In this episode of Firebrand Live, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-GA) responds to a good Samaritan being arrested in Tallahassee, Florida, and calls for Congress to take action to protect former presidents from political prosecution funded in part by federal dollars. Also, former prosecutor Mark Pomerantz defends his decision to take on the role of special counsel in the case against Donald Trump, who is now facing an investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney s office. And some legal experts question whether or not this is a good thing. Thanks to everyone who joined us on the live stream, and all the patriots who sent in their thoughts and reactions to the latest news. We are broadcasting from Room 2021 of the Rayburn House Office Building in the Capitol Complex in Washington, D.C. Our border is in total disarray, and we need to keep running those stories to get hurt again. If you stand for the flag and kneel in prayer, if you want to build America up and not burn her to the ground, then you are in the right place. This is the movement for you. Firebrand: We are in a movement, we are in it for you, my fellow patriots. Tweet Me! Timestamps: 1:00:00 - What's wrong with the Deep State? 4:30 - What is the deep state? 6:00- What are we should do about it? 7:00 8: Should Congress do? 9:15 - Who should be protected from political prosecutions? 11:30- What should be prioritized? 12: Should the DOJ investigate a former president? 15:00 | What are the boundaries of political prosecution? 16: What does it mean to be a political target? 17:40 - Is it illegal? 18:20 - Is there a special interest? 19:40- Is it ethical? 21:10 - Is this a crime? 22:10- What do we get to do with our money? 24:30 25:00 -- Is this case? 26: What should we do with my money or my time? 27:30 -- Is it a crime ? or do I get a chance to pay my money back? 35:00-- Is it possible to have a job? 36:10 37:40 -- Should I pay for my legal fees?
00:04:50.000Matt Gaetz was one of the very few members in the entire Congress who bothered to stand up against permanent Washington on behalf of his constituents.
00:04:57.000Matt Gaetz right now, he's a problem for the Democratic Party.
00:05:00.000He can cause a lot of hiccups in passing applause.
00:05:03.000So we're going to keep running those stories to get hurt again.
00:05:06.000If you stand for the flag and kneel in prayer, if you want to build America up and not burn her to the ground, then welcome, my fellow patriots.
00:05:43.000We are broadcasting from Room 2021 of the Rayburn House Office Building in the Capitol Complex in Washington, D.C. Our border is in total disarray.
00:05:53.000I've got news from Tallahassee, my alma mater, Florida State.
00:05:58.000I also have my reaction to a good Samaritan in New York being arrested.
00:06:04.000The total mischaracterization What am I trying to say?
00:06:09.000Miscarriage of justice that's happening there.
00:06:12.000And certainly grateful everyone is tuning in on the live stream.
00:06:16.000We've got folks from California, Oregon, Texas, Florida, Arizona, internationally from the UK. Travis on Facebook says the Democrats are liars.
00:06:25.000Bob on Facebook says he's drowning in BS. Tired of the BS, wants action, not talk.
00:06:33.000Well, I can tell you the action I was directly involved in today.
00:06:36.000I spent hours taking the deposition of Mr. Mark Pomerantz.
00:06:41.000Mr. Pomerantz was the person from the New York Manhattan DA's office who left, wrote a book.
00:06:52.000And when it became evident that the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, Was going to take this unprecedented step and indict the former President of the United States, Donald Trump, on dubious legal grounds.
00:07:06.000The House Judiciary Committee was understandably very concerned.
00:07:19.000Let's remember, this is President Trump.
00:07:22.000It's easy to see how shady the Alvin Bragg indictment really is.
00:07:26.000Alvin Bragg is a Soros-backed, ultra-liberal prosecutor who campaigned explicitly on taking down Trump, said he had sued Trump more than 100 times as the organizing principal of his campaign for the Manhattan DA position.
00:07:42.000Now, Bragg's predecessor, Cyrus Vance, declined to bring charges against Trump, given the lack of Michael Cohen's credibility and presumably other major factual and legal challenges.
00:07:54.000There was a statute of limitations problem they faced.
00:07:58.000There was a merging of federal and local law, and Cy Vance decided not to bring an action during his tenure, and even initially Alvin Bragg decided not to, but then that changed.
00:08:11.000Alvin Bragg bootstrapped federal campaign law to local business regulations to invent a felony where none would have existed for any person other than the left's number one target, President Trump.
00:08:26.000Former president, leading Republican candidate for president in 2024. So should Congress take action to insulate current and former presidents from political prosecutions funded in any part by federal dollars?
00:08:59.000And he literally volunteered to go into the Manhattan DA's office to take on a special role for Cy Vance in building this case against Trump.
00:09:09.000When he wrote a book about it, he wrote a scene where he comes home from having obtained this position from Cy Vance.
00:09:17.000And his wife asks him about the economic conditions of this new employment relationship.
00:09:23.000And Mr. Pomerant said to his wife, Oh, the financial terms are outstanding.
00:09:29.000They gave it to me for free without even knowing how much I would be willing to pay to go and prosecute Trump.
00:09:39.000You shouldn't be able to buy your way with influence or prestige into a case just because you have a particular grievance with someone who could be a target or a subject.
00:09:52.000When Alvin Bragg initially declines to prosecute before then deciding to prosecute, Mark Palmerance literally wrote a book slamming Alvin Bragg and many of the actions taken by the Manhattan DA's office.
00:10:07.000He even went on Chuck Todd's Meet the Press to defend his decision to write that book.
00:10:34.000Well, I think the criticism is unfounded, and I can tell you in a nutshell why.
00:10:41.000First, with respect to the Stormy Daniels investigation that has gained impetus over the last month or so, the facts have been in the public domain for literally years.
00:10:54.000In fact, as I was doing research and pulling together the facts for my summary of what would go into the book, Where I went to discover those facts was the Internet, Michael Cohen's book, and the publicly available information from the federal prosecution of Michael Cohen.
00:11:20.000You can't unknow that information, so even though you're using the public record, what you choose to excerpt is certainly not, is it not influenced by what you know took place in the grand jury?
00:11:31.000Everything that went into the book with regard to the Stormy Daniels investigation, the financial statement investigation, was in the public domain and If there was a detail that wasn't, as soon as there's an indictment, if there is an indictment, we don't know yet whether there will be a prosecution.
00:11:51.000If there is a prosecution, on day one, under New York's discovery law, which is among the most liberal in the United States, the defendant, in this case Donald Trump, will get everything that the DA has by way of witness statements, documents, facts, and so on.
00:12:46.000And Mark Pomerantz taking the Fifth Amendment.
00:12:49.000That's what I'm here to share with all of you live on Firebrand.
00:12:53.000Now, because Mark Pomerantz had written a book on the subject of his time at the Manhattan DA's office, because he was a Trump-hater working to build this case, because he may have broken laws on rules of legal ethics, statutes, we wanted to interview him in the House Judiciary Committee.
00:13:14.000That interview occurred today, and I can report exclusively to our Firebrand audience.
00:13:21.000Mark Pomerantz, the prosecutor who was literally in charge of building the case against Trump, pled the fifth to almost every question we asked him today.
00:13:33.000I asked him if he violated Donald Trump's constitutional rights.
00:13:47.000I asked if he broke any laws during his time with the Manhattan DA while investigating Trump.
00:13:52.000And he exercised his constitutional right not to incriminate himself.
00:13:58.000While every American is entitled to take the fifth, and taking the fifth in no way means that someone is guilty of anything, It sure does raise additional questions regarding the propriety of the unprecedented charging of Donald Trump.
00:14:45.000He even asked Alvin Bragg questions that would...
00:14:52.000Be easily answerable just by a review of the documents before him, and he asserted the same privilege.
00:14:58.000Something is rotten in the New York Manhattan DA's office.
00:15:02.000I am more certain of this now than when this day started, and we are not done investigating potential misconduct, misuse of federal funds, and further concerns.
00:15:14.000I suspect we will be calling Mr. Pomerantz back to compel responses when we are armed with a court order requiring him to do so.
00:15:24.000I believe he engaged in a subject matter waiver of the Fifth Amendment rights he asserted.
00:15:55.000Do you do your duty as a free American?
00:15:59.000Or do you just sit there, like an extra in the movie, watching the violence go down?
00:16:06.000Well, Marine U.S. Patriot Daniel Penny probably asked himself similar questions, and he decided to act.
00:16:14.000When the dangerously insane Jordan Neely walked into Daniel's subway car, when he was making violent threats, Daniel bravely put himself in harm's way to subdue Jordan Penny.
00:16:28.000And to put him in a hold until the police arrived.
00:16:31.000Daniel is even on video providing due care and releasing this person from the hold, even trying to wake him up after he was subdued.
00:16:42.000Tragically, and in the course of this altercation that could have been avoided, Jordan Neely took his last breath.
00:16:51.000Maybe you haven't heard of Jordan Neely.
00:16:56.000Jordan Neely has been arrested 42 times.
00:17:00.000Many such cases involved crimes on the subway.
00:17:05.000These soft on crime policies like we see in New York kill.
00:17:09.000It's just a matter of whom in far too many cases.
00:17:13.000And it shouldn't be the people not committing crimes.
00:17:16.000If we reopen the asylums and put disturbed and dangerous people like Jordan Neely inside them when they need to be, maybe he'd still be alive today.
00:17:27.000Maybe there would be some opportunity for recovery or a renewed life.
00:17:34.000But the left doesn't actually want this.
00:17:37.000The Soros prosecutors like Alvin Bragg They want you to fear for your life.
00:17:43.000They would rather you die than defend yourself.
00:17:46.000Maybe you die while asking yourself the question about whether or not you should defend yourself.
00:17:50.000But it isn't Jordan Neely that the New York City prosecutors are removing from the streets.
00:17:56.000They never did that, in fact, never to any success or significant oration.
00:18:03.000Daniel had the nerve to stand up to the anarcho-tyranny That is running rampant throughout New York and particularly in their public transit systems.
00:18:15.000And now it seems he will pay dearly for it.
00:18:18.000Look at how New York prosecutors perp walked him.
00:18:22.000I mean, this was the guy who literally...
00:18:25.000He stood up to protect those around him from what could have been a dangerous situation.
00:18:30.000Now it's imperative that Daniel prevail and that Alvin Bragg drop the bogus charges against him.
00:18:40.000Kyle Rittenhouse faced the same evil that Daniel Penny is now facing when he defended himself against a group of armed pedophiles and rapists chasing him down to murder him in the streets.
00:18:53.000And Firebrand listeners will also remember the case of Jose Aldo, the bodega store owner in New York City.
00:19:01.000Then he was one of the witnesses in the House Judiciary Committee's field hearing on crime in New York City.
00:19:07.000He faced similar persecution when he used a knife to defend himself against a couple who tried to beat him to death when he insisted that they pay for a bag of Doritos.
00:19:20.000In blue cities, there is an all-out assault on self-defense.
00:19:25.000Meanwhile, they let the criminals and the dangerous and the insane seemingly do whatever they want to the rest of us.
00:19:32.000Preventing good women and men from defending themselves and their communities is nothing new, actually.
00:19:38.000It comes from some of the worst governments that have ever existed.
00:19:43.000The Marxists have been doing this for ages.
00:19:47.000Alexander Solzhenitsyn commented on this very problem.
00:19:51.000He famously said,"...in the Criminal Code of 1926, there was a most stupid article 139 on the limits of necessary self-defense, according to which you had the right to unsheathe your knife only after the criminal's knife was hovering over you, and you could stab that criminal only if he had stabbed you.
00:20:14.000Otherwise, you would be put on trial." This fear of exceeding the measure of necessary self-defense led to a total spinelessness as a national characteristic.
00:20:26.000A hoodlum once began to beat up the Red Army.
00:20:32.000Alexander Derhoff was that army member.
00:20:35.000He was outside of a club and Zakharov took out a folding knife and he killed the hoodlum.
00:20:40.000And for this, he got 10 years for murder.
00:21:08.000See how much it's changed since 1964. So in 64, we have this case, Kew Gardens, Queens, New York, 28-year-old Catherine Genovese, known as Kitty, was brutally murdered.
00:21:19.000But it wasn't the particulars of the killing that became the focus of the nation in this case.
00:21:26.000It was the response, or the lack of a response, from her neighbors.
00:21:32.000As this 28-year-old woman screamed for her life, please help me, please help me.
00:21:39.00038 witnesses in that community did not do anything to intervene.
00:21:44.000And according to reports, nobody even bothered to call the police.
00:21:48.000One witness later explained himself with a phrase that passed into infamy.
00:21:58.000This was so bizarre back then in New York.
00:22:02.000Psychologists struggled to comprehend the behavior, the despondence.
00:22:08.000Were we all becoming sociopaths as bystanders that we wouldn't react and help someone screaming for their life?
00:22:15.000The public quickly picked on this story as an example of the ills of contemporary urban decline.
00:22:22.000And the decline of life in urban areas.
00:22:25.000People even cited the general moral collapse of modern society, the decay of Western civilization because of what happened in 1964 in Kew Gardens, New York.
00:23:03.000They are collectivists with no sense of community.
00:23:07.000Look at this horrible video of what reality is like in China.
00:23:15.000China is doing a little soul-searching after this heartbreaking video began making the rounds.
00:23:21.000It shows a two-year-old girl being struck by a van, not once, but twice, as more than a dozen people walk, drive, and cycle by, ignoring her, leaving her to lie in a pool of her own blood.
00:23:36.000The scene unfolded Thursday and was captured by a surveillance camera.
00:23:40.000A garbage worker eventually comes to the girl's side and picks her up.
00:24:06.000That is the future that the left wants for us, that you just saw there on that clip from China, where we are so desensitized to human life and the loss of human life that we would walk by, that we would let bad things happen.
00:24:21.000Well, Daniel Penny wasn't going to let bad things happen at the hands of a person who had been arrested 42 times, who was harassing and scaring the other people who were there.
00:25:33.000Alvin Bragg must drop these charges, and we must make our country righteous and just and fair again.
00:25:41.000Daniel Penny has set up a Give, Send, Go account, and I will be donating to his legal defense personally today.
00:25:50.000There's another story I want to bring to you regarding Florida State University, my alma mater, big news out of Tallahassee, and sadly it is the news of fraud.
00:26:01.000Only good part is I think we've got the fraud fees are identified, caught, and appropriately exposed.
00:26:09.000An African-American professor named Eric Stewart from the criminology department at Florida State University has abruptly left the university after more allegations of fabricating data used in his papers to make it seem like racism against blacks and Hispanics is more common than it is actually came to light.
00:26:30.000Once again, the demand for racism is greater than the supply.
00:26:35.000Imagine building a career on crying wolf over racism while you fake and manipulate data to support those very delusions.
00:26:46.000That's your brain on critical race theory, I guess.
00:26:49.000Now this story was first reported by the Florida Standard's Livia Caputo, and it's really something else.
00:26:55.000Apparently Eric Stewart, who made quite a name for himself as a, quote, fellow of the American Society of Criminology, has had six research studies retracted.
00:27:12.000Stewart was first accused of falsifying data in 2019 by another professor who co-authored a study with Stewart in 2011. This particular study resulted in Stewart's findings published, saying,"...as black and Hispanic populations grow, so did the public's want for more discriminatory sentences." Sounds grisly.
00:27:37.000The problem was that the actual data showed the exact opposite.
00:27:43.000Stewart had rigged the data so bad to show bias that the numbers added up to the point of a mathematical impossibility.
00:27:52.000Since then, Stewart has authored a number of similar studies that have been retracted and put under investigation by a three-person committee at FSU. The investigation stalled, of course.
00:28:03.000Maybe it had something to do with the fact that two of the committee members had previously authored papers with Stewart, which violates FSU's own academic conflict of interest rules.
00:28:14.000Stewart has no other defense than to call these investigations and allegations racist.
00:28:39.000His sudden unexplained absence in March of 2023 and subsequent replacement indicates his fraudulent life work has come to an end with the Knowles.
00:28:49.000What does this teach us about academia?
00:28:52.000The peer review process is bogus, and if fraud is ever discovered, these universities are slow to act.
00:28:59.000The media and academia are starving for content that shows racial bias in society.
00:29:05.000Some have literally built their careers on it.
00:29:09.000There's so much of an incentive to put out the fake data and push this BS, but there is no oversight and little accountability when people get caught just making it up, literally making up numbers so that you believe that your fellow Americans are racist when in fact, while we all have our bumps and bruises and warts and problems, this is a just, kind, and loving society.
00:29:32.000We need a complete and total auditing of academia and a mass purging of some of the academics.
00:29:39.000People like Eric Stewart are simply evil and they should be ashamed of themselves for doing this.
00:29:44.000They are absolutely, absolutely wrong to bear false witness.
00:29:50.000In the meantime, we need to go after these ilk, catch them in their lies, and force universities to hold them accountable.
00:29:56.000Maybe even hold federal funding back if they continue to promote this nonsense or if they turn a blind eye to manipulation of data so that there can be social virtue signaling.
00:30:07.000We owe it to our future to force academia to do better.
00:30:13.000Other big news of the week, I wanted to share the passage of HR2 in the House of Representatives.
00:30:34.000If we have detention beds, people who are Justly and appropriately in the right categories to be detained should be detained.
00:30:45.000But telling people to show up somewhere and self-report as illegal immigrants or however they've abused the asylum process to call these people asylum seekers, they're not.
00:30:59.000If it were law today, the Title 42 authorities that are expiring under the public health end of the emergency disaster declaration, those authorities would transition over to an immigration context and be used to turn people away.
00:31:37.000You can go back and watch the episode I did with Andy Biggs, Homeland and Security, to see some of the points and arguments there around E-Verify, but that was why Massey didn't vote for it.
00:31:48.000And the other no vote was Representative John Duarte of California's 13th District.
00:31:53.000He put out a statement afterwards saying, quote, While I wholeheartedly support enhanced border security, valley families deserve practical solutions that both Democrats and Republicans can support.
00:32:05.000Unfortunately, this bill would harm any families that work in our valley and create difficulties for our food producers.
00:32:12.000So the Duarte standard for a bill he would support is that Democrats have to vote for it too.
00:32:19.000That's quite the standard because every single Democrat voted against HR2, even the ones in the border communities who are being overrun and harmed the most by this Biblical Migration of people without permission, without process, without consequence, and it must be stopped.
00:32:40.000H.R. 2 would solve the problem, but we know the Senate will not take it up.
00:32:44.000Fundamentally, we will not secure this border until a Republican is in the White House because the executive powers are essential to exercise fully and thoroughly to internally enforce our existing immigration laws in our country,
00:33:01.000To expel the people who are not here legally and to ensure that none come again without us inviting them and giving them the great extension of American grace that we've always been willing to give to people willing to do it the right way, not the people whose first act in our country is a criminal act of unlawful entry.
00:33:21.000We'll have more on the border and on our investigative work in the coming days and weeks.
00:33:27.000Thanks so much for joining us on Firebrand.
00:33:29.000The big favor you can do me, make sure you share this episode, give us a five-star rating, leave a comment with the information you'd like to learn about in great detail from the United States Congress.
00:33:40.000Appreciate you being part of our audience.