America’s Lawyer E109: The Defense Department has had to backtrack on their plea deal with the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks after massive public backlash – we’ll bring you the details. A new poll found that a majority of Americans believe that the country is sliding into chaos. And bookies, psychics, and all other sorts of people who think they can see the future are making their predictions about who will win this year’s election. 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. The Defense Department has had to backtrack on their plea deal with a mastermind of 9/11 after massive public backlash. We’ll bring you the details. A new poll, well, it found that a majority of Americans believe that the country’s sliding into chaos. And bookies, psychics and all other sorts of people who think they can see the future are making their predictions about who’s gonna win this next election. We got some interesting stories about that. All that and more, don’t go anywhere. America’s Lawyer is coming up.
Last week, the Defense Department announced that they had reached a plea deal with the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Two days later, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that the deal is revoked. This came after tremendous backlash from the families of the victims, politicians and first responders. I’ve got Farron Cousins to talk about it. This has had to end like this. Thank God somebody said, are you freaking kidding me? You know this plea deal, it’s another story, we talk about all the time about how the Department of Justice, and here it’s Department of Defense and the Department of Justice working together, always take the least, the path of least resistance. That’s what happened here. Thank goodness Austin was there to say, hell no. No, this isn’t going to happen. We’re in an election year. He was appointed by Biden, we’re in an election year. How’s it gonna look for the White House to say, yeah, you killed 3000 people, but we’re gonna give you a break.
Farron Cousins: You’ve learned your lesson.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. It’s been going on for 20 years to begin with, right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Okay. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in Guantanamo Bay, and again, 20 plus years, this guy has been held there. We know who he is. We know what he’s done. This prosecution should have happened before George W. Bush even left office.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, of course.
Farron Cousins: But it didn’t. It didn’t happen under Obama. It didn’t happen under Trump. And now finally it could happen under Biden, and they say, oh, no, let’s just do a plea deal. We’re tired. We don’t want to do this. It’s too difficult. Oh, there could be issues with the torture part of it and then we can’t admit this evidence. You don’t even need any of that. We know what happened here.
Mike Papantonio: Can I tell you, these heads would already be rolling had it been reversed, had they been in Saudi Arabia where they came from, it would’ve already been over. 20 years these people have had a chance to live, breathe, eat. 3000 family members, they don’t. You know? And so we now have, but to me, I just, I almost can’t get my arms around it sometimes when I watch the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense here too. You had, what was her name? She, the general, that said, hey, we’re gonna.
Farron Cousins: Susan K. Escallier.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. Susan K. Escallier has been overseeing this whole thing. Right. She’s been doing it for years, apparently. And she finally says, eh, it’s a lot of work. We don’t really want to do this. And she tries to blame it on the idea, well, if we do this, this is gonna cause the potential, additional terrorism activity. We heard that 20 years ago, Susan. So, as I look at this story, there is zero, zero way to justify what they’re doing. It’s not the torture. There’s been plenty of cases they’ve overcome that already where people have received the death penalty. But thank God Austin said, hell no. Right?
Farron Cousins: Right. And he removed that general immediately too, said, you’re done overseeing any of this, but what a huge political miscalculation here. I mean, we are in the middle of a contentious election that’s already been thrown into turmoil four or five times in the last month alone. And then to come out with this in the middle of the week and say, hey, look at this great thing we did. This man’s gonna live until a ripe old age.
Mike Papantonio: They’re already doing it.
Farron Cousins: That is dumb.
Mike Papantonio: They’re already doing it. They’re hanging this around Biden and Harris. This is just another Democratic leadership idea.
Farron Cousins: Soft on crime.
Mike Papantonio: Soft on crime. We don’t have to kill these people who killed 3000 people. Hell, they’d already be dead and probably not even buried if they were in the Saudi Arabia. Thank goodness for what Austin did here. It just took courage and some common sense.
After years of doing nothing, the US Senate has finally passed a pair of bills that would strengthen protections from minors on social media websites, protecting them from harmful content and hopefully preventing their data from being stolen. Their parents’ data included, by the way. Right? Go ahead and pick that up if you would.
Farron Cousins: So we’ve got these two bills that passed the Senate last week. You have KOSA and COPPA 2.0. and basically what they do in these two separate bills, the first one is basically protecting from the harmful content, which of course, we have seen time and time again. We’ve talked about these studies. These children are seeing images of eating disorders, almost glamorizing this self emulation type thing. We see coercing children to harm themselves or to harm others. And finally, the Senate says, well, wait a minute. That’s pretty bad. We gotta put a stop to that. The second one, the COPPA 2.0 is the one that works even further to protect the data and of course, it puts it on the social media companies, this is now your responsibility, and if you do not comply, there are going to be legal consequences. But, you know, we know how that goes.
Mike Papantonio: Passes 91 to 3. That’s incredible. In the Senate passes 91 to 3. Wyden, obviously, Wyden is bought and owned by the industry. The tech industry. He’s in Oregon. I mean, he has huge connections. You got Paul, Paul who’s always talking about the risk of censorship. He voted against it. Mike Lee from Utah. I don’t know where he comes up. I couldn’t figure out where he lines up in it, probably on a censorship issue. But the truth is, this has been kicking around, another thing that’s been kicking around, and the argument is, we’re they’re worried about the mental health of these kids. Right. They’re saying that we’re really affecting the mental health. But when you stand back and look at what they’re saying, I can’t make a distinction here. Maybe you can help me with it. What’s the distinction between Facebook and Meta and everybody else that’s doing the same thing? I mean, all this, they’re doing exactly the same thing. They’re taking information and selling it to the public.
Farron Cousins: Right. Well, and this legislation does cover any kind of social media outlet. And I think the kind of overall take on what they’re doing here is they’re bringing it the same way they do with the ratings on television shows, the ratings that they do on movies, on music, video games. And it just says, okay, this is another avenue where children are seeking entertainment. So we need to make sure, because we regulate everything else too this way, we have to do it this way. So it’s, this one in particular is not targeted towards any specific company. It’s the broad brush.
Mike Papantonio: My point is this, my point is the reason it’s called the TikTok legislation. I mean, it was all, it all centered around TikTok.
Farron Cousins: Of course.
Mike Papantonio: Because they’re Chinese. And only point I was making, there’s no difference. You see, this has been going on with Meta. It’s been going on with Instagram, Facebook, you name it. They’ve been doing this for years, but now they found this way to say, look, this is different. This is Chinese. And so we really have to do something about it. Does it do anything to 230 at all? Does it loosen the strain of 230?
Farron Cousins: It kind of impacts it. It doesn’t specifically impact it, but you can kind of make the leap that it could impact 230.
Mike Papantonio: I promise you it will.
Farron Cousins: I hope it does.
Mike Papantonio: I do too. As a lawyer, I’m looking at it and saying, it’s mighty close to saying, no, you don’t have immunity when you do this and there’s children that commit suicide, children that are bullied, and it ends up with a murder. Children who have addiction issues, whatever it may be, you’re moving mighty close to the 230 protection that the industry’s had. And I would think that, it wouldn’t surprise me that within a couple years, we will already test this case. We’ll test how far does this go? And hopefully we’ll accomplish something there.
A new poll has found that a huge majority of Americans believe that the country sliding into complete chaos and the big catalyst they say was the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Um, okay. I don’t buy that, but go ahead. First of all, the chaos, yes. I kind of agree. The numbers are actually startling. I mean, when you look at these numbers where 67% of the respondent says that we’re in trouble, 80% of the voters. But then they narrowed the respondents down by parties and go ahead and pick this up.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. We’re looking at a time where you have, again, 80% of the voters overall, almost equal parts of Republicans and Democrats who say, listen, we look at what’s happening in this country today, not necessarily with politicians, but with politics. We see the anger on both sides. We see violence coming, and this is horrible for this country. This is leading us into chaos, according to what these voters have to say. And yeah, this poll was taken almost immediately after the failed assassination attempt. So clearly very fresh on people’s minds. They see what political violence can do. They remember January 6th. They’ve seen all sorts of things throughout their lives, because we do have two generations coming up where chaos in this country.
Mike Papantonio: It’s been nonstop.
Farron Cousins: Whether it’s the housing market collapse, the economic collapse, the wars.
Mike Papantonio: January 6th, I mean.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. All of it together. And that affects people, that impacts them. They have not known a normal country in their lifetime.
Mike Papantonio: That is such, that’s so well put. It really is. When I looked at this story, I never stepped back and said, yeah, there are two generations that have looked at this and said, my God, this is what we have to live with. So, okay. But at any rate, these numbers are pretty startling. And I was really interested when they did these searches, they found that 65% of registered voters believe that, right after the assassination attempt, that it was divine intervention that prevented Trump from being killed. I’m seeing that out there. I’m seeing it with, there’s kind of nuanced suggestion that there’s a plan here. Trump was saved from this, therefore it must be divine intervention. Aren’t you seeing some edges of that?
Farron Cousins: Oh, yeah. Even Trump himself has suggested that it’s because of God that I moved my head slightly to the left, I guess it was, and it missed me. But if you accept that, then you also have to accept that, okay, then that means God wanted Mr. Corey Comperatore to die.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: I don’t know that that’s the best message to be sending out there. That, hey, God saved me, and this guy got smited.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. I wondered, it’s not a good message. And it’s almost, it’s just so wrong to bring in people’s Christian faith, which, in this country is still alive and well. And try to say, well, I’m going make that into an election idea. It just, there’s something about that that really bugged me when I saw it.
The Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against TikTok alleging that social media app is illegally collecting children’s data. If they were actually concerned about the data theft, they’d be suing every social media website, ties into the last story we just did. This is the mean Chinese, we gotta do something. It’s all been going on for so long, Meta, everybody’s been doing exact same things, but it’s easier to do when it’s the Chinese, right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Because there you have the bad guys, and the bad guys are not some guy in a corner office down in Silicon Valley. The bad guys are over there in red China. They want to get you, they want to take your data. They want to turn us all into communists. These are all talking points, by the way, we have heard over the last few years about China.
Mike Papantonio: You think there might, I mean, the Department of Justice is all over this.
Farron Cousins: Right.
Mike Papantonio: They’ve come alive, right?
Farron Cousins: They really have. This will be one where they don’t try to settle it. They want to get these SOBs. But the point is, did TikTok violate the agreement to not steal data?
Mike Papantonio: Yes.
Farron Cousins: Seems pretty obvious.
Mike Papantonio: They did.
Farron Cousins: Yes, they did. But you cannot, this is a selective prosecution. That is what this is.
Mike Papantonio: There is no question.
Farron Cousins: The political persecution that everybody talks about. This is it because you could go after Google, you could go after Meta and Facebook. You could go after Instagram, even before Facebook bought ’em, all of these other sites, all of these apps. Amazon, of course, with the data theft, you could go on and on with pretty much any website anybody’s ever visited, collecting and selling your data. And they only pick TikTok. That is it. We gotta go after them because they’re an easy enemy, like you said, because we connect ’em to China. Everybody’s afraid of China right now. We got this in the bag, the DOJ says.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. There’s another point to this though and it’s kind of real nuance. The DOJ, I’m assuming they’re thinking this. Hell, I don’t know what they think half the time. But if the DOJ looked at this in kind of a macro way, the discovery that takes place in this case, you understand, this discovery could go on for a long time. They could find documents, they could take depositions, they could find things that lead to far more than this. It could mean corporate espionage. It could mean international espionage. My guess, if somebody with a brain is driving this, they’re using that as the vehicle. We do it all the time. We’ll bring in a company and we’ll say, okay, with this company, we’re able to find out the bigger picture of what your industry is all about, you see. That’s what we do on, think about, it’s what we did on opioids. We did it on PFAS. We do it, it’s a very common approach. And so the Department of Justice has an opportunity here. They want to talk about, well, there’s all of this espionage going on. They should be able to find out. I mean, there’s stuff that they can find out that ordinarily they would not be able to know. Now, the question is, will they do that? Ah, probably not. They’ll settle. They’ll settle for a little, some little bit of money. At the same time, these folks aren’t killing people like Boeing did. Right? How much did they settle for Boeing?
Farron Cousins: Oh God. I forget the number off the top of my head. But it was pathetic.
Mike Papantonio: It was chump change. Right. These are people who killed hundreds and hundreds of people and they took the money here. I’d be interested to know what they think the value of this is when they settle because probably they will settle it, you know.
Farron Cousins: Well, and another thing it does too, is it encourages TikTok, okay, well, with this and the legislation that they passed this year, now we’ve gotta sell. And that’s of course, I think what the federal government wants to do. And then their wealthy Silicon Valley backers, one of them can snatch it up, and that’s what’ll happen here.
Mike Papantonio: There might be an answer to my question right here. It’s TikTok settled with the FTC over the allegations a year ago, or several years ago, paying a record amount. Now, this is a record amount of $5.7 million. Okay. That puts it into perspective. Here, Boeing kills hundreds of people after being warned, get this right, get this right. Kills hundreds of people, and they pay chump change. Here, I think when it’s all over, we’re gonna have a pretty good indicator of how the Department of Justice really views the bigger world, right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: On average, politicians in this United States are older than those serving in every other country on the planet. In other words, we’ve got a real big problem with aging politicians and voters who keep sending these folks back to Washington. Well, there’s a reason they do. Right? People are writing about what the reason is. I’m interested. Go ahead.
Farron Cousins: Yeah, they believe, of course, oh, older means more experienced. It really comes down to as simple as that, in most cases. This person is older than me, obviously they’re wiser than me. Obviously they know what’s happening here. And they don’t. That old way of thinking that, oh, somebody older than me is clearly better, that’s out the window when you look at the people that we have in Washington, DC Mm. We’re watching them drop like flies at this point, over the last five years, these people that have just been hanging on for too long can’t keep hanging on. And of course, it’s sad. I’m not trying to mock anybody’s death here, but these people should have been out a long, long time ago and enjoy your golden years.
Mike Papantonio: Look at the list. Pelosi, McConnell, Feinstein, Biden. I mean, you go on forever. Here’s a pretty telling bit of information. You’ve got the population age 30, well, 39 is the mean average. That’s in 2022. Now in 2019 it was 50. So that little bit of change is kind of telling you that trend. It’s almost like a, you know, it’s a generational war that has potential, isn’t it?
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: You’ve got people that are saying, why in the world are you holding us down? I think that’s why Trump went after Vance. And I’m thinking about what Kamala Harris did with her choice. He’s an older man. He looks grandfatherly. He looks like he’s had experience. How was wondering, what’s your take on that?
Farron Cousins: He, first of all, I love Tim Walz. I think he’s phenomenal. I think he was the best pick she could have made. But he is, and he’s actually only a year older than her.
Mike Papantonio: Right. But he looks older.
Farron Cousins: He really does. My mom even was like, I wish she hadn’t gone with the old guy. And then my mom said, oh, wait, he’s actually younger than me by a couple years. That’s, I didn’t realize that.
Mike Papantonio: I thought it was smart to tell you the truth.
Farron Cousins: But I do think his age at 60 is not as big of a deal. But you’re gonna put him on a debate stage with a 39-year-old. Look at it this way, because look at Mitch McConnell right here, Mitch McConnell has held that same Senate seat for as long as JD Vance has been alive.
Mike Papantonio: That’s amazing.
Farron Cousins: That one seat for JD Vance’s whole life. And he’s still there, freezing up and not knowing where he is or what’s going on.
Mike Papantonio: What’s for dinner.
Farron Cousins: But these people, well, yeah, these people have to go. I mean, Menendez. Menendez should have been gone years ago, but he stayed because, hey, he’s profiting off it.
Mike Papantonio: He’s a criminal. Well, he’s a criminal.
Farron Cousins: Exactly.
Mike Papantonio: He had all those gold bars stuffed under his bed. Yeah. It pays, doesn’t it?
Farron Cousins: It does.
Mike Papantonio: We have always said this, and I don’t know whether you’ve changed your mind about it. Maybe you have. Tell me if you have. But it’s always been my theory, at least, they stay in there because it’s a big money maker.
Farron Cousins: Oh, it is. A hundred percent.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. They go in sometimes with, what’s her name? Haley. Okay. Haley goes in, she goes in with, she’s bankrupt. She has no money at all.
Farron Cousins: Right. She’s got a few thousand dollars in the bank.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. Within four or five years, she’s living in a $5 million mansion. Well, how does that happen? Because this pays good. And so to them, it’s just, hell no, I’m not leaving. You can’t force me out of here because the money’s too good. It was like with Feinstein. Look at the money hubby made with Feinstein being there.
Farron Cousins: Pelosi as well, Jesus.
Mike Papantonio: Pelosi, oh my God.
Farron Cousins: Hundreds of millions of dollars that these people can make.
Mike Papantonio: But at some point, don’t we have to say, you had a good run time to get out of here. Let’s put some younger people in here.
Farron Cousins: Term limits are desperately needed. And honestly, it’s weird enough, Ted Cruz is one of the people out there pushing for term limits. It’s the only thing I agree with Ted Cruz on. But I would gladly team up with him if it means we can get some term limits for these people.
Mike Papantonio: That would be torturous to you. You couldn’t do it.
Farron Cousins: It would be, but I would tough it out for that.
Mike Papantonio: All right.
Now that both presidential tickets are secured, the predictions about who’s gonna win the election are coming in fast. They’re coming from bookies. They’re coming from psychics. They’re coming from data analysis. Everybody thinks they know exactly who’s gonna win. You know what caught my eye is this Allan Lichtman. He, Allan apparently says, you know, he’s been calling them, I’ve been really kinda looking behind that. It’s not quite as accurate as everybody’s saying, but according to him, Harris has won. Election’s over. He says, all I have to do to really secure what I’m saying is I just need to wait for the Democratic convention. And then, yes, I’ve said she’s gonna win four or five times. Yes, I changed my mind maybe in between there. It’s like, it’s blowing with the wind. But he says she’s gonna win. So all you Harris people out there go celebrate. It’s over. Harris is gonna be the next president, right?
Farron Cousins: According to Lichtman, again, unofficially, but it’ll be official soon. But Lichtman’s got these 13 keys, and they’re actually, I didn’t realize how big these 13 keys were, they really do have their own life on the internet. And he says, most of them right now, like the incumbency, is the economy good, things like that.
Mike Papantonio: Let’s go down the list. Have some fun. First of all, it is 13 keys, like you just said. He has a site where he has 52,000 subscribers. He’s a professor, was is it, Washington University?
Farron Cousins: American University.
Mike Papantonio: American University. He says, I really look to things like social unrest, third party candidates, foreign policy features to what my decision. But the list is, and we’ll put it up, I think it’s pretty interesting. He says, well, look at party mandate. The incumbent holds more seats than the other. That’s important here. We gotta look at, what is the party mandate? The contest, the candidate is motivated, he’s nominated on the first ballot. Okay. We have a candidate in a normal situation that’s nominated on the first ballot. That’s important. The incumbent already in the office, obviously incumbency is important. Third party, who are they? Can they carry more than 5% of the votes? That’s a big factor. Short term economy, whether you’re in a recession or talking about recession. Right. Long-term economy, increased per capita growth. Policy change, the administrative achieves a new deal, quality kind of policy change. The scandal. Is there a scandal? Yes or no? Military failure or success? Big factor. Charisma. Is the person a national hero? If they’re not a national hero, do they have just a natural kind of charisma about ’em? And then does the challenger have a natural charisma, or are they not inspirational? This is exactly the list. He says he’s used this and he says it’s almost bulletproof.
Farron Cousins: Well, and another one too there is, did they have a nasty primary? And that’s where she has a huge benefit, obviously.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, yes, yes, yes.
Farron Cousins: She was not in a primary. She had 12 hours where there was, maybe it’ll be her, maybe it’ll be somebody else. After that, the party really quickly fell in line. But I do love the stories like this, because we get them every four years. And there was a time, we talking about this, I think it was 2008, you had all these fortune tellers that started going on the media. And you’ll see it this year. We’ll get around September, October, they’ll start bringing in the psychics. They’ll bring in the tarot card readers, and those people will start making their predictions about who is gonna win for president.
Mike Papantonio: Didn’t you do a story on how absurd it was? How crazy.
Farron Cousins: Yeah, we did.
Mike Papantonio: It was just so wrong. It was just so radically wrong.
Farron Cousins: Well, and in 2004, they all predicted John Kerry’s gonna win in a massive landslide.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
Farron Cousins: It’s gonna be.
Mike Papantonio: Well, according to Lichtman, he might have made that call. But all of you Harris folks out there, congratulations, you have a new president, according to Lichtman. I don’t know what the psychics are saying yet, but let’s keep up with that. Okay.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: That’s all for today. Farron, thanks for joining me. All of these segments are gonna be posted right here on this channel in the coming week. Make sure that you subscribe. I’m Mike Papantonio, and this has been America’s Lawyer, where we tell you every week stories that corporate media won’t tell you because their advertisers just don’t let ’em, or their tribal politics don’t allow for it. We don’t have that problem, as you can tell watching this show, we aren’t beholden to corporations, and we sure aren’t beholden to one political party. 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.
