A good Samaritan in Tallahassee, Florida has been arrested, and a good friend in New York City has been charged with conspiracy to commit a crime. What does this have to do with the Mueller investigation?
00:00:00.000Matt 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.
00:00:10.000Matt Gaetz right now, he's a problem in the Democratic Party.
00:00:13.000He could cause a lot of hiccups in passing of laws.
00:00:16.000So we're going to keep running those stories to keep hurting him.
00:00:19.000If 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.
00:00:29.000You are in the right place. This is the movement for you.
00:00:33.000You ever watch this guy on television? Like a machine. Matt Gaetz.
00:00:38.000I'm a canceled man in some corners of the Internet.
00:00:41.000Many days I'm a marked man in Congress, a wanted man by the deep state.
00:00:46.000They aren't really coming for me. They're coming for you.
00:02:29.000Were constitutional rights impaired all for the sake of politics?
00:02:33.000Let's remember, this is President Trump.
00:02:36.000It's easy to see how shady the Alvin Bragg indictment really is.
00:02:40.000Alvin Bragg is a Soros-backed, ultra-liberal prosecutor who campaigned explicitly on taking down Trump,
00:02:48.000said he had sued Trump more than 100 times as the organizing principle of his campaign for the Manhattan DA position.
00:02:56.000Alvin Bragg's predecessor, Cyrus Vance, declined to bring charges against Trump,
00:03:01.000given the lack of Michael Cohen's credibility and presumably other major factual and legal challenges.
00:03:08.000There was a statute of limitations problem they faced.
00:03:11.000There was a merging of federal and local law, and Cy Vance decided not to bring an action during his tenure,
00:03:20.000and even initially Alvin Bragg decided not to, but then that changed.
00:03:24.000Alvin 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.
00:03:40.000Former president, leading Republican candidate for president in 2024.
00:03:45.000So should Congress take action to insulate current and former presidents from political prosecutions funded in any part by federal dollars?
00:03:58.000Enter Mark Pomerantz, the subject of this discussion we're having on the podcast today.
00:04:04.000Mark Pomerantz described himself as one of the legal eagles of New York.
00:04:11.000He's a top flight shark, and 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.
00:04:23.000When he wrote a book about it, he wrote a scene where he comes home from having obtained this position from Cy Vance,
00:04:31.000and his wife asks him about the economic conditions of this new employment relationship.
00:04:37.000And Mr. Pomerantz said to his wife, oh, the financial terms are outstanding.
00:04:42.000They gave it to me for free without even knowing how much I would be willing to pay to go and prosecute Trump.
00:04:53.000You 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.
00:05:06.000When Alvin Bragg initially declined to prosecute before then deciding to prosecute,
00:05:11.000Mark Pomerantz literally wrote a book slamming Alvin Bragg and many of the actions taken by the Manhattan DA's office.
00:05:21.000He even went on Chuck Todd's Meet the Press to defend his decision to write that book.
00:05:30.000Barbara McQuaid, a former U.S. attorney, writing a book about a pending investigation was really poor form.
00:05:35.000Cynthia Alksney, a former federal prosecutor, strikes me as totally improper.
00:05:39.000Eliza Orleans, New York City public defender, this book could do irreparable damage to an ongoing investigation.
00:05:45.000I know you've heard this criticism. What say you?
00:05:48.000Well, I think the criticism is unfounded and I can tell you in a nutshell why.
00:05:55.000First, with respect to the Stormy Daniels investigation that has gained impetus over the last month or so,
00:06:03.000the facts have been in the public domain for literally years.
00:06:07.000In fact, as I was doing research and pulling together the facts for my summary of what would go into the book,
00:06:14.000where 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.
00:06:28.000Let me stop you there, though. In fairness, you know what was in that grand jury testimony, though.
00:06:32.000So you know what... You can't unknow that information.
00:06:36.000So even though you're using the public record, what you choose to excerpt is certainly not...
00:06:41.000Is it not influenced by what you know took place in the grand jury room?
00:06:45.000Everything that went into the book with regard to the Stormy Daniels investigation, the financial statement investigation, was in the public domain.
00:06:56.000And 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.
00:07:04.000If there is a prosecution, if 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.
00:07:36.000We sent a letter requesting documents and witnesses.
00:07:39.000And here was the first subpoena that we had worked to convert into a deposition.
00:07:46.000And that deposition resulted in Mark Pomerantz taking the Fifth Amendment.
00:07:51.000That's what I'm here to share with all of you live on Firebrand.
00:07:55.000Now, 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.
00:08:16.000That interview occurred today, and I can report exclusively to our Firebrand audience.
00:08:23.000Mark 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.
00:08:35.000I asked him if he violated Donald Trump's constitutional rights, he took the fifth.
00:08:42.000I asked if he violated standards of legal ethics, he took the fifth.
00:08:46.000I asked if he misused federal funds, fifth.
00:08:50.000I asked if he broke any laws during his time with the Manhattan DA while investigating Trump.
00:08:55.000And he exercised his constitutional right not to incriminate himself.
00:09:00.000While every American is entitled to take the fifth, and taking the fifth in no way means that someone is guilty of anything,
00:09:09.000it sure does raise additional questions regarding the propriety of the unprecedented charging of Donald Trump.
00:18:05.000They are collectivists with no sense of community.
00:18:09.000Look at this horrible video of what reality is like in China.
00:18:16.000China is doing a little soul searching after this heartbreaking video began making the rounds.
00:18:23.000It 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.
00:18:38.000The scene unfolded Thursday and was captured by a surveillance camera.
00:18:43.000A garbage worker eventually comes to the girl's side and picks her up.
00:19:08.000That is the future that the left wants for us, that you just saw there on that clip from China, where we are so desensitized just to human life and the loss of human life that we would walk by, that we would let bad things happen.
00:19:23.000Well, 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.
00:19:42.000We have to take back our streets, and we have to repopularize the notion of duty, the duty we have to one another, our brother's keeper, our fellow Americans.
00:20:35.000Alvin Bragg must drop these charges, and we must make our country righteous and just and fair again.
00:20:42.000Daniel Penny has set up a Give, Send, Go account, and I will be donating to his legal defense personally today.
00:20:50.000There's another story I want to bring to you regarding Florida State University, my alma mater.
00:20:59.000Big news out of Tallahassee, and sadly, it is the news of fraud.
00:21:04.000Only good part is I think we've got the fraud fees are identified, caught, and appropriately exposed.
00:21:11.000An 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.
00:21:32.000Once again, the demand for racism is greater than the supply.
00:21:37.000Imagine building a career on crying wolf over racism while you fake and manipulate data to support those very delusions.
00:21:47.000That's your brain on critical race theory, I guess.
00:21:51.000Now, this story was first reported by the Florida Standards' Livia Caputo, and it's really something else.
00:21:57.000Apparently, 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.
00:22:39.000The problem was that the actual data showed the exact opposite.
00:22:45.000Stewart had rigged the data so bad to show bias that the numbers added up to the point of a mathematical impossibility.
00:22:54.000Since then, Stewart has authored a number of similar studies that have been retracted and put under investigation by a three-person committee at FSU.
00:23:05.000Of course, maybe 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.
00:23:17.000Stewart has no other defense than to call these investigations and allegations racist.
00:23:41.000His sudden unexplained absence in March of 2023 and subsequent replacement indicates his fraudulent life work has come to an end with the Knowles.
00:23:51.000What does this teach us about academia?
00:23:55.000The peer review process is bogus, and if fraud is ever discovered, these universities are slow to act.
00:24:01.000The media and academia are starving for content that shows racial bias in society.
00:24:07.000Some have literally built their careers on it.
00:24:10.000There'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,
00:24:26.000when in fact, while we all have our bumps and bruises and warts and problems, this is a just, kind, and loving society.
00:24:34.000We need a complete and total auditing of academia and a mass purging of some of the academics.
00:24:41.000People like Eric Stewart are simply evil, and they should be ashamed of themselves for doing this.
00:24:46.000They are absolutely, absolutely wrong to bear false witness.
00:24:52.000In the meantime, we need to go after these ilk, catch them in their lies, and force universities to hold them accountable,
00:24:58.000maybe 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.
00:25:09.000We owe it to our future to force academia to do better.
00:25:15.000Other big news of the week, I wanted to share the passage of HR2 in the House of Representatives.
00:25:21.000I voted for it proudly. We have got to secure our border. We have got to get these asylum reforms in place.
00:25:27.000And the key feature of HR2 is to not just release and parole people in the United States.
00:25:33.000You wait in Mexico. You wait in your home country.
00:25:36.000If we have detention beds, people who are justly and appropriately in the right categories to be detained should be detained.
00:25:47.000But 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.
00:25:58.000It's just a legal fiction. Anyhow, this bill, very important.
00:26:02.000If it were law today, the Title 42 authorities that are expiring under the public health end of the emergency disaster declaration,
00:26:14.000those authorities would transition over to an immigration context and be used to turn people away, detain or turn away.
00:26:23.000The vote was 219 to 213. Two Republicans voted against the bill. One was Thomas Massey, our good friend and frequent Firebrand guest.
00:26:33.000Thomas Massey's objection was to the E-Verify provisions of the legislation.
00:26:38.000I support E-Verify. You 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.
00:26:48.000But that was why Massey didn't vote for it.
00:26:50.000And the other no vote was Representative John Duarte of California's 13th District.
00:26:56.000He 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.
00:27:08.000Unfortunately, this bill would harm any families that work in our valley and create difficulties for our food producers.
00:27:14.000So the Duarte standard for a bill he would support is that Democrats have to vote for it, too.
00:27:21.000That's quite the standard because every single Democrat voted against H.R. 2, 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.
00:27:40.000And it must be stopped. H.R. 2 would solve the problem, but we know the Senate will not take it up.
00:27:46.300Fundamentally, we will not secure this border until a Republican is in the White House.
00:27:52.300Because the executive powers are essential to exercise fully and thoroughly, to internally enforce our existing immigration laws in our country, to expel the people who are not here legally,
00:28:05.300and 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,
00:28:17.300not the people whose first act in our country is a criminal act of unlawful entry.
00:28:23.300We'll have more on the border and on our investigative work in the coming days and weeks.
00:28:29.080Thanks so much for joining us on Firebrand.
00:28:31.100The 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.
00:28:43.000Appreciate you being part of our audience. Have a great weekend. Roll the credits.