Google is trying to get out of a massive lawsuit from consumers who allege that the company is illegally spying on them through their Google Home devices. Plus, several members of President Biden’s White House Advance Team have resigned following an investigation into complaints of verbal harassment and abuse of the staff. 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: Google’s trying to get out of a massive lawsuit from consumers who allege that the company is illegally spying on ’em through their Google Home devices. But the company suffered a serious setback when a judge refused to force the plaintiffs into arbitration. Look, how many times have we talked about this? The Roomba, all of these access points that social media has, is there any question in your mind, if you go home and you tell your wife, you know, I really want a new Chevrolet, that you’ll be covered up with Chevrolet ads within five minutes. You can’t look at that and say, there’s not a problem here. People are listening. And then that material can be sold to other sources. It’s just that one conversation. Just the edge of that conversation can be sold to thousands of different places, both conmen and straight business people. But it’s just gotta be stopped.
Farron Cousins: Right. And sometimes it is harmless. Like you say, if I start talking about Chevrolet, I’m gonna get ads on my social media, but also a week or two down the road, I’m gonna get a flyer from my local Chevrolet dealer because they buy that data and okay, that’s annoying, but it’s harmless to a degree. But what happened in this Google case, and this is why the judge told Google, you’re not escaping trial. This case was being kind of litigated for four years. Four years Google was letting this happen. They were having hearings, filing motions.
Mike Papantonio: Even after it happened. Nothing changed though. Even after the lawsuit. But go ahead.
Farron Cousins: And so Google finally, after four years, they say, hey judge, they can’t even sue us because we gotta go to arbitration because that was part of the agreement. And the judge essentially laughed it out of court saying, you’ve had four years, you’ve wasted your money, you’ve wasted their money, you’ve wasted these lawyers’ time, now telling us that we’re going to arbitration. Hell no, you’re gonna take this to trial. And I will say, right now, the plaintiffs do have an uphill battle.
Mike Papantonio: It’s totally an uphill battle.
Farron Cousins: Because you gotta prove that Google’s devices were listening to you.
Mike Papantonio: Correct.
Farron Cousins: And that Google knew it and did nothing about it. You gotta prove the intent.
Mike Papantonio: The new norm, as you know, I handle cases bigger than that and of course, the new norm is to destroy all, if you have documents, you can prove intent. You can, just the indicia, you put the documents together, the emails, the whatever took place in private meetings. And you have plenty of information to show that yes, they had a plan. Yes, they knew they were gonna make money by getting that information and selling it to somebody else. The problem is that now the whole idea is destroy documents. They’re destroying documents as quickly as they generate ’em right now. There’s some companies that if I email you and I say, look, we got a problem in Toledo, something’s killing, our company’s killing people in Toledo, that will be gone in a nanosecond. Okay. So they’ve got it down to whole science. But when I first started doing these huge cases all the way back to tobacco, actually asbestos, we could tell what the company was doing by looking at their emails and looking at, but they’ve just gotten to the point to where it’s automatic destruction, to prove the kind of intent you’re talking about is difficult.
Farron Cousins: Yeah, absolutely. Especially for a company like Google that obviously is very tech savvy. So they don’t have to waste a lot of time. So unfortunately, again, for these plaintiffs, it doesn’t matter how good your lawyers are, and they do have some good lawyers on this case.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, they do.
Farron Cousins: It’s just the fact that Google is not necessarily sloppy. So, I don’t think they’re gonna leave these kind of things lying around with memos printed out saying, hey, we’re spying on people and that’s hilarious.
Mike Papantonio: One place you get a, that’s interesting, most of the time I get my information from third parties. Okay. They may be a subcontractor, they may be somebody not directly associated with the company who doesn’t destroy it. And that’s where you end up getting these great, great bits of information about what the company was up to. But in this case, the other part of it is arbitration. Wow. What a scam. Huh? What a scam. And we used to talk about this when the first idea of arbitration started. It was driven by the Chamber of Commerce. It was driven by associated industry. Let’s take the courtroom away from the plaintiff. Let’s take the courtroom away from the claimant where a jury never hears this. Instead they bring in these cats that are part of corporate. They’re just raised with corporate, all they know is corporate. And most of the time they have some association with very corporation they’re trying to arbitrate for.
Farron Cousins: Yeah, absolutely. And if you sign up for a new cell phone service, if you go buy a car, if you basically are signing any kind of contract, buying a house, you’re signing an arbitration agreement. And they’ll quickly say, okay, and here’s your, this arbitration agreement.
Mike Papantonio: And everybody just, yeah, sure.
Farron Cousins: Yep because you’ve already signed 800 things, you’re just ready to get out of there with your car or your new keys. And so you are signing these things. If you’re watching this, you’ve signed one of these and you probably don’t even realize it.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, dozens of them, dozens. Just like going on the internet where have to tag some, you hit a check mark here as arbitration. Judges are starting to say, uh-uh, we’re gonna go to court.
Mike Papantonio: Several members of Biden’s White House advance team have resigned following an investigation and complaints of verbal harassment and abuse of the staff. This story’s been kicking around a long time. And the first time I read it, I go, yeah, people are just so sensitive. But then, it’s these blast of GD and Fs, you know, the whole F slinging around. And you go, well, maybe there’s something to this. You know, he’s old, he’s tired. He doesn’t want to have any kinda resistance. I think the first time I saw it was when they said to him you’re getting your kicked. The polls are killing you. He went crazy. Right? What do you think of this story?
Farron Cousins: Well, in this particular case, we’re finding out like, yeah, okay, well we know Biden, he’s got a temper behind the scenes. And we’ve seen that throughout his career. But this one is actually, goes even deeper into the staff, into this weird, what’s called the advanced team, which is made up of both White House staffers and campaign staffers. It’s where they strategize on what he’s gonna do in the office versus what he’s gonna do on the campaign. So what we found out, through an investigation, which office was it here, the White House Council’s Office, had to investigate because they were.
Mike Papantonio: Required to investigate.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Because they got so many complaints from these staffers saying that their supervisors, led by a man by the name of Ian Mellul. He was not physically abusing them, but abusing his position, screaming at them, telling them, if you don’t do what I say, I’m going to ruin your life. Making them go pick up his dry cleaning and running his personal errands according to this report. So he resigned before the investigation could go too deep. But this is what bothers me so much about Washington DC because it’s not just about the dysfunction. It is these people.
Mike Papantonio: In a bubble, they’re in a bubble.
Farron Cousins: You got two separate kinds of people that get into work as staffers for members of Congress or for the President. You’ve got the people that for some reason, think they’re gonna make a difference. And those are the hopeful, optimistic, they will be crushed soon enough. But then you have these power hungry little freaks, like this guy who go in there, they get on this power trip and they say, well, I’m in charge of five people. So obviously I am the king of this castle. Go get my dry cleaning. You go get me coffee. I am the king of the Biden White House.
Mike Papantonio: Isn’t the Biden White House the kinder, gentler White House? I mean, isn’t that kinda, wasn’t that supposed to be the deal?
Farron Cousins: See, that’s the thing is it never actually works out that way because you have too many of these power hungry weirdos that latch themselves onto the Democrats. They latch onto the Republicans and they help destroy things from the inside out.
Mike Papantonio: Republicans just as bad. It is, you hit it on the head. It is this power trip. Right. They really think, they really think that what they do really matters. They really think that what they’re set out to do is gonna have a big impact. It most of time has zero impact. But the criticism where you see with Biden, I mean, the first time I saw it, I think was the Anita Hill hearings.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: I saw a side of him, I’m going, what the hell? Him attacking this woman who has been, Clarence Thomas had clearly victimized this woman. There wasn’t a story here that she’s making up. And Biden jumps on the train. Anita Hill this, Anita Hill that. Basically stands up and starts making these speeches about what a, how awful she is. She was just there trying to protect herself and try and tell the story that Clarence Thomas had tried to, was making all kinds of advances to her. I’ve never seen anything like it. But then you start, and then I think he disappeared at that point. But now you’re hearing these stories again. And it’s not just him, it’s his entire staff that you’re hearing stuff like that.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. You see the dysfunction decaying the administration from the inside out. And that is one thing, look, we get it. These people, especially, he’s old, he’s crotchety, he’s mad sometimes, and sometimes he’s eating ice cream and he is happy. But if you can’t get good enough people in your, as your staffers, then you’re going to have this dysfunction. And we saw it a lot and I talked about it a lot during the Trump administration. That’s when things boil over and it becomes a massive story. And it’s because you picked bad people, you did this, you are ultimately responsible.
Mike Papantonio: It all flows from the top. It all flows from the top.
Farron Cousins: And we just don’t have people in DC, again, left or right that are picking good enough staffers to keep things running. And they do think they’re too important too.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. They don’t pay ’em anything. They have a sense of importance. They’re in a bubble that is so weird, where they really do believe that what they do really does matter and they’re just passing through. And there’s, you know, this was awful during the Trump administration too. We did a story on this on the Trump administration. It was the same kind of thing. All the way from Trump down to his staff just absolutely abusing people as if this is the new norm. Feed him more ice cream, maybe that’s gonna help. Thank you for joining me.
Farron Cousins: Thank you.
Mike Papantonio: That’s all for this week. But all these segments are gonna be posted right here on this channel in the coming week. So make sure you’re subscribed. I’m Mike Papantonio and this has been America’s Lawyer where we tell you stories that the corporate media won’t tell you because their advertisers won’t let ’em tell the stories. Advertisers are gonna say, I’m gonna pull our money if you tell this story. Or their political connections are so Democrat or so Republican that they can’t color outside the lines at all. As you can tell, we don’t have that problem around here. We’ll always color outside the lines and call balls and strikes. Hopefully we’ll see you next time.
Farron Cousins: Ring of Fire founder and host of America’s Lawyer, Mike Papantonio has a new book came out this week called, “Suspicious Activity.” Like his other books before it, this book actually deals with real legal cases that Mike Papantonio has handled, but in a fictionalized way. The book follows the character of Nick Deketomis that Papantonio first introduced in his book, “Law and Disorder,” and it carries on the story that began in “Law and Disorder” through “Law and Vengeance,” “Law and Addiction,” “Inhuman Trafficking,” and now “Suspicious Activity.” This book, in particular, deals with the financial institutions that have helped launder money for terrorist organizations, which of course is a topic we have covered extensively here on Ring of Fire. So if you’re a follower of Mike Papantonio’s books, or if this is your first one, you can get your copy of “Suspicious Activity” now. Just go to MikePapantonio.com and place your order. And if you haven’t already, check out Mike’s other books, also available on MikePapantonio.com.
