The Megyn Kelly Show - Dangerous DOJ Overreach, and Adnan Syed Released, with Matt Taibbi, Arthur Aidala, and Mark Eiglarsh

00:00:00.480 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:11.280 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Monday.

00:00:15.180 We are kicking off our two-year anniversary week today, launched two years ago with some

00:00:21.340 of our favorite guests from our first two years of shows. Later in the week, I'm going

00:00:26.300 to be joined by old pals like Ben Shapiro and Bridget Phetasy. Yay, looking forward to

00:00:30.500 that. And new guests, I'm so looking forward to this, like Father Mike Schmitz of the huge

00:00:37.640 hit The Bible in a Year podcast. I've been listening to this and let me tell you, I got

00:00:42.180 questions. I got a lot of questions, people. This thing is like on fire. Everybody loves

00:00:47.380 this podcast and it's because of him. He makes it so easy to digest and also just makes you

00:00:52.280 want to be a better person. And we're also going to have an old friend of mine who used

00:00:56.220 come on The Kelly File. He actually broke some big news on it. His name is Mike Rinder.

00:01:00.540 He's out with a new book about Scientology. He was at the top of this organization. He

00:01:05.960 was a part of Sea Org. You know, they run Scientology. He's been, he claims, stalked

00:01:11.540 by Scientology, surveilled by them, totally disassociated by the members of his family who

00:01:17.860 are still in Scientology. Scientology denies all of this and attacks him as a liar. It's ugly

00:01:22.340 and it's interesting and we'll have him on. Today, we've got Kelly's Court OGs, Arthur

00:01:28.440 Idala and Mark Eiglarsh coming up. It's hard to get the OGs together sometimes. They're

00:01:33.260 busy men. They've got successful legal practices, but this is our anniversary week, so they're

00:01:37.440 here. Yay. And we're going to take a deep dive into the Adnan Syed case that was made

00:01:42.360 famous in Serial. You know, that podcast has over a hundred million downloads that took a

00:01:48.160 long, long look at this case in which Adnan Syed was ultimately convicted of strangling

00:01:53.300 his 17-year-old girlfriend to death and then disposing of her body. Now, Syed has just been

00:01:59.620 released and many have celebrated this because they listened to Serial, which seriously suggested

00:02:05.560 that the guy was not guilty and had been railroaded. And guess who was responsible for

00:02:11.120 his release? Marilyn Mosby. Remember her? Prosecutor in Baltimore, severely corrupted and compromised

00:02:18.600 and is facing federal indictment now. And it was just bounced out of office. And this is the woman

00:02:23.500 who, after Freddie Gray, and remember the rough ride that was alleged by those cops who were

00:02:28.400 exonerated, went out to the cameras and said, this is our moment. No, it's not. It's not your moment.

00:02:33.200 Shut up. Either prosecute the case or don't, but it's not your moment. It's not about you.

00:02:36.180 That's Marilyn Mosby. She's the one who let him out. Well, case gets a little bit more complicated

00:02:41.720 then, doesn't it? Why'd she do it on her 11th hour in office? And is this actually a case of a

00:02:47.940 potentially innocent man? Or is this left-wing politics potentially at play? We'll look at it.

00:02:54.440 Okay. But we begin today with the great independent journalist, Matt Taibbi. He's been writing about

00:02:59.220 the implications of the Trump raid at his TK News substack. That's what it's called, TK News.

00:03:06.180 And the state of civil liberties in America in a really unique way. This is actually a really

00:03:12.480 important topic. You should be concerned about this Trump raid, even if you hate Trump's guts.

00:03:17.400 All right. And most liberals would have been. The people who are jumping up and down about,

00:03:23.020 you know, torture and the Justice Department's overreaches of yesteryear don't seem to care.

00:03:30.640 Why? Because Trump, orange bad, man bad, right? Well, Matt Taibbi is able to see clearly despite

00:03:38.480 whatever his politics may be. And we're going to watch this closely because what's also happening

00:03:44.200 this week is we think we're approaching the series finale. Maybe the series finale or just

00:03:49.460 the season finale? Unclear. Of January 6th theater with what they say is the final committee hearing

00:03:55.240 coming on Wednesday. I guess it depends on how the Democrats' polls look in advance of the midterms.

00:04:06.080 Matt Taibbi, welcome back to the show.

00:04:08.600 Thanks so much for having me, Megan. Great to be back.

00:04:11.300 Could be could be series finale, could could be season finale. Depends on

00:04:14.620 what those poll numbers look like and how badly the Democrats need yet another January 6th hearing

00:04:18.640 after this week. Yeah, it could be. I'm skeptical that those hearings do a whole lot for their poll

00:04:25.040 numbers. But yeah, we'll see. But they did start to turn their fortunes a bit, you know, over the

00:04:30.480 course of the summer. And they had, you know, their star witness. And I mean, their fortunes started to

00:04:35.640 get a little bit better over the summer. That wasn't the only thing they had going on. Joe Biden managed to

00:04:40.160 get a couple of pieces of legislation through. And then Trump popped back in the news, thanks to the

00:04:44.500 Mar-a-Lago raid. But all of that is Democrat originated. You know, I mean, a lot of us

00:04:48.660 believe the Trump raid wouldn't have happened if we weren't facing these midterms where their

00:04:52.260 electoral prospects look so weary.

00:04:56.060 Right. I mean, I think you could throw Roe v. Wade in there, too.

00:04:59.080 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dobbs.

00:05:00.980 Whole turnaround. But certainly, I think, you know, that's the concerning thing about the Trump raid

00:05:08.060 from a, you know, from a long-term point of view is, was it politically

00:05:14.060 motivated? And could they do this to anybody? And I think that's the underlying question.

00:05:19.580 As you mentioned, even if you can't stand Donald Trump, there are a whole lot of concerning issues

00:05:24.060 about this case and some other cases. The use of the Espionage Act, the use of filter teams,

00:05:32.220 these are all things, as you mentioned, that all of those sort of ACLU style liberals, 15 years ago,

00:05:39.020 they would have been freaked out by this kind of stuff. But there's dead silence now because

00:05:44.860 it's Donald Trump. And Trump has turned out to be like the greatest PR campaign for the

00:05:50.540 intelligence community and for federal law enforcement that they've ever had. They were

00:05:55.980 so unpopular heading into his election, and now they're getting away with stuff that they never

00:05:59.900 would have before.

00:06:00.620 Hmm. Now, their fortunes with the right have gone down, certainly with the hardcore MAGA,

00:06:05.020 right? And for those of us who are, I don't know, right adjacent, I don't know. I don't know what

00:06:10.300 we are. It's just like open, open-eyed. I think you and I have something similar going for both of us,

00:06:15.660 which is we're not under Trump's spell, but we don't suffer from Trump derangement syndrome.

00:06:21.340 You know, you can sort of see facts clearly, even though they may have Donald Trump involved in them.

00:06:27.340 Yeah, I mean, for me as a journalist, I just look at Donald Trump as another politician. I don't feel

00:06:34.860 one way or another about him. I feel like it's my job to not particularly feel emotionally strongly in

00:06:41.580 any direction about him.

00:06:42.780 Yes, yes.

00:06:43.660 So, you know, when I look at the case, I think, you know, several things can be true. It could

00:06:50.140 be true that he's technically guilty of mishandling these documents, but then you also have to,

00:06:55.100 you know, think as a journalist, well, what does that mean exactly? And go back and look at the

00:06:59.900 other cases that were similar. And, you know, I remember the General Petraeus case where,

00:07:05.900 you know, they allowed him to plead to a misdemeanor count of what was clearly mishandling secret

00:07:12.460 documents. And he clearly knew it was a crime. I mean, he's telling his mistress about these

00:07:19.740 secrets that are going into a book and that's a misdemeanor. And now we're going to use the

00:07:24.700 Espionage Act and the former president, which is a much more serious law where you can get basically,

00:07:31.820 you know, any amount of time in prison for that. So you have to think about those things. No matter

00:07:37.580 what you think about Donald Trump, could they do this to somebody else? Well, they've already used

00:07:41.820 this law with lots of other people who, you know, who may not have deserved it, you know, from Julian

00:07:48.940 Assange to, you know, John Kiriakou, the whistleblower who disclosed the torture program. So those are

00:07:56.940 things I think you have to think about. Okay. So you've made a couple of points recently,

00:08:00.460 your substacks about this that are interesting because you zoom out from the Mar-a-Lago raid

00:08:06.060 and Trump to patterns by the DOJ and the FBI that are concerning to you as a citizen,

00:08:13.100 as a journalist. And some of them you just alluded to. Let me start with a smaller point

00:08:17.340 and then I'll build to your bigger point. Your smaller point on the FBI has been,

00:08:21.580 because you just made the point about they're saying he disclosed or he had and mishandled

00:08:26.140 classified information. One of the points you've been making is that's the FBI's bread and butter.

00:08:31.500 The FBI and the DOJ pretty much daily these days disclose secrets that they're not supposed to

00:08:37.980 disclose and that prior to about 10, 12 years ago, they were not disclosing in the press. It used to

00:08:44.620 be that you could not get a leak out of those organizations if your life depended on it as a

00:08:49.500 reporter. But there's been a shift and now they're bread and butter is to disclose stuff,

00:08:53.900 secrets that they shouldn't be disclosing the very thing they're now accusing Trump of doing.

00:08:58.700 Yeah, exactly. Whether it's leaking grand jury material, which is the most recent, you know,

00:09:04.140 they've done that quite a lot, but they they did it recently with the the Trump case where

00:09:10.300 some somehow political reporters knew ahead of time that a whole bunch of Trump

00:09:15.100 affiliates were going to be getting subpoenas from a grand jury or whether it's something much more

00:09:21.260 serious. I think, you know, the story that really caught my attention was the one involving the

00:09:27.020 Washington Post and Michael Flynn in early 2017, where they basically busted him for talking to

00:09:36.620 the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kisilak. And that was leaked signals intelligence. That's a felony crime.

00:09:44.860 It's one of the few kinds of leaking, a few types of leaking where they can actually implicate the

00:09:50.380 journalists in addition to the leaker. And they started to do that regularly, like around that time,

00:09:57.980 you started to see news stories where you would see an attribution that was like people familiar with

00:10:03.820 the matter or for current and former US officials said. And then there would be this leak that would

00:10:11.420 involve something like FISA material or signals intelligence or intercepts. Remember the the

00:10:21.900 story about Eric Prince and the Seychelles having the back channel meeting with Russians like that was

00:10:27.100 a leaked story. Yeah, there were a whole bunch of them. You know, there was the New York Times story

00:10:33.740 about repeated contacts with Russian intelligence. Another one, there were dozens of them. I had a

00:10:39.900 congressional league call me up at one point and saying and say to me, how come you guys never

00:10:45.580 noticed this? Are you going to do a story about this? Because this is this has become an epidemic.

00:10:51.500 And it's just interesting that nobody's really picked up on this. And honestly, that's that's worse

00:10:58.860 than what Trump was doing by any measure, because they're taking this information and putting it in

00:11:04.620 the Washington Post in the New York Times. Trump, at worst, unless you're some lunatic theorist on

00:11:11.900 the Internet, at worst, so far, what we've seen about Trump is he didn't protect these documents to

00:11:17.100 the extent the National Archives would have liked. Right. Or somebody at the DOJ would have liked.

00:11:22.860 But it's not like Trump was leaking them to the New York Times. He hasn't been accused of publicizing

00:11:27.980 any of this stuff. To the contrary, he had it behind lock and key at Mar-a-Lago.

00:11:33.660 Yeah, exactly. And so they're they're going to say that he is guilty of the espionage act because

00:11:41.100 that act says that you can be guilty of a very serious felony just for possessing or conspiring to

00:11:50.540 possess national what they call national defense information, which doesn't even need to be classified,

00:11:57.260 by the way. It can be anything they say it is. That's why this law is so dangerous. They can say,

00:12:02.140 well, you have national defense information and you conspired to obtain it, which, you know,

00:12:08.780 as you know, Megan, you're a journalist that can be almost anybody who covers national security is

00:12:14.460 guilty of that on a daily basis. Right. If you're trying to get something they think is important,

00:12:20.060 they can call that a crime now. So there are implications for the potential

00:12:24.060 conviction of Donald Trump for for everybody. Right. And that's what I think you have to think

00:12:31.020 about with this case. It would be interesting. I mean, I don't want to see Trump charged.

00:12:35.740 I think it crosses a line that we should not cross as a country on very weak facts. But it would be

00:12:43.660 interesting if they charged him to see the defense, you know, to see his defense attorneys put the system

00:12:49.180 on trial and put the FBI on trial and call into the light what they've been doing and try to sort of

00:12:56.940 point out the absurdity of this kind of government prosecution of a former president who may have had

00:13:01.740 a couple of files down there that arguably he shouldn't have had. I'm still not convinced that

00:13:06.540 that's even true. I don't know. I'm not sure. I know everybody's mocking his. I can just think

00:13:10.700 about it and it's declassified. I have to tell you now, having listened to so many lawyers on both

00:13:15.740 sides and having looked at the case law myself, I'm genuinely still uncertain of what the law is.

00:13:22.140 He might actually win on that defense. It's murky enough. He might actually win on that.

00:13:28.140 There's a real question about whether Congress can sort of handcuff the president's ability to

00:13:32.060 declassify and make him jump through certain hoops to declassify because he's the executive.

00:13:37.500 So anyway, my point is it's it's a weak case and it might be interesting to see it get fought just as

00:13:43.660 it tears the country apart. All right. So let's go back out to the 30,000 foot and talk about the

00:13:48.620 pattern that you've been seeing that you've been noticing with the DOJ and the FBI, almost trying to

00:13:56.060 almost trying to like elbow the courts out of the legal process altogether, almost trying to make

00:14:03.260 these alleged crimes into just an administrative matter where you will freaking plead guilty. You

00:14:10.140 will trust us. You're going to or we'll make your life a living hell and not just yours,

00:14:14.540 but everyone around you that you hire to protect you. Yeah, absolutely. And this this is something

00:14:20.540 the first time I started to think about this was when I covered a story involving

00:14:28.220 a drone case. There was a private person, an American citizen, who sued the American government

00:14:36.540 because he claimed he had been the victim of several unsuccessful drone attacks and basically

00:14:44.700 asked the courts as the federal courts to provide evidence of why he was had been targeted for lethal

00:14:53.100 action. So I went into a courtroom and I saw a federal judge sit there with a lawyer for the DOJ who refused to

00:15:04.460 name what agency he represented. He would only say that he had a client. And they the government

00:15:10.860 successfully asserted that this is what they called political question. It was a matter not for the

00:15:17.100 courts. Of course, you're not supposed to decide political questions. I mean, it is true that if it's

00:15:22.540 a political question, they're not supposed to decide it. Right. But one would think that whether or not

00:15:29.340 you are guilty of a crime punishable by death would be something that you could litigate as an American

00:15:35.180 citizen. You know, it was a little bit shocking to see that. And so this is all part of the war

00:15:40.220 and terror machinery where they've progressively removed more and more processes out of the courtroom

00:15:48.380 and into the sort of administrative sphere. And that is what they're doing when they bring in a filter team

00:15:55.180 to to to vet to vet information, because rather than having a court rule on questions of privilege

00:16:05.100 and admissibility, they basically say, well, we have our own department that does that.

00:16:11.900 We stand by, stand by, stand by, stand by. Let's let's let's let's take two steps back and explain what

00:16:16.700 happens, because there's a great quote in one of your pieces of one of the courts saying this is like the

00:16:21.020 government fox guarding the defendant's hen house. So what explain what they're doing? They're going

00:16:27.660 in these huge, broad brush searches. And rather than saying, I think Matt Taibbi robbed Bank of

00:16:34.780 America on 63rd and Lex, they say, you know, and then rather than getting a search warrant to say,

00:16:40.380 give us all the documents that might pertain to your relationship with Bank of America and where you

00:16:44.780 were on this date. They take everything in Matt Taibbi's files. They go back 20 years. They take

00:16:51.020 your your marital records. They take every single thing they can get their like the widest grab.

00:16:56.380 And then the taint team or this filter team explain what they've been doing.

00:17:02.380 Yeah. So typically they bring out these teams when they're rating an attorney or an attorney's office.

00:17:10.940 And so I went back and I researched the kind of the history of these cases. And one of the first big

00:17:17.260 ones was an attorney named Lynn Stewart, who represented, if you remember, I do. I covered

00:17:25.340 that. You covered that. OK, right. Yeah. So she was very unpopular, if you remember at the time, because

00:17:32.220 she was she was representing the blind Sheik. And they raided her office. They raided this attorney's

00:17:39.500 office. And they didn't just take the files pertaining to that client. They didn't just

00:17:45.180 take her files. They took all the files of all the attorneys at the firm involving all of their

00:17:52.380 clients. And they just had this separate Justice Department team, this what you call a taint team

00:17:59.820 or a filter team decide what's inadmissible, what's what's privileged, what isn't. And then they would

00:18:07.500 pass on the material they would say that the actual investigators could look at. So they just

00:18:15.420 completely bypassed judges. You know, it's actually their province. It's the judicial branches

00:18:25.180 province to rule on these matters. And they've done this over and over and over again, involving

00:18:32.060 either law firms or big corporate clients. Well, they'll go in, they'll just take everything.

00:18:37.580 And they get a free look at the most interesting, secretive, valuable stuff. And they say, oh, well,

00:18:44.780 there's a Chinese wall. We would never use that. But do you feel comfortable about that? Like I wouldn't.

00:18:49.660 No. No.

00:18:49.980 You know, as the client of a law firm, if the FBI went in and took everything because there was some

00:18:56.300 unrelated case that they were investigating, it doesn't make me feel very good. And so that's what

00:19:01.580 those filter teams are for. They're there to bypass judges that they don't have a legitimate use.

00:19:08.540 This is why the James O'Keefe case is so interesting. We got into this last week because we took a deep

00:19:14.220 dive on the Ashley Biden diary. And what's going on here? You've got a you've got the FBI and the

00:19:19.500 Department of Justice going after two losers who took the president's daughter's diary. And she

00:19:25.580 he wasn't even president when they took it. He was running. And that there's a there's a reason they

00:19:31.580 did that. Right. Like what's going on? It seems like abuse of the justice system, frankly, because

00:19:35.580 this would not be a federal case in any other circumstance. But in the connection with this,

00:19:39.820 because these two guys, these two, a gal and a guy who stole it or took it, they say they stole it,

00:19:43.980 they pleaded guilty, tried to sell it to James O'Keefe for 40 grand. And ultimately,

00:19:49.100 I believe he did pay the 40 grand, but he decided not to publish it. But James O'Keefe got

00:19:55.980 swept up in exactly all the things that you are just talking about that you were just talking about.

00:20:01.660 They raided the journalists home at like five in the morning and the homes of the guys who worked for

00:20:07.900 James in this journalistic operation. They took his attorney client privilege stuff. They took all the

00:20:15.020 stuff he was working on in other cases having nothing to do with Ashley Biden.

00:20:20.140 Then they said that they yes, sources. Exactly. Then they said that they were going to filter it.

00:20:25.740 They decide what was attorney client privilege. But he he filed a motion right away saying, hey,

00:20:30.380 you know that this is not OK. And they was the other piece of it. So they they wanted to look

00:20:38.940 through the documents. There was one other similarity that they had also leaked about it.

00:20:45.820 But oh, that was it. They leaked it to The New York Times. They leaked it to The New York Times,

00:20:50.220 like who James was involved in a litigation with at the time. Yeah, exactly. Exactly right. And so you

00:20:57.980 have exactly the people that you don't want to be looking at your stuff, you know, who are clearly

00:21:05.500 in an adversarial position to you, assuming this would be neutral role of the sorter of, you know,

00:21:14.460 privileged material. But that's just devastating. I mean, it's horrible for lawyers. It's it's

00:21:20.460 lethal for a law firm. I mean, think about trying to stay in business after you've had to explain to

00:21:26.060 every one of your clients that the government has seen all of your privileged communications.

00:21:30.620 Forget it. But yeah, but it's even worse for journalists. I had one of my sources on this

00:21:36.220 story chew me out and say, what's wrong with your colleagues? Like, don't they realize that when they

00:21:41.500 raid us, they're going to find journalists in the email boxes of every lawyer in this country,

00:21:48.380 right? And, you know, your sources are going to get outed and you're never going to be able to work

00:21:53.660 again. And, you know, this is a serious problem for us. Like, it's not it's it's really not okay

00:22:00.540 for the government to go in and find out who your sources are, but promise not to use that information.

00:22:07.580 Yeah. Like they're not going to tell. But but they but they might they might tell the New York Times

00:22:12.060 something that's really damaging about you if you're involved in a litigation with them because

00:22:15.580 they're friends with the New York Times. Right. But they promise they're not going to tell the

00:22:18.220 other lawyers within DOJ. But don't worry, that would be a bridge too far. Well, right. Yeah,

00:22:23.100 exactly. That's what that's why these secrets are so closely held. Right. I mean, you know this when

00:22:27.900 you when you make a promise to a source and you say, hey, it's just between you and me. I promise

00:22:33.420 like I will keep my mouth shut. If they if they threaten to throw me in jail, I will go to jail

00:22:37.740 for you. Like that's that's the bond that you have to make with a source. And it's serious like that.

00:22:43.020 That's why this job is serious. Right. And if if it can be broken just like that,

00:22:49.980 if the government can just walk into an office or access your computer files and find out who your

00:22:57.100 sources are, then those promises are meaningless and you'll never be able to do journalism. I mean,

00:23:02.380 forget about all the other stuff involving laws like the Espionage Act, you know, that come into

00:23:09.020 play with cases like the Assange case. Right. Like, you know, if you if you are actually trying to learn

00:23:14.620 secrets, national defense secrets and you and you succeed in doing so and you have a secret source

00:23:20.300 and they're upset about that and they want to prosecute that because they they think that you've

00:23:24.780 leaked something that's dangerous to national security. I have a lot of questions about that,

00:23:29.580 but this is worse. Like they can just come and find out your your sources. And that that is very

00:23:35.500 dangerous. Mm hmm. So we have a DOJ that's gotten larger and more aggressive and more leaky and more

00:23:42.780 political and feels very much out of control run by a guy who's been very partisan, in my opinion,

00:23:49.420 since he took over this office. I mean, the fact that he didn't just dismiss out of hand this attempt

00:23:53.740 to label parents as domestic terrorists when it was brought to him shows that this he's a partisan

00:23:59.180 guy and he's got a son who's pushing this critical race theory for a bunch of dollars. Son in law,

00:24:05.420 I think it is. And which he refuses to talk about. Yeah, he does. His his either I think it's his son

00:24:11.260 in law is making millions off of these critical race theory classes and all this agenda that's been

00:24:16.780 pushed on schools. Meanwhile, Merrick Garland refused to even discuss whether that appeared

00:24:21.420 to present a conflict of interest for him. So there have been a few examples. And most recently,

00:24:26.140 the thing with Trump was egregious, too. I won't talk about it. I'm going to get up here in front

00:24:29.820 of the cameras and I'm going to be this stoic, guarded attorney general at the justice system

00:24:35.260 do its job and then runs and leaks to the Washington Post. Nuclear secrets in Trump's arsenal.

00:24:41.260 Bullshit. We haven't really seen that. Right. Like so far, no proof of that. But now it looks like

00:24:46.940 Matt Trump is going to be indicted. I mean, that's how pretty much everyone I trust sees it,

00:24:53.580 that he's going to be indicted and that we're going to get article after article about what

00:24:58.860 a dirtbag Trump is, how he endangered the country. He had nuclear secrets or who knows what else

00:25:03.660 without putting it in the context that you just did. Yeah. And you can expect a cascade of these

00:25:12.140 leaked stories by people familiar with the matter. Right. That's that's the that's the

00:25:19.340 the name du jour. Right. Of the anonymous source where they they hint at this kind of illegal activity

00:25:27.420 or that. And before long, next thing you know, in the next round of stories that you see written

00:25:32.860 about the subject, it's written about as fact. This has been the pattern throughout the Trump years,

00:25:39.580 whether we're talking about, you know, his alleged help, his alleged collusion with Russia's

00:25:47.980 interference activities. Right. So they'll have somebody who is close to the investigation,

00:25:53.980 leak a bunch of stuff that becomes assumed by the rest of the press corps ahead of time.

00:25:59.820 And then before you know it, you know, they're arguing for prosecution and the potential jury pool

00:26:05.660 has had six months or eight months of listening to journalists tell you absolutely 100 percent for

00:26:11.980 a fact that something something happened. As you mentioned, like, you know, you always have to,

00:26:16.860 as a journalist, keep a little bit of doubt in your mind about what the basic facts are until it's

00:26:21.420 actually come out in court. And we've seen this over and over again, again, in the Trump years,

00:26:25.660 like remember the indictment of the GRU officers by by Mueller. And you had all these journalists say,

00:26:35.660 oh, look, finally, we have proof that they did this or that. And then one of the defendants actually

00:26:41.420 tried to appear in court and they immediately dropped the case because they didn't want to have

00:26:44.620 to give discovery to the other side. So, you know, accusations are not proof. Leaks are not proof.

00:26:53.420 Proof comes in a court case after a jury is decided. And you we've just forgotten that.

00:26:59.500 Well, well, I thought I saw you. Two points. One, insurrection versus riot is another example. I know

00:27:05.260 you called attention that I've been noticing it, too. Every single media person now just calls January

00:27:09.420 6th an insurrection as if it's established fact that was an insurrection. Bullshit. That has a

00:27:14.140 specific legal meaning. And what happened on January 6th, in my view, did not come close to meeting it.

00:27:20.220 But at least it's a matter of dispute. And so a journalist shouldn't be using that term unless if

00:27:26.780 it's if it's not charged politically the way that one is, they shouldn't be using it. If it is charged,

00:27:33.180 they shouldn't be. And instead of just saying riot, which is indisputable. What about what happened to

00:27:40.860 Matt Gaetz? I like what happened to him is a good example of what you just talked about, where Matt Gaetz,

00:27:47.180 I mean, he was all over the news in fall of 2020. Sex trafficking. He had paid for sex with a 17 year old

00:27:55.100 girl. And now that case has totally fallen apart. And they've said that the witnesses who came forward in

00:28:01.900 that case against him are not credible and no prosecution could be based on these alleged

00:28:06.380 people or these these people and their allegations. That's not going to be front page news every

00:28:10.460 place. Right. He's already been tarred and feathered. Right. And that and that's why there used to be

00:28:17.100 such a prohibition in this business about going to certain places with accusations against people,

00:28:22.460 even if you can't stand them. This is the this is the key point. Like you can't make certain kinds of

00:28:29.020 accusations against somebody or even hint at it without an enormous amount of confidence that

00:28:37.020 this is actually going to be proven to be true because the damage is already done by that by that

00:28:43.580 time. I mean, if you start doing stories about how so and so is alleged to have had relationships

00:28:49.740 with a 17 year old or is alleged to have committed rape or, you know, you know, alleged to have done

00:28:57.420 done something terrible. Now, in the social media age, what happens instantaneously is that 50,000

00:29:05.500 accounts, you know, many of whom might be anonymous or PR accounts, whatever, they start circulating this

00:29:10.940 as though it's fact. Oh, well, he had sex with a 17 year old. And then what happens two years later,

00:29:16.540 you know, it comes out that the key witnesses aren't reliable and you got to drop the case.

00:29:20.940 You can't just turn around and say, I'm sorry. At that point, it's over.

00:29:24.540 I mean, that people are going to think that's true forever, no matter what.

00:29:28.860 And that's that's what we don't want to happen as journalists. That's why that's why, especially

00:29:34.460 if you don't like the subject that you're writing about, you've got to be careful because extra,

00:29:39.100 extra careful, extra careful. Exactly. And that's that's what hasn't happened in the Trump years.

00:29:44.540 Yeah, honestly, this is one of the reasons why I'm so resentful of the mainstream media,

00:29:48.860 corporate media, whatever you want to call them, because at a time when I was getting needled

00:29:54.300 by then candidate Donald Trump on a daily basis, I did my level best. Every night before we went

00:29:59.820 out there, I reminded myself on the Kelly file, this is not about me. This is about something

00:30:03.820 much bigger than me. And many nights I defended Trump, a couple of nights I hit Trump when he did

00:30:08.380 something crazy, let he get to attack that judge as not able to hear his case because he was Hispanic.

00:30:13.500 That was one time. But, you know, it's you really have to challenge yourself to check your ego and

00:30:19.260 remind yourself it's not about you and your feelings about this guy. And they just won't.

00:30:24.780 They're just disgusting. Matt, stand by. I want to talk about so much more with you, including this

00:30:29.900 this film about Gitmo detainees. It was supposed to be this media darling at the Sundance Film Festival

00:30:36.140 where this woman tracked their rehabilitation and so on. And then the left turned on her hard once

00:30:43.740 they got a look at her film. We'll talk about that much more with Matt Taibbi right after this.

00:30:48.060 But first, we are bringing you some memorable moments over our first two years of the Megan

00:30:52.540 Kelly show all week. And we begin with a powerful conversation I had with Marcus Luttrell and his

00:30:59.500 twin brother, Morgan. It was August of last year. You know, Marcus, of course,

00:31:03.740 lone survivor and his battle. It's been well documented. This was episode 149. This part

00:31:09.820 in particular stood out on making the most of every day. Listen.

00:31:13.980 I only got one day down here. Tomorrow, you don't have any idea if you're going to see it.

00:31:19.900 Yesterday is gone. That's why we say the only easy day is yesterday. You wake up in the morning,

00:31:24.300 see what you can do. The further you travel away from your day, the further you're traveling away

00:31:28.300 of what you're supposed to be doing. And the day is too heavy. It's like fish get carried by the

00:31:32.860 water. The birds get carried by the air. You're actually supposed to get carried by your day.

00:31:36.620 You're meeting some resistance. You're in the wrong spot. And the people in our lives are,

00:31:40.700 we're talking like stones and we're blades and they're either going to sharpen you,

00:31:44.380 polish you or dull you out. If your life starts to get dull, look around you. And people who say

00:31:49.420 they don't love this country or they hate this, that's the town or whatever the environment they're

00:31:54.220 living in. I heard something like 50 something percent of all people on either the planet or

00:31:58.140 the country don't leave the town they're raised in. So think about that. So just change your environment

00:32:03.500 and everything will change. That was one of my favorite interviews. It was right after Afghanistan

00:32:09.740 and our disastrous exit. So we were so lucky to have him. That is well worth your time.

00:32:13.980 If you're taking a trip, you just want to sort of go through something interesting,

00:32:16.300 listen to a fascinating guy. 149. Check it out.

00:32:24.540 Matt, this was all over Twitter yesterday as people were losing their minds. I love pretty much

00:32:30.300 everything there is to love about the story. There's a filmmaker named Meg Smaker.

00:32:36.060 Smaker. And she made, she smade a film inside of a Saudi rehabilitation center for accused

00:32:44.940 terrorists. So I guess we're in favor of this idea in general. I mean, if you're going to start

00:32:48.860 releasing people from Gitmo, I'd rather they go through the Saudi rehabilitation center for

00:32:53.020 accused terrorists than just like back to business. And she made a documentary called Jihad Rehab.

00:33:00.620 They invited her to present it at the 2022 Sundance Festival, one of the most prestigious

00:33:05.580 showcases in the world, quoting from the New York Times. Her documentary centered on four former

00:33:09.820 Gitmo detainees sent to a rehab center in Saudi Arabia who had opened their lives to her speaking

00:33:14.060 of youthful attraction to Al Qaeda and the Taliban of torture endured and of regrets. Film critics

00:33:20.220 warned that conservatives might bridle at these human portraits, but reviews after the festival screening

00:33:26.300 were strong. But attacks would come from the left, not the right. Arab and Muslim filmmakers and their

00:33:33.740 white supporters accused Ms. Smaker of Islamophobia and American propaganda. Some suggested her race

00:33:39.820 was disqualifying a white woman who presumed to tell the story of Arab men. I can't wait until we get to

00:33:45.580 the point where only white people can tell the stories of white people because you realize white people have

00:33:49.980 dominated this country for a good 200 plus years. Like if we, if we're going to do that, there's not

00:33:54.460 going to be a lot of stories left, right? Okay. So is this how we really want to go? Sundance leaders

00:33:59.260 reversed themselves and apologized. They're sorry they filmed her screen. And then here's the capper.

00:34:06.060 Abigail Disney. God, this woman's a pain in the ass. Grand niece of Walt Disney had been the executive

00:34:11.900 producer of Jihad Rehab and called it freaking brilliant in an email to Ms. Smaker. Now she has disavowed

00:34:19.180 it. She has, there's some, I don't know, what did she say? Hold on. I want to find the exact quote

00:34:24.140 where she said, um, she underestimated how much they were going to hate it. And I failed, failed,

00:34:32.220 absolutely failed to understand just how exhausted by and disgusted with the perpetual representation

00:34:36.860 of Muslim men and women as terrorists or former terrorists or potential terrorists, the Muslim people

00:34:41.820 are. So what do we make of this? I mean, where do, where do you even start? There's so many issues

00:34:48.940 here. Uh, so many, so many. So I should just disclose, I've personally dealt with a little tiny

00:34:55.740 bit of this. Uh, I, I co-wrote a book with a black author, um, called the business secrets of drug dealing.

00:35:03.180 I basically ghost wrote a book, uh, uh, with an anonymous uncaught drug dealer. And I caught a lot

00:35:11.420 of flack for putting my name on the book of, uh, of the story of some of a, of a black person. Um,

00:35:20.780 even though we're, we're close friends and, uh, and this was basically just me being a ghost writer.

00:35:26.940 You know, it wasn't, I wasn't cultural appropriation. I got criticized for that. Um,

00:35:31.900 and so this is now, uh, you know, uh, a factor that you have to consider when apparently when you're

00:35:38.620 doing reporting, I mean, I also, I also wrote a book about the, the Eric Garner case, and I think

00:35:44.460 that would be difficult to get that kind of, um, book contract these days, um, because of the tension

00:35:52.460 of a white reporter, uh, covering that story. No, I, I wrote that book because just, I happened to

00:35:58.220 live near the area and went to the place and, and from the stories, I, I liked the character and I

00:36:04.860 felt like I could connect with it and try to tell that story, but that's not the only consideration

00:36:10.460 now for journalists. You have to think about all this other stuff. And then there's the, the other

00:36:14.460 crazy thing where now we don't want, um, we're worried about people seeing documentaries about

00:36:25.020 questionable characters just because, um, you know, we're trying to learn about them. Like

00:36:31.580 that's somehow bad. And we saw this with Alex Lee Moyers movie, uh, that feeling when no GF, you know,

00:36:38.380 um, about, uh, you know, in cell culture. Uh, apparently that was bad because we got to

00:36:46.300 see these people, but they weren't just brutally criticized. We actually learned what they were

00:36:50.860 all about. I think that's, that's what journalism is for, isn't it? Like we're, we're supposed to be

00:36:56.140 learning why things happen. Um, and suddenly there, you know, that's dangerous. I don't know what you

00:37:03.100 think. I think that's crazy. I mean, what's crazy is it sounds like this is a, this film is rather

00:37:07.580 sympathetic toward these accused terrorists who are now reforming themselves thanks to their rehab.

00:37:14.460 And they were worried that the right was going to think it was too sympathetic. Meanwhile,

00:37:18.540 the right's like, we don't give a shit. Like do your thing. We're not the ones who are censoring.

00:37:23.340 That's yesteryear. Now it's the left who censors. And the left doesn't seem to be saying you've

00:37:28.620 misportrayed these guys. The left is saying just the fact that you would highlight them having,

00:37:35.820 you know, being reformed terrorists is somehow wrong. And the color of the filmmaker is wrong.

00:37:44.060 It's like, I'm sorry, but they are apparently admitted terrorists trying to reform themselves.

00:37:51.260 And there's no question who attacked us on nine 11. It doesn't mean all Muslim people are bad,

00:37:55.740 but sorry, they did come from Saudi Arabia. And this is a piece of our history. There's nothing,

00:38:00.700 we're not going to whitewash it. Next thing you know, we're going to see reform movies where the

00:38:04.060 9 11 hijackers were all white. That's going to make the left feel better. That can air at Sundance.

00:38:10.380 Well, first of all, if they're saying that, I think they misunderstood the point of the movie.

00:38:18.460 You know, because if they're, if they're saying this is, this is a caricature of,

00:38:25.500 of our people as terrorists. Uh, my understanding of what this film is now, I should admit, I haven't

00:38:32.220 seen it, but you know, uh, what it does do is it presents the argument, um, of these people and

00:38:42.060 shows why they were attracted to this cause, which was very taboo in our culture for, for a long time.

00:38:47.580 I mean, we went 20 years, um, in the United States really without hearing, well, why do people join

00:38:53.500 groups like Al Qaeda? I mean, there's no good reason that you would do that, but there are reasons,

00:38:58.780 right? And we have to know what they are. It's like, that's important. And, um, and so if, if you're

00:39:05.420 some kind of leftist and you're saying this is a bad film because it, it inaccurately portrays

00:39:12.060 people, um, as terrorists when actually, uh, from the sound of it, uh, what, what it,

00:39:20.380 what it was doing was, was, was putting a, you know, um, uh, sort of a neutral face on the argument

00:39:27.580 for terrorism. Uh, they didn't seem to have a problem with that. I don't, I, that was strange.

00:39:32.940 Nor it's like, nor did they pick like some cab driver in New York and say, here's the Muslim man.

00:39:37.900 Let's talk about how he's likely linked to terrorism. That's not what happened. They,

00:39:40.860 they, they, these are Gitmo detainees who admit, according to what I read in the times,

00:39:46.220 that they were part of, they were attracted to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. They received torture and

00:39:52.540 so on. They regret it. And so the, the, what Abigail Disney says is people are disgusted

00:39:58.620 with the perpetual representation of Muslim men and women as terrorists or former terrorists or

00:40:04.300 potential terrorists. Um, I don't, it doesn't sound like that's what this film actually does.

00:40:08.060 It talks about people who actually were potential terrorists and now regret it. So sorry,

00:40:13.500 if you don't want attention being called to one of the darkest chapters of American history,

00:40:18.780 which was a mere 21 years ago, but it happens to be part of a, you have no problem calling attention to,

00:40:24.860 you know, 16, 19 in American history. This one's a lot more recent and needs to be explored.

00:40:30.540 Right. And, and by the way, there, there are movies about the innocent Muslim men who were

00:40:37.980 targeted by, you know, the military. I mean, think of, I think of Alex Gibney's movie,

00:40:43.020 Taxi to the Dark Side, where they, you know, they, they did make mistakes and put people in Gitmo

00:40:47.500 who didn't belong there. Right. That's a story. That's a real story. But there are people who did

00:40:51.980 belong there. Right. I mean, or, or belong somewhere. I mean, I think I, I have a little bit of a problem

00:40:57.900 with like, you know, the whole concept of an enemy combatant, you know, without the Geneva

00:41:02.380 conventions, no trials, but whatever, like there are, there are people who are admitted terrorists

00:41:07.740 and this movie is about them. Right. So it's very valuable to learn what they have to say.

00:41:14.220 You can't, like the fact that this Abigail Disney turned on these folks just as soon as,

00:41:18.380 now she's not, um, she's not supporting this filmmaker. This filmmaker is now broke. She has no

00:41:23.500 money. More than 230 filmmakers signed a letter denouncing the documentary. A majority had not

00:41:29.980 seen it. The, the head of the festival demanded to see consent forms from the detainees. She

00:41:36.860 demanded to see the filmmakers plan to protect them once the film debuted. How the hell is that

00:41:41.180 Sundance's, you know, concern? Okay. Uh, she, she required an ethics review of the plans and she gave

00:41:47.980 the filmmaker four days to comply. Uh, now she's not answering calls. This tap at the Jackson,

00:41:53.820 uh, from the Sundance film festival, uh, from the New York times. She won't even talk to them. So

00:41:58.220 anyway, it's, it's crazy. All right, let me shift gears. How many, how many elements of that story

00:42:03.340 have you heard like 500 times in the last five years? First of all, there's the mandatory apology,

00:42:10.140 right? Yep. Then there's the, then there's the group letter that's signed by a bunch of people who

00:42:15.100 didn't actually read the offend, read or watch the offending material. Um, you know,

00:42:20.380 and, and then it doesn't, the apology doesn't help anyway. Right. That's the other thing.

00:42:25.980 That's right. The person who tries to do the, you know, make amends ends up, you know,

00:42:29.800 with their career wrecked anyway. It's just, it's the same story over and over.

00:42:33.380 Can I tell you just as an aside, I was at this event a couple of weeks ago and general,

00:42:36.920 general Michael Hayden spoke and general Michael Hayden actually went out there and started to

00:42:40.740 speak to the crowd on what is and is not disinformation. And I was like,

00:42:44.920 you've got to be kidding me. Like you were one of the people who signed the absurd letter

00:42:49.760 on the Hunter Biden laptop for which you have not apologized. And you were literally on Twitter

00:42:53.680 two weeks prior to this comparing Trump to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg sold secrets to the Russians and

00:43:01.980 were executed. So I think you should not talk about disinformation publicly, maybe just to your

00:43:07.740 family and your friends, but this is not your area of information or expertise anymore. But to your

00:43:12.700 point, uh, we keep doing this over and over and over. And of course there's the well-meaning

00:43:17.540 liberal, like Abigail, uh, Disney walking face first into like the garden hoe, which steps on

00:43:24.640 and smacks her in the face. I was just trying to do a wonderful thing for the Muslims and I just

00:43:28.540 didn't see it. And then the left eats her alive. Okay. Let's talk about Hillary Clinton. So we got

00:43:35.280 Hayden comparing Trump to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Okay. And we've got Hillary appearing to compare

00:43:42.480 Trump to wait for it. Well, and his supporters to Hitler and Hitler's supporters. Listen,

00:43:49.920 I remember as a, as a young student, you know, trying to figure out how did people get basically,

00:43:59.120 um, drawn in by Hitler? How did that happen? And I'd watch newsreels and I'd see this guy

00:44:05.380 standing up there ranting and raving and people shouting and raising their arms. I thought,

00:44:11.680 what's happened to these people? Why did they believe that? You saw the rally in Ohio the other night,

00:44:17.260 Trump is there ranting and raving for more than an hour. And you have these rows of young men

00:44:25.100 with their arms raised. Of course. In, in the, I guess, presumably the Heil Hitler sign,

00:44:33.200 which they were openly doing at a Trump rally. No, the only story I saw was a group in prayer,

00:44:38.220 um, raise their hands as you do often in church or religious settings where a prayer is being said.

00:44:43.740 Right. Um, that, that's what I saw. And it was misrepresented repeatedly by the media and people

00:44:49.360 like Hillary Clinton. Yeah. I've been to a lot of Trump rallies. Um, and you know, in not,

00:44:57.060 not always friendly circumstances. I mean, as the media, they, they don't, they don't tend not to

00:45:01.520 like you too much. And, um, I've never seen anything like that. So I, I don't know what she's

00:45:06.220 talking about, but that was like the meme du jour last week that the Ohio rally was Nuremberg. Uh,

00:45:12.880 it was like everybody passed out a memo that this is, this is what we're going with this week. Um,

00:45:18.360 and this is ridiculous. Like, you know, Hitler is Hitler. Let's, let's stop with that. You know,

00:45:24.160 can I tell you the Heil Hitler sign, however, is a little too common. Like it's, this is a gesture

00:45:31.720 that like you get asked to make in your life and you're like, Oh my God, I look like I'm heiling

00:45:35.760 Hitler. Like we were at our friend's vow renewal and the priest asked us to all hold up our arms

00:45:41.520 in like a, for a blessing over the couple. And like, you look around the crowd, it is a little

00:45:47.000 close to the Heil Hitler, but no sane person would ever look at this thing and say, Oh, they're all

00:45:52.460 heiling Hitler. There was this one time I did one of those, um, zip lines, Matt, you know,

00:45:58.540 you do the zip line and, um, they said, Oh, the photographer is going to be at the last zip line.

00:46:03.100 So make sure you do your supermodel pose, you know, and they, and you know, you can put your

00:46:06.900 hand behind your head and put your arm out, you know, like I'm swimming in. And I tried that in

00:46:11.640 every single picture. It looked like a Heil Hitler. I was like, Holy shit. Not only do I not want to

00:46:14.880 buy these, you need to destroy the negatives. That's new. Yeah, that's right. It's hard. Like they're

00:46:28.220 okay. Sign now it means you're a white supremacist, your arm up in prayer or you can't, can't do

00:46:33.260 anything anymore. Matt, it's been a pleasure. Come back soon. Would you? Of course. I'd be

00:46:38.900 glad to. And congratulations on your two years. Thank you. The show's been great. Thank you. And

00:46:44.240 thanks for being a part of it so often. All right. Coming up the OGs, Arthur and Mark are here for

00:46:49.560 Kelly's court. We have so much goodness for you. Breaking news, by the way, on Alec Baldwin. We're

00:46:54.180 going to get into that Adnan Syed case and the woman, so-called Central Park Karen. She just had

00:47:00.180 a big court ruling. We'll tell you what happened. Remember folks, you can find the Megan Kelly show

00:47:04.340 live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon East and the full video show and clips when

00:47:11.040 you subscribe to my YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megan Kelly. If you prefer an audio podcast,

00:47:17.420 that's what we launched two years ago. Follow and download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher,

00:47:22.140 or wherever you get your podcasts. There you'll find our full archives with almost 400 shows. And

00:47:27.180 if you've got thoughts on any of them, you can now email me at Megan, M-E-G-Y-N, at MeganKelley.com.

00:47:39.720 We could not celebrate our two-year anniversary without Kelly's court and two of my all-time

00:47:44.040 favorite lawyers, Arthur Idala and Mark Iglarsh, both former prosecutors, now defense attorneys,

00:47:49.320 on the docket today. Several big cases making headlines today, including a deep dive on the

00:47:54.840 case of Adnan Syed. He's the man featured in the popular 2014 podcast Serial. He was released last

00:48:02.720 week from prison after spending 23 years behind bars for killing his ex-girlfriend. Prosecutors now

00:48:09.620 asking for a new trial. And there's a real question about whether they'll even pursue that.

00:48:15.180 Is he really innocent? Or is this left-wing politics at play? We'll discuss it. But first,

00:48:21.480 there is breaking news on whether Hollywood actor Alec Baldwin is about to be charged criminally in

00:48:28.820 connection with the shooting death of the cinematographer on his film Rust. We're going

00:48:34.320 to talk about it with Arthur Idala, trial attorney, managing partner at Idala, Bertuna and Kamens,

00:48:39.240 and Mark Iglarsh, as I said, former prosecutor, now defense attorney. All right, guys, Alec Baldwin

00:48:45.480 is back in the news and here's the story. All right, this is from the New York Post. Alec Baldwin could

00:48:51.920 soon face criminal charges for allegedly firing the round that killed cinematographer Helena Hutchins

00:48:57.720 on the set of Rust as the Santa Fe Sheriff's Office prepares to release its final investigative report.

00:49:05.180 The Santa Fe DA, Mary Carmack Altwise, filed an emergency request for more than 600,000 bucks

00:49:12.920 from New Mexico's Board of Finance so her office would have the funds necessary to prosecute,

00:49:16.900 she says, up to four people in connection with the incident, citing the Santa Fe New Mexican

00:49:21.680 as its source for the reporting. She did not disclose who the four people would be,

00:49:26.160 but noted in the request, quote, one of the possible defendants is well-known movie actor,

00:49:30.680 Alec Baldwin. Oh, so it's, well, hmm. So, yeah, let me see if I can divine.

00:49:39.140 And they're saying the prosecution could require up to four separate jury trials. The only thing

00:49:44.140 she's waiting on, she says, is FBI reports, phones, phone reports and interviews that they've been

00:49:49.520 waiting on for the last year, but they're expecting them right now. And the Sheriff's Office final report

00:49:54.820 is expected within a week. She says, we're ready to move forward immediately once we get the data that

00:50:01.560 we're expecting. So it looks very much like Alec Baldwin could be charged and he could be charged

00:50:06.760 soon. Before I toss it to you, one other piece of color. His Instagram post this morning was pretty

00:50:12.080 cryptic. Quote, my heart has been broken a thousand times this past year and things in my life may never be

00:50:19.840 the same. Lots of changes coming, but my family has kept me alive. So do we think he will be charged

00:50:27.900 with some sort of potentially gun violation? Something as bad as negligent homicide? Or do we not? And what

00:50:37.300 are the odds of him actually being convicted of such a charge? Mark, you want to take it first?

00:50:42.200 Yes. Okay. This is outrageous. He's an actor. I can't imagine if somebody hands him a prop that it's his

00:50:52.200 obligation to look through it and make sure that it's safe. That is clearly someone else's responsibility.

00:50:59.160 But what gives me pause is I think that I read that he was saying that it went off accidentally.

00:51:04.200 Yep. Wait a second. If I'm his lawyer, I say, you don't need to say that. Shut up.

00:51:08.380 You pulled the trigger, you aimed it, and you pulled it because you believed that someone whose job it

00:51:14.620 was made sure it was safe. Yeah. You are so right. Arthur, before you weigh in, here is that moment

00:51:20.360 in which Alec Baldwin told George Stephanopoulos he never fired the gun, the gun that killed Helena

00:51:28.040 Hutchins. So I take the gun and I start to cock the gun. I'm not going to pull the trigger. I said,

00:51:34.220 do you see that? She goes, well, just cheat it down and tilt it down a little bit like that. And I

00:51:37.340 cocked the gun. I go, can you see that? Can you see that? Can you see that? And she says,

00:51:41.120 and then I let go of the hammer of the gun and the gun goes off.

00:51:45.160 I let go of the hammer of the gun and the gun goes off.

00:51:47.260 At the moment. The decisive moment.

00:51:48.740 That was the moment the gun went off. Yeah. That was the moment the gun went off.

00:51:51.200 It wasn't in the script for the trigger to be pulled.

00:51:54.980 Well, the trigger wasn't pulled. I didn't pull the trigger.

00:51:57.000 So you never pulled the trigger?

00:51:58.300 No, no, no, no, no. I would never point a gun at anyone and pull a trigger at them. Never.

00:52:01.560 Well, Arthur, the experts have all come forward and said that's not possible. In fact, a recent FBI

00:52:08.920 forensic report concluded this particular firearm could not have gone off unless someone pulled the

00:52:15.000 trigger.

00:52:17.200 That sounds like it's logical and makes a lot of sense. I just want to back up to the request for

00:52:22.760 the money. Having worked with a particular district attorney's office in their request for here in

00:52:29.140 the city of New York for additional funding. They always exaggerate what they need the money for.

00:52:35.640 And, you know, in New York, you're asking for millions of dollars here. You're asking for 600,000.

00:52:39.780 But I assume that's a tremendous amount of money for a small district attorney's office.

00:52:44.260 So they're going to like blow out what they are. We have all this thing and it's going to be a famous

00:52:48.580 person. Of course, they want to give the idea that it's going to be an international case because

00:52:52.880 let's face it, Alec Baldwin gets arrested for homicide, any form of homicide.

00:52:57.600 It's going to be an international event. And they want to have the money so that New Mexico looks

00:53:03.580 good and looks very professional. So I wouldn't be shocked if arrests are made. And ultimately,

00:53:09.240 after the prosecutor has secured the funding for the office, Alec Baldwin does not turn out to be

00:53:15.180 a defendant in this case.

00:53:15.740 That's interesting.

00:53:16.200 Because I totally agree with Mark. It's not it's not his responsibility. And there's anything we've

00:53:22.240 learned through the coverage of this case that there were people who it was their exact

00:53:27.340 responsibility to make sure it was a cold gun.

00:53:31.220 That's not that it's not that clear. Yes, there were people whose responsibility that was. However,

00:53:35.620 we've had lots of actors. I think George Clooney, wasn't he one of them,

00:53:39.880 came forward and said, I would never, would never, ever handle a gun on a movie set without

00:53:46.500 checking it myself. I don't care how many people tell me it's a cold gun. It's what you do.

00:53:51.400 But how does he know the difference between that?

00:53:53.140 It's his George Clooney. Hello.

00:53:55.880 How does he know? How does he know which bullet is a live bullet versus a black bullet?

00:53:59.780 And also, what value is that? So Clooney knows, you know, the guys who handle the guns get high.

00:54:05.100 Maybe Alex doesn't know that, you know, so he just trusts. That's not criminal. Understand that

00:54:10.700 to reach a level of criminality, you're talking about proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Okay,

00:54:15.140 he was negligent in hindsight. Now he knows you check the gun, make sure you don't trust anybody.

00:54:20.280 Okay, but wrinkle, wrinkle, counselor wrinkle. He was the producer, he was the executive producer

00:54:25.480 of the whole movie. And the movie was said to be riddled with security problems, safety problems,

00:54:30.020 I should say. One guy resigned in protest. They weren't running the shop well. And clearly,

00:54:35.620 if the girl, the armorer who was responsible for the guns, and she didn't hand the gun,

00:54:42.420 somebody else, the assistant director handed him the gun, but she was in charge of guns. So here's

00:54:46.640 the people that they could be looking at. The assistant director is the one who handed Alec Baldwin

00:54:50.280 the gun and said, cold gun. Alec Baldwin's the one who fired the gun without checking inside.

00:54:54.780 Um, then there's the armorer who was responsible for the guns on the set, but she's been pointing

00:55:00.040 her finger at the ammunition guy because the problem, according to the armorer, is she was

00:55:07.060 given what were supposed to be blanks that were actually live rounds. And the person who gave her

00:55:12.500 that ammo should have known that. And there's also a question about whether there was some sort of

00:55:16.580 subterfuge on set with somebody actually messing with the gun for some reason.

00:55:21.020 So you added the wrinkle is that he's the executive producer. Okay. And in a criminal

00:55:27.980 setting that has to me a little bit of relevance, but in a civil setting, it has a lot more than

00:55:34.700 your responsible civilly. My question is, does he even know the difference? Does he, is he an expert?

00:55:41.180 Is he supposed to open up whatever it is, look inside and he's supposed to know whether it's a live

00:55:47.320 round or not a live round? That cannot be his responsibility. Well, especially if it was missed,

00:55:52.680 if it was missed by the armorer, who is the gun expert. And we'll see whether their theory is she

00:55:57.500 missed, she, she didn't, she couldn't tell the difference or, um, she, she failed to check. I

00:56:03.020 believe it's that she saw and she couldn't tell the difference. Go ahead, Arthur.

00:56:05.980 It's just, it's whether it rises to a crime versus a civil liability, whether this is thing about

00:56:14.080 people forking up a whole bunch of money, um, to her family, um, or should they be going to jail?

00:56:21.440 And, um, it, look, it just sounds like there were so many hands in this puzzle and this pie or soup,

00:56:27.040 whatever you want to call it. I don't think it rises to the level of criminality that any actor,

00:56:33.300 Alec Baldwin, George Clooney, or some extra has that, they have the duty, the criminal,

00:56:39.100 they're bound by criminal, by the penal law to make sure. Okay. But that may not be true.

00:56:45.780 That it's cold gun. They're told it's a cold gun. No, no, no, but I'm backing up. Okay. I don't,

00:56:51.160 I don't see right now. I don't see the criminal liability of Alec Baldwin. I agree, but I do see the

00:56:55.460 civil liability through the roof. And I also see his failure to, to keep a safe set as a defense.

00:57:01.360 The others are going to use, you know, they're going to point the finger at him and say,

00:57:05.120 I was overworked. I was stretched too thin. I raised the alarm saying, I can't handle all of

00:57:10.240 this. I need help. It's him. He's the one who wouldn't fork out the dough. Cause he wanted to

00:57:14.320 maintain his little house in the Hamptons and his house here. And then the big star and F him

00:57:18.960 because he wanted to save dough. Somebody died. That's what they'll say. But I do think that there

00:57:23.580 is somebody like if what the armor seems to be saying is true. If the guy who is responsible for funding,

00:57:29.860 for putting the ammo on the set, gave a box of live rounds that was mislabeled dummy rounds,

00:57:39.600 that definitely could be criminal. No.

00:57:42.740 Yes. That's criminal. I would say, I would say you can make a strong case for criminally

00:57:47.480 negligent homicide.

00:57:49.200 Yeah. We're reckless conduct, willful and want disregard of human life and property. I would

00:57:53.500 like to hear more, but now we're getting into that kind of thing. Yeah.

00:57:56.980 Yeah. And by the way, just to make a clarification, cause I looked at this when the case first

00:58:01.080 broke, the difference between dummy rounds, excuse me, and blanks is blanks. You put in

00:58:05.880 the gun because you want them to do smoke and make a sound and make the gun look like something

00:58:11.360 just happened. Dummies are just lookalikes. They're just like little imposters of actual

00:58:18.580 bullets. So if you have a gun, like a Colt 45 that shows the bullets, the movie audience

00:58:24.560 sees bullets. You know, they think what they think they see bullets really, they just see

00:58:28.720 imposters, but they can't do the smoke and the noise and all the stuff that blanks. And I think

00:58:34.080 the allegation here is that these were supposed to be dummy rounds to just make the gun look real,

00:58:38.900 like it was loaded. And in fact, it's really troubling me. And I think Arthur could speak to

00:58:44.220 this too. There seems to be, and I see it happening more lately where you've got civil liability,

00:58:51.820 but then you've got a lot of public protest, people who are outraged. You've maybe got a dead

00:58:58.060 body and a family who gets a lawyer. And then that all of a sudden gives rise to the prosecutors to

00:59:03.760 say, you know what? We need now to charge this criminally when it falls short of criminality.

00:59:09.740 That seems to be happening more often. It's happened with some of my clients and I take exception to it.

00:59:14.300 It's kind of happening with Donald Trump.

00:59:16.200 And we, I guess you want to segue maybe, but Megan, we've covered, the three of us

00:59:22.040 have covered cases regarding police officers that really should probably be civil cases where

00:59:27.740 the government, the city entity should be paying a victim. And, you know, we take it to the extreme

00:59:34.180 and we charge them criminally and wind up putting them in jail.

00:59:38.360 Also, Megan, we kind of skipped over Alec Baldwin denying that he actually pulled the trigger

00:59:44.120 when probably the overwhelming evidence shows that he did pull the trigger or someone has

00:59:49.880 100% he pulled the trigger.

00:59:52.020 Right. So I don't know how that fits into this conversation that we're having.

00:59:55.920 He's a liar.

00:59:56.480 He's now lying about what happened.

00:59:58.720 It hurts him. I don't, whether it's true or not, he's now narrowed down the factual focus to that.

01:00:04.520 It shouldn't be that. His best argument is it's not his job. Someone else is hired to do that.

01:00:09.660 Yeah. You're right. That's his ego. As Mark always says, it's not his amigo because he needed to do

01:00:16.180 a PR splash with George Stephanopoulos. Like I'm cool. I'm Alec Baldwin. I would never hurt anybody.

01:00:21.960 I was totally in control and I did all the right things. And the gun just magically went off as the

01:00:25.000 magical gun. And he was too stupid to realize when you're talking about potential criminal charges,

01:00:29.920 keep your mouth shut. Say nothing. Your only goal should be not to get charged. And once all those

01:00:35.340 decisions are made, you can go out and talk to the cameras again. Okay. Let's shift gears because I

01:00:39.600 really want to talk about, and we will get to Trump if we have time, but let's talk about Adnan Syed

01:00:43.780 because this is, I mean, everybody's talking about this. I don't know people who even didn't listen

01:00:48.360 to serial when it came out. I just re-listened to it because of the update, but here's the story.

01:00:54.380 So Adnan Syed was 17. He was accused and then found guilty of murdering another 17 year old,

01:01:00.820 his girlfriend who had recently broken up with him. And, um, there were cultural barriers that

01:01:06.960 didn't allow them to be like open with their relationship. His family, he was Muslim and his

01:01:12.160 family didn't want him dating her. And I think she was Asian and her family didn't want her dating

01:01:17.120 or dating at all, not even necessarily the other. So they kept it on the down low, but then she broke

01:01:21.920 up with him. And the theory was that he was so angry. He killed her. He strangled her. And the

01:01:26.980 linchpin to the case was his friend. Uh, this guy, Jay came forward and said,

01:01:32.680 Adnan told me he was going to kill her. And then he called me up and said, come outside,

01:01:38.040 take a look at what's in the trunk. And it was her and she was dead and he had just strangled her.

01:01:44.020 He claimed to his friend, Jay, and then Jay helped him bury her body. And he led police,

01:01:51.480 Jay did ultimately to the, uh, location of the car, um, where they had, uh, which they had

01:01:59.840 disposed of. She was allegedly strangled in the back of her car. So those are the basic facts

01:02:04.360 against Adnan. And Adnan basically said Jay made the whole thing up. None of that happened. And he

01:02:08.480 did not kill her. And, um, serial, which is by, it's like this reporter for the New York Times

01:02:14.380 put together this fascinating look at it. And she led us down a road where she did acknowledge

01:02:19.620 facts that were bad for Adnan. You know, she, she didn't sound like she was in the tank for him

01:02:23.780 as she did the reporting, but she didn't cover every fact that was bad for him. And she definitely

01:02:30.600 seemed to want to believe in him. And, you know, he's a reporter, even as a lawyer, you can get

01:02:34.360 sucked into the, like, I'm rooting for a certain result as opposed to, I just want to know what's

01:02:40.360 true. Right. Yeah. Right. And especially as a prosecutor, you're not supposed to do that.

01:02:45.260 You're supposed to not get sucked into narrative. You're supposed to get sucked into truth and

01:02:48.120 justice. Anywho, uh, now he's been released because Marilyn Mosby on her way out, this woman's

01:02:55.940 facing her own criminal indictment for taking illegal advantage of the tax laws, uh, in

01:03:02.700 connection with COVID. She just got booted out of office by the city of Baltimore, whose murder rate

01:03:07.620 has gone up like 300% every year for the past several years. She's soft on crime. She's one of

01:03:12.380 these DAs who doesn't like to prosecute crime. And in this case, there have been allegations of it's

01:03:17.480 the fact that Adnan is Muslim, is Pakistani, was used against him. And on her way out of office,

01:03:24.500 she says, we, the prosecutor's office didn't do right by this guy. And we need to walk away from

01:03:31.620 this case. And so he got out of jail. They have 30 days to say whether they're going to retry him.

01:03:36.540 I don't, I don't believe anybody thinks that's going to happen. But what is your take as to people

01:03:41.160 who have steeped themselves professionally in the criminal law for your entire adult lives? Arthur?

01:03:49.300 When I read over, uh, the research packet that your staff so diligently put together,

01:03:54.880 and I say that with all sincerity, cause it really was, uh, very thorough.

01:03:59.180 Here's what stuck out, stuck out for me in terms of guilt or innocence.

01:04:02.600 If you, Megyn Kelly, got a call today from someone in the world of your good friend, Janice Dean,

01:04:10.260 and said, we haven't spoke, we haven't heard from Janice in two days. Have you spoken to her,

01:04:13.940 Megyn? I can tell you, cause this happened to me last week. The first thing I would do

01:04:19.800 is pick up the phone and try to call that person myself. Maybe she's mad at Sean, her husband.

01:04:25.680 Maybe she's, there's an issue, but she'll accept my call. And that's exactly what happened to me

01:04:30.580 and the individual who they were looking for pick up the phone immediately and said,

01:04:35.120 Hey, Art, what's going on? This guy who spoke to this woman every day, every day gets a call

01:04:41.520 that, and that he hadn't spoken to her in a day and a half or something like that. And they can't

01:04:45.260 find her. And he never, ever dials her number again. And for me as a prosecutor, that's what I

01:04:53.040 would be driving home more than any Brady violation, more than any story or anything that just does not

01:05:00.480 make sense. That is a devastating fact. I have to say, Mark, that that's, that's what jumped out

01:05:06.560 at me too, of all the bad facts against him. I mean, it's not quite as bad as Jay saying he showed

01:05:11.720 me the dead body in his car and then I helped bury the body. You know, I'm like, that's, that's

01:05:15.940 pretty bad, but that's another bad one. First of all, no one's vouching here for the credibility

01:05:20.740 of Jay. We don't know him. We don't know his motivations. We do know he's human. And Arthur and I

01:05:25.280 know in our business, humans lie. What I do know is that the prosecutors have said that we're not

01:05:32.480 requesting a new trial because he's innocent. So I can't say that the guy is innocent. Prosecutors

01:05:37.760 can't say that. But what it seems like occurred here is he was denied fundamental due process.

01:05:45.340 When you rely upon a cell phone tower technology and evidence that somehow wasn't proper, I don't know

01:05:55.120 exactly why it was junk science. No, I know. I know why. I know why. I looked at this. So one of

01:06:00.480 the things, so Jay gets up there and Jay had changed his stories a couple of times. He changed the

01:06:04.280 location at which he was allegedly shown the, the, the dead body, the victim. And, um, he, so he,

01:06:12.260 first he said it was one location and then it turned out it was another location. And now he says,

01:06:15.560 look, it happened in front of my grandmother's home and I just didn't want to get my grandmother

01:06:18.620 involved. And I'd been dealing drugs out of my grandmother's house and I just didn't want

01:06:21.860 anything to come back on me or her or anything there. That's why I didn't say originally where

01:06:26.760 it happened. Okay. But, but he also says that, um, he had Adnan's phone that day. Anyway,

01:06:33.740 let me try to boil it down. There was a question about whether Adnan had been at the site where the

01:06:38.980 body was disposed of. And the prosecutors use cell phone records to say, look, you can see Adnan's

01:06:45.980 phone at this site. This site was, it's called leaked, leaked in or leaking park. It sounds like

01:06:53.300 Lincoln park, but it's not. And they said, you can see his cell phone right by this park, Adnan.

01:06:58.180 So we can, so Jay has corroboration. The cell phones of Adnan, Adnan's cell phone records show he was

01:07:03.940 there. And what they're saying is that if that you're, that if Adnan made an outgoing call from his

01:07:11.240 cell phone from that park, it would be reliable, but that quote, according to the times, all experts

01:07:16.320 agree incoming calls to one cell phone may not be used as corroborating evidence of the location

01:07:23.800 of the person holding the phone and receiving the call and that it was allowed at this trial.

01:07:30.020 So you add that to the fact that there were two, at least potential other suspects that prosecutors

01:07:37.320 knew about and failed to disclose to the defense, a clear Brady violation, a clear violation of due

01:07:44.140 process. And so why should we care about this guy? Even if he's guilty, why should we care about him?

01:07:49.820 Because any of us, if we're ever accused of anything or someone we love or know is accused of a crime,

01:07:56.000 we must hold prosecutors to following the rules so that this doesn't happen to us. We don't have

01:08:02.740 failures or miscarriages of justice, which apparently occurred in this case. So I applaud

01:08:07.220 the prosecutor. That's truly what happened. I applaud her for doing the right thing.

01:08:12.520 If there's a Brady violation, Brady, Brady is the, is the rule that requires you as a prosecutor to

01:08:16.920 turn over all evidence that may be potentially exculpatory, meaning it may suggest the guys didn't

01:08:23.180 do it to his defense lawyer. And they're saying in this case, that wasn't done, that there were two

01:08:27.860 potential other suspects and the prosecutor had them and knew of them in his files and her files

01:08:33.080 and did not turn them over to the defense. Go ahead, Arthur.

01:08:36.300 In terms of due process and in terms of echoing what, what Mark said, and it is a lot of, I just

01:08:42.300 lectured the other night to, you know, a law school class asking about the role of the criminal defense

01:08:48.000 attorney. And a lot of it is to making sure we're making sure that everyone's kind of playing by the

01:08:52.900 rules. And one of the debates that I'm in right now regarding Brady is although the prosecutor

01:08:59.240 turned the Brady material over to me, they did not disclose it to the grand jurors who indicted my

01:09:05.700 client. And my argument is, no, you have to tell the grand jurors that there's someone else who the

01:09:10.860 police looked at as a, as a potential suspect and all of the information regarding that they're

01:09:15.980 saying, the prosecutor saying, no, no, no, no. We don't have to just tell you that. We don't have to

01:09:20.060 tell the grand jurors that, and we're in litigation over that. And it, these, these little battles that

01:09:24.980 Mark and I do, they overall have an effect on our life and our criminal justice system in the United

01:09:31.480 States of America. Okay. But let me ask you something on this alleged Brady violation,

01:09:34.820 because I do think that's the best argument for a new trial, right? If, if the prosecutor had

01:09:40.020 information that there were two other suspects and didn't turn it over to the defense, that's bad.

01:09:44.660 That's, that's pretty clear ethical violation that exactly of the kind that could get you a new

01:09:49.200 trial. But if you're a prosecutor and you guys have both been, and you just get some random name

01:09:54.600 called into you and you scribble down the name, Joe Schmo, you know, potentially connected question

01:10:00.160 mark. And you send a cop out to go run down Joe Schmo. And you're like, oh, it's bullshit. That

01:10:05.140 wasn't a real tip. I don't, not credible, whatever. Do you have to turn that over?

01:10:10.600 Why not? Like, why not? What, what, what's the harm? What's the harm here? We sent our guy,

01:10:16.740 you go send your, your private investigator over. I don't know. It's not why not? I get best

01:10:21.920 practices, but could that be the kind of thing? The way, Megan, the way you worded it,

01:10:27.820 it was very carefully worded. The way you worded it, I would say, no, I don't know that that's a

01:10:32.780 Brady violation. If I mean, cause there's look, when you show up at a scene, there could be,

01:10:37.060 you know, hundreds of potential people who did it. And, and as you go, you know, you narrow it down.

01:10:42.120 I don't know that you have to keep, you know, sending over all this person still included as

01:10:46.680 a possibility. I think this was different. If you're a prosecutor and your phone rings at your

01:10:51.060 desk and it's someone who sounds like they're not high or drunk and says, listen, I don't want to

01:10:56.660 get involved, but I'm telling you, I know who did the murder. I know who committed the crime and

01:11:02.040 this is what they're wearing and this is where they're located. If I'm the prosecutor, I'm giving

01:11:07.500 that over. Not Megan's hypothetical. It seemed like she was suggesting it. Correct me if I'm wrong.

01:11:12.960 You know, you got some names, but you know, there's no real validity to it. Um, it's more

01:11:18.120 like work product, you know, you're, you know, there's not, you run it down. You're like, this

01:11:22.340 is not worth our time. But is that what happened here? I understood. I don't know. Here's let me

01:11:26.960 suspect on it. They said this was a major reason why he was denied. Well, let me read it to you. Okay.

01:11:35.380 No, I just wanted to get sort of the basic rule established. Like if there's any name that comes

01:11:39.560 up to you as a prosecutor, do you have an obligation to turn it over? And I think I side with Mark on

01:11:43.560 that one. You do not have any name, any number, anybody saying it could be this person. That's

01:11:48.220 not necessarily a Brady violation. If you don't turn that over to the defense as a prosecutor,

01:11:51.660 you have to, I think it has to rise to no, this could be a potential suspect. It doesn't have to be

01:11:56.480 an actual other suspect. So here's what the times is reporting. Um, per Sarah Koenig, who's the girl

01:12:01.480 who did the woman who did all the reporting. She said the headline of the state's motion,

01:12:05.260 this is the prosecution's motion to, to get Adnan out, um, is that they've developed more

01:12:11.060 evidence about two people who might've been involved in the crime, but whom they say were

01:12:14.740 not properly ruled out as suspects. They don't name these people. They just call them the suspect

01:12:19.500 or the suspects because they say the investigation is ongoing. They might have been involved together

01:12:23.820 or separately. They don't know. Both were known to detectives at the time. The handwritten notes

01:12:28.760 that they found from prosecutors, uh, in the prosecution's file, because keep in mind,

01:12:33.540 this is the prosecutors going back and looking at their own old files, uh, a new set within the

01:12:38.840 same office of prosecutors. They found handwritten notes that appear to be written by a prosecutor

01:12:42.940 memorializing two different phone calls from two different people who called the state's attorney's

01:12:47.720 office to give information about the same person. The notes aren't dated, but as a prosecutor telling

01:12:52.920 the story, uh, could tell the calls came in several months apart. And before Adnan was tried,

01:13:00.100 the gist of the info from both calls is that a guy the state had more or less overlooked had a motive

01:13:05.440 to kill Hey Min Lee, the victim, that this person was heard saying he was upset with her and that he

01:13:11.640 would quote, make her disappear. He would kill her unquote in court. The prosecution said the state

01:13:17.860 had looked into this individual and found the info in those notes to be credible. And the suspect had

01:13:24.640 the quote motive opportunity and means to commit the crime, whether he did or did not though,

01:13:29.520 legally speaking, this would be a major breach. And they talk about how this would be a, a Brady

01:13:34.360 violation. I'm picturing Arthur's veins protruding from his neck and from that bald skull. He found out

01:13:43.520 about this, whatever he'd be livid the same way I would. How dare they do that? I'd want sanctions.

01:13:51.020 I'd want a hug and then I'd want an apology.

01:13:52.980 I have to tell you though, Arthur, I remain skeptical because the woman pushing this whole

01:14:01.300 narrative, um, her name is Becky Feldman. She works for Marilyn Mosby. Becky Feldman described by the

01:14:07.160 New York times as follow follows pretty new to the prosecutor's office, pretty new to being a

01:14:11.440 prosecutor. She'd been high up at the public defender's office for years. Her sense of alarm

01:14:15.880 was cultivated on the defense side. I'm keep in mind, this is a prosecution's prosecutor's office

01:14:21.560 that doesn't like prosecuting crime. And there's a narrative here pushed by Sarah Tekenig at the

01:14:26.480 New York times that maybe there was a anti-Muslim bias in this case, that the word honor had been

01:14:33.060 mentioned too many times in this case, like honor killing potentially, though that doesn't appear to

01:14:38.280 be what was actually argued. And by the way, that is a thing within some extreme segments of, uh,

01:14:45.260 you know, ardent extremist Islamist communities. We've covered that too, but that's not a claim

01:14:52.700 that was openly made against Adnan. Anyway, I got my doubts and just to take it down memory lane,

01:14:59.160 here's Marilyn Mosby. Okay. Here's Marilyn Mosby talking about why she, why she did this in the Adnan

01:15:05.300 Syed case, you know, two minutes before she was kicked out of office. Here she is.

01:15:10.280 My sentencing review unit is responsible for the year long collaborative investigation into this

01:15:17.720 case and today's motion to vacate the conviction of Adnan Syed. The vacature statue, which was drafted,

01:15:26.100 lobbied, testified to in Annapolis by my office, despite the opposition of almost every one of my

01:15:32.780 my colleagues across the state, with the exception of Aisha Brave Boy, this vacature statute is

01:15:39.320 responsible for today's outcome. Becky Feldman subsequently led a year, nearly a year long

01:15:46.500 exhaustive investigation, reviewing the substantive facts of this case, where several problematic issues

01:15:52.960 were presented and thereafter leading my office to file a motion to vacate the conviction of Adnan Syed.

01:15:59.960 So first of all, that to me sounded like a victory lap. My, my, my, my, my, my, my, my critics didn't

01:16:05.500 like this vacature statute. By the way, that's a statute that lets you take a look at the conviction of

01:16:09.760 people who are underage when they committed the time, the crime, to see whether the sentence is

01:16:13.980 appropriate. That was, she was in favor of me, me, me, me, me. And of course, who could forget 2015,

01:16:20.220 this is the same woman when Freddie Gray, who allegedly got a rough ride by six Baltimore cops,

01:16:24.560 wound up dying. She, she indicted those cops. She prosecuted all of them, all of whom were found

01:16:30.980 either not guilty or the case completely found apart, fell apart, right? Those cops were exonerated.

01:16:35.760 She was not able to make the case. This was Marilyn Mosby, that woman we just listened to back then.

01:16:41.640 To the youth of this city, I will seek justice on your behalf. This is a moment. This is your

01:16:50.960 moment. And as young people, our time is now. Oh my God. She's in identity politics.

01:16:59.740 Memories.

01:17:00.640 Megan, me, you, and Arthur Wichel turns trashing her after we heard that.

01:17:05.960 That was us. So there she is again. I'm just saying, I don't trust her. I don't trust her

01:17:12.520 judgment. And Becky Feldman sounds like a lefty who doesn't much love prosecuting crimes. And I'm

01:17:17.860 just wondering whether identity once again is rearing its ugly head in this case, or whether

01:17:23.160 there really is a Brady violation. Well, I mean, Megan, the only way that we'd have a real big problem

01:17:30.580 here is if Becky Feldman created this document. And I don't think any lawyer, I'd like to think,

01:17:36.340 I should say, I'd like to think that any lawyer is not going to put their whole career on the line

01:17:41.320 and fabricate this document, these handwritten notes that are in that file. If what's written

01:17:47.880 on those notes is authentic, and they were in the file at all the time, at some point, I think we can

01:17:54.940 all agree that that is a textbook Brady violation. And they did the right thing by bringing it forward.

01:18:00.680 And then they, you know, they took the extra step. Look, they didn't have to move for the case to be,

01:18:06.620 that verdict to be dismissed. They could have left it up to the judge. And the judge can make that

01:18:12.300 decision as to whether it should be dismissed or not. But they took the extra step to say we're asking

01:18:17.900 it for it to be dismissed. And that basically handcuffs the judge to do what they want.

01:18:22.320 I think there should be another trial. This guy should be tried again.

01:18:24.940 If there's a, I'm not convinced he didn't do it. I'm not. And I realized, by the way,

01:18:28.960 the audience should know to your point about, did they really not turn over notes? Again,

01:18:33.740 Sarah Koenig of the New York Times reporting that one of the two main detectives on the case

01:18:37.880 was accused of misconduct in another murder case that went to trial the same year this one did.

01:18:42.220 In that case, the detective was accused of manipulating evidence, fabricating evidence,

01:18:45.720 not disclosing exculpatory evidence. And the guy convicted in that case was exonerated

01:18:52.000 back in 2016, in 2016. Okay. So he had there, she's suggesting he railroaded somebody else who

01:18:58.320 was later exonerated. Don't know whether, you know, how much stock we put in that or not,

01:19:03.040 but that's not a good fact for the prosecution. I just, I think that they should have another

01:19:07.060 trial, Mark. Am I crazy?

01:19:08.300 You're not crazy. You're just not informed. I mean, you're not close enough to the fact

01:19:13.300 like they are. You've got to, I'm sorry, you've got to defer.

01:19:16.440 That was sweet. That was sweet.

01:19:18.220 I meant that with love. And I knew what I was saying. And I knew I'd get that reaction because

01:19:21.560 you haven't sat down with this guy, Jay, to look him in the eyes and confront him

01:19:25.380 with his inconsistencies. You don't know what the evidence truly is. Yeah. I don't trust Mosby,

01:19:31.580 but I've got to trust people who work at that place who wouldn't let a murderer go. I think

01:19:37.420 that they believe that the evidence falls short of being able to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.

01:19:42.560 And if they don't seek another trial, you got to question whether they've got the goods.

01:19:47.800 Yeah. I think also, Megan, you have to, from a prosecutor's point of view,

01:19:50.900 any prosecutor's point of view and any judge's point of view, he's done 23 years. I know he was,

01:19:56.780 you know, given life, but he was, it's not like he's done 23 months. And sometimes that does factor

01:20:03.380 into a prosecutor's decision-making process in a city where crime is running wild, where they need

01:20:09.540 every resource they can. I think you were, we just said it went up 300% every year. They may say,

01:20:15.140 look, we're not going to spend our top two prosecutors on a case where the guy's already

01:20:19.180 done 23 months. That's a good point. It's a good point. But I have to say, if she, if she,

01:20:24.780 if she actually would start to prosecute crime, that'd be one thing, but I don't think Becky

01:20:28.500 Feldman or whoever's taking over for her is going to do, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the new prosecutor's

01:20:32.840 a little bit harder on, on crime. I think that's one of the reasons Mosby got booted because she

01:20:37.480 wouldn't prosecute. So we'll see. But I think the family of the victim deserves, they deserve a new

01:20:43.600 trial as stretched as they may be for Haylin, for Haymin Lee, the victim in this case. Stand by much,

01:20:49.960 much more with Arthur and Mark. We got to talk about Central Park Karen and Trump. But first,

01:20:54.180 here's another memorable moment from the first two years of our show. Do you remember

01:20:57.900 it was this time last year when a bird, a bird showed up in the studio during a show about

01:21:07.260 ghosts? First, we heard the activity. We didn't know what it was. I thought my staff was punking

01:21:12.240 me. It was October of just last year, episode 192. Just watch how Abby and yours truly reacted.

01:21:19.700 What? I'm only in here with Abby, my assistant.

01:21:25.160 What? There's a real bird in here. There's a real bird in here. There's a real what? There's a real bird in here.

01:21:30.800 There's a bird in here?

01:21:31.920 There's a real bird.

01:21:32.280 Oh my God. We're hearing something down the, down the hall in the closet. Are you messing? I thought

01:21:39.780 this was like a setup. Is this a setup? There's a real bird in here. Oh my God. Can we close the

01:21:45.320 door? There's a door down there. And that's where like the brain of the, and we heard something and

01:21:50.940 we're like, she's making the big eyes at me and I'm making the big eyes at her. And she went down to

01:21:55.180 investigate and there's a bird. It's in this situation. A crow? I believe that's usually a

01:22:00.760 crow. Well, that's a, that's. Holy. As long as it's not like a raven. I mean,

01:22:05.380 bring her dad. This is his job. That was amazing. My mom made jokes for a year about like what kind

01:22:15.900 of bird soup she was going to get me. I'm like, it was every, by the way, I, I've been letting my

01:22:20.420 hair get darker and I think it looks a lot better now. I don't know. Let me, let me know your

01:22:23.420 thoughts. Megan at megankelly.com. So it was a lot blonder back in that clip 12 months ago,

01:22:28.960 but I've been working on something with my hairstylist. Um, in any event, we're having so

01:22:32.600 much fun having our retrospective and our look back on fun, memorable moments. If you've got one,

01:22:37.680 you can email them to me, Megan, M-E-G-Y-N at megankelly.com. And, uh, maybe we'll queue it up

01:22:43.360 and play it this week. He's like corn pop. Some guys in the world, man, you just, you just can't.

01:22:53.420 Yeah. Yeah. It can't trust him, man. Hey, Hey, did you, did you, did you shit my pants or did I?

01:23:03.600 What's going on here?

01:23:06.600 What happened?

01:23:09.260 Kagan, Kagan Mellie, the classiest gal in, in the new, in the news.

01:23:13.140 Just, it's trans Trump. It's a new, uh, campaign. Okay. Trans Trump. It's so stunning. So terrific.

01:23:22.240 Trans Trump.

01:23:23.400 No.

01:23:24.740 You got, look, look, you got to vote for me. You got no choice.

01:23:28.180 Oh my God. That is literally one of my favorite episodes we have ever done. I went back and listened

01:23:35.200 to it. I've showed clips to that from that to my kids repeatedly. He does a great one of Kim

01:23:40.520 Kardashian that I quote all the time. PayPal, they don't work. They don't work. His imitation of Joe

01:23:47.160 Biden and that thing with trans Trump was hilarious. It was Kyle Dunnigan and it was episode 291. And if

01:23:54.740 you want to laugh, go to that episode. Remember we started the impressions in the second hour and

01:24:01.040 it was gold 291. I promise you'll laugh. And if you're smart, you'll do it on YouTube. Cause you

01:24:06.380 see, he's got, he's got this like technology where it's like face swap. He's got the, got like Biden's

01:24:11.300 face on his face and he puts on a wig. It's good stuff. Anyway. Okay. We're back now with Arthur

01:24:16.380 Idala and Mark Eiglarsh. I have so many great cases that I want to get through. So let's just bang

01:24:20.840 through some of these things. The migrants who were sent by governor DeSantis, who's in Florida

01:24:25.460 from Texas to Martha's Vineyard have now begun their time in the United States by doing the

01:24:31.680 quintessential American activity. And that is suing. They are suing governor DeSantis and others

01:24:38.220 in Florida. Um, thanks to this left-wing group that's representing them. They're from Venezuela

01:24:43.440 and they're claiming that, um, they were induced by DeSantis to board a plane in Texas to go to

01:24:49.600 Martha's Vineyard, that they felt helpless, defrauded and desperate, that they felt anxious,

01:24:53.580 anxious and confused, lack of sleep, vertigo. Uh, and this is all thanks to Ron DeSantis's alleged

01:24:59.660 fraud in giving them $10 McDonald's gift certificates, uh, to get them on board this

01:25:04.680 plane and promising them that if they got to Massachusetts during the first 90 days, they

01:25:11.120 would get basic needs support, including assistance with housing, furnishings, food, other basic

01:25:14.760 necessities, clothing, transportation, et cetera. All of which comes from the Massachusetts Refugee

01:25:21.240 Resettlement Program, which is a government program with highly specific eligibility requirements,

01:25:24.980 which were not disclosed. What do we make of this? Arthur?

01:25:29.300 Well, actually, I think in the long run, they actually did get all of those things that DeSantis

01:25:33.740 promised, even though it wasn't the way that they, uh, were told that they were going to get it.

01:25:38.640 Apparently the, the, uh, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has opened their arms to these

01:25:43.980 people. Look, I, I know that that was a political stunt by Mr. DeSantis, but, um, I did applaud it

01:25:50.460 because I think it opened the eyes of a lot of people that this is a real problem in America.

01:25:56.700 And it's a problem that I feel needs to be shared by all of America. You know, the NIMBY,

01:26:01.960 not in my backyard. It's easy when you're in a state that has no real immigration issues

01:26:06.960 to pound your chest for immigration. But when you're Arizona and Texas and, and, and Florida

01:26:13.000 and have real issues that cause financial hardship to your tax base, then you know what? We are the

01:26:19.140 United States of America. And I mean, I pay a lot of money to go to Martha's Vineyard. It's not exactly

01:26:25.040 like they said he sent them to some place that's, you know, people don't want to go to.

01:26:30.220 Then they got booted out to the military camp. Mark, uh, two problems for this case, at least number one,

01:26:36.160 they signed waivers before they got on that plane, releasing the defendants from all liability.

01:26:39.940 And number two, we've got NBC news footage of them saying, it's great. Thank you,

01:26:44.340 Governor DeSantis. I'm so glad I did this. Yeah. Those are two big problems I was going to mention.

01:26:50.020 Um, I still am not throwing this out as meritless. I do want to hear from the individuals.

01:26:55.960 I'm certainly suspect about their long-term permanent challenges of not being able to sleep over this

01:27:03.040 and whatever. Over this. They're from Venezuela, but this was a bridge too far.

01:27:07.700 Yeah. But I disagree with Arthur. I don't like the idea at all. Um, I understand about proving

01:27:13.780 that point, but I don't know that you do it by lying to people, assuming that that's true and

01:27:18.640 telling them they're going to get something when they're not. Um, sounds like there might be some

01:27:22.500 truth to that. But aren't, aren't these people who are here without obeying, obeying the laws?

01:27:27.240 I don't think these are the people who came over who filled out all the appropriate paperwork to be

01:27:31.720 here. So they lied. My understanding is to get here. So we're lying to put them somewhere else,

01:27:37.140 you know, in Brooklyn style, that's okay. Unclean hands. That's the unclean hands

01:27:41.880 defense. All right, let's move on. Um, speaking of political actions, Letitia James, attorney general

01:27:47.000 of New York has sued Donald Trump and all of his children in a civil case. This is not criminal

01:27:52.020 claiming it's so convoluted that he, I'll just quote, um, uh, engaged in a sprawling decade long

01:27:58.700 fraud scheme to obtain lucrative business accounting benefits by inflating the value of

01:28:02.440 his assets and net worth. He overstated the value of his assets to get more favorable bank terms and

01:28:07.100 loans and so on. Not a single bank is complaining about this. Um, but Letitia James is, she's saying

01:28:12.900 whether the banks were, were not actually tricked, isn't relevant to the legal case. Trump's a bad

01:28:17.200 person and I want to hurt him is basically what she's saying. So Arthur, you're, you're

01:28:21.900 in New York. Hold on, hold on. Yeah. Hold on. That's not sure for me. And she is right. It

01:28:29.340 doesn't matter if there's a loss. I have a client who's charged in federal court right now and the

01:28:33.700 PPP loans that he clearly obtained by committing fraud. He invested in real estate. He's making

01:28:40.020 millions. So he'll be able to pay back everything. The government's going to get more. That doesn't

01:28:44.200 mean that the charges can't be brought. So it's not whether there's harm to the banks in this instance

01:28:48.540 is, is, is Trump's residence 11,000 square feet, which the government claims it is, or is

01:28:57.620 it 33,000 square feet? Like he claims, is it worth 327 million or you're, we're hearing that

01:29:05.340 the most expensive unit there is 16.5 million. You can't do that. So put politics aside. Factually,

01:29:13.140 did he lie? Yes or no, then we'll move on. Yeah. That's not a bad point. Go ahead, Arthur.

01:29:19.880 There's a, there's a, there are a couple of issues here. Number one, and disclaimer, I know

01:29:25.040 Letitia James were very friendly, but I did not think it was appropriate, appropriate for her. When

01:29:30.400 she ran for attorney general, her platform was, I'm going to get Trump. That is against everything

01:29:36.820 you're taught as a prosecutor, whether you're the lowest prosecutor or you're someone running for high

01:29:41.180 office as a prosecutor. You're, you're not supposed to pick the target and then find the evidence to

01:29:47.720 go after him. We agree, but can you focus on what she's claiming he did? Yes. What she's claiming he

01:29:53.960 did. I I'm going to agree with Mark. Megan, I have a guy right now who he lied on his bank forms.

01:29:59.860 The bank never complained. He paid back the loan. He's not, he's totally in compliance, but when he was

01:30:05.560 being investigated for something else, the FBI people who looked at all his records found that

01:30:11.220 he lied the same way that Trump did and they prosecuted him. To Mark's point though, because

01:30:17.300 the, the, the falsehoods in these documents were tremendous. The way Mark said, doesn't the bank

01:30:22.840 have some due diligence to just look up how big his apartment is? They do. And that's what Trump's

01:30:28.020 been saying. Trump's been basically saying that, that, that the banks had the obligation and the

01:30:31.600 banks pursue that obligation. And the banks came to understand exactly how big his apartment was

01:30:36.280 and wasn't, and therefore no harm, no foul. He did try to settle this case. She would not accept the

01:30:41.400 offer. So we'll see whether, how far down the road this gets. Could it get, could it be over past the

01:30:46.460 midterms? We'll see. Okay. Let's move on because Amy Central Park, Central Park, Karen, sorry, Amy

01:30:52.920 Cooper, but that's what she's known as. She had the confrontation with the angry bird watcher.

01:30:58.900 And she said, he said, get your dog out of here. They're supposed to be on a leash. And she didn't

01:31:05.360 comply. And he said, uh, you're going to do what you're going to do. And I'm going to do what you're

01:31:10.280 going to, what I'm going to do, but you're not going to like it. And she said, I'm going to call

01:31:13.460 the cops and tell them that an African man, African American man is threatening me. And he said,

01:31:18.120 go ahead and call the cops. That's how she became known as Central Park, Karen. She looked pretty

01:31:22.700 douchey, but then so did he, because it came out. He's got this long pattern of harassing dog

01:31:27.640 owners in the Bramble, in the park, including another black man who had exactly the same

01:31:33.120 encounter with him, who he threatened that guy too, where he said, you leash your dog.

01:31:37.540 They can't be off leash in here. And said, according to that man, Jerome, uh, Lockett,

01:31:42.200 uh, and I quote, if you're going to do what you want, then I'm going to do what I want,

01:31:45.960 but you're not going to like it. So the guy, Christian Cooper is his name. No relation to Amy

01:31:51.980 has a long history from the sound of it, of being kind of an asshole, but it doesn't excuse

01:31:58.080 her threatening to tell his race to 9-1-1. Okay. This is kind of the background to what

01:32:04.040 happened here. She sued her employer for firing her when this became a national firestorm

01:32:09.640 saying, you said publicly did an investigation that you found me guilty of being a racist

01:32:13.900 and you fired me and you didn't do an investigation. You just looked at a piece,

01:32:17.100 a snippet of videotape and you lied and you defamed me. And now her case has been thrown out.

01:32:24.560 She has been, she's lost her case filed in the Southern district of New York, uh, in a 17 page

01:32:29.660 ruling where the judge said, watching a video of the incident and discussing her conduct

01:32:34.860 meets a reasonable interpretation of internal or review.

01:32:39.140 Oh, of course. Come on, go away. Learn from the thing that you did, which isn't the worst thing,

01:32:46.240 but it's not the right thing. Just learn from it to double down and try to go after your employer

01:32:51.420 who had every legal right. What did she do that with, what did she do? That was so wrong.

01:32:55.240 She was intimidated. Hold on. What, what Megan just didn't leave. What left out in the prologue is

01:33:01.580 she also identified in her suit that there were three men who worked in the same firm.

01:33:05.880 One had a domestic violence incident. He didn't get fired. One was, was doing things financially

01:33:10.840 at the financial firm inappropriately. He didn't get fired.

01:33:15.220 Irrelevant.

01:33:15.880 They're misconduct by other people in her firm and they did not meet the same fate that she did,

01:33:22.360 which was termination. And her argument was, it was only because it made this big splash.

01:33:26.340 And all I was doing on 9-1-1 was I was identifying the individual. So if the police show up,

01:33:32.140 they know at least they have some parameter of identifying who was harassing me.

01:33:37.240 You are not going to pull the naive card and not look at this for what it is, Arthur.

01:33:42.240 She pulled the racist card. She lied and tried to suggest that he was threatening her.

01:33:48.480 No, he did threaten her. That wasn't a lie.

01:33:50.960 Thank you.

01:33:51.420 But I will grant to you, her mistake was not even telling the 9-1-1 officer that he was

01:33:56.220 African-American man. You do have to identify the person. It was, she threatened to use his

01:34:01.060 race against him. She said, I'm going to tell 9-1-1 an African-American male is threatening me.

01:34:07.140 That's where Amy Cooper went off the rails. In any event, she's lost a lot and they've

01:34:10.840 thrown out, including this lawsuit, they've thrown it out. But her employer was kind of douchey

01:34:14.600 as well. And just getting rid of her and publicly calling her a racist because they were just too,

01:34:19.520 I don't like the P word. I'll say all the other words, but I don't like the P word,

01:34:22.200 but they were kind of P words and not like, well, she'd behave like an asshole outside

01:34:26.620 when he was being threatening and she did something bad, but she doesn't have to lose her job,

01:34:30.600 get fired. I don't know. I'm uncomfortable with their behavior.

01:34:33.480 You're a genderist. You don't like the P word? You're a genderist.

01:34:35.880 I know. I kind of am. I don't know. I don't like that one. My mom would never say the F word

01:34:40.360 and she would never say the other P word, P-I-S-S. She never would. And I feel differently.

01:34:47.680 I'll say those words, but I'm not the one that means cat.

01:34:52.200 Why are we discussing this? Love you guys. Thanks for coming on.

01:34:58.920 Happy anniversary. Take care, Arthur.

01:35:01.940 Great as always. Thanks for joining us today. Tomorrow we'll have more memorable clips

01:35:06.440 and we'll also have Father Mike Schmitz of the Bible in a Year, the mega hit podcast.

01:35:12.720 Excited for that. In the meantime, download the show so you don't miss it. Go to youtube.com

01:35:16.420 slash Megan Kelly. We'll see you tomorrow.

01:35:18.320 Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

The Megyn Kelly Show - September 26, 2022

Dangerous DOJ Overreach, and Adnan Syed Released, with Matt Taibbi, Arthur Aidala, and Mark Eiglarsh ｜ Ep. 398

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