A jury is deliberating on whether to convict Donald Trump on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, a charge that could land him in prison for up to 20 years. But what exactly is a falsification of business records and what does it have to do with the 2016 presidential election? And why is it a crime? And what are the three possible crimes that could be committed in order to falsify business records? And who is the target of these three crimes? All that and much more on today's episode of Judge Jeanine's new show, "The People's Court," where we talk about all things New York City, politics, and everything else going on in the city. Today's episode is brought to you by the New York Times and the Associated Press, and edited by Alex Blumberg and Annie-Rose Strasser. The opinions expressed by the host are our own, not those of our editors, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of our respective law enforcement agencies. We do not represent the views of our clients, employers, clients, or legal counsel. This episode was produced for noncommercial use, unless otherwise specified. Thank you for listening and supporting the program. If you like what you hear, please consider becoming a patron patron or subscribing to the podcast and/or leaving us a five star rating on Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Podcoin, or wherever you get your listening choices. Thanks again for listening! if you like the podcast, please leave us a rating and review and review in iTunes. We really appreciate your support. - we really appreciate it! - please consider rating and reviewing our work and reviewing the podcast. in the comments section below. Thank you! We really really appreciate the support we do you really do appreciate the work you're listening to this podcast! Timestamps and reviewing this podcast, it really does mean a lot. Please consider supporting the podcast - it really helps us a lot of people listening to us. -- Thank you very much, really really appreciates the work we do -- thank you, really deeply, deeply appreciate it greatly, really appreciate you, very much appreciate it, thank you deeply, and we appreciate it deeply, truly appreciate it. XOXO, bye. Sarah, Sarah, Amy - Margo, Jack, Mike, Kristy, Abbie, Evan, and Sarah, Jacklyn, Brian, and Jacklyn
00:00:00.000The jury is now considering whether to convict Donald Trump on 34 felony counts of falsification of business records.
00:00:07.000It would be a shock, frankly, if he were not convicted in this particular case because, of course, he's got 12 angry New Yorkers on the jury, and New York juries probably not going to be particularly fond of President Trump.
00:00:19.000Also, the judge in this case has made it a foregone conclusion that Trump will be convicted.
00:00:24.000The reason I say that is because his jury instructions are totally insane.
00:00:31.000They deliberated for like four and a half hours, and then they went out for a hoagie or something, and they are back this morning, still deliberating, just before 4 p.m.
00:00:41.000Jurors asked to, again, hear legal instructions the judge had read earlier in the day, because this is a very confusing legal case, mainly because no one knows what the hell the charges are.
00:00:50.000So I have the jury instructions here in front of me.
00:00:53.000The problem with jury instructions is that it is absolutely unclear what exactly the crime that is being alleged is.
00:01:01.000The first crime would be falsifying business records in the first degree under New York penal law section 175.10.
00:01:09.000That law says that a person is guilty of falsifying business records in the first degree when, with intent to defraud, that includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof, that person makes or causes a false entry in the business records of an enterprise.
00:01:23.000So the idea here would be that if Donald Trump Made a false business record in 2017 with intent to cover up a crime in 2016.
00:01:32.000That's what falsifying business records in the first degree would be.
00:01:34.000The problem is, what was the second crime that he was seeking to cover up?
00:01:40.000The big problem with this case, of course, is that Alvin Bragg is trying to spin a non-existent crime out of Donald Trump making a hush money payment.
00:01:47.000Now, hush money payments are ugly, and they're unseemly, and they're kind of gross, particularly when you're talking about paying somebody off to shut up about one 10-minute stand that you had in, like, 2007 at a golf tournament with a porn star.
00:02:02.000That's awkward, but that doesn't make it illegal.
00:02:10.000Because falsifying business records is a misdemeanor.
00:02:12.000What turns it into a felony is the underlying crime that you are seeking to supposedly cover up.
00:02:17.000And here is where the jury instructions get super duper weird.
00:02:22.000According to the jury instructions that Judge Juan Merchan gave to the jury yesterday, quote, the people allege that the other crime the defendant intended to commit, aid or conceal, is a violation of New York election law section 17152.
00:02:33.000Section 17152 of the New York election law provides that any two or more persons who conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means and which conspiracy is acted upon by one or more of the parties thereto shall be guilty of conspiracy to promote or prevent an election.
00:02:50.000Under our law, when a person is guilty of such conspiracy with intent that conduct be performed that would promote or prevent the election of a person by unlawful means.
00:02:59.000Again, a hush money payment is not necessarily unlawful means.
00:03:04.000People do all sorts of things to impact elections.
00:03:06.000They go on the campaign stump and they fib.
00:03:08.000They activate their agents to try to bury stories from... There's all sorts of stuff that's ugly in elections, known about it for literally thousands of years, that people do in order to affect the outcome of elections.
00:03:18.000The question is whether the thing you are doing is illegal, such that falsifying a business record about that thing turns it into a felony.
00:03:48.000Now what's particularly weird about this, what's super weird about this, is that Merchant says quote, That is something, I've never heard of anything remotely like that in criminal law before.
00:03:56.000to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means.
00:03:59.000You need not be unanimous as to what those unlawful means were.
00:04:03.000That is something I've never heard of anything remotely like that in criminal law before.
00:04:07.000That I'm going to specify three possible crimes.
00:04:10.000The jury can disagree on which of those three crimes were committed.
00:04:15.000But if you have a unanimous verdict that a crime was committed, then you can be convicted under the second law.
00:05:17.000And one was some form of wife beating, assault.
00:05:21.000And we don't know which one of those it was, but if four of you agree on one, and four of you agree on another, and four of you agree on the third, and a murder was committed by somebody in your crew, attended to any one of those three, then we'll convict you.
00:05:31.000I've never heard of anything remotely like this.
00:05:34.000It's relatively unprecedented legally, so far as I'm aware.
00:05:38.000Beyond which, all of the allegations here, the three laws that are sort of underlying the misdemeanor, again, remember, there's a patina of a misdemeanor, which is a violation of New York election law, and it's supposed to stack on top of some other sort of concealed crime.
00:05:52.000And there are three types of crime that are being alleged that the jury does not have to be unanimous upon, according to Judge Maraton.
00:05:59.000First of all, I don't see how this is a reversible error.
00:06:01.000Those jury instructions are so bizarre.
00:06:03.000I don't see how this doesn't get reversed on appeal.
00:06:09.000The first of the people's theories of unlawful means, which I will now define for you, is the Federal Election Campaign Act.
00:06:14.000Under FECA, it is unlawful for an individual to willfully make a contribution to any candidate with respect to any election for a federal office, including the office of the presidency, which exceeds a certain limit.
00:06:23.000In 2015 and 2016, that limit was $2,700.
00:06:26.000It is also unlawful under FICA for any corporation to willfully make a contribution of any amount to a candidate or candidate's campaign in connection with any federal election or for any person to cause such a corporate contribution.
00:06:37.000We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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00:07:42.000So, the basic idea here would be that Donald Trump, in making a payoff via Michael Cohen to David Pecker at the National Enquirer to pay off Stormy Daniels, that that was, in fact, a campaign contribution that was not labeled as such, and therefore was a federal campaign finance violation.
00:07:56.000The problem, of course, is the federal government looked at this and didn't do anything about it.
00:08:02.000So what you have is a state prosecutor attempting to spin a non-existent federal felony into a state-level felony for purposes of prosecution.
00:08:11.000By the way, there's literally no evidence that Donald Trump was falsifying business records in 2017 in order to cover up anything having to do with FICA.
00:08:19.000See, one of the problems with this entire case is that you have to prove Donald Trump's legal intent to defy the law by signing certain things.
00:08:27.000And Donald Trump's entire case has basically been, well, you know, Michael Cohen was my lawyer.
00:08:30.000He's the one who's supposed to do it legally.
00:08:32.000So I told him to go do it legally, and if he did it illegally, that's his problem.
00:08:36.000Which, in a specific intent case, which this is, a willful intent case, as the law says, not a horrible defense.
00:08:42.000I mean, by the way, most of us do this with our lawyers all the time.
00:08:45.000I'm a lawyer, and I still do this with my lawyers.
00:08:47.000I say to them, like, do what you have to do to make sure that I'm complying with all available law.
00:08:51.000Now, if they then advise me badly, and they go and violate the law on my behalf, can I be held responsible for my lawyers being bad lawyers?
00:09:00.000The second possibility is falsification of other business records.
00:09:03.000So it's turtles all the way down under this one.
00:09:06.000Under New York law, a person is guilty of falsifying business records in the second degree when, with intent to defraud, he or she makes or causes a false entry in the business records of an enterprise.
00:09:16.000For purposes of determining whether falsifying business records in the second degree was an unlawful means used by a conspiracy to promote or prevent an election, you may consider the bank records associated with Michael Cohen's account formation paperwork, blah, blah, blah.
00:09:26.000So basically, this is still a FICA violation, right?
00:09:29.000What they're basically saying is that there was a falsification of state-level business records in order to illegally pay off Stormy Daniels, but they've not proved that she was illegally paid off.
00:09:38.000Again, she was paid off, almost certainly, but illegally, not clear at all.
00:09:46.000It is unlawful under New York State and New York City law to knowingly submit or submit materially false or fraudulent information in connection with any tax return.
00:09:55.000Now again, this is really, really weak tea.
00:10:00.000And it becomes even weaker tea when you recognize that what the judge is doing here is cobbling together a basic series of legal excuses and then saying to the jury, choose from this Chinese menu of possible legal excuses, and if you can come to unanimity that you want anything on this Chinese menu, Donald Trump is guilty.
00:10:16.000So, Andy McCarthy, the legal analyst over at National Review, he has a good piece explaining the problem here.
00:10:21.000He says, With the help of Judge Juan Merchant and none other than
00:10:23.000Donald Trump, prosecutors from the Office of Elective Progressive Democratic District
00:10:27.000Attorney Alvin Bragg have effectively concealed what should have been fatal holes in their case.
00:10:32.000The state is well aware of these holes and has thus cleverly created an illusion of mountainous
00:10:36.000The sleight of hand is that the mountain proves legal conduct.
00:10:39.000It seems illegal because the subject matter is sorted.
00:10:42.000Paying off a star in a Playboy model during the 2016 election to maintain silence about extramarital affairs with Trump.
00:10:47.000But the payoffs were lawful consideration for lawful contract.
00:10:51.000It is not hard for prosecutors to assemble prodigious proof of legal act, even unsavory ones.
00:10:56.000The hope is that no one will notice the dearth of proof on what is the dispositive issue.
00:11:01.000In 2016 and 2017, when these non-disclosure agreements between the National Enquirer and Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal were being negotiated and then Trump reimbursed fixer Michael Cohen for the Stormy payoff, did Trump willfully violate the federal campaign finance laws?
00:11:17.000Which prescribed felony offenses Bragg has no jurisdiction to enforce.
00:11:20.000And as Andy McCarthy says, there is not a shred of evidence that Trump was even thinking about FICA in 2016-2017, much less willfully transgressing it.
00:11:29.000With merchants' help, and not much resistance from defense lawyers, Braxium has shrewdly conflated two very different things.
00:11:34.000One, knowing and intentionally burying politically damaging information through NDAs, which is in fact legal.
00:11:39.000And two, knowing and intentionally flouting FICA regulations, which would be illegal if prosecutors could prove it, but there's no evidence against Trump.
00:11:46.000So he says, obviously, this case is lacking on the merits.
00:11:49.000One problem here, Is that Donald Trump, because he has insisted politically that he never slept with Stormy Daniels or Karen McDougal or any of the rest of this sort of stuff, because he says that sort of stuff, it makes it difficult to defend his case legally, which is true.
00:12:04.000As Annie McCarthy points out, he says, Team Trump has presented one of the most ill-conceived, self-destructive defenses I've ever seen in decades of trying and analyzing criminal cases.
00:12:16.000Trump insisted his lawyers subordinate his defense at trial to the political narrative he wants to spin in the 2024 campaign.
00:12:23.000Against the weight of evidence and common sense, Trump insists on telling voters that Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal are lying.
00:12:28.000But no one with even a passing familiarity with Trump's combative and parsimonious nature would believe for a second he would agree to pay $130,000 to Stormy and $150,000 to McDougal if they were falsely claiming to have had affairs with him.
00:12:39.000Or that Cohen would have paid Stormy and Trump's pal David Pecker would have paid McDougal unless Trump had greenlit the payments and assured them of repayment.
00:12:47.000Legally speaking, says McCarthy, Trump's gambit is disastrous.
00:12:49.000It makes no sense in a criminal courtroom for a defendant to deny his complicity in legal conduct when there's daunting evidence he was complicit up to the neck.
00:12:57.000So basically, what McCarthy is saying is that the prosecutors are trying to prove, effectively, that Trump engaged in ugly but legal conduct.
00:13:05.000And Trump is saying, I didn't even engage in the ugly conduct, when what he's saying is, sure it's ugly, but also it was totally legal.
00:13:11.000Right, that's the argument that Trump should be making, but he's not making that particular argument.
00:13:17.000Maybe that makes no difference because, again, the jury is oriented against him and Merchant clearly wants some sort of conviction here.
00:13:23.000And as McCarthy says, none of this would matter if the jury understood that first, paying NDAs is not a campaign expenditure under FECA that triggers spending limits and reporting requirements.
00:13:31.000And B, there's no evidence that Trump or even Cohen or Pecker were thinking about FECA, much less conspiring to flout it, when the NDAs were paid and when Cohen was reimbursed.
00:13:40.000FICA was not an issue until the FEC started asking questions in early 2018 long after the NDAs were negotiated and weeks after the last reimbursement payment to Cohen.
00:13:48.000It is not possible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt Trump willfully intended to violate FICA if there's no indication he ever thought about it at the relevant time.
00:13:56.000So again, this basically is a conspiracy between the judge and the prosecutors to find Trump guilty of a crime that doesn't exist.
00:14:03.000He says the judge and prosecutors have led jurors to believe the violation of FICA is an established fact in this case.
00:14:26.000The kit can treat over 39 different medical issues.
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00:15:12.000So, he's likely to be convicted in this particular case, but Trump is correct when he came out yesterday and he said, no one knows what the crime is because there's no crime.
00:15:19.000This happens to be the actual legal case that Trump's attorneys should be making.
00:15:24.000The other thing, the confusion is, nobody knows what the crime is because there's no crime.
00:16:45.000Okay, I mean, again, classic Trump, you know, sort of exaggeration for a fact.
00:16:49.000I'm pretty sure that Mother Teresa could beat those charges by correctly claiming that she never slept with Stormy Daniels or Karen McDougal and didn't pay them lots of money to be quiet about it.
00:16:57.000But he is correct that the charges themselves are drawn up such that a conviction becomes almost a necessary a necessary consequence of the charges themselves.
00:17:08.000That the judge has gone out of his way to construct a set of charges that would be
00:17:11.000thrown out of court, it'd be laughed out of court.
00:17:13.000This never would have been brought against anybody else.
00:17:14.000This never would have been brought against a Democrat in New York.
00:17:26.000It's constantly Scooby-Doo villains attempting to get away with it,
00:17:34.000if only those meddlesome kids hadn't stopped them.
00:17:37.000Here is an MSNBC legal analyst, Andrew Weissman, saying that he is a man-crush on Juan Marichal.
00:17:42.000I mean, again, it is truly incredible to me how members of the left start worshipping weird political figures so long as they go after Donald Trump.
00:17:52.000Remember when they were buying votive candles to Robert Mueller during the Mueller report days?
00:17:57.000And then they said that Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for Stormy Daniels who ended up in jail, Almost all jurors, unless you've got a really erotic judge, develop a real bond with the judge.
00:18:06.000Wurtenstein is a hero of the republic.
00:18:08.000Here's Andrew Weissman saying that now Judge Merchant is a hero, everyone's a hero of the republic,
00:18:11.000all you have to do is crap on Trump long enough.
00:18:13.000Almost all jurors, unless you've got a really erratic judge, develop a real bond with the judge.
00:18:23.000The judge, he or she is looking out for the jurors, they're just paying careful attention to their time,
00:20:01.000The numbers are so bad for Joe Biden that a poll came out last night showing that Joe Biden and Donald Trump are tied in Virginia.
00:20:07.000If they're tied in Virginia, if Virginia is a close race, this race is over.
00:20:11.000Joe Biden is a terrible president and all of the talk about the Trump trial is not having the impact that all the Democrats thought it was going to have.
00:20:17.000They thought if we convict Trump in a court of law, then the American people will turn away from Donald Trump.
00:20:21.000But it turns out that when it's obvious to literally everyone that you are That you are setting up the game.
00:21:30.000So you have slowed economic growth, continued inflation that is now baked into the cake,
00:21:36.000and an old president who doesn't know how to articulate any of this.
00:21:39.000We'll get to more on this in just one second.
00:21:42.000First, let's say you had an employee who once was a great actor, you know, like godfather to raging bull level, and then went nuts and decided to show up at political events and then yell and mumble unintelligently like the current president.
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00:23:09.000It's about time we stop this looking at this trickle-down economy, where you say, okay, if the super wealthy do well, a lot will trickle down on our plates and things will be well.
00:23:21.000My dad used to say, not a damn thing trickled down his kitchen table.
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00:28:15.000Entire article in Politico today, quote.
00:28:17.000Prominent black officials are warning the Biden campaign that the president's efforts to keep black voters firmly and enthusiastically in his electoral coalition aren't working, and that time is running out to get his message across.
00:28:27.000The publicly voiced concern from these black Democrats isn't that the White House lacks policy achievements.
00:28:31.000It's that black voters aren't hearing about them.
00:28:33.000By the way, again, another mark of a failing campaign is, we're doing amazing, but people just aren't getting the message.
00:28:42.000Or maybe they are hearing you, and they think you're full of it.
00:28:45.000Worse, they fear the Biden campaign has not fully graphed the severity of the information gap at hand, particularly in key battleground states.
00:28:53.000Representative Jasmine Crockett, she of the high intellect debate with Marjorie Taylor Greene that involves one insulting the other's eyelashes and the other talking about Bleach blonde, bad built butch body.
00:29:08.000She said that a balkanized news landscape has contributed to the problem.
00:29:12.000She definitely did not use the word balkanized.
00:29:13.000She said, I think that the way we communicate has changed in such a way that if you don't invest earlier, it's going to be a problem.
00:29:18.000I'm not saying it's the last minute, but we are in crunch time.
00:29:21.000More privately, Democratic operatives express other fears, including that black influencers and media personalities have soured on Biden and that the president himself has eschewed major interviews unless scripted campaign stops, making him less accessible to voters.
00:29:36.000So, Biden is trying to shore that up by now catering exclusively to black voters in some of the most pandering and ridiculous ways.
00:29:44.000So, here is Biden's campaign spokesperson, Quentin Foulkes, yesterday, saying he kept his promise to pack black people on the courts.
00:29:51.000I mean, is there a higher form of pandering than, we took a bunch of people who have your skin color and we shoved them on the courts just to please you?
00:30:16.000President Biden made a lot of promises to African-American voters and voters across this country, and he has kept them.
00:30:21.000And particularly for African-American voters, record low unemployment, the lowest racial wealth gap, packing the court with black women, more black justices on the court than all of the presidents combined.
00:30:33.000And that is what our campaign has been focused on.
00:30:35.000And we've been making sure that we're building an apparatus to be able to speak to voters wherever they are in their countries, in their own communities.
00:30:43.000Yeah, nobody's believing that any of that makes any sort of difference.
00:30:47.000Biden himself is, again, on the pandermobile.
00:30:50.000He's going around with Kamala Harris as though black Americans are in love with Kamala Harris, which, by the way, they are not.
00:30:56.000Black Americans are pretty luke-cold on Kamala Harris, just as all other Americans are ice-cold on Kamala Harris.
00:31:03.000But that means that Joe Biden is also saying deeply ridiculous and insulting things about race in the United States.
00:31:08.000So, for example, yesterday he dropped a line that he usually uses about women.
00:31:14.000He usually says, there's not a thing that men can do that women can't do better, other than open pickle jars and pick up heavy objects and maybe some stem fields.
00:31:29.000Again, if you took this quote and reversed the races, it would be like the most racist thing a president has said in modern American history.
00:32:01.000I got $16 billion in the B, billion dollars this year.
00:32:11.000And it's too easy to be a wasted asset if we didn't, but I want to prove to everybody it's not a damn thing that a white man can do that a black man can't do or do better.
00:32:33.000This sort of stuff falls on deaf ears, though, because again, the reality is that the vast majority of black voters in America right now are not experiencing high levels of prosperity under Joe Biden.
00:32:44.000Black wages and income grew under Donald Trump.
00:32:47.000Everybody's wages, on average, fell during the tenure of Joe Biden vis-a-vis inflation.
00:32:53.000Even Biden's co-chair, Representative Lisa Blunt Rochester, even she is recognizing that people are going through a lot of struggles.
00:32:58.000When you're the president and people are going through a lot of struggles, guess who gets blamed?
00:33:05.000If the campaign was in such good shape with black voters as President Biden has done in the past so many times, why would it be using its most valuable resource, the president, to hold so many events, five events, targeting black voters in May of an election year?
00:33:22.000You know, I think part of it is to show that we see how important that vote is.
00:33:28.000A lot of times people feel like their vote doesn't matter.
00:33:31.000A lot of people are going through a lot of struggles right now coming out of the pandemic and they are not even aware of the things that this administration has done to really uplift our communities.
00:33:42.000So is that evidence of why we're seeing some, I'm sorry to interrupt, is that evidence of why we are seeing some of the erosion right now?
00:33:48.000The need to sort of better communicate that so they can bring those black voters back?
00:33:52.000You know, again, I think a lot of people have their own pains and things that they're dealing with.
00:33:58.000And so we want to make sure that we highlight the different investments that he has made.
00:34:21.000Would those Black people storming the Capitol on January 6th have been doing so in an attempt to affect the election outcome in favor of Donald Trump?
00:34:30.000Because I think it probably has more to do with the cause.
00:34:33.000Again, and I think January 6th is awful.
00:34:35.000It has a lot more to do with the cause than the... In fact, I personally know a black man who was arrested for activities on January 6th.
00:34:42.000I assume that Donald Trump is a fan of his.
00:34:44.000In any case, here is Joe Biden playing the race card.
00:34:46.000It's clear that when he lost in 2020, something literally snapped in his car.
00:35:24.000What do you think would have happened if black Americans had stormed the Capitol?
00:35:30.000I don't think he'd be talking about pardons.
00:35:34.000Well, I mean, when Black Lives Matter caused two billion dollars in property damage, the most damaging riots in American history in 2020, your entire party sided with the protesters and the rioters.
00:35:46.000Kamala Harris bailed them out of jail.
00:37:00.000Given the fact that the current president of the United States is no longer able to give long-form interviews, they're now trotting out Dr. Jill Biden like Edith Wilson, holding the hand of her decrepit husband and signing bills.
00:37:11.000They're trotting her out to the media to pretend that Joe is with it.
00:37:13.000So the question is, if Joe is with it, why isn't he on The View?
00:37:56.000Joe has been traveling as much as possible.
00:37:59.000And we're not going to take anything for granted.
00:38:01.000And those polls are going to turn, I'm confident of it, because as time goes on and as people start to focus a little bit more about what's at stake and start to become educated on the issues and the differences between the two men, I believe that Americans are going to choose good over evil.
00:38:26.000Yes, good over evil is what she's saying right there, because that's what this is a battle about.
00:38:31.000Nothing says unity in the country like declaring that everyone who is voting for the other guy is evil, like full-on evil.
00:38:43.000Everything that your eyes and ears have been telling you about Joe Biden being incompetent, bumbling, befuddled, All that's gonna go away when you see him unleash his brilliant wit, his incisive brain.
00:38:55.000It's gonna be mind-exploding to watch the genius at work, says Dr. Jill Biden from her perch atop America's medical system.
00:39:06.000American people deserve a debate because you need to see your choices.
00:39:10.000You need to see Trump and you need to see the president and you need to see the differences.
00:39:17.000And my husband's, and you're going to see how smart he is and the experience he has.
00:39:22.000And then you'll see somebody who, like you're saying, I'm going to use Julie's words, can't put a sentence together and everything is beautiful and it's wonderful.
00:41:02.000When they're pulling the fire alarm, or mistaking it for a door release if you're Jamal Bowman, when you're pulling the fire alarm this early, you got a problem.
00:41:10.000I'm just looking at the 2012 election polling, Obama versus Romney, because that's the last re-elect race we had that the incumbent actually won.
00:41:18.000The incumbent in that case, Barack Obama, who is deeply unpopular in terms of his general popularity rating, still, he basically led that race wire to wire.
00:41:27.000Only in the latter days of the election was there some sort of serious tightening.
00:41:30.000But for pretty much the entire race, Obama led in the RealClearPolitics polling average.
00:41:43.000And so Democrats are forced to pick up wilder and wilder stories in an attempt to cudgel Americans into believing that their political opponents are evil.
00:41:51.000The latest example of this is this unbelievably stupid story about Samuel Alito's wife putting up an appeal to heaven flag at their like vacation house.
00:42:00.000This is the stupidest story I have ever heard.
00:42:04.000So first, there was this unbelievable story about Samuel Alito's wife putting up an American flag upside down, which is typically a sign of distress.
00:42:12.000And she was doing so because she was in a fight with a neighbor or something.
00:42:14.000And so the media tried to pretend it had something to do with support for January 6th.
00:42:19.000Then they said that the flying of an appeal to heaven flag, which was created by George Washington, that that was some sort of white supremacist exercise, which is strange because yesterday, literally yesterday, San Francisco officials removed a colonial era appeal to heaven flag from the Civic Center Plaza.
00:44:09.000This, of course, set off the morons over at MSNBC.
00:44:13.000So here is the MSNBC legal analyst, Melissa Murray, very angry at Samuel Alito for not abandoning his seat on the Supreme Court because his wife put up a flag that the media decided was bad five seconds ago.
00:44:24.000First of all, this letter is nominally addressed to Congress.
00:44:31.000This man is not simply saying he is not fond of flying flags, but his wife is.
00:44:36.000He's basically trolling Americans who know that he is the author of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the decision that withdrew the constitutional right to an abortion that Roe v. Wade established.
00:45:16.000Actually, it's technically a giant F you to the lady with the really, really thick glasses, which don't make her any smarter.
00:45:22.000One of my favorite things about MSNBC is apparently there's a widespread aesthetic belief at MSNBC that the thicker your glasses, the smarter you look.