It is a huge day for Donald Trump. One of the four criminal cases against him could effectively end today. As the DA on it could be exposed once and for all, potentially as a liar, a perjurer, and corrupt.
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00:00:30.960Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East.
00:00:42.460Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.
00:00:45.620It is a huge day for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election.
00:00:50.000One of the four criminal cases against Trump could effectively end today.
00:00:54.160As the DA on it could be exposed once and for all, potentially as a liar, a perjurer, and corrupt.
00:01:00.640If 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.
00:01:11.040Judge Scott McAfee holding a hearing at 2 p.m. with Terrence Bradley, the former attorney, friend, and one-time law partner of Nathan Wade.
00:01:19.820Wade is a special prosecutor in the case against Trump.
00:01:23.620He stands accused of engaging in a kind of improper kickback scheme with DA Fannie Willis, with whom he had an extramarital affair.
00:01:31.900The 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.
00:01:45.860And 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.
00:01:54.300That 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.
00:02:07.800Both Wade and Willis claim the affair did not begin until after Willis hired him.
00:02:13.260They say it was early 2022 when it started.
00:02:17.220And 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.
00:02:33.340By 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.
00:02:43.340If you're a Times reader, here's what you were told.
00:02:45.420Willis and Wade, quote, have testified that they roughly split the costs of their vacations, end quote.
00:02:56.460So did the affair begin prior to 2022, contrary to the sworn testimony of both of these prosecutors?
00:03:04.640And 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?
00:03:12.720Ms. 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.
00:04:22.440But 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.
00:04:33.140Maybe she had a motive to lie, though that was not effectively fleshed out on the stand at all.
00:04:38.700They just got her to testify that she was booted, and it did not appear to be with her agreement.
00:04:43.160Lots 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.
00:04:51.700This is not like two gals at a bar talking about a third.
00:04:55.880This woman's under oath on the witness stand in a court proceeding.
00:05:01.260They 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.
00:05:09.720And despite all their promises they were going to put on witness testimony showing that she's a liar, it didn't happen.
00:05:22.540The Trump Defense Counsel got a hold of the special prosecutor's phone records.
00:05:26.940They were submitted by Trump's counsel after the hearing closed.
00:05:30.320The prosecution wants to keep them out.
00:05:32.140A hearing on that happens this Friday.
00:05:33.480If 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.
00:05:42.2202021, before they claimed their affair, began more than 2,000 times.
00:05:48.000And texted each other nearly 12,000 times.
00:09:26.880At a closed-door meeting with Judge McAfee yesterday, during which Mr. Bradley's former
00:09:32.720client and friend, Nathan Wade, was reportedly right outside waiting in the courtroom, Terrence
00:09:39.140Bradley tried to justify his privilege assertions.
00:09:42.260Again, something that would have been very hard for him to do, since we know for a fact he already
00:09:48.580disclosed much about this tryst to attorney Ashley Merchant.
00:09:53.320So 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.
00:10:07.200Okay, 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.
00:10:21.340But I think I'd rather be in the I mistakenly asserted privilege on the stand camp.
00:10:25.360Late yesterday, the judge issued his ruling.
00:10:30.200Hasn't yet been released publicly, but the New York Times has it, quoting here.
00:10:33.320The 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.
00:10:47.800Thus, it would seem Terrence Bradley must now reveal what he knows about the relationship between Fannie Willis and Nathan Wade.
00:10:55.840If 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.
00:11:08.880Two 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?
00:11:58.860They know very well they can't stay on this case.
00:12:01.800These folks may not care about the vacations or the affair, but any honest lawyer will tell you.
00:12:06.140An 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.
00:12:18.980And the lie here would be to cover up their conflict of interest and the alleged kickback scheme.
00:12:25.600So it's not like it was a meaningless lie.
00:12:28.180They will be lucky not to wind up convicted felons, never mind prosecutors on this case.
00:12:34.740So those are the stakes today, and we're waiting for it to start.
00:12:39.620Will Terrence Bradley say on the stand what he said to Ashley Merchant in these texts?
00:12:45.000Or will he hem and haw again and try to protect his friend?
00:12:47.860If 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.
00:12:59.320What these two should do instead is to spare themselves and the citizens of Fulton County the embarrassment of this spectacle and resign.
00:13:08.040It 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.
00:13:20.940Judge McAfee should not have to order these globe-trotting lovebirds off of this case.
00:13:26.280They should do the right thing and step down.
00:13:38.440So I understand you actually saw Terrence Bradley earlier today.
00:13:43.020He's out and about practicing law and doing his job.
00:13:46.700And do we expect him to show up in Judge McAfee's court today at 2?
00:13:52.460Well, great to be with you again, of course, Megan.
00:13:55.220You know, here's the thing about today.
00:13:56.660It's all about what is and what is not attorney-client privilege.
00:14:01.780And so, look, if you are my client and you tell me where you buried the body, I can't talk about it ever.
00:14:08.820But if I see you burying the body, that's a different story, right?
00:14:12.840So 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.
00:14:42.840And 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.
00:14:55.220If he has ever said anything contrary to that, if Ms. Merchant has this documented, she can confront him with the prior inconsistent statement.
00:15:04.940And that inconsistent statement, if it exists, can be used as substantive evidence in the case.
00:15:10.220So 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?
00:15:24.980And 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.
00:15:34.440It's this personal financial benefit that is at issue.
00:15:37.520And 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.
00:15:49.340So 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.
00:16:02.080Because prosecutors cannot have a financial interest in even the existence of a case, and that is what this is about.
00:16:09.540We're talking about fundamental fairness, due process, and if the case goes away because of a due process violation, then so be it.
00:17:12.940He could refer them to maybe the attorney general's office to see if they've committed the crime of perjury.
00:17:18.200This is a disbarbable offense if there's been a fraud perpetrated on the court.
00:17:22.660And by the way, it doesn't matter if a lawyer says something false to a judge that's under oath or not.
00:17:27.240We have the ethical obligation of candor to the court.
00:17:30.560We've got to be honest, even in things that we put in writing.
00:17:33.000So 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.
00:17:45.080You heard prosecutors call her a liar.
00:17:46.780They said you don't have a good faith basis.
00:17:48.520Well, 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.
00:17:56.860And that's really what's at the heart of all of this.
00:18:01.380Fannie 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.
00:18:13.200Because it was based in part on what Merchant admitted she'd been told by Terrence Bradley.
00:18:18.960We 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.
00:18:29.500And Fannie Willis took that stand, loaded for bear, and unleashed a can on Ashley Merchant.
00:18:50.740All right, so that was it, just the argument, no testimony.
00:18:54.140Right, 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.
00:19:03.560And I'm actually surprised that the hearing continued.
00:20:18.000I'll introduce it into evidence if you want.
00:20:19.540And 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.
00:20:28.380So she thought she was going to get away with just calling Ashley Merchant a liar.
00:20:32.040And now that bill's coming, come and due today at two.
00:20:40.320She's been a guest on my podcast and we've had cases together.
00:20:43.920She's not the type of person, in my view, that's going to take this allegation laying down.
00:20:50.880If she's got a good faith basis, I expect she's going to try to present that today.
00:20:55.460She says in this pleading, she says more specifically.
00:21:00.660She says Bradley has information about the relationship between Wade and Willis directly from Wade and not in the context of them seeking legal advice.
00:21:11.840She 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.
00:21:23.940So she's telling us in this pleading, she's telling the court that Bradley knows this stuff.
00:21:30.020How does she know what Bradley knows unless Bradley has told her what he knows?
00:21:46.440And in the past, it seems like those text messages were really going to be the smoking gun.
00:21:51.360But 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.
00:22:02.740On 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.
00:22:16.640And 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.
00:22:28.040But one thing that I know for sure is that Ashley Merchant is not going to take these claims laying down.
00:22:34.220She's not going to sit by and have anybody call her a liar.
00:22:37.920She's not going to sit by and have anybody say that she doesn't have a good faith basis for making this claim.
00:22:47.980Like 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.
00:23:12.160And 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.
00:23:19.960So it seems to me pretty clear that this judge has now said those assertions of privilege are not valid.
00:23:27.980That'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.
00:23:37.900And 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.
00:23:49.200And even I read you the words according to the Times of what he ordered.
00:23:52.340So 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?
00:24:01.900What was the nature of the relationship prior to 2022?
00:24:04.360Yeah, so I'm glad that the judge has ruled that there was no attorney-client privilege that would apply.
00:24:13.440So 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.
00:24:24.580So hopefully we'll get to the bottom of all of this.
00:24:28.460Undoubtedly, there's going to be some knowledge that he has that's attorney-client privilege because he was the lawyer on the divorce.
00:24:34.660I think he filed the complaint for divorce.
00:24:37.960So clearly there's some degree of attorney-client privilege.
00:24:41.560But what we don't know is how much latitude the judge is going to give the parties.
00:24:46.200We don't know if there's some things that are still off limits.
00:24:48.720We're going to have to wait and see how the judge rules on this.
00:24:50.760He's not going to let him go on a fishing expedition and get too far afield.
00:24:54.580But it's clear that the judge believes that Bradley has some relevant information.
00:24:59.420The judge could have simply said, you know, there's no attorney-client privilege here, but this is all much ado about nothing.
00:25:06.500This is all irrelevant, so we're just going to move on.
00:25:09.100He didn't do that, which that tells me the judge believes there's some benefit to having additional testimony from Mr. Bradley.
00:25:16.720And so it's all going to depend on what is the basis of his knowledge.
00:25:22.360The pleading that Ashley Merchant has filed says that he has non-privileged information.
00:25:27.860And so that is what we're going to be drilling down on.
00:25:32.300What are the things that you observed?
00:25:34.520What are the things that you talked about in some setting other than an attorney-client conversation?
00:25:40.320I 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.
00:25:49.600And so he said, no personal knowledge of anything.
00:25:53.000You remember, the audience will remember.
00:25:55.040He said, no, no personal, everything I know, I know because I'm an attorney.
00:25:58.340And 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.
00:26:10.140That's why you left the Nathan Wade law firm.
00:26:12.560And the guy's like, whoa, no, none of that is true.
00:26:16.020And 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.
00:26:25.460And that was when the judge got the light bulb saying, this man doesn't understand the nature of attorney-client privilege.
00:26:39.360Like, 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.
00:26:49.560But he's going to have to contradict one of those prior things.
00:26:56.200And I certainly don't envy anybody being in that position.
00:26:59.080And 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?
00:27:29.080It certainly is part of the record that would go up on appeal when there's any appeal from any of this.
00:27:34.100But so there is a memorialization of what was said.
00:27:38.100And so until or unless we know exactly what that was, it's really hard for us to fully analyze all of this.
00:27:44.900But 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.
00:27:57.840He's got the opportunity to say, you know what?
00:27:59.660Well, 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.
00:28:10.300And 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.
00:28:17.060Yeah, and that discussion was just yesterday.
00:28:19.860So 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.
00:28:38.100And so the judge is probably going to parcel out some instances where it might be attorney-client privilege.
00:28:45.440But what Ashley Merchant is saying is this was personal knowledge that was not obtained in the context of an attorney-client relationship.
00:28:53.640And so the judge is, I think, going to allow her to drill down on that.
00:28:56.940She's going to be able to say, look, this is the good faith basis I've got.
00:28:59.000Well, and the judge now knows the content.
00:29:01.380So he's going to know which doors can open and which doors can't.
00:29:04.760But 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.
00:29:13.760And even in the privilege log, which, you know, you've got to tell the other side, like we've got all these.
00:29:18.460You'd have to say, this is the date of the document.
00:29:21.040These are the two participants or three, whoever.
00:29:23.720These are the participants on the document.
00:29:25.460And here is the nature of the communication without revealing the communication.
00:29:30.000You 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.
00:30:05.280No, there's another thing that could happen.
00:30:08.060It 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.
00:30:19.600They may have opened the door, so to speak, to the admission of this type of information.
00:30:24.300Even 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.
00:30:29.940Well, that's so interesting because it comes in.
00:30:32.540It's not coming in for the truth of the matter.
00:30:34.120It's coming in to redeem Ashley Merchant.
00:30:36.500There's not, I don't know that there's such an exception to the privileged law.
00:30:39.380But, yeah, it could certainly have been waived by Nathan Wade, not necessarily by his lawyer.
00:30:44.340I 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.
00:30:52.800She was speaking about Ashley Merchant, who did not lie.
00:30:55.940But 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.
00:31:09.220He said in his divorce case under sworn interrogatories that he never had an affair.
00:31:12.780He 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.
00:31:22.780And 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.
00:31:45.020Are there other DAs who could take this case?
00:31:48.460If 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.
00:32:11.780And 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?
00:32:28.320And if they do that, they're going to have to have somebody willing, which this is an excellent point.
00:32:32.820I'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.
00:32:55.400You can't go after people that you politicked against.
00:32:58.320So to this day, the Prosecuting Attorneys Council has not referred that it matter to any other prosecutor in the state of Georgia.
00:33:07.580So 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.
00:33:15.100But 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.
00:33:20.480Because 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.
00:33:34.480And I don't know any prosecutor that wants to do that because it's going to consume their office.
00:33:40.180Most offices in Georgia don't have the resources that Fulton County seems to have for this.
00:33:45.520So I think that it's going to be a tough sell getting anybody to pick it up.
00:33:48.860Maybe 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.
00:33:56.680But it's going to be very interesting to see where this goes.
00:34:14.400She failed in her election to be a judge.
00:34:16.600And she gets in as DA and she saw an opportunity.
00:34:19.860There 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.
00:35:10.140Well, 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.
00:35:24.220Now we continue our Fannie Willis coverage with a reporter who's been following this closely, and he's been breaking news on this story.
00:35:30.800Wendell Huizebo is a politics reporter at Breitbart News, and he joins me now.
00:36:02.360And 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.
00:36:11.240None of their fingerprints are anywhere on them.
00:36:16.800Well, 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.
00:37:14.220Like I said, he's run multiple campaigns.
00:37:16.420And 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.
00:37:35.560And 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.
00:37:47.200Or 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?
00:38:36.340We have more more breaking news in the following days on this.
00:38:39.400Hmm. 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.
00:38:50.520I do believe there was at least one other because there was that 24 hour bill that he submitted for his time.
00:38:56.480So we know that there's been at least some chatting between Wade and the White House.
00:39:00.840And 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.
00:39:13.360There's at least four of those bills by Nathan Wade's own hand.
00:39:18.460So, you know, all of this has the feel of coordination.
00:39:22.920I 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.
00:39:30.140I think the Georgia prosecution was their ace in the hole.
00:39:33.360New York is going to be like a slap on the wrist.
00:39:36.120The the federal prosecutions are big and bad, but they're not going anyplace anytime soon because of all the legal maneuvering.
00:39:43.880And Georgia was their ace in the hole because they have a very Biden friendly prosecutor, a Biden friendly jury pool.
00:39:51.240And while the judge is right down the middle, he's a former federalist guy.
00:39:54.880So I think he's more Republican leaning.
00:39:56.360It's better to have a good jury pool than to have the best judge.
00:39:59.820So this is the position they were in, which is why all of this is so potentially devastating.
00:40:03.780So this guy, DeSantis, what do we know about him?
00:40:07.560Like, what do we know whether he's been actively involved in the Trump case?
00:40:13.020My sources say that Jeff DeSantis is involved with targeting President Trump, helping organize it in the background.
00:40:24.640And between Jeff DeSantis and Nathan Wade, we have two guys who sources say were involved before and after this prosecution of former President Trump.
00:40:40.440And going back to Nathan Wade, Nathan Wade was on the transition team.
00:40:46.540Breitbart 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.
00:41:02.080Willis was Wade was not a staff member of Fulton County yet.
00:41:07.480So that really raises questions why he was there.
00:42:17.140Um, 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.
00:42:30.120But she went in front of her church now twice, but especially the first time, got very political, started making it a race thing.
00:42:36.880Um, saying they, they accused me of playing the race card.
00:42:40.400They who threw played the race card and so on.
00:42:43.540Um, she said they were picking on Nathan Wade because he's black.
00:42:47.140Um, 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.
00:42:59.400It didn't just start with the Trump case or these accusations against her.
00:43:04.920Over at Breitbart News, you can go there right now.
00:43:08.420And, uh, our reporting is that, uh, Fannie Willis essentially was running a race education program, uh, dubbed by many leftists as a DEI program.
00:43:19.060And, um, my sources, uh, gave me slides, gave us slides.
00:43:24.020They gave us video of, uh, this, uh, race education program that was going on.
00:43:30.100If 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.
00:43:45.560And so if you ask me, this was just explicit racism.
00:43:48.980The left cloaks this under, you know, DEI quality inclusion, all that garbage.
00:43:54.060But in reality, they are training or were training, uh, employees to judge people based upon skin color.
00:44:02.500It's really amazing because not only is this racist, but she's the DA.
00:44:07.880If 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.
00:44:19.220And it's no less pernicious just because she's black doing it to whites.
00:44:24.240Um, 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.
00:44:34.320You know, you did, I know, talk to some people who know Fannie Willis and they know how her office operates.
00:44:42.280I 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.
00:44:49.220No, in fact, the sources said that before Fannie Willis won election in 2020, uh, the, the staffers were, were very happy.
00:44:59.060And 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.
00:45:17.040And so these, uh, these sources tell me that, you know, the, the, the shop or the office over there was, was very corrupt.
00:45:25.460And 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.
00:45:33.100And she was, uh, admonished by the judge after she, you know, had some sort of, uh, temper tantrum.
00:45:39.780And 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.
00:45:49.940Hmm. 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.
00:46:07.160And 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.
00:46:18.760This shouldn't just miraculously happen.
00:46:21.240Of course, Willis is not going to prosecute the former president of the United States without the current administration's approval.
00:46:26.920I mean, that makes sense to a lot of us.
00:46:29.540It 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.
00:46:52.100I encourage everyone to go to brightbartnews.com.
00:46:54.500We have the DEI, uh, story up right now in that story.
00:46:58.560In 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.
00:47:14.120Well, judges in Georgia don't run, uh, for their position based upon political affiliation.
00:47:20.260And 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.
00:47:29.940It was an overarching data, uh, a piece.
00:47:33.540And so the whole thing just seems to me just to be a bunch of hooey.
00:47:36.800Well, that would make sense because that's what her prosecution looks like to me, not to mention her sworn testimony more on this case.
00:47:45.100As 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.
00:47:50.960Don't forget to tune into the show tomorrow because we'll have the full rundown.
00:47:58.040I'm Megan Kelly, host of the Megan Kelly show on Sirius XM.
00:48:02.440It's your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations with the most interesting and important political, legal, and cultural figures today.
00:48:10.220You can catch the Megan Kelly show on Triumph, a Sirius XM channel featuring lots of hosts you may know and probably love.
00:48:17.980Great people like Dr. Laura, Glenn Beck, Nancy Grace, Dave Ramsey, and yours truly, Megan Kelly.
00:48:24.480You can stream the Megan Kelly show on Sirius XM at home or anywhere you are.
00:49:32.580She was dragged to a secluded area apparently in an attempt to conceal her body.
00:49:37.540Her 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.
00:49:48.740And 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.
00:50:03.540Well, 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.
00:50:13.900But I think the important thing to focus on is any one instance shouldn't shape our overall immigration policy.
00:50:22.000Joining me now, Mary Catherine Ham, host of the Getting Hammered podcast.
00:51:26.820I 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.
00:51:38.540And, 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.
00:51:46.820I know exactly where her body was found.
00:51:48.480I know the place they're talking about and what it feels like and what it smells like.
00:51:52.380And the reason it felt safe is because it was safe.
00:51:54.900There hasn't been a homicide on campus at the University of Georgia in 30 years.
00:51:58.900But 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?
00:52:12.440They'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.
00:52:21.160But the conversation we should be having is about facts, right?
00:52:25.220When 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.
00:52:39.700As 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.
00:52:56.800No, and I want to, I think part of, look, there's two stories here, right?
00:53:00.780There'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.
00:53:15.440So it's been a tough week for them, and I want to honor that part of it and the personal part of it.
00:53:21.880And 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.
00:53:29.060So 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.
00:53:44.660And those are, in her words, the undocumented immigrants part.
00:53:48.100And so he's hanging out there with three arrests.
00:53:50.700His brother comes down, the alleged perpetrator in this.
00:53:54.160He's arrested maybe once in Athens, definitely once in New York.
00:53:57.620And 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.
00:54:06.300They don't have to worry about that endangering their sort of pseudo-asylum claims, right?
00:54:11.160They 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.
00:54:34.360You, 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.
00:54:46.640Um, but worst case scenario, it's about a cop behaving badly and an individual.
00:54:54.140This 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.
00:55:51.380Unlike Lakin Riley and the other girls and young men just like her on college campuses and elsewhere.
00:55:57.440Yeah, this is not a say her name scenario, right?
00:56:01.160They only liberals and media get to decide, but I repeat myself, get to decide whose name we say.
00:56:06.920Well, I would like to say Lakin Riley's name, right?
00:56:09.500And we can all do that, um, outside of their, their narrative setting.
00:56:13.960And, uh, and that is something that we must do because look, you're right.
00:56:18.340The 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?
00:56:28.540This one seems to actually apply to real policy and you could take care of some things to perhaps prevent such tragedies in the future.
00:56:38.980And 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?
00:57:39.600They've, there are whole counties that elect people like Fannie Willis and it's sicker on the former president.
00:57:44.640Like you really do have to pay very close attention.
00:57:46.880Who 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.
00:58:05.500And 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.
00:58:13.040Certainly 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.
00:58:18.960Cause you're not generally really in tune to your local government when you're a student, but they are being failed, right?
00:58:25.300And their, their needs are not being put above those of the illegal immigrants who come to this community.
00:58:32.640Now it matters by the way that the parents of those students, many of them and the students themselves are Georgia voters, right?
00:58:38.940And the parents groups, by the way, who have university of Georgia kids lighting up just there on fire this week.
00:58:46.360There was another person held at gunpoint, apparently near campus during the same week.
00:58:53.380They'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.
00:59:02.420And it's something they're going to demand of local leaders.
00:59:09.780Here'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.
00:59:17.020And, you know, you really got to, of course you feel differently about them than you do about single women.
00:59:20.820Single women are not the ones who are attacking women on running paths.
00:59:24.120And generally you're not the ones who are causing the felonious harm.
00:59:28.120And honestly, that's true of American citizens too.
00:59:30.220But in any event, it's mostly these men who do it.
00:59:51.460According 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.
01:00:00.220They have not said exactly how she was killed, only that her death was caused by blunt force trauma.
01:00:05.140He'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.
01:00:21.260That'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.
01:00:28.040By 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.
01:00:41.240Molly Tibbetts, strikingly similar story, university student went out for a run, disappeared.
01:00:46.520It 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.
01:00:58.000So 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.
01:01:06.360That's not the conversation they want you to have. Those aren't the facts they want you to have at your disposal.
01:01:10.520Okay, 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.
01:01:21.080Like, she wouldn't have wanted that. We don't want that.
01:01:23.840And I remember saying at the time, with all due respect to the grieving brother, that's not for him to say.
01:01:28.340That'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.
01:01:38.100And we must say what led to this person being here and that it's a factor we have to consider and stop.
01:01:46.200No, you're correct. I read up on the other day and part of her family did say that.
01:01:50.780And nonetheless, as I said, there are two different stories.
01:01:53.340There's the personal story and we want to honor the person who's a victim of this and their family.
01:01:58.020And also there's a policy story and the facts matter to the policy story.
01:02:02.240And 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.
01:02:14.200And 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.
01:02:21.820But 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?
01:02:29.760And in the case of an illegal immigrant, it's preventable at the moment that they come across the border.
01:02:34.080It's preventable anytime they have a run in with the police after that point.
01:02:38.840And so at many points, this might have been preventable.
01:02:41.620And that is just worthy of more outrage, frankly.
01:02:46.480It's so unthinkable that you could have stopped this and didn't.
01:02:51.820The other piece of it is back to our, you know, Democrat double standard, the White House spokesperson responding to this.
01:02:57.400This must have been somebody other than KJP because I think it's just a written statement.
01:03:01.440We would like to extend our deepest condolences to the family and loved ones of Lake and Hope Riley.
01:03:08.200Now, 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.
01:04:10.300No, it's always this egregious double standard.
01:04:13.140And 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.
01:05:19.780He 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.
01:05:31.700I, this is becoming an issue for Democrats too.
01:05:34.720And 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.
01:05:44.120All 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.
01:05:54.480And that is the death, the suicide, death by suicide of Aaron Bushnell.
01:06:00.820Now, 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.
01:07:08.740That fostered and inflicted enduring harms on its students.
01:07:12.040So, clearly, there's some troubling things in this guy's background you won't be surprised to learn.
01:07:18.040A former group member talked about members losing a sense of belonging once they left the group.
01:07:22.100That makes it sound like a cult, right?
01:07:24.700Once you're out, if you no longer feel the sense of belonging, you're good to potentially be.
01:07:28.300And 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.
01:07:41.520That he, Bushnell, texted a friend on Sunday,
01:07:43.620I 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.
01:07:51.620In it, he gave his cat to a neighbor in a fridge full of root beers to a friend.
01:07:56.180And 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.
01:08:08.180He knew no one who was in charge was listening to the protesters out there every week.
01:08:12.740He knows that he has privilege as a white man and a member of the military.
01:08:18.460And in response to seeing this guy set himself on fire, you literally have two of the presidential contenders,
01:08:30.700Cornel West and Green Party politician Jill Stein, celebrating what he did.
01:08:38.320The Cornel West post on X takes the cake.
01:08:42.000Let us never forget the extraordinary courage and commitment of brother Aaron Bushnell, who died for truth and justice, exclamation point.
01:08:54.240I pray for his precious loved ones, exclamation point.
01:08:57.840Let us rededicate ourselves to genuine solidarity with Palestinians undergoing genocidal attacks in real time.
01:09:03.740And from Jill Stein, rest in power, Aaron Bushnell.
01:09:08.180I quote, I will no longer be complicit in genocide, free Palestine.
01:09:12.000Quoting his dying words, may his sacrifice deepen our commitment to stop genocide now.
01:14:16.560Because he's white and he's a Marine or he's a he's an Air Force guy.
01:14:19.340I 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.
01:14:36.720There'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.
01:14:52.440And that's bad, but because that is a phrase reserved for the black community.
01:14:56.600And therefore, to do that would be appropriating that.
01:15:32.700And 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.
01:15:45.500He's lamenting from the sound of this, the following.
01:16:20.620And 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.
01:16:38.0009-11 was an outlier and the first of its kind.
01:16:40.660That'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.
01:18:02.360And my sister tried once after she was grounded, but she couldn't get the Stanley knife to open.
01:18:06.680Imagine, 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.
01:18:26.580The 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.
01:18:47.140And 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.
01:18:54.940So, you got a lot of leeway in this country.
01:19:02.660Farhana 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.
01:19:14.280RIP Aaron Bushnell, who self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy as a political protest against genocide.
01:19:20.080Don't believe the spin-doctoring otherwise.
01:19:21.540He showed more moral clarity and courage than politicians and genocide heirs.
01:19:29.820They still try to spin-doctor it as mental health issues, but he was rational and clear about his political reasoning.
01:19:59.520Now, she has set her Twitter profile to private, but we did see before her big things were,
01:20:07.340I'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.
01:20:23.780But then you didn't need me to tell you that, MK, you could have written that bio yourself.
01:20:29.620By the way, just everybody think about the money you're spending on college.
01:20:35.140We spent 60 grand so I could go there back in the 80s to 90s.
01:20:39.380It 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.
01:21:33.980So 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.
01:21:53.320There was the top guy who got booted, eventually out, James Bennett.
01:21:59.120And 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.
01:22:04.940And 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.
01:22:13.520Sometimes I did what I was hired to do and I paid for it.
01:22:18.040And 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.
01:22:46.760Russ and Daughter's super heapster came to mind, but I figured mentioning a $19 sandwich wasn't a great way to win new friends.
01:22:53.900So I blurted out the spicy chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A and considered the ice broken.
01:23:00.000Now, you or I could have told Adam that that was a mistake in front of The New York Times.
01:23:05.120So 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.
01:23:17.900The 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.
01:24:16.400Taylor, 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.
01:24:25.520I imagine they have some backup for this.
01:24:27.360And 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.
01:24:59.960So but the whole story is is really bad.
01:25:02.560And what it what it illustrates is not only that this newspaper did not have Rubenstein's back at all.
01:25:08.900He was a, you know, a mid-level opinion editor.
01:25:12.600He 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.
01:25:37.940This should have been non-controversial in the paper of record.
01:25:41.500However, it was not non-controversial.
01:25:43.680And 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,
01:26:09.240And 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.
01:26:20.220And Rubenstein is the one who took the fall.
01:26:21.920Well, the details about what happens in The New York Times' Slack channel, which should be abolished immediately.
01:26:32.120Do 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.
01:26:41.700He said he wrote for the Weekly Standard for a bit and the Wall Street Journal, so he should have known about Chick-fil-A.
01:26:46.780But he says it was a strange experience to be, you know, conservative or at least considered one at the Times.
01:26:52.680I 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?
01:27:00.340Only to realize how unwelcome such questions were.
01:27:03.020By 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.
01:27:15.300Same thing happened to him on the Hunter Biden laptop story.
01:27:19.220There was a sense that publishing the occasional conservative voice made the paper look centrist.
01:27:25.000But I soon realized that the conservative voices we published tended to be ones agreeing with a liberal line.
01:27:31.380It was also clear that right of center submissions were treated differently.
01:27:35.220They faced a higher bar for entry, more layers of editing and greater involvement of higher ups.
01:27:41.220Standard 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.
01:28:25.360Everything he wrote, I was like, I know exactly what he's feeling, right?
01:28:28.480Because you see things slightly differently.
01:28:30.180And in a newsroom that was interested in finding news and facts and understanding the way people see the world, they would say, oh, interesting.
01:28:38.160That is a different way of looking at that.
01:28:41.100But 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.
01:28:53.600You don't have to think about it at all.
01:28:55.160But the act of news gathering should be about thinking.
01:28:59.460It should be about rationally evaluating fact versus quotes and scenarios and an explanation from different sources and what their motivations are.
01:29:09.120But, like, the call is to not do that on the left.
01:29:13.180It's just to take in whatever the line is and agree with it.
01:29:17.960And then they surround themselves with nobody who disagrees.
01:29:20.200And someone like Rubenstein either takes the fall or gets the boot, right, if you object to this.
01:29:27.740So this is how, you know, Barry Weiss left the New York Times, too.
01:29:30.720I mean, she was, in particular on Israel, outraged at their one-sidedness, wound up leaving.
01:29:35.580This guy, James Bennett, wound up leaving.
01:29:37.980I'll give you one last paragraph here because it's worth it.
01:29:40.300He 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.
01:29:47.680And he said, he writes, I had one more task to take care of before it printed.
01:29:52.100Cotton'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.
01:30:01.440One was of U.S. troops enforcing the desegregation of the University of Mississippi in 1962.
01:30:07.640I sent these to a photo editor, and he names names, Jeffrey Henson Scales, and asked him to consider them.
01:30:13.700He 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.
01:30:23.220I thanked him and added a confusion emoji in case he wanted to expand on what he meant.
01:30:31.000He replied by sending me the emoji of a black box representing solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.
01:30:47.180And 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,
01:30:56.360who 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.
01:31:12.560Right, 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.
01:31:20.460Reporter after reporter, editor after editor, executive after executive, just decided the only way to handle this was,
01:31:26.140we all hate Tom Cotton, some rogue employees got out of control and didn't do the proper vetting, right?
01:31:39.140Now, 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.
01:31:53.060And not a lot of people who are practiced in thinking through issues, because the thinking through has become a problem.
01:32:00.140College is the opposite of a place for free inquiry.
01:33:05.840And here is some of the scintillating exchange.
01:33:08.580And 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.
01:34:41.480And the idea that he thinks he can do that.
01:34:44.400The 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.
01:34:56.420First, we'll ever introduce a call for that.
01:34:58.440And here they're saying, he's saying, no, don't do that because that will help Biden.
01:35:32.220Trump wants to disregard the rule of law.
01:35:33.760OK, you mean like what you're doing in this federal prosecutions, breaking norms that we never crossed before in our 200 plus year history.
01:35:55.660Not 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.
01:36:03.920Who double crossed the FBI, who gave false information.
01:36:07.040They stormed the Capitol and cops died.
01:36:17.460It's about the United States of America.
01:36:19.300We've covered that in the beginning of this show.
01:36:21.480It is about the United States of America.
01:36:23.640You 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.
01:36:32.720We could go on, but democracy is at stake, MK, but not for the reasons he says.
01:36:37.460I like my jaw dropped, but I didn't hear any of that from Seth Meyers.
01:36:42.680It's not his job to push back on that.
01:36:44.300You know what a nefarious government might also do?
01:36:47.080And he notes like that's what Eastern European countries do.
01:36:50.200They 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.
01:37:08.240That's a thing that might happen in one of those countries.
01:37:10.560And that's what happened to Donald Trump.
01:37:14.000But they do not see it in themselves because, of course, they do it for the right reasons.
01:37:18.000Other people do it for the wrong reasons.
01:37:19.360By 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.