America’s Lawyer E114: The oracle of American politics has unveiled his prediction for which candidate he believes will win the White House this year, so we’ll tell you who it is and why they are the favorite to win. New York governor Kathy Hochul is in deep trouble after one of her aides was arrested for acting as a foreign agent. Democrats are now worried that Hochul’s nonstop scandals could cost them big in New York this year. And another school tragedy has once again gripped the headlines, but the way this case is being handled could bring significant changes that might make parents think twice before handing their children high-powered weapons. 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 Oracle of American politics has unveiled his prediction for which candidate he believes is gonna win the White House this year. We’ll tell you who that is. And New York Governor Kathy Hochul is in deep trouble after one of her aides was arrested for acting as a foreign agent. Democrats are now worried that Hochul’s nonstop scandals could cost them big in New York this year. And another school tragedy has once against gripped the headlines. But here’s the point. The case is being handled in a way it should be. We’re going after the parents. They’re looking about what is it that the parents have done that we might be able to prosecute. All that and more. It’s coming up. Don’t go anywhere. America’s Lawyer starts right now.
A college professor named Allan Lichtman has been called the Nostradamus of American politics for accurately predicting nearly every presidential race for 20 years. He’s made his predictions this year. I’ve got Farron Cousins with me to talk about those predictions. Farron, it looks like Nate Silver, who’s calling a 63% chance of Trump winning versus Lichtman. Who do you believe? If you go back and look, there’s a lot of flaws in both of ’em.
Farron Cousins: There really are. And I think at this point, everybody is kind of throwing everything at the wall and let’s see what sticks. Lichtman, of course, oh, he’s got nine out of the last 10, and he only missed the one because it was Bush v Gore, which was a super weird situation anyway. But if you look at the regular polls, a normal person would say, okay, yes, it looks like Harris is gonna win. Seems like a safe bet. So I don’t know that you need the 13 keys if you’re just looking at what the numbers say, okay, this would work. But Nate Silver is looking more than just the numbers on the surface, not that he has been a hundred percent correct either.
Mike Papantonio: He hasn’t been.
Farron Cousins: And in 2020 and 2016, he was way off the mark. Everybody was way off the mark. But he’s looking more at the swing states. Forget these national polls. National polls do not tell us much at all. This race is probably gonna come down five or six states.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. I was surprised to see the numbers spread though for Nate Silver.
Farron Cousins: That was massive.
Mike Papantonio: I’ve never seen him do that before. He’s been off three or four points, but here, 63% chance of Trump winning. And he says that, first of all, he does it with his mathematical data. He’s a guy that predicts baseball outcomes and basketball, and they do love him in Vegas. I mean, they really do love Nate Silver in Vegas. Now, the professor on the other hand says, I’ve had these 13 keys. We’ve talked about these keys in the past before, and they’re legitimate. They make perfect sense. But I think what we have to do is avoid all this. As you were talking about earlier, you’ve even got astrologers that are coming in, you know, the Moon is lining up with Venus, and that’s telling me that this candidate. At some point, don’t you have to say no? All that matters is what’s happening at the ballot box. Right. Go out and vote. Don’t be influenced by any of this stuff.
Farron Cousins: Exactly. And you’re right, because we don’t just have the professors or the numbers people, the psychics are out there making their predictions. The bookies in Vegas.
Mike Papantonio: Bookies are big on this one, man.
Farron Cousins: They really are. And it’s kind of gone back and forth. At one point, Trump was obviously way ahead, then Harris, now I think it’s swinging back.
Mike Papantonio: Now Trump is back.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. So, a lot of people want to make a lot of money off of it, but really nobody knows. This is all a guessing game until those votes start coming in November 5th. But right now, even with the polls, even if you look at these polls, okay, well, she’s ahead in four swing states. He’s ahead in the other four swing states. But they’re all within a margin of error. Even the national polls. And I don’t know, it seems odd that everything is so close and I do think the media to a degree, pushes a horse race.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, it is.
Farron Cousins: Because if either one of these people was running away with it right now, nobody’s tuning into anything.
Mike Papantonio: Look, don’t believe Nate Silver, don’t believe Lichtman, go out and vote. That’s the answer here. And if you want to read some astrology for the hell of it, read some astrology or talk to a psychic. It doesn’t make any difference. What makes a difference is showing up at the polls. Now, a lot of times you’ll see, we’ve talked about this, parties use polls, don’t they?
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Trump will go out and he’ll get some cat at a college, do a poll, make it look like I’m winning. Harris will do the same thing. And I guess what it does is it empowers people to say, I got a chance. I’m on the winning side. I want to go out and be one of the winners who votes. But look, at the end of the day, just go vote.
Farron Cousins: Yeah
Mike Papantonio: New York Governor Kathy Hochul has always been deeply unpopular, but the arrest of her chief of staff last week for acting as an agent of China has made the situation much worse. There are now fears that Hochul’s nonstop problems could hurt the under ticket for the Democrats. It’s not just this case, by the way. She had another person who worked for her prosecuted for bribery.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Her first lieutenant Governor was arrested and prosecuted.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah, for bribery.
Farron Cousins: So, Kathy Hochul’s entire administration, first of all, let’s not forget the fact that she came in after Cuomo and Cuomo ended up towards the end there, an absolute disaster. He was the rising star of the Democratic party. He was the guy that they originally were talking about, hey, if Biden can’t, let’s get Cuomo. And so, okay. It ends in disaster. He’s gotta go. We get Hochul. And Hochul somehow has managed to be so much worse than the end of the Cuomo years.
Mike Papantonio: Well, do you know what? Do you remember Cuomo, when Cuomo said it, I thought, well, of course you’re saying she’s gonna be awful, but he said she’s gonna be awful. And maybe he knew she was gonna be awful because he knew all of these things were in place. All the things that she had to try to overcome. The crime issue, it’s killing her. It is absolutely killing her. The issue of housing in New York is killing her. The immigration, dealing with immigration in New York is killing her.
Farron Cousins: The pocketbook issues, the surge pricing in New York. It took her two years to get a bill passed with a Democratic controlled Senate. Her appointees to the courts getting shut down by her own Democrats. 39% approval rating. The state is telling her, we don’t like you. And the last thing she needed was, okay, well, you may not like me, but at least my friends aren’t going to prison. Uh oh, well.
Mike Papantonio: They are going to prison.
Farron Cousins: They could be. Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Well, I remember listening to, it was Cuomo and it was all of his kind of flying monkeys. She’s gonna be awful. She’s gonna be terrible. This is gonna happen. Well, they knew. It was already there. It was in place. But this gets a little crazy when you have one of your key staff members interviewing, saying that we can’t allow the Taiwanese ambassador to come to the United States. She stopped that. She did stuff like that because she was on working for China and all of this influence pedaling, she’s been doing, this person who’s being prosecuted. But there’s no way that you can say that doesn’t reflect on leadership. I’d hate to think, we’ve got what, 250 employees here. I’m probably gonna know it something’s wrong. I mean, I’m gonna hear bits and pieces.
Farron Cousins: And it’s almost sad what this employee got in return for all of these huge favors to China.
Mike Papantonio: Talk about it, I though the same thing.
Farron Cousins: She got some duck dinners.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. Twice fried duck. She gets a twice fried duck dinners. It’s almost comical.
Farron Cousins: You know, hey, we need you to do all these favors, get China all these special favors in New York where we want to do business. We’re gonna make billions off of it, and, uh, we’re gonna take you out for some nice wings.
Mike Papantonio: How about her husband, Hu? What is his name, Hu?
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. So he is a Chinese businessman. So he benefited directly from that.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. So this is.
Mike Papantonio: Not just twice fried duck. He got some other stuff.
Farron Cousins: So he is of course also one of the individuals that’s been indicted here. And yeah, he is deeply connected to these individuals. So it’s very obvious based on the indictment that she is abusing her position. Using it to get her husband rich, using it to fill her belly, I guess.
Mike Papantonio: What do you think of her? What do you think of Hochul? When you watch her, when you watch her speak and you go, what do you think?
Farron Cousins: From what I’ve seen, again, I don’t get too much involved with the state politics, but what I’ve seen from all the friends in New York and all the folks on social media, they despise her. She has been horrible on the economic issue. She’s been horrible on all of the immigration, on crime, on everything. Just dropped the ball. And even Nancy Pelosi now is starting to worry, hey, we’ve got a real problem. Because even though you’re not on the ballot this year, you’re a Democrat and you’re at the top of the food chain in New York, and that’s gonna hurt us.
Mike Papantonio: I love the way she went back at Nancy Pelosi though. Okay. So Pelosi says, you’re gonna cost us elections. And Hochul comes back and says, really? You cost us this many House members in California, Pelosi. It’s just this cat fight, this infighting that I just think is so interesting. I think this is the end of her career unless she does something really extraordinary.
A new lawsuit brought by right wing religious organizations could soon make political donations a tax deductible item, which could lead to even more corporate money flowing into our election process. I gotta tell you, I like The Lever. I read The Lever just like you do. I think it’s a good source of information. But I read this story and they really miss something. Okay. He spends a lot of time talking about this 501(c)(3) transition, that you’ve got dark money folks that want to say we ought to make this tax deductible too because he focuses on the church. But what he misses is, and this is good, if you’re a Democrat, this is a great thing for you. The Democratic dark money is much more, right now, than the Democratic Republican money. So it’s kind of one of those things. Be careful what you ask for. The way this was handled, I thought was kind of one sided.
Farron Cousins: To be honest, I thought the exact same thing too, because this is not just a right wing issue. Yes, the lawsuit is being brought and funded by right wingers. But what’s even weirder here is it’s, yes, the churches, the religious groups are bringing it, but they’re not the ones funding it.
Mike Papantonio: Correct.
Farron Cousins: You have these big corporate big money donors that are funding this and they’re using the churches as their shield. So you have these churches that have now gone to the courts because they’re hoping to get it to the Supreme Court saying, listen, if we are not allowed to engage in politics, that’s a violation of our free speech rights. So they’re trying to make it a very simple First Amendment argument. And if we talk about politics, you strip us of our tax exempt status. So you’ve now empowered the IRS to limit our freedom of speech. That is their argument.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. You got problems with 501(c)(4) on its face, don’t you? The Supreme Court looked at it, Citizens United, and they said, this is a social welfare organization. They’re doing social welfare. This much, if if this is 501(c)(4), how it’s used, this much may be social welfare. The rest is political donations. And so right now the Democrats are dominating the dark money. There’s no question about it. I think that the chances of this really, if anything maybe it’ll give us a chance to take another look at Citizens United and say, no, there is no social welfare here. There’s no loss of freedom of expression or First Amendment rights. The look at the whole thing because it’s a mess right now. I was taking a look, Politico, I think the last cycle, they put this one organization, it’s called the Sixteen Thirty Fund. The Sixteen Thirty Fund had put $410 million into that Democratic run within about a month. I mean, the money comes in quick. It comes in quick. It comes in big. And the Republicans are saying, hell, we want to do the same thing. We want to expand our ability to raise money. And using 501(c)(3). I think it’s dead on arrival.
Farron Cousins: It should be because look, what these billionaires and corporations are trying to do is say, look, if we can get this to a point where it’s tax deductible, which is what the lawsuit’s all about, we can then deduct up to 60% against our income. So if my income is a hundred million dollars a year, I can write off $60 million of it by giving it and paying off and buying politicians. So that’s what they’re after here. And to me it’s a really weird timing of filing this lawsuit because obviously before it could go to the Supreme Court, which is where they will end up. It’s gonna take years. And years from now.
Mike Papantonio: Could be changed. Could be different.
Farron Cousins: Exactly. Especially if Harris wins because Clarence Thomas, uh, he’s kind of defying the laws of nature right now, still being around and on that court. So it’s only a matter of time before we start getting some vacancies.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. Don’t we look at every story like that, Farron? Don’t we always say, okay, this party wants this to happen right now. Okay. And it’s almost like they have an inability just to look 10 years down the road and say, if we change this that dramatically, we’re gonna be affected by it. And I think this is one of those stories. It’s the same kind of deal. I think if you, right now Democrats are way ahead on dark money, I don’t know where this is gonna go. I don’t think it puts anybody in any better position, but I don’t think it’s gonna pass at all. I don’t think they’re gonna go anywhere with 501(c)(3) change that gives them a tax benefit like that.
Farron Cousins: I really hope so.
Mike Papantonio: The Department of Justice announced that they had indicted several individuals last week who were using Russian government money, according to them, to spread propaganda in the United States. But even if everything in the indictment is true, these efforts were so lackluster. I was glad to see Ken Klippenstein is, you know what I think of him, he’s a great writer. He’s just so on point. But he says, look, he made a comparison. He said, all of the money that these two people have been accused of doing, they were able to generate 2000 videos. Okay. And the views were 16 million views with the 2000 videos. He said, if that’s a success, Klippenstein said, I generate 463 million views with just what I do in my little blog. We’re kinda the same situation. If all we generated was 16 million views with what we do, we’d be out of business.
Farron Cousins: Right. And if we had 2000 videos that only got 16 million views, it’s time to pack it up. We get 16 million in about a week or two weeks at this point.
Mike Papantonio: Exactly.
Farron Cousins: And that’s off 50 videos. So it is laughable how pathetic the scheme was. And just so everybody knows, the podcasters and the people that were being paid, none of them were hit with any charges. Basically they were doing stupid things without even realizing it. They didn’t ask questions about where the money came from, and technically they didn’t have to. But common sense would say, well, wait a minute, where’d you get $10 million? But anyway, they were just happy to get the money. But the two individuals were only charged with acting as an unregistered foreign agent.
Mike Papantonio: That’s what I was gonna say right there. Now, okay, you had Garland. What a disaster. Garland’s up in front of, like, we have uncovered the most vast spy network ever uncovered in America. Well, no, you really didn’t, Garland. You’re making an issue out of something that, yeah, it’s good we’re paying attention to it. But to tell the American public that the DOJ has really uncovered this vast conspiracy, it’s a disservice. Because as I’m listening to that, I want to say, you know, Garland, how about you prosecute, if you want to prosecute somebody, how about you prosecute the manufacturers of opioids that killed 150 people a day for 10 years? Okay. Addicted more people than we can count. They could easily be charged with manslaughter. I don’t think there’s any question about it. Why don’t you do that?
Or Garland, why don’t you deal with the thousands of people who were dying from exposure to PFAS because the manufacturers knew exactly what they were doing. They put it into our, they spread it all over the world, and people are dying because of it. Why don’t you do something about it? Why don’t you do something about HSBC or banks, all the banks that were with HSBC who admitted, admitted, signed a document, yes, we washed money for terrorists? We washed money for drug cartels. We washed money for cartel traffickers involved in human trafficking. Why don’t you do something about that? Why don’t you prosecute them? Instead, every one of those, those three facts that I just gave you, they had all of the information and they let ’em walk. Nobody was prosecuted. But here we’ve got ’em acting like this is just revolutionary. We’ve got this huge spy ring taking place in the United States. It’s disturbing to me, man.
Farron Cousins: What about Boeing? Right. Boeing kills hundreds of people. The DOJ announces this year, uh, we’re gonna let ’em go. They violated the non prosecutorial agreement we had. But we’re gonna be okay with that.
Mike Papantonio: Well, talk about that just a second. Explain that a little bit just to show how ridiculous this is. That’s why Klippenstein said, you guys are a bunch of freaks. You’re wasting our time.
Farron Cousins: This very same DOJ that did a press conference about this issue, they a couple years ago made a deal with Boeing after the doors were flying off and hundreds of people were dying in crashes. And they said, listen, we’re not gonna prosecute you. We really, really, really just need you to make these changes. Put these kinds of bolts in. Do this, have the regular safety checks that you weren’t doing. Do that. We’re not gonna prosecute you.
Mike Papantonio: And they said, okay, give me the document. We’ll sign it.
Farron Cousins: Yeah, Boeing says, yeah, we’ll do that. And then Boeing didn’t do it. The DOJ investigates again and says, well, you didn’t do what we told you to do and we said we’d prosecute you if you didn’t, but we’re still not gonna prosecute you. You just give us some money. What was it, a billion dollars maybe? Or no, I think it was a couple hundred million. And now you’re free to go. But on this one, the issue here, and look, I’m not saying I condone what happened at all. This shouldn’t happen.
Mike Papantonio: No, of course not.
Farron Cousins: But the reason these people aren’t being prosecuted is because they didn’t fill out a piece of paper. If they’d have filled out the piece of paper and said, yep, I’m a foreign agent here. Here’s where the money is. There’s your paper. This would’ve been perfectly legal.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. All I’m trying to say is, if we’re gonna call BS, let’s call BS. Okay. And if you want to really do something Garland, do something about the kind of cases we’re talking about, prosecute some white collar criminals. They don’t look like criminals to the Department of Justice because they’re dressed up in Armani suits.
Farron Cousins: And it’s the people they used to work with a lot of times.
Mike Papantonio: That’s right. It’s like this revolving door. I don’t know, man. To me, Klippenstein got it. He made it into a joke and the column is great. It makes it look how ridiculous the whole thing is.
The tragic school shooting in Georgia has reignited debates about gun control in America. That may be a problem that never gets solved, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a solution out there. And the way this case has been handled could offer an answer to help prevent tragedies. First of all, we have to admit this is a tragic occurrence in America, time after time and we keep saying, what a tragedy. And then the same people keep saying, well, we only have one thing to talk about, that’s gun control. Great to talk about that. But why don’t you talk about something that might make a difference like this prosecutor who says, you know what? I’m going after the parents. The parents, it’s not just negligence. They’re saying the conduct by the parents in this situation rose to manslaughter quality. Okay. Pick it up from there.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. What we’re looking at here is obviously according to the prosecutor who’s already arrested the dad, and they’ve said, listen, the dad obviously didn’t carry this out. What the father did was ignore all of the warning signs that have been there for at least one year, if not obviously longer, and still decided to give his child this high powered assault rifle as a present. Last year alone, this child had an incident where he was posting some threats online. So the school did an investigation. The police did. They talked to the parents, told them, listen, your kid has a problem. Something bad could happen. And they said, okay, well, we’ll get.
Mike Papantonio: We got this.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Don’t worry about it. And then they buy him the gun. They didn’t do anything to address any kind of mental health problems he may have had and then tragedy strikes.
Mike Papantonio: To toughen him up. Did you see that article? To toughen him up. I’m gonna give him the gun. There’s pictures of blood on his, he’s obviously killed an animal and daddy’s put blood on his face, like that’s gonna toughen him up. The problem we have and I think if you look at also the Crumbley case that took place just last year. Was it last year?
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Last year was the prosecution.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. And those parents were prosecuted and they were convicted. And the prosecutor did such a good job. This prosecutor in Georgia, I’m convinced, is gonna do a great job here. He’s gonna line up facts. He’s gonna say, at what point do we act responsibly? If the kid is in a room and he’s locked the door and he’s in there watching killing games all day long and he doesn’t speak to you. And people at school saying, we’re really worried about this kid. And he’s writing stuff like this Crumbley kid had written right before he killed all those people. It’s just at some point, the only solution is you have to scare the hell out of parents with the fact, you know, you’re going to go to prison. We can put you in prison for not being a parent. Not being a parent who knows what your child’s doing. Who is aware of all the machinations going on in his head as best you can be, and not paying attention to what has to be paid attention to. It’s not even a matter of just, hey, we’re gonna make a law to lock up a gun case. That doesn’t really solve it. The kid’s going to find out how to get in the gun case. But it’s the overall picture of don’t we have responsibility to raise a child that’s not gonna go out and kill other kids that go to school?
Farron Cousins: Exactly. And that’s why I think this is such a powerful move, just like what they did with the Crumbleys, because these parents in both instances saw all the same red flags. And that’s what the prosecutors are telling us, is that it’s not enough to see them. You as a parent have a duty to act. That’s what it is, the duty to act.
Mike Papantonio: Right.
Farron Cousins: If you do not do anything, or if you do something like then buy them the gun to make things worse, this is on you. And so hopefully, again, the gun control debate is always gonna be the gun control debate. We have too many politicians that will or will not do something. I don’t think that part of it’s ever gonna be solved.
Mike Papantonio: There’s two things you and I have talked about over the years. First of all, make insurance, make them have insurance that’s really expensive. Okay. You can own a gun, but you have to have insurance on that gun and the prices, they’re gonna be high. And parent, you have responsibility when you have all these things happening that are foreseeable, it’s foreseeable that something’s gonna go bad. Like the Crumbley kid, he was drawing these drawings of guns and bloodied up people during a math assignment. He’s sitting there drawing these, killing people while he’s in math. And he at the top of it says, my thoughts won’t stop. Help me. Help me. My life is useless. If you’re a parent, isn’t that like, my God, this is serious and you need to pay some attention? And right after that, he goes out and just kills kids. Kills teachers.
Farron Cousins: I mean, that one cannot be any more crystal clear. Literally calling out for help on something they knew they were gonna turn in. And we do have this mental health crisis here in this country, and we have such a poor apparatus to handle it, that things like this do happen more and more frequently. And I don’t know if it’s a lack of resources within schools, within families to get this mental health. But if we could get some kind of program together, maybe that could stop this. Because again, we’re looking at a situation where we’re not gonna control or solve the issue of the guns. But we can solve other parts of the problem that could reduce this. Yes, I know what I want my solution to be. I want the assault weapons off the streets altogether, and a lot of other folks do too. But if we can’t do that, okay, well, we gotta find another workaround quickly. And this could be it. Hold the parents responsible, do the insurance, get the mental health help for these individuals.
Mike Papantonio: Required.
Farron Cousins: Required.
Mike Papantonio: When a teacher says, I just saw this note, he’s drawing bloodied people and saying, help me, help me, help me. It’s required.
Farron Cousins: You know what? Maybe shave a hundred billion off the defense budget each year and direct it just to that. And hey, we could fund the whole thing.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. Last story. I keep getting emails and they want to know more about you. They want to know about your background. Now, I hired you as a kid. I mean, really weren’t you 19 years old?
Farron Cousins: Well, 21. I had just turned 21 a few months before.
Mike Papantonio: And you had just come out of political science where you aced everything and you pushed all the right wingers back in class, and then you, but what they want to know is what is it you do to get ready for the way you present a story? What is it you do? How much digging do you do? How much time do you spend? What does your day look like in that regard?
Farron Cousins: It’s constant. I don’t think there’s much time where I’m not looking at news or anything like that. If we sit down in the evening and watch tv, I will pull up my phone and start digging through news and reading stories and things of that nature. I do that on the weekends. I do it first thing in the morning. Typically I’m the first one in this building every day and I sit down and I’m reading. But that’s the thing. I’m reading.
Mike Papantonio: All the time.
Farron Cousins: I do not watch cable news. I do not watch other YouTube people. I do not listen to a single podcast. I don’t listen to anybody else. I read and I form my own thoughts and my own opinions and talking points. And that’s what I do. And that’s what I would, I don’t want to tell people don’t watch the YouTube people or the podcasters. But in order to form my opinions and get my own information, I do it myself. I don’t want other people to tell me.
Mike Papantonio: The other thing people ask about constantly is, okay, if I have a side that I’m trying to project, either because I think it’s something that we’re trying to balance out the narrative or whatever it may be. They’re always saying, well, Farron, why don’t you jump on Mike about what he disagrees with you on, or Pap, why don’t you jump on Farron about what he? What is your take on that when you see those kind of comments? I mean, we’ve been dear friends for all those years. Sometimes you and I disagree. I think people sometimes hear me with these right wing, they’re not really right wing, they’re middle of the road, but they interpret that as right wing. And they say, why don’t you just jump all over Pap and push back? Talk about that relationship a little bit. I think it’s important.
Farron Cousins: We have respectful disagreements sometimes. And in a lot of cases too, you make a point and if it’s contrary to what I was already thinking, but you make sense. It’s okay. I hadn’t thought of it that way. And that happens a lot. I think it happens a lot with both of us. I’ll say something and you’ll be like, oh, that is an interesting way to look at things. Everything doesn’t have to be an argument and I think people that are so online are just used to arguments. I gotta fight in the comments. I gotta fight on Twitter. I want to watch these two political commentators go at it. That’s not what we do. Because we agree on 99% of things.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, 99.9% we agree on. What is it that you do, that you want make this show a little different in that regard? What is it you want to accomplish with this show?
Farron Cousins: I think with America’s Lawyer, this is about stripping opinion away, which, what we do at Ring of Fire is mostly opinion based in fact. This one is, we’ve gotta get news out to people because it’s not getting out there any other way. So we rely on all these individuals who do real investigative work. We rely on your history and lawsuits that you’re working on. This show is about straight to the facts. This is what we’re gonna give you. We’re not gonna skew it one way or the other. We’re gonna make sure you learn something and then you can form your own opinion based on this, which is perfectly great. We hope you do. But we are giving you facts here and sometimes, a lot of times it can be facts you don’t like, but you’re gonna get ’em.
Mike Papantonio: Well, you’ve really formulated the idea of this show. I mean, when it comes right down to it, that’s what I hope to accomplish. Like I say, if you looked at my politics and yours, they’re almost exact. But in this show, what we try to do is say, think about something else. That was your idea from getting away from just the straight Ring of Fire attack, attack, attack. I think it’s working.
Farron Cousins: We want people to think.
Mike Papantonio: We want people think. Thanks for joining me, Farron. Okay.
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 subscribe. I’m Mike Papantonio and this has been America’s Lawyer, where we tell you stories that corporate media won’t tell you because their advertisers don’t let ’em. They’re going to lose money if they tell that story or their political relationships are so Democrat or so Republican that they can’t color outside the lines. We don’t have that problem here. We have no tie to corporate. We really have no tie to political parties. We just try to give you the stories as we see ’em. Thanks for joining us. 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.
