America’s Lawyer E69: Democratic Senator Bob Menendez has been indicted in one of the most serious cases of political corruption that we’ve seen in modern times – and he’s refusing to resign in spite of the evidence against him. Saudi Arabia has sent a teenager to jail for the next two decades for the crime of being critical of the regime on social media. And a new poll has some terrible news for President Biden as it looks like his chances of winning next year’s election have completely evaporated. 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: I’m Mike Papantonio and this is America’s Lawyer. Democratic Senator Bob Menendez has been indicted in one of the most serious cases of political corruption that we’ve seen in modern times, and he’s refusing to resign in spite of all the evidence against him. It’s overwhelming. Saudi Arabia, well, they’ve sent a teenager to jail for the next two decades. The crime, well, they didn’t like what she said on Twitter. And a new poll has some terrible news for President Biden as it looks like his chances of winning next year’s election have completely evaporated. I know that bothers Democrats, but it is the truth and sometimes you have to adjust to the truth. All that and more it’s coming up. Don’t go anywhere. America’s Lawyer starts right now.
Democratic Senator Bob Menendez is refusing to step down after he was indicted for a massive bribery and political corruption scheme. The senator is accused of using his position to secure special treatment for his friends in Egypt in exchange for cash and gifts, totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars. Joining me to talk about that is the best guy in the progressive business. Farron Cousins can always bring information that matters. Farron, this story is shocking. This is the second time in 10 years for Bob and he barely escaped last time, but the facts are basically the same facts, the same mo except this time he’s got his wife involved in the business, right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. His wife, when you look through this indictment, it almost seems like she’s the one who set a lot of this in motion. She introduced him to her friends from Egypt and then, oh, well, we need some favors, and you’re the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And from there it just snowballed into this massive pay to play, really?
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: He was getting gifts. I mean.
Mike Papantonio: Here’s the list. $450,000 in just gold around there. Gold bars that have fingerprints of the cats who gave it to him. Cash, what, $500,000 in cash sewn into his clothes. Stuffed under the mattress. Hidden in the wife’s jewelry. On top of that, what is it, he gets, they’re making house payments for him. He gets a Mercedes. And the guy’s taking the position, oh, I’m just a victim because I’m Latino. I mean, isn’t that revolting? Isn’t that disgusting? Rather than just saying, look, you know what, I got caught. You know, he comes from, what is it called, a union city up in New Jersey, A big mob area, by the way. So he’s learned the mob business and he’s pretty good at it, apparently. What do you think?
Farron Cousins: Look, he has no choice at this point, but to resign. You do finally have more and more Democratic senators that have come out this week that said, yes, obviously he deserves the presumption of innocence till trial, but he’s gotta get outta the Senate. And that’s absolutely true. And when you look, obviously he does deserve the presumption of innocence, but I mean, he pretty much had everything except for big bags with dollar signs on them in his house.
Mike Papantonio: With film of them. Here it is.
Farron Cousins: I mean, gold bars. We’re talking about real cartoon villain here. Money just popping out of his jackets, he had so much of it.
Mike Papantonio: He’s got the same criminal lawyer that Hunter Biden has, and I know Lowell. I mean, he ain’t, he is not a magician. And that’s what you’d have to be on here. His position, well, I just saved cash, not on $180,000 a year, is what he’s making. His wife had a no-show job that was also part of the deal. So between them, if they’re making $250,000, he’s got almost $500,000 in cash. He’s got 400, gold bars that are worth $150,000. And then you add all this stuff that’s in addition to that. And I don’t know whether he has much of a defense. Now, if it’s tried in New Jersey, he might, because they’re used to trying cases, mobster type cases up there. But there was something that struck me about this. This came on the, the week before the DOJ got absolutely obliterated in hearings, I thought, because the answers to some of the questions weren’t good. Not that the questions were so smart, but the answers to the question about some of what the DOJ’s been up to. What did they do in this situation? Why did they fail to do this and this? It looked bad, the totality of it. But this comes the week after that. And you gotta say, I wonder, is this DOJ rehab, you think?
Farron Cousins: It might be, but we also gotta talk about what he did. Not just with the money he had, but he’s basically giving Egypt government secrets. You know, sharing top secret information with them in exchange for this cash. He’s steering these massive weapons sales to Egypt, all because of his position on that committee. So it.
Mike Papantonio: And he is trying to fix prosecution too. He tried to handpick a prosecutor that was his pal, that he thought, well, this prosecutor, he’s gonna let my guy go and I’m gonna get, the prosecutor’s name, Sellinger. But he did, Sellinger did the right thing. What I thought was so interesting is at the press conference with the DOJ, the fellow running the press conference said, congratulations Sellinger, you didn’t sell out. Really? Why would you even say that? Congratulations, you didn’t get pulled into the mob scene. As if that’s a big victory for the DOJ. That was really a weird thing to say. But Menendez, he’s defiant, isn’t he?
Farron Cousins: He really is. And that obviously is also one of the more disgusting pieces of this. And the Democrats need to be much, much louder with calling for his resignation. We remember the Al Franken thing.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, of course.
Farron Cousins: You know, we were out there that same day too, saying, listen, it doesn’t matter what you personally think of Al Franken, whether you love him, whether you think what he did was wrong, and he should resign. We said that, and we’ve known Al Franken for decades through Air America.
Mike Papantonio: Well, we used to work with him, with Air America.
Farron Cousins: Exactly. But we said, listen, he’s gotta resign. And this is no different. And the Democrats need to be louder. There needs to be more of them. As of us sitting here, Chuck Schumer said, I’m not gonna do that. It’s ridiculous.
Mike Papantonio: Right. Well, it is. It looks so bad. But hey, the good news is Santos came out and supported him. Did you see that? Santos came and said, not so quick. Maybe he’s just being targeted because he’s Latino. Santos, do you want Santos on your side in this? But that, he’s out there saying, hey, look, I don’t see anything wrong here. Of course, he doesn’t see anything wrong. The guy’s a thug. He’s a criminal. Yeah. I don’t think he’s going to resign. He might, who knows. The discussion right now is innocent until proven guilty. Look, they got fingerprints, they got DNA. What I find interesting about this article too, about not the article, but the story, is the DOJ found this stuff a year ago. Did you know that?
Farron Cousins: I did not know that.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. They found it in 2022 and they sat on it all this time. I think that’s interesting. That’s why I’m saying the release of the indictment, the timing of the indictment was right after the DOJ looks like a clown show. I mean, it looks like the whole DOJ is a nothing more than a clown show the week, two weeks before in hearings. And so this comes right on the foot of that. I don’t know if it’s gonna help him all that much.
The president of Brazil was at the United Nations last week to tell world leaders to let Julian Assange go free, arguing that it’s essential to freedom of the press around the globe. We’ve been saying they need to let this guy go for a long time, haven’t we?
Farron Cousins: We really have. It’s such a disturbing story too, especially with everything that they’ve tried against Assange, the oh, we think you’ve sexually assaulted somebody. We’re gonna look.
Mike Papantonio: It was a lie.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. It was a complete fabrication. And at that time, I was like, okay, let’s see where the investigation goes. These are serious allegations. And it turns out it was a total farce. And at this point, he’s basically been in prison for the last 13 years, unable to go anywhere. Unable to travel. And what was the crime that he committed here? Oh, well, he exposed a ton of war crimes from the United States government. I mean, we cannot lock a man up for that. I don’t care what your personal opinions are of this guy. What he exposed through those WikiLeaks cables was criminal activity by the US government.
Mike Papantonio: Why is it that progressives hate this guy so much? I mean, let’s think about what he did. He exposed the fact that corporate, international corporate is in charge of policy around the world, influence in the United States. He talked about the fact that we were torturing prisoners illegally. He talked about the fact that the government is spying on us. He talked about the fact that the folks at top of government typically are not running government. That’s what all this showed. And all he did was released it. And then how about the people who printed it? How about the New York Times? How about The Guardian? They printed it. They’re the ones that put it out there. Why aren’t they in prison too? So what you.
Farron Cousins: I mean, out there winning Pulitzers
Mike Papantonio: They’re winning on his work.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: They’re winning. This guy is being targeted as a criminal and they’re making, they’re actually getting, as you point out, Pulitzers on his work. And so, as you look at this, you can’t help but think, what if we had had such a regressive government and what if we had had such a regressive press? Now part of it is the press too. When we had the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, when he uncovered the Pentagon Papers, that led to a lot of things, including Watergate. We got rid of Richard Nixon. We found out an ugly, ugly backstory that was going on at the very top of government. But we didn’t put him in prison. And the press didn’t treat him like a criminal. What has changed about progressives? Maybe you could, I mean, you are always defending progressives. What is it that’s changed?
Farron Cousins: With the Assange story, everything changed. Because the progressives, the liberals, Democrats, they loved Assange prior to the 2016 presidential election. When they released the DNC emails, at that point, it flipped. Okay. Now Democrats hate Assange because he exposed all this crap within the DNC and the Republicans loved him, but the.
Mike Papantonio: It was DNC. That’s the point. That’s the point you’re making. Okay. Now, I don’t care if it’s DNC or GOP, I, as you know, I am indifferent. I am as about as neutral on those party issues as I can get. But I do look at this story and go, what the hell? What are progressives thinking, thinking that Assange is some kind of criminal? You realize nobody has disputed a word he said, do you realize that? Nobody has said none of this is true. Not one word saying none of this is true. It is that you put it out there, we didn’t like it and the military, the Pentagon’s mad. World leaders are mad about you. And so now, fortunately, Australia, Prime Minister in Australia and Brazil, they’re coming to his aid. Because they think this is the most asinine thing we’ve ever seen. But still, when we do this story, you will have some jerk waters say, oh, I hate Assange. I don’t understand it. Can you help me with it? I mean, seriously. Can you help me understand that?
Farron Cousins: It all just goes back to that, the hack of the DNC. But at the same time, like I said, it doesn’t matter what your personal opinions are of Assange, you may not like it. This guy through Chelsea Manning, who leaked the information to him, showed how we were killing civilians, killing reporters, American reporters.
Mike Papantonio: Right. Trying to kill Seymour Hersh, they tried to kill Seymour Hersh all the way we found that out in the Frank Church hearings. And now Seymour Hersh was a target again.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And so all of these things that he exposed were criminal in nature by the US government. If you’re gonna be angry about some, at somebody about this story, it needs to be directed at the government, not at him.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. Because, and it’s all, and you think it’s all because he disclosed some things that hurt the DNC?
Farron Cousins: That is when the flip happened. He was a hero. He was on Free Speech TV all the time prior to that.
Mike Papantonio: God oh mighty. Yeah. Well, of course he was. And I mean, he was, he told the truth for God’s sakes. But you got that snowflake mentality out there. It’s, I call it the headline mentality. It’s a Democratic, Republicans do the same thing. What’s the headline of the day? That’s all I’m gonna think about. That’s all I’m gonna talk about. What is the headline of the day? Well, the GOP says I ought to talk about this. So that’s what I’m gonna talk about. The DNC says I ought to talk about this. So that’s what I’m. And it just lulls people into just sheer stupidity. And this is an example in the Assange case right here.
A teenager in Saudi Arabia has been sentenced to 18 years in prison for criticizing the Saudi Arabian government on social media. These arrests are becoming far too common and the United States is staying completely silent about this disgusting abuse of human rights. God, how many times have we done this story? One iteration or another? Pick it up. Would you?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. We have a young girl who was under the age of 18 years old, when she got on social media and criticized the government, and actually not even so much criticized them, but defended people who were being targeted for what they were posting on social media, you know, critics of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. She defended these people and was basically saying, listen, they’ve got a right to say these things. That’s okay. Well, no, you don’t have a right to say those things if you live in Saudi Arabia. They’ve come out, arrested her, sentenced her to 18 years. But I think we all know she’s not gonna be in prison for 18 years.
Mike Papantonio: I don’t think she’ll live through it.
Farron Cousins: Well, exactly. This will be the last we ever hear of this individual.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, of course.
Farron Cousins: Because we’ve seen that happen plenty of times before. Family members say, yeah, my family member was sent to prison for a social media post and then we’ve now lost track of them.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. So MBS here, this madman in charge of government over there, what they’ll do with her is what we’ve seen before. They’ll just have 80 beheadings, was it 80 last year? Maybe more than that?
Farron Cousins: Well, it was several hundred last year.
Mike Papantonio: Several hundred beheadings. Okay.
Farron Cousins: 80 at a time, roughly.
Mike Papantonio: So she’ll simply fall into one of those anonymous, why are they being beheaded? We don’t really know. But she’s not gonna make it. I mean, they’re not gonna, she’s not gonna make it. They did the same thing to, I mean, it’s just the story you hear almost every week. You know, the bothersome thing, we did a story a couple weeks ago about Jack Dorsey, who was part of all this. Now maybe not her case. Do a quick review on that.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Where Twitter was infiltrated by spies from Saudi Arabia. The FBI warned Twitter that, hey, you’ve got people that are feeding information to the government of Saudi Arabia about these political dissidents on your platform. You need to do something. And this was when Jack Dorsey was in charge. They did nothing. They were warned by the FBI and did not take action.
Mike Papantonio: And there’s no question, Jack Dorsey knew exactly what was going on. He knew that his, them allowing to scrape that information, these tweets and send it to the people that make the decision, do we behead this person? Do we put them in prison? Jack Dorsey knew exactly what was going on. There’s no question about it. Matter of fact, he met with him, he met with this guy. And so to me, we just, that’s a yawn moment, isn’t it? Oh, it’s Jack Dorsey. He’s so cool. He’s got that cool beard. He’s just, he’s Jack Dorsey. He’s one of us. So we ignore it. Well, anyway, this continues.
Farron Cousins: Well, and it’s like I always say, if you were to replace the phrase Saudi Arabia in this story with Russia, with North Korea, with Iran, the United States military would be right there to say, okay, we’re gonna, this is a human rights abuse. We’re not gonna have this. But when it’s this guy right here, oh, no, no, no, no, no because he’s gonna buy a bunch of weapons for us. So we look the other way on the human rights abuses.
Mike Papantonio: It would be another Lusitania moment, wouldn’t it?
Banking giant Wells Fargo was recently found to have committed what has been called one of the biggest banking scandals in modern history. And last week, a single, just one executive at the bank was given a criminal sentence. The sentence is a slap on the wrist. It’s meaningless. And this executive is the only person that’s gonna go to face justice of this incredibly, almost chronic, corrupt behavior by this organization. There was a time when you and I were doing a story almost every month about Wells Fargo, wasn’t it? Fraud, lying to the government, lying to their customers. This fraud though, here, she just made stuff up out of the clear blue and said, we have all these customers. And they didn’t have ’em. And there was a benefit to doing that because it increased the value of the stock, right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. It increased the value of the stock. And of course, in some of these instances, well, what they did, they were pushing the salespeople like, you gotta open more accounts. You’re not opening enough accounts. So the bank said, well, what if we just open accounts for people? You know, you’ve already got a checking account with us. We’re gonna open up another account in your name without your permission. Oh, and by the way, we’re gonna charge you a monthly fee for it too that’s gonna come outta your checking account. But you’re not gonna notice it because the fees and we’ve seen this with so many industries.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. Back up. Back up. That came out a little fast. Slow that down a little bit so you can, people can understand the fact that this wasn’t a harmless crime. This was costing consumers money. Right?
Farron Cousins: It absolutely was. And the estimates are that it was a little over a million accounts had been created. So you take a look at that, you got a million accounts, they’re each getting charged a monthly fee, maybe $5, something that people aren’t gonna notice too much. But suddenly, with a million people losing $5 a month, the bank is gaining $5 million a month or more, depending on what the fees are. So they’re racking in millions and millions of dollars per month off this. The people don’t know they’ve got these new accounts in their names. And they directed it.
Mike Papantonio: How many similar events though, have we seen in the last couple of years with Wells Fargo? It’s almost chronic crime. And it all starts up at the top. Starts at the very top. Now, how do you think they talked, Carrie Tolstedt, that’s her name, 63 years old. She was a former head of Wells Fargo community bank division. How do you think they talked her into taking the fall for all this? Because that’s what they did. This is one person, everybody knew what was going on. There wasn’t any question about it. But she takes the fall. How do you think they did that?
Farron Cousins: That is still a mystery to me, because obviously, yeah, she knows where everybody else is on this. She knows that she was not the one who came up with this scheme and not the only one pushing it. So that is an interesting question that I do want an answer to. Unfortunately, I don’t have it. But I will say, yes, she was made to be a scapegoat, but even the judge, this horrible judge overseeing this case says, well, I don’t wanna make her the scapegoat. No. So you give her, you get six months home confinement, three years probation. This judge, US District Judge Josephine Staton, an Obama appointee from a corporate law firm.
Mike Papantonio: Right. And what she could have done is she could have said to the Justice Department. You know, this is absolutely a coverup. But this judge came up in the corporate. She came up corporate. That’s all she’s done is defended corporate. She hadn’t defended consumers. Seen it before with her, haven’t we?
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: So this is no big mistake here. This is the way it’s supposed to work out. In corporate America, they don’t look like criminals because they’re all dressed up. They got gold chains, they got Rolex watches, they came up in a Jaguar, so they don’t look like criminals. And this is how we treat ’em, because they don’t look like criminals.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And the judge says, okay, so your punishment is you stay in your multimillion dollar mansion for six months and then you’re good to go. That’s a vacation.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. What if she had shown up in a hoodie at court? Buddy, three years immediately.
A new poll from Washington Post and ABC has been making headlines this week, because the poll shows that Donald Trump has a 10 point lead over President Biden’s election process this year. Biden’s campaign is telling everyone to ignore the polls. It’s an outlier. And Democrats are going crazy. What does it take? I mean, you watch staff, when they start getting comments, it’s gonna be God almighty, how dare you talk about this? This is all a sham. What is it going to take? You know what? I gotta tell you, I saw the article that I think you sent over to me. Cenk Uygur’s a friend of ours. Matter of fact, Cenk and I used to do TV together. We did radio together. We did Air America together, right? You did too. You were one of the producers there. And so here you got Cenk Uygur, God, this infuriated people when he wrote this for Newsweek, all he was doing is telling the truth. He’s just saying, look, what is it about Democrats that they want to hide from the truth? That they’re like children. That you tell ’em something they don’t want to hear and they go spastic on you. What is that about? That’s what he’s saying here. He’s saying you sound like a Dem MAGA. You sound like a MAGA, a blue MAGA is what you sound like. So pick it up. Start with Cenk’s story. I think he did a great job here.
Farron Cousins: Yeah, he really did. And what he’s pointing out in this piece that he wrote, is just that, listen, the polls, and this was by the way, before this poll.
Mike Papantonio: Exactly. I was gonna say that.
Farron Cousins: Before this poll. He says, the polls are already telling us Biden can’t win. And he backs it up perfectly with statistics. He does a beautiful job with it. And he points out the fact that, listen, back in 2020, this guy had a 10 point lead, but still only won by a few thousand votes in three different states. He had a slim margin of victory with the electoral college. So even when he was polling way ahead of Trump, he still barely beat him. And now, in the best case scenario, even if this poll here is an outlier, they’re still tied in all the other polls. Like, that’s the problem.
Mike Papantonio: That’s the problem. That’s the tie issue. Let’s give ’em that. This is not an out, ABC and Washington Post, they would never have printed this had they thought this was an outlier. So, but what you’ve got here is you’ve got, I mean, we’re talking about what, I’m trying to think of the, what was it, 63 felony charges. No, 91.
Farron Cousins: 91.
Mike Papantonio: 91 Felony charges against Trump. Three different districts. He’s labeled, some of this stuff is true. You know the guy’s got some criminal conduct going on here. But even with that, they’re saying, well, I’m sorry. We don’t trust the guy. We just don’t trust him. And it’s a lot more complicated than that, isn’t it?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And also in this new poll, it shows that Trump’s approval rating has jumped up 10 points.
Mike Papantonio: How could that?
Farron Cousins: Since he left office. And look, we saw the same thing with George W. Bush, though, because he left office historically unpopular. And then a year or two later, everybody’s like, well, I mean, he wasn’t that bad because the public has an attention span of about two days, and they can’t remember what happened a week ago. So they’re like, well, was Trump really that bad? I mean, was it that horrible? The answer is, yes, it was.
Mike Papantonio: What I love about this, Washington Post, they did a nice job on this story. They didn’t just say, we did a poll and we’re not going to stand behind it. They stood behind this poll and they break it down. I think really interesting the way they break it down. They say that, first of all, let’s look at each issue. You hear the Democrats out there, well, my God, look what he’s done for the economy. People don’t understand what he’s done for the economy. All they know is Gasoline’s gone up, beef has gone up, they gotta pay more for natural gas. They have to pay more for a used car. They have to pay more for eggs. So all this Biden economics, it may be true, maybe there’s been a bump. Maybe we’ve gotten better. But the American public doesn’t see that. And it’s frustrating the Democrats. And then you go to the other issue, like, you’ve got Biden standing behind Ukraine, 63% of the American public says, hell no. We got problems at home that we gotta pay attention of.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. We’ve seen a big flip in the support for Ukraine.
Mike Papantonio: Huge flip.
Farron Cousins: You know, a year ago, most people said, absolutely do whatever it takes. Now, as you said, we got 63% that says, stop giving them anything. We gotta fix our own country here.
Mike Papantonio: So if you take each one of these, abortion, analyze abortion. What, is it a game changer? It should be, it should be a game changer.
Farron Cousins: It should be. But the administration here is not capitalizing on that issue in any way. I mean, the voters have reacted to it. Listen, we have had special elections all year, and Democrats have over-performed in every one of those elections.
Mike Papantonio: Totally on the abortion issue.
Farron Cousins: Exactly. And he’s not saying anything. He’s not doing anything. And maybe that’s a smarter move. Maybe they say, listen.
Mike Papantonio: I don’t know.
Farron Cousins: We don’t wanna wade into the fight because we know the negative connotation. But at the same time, where you’re talking about the economy, I think it’s such a good point, because people don’t care about graphs and charts and statistics.
Mike Papantonio: No. How much do eggs cost?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. People care about what they see when they go to the grocery store. They care about what they see when they log in to check their bank balance. That is what matters to them. It doesn’t matter that, oh, okay, well, in another state, these people are doing better.
Mike Papantonio: It’s gotta be frustrating. Okay. Because the Democrats, especially the Democrats that I call ’em headline Democrats, all the headline Republicans do the same thing. What are the Republican leadership talking about? Well, that’s gonna be my talking point, Democrats are the same way. What is the headline? Because that’s what I’m gonna talk about. So they’re seeing the headline from the talking heads around Biden, and they’re saying, well, this sounds right. But they don’t understand. It doesn’t make any difference. The inflation issue is killing everything you have to say about Biden economic policy. So, how about young vote? I was shocked. These numbers are shocking to me.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. With Trump leading, what’s the number, is it 20%?
Mike Papantonio: 20%, yeah.
Farron Cousins: 20% among young voters. That to me, I struggle to believe that. That really, that just doesn’t, because again, like you said, 91 felony accounts, the guy is out there on social media this week saying that Mark Milley should be executed. He’s a crazy madman. But yet everybody, like the public’s still looking at him, like, you know what, maybe, maybe four more years.
Mike Papantonio: Maybe he’s better than Biden. I don’t, how crazy is that?
Farron Cousins: I mean, it make no sense.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. Let me keep going down. How about the shutdown that’s coming up? Is that gonna change anything? What do the numbers say there? Does it make any difference?
Farron Cousins: No. And look, Biden has nothing to do with the shutdown.
Mike Papantonio: Right. Absolutely nothing.
Farron Cousins: I mean, he has no power to stop it or make it whatever.
Mike Papantonio: But what’s the public thinking about it? It doesn’t make any difference to ’em.
Farron Cousins: It’s the guy at the top. It always comes to the guy at the top. It doesn’t matter if their party does it or not. If you’re in charge, it’s on your watch. That’s what the public thinks. I’m not saying that’s what I think. I’m telling you that’s what the public thinks.
Mike Papantonio: Well, you said it, Farron. So everybody’s gonna think that’s what you think. Okay. So how about this. The third party run. The third party run is lights out, isn’t it? I mean, according to these numbers.
Farron Cousins: It really is. If we get, if there’s anybody that siphons even just a couple thousand votes away, then Donald Trump is headed towards a massive landslide. And when you look at these polls, somebody on social media, I wish I had saved it, posted what an electoral college map looks like with these numbers.
Mike Papantonio: Oh I know, talk about it a little bit.
Farron Cousins: You’ve got like six blue states, six. It is annihilation in the electoral college. Now, unless again, Washington Post and ABC just totally blew it with the poll. If that’s the case, then okay, you still got a lot to worry about. But this is worrisome. And I’ve seen far too many people on social media, higher ups with Democratic types saying, no, no, no, don’t pay attention to this. I’ve seen the articles like, oh, don’t worry. No, if you don’t worry about it now you’re gonna be the one in tears next November.
Mike Papantonio: Now most Democrats watching, the blue, what I call the, the new term is MAGA blue, those folks are gonna have tuned out by the time I ask you this question. They’re just so mad. I can’t watch that. I’m gonna unsubscribe. Fine. Tell us how many, every week, how many segments do you do attacking Republicans and Trump and all of his pals? How many?
Farron Cousins: 40 total videos per week, not including this show. So I would say at least 35.
Mike Papantonio: And how many years have you been doing that?
Farron Cousins: We started doing the daily segments in 2015. So it’s been, what is that, eight years?
Mike Papantonio: Eight years.
Farron Cousins: Eight years of doing 40 videos a week.
Mike Papantonio: You’ve being doing this. Right. Okay. The only advantage we have is we don’t rely on subscribers. We don’t rely on advertising dollars. We’re self-funded. So we’re able to do these kinds of shows. But the point is, when we do this show, this one segment, people will go completely crazy. I can’t.
Farron Cousins: Yeah, and all we’re doing is just sounding the alarm bell.
Mike Papantonio: Exactly.
Farron Cousins: We’re not saying this is good.
Mike Papantonio: And the fact we defended Cenk Uygur, oh my God, you’ve lost your mind. You’re one of them now. Well, okay.
Farron Cousins: I mean, the guy’s got the largest online progressive following.
Mike Papantonio: Following, in the world, on progressive following. And he happens to be a friend of ours. Okay. Has been for a lot of years. How many years ago did we do radio with him? How many?
Farron Cousins: Oh God. When was Air America?
Mike Papantonio: I mean, we did it three years with Cenk Uygur. We worked together.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. We’ve done projects with him, through TYT.
Mike Papantonio: You do a show with him.
Farron Cousins: Nonstop.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. He’s a dear friend of mine, actually. Anyway, let’s move on.
Left-wing columnists have a very clear message for President Biden as we approach the 2024 election, you have to dump Vice President Harris. Harris has an approval rating below 40% and reports over the past year tell us that even the Biden administration, they’re not happy with her performance. Could it go any more wrong? I mean, really? Could it go any more wrong?
Farron Cousins: You know, I think when you add this into the.
Mike Papantonio: She looks like a predator behind in this picture. I don’t think we meant to do that. I don’t know if we created that picture or not. But anyway.
Farron Cousins: When you add in the Harris issue with obviously, okay, you’ve got Biden whose approval rating is in the thirties. Her approval rating is even lower than that. So how do you bolster the guy that clearly is not gonna step aside, he’s gonna be the nominee. So what do you do to bolster him when you can’t bolster him? You gotta bolster the other half of the ticket. Now, it’s a tightrope situation here. He can’t get rid of her.
Mike Papantonio: Why, why, why? Tell me why.
Farron Cousins: Because it’s, well, I’ll tell you the real reason.
Mike Papantonio: Okay.
Farron Cousins: Because it’s an admission that you failed.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. Well, everybody told the Democrats they failed as soon as they put her on the ticket. She lost, came in absolute dead last in Cali, her own state, California, when she was running. Right? For president.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: She has underperformed virtually everything she’s touched. Now, the.
Farron Cousins: And that’s what the administration, the insiders have said. That’s what they’ve said.
Mike Papantonio: And the border issue. Right now, all of a sudden, Biden asked her to go down there and solve the problem, fix it. Because the US Chamber of Commerce is lying to us. We don’t need to have this kind of influx of immigrant work. The US Chamber of Commerce wants ’em because it’s all about money. Associated industry wants it because it’s all about money. And you would think that she went down to the border to solve the problem, but anything but like that happened, didn’t it?
Farron Cousins: Right. And look, I think with Harris, what the Biden administration has to do is they have to get her to step off, to say, listen, I’m not gonna be the vice president on the ticket. I will serve out the remainder of this term, but I have other things I would like to do. I’ve done my service here and I’ll move on. Freeing him up to.
Mike Papantonio: You think, will she do that?
Farron Cousins: They would have to basically force her to make that decision. Because again, if they get rid of her, then obviously the public looks at it and says, oh, well you picked somebody bad. You’re not good at this. We’re not gonna vote for you. So it is, it’s so delicate. But look, we’ve got wonderful people out there. We’ve got Katie Porter, who by the way, should like right there just be the vice president.
Mike Papantonio: Ro Khanna, I mean, you’ve got.
Farron Cousins: Ro Khanna.
Mike Papantonio: Raskin.
Farron Cousins: Raskin. You’ve got Stacey Abrams. You’ve got Elizabeth Warren. I mean.
Mike Papantonio: You have some great candidates out there.
Farron Cousins: There’s so many. We could sit here all day and name them. You don’t have to be stuck with this weight.
Mike Papantonio: What about the argument, you can’t do that because you’re going to lose the black vote if you do it? That’s such an empty, first of all, it’s insulting.
Farron Cousins: It’s insulting. It’s very insulting.
Mike Papantonio: It’s absolutely insulting to black voters to say, oh, I’m just, I can’t analyze politics. You just gotta put a black person up there for them. That’s insulting. Second of all, she didn’t carry the black vote in California, has never carried the black vote. They don’t have any kinship with her in a broad way. She’s got her pockets of followers, of course. But it’s these excuses for not getting rid of her. And I mean, hell make her ambassador to the UK, I don’t know, but.
Farron Cousins: Put her on the Supreme Court. Well, actually don’t do that. She’s very corporate.
Mike Papantonio: No Well, she actually, not only that, she failed the bar exam at least once that I know of.
Farron Cousins: But it’s also, it’s not just her. You’ve got a lot of people in this administration that are clearly not good at their jobs. And again, this is gonna draw hate. I don’t care because it’s the truth. Buttigieg is the worst transportation secretary you could have picked. That man is over his head. We have had transportation disaster after disaster, after disaster, after disaster.
Mike Papantonio: You can’t even, can’t keep up with him and his failures.
Farron Cousins: And he’s, it’s remarkable.
Mike Papantonio: But you have the Democrats that say, oh, Buttigieg what?
Farron Cousins: He’s the future of the party,
Mike Papantonio: The future. That kind of thing scares the hell out me.
Farron Cousins: It does.
Mike Papantonio: Because there was a day when, I guess politics wasn’t quite, they didn’t regard politics as a baseball game. See, that’s the way you regard it now, my team versus their team, rather than saying, this is not a football game or a baseball game. This involves the very future of this planet. It involves the future of our lives. But you have these people that just fall into the shallow end of the pool and this is what they want to, the Democrats say it, therefore it must be true. The Republicans, Republicans say it, therefore it must be true. And you develop this hysteria that you almost can’t penetrate through the hysteria on either side.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. For far too many people, this is team sports. It doesn’t matter if you’re getting the results that you need for the public, it doesn’t matter if people are out there suffering. All that matters. Is that my team that I wear on my hat, that’s my whole identity, is my political party.
Mike Papantonio: Is it identity?
Farron Cousins: It is. This, just like you see the Alabama fans out there, the Georgia fans or the, you know.
Mike Papantonio: Where at the end of the game, if they lose, they almost have to be hospitalized.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: So the identity issue, let’s do a show on that. I know there’s probably plenty of shrinks that have looked at it. What is it that in the face of logic prevents either a Republican or a Democrat to say, you know, there’s some truth to that? And sometimes I just gotta, I have to abide by the truth rather than being a home plate player. Right. Farron, thank you for joining me. Okay.
Farron Cousins: Thank you.
Mike Papantonio: That’s all for this week. But all these segments are gonna be available throughout next week. So make sure you subscribe to Ring of Fire YouTube channel. I’m Mike Papantonio and this has been America’s Lawyer, where we tell you every week stories that corporate media can’t tell you. Their advertisers don’t allow it. The advertisers pull away money if they tell some of the stories we tell or their political connections don’t allow for it because they’re too Republican. And the Republicans get mad if we tell a story that hurts ’em or the Democrats get mad if media talks about something that hurts them. But you know what? We really don’t care here. We’re gonna tell the story we want to tell you every week, may be offensive to some of you, so be it. But decide to stay. We’ll see you next time.
