The Megyn Kelly Show - Biden's Gas Price Spin and Putin's Motive and Opportunity, with Sen. Josh Hawley, Admiral James Stavridis, Vinnie Politan and Robert Barnes

00:00:00.420 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:11.560 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:14.660 As talks between Ukraine and Russia collapse again, we have two very important guests today.

00:00:20.180 Senator Josh Hawley, who sits on the Armed Services Committee, and retired four-star

00:00:24.920 Admiral James Stavridis, who once served as the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces.

00:00:31.360 It'll be interesting to get his take, won't it? The talks failed just hours after a Russian

00:00:35.660 airstrike hit a maternity ward in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol. The reporters for the Associated

00:00:43.440 Press were nearby when the attack happened and caught the explosion on camera.

00:00:54.920 A terrifying sound no matter the situation. The AP reporting that the ground shook more than a

00:01:02.000 mile away. The reporters then rushed to the site and witnessed harrowing scenes. A mother crying while

00:01:07.960 holding her little girl, who looks to be less than two. A pregnant mother. Oh, look at that. Oh,

00:01:13.260 this poor mom. For you guys who are listening, it's a mom clutching her daughter in a pink snow suit and

00:01:18.420 just crying. A pregnant mom. She looks at least six months pregnant, probably more, uh, being carried out of

00:01:25.380 the wreckage on a stretcher. It's hard to tell her condition. Uh, soldiers trying to comfort an upset

00:01:30.560 little boy, a little girl standing there wrapped in a blanket, just looking around, not knowing what's going

00:01:35.780 on. According to local government officials, at least three people were killed, including a child whose age is

00:01:41.680 not yet known, but the death toll is very likely to go up there. Britain is now also accusing Russia

00:01:47.180 of using thermobaric vacuum bombs in its attack across the country, but the Pentagon is not yet

00:01:53.420 confirming that that would be an outlawed weapon. Uh, joining me now to react to this news and, uh,

00:01:59.840 some economic news as well is Senator Josh Hawley. Senator, great to have you here.

00:02:04.320 Thanks for having me.

00:02:05.320 I mean, this, this is just beyond, you know, I mean, every day there's new news about hitting

00:02:09.660 civilian targets and we see these scenes that just tear at your heartstrings like a maternity

00:02:15.500 ward. You know, there's nothing that he's, he's incapable of Vladimir Putin and, and the talk of

00:02:21.180 like, okay, we'll set up a civilian corridor. We'll set up a limited no fly zone to get the civilians

00:02:25.820 out. Well, they've done that. The Ukrainians and the Russians have agreed to that already. He's not

00:02:29.740 honoring it. So that's not to me, a realistic solution for protecting civilians. You know, I, as far as I

00:02:36.940 can see, we don't have a real plan. We're going to sanction him to the point where we hope he folds.

00:02:41.100 It doesn't sound like Vladimir Putin, right? To fold. We're not, we're might do a no, a limited

00:02:47.420 no fly zone. Again, that requires honor on his part. I don't see that. So what do you think of

00:02:53.260 it? What, what, what's the way forward? Well, I think that the way forward here is that we've got

00:02:58.300 to help the Ukrainians in the defense of their homeland. What we're learning Megan is, is that they are

00:03:02.380 terrific fighters. I mean, it's really, it's unbelievable to see their defense, to see their

00:03:08.700 stand against the Russian military. And I can tell you that I don't think Vladimir Putin expected

00:03:12.860 this. I don't think he expected this level of resistance. And the Ukrainians are proving

00:03:16.620 that they are not just going to roll over, that they are not going to give in. They're not going

00:03:20.300 to see their nation extinguished in the United States. My view is ought to be to help there to help

00:03:24.860 them in their fight. I don't think we should fight it on their behalf, but I think we should help them

00:03:28.780 in their fight by providing weapons, defensive weapons, by providing ammunition, and then

00:03:34.460 by sanctioning Russia's oil and gas sector and turning on American energy. I mean, Russia

00:03:40.700 is a gas station. That's what it is. That's how Vladimir Putin makes his money. That's how he's

00:03:45.100 financing this war. It's from his oil and the natural gas sales. And it's, it's good that we're

00:03:50.140 not importing energy anymore from Russia, thankfully. I mean, it took Joe Biden a year and a half to get

00:03:55.340 there, but he finally did. But we need to do more than that. We need to sanction their energy sector

00:03:59.740 and we need to turn on American production. I wish the president would do that. I think that

00:04:03.740 would send a strong message. We won't. We're not doing it. And even now, as he cuts off the 7% of

00:04:10.140 our oil supplies we get from Russia, he and his press secretary and his surrogates are all focused on

00:04:16.780 renewables, on how we are going to make up the difference with our little windmills and our solar

00:04:22.380 panels. And that to the extent there's not more oil drilling, says Jen Psaki, that's on the oil

00:04:28.300 companies. We have 9000 outstanding leases. If they're so desperate to drill, why aren't those

00:04:34.780 applied for? You know, this is from the same president, Megan, who came into office and in

00:04:40.540 his first days in office shut down the Keystone pipeline, shut down new oil and gas leases, shut

00:04:46.700 down drilling on federal lands, applied a raft of new regulations to oil and gas and other forms

00:04:53.340 of energy production in the United States. And he hasn't rolled any of that back. I mean,

00:04:56.620 there's a reason why we were energy independent two years ago, actually just over a year ago,

00:05:01.340 and now we're not. There's a reason why gas prices are up 50 percent, 5-0, under Joe Biden.

00:05:07.020 And that's not just in the last couple of days. That's over the last year. It's because of his

00:05:11.340 policies. And, you know, this whole talk about, oh, let the American people just buy electric

00:05:15.660 vehicles. I mean, that's the 21st century version of let them eat cake. I mean, that's the idea that,

00:05:20.780 what, so we're going to go to China and bake them, because that's where the batteries are made,

00:05:23.900 bake them for supplies, bake them for component parts, and somehow distribute these all to Americans.

00:05:29.740 Listen, I'm in favor of every form of energy production, but that has got to include, in fact,

00:05:34.300 right now it's got to begin with, oil and natural gas production in this country. And if he would

00:05:41.100 open up production, we'd see a shift in oil prices, I think, very quickly, because it's a

00:05:44.780 futures-based market. But, Megan, you're right. He's not doing it. And the reason he's not doing it

00:05:49.980 is because he is in thrall to the political left, the hard environmentalist left in his own party.

00:05:55.660 And the world's paying a price for that now. It's a religion for these Democrats, this commitment to

00:06:01.980 reducing carbon emissions, which that's a good goal. Nobody's saying that's a terrible goal. But right

00:06:06.860 now we're in a massive crisis and is now really the time to be focused on that. And we could reduce

00:06:11.900 carbon emissions by using things like nuclear and not relying on, you know, basically the water wheel,

00:06:17.420 which was how the country first got started before we had things like electricity. Let me ask you this,

00:06:23.660 those 9,000 leases, is it because of this that those are not applied for and filled out and we're not

00:06:30.220 humming in the oil industry to the extent we were under Donald Trump. Here's soundbite

00:06:34.300 four. This is Joe Biden during the campaign on the oil industry.

00:06:39.260 Three consecutive American presidents have enjoyed stints of explosive economic growth due to a boom in

00:06:45.020 oil and natural gas production. As president, would you be willing to sacrifice some of that growth,

00:06:51.580 even knowing potentially that it could displace thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of blue

00:06:55.420 collar workers in the interest of transitioning to that greener economy? The answer is yes.

00:07:00.700 No more subsidies for fossil fuel industry. No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling,

00:07:05.740 including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period. Ends.

00:07:11.660 I've been against Keystone from the beginning. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period. Ends.

00:07:18.060 What do you make of it, Senator? The claims now. Yeah, well, this is an area where

00:07:23.820 Megan Joe Biden has been very successful. I know he can't claim a lot of successes in his year as

00:07:28.860 president, but this is one he has been successful in making us energy dependent. He has been successful

00:07:34.540 in throttling down our energy production. And yeah, putting the premise of that question that we just

00:07:38.860 heard, putting thousands of American workers, blue collar workers out of work, out of a job. Yep,

00:07:43.900 he's done that too. And here's the thing that really gets me, Megan. I notice now

00:07:48.060 that Joe Biden doesn't seem to have any objection to increased oil and natural gas production in

00:07:52.780 general. He's begging Venezuela to do it. He's begging Saudi Arabia to do it. What he has an

00:07:57.980 objection to is Americans producing American energy in America. And by the way, who could do it more

00:08:05.020 cleanly than any other nation? It would be us. I mean, who has the highest environmental standards? It

00:08:09.420 would be us. But yet he's happy to beg these dictators for more oil and natural gas, let them

00:08:13.980 get rich. But he doesn't want the American people to actually produce our own energy. It is insane.

00:08:18.940 What do you make of that? Because we are learning now that the president's team has been in touch

00:08:23.180 with the regime in Venezuela for preparing to offer them a special package that will ease restrictions,

00:08:28.940 the sanctions on them, get them to make up the difference in oil. The president also potentially

00:08:33.340 planning a trip to Saudi Arabia to ask the Saudis to increase their oil production.

00:08:38.540 So we really are on it. We're not looking at any American oil company and saying, could you drill

00:08:43.500 more? Could you be part of the solution? Just just these other regimes that are deeply problematic

00:08:48.460 that he promised to make pariahs of. Now he goes to them on bended knee. And so far, the reports are

00:08:53.820 that a couple of them didn't take his call last week, that they're really not that interested in talking

00:08:59.340 to him. Well, they know they've got the leverage now, Megan. I mean, this is what is so frankly pathetic

00:09:04.860 about this. The president of the United States is groveling before murders like Maduro down in

00:09:09.980 Venezuela. He's groveling before the Saudis. We even have reports that he's groveling to Iran. I mean,

00:09:14.940 he's thinking about offering Iran new and better terms if they will increase their energy production.

00:09:19.420 I mean, this is really, this is a reductio ad absurdum. And this is the absurdity you get when

00:09:25.500 you embrace the kind of delusional politics he has. And it just goes back to the fact, why should the

00:09:29.820 American people be held hostage to Joe Biden's indebtedness to the political left? I mean,

00:09:35.660 just because he's enthralled with the political left and he's made all these commitments to the

00:09:39.660 hard environmental left of his party, why should the rest of the American people have to pay for

00:09:43.420 that? They don't agree with those policies. They haven't made those commitments. They don't share

00:09:47.100 those politics. So I would just call on the president, listen, this shouldn't be about politics

00:09:51.420 anymore. This ought to be about the security of the American people. Open up American energy

00:09:56.460 production. That's the only smart thing to do. At a time of record inflation,

00:10:00.780 of eye popping numbers at the gas pump. You know, we're talking about oil prices that could come in

00:10:06.700 200, even $300 a barrel. They're talking about if things go really south, even more than they have

00:10:12.860 with Putin. Yeah. Why wouldn't we look internally? It should be an all hands on deck situation, but it's

00:10:18.440 not. And now with that serious pain in the pump, I mean, you and I have never seen anything like it in

00:10:23.600 our lifetimes. Right. It hasn't been that we haven't been in a global energy crisis this bad

00:10:28.160 in 50 years. And I know you're not even 50 years old. So now you've got the White House. You tell me

00:10:34.880 seeming to sense a scapegoat for gas prices that are political problems for them that were already

00:10:43.840 in place. They were already rising long before the battle with Putin in Ukraine. But listen to Jen Psaki.

00:10:49.400 This is today. She sent out a tweet of her on video addressing the gas prices.

00:10:55.760 You may have noticed this week that your gas prices have gone up. I want to talk to you a

00:11:00.020 little bit about why. A lot of it has to do with Vladimir Putin. U.S. production of oil and gas is

00:11:06.520 rising. In fact, in the first year of the Biden presidency, there was more oil and gas produced

00:11:11.520 in the United States than the first year of the Trump presidency. Part of this is on the oil

00:11:16.020 companies. Right now, there are 9000 approved unused permits that oil and gas companies could

00:11:22.580 tap into now. The only way to protect the United States over the long term is to become energy

00:11:27.080 independent. That's why the president has been so focused on investing in clean energy technologies

00:11:32.100 so that we can rely on that and not President Putin to set the price of gas.

00:11:37.380 Energy independent, meaning renewables only, only not nukes, not more drilling, not natural gas,

00:11:43.440 which we have in such abundance, not oil, not just back to the windmill. But what do you make

00:11:48.400 of that that claim about the gas prices are they're rising because of Putin?

00:11:54.420 Yeah, she really ought to get out more. I mean, I noticed she said if you've noticed in the last

00:11:58.480 week, your gas prices have gone up. We try the last year and a half. I mean, ever since this

00:12:04.220 president came to office, we have seen a steady uptick in gas prices, again, to the tune of more than

00:12:08.960 50%. And I can tell you, Missouri, we have been paying even above the national average. I mean,

00:12:13.760 our inflation in gas has been higher than it has been in other parts of the nation.

00:12:17.600 We have a chart of it on the board. You can't say it, Senator, but it shows that the climb started

00:12:22.160 back in November 2020, for sure, the last most recent upward spike happening in the context of

00:12:28.740 Ukraine. But he wants to blame this entire graph, which goes over the course of a year and a half,

00:12:34.180 on Vladimir Putin, not on his own policies. Just not credible. And listen, everybody knows

00:12:39.520 it's not credible. I mean, the American people aren't stupid. They pay for gas. I mean, people

00:12:43.540 who have to fill up their trucks, their minivans, you know, get to work, take the kids to school,

00:12:47.440 they have been paying higher gas prices for over a year. And they know that. And they know that Joe

00:12:52.000 Biden has boasted, you just played the clip, he has boasted about shutting down American energy

00:12:57.620 production. You can't have it both ways. You can't say that, oh, we are shutting down American

00:13:01.020 energy production. We are happy to do that. We're no more drilling, no more exploration. You can't

00:13:05.800 say that at one time and then turn around later and say, oh, but we're for, we're for increasing

00:13:09.740 it. You know, we've tried to increase it. It's just not true. It's not credible. Even now, their

00:13:14.540 policies are throttling down American energy production. And even now they're saying that,

00:13:18.900 oh, no, we shouldn't drill more. We shouldn't pump more. We shouldn't do more biofuels. What we

00:13:22.720 ought to do is clean energy, you know, sometime in the future, who knows when, rely on China for all of

00:13:29.200 those component parts. It's just not credible at all. Megan, the American people know that.

00:13:34.120 You know, it's we're so ethically compromised in these choices because this is all right now

00:13:39.580 because of the terrible actions of Vladimir Putin. He's killing civilians. There's no question about

00:13:45.380 it in Ukraine and innocent people. And so we want to punish him. And we say, forget it. We're cutting

00:13:50.880 off, among other things, the 7% of oil we buy from you. What are we going to do instead? We're going

00:13:54.820 to become more energy independent again. OK, what are we going to do? We're going to do windmills and solar.

00:13:59.440 Where do we get the solar panels from? From China, which is conducting a genocide on its own

00:14:03.100 people, on the Muslim minority, the Uyghurs. That we're willing to look the other way on.

00:14:08.920 That, I mean, they'll be able to host a whole Olympics, never mind suffer the penalties that

00:14:12.780 we're imposing now. Well, who else do we have? Let's see. There's the Saudis that killed Jamal

00:14:18.600 Khashoggi. And that's the regime he said he'd make a pariah out of. No, we're going to increase

00:14:23.160 our business with them. And the Venezuelans and maybe Iran. Maybe Iran could come to our rescue.

00:14:27.600 You see how it's like it's not that the American people don't care about Ukraine and at all. I

00:14:32.820 mean, they care deeply. The polls show that. But his solutions and the underdogs he's looking to,

00:14:39.900 to, you know, fly in and save the day are also deeply problematic.

00:14:43.800 Yeah. And they also put us in a position of weakness, Megan. I mean, groveling to these

00:14:48.640 people, begging them, whether it's China, whether it's Venezuela, whether it's Saudi Arabia, you name

00:14:53.500 it, that puts us in a position of weakness. Think about this. One of the reasons Vladimir Putin felt

00:14:58.100 empowered, emboldened to do what he's done in Ukraine is because he supplies 55% of Germany's

00:15:04.220 energy, particularly natural gas. He supplies about, I think it's 40% of Europe's overall energy

00:15:10.040 between oil and natural gas. Why should we allow Vladimir Putin to have that kind of a near monopoly

00:15:15.840 on the energy sector anywhere, let alone in Europe? The United States absence of leadership under Joe

00:15:21.780 Biden is a huge reason for this. I mean, it's not just Americans who pay at the pump and who pay with

00:15:27.020 these outrageous inflationary prices. It's the whole world that suffers when America doesn't lead.

00:15:32.160 And abdicating our energy independence, withdrawing from our energy production is a form of weakness.

00:15:38.800 And every American knows that. And this is why it's embarrassing to see the president of the United

00:15:43.160 States go and beg these other countries, especially these dictators, for help. When we could help

00:15:48.760 ourselves, we could stand up for ourselves. And I think that's what Americans want. They want somebody

00:15:53.980 who's going to say, listen, it's time to get tough. We're the strongest country in the world. We should

00:15:58.040 act like it. What is likely to happen now with inflation again at record highs and the gas

00:16:04.080 prices going only one direction, the bad one, people just sort of wobbling out of this two-year

00:16:10.500 COVID hell and the financial penalties that were imposed upon them by the government, people who have

00:16:15.240 lost their jobs because of Joe Biden and other companies who impose these vaccine mandates and so

00:16:21.340 on, or you get fired. What is going to happen given all of that? Well, I think the inflation,

00:16:26.500 unfortunately, Megan, there's really no end in sight. And as you and I speak, Congress, the Senate

00:16:31.340 is debating another $1.5 trillion, that's with a T, trillion dollars in spending in Joe Biden's

00:16:38.680 budget. I mean, you talk about inflationary pressures. I mean, this is a tax and spend bonanza

00:16:44.640 that Joe Biden is trying to get through. And I'm afraid the Senate is going to pass it today. I

00:16:48.580 certainly am not going to vote for it. But unless there's a change in policy, Megan, unless we actually

00:16:53.340 produce our own energy, unless we work on bringing our supply chains out of China, out from overseas

00:16:59.420 and back home to the United States, and unless we stop the socialist economics at home, this

00:17:04.600 inflationary binge is just going to continue. And as you point out, who gets hurt from this? I tell

00:17:09.180 you who gets hurt. Working people get hurt. Working people's wages are flat or declining because

00:17:14.500 they're not keeping pace with inflation. Parents get hurt. They can't afford basic things for their

00:17:19.940 kids. They can't afford to supply, you know, buy the gas to go to their, to take the kids to school,

00:17:25.100 to buy school supplies. All of that costs more and more and more. And that's because of this

00:17:30.540 president and something sooner or later has got to give. Let me ask you a quick politics question,

00:17:35.320 because prior to Ukraine and so on, I think most pundits were predicting a bloodbath for the Democrats

00:17:40.920 in the midterm elections, in definitely the House and also maybe the Senate. And now President

00:17:48.180 Biden's polls have gone up. Generally, they do for the sitting American president when there's

00:17:52.820 a conflict like this. It's sort of a patriotic rallying behind our leader. We've seen that many

00:17:57.780 times in the past. Don't know whether that will hold. But as I understand it, the Democrats have

00:18:02.500 won a bunch of court battles recently when it comes to their efforts at redistricting and defeating

00:18:08.820 Republicans, you know, similar efforts at redistricting. So the Republicans' efforts to sort of

00:18:14.660 rejigger the voting map to save more seats for them, they are not working out. And the Democrats'

00:18:20.420 efforts for them are working out. So how does that change, if at all, what you think is going to

00:18:25.460 happen in November? You know, I don't think that's, I don't think that last thing, Megan,

00:18:29.340 and you're right about it, the gerrymandering. You're right that the Democrats are furiously

00:18:33.140 gerrymandering wherever they can. New York State is a prime example, trying to retouch these maps in the

00:18:38.560 most implausible manners, you know, in order to save Democrat seats. I don't think it's going to save

00:18:43.300 them. And the reason is, the American people, I think, have reached a judgment on this administration

00:18:47.480 and the course that we're on. And they are screaming to anybody who will listen, pump the

00:18:52.080 brakes, stop the car and turn this thing around. They do not like the direction that this country

00:18:57.000 is going. And they hold Joe Biden accountable for it. And that's the right person to blame.

00:19:01.080 And the Democrats in Congress are with him 100% of the way. I just listened to my Democrat colleagues

00:19:07.040 on the floor of the Senate yesterday and this entire week talk about how we don't need energy

00:19:11.660 independence in America. That's an overblown concept. That's antiquated. We don't need to

00:19:15.880 worry about inflation. You know, those are all, that's an overblown problem. I think that normal

00:19:20.920 people who are trying to just make it through the day, have their kids make it through the day and

00:19:26.440 have some prospect of a decent future, they listen to that and they just think, who are you talking to

00:19:31.300 and what are you talking about? Megan, I think for those reasons in November, I think you're going to

00:19:36.020 see the American people deliver a pretty strong message that we need to go a different way.

00:19:39.260 Another question back on Ukraine. There's a question as we debate whether we need to create

00:19:44.720 a no-fly zone, whether NATO needs to create a no-fly zone, either limited or more broadly,

00:19:49.680 whether that would be a decision only appropriate for the U.S. Congress, because, you know, obviously

00:19:54.980 that is very likely to be perceived as an act of war by Vladimir Putin and really could be the

00:20:00.440 beginning of World War III. Do you believe that Biden would have to submit that question to Congress

00:20:05.660 and how do you think it would fare? It's a good question. I think Congress should be involved

00:20:10.860 if there is a circumstance where we may have American troops of any kind. I mean, American

00:20:16.120 airmen and women, American service members of any kind involved in hostilities against the Russians.

00:20:20.800 I mean, I think Congress would need to weigh in at that point because that would be war.

00:20:26.120 And, you know, I have been opposed to American soldiers, American troops, American service members

00:20:30.980 fighting in this war. But that's different than helping the Ukrainians fight their own war and

00:20:36.400 fight their own battle while taking every action we can against Russia through sanctions and other

00:20:41.680 means to push back against this invasion and push back against his offensive. So what I would prefer

00:20:47.360 to see happen, Megan, and what I hope this administration will do is get serious about arming the Ukrainians,

00:20:52.620 about providing them the weapons they need, the ammunition they need, including the planes that they are

00:20:57.280 asking for. I think they ought to get all of those things. You know, the administration is dragging

00:21:01.280 its feet on a number of these requests. Okay, so you think they should get the Polish MiGs?

00:21:06.400 Yeah, I don't see any problem with that, Megan. I mean, if the Polish government wants to give these

00:21:10.500 MiGs, and the key thing about the MiGs is the Ukrainians know how to fly them. I mean, you got to give

00:21:14.360 them planes that they can fly, that their pilots are trained on. They can fly the MiGs. I think we ought to

00:21:19.200 give them the MiGs. Okay. Because that's, I mean, Joe Biden has said no. And that's what Zelensky has been begging

00:21:25.860 for. And I guess Poland's ready to do it, but we're not. Yeah, I don't quite understand what

00:21:33.400 the line is for the administration there. I mean, they say on the one hand, we want to arm the

00:21:36.960 Ukrainians, which I think is the right solution. They need help in the air. I'd rather see us help

00:21:41.860 them get airplanes they can fly than American pilots do the flying and do the shooting, which would take

00:21:48.060 us right into the war. So I would look to arm them in every way that we can. And then at the same time,

00:21:53.900 bring the Russian energy sector to its knees. I mean, certainly, I assume they're hearing

00:21:59.480 messages from the Kremlin that they would perceive that as an act of war if we allow the Polish to use

00:22:04.620 the MiGs. But that, I have to wonder whether that's true. If it's not an American, you know,

00:22:10.320 in the cockpit, I have to wonder whether Vladimir Putin really would treat that as American direct

00:22:15.640 intervention because he doesn't actually want us in that war, I think. I mean, I don't know the man,

00:22:21.000 but, and I know there's some who are saying he does, he wants, he wants World War III. I don't

00:22:24.820 really believe that. Well, Putin has also said that he thinks that the sanctions, he said he'll

00:22:29.280 treat the sanctions as an act of war. I mean, come on. This is, that is just bluster, I think. And

00:22:34.200 listen, nobody is more skeptical of American service members fighting a war against Russia than I am,

00:22:39.680 not least because it would detract from our ability to confront another big problem we haven't talked

00:22:44.320 about, Megan, but that's huge for us security-wise, and that's China. China is a huge and pressing

00:22:49.320 issue for us, and we can't get bogged down in a war in Europe that would distract us from the

00:22:54.260 situation in China, which is very serious, and it's going to be serious for probably the rest of

00:22:58.440 our lifetimes. But having said that, there's a difference between saying, no, American service

00:23:03.080 members aren't going to fight in war, we're not going to go to war. There's a difference between

00:23:06.500 that and providing the Ukrainians help, and I think we ought to help them.

00:23:10.320 Okay, let's shift gears and talk about domestic politics and the U.S. Supreme Court,

00:23:14.400 which are kind of hand in hand. The Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown-Jackson, nominated by

00:23:21.000 President Biden, and you will have to vote on her at some point soon when she gets her confirmation

00:23:25.840 hearing before the Senate. She seems to be doing rather well in her meetings so far. She seems to

00:23:32.040 be a very charming person. She's got a big smile. She talks about love in America. She's got a couple

00:23:37.220 of brothers who are cops, one who was in the military. She doesn't sound like one of those

00:23:43.540 crazed lunatics from the left. I think there was a piece on National Review, I think, by Dan

00:23:48.440 McLaughlin saying, Americans know that when they see it, you know, sort of a lunatic left-wing

00:23:55.080 professor who wants to indoctrinate us all. She doesn't seem like that, but she's of the left,

00:24:00.860 and her opinions are certainly in line with the left. She won't answer whether she believes in a,

00:24:04.720 quote, living constitution, which is code for, I believe it can be changed by me. By the way,

00:24:11.900 when I was in law school, I know you graduated from law school, they literally taught us that it

00:24:15.680 was a living constitution. There wasn't even like, oh, some believe this, and then the more originalists

00:24:20.160 believe that it was, it is a living constitution. Anyway, what do you make of her, and, you know,

00:24:25.140 is she likely to sail through? Well, I met with her yesterday, Megan. We had a good talk. We had a long

00:24:29.760 talk. We talked for a solid hour, which is all the White House would give me, but it was a very thorough

00:24:34.620 conversation, and it would bring you back to your law school days. We went through lines of doctrine.

00:24:38.760 We talked about substantive due process. We talked about stare decisis. I mean, everything that, you

00:24:43.080 know, listeners are saying, what in the world is he talking about? But all of the key...

00:24:46.760 Rule against perpetuities.

00:24:48.340 Yeah, exactly. There you go. We didn't quite get to that, but there you are. You're right on. So,

00:24:52.360 we had a very substantive conversation. I asked her about the living constitution,

00:24:55.880 and she wouldn't answer that for me either. You know, she said, well, she wasn't sure she

00:25:00.060 quite understood that theory, so she wasn't sure what to make of it. I think there's going to be

00:25:04.540 a lot more questions for her for the hearings. Here's what I'm focused on, Megan, out of our

00:25:08.040 meeting. Judge Jackson, as a private attorney, represented Guantanamo Bay terrorists. She did

00:25:15.200 it both when she was in the public defender's office, four different ones, four different

00:25:18.940 terrorists she represented, and then even when she went to private practice at a law firm, she

00:25:23.040 continued to represent these terrorists and later participated on their behalf in two different

00:25:27.700 Supreme Court cases. I'm concerned about that. And we talked about that. I told her. I said,

00:25:32.020 you know, this is of concern to me. Tell me about this. So, I would like to hear more from her about

00:25:36.900 why she chose to represent these terrorists, why she continued the representation in private practice,

00:25:42.740 why she was very aggressive against the United States government at the time and seeking sanctions

00:25:47.940 against them on behalf of these terrorists. And I also want to hear about her work on the

00:25:51.780 Sentencing Commission, where she did things like recommend getting rid of mandatory minimum sentences for

00:25:57.140 criminals. I mean, I think we're seeing, unfortunately, the negative effects of getting

00:26:02.180 soft on crime in this country that Democrats have advocated. It's soaring crime wave all across the

00:26:07.220 country. So, I want to hear more from her on these key issues, and I think the hearings are going to be

00:26:11.860 critical. Let me ask you this, and then I'll let you go. To those who are worried, she's sort of a far

00:26:17.440 left loon, you know, like she's going to be hardcore left. And I frankly think Sonia Sotomayor is falling

00:26:23.420 into that category. But not Eleni Kagan, I would say. Should they be worried that she is that way?

00:26:30.620 Do you feel like it could have been worse, right? Like he could have gone worse ideologically?

00:26:35.740 Well, I think we need to know more. I would say I think the hearings are going to be important,

00:26:39.420 Megan, because there's a lot we need to learn about Judge Jackson. I really liked her. I mean,

00:26:42.780 I want to be clear about that. We had a great conversation, and I respect her, and I really liked her.

00:26:48.060 Now, I don't vote for judges, though, on the basis of whether or not I like them. I vote for them on the

00:26:51.980 basis of whether or not they're going to uphold the Constitution. That's the key thing.

00:26:55.660 So I need to get some more clarity from her on that, and I am concerned. I'm concerned about

00:26:59.820 what I think is her penchant for living constitutionalism. I'm concerned about her

00:27:03.500 approach to the Constitution, and I'm concerned about her representation of terrorists and what

00:27:07.980 that means about her views on criminal law, on getting tough on crime. I don't think we need a

00:27:13.260 soft on crime justice in this country, not right now. So I need to learn more, and I think the

00:27:18.140 hearings are going to be pretty key. Yeah. Sonia Sotomayor is also a delightful

00:27:22.460 human being to spend time with, but that doesn't mean she's a good jurist or has any business sitting

00:27:26.620 on the U.S. Supreme Court. And as it turns out, she is just an ideological partisan up there.

00:27:31.420 That's been my impression of her, even though I was open-minded. I covered those confirmation

00:27:35.500 hearings very closely. It's always a pleasure, Senator. Thank you so much for being here.

00:27:39.100 Thanks for having me. All right. Talk soon. Talk soon, I hope. Up next, Admiral James Stavridis.

00:27:44.780 This is the guy who ran NATO for several years under Barack Obama. What does he think

00:27:49.660 about what's going on and what our next move should be?

00:28:00.940 Joining me now, retired four-star Admiral James Stavridis, who served as the Supreme Allied

00:28:06.540 Commander of NATO Forces from 2009 to 2013. Admiral, thank you so much for being here.

00:28:12.220 It's my pleasure.

00:28:13.100 Meghan, always great to see you.

00:28:15.180 So, my goodness, things have certainly changed since the last time we spoke while I was at NBC

00:28:20.780 and interviewing Vladimir Putin at the time. Here we are, you know, years later and he's,

00:28:27.500 it turns out it wasn't just saber rattling, right? I mean, it turns out, I don't know if he's always

00:28:31.340 had it in mind that he would do this kind of thing, but he's taken it to a level. I think a lot of

00:28:34.860 us didn't actually believe he'd go to. So, let me just ask you for your broad picture on what you

00:28:40.700 think is happening here, why he's doing this. Yeah, I get that question a lot. And, you know,

00:28:44.700 it's often said, and you're a lawyer and have been around crime. Crime is where motive meets

00:28:50.300 opportunity. I think here the motive has been pretty clear for a long time that his goal is to kind of

00:28:56.780 reestablish the arc of the old Soviet Union. And what he's seeking to do, Meghan, is reel back

00:29:05.340 those republics that broke away to include Armenia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan,

00:29:12.700 Belarus, and for our purposes here today, most specifically Ukraine, which is, of course,

00:29:18.540 the crown jewel of all of them in terms of strategic minerals, agrarian production. So,

00:29:24.220 his motive is to rebuild that Soviet Union, really recast, not as a communist project,

00:29:31.900 but as the old Russian empire. His ambition is that breathtaking. That's the motive. The opportunity,

00:29:38.220 he felt the West was distracted with COVID. He felt the United States, he watched the debacle in

00:29:45.820 Afghanistan and felt they're weak, they won't oppose me. He saw a new chancellor in Germany,

00:29:52.540 Chancellor Schultz. And he saw the divisions here in the United States. I think he put all that

00:29:58.540 together. Motive, opportunity, like in Top Gun, Maverick, he took his shot. Here he is, and here we

00:30:06.620 are. What, how much does it have to do with his particular concerns about Ukraine, his immediate

00:30:13.180 neighbor, a country he said repeatedly he views as part of Russia, a country that he has said all along

00:30:19.260 he would never allow to be militarized by NATO right on his border in the same way we here in America

00:30:24.460 wouldn't allow, for example, Cuba to be militarized by another superpower. So how much of that is real,

00:30:31.660 and what is going into his motivation? I think it's quite real, Megan, and you can kind of drop a plumb

00:30:38.220 line to the earliest days of Vladimir Putin and listen to his speeches and read his writing. Most

00:30:45.180 recently, last summer, he published, and I think he actually wrote it, a long, lengthy essay on the

00:30:53.340 importance of Russia, on the bond between Slavic peoples. I think he sincerely believes that Ukraine

00:31:00.780 and the Ukrainians are really just a part of the Rodina, Mother Russia. Unfortunately for him, the Ukrainians

00:31:08.540 don't see it that way. They're fighting very fiercely. They have their own language, their own culture,

00:31:14.460 their own history. And at the moment, I don't see any quit on the part of the Ukrainians, nor do I see any

00:31:21.980 climb down on the part of Vladimir Putin. I think it's sincere.

00:31:26.060 Can you walk us through what really happened in 2014 with the so-called Maidan revolution, where Putin says

00:31:30.940 it was a coup by the West to get rid of the pro-Russian guy who was running Ukraine, Yanukovych, and

00:31:36.540 to install somebody who was more friendly to the West? You hear, you know, Western representatives talk about that and

00:31:43.500 say, no, the Ukrainians wanted democracy. But what really happened there is important, and it led to

00:31:48.940 Crimea, him annexing Crimea. So I had just left as Supreme Allied Commander in 2013. We were watching

00:31:57.260 events very, very closely there. I mentioned that, Megan, to share with you that was there a U.S. coup or did

00:32:05.060 we have involvement in pushing this through the CIA or anything else? Believe me, I would have been aware of

00:32:11.660 it. We did not. It was a sincere movement on the part of the people of Ukraine who were sick of the

00:32:19.900 dictator who had been driving the country, and they rose up. And this was not something manufactured

00:32:27.440 from the West as much, I think, as Vladimir Putin would like to categorize it as such. It was, like all

00:32:33.420 these color revolutions, a quite sincere, ground-up kind of thing. And, you know, if you think back to the

00:32:39.620 Cold War, which I'm old enough to remember, and you look at the Warsaw Pact nations, tanks rolled

00:32:45.620 into Budapest, tanks rolled into Prague, tanks rolled across that stretch of Central Europe,

00:32:53.520 and the people fought back. And in this case, in Ukraine, they fought back and they won. And that

00:32:59.940 has stuck in Vladimir Putin's throat like a chicken bone. He just can't get out of there.

00:33:05.380 What about the argument that NATO, and this is your area of expertise, has been too expansionary? You

00:33:11.340 know, that we allegedly promised the Russians back in the 1990s that we would not expand eastward

00:33:15.820 if only he would, they at that time, would get out of East Germany. He's, they've been claiming all

00:33:21.840 along we made that promise. We've been kind of denying it. We say it kind of was put out there by

00:33:25.640 George Shultz, but then it was never agreed on by George H.W. Bush, so you didn't have a deal. They've held

00:33:30.720 onto it as though it was a blood oath, even though that's not what the ultimate treaty said. Okay,

00:33:35.480 we got that. But still, there's been a lot of pushback on NATO. Why did it need to keep expanding

00:33:40.760 eastward? What was, why was that necessary? The USSR had collapsed. That's why it was born,

00:33:46.560 NATO was, right, to fight the USSR. It's gone now. So why be so provocative over the years?

00:33:52.780 First, let's debunk this idea that promises were made. And you didn't mention, I think,

00:33:58.400 the actual central actor in that time, James Baker. Go read his memoir. It's crystal clear.

00:34:05.360 I think there were perhaps some casual conversations, but when it came time to sign

00:34:11.120 documents, NATO and the West did nothing to promise that there would not be an avenue for

00:34:19.160 democracies, new democracies to apply for membership in NATO. So now you have the Warsaw Pact nations.

00:34:26.020 They had just spent 40 plus years with a Russian boot on their throat. I am quite sympathetic to

00:34:32.720 their view that never again, we want to be part of NATO. And as to the Russian sense that somehow

00:34:39.620 that's provocative, Megan, I would say, open up the book of history and show me that page,

00:34:46.860 you know, the page where the NATO tanks rolled into Russia, or even rolled into a Warsaw Pact country.

00:34:53.420 You can't find that page. But you can find the pages in 48 and 56, and many other times when

00:35:01.240 Soviet tanks rolled into those Warsaw Pact countries. So bottom line, NATO is a treaty organization. And

00:35:10.440 under the treaty, which all the nations have signed, it's an open application process for a democracy

00:35:17.080 in Europe in a position to further the ideals of the alliance, democracy, liberty, freedom of speech,

00:35:24.620 and so forth. As a result, I feel NATO did the right thing, allowing those Warsaw Pact countries to

00:35:32.800 come in. Final thought, do you really think, not you, but do people really think we'd be in a better

00:35:39.120 position today if we had rejected all those Warsaw Pact countries and made them an opportunity for

00:35:46.180 Vladimir Putin, the way he is using the opportunity of Ukraine not being inside NATO? I don't think

00:35:52.420 that's a better world.

00:35:54.060 For the audience, over the course of the 90s, this is from NPR and early 20s, 2000s, NATO expanded

00:36:00.180 three times, first to add the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, then seven more countries

00:36:04.200 even farther east, including the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania,

00:36:10.140 finally with Albania and Croatia in 2009. And Putin has been angry about each one of those

00:36:17.620 eastward progressions, getting closer to him, closer to his border, and so on. So we are where

00:36:23.180 we are, and he's done what he's done. And- Can I add one other thought, Megan, which is,

00:36:28.020 I think there's going to be another wave of expansion, and this one is really going to make

00:36:32.620 his head explode. And it's going to come from Finland and Sweden. These are two highly capable

00:36:38.800 techno-democracies. Their troops deployed under my command to Afghanistan. They were part of our

00:36:44.300 mission in Afghanistan as a partner to NATO. Both of them are watching events in Ukraine and thinking,

00:36:51.640 hmm, that NATO membership card looks pretty good to me about now. Watch for Stockholm and Helsinki to

00:36:58.780 make a move. So he's getting more and more trapped, more cornered. Maybe, I don't know if I would use

00:37:05.760 the word panic when it comes to Vladimir Putin, right? But he recognizes the water's rising.

00:37:09.920 So what does he do next? Where do you see this going? I think the chances are probably better than

00:37:16.360 even, call it maybe 60%, that this will end up in a negotiated conclusion, kind of like the Balkans did

00:37:24.320 in the 1990s, which is to say the ethnic Russians and Russian speakers will gravitate toward the

00:37:31.560 southeast of the country, Crimea, Donbass, that whole region. The Ukrainian ethnic group will be in

00:37:39.000 the left-hand two-thirds of the country, if you will. Putin will then negotiate from a position of

00:37:47.100 strength, if you will, to claim that southeastern corner. And I think that could be, again, 60%

00:37:54.920 chance how this comes out, using the Balkans as a model. Look, Megan, everyone will hate it. Putin

00:38:01.280 will hate it because he will not have achieved his fundamental objective to conquer the whole country

00:38:06.420 and get rid of Zelensky. The Zelensky government under this scenario will hate it because it breaks

00:38:12.880 Ukraine and throws away that Russian-speaking part. The West will hate it because it affords Vladimir

00:38:20.140 Putin a chunk of territory. So that's what compromise is. The key element here is we've got to come up

00:38:29.060 with a solution that ends this killing, ends these waves of refugees. We've got to do it in a way that

00:38:35.780 gives Vladimir Putin some level of climb down, but still preserves the sovereignty of Ukraine.

00:38:43.420 It's going to be a tough passage. Why can't that happen right now? I mean,

00:38:47.160 Zelensky sounds like he's getting more and more desperate, and he's already said, well, we may be

00:38:51.480 rolling back our interest in NATO. And obviously, that's a tip of the hat to Putin. They're not

00:38:57.040 actually interested in rolling back their entry in NATO. So why can't that just happen now? How could we

00:39:04.420 make that happen? How would Henry Kissinger go make that happen?

00:39:09.300 It can't happen this minute because of Russian behavior. And what I mean by that is we need to

00:39:16.700 remember who's the aggressor here. There are 200,000 Russian troops in the country. They are

00:39:22.820 indiscriminately destroying residential areas, hospitals. They've attacked a nuclear power plant.

00:39:28.900 It's creating a wave of bitterness, anger alongside those now 2 million, probably headed to 5 million

00:39:36.840 refugees. So we're in a moment of extreme crisis here. I think the next step in the drama is actually

00:39:44.920 not going to be on the battlefields of Ukraine, which I think are going to continue to be somewhat

00:39:50.820 stagnant, but trending toward Russian success simply because of mass. The next act in the drama,

00:39:56.920 Megan, will be the sanctions as they really hit the Russian economy and the Russians start to realize

00:40:03.540 they're going to be eating bread from their own wheat, eating potatoes from their fields,

00:40:08.880 and maybe drinking vodka from the potatoes and not much else. I think that's when Putin may be willing

00:40:16.060 to come to the table. And by the way, just today was not successful, but just today,

00:40:22.460 very high-level delegations. The two foreign ministers of Ukraine and Russia had some talks.

00:40:29.460 I think over time we'll get to what I mentioned in terms of a solution, but I think it's going to be

00:40:36.940 some months coming, unfortunately.

00:40:39.500 That would certainly be the alternative of the possibility of a 10-year insurgency,

00:40:44.200 you know, where Putin's got some sort of a puppet government in there, but the Ukrainians won't give up,

00:40:48.800 and now they're dying weekly and monthly in shocking numbers, that this goes on and on and on.

00:40:54.940 And no one wants to see that. So yes, we'd like to see some sort of negotiated settlement. That would

00:40:59.140 be ideal. Can we talk for a minute about the Russian military? Because I never know whether

00:41:03.200 what I'm getting fed is propaganda, right? Even here, right? Because the Ukrainians do it too,

00:41:08.360 right? Zelensky's putting out information that may not be 100% trustworthy because he's got a certain

00:41:13.240 goal. Obviously the same with Putin. So what's real? Because it doesn't seem, from a laywoman's

00:41:18.920 perspective, like Putin's military is doing so well. I personally expected them to be a lot stronger

00:41:25.040 and more efficient and faster in their mission.

00:41:28.440 Megan, you are on a pace with many, many military analysts. And I've spent my life in the Cold War

00:41:37.380 assessing the Soviet military, watched it fall apart completely. But over the last five, seven years,

00:41:45.540 I thought Putin had managed to really rebuild some quality into this army. As it turns out,

00:41:52.300 first and foremost, the logistics are a shambles. They can't get food, fuel, ammunition forward.

00:42:01.300 They're having trouble just kind of keeping the lights on and keeping the troops warm, let alone

00:42:05.420 moving them into combat. So logistics of failure. Number two, too many conscripts, too many reservists.

00:42:13.820 You know, I thought there would be a much more professional army emerging from the efforts and

00:42:20.440 the rubles that have been spent on it. And third, finally, you know, I say this as an admiral,

00:42:25.920 bad generalship. The generals have failed Putin here. They gave him a crummy battle plan,

00:42:31.380 spread out over six different axes. We say in the military, when you try to attack everywhere,

00:42:38.000 you attack nowhere. They spread their forces too thin. So they look bad. And this is going to hurt

00:42:46.060 Vladimir Putin going forward, not only at home, but also around the world. His vaunted military,

00:42:52.740 for which he has spent a great deal, has fallen kind of flat on their face here.

00:42:57.840 We know he has nukes. He also is apparently willing to use thermobaric bombs, which I'm told are

00:43:04.000 outlawed. And we have reports, at least, that he dropped one. If too much of that happens,

00:43:12.300 does it change our military willingness?

00:43:16.460 To be determined. Let's face it. We watched him use these techniques in Chechnya. We watched him use

00:43:24.140 them in support of a war criminal Bashar al-Assad in Syria. He pulverized Syrian cities. Go Google

00:43:32.320 Aleppo after the battle, and you'll see an absolutely destroyed city. What I'm seeing now in the frustration

00:43:40.900 of his generals and his own frustration is an increasing tendency to take that Syrian battle plan

00:43:47.640 and start turning these Ukrainian cities into rubble. He needs to be careful that it does not create

00:43:54.920 a wave of simply passionate, we've got to do something from the West that would lead toward

00:44:03.660 boots on the ground or a no-fly zone overhead. I think those are both dangerous moves on the part

00:44:09.600 of the West. What we need to do is to stick with our current plan, let the Ukrainians do the fighting,

00:44:16.360 but give them every tool they need or want to do that fighting, hit Putin with massive sanctions,

00:44:23.260 reinforce the borders of NATO so he doesn't have the idea for another adventure. And I think if we do

00:44:29.900 those three things over the coming months, the pressure we'll build, we'll be able to get them

00:44:35.480 to a negotiating table, and hopefully the Ukrainians as well.

00:44:39.800 You know, Admiral, you were Supreme NATO commander at a time when Barack Obama was president.

00:44:43.880 And I know, I remember, you were trying to raise concerns about Russia and this situation.

00:44:51.740 He didn't have much of an audience. What do you think Barack Obama should have done differently

00:44:57.720 that might have helped prevent some of this?

00:45:01.400 You know, I wouldn't personalize it to the president. This was the whole interagency,

00:45:05.560 and it was my fellow admirals and generals. I remember as we constructed the national military

00:45:11.780 strategy, everyone, again, this is back in 10, 11, 12, everyone was completely seized with the idea

00:45:20.960 of Afghanistan and Iraq. We had 400,000 troops engaged in two massive conflicts. I was the guy on

00:45:28.060 the side, U.S. European command saying, yeah, that's important. We are fighting terrorism,

00:45:34.820 but we need to keep Navy term alert here. We need to keep a weather eye on what's coming from

00:45:43.280 potentially Vladimir Putin. And I couldn't make that case. In today's world, I think it's become clear

00:45:51.200 that the pivot to the Pacific, which makes some sense geopolitically, the complete focus on

00:45:58.020 terrorism, which tactically made a lot of sense. We missed a turn on preparing for what Vladimir

00:46:04.820 Putin has delivered on our doorstep. Thank you for your service and thanks for coming on. It's great

00:46:11.480 to connect again. Same here, Megan. Let's do it again. Yeah. All the best, Admiral. And remember,

00:46:17.000 folks, you can only find conversations like that right here on The Megyn Kelly Show. How great is

00:46:21.760 it to go in depth with a guy like that, right, who's actually been and who served our country

00:46:25.920 honorably for as many years as he did. It's our honor to bring him to you. If you want more of

00:46:30.360 these conversations, you can find them on our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly,

00:46:34.540 or you can download and subscribe to this show as a podcast on Apple, Pandora, Stitcher,

00:46:38.340 or wherever you get your podcasts for free. We'll be right back.

00:46:47.000 So the vice president is in Poland, visiting over there to try to negotiate some something of use

00:46:54.600 in this whole conflict. And here's how that's going. Is the United States willing to make a

00:46:58.420 specific allocation for Ukrainian refugees? And for President Duda, I wanted to know if you think

00:47:06.120 and if you asked the United States to specifically accept more refugees.

00:47:12.880 Okay.

00:47:16.680 A friend in need is a friend in need.

00:47:23.560 Okay.

00:47:24.220 Oh my God. Does it have to continue like that? And by the way, we're saying she's negotiating nothing.

00:47:29.580 That's what the administration is saying. Up next, Kelly's Court. Don't miss it. Stay with me.

00:47:36.120 Kelly's Court is back in session. Today, we're going to bring you the latest on the Gretchen

00:47:41.620 Whitmer kidnapping case, which has now gone to trial. They're in the midst of it. The defendants

00:47:46.560 there accused of plotting to kidnap her are claiming that they were entrapped and plied with

00:47:53.100 drugs. We're also going to talk about juror number 50 in the Ghislaine Maxwell case. Remember,

00:47:59.080 this is the guy who didn't disclose that he was an alleged sexual abuse victim on his juror

00:48:05.120 questionnaire only to then brag about it to the Daily Mail and about how he used it to turn the

00:48:11.160 jury against her during the jury deliberations? That was a problem. Now he's offering a bizarre

00:48:16.560 reason as he gets cross-examined by the judge for his dishonesty for lying during the jury selection.

00:48:22.500 Then we'll get to Alec Baldwin taking a public swipe at the grieving widower of Helena Hutchins,

00:48:29.740 the woman Baldwin killed on set of his movie. He should just be quiet, but he won't. Here to

00:48:36.700 discuss it all, lead anchor of Court TV, Vinnie Politan. Vinnie, great to have you. How are you?

00:48:42.700 Oh, I'm great. Thanks so much. Great to be here and great to see you.

00:48:47.060 Oh, you too. All right. Robert Barnes is going to be here in a minute, too. He just got out of court,

00:48:50.760 so we'll firm up both sides in a second. Wait, a working attorney? I hate to tell you we brought in

00:48:56.820 the big gun. All right. So let's talk about Whitmer. Can you set it up for the audience? Like,

00:49:02.680 you know, there was this horrible plot and everybody's like, my God, that's terrible.

00:49:06.020 Whether you like her politically or not, what was allegedly being plotted against her was awful.

00:49:11.200 Then it turns out that like some healthy proportion of the plotters were government

00:49:16.160 agents and informants and so on. And now the remaining few defendants are like,

00:49:19.400 this whole thing was set up by the feds. So they're claiming entrapment. You take it from

00:49:23.680 there. Yeah, absolutely. And my background is I was a state prosecutor. And I think I have to

00:49:29.020 explain this first. State prosecutors, what we would do is a crime would happen. Our investigators

00:49:34.740 or the local police would investigate, figure out who was responsible, and then we would prosecute

00:49:39.660 them. That's like old fashioned prosecution. Simple. In the federal system, it's a little different.

00:49:44.800 It's a little different. Sometimes there's like, hey, there may be some criminal activity over

00:49:48.580 here. And then the feds always seem to infiltrate the plot themselves. And they do it for a couple

00:49:55.280 of reasons. One is it's a stronger case when you get to when you get to trial, because you've got

00:50:00.480 audio tapes, you've got videotapes, you've got cooperating witnesses, you've got eyewitnesses,

00:50:04.700 you have direct evidence, you have circumstantial evidence, you have a lock solid case. But on the

00:50:10.060 other hand, it makes us wonder sometimes, sometimes whether or not the crime would actually have gone

00:50:15.900 forward, without the help of the of the FBI, and the the informants and the paid informants that

00:50:24.560 they use. And that's one of the problems in this case is that you've got people who are part of this

00:50:29.120 alleged plot to kidnap the governor, who were paid informants. So it was like their job was to make

00:50:38.540 sure that this thing kept going forward, because the more it went forward, the more they would get

00:50:42.420 paid. And that's one problem that I have with the whole thing. That being said, the feds are very

00:50:49.080 successful at trial, we know their track record of winning, you know, 90% of their cases that go to

00:50:55.980 trial, most of them don't. And if they have a bad case, they'll plead it out, or just dismiss it outright,

00:51:00.520 because they hate to lose more than than state prosecutors like me. But in this case, the problem

00:51:05.480 you have, is that who is actually leading all of this, and the defense is saying, it's not really being

00:51:12.560 led by the the defendants who are at trial, it's really being led by these informants. And you've got FBI

00:51:19.260 agents who have infiltrated as well. So you get this argument that is this really a crime? Did they really

00:51:26.100 intend to kidnap Governor Whitmer? Or are they just kind of following along with these informants and agents who

00:51:33.300 were actually spearheading the plot? And that's what this jury has to figure out. And it's, the FBI is

00:51:40.400 good at this, though, the FBI is really good at straddling that line between getting great information,

00:51:46.560 you know, great testimony and videos and audio tapes of this plot of plots like this happening,

00:51:53.020 and not quite crossing that line to entrapment. And once you get it in front of a jury,

00:52:00.260 unless you have defendants who are like pillars of the community have led a great life up until this

00:52:07.800 point, present themselves very well in court and are leading very innocent lives, I think it's going

00:52:14.360 to be difficult to convince a jury of the entrapment that they are, in fact, the victims of the FBI

00:52:21.040 agents and victims of the informants in this case. It doesn't sound like these are these are the most

00:52:27.580 stellar, upstanding citizens you've ever found in your life. The legal test, as I understand it, is

00:52:32.960 did the government induce them to do something they would not otherwise have done? If the government

00:52:39.620 hadn't stepped in, would these guys have still conspired to kidnap the governor? And the defendants

00:52:49.180 are saying, no, it was like loose talk. We're like a couple of losers sitting around like, yeah,

00:52:53.720 we're going to get her. We're good. And I like some of the talk that they cite does sound a little

00:52:59.120 crazy. I mean, it's like we're going to we're going to get like a Black Hawk helicopter. We're

00:53:04.960 going to do like stuff that they could never do. And I think that does help the defendants argue

00:53:09.220 this wasn't real. This was a bunch of nonsense fired up over and over by the informants.

00:53:15.720 We just didn't like her. But at no point were we actually going to get a Black Hawk

00:53:20.140 helicopter and go kidnap the woman. Right. So so the question is, how much

00:53:26.280 evidence is there of them taking some sort of a step? Right. Like doing something that makes it a

00:53:31.800 little more real than a bunch of guys who are high. That's what the defense is saying. Everybody's

00:53:36.720 stoned out of their minds when they're talking about all that. And that it was one of the informants

00:53:40.460 who was giving them all the all the pot, all the drugs. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So, I mean,

00:53:46.120 that's problematic. And it's a it's a it's not the cleanest case for prosecutors. And I'm kind of

00:53:50.640 surprised that it's going to trial because a lot of times we have a case where it's kind of on that

00:53:56.280 borderline could go either way. The feds will fold and just give you a great deal and give you, you

00:54:02.060 know, a sweetheart deal that you can't walk away from. But that's not happening here. So I'm wondering

00:54:07.140 what type of evidence they'll be able to produce during the course of this trial, whether they're

00:54:11.240 they're going out and practicing, whether they're sketching things out, if there's some sort of a

00:54:17.600 step like that, I think that gets the feds a lot closer. Because, again, we come back to the first

00:54:23.720 point, which I think is the most important point. Who are these defendants? You know, is the jury,

00:54:28.800 you know, they're not supposed to put themselves in the shoes of the defense, but they always do

00:54:32.140 of the defendants, but they always do. And it's like, well, you know, I wouldn't have done that.

00:54:37.180 You know, yeah, maybe I don't like the governor either, but I never would have done that.

00:54:40.880 And these guys, I don't want to give them the benefit of the doubt, right? It's not so much

00:54:46.420 about reasonable doubt, it's about benefit of the doubt about what exactly is going on here.

00:54:50.900 But again, the feds are going to come into court, they're going to have the direct evidence,

00:54:54.320 which is the testimony of the informants who were part of all this. They're going to have

00:54:59.500 recordings of it. And all of that is difficult to overcome because you've got so much to explain.

00:55:06.740 Okay, but here's the thing. So they're not going to call the three special FBI agents who are publicly

00:55:12.300 identified in the case, but they are going to call these other three guys who seem to have,

00:55:17.300 I don't know, like the guys that they're calling or the ones who were informants in the case,

00:55:23.900 they seem problematic to me and whether they're, I don't know if they're taking the stand or not,

00:55:27.280 but the defense is certainly going to raise how problematic these guys are. One of them was like

00:55:31.700 a double agent and decided he was more aligned with the alleged bad guys than he was with the FBI

00:55:37.660 and started warning them, like, get rid of that stuff. The FBI is monitoring all. So like

00:55:42.820 their witnesses on the FBI side and the government side don't seem all that pristine.

00:55:47.880 And the way that the defense was spinning yesterday at the opening statements, they were saying,

00:55:52.900 look, here's my guy. There's this guy, Fox, Adam Fox. He's one of the guys that he accepted his

00:55:59.200 co-defendant, Barry Croft Jr.'s call to action in April, 2020. That's actually what the prosecution

00:56:04.360 alleged, um, that they, that, uh, this guy, I think it was Croft was a national figure in the

00:56:12.840 boogaloo movement, which believes the second civil war is coming and they want it. And that that meant

00:56:17.960 violence that they, they wanted violence and that Croft asked God for permission to kill and got it.

00:56:23.160 Okay. So far we're not at anything criminal yet. It just sounds like crazy musings. You know,

00:56:27.000 I mean, a lot of people get weird musings from above and they don't get charged. Um, Adam Fox,

00:56:31.860 similar stuff, claimed to be anointed by God, anointed by God to wage war on the country, blah,

00:56:35.420 blah, blah. They were going to break into her office, into her home, kidnap her at gunpoint.

00:56:39.520 They would hog tie her and take her away. It's not just talk. They said their actions were louder

00:56:43.880 and just disturbing as their words. Cause just, you know, talk about, I could kill her. I could

00:56:47.460 hog tie her. That's not going to do it. The defense says, um, they did agree that they did not agree

00:56:53.540 with anybody to kidnap the governor. There was no plan. And they say Fox, this guy, Adam Fox was

00:56:58.620 basically a loser who lived in the basement of a vacuum cleaner shop. He didn't have any friends.

00:57:03.460 He was taken in Vinny. He was taken in by big Dan, big Dan, who I deed himself as a militia member,

00:57:10.100 but was really an FBI informant. And I think that the defense plan is to make big Dan, the villain

00:57:16.780 and the one who secretly pushed this whole thing.

00:57:22.120 Oh, I agree. I think you're, you're spot on with that analysis of where they're going to go.

00:57:27.860 Cause he's testifying big Dan's testifying. He's going to testify. Now here's, here's what

00:57:33.180 prosecutors do because I, you know, sometimes I would have to do this as a prosecutor as well.

00:57:37.940 When you have to, when you have these witnesses who are the key to your case, who are not the pillars

00:57:43.380 of the community either who are, you know, they're bad dudes. Right. Um, you have to explain it to

00:57:49.180 the jury and you say, well, ladies and gentlemen, we don't pick these people. Yeah. He's an informant,

00:57:54.040 but why is he hanging out with this guy? Because they're the ones who are friends, right? You know,

00:57:59.600 we didn't, we didn't go to them. We, we found this guy and he ended up, uh, testifying for us,

00:58:06.220 but he's the one, the defendant is the one hanging out with him. So it's birds of a feather kind of

00:58:11.200 argument. But I think the fact that he's coming out of this thing, uh, clean and he seems to be

00:58:17.620 the leader is, is the, the best argument you can make is who's really pushing this thing forward.

00:58:25.400 And what is the incentive to do it? Right. If you're the FBI informant, why are you doing it? Well,

00:58:30.780 if you're getting paid on the one, that's, that's, that's an incentive to do it because now it's a job

00:58:35.700 all of a sudden, wow. Good point. Yeah, exactly. So I think there's a chance, but I, I, I always,

00:58:44.760 because I just know the way the feds work is if they really believe there's a, a decent chance of

00:58:51.860 losing this case, they would never try it. Me as a state prosecutor, if I believed I had the right

00:58:57.440 person for the crime, regardless of what I was able to get in front of the jury, but I knew that

00:59:02.700 this was the person I'm trying to case anyone, right? Feds, they don't think that way because

00:59:08.220 it's so much more about the headlines and the politics of it because the, um, uh, the attorneys,

00:59:16.480 uh, the U S attorneys are, are very, very political. They love the press conference,

00:59:22.160 the local prosecutors, eh, give or take, you know, it's the political process, but not as much.

00:59:27.680 These U S attorneys are people that maybe want to be Senator one day. Maybe they want to be

00:59:32.560 mayor of a really big city. Uh, maybe they want to run for president and, and they're much more,

00:59:37.660 um, focused that way. Uh, and they hate to lose. And that's why every time I see these cases,

00:59:45.160 I'm like, well, if it's a real bad case, they're going to get a sweetheart deal. Just like some of

00:59:49.600 the, the parents in the college admissions scandal got really good deals at the end.

00:59:54.800 The ones that stuck it out to the end got great deals, uh, because they did not want to try some of

00:59:59.600 those cases. Hmm. Big Dan, by the way, got paid $54,000. Uh, this other guy, Steven Robeson,

01:00:05.580 one of the informants got paid more than 19,000. And, uh, I found the wacky stuff. Uh, they said

01:00:11.220 that they were talking about pyramids. They said they were talking about black Hawk helicopters. And

01:00:16.320 they said that they were talking about somehow like barking, like dogs out around, uh, Gretchen

01:00:20.960 Widmer's, um, college or a cottage so that they could convince her that even the animals had

01:00:26.800 turned against her. They were highest kites. This is like stupid ass talk. This wasn't a criminal

01:00:33.460 conspiracy, but you know what? We haven't heard the tapes. Yeah. So when you, and again, you know,

01:00:39.600 they've got to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt. So that's the other burden. Prosecutors,

01:00:43.040 as you know, everyone knows people listening now know they've got to prove it. So, um, it's not just,

01:00:48.520 yeah, I think they, I think they would have done it anyway. No, I'm going to be convinced that,

01:00:52.520 oh, absolutely. Beyond any reasonable doubt, they would have done this even without, uh, all the,

01:00:57.880 all the things that Dan was doing. That's going to be, that's a high bar. Unless I forget,

01:01:02.440 there's some politics at play too. You know, a lot of people don't like her.

01:01:05.480 Well, who's on that jury? Who's on that jury? That's the jury question.

01:01:10.360 Right. Because especially now in the wake of, you know, blue state, red state COVID,

01:01:13.880 it's like you get some Republicans on the jury who are like, ah, I remember her. She is annoying.

01:01:18.840 You know, it's like, not like they want her to be kidnapped, but they're like,

01:01:22.520 you whiner, nothing was going to happen to you. You never know. That's what you're supposed to

01:01:26.280 probe for during voir dire. Like, could you convict a man who wanted to hurt governor Whitmer,

01:01:31.480 even though you might be on the same or the, you know, the opposite of, uh, her political lab.

01:01:36.520 Right. Yeah. And you know, how sympathetic is the, uh, uh, victim or alleged victim and as the

01:01:43.160 defense sees it. So that's, that's another part of the equation, the politics infiltrating all of this.

01:01:48.200 But I'll tell you what I've been seeing on court TV is that as much as I think the politics

01:01:51.720 infiltrate things at the end of the day, I trust jurors that they really listen to the judge's

01:01:58.680 instructions. And when it comes time to get to a verdict, uh, they do it based on the evidence

01:02:03.400 and, and they kind of put the, the politics of it aside. Uh, and to me, the biggest point in case

01:02:09.240 is the Kyle Rittenhouse case, because that was the most divisive case I've ever covered in my entire

01:02:15.720 career. And, and going into it, I thought the most likely outcome was going to be a hung jury

01:02:21.960 because there was no way it was going to be all, uh, right or all left on that jury. There was going to

01:02:27.160 be some sort of a split, but at the end of the day, the jury actually focused on the evidence,

01:02:33.080 the facts of the case and the legal standards, and they were able to come to a unanimous verdict. So,

01:02:37.560 um, at the end of the day, I, I, I still trust jurors. Yeah. I don't trust that Casey Anthony

01:02:43.000 jury from years ago, but that's another story for me. Oh my God. I had on, I had on her lawyer.

01:02:47.560 It was the craziest two hour interview. We aired it. I was on vacation and we aired like a crime

01:02:53.640 series, which people loved. His name was Chaney Mason. And, uh, we had Beth Karras on. She was

01:02:58.160 on court TV back in the day. You got, you got, you were there. She was there. I was your fan. I

01:03:02.080 watched both of you guys. And, um, she was sort of offering more of the prosecution's vantage point

01:03:06.440 and he was offering the defense. And, uh, we had such, it was Vinny, you would have laughed

01:03:09.400 because we started off very contentious. He came in, you know, loaded for bear was all over me. I'm

01:03:14.480 like, all right, slow your roll, sir. I'm like, I'm giving you a chance here. I'm open-minded. I

01:03:19.220 think she did it, but I'm going to let you make your case. And by the end, he and I had really

01:03:22.920 bonded and he was crying about his, the loss of his wife. And I was, it was actually like,

01:03:27.320 it's a whole emotional rollercoaster and all your spare time is you go listen to it. Okay. Let's talk

01:03:31.000 about, uh, Ghislaine Maxwell. Okay. Speaking of reason not to trust a juror, this juror number 50 is a

01:03:39.860 moron. So this guy sat on the Ghislaine Maxwell, uh, jury. He did not check either the boxes on

01:03:49.900 the jury questionnaire that said, are you, have you been the victim of a crime? Have you been the

01:03:54.720 victim of a sexual assault or sexual abuse? No, no, I haven't. Nope. Not me or you or anybody,

01:04:00.260 you know, nope. This is a picture of more showing for the YouTube audience. And, um, then he waits

01:04:05.620 until after the verdict, finding Ghislaine Maxwell guilty in crimes involving sex assaults,

01:04:10.480 sexual, you know, uh, nature of a sexual nature. And he was like, he brags to the daily mail,

01:04:15.180 to Reuters, to anybody who will sit with him saying, I, I was instrumental in that jury room.

01:04:20.260 You should have seen me. I was amazing. I was telling all the jurors about what it's like for

01:04:23.960 a sexual assault victim and how they really couldn't question the alleged victim's testimonials

01:04:29.700 for being sketchy on the details. Cause I can tell you firsthand, that's what happens. You forget,

01:04:35.100 but you don't forget what happened to you. Right? So it's like, okay, maybe that could have been okay

01:04:40.060 if he had disclosed the fact that he was an alleged victim to the court and had been exposed to

01:04:45.880 questioning, but he didn't. So then like a dumb ass, he goes and tells everybody that he did this.

01:04:50.400 Then people go back and check the questionnaire. Nope. He didn't come clean on it. And now they're

01:04:56.400 having a hearing with the judge and she's cross-examining him to figure out, why did you not tell the

01:05:03.360 truth on your form? Juror 50. And, um, you tell me what his new reason is or why, why he didn't feel

01:05:12.360 the need to disclose that.

01:05:14.260 Okay. I can start here. Juror misconduct is a big problem and criminal, uh, appeals are very, um, rarely

01:05:25.500 successful. But when we start focusing on jurors and things that they've done, things that they've

01:05:30.580 said, uh, and, and reasons that they get, it's, it's problematic. And to me, this one is really,

01:05:36.720 really serious. It's really, really troubling. First of all, you've got a hearing on it and you

01:05:40.860 got the judge involved herself and all this. So that's, that's a huge problem, uh, for this case.

01:05:47.440 And the bottom line though, when we start talking about criminal appeals, okay, what do you win?

01:05:55.980 What does the defendant win? You win a new trial and the ability to be prosecuted once again. And

01:06:04.440 yeah, you may be getting a different jury, different outcome, but that's better. It will be the same.

01:06:08.560 That's better than a standing guilty verdict than where she is now. But, but this isn't about the

01:06:13.740 evidence. It's not like as a result of this appeal, she's going to go in front of another jury and have

01:06:19.620 brand new evidence or, or the prosecution will be limited, uh, with some of the evidence that they

01:06:25.660 brought the first time. So it's always better to get a second bite at the apple. Now that you've

01:06:30.040 seen that the government's case forward and backward, you know what they're going to do with

01:06:33.200 every witness. And now you're like, okay, I got it. I will have a much better game plan for attacking

01:06:38.320 all these points. Right. But I get that. I get that. But the case isn't going to, isn't going to

01:06:45.600 change. And by the way, uh, on retrials, when there's a hung jury, the prosecution always has

01:06:51.920 the advantage. So, um, I don't see the prosecution case here getting any weaker, uh, but I am very,

01:06:57.960 very troubled, uh, by this knucklehead. Um, but I think it's more serious than being a knucklehead

01:07:04.300 because, um, we need our jurors to be 100% honest and we need them to disclose everything.

01:07:11.640 Scott Peterson, uh, the same issue, same sort of issue as popped up in his case, uh, you know,

01:07:17.680 years ago, uh, he was convicted. He was on death row. And, and these are the most problematic because

01:07:23.860 our system is predicated upon ordinary citizens coming in and being very honest and having an

01:07:30.260 open mind and, and, and basing everything on the evidence, but also disclosing everything,

01:07:34.520 uh, because there are certain jurors you would not want on. And I think we, I think everyone agrees.

01:07:39.240 It's pretty straightforward that if he disclosed this, there's no way Maxwell's team is going to

01:07:45.960 use one of their, uh, peremptory strikes on him and eliminate him from the, from the jury pool.

01:07:51.680 He would have been gone, but he made it on. And now he's saying, well, I didn't lie. And it's,

01:07:57.060 it matters whether it was a lie or just a, you know, an omission because he forgot because if he lied,

01:08:03.080 the question is, why'd you lie? And were you just one of those jurors who just wanted to make it on

01:08:07.500 the jury so that you could write a book or you could feel like a big man, or you had it in for

01:08:11.680 her, or you're trying to work out your own issues about your own past experience on this woman who

01:08:17.540 doesn't deserve that. Um, so it does matter. And the judge is cross-examining him saying,

01:08:23.680 you know, you didn't fill out the form. Why didn't you fill out the form? And this guy says,

01:08:27.220 well, I was thinking about, um, he first, he says, I was thinking, I didn't really see that I was a

01:08:35.340 crime victim. He says, um, I wasn't thinking of my sexual abuse as being a victim of a crime because

01:08:41.500 I no longer associate with being a victim. He says, and really what happened was I was thinking

01:08:47.220 about my breakup. My girlfriend had just dumped me. So I was distracted, Vinnie. I was distracted by my,

01:08:53.120 my loss of love. And that's why I went haywire on those couple of questions. And then the judge says,

01:09:00.540 well, you made it to the second round of jury selection, which took place on a different date.

01:09:06.220 And then you answered all those questions accurately, but there wasn't one about sexual

01:09:11.540 abuser assault. And, uh, she said, how, how were you able to do that? And he said, well,

01:09:16.080 I wasn't thinking about my ex at that second. I mean, this guy's full of it.

01:09:21.380 Yeah, he is. I mean, to me, it's obvious. I don't, um, and it's great that people want to serve on a jury,

01:09:26.920 but you don't lie. So you can serve on a jury, right? Yeah. And most of us lie to get out of

01:09:32.600 serving. Yeah. Yeah. Usually you get to use the other way around. That's the American way.

01:09:37.880 It's the, it's the same situation with, with, with Peterson on the other coast is saying that,

01:09:42.620 Oh, I didn't think it was really, I didn't think I was, but when it becomes an issue and you,

01:09:48.280 and you remember it afterwards and you remember it during the deliberations, it's, it's a big,

01:09:53.240 big problem. So, um, I think there is a real chance that she gets another trial, but, you know,

01:10:03.140 I think you're going to have the same result because the evidence is not changing. I mean,

01:10:06.560 there's still going to be pictures of her rubbing Jeffrey Epstein's feet on the private plane and she

01:10:11.720 cannot separate herself from this guy. She just can't. She was there with him way too long.

01:10:18.560 Well, and she, she behaved, I mean, in a way that was criminal. It wasn't just,

01:10:24.060 you knew what he was doing. It was, you helped abuse me. You were there. You also abused me. I

01:10:29.980 mean, it was her directly with these witness testimonials. So it really came down to whether

01:10:33.780 the jury believe these witnesses or not. And you're right for the record. It actually is okay for a

01:10:39.940 juror who has disclosed everything properly on a questionnaire who then makes it on the jury

01:10:44.060 to talk about his own personal experiences in there. That's, that's allowed. Um, so a lot of

01:10:48.900 people think that wouldn't have been okay for him to do, even if he had disclosed you, you can,

01:10:52.560 you're allowed to say that stuff, but not unless you've given the court fair notice about who you

01:10:57.260 are and what your past experiences are. Okay. Let's pause it there because I'm going to squeeze in a

01:11:01.380 quick break. And then we have a case that we're going to, we're going to crack open this case on

01:11:05.920 butts. Not even kidding. I'm sorry, but the nature of Kelly's court when it first started was that of a

01:11:12.480 12 year old boy, and we're doing it. We're feeling blue enough about what's happening overseas.

01:11:17.980 Now it's time for a little fun.

01:11:24.520 Kelly's court is back in session with lead anchor of court TV, Vinnie Politan,

01:11:29.660 and just out of real court trial lawyer and founding attorney of Barnes law, Robert Barnes. Okay,

01:11:36.220 Robert, we're glad that you can make it. I know you're just in a recess, so you've got to go back in

01:11:39.320 shortly because you're doing real, real law. So let me start with one that I really want you to

01:11:44.200 get to weigh in on. And that is there are reports in the news now that CNN has settled with Jeff

01:11:49.940 Zucker, the ousted head of CNN for $10 million, according to the news in exchange for him not

01:11:59.220 suing them for what I have no idea since he was fired for cause. But you tell me whether that makes

01:12:05.660 sense to you and how, if at all, it affects the still outstanding case of Chris Cuomo threatening

01:12:10.980 to sue CNN for firing him, he says, with no cause. I mean, it's extraordinary. I mean,

01:12:15.780 I know there's talk that Chris Cuomo would get a similar big check for his settlement. I mean,

01:12:20.000 it feels more like payoffs to stay quiet about all the problems at CNN than it does. Sincere settlement

01:12:25.800 of a sincere claim, because I don't see how either Chris Cuomo or Zucker have a legitimate legal claim.

01:12:32.460 What they have is a potential PR claim that could do damage to the CNN brand. That's the only logic I

01:12:38.620 see behind these huge settlements. They're even paying Alison Gullist a million dollars, which

01:12:44.560 actually isn't that much for an executive. But it's hush money. It's 100 percent hush money because

01:12:49.740 they Zucker and Gullist were fired for cause. It's very clear you cannot have an affair with your

01:12:55.460 underling. He was forced to resign because he broke the rules. Check CNN's own website, if you don't

01:13:00.240 believe me, as to what the rules are. And that's if you accept their version of the story. The real

01:13:06.200 version of the story, which we've been reporting and has been everywhere, is that they did a lot more

01:13:11.000 things than they're being accused of that were unethical and completely grounds for termination at any

01:13:19.400 news organization, including advising Governor Cuomo, helping him come up with one liners in response

01:13:24.300 to President Trump, telling him exactly when he should have his press conferences so that they

01:13:28.000 would get the most play and CNN could air them wall to wall. It goes on from there. But all of that is

01:13:34.160 unethical and you could be fired for it. And so, yeah, your take on it, Vinny, on whether this is in

01:13:38.200 fact just hush money. Yeah, I think it is. But I don't think it's much different than most

01:13:42.260 corporations. Whenever there's a separation from someone who's very high up in a corporation,

01:13:49.000 it's a way to eliminate uncertainty. And before I was at Court TV and between being a trial attorney,

01:13:58.260 I worked at a big, big insurance company and handled a lot of these types of claims. And the one thing

01:14:04.520 that corporations, insurance companies, everything else, whoever might pay some money out, what they

01:14:09.100 don't like is uncertainty. Settlements are certain and then you seal. So it's done. You move on. It's

01:14:16.960 off the books. You don't have to worry about any potential judgments. And then when you're a very

01:14:21.260 public company like CNN, like you're saying, you don't have to worry about the PR aspect of it.

01:14:27.000 But this is very, very common for high level people who are dismissed from their jobs with large

01:14:35.860 corporations. And there's a lot of money at stake. But I think you're right. But I think there's even

01:14:40.500 more to it. This is corporate America. This is what they do. And sometimes it's great. You get paid to

01:14:46.560 not work. Andrew Cuomo and Jeff Zucker and Alison Gullist and Chris Cuomo worked together to cover up

01:14:55.100 for the governor who was flailing in his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. And they presented him as a

01:15:02.640 hero who was to be celebrated and possibly even replaced Joe Biden as the top of the ticket on the

01:15:07.960 Democratic nomination. And meanwhile, he had been issuing these orders to put COVID positive patients

01:15:13.320 into nursing homes, 15,000 of whom would later die. And there's been absolutely no accountability for

01:15:18.600 that. Those people haven't gotten any money at all, Robert, any money at all. And now you've got three out of the

01:15:25.460 four I just named collecting million dollar checks, multi multiple millions from CNN, happy to pay them

01:15:32.580 off. Right. At least Zucker and Gullist and Chris Cuomo suing. And the families who were hurt by these

01:15:41.000 lies, who had a public turn against them, ignore them by these lies. They get nothing.

01:15:47.000 I mean, no doubt. I mean, the guy who should be getting checks and the people who should be getting

01:15:51.080 checks is not Jeff suckers, not Chris Cuomo, is not any of the people that were part of the false

01:15:56.300 reporting and fake news reporting at CNN for more than a year, covering for all of Cuomo's different

01:16:01.580 crimes, giving him advice behind the scenes, which has come out in little bits and pieces. And

01:16:06.740 presumably this is the kind of hush money payment to make sure this other scandals that are present at

01:16:12.180 CNN, along with the Cuomo scandals, don't get fully put on broadcast around the world. And it's a

01:16:18.340 it's a continuing effort to cover up the corruption in corporate news rather than deal with it honestly

01:16:23.600 and address the concerns of those people who are truly injured by what they did.

01:16:27.880 Hmm. All right. Let's shift gears to Alec Baldwin, who is just making dumb decision after dumb

01:16:33.040 decision. I mean, I'm fascinated for your take on this, Vinny, because we haven't talked about it

01:16:36.820 yet. But he gave that disastrous interview to ABC where he's like, I don't feel guilty. You know,

01:16:42.000 I don't feel I don't feel guilty. OK, sure. Great. You can spin it however you want. That's going to come

01:16:47.680 back to haunt you. Virtually every lawyer I know predicted that. Sure enough, it did. Then came

01:16:52.140 the lawsuit from Helena Hutchins, husband. She's the cinematographer he killed on set of Rust.

01:16:57.680 This movie he was shooting where she was a cinematographer and he had a loaded gun in his

01:17:01.360 hand, which he didn't know. He says he didn't know. I think most people would agree he didn't know,

01:17:06.020 but he pointed at her and it went off and she died. So now he's being sued. And this is what

01:17:12.180 Alec Baldwin. He decided to comment again. Here he is.

01:17:15.640 What you have is a certain group of people litigants and whatever on whatever side who

01:17:21.380 their attitude is. Well, the people who likely seem negligent have no money. And the people who

01:17:29.040 have money are not negligent. But we're not going to let that stop us from doing what we need to do

01:17:34.320 in terms of litigation. So we have people that are suing people that they think are deep pockets

01:17:38.420 litigants, where they're going to be able to, well, why sue people if they're not going to get

01:17:41.920 money? That's what you're doing it for. Your thoughts on that, Vinny?

01:17:45.840 In what world does a man who's holding a gun and points it at someone and squeezes the trigger and

01:17:52.460 kills them, not responsible for doing that? Right. And this, we're not talking about the criminal

01:17:58.880 responsibility, which is still being investigated. We're talking about simple negligence. This is

01:18:05.420 gun handling 101. To me, he's saying, because I have deep pockets, I'm not negligent. But the people

01:18:13.540 who are negligent don't have deep pockets. Now, more than one person can be responsible. There can be

01:18:19.840 contributory negligence in this. And I said from the beginning in this case, I said, there is no doubt

01:18:26.160 that there is negligence here. There's no doubt there is liability here. In a simple sense, to me,

01:18:32.040 the whole debate was whether or not he's going to be indicted. But now he's taken at that next level

01:18:36.700 saying, oh, I'm not negligent. Really? Really? Is there some sort of shield that actors have

01:18:43.460 from handling a gun that the rest of society doesn't have? For instance, if, say, someone handed

01:18:49.000 me a gun and said, it's not loaded, and I pointed at someone and kill them. You don't think I'm

01:18:52.600 responsible for their gun? Right? So you don't get a shield for being an actor. And you don't get a

01:18:57.640 shield because you're at work. Because when a trained police officer accidentally kills someone,

01:19:05.800 their civil liability is automatic. And the criminal responsibility we're seeing is even there.

01:19:12.380 We saw that. That's Kim Potter.

01:19:13.260 Kim Potter. Yeah.

01:19:14.260 Right. So I don't understand this world he's living in where he's distancing himself from the

01:19:19.680 negligence. I thought he would have embraced the negligence. And in order to try to distance himself

01:19:26.700 from the criminal liability, which I think there's a real possibility for that as well.

01:19:32.240 How about, Robert, just the, of course, they want money. Why do you sue somebody? Why sue people if

01:19:36.700 you're not going to get money? That's what you're doing it for. Why doesn't the husband of the woman

01:19:42.100 you killed deserve some money? None of us has a problem with him getting money.

01:19:48.440 I mean, absolutely. And not only that, but I mean, her minor child, who now gets to grow up without a

01:19:53.640 mother. I mean, clearly what Alec Baldwin did was illicit. The only question is whether just civil

01:19:58.940 liability should attach or should also criminal liability should attach. Because what Kim Potter

01:20:03.460 was convicted of was for far less conduct than what Alec Baldwin did. He aimed the gun at a human

01:20:09.420 being, cocked it back, and then pulled the trigger. Claims he didn't, but that logically doesn't hold.

01:20:15.680 So he's likely lying about the fact that he pulled the trigger. So you look at those aggregate

01:20:20.380 consequences. He and the production companies are absolutely civilly liable for what they did.

01:20:25.180 And it's going to be a big check that they have to write. And the plaintiff's firm that is

01:20:29.320 representing the husband and the young son as one of the top in the country. So Baldwin should just get

01:20:35.880 his checkbook out. Yeah, there's going to be an insurance company is going to write this check.

01:20:39.880 Vinny there. Why is he even out there fighting a PR award that is unwinnable? All of the public

01:20:46.060 sympathy is with the victim and her family. It may be part of a personality. When you are that public

01:20:54.780 and you're a celebrity, yes, he's been a controversial celebrity, but I think that's

01:20:59.420 part of his DNA. You think you can talk your way out of it. We see this with other criminal defendants

01:21:07.920 sometimes trying to talk their way out of it. And it doesn't work that way. It doesn't work. To me,

01:21:13.240 it's a case of where a little bit of knowledge is dangerous, right? Alec Baldwin is obviously

01:21:17.640 intelligent, right? He's obviously, this has been the center of his life. So he understands a little

01:21:23.440 bit about the law and the way it works. But that little bit of knowledge is turned into a dangerous

01:21:30.480 public relations disaster. But now some of these things he's saying may end up in a courtroom and

01:21:37.620 be used against him. And I don't think making statements like that in any way set things up

01:21:45.300 better for his criminal liability either, because you've got a DA who I think this is really a call

01:21:50.980 for the DA to make. Should I or should I not go forward with prosecuting this case? And you keep

01:21:57.140 saying things like this. It could get under her skin and she may just file those criminal charges.

01:22:01.980 Mm hmm. I should tell our audience that Robert went back to his court hearing. I guess he's doing

01:22:06.980 it via Zoom, thankfully for us, because he can pop into our court and go into real court.

01:22:11.540 This is kind of fun. Now we can now we can debunk all of his points while he's gone.

01:22:15.640 Vinny, why do you think that he's actually facing the real potential of criminal charges in this case?

01:22:22.940 Because, you know, a lot of lawyers have pooh-poohed that.

01:22:25.680 Yeah, I would not pooh-pooh that. And again, you know, one analogy I use a lot is take it out of

01:22:33.060 the context of a of a movie set. And, you know, there's no way there would not be some level of

01:22:39.240 criminal responsibility. Also coming off of the Kim Potter case. You know, I make I make that

01:22:43.780 comparison all the time. Here's someone who thought she had one weapon in her hand and had it had the

01:22:49.580 wrong weapon. Well, he thought he had an unloaded gun in his hand, but he had a loaded gun.

01:22:54.820 Now, whose fault is it? Well, guess what? Someone hands you a gun and you can have expert after

01:23:01.100 expert after expert come in and say the way it's supposed to happen. That gun is supposed to be

01:23:05.800 checked. If he's not going to personally check it, it should be checked in front of him. So if the

01:23:11.720 armorer or whoever is going to say this is not a loaded weapon, that check of the weapon should be

01:23:18.080 done in front of him so he can eyeball it himself. That is the industry norm. And he deviated from the

01:23:24.440 industry norm, just like you could say Kim Potter deviated from the industry norm of not doing a

01:23:30.300 cross draw for the taser. Right. I mean, I, I, the way our courts have expanded criminal liability and

01:23:39.180 the way prosecutors have gotten more aggressive, especially going after police officers should

01:23:44.780 apply across the board. And I think that's why there is a real chance here in this case of criminal

01:23:50.980 responsibility for Alec Baldwin. He's got the gun in his hand. And there's also potential evidence

01:23:58.280 that he refused to do the, the training that was offered by the armor. So if all of that is true as

01:24:04.840 well, now you're getting into reckless, uh, uh, extreme recklessness where they just hand me the gun.

01:24:10.420 All right. And I'll trust whatever you say. Well, what if you weren't an actor and someone handed you a gun

01:24:16.020 or are we supposed to trust them? Yeah. And you, and you refuse the training. If you refuse the

01:24:21.760 training and then mishandled the gun on set and the jury rejects his claim about, I never pulled

01:24:26.720 the trigger. It just went off because most of the gun experts have said, no, that's not true. It's

01:24:31.680 awfully convenient for him, but it's not true. Then yeah, he could be in a lot of trouble. I want to ask

01:24:36.180 you about the armor. I find this piece of the case fascinating. The armor is also getting sued and

01:24:41.480 she's suing the guy who provided the ammo and the ammo is absolutely the problem. I mean,

01:24:48.220 if you want to talk about, you want to go like ground zero of the problems, somebody put a real

01:24:52.680 bullet instead of a, just the blank, uh, or the, the dummy round, um, blanks just like make sound

01:24:59.300 and the dummy rounds, um, look, they just look like real bullets. Um, anyway, somebody put an actual

01:25:06.060 live round of a live bullet in that gun. So you tell me who is more liable and does it matter at

01:25:13.340 all? It might matter for criminal reasons. If the armor was given live rounds by the guy who provided

01:25:20.820 the ammo and she put it in the gun, not knowing that it was live, right? It looked like a dummy

01:25:27.440 bullet and she was expecting a dummy bullet, right? Who is more responsible as, cause those two are

01:25:33.640 pointing the finger at each other right now. Yeah, they are. And, and, you know, there's the,

01:25:38.920 the dummies look like live rounds. There is a slight difference, but the dummies look like live rounds.

01:25:44.120 The blanks look a much, look much different. They'd be easier to distinguish. Um, I think, I think

01:25:50.540 there's, there's a level of equal responsibility here because as the armor, you still have to physically

01:25:57.440 place those rounds into the weapon. So you should inspect each one. So there's a level there that

01:26:04.400 she's assuming that's what, what's in a box that has a certain label. Everything in that box is

01:26:09.300 what it purports to be. And also one of them, I can't remember which one Vinny,

01:26:14.020 it's either the, the dummy round or the live round. If you shake it, it, you can hear movement inside.

01:26:20.420 I don't remember whether that's a live round or the, but the point is somebody who's an expert in

01:26:24.720 firearms would, it would purportedly supposedly know. Right. And that's your job. And that's your

01:26:32.220 job. That's why I think most people, when they look at this case, look at the armorers having the

01:26:37.600 most responsibility, even though you're sort of the, the middle person, uh, between the ammo, uh,

01:26:44.320 supplier, but she's the one getting, getting the ammo. She's the one grabbing the individual rounds

01:26:49.660 and placing them in. She's the one saying it's, it's, it's, it's, you know, it's a cold, uh, weapon.

01:26:55.080 It's fine. It's good to go. Um, so I would say she probably has a little bit more than the supplier

01:27:02.000 does, but they're both on the, on the hook here. I think it's going to be a little more difficult

01:27:06.260 to prove that the supplier had live rounds in there unless they've retained the rest of that box of

01:27:14.420 ammo and have found live rounds in there. Then there's more of a connection, but there's also the

01:27:18.880 chain of custody, right? Was with the name, who else had access to that box? Was it sealed when

01:27:24.020 she opened it? All the things that could, that could potentially go wrong. I think they're all

01:27:29.060 going to be civilly liable for different amounts. Um, and you know, different percentages of responsibility,

01:27:36.680 but I don't think they use up a hundred percent of it. There's going to be a percentage that is left

01:27:42.600 over for the man who actually squeezes the trigger and, and aims the weapon. So you, there's so many

01:27:51.260 things that went wrong here.

01:27:52.740 Was at least in name, a producer on the movie as well. And you know, that that's going to come

01:27:58.140 back to haunt him. Uh, the production company is going to, their insurance company is going to wind

01:28:01.900 up cutting a check and it's going to be a big one. Um, okay, let's talk butts.

01:28:05.480 Um, your esteemed legal career and my own have led us to this moment, Vinny, but we need a laugh.

01:28:11.960 Um, and this one is absurd. It makes me want to laugh and cry. Mississippi elementary school

01:28:18.320 assistant principal is fired for reading a children's book called I need a new, but how about

01:28:27.400 a boy who notices there's a problem with his bottom. It has a crack in it and sets out to find a new one.

01:28:34.020 Um, this, so I have an eight-year-old, this was read to seven and eight-year-olds.

01:28:39.960 This is genius. This is right up their alley. This is a hundred percent the way you should be

01:28:44.300 bonding with seven and eight-year-olds. I'm sure they ate it up. They probably freaking loved it.

01:28:48.280 How does a guy get fired over this?

01:28:51.520 Well, um, some people are upset. People raising a stink about, about the, uh,

01:28:56.740 Boo hoo. Someone's always upset about everything today.

01:28:59.260 Yeah. Well that, that's, that's part of it. So.

01:29:02.120 Did you say raising a stink? Did you just say, did I, that was on purpose. There are no,

01:29:08.280 uh, accidental words here.

01:29:10.720 Well done.

01:29:12.580 So it's the perception, right? The judgment, you know, um, you've got to know your audience.

01:29:19.460 Yes. He knows his audience. It's ideal.

01:29:21.280 But if you're on it, but your audience, when you're reading to eight-year-olds is not the

01:29:24.200 eight-year-olds, your audience is the parents of the eight-year-olds.

01:29:26.880 Oh, well, why don't we just bust out some Dostoevsky? Yeah. Come on.

01:29:33.440 I, I get it. I, I wouldn't have a problem with it. You know, I would probably crack up as much as

01:29:39.180 the next guy. There we go.

01:29:41.980 Thank you. Give a little counter below. You can keep track of these, but, uh, but, uh,

01:29:48.040 you're talking about bodily functions. You're talking about, um, parts of the body

01:29:54.760 that we don't necessarily expose. Let's give our audience a flavor. Exposed. Let's give our

01:30:00.280 audience a flavor. I had my team pull. I need a new butt by Don McMillan, illustrated by Ross.

01:30:04.980 Are you going to do a dramatic reading?

01:30:06.240 Here we go. Ready?

01:30:07.460 Or should we get Sir Mix-a-Lot to do this?

01:30:09.320 I like big butts and I can't, no, that's a different, okay. I need a new butt. Mine's

01:30:14.100 got a crack. I can see in the mirror, a crack at the back. Did I do it on the slide or on the

01:30:19.080 banister inside? Or when I jumped my BMX or with the fart that happened next? Of course the fart,

01:30:27.420 that's what blew my butt apart. It works on 51 year old women too. Split the thing clean in two.

01:30:37.540 Now I wonder what to do. I need a new one, a green one or a blue one, a fat one or a thin one,

01:30:42.780 a wood one or a tin one. Why not an arty farty butt? Or one not to be forgotten with watercolors

01:30:48.820 on the top and a mural on the bottom or yellow spotted, purple dotted, a butt with color,

01:30:52.760 a butt with flair, a butt as bright as I dare to wear, a butt as bright as dad's underwear.

01:30:56.400 And it on, it goes on from there. Vinny, this teacher should be elevated to principal. Nevermind.

01:31:02.140 Forced out. The guy's got two kids with autism. Now he's asking,

01:31:07.140 he's got to started to go fund me to help him pay his bills. He got fired over that stupid ass

01:31:12.540 reading, which was fun and on point. Yeah. I don't, you know, there was nothing. I don't

01:31:19.260 think there's anything in his heart that was wrong at that moment. He wasn't trying to push some agenda

01:31:24.040 and, you know, we've seen stories like that and that's not what this was about. Um, I think he came

01:31:30.780 into it with an innocent mind. People are saying it's a, it shows a lack of judgment. I don't

01:31:36.180 necessarily agree. I think he may have a very good case. Um, and you know, it, I, I understand why,

01:31:48.140 but I think this is one where maybe you get a second chance or like, okay, maybe you have a meeting

01:31:54.860 with the parents and you try to explain it and that sort of thing. It seems like the parents are

01:32:00.480 on his side. Most of them, the vice prince or the head of the school district. This is Gary road

01:32:05.940 elementary in Mississippi. Uh, the head of the school district says he caused unnecessary embarrassment

01:32:11.720 to the school and blamed him for a lack of professionalism and impaired judgment. It reminds

01:32:17.000 me of that scene in uncle buck when uncle buck yells at the mean principal. And he's like,

01:32:21.320 I don't think I want to know a kindergartners who's not a silly heart, right? Like that's he,

01:32:25.600 this guy needs that speech. I don't think I want to know somebody who reads to second graders who,

01:32:30.180 who has total professionalism and judgment when it comes to the book selections,

01:32:34.880 which should be fun and silly. That's what the guy is saying that the guy got, uh, fired Toby price.

01:32:41.240 He says, I got fired for reading an awesome book to kids. That's exactly right. So he's got to go

01:32:48.300 find me if you care to support him, not endorsing, have no idea whether it's, you know, what's

01:32:53.140 happening there, but he's not asking another job. I hope we can get another job. It looks like he's

01:32:58.020 the type of teacher that we want or type of administrator that we want in our school systems

01:33:03.320 that has a sense of humor and wants to make that connection with the kids, which is what we want.

01:33:08.580 A hundred percent. This is not even close to like the weird sexual stuff that's showing up in some

01:33:14.380 school districts that parents are like, well, that's too much that I get those objections.

01:33:18.120 This is just fun. It's he's right. It's a funny, silly hearted book. And frankly,

01:33:22.620 I'm going to be ordering it today because my little Thatcher is going to love it. My,

01:33:26.300 my kids will come over to me and be like, mom, look at this. They'll show me just like a

01:33:29.080 pronouncer. You know how you can, you can Google a pronouncer Vinny, you know, this is a, as an

01:33:32.700 anchor before you go on the air, you're like, how do you say that? Um, and, and they'll give it to

01:33:36.260 me and all it says is butts, butts. I'll be honest with you. I have not read the book. I am waiting

01:33:44.040 for the movie to come out. I'm telling you right now, you have a duty to do it.

01:33:50.200 Oh, please. We have a winner. We have a winner. Pull me into your dark, dark world.

01:33:58.580 Vinny, such a pleasure. I hope you come back. Great to be on. Yeah. I'll be back anytime.

01:34:02.900 I hope Robert's winning. I like, I hope he was prepared. What's he doing with us?

01:34:06.680 It depends who he's representing. I don't know if I'm cheering for him if he's not representing the

01:34:10.040 outside. I'm sure he is. Don't miss tomorrow. Dave Rubin is back with us for a fun Friday afternoon.

01:34:17.800 Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

The Megyn Kelly Show - March 10, 2022

Biden's Gas Price Spin and Putin's Motive and Opportunity, with Sen. Josh Hawley, Admiral James Stavridis, Vinnie Politan and Robert Barnes ｜ Ep. 277

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