The Megyn Kelly Show - How Texts Could Torpedo Fani Willis, and Left Spinning Georgia Student Death, with Mary Katharine Ham, Phil Holloway, and Wendell Husebo ｜ Ep. 732

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00:00:30.960 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East.

00:00:42.460 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:45.620 It is a huge day for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.

00:00:50.000 One of the four criminal cases against Trump could effectively end today. 0.96

00:00:54.160 As the DA on it could be exposed once and for all, potentially as a liar, a perjurer, and corrupt.

00:01:00.640 If she goes, the whole case could go, in a prosecution that was looking very scary for Trump, given the rubidity of this DA and the jury pool in Fulton County, Georgia.

00:01:11.040 Judge Scott McAfee holding a hearing at 2 p.m. with Terrence Bradley, the former attorney, friend, and one-time law partner of Nathan Wade.

00:01:19.820 Wade is a special prosecutor in the case against Trump.

00:01:23.620 He stands accused of engaging in a kind of improper kickback scheme with DA Fannie Willis, with whom he had an extramarital affair.

00:01:31.900 The allegation is that Ms. Willis hired her alleged lover to work on the Trump case, capping his hours at a higher number and paying him more than the other two special prosecutors she brought in, and far more than any assistant DA in her office.

00:01:45.860 And that the two of them then enjoyed the fruits of those payments on lavish vacations paid for by Wade in places like the Bahamas, Aruba, and Napa.

00:01:54.300 That all of this created a conflict of interest, or at least the appearance of one, for prosecutors whose mission is supposed to be the pursuit of justice, not the pursuit of pina coladas by the sea on the taxpayer's dime.

00:02:07.800 Both Wade and Willis claim the affair did not begin until after Willis hired him.

00:02:13.260 They say it was early 2022 when it started.

00:02:15.920 She hired him November 21.

00:02:17.220 And have testified there were no kickbacks, that Willis repaid Wade for all of those trips in cash with no receipts, no ATM withdrawal slips, no deposit records, nor anything else to document the alleged repayments.

00:02:33.340 By the way, in their write-up on this story today, the New York Times did not think it was relevant to tell its readers the alleged repayments were all in cash with no receipts.

00:02:43.340 If you're a Times reader, here's what you were told.

00:02:45.420 Willis and Wade, quote, have testified that they roughly split the costs of their vacations, end quote.

00:02:52.520 Nothing to see here.

00:02:54.140 Great job, Times.

00:02:55.140 Great job.

00:02:56.460 So did the affair begin prior to 2022, contrary to the sworn testimony of both of these prosecutors?

00:03:04.640 And can this court give credence to the testimony of Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade that, despite the absence of receipts, Willis paid Wade back for these many vacations?

00:03:12.720 Ms. Willis' longtime friend, Robin Irty, took the stand on February 15th at the motion, on the hearing, on the motion to disqualify, and told the court the affair began long before 2022.

00:03:26.660 She said it was as far back as 19.

00:03:28.900 She said she saw it with her own eyes, and she also heard about it from Ms. Willis, her good friend.

00:03:34.620 And, quote, no doubt in her mind about it.

00:03:38.200 From everything that you saw, heard, witnessed, it's your understanding that they were in a romantic relationship beginning in 2019.

00:03:46.960 Yes, you have no doubt that their romantic relationship was in effect from 2019 until the last time you spoke with her.

00:03:55.800 No doubt.

00:03:56.540 And did you observe them do things that are common among people having a romantic relationship?

00:04:05.580 Yes.

00:04:06.360 Such as, can you give us an example?

00:04:11.600 Hugging, kissing, disaffection.

00:04:14.840 All before November 1st of 2021, correct?

00:04:19.860 Yes.

00:04:22.440 But Willis ultimately dismissed Ms. Irty from the DA's office, where Irty worked for a time, and thus, her testimony could potentially be discounted by this judge.

00:04:33.140 Maybe she had a motive to lie, though that was not effectively fleshed out on the stand at all.

00:04:38.700 They just got her to testify that she was booted, and it did not appear to be with her agreement.

00:04:43.160 Lots of people get fired and would not go on to perjure themselves to get back at their old boss, especially when to do so would be a felony.

00:04:51.700 This is not like two gals at a bar talking about a third.

00:04:55.880 This woman's under oath on the witness stand in a court proceeding. 1.00

00:05:01.260 They did nothing to prove to us that Robin Irty is the kind of person who would go that far to get back at someone who let her go from a job.

00:05:09.720 And despite all their promises they were going to put on witness testimony showing that she's a liar, it didn't happen.

00:05:15.340 They didn't bring a soul.

00:05:18.340 Then there are Nathan Wade's phone records.

00:05:21.040 Nathan Wade's phone records.

00:05:22.540 The Trump Defense Counsel got a hold of the special prosecutor's phone records.

00:05:26.940 They were submitted by Trump's counsel after the hearing closed.

00:05:30.320 The prosecution wants to keep them out.

00:05:32.140 A hearing on that happens this Friday.

00:05:33.480 If they come in, however, they show that these two, Wade and Willis, called each other more than 2,000 times in an 11-month period in 2021.

00:05:42.220 2021, before they claimed their affair, began more than 2,000 times.

00:05:48.000 And texted each other nearly 12,000 times.

00:05:52.580 Platonic friends.

00:05:54.160 That's an average of six calls a day for 11 months and nearly 36 texts a day.

00:05:58.900 Think about the people in your life.

00:06:01.040 Who do you text with 36 times a day?

00:06:06.280 As a grown adult, right?

00:06:08.940 Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Bill Torpy noted,

00:06:11.780 This is a level of connectedness not usually reached by teen BFFs.

00:06:16.180 100% true.

00:06:17.520 That's right.

00:06:18.860 The phone records also show that Nathan Wade appears to have visited Fannie Willis at her home

00:06:23.960 as many as 35 times in 2021, before they say their affair began,

00:06:29.500 including at least two overnights,

00:06:31.740 complete with what looks like the got-home-safely text at the end of one of those.

00:06:36.220 Any thinking person can see what was going on here.

00:06:39.340 They always tell jurors you don't check your common sense when you walk into the jury box.

00:06:43.280 To the contrary, it's your most important skill.

00:06:46.380 But could this judge, it's not a jury case yet, right now it's just the judge's decision,

00:06:50.500 could the judge nonetheless refuse to consider the cell phone evidence?

00:06:54.880 Yeah.

00:06:55.760 He can say it was filed too late.

00:06:57.380 It wasn't supported.

00:06:58.780 It's not conclusive.

00:07:00.680 Cell phone tower data is used all the time by prosecutors in criminal cases.

00:07:06.640 It's odd how suddenly Ms. Wade, the prosecutor, Willis that is,

00:07:10.140 suggests it's totally unreliable here.

00:07:12.620 Well, it's so weird.

00:07:14.080 If you were a defendant in her jurisdiction being prosecuted by Willis or any of her DAs,

00:07:18.440 wouldn't you be bringing those words back to haunt her in emotion right now?

00:07:23.800 All of which brings us to Terrence Bradley, Nathan Wade's old pal and today's star witness.

00:07:30.160 He tried to get out of testifying at the hearing on whether Willis and Wade should be disqualified

00:07:34.640 two weeks ago, despite the fact that it appears he had already given up the game

00:07:40.300 before he raised those objections, exchanging text messages with one of Trump's,

00:07:45.500 well, one of the Trump defendants, lawyers, saying that the motion to disqualify, quote,

00:07:49.820 looks good.

00:07:50.780 It looks good.

00:07:51.640 Thumbs up.

00:07:52.580 And according to that lawyer, confirming her allegations about this affair, when it began,

00:07:57.340 and so on.

00:07:59.000 Ashley Merchant is the name of that attorney.

00:08:01.420 She represents a guy named Michael Roman, who's been tried, is being accused along with Trump.

00:08:06.000 Uh, she has all of these text messages.

00:08:09.700 They were between Merchant and Terrence Bradley.

00:08:12.300 She's got him in her possession.

00:08:13.520 She read at least two of them into the record at the DQ hearing.

00:08:17.260 In one of them, Merchant asked Bradley if he knew anyone who would give her an affidavit

00:08:22.320 about the affair.

00:08:24.020 And he responded, no one would freely burn that bridge.

00:08:28.080 Listen.

00:08:29.540 Can you repeat the question?

00:08:30.540 The question is, did I text you asking you if you knew who I could get an affidavit from

00:08:36.360 about the affair?

00:08:37.240 And you responded, no, no one would freely burn that bridge.

00:08:41.320 Yes, I do see that.

00:08:44.800 Now, the other message shared in court, Terrence Bradley was asked about being sent the January

00:08:50.300 8th motion to disqualify.

00:08:52.700 That first detailed the alleged allegations, the affair allegations, I should say, before it

00:08:58.020 was filed.

00:08:58.580 She wanted him to look it over.

00:08:59.760 He was somebody who knew Wade.

00:09:01.480 He was someone who'd gone way back with Wade.

00:09:04.180 And Terrence Bradley responded to that draft motion saying, looks good, as I mentioned.

00:09:09.580 Merchant sought to confirm those messages and others with Mr. Bradley and to get him talking

00:09:14.120 about what he knows about this affair at the hearing two weeks ago.

00:09:18.460 But Bradley clammed up on the stand, repeatedly citing the attorney-client privilege.

00:09:23.120 Well, those privilege claims have not held up.

00:09:26.000 It's official now.

00:09:26.880 At a closed-door meeting with Judge McAfee yesterday, during which Mr. Bradley's former

00:09:32.720 client and friend, Nathan Wade, was reportedly right outside waiting in the courtroom, Terrence

00:09:39.140 Bradley tried to justify his privilege assertions.

00:09:42.260 Again, something that would have been very hard for him to do, since we know for a fact he already

00:09:48.580 disclosed much about this tryst to attorney Ashley Merchant.

00:09:53.320 So Bradley was either mistaken when on the stand he said these communications were all privileged or he was correct and he unethically divulged them to counsel for the defense.

00:10:07.200 Okay, so either he was wrong to say they were privileged or he was right to say they were privileged, which would have made his disclosure to Ashley Merchant of the Communications improper and unethical.

00:10:19.660 Tough spot to be in.

00:10:21.340 But I think I'd rather be in the I mistakenly asserted privilege on the stand camp.

00:10:25.360 Late yesterday, the judge issued his ruling.

00:10:30.200 Hasn't yet been released publicly, but the New York Times has it, quoting here.

00:10:33.320 The court believes that the interested parties did not meet their burden of establishing that the communications are covered by the attorney-client privilege, and therefore the hearing can resume as to Mr. Bradley's examination.

00:10:47.800 Thus, it would seem Terrence Bradley must now reveal what he knows about the relationship between Fannie Willis and Nathan Wade.

00:10:55.160 It's go time.

00:10:55.840 If he testifies consistent with what is in his texts to Ashley Merchant, putting the lie to the testimony given by Wade and Willis, there is zero doubt that they should be thrown off of this case.

00:11:08.880 Two prosecutors in one of the biggest criminal cases in the country lie to the judge under oath about the nature of their potentially conflicted relationship, and they can continue on with impunity?

00:11:20.840 I don't think so.

00:11:22.320 I don't think so.

00:11:23.260 Even Fannie Willis' defenders get stuck on this point.

00:11:29.920 Before, they were saying, no, they can't be booted.

00:11:32.120 No, there's not enough of a conflict of interest.

00:11:33.720 No, the appearance of a conflict isn't enough.

00:11:35.300 It has to be an actual conflict.

00:11:36.640 What's the conflict?

00:11:37.520 No, she reimbursed him half the money.

00:11:39.160 She paid in cash.

00:11:39.840 So what?

00:11:40.160 She doesn't have receipts. 0.67

00:11:41.060 The judge is going to find her credible.

00:11:42.760 You get to the point of two officers of the court lying under oath, and you watch them wither on the vine.

00:11:51.680 Read the articles.

00:11:52.420 They all start stumbling.

00:11:55.040 Watch the clips.

00:11:56.300 They all start stuttering.

00:11:58.860 They know very well they can't stay on this case.

00:12:01.800 These folks may not care about the vacations or the affair, but any honest lawyer will tell you.

00:12:06.140 An officer of the court lying to the judge under any circumstances, never mind under oath, is a serious ethical breach, not to mention, oh, a felony.

00:12:18.140 It's a felony.

00:12:18.980 And the lie here would be to cover up their conflict of interest and the alleged kickback scheme.

00:12:25.600 So it's not like it was a meaningless lie.

00:12:28.180 They will be lucky not to wind up convicted felons, never mind prosecutors on this case.

00:12:34.740 So those are the stakes today, and we're waiting for it to start.

00:12:39.620 Will Terrence Bradley say on the stand what he said to Ashley Merchant in these texts?

00:12:45.000 Or will he hem and haw again and try to protect his friend?

00:12:47.860 If he confirms the affair began prior to 2022, expect the state to once again attempt to attack his character, as they did when he said almost nothing two weeks ago.

00:12:59.320 What these two should do instead is to spare themselves and the citizens of Fulton County the embarrassment of this spectacle and resign.

00:13:08.040 It will do Fannie Willis no good in her quest to avoid ethics charges with the bar and probably others to continue this fight if Terrence Bradley does her in today. 1.00

00:13:20.940 Judge McAfee should not have to order these globe-trotting lovebirds off of this case. 0.95

00:13:26.280 They should do the right thing and step down.

00:13:29.320 Joining me now, Phil Holloway.

00:13:32.460 He's back.

00:13:33.220 He's the founder of Holloway Law Group in Cobb County, Georgia.

00:13:37.040 Phil, good to have you.

00:13:38.440 So I understand you actually saw Terrence Bradley earlier today.

00:13:43.020 He's out and about practicing law and doing his job.

00:13:46.700 And do we expect him to show up in Judge McAfee's court today at 2?

00:13:52.460 Well, great to be with you again, of course, Megan.

00:13:55.220 You know, here's the thing about today.

00:13:56.660 It's all about what is and what is not attorney-client privilege.

00:14:01.780 And so, look, if you are my client and you tell me where you buried the body, I can't talk about it ever.

00:14:08.820 But if I see you burying the body, that's a different story, right?

00:14:12.840 So Ashley Merchant, a few weeks ago, in one of her responses to something the state had filed on this very issue, she says that Bradley has non-privileged personal knowledge that he can testify to that this affair began prior to Willis being sworn in as the district attorney in January of 2021.

00:14:37.740 But he denied that on February 15th.

00:14:42.000 Yeah, he did.

00:14:42.840 And so now we're in the situation where if he denies this again today, if she has any prior statements that he may have made, and this is where we were talking about the text messages and things like that.

00:14:55.220 If he has ever said anything contrary to that, if Ms. Merchant has this documented, she can confront him with the prior inconsistent statement.

00:15:04.940 And that inconsistent statement, if it exists, can be used as substantive evidence in the case.

00:15:10.220 So that is what the judge is going to have to consider here, is, is there any corroboration that Mr. Bradley can bring to the issue that would corroborate Robin Yurdy, that would corroborate the cell phone data?

00:15:24.980 And if so, the judge can believe that Terrence Bradley and Fannie Willis were lying about the cash payments, because this all relates back to that.

00:15:34.440 It's this personal financial benefit that is at issue.

00:15:37.520 And if the judge believes that they are not telling the truth about this, he is entitled and should disbelieve their testimony about the cash reimbursements.

00:15:49.340 So we're all going back to the very beginning here, and we're going to have to sort out whether or not there was a personal financial benefit to the point that Fannie Willis had a conflict of interest.

00:16:02.080 Because prosecutors cannot have a financial interest in even the existence of a case, and that is what this is about.

00:16:09.540 We're talking about fundamental fairness, due process, and if the case goes away because of a due process violation, then so be it.

00:16:18.560 We've got to have a fair system.

00:16:20.860 If prosecutors are not fair-minded, and if they don't play by the rules, we don't even get to the point of having a trial in the case.

00:16:27.220 So it's important to remember that this is about fundamental fairness.

00:16:32.220 It's about due process.

00:16:34.000 It's all very interesting, this sideshow that we have now.

00:16:37.640 It's a circus, basically, right here in Fulton County.

00:16:41.760 It's like the real, I don't know, real lawyers of Atlanta.

00:16:45.660 There's got to be some kind of a reality TV show that could be made out of this because it's really quite disturbing.

00:16:52.860 The judge is going to have to decide about the conflict of interest, but here's the other thing.

00:16:57.760 If she's lied to the court, if anybody has lied to the court, the judge, in my opinion, has really a duty to do something about it.

00:17:06.420 And what could that look like?

00:17:07.860 Well, he could hold them in contempt and throw them in jail if he believes they've lied.

00:17:11.540 He could refer them to the state bar.

00:17:12.940 He could refer them to maybe the attorney general's office to see if they've committed the crime of perjury.

00:17:18.200 This is a disbarbable offense if there's been a fraud perpetrated on the court.

00:17:22.660 And by the way, it doesn't matter if a lawyer says something false to a judge that's under oath or not.

00:17:27.240 We have the ethical obligation of candor to the court.

00:17:30.560 We've got to be honest, even in things that we put in writing.

00:17:33.000 So this is why I say that this pleading that Ashley Merchant filed where she details what she believes Terrence Bradley is going to say, she has to have a good faith basis for that.

00:17:45.080 You heard prosecutors call her a liar.

00:17:46.780 They said you don't have a good faith basis.

00:17:48.520 Well, today, Megan, is the day that Ashley Merchant gets to tell us, and I think we're going to get to see, what her good faith basis was.

00:17:56.860 And that's really what's at the heart of all of this.

00:17:59.600 Here we have a little bit of that.

00:18:01.380 Fannie Willis attacking Ashley Merchant as soon as she got on the stand, the witness stand Fannie did, suggesting that the lawyer had lied for the basis of the disqualification motion.

00:18:13.200 Because it was based in part on what Merchant admitted she'd been told by Terrence Bradley.

00:18:18.960 We all watched Ashley Merchant tell the judge that when they were pressing her on what her evidence is, that this affair began long before the two said it did, and so on and so forth.

00:18:29.500 And Fannie Willis took that stand, loaded for bear, and unleashed a can on Ashley Merchant. 1.00

00:18:35.640 Here's a bit of it in SOT 3.

00:18:38.220 Did you listen to any arguments?

00:18:40.160 I did hear the arguments this morning.

00:18:41.820 It's ridiculous to me that you lied on Monday, and yet here we still are.

00:18:46.600 And I did listen to that argument.

00:18:50.740 All right, so that was it, just the argument, no testimony.

00:18:54.140 Right, I listened to the argument this morning, where Adam Abadi, I thought, did an excellent job pointing out how dishonest you were with the court on Monday.

00:19:03.560 And I'm actually surprised that the hearing continued.

00:19:07.320 But since it did, here I am.

00:19:08.760 Did you meet with Mr. Wade and talk to him about the motion that I filed to disqualify you?

00:19:14.280 On January, this first January motion?

00:19:16.640 Yes.

00:19:17.380 I don't know if you could say, talked about.

00:19:20.380 I probably had some choice words about some of the things that you said that were dishonest within this motion.

00:19:26.080 But it seems today that a lawyer writes a lie, and then it's printed for all of the world to see.

00:19:31.760 When I met him, Judge Reeves introduced us.

00:19:35.760 He handed me his business card.

00:19:37.560 I'm unsure if I handed him my business card, but we exchanged information.

00:19:41.720 He said, if you ever need any help, give me a call.

00:19:44.300 And he walked to the parking lot.

00:19:46.740 So after that, you started dating shortly thereafter, correct?

00:19:52.620 That's a lie.

00:19:53.140 That's one of your lies.

00:19:54.080 So virtually every time she mentioned that word lie in that first exchange was a reference to Terrence Bradley.

00:20:03.580 She didn't say it explicitly, but that's what she was talking about.

00:20:05.960 Because Ashley told the court, I spoke with this guy.

00:20:08.860 He gave me texts.

00:20:10.500 And then the other side said, oh, you never actually spoke to him.

00:20:15.500 And she said, well, I have text messages.

00:20:17.000 You can see my whole phone.

00:20:18.000 I'll introduce it into evidence if you want.

00:20:19.540 And then Bradley had been up there saying, all right, he's like they knew he wasn't going to give it up once actually asked to say it under oath.

00:20:28.380 So she thought she was going to get away with just calling Ashley Merchant a liar.

00:20:32.040 And now that bill's coming, come and due today at two.

00:20:36.960 Yeah, well, I know Ashley Merchant. 1.00

00:20:39.120 I've known her for a long time.

00:20:40.320 She's been a guest on my podcast and we've had cases together.

00:20:43.920 She's not the type of person, in my view, that's going to take this allegation laying down.

00:20:50.880 If she's got a good faith basis, I expect she's going to try to present that today.

00:20:55.460 She says in this pleading, she says more specifically.

00:21:00.660 She says Bradley has information about the relationship between Wade and Willis directly from Wade and not in the context of them seeking legal advice.

00:21:11.840 She goes on to say that Bradley has personal knowledge that Wade and Willis regularly stayed together at her home until Willis' father moved in sometime in 2020.

00:21:23.940 So she's telling us in this pleading, she's telling the court that Bradley knows this stuff.

00:21:30.020 How does she know what Bradley knows unless Bradley has told her what he knows?

00:21:33.440 So that's what this is really about.

00:21:37.380 We're going to see today exactly what kind of cards Ms. Merchant is holding. 0.97

00:21:43.140 I think we might see the text messages.

00:21:45.240 We've talked a lot about those.

00:21:46.440 And in the past, it seems like those text messages were really going to be the smoking gun.

00:21:51.360 But if there's direct testimony today from Mr. Bradley, as Ashley Merchant has said would happen in this pleading, then we won't need the text messages.

00:22:02.740 On the other hand, if there's a discrepancy between what he has said to her in the past or what she believes he has said or what she can prove he said, if there's a discrepancy, then she's going to come out with the prior statements.

00:22:16.640 And so then the judge gets to weigh what has he said in the past versus what he's saying now under oath, and the judge is going to have to decide which of that to believe.

00:22:28.040 But one thing that I know for sure is that Ashley Merchant is not going to take these claims laying down.

00:22:34.220 She's not going to sit by and have anybody call her a liar.

00:22:37.920 She's not going to sit by and have anybody say that she doesn't have a good faith basis for making this claim.

00:22:44.360 And so I'm going to be sitting here.

00:22:47.980 Like I watched Nathan Waite, not Nathan Waite, I watched him too, but I watched Terrence Bradley the first time and he tried to wiggle, I mean, like nobody's business, out of saying anything, anything.

00:22:59.720 Every answer was slow.

00:23:04.640 Yeah.

00:23:05.140 Then another word would come.

00:23:06.200 No, no, no.

00:23:06.540 I'm imitating him.

00:23:08.220 Long pauses.

00:23:09.060 You're like, oh my God, is he done?

00:23:10.880 Like he's not saying anything.

00:23:12.160 And then it would be these long, long pauses in between his words where he would wind up saying absolutely nothing other than privilege, privilege is privilege.

00:23:19.960 So it seems to me pretty clear that this judge has now said those assertions of privilege are not valid.

00:23:27.980 That's what they were arguing over, whether he could assert the privilege in response to these questions about when the affair began, what he saw with his own eyes and so on.

00:23:37.900 And this judge has now overruled the objections in in chambers and in this order, which we haven't yet seen ourselves because he's emailed to the council last night, but it wasn't posted on the docket.

00:23:49.200 And even I read you the words according to the Times of what he ordered.

00:23:52.340 So do you believe, at least in the judge's mind, that it's time for Terrence Bradley to answer the question, when did the affair begin?

00:24:01.900 What was the nature of the relationship prior to 2022?

00:24:04.360 Yeah, so I'm glad that the judge has ruled that there was no attorney-client privilege that would apply.

00:24:13.440 So that would tend to, I think, help Mr. Bradley feel better about freely testifying because he doesn't want to take the stand and testify if he thinks that he's giving up attorney-client privilege.

00:24:24.580 So hopefully we'll get to the bottom of all of this.

00:24:28.460 Undoubtedly, there's going to be some knowledge that he has that's attorney-client privilege because he was the lawyer on the divorce.

00:24:34.660 I think he filed the complaint for divorce.

00:24:37.960 So clearly there's some degree of attorney-client privilege.

00:24:41.560 But what we don't know is how much latitude the judge is going to give the parties.

00:24:46.200 We don't know if there's some things that are still off limits.

00:24:48.720 We're going to have to wait and see how the judge rules on this. 0.93

00:24:50.760 He's not going to let him go on a fishing expedition and get too far afield.

00:24:54.580 But it's clear that the judge believes that Bradley has some relevant information.

00:24:59.420 The judge could have simply said, you know, there's no attorney-client privilege here, but this is all much ado about nothing.

00:25:06.500 This is all irrelevant, so we're just going to move on.

00:25:09.100 He didn't do that, which that tells me the judge believes there's some benefit to having additional testimony from Mr. Bradley.

00:25:16.720 And so it's all going to depend on what is the basis of his knowledge.

00:25:22.360 The pleading that Ashley Merchant has filed says that he has non-privileged information.

00:25:27.860 And so that is what we're going to be drilling down on.

00:25:30.640 What are the things that you saw?

00:25:32.300 What are the things that you observed?

00:25:34.520 What are the things that you talked about in some setting other than an attorney-client conversation?

00:25:40.320 I mean, it's good, but he's in a very strange position right now because he tried to deny that there was any of that back when he took the stand on Feb 16.

00:25:49.600 And so he said, no personal knowledge of anything.

00:25:53.000 You remember, the audience will remember.

00:25:55.040 He said, no, no personal, everything I know, I know because I'm an attorney.

00:25:58.340 And then the prosecution got up there and cross-examined him as though he had given up the farm and tried to lambast him with not one but two sexual assault allegations against you.

00:26:10.140 That's why you left the Nathan Wade law firm.

00:26:12.560 And the guy's like, whoa, no, none of that is true.

00:26:14.740 What are you doing?

00:26:15.240 Well, you're coming for me.

00:26:16.020 And the judge, once again, they had got into a privilege discussion because Terrence Bradley tried to say the circumstances of my departure from the firm are all privileged.

00:26:25.460 And that was when the judge got the light bulb saying, this man doesn't understand the nature of attorney-client privilege.

00:26:30.260 This does not cover all this stuff.

00:26:32.240 And I got to go reexamine this.

00:26:33.960 So the prosecution opened the door to this whole thing.

00:26:36.560 So it is still possible.

00:26:39.360 Like, basically, Terrence Bradley's in the position of having to either pick the position he took in his texts to Ashley Merchant or pick the position he took while on the stand.

00:26:49.560 But he's going to have to contradict one of those prior things.

00:26:54.500 Yeah, it's not a good position.

00:26:56.200 And I certainly don't envy anybody being in that position.

00:26:59.080 And another thing that we don't know, I think it's worth talking about, is what did he say to the judge that was in the in-camera discussion back in the jury room or in the judge's office or wherever they did it behind closed doors?

00:27:09.700 Who was there, Phil?

00:27:10.480 Do we know?

00:27:11.360 Okay, so it's going to be the witness, Mr. Bradley.

00:27:13.400 Who was there yesterday?

00:27:15.120 And then you'll tell me what's happening today.

00:27:17.040 Yeah, it would be the witness, Mr. Bradley, the judge, counsel for Mr. Bradley, and a court reporter.

00:27:24.120 So there's going to be a record.

00:27:25.580 And it may wind up being sealed.

00:27:27.340 It may be revealed to the parties.

00:27:29.080 It certainly is part of the record that would go up on appeal when there's any appeal from any of this.

00:27:34.100 But so there is a memorialization of what was said.

00:27:38.100 And so until or unless we know exactly what that was, it's really hard for us to fully analyze all of this.

00:27:44.900 But if there's any discrepancies between what Mr. Bradley or any other witness, quite frankly, has said previously versus what they say in court, today is the day that he has an opportunity to clarify that.

00:27:57.840 He's got the opportunity to say, you know what?

00:27:59.660 Well, and Phil, if he told the judge a story yesterday, if he actually did say, judge, here's the story, and this is why I've been the way I've been, then the judge has that knowledge today.

00:28:10.300 And he's not going to be able to get away with it today because now the judge knows what the answers are versus where we were two weeks ago.

00:28:17.060 Yeah, and that discussion was just yesterday.

00:28:19.860 So undoubtedly what we'll hear today may be some iteration of what was discussed with the judge yesterday, what the judge would have been asking him to say, look, you know, tell me what the information is and tell me the circumstances surrounding how you obtained it.

00:28:38.100 And so the judge is probably going to parcel out some instances where it might be attorney-client privilege.

00:28:45.440 But what Ashley Merchant is saying is this was personal knowledge that was not obtained in the context of an attorney-client relationship.

00:28:53.640 And so the judge is, I think, going to allow her to drill down on that.

00:28:56.940 She's going to be able to say, look, this is the good faith basis I've got.

00:28:59.000 Well, and the judge now knows the content.

00:29:01.380 So he's going to know which doors can open and which doors can't.

00:29:04.760 But even when I was a practicing lawyer, you'd have to present what's called a privilege log when you were withholding documents from the other side.

00:29:13.760 And even in the privilege log, which, you know, you've got to tell the other side, like we've got all these.

00:29:18.460 You'd have to say, this is the date of the document.

00:29:21.040 These are the two participants or three, whoever.

00:29:23.720 These are the participants on the document.

00:29:25.460 And here is the nature of the communication without revealing the communication.

00:29:30.000 You know, there are certain where, when, who, when, why, where, where facts around a privileged communication that are revealable to the other side without getting to the what.

00:29:40.760 Right.

00:29:41.280 So, like, all of that can fairly be probed by Ashley Merchant today.

00:29:45.400 And I actually do expect substance of the communications.

00:29:48.540 I think this judge in his order said that these claims of privilege do not hold up.

00:29:55.160 And so he's overruled the objection to having him testify to these subjects.

00:30:01.000 That's what I expect will happen today.

00:30:02.340 All right.

00:30:02.480 Let me ask you something else.

00:30:04.160 Yeah, go ahead.

00:30:05.280 No, there's another thing that could happen.

00:30:08.060 It could be that there was privileged information that he's got, but the privilege may have been deemed waived by Mr. Wade because his prosecution team called Ashley Merchant a liar and said that she had no good faith basis.

00:30:19.600 They may have opened the door, so to speak, to the admission of this type of information.

00:30:24.300 Even if it once was privileged, the judge might very well say, you know what, that's been waived and we can get into it now.

00:30:29.940 Well, that's so interesting because it comes in.

00:30:31.260 It's almost like a hearsay objection.

00:30:32.540 It's not coming in for the truth of the matter.

00:30:34.120 It's coming in to redeem Ashley Merchant.

00:30:36.500 There's not, I don't know that there's such an exception to the privileged law.

00:30:39.380 But, yeah, it could certainly have been waived by Nathan Wade, not necessarily by his lawyer.

00:30:44.340 I did think it was interesting in that soundbite we played of Fannie on the stand, a lawyer writes a lie and then it's printed for all the world to see.

00:30:52.800 She was speaking about Ashley Merchant, who did not lie.

00:30:55.940 But that line is true about Nathan Wade, and we haven't even talked about his perjury in his divorce case, which this judge knows very well he committed because you don't need, that's not a matter of dispute.

00:31:09.220 He said in his divorce case under sworn interrogatories that he never had an affair.

00:31:12.780 He said on the stand in front of this judge that he did, that he had an affair with Fannie Willis while he was still married, which, by the way, he still is.

00:31:20.360 The divorce is not final.

00:31:22.000 So we know.

00:31:22.780 And then he went back and tried to amend it with his fake made-up privacy privilege, which is not a thing, like saying, oh, never mind, I amend my answers to asserting a privacy privilege.

00:31:31.880 That's not a thing.

00:31:32.780 It's improper.

00:31:33.400 So at a minimum, he should answer for that unethical behavior with the bar and with the court.

00:31:41.500 But I want to get to this because I only have a minute with you left, Bill.

00:31:44.340 Yep.

00:31:45.020 Are there other DAs who could take this case?

00:31:48.460 If Fannie Willis were disqualified and the whole office goes with her, Nathan Wade as well, and keep in mind, there are two special prosecutors other than Nathan Wade who have been on the case.

00:31:56.580 What is likely to happen?

00:31:59.060 Are there other DAs who would take this circus?

00:32:01.840 Yeah, you've got to have special prosecutors.

00:32:03.800 You've got to have somebody with the constitutional authority as a prosecutor.

00:32:07.200 So what would happen in Georgia, we have something called the Prosecuting Attorneys Council.

00:32:10.980 It's a state agency.

00:32:11.780 And when there's a conflict or some reason why a district attorney in the actual jurisdiction that were a venue would lay for an alleged crime, when that prosecutor can't for any reason handle the case, the Prosecuting Attorneys Council has to decide, look, are we going to appoint somebody else?

00:32:27.200 And if so, who?

00:32:28.320 And if they do that, they're going to have to have somebody willing, which this is an excellent point.

00:32:32.820 I'm glad you brought it up because Fannie Willis was disqualified from investigating Georgia's current lieutenant governor, Burt Jones, because he was going to be one of these defendants.

00:32:44.800 Willis had her way. 0.92

00:32:45.960 But she had supported and given money and I think campaigned maybe for his opponent in the election last time.

00:32:51.860 And so the judge said that's a conflict of interest.

00:32:54.560 You're disqualified.

00:32:55.400 You can't go after people that you politicked against.

00:32:58.320 So to this day, the Prosecuting Attorneys Council has not referred that it matter to any other prosecutor in the state of Georgia.

00:33:07.580 So I'm of the mind that I need to – I'm not sure, Megan, whether or not they even would send this to another district attorney.

00:33:15.100 But if they did, anybody that takes it is going to have to pick it up from the beginning and I think start over from scratch.

00:33:20.480 Because if the investigation has been so tainted because of a constitutional violation for fundamentally unfair prosecutorial tactics, then all of it is going to have to go away and they're going to have to start over from scratch.

00:33:34.480 And I don't know any prosecutor that wants to do that because it's going to consume their office.

00:33:40.180 Most offices in Georgia don't have the resources that Fulton County seems to have for this.

00:33:45.520 So I think that it's going to be a tough sell getting anybody to pick it up.

00:33:48.860 Maybe there will be someone, but we may not even be necessary if the judge tosses the whole thing because then we're in the appeals courts.

00:33:56.680 But it's going to be very interesting to see where this goes.

00:33:59.520 We all need to buckle up.

00:34:02.300 This thing was such a long stretch to begin with, this case against Trump and the other co-defendants.

00:34:07.560 Fannie Willis, in my view, wanted to be a star. 0.95

00:34:10.420 She wanted to make a national name for herself. 0.98

00:34:12.700 She barely won this election. 1.00

00:34:14.400 She failed in her election to be a judge. 0.97

00:34:16.600 And she gets in as DA and she saw an opportunity.

00:34:19.860 There are reports from the Defense Council that she hired this media monitoring firm that she paid a bunch of taxpayer money to to make sure she knew about all the media hits on her. 0.99

00:34:28.780 What are they saying about me?

00:34:30.360 How often does my name appear in the press?

00:34:32.900 Tell me everything they're saying about me and my case.

00:34:35.040 She sat down for interviews.

00:34:36.640 She did her press conferences.

00:34:37.680 She was more out there than any of these DAs, certainly more than Jack Smith, I have to say, even more than Alvin Bragg in New York.

00:34:45.160 She wanted to be a star.

00:34:47.620 Well, there's famous and there's infamous, and she's starting to learn the difference.

00:34:52.460 I don't think there's any way in which she sees this case through to the end, and I think the end is very clear.

00:34:57.940 It's very near and clear for her and for Trump.

00:35:00.980 Phil, thank you.

00:35:01.600 To be continued, we'll do it again tomorrow when we know what happened.

00:35:04.220 Yeah, you bet.

00:35:05.060 Let's talk soon.

00:35:05.620 All right, good deal.

00:35:07.660 Okay, first, though.

00:35:10.140 Well, we're going to get to Breitbart in two minutes because there's a reporter from Breitbart who's coming on with new information about what's going on inside Fannie Willis' office that we thought was so interesting we're putting him on, so stand by for that.

00:35:24.220 Now we continue our Fannie Willis coverage with a reporter who's been following this closely, and he's been breaking news on this story.

00:35:30.800 Wendell Huizebo is a politics reporter at Breitbart News, and he joins me now.

00:35:35.620 Wendell, welcome to the show.

00:35:36.500 How are you doing?

00:35:37.680 Megan, thanks for having me on.

00:35:39.180 Good day to you.

00:35:40.300 Sure, and to you.

00:35:41.280 All right, so you've got some reporting out today about a possible connection between the Biden White House and Fannie Willis' office.

00:35:50.440 There's been a lot of buzz about this because we saw billings from Nathan Wade who met with the White House in connection with this case.

00:36:00.120 I think it was more than once.

00:36:01.520 It was at least twice.

00:36:02.360 And people were wondering what exactly was going on there because the White House wants us to believe they've had nothing to do with any of these prosecutions.

00:36:11.240 None of their fingerprints are anywhere on them.

00:36:13.660 This is just a Fannie Willis project. 0.53

00:36:16.040 So what have you learned?

00:36:16.800 Well, I have multiple credible sources with direct knowledge that a man named Jeff DeSantis is a plant or a type of liaison to the Biden administration in Willis' office.

00:36:34.020 Jeff DeSantis is a DNC operative.

00:36:37.060 He's been around Georgia politics for years and years.

00:36:39.760 He ran Fannie Willis' campaign in 2020.

00:36:45.140 He helped with the transition in 2020 into 2021.

00:36:49.100 And he's still there as a deputy DA assistant.

00:36:52.740 So how connected is this guy to the Democrat Party outside of Georgia?

00:36:58.340 He's very connected.

00:36:59.840 I mean, he's run multiple campaigns.

00:37:02.120 He probably knows everyone on the Rolodex of Joe Biden.

00:37:05.340 I don't know that for sure, but that's just how connected this guy appears to be.

00:37:09.140 His bio is extensive.

00:37:11.200 He worked for the Georgia DNC.

00:37:14.220 Like I said, he's run multiple campaigns.

00:37:16.420 And I have a story coming out tomorrow exposing that he worked with a member of Congress in 2020 and was receiving funds in 2023 as a consultant.

00:37:35.560 And so this just raises questions as to why he would be working for Fannie Willis at the same time as, you know, double dipping essentially on the campaign front.

00:37:47.200 Or was it just was it a convenient accident that this guy with national DNC ties winds up in the Fannie Willis office or was it intentional?

00:37:59.360 Right. That's the question.

00:38:00.360 Did they just get lucky that somebody who's this connected to the Democrats writ large wound up in her office or was he placed there?

00:38:07.620 My sources tell me it's not a coincidence that has yet to be, you know, sussed out how connected the White House is.

00:38:17.040 But my sources, which have direct knowledge of the ongoings of the office, say that this guy was the point guy.

00:38:26.060 Nothing happened in that office that this guy doesn't know about this guy being Jeff DeSantis.

00:38:32.940 And so more reporting to come.

00:38:36.340 We have more more breaking news in the following days on this.

00:38:39.400 Hmm. OK. And just as a refresher, Mr. Wade's expense reports show he traveled to Athens, Georgia, for a conference with the White House counsel's office on May 23rd, 2022.

00:38:50.520 I do believe there was at least one other because there was that 24 hour bill that he submitted for his time.

00:38:56.480 So we know that there's been at least some chatting between Wade and the White House.

00:39:00.840 And we also understand that he's had multiple meetings because he's invoiced for them with the January 6th committee team meeting conference with J6 research legal issues to prep interview.

00:39:13.360 There's at least four of those bills by Nathan Wade's own hand.

00:39:18.460 So, you know, all of this has the feel of coordination.

00:39:22.920 I mean, we know we reported earlier there was based on a political report that Biden's very angry at Jack Smith for not moving faster on those prosecutions.

00:39:30.140 I think the Georgia prosecution was their ace in the hole.

00:39:33.360 New York is going to be like a slap on the wrist.

00:39:36.120 The the federal prosecutions are big and bad, but they're not going anyplace anytime soon because of all the legal maneuvering.

00:39:43.880 And Georgia was their ace in the hole because they have a very Biden friendly prosecutor, a Biden friendly jury pool.

00:39:51.240 And while the judge is right down the middle, he's a former federalist guy.

00:39:54.880 So I think he's more Republican leaning.

00:39:56.360 It's better to have a good jury pool than to have the best judge.

00:39:59.820 So this is the position they were in, which is why all of this is so potentially devastating.

00:40:03.780 So this guy, DeSantis, what do we know about him?

00:40:07.560 Like, what do we know whether he's been actively involved in the Trump case?

00:40:13.020 My sources say that Jeff DeSantis is involved with targeting President Trump, helping organize it in the background.

00:40:24.640 And between Jeff DeSantis and Nathan Wade, we have two guys who sources say were involved before and after this prosecution of former President Trump.

00:40:40.440 And going back to Nathan Wade, Nathan Wade was on the transition team.

00:40:46.540 Breitbart News reported this on Sunday that he led the transition team of Fannie Willis, Fannie Willis coming into office and was in charge of hiring and firing Fannie staff.

00:41:02.080 Willis was Wade was not a staff member of Fulton County yet.

00:41:07.480 So that really raises questions why he was there.

00:41:10.400 Why was he directing staff decisions?

00:41:12.740 On top of it, the sources told me that it was obvious that Wade and Willis had a relationship going on.

00:41:21.520 During this transition, and that contradicts what Wade said on the stand, which is that, you know, the affair really got going in 2022.

00:41:30.380 Well, that's not what my sources are telling me.

00:41:32.380 What did what did your sources observe between them?

00:41:36.040 They observed behavior that, you know, indicates that they were in a relationship.

00:41:43.680 I didn't go deeply into that.

00:41:46.400 My reporting is mostly on how, number one, Wade was involved and led the transition team.

00:41:53.360 Uh, and that number two, Jeff DeSantis, uh, sources are telling us, uh, was a, was a plant from the Biden administration.

00:42:02.900 By the way, we should reach out to Jeff DeSantis and we'll bring you his response if we get one from him on this allegation.

00:42:08.100 I assume he did.

00:42:08.660 And I have reached out.

00:42:09.620 I have reached out and I have not heard back.

00:42:11.640 I would love to hear back and report their side of the story.

00:42:15.580 Yeah, same.

00:42:16.360 And we will reach out.

00:42:17.140 Um, the other piece of it is we've been listening to Fannie Willis from the moment this broke, you know, she, this alleged relationship and the kickbacks and all of that, she wouldn't come out and deny it directly to the voters because she knew she was having an affair.

00:42:30.120 But she went in front of her church now twice, but especially the first time, got very political, started making it a race thing.

00:42:36.880 Um, saying they, they accused me of playing the race card.

00:42:40.080 Isn't it?

00:42:40.400 They who threw played the race card and so on.

00:42:43.540 Um, she said they were picking on Nathan Wade because he's black.

00:42:47.140 Um, you've just uncovered information to show this woman's obsession with the skin color thing as, you know, indicative of who you are as a person runs deep.

00:42:59.400 It didn't just start with the Trump case or these accusations against her.

00:43:03.360 What's your latest reporting on that?

00:43:04.920 Over at Breitbart News, you can go there right now.

00:43:08.420 And, uh, our reporting is that, uh, Fannie Willis essentially was running a race education program, uh, dubbed by many leftists as a DEI program.

00:43:19.060 And, um, my sources, uh, gave me slides, gave us slides.

00:43:24.020 They gave us video of, uh, this, uh, race education program that was going on.

00:43:30.100 If you look at the slides at Breitbart.com, you can actually see where the user of the software program was supposed to decide which color face was, uh, you know, good or bad predicated on if they were white or black.

00:43:45.560 And so if you ask me, this was just explicit racism. 0.96

00:43:48.980 The left cloaks this under, you know, DEI quality inclusion, all that garbage. 0.82

00:43:54.060 But in reality, they are training or were training, uh, employees to judge people based upon skin color. 0.97

00:44:02.500 It's really amazing because not only is this racist, but she's the DA. 0.89

00:44:07.880 If this were a white DA doing this about black people, this person would have bounced out on their behind immediately trying to associate badness with a skin color. 0.99

00:44:19.220 And it's no less pernicious just because she's black doing it to whites. 1.00

00:44:24.240 Um, you know, I'm sure the Trump defendants would, would love to cross examine her a bit more on why she thinks white faces ought to be associated with these colors with, with bad, with these judgments. 0.72

00:44:34.320 You know, you did, I know, talk to some people who know Fannie Willis and they know how her office operates. 0.89

00:44:40.860 Her reputation.

00:44:42.280 I mean, it, it, it doesn't sound from your reporting, like she's known as exactly, um, you know, an Einstein running around that place.

00:44:49.220 No, in fact, the sources said that before Fannie Willis won election in 2020, uh, the, the staffers were, were very happy.

00:44:59.060 And then when she came in, there were systematic changes to, to, uh, change the chain of command so that all of the employees were walled off except for a few select Jeff DeSantis and Nathan Wade to communicate with, with Willis.

00:45:17.040 And so these, uh, these sources tell me that, you know, the, the, the shop or the office over there was, was very corrupt.

00:45:25.460 And it was a very hostile work environment, which, you know, honestly, you can see with, uh, Fannie Willis being on the stand, she was very contemptuous.

00:45:33.100 And she was, uh, admonished by the judge after she, you know, had some sort of, uh, temper tantrum.

00:45:39.780 And so, uh, you know, these sources, again, they have direct knowledge of, of the office and they know these, uh, they know these individuals inside and out.

00:45:49.940 Hmm. So their reporting is that it was a largely a hostile work environment, that she's not the brightest bulb, that the thing was being basically run by DeSantis and Wade, that DeSantis has extensive DNC ties and also potentially ties to the white house.

00:46:07.160 And that the belief by many people in a position to know close to and around her is that as you write your piece, anyone that has common sense knows the white house has been involved in this prosecution.

00:46:18.760 This shouldn't just miraculously happen.

00:46:21.240 Of course, Willis is not going to prosecute the former president of the United States without the current administration's approval.

00:46:26.920 I mean, that makes sense to a lot of us.

00:46:29.540 It doesn't seem like this, you know, relatively new DA with absolutely no resume behind her would run in there and start saying, yeah, I'll get him without some sort of a blessing, uh, or push, but it hasn't yet been proven explicitly into the country.

00:46:45.440 It's been denied by those in power.

00:46:47.240 You're casting real doubt on that today.

00:46:50.980 We are, we are.

00:46:52.100 I encourage everyone to go to brightbartnews.com.

00:46:54.500 We have the DEI, uh, story up right now in that story.

00:46:58.560 In fact, we have a video of, uh, of what, uh, uh, funny Willis showed the employees and, uh, it, it, you know, tells the employees to rank judges based upon, uh, their skin color and, and political affiliation.

00:47:14.120 Well, judges in Georgia don't run, uh, for their position based upon political affiliation.

00:47:20.260 And so, um, and another thing is that this video was, uh, uh, taken with a bunch of data, uh, that had nothing to do with Fulton County.

00:47:29.940 It was an overarching data, uh, a piece.

00:47:33.540 And so the whole thing just seems to me just to be a bunch of hooey. 1.00

00:47:36.800 Well, that would make sense because that's what her prosecution looks like to me, not to mention her sworn testimony more on this case.

00:47:45.100 As we get it, the developments will continue throughout the day and we will bring you, uh, the latest news just as soon as we have it.

00:47:50.960 Don't forget to tune into the show tomorrow because we'll have the full rundown.

00:47:53.400 Wendell, thank you.

00:47:54.300 When we come back, Mary Catherine ham is here.

00:47:57.540 Don't go away.

00:47:58.040 I'm Megan Kelly, host of the Megan Kelly show on Sirius XM.

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00:49:00.720 We are learning grim new details about the Georgia nursing student who went for a run in broad daylight.

00:49:06.860 Broad daylight.

00:49:08.260 Last week and wound up dead.

00:49:11.300 Lake and Riley was just 22 years old and by all accounts well-liked.

00:49:15.040 A sister, look at this one young woman. 1.00

00:49:17.700 A daughter, a friend who loved God.

00:49:21.120 Something her family says exemplified every aspect of her life.

00:49:25.560 According to new court documents, her accused killer beat her so brutally her skull was disfigured.

00:49:30.680 Mother effer.

00:49:32.580 She was dragged to a secluded area apparently in an attempt to conceal her body.

00:49:37.540 Her death is shining new light on our open borders because her accused killer is a 26-year-old Venezuelan man who entered this country illegally and, of course, had prior run-ins with law enforcement.

00:49:48.740 And while many are rightfully pointing to the fact that we simply do not know who has been allowed to run free in America, especially in the wake of this sick crime, one Democrat had a very different take on this tragedy.

00:50:01.680 Listen to Katie Porter. 1.00

00:50:03.540 Well, I think when a horrible tragedy like this happens, I think whenever we're dealing with violent crime, there is a sense of outrage, of sadness, and of loss.

00:50:13.900 But I think the important thing to focus on is any one instance shouldn't shape our overall immigration policy.

00:50:22.000 Joining me now, Mary Catherine Ham, host of the Getting Hammered podcast.

00:50:26.780 MK Ham, great to have you here.

00:50:28.680 How about Representative Katie Porter, Democrat of California? 0.94

00:50:31.900 You know, what's important is to focus on any one instance to shape our overall—it's just this one, just this weird one-off.

00:50:41.540 We're an illegal American.

00:50:43.620 By the way, Democrats are so good at being very rational and calculating and never pinning their policies on one emotional story.

00:50:53.700 That's like their whole MO.

00:50:54.840 Look, a lot of being a Democrat is about policing what the rest of us are allowed to be upset about.

00:51:02.140 And in this case, I'm upset about the loss of Lake and Riley.

00:51:05.440 It's an outrage.

00:51:07.260 It is viscerally awful to think about this young woman not being able to live her life from 22 into the future.

00:51:15.820 Part of the reason is because I have a personal connection to the place where she died.

00:51:19.800 It is a place that I ran that trail every single week of my college life.

00:51:25.020 I went to the University of Georgia.

00:51:26.820 I look at the pictures of her with her classmates, her best friend, her roommate, and I see a woman who's finishing a half marathon, who's going to tailgates with her friends, who's enjoying downtown Athens.

00:51:38.540 And, yes, going for this run in broad daylight, as you note, in a place that really felt safe, that was a wonderful place of memories for me.

00:51:46.820 I know exactly where her body was found.

00:51:48.480 I know the place they're talking about and what it feels like and what it smells like.

00:51:52.380 And the reason it felt safe is because it was safe.

00:51:54.900 There hasn't been a homicide on campus at the University of Georgia in 30 years.

00:51:58.900 But the left will tell you that you're not allowed to be upset about this incident because it might, like, give people wrong think about the border, right?

00:52:11.120 That's what the media will say.

00:52:12.440 They're like, oh, let's just downplay that he was an illegal immigrant because those are facts that don't help the conversation that we in the media think we should be having.

00:52:21.160 But the conversation we should be having is about facts, right?

00:52:25.220 When you point out the media and, you know, your own experience on this trail, and we talked about this yesterday, but the AP, you saw it yesterday, the killing of a nursing student out for a run highlights the fears of solo female athletes.

00:52:39.700 As though the University of Georgia had been having a problem with their solo female athletes just out running and being randomly attacked for those 30 years, as opposed to 30 years of peace.

00:52:52.680 And then what changed?

00:52:53.760 Our open border.

00:52:56.140 Right.

00:52:56.800 No, and I want to, I think part of, look, there's two stories here, right?

00:53:00.780 There's a personal story for the friends and family of Lake and Riley, who, by the way, the whole UGA campus had this very emotional memorial service in the center of campus, just flooded with people, partially also for Wyatt Banks, a young man who lost his life to suicide, the same week.

00:53:15.440 So it's been a tough week for them, and I want to honor that part of it and the personal part of it.

00:53:20.200 It is also a policy story.

00:53:21.880 And if you want to honor the people who are involved and you want to honor Lake and Riley, you have to deal with the facts of the actual incident.

00:53:29.060 So the person in custody is an illegal immigrant who had run-ins with the law several times over, was hanging out with his brother in Athens, which is a sanctuary city, sanctuary area, with a DA who's promised to treat undocumented immigrants with kid gloves.

00:53:44.660 And those are, in her words, the undocumented immigrants part.

00:53:48.100 And so he's hanging out there with three arrests.

00:53:50.700 His brother comes down, the alleged perpetrator in this.

00:53:54.160 He's arrested maybe once in Athens, definitely once in New York.

00:53:57.620 And these two guys, because of the federal policy and because of sanctuary city policy, don't have to worry about that endangering their time in America.

00:54:06.300 They don't have to worry about that endangering their sort of pseudo-asylum claims, right?

00:54:11.160 They get to live just as they want until the moment that they stop an innocent young woman from living, and then maybe, maybe we'll hold them in custody.

00:54:21.160 That's, or the one guy in custody.

00:54:23.520 This is, it's a travesty.

00:54:25.380 She was failed by her government, whose fundamental actual job is to keep her safe.

00:54:32.840 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

00:54:34.360 You, you, there is a difference between this and, let's say, the George Floyd situation, where, worst case scenario, and we did the whole documentary on Derek Chauvin, which was very eye-opening.

00:54:46.640 Um, but worst case scenario, it's about a cop behaving badly and an individual.

00:54:52.520 That's worst case.

00:54:54.140 This is about a government system and policies put in place by the, by the sitting president that have a direct connection to this guy's entry into the country illegally, as he, quote, claimed asylum, which is just nonsense.

00:55:07.780 Right.

00:55:08.220 And this young woman's death.

00:55:09.480 But they won't, the Democrats won't turn this one incident, the way they did with George Floyd, into a national story.

00:55:16.800 I mean, there was a tweet yesterday.

00:55:18.720 Hold on a second.

00:55:19.560 Where is it?

00:55:20.280 I, I really liked it because I like this guy.

00:55:22.320 But he was talking about how, um, this is exactly what the Dems do and they'll, what was it, Chad Panther?

00:55:28.480 Yeah, it was, it was Chad Prather, comedian, and wrote, hmm, they shaped a shit ton of policy after George Floyd died.

00:55:35.520 I would say Lakin Riley's murder is a solid reason to shape overall immigration policy, especially when it was caused by a federal policy.

00:55:42.580 Uh, and he said accurately, Katie Porter would change her tune if it happened to her, but Katie Porter is protected.

00:55:49.240 So she doesn't have to worry.

00:55:51.380 Unlike Lakin Riley and the other girls and young men just like her on college campuses and elsewhere.

00:55:57.440 Yeah, this is not a say her name scenario, right?

00:56:01.160 They only liberals and media get to decide, but I repeat myself, get to decide whose name we say.

00:56:06.920 Well, I would like to say Lakin Riley's name, right?

00:56:09.500 And we can all do that, um, outside of their, their narrative setting.

00:56:13.960 And, uh, and that is something that we must do because look, you're right.

00:56:18.340 The left will fabricate a way to change policy for its, uh, preferred ends based on an emotional, uh, isolated incident that may or may not apply at all, right?

00:56:28.540 This one seems to actually apply to real policy and you could take care of some things to perhaps prevent such tragedies in the future.

00:56:38.980 And that's, that's the thing that I'm worried about because, because by the way, one of the, one of the brothers apparently had a job on campus, right?

00:56:46.060 He has several arrests to his name.

00:56:47.780 And why is that?

00:56:48.860 It's partly because he has fake papers, right?

00:56:51.740 So when he goes to the dining hall and says, I want a job, they run his papers and nothing pops, right?

00:56:56.980 Cause they're fake.

00:56:57.840 An American citizen who has an arrest would actually have to pay a price for that.

00:57:01.480 It might endanger their employment opportunities, but it's different, especially for an illegal immigrant in a sanctuary city.

00:57:08.220 And Americans are right to look at the situation and be like, well, why don't you care about my safety or my employment?

00:57:13.100 And it's always this person who's being put above me.

00:57:16.540 I was like, not only do we need to look at, you know, where to send our, our kids to school.

00:57:20.980 So a place that's safe, ideally not woke, trying to indoctrinate them into hatred of Jews, you know, take your pay.

00:57:27.300 These are the things we now need to worry about was right.

00:57:29.540 As we send our kids off to school, but now you have to actually look, you think Georgia.

00:57:33.080 Okay.

00:57:33.220 Hey, yeah, that's good South.

00:57:34.420 It's like, they're not going to know look within Georgia.

00:57:36.720 It's becoming more and more blue.

00:57:38.160 There are sanctuary cities there.

00:57:39.600 They've, there are whole counties that elect people like Fannie Willis and it's sicker on the former president. 1.00

00:57:44.640 Like you really do have to pay very close attention.

00:57:46.880 Who would want their child going to school in a sanctuary city where even, you know, we just saw the news in, in New York city where mayor Adams was like, we're open.

00:57:56.720 Welcome immigrants here.

00:57:57.960 We will always be a sanctuary city to now we need to stop the sanctuary city policies.

00:58:02.980 Too many people are getting hurt.

00:58:03.940 We can't handle it.

00:58:05.340 No.

00:58:05.500 And I think, look, this is a calculation certainly for, and probably a surprise to some of the parents who sent their kids to the university of Georgia.

00:58:13.040 Certainly it's probably a surprise to some of the students who are there who didn't really think that this was the attitude of their local government.

00:58:18.960 Cause you're not generally really in tune to your local government when you're a student, but they are being failed, right?

00:58:25.300 And their, their needs are not being put above those of the illegal immigrants who come to this community.

00:58:32.640 Now it matters by the way that the parents of those students, many of them and the students themselves are Georgia voters, right?

00:58:38.940 And the parents groups, by the way, who have university of Georgia kids lighting up just there on fire this week.

00:58:46.360 There was another person held at gunpoint, apparently near campus during the same week.

00:58:50.260 So they're going through a lot.

00:58:51.660 They're talking about these things.

00:58:53.380 They're paying a lot of money in many cases to send kids to a place where they'd like to be assured that someone's interested in keeping them safe.

00:59:02.420 And it's something they're going to demand of local leaders.

00:59:05.220 And they have some clout to do that.

00:59:07.540 So I look forward to that.

00:59:08.860 And here's the other thing.

00:59:09.780 Here's the other thing that's disturbing about this guy's case is he wasn't, although there are plenty of single men who are coming across that Southern border.

00:59:17.020 And, you know, you really got to, of course you feel differently about them than you do about single women.

00:59:20.820 Single women are not the ones who are attacking women on running paths. 0.99

00:59:24.120 And generally you're not the ones who are causing the felonious harm.

00:59:28.120 And honestly, that's true of American citizens too.

00:59:30.220 But in any event, it's mostly these men who do it.

00:59:33.680 But this guy was married.

00:59:34.820 This guy has a wife who's also an illegal immigrant claiming asylum.

00:59:39.060 And under the Biden policy, his new, quote, humane policy, those two would have been, they would have had the red carpet.

00:59:43.860 There's no way he would have been holding them to account on returning back for asylum hearings and so on.

00:59:49.040 Meanwhile, this is who we let in.

00:59:51.460 According to new arrest affidavits that have just been released, he used some type of object as a weapon and is accused of, quote, disfiguring her skull.

01:00:00.220 They have not said exactly how she was killed, only that her death was caused by blunt force trauma.

01:00:05.140 He's accused of dragging her, 22-year-old woman, to a secluded area, that it was committed between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. on Thursday, and that he also stopped her from making or completing a 911 call, which is chilling.

01:00:21.260 That's chilling, MK Ham, because, you know, she, like, she must have tried and they must have seen it or they must have a record that she tried to call for help.

01:00:28.040 By the way, this is a, this is an echo of the Molly Tibbetts case from 2018, which the Associated Press, in that story you noted, about being afraid to be a solo jogger, they note the story of Molly Tibbetts.

01:00:41.240 Molly Tibbetts, strikingly similar story, university student went out for a run, disappeared.

01:00:46.520 It turned out the guy who's serving a life sentence for this was an illegal immigrant, and the reason that he attacked her was because she picked up her phone and said she was going to call police when she had a run-in with him.

01:00:58.000 So these, like, strangely, the AP can't find that common thread when they're writing this story because they don't want to find that common thread.

01:01:06.360 That's not the conversation they want you to have. Those aren't the facts they want you to have at your disposal.

01:01:10.520 Okay, wasn't that, wasn't that case, it's been a couple years, but wasn't that the case in which, a case in which her brother said, no, don't use this guy's immigration status against him.

01:01:21.080 Like, she wouldn't have wanted that. We don't want that.

01:01:23.840 And I remember saying at the time, with all due respect to the grieving brother, that's not for him to say.

01:01:28.340 That's not, that's not for him to say, because there are other girls out there and young men who are going to be hurt by illegals just like these two.

01:01:38.100 And we must say what led to this person being here and that it's a factor we have to consider and stop.

01:01:46.200 No, you're correct. I read up on the other day and part of her family did say that.

01:01:50.780 And nonetheless, as I said, there are two different stories.

01:01:53.340 There's the personal story and we want to honor the person who's a victim of this and their family.

01:01:58.020 And also there's a policy story and the facts matter to the policy story.

01:02:02.240 And somebody on Twitter asked me yesterday, well, they said, well, the statistics show that way more Americans commit these kind of crimes proportionally than undocumented immigrants or something like that.

01:02:12.940 Are you scared of them?

01:02:14.200 And I said, well, generally I'm scared of, I'm scared of all murderers actually when I'm around them, but I don't discriminate in that way.

01:02:21.820 But what I would say is our question as a society and what government should be used for is at what point is this terrible crime preventable?

01:02:29.760 And in the case of an illegal immigrant, it's preventable at the moment that they come across the border.

01:02:34.080 It's preventable anytime they have a run in with the police after that point.

01:02:38.840 And so at many points, this might have been preventable.

01:02:41.620 And that is just worthy of more outrage, frankly.

01:02:46.480 It's so unthinkable that you could have stopped this and didn't.

01:02:50.580 And didn't care to.

01:02:51.820 The other piece of it is back to our, you know, Democrat double standard, the White House spokesperson responding to this.

01:02:57.400 This must have been somebody other than KJP because I think it's just a written statement.

01:03:01.440 We would like to extend our deepest condolences to the family and loved ones of Lake and Hope Riley.

01:03:08.200 Now, this is the point at which when the right says this after an incident involving a gun and you say thoughts and prayers to the children or whatever, they excoriate you.

01:03:17.640 You can't say thoughts and prayers.

01:03:19.480 That's not allowed.

01:03:20.700 Do something.

01:03:21.880 Doesn't apply when the White House responsible for these policies says deepest condolences to the family.

01:03:28.060 OK, it doesn't work both ways.

01:03:30.120 People should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law if they are found to be guilty.

01:03:34.960 Wow.

01:03:36.600 Given that this is an active case, we would have to refer you to state law enforcement and ICE.

01:03:41.660 That's very different messaging than we heard about, say, Kyle Rittenhouse naming a minor.

01:03:48.400 You can't talk about an in-progress case now?

01:03:50.980 Oh, so weird.

01:03:52.300 Right?

01:03:52.640 Very suddenly.

01:03:54.100 And people should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law if they are found to be guilty.

01:04:00.160 You mean this guy whose name we have who actually is an illegal immigrant, Jose Antonio Ibarra?

01:04:06.320 Say his name.

01:04:07.400 Say his name.

01:04:08.160 Say his name.

01:04:10.060 Yeah.

01:04:10.300 No, it's always this egregious double standard.

01:04:13.140 And I think genuinely many in media, that's the area where I happen to have experience, think like, well, no, we're doing it for the right reasons.

01:04:21.840 Right?

01:04:21.980 When we change policy, we're doing it for the right reasons.

01:04:25.340 When we sensationalize something, when we're angry about something, it's for the right reasons.

01:04:28.660 When you guys do it, it's for the wrong reasons.

01:04:30.440 So bad, bad, bad.

01:04:31.760 I mean, that's really as ham-handed and simple as it is.

01:04:36.900 But that doesn't help people who end up being victims of crimes that you could otherwise prevent.

01:04:42.200 Yeah.

01:04:42.900 Ham-handed.

01:04:43.280 I like how you got ham-handed in there, MKham. 1.00

01:04:45.120 This is the MKs.

01:04:46.260 Yesterday we had on the EJs.

01:04:47.540 Now you and I are the MKs.

01:04:49.300 Yeah, that's right.

01:04:49.780 I do want to point out that there, I mean, we could be doing this all day if we want to talk about the crime being committed by illegals. 0.92

01:04:55.440 But here's just another one that just happened on Thursday.

01:04:58.200 Campbell County, Virginia, 32-year-old Venezuelan, again, Renzo Mendoza Montez, arrested in connection with the sexual assault of a minor.

01:05:07.920 He is here illegally. 0.99

01:05:09.560 He was detained and released by Border Patrol in El Paso on September 2nd, 2023.

01:05:17.060 It was just, it just happened.

01:05:19.780 He was held without bond, but has reportedly, he was being held without bond, but has reportedly now been taken into ICE custody in the wake of this alleged crime against a minor.

01:05:29.380 It's just our children.

01:05:31.700 I, this is becoming an issue for Democrats too.

01:05:34.720 And that's the only, you know, silver lining to this mess is that they too are paying attention to the thing that Republicans have been jumping up and down about for a long time.

01:05:44.120 All right, let's shift gears and talk about something else in the news, which is dark, but stunning, and also has this very strange media slash activist angle to it.

01:05:54.480 And that is the death, the suicide, death by suicide of Aaron Bushnell.

01:06:00.820 Now, if you're not online, you may not have seen this yesterday, but it was all over X and it's too disturbing to show.

01:06:07.740 I'm sorry.

01:06:08.140 We are not going to show you this video.

01:06:09.580 It's on X, but it's just too disturbing to look at.

01:06:12.560 This 25-year-old man set himself on fire outside of the Israeli embassy on Sunday.

01:06:16.820 He, again, is a relatively young man.

01:06:20.800 He was in the U.S. Air Force.

01:06:23.560 He had joined in May of 2020.

01:06:25.220 His service, I understand, not yet complete.

01:06:27.680 And he doused himself with a liquid, some sort of accelerant, we believe, and set himself on fire.

01:06:34.240 He had posted a video online saying he did not want to be, quote, complicit in genocide.

01:06:39.800 And he shouted, free Palestine, as he burned.

01:06:44.080 And per a friend to the Washington Post, he was scheduled to leave the military this May.

01:06:51.120 Now, just a bit of background in him, MK, for the audience.

01:06:53.600 He was part of something called the Community of Jesus, raised at a religious compound in Orleans, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod.

01:07:00.660 He eventually left the group, but the group's school is alleged to have created an environment of control, intimidation, and humiliation.

01:07:06.720 This is via Washington Post.

01:07:08.740 That fostered and inflicted enduring harms on its students.

01:07:12.040 So, clearly, there's some troubling things in this guy's background you won't be surprised to learn.

01:07:18.040 A former group member talked about members losing a sense of belonging once they left the group.

01:07:22.100 That makes it sound like a cult, right?

01:07:24.700 Once you're out, if you no longer feel the sense of belonging, you're good to potentially be.

01:07:28.300 And his friends, talking to the Washington Post, talked about how two weeks before the incident, they had talked about their identities as anarchists and what kinds of risks and sacrifices were needed to be effective.

01:07:41.520 That he, Bushnell, texted a friend on Sunday,

01:07:43.620 I hope you'll understand, I love you, this doesn't even make sense, but I feel like I'm going to miss you, sent a friend a copy of his will on Sunday.

01:07:51.620 In it, he gave his cat to a neighbor in a fridge full of root beers to a friend.

01:07:56.180 And then another friend, Lupe Barboza, told the Washington Post that this man, Bushnell, was outraged about what's happening between Israel and Palestine, in particular in Gaza.

01:08:08.180 He knew no one who was in charge was listening to the protesters out there every week.

01:08:12.740 He knows that he has privilege as a white man and a member of the military.

01:08:18.460 And in response to seeing this guy set himself on fire, you literally have two of the presidential contenders,

01:08:30.700 Cornel West and Green Party politician Jill Stein, celebrating what he did.

01:08:38.320 The Cornel West post on X takes the cake.

01:08:42.000 Let us never forget the extraordinary courage and commitment of brother Aaron Bushnell, who died for truth and justice, exclamation point.

01:08:54.240 I pray for his precious loved ones, exclamation point.

01:08:57.840 Let us rededicate ourselves to genuine solidarity with Palestinians undergoing genocidal attacks in real time.

01:09:03.740 And from Jill Stein, rest in power, Aaron Bushnell.

01:09:08.180 I quote, I will no longer be complicit in genocide, free Palestine.

01:09:12.000 Quoting his dying words, may his sacrifice deepen our commitment to stop genocide now.

01:09:20.320 My God.

01:09:22.400 I mean, the story, the initial story is deeply disturbing and sad and his death is useless.

01:09:29.540 And then to see the reaction to it.

01:09:33.860 And probably even more disturbing, possibly than the initial thing, like the idea that we have a society where major

01:09:41.500 figures who would be considered, I believe they call them thought leaders, are valorizing, self-immolation

01:09:48.820 is just insane to me.

01:09:53.520 There are moments when you look around at your fellow Americans and you don't want to have that moment,

01:09:57.720 but you look around and you go, are we living in the same world?

01:10:01.500 Are us, the two of us, are we living in the same world?

01:10:05.280 Because any society that starts glorifying self-immolation is on a very, very bad path.

01:10:12.180 And it's a very short path, by the way.

01:10:13.960 And one of the few things that you can take from this that's like a silver lining,

01:10:17.640 it's a very short path to someone who would hurt a bunch of other people in the name of a political cause.

01:10:22.220 He happened to only hurt himself, which is sad enough.

01:10:25.960 But this is frightening.

01:10:28.360 This reaction actually made me disturbed in sort of a physical way.

01:10:33.600 I had to put down my phone and walk away from this conversation because I was like, what is happening here?

01:10:38.400 What's happening?

01:10:39.580 How do you look at this?

01:10:41.000 Again, we're not going to show it, but this deeply disturbing video.

01:10:44.800 And I will just say, he does not die immediately.

01:10:47.680 And it's very, very bizarre to see this man on fire walking around, seemingly shouting.

01:10:55.280 And to look at that and have any reaction other than, this is horrifying.

01:10:59.720 This is obviously a deeply disturbed man.

01:11:02.340 And, you know, care and love to those who have survived him who cared about this man.

01:11:07.000 But we need to do more about mental health.

01:11:09.080 That's the normal person's reaction.

01:11:11.240 Here's Wajahat Ali, who was one of the guys in that infamous Don Lemon video.

01:11:18.200 He used to be at CNN.

01:11:19.140 You remember this, MK, who is sneering at the Trump supporters.

01:11:23.440 You Trump supporters with your maps and your math.

01:11:27.980 Remember that clip with Don Lemon, this guy and the Lincoln Project guy?

01:11:33.160 So here he decides to weigh in.

01:11:37.500 Rick Wilson was the third.

01:11:39.300 There was a poster on X saying,

01:11:41.820 I strongly oppose valorizing any form of suicide as a noble, principled, or legitimate form of political protest.

01:11:51.460 Wajahat Ali responds,

01:11:52.820 There is no evidence Aaron Bushnell was suffering from mental illness.

01:11:58.280 Other than the fact that he set himself on fire and took his own life at 25,

01:12:03.900 as you point out in an act that will do absolutely nothing to change the national conversation around Palestine.

01:12:10.160 He was very clear about his reasoning for self-immolation,

01:12:14.140 the most extreme form of protest against what he believes is an ongoing genocide against Palestinians by Israel.

01:12:19.660 His last words were,

01:12:20.860 Free Palestine.

01:12:21.500 This is not the right horse to die on, Wajahat Ali. 0.99

01:12:26.860 They really do see this guy as noble and totally sane and competent in body and mind and made this just a choice. 0.87

01:12:36.540 It's like on the menu of things you can do, like get your picket sign and set yourself on fire and die at 25. 0.92

01:12:43.940 It's right there. 0.95

01:12:44.740 There it is.

01:12:46.240 Yeah.

01:12:46.460 And he sees it as courage, right?

01:12:50.520 Yes.

01:12:50.960 It's like all of them do.

01:12:52.220 Real adherence to your values in the face of real odds.

01:12:56.480 That's what he sees this as.

01:12:58.700 And that's scary, frankly.

01:13:00.520 And they're not going to do it.

01:13:01.940 You know, not that I want them to do it.

01:13:02.920 I'm saying they're not going to do it.

01:13:04.240 They don't think it's so wonderful they're going to do it.

01:13:05.900 You know, they're going to use these terms loosely and irresponsibly.

01:13:10.200 And then some other young disturbed person is going to do it because you're like, oh, presidential candidates are praising it.

01:13:14.820 Were we told on the right that you need to be very careful about things like that, right?

01:13:18.660 Because you could set off the next school shooter.

01:13:20.460 You have to be much more responsible in your rhetoric, Cornell.

01:13:23.080 No, again, the rhetoric rules are always one sided, Megan.

01:13:29.120 OK, so if we do it bad, if they do it, it's for the right reasons.

01:13:33.040 But I do think like there's actual studies that media coverage of suicide can create more suicides.

01:13:39.800 Like, yes, you actually, that's why they no longer say it.

01:13:43.340 OK, that's why you're no longer supposed to say what the method of suicide was.

01:13:48.720 Right.

01:13:49.200 Like after Kate Spade took her own life, she died by suicide.

01:13:54.340 There was that there was Anthony Bourdain.

01:13:56.940 There was like a cop.

01:13:57.720 There was a spike.

01:13:59.920 And the word went out.

01:14:02.100 I was at NBC at the time.

01:14:03.000 Like, we're no longer saying how they did it because it puts it in the mind of vulnerable people.

01:14:08.480 Now, this, I mean, it's all that's out the window to all these same people want to be extra cautious when it's a civilian.

01:14:15.200 Don't care at all.

01:14:16.080 Why?

01:14:16.560 Because he's white and he's a Marine or he's a he's an Air Force guy.

01:14:19.340 I don't or just given the cause and the fact that they they're celebrating the fact that he thought his whiteness and status as a member of the military was something to be ashamed of and why, you know, he needed to do something extraordinary.

01:14:34.060 We've lost our minds.

01:14:35.860 No, it's great.

01:14:36.720 There's a real left eats its own moment here where people were talking about the phrase rest in power and white liberals were pointing out you should not use the term rest in power for this individual, not because he self-immolated on behalf of a political cause.

01:14:52.440 And that's bad, but because that is a phrase reserved for the black community.

01:14:56.600 And therefore, to do that would be appropriating that.

01:14:59.720 And it's disrespectful.

01:15:01.120 Like in the mind of some left leaning tweeters, a person can literally light themselves on fire for your cause.

01:15:10.020 And it he's still just a white guy, right?

01:15:13.100 Like it's it is the the insanity is sort of magnificent.

01:15:16.860 And it makes me, like I said, like viscerally disturbed to see this fight play out.

01:15:24.120 Like I want to laugh so that I might not cry, but I can't.

01:15:27.840 Here's the hold on a second.

01:15:30.620 Here's the best the best piece of it.

01:15:32.700 And by that, I just mean like the most stunning and horrifying, a Palestinian writer described himself as a writer and a poet, Mohammed El Kurd, has nearly 400,000 followers on X.

01:15:45.500 He's lamenting from the sound of this, the following.

01:15:50.100 You can't protest peacefully.

01:15:51.600 You can't boycott.

01:15:53.000 You can't hunger strike.

01:15:54.300 You can't hijack planes.

01:15:55.880 You can't block traffic.

01:15:57.360 Yes, you caught me in there in between hunger strike and block traffic.

01:16:00.320 Like he's lamenting, you can't hijack planes.

01:16:03.120 You can't throw Molotovs.

01:16:05.060 You can't self immolate.

01:16:06.700 You can't heckle politicians.

01:16:08.420 Yes.

01:16:08.920 In between Molotovs and heckling politicians, he has self immolate.

01:16:12.660 You can't march.

01:16:13.420 You can't riot.

01:16:14.320 You can't dissent.

01:16:15.280 You just can't be.

01:16:17.820 His tweet has three million views.

01:16:20.620 And then a Twitter poster, an ex-poster called Rose Dark, retweeted El Kurd and wrote, quote, reminder that plane hijackings used to be perfectly normal and were mostly nonviolent.

01:16:38.000 9-11 was an outlier and the first of its kind. 0.97

01:16:40.660 That's Rose Dark trying to rehabilitate the reaction of this poster, you know, Muhammad El Kurd, after people like, you know, you and me said, you can't hijack planes.

01:16:51.160 You're equating that with it.

01:16:52.740 And so Rose Dark says, plane hijackings used to be perfectly normal.

01:16:56.000 They were mostly nonviolent.

01:16:57.300 9-11 was an outlier and the first of its kind. 0.97

01:16:59.760 And I must, must spend a minute on what Charles C.W. Cook of National Review responded.

01:17:04.220 He responded as follows.

01:17:07.180 Yet another thing 9-11 took from us.

01:17:09.580 The joy of those perfectly normal.

01:17:12.780 It's gallows humor, but we must.

01:17:16.500 The joy of those perfectly normal.

01:17:19.340 Nonviolent plane hijackings we all enjoyed.

01:17:22.840 I remember it well.

01:17:24.340 Do you have a layover?

01:17:25.280 My parents would ask.

01:17:26.420 That depends, I'd answer impishly.

01:17:28.420 And then we'd all laugh and shout, fingers crossed.

01:17:32.700 No, it's fine.

01:17:34.220 These are wild takes.

01:17:35.740 You have to contextualize the plane hijackings.

01:17:39.820 You see, who was impressed?

01:17:41.640 Who was not?

01:17:42.680 Let's hash it out.

01:17:44.940 The good old days.

01:17:46.520 You know, maybe I'll make it.

01:17:47.860 Maybe I won't.

01:17:48.920 I'm going to book a layover just to see.

01:17:50.980 Here's a couple more from him.

01:17:52.620 It was a simpler time back then.

01:17:54.260 In the 1980s, my mother hijacked at least four commercial airliners in protest at the ongoing roadworks on the A-14.

01:18:01.140 My uncle got to seven.

01:18:02.360 And my sister tried once after she was grounded, but she couldn't get the Stanley knife to open.

01:18:06.680 Imagine, he adds, being so online that you can cast the pre-9-11 hijacking of planes, which was terrifying for all involved, as a perfectly normal form of political protest.

01:18:17.340 Embarrassing.

01:18:17.780 Grief.

01:18:18.760 I know.

01:18:19.440 Embarrassing.

01:18:20.240 They're not embarrassed, though.

01:18:22.860 Oh, it's, again, embarrassing.

01:18:26.580 The idea, by the way, and this is a problem on the left in general, that this guy can't tell the difference between something like self-immolation or Molotov cocktails versus protesting and hunger strikes, which you are absolutely allowed to do.

01:18:39.180 And you guys do all the time.

01:18:41.580 Yeah, those harvestings went 12 whole hours without eating, just like two weeks ago.

01:18:46.520 I know.

01:18:47.140 And by the way, even the Molotov cocktails thing, it turned out in 2020 and that summer, not really so much problematic and often not rescued.

01:18:54.940 So, you got a lot of leeway in this country.

01:18:59.300 Tons.

01:19:00.400 One more.

01:19:02.660 Farhana Sultana, a professor of public affairs, I'm embarrassed to say, at Syracuse University, told her followers that despite his self-immolation, indeed, Bushnell was of sound mind.

01:19:14.280 RIP Aaron Bushnell, who self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy as a political protest against genocide.

01:19:20.080 Don't believe the spin-doctoring otherwise.

01:19:21.540 He showed more moral clarity and courage than politicians and genocide heirs. 0.76

01:19:29.820 They still try to spin-doctor it as mental health issues, but he was rational and clear about his political reasoning. 0.99

01:19:36.900 How the fuck does she know anything? 1.00

01:19:38.720 She doesn't know jack shit. 1.00

01:19:40.940 Sorry. 0.99

01:19:41.780 Which resonates with the majority of the world.

01:19:44.020 May his sacrifice not be in vain.

01:19:45.880 Indeed, it was legitimate moral outrage and courage against the Holocaust and barbarity in Palestine with full U.S. participation.

01:19:54.340 May his sacrifice not be in vain.

01:19:55.860 May his last words on this earth ring true.

01:19:57.760 Hashtag free Palestine.

01:19:59.520 Now, she has set her Twitter profile to private, but we did see before her big things were,

01:20:07.340 I'm broadly interested in water governance, climate justice, political ecology, critical development studies, transnational feminist theories, critical urban studies, social justice, human rights, citizenship, decolonizing, and South Asia.

01:20:23.780 But then you didn't need me to tell you that, MK, you could have written that bio yourself.

01:20:29.620 By the way, just everybody think about the money you're spending on college.

01:20:33.460 Think about it real hard.

01:20:35.140 We spent 60 grand so I could go there back in the 80s to 90s. 1.00

01:20:39.380 It was expensive back then, $15,000 a year, to be exposed to idiots like this who want to celebrate the courage of somebody who dies by suicide in this manner. 1.00

01:20:49.260 It's just truly horrific. 1.00

01:20:51.760 And if that's courage, what's not acceptable in the name of something you deeply believe in as long as it's a lefty belief?

01:20:59.100 That's a good question.

01:21:00.160 That's a scary road to walk down.

01:21:01.960 Well, I mean, what are they going to do when somebody like that sets himself on fire and somebody else dies?

01:21:07.980 Which could have happened here.

01:21:08.900 Yes, exactly.

01:21:09.420 Who knows?

01:21:09.940 God only knows.

01:21:10.820 He could have wandered out into the street.

01:21:12.400 Somebody could have hit him in the car and hurt themselves.

01:21:14.980 Is that we're celebrating?

01:21:16.120 Are we going to be morally conflicted about that because it was in the name of the Palestinians?

01:21:21.700 I don't think so.

01:21:22.740 All right.

01:21:22.960 Last but not least, I've got to talk to you about this guy, Adam Rubenstein.

01:21:27.300 I know you've been commenting on this.

01:21:29.520 This is while we're on this subject of media.

01:21:31.760 We'll end it on a lighter note.

01:21:33.980 So this is one of the guys who was at the Times when that whole Tom Cotton op-ed on what we should do with the rioters in the wake of George Floyd and whether the National Guard should be used to maintain order in the cities.

01:21:50.260 He got caught up in all of that.

01:21:53.320 There was the top guy who got booted, eventually out, James Bennett.

01:21:59.120 And then there was this guy who said he was kind of, it sounds like he was second in command on the Times side for this article.

01:22:04.940 And he has written like a full download of what happened to him in The Atlantic, the title of which is I was a heretic at The New York Times.

01:22:13.520 Sometimes I did what I was hired to do and I paid for it.

01:22:18.040 And we'll get to all of it, but we've got to begin, of course, with the opening paragraph, which I know you've read.

01:22:22.720 Of course.

01:22:23.680 It reads as follows.

01:22:25.860 On one of my first days at The New York Times, I went to do an orientation with more than a dozen other new hires.

01:22:31.860 We had to do an icebreaker, pick a starburst out of a jar and then answer a question.

01:22:36.440 Oh, Lord.

01:22:36.980 My starburst was pink, I believe, so I had to answer the pinked prompt, which had me respond with my favorite sandwich.

01:22:45.360 My God.

01:22:46.760 Russ and Daughter's super heapster came to mind, but I figured mentioning a $19 sandwich wasn't a great way to win new friends.

01:22:53.900 So I blurted out the spicy chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A and considered the ice broken.

01:23:00.000 Now, you or I could have told Adam that that was a mistake in front of The New York Times.

01:23:05.120 So I think as soon as you say Chick-fil-A, if you spend any time on the right or consuming any sort of left or right of center media, you know that this is this is a trigger word for the left.

01:23:16.040 Adam finds out the hard way.

01:23:17.900 The H.R. representative leading the orientation, because there's always got to be some big boss there, you know, corralling your language, chided me, quote, we don't do that here.

01:23:27.760 They hate gay people. 0.99

01:23:29.700 Didn't you know you're you're supporting gay hatred if you eat the chicken sandwich. 1.00

01:23:34.120 Sandwich. 0.99

01:23:35.260 People started snapping their fingers.

01:23:37.760 My God, is everyone there 17 in acclamation?

01:23:41.820 I hadn't been thinking about the fact that Chick-fil-A was transgressive in liberal circles for its chairman's opposition to gay marriage.

01:23:47.680 Not the politics.

01:23:49.240 The chicken, I quickly said.

01:23:51.880 But it was too late.

01:23:53.360 I sat down ashamed.

01:23:56.100 And things did not get much better for Adam from there.

01:23:59.300 So what do you make of his his look back at how he was his career was basically ruined over that that Senator Cotton op-ed?

01:24:07.640 No.

01:24:07.960 So this this is like a microcosm of all the problems with the media.

01:24:12.500 The whole story is is worth reading.

01:24:14.720 This Chick-fil-A thing in particular.

01:24:16.400 Taylor, can I just note that a bunch of people on Twitter, like the Nicole Hannah Joneses of the world, are saying we don't believe that this anecdote happened.

01:24:23.100 Well, I've written at the Atlantic.

01:24:24.160 They do a lot of fact checking.

01:24:25.520 I imagine they have some backup for this.

01:24:27.360 And also all of us believe this happened because we all know if I took if I took a sack of Chick-fil-A into a room filled with the Chick-fil-A truthers who are saying this never happened and said, I got you guys lunch.

01:24:37.980 They would call me out.

01:24:39.680 They would say it's painful for me to bring that chicken to them.

01:24:43.000 We all know this.

01:24:44.520 And yet they say Chick-fil-A truthers.

01:24:47.140 Yes.

01:24:49.400 You're right.

01:24:49.900 That's what they are.

01:24:50.740 I saw her.

01:24:51.300 I saw her saying it's not true.

01:24:52.680 Meanwhile, now all the friends of this guy, Adam, are like, he told me the story of the Chick-fil-A at the time.

01:24:57.820 It's turned into this whole thing.

01:24:59.380 It has.

01:24:59.960 So but the whole story is is really bad.

01:25:02.560 And what it what it illustrates is not only that this newspaper did not have Rubenstein's back at all.

01:25:08.900 He was a, you know, a mid-level opinion editor.

01:25:12.600 He goes through all the right channels to publish this perfectly reasonable op-ed from a senator of the United States of America, a position, by the way, with which that he's expressing that most Americans agreed with at the time, which is that maybe we should have some military authority use some muscle to try to break up the the riot.

01:25:32.560 It's here.

01:25:33.360 Now, it made a distinction between protests and riots.

01:25:35.760 They pretend it didn't, but it did.

01:25:37.940 This should have been non-controversial in the paper of record.

01:25:41.500 However, it was not non-controversial.

01:25:43.680 And what happened was Rubenstein got called out by name in public by The New York Times as the person responsible for this op-ed, which all of the staffers at The New York Times, having never been exposed to anyone who disagrees with them in their media journey from Ivy League to The New York Times,

01:26:01.500 that they said it made them unsafe.

01:26:04.120 It made them unsafe, Megan, to see words that they disagreed with.

01:26:08.960 Words.

01:26:09.240 And unfortunately, the staff of The New York Times and the higher-ups were either in agreement on this or too cowardly to say, no, you guys are wrong about this.

01:26:20.220 And Rubenstein is the one who took the fall.

01:26:21.920 Well, the details about what happens in The New York Times' Slack channel, which should be abolished immediately. 1.00

01:26:29.380 I mean, these people are so dumb. 0.97

01:26:30.900 Get rid of the Slack channel. 1.00

01:26:32.120 Do not let the little hens get in there and cluck away, or you're going to wind up with, you know, a thousand of these situations, which they already have.

01:26:39.100 But he says he's conservative.

01:26:41.700 He said he wrote for the Weekly Standard for a bit and the Wall Street Journal, so he should have known about Chick-fil-A.

01:26:46.780 But he says it was a strange experience to be, you know, conservative or at least considered one at the Times.

01:26:52.680 I often found myself asking questions like, doesn't all this talk of voter suppression on the left sound similar to charges of voter fraud on the right?

01:27:00.340 Only to realize how unwelcome such questions were.

01:27:03.020 By asking, I'd revealed that I wasn't on the same team as my colleagues, that I did not accept as an article of faith the liberal premise that voter suppression was a grave threat to liberal democracy while voter fraud was entirely fake news.

01:27:15.300 Same thing happened to him on the Hunter Biden laptop story.

01:27:18.540 And then there's this.

01:27:19.220 There was a sense that publishing the occasional conservative voice made the paper look centrist.

01:27:25.000 But I soon realized that the conservative voices we published tended to be ones agreeing with a liberal line.

01:27:31.380 It was also clear that right of center submissions were treated differently.

01:27:35.220 They faced a higher bar for entry, more layers of editing and greater involvement of higher ups.

01:27:41.220 Standard practice held that when a writer submitted an essay to an editor, the editor would share that draft with colleagues via an email distribution list.

01:27:47.800 Then we'd all discuss it.

01:27:49.220 But many of my colleagues did not want their name attached to op-eds advancing conservative arguments.

01:27:55.560 And early to mid-career staffers would routinely oppose their publications, their publication entirely.

01:28:03.160 They didn't even want their name associated with being an editor on it.

01:28:07.700 So upsetting were the views of literally half the country, M.K.

01:28:13.420 No, this is the opposite of thinking.

01:28:17.520 This is the opposite of inquiry.

01:28:19.760 And Adam Rubenstein walks in there as a center right person.

01:28:23.280 Like, just like, I know that feeling.

01:28:25.360 Everything he wrote, I was like, I know exactly what he's feeling, right?

01:28:28.480 Because you see things slightly differently.

01:28:30.180 And in a newsroom that was interested in finding news and facts and understanding the way people see the world, they would say, oh, interesting.

01:28:38.160 That is a different way of looking at that.

01:28:39.620 Can you please explain that to us?

01:28:41.100 But actually, the virtue for New York Times staffers is, as he notes, to already have a position, to take this as a given, that whatever thing the left believes is already true.

01:28:52.500 Done and done.

01:28:53.600 You don't have to think about it at all.

01:28:55.160 But the act of news gathering should be about thinking.

01:28:59.460 It should be about rationally evaluating fact versus quotes and scenarios and an explanation from different sources and what their motivations are.

01:29:09.120 But, like, the call is to not do that on the left.

01:29:13.180 It's just to take in whatever the line is and agree with it.

01:29:17.960 And then they surround themselves with nobody who disagrees.

01:29:20.200 And someone like Rubenstein either takes the fall or gets the boot, right, if you object to this.

01:29:26.400 Somehow he got in.

01:29:27.740 So this is how, you know, Barry Weiss left the New York Times, too.

01:29:30.720 I mean, she was, in particular on Israel, outraged at their one-sidedness, wound up leaving.

01:29:35.580 This guy, James Bennett, wound up leaving.

01:29:37.980 I'll give you one last paragraph here because it's worth it.

01:29:40.300 He writes about how it went down before the op-ed by Cotton was published and some of the back and forth he had with his higher-ups there before, you know, they hit print.

01:29:47.680 And he said, he writes, I had one more task to take care of before it printed.

01:29:52.100 Cotton's office had emailed me several photos that they wanted to see published alongside his op-ed, showing times when the same legal doctrine had been invoked in the past.

01:30:01.440 One was of U.S. troops enforcing the desegregation of the University of Mississippi in 1962.

01:30:07.640 I sent these to a photo editor, and he names names, Jeffrey Henson Scales, and asked him to consider them.

01:30:13.700 He wrote me back to say, quote, a false equivalence, but historical images are there now, meaning he had added them to the story file in the system.

01:30:23.220 I thanked him and added a confusion emoji in case he wanted to expand on what he meant.

01:30:31.000 He replied by sending me the emoji of a black box representing solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.

01:30:40.320 Done and done.

01:30:41.020 Argument made.

01:30:42.520 Did you and I write this in a fever dream, or did this really happen?

01:30:46.140 No, it's amazing.

01:30:47.180 And by the way, he names names for a reason on that photo editor, because that photo editor leaked his slack against company policy to the New York Times' own reporters,

01:30:56.360 who were reporting on the placing of an op-ed in their own paper, and they misrepresented the chat to make him look as if he was admitting to inaccuracies in the piece.

01:31:07.120 Like, completely lied about.

01:31:08.220 That's right.

01:31:09.040 That's right.

01:31:09.820 That's actually a whole other piece.

01:31:10.800 There's a good journalism, guys.

01:31:12.560 Right, where he talks about how the New York Times, once it went into a full meltdown about the fact that they had published the piece and there was all this blowback, that they just lied.

01:31:20.460 Reporter after reporter, editor after editor, executive after executive, just decided the only way to handle this was,

01:31:26.140 we all hate Tom Cotton, some rogue employees got out of control and didn't do the proper vetting, right?

01:31:33.200 That's what this is.

01:31:34.080 And really, you know, he exposes on how it's not what happened at all. 0.99

01:31:37.740 They're just cowards.

01:31:39.140 Now, I say this sometimes, and sometimes I feel like a little hacky saying it, but there are far too many people in media who have been taught to, highly trained, to reflexively lie for an ideology or to stay sort of in the conformity bubble. 0.97

01:31:53.060 And not a lot of people who are practiced in thinking through issues, because the thinking through has become a problem.

01:32:00.140 College is the opposite of a place for free inquiry.

01:32:03.160 It just is.

01:32:04.340 And so if you're not ready to put your neck out like a Rubenstein, you're not going to hear other arguments.

01:32:11.260 You're not going to be the other arguments.

01:32:12.960 You're not going to try to get to the bottom of something.

01:32:15.400 And certainly, it's not only the left that is guilty of this, but dag on in media.

01:32:19.640 Woo, they are in control, and they have trouble hearing anything that deviates from the line.

01:32:29.660 Okay, I lied.

01:32:30.620 I do have one other thing I want to get to you with, and that is President Biden finally gave an interview.

01:32:36.840 He didn't want to do CBS and Gayle King, so he decided instead to go, you know, forgive me, balls to the wall, Seth Meyers.

01:32:45.420 Seth Meyers?

01:32:46.380 I honestly, like, I think I can safely say the biggest hack at NBC.

01:32:51.840 The truly, like, the weakest need, biggest hack at NBC.

01:32:55.800 And it's a fierce competition, so right on, Seth.

01:32:58.240 You're number one.

01:32:59.460 Yay, you won.

01:33:00.580 That's why you were chosen.

01:33:02.080 We knew this about you beforehand, but that's why you were chosen.

01:33:04.660 So congrats.

01:33:05.840 And here is some of the scintillating exchange.

01:33:08.580 And don't forget, NBC, as Rachel Maddow has explained to us many times, is a place you go for truth, for fact-checking when something false is said.

01:33:16.360 That's the principle they live by.

01:33:17.680 That's why they cannot even air Donald Trump, cannot even air his acceptance speeches after these big victories.

01:33:22.680 But this can air with absolutely no problem.

01:33:26.900 Listen.

01:33:27.040 It's just outrageous what he's talking about.

01:33:31.600 He talked about how he wants to be a dictator on day one, but only day one.

01:33:35.360 You are someone who has dealt with dictators over the years.

01:33:38.040 It does seem as though democracy, in vague terms somehow, is not easy for us to grasp.

01:33:44.160 Having dealt with dictators, what do you see in a world where democracy is actually at risk in a way it might be in this election?

01:33:50.760 The first thing they do, dictators do, is they disregard whatever the rule of law is.

01:33:57.380 They just disregard it.

01:33:58.920 Here's the guy who says he wants to, he thinks he can change the Constitution and ignore it, just ignore portions of the Constitution.

01:34:05.680 Here's the guy who talks about retribution.

01:34:08.080 Here's the guy, look, you have the guys, the thousands of people who stormed the Capitol, stormed the Capitol.

01:34:15.840 They're insurrections.

01:34:17.260 Two cops died.

01:34:18.500 Other people were badly here.

01:34:20.760 And what did he say?

01:34:22.100 They got convicted and or they pled guilty.

01:34:24.740 And he said they're patriots?

01:34:27.300 God, patriots?

01:34:29.020 And he says he's going to forgive them all?

01:34:31.060 He's going to, every one of them is going to be released?

01:34:34.800 What is, I mean, that's what happens in Eastern European countries.

01:34:39.360 That's not what happens in America.

01:34:41.480 And the idea that he thinks he can do that.

01:34:44.400 The idea he talks about things like, for example, the idea that he said the Congress wants to pass an overwhelmingly, a border provision that would allow us to control the border.

01:34:56.420 First, we'll ever introduce a call for that.

01:34:58.440 And here they're saying, he's saying, no, don't do that because that will help Biden.

01:35:02.040 Help Biden?

01:35:03.300 It's about, not about Biden.

01:35:04.580 It's about the United States of America.

01:35:06.040 And look, it just.

01:35:10.080 I don't want to get started.

01:35:17.380 I mean, there's so much.

01:35:26.040 OK, there's so much.

01:35:28.020 I know I'll give you I'll give you a couple of my thoughts on it.

01:35:31.040 Disregard the rule of law.

01:35:32.220 Trump wants to disregard the rule of law.

01:35:33.760 OK, you mean like what you're doing in this federal prosecutions, breaking norms that we never crossed before in our 200 plus year history.

01:35:40.760 Ignore the Constitution.

01:35:41.980 He wants to ignore the Constitution.

01:35:42.980 You literally just bragged about doing that with respect to student debt, quote, forgiveness.

01:35:47.460 They told me I couldn't do it and I did it.

01:35:49.060 I didn't listen to them.

01:35:50.200 There are many other examples.

01:35:52.060 Retribution.

01:35:52.720 He's about retribution.

01:35:54.240 Look what he's doing to Trump.

01:35:55.660 Not to mention that FBI informant who turned out to be, they say, not credible and who they believe who lied to him, who's getting treated like no one else.

01:36:03.920 Who double crossed the FBI, who gave false information.

01:36:07.040 They stormed the Capitol and cops died.

01:36:09.100 That's not true either.

01:36:10.500 They've been telling that lie over and over.

01:36:12.760 Congress wanted border protection and he stopped it because it would help Biden.

01:36:16.700 It's not about Biden.

01:36:17.460 It's about the United States of America.

01:36:19.300 We've covered that in the beginning of this show.

01:36:21.480 It is about the United States of America.

01:36:23.640 You say we need to be more humane, which is why you opened the border and your proposed border bill was full of holes and was actually totally feckless.

01:36:32.720 We could go on, but democracy is at stake, MK, but not for the reasons he says.

01:36:37.460 I like my jaw dropped, but I didn't hear any of that from Seth Meyers.

01:36:41.280 Oh, no, no, no.

01:36:42.680 It's not his job to push back on that.

01:36:44.300 You know what a nefarious government might also do?

01:36:47.080 And he notes like that's what Eastern European countries do.

01:36:50.200 They might call the duly elected president a foreign asset and use national intel wrongly against him and other American citizens and use a compliant media to say that he was a Russian asset for about four years of his presidency to then go like, oh, oops, we didn't have the goods and then pretend that that never happened.

01:37:08.240 That's a thing that might happen in one of those countries.

01:37:10.560 And that's what happened to Donald Trump.

01:37:12.280 Like, that's a real thing, guys.

01:37:14.000 But they do not see it in themselves because, of course, they do it for the right reasons.

01:37:18.000 Other people do it for the wrong reasons.

01:37:19.360 By the way, there was a piece, just to come full circle on the media, there was a piece in The Atlantic this week about, hey, you know, if Trump were elected again, Democrats could, on January 6th, refuse to place this election.

01:37:32.820 To certify the election.

01:37:33.780 Yeah, that is exactly right.

01:37:35.600 But retribution is wrong.

01:37:37.320 Just FYI, retribution is deeply wrong.

01:37:39.580 MK Ham, what a pleasure, my friend.

01:37:41.540 Great to see you.

01:37:42.660 Good to see you.

01:37:43.820 To be continued.

01:37:45.000 All right, and don't forget, tomorrow we'll have a full rundown for you of what happened today.

01:37:49.660 Terrence Bradley.

01:37:50.740 We'll see you then.

01:37:55.580 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. 0.94

01:37:57.760 No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

01:38:01.360 We'll see you then.

01:38:03.480 We'll see you then.

01:38:05.020 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. 0.94

01:38:09.360 No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

01:38:12.180 We'll see you then.

The Megyn Kelly Show - February 27, 2024

How Texts Could Torpedo Fani Willis, and Left Spinning Georgia Student Death, with Mary Katharine Ham, Phil Holloway, and Wendell Husebo ｜ Ep. 732

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