In this episode of The Megyn Kelly Show, host Meghan Kelly sits down with National Review Institute Senior Fellow Andy McCarthy and Political Commentator Julie Kelly to discuss the impact of Joe Biden's Supreme Court confirmation hearing on the Justice Department's ongoing case against Andrew Cuomo.
00:04:13.940I've been making the same gesture in public all my life.
00:04:19.420I actually learned it from my mother and from my father.
00:04:27.500It is meant to convey warmth, nothing more.
00:04:33.120Indeed, there are hundreds, if not thousands of photos of me using the exact same gesture.
00:04:40.420I do it with everyone, black and white, young and old, straight and LGBTQ, powerful people, friends, strangers, people who I meet on the street.
00:05:03.840There's a long, long list of people he's touched.
00:05:32.920I'm 62 and I've sort of traveled around in, not at the same level, obviously, but I've, you know, I've been in sort of elite Washington and especially New York legal circles and some political circles.
00:05:48.740What's described in that report was never right.
00:05:52.420There was never a time when that was when that was OK.
00:05:55.740So, you know, for him to sort of he's a very sophisticated guy.
00:06:00.860And, you know, for him to say, you know, gee whiz, the mores changed and I just it just happened so fast that I never caught up with it is laughable.
00:06:12.420On the other hand, the report that was written is very explosive and I think it's devastating for him politically.
00:06:23.540But you'll appreciate this as as a lawyer when you're preparing a case to go to trial, when you're writing an indictment or you're writing a civil claim, you write the charging instruments with an eye toward what you can actually prove in court.
00:06:40.300And this thing is very interesting because Letitia James, the AG, took her mandate as basically writing a report not to do anything.
00:06:51.160So, you know, no criminal prosecution, no civil claim.
00:06:55.380So the usual thing that you have as a lawyer that disciplines you to only put out what you can prove is not present in the four corners of that report.
00:07:05.180That doesn't mean that there's not a lot of corroborated information and that the victims are incredible.
00:07:11.700But, you know, I mean, this thing has been put out in a way that is never going to be challenged in court.
00:07:20.560And, you know, it's probably going to kill him politically.
00:07:25.400Maybe we'll see. I mean, he's not going to step down.
00:07:27.440So it's really up to the assembly to see whether they want to impeach him.
00:07:31.080And so far, they haven't won. They haven't wanted to.
00:07:34.100You know, he's too powerful. There's a battle.
00:07:35.940I saw your tweet on this yesterday. You nailed it.
00:07:40.240This is about moderate Dems versus progressive woke Dems.
00:07:43.960And unfortunately, as a New Yorker, I'm on the side if I have to choose between those two of moderate Dems, which sadly he kind of is.
00:07:53.020So if we lose him and I want him to go, don't get me.
00:07:56.260I mean, I just think he's too bad of a man to stay in office.
00:07:58.280But what are what are we going to get?
00:08:01.220Well, I think if they do it quickly, you may get the lieutenant governor you have now, who I think moderates would be more pleased with than than with Cuomo.
00:08:10.640The weather vane here, Megan, it seems to me, is heasty because he's a Cuomo guy through and through.
00:08:18.340And I thought it was very interesting.
00:08:20.380He really did a 180 yesterday when the report first came out.
00:08:23.420I mean, you knew what was going to happen, right?
00:08:24.800The report comes out and these guys are like humming and humming and humming.
00:08:28.160They don't want to say anything where they're planting their feet and they want to see how the polls in New York go for two or three days before they decide where they have to come out.
00:08:36.620So he initially came out and said, I find this report very disturbing.
00:08:59.880As soon as the president told me what it was.
00:09:01.740And then, you know, he basically said he's unfit to serve and we've lost confidence in him.
00:09:07.840To me, that's a big deal in New York politics because he's Cuomo's guy.
00:09:13.540And I just don't see how Cuomo survives.
00:09:16.620This to me is not like a Ralph Northam situation where he toughed it out.
00:09:21.380But the politics of Virginia are really that sort of prism of Republican versus Democrat.
00:09:26.080I don't think Cuomo can survive the woke progressives wanted him out already.
00:09:32.540So this is a very different dynamic than what we see in the country.
00:09:36.200And if he doesn't have the support of establishment Democrats, I think he's toast.
00:09:40.800Yeah, I think I mean, this is really a this is an important moment, I think, for Democrats in New York state, because somebody tweeted out yesterday, if they don't get rid of this guy, the Me Too movement is officially dead.
00:09:52.060I mean, I would argue it died with Kavanaugh.
00:09:54.240But whatever was left of it is definitely dead if they don't get rid of this guy.
00:09:59.180You got 11 women coming forward and he has had the opportunity to submit his 85 page rebuttal and he's had press conferences and he has he's had aides out there defending him.
00:10:08.160So he you know, in the in the public world, in the PR world, he's had, quote, due process.
00:10:13.340This isn't yet a legal matter that would require a whole level, additional level of scrutiny.
00:10:17.980But, you know, you've got state troopers coming forward with other state troopers who witnessed her account.
00:10:23.820These women seem very credible to me and not like somebody bringing up a 30 year allegation that there's no way of knowing whether it happened and there's no contemporaneous corroboration.
00:10:33.460At this point, if if if they don't do anything about it.
00:10:38.140I don't know what it's saying to American women.
00:10:40.780I just feel like it's just a such a middle finger to American women if they don't do anything about this.
00:10:47.120The interesting thing, though, is you were rolling all through that.
00:10:50.320And that's exactly the way that you would want to marshal it.
00:10:54.800I keep going back to, you know, you with Janice Dean yesterday when this all came out.
00:11:00.240What we're now seeing, this latest report has turbocharged this thing in a way that, you know, two days ago you would have thought that Cuomo would easily survive.
00:11:10.640Now it looks like he probably won't survive.
00:11:14.060But the real important thing here, I mean, I don't mean to belittle the sexual harassment report.
00:11:21.060But the handling of the nursing homes with the covid patients is the is the five alarm scandal here.
00:11:33.800As a direct result, you could definitely make the case of his order sending covid positive patients back into these small nursing homes with the most vulnerable population over the objections of nursing and health groups who said, don't do this, governor.
00:11:48.380And I think, you know, if he had copped to it at the time, Megan, you know, if he had just said, look, we were grappling at the beginning, we didn't really know the tiger we had by the tail.
00:11:57.940We were worried about hospital space and we screwed up.
00:12:01.620I think, you know, people wouldn't have liked that, but they would have understood it.
00:12:05.720But he not only didn't do that, they covered up what they did.
00:12:09.480And then he takes this friggin victory lap with the with the book, which is just I mean, it's infuriating.
00:12:15.460And I just think that should have been enough in a normal political culture and normal political climate that should have been enough to get him out.
00:12:22.780Well, they believe that a lot of those Dems have their own hands dirty when it comes to that scandal.
00:12:28.180And therefore, they'd much rather boot him based on this.
00:12:31.660They weren't there while he allegedly put his hand under the executive assistant's blouse and grabbed her breast.
00:12:36.380You know, that can be totally his scandal.
00:12:38.080So we'll see. OK, let's move on to vaccine passports, because we're seeing in New York City and trust me, it's coming to a city near you.
00:12:46.000Yeah, that now you're not going to be able to go out to eat inside of a restaurant or go to an entertainment venue or go to a gym without proof of your vaccination.
00:12:56.060And I know that there's Supreme Court precedent saying vaccine mandates are OK in many settings.
00:13:00.980That's sort of the history here for public health reasons.
00:13:03.300But do you think there's any legal argument against this or do you think this is going to fall right in line with legal precedent?
00:13:09.840Well, it does fall in line with the legal precedent.
00:13:12.480But you have a lot of important voices, Justice Alito and Justice Gorsuch among them, saying that we really need to revisit Jacobson versus Massachusetts,
00:13:23.740which is this early 20th century, I guess it's smallpox era case that basically said these vaccine mandates are OK.
00:13:33.300They didn't really come out and say they're OK.
00:13:36.820I mean, basically, the mandate in that case, you could get out of it by paying a five dollar fee, which is about 140 bucks now.
00:13:45.580So it's not really the same kind of mandate we're talking about.
00:13:49.160And the other thing that justices say who are who want to revisit this is that this case came out before the Supreme Court developed what is now its its real jurisprudence for evaluating claims that the state has infringed your what you claim to be your fundamental rights.
00:14:09.500Right. So after that case, the Supreme Court develops this test where they say if you're claiming a fundamental right,
00:14:19.160was is being infringed, the state has to show that it has a compelling reason to regulate and that the regulation it's chosen is the least restrictive alternative.
00:14:30.220It's the it's the smallest thing they can do in terms of interfering with your right while at the same time pursuing or facilitating their compelling interest.
00:14:40.120And if we're if you're not dealing with a fundamental right, you're in a different category called rational relation, which means the state just has to show they have a legitimate reason to regulate and that the regulation they've chosen is rationally related to the end they're trying to accomplish.
00:14:59.320And what this all means in a nutshell is that if it's rational relation, the government wins always.
00:15:07.280And if it's strict scrutiny, the government usually loses, but not always.
00:15:13.320So what you get down to is what kind of right is this?
00:15:17.520What is the right not to be vaccinated?
00:15:20.520And so far, the courts relying on Jacobson have said it's an important right, but it's not a fundamental right.
00:15:28.740So we're going to use rational relation scrutiny.
00:15:32.080But, you know, the case came up before there was rational relation scrutiny.
00:15:36.300So there there may be very good reason to go back and take another look at it.
00:15:39.800Hmm. So if you were a betting man and you look at the Supreme Court, which leans more right now than it has in any recent decade, what would you say the odds are that they would say the government's gone too far on some of these vaccine mandates?
00:15:52.860I mean, we've seen district courts, lower federal trial courts uphold them at universities already saying you can't come to this college unless you get a vaccine.
00:16:10.420Now, the wild card here is and this is unbelievable from the Biden people.
00:16:16.900The vaccine doesn't have final approval from the FDA.
00:16:20.640Right. So, yeah, since it's only approved for emergency purposes, statutorily, they have to tell people that they have an option not to to take it.
00:16:30.100So I think that, you know, that that obviously if they if they button that down, then you're in a different you're a different set of facts before court.
00:16:38.660But the history of the United States, I don't mean to be like too portentous about this, but this is this is what it is.
00:16:48.880The court tends to give a wide berth to the elected officials, especially the executive officials, to deal with the crisis.
00:16:57.760And to the extent that you get new law that upholds civil rights, it tends to come after the crisis is over and it sets norms for the next crisis.
00:17:09.060But it's cold comfort to the people in the here and now. Right.
00:17:11.540So, you know, you have Lincoln suspending habeas corpus, you have the Japanese internment, all sorts of things that the court has kind of looked the other way on while the crisis was going on and then clamped down afterwards.
00:17:25.800If this follows that pattern, I think and you have not only the the three progressive judges on the court, but I think certainly Chief Justice Roberts and maybe even Justice Kavanaugh are kind of of a mind to sort of let the elected officials do their thing.
00:17:46.160And if the people don't like it, let there be a political, not a judicial outcome.
00:17:52.740And I think the court is probably with respect to vaccines, at least going to give the executive branches of the state and the federal government a wide berth.
00:18:07.680Now, there's other things that they're that they're going to do, especially if we get to lockdowns again.
00:18:15.160Yeah. The Cuomo decision a few months ago indicated that if you really are in that established fundamental right category, like religious liberty, the Cuomo case was about the restrictions on worship rights in a couple of places in New York.
00:18:32.220And the court said, no, you can't do that because religious exercise is a fundamental right.
00:18:39.960And there's a lot of ways that you could accomplish what you're trying to accomplish without these ridiculous draconian limitations.
00:18:47.780So, you know, if you can if you could come up with a theory where not getting vaccinated gets you into the basket that the court calls fundamental rights, you know, then you'd be in a different, you're a better position as far as the vaccines.
00:19:02.180Let me ask you this quickly. I want to get to the January 6th thing, but I but I I've been reading you on this rent abatement thing that's happening.
00:19:09.680So the CDC said we're going to issue rent abatement for people.
00:19:14.480They don't have to pay their rent because we've imposed all these, you know, the government's imposed all these terrible restrictions and lockdowns.
00:19:20.680And it's not fair to stop people's income stream and then say, and now get the hell out for not paying your rent.
00:19:25.980That was the original thought behind the rent abatement program.
00:19:29.600And by the CDC, exactly. Unelected bureaucrats.
00:19:33.820So I was like, OK, well, so then the Supreme Court said, yeah, that's going to end on July 31st.
00:19:40.840That's the end of that. And the executive doesn't have the power to do this.
00:19:44.300And then what happened? The executive stepped in and did this again.
00:19:47.760There was so much pressure. The Congress needed to extend it.
00:19:50.460If anybody, they refused. They didn't have it.
00:19:53.200So Biden, under enormous pressure, basically just flouted the Supreme Court and said, we're extending it.
00:19:58.980And I think you tell me, I think the strategy is that I heard Cori Bush over on NPR saying, yeah, we yeah, that's it.
00:20:05.800And we don't care. And really, what we're looking to do is buy time to get more money to tenants and so on.
00:20:13.400While this legal process plays out, even though we know we're going to lose.
00:20:17.620So is there any question that they've overstepped their executive power?
00:20:20.460Something we we we heard them complain about a lot under Trump.
00:20:24.480And it seems a rather big power grab to me under Biden.
00:20:27.160There's there's no question that they have overstepped and they know it just on Monday.
00:20:34.560Gene Sperling, who's a White House advisor, longtime smart guy in Democratic circles, was at the briefing in the White House with Jen Psaki and said, you know, we've looked at this up, down and sideways.
00:20:50.200And that was when Biden was basically pleading with the states to do something, which, by the way, you wouldn't be surprised because this is intrastate commerce.
00:21:00.320It's not intrastate commerce. It's not something the federal government ought to be regulating anyway.
00:21:04.620But, you know, no, they absolutely know that they're in the wrong and they are playing for time.
00:21:11.080And I think, Megan, you know, I hate to go back to the, you know, to the Alinsky rhetoric about Obama.
00:21:19.280But this really is governance where the process is the penalty.
00:21:25.040You know, you have people who they know they're running the government.
00:21:29.100They may be in the wrong, but the wheels of justice grind slowly.
00:21:33.120It takes a long time to get this stuff challenged in court.
00:21:35.420It takes a long time to get it up to the Supreme Court.
00:21:37.660And there's a lot you can do if you're willing to be abusive and use the the slowness of the process and the difficulties of people trying to to pursue their rights that are built into the process.
00:21:51.860If you're willing to use those in a punitive way, there's a lot of bad things you can accomplish.
00:21:56.800And it's not to say that anybody has anything other than empathy for the people struggling to pay the rents at the moment.
00:22:02.380But they've also been given a lot of checks. The government's also already issued a lot of aid.
00:22:08.340The taxpayers are already trying to help these people.
00:22:10.880The unemployment rate is still unnecessarily low because people are on their couches, not going back into the workforce.
00:23:25.140And I'm sick that they're trying to politicize the January 6th event to the place where, without, without downplaying it, they're trying to overstate it.
00:23:37.040And I'm just going to give you a little flavor of the press and the left making the case that this is worse.
00:23:46.920The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.
00:23:50.200The 1-6 attack for the future of the country is a profoundly more dangerous event than the 9-11 attacks.
00:23:58.920And in the end, the 1-6 attacks are likely to kill a lot more Americans than were killed on the 9-11 attacks, which will include the casualties of the wars that lasted 20 years following.
00:24:11.680This is the most important issue of our time, and I think it's actually the most important issue in the last 150 years since the Civil War.
00:24:21.060Though there was less loss of life on January 6th, January 6th was worse than 9-11 because it's continued to rip our country apart.
00:25:04.040Well, to start with Merrick Garland, who you finished with there, I got to know Merrick Garland prosecuting terrorist cases in the 90s, and I really liked him.
00:25:14.660He was one of the real adults in the Clinton Justice Department.
00:25:19.860And when we needed something in terrorism prosecutions, he was the guy that you would talk to because he had a real sophisticated understanding of the issues and the importance of them.
00:25:30.980And then he personally, Megan, led the prosecution.
00:25:36.200He didn't end up trying the case, but he ran the investigation when Timothy McVeigh killed almost 180 people and destroyed a federal courthouse.
00:25:44.500So for him to come out and say, echoing these other folks that you played, that this is the worst thing that he's ever seen in his professional career in terms of peril to the United States is just, to me, mind-boggling.
00:26:02.340And I'm really tired of every time I have to go on this rant saying that, you know, January 6th was a bad thing.
00:26:12.900Anybody who watched it knows it was terrible for the country.
00:26:18.460The worst thing about it is our proud boast, which became a norm for Western democracy on the peaceful transfer of power.
00:26:27.240We'll never be able to brag about that in the foreseeable future like we were on January 5th, right?
00:26:33.760So that's a terrible thing for the country.
00:26:36.200But to compare it to a mass murder attack, I mean, the World Trade Center was destroyed and the Pentagon was struck by a missilized jumbo jet, right?
00:26:46.560You want to compare that to a riot at the Capitol that, A, wouldn't have happened if they had put adequate security forces that had adequate training, if they were out there a number enough.
00:27:21.580There was never a shadow of a doubt about that.
00:27:24.080If they had needed to reconvene, they would have reconvened in Union Station or someplace if that's what they needed to do.
00:27:29.840But they didn't need to do it because unlike 9-11, where buildings were destroyed, they were able to, you know, they had some broken windows and broken doors.
00:27:39.940And I'm not trying to, you know, I want to say that that's not a big deal.
00:27:55.540Unlike 9-11, we had 3,000 Americans killed, the hundreds of firefighters, the New York City police, and all of the firefighters and police officers who have died since as a result of cancers and other illnesses at Ground Zero, all of our troops who've been killed fighting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
00:28:13.440I just think it is the height of disrespect to even mention those two events in the same sentence.
00:28:19.360If I could say one more thing about it also, Megan, here's their excuse for doing it.
00:28:25.040They say that maybe not as many people were killed and buildings weren't destroyed, but this was our democracy that hung in the balance.
00:28:35.640So basically what they're saying is there's this abstraction out there that they call democracy that was going to be killed by this event.
00:28:45.260Under circumstances where the reality of the situation is, the outcome of the presidential election was not in doubt, and there was no question that Congress was going to do its constitutional job, whether it was able to do that in the Capitol or not.
00:28:57.640But if the abstraction they're talking about, democracy, is so weak that what happened on January 6th could destroy it, then we have much bigger problems than January 6th.
00:29:14.260So you've heard it. I've heard it. It was an insurrection. It was an insurrection.
00:29:19.200One of the things I've been following you on is, interestingly, it's almost like the Giuliani thing, where Giuliani kept saying fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud in front of the cameras during the Trump electoral challenges.
00:29:30.660But when he got into court, he wouldn't say that. That's what's happening now with the other side.
00:29:36.840They say in front of the cameras, insurrection, insurrection, sedition, terrorism.
00:29:40.980But when you actually look at what they're saying in court, they're not charging anyone with insurrection.
00:29:47.660Right. And there is a crime of insurrection on the books and seditious conspiracy is on the books.
00:29:53.460I prosecuted the blind sheikh and his jihadist cell for that.
00:29:58.000And interestingly, the statute is called seditious conspiracy.
00:30:04.840But if you read the charging language of it, the word sedition doesn't appear because of this dark history we have with the Alien and Sedition Acts.
00:30:13.140But all of all of the statutory prongs are about using force against the government in a way that is almost projecting making war on the government.
00:30:23.860In fact, one of the prongs is levying war against the United States.
00:30:28.000Nobody's been charged with that. So, again, you're exactly right.
00:30:31.880This is one of these things where there's kind of a public rhetoric about this and then there's what they say and do in court.
00:30:38.660And there was a case, Megan, I think, within the last two weeks where one of the demonstrators, rioters, who was famously in the well of the Senate near Vice President Pence's desk there, pled guilty.
00:30:55.560I think they charged him with interfering with Congress.
00:31:00.080The government wanted him to get 18 months, which, given their extravagant rhetoric, is not exactly what you would expect for the seditionist, insurrectionist event that ended the United States.
00:31:13.620The judge thought, yeah, right. And the judge thought that this was that was that was over the top.
00:31:18.900So he gave him eight months. So, you know, maybe that maybe the one silver lining we have here is that for all the crazy stuff that's being said.
00:31:27.880And I can I can attest to this for from my terrorism prosecution, too.
00:31:32.220There was there was one set of things that the government was saying on the steps of the courthouse and in, you know, in the White House and the press conferences.
00:31:42.200And then there was what was going on in the four corners of the trial where there was no politically correct presentation.
00:31:48.420And we were able to say this is what happened. This is why it happened.
00:31:52.800And maybe here we're getting kind of the reverse of that, where, unlike in my case, where they were trying to soft pedal what happened here, they're they're hysterical about it.
00:32:04.060But when you look at what's going on in the courtroom, the charges are very reasonable.
00:32:07.860It looks like the sentences have been pretty reasonable, too.
00:32:10.260They keep saying over and over again that seven people died on the January 6th riot. Is that true?
00:32:18.120Well, one person died and that was the rioter and the Justice Department looked at that.
00:32:27.840And they decided it was a righteous shooting and they didn't charge anyone.
00:32:31.960Actually, that was Ashley Babbitt. Right.
00:32:34.060As far as, you know, they continue that even last week at this at this first committee meeting of the January 6th committee, again, chairman who's at Benny Thompson is the chairman, said that six.
00:32:49.360And I guess they now say it's seven or did he say seven and now it's eight because somebody else, another police officer who committed suicide.
00:32:56.240Yeah. So we're up to eight. But the thing is, you know, you hate to have to to do this, but nobody was killed in the fighting, which is the suggestion that you that you get when they say these things.
00:33:12.380Officer Sicknick, what they did with that guy is just I mean, it's appalling the way they they used his death.
00:33:19.540But Democrats and the media have really misrepresented the Brian Sicknick case in a way that and.
00:33:26.240Is egregious. Yeah. And right up to not only did they misrepresent it at the time when the Democrats filed their impeachment brief in the Senate, which was now almost five weeks after Sicknick passed, they continued to say that he was bashed over the head with a with a fire extinguisher extinguisher when it was already known by then that he went back to his office.
00:33:51.460He never got hit over the head. He talked to his brother by text and said that he was fine other than he had gotten sprayed.
00:33:57.800And then he expired. And then he expired tragically because of two strokes that he had, which, you know, can we say as a cosmic certainty that they had no causal connection between the between the rioting and what happened to him?
00:34:14.020No. But, you know, no. But, you know, the burdens on the government to prove that that's the way it's supposed to work.
00:34:19.300And they haven't proved it. There's no. In fact, two people have been charged with assaulting Officer Sicknick.
00:34:25.880And his death is not even mentioned in the charges, much less do they allege that the people who they've charged caused it.
00:34:35.020And in the meantime, the other police officers and now there now I guess there's three other ones who have who were involved in the fighting and who have died all committed suicide.
00:34:45.500And it's just it's a tragic fact about police work. But it is a fact that people in that profession commit suicide at higher rates than people in other walks of life in our society.
00:35:01.100So, you know, you can't say with certainty that that the rioting had anything to do with these people who passed.
00:35:08.620And I just think, Megan, the fact that they so obviously hyperbolize here and continue to to distort the record on this speaks volumes about their ridiculous rhetoric about how this is worse than 9-11 and worse than every other.
00:35:25.020You know, let's face it, it's the worst thing that's ever happened in the history of things. Right.
00:35:28.940Right. But if it were, you wouldn't have to make this kind of stuff up and you wouldn't have to, you know, take people who didn't die in it and pretend that they did.
00:35:39.760That's right. And none of that is to diminish what actually happened that day and in particular what the cops went through, because to me, that was the most infuriating thing.
00:35:50.520And I said it right from the beginning and I've heard you say it over and over.
00:35:53.080I thought the law enforcement officers who testified on day one of the January 6th hearing were compelling.
00:36:00.480At least one of them was definitely very partisan.
00:36:03.360And if you look at his tweets about Trump and so on, you know, had I been there as a Republican lawmaker, I probably would have raised that stuff just to show the potential for exaggeration or some extra flair in the testimony.
00:36:16.740Right. Because he clearly hated Trump and he does not like Republicans. But these guys were hurt and you could see it.
00:36:23.880You don't even really need to believe them. You could see it. You could hear the N word.
00:36:27.280You could like a lot of this stuff is on tape. And I do think it's important for the purposes of this discussion to play some of that.
00:36:34.080We have a lot of Republicans and Trump supporters listening to this program.
00:36:37.580Let's operate in reality because this was not a day in the park either.
00:36:41.340When I was 25 years old and then a sergeant in the army, I had deployed to Iraq for Operation Iraqi Freedom.
00:36:53.360But on January 6th, for the first time, I was more afraid to work at the Capitol than my entire deployment to Iraq.
00:37:02.300Iraq. The rioters called me a traitor, a disgrace. I, an army veteran and a police officer, should be executed.
00:37:12.540I told them to just leave the Capitol. And in response, they yelled, Joe Biden is not the president.
00:37:19.560Nobody voted for Joe Biden. Well, I voted for Joe Biden. Does my vote not count? Am I nobody?
00:37:26.980That prompted a torrent of racial epithets. One woman in a pink MAGA shirt yelled, you hear that, guys?
00:37:36.260This voted for Joe Biden. Then the crowd, perhaps around 20 people, joined in screaming, boo.
00:37:44.660I heard chanting from some in the crowd, get his gun and kill him with his own gun.
00:37:53.680I was aware enough to recognize I was at risk of being stripped of and killed with my own firearm.
00:38:00.200I was electrocuted again and again and again with a taser.
00:38:06.020During those moments, I remember thinking there was a very good chance I would be torn apart or shot to death with my own weapon.
00:38:12.540I thought of my four daughters who might lose their dad.
00:38:15.960Doctors told me that I had suffered a heart attack and I was later diagnosed with a concussion, a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.
00:38:25.700Directly in front of me, a man seized the opportunity of my vulnerability, grabbed the front of my gas mask and used it to beat my head against the door.
00:38:33.300He switched to pulling it off my head, the strap stretching against my skull and straining my neck.
00:38:37.300He never uttered any words I recognized, but opted instead for guttural screams.
00:38:43.180At this point, I knew I couldn't sustain much more damage and remain upright.
00:38:47.180At best, I would collapse and be a liability to my colleagues.
00:38:50.720At worst, be dragged out into the crowd and lynched.
00:38:53.040I did the only thing that I could do and screamed for help.
00:39:00.680What's going to happen to the guys who are charged with hurting those officers?
00:39:04.320I think they're going to do a lot of time and they deserve to.
00:39:08.280You know, I think you got probably three baskets of defendants, right?
00:39:15.300You have people who were essentially loitering around the Capitol, many of whom got into the building after the defenses had been breached and the police were not trying to stop them from coming through anymore.
00:39:28.380They're the kind of cases that, in a normal case, would get deferred prosecutions, which would mean you wouldn't actually indict them and prosecute them.
00:39:37.360Here, apparently, the Justice Department is taking the position that that's not available.
00:39:41.360So they're the kind of people you're going to see getting, you know, eight months or less.
00:39:46.220Some people will get no time at all, probably.
00:39:49.000Then there's the next category of people who were involved in breaching the defenses and breaking glass and vandalizing and doing those kind of things.
00:39:57.960And I think they're going to get, you know, four or five years in prison, maybe a little more, maybe a little bit less.
00:40:04.840And then there's the category, Megan, of people who did something to interfere with the police.
00:40:11.400And the reason I'm sounding a little bit weaselly on that is because what the indictments say is that they've done anything from impede the police to assault a police officer.
00:40:24.880And as we just heard, assaulting a police officer can be very serious.
00:40:30.060On the other hand, in my second trial, I think around, I don't want to put a year on it, but many years ago, my second trial was assault on a federal officer.
00:40:39.220And I had a defendant who clenched his fist and lunged but didn't do anything, and the police officer flinched.
00:40:47.000And that was enough to get him on assault, you know.
00:40:49.660So obviously there's gradations of that kind of behavior.
00:40:54.200But let's say out of 130 or 140 people who have been charged with crimes against the police, 50 or 60 of them are really serious.
00:41:03.420I think those people are going to do major time.
00:41:06.180I think they're going to do more than 10 years, and they ought to.
00:41:09.220And I mean, it does bear noting that as horrified as some of these committee members purport to be at what happened to guys like Officer Fanon, who we heard there talking about his heart attack and so on.
00:41:23.560Very different reaction, Andy, in the wake of the BLM riots, where 2,000 police officers were stabbed, hurt, had bricks thrown in their heads, at their heads, had bones broken.
00:41:34.06025 people died in and around the riots and connected with them.
00:41:51.580And, you know, this goes to one of the hysterical statements that you played from one of the political people before talking about, you know, this is so important because it's tearing our nation apart.
00:42:04.960What's tearing our nation apart is the idea, which is much more than an idea, it's a concrete reality, that you have two tiers of justice in this country.
00:42:15.420And that if you are of a certain political persuasion, you are treated officially by the Justice Department and by prosecutors across the country one way.
00:42:25.800And if you are of a different political persuasion, you're treated entirely differently to the point that you have the FBI scorching the earth using Facebook,
00:42:37.560using all kinds of technological means to identify every single moron who was, you know, loping through the Capitol that day, no matter how unserious the behavior was, so they could prosecute them for something.
00:42:51.140And then in New York, the district attorney just cut loose everybody who was involved in the rioting because they say, well, you know, they were wearing masks.
00:43:05.000But if you want to know what's tearing the country apart, that's what's tearing the country apart.
00:43:09.420When the government officially treats the society like we have two different castes, that's what tears the society apart.
00:43:17.060That is the perfect note to tee up our next guest, Julie Kelly, who's been taking a hard look at some of the specific cases and what the government's doing.
00:43:24.820It's it's all hands on deck against a couple of these guys who on your in your categories are probably going to end up in category one.
00:43:31.520You know, they loped onto the property after the breach had taken place.
00:43:37.080They may have had bad thoughts, but the government's treating them as though they were cop assaulters and so on.
00:43:43.040And so it raises an interesting debate.
00:43:45.160If you find yourself with a very bad person in custody, an immoral person, but in what he's actually done is not that serious under the law.
00:44:05.300Up next, Julie Kelly, who has been interviewing those charged in connection with the January 6th riot and why she says thought crimes are now being punished with jail time.
00:44:17.460I want to pick up where I just left off.
00:44:23.440We just we just said goodbye to Andy McCarthy.
00:44:25.320And his final point was that in looking at those who are being held right now in connection with the January 6th riot, there are there appear to be two tiers of justice.
00:44:34.000And those tiers depend on your political stripes, because we talked about how those who are in custody right now for January 6th are being held to a very different standard than those who rioted, maimed, murdered, hurt people.
00:44:50.620During the BLM riots that we saw during the BLM riots that we saw the previous year, two very different approaches to crimes that may or may not have been violent.
00:45:05.880And I think that that is what really enrages people is because they saw over last summer for weeks, if not months, of violent protests, attacks against hundreds, if not thousands of police officers across the country.
00:45:21.040Those people were not charged the same way as, say, several of the detainees in the D.C. jail who have been accused of attacking police officers who are denied bond.
00:45:31.580They can't even, their families can't even have an opportunity to place bond for them.
00:45:37.380The judges are outright denying and going along with the government for pretrial detention orders.
00:45:42.860So that's just one set of differences is how so many people, protesters, violent protesters, including those outside of the White House in June of 2020,
00:45:53.900how they were let off, charges dropped, certainly not held behind bars for months on end, awaiting a trial or a plea deal, whereas these defendants, many of them with no criminal record,
00:46:06.800have been held for months and could be held, Megan, up to a year before their trials even start early or mid, middle of next year.
00:46:14.280Hmm. It's funny because in New York, there's this big movement to get rid of bail because sort of these more progressive people think it's unfair to hold people for a year in jail
00:46:25.680because you don't yet know whether they're guilty of a crime and that we're sort of overusing the bail system and setting bail too high in too many cases.
00:46:33.140They don't they haven't said a word about what's happening to the January 6th rioters.
00:46:37.840And I realize that they may not be the most sympathetic group, but fair is fair. Right.
00:46:41.960What's good for the goose. So how many people have been arrested at this point?
00:46:46.140Do we know and how many people are still in custody?
00:46:49.120So, Megan, about 550 Americans have been arrested for their involvement in the Capitol protest.
00:46:56.340The overwhelming majority face misdemeanor charges.
00:47:00.060So the most frequent charges are trespassing in a restricted area, disorderly conduct, violent entry, parading and picketing in Congress, which always makes me laugh.
00:47:11.320So those are the overwhelming majority of charges.
00:47:15.740Roughly 100 defendants face charges of either assaulting or impeding law enforcement.
00:47:22.520The same amount carrying some sort of weapon.
00:47:26.120It's important to note that there were no one was arrested for carrying firearms or using firearms in the building that day,
00:47:33.960even though we were told it was an armed insurrection.
00:47:36.380A lot of people charged with pepper spray, flagpoles.
00:47:40.960Some people stole riot shields that have been left by police.
00:47:44.600So those are the sort of weapons charges that we saw.
00:47:48.060But again, over and over, you see this disparity in how January 6th protesters were hand are handled by our judicial system and how other rioters, activists.
00:47:59.960You could go back to the 2018 Brett Kavanaugh protests inside the Senate office building.
00:48:06.200Those protesters got far closer to lawmakers in the face of lawmakers screaming at them, threatening them than certainly anyone on January 6th.
00:48:14.820And so that is what's really, and listening to these court hearings and reading these documents, Megan, very upsetting because the judges are going along with this.
00:48:25.380The prosecutors are insisting, and I just heard this a few weeks ago, that January 6th was an act of domestic terrorism.
00:48:33.480And anyone who was involved, even someone who walked through an open door, committed no violent act, should be considered a domestic terrorist.
00:48:43.620It's not only dangerous individually for these people, but certainly for the country and what that means for future political protests.
00:48:51.260Right. And no one's been charged with domestic terrorism.
00:48:53.680So they say that, but they're not actually able to prove that in court, but they use it to hold these people behind bars for, as you say, up to a year prior to actually seeing the inside of a courtroom.
00:49:03.680Meanwhile, Antifa, according to Andy Ngo, who's been reporting on them, you know, from the inside, going to all of their protests, they're using the ends of umbrellas as weapons.
00:49:14.020They're throwing rocks at people, frozen water bottles openly caught on camera at cops.
00:49:20.980According to the law enforcement officers unions, 2,000 cops were injured in the BLM riots and related melees that we saw over the past year.
00:49:28.460So it's not to diminish what happened to those on January 6th, but the lack of outrage by the people claiming to be so empathetic toward the cops right now on behalf of the other 2,000 cops who were injured over the past year is stark.
00:49:43.800OK, so let's talk about what's happening, because I heard last week that the Justice Department's lead prosecutor announced she's not going to be able to try a lot of these cases until the earliest 2022.
00:49:56.920Two, because they haven't even set up the database that would allow them to share with defense counsel the evidence they're amassing.
00:50:06.460Right. So that I listened to that hearing on Friday.
00:50:10.220That was the prosecutor in the Tim Hale case.
00:50:12.860Tim Hale has not been charged with any violent offense.
00:50:15.260He's been in the D.C. jail since early February, arrested middle of January.
00:50:22.780The government does not have their evidence together.
00:50:25.780They don't even have a platform, Megan, to set up all this huge trove of digital evidence, which, as you know, includes 14,000 hours of surveillance video captured by the U.S. Capitol Police surveillance system that day that they are desperately trying to keep under wraps, not just from the public, but from the media and even from defense attorneys.
00:50:46.920They also have thousands of hours of body-worn camera footage.
00:50:55.500This has been basically sitting there.
00:50:58.080They still don't have a platform to put all of it on.
00:51:01.980The defense attorneys are desperate to get this information that they know could very possibly contain exculpatory evidence in favor of their client.
00:51:10.680In the meantime, the Justice Department is using little cherry-picked clips, even like we saw last week in the January 6th Select Committee, little tiny cherry-picked clips to prove the guilt of a certain client.
00:51:25.200What's dangerous is they're using those clips in these detention hearings to prove that this person is a danger and should stay behind bars.
00:51:32.100But what this prosecutor said even surprised the judge, Judge Trevor McFadden, when she said the government will not meet its full discovery obligations until early 2022 at the soonest.
00:51:46.340This means they will not have all of this evidence available, possibly until a year from now.
00:51:52.480Meanwhile, you have all these people sitting in jail, denied bond, waiting to see their evidence, and they won't be able to for several more months.
00:52:01.160Wow. And, you know, in a real trial, just a little clip without providing the full videotape would not be allowed into evidence.
00:52:09.180That wouldn't be considered fair. It wouldn't allow the defense attorney to do his job.
00:52:13.000So let's get through, let's go through a couple of these cases, because I have to tell you, as a lawyer, I find this stuff very interesting.
00:52:19.700I really, I definitely want to talk about Timothy Hale, because I think his case is maybe one of the most interesting.
00:52:24.180But let's start with Paul Hodgkins, who Andy mentioned as well, that Paul Hodgkins, he pleaded guilty in June.
00:52:32.040He admitted to breaching the Senate floor with a Trump flag and a backpack full of goggles, rope and a pair of latex gloves.
00:52:38.860He said he was remorseful for his stupid decision.
00:52:41.340And then can you just tell, because I did not know this until I read it in your article, they're making people like Hodgkins and others say certain magic words upon pleading guilty about Biden's presidency?
00:52:56.080Um, yes, well, they're not so much forcing them, maybe his attorney did say that.
00:53:02.960But I'll tell you, Megan, that I listened to that hearing, and it broke my heart.
00:53:08.460And I've covered a lot of this, as you know, from the very beginning, I felt so bad for this man.
00:53:14.360He took a bus by himself from Tampa to Washington, D.C., 900 miles.
00:53:30.080He had a Trump flag, which the judge and the prosecutor found very insulting, accusing Paul Hodgkins of displaying his loyalty to a man instead of a country.
00:53:41.780You know, there are a lot of people who think supporting your president is supporting the country.
00:53:45.380But when it's Donald Trump, that's different.
00:54:26.360And sentenced him to eight months in prison.
00:54:28.700And he will now be a convicted felon, a man with no criminal record, working class guy from Florida, for the crime of going in the Capitol and for bringing a Trump flag.
00:54:38.000And, you know, Andy pointed out, too, not in our discussion, but in a piece I read online that the Justice Department, in order to inflate the gravity of the misconduct, has been hyping the potential exposure of up to 20 years incarceration, up to 20 years, they've been saying.
00:54:55.620Then they didn't charge Hodgkins with anything like terrorism.
00:54:59.140In fact, they charged him to that single count that you mentioned, obstructing a congressional proceeding, which no one's getting 20 years for.
00:55:06.800And then behind closed doors, when they got in there, they asked for an 18 month sentence, which is not 20 years.
00:55:12.720And even the judge said, you're not getting 18 months.
00:56:07.840And when George W. Bush signed the law, he specifically said, this does not apply to political protests.
00:56:13.100We cannot use this to silence political protests.
00:56:17.860So there was an interesting filing this week.
00:56:21.060A defense attorney finally is pushing back on this obstruction of an official proceeding and saying, look, this wasn't really official business.
00:56:28.360It was more ceremonial, but even so, is this going to apply to all committee hearings?
00:56:36.620Is this going to apply to Judge Kavanaugh, Supreme Court proceeding, which we saw that was disrupted several times.
00:56:46.140And so they really are pushing people to plead guilty to this, making them convicted felons.
00:56:50.780But some people are starting to push back.
00:56:53.040It's going to be interesting to see how the government defends that charge in court.
00:56:56.740That's fascinating because, I mean, I spent a lot of years in the Fox News anchor chair watching Code Pink disrupt military related hearings, you know, 9-11, post-9-11 related hearings on Capitol Hill.
00:57:10.980Like, be careful what you wish for, because if you're going to interpret that statute this broadly, you could wind up sweeping a lot of regular old protesters in there, American protesters.
00:57:19.740This is as American as apple pie, regular protest in America, into this statute.
00:57:24.040So you do have to worry about long term ramifications.
00:58:33.920He committed no crime, didn't attack anyone, didn't vandalize the property, was inside, I think, for about 15 or 20 minutes, like a lot of people.
00:58:43.360Then Navy Intelligence, where he was working at a Navy yard, interrogated about four dozen of his coworkers trying to seek out his white supremacy views.
00:58:54.980And this is actually in the filing, seeking his pretrial detention, accusing him of being a white supremacist, explaining what his coworkers had said in a questionnaire, looking at memes on his phone, some of his videos.
00:59:10.860I, you know, he could be, he could not be.
00:59:14.800But look, if we're going to start interrogating people's coworkers and looking at people's phones after they are involved in a political protest, again, we're going down a very slippery slope.
00:59:25.840He has been held in jail now going on almost seven months.
00:59:30.780And this was the hearing on Friday where the government admitted they can't meet their discovery obligations until next year.
00:59:36.520But he's still being held behind bars in Washington, D.C., again, for no violent, committing no violent crime.
00:59:58.080But the point is, let's assume for purposes of this discussion, he is a racist.
01:00:03.560And just to give the audience a feeling, they say that they found things on his phone saying, this is in his voice, babies born with disabilities should be shot.
01:00:49.500And he admitted to picking up a flagpole that someone else had thrown like a javelin at a cop and referring to it as a murder weapon.
01:00:55.640But he's not accused of using the flagpole himself or of threatening to use a flagpole.
01:00:59.720And so you get in front of a court and this is a Trump appointee that you mentioned him a moment ago, Judge Trevor McFadden, who denied his release, who said you've got to stay in jail.
01:01:09.820And the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, after the Supreme Court, the most powerful and respected court in the nation, refused to overturn that order and said, you've got to stay in jail.
01:01:18.340And they said, look, he's got a well-documented history of racist and violent language, generally engaged in hateful conduct, if not violent conduct.
01:01:28.320And they said we don't typically penalize people for what they say or what they think.
01:01:33.620But the district court thinks he poses a danger to the community.
01:01:37.260And that weighs in favor of detention, given all of the, quote, violent language he used.
01:02:12.760And when you have judges, even appellate court judges, as you said, one of the most powerful, respected courts in the country,
01:02:19.000going along with prosecutors, keeping him behind bars, and criminalizing his thoughts or his viewpoints, that is very thin ice.
01:02:29.480But that is, and it's not the first time I've seen it.
01:02:31.860I mean, I've seen defendants being mocked for being homeschooled.
01:02:37.300In the case of Bruno Kua, they did not want to release him, an 18-year-old high school senior, to his parents because his parents homeschooled him.
01:02:44.620And as the prosecutor said, Bruno ingested his parents' political beliefs.
01:05:05.300But the idea is that the mere fact she was there supporting Donald Trump makes her a racist, makes her an anti-Semite, makes her somehow ignorant.
01:05:16.460So, again, she wrote this whole letter to the court saying she basically apologizing for her white privilege and saying that she now understands, you know,
01:05:27.000things that other Americans have gone through that she doesn't have to because she's white.
01:05:31.080She called out her own son-in-law for being a Holocaust denier.
01:05:35.960So this is the sort of thing that some of these defense attorneys are doing.
01:05:41.120Heather Shaner has a lot more clients.
01:05:43.400She just bragged in an article last week that one of her clients switched her party affiliation from Republican to Democrat.
01:05:50.340She now is representing a family of five in Texas who are arrested for misdemeanors, too.
01:05:55.100So this is all part of of how this is a reeducation working against.
01:07:06.360In March, both of these men were arrested and charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon, which was a chemical spray.
01:07:14.860It ended up being pepper spray against Officer Sicknick.
01:07:17.560So they basically have been arrested, kept in jail.
01:07:21.800They're both in the D.C. jail since March to keep alive the storyline that somehow Brian Sicknick, who died of natural causes at the age of 42, very tragically, somehow he was killed by Trump supporters that day.
01:07:36.480So both have been charged, and Julian Cater actually is the one who is accused of using, it was a keychain pepper spray against Sicknick.
01:07:46.820Now, it's important to also note that police were attacking protesters that day, too.
01:07:53.120And we have this video, and I'm sure you've seen this video, Megan, several videos of police attacking the crowd with explosive devices.
01:08:00.580One judge called it a super soaker filled with tear gas.
01:08:05.240These were people far outside the building, not inside.
01:08:10.460George Tanios is not accused of spraying Sicknick with anything, but the two men are charged with conspiracy to assault an officer because they brought chemical spray to Washington, D.C.
01:08:22.760That day, and George Tanios had the backpack, Julian Cater took, apparently took the spray out and allegedly sprayed Brian Sicknick and a few others.
01:09:31.820It's more compelling for the government than the others, because if they did spray Brian Sicknick with pepper spray and he had a stroke a day later, whether that's, you know, I realize the medical examiner is not tying it exactly to that moment.
01:09:45.520I think the average person can say, yeah, you've got blood on your hands, you know, you if that affected him in some way negatively and ultimately had a stroke.
01:09:52.620Now we're in business and I feel less empathy for those guys than for somebody, you know, like the last like Anna Morgan, who walked into the Capitol for five minutes and then walked out.
01:10:03.320True. But look, we also need to see all the video and there's a reason why they are keeping the surveillance video under wraps, under protective orders, 14,000 hours, not including body cam footage from D.C. Metro Police.
01:10:17.900U.S. Capitol Police do not wear body cameras.
01:10:46.200And you can't just say, well, you can never do anything.
01:10:48.240Well, you're entitled to defend yourself, too, regardless of who is attacking you.
01:10:54.100Well, but look, we have to see what the police were doing that day, OK, because we already saw evidence of what they were doing outside that Capitol about 1 or 115.
01:11:05.460There are also rules for police officers.
01:11:07.580They can't just go ahead and attack people who are doing nothing wrong for American citizens on public property, protesting lawfully and not committing any crime.
01:11:19.700So everyone has rules that they're supposed to abide by, not just protesters, police, too.
01:11:37.940I want to tell you something that probably your audience does not know.
01:11:41.540The press coalition and the defense, the three men who are charged with attacking Officer Fanone, have asked for his full body camera footage.
01:11:51.120A judge has denied that, saying that they are not entitled to see the full body camera footage of Officer Fanone.
01:12:00.360If we are told these people are domestic terrorists, that this was an act of domestic terrorism similar to 9-11, we need to see all the footage from everyone, especially publicly paid employees and publicly paid surveillance system of what happened on January 6th.
01:12:17.300There's no reason not to make that available.
01:12:20.240In the same way we want to see the whole body camera footage in a case like Floyd or any of these officer-involved shootings, we want to see it here.
01:12:29.620And it's for the benefit of the officer and for those being accused.
01:12:33.220What's the stated reason for us not being able to see his body cam footage?
01:12:38.480They are calling this all protected material.
01:12:41.480In the case of the 14,000 hours, they're calling it highly sensitive government material.
01:12:47.160In the case of Officer Fanone's body-worn camera, here's what they're doing in court, Megan.
01:12:52.400They're taking still shots from the body camera footage, still shots, and putting it in these motions for pretrial detention.
01:13:02.540So what the government and what the judges are agreeing with is that because the video was not itself, wasn't used in these court proceedings, that the press is not entitled to see it.
01:13:15.760That's how they're getting around this.
01:13:17.460In the meantime, we can see 20 seconds of what happened to Officer Fanone.
01:13:30.620He put on the uniform for the first time in 10 years, including body camera.
01:13:35.600We should see the entire body of video footage, all the digital evidence that the government has on this.
01:13:43.820And it should raise many red flags that the government and federal judges continue to withhold this, not just from the public, from the press, and even from defense attorneys.
01:13:55.780So let's talk about Fanone because you sent out a tweet about him.
01:13:59.120This is the guy we played a butted soundbite with Andy, and he is the man who said he suffered a heart attack in the midst of this whole thing, among other injuries.
01:14:07.680And you tweeted out, crisis actor Fanone just beat on the table and said it's disgraceful that any elected official denies his narrative of what happened on January 6th.
01:14:19.360Calls it an insurrection, blasting GOP lawmakers.
01:14:23.340Now says this isn't about politics, LOL.
01:14:25.700Well, he has many tattoos and and there was blowback, considerable blowback on you for calling this guy a crisis actor and questioning his testimonial.
01:14:39.100I called him that because I thought the overheated, emotional, highly partisan, and dangerous rhetoric coming out of these officers already helping to taint a very partisan jury pool in Washington, D.C.
01:14:57.040I thought it totally crossed the line.
01:14:59.520None of them gave just an unemotional, factual account of what they saw or what they experienced on January 6th.
01:15:07.780Michael Fanone has been in the media since January 14th when he was profiled in the Washington Post.
01:16:29.400I think that this is one of the problems in not having any Republicans.
01:16:33.340I mean, forgive me, but sort of real Republicans there to press the witnesses a bit, with all due respect to the police officers in particular, whose service I admire.
01:16:44.100It would have been nice to have somebody there to say, Officer Fanon, with all due respect to the injuries you've suffered, may I ask you why have you appeared on CNN, you know, four dozen times between then and now, with Don Lemon, with Chris Cuomo, right?
01:17:00.080That you've gone to sort of left-leaning media to attack Republicans writ large, to attack Republican lawmakers.
01:17:05.740And the other police officer, whose name escapes me right now, but he's been very partisan in his tweets, very anti-Trump, anti-Trump supporters.
01:17:24.760But I do think this is why you normally have both sides represented, so that even if gently, like we saw during Kavanaugh, there's somebody there to press the witness on possible other motives, political motives, because this case is totally charged with politics on both sides.
01:17:41.280And we're not seeing that, because Adam Kinzinger isn't going to do it, and neither is Liz Cheney.
01:17:46.480So it really is sort of a kangaroo court that's designed to reach a political indictment against Trump and his supporters, and they'll get that.
01:17:56.860And, you know, he's awful, and his supporters are awful, and the people who protested that day are awful, without much nuance on what individuals may or may not have done.
01:18:07.220Well, and I do think, you know, Officer Dunn said, held a moment of silence for Brian Sicknick for being killed in the line of duty.
01:18:16.480You had Officer Hodges repeatedly refer to American citizens as terrorists.
01:18:22.520You had Officer Gunnell say that Republican lawmakers who had been at the Justice Department that day demanding answers about this unequal treatment between January 6th protesters and protesters last year.
01:18:35.580You had this man say they don't belong in elective office.
01:18:39.500Who are these people to make such outlandish, partisan statements?
01:18:45.080These are not legit people acting as law enforcement officers.
01:18:50.940They are partisan props, and that is exactly why Nancy Pelosi did not want Jim Jordan and Jim Banks on that committee.
01:18:57.780Andy McCarthy wrote this week that, you know, he didn't understand why she would leave them off, because he thought that the testimony from these officers was unimpeachable.
01:19:08.300But if it was, then there's a reason why Pelosi wanted Jim Jordan and Jim Banks not to be on that committee, because they would have asked some of the tough questions.
01:19:17.860That's right. I do think you have to be sensitive with a witness like that, right?
01:19:52.060You don't make big statements about the Republican Party, because that all gives people a reason to dismiss your testimonial and see you through a partisan lens.
01:20:04.200You're not entitled to sort of an immunity blanket against tough questions because you're a police officer, right?
01:20:12.660So you can't overcorrect too much the other way.
01:20:15.320So what's your takeaway on the whole thing, Julie, at this point?
01:20:18.920What do you want people sitting at home to remember in the months ahead as we see all these people sit in jail awaiting trial dates that have yet to be set?
01:20:27.180And they basically have already been sentenced to a year in prison at this point without having had a trial.
01:20:33.880I think people, especially people on the right, need to be very aware that January 6th is being used as a pretext to achieve all sorts of long sought after goals by the Democrats,
01:20:46.600which is basically weaponizing powerful government agencies against people on the right.
01:20:52.620You know, I wrote that last week was a five-year anniversary of the official launch of Crossfire Hurricane.
01:20:59.620This is yet another iteration of Crossfire Hurricane because they got away with this Justice Department under Obama and then under Donald Trump through Robert Mueller's probe and then impeachment.
01:21:11.580Because the Democrats were allowed to use all of the levers of power to go after Donald Trump, his family, his associates, now they're going after Trump supporters.
01:21:23.660And this is going to include not just the Justice Department.
01:21:26.740We already see it coming out of Department of Homeland Security.
01:21:30.220It's coming out of the intelligence community, overreaching their authority to target foreign terrorists, to making, to now targeting Americans.
01:21:39.720They're going to use all of their surveillance tools and now law enforcement tools to go after, to quash political dissent, to silence political speech and activity.
01:21:51.320And this is really unchartered territory.
01:21:55.220So anyone who thinks that it's just about these 550 people, these insurrectionists and what happened for four hours on the Capitol on January 6th,
01:22:04.220anyone who thinks that this is legitimately what it's about really needs to look harder behind the scenes at what the Biden administration is already doing and has plans to do to Americans on the right.
01:22:20.280It kind of ties into what we're seeing with COVID and the crackdown on speech that pushes back against the official narratives on COVID, the increasing push to monitor our phone message, our text messages, our emails, never mind our online posts,
01:22:36.100because Big Brother will decide what's appropriate, what's not, what's factual, what's not.
01:22:41.720We're in we're in dicey territory right now.
01:22:44.480And I mean, I think it's why people libertarians like Charles Cook over at National Review is writing a lot about this.
01:22:51.620Like people need to pay attention because even if you like the cause, even if you're on the left and you don't like the COVID pushback, you know, the quarantine pushback and the lockdown pushback, the mandate pushback.
01:23:01.040And you hate what happened on January 6th and you hate all the Trump supporters.
01:23:04.540You should care because you care about America.
01:23:07.360You cared about small L liberal values that the country stands for.
01:23:13.040Julie, thank you for your reporting on this.
01:24:23.440And a review on what you think about the January 6th riots and the media's coverage of them on Apple Reviews or wherever you get your podcasts.