America’s Lawyer E107: President Biden dropped out of the Presidential race on Sunday, and Vice President Harris immediately took control of the campaign. But Democrats may want to slow down before they anoint Harris as the candidate. Wall Street is trying to cash in on asbestos lawsuits – and we’ll explain their dirty scheme to get rich and deny victims what they are owed. And Republicans are saying that President Biden has to resign from office after dropping out of the presidential race. 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. President Biden dropped out of the presidential race on Sunday, and Vice President Harris immediately took control of the campaign. But Democrats may want to slow down before they anoint Harris as the candidate, according to the numbers. Wall Street’s trying to cash in on asbestos lawsuits, and we’ll explain their dirty scheme to get rich and deny victims what they’re owed. And Republicans, well, they’re saying that President Biden has to resign from office after dropping out of the presidential race. All that and more. It’s coming up. Don’t go anywhere. America’s Lawyer starts right now.
President Biden is officially out of the presidential race now, and Vice President Harris is likely to be the nominee without any pushback, but that’s not what the Democratic Party needs right now and an open convention could be the key to victory in November. I’ve got Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins with me to talk about that. You know, big news, obviously. Of course, we were so criticized before saying he’s gotta step down. He’s gotta step down. It was absurd. The people, you know, he’s my guy. He’s fine. No, he wasn’t fine. And now he steps down, does the right thing for this country. And I think that’s what everybody’s, they’re not really talking about what a big step that was for this country, for him to do that. And I’m proud of him for doing it, frankly.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: So now everybody’s attention turns to Kamala Harris. Pick it up.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. So what we’ve seen, really in just the last few days is, well, really in the hours after Biden made the announcement, he then immediately endorsed Harris as the heir apparent. Then immediately all of the Democrats start coalescing around her and say, okay, she’s gonna be the nominee. Who’s gonna be the vp? They already moved on and accepted the fact that, nope, she’s got it. She’s our person. Now who’s the vp? And so that’s where the media immediately moved. But hold up now. We have time. We do not need to make any rash decisions. We do not have to say, yes, we’re gonna do this, or no, we’re not gonna do that. Can we at least, and this is what we talked about with Biden, can we at least for the love of God, have a conversation first? Before we make these massive decisions, let’s think for just a second and the Democratic Party said, no, no, no, no. We’re good to go. We got it.
Mike Papantonio: It’s not the way the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. The power that they wield over the American voters. Okay. And so now we’ve got this candidate that Trump is delighted to run against. And maybe you can make heads or tails of it. I don’t. New York Times, she is least electable. New York Times, she’s the most risky candidate. I’m not really seeing that right now. I think they have time, if this is their choice, they have time to make her competitive. If the numbers are right now, she’s not even remotely competitive. But what’s occurred here is that you had the Democrats really were threatening Biden with we’re gonna vote the 25th Amendment here if you don’t do something. We’re gonna join the Republicans and you gotta step down. But it looked like this has been laid out in place for at least three to four weeks. Don’t you think?
Farron Cousins: Oh, yeah. I don’t think Biden would’ve come to this decision if they didn’t already have this apparatus in place behind the scenes knowing that, okay, Harris is gonna take over. And I will say, if you look at the polls right now, Trump is still winning. But in the aggregates, he’s winning by two points over Harris and that is typically well within the margin of error because we’re seeing margins of error of four to 5%. So it is still a toss up, and it is a statistical tie, but she does poll better, obviously, than Biden does against Trump. The last poll we had for Biden, Sunday morning, losing Michigan by seven points.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. It was disaster.
Farron Cousins: And so the writing was on the wall for Biden. And of course, in the few days since Harris has already taken over as the potential nominee here, more than a hundred million dollars in 36 hours, the Democratic party raised. That is insane. And you now have a poll, earlier this week, 80% of Democrats say, yep, we’re good with Harris. So it does seem like, okay, I know the Democrats, we should have a conversation. But I think at this point, even if we do have the conversations, I think everybody is already coalesced around Harris to the point where this is what they’ve got.
Mike Papantonio: There’s no turning back. And so it is what it is. And when you look at what the, both sides of it, the critics, she was terrible on border immigration, the surge of migrant problems. She was supposed to figure out the root cause, she didn’t do it. She had so little visibility. I don’t know whether they did that on purpose, but she had very little visibility.
Farron Cousins: Well, big reports too, from the first two years of the Biden administration that these two were not getting along.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, right.
Farron Cousins: And Biden was not happy with her.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. Her ability to speak. It’s awkward. It’s unclear. This isn’t me. Just so you know, this is coming directly from the Washington Post, New York Times, all these various places. She’s awkward, she’s unclear. She can’t convey a message. The thing of staff turnover, that keeps coming up, where 90% of her staff turned over. Is that important? First of all, is it an issue people even really care about? But I’m going through the hits on her that we’re seeing in the press and that’s one of ’em. What do you think?
Farron Cousins: Yeah, you gotta be able to weather the storm, obviously, and the staff turnover thing, that’s something even you and I had talked about within the last couple years, which does indicate some kind of issue with the leadership taking place at that office. But I think at this point, Harris may have matured as a candidate. I’m not saying she was immature, but just as a candidate, it’s a different world. So we could be looking at somebody who’s a little different than what we saw in 2020. She does have a little more experience under her belt at this point on the national level. But you bring up a good point. She hasn’t done a whole lot other than the last six months or so, once Biden like, okay, let’s not have him out there. She finally did start coming out more where it was a little bit better than what we saw.
Mike Papantonio: They almost hid her. I mean, some of these articles talk about they just kept her in hiding.
Farron Cousins: For the first few years, really. And now it’s the opposite. Now, we haven’t seen Biden in a week.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. One of these weird, these conspiracy nuts are so freaking crazy. Like, no, Trump wasn’t shot in the ear. The one on Biden is, is Biden alive? I mean, really? How freaking crazy have we become? But as I’m looking at the pros and the cons, they talk about the problem that Harris had when she was running for president, that in Iowa and New Hampshire, she was in low single digits. Had to pull out, even in California, she was around 12%. And her, the newest thing is that she helped cover up the story about how bad Biden was. But on the positive side, let’s talk about negatives and positives. There are some positives out there. First of all, she was tough on crime. She supported the death penalty, from a conservative standpoint, they’re gonna like this. She supported the death penalty. She supported the three strike rule. She tried cases. I think she tried 37 drug cases. She’s young. She’s, if she could learn how to speak, she would have some of that young charisma. But somebody’s gotta work with her on it. Somebody has to sit her down and say, what is this? Why do you always sound like you’re in la la land when you speak?
Farron Cousins: She to me, appears to have a lot of nervous energy. That’s what I get when you see her. She doesn’t feel comfortable. She feels like it is kind of awkward for her to be here. So, again, now that she is at the top of the ticket, essentially, she’s gonna get all the best advisors. She’s gonna get all the best coaches, and they can work with her and be like, hey, okay, listen, first of all, let’s relax a little bit. We don’t always have to have that crazy kind of, like, just, we’ll tone it done.
Mike Papantonio: That crazy laugh and the craziness.
Farron Cousins: Well, she didn’t interview actually, where she explained the laugh and she says that is something, obviously, people have talked about for her whole career. But she says, it’s almost, she told a really good story about it, how it goes all the way back through her family. The women in her family have always had that laugh and it’s something that they now embrace.
Mike Papantonio: Well, it doesn’t bother me. It doesn’t bother me. It shouldn’t bother people.
Farron Cousins: Well, it’s becomes such a thing that she actually had to talk about it. But, I do think, again, with a little bit of coaching, the problem is do you have the time?
Mike Papantonio: Well, you’re a Democrat. Do you feel warm and fuzzy about this?
Farron Cousins: Um, wouldn’t have been my first choice. But I do think based on what we’ve seen in this last week, there seems to be enthusiasm, which we haven’t seen in over a year. There seems to be optimism, which had gone out the window when Biden was on the ticket. So I think the people are feeling good. And so, okay, let’s go with it. Look, I would love it, and I think the winning ticket would be if Harris were to pick Bernie Sanders as the running mate. I know he’s old, but as the vice president, the age doesn’t matter as much. And you’re gonna bring all those Bernie people back. You’re going to, I just think that would be the winning ticket. They won’t ever do it. But I’m not anti Harris. I really am not. I think this could work.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. Well, the point is, you do feel a little bit warm and fuzzy about her being your candidate. I mean, I think that’s what I’m hearing.
Farron Cousins: To a degree I do. Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. Well, and course with the right vice president, governor from Pennsylvania.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: I mean, that’s the first place.
Farron Cousins: That’s also very strong.
Mike Papantonio: That’s the first place I’d go. Hopefully they’re looking at that. But we’ll see how it plays out. All this, of course, just like everything that happens with the Democrats and the Republicans, it all begins in a smoke-filled dark room where people are making decisions for the American voters.
A minor glitch in the software update last week caused chaos for the banking industry. Airlines and hundreds of millions of people across the globe could not get where they wanted to go. This massive outage could have been avoided, but the company’s responsible have sent millions convincing regulators to back off. We’re doing fine. We don’t need any help. We don’t need any regulations. Well, look, it’s so apparent. You’ve got Microsoft that is trying to blame this on.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. They’re saying the CrowdStrike update.
Mike Papantonio: The CrowdStrike. Yeah. Okay. Well, no, that is nonsense. The truth is, the federal government said to Microsoft, and they said to Amazon, and they said to Google, you guys have a big problem because you own everything. There’s no diversity in the cloud system. Everything’s going into the cloud and being controlled by companies that don’t have the capacity to do it. And they said, no, if you do that, you’re gonna interfere with innovation. We’ve got this. Don’t worry about this regulator. We’ve got it under control. You think back, it was the same thing with railroads. This is the closest to the railroad monopoly that I’ve ever seen. And for some reason, we act like it’s different. It’s exactly the same thing. They need to be busted up. You can’t have these people controlling all this.
Farron Cousins: Right. The FTC has been on Microsoft’s back for over a year telling them, hey, this is gonna cause a problem. We really need to have some hearings about this. We need you guys to respond. And every Microsoft response was, you guys are overreacting. Everything is perfectly fine. Who do you think you’re talking to here? We’ve got this under control. In fact, as recently as two days before the outage, the federal regulators were warning, something horrible is going to happen because you have not diversified. It is so consolidated that something as simple as a software update crippled the world.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, understand, an update. This was run the update and everything stopped. And the point, this is a massive threat to the economy.
Farron Cousins: It is.
Mike Papantonio: I mean, if somebody figured out how to make this an element of war, we’d be in big trouble.
Farron Cousins: Well, and I guarantee you, after seeing what happened, they’re working on it. They absolutely are working on it.
Mike Papantonio: No question. So you have this argument, you can’t regulate us. We’re so smart. We have a security system. They knew they didn’t have a security system. Matter of fact, it showed they didn’t want to spend money on the security system. It would’ve cost them too much money to do what the government was telling ’em to do. You have to have a security system. And they lied, basically. They absolutely made up this lie that we’ve got it under control. There’s nothing to worry about and that the consolidation of our companies, there should be no limits. If it’s Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, we should be able to control the world of tech. And you see how dangerous this is. It’s just so freaking dangerous.
Farron Cousins: Well, honestly, I think you bring up a really great point here with the arrogance of these companies. Look, we’re the tech guys. We’re so much smarter than everybody else. You can’t sit there in Washington, DC, with your law degree and tell us how to run a tech company. You don’t know anything about this. Well, they know enough to have warned you for years that this would happen. You dismissed it and then it happened. But they’ve also spent so many millions of dollars lobbying these same organizations and lawmakers to not do anything about it, that it probably would’ve been cheaper just to invest in the security than buying everybody off.
Mike Papantonio: That’s an interesting point. If you look at the multi-millions of dollars that they paid to politicians to make ’em vote their way. And you just said, okay, let’s regroup on that. Could we have done what the government was telling us we needed to do? That we needed a security system and had we not lied to them about, yes, we have a security system. That all this consolidation and all this power being held up in the handful of service cloud service providers, if they had been honest, and if they had just taken that money and made it work, we’d had never had this problem. You’re not gonna change this unless you sue them and I think that’s what’s coming. I think you’re gonna see some big lawsuits on loss of business that, matter of fact, we’re being asked to do that. We’re being asked to handle some of these big companies that say, look, they cost us gazillions of dollars. I mean, look at the airline industry. They’re still don’t have it under control. So, as this progresses, it’s gonna probably take a couple of more events like this, hopefully not as serious as this, but a couple of more events before anybody starts paying attention.
And then you have AT&T. According to AT&T, the company recently suffered a massive data breach that exposed calls and text messages. It exposed all that data about all of their customers. This massive breach wasn’t even a blip on the media’s radar, but hundreds of millions of people have been violated and they don’t even know what happened. Well, the reason the media didn’t report is because the mainstream media or corporate media, it’s not mainstream anymore. I wish they’d do away with that term, mainstream media. It’s not. It’s far from it. But they wouldn’t tell this story because the advertising.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: The advertising is monstrous that AT&T is paying MSNBC and CNN and Fox and CBS, ABC, they’re paying so much money that they weren’t about to do a story. This is a serious story.
Farron Cousins: It it really is because this is not, like you said, okay, it’s not just, uh-oh, some data got out. Every customer, if you have AT&T, I have AT&T, my data was part of this. Everybody who has AT&T your data was part of this. They got your call logs, they got your text message logs. Now the company swears, they didn’t get the content of your text messages.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, they got enough.
Farron Cousins: But they got your location data. I mean, this is gonna be used by, probably improperly, I imagine by police. Right? Uh-oh, look, we got you talking to this guy. We got you in this location where a crime was committed. This is horrible and has horrible ramifications. But the personal data itself, and nobody knows that this happened, this was a big news. And honestly, this is a one page story. I mean, my God, this is such a huge data breach, one of the biggest in the history of data.
Mike Papantonio: But it’s just like everything about dysfunctional corporate media right now. Can you imagine choosing, having the guys in the top office say, no, don’t do this story because these people pay so much money for advertising.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: We’ve seen it firsthand. You’ve seen it. I’ve seen it firsthand. They’ll make the call, you better kill this story, or else. Matter of fact, my daughter, Sara’s working on a case, a baby formula case that is killing preemie children. Okay. There was a $60 million verdict in the case. And so Fox said, yeah, this is a big story. People ought to know that you got a product out there that’s killing people. But it was Abbott. It was these companies that make this stuff that advertise so much on their station. They killed the story. They killed it like, a week before they were supposed to do it. So this is just another example. And then I guess the thing that really is concerning, they say, well, they don’t actually have your social security numbers or your date of birth. Can you imagine how easy it is to find that with just these little traces of information that they take from your calls and your texts? I mean, it’s just a ridiculous argument. And the other part of it is we’re, as taxpayers, we’re having to pay the feds to go out and do all this investigation and find out what happened. And AT&T, they, what the hell? They don’t care. The feds are spending the money, taxpayers are spending the money, to stop all this. They’re not spending a dime from the standpoint of really making this a safe system.
Farron Cousins: Well, and thanks to the Patriot Act, they don’t ever punish any of these tech companies for the massive data breaches because they rely on them when they need to kinda skirt what’s legal and what’s not, because we’ve been covering that for 20 years now.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. Talk about that. People don’t get that, this symbiotic relationship between the feds and these companies.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And again, we have covered this for 20 years now, the fact that these telecom companies, they get in trouble a lot. They screw up a lot. They never get held accountable because every time it says, oh, okay, well, AT&T or Verizon, whoever you are, you did something really bad here. You let everybody’s data go out to the public. Okay. But we’re also working with you and providing you with all of this information, we’ve got these government contracts to work with you so that you can have this surveillance data on all the bad guys. Do you want to lose access to the so-called bad guys? No. So just forget the data breach. Forget all the bad stuff. We’re your buddies.
Mike Papantonio: We’re the best. We’re your friends. Yeah.
Wall Street bankers have started buying up asbestos lawsuit liabilities from companies, and they’re using the massive pools of cash that have been set aside for victims to make a fortune for themselves. And this is just the tip of the iceberg now, how corporations are trying to pocket the monetary damages that are supposed to go to people who are dying from disease. This is called, the broad idea, this is called the ghoul process. The ghoul process is Wall Street comes in and buys the paper. They buy a company that’s what we call a spinoff company. The company puts all of their assets into the spinoff company. Right. Wall Street buys the spinoff company, and they, with that spinoff company, they buy all the cash that the primary companies put into the spinoff company. They buy all that money. Then the way they make their money, and the way they make it into a profit center is they don’t pay claims. Now, what they really do in the asbestos case is they wait for people to die. Okay. We know that if you’ve got a hundred cases, the statistics are gonna be that 20 of them are going to die within a certain period of time. If they die, the case is worth about a quarter of what it would’ve been had they lived. So Wall Street takes that money, puts in their pocket, they invest and they make money. This is a disgusting story. Again, nobody’s telling the story. Nobody’s telling this story in corporate media.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And so what we have here, like you explained, they spin off and say, okay, all our liabilities are over here, but also because we have to put the money here, especially with asbestos, there’s the law that says you have to have the money. The big pot of billions of dollars is sitting in this company. We’ll pay it when we get to it. And typically they’re more inclined to settle. Right. Let’s get these gone. Let’s get everybody processed through. But Wall Street says, we don’t have that problem. We don’t have to get rid of these people. We will get rid of settlements, even if somebody has a crystal clear case of mesothelioma from asbestos exposure, what we will do is we will file appeals. We will file motion after motion.
Mike Papantonio: Till they die.
Farron Cousins: After motion. And they will drag it out as long as humanly possible because one, they know that not only will the person die, but two, that person may not have the financial resources to keep having their lawyer respond to filings and work on a case for 10 years.
Mike Papantonio: Well, what I do love about this, this is the hidden part of this message, that if you don’t do this for a living, you don’t catch it. It opens up the door to go after Wall Street in a really big way. And that’s what you’re gonna see us do. I started my career trying asbestos cases, and the documents in those cases are so overwhelming. I mean, they have documents that say basically these guys make a good living with asbestos. It’s okay if they die with asbestos. An actual document.
Farron Cousins: Yep.
Mike Papantonio: You’ve got documents that says, keep this covered up as long as possible, as long as we can squeeze a profit out of this product, keep it as a cover. And this is, we’re talking about 50 years ago,
Farron Cousins: Some of the documents over a hundred years ago.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, yeah.
Farron Cousins: I mean, it’s crazy.
Mike Papantonio: They’re called the Sumner Simpson documents. When you’d try the case, the jury would sit there and go, people actually wrote this. People actually, they actually sounded like they were the scientists from a Nazi prison camp where they used to do experiments. That’s how bad they were. And so now Wall Street’s involved, and I love, I love that now they are a target. These big funds coming in, man, you can mix it up with them, take shots at them and this could be a very, very big problem for these folks that think that this is gonna be a walk in the park. It’s not. When people start paying attention and understand what the avenue is, take ’em to trial, this could be a big screw up on their part actually.
Farron Cousins: Well, let’s hope so.
Mike Papantonio: If I were advising ’em, I would tell ’em that.
Farron Cousins: Yeah, let’s hope so, because asbestos is just the first part. They’re now also trying to go after the PFOS pieces.
Mike Papantonio: Which is also my case.
Farron Cousins: Exactly.
Mike Papantonio: I tried the first five PFOS cases in the country. What we found in that scenario was people were dying of testicular cancer. They were dying of kidney cancer. There was birth defects. There was this whole cadre of illnesses that we uncovered in Ohio. They made a movie about it. It’s called Dark Waters. It was about the fellow who brought us the case, his name was Rob Bilott, just a courageous young man. But now they’re trying to do the same thing here. They know these people are gonna die, and if they die, they pay less money. It’s literally one quarter of what they would pay if the people stayed alive. It’s called the ghoul defense. It’s been around a long time. Wall Street’s now figured it out.
Now that President Biden has admitted he can’t go on in the presidential race, questions are being raised about whether he can even serve the remainder of his term. Republicans are calling for his resignation, but Biden says he’s gonna finish out the year. This is really overkill, to say, you gotta step down as president. I mean, come on. It’s not like he’s the only guy there. He’s gotta make it six months. The Dems better hope he makes it six months. They better hope there’s no invasion. They better hope nothing goes really bad wrong, because, I just strike, this is a little much to me. What is your take on it?
Farron Cousins: I think in terms of will they actually force him to resign? Absolutely not. But is it a powerful campaign message? Because that’s what they’re testing right now. They’re putting it out there to the public saying, listen, this guy was so messed up that he couldn’t run for president and they’re gonna let him keep being president.
Mike Papantonio: And that’s the Democrat mentality.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: That’s where this is heading.
Farron Cousins: Right. They’re trying to hang this on the head of the Democrats. Which I don’t think they understand that if Biden were to actually say, okay, fine, I’ll resign. Well then Harris becomes president, then she is technically the incumbent on the ballot. Like, calling for his resignation would severely hinder the Republican party. But they don’t always think things through. They just jump on a talking point.
Mike Papantonio: First of all, it’s not fair to him. He’s gonna make it. Although, the idea of his brother James, his brother James saying, this gives me some time to spend with my brother in the last days of his life. Something, did you see that quote? I didn’t get that exact. But, let’s see. It gives me time to spend with my brother in the, towards the end of his life. As if he’s on the deathbed. But I just think this is a little much, and I’m a little offended by making the statement, there’s people that can be there for the next six months to make sure everything’s okay. But the Democrats better hope like hell, nothing goes wrong. Because if it does, it’s just another thing where, first of all, they have the coverup. Right. The argument, they covered this up for a year and a half, which it’s, you and I have done the stories on that. I kind of agree there was a coverup. But to say that he’s incapable of making it these next six months with the kind of support they’re gonna have behind him. I mean, everybody worries about the nuclear attack in the middle of the night. Can he respond to it? I would hope that everybody’s tightening up in the next six months while he finishes up. But to ask him to retire is a little much.
Farron Cousins: Right. It’s not gonna be Biden sitting alone in a room making that decision. He will have much smarter people, just like every president has, much smarter people around them.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. And they’ll double up. If they’re smart, they will double and triple up for the next six months.
Farron Cousins: And in the event, obviously, if something were to happen to Biden, if he passes away, well that’s why we have a presidential line of succession. We’re not gonna be left without a leader. The Constitution kind of handled that.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. Now, here’s the test. Here’s the test because I asked you in the other segment. Are you warm and fuzzy about Kamal Harris? Are you warm and fuzzy with her being in command of a nuclear attack?
Farron Cousins: I would be.
Mike Papantonio: Okay.
Farron Cousins: I definitely do trust her on that front.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. Well, good, good. I’m just curious because I’m always trying to figure out your balance. So that’s safe. I’m not, look, I’m not pro or con her. I’m just watching right now. I’m just trying to figure out where does this go? How does it?
Farron Cousins: It’s gonna be a weird, what do we have a hundred some odd days? Basically, a hundred days. It’s gonna be a weird a hundred days. No matter what happens with what’s happened in the last two weeks in this country, the next hundred days are gonna be so much weirder.
Mike Papantonio: Alright, Farron, you know I always listen to you, man. Let’s see what happens. That’s all the time we have. But all these segments are gonna be posted right here on this channel in the 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 just won’t tell you because their advertisers don’t allow for it, or their tribal politics simply don’t permit it. The problem is if you’re a Democrat, you’ve got to color within the Democrat lines. If you’re Republican, you got to color within the Republican lines. As you can see watching this show, we don’t have lines. Hope to see you next time.
Suspicious Activity: That it had helped dirty money flow through its branches around the world, including at least 800. Plaintiffs allege that the defendants provided money and medical goods to terrorist groups, Hezbollah and Jaysh al-Adl. This is a well organized business for these individuals that carry out these attacks. Terrorism is a business and they run it like a business. They knew about what was going on for a decade. They absolutely, absolutely no question about it knew that HSBC was washing money. They had every reason to understand it was for terrorism and it was for drug cartels. Took no action whatsoever.
These banks are involved, their accounts are connected, and they’re using them to mask the transactions. The more complicated they can make the transactions, the more distance they could put between the bad guys and a seemingly legitimate purpose of these funds. They pay $1.9 billion, which is a drop in the bucket compared to what they’ve made. And nobody goes to prison. These CEOs, these bankers that made this decision, they’re safe at home. They know what they’ve done. They know it’s resulted in the death of Americans, contractors and soldiers, not just hundreds but thousands. And we look the other way because they don’t look like criminals. The die cast, the people that are responsible for it, are on Wall Street. And they don’t look like criminals. It’s almost a suspension of disbelief. Sometimes I’ll have people call me and say, is this, is this real? Do they really get away with this? Yeah, they do.
