America’s Lawyer E31: The White House is once again protecting the Saudi Crown prince by basically saying he’s allowed to kill whoever he wants – we’ll give you the details. A careless reporter almost started World War 3 by getting basic facts wrong about the ongoing Russia – Ukraine conflict. And victims of Jeffrey Epstein are now suing the big banks that allowed him to use his money to traffic women. All that, and more is coming up, so don’t go anywhere – America’s Lawyer starts right now.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Hi, I’m Mike Papantonio and this is America’s Lawyer. The White House is once again protecting the Saudi Crown Prince by basically saying he’s allowed to kill whoever he wants, and we’re gonna give you immunity. That’s really a story. A careless reporter, well, they almost started World War III by getting basic facts wrong about the ongoing Russian Ukraine conflict. And victims of Jeffrey Epstein are now suing the big banks that allowed him to use his money to traffic women. All that and more. It’s coming up, so don’t go anywhere. America’s Lawyer starts right now.
The Biden administration came out recently and said that the Saudi Crown Prince is immune from being prosecuted for murdering journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins joins me now to talk about that and other issues. Farron, you know, we almost called this right. We’ve, we did, I can’t even count the stories we’ve done on this mutt of a dictator, but, you know, the, the problem I’m having with this is when Biden was running, he is, we’ve gotta do something about these predators. I forget what he called ’em. It was pretty ugly language.
Farron Cousins: He said, let’s make ’em pariahs.
Mike Papantonio: Pariahs.
Farron Cousins: On the world stage.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. So they’ve gone from pariahs now to where we’re giving them immunity. We’re giving the Saudi prince immunity. The problem I got with this is A, Saudi prince is not entitled to immunity. So they had to mix it up, and they had to change the politics and make him Prime Minister. Pick it up from there.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: This is a troubling story.
Farron Cousins: It’s a truly disgusting story because as you said, as the Crown prince, he’s not immune from anything. Only a head of state would be immune, which I still think is a very stupid policy. But either way, the Royal family said, okay, we, we know you’re gonna be prosecuted. We know that they’ve already determined you authorized this killing. You were behind it, so we’re just gonna make you Prime Minister. Usually that’s only reserved for the king of Saudi Arabia. But they went ahead, passed it on to the son here so that he could not be prosecuted, again, under this very stupid policy where we say that, oh, you can kill whoever you want, but if you have this title, there’s nothing we can legally do about it. That’s, that’s absurd.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. Here, I want to come back and say what I’ve said so many times. We, we talk about the Biden administration, but truthfully, he has advisors around him. He has people that are saying, yeah, that’s a good idea. Let’s give this dictator who has mowed down more, more folks than we can count for simply pledging, pledging that they need to end this ugly little bit of politics called crown politics, disappeared, lost their heads. We’ve known that whole history. Biden knows that and instinctively Biden came out and he said, we’re not gonna let that happen. But then politics takes over. His advisors say, this is a good idea. It’s a terrible idea. And, you know, the truth is, as this story goes forward, it seems to be getting worse and worse because people keep digging and digging into how this came about.
Farron Cousins: Well, and it’s truly disturbing as well, because Biden went to Saudi Arabia, as we talked about many weeks ago over the summer, begged them, please, OPEC, do something about gas prices. And they basically laughed in his face. They said, we’re not gonna do anything at all. We’re gonna cut production, actually. And so when we need a favor from them, they are not there to help us one bit. But everything they need, whether it’s weapons, whether it’s military support and training, we bend over backwards to give it to this government of Saudi Arabia and it’s to our own detriment. We get nothing in return and they are abusing this relationship.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. It’s like a cash cow for the weapons industry. Okay.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Everybody for oil, oil, oil. No, it’s not oil, it’s weapons.
Farron Cousins: It is.
Mike Papantonio: Our, you know, Boeing, Raytheon, all of them are making a ton of money selling to this punk who by all right, what do they call him, they call him the wild bear or something, which is a huge insult to him. He gets really mad when you call him the wild bear. Well, that means something over. It means that he’s out of control. And, and truthfully, I know that Biden didn’t call the Justice Department and say, hey, let’s really work to give this guy an unlimited license to kill, but that’s what they’ve done.
Farron Cousins: Yep.
Mike Papantonio: A reporter with the Associated Press nearly plunged us into World War III by getting some basic facts of a story completely wrong. Wow. You know, three weeks ago, we, we did a story and we talked about how so many experts that really do understand how the nuclear process works are saying we are edging more and more towards a nuclear disaster because of crazy steps that government’s taken and the media’s taken. This story’s right on point, isn’t it?
Farron Cousins: It is. You had this Associated Press reporter who immediately came out following an incident and said, oh my God, Russian missiles have been fired at Poland.
Mike Papantonio: Mm-hmm.
Farron Cousins: They hit in Poland, they killed people. Russia is now attacking a sovereign NATO country, and the NATO country, part of that is obviously the big deal because if you attack a NATO partner, the rest of NATO is going to come at you. And he immediately reported that story. He said it was based on intelligence. I can’t name the person.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, anonymous intelligence.
Farron Cousins: Somebody told me who’s in the intelligence community this was Russia. And the entire media at that point was gearing up for World War III. That was all the headlines. That was all that was going on on social media. We were on the cusp. We truly were.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. You know, first of all, let me back up and break this down a little bit. Poland, the, the folks in charge of Poland said, no, it wasn’t Russia.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: There’s a lot of bad stuff the Russians have done. I mean, you wanna talk about some really, really bad stuff, there’s plenty to talk about, but not to the point to where some little freak says, I have have to be the first to get this story.
Farron Cousins: Yep.
Mike Papantonio: You know, I was a journalism major back at University of Florida, and, and back then, it used to be important that you could verify a story. That there was no race to get the first printout when it’s something as, as serious as potential World War. And you know, when we did that segment last time, I, I’d remember, I don’t know who these commenters are that came in on the, to comment on the segment, but it’s an overstatement of the risk. You don’t worry about, you don’t worry about nuclear, nonsense. This is how it happens. And so this cat, they fire him, but you know what? It ought to wash up his career to tell you the truth. It, it, he, the, the severity of what happened here was so serious that they not only fired him, but, you know, I think he’s gonna have a tough time getting a job.
Farron Cousins: Oh, ab.
Mike Papantonio: Due diligence. Isn’t that still important for journalists?
Farron Cousins: It really is. But you nailed it on the head. That’s how the media works these days. It doesn’t matter how accurate your story is. What matters is how quickly you get it out there. You’ll issue the retractions and the corrections later on, but you have to be the first to put it out there, because the media is no longer about spreading information. It’s a business.
Mike Papantonio: It’s a race, isn’t it?
Farron Cousins: It’s about making money.
Mike Papantonio: And war, war is a big money maker.
Farron Cousins: It is.
Mike Papantonio: You know, we, we talk about, if you take a look at MSNBC right now, or Fox or CNN, God bless CNN if they’re around for another year. But the point is, if you take a look at who they’re pushing, they’re pushing retired generals. This is retired General Jones. Well, they don’t tell the backstory. Retired General Jones is working for frigging Raytheon right now. Okay. Smith, Smith is working for Boeing. They have a direct interest in going on the air and scaring the hell out of everybody about what’s happening in the Ukraine. Well, they should go on the air and they should talk about the balance, the, the slim balance that’s taken place right there. You could be involved in a nuclear conflict that quick. Putin is a crazy man. He is a lunatic. And this story to me, I mean, going forward, these folks need to be really, really careful. This is corporate, this is corporate media mentality. How do we get advertisers? Well, we create a big story. Nuclear war is a pretty big story that they’re about to create if they’re not careful.
Farron Cousins: And, and it’s very disturbing too, to see this from the Associated Press.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, I know.
Farron Cousins: I mean, you know, you could understand if it’s one of the corporate media outlet or, or cable news outlets doing this, yeah. Associated Press, you’re held to the highest of the high standards.
Mike Papantonio: Right, right.
Farron Cousins: And when y’all get something so badly wrong, that, that, you know, is.
Mike Papantonio: Well, it bleeds everywhere, doesn’t it?
Farron Cousins: It does.
Mike Papantonio: This story was around for three days before anybody knew it was nonsense.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: I mean, maybe four days.
Farron Cousins: I, I don’t think most people understand that those missiles actually came from Ukraine. It was an accident.
Mike Papantonio: Of course.
Farron Cousins: But that’s where the missiles came from.
Mike Papantonio: But the easy story is to sell the jazz, right? And the jazz is Russians do it again. They wanna start a nuclear war. They’re bombing Poland. Jesus Christ.
Several victims of Jeffrey Epstein are suing big banks for allowing Epstein to use his money for human trafficking and abuse. I love this story because finally, these brilliant young lawyers who are my friends, by the way, you know, we followed these guys from the very beginning of this story. They’re the ones that identified what was going on with Epstein, the Epstein, the fact that the government was giving him a free pass to involve raping children. That’s, I mean, that’s the headline there. He was raping children. So here, what these guys have done is they said, we’re gonna step it up a little bit. We’re gonna say the banks were involved because they enabled him. Talk about it just a little bit.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. What happened was, Jeffrey Epstein had basically triggered all of the red flags that banks have in place to identify things like human trafficking or money laundering. He triggered all of these red flags, but instead of doing anything about it, what he did was he brought ’em on down to his little Epstein island down to South Florida and said, listen, I, I know there’s some issues here. Go, go meet with this young girl. She’s gonna give you a massage and whatever else you wanted. And that’s the story the young women are telling right now.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: Of course, they’re doing it anonymously. They’re very afraid of what could happen to them. But they’re implicating some of these big executives at these banks, some of the big wigs and they said, clearly in this lawsuit, Epstein brought them down to keep himself untouchable. To make these deals.
Mike Papantonio: Well, okay, so let me talk about the deal. The deal is you bring somebody from a big bank, right? And you say, I have billionaire friends and I can get you their accounts, or I can make their accounts disappear if I want to. It’s the influence of that. So people like, was it JP Morgan, he was, his big one was JP Morgan. JP Morgan says, hell yeah, we don’t care what you’re doing. This is, Farron, this is after the guy had already been caught raping girls in South Florida, kids. When they tell him, well, you know, you know what your punishment is? You gotta show up in a, in a cell, a jail cell from six o’clock in the morning. What, what are the times?
Farron Cousins: It was 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM.
Mike Papantonio: 6:00 PM to six in the morning. Right.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: So you have to show up and that’s your punishment. And oh, by the way, carry on your life as much as you want.
Farron Cousins: You just leave during the day.
Mike Papantonio: You can leave during the day. And we found out it was a corrupt judge. It was corrupt prosecutors. It was corrupt federal prosecutors. It was corrupt state prosecutors. And you know what? Nobody paid any attention to it. Nobody went to jail over that. You see?
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: And so then we find out, well, no, this is a lot more serious than that. But the banking part of it, these guys, like I’ve always said, there’s some money that’s too expensive. Not for these guys. These guys were willing to push it to the limit so they could get another account. Right?
Farron Cousins: Well, it’s like we’ve talked about with these banks in the past and other banks, you know, they’ll launder, launder money for terrorists. They’ll launder money for human traffickers. They will do whatever it takes to put more money in their pockets.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: They don’t care about the red flag laws they have in place. Those are only basically customary, depends on who it is. If you’re a low level, you know, nobody, they’ll pop you for it. If you’re a Jeffrey Epstein.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: You’ll get invited down to the island.
Mike Papantonio: DOJ, DOJ has done nothing meaningful in this case.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: They, they have a list of who they could go after. They know all the facts. They’ve done nothing. They’re still covering up. Wall Street, I call it the Caligula mentality. You know, there’s nothing so awful that they won’t be involved with for the right amount of money. And that’s what happened here.
CNN recently announced another round of layoffs as the cable news company continues to lose viewers by the tons. Do they make it? You know, okay, let’s put it in perspective. When we’re talking about them losing, all we’re, all they’re really saying is, gee wiz, we made a billion dollars less than we did the year before. But, and so because of that, they’ve now put Licht in, in charge of it, who has no, he, he has absolutely zero experience with trying to, to.
Farron Cousins: He’s crazy.
Mike Papantonio: To, to take a company that’s failed and put it on its feet again. Only thing Licht does, by the way, he used to, he used to be one of the producers for my ex-law partner, Joe Scarborough. Did you know that?
Farron Cousins: No, I did not.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. So that’s his, that’s his experience. But now what he’s done is he said, I’m gonna come in, I’m gonna save this, this company, I don’t know if it’s save-able at this point.
Farron Cousins: No. And, and they have no idea what they really want to do with it either. You know, they say, oh, well, we’re gonna move more to the center, but they don’t even know what the center is. Then they say, well, maybe we’ll move a little bit to the right. Maybe we’ll just move to actual investigative journalism.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: Which, that would be great, if you actually wanna be the network of investigative journalism.
Mike Papantonio: Tell ’em, give us, do news again.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Do news again. How about that?
Farron Cousins: People on the ground in the conflict areas like we used to see in the sixties. I know it’s dangerous, but that is news, that is reporting, people in the field.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. Zucker, Zucker came in and he said, we’re gonna make, it’s called quick profits bad, bad planning. Okay. It was quick profits, bad planning. Quick profits were everybody hates Trump. Okay. Like that’s a headline. Yeah. We know everybody hates Trump. But you don’t need, you don’t need Brian Stellar and Jake Tapper and the same folks every day saying, we hate Donald Trump. The world hates Donald Trump, but give us some news. Give us a reason to tune in. I don’t want to hear what’s on top of that little freak Stellar’s head every day. I wanna report the news.
Farron Cousins: Well, and, and part of the problem too, is they would just talk about it, make fun of him. You know, talk about, oh, this is just so bad that he says these things.
Mike Papantonio: No substance.
Farron Cousins: Right, because you can, you can address those things because I do it every day. But you can tie it into bigger issues. And if you can do that and make it a real story, then it could be worthwhile. Of course, you don’t wanna oversaturate it. But I think Jay Rosen, professor of journalism, NYU.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: We’ve actually had him on Ring of Fire in the past.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, yeah.
Farron Cousins: He had the best point when he said, CNN was enjoying this sugar high.
Mike Papantonio: Yes.
Farron Cousins: On Donald Trump.
Mike Papantonio: That’s exactly right.
Farron Cousins: And then, uh-oh, you’re suddenly outta candy, and then you come crashing down.
Mike Papantonio: Zucker has destroyed this network.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: And, and now he’s moved on. God knows, I don’t know where he is right now, but the, the business, the media business doesn’t really care. He was a big name. We’re gonna move him to some new position. He’ll find a new position. But the big question for CNN is, how do, how do you take a news agency and, and report the news again, when the public is so tribal? They’re so polarized that if we even suggest as, as far to the left as we, you and I are, if we suggest there’s a story that maybe the Democrats did something wrong, you know, there’s pandemonium among our followers. But the point is, how do you ever get to the point where it’s, it’s almost the, the, it’s so polarized that you can’t tell a story that this part of the, that this part of the public believes is, you know, offensive.
Farron Cousins: Well, and the problem is the media created that problem. The media polarized itself and then polarized the country. And now that the media is realizing, uh-oh, we can’t sustain ourselves on this anymore, they can’t go back to normal because of the problem they created. You know, CNN with Crossfire back in the early two thousands.
Mike Papantonio: That was okay in a little bit, but now it’s 24/7.
Farron Cousins: Right, exactly.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: So they, they helped push us to that before Fox News was doing it, way before MSNBC was doing it, and now they’re stuck.
Mike Papantonio: Murdoch came in with the formula. Okay. He was doing it in Australia. He comes to the US and said, hey, let me do Fox News. And then, although it worked, I don’t know how it works for Fox News. It obviously doesn’t work for liberal media, and I don’t know why nobody seems to get that. It kinda reminds me of the Air America days, you know, when it was me and Rachel Maddow and Chuck D and, God, a great lineup of people doing those shows, we knew we couldn’t make it because it, it was, had to do with the liberal formula that’s, it’s a problem for the media right now.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Colleges have found a new way to make a quick buck, but getting students addicted to gambling on sports event may not be the way to do it. I don’t know how to take this story, man. I, I kind of, you know, I don’t, it sounded a little preachy to tell you the truth when I read it. Hell, you know, a kid’s 18 years old, so what if he has a chance to gamble? Now, I get it. Gambling can be very addictive. There’s no question about that. And the statistics show that it’s most addictive between 18 and what, 35 or somewhat, somewhere like that. But I mean, look, they’re coming and they’re paying these colleges, you know, millions of dollars just to say, hey, we, we want little Johnny to be able to gamble if he wants. If the parents say, no, we don’t like that, send him to another college, you know.
Farron Cousins: Well, well, the big issue here is that you have these college boards, right. The people running the college sending out mass emails to all the students saying, hey, here’s a great offer from our newest sponsor, which colleges shouldn’t have sponsors to begin with.
Mike Papantonio: Right.
Farron Cousins: But they say, listen, you go place a $20 bet on this new Caesar sports book. We’re gonna, they’re gonna give you an extra hundred dollars. So they’re enticing these students to go and make money for their new investor.
Mike Papantonio: Wake up call. They already have bookies. Okay. The bookies are already working college campuses. This is not like it’s revolutionary.
Farron Cousins: But, but to me, what what gets me about this is, listen, we understand you’re gonna have these groups that come in and sponsor college sports. You know, obviously Gatorade and other sports drinks will do it. You’ll have your Pepsi and your Cokes that do it, and, and Under Armor all of those. Okay, I get that. That’s fine. The problem is when schools are bringing in $8 million a year from a Caesar’s contract, why is this not translating into lower tuitions? If you’re bringing in the money from somewhere else, you don’t have to gouge these poor students taking out hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans to go to your school.
Mike Papantonio: Same way with the football team. Same way with the entire sports.
Farron Cousins: Exactly.
Mike Papantonio: Good point. I, as I was reading this, I really didn’t think about that. I thought it was funny, we talked about LSU and couple of other colleges say, this is great, man, we’re making a lot of money doing this.
Farron Cousins: And that’s the problem, is they’ve turned colleges into businesses.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: And that’s why we’re seeing the skyrocketing tuitions. That’s why we have the student loan debt crisis. It’s because these colleges have become money hungry. And a lot of this is because they lost a lot of money during the pandemic. You couldn’t have everybody come to your football games, your basketball games. Well, how do we get it back? Well, Caesars stepped in and said, hey, I’ve got an idea. Let’s get ’em addicted to gambling.
Mike Papantonio: We’re here to help you.
All right. Medical debt is trapping families in poverty and big banks, they’re cashing in on it. How many big bank stories do we have to do to where somebody says, Jesus, we need to really rethink of how we’re treating Wall Street? You know, when I was, I gotta tell you, in the, in the maybe sixties or the seventies, banks weren’t, you know, it was, it wasn’t that, was it Gekko. What was the movie that was made, greed is good, you know?
Farron Cousins: Wall Street.
Mike Papantonio: Wall Street. Okay. Before Wall Street you had mom and pop banks. Okay. And then just like everything else you had, you had predators come in and buy all the mom and pop banks and come up with organizations like Wells Fargo, and you name it, Chase Manhattan. And so now we’re at a point to where, I don’t think there’s a way to turn around here, man. This is an ugly story. Why don’t you give, give us the story.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Excuse me. Basically what’s happening here is obviously medical debt is a massive problem here in the United States. Skyrocketing healthcare costs, skyrocketing prescription drugs, surgery costs, whatever it is and people can’t pay it. So the big banks thought, wait a minute, here’s people in debt. How do we capitalize on this? Well, we partner with the hospitals.
Mike Papantonio: Mm-hmm.
Farron Cousins: So when you’re recovering from your surgery, the hospital comes up to you with a document and says, hey, uh, this is gonna set you, you back about $80,000. But don’t worry, sign this little piece of paper right here. We’re, we’re partnered with this Allied bank over here, whatever it is.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: You sign this, they’re gonna give you the loan and pay it off and you don’t have to worry. I know you just got a new heart a few hours ago, and we wanna make it as hassle free for you as possible. So they take out these massive loans that do, for the most part, at first, have a lower interest rate than a credit card.
Mike Papantonio: And then every year it turns and it turns and it turns.
Farron Cousins: It just balloons and balloons and balloons. And they’re, they’re screwing these patients over.
Mike Papantonio: Who are the people behind this? Is it, is it coming directly, is it Wall, is it a new Wall Street grab or is it just kind of, just here and there?
Farron Cousins: It’s, it’s both Wall Street because you got a lot of hedge funds in it and just the simple greed of the hospital industry.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: And I think people overlook the hospital industry.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: We don’t have, you know, you’ve talked about mom and pop, we don’t have mom and pop banks.
Mike Papantonio: No.
Farron Cousins: We don’t have mom and pop medical centers anymore.
Mike Papantonio: Doctor, doctor owned doctor. Doctor owned hospitals are a thing of the past.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: You know, where they came in and consolidated all that. This is how it lands right here.
Farron Cousins: Yep. And it’s all about the money. It’s not about the care. And the banks said, there’s a lot of money in this. Let’s go get our cut.
Mike Papantonio: Okay.
The secrets of a brutal Florida school for boys are finally being exposed. It, it’s an ugly story that’s a decades, it’s decades old about death and abuse that occurred at Dozier School. You know, it’s hard to get your arms around this because it, it’s, it really started happening in the 19 hundreds where we knew, early reports, we already knew that these kids that were being sent to reform school for things like smoking, for running away from, from homes that were awful to, to try to get away and have a life on their own. The things they were sending ’em to reform school. It wasn’t crimes. There were some crimes, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you would think about. So Dozier rises up out of that. Pick it up.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. You have this school in this small little town in Florida, you know, it’s a drive through town. Nobody pays attention to it.
Mike Papantonio: Marianna.
Farron Cousins: Marianna right outside the capital and starting in, in 1900 I think, late 18 hundreds possibly, Dozier School pops up.
Mike Papantonio: Mm-hmm.
Farron Cousins: And they say, well, send us your troubled boys. We got a lot of troubled boys around these parts all through the state. Send them here. We’re gonna take care of ’em. We’re gonna put ’em on the right path. Well, the right path led to a little building on that property that they called the White House. It was painted all white. And in that room is where torture, I mean, no other way to describe it other than torture took place. They would drag these boys out of their, you know, dorm room sometimes in the middle of the night, take ’em over to the White House and beat them mercilessly.
Mike Papantonio: Mm-hmm.
Farron Cousins: I mean, those are the stories that the people who were there have told, and sometimes worse than just beatings.
Mike Papantonio: Well, this quote, this is, there’s been some great reporting on this but there hasn’t been enough.
Farron Cousins: No. Not enough.
Mike Papantonio: You know, it’s, I call this, it, it’s a, the shelf life on this should be endless because it’s not just, it’s not just Marianna Florida where this is taking place. But this is from one of the people that I actually interviewed, you know, the man just went through absolute hell. He said, the first blow lifted me a foot and a half off the bed. And every time, and every strap would come down, you’d hear the shuffle on the concrete because their shoes would slide as they put as much force as they can behind it. And you could hear the swoosh, swoosh, bam, bam. The same person reported that he saw one of, one of the kids there that was beaten to death, put in a tub after he was beaten to death. And then where the story gets really, really bizarre is they would call the parents and say, you know, your, your child got sick and we had, we had to, we had to bury him because he died. And so the, the point is, they, they could only find, they could only find places where they buried 31 kids, but they know that there’s far more buried all over that grounds. And there’s no records to even show it. Because they understood, if we can, if we can get away with this, we can do it quietly. Nobody’s gonna know about it. These were kids, they were farming out to the community. Farmers would hire ’em for nothing. They’d go out and work all day long, come back and.
Farron Cousins: And Dozier school would get the money for basically having this forced labor. They’d come back and they’d get the hell eaten out of ’em for any minor, real or not, infraction. And, and, and what really is concerning here is we still don’t know how many bodies are buried.
Mike Papantonio: Mm-hmm.
Farron Cousins: They’re having to use this specialized equipment sending, you know, the, the sound waves through the ground to find anything that may look like they, you know, a body underground. It, it’s horrifying what they’re having to do. And, and here’s what’s even more disgusting. Couple years ago, I think a little over 10 years ago when Charlie Crist was our governor, they finally looked into the Dozier school, had been going on for a hundred years. And Crist looks at it and his government says, hey, you know what? There’s nothing we can do.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: You know, we’re just, we’re just gonna let it be. It said, the state report found no evidence indicating a staff member was responsible for any student deaths.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. You know what, that was the FDLA report, Charlie paid for it. I went to law school with Charlie. He’s, you know, he’s a capable lawyer. He could have read the report the same way I did. It was, it was a useless report. All you had to do is read between the lines. That the interviews that were, where some of the boys said this is what happened. They were, they were cut out. There was no questions, why did you cut that out? Why did you cut out the fact that the, the story after story where they say we’re, we’re pulled into, into the White House, they bind our feet, we’re raped, we’re beaten, and we’re buried. Now how do you have all of these stories out there that I know they told, because we’ve talked to ’em, they told these stories to the FDLA. Charlie looks at it and says, well, what the hell? I mean, I don’t see anything here. It was just an absolute cop out, wasn’t it?
Farron Cousins: It, it really was. And so what we have right here is this, these failures across the board, you know, past government, current government, the law enforcement officials, the law enforcement oversight, they all knew this was happening. They did nothing about it because even though, you know, this, this ended, you know, a couple decades ago, they don’t wanna get into it now because then it opens up this new can of worms. We gotta investigate the current law enforcement. Maybe this is gonna make other states look into what’s happening today.
Mike Papantonio: Here’s the good news. The good news. The good news is that we’ve talked to some of the legislators who knew nothing about it. They weren’t the idiots that came up with the idea, hey, let’s put a plaque. The plaque is about this big, and it’s on the wall. It’s on the outside wall of the White House where all this beating and rape and horrible things took place. And it says, we’re sorry. You know, we’re really sorry. And you know, the, the thing to me that is the most agonizing is how the community let this happen. How the, we’re talking about Marianna Florida. I mean, there’s what one red light there. And to say we didn’t know what was going on is just reprehensible to me. It reminds me, I, I don’t know if you’ve ever traveled, you go to a place like Auschwitz and Auschwitz or Dachau and Dachau’s in this little village and in the middle of the village are these big smokestacks and, you know, where people are being murdered and burned, burned alive sometimes. And the community says, oh, we didn’t know anything about that. It’s just, I don’t know what it, whether it’s some type of peculiar social event that takes place where, where it’s just absolutely people are willing to put their head in the sand and ignore it. But that happened here. The rest of this story is that this is going on in other places in the country. If you take a look at what’s going on in Louisiana, I took a look at the New York Times story on what’s happening in Louisiana. Very, very well done story talking about these kids committing suicide, like three suicides back to back because they are in a Dozier kind of school. It’s not just, it’s not just Louisiana, it’s not just Florida. It’s all over this country. And my goal is to try to get lawyers to pay attention to that and shut these places down. Thank you, Farron.
Farron Cousins: Thank you.
Mike Papantonio: That’s all for this week. But all of these segments are gonna be available this coming week right here on this channel. And you can follow us on Twitter @AmericasLawyer. I’m Mike Papantonio and this has been America’s Lawyer, where every week we tell you stories that corporate media won’t tell you because their advertisers don’t let ’em, or their political connections just don’t allow for it. We’ll see you next week.
