Republicans are warning that the prosecution of Donald Trump could lead to prosecutions of other politicians – especially Democrats – in the future. But is that such a bad thing? 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: Republicans are warning that the prosecution of Donald Trump could lead to prosecutions of other politicians, like Joe Biden, especially all Democrats in the future. But is that such a bad thing? Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins joins me to talk about this. He has, I love your take on this. I love your, explain what your thought is because it’s easy to go to corner here and not really analyze this issue.
Farron Cousins: Um, I love that idea. Like, don’t threaten me with a good time Republicans. Like, oh no, we’re gonna prosecute everybody. Bring it on. We have sat here, you and I, and talked about crime after crime committed by members of Congress, by Democrats, by Republicans, and nobody ever faces any accountability. And one of the big things, obviously, is the insider trading that we have seen Congress do. We’ve got over a hundred members in the last three years alone that have been busted selling and trading stocks based solely on information they get as members of committee before it’s public. You do that, I do that, we’re going to jail.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: Members of Congress do it, they pay a $200 fine, but they pocket about a hundred grand from these stock sales.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. There’s no, if you take a look at the history, you go into Congress, you’re worth a hundred thousand dollars. You come out and you’re worth $10 million. Okay. Now, the way it happens is there’s a lot of ways they do this, that if we did say, okay, everybody’s fair game, we would be looking at that congress, that congressperson who was on a committee, and all of a sudden the committee’s talking about, well, we need to do something with oil and gas. That guy, person, goes out and buys oil and gas and they make a lot of money. There’s tons of things like this. I think the first target really is gonna be Biden’s, I think it’s gonna center around Hunter Biden and they’re gonna tie Hunter Biden’s money into Joe Biden.
You’re already seeing Republicans try to do that. Whether it goes anywhere. I don’t know. I mean, I think the attitude is going to be, well, the Republicans don’t think that there’s anything to what they’re accusing Trump about. And they’re gonna say, well, we’re gonna do the same thing. We don’t know if the Hunter money actually went to Joe Biden and his family, but they’re gonna take a shot at it. We start looking like a Banana Republic when that happens. I mean, we really do. And I just think that’s where this is headed.
Farron Cousins: Well, and the thing is too, we’ll look like a Banana Republic once all these get rolling, but at the end of it all, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna weed out all of the bad actors. Doesn’t matter to me if it’s a Democrat, doesn’t matter if it’s a Republican. If we have people in office, which we clearly do, who are breaking the same laws that would land us in prison, I mean, the campaign finance laws that these people routinely break, and then the FEC comes back and says, oh, don’t worry about it. Just fix this.
Mike Papantonio: Well, explain that. Explain that.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. There was a big issue recently. George Santos accepted a donation from a man well in excess of the legal amount. So the FEC says, hey, this is an illegal donation, but what you can do, because this is actually a joint account with his wife, is you can just say that half of it came from the wife on your form and then you’re legal. And so he just changed, so the FEC that’s supposed to.
Mike Papantonio: The regulator.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. The regulator, instead of saying, I’m gonna prosecute you, says, listen, just change a couple names here and you’re good to go. And it’s crap like that, that let’s lower the bar for prosecution and get these folks out.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. I agree with you, Farron. I think we lower the bar. Everybody’s fair game. It’ll look ugly for awhile. But then it might actually require that things like we’re the DOJ when we’re not even talking about politicians, but we’re talking about people who have big influence, the CEOs of large corporations, the people who have all the money, the affluence. Maybe we’ll start doing what we’re supposed to do and that is throw them in prison when they kill 2000 people with a dangerous product. You know, maybe that’ll happen. Maybe the DOJ will finally wake up and go after Wall Street when they steal mom and pop’s pension programs. Maybe.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. I mean, if we lower the bar enough, we can get all these folks on conflict of interest, failure to recuse, you know, investigating the company that you used to represent in court. All of these things, it’s a good slippery slope.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. We’ve talked about, we have an upside down justice system right now. If you’re a child in a hoodie selling 10 ounces of marijuana on the street corner, you’re gonna be prosecuted. If you’re dressed up in an Armani suit and you have killed 10,000 people with a dangerous product, you’re gonna walk free. How about the opioid crisis? Who was prosecuted there? Zero. None of those folks went, killed 150 people a day. Maybe this opens the door to that.
