America’s Lawyer E47: Former President Donald Trump has now officially been indicted, and his numbers are going through the roof. Support for Trump has increased since the indictments were announced, and the charges are rallying more Republicans to come to his defense. A police union executive has been arrested for smuggling drugs in a massive operation that has been going on for years in California. And after a century of rising, the IQs of American citizens are now on a downward slope – Yes, the country is getting dumber. 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. Former President Donald Trump has now officially been indicted and his numbers are going through the roof. Support for Trump has increased since the indictments were announced, and the charges, well they’re rallying Republicans to come to his defense. A police union executive has been arrested for smuggling drugs in a massive operation that’s been going on for years in California. And after a century of rising, the IQs of American citizens are now on a downward spiral. Yes, the country is getting dumber and dumber and dumber. All that more. It’s coming up. Don’t go anywhere. America’s Lawyer starts right now.
Donald Trump, well, he isn’t sweating his indictment as much as you might think and it looks like the charges might actually help him win the Republican nomination for President. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins joins me now to talk about it. Farron, you know what, you’re like a sooth sayer. I think you’re the best in the progressive business at looking at a story and saying, this is where I think it’s going to go. That’s why I’ve enjoyed doing this with you for 20 years. So let’s talk about this one. You know, if you talk to all the experts, you hear there’s a problem with due process here. There’s a problem with selective prosecution. There’s a problem with vagueness of the indict. There’s all of these problems that are centering around this. There’s a problem with the jurisdiction when you can argue, you know, all you’re gonna get is blue jurors. All you’re gonna get is a blue judge. All you’re gonna get is blue appellate judge. So, as I’m looking at this, they’ve got a lot of ways to hang this up for a long time, maybe already past the election. What do you think?
Farron Cousins: Yeah, I mean, they absolutely can, especially with, you know, 34 charges against him. That opens the door, you know, multiple different challenges per indictment.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: You know, so they could wrap this up in the courts potentially for years. But based on what Trump has already seen in the last week, I don’t think he wants to do that. I mean, what we are seeing right now is absolutely unbelievable because you have focus groups, you have polling data, and all of it shows that all of those Republican voters that were ready to get rid of Trump, they have now come back to him. They’re saying, you know what? We are now supporting you. I was ready to move to Ron DeSantis, but I’m going to you, I’m going back to Trump.
Mike Papantonio: Right. They’re angry. I mean, if you really, if you really look at it, this is pure anger. Okay. When you look at, and here’s the things that are coming up now. I mean, it’s just in the last two days. I know you’ve looked at the articles. But the right is using this to remind everybody about all the things they talk, they talk about Antifa, how it’s such a big problem, how it’s part an extension of the Democratic Party. They talk about the transgender issues because that’s tied into what they feel is gonna be on the docket for the next election. This, these are all points. Now these aren’t my points.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: These are points that are surfacing in the discussion right now. They’re left wing Soros style billionaires controlling the media, controlling Hollywood, controlling the American financial system, aided by the FBI and the CIA, weaponizing the justice system. These are just a few. This is me going online trying to see what are, what’s coming out now, what’s bleeding through all of this. These are the things that are bleeding and their point is, it’s, they’re using all this to scare the hell out of everybody and say that he is the only man who can fix it. Now, you see what I’m saying?
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: I’m not, whether this is true or not, I don’t, I don’t know. But I can tell you these stories are all surfacing to be hung around the neck of the Democrats.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. They are. And of course, the Republicans fear is what motivates those voters more than anything else. And what they’re giving them right now is this fear that, oh my God, if it can happen to Trump, it could happen to you. And that freaks these Republicans out. Like, oh my God, what’s gonna happen to me? Well, if you haven’t committed any crimes, you don’t have to worry about it. But that, you know, that reality of that does not affect these folks. They look at this, no matter what happens, even if we were to get a trial in six months, and he’s found guilty on all 34 counts, those true believers will still think it was a political setup. They’ve been planning this for years. It was a deep state coup.
Mike Papantonio: Right.
Farron Cousins: He is innocent, and they did this, and we’re angry. So nothing will change their minds.
Mike Papantonio: Right. Farron, you see the timing of all this though? Why are, why is all this popping up? And I mean, it’s like story after story, whether you’re talking about Soros, Hollywood, media, the American, the FBI, the CIA, the deep state, all this stuff in just in the last few days since all this discussion started is surfacing. And what I believe is it’s an extension of what’s going on with Trump and then the argument is Trump is the only guy who can solve it. That’s what’s going on here.
Farron Cousins: You know what’s really interesting to me too, though, is you would think Ron DeSantis would be loving every second of this. This was supposed to be his window to jump into this race. But instead, what DeSantis has had to do, what Mike Pence, who Trump hates has had to do, they have all had to come out and defend Donald Trump. So that makes them look a little bit weaker. It makes Trump look a little bit stronger. And that’s one of the reasons Trump is loving this so much. All of those people that want to challenge him for the nomination now have to go on record, saying, oh, it’s so sad what’s happening to this man. They’re losing clout. DeSantis’ poll numbers are just getting worse and worse.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. It’s this collage of things that I’m talking about that this, this is the vehicle driving this collage of right wing talking points. And the timing, there’s no coincidence here. This isn’t just happening sua sponte. I mean, this is happening because there’s a plan.
A police union executive has been arrested for running a massive drug smuggling operation out of her home for the past eight years, sending drugs all over the country by disguising them as wedding gifts and candy. Wow. Okay. Pick the story up, please.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. This is a bit of a shock here. We’ve got this San Jose Police Union executive, you know, basically kind of at the top overseeing the entire police union for San Jose, California. Well, it turns out that for, you know, almost a decade at this point, she had been bringing drugs into the country and then acted as the distribution point sending them all over the country. So she was getting drugs from China according to the allegations, from China, from India, from all of these foreign countries, just having them shipped to her in the mail.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. While, she’s using WhatsApp.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: I mean, she’s coordinating with WhatsApp and coordinating with the police, with the police’s own equipment.
Farron Cousins: Right. She’s using their computers.
Mike Papantonio: Eight years.
Farron Cousins: To set up her drug ring. And it all is happening under the nose of these police officers, like you said, for eight straight years. And then she finally gets popped and she says, oh, clearly it was my housekeeper that’s smuggling all these drugs and sending them from my home. But her methods are becoming more and more prevalent that we’re seeing with these drugs smugglers.
Mike Papantonio: That’s the story. That’s the story, isn’t it? I mean, the reason we’re doing this story is not because of that event that took place in California. There’s this real pervasive use of a lot of creative things that are being done. Talk about a few that we’ve already discussed.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. So she was disguising it as makeup. And what you do is you take, you know, a pack of makeup that has different powders and colors in it. You empty that out, you replace one or two of ’em with a powdered drug. That way somebody opens it up, it looks normal. She can, you know, well, not she, but you can bake it to look like candy. That is something that we see. You could.
Mike Papantonio: That’s, that was the wedding gift. It was candy.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. I’ve got you all of these lovely chocolates, but it’s actually just drugs. We’re seeing them put it in shampoo bottles. In lotion bottles. They’re liquefying drugs to be able to send them, get them in and out of the country. It truly is massive. The ingenuity of these drug smugglers. I mean, not to give them credit, but you kind of have to because the creativity is off the charts and we’re falling behind on being able to detect them.
Mike Papantonio: DEA doesn’t have a chance here. I mean, that’s the real story. They, they’re not funding the DEA. They’re not training the DEA. They’re not keeping up with times. We talked about one where they’re putting on, where tourists are bringing the drugs back in, the magnet story.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Yeah. What the cartels down in Mexico have started doing is they’ll put a package of drugs with a giant magnet on top, cover it in mud on a road. The tourist will drive over it, the magnet sticks to the bottom of the car and most of the time, you know, it’s just your average everyday tourist, they’re able to get through with no problem on the border because the bottom of the package will also be caked in mud so that it looks like, oh, your undercarriage is dirty. You ran through mud. No problem. Keep going. So they’re using anyone as a mule that they can find, even people who don’t know they’re being used. And of course, that creates massive problems for these people when they get caught because they had no idea that they were bringing drugs into the country.
Mike Papantonio: This story tells me that the DEA is fighting a losing battle and somehow, if they’re serious about it, need to adjust.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Bernie Sanders hammered former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz at a hearing last week and Sanders may have gotten Schultz to actually lie under oath about how his company is violating labor laws. You know, here’s the way I looked at this story. It is that either Schultz was delusional and he didn’t realize he was lying, or, you know, he was disconnected from the truth. Nobody told him, hey, you might wanna know you’ve already been prosecuted a hundred times for violations, or he just is lying. He just is lying as if nobody’s gonna find out. This is a troubling story because had it not been for Bernie Sanders, this guy would never have been put on the spot, but he was put on the spot. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And this is all credit to Bernie Sanders on this particular story.
Mike Papantonio: Totally.
Farron Cousins: Because he was the head of the committee. He is the one who wanted this to happen. Because, I mean, look, Starbucks is one of the biggest companies in this country today, and just in the last few years, there’s 1400 violations that have been reported. A hundred, like you said, that have actually resulted in judgements against Starbucks. There is no way this man that was CEO of the company didn’t realize that on average they’re getting hit with a complaint every single day of the week.
Mike Papantonio: How can he not know? He’s a CEO of the company? He’s sworn under oath to where Bernie Sanders has to say, listen, Mr, do you understand you’re committing perjury if you lie under oath in front of this committee? Oh, I’m not lying, but as he’s speaking these words, you’ve got NLRB judges saying that there’s a reign of ugly coercion taking place in the labor movement with Starbucks. And oh, by the way, right now there’s 70 cases pending against your company for things like coercion, spying on organizers, creating, taking away benefits for organizers, threatening organizers. I mean, that’s the story here. And he’s, yeah, I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Farron Cousins: Right. I mean, Bernie ended up citing this specific law 18 US code section 1001. So Sanders knew this man was lying. And, you know, of course, look, nothing’s gonna happen to the guy. They could easily hit him with perjury.
Mike Papantonio: Why is that, man? It was like those, it was like the dwarfs, the little 12 dwarfs, the CEOs of the tobacco company.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: Remember that? No sir, we have no information that shows that at all, that nicotine causes any physical problem. Do you remember that?
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: They clearly lying. One of them even admitted, yeah, he knew. But, you know, he was told to do that by his lawyer. Nobody prosecuted because they have a tie on. They have a white shirt and an Armani suit. So we don’t do anything to these people. And it’s killing democracy because anybody goes and lies in the courthouse is going to trial, they’re going to, they’re going to jail for perjury. But not this guy because he’s a billionaire. Right?
Farron Cousins: Exactly. Let’s not forget too, you know, this is the guy that was on the top of Hillary Clinton’s list to be Labor Secretary.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, I know.
Farron Cousins: Had she won in 2016.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, love affair with Hillary Clinton. Love affair. My God. You wanted to tell, I saw pictures where you wanna say check into a room, Hillary with him.
Farron Cousins: And so that’s, you know, that’s the difference I wanna point out. Bernie Sanders pulls this guy into the Senate, basically gets him to lie under oath. Hammers the hell out of him. But Hillary Clinton would’ve had him in charge of labor policy for the US.
Mike Papantonio: Corporate Democrat. Corporate Democrat. That’s what this is. They’re their own little animal out there. And all the folks watching this, anything that’s Democrat by God I’m for, and they never differentiate between the, those corporate Democrats are great on social issues. Where it comes to gay rights or it comes to any kind of rights that we’re concerned about, whether it’s gender rights, whatever it may be. They’re good on those issues, but they’re awful, terrible where it comes to protecting consumers against Wall Street. They are part of Wall Street and everybody watching this program, anything we say about the Democrats, oh my God, how dare you say about the Democrats. They’re killing us. Corporate Democrats are killing us.
The Biden administration auctioned off an area of the Gulf of Mexico the size of Italy last week for oil drilling, further damaging Biden’s credibility on the environment. You heard him just like I did. We’ve talked about it a couple how proud we were. Do you remember how proud we were? God, we gotta elect this guy. He’s talking about how important it is that we stop drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and we don’t drill in Alaska. He’s one of us. What the hell? Pick it up from there.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. This, the size of Italy out of the Gulf of Mexico, which is a lot of the Gulf of Mexico, by the way, for anybody that doesn’t understand the size of it,
Mike Papantonio: It’s most of it, it’s most of the Gulf of Mexico.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. We’re talking about the same kind of deep water drilling that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Mike Papantonio: The we handled, we handled that disaster. Real ugly disaster.
Farron Cousins: And this is a free for all and the worst part is $300 million is what they got. That is what the federal government got from these oil companies who are going to make hundreds of billions of dollars from it. And we’re selling it for $300 million. Elon Musk could have just bought the Gulf of Mexico for cheaper and not polluted it if he wanted to or any billionaire out there. But we’re killing us. We’re killing ourselves. We still see this massive dead zone that is getting bigger every year in the Gulf. We’re still dealing with the wildlife that has not fully returned from the Deepwater Horizon disaster. And Biden is sitting there saying that, no, we have to do it because even though we don’t want to, if we didn’t do it, they’d sue us and they’d win. So we’re just gonna not even fight. That is their reasoning.
Mike Papantonio: Well, as you know, this law firm headed up the Deepwater Horizon case. That was our case that we handled, led the litigation, led the discovery, did it across the board. And as this thing, as we were watching it develop, we’re watching these cozy relationships with Washington. And I don’t care who the president was, Democrat, Republican, it didn’t make any difference. They had so much money to spread around. And that’s what’s happening here. But I think the most troubling thing is when Biden came up, I remember us doing a show saying, God, finally somebody who gets it, that we have to push the envelope on this. We, yeah, is there going to be some suffering because we’re trying to get off of fossil fuel? Of course there is. Gas prices are gonna be high. We have to adjust. Those adjustments are gonna be difficult. But what this does is this wipes out, completely utterly wipes out anything that’s been done as far as wind energy or alternative energy of any kind. Right?
Farron Cousins: Right. All of the emission reductions that we would’ve seen through the infrastructure bill are undone based on this action, this action alone. That doesn’t even include the Willow Project that they have.
Mike Papantonio: The Willow in Alaska. Talk about what he did. This is right after he says, hell with Alaska, we’re going forward with the Willow Project. Right?
Farron Cousins: Exactly. And that of course has caused huge backlash with Democrats. Even some of the more, you know, vote blue, no matter who people that I’ve seen.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, I get so, I get so frigging tired of vote blue, no matter what. I mean, how do you do that?
Farron Cousins: Well, then those folks came out and said, this is reprehensible. So it’s good that they see, listen, sure, I guess they’re better than the Republicans. But at the same time, it’s just like with Obama, he did great things for the environment, but at the same time he’s doing horrible things behind the scenes that nobody was paying attention to that undid the leaps we made in emission reduction. I was writing about it at the time.
Mike Papantonio: It is suspension of disbelief. That’s what we see with Democrats. Suspension of disbelief. Well, he said he was gonna be our president. He said he was gonna do this, and now we look back and he lied to us. I mean, and so we just, oh, well that’s okay. He needed to get elected. That’s okay. That’s kind of the attitude. It’s just.
Farron Cousins: It is.
Mike Papantonio: It’s dumbfounding to me.
A new study of human intelligence has found that the IQs of American citizens have been dropping for nearly two decades as we continue to lose our skills in logic, in math, in vocabulary, in critical thinking, we are turning into a nation of dummies according to this study. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah, we are. And what’s really interesting to me is, you know, not just the drop in IQ, but the way they explained it and they said, you know, look back in the day before we had washing machines and dishwashers, those were manual labor type things. You had to do them every day. It was physical, you did it. And then as technology came in, you didn’t have to do it. So we lost a little bit of that physical activity and they’re saying it’s no different with the brain. So what we have seen in the years that we’re seeing the drop, you know, 2006 to basically today, so almost two.
Mike Papantonio: It’s significant. It’s two to three points is what’s dropping.
Farron Cousins: In such a short amount of time. And they’re saying it’s because we don’t have to think anymore. We have this little phone in our pocket that contains all of human knowledge. And so we don’t have to.
Mike Papantonio: Alexa do this. Siri do this. Is that what you’re saying?
Farron Cousins: Yeah, absolutely. And so we don’t have to use our brains. We don’t have to put ideas together because we can just wait for somebody else to do it and then we say, okay, well that sounds right. I’ll go with that. And that also confirms our, you know, confirmation biases. It makes people more tribal one way or the other depending on what you’re consuming. And it is making us dumber to put it as bluntly as possible.
Mike Papantonio: There was something called the Flynn Effect. You might wanna check it out. Google it. Flynn Effect is where our IQs were raising, I mean, just going sky high. And so now the question is, have we reached a ceiling that is irreversible? I mean, is it gonna go, is it now gonna start going down the other way? I mean, I think you’re mensa, if I’m not mistaken. I’m not trying to put you on the spot, but I think you are mensa and I don’t see any signs that your IQ is dropping. But this is very, this is problematic to me. I see these videos on where they go on a college campus. Have you ever seen these videos?
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: They’re man on the street. Mr. Joe, could you tell us who won the Civil War? Oh, the British won the Civil War. Could you tell us how many planets there are? Well, there’s, I think there’s four planets. And you go, my God. What is happening? Can you name a Supreme Court judge? Oh yeah, Herbert Hoover. You know, and doesn’t it scare you just a little bit?
Farron Cousins: It really does. And I will say, you know, the one thing actually that I feel great about is, you know, yesterday my son came up to me, he’s like, I’ve been seeing all these videos on TikTok for this thing called the Willow Project, like up in Alaska. What? Explain that to me. So I was like, oh my God. And he’s, you know, 13 years old. So I was shocked. I thought, okay, if we can utilize the technology properly, we can use it as a tool instead of a replacement for actual knowledge. And that’s the problem is far too many people want to use it as a replacement. I don’t need to think anymore. I can just say, Alexa, what does this word mean? Instead of me looking it up, reading it, which does, it is a difference in learning that way.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. You and I have done a couple of stories on not just kids, not just, you know, how’s the IQ of kids in school? The, how is the IQ of the American public? And you, they read and comprehend the American public, reads and comprehends on a sixth to seventh grade level. Okay. Now, you’re gonna get all these Europeans coming, oh, well, we’re so. No, you’re not that much smarter. Don’t get on our site and say, well, I’m in Europe, and we’re, you know, we’re much smarter. No, that’s not what these studies show.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. The studies show that even over in Europe, you guys are losing a couple points.
Mike Papantonio: Just be clear, it’s not just America. Okay. Farron, thanks for joining me. Okay.
Farron Cousins: Thank you.
Mike Papantonio: That’s all for this week. But all of these segments, well, they’re gonna be available throughout next week. And make sure you follow us on Twitter @AmericasLawyer. I’m Mike Papantonio and this has been America’s Lawyer, where we tell you the stories that corporate media won’t tell you because their advertisers don’t let ’em, or their political connections are either so Republican or so Democrat that they don’t allow for it. We’ll see you next time.
