Via America’s Lawyer: A bombshell letter written by Matt Gaetz associate Joel Greenberg describes how the FL representative paid for sex with at least one underage girl. Also, Hollywood dispatches a team of lobbyists to Washington in an effort to stop lawmakers from waiving COVID vaccine patent rights. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

Transcript:

*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Mike Papantonio:             Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz is getting sucked further into scandal after the man, he allegedly paid to deliver girls to him, further implicated him in criminal activity. Joining me tonight to talk about this is Farron Cousins with the trial lawyer magazine, absolutely the best progressive in the business. I, your reporting just gets better and better. I’ve known you since you were a child, and every year it gets better, Farron. Really it does.

Farron Cousins:                  Thank you.

Mike Papantonio:             So let’s, let’s really nail this story. I look at this story and it gets weirder by the moment. You got Roger Stone kicking around in there, you got confession letters kicking around. You got Matt Gaetz hiring lawyers. He’s lawyering up, paying money through his campaign income to, to, to pay, to pay his way through this. Give me your take on this story.

Farron Cousins:                  Um, right off the top, I think, look, Matt Gaetz understands how much trouble he is in, and there’s no way he can even spin himself out of it at this point. But what we found out late last week, the Daily Beast, which who by the way, has done a phenomenal job on this story. You know, we always talk about how journalism’s dead, the Daily Beast doing some great work here.

Mike Papantonio:             Good.

Farron Cousins:                  But, you know, they published these letters that they had gotten from Greenberg, where he wrote these letters to Roger Stone at Stone’s request saying, hey, I’ll try to get you the pardon because that’s what they had been talking about in this private messaging app that Greenberg, for some reason screenshot the conversations. So we know all this is true.

Mike Papantonio:             Now this is one that’s supposed to disappear.

Farron Cousins:                  Right, right. They’re supposed to disappear after five.

Mike Papantonio:             Called Signal.

Farron Cousins:                  Yeah, after five seconds, but Greenberg said, let me save it. So he writes confession letters at Roger Stone’s requests because Roger Stone was going to take these to Donald Trump and to the pardon committee and to Pat Cipollone. And of course, Roger Stone at the end of all of it, and this is skipping a lot of info, but Roger Stone couldn’t secure the pardon for Greenberg, but did eventually get one for himself. So it worked out for Stone, not so much for Greenberg and by extension Matt Gaetz.

Mike Papantonio:             It sounds like the Confederacy of Dunces.

Farron Cousins:                  It really is.

Mike Papantonio:             To tell you the truth. Okay. So $250,000 is on the table. Roger, you go get me this pardon and you’re going to make $250,000. And oh, by the way, if you get it by the end of tomorrow, I’m going to give you an extra $50,000. Well, Roger comes into it says, you know, I did, I did my best, but something you need to know, something you need to know, Joel. And that is that Matt Gaetz told me that he didn’t want, he didn’t want me to help you. He wants, he wants you out there swinging in the wind, basically. Right?

Farron Cousins:                  Yeah. And that is what shocked Greenberg, because Greenberg in a previous conversation had told Roger Stone, listen, I am under tremendous pressure from the feds, from the authorities to start flipping on MG, as they called him in the conversations, Matt Gaetz. So they wanted him to flip, but he was reluctant to do so because he thought he was going to get a pardon. I don’t need to cut a deal with these people because everything’s going to be okay. And then Stone tells him, hey, your good friend is the one who interfered and it almost, I mean, it broke poor Greenberg’s heart. He was so distraught after that, he said, oh wow, he didn’t know what to do. And I think that was the point where he probably picked up his phone to his lawyers and said, all right, it’s time to play let’s make a deal.

Mike Papantonio:             Yeah. So the quote is, he actually said not to help. That’s what he, that’s what, that’s what Stone is reporting to Joel. Okay. This is, you know how this goes, right? So we talked about this as soon as we, the first time we reported this story, this is where we said it was going to go, it’s there. Here’s where it’s going next. They’re talking to the underage girl who now is 19, probably 19 years old. And so they’re, they’re, they’re saying to her, you’re interfering, you’re interfering with this to the point that you, that it’s obstruction of justice. But the interference alone, even before you get to the serious obstruction of justice is a very serious kind of thing. She doesn’t want to spend any time in prison.

Farron Cousins:                  Right.

Mike Papantonio:             She’s, she’s being told she can. Take it from there.

Farron Cousins:                  Right. I mean, she’s got her whole life ahead of her. You know, she’s still young figuring things out. Didn’t realize at such a young age, she was going to be involved in a scandal of this magnitude. And of course, we also find out that allegedly, she had lied about her age to Greenberg and Gaetz. And, you know, Greenberg tried to say, oh, you, look what you’ve done. This is horrible young lady. We don’t know if she actually lied or if they knew and didn’t care.

Mike Papantonio:             It doesn’t make any difference.

Farron Cousins:                  Right.

Mike Papantonio:             I mean, statutory rape is statutory rape. Look, but what he says is he, this is Greenberg, says Matt Gaetz and I both had sex with the underage girl. So obviously he’s not making that up.

Farron Cousins:                  Right.

Mike Papantonio:             He’s saying I’m, I’m telling you I did it and Matt Gaetz did it. I don’t see a quick way, oh, and then Joel, Joel says to Stone, Joel Greenberg says to Stone, I pray, the Lord will help. Almost, I mean, just really dark, dark kind of contrast here. It’s a, it’s almost a sociopathic kind of reality. Isn’t it?

Farron Cousins:                  It is.

Mike Papantonio:             As you watch this story, you see sociopath everywhere and the sociopath reality that everybody’s caught up in. Right?

Farron Cousins:                  Right. Well, and Matt Gaetz has never had to face any consequences for any of his problems in the past. You know, daddy got him out of the DUIs. In fact, the cop that actually pulled him over and gave him the DUI, the cop ended up getting fired. That’s how much power daddy had here in the state of Florida. But dad can’t help you now, Matt. He’s not involved in any of this. He doesn’t have any power over these investigative bodies. You’re in deep trouble. And at one point too, Greenberg even said, you know, I’ve already told everybody you’re going to need to hire a lawyer. And this was about a year ago, he said that to everybody.

Mike Papantonio:             Didn’t you love when Green, the quote Greenberg says, you think Gaetz is going to visit me in prison? It gets crazy. He, Greenberg says, I feel abandoned. Yeah. Well, he’s abandoned by his pal. I can tell you that. Because his pal is fighting for not only his political life, but the right to stay out of prison.

Farron Cousins:                  Right. I mean, that’s, what’s really on the table now for Matt Gaetz. It’s, it’s evolved beyond trying to save his seat.

Mike Papantonio:             Yeah.

Farron Cousins:                  Now he’s actually trying to save his behind.

Mike Papantonio:             Yeah, you got it. In many ways.

Mike Papantonio:             Lobbyists for Hollywood studios are actively working to prevent the COVID vaccine patent from being made public. And as you can figure, that’s, that’s Hollywood saying, we want to put our profits ahead of human lives. That’s what this story is about. Hollywood is saying, oh, we can’t, we can’t run the risk of giving up any of our patent rights and protections, even though 300,000 people might die because of it. This is an ugly story.

Farron Cousins:                  Yeah. I mean, what did we have over the weekend? I think on Saturday, about half a million new COVID cases alone, just in India, because they’re starved for the vaccine that we have here in the United States. We could give them the patent for it. We could let them have it. But instead the administration says, we’ll send you 30 or Moderna said, we’re going to send you 34 million doses. So 17 million, it’s not enough. But Hollywood is actively going out there, sent their lobbyists to DC. And they said, listen, if you lift the patent on this vaccine, there’s a chance that through some screwy logic that we have, that’s not even in the bill, by the way.

Mike Papantonio:             No. It’s very specific in the bill. It is excluding.

Farron Cousins:                  Exactly.

Mike Papantonio:             This thing that Hollywood is saying, we’re worried about, it says, no, this won’t happen. But Neil Turkewitz, who’s the talking head for this whole thing, comes up and says, we can’t run any kind of risk like that. Really? We’re running the risk of killing people all over the world because they can’t get information about how to improve the system. If you, if you do this to them, if you don’t allow this free open discussion, more people are gonna die and Hollywood knows it. And they don’t give a because it has to do with, they try to dress it up. You know, I’m waiting for a Gal Gadot maybe to do, get all of her tone deaf friends together and do a, do one of these videos. Maybe they’ll do Money by Pink Floyd. I don’t know.

Farron Cousins:                  Well, you know, a lot of the places that are seeing the rise in COVID cases, you know, maybe this is coincidence, maybe not, but you’re talking about India. And what happens in India? Well, they’ve got their own version of Hollywood. Don’t they? They’ve got their own movie productions. They’ve got their own music productions there. It is a big competitor overseas. So why not just let them die? I think is what Hollywood is thinking right now. I, I guarantee you that is playing a role in this, that people are not thinking about. But that’s a big factor, I think.

Mike Papantonio:             One thing, don’t forget, 2013 Hollywood actually did this another time when they were trying to change the laws so disabled people could have better access. Deaf people wanted to have access and Hollywood fought that too. And now, but they’re saying, gee wiz, we, the only group that seems to have a brain here is the organization, the documentary group. The documentary association says absolutely we don’t care about our patent. We care about human life. World health organization, you know, they’re saying, look, this is, this is a disaster. WTO says, if we don’t do this, millions of people are going to die.

Farron Cousins:                  Well, and it, let’s be clear too. It’s not even just about the vaccines that these people are trying to get. It’s about just basic research. Even news stories coming out of the United States about the real numbers, they don’t have access to that because of our copyright laws here.

Mike Papantonio:             Yeah, yeah.

Farron Cousins:                  And again, the law does not say you can open up, you can reproduce Hollywood movies, steal them. It is explicitly prohibited.

Mike Papantonio:             You can’t do that.

Farron Cousins:                  Right. We just want to give them science and a chance at life.

Mike Papantonio:             Farron, thank you for joining me. Okay.

Farron Cousins:                  Thank you.