America’s Lawyer E80: Democratic Senator Bob Menendez was hit with a superseding indictment this week that includes even more bribery allegations than were previously revealed. The EPA is about to approve a dangerous pesticide even though the agency admits that it DOES NOT meet safety standards. And experts are predicting a massive wave of misinformation ahead of this year’s election – and it will be driven, experts say, by artificial intelligence. 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. Democratic Senator Bob Menendez was hit with superseding indictments this week that include even more bribery allegations that are just now revealed. The EPA is about to approve a dangerous pesticide, even though the agency admits that it doesn’t even meet safety standards and really it doesn’t work. And experts are predicting a massive wave of misinformation ahead of this year’s election. And it’s gonna be driven, the experts say, by artificial intelligence. All that and more, it’s all coming up, don’t go anywhere. America’s Lawyer starts right now.
Democratic Senator Bob Menendez is in even more trouble after a new indictment alleges that his corruption went on longer than previously known. It involved more foreign countries, sending bribes seems to be the problem. I’ve got Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins with me to talk about what’s happening on these issues. I don’t know anybody that’s better on issues like this than you. Pick this one up. Okay.
Farron Cousins: So Menendez earlier this week gets hit with this superseding indictment that says, not only was your corruption, it went into last year into 2023 and they previously thought, okay, he stopped around 2022. But nope, all through last year as well. And it’s not just Egypt where he was selling favors. Now we find out he’s doing it according to these allegations with Qatar, basically on behalf of a wealthy donor friend, getting him his hands on the Qatari Government’s investment fund in exchange for favors from Menendez.
Mike Papantonio: So the real estate guy, the funder that, if you don’t think he’s splitting money with Menendez on top of all this, that’s not in the story, but I bet that’s what they’re gonna find.
Farron Cousins: Probably.
Mike Papantonio: But here you’ve got this guy that has been, he’s part of the Menendez gang, so to speak. He’s been dealing with him a long time, and he says, hey, listen, I can get you a really good deal on some funds that you wanna be invested in. And to help you do it, I’m gonna write a letter for you. Oh, by the way, what do I get in exchange? So, starts off with watches. Take it from there.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. They send him a picture of these watches that cost tens of thousands dollars a piece and he says, okay, yeah, that looks good. They give him Grand Prix race tickets. All kinds of cash and favors. And all Menendez really has to do is he puts forward this resolution in the Senate saying, Qatar is one of our great friends. It’s a great country. We shouldn’t have any kind of hostility towards them. And that is the exchange, basically saying, the US government gives Qatar the green light to do whatever. We’re not gonna interfere as part of any of our terrorism investigations.
Mike Papantonio: Isn’t he foreign agent, Farron?
Farron Cousins: It certainly seems that way. Yes. I mean, it’s obvious at this point, he is working on behalf of foreign governments to influence US policy.
Mike Papantonio: Right. Okay. So you’ve got him where he is, we know he’s got gold bars stuffed everywhere around his house. We know he’s got cash stuffed all around his house. And now we’re finding that that’s just really the surface of all this. So why in the hell haven’t the Democrats gotten rid of him?
Farron Cousins: That’s what’s starting to really anger me at this point. At least, when you look at like Santos in the House who got expelled a month ago, that push was actually driven by Republicans in his state that said, we gotta get this guy out. He’s making us all look bad. The Democrats need to come out and say, get out of this body. There is enough evidence against you. Look, the tens of thousands of dollars you had stuffed in your jacket, pockets in your closet. That’s not normal.
Mike Papantonio: Gold bars. Who has stacks of gold bars in their closet?
Farron Cousins: Under his bed.
Mike Papantonio: Under his bed. Wife is involved. I call it the Menendez gang. Up in New Jersey, there’s this mobster mentality in the very area that he represents. And it seems like that’s just the way that they conduct business and they need to get rid of him. He’s an embarrassment. And every time they fail to get rid of him, the Republicans are able to say, look, we at least took care of Santos. You need to take care of this thug.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. He’s gonna become an election issue for the Democrats.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, no question.
Farron Cousins: If they’re not careful about this. They gotta get rid of him now. And look, he’s terrified, he’s gonna spend possibly the rest of his life in prison at this point.
Mike Papantonio: With a little luck.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. But, I mean, the evidence is overwhelming.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. It is.
A recent investigation found that Tesla vehicles are failing at an alarming rate. Now, the Senate’s demanding answers from the company about what they knew and when they knew it. Yeah. I gotta tell you something. I got problems with this story. Why don’t you lay this story out and I wanna tell you what my problems are. Okay?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Recently, Reuters came out, they did this big investigation. They found that there were steering failures with these Tesla vehicles that would almost render the entire vehicle inoperable, would become a danger on the roadway. So Reuters goes in, does their due diligence, looks at the internal documents, talks to people that work there. And what they said was, it looks like Tesla’s trying to shift responsibility from themselves and just saying, nope, the drivers, thousands of drivers all screwed up in the same way. So that’s where we’re at with what we know.
Mike Papantonio: You know, this is almost unprecedented. I don’t know if you realize that. Coming from Congress, now they’ve got, Musk has got a big ol’ zero on his back. He’s got a big target on his back. Let me give you the truth. The other side of the story. Faulty hidden defects are American cars, Japanese cars, they’re everywhere. Just some examples that I saw before we came in here where you had unintended acceleration in Toyotas. Killed 300 people. That went on for years. And there were complaint after complaint, went to Congress, went to regulators, they did nothing. Faulty ignition switches that caused the car to shut down and the driver would lose control of the car completely. That was complained about. You had regulators, you had Congress, no word, nothing was done. Okay. So what’s the difference here? Defective tires. The Firestone case. You remember that?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. God.
Mike Papantonio: Do you have any idea how long people, and it was 700 injuries. On the faulty ignition, 300 people died. I mean, we’re talking about far worse than we’re seeing with the Tesla case. But the Democrats at this point hate this guy and they’re going after him. And now this is what he’s faced with. I just think if you’re gonna do it, do it with everybody. Don’t center on Musk. The other one was the, you remember the bucking Bronco? That was, I mean, what, it killed a thousand people.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: 1000 people. And Congress knew about it. Regulators knew about it. The Pinto exploding gas tank, same deal. Plenty of notice what was going on. But Congress did nothing. And now they’re going after him. You gotta play fair. You gotta say, this is good for you and it’s good for everybody, and you can’t just pick favorites.
Farron Cousins: Right. I agree with you a hundred percent on that. And look, I understand Musk, he’s got his political leanings and yeah, he has off the Democrats. And they should be looking at this. But like you say, they ought to be looking at every single one.
Mike Papantonio: Everybody. Exactly.
Farron Cousins: There isn’t a single automaker in the United States that hasn’t, at some point, probably some of them even today, that are covering up significant dangers that eventually are gonna come across your desk here at the law firm. And you’re gonna have to deal with it and see the documents. But, I also wanna point out, by the way, the GM ignition switch, so everybody understands GM saved $2 and 13 cents per vehicle on that ignition switch that killed hundreds of people.
Mike Papantonio: 300 people.
Farron Cousins: For less than $3, is what they saved. But look, we could be looking at something similar with Tesla. It has all the signs of yeah, they probably knew something was screwed up and yeah, this many people could get hurt. It’s what they all do. But if you’re gonna call them in and say, come answer questions, say, oh, by the way, after you, we’ve got GM, Ford, Toyota, everybody coming in after.
Mike Papantonio: Exactly. I mean, play fair. As you know, I’m no big fan of Musk. I’m just saying, look, how many times have you seen us involved with a lawsuit that’s outrageous? I mean, completely crazy. Like the CPAP lawsuit that’s going on right now that we’re handling, that’s the mask that you put on because you have apnea, hell, it’s causing all kinds of lung diseases. So we take that kind of information. We put it in a box. We send it to the right people. Invariably they do nothing about it. Okay. So this bothers me a lot because this is targeting, and when you start targeting and weaponizing the process, that’s all that’s happened here. Whether I like him or not, you know what, doesn’t make any difference. Let’s be fair across the table.
Scientists at the EPA have been pressured for years to approve a dangerous pesticide that poses massive health risk to humans, animals, and the environment. And when scientists raise these concerns, they were told that, you know what, we might have to cover this up. And that’s what’s going on. How many times does this story have to be told? You know, Paraquat, Roundup, Atrazine, I could go on forever, where the EPA, they just fall under political pressure. You know, some regulator calls ’em from another department, or some senator calls ’em and says, you know, we really need to make this happen. Pick it up.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. This is a pesticide called Aldicarb. And Aldicarb, the EPA has been going back and forth on it for 14 years at least. Oh, do we approve it? Do we not? Well, according to the EPA’s own scientists, this stuff is gonna give you developmental issues. It alters babies’ brains. It’ll kill people. It’ll kill animals. It’ll kill the environment. It’ll poison the water. Poison the food. Literally poison everything out there. So let’s not approve it. But every time they say that, the higher ups and sometimes the politicians, the industry insiders.
Mike Papantonio: It’s senators. I mean, it’s senators, it’s congressmen.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. They make the phone calls and they say, hey, run your test again, but this time only look for X, Y, and Z, things they know they won’t find.
Mike Papantonio: We see it all the time. As you know, I handled Roundup. I’m handling Paraquat. I handled PFAS. Every time, the department would phony up clinicals, they literally would phony ’em up and come up with a test that would make it look safer. They would just move some numbers, a decimal point here, a decimal point there, and they’d move numbers around. This thing is so bad, it even has a nickname in the industry. It’s called All De Crap. It is absolute poison where they can see functional changes on PET scans, neurological changes on PET scans with children, babies. So they wanna use this in orange groves. All the orange juice is gonna be contaminated. Where they use it, the aquifer’s gonna be contaminated. It’s gonna be in our water, it’s gonna be in our air. But the EPA is literally still considering after 14 years, they’ve been giving, everybody has told ’em, it’s banned in 100 countries, Farron. 100 countries have looked this and said, hell no, we can’t use this.
Farron Cousins: We see that all the time too. In a lot of those cases you’re mentioning that you’ve either handled or are handling, a lot of those chemicals have been banned across the planet. But here in the United States, because we have this industry regulatory capture, we keep putting it out there and poisoning our own country, when everybody else in the world looks at us and says, are you insane? We took this off the market 20 years ago because we knew it was killing everybody.
Mike Papantonio: Imagine the politicians making these calls. I mean, most of them, IQ about room temperature. Have no idea what the science is. Well, Mr. EPA, this guy’s in my district, he gives me a lot of money. Could you just give him a break? We’re talking about killing thousands of children. I mean, that’s what the conclusion is. You would cause brain damage for infants and young children, the most susceptible to this.
Farron Cousins: Orange juice in the store would become poison for everybody drinking it.
Mike Papantonio: We’re talking about hundreds of millions of pounds of this pesticide that’s already been banned around the world. And we have a dysfunctional, stupid unworkable EPA with the same morons involved that have given us Paraquat, they’ve given us Roundup, they’ve given us PFAS. At what point do you say this is not working? You know, Richard Nixon of all people started the EPA. How crazy is that? And he said, this is a good idea to have somebody looking over these guys’ shoulders. Well, it doesn’t make any difference anymore. It is absolute fraud. It’s EPA fraud. The scientists are frauds that make this happen. They move decimals around and they make it look safe. They know exactly what they’re doing. Congress knows what they’re doing. And you know what, have you seen this article anywhere? Have you seen the corporate media covering this anywhere?
Farron Cousins: Oh, heck no. And they certainly won’t. Absolutely not.
Mike Papantonio: No. They won’t cover it a bit. But it’s kind of the perfect storm. Politicians put their foot into it to make it happen. The media has, I mean, if it’s not a low hanging fruit story, they don’t do the story. They don’t even understand how dangerous. Dicamba, great example. Same thing. And then you have regulators who end up going to work for the industry. They talk to some regulator who’s making $50,000 a year and say, hey, how would you like to make $500,000 a year? Give us a break on this, will you, Joe? And that’s what happens.
Experts are ringing the alarms about the role that artificial intelligence could play in this year’s election. AI can create deepfake videos, sound clips, images that have a significant impact on what voters believe. Talk about deepfake. Give us an example of deepfake.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. There’s a lot of videos going around right now that appear to show, just some funny ones, not harmful, but President Biden and President Trump playing video games and talking over the headsets. The voices sound identical. And that’s fun and harmless. But if you were to see these things, a lot of these are getting really good. And if you didn’t know it was fake, I’m sure some people out there say, oh my God, why are these guys actually doing this? Because they are very realistic at this point. And you can take that and you could say, hey, look, we’ve got this politician having sex with a penguin. Here’s the video. You can make that video fairly easily these days because of this AI technology that has just blossomed in the last 12 months.
Mike Papantonio: I think on farronbalanced a show that you do, you did this story on Ron DeSantis and how he had took images of Trump and he made it look like Trump was putting his arms around Anthony Fauci. Remember that?
Farron Cousins:: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: And so that, but it was so real. I mean, actually front pages of papers were covering that. But there’s no limit to what they can do here. They can make anything look legitimate and they can create, in the voter’s minds, ideas that are completely, so far off base, they have no anchor in reality.
Farron Cousins: Well, let me put it this way because again, the experts are saying, one of them says, I expect a tsunami of misinformation. Because anybody can do it. Other countries can do it and send it over here. But let me explain it to you this way, how easily duped the voters are. Because we all remember Sarah Palin when she said, I can see Russia from my house, except Sarah Palin never said, I can see Russia from my house. That was Tina Fey impersonating Sarah Palin that said that.
Mike Papantonio: No kidding.
Farron Cousins:: But everybody remembers Sarah Palin saying that.
Mike Papantonio: Wait, wait a second. You know what? I never knew that.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: I never knew that. She never really said it.
Farron Cousins: She never said it.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. But it took all life of its own.
Farron Cousins: It does. Because all it takes is that one pop culture moment or that one really good fake video. It’s almost like the Mandela effect. You think you remember something and then other people think they do. So it becomes reality.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. And that’s the thing. That’s the hit on Sarah Palin. I first of all, I did not know that. Thank you for that information. And I’ve used that so many times when I talk about her, you know, she can see Russia from her house. Right. But that’s the idea. Now we’ve taken it to a whole new level though. Right.
Farron Cousins: And now you can actually have her say that with her voice and her video.
Mike Papantonio: Not Tina Fey. Actually, somebody that is her.
Farron Cousins: Right. And we’re gonna see that, especially when you look at the two people at the top of both tickets. Okay. It’s not out of the ordinary for either one of them to say something crazy and stupid.
Mike Papantonio: Well, they might have.
Farron Cousins: So you don’t have to go too far with it.
Mike Papantonio: Right. They might have Biden falling down. They might have him stumbling downstairs or saying stupid stuff. They might have Trump saying the most outrageous things that you go, I can’t believe he just said that. It’s hard to know what’s true and what’s not.
Farron Cousins: Exactly. Exactly.
Mike Papantonio: New polls show that the American public isn’t sick of Biden and Trump, they’ve grown disgusted by the entire political process in this country. It’s a lot deeper than they don’t like Biden and they don’t like Trump. They hate the two party system of government. How have we gotten here. Talk about these polls. These are significant findings, man.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. I love this because a lot of the polls we’ve seen and we’ve talked about, say, well, I’m not crazy about Biden, I’m not crazy about Trump. But now a majority of Americans are saying, listen, I don’t like any of this. I don’t like the process. I don’t like these parties. Not only, it’s not just the people, it’s the parties. It’s the mechanism that they have for choosing people. And a lot of people both on the right and on the left, think that their respective parties are not running fair primaries and caucuses, which, when you look at it is true. We’ve got multiple states on the Democratic side who said, listen, we’re not gonna put all these other people also running on the ballot. You go in there for your primary, I forget the latest state to do it, but the only choice you have is Biden. Even though you do have Marianne Williamson, you’ve got Cenk Uygur, you’ve got Dean Phillips. I think I’m missing somebody else too, but.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. The point, first of all, this is Associated Press and it’s the Center for Public, what is it, Center for Public Affairs Research. We’ve used their stuff many times. It’s really credible. Here’s the thing that caught me. 25% of Americans, of adults, say that they have only little or none at all confidence in the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. I don’t think it’s ever been like that, do you think?
Farron Cousins: No.
Mike Papantonio: I mean, it’s crossing both party lines.
Farron Cousins: It really is. And in recent years, we’ve seen a lot more people switch from an actual party to either no party affiliation or independent. The number of independent voters in this country continues to rise every single year, which is great because it does open the door for third parties. Now the problem is the third parties we have right now, not super great. We need something better. We need something more cohesive. But the two party system, more and more people say, this isn’t working anymore.
Mike Papantonio: You could assemble something and call it a unity party outta what’s out there. You could say, okay, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Let’s put a party together. They’re just sitting ducks. Democrats and Republicans are sitting ducks. The American public is sick and tired of their stupidity. It’s just like one upsmanship. Oh, well, we did. It’s like, I was trying to look, there was a great quote where somebody says, everybody right now is a bunch of children stomping their feet until they get their way. There are no winners. They all want to claim to be winners. That was one and I think that’s well put. That it’s so childish.
Farron Cousins: It’s team sports. It’s my football team either wins or loses and I’ll be sad about it for the next week until the next game. And that’s how elections are. Like, did we win or did we lose? My team won. I’ll gloat for four years. And then we’ll see what happens next time. That’s all politics is these days.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. It is children yelling at children, pointing fingers at children. There’s no statesmen out there. There just are no, well, there’s a couple, but it’s just so rare, man. It’s just so rare to have statesmen out there anymore. They’re just, they don’t exist. That’s all for this week, Farron. Thank you for joining me. Okay.
Farron Cousins: Thank you.
Mike Papantonio: These segments are gonna be posted right here on this channel in this coming week, so make sure you’ve subscribed. I’m Mike Papantonio, and this has been America’s Lawyer, where we tell you stories every week that corporate media won’t tell you. Mainly because their advertisers won’t let them tell the story if it affects the product that we’re talking about or their political connections are so deep. It’s so Democrat, it’s so Republican that you can’t really get the truth because they’re afraid that they’re gonna hurt their political party. We don’t really have that problem here. I know it upsets some of y’all, but you know what, that’s what we do every week. We’ll see you next time.
