In this episode of The Stone Zone, host Alex Blumberg is joined by journalist Jason Goodman, founder of Crowdsourcing the Truth, to discuss what we know about New York AG Letitia James and what we don't know about Adam Schiff.
00:03:08.940Adam Schiff, obviously everybody knows that he's a representative from California.
00:03:13.080So he purchased a home in Maryland that I guess would be his second home.
00:03:21.400But a lot of people, particularly those who have had mortgages, a lot of people know that you get a much favorable rate on your mortgage if the loan is on your primary residence.
00:03:31.240And this is based on, I guess, actuaries have figured out that when you live in the house, you take care of it.
00:03:36.520And it's just much more statistically likely for a loan to be repaid on somebody's primary residence than a secondary residence that they might abandon or whatever.
00:03:45.980So the thing that is so important about what Adam Schiff has done, Roger, is that we almost don't even need any more investigation or any trial because he's incriminated himself.
00:03:56.580He's basically taken out a loan for this property in Maryland, and he has signed the loan sworn under penalty that he will occupy the home and that it will be his primary residence within 60 days of executing this agreement,
00:04:12.700which is, you know, a 20-something-year-old agreement that he was lying about for 17 years, repeatedly making this false statement.
00:04:22.260Now, remember, you were talking about Letitia James.
00:04:25.180She's all up in arms that somebody who works for Donald Trump, not even Donald Trump, Michael Cohen, made payments and got involved in how these things were recorded as legal payments or whatever.
00:04:36.980There's a strong argument to be made that they were legitimate legal payments.
00:04:40.000He was paying a settlement in a lawsuit.
00:05:20.900There's no third-party attorney signing in the fields where normally, you know, if you or I were to close on a home, we'd probably hire a real estate attorney.
00:05:29.880I can only surmise that these lawfare criminals didn't want to do that because, obviously, it's much easier for two people to keep a secret if one of them are dead or if the other person never knew about it.
00:05:43.200So I think they don't want to involve potentially legitimate attorneys in these transactions because it could be a stop to the flow of funds.
00:05:51.940But the thing that Adam Schiff did that I just don't see how he gets out of, he put himself into a legal double bind because if he was being honest in his sworn statements that he signed on the Maryland mortgage, that that was his primary residence, well, then he's committed fraud in representing that he could run to be a congressional representative from California.
00:06:13.160And if he was being honest in his statements about running for Congress in California, then he's committed mortgage fraud.
00:06:47.420Well, it's unclear if he bought it or if it was like a Christmas gift, excuse me, a Hanukkah gift, because Weissman, he actually lives in sort of near the NYU area, the northern tip of the West Village.
00:07:03.860And he's a professor, everyone knows, at NYU Law.
00:07:06.780That's where I first confronted him about his relationship with Felix Sater, which is going to come up later in this investigation.
00:07:14.920Felix Sater, many people know, is a very longstanding FBI confidential human informant signed an agreement with Weissman in 1998.
00:07:26.140And Sater has testified under oath that he's done all kinds of things.
00:07:30.320This guy's basically the Russian James Bond.
00:08:02.380But this guy wasn't just someone who happened to be doing business at Bear Stearns and didn't know anything about Epstein.
00:08:08.260Tobaroff was involved in the Tower financial scandal, which was, people might recall, Stephen Hoffenberg, who was involved with the New York Post.
00:08:18.680Horst Hoffenberg later was convicted and admitted to being involved in a $460 million Ponzi scheme.
00:08:28.920And Epstein had lied about the source of the funds for an investment that Tobaroff, Epstein, and a guy named Niederlander made in a company in 1988 called Riddell Sports.
00:08:39.880So $1.6 million of that investment came from stolen funds.
00:08:46.420And so, you know, this is, this is, Tobaroff is involved in this deal and he just doesn't care.
00:08:51.480So, you know, it's a little bit inexplicable why Tobaroff would do that.
00:08:55.800Then he had already been involved with this thing called Penwalt Corp, some sort of takeover bid.
00:09:02.640And again, I mean, these are details that people are going to know a lot more about than I did.
00:09:06.500I just was researching this for background into this Tobaroff.
00:09:09.640And these are all things that Charles Ortel has told me about over the years.
00:09:13.460Charles knows great details about each of these scandals.
00:09:17.440But the point is, this is not just some random guy.
00:09:20.760This is a criminal associate, excuse me, an alleged criminal associate.
00:09:25.840I should also say, everything that I'm saying is my opinion.
00:09:28.780And Roger Stone and ABC Radio don't necessarily endorse this.
00:10:12.000Now, this is the guy who was the head of the DOJ's Enron Task Force.
00:10:16.980He was the lead prosecutor on Mueller's impeachment of Trump.
00:10:21.680Let's just focus on Weissman for a second, because this is not, I mean, if I told you I bought an apartment and then I found out the guy was associated with Jeffrey Epstein, I'm a dummy who was running 3D cameras for Spider-Man for many years.
00:10:32.920I don't know who all the high-end financial criminals in New York City are, but Andrew Weissman was in charge of the Organized Crime Division of the Eastern District of New York U.S. Attorney's Office for many years.
00:10:47.140In fact, deranged Jack Smith came up under Weissman in the Eastern District of New York U.S. Attorney's Office.
00:11:42.200But the other thing is there's no record of where the other $6.5 million came from.
00:11:50.700Weissman gets this sort of fugazi $1 million mortgage from First Republic Bank five days before it goes into FDIC receivership.
00:12:01.320So it's impossible to presume that the bank didn't know that that was imminent or that the DOJ and, you know, the Treasury Department people knew that that was happening.
00:12:11.980And it just seems weird to me that a bank in such financial distress would be giving out a million dollar loan to anybody, let alone one with such ridiculous terms.
00:12:22.460You know, average mortgage rate in 2023 at that time in April was like six and a half to seven and a half percent.
00:12:34.920It's an adjustable rate mortgage that starts at 4.95 percent, but it can go up as high as I think 10 percent or possibly even higher.
00:12:43.880The thing that's crazy is five days later, when First Republic goes into FDIC receivership and $15.6 billion of, you know, insurance magic happens.
00:13:03.000You didn't pay for it, but you probably did pay $9 for eggs because the dollar is worth about half as much as it should because they keep printing more of them.
00:13:21.180He seems to have foreknowledge that the bank was going to collapse.
00:13:25.020And so when the bank collapses and the FDIC takes it over, receivership, whatever they do, it gets taken over by J.P. Morgan.
00:13:33.640And Weissman, because of this wonderful arrangement, he locks in his 4.95 percent rate for 10 years.
00:13:44.380So he's getting an amazing deal on the mortgage.
00:13:46.780Roger, it's interesting because I started this investigation maybe about five days ago, and some of this stuff has been kicking around, and a lot of people have been sending me ideas, and something occurred to me.
00:13:57.300You know, it does kind of make you upset to hear about these connected guys getting good deals on mortgages, and we're talking about $7.5 million this and this and that.
00:14:08.260But specifically with, let's say, Jamie Raskin and Adam Schiff.
00:14:12.480Let's just look at that specifically for a moment.
00:14:15.020Jason, we're going to have to come back and do that on the other side.
00:14:17.860If you're just tuning in, you are listening to The Stone Zone.
00:14:21.020I'm interviewing Jason Goodman, the founder of CrowdSource the Truth.
00:14:25.040And we'll be right back with The Stone Cold Truth.
00:14:28.180Whatever you do, don't touch that dial, because here we tell you The Stone Cold Truth.
00:14:33.620We criticize Republicans and Democrats, and what you hear about Congressman Jamie Raskin on the other side may shock you.
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00:15:20.860We're talking to investigative journalist Jason Goodman about the sweetheart deal that was gotten by former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissman.
00:15:30.260He's the guy who covered up mob murders in Brooklyn, the guy who who brought down both Enron and Arthur Anderson, only to have his convictions in those cases unanimously overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.
00:15:43.820The Andrew Weissman who destroyed the cell phone memories of all of the Mueller prosecutors when they were under subpoena from Special Prosecutor John Durham.
00:15:55.280That Andrew Weissman, you may have seen him at MSNBC.
00:15:58.660By the way, he is the guy who ordered the FBI to store my home at six o'clock in the morning when they simply could have contacted my attorney and told me to turn myself in.
00:16:09.340And we know that because I was arrested at 6.06 and at 6.11, a producer at CNN texted a copy of my sealed indictment to my attorney.
00:16:20.020And while it had no court stampings or other court markings on it, if you looked at the metadata tags, it did have the initials of the man who wrote it.
00:16:27.940And therefore, the man who leaked it in violation of federal law, that would be Andrew Weissman.
00:16:33.700But I want to wrap up with Weissman and get into Congressman Jerry, Jamie Raskin.
00:16:56.980Obviously, if somebody could gift you a seven point five million dollar apartment in New York City, you're looking at maybe twenty five thousand dollars a month in income or more.
00:17:04.960But when we look specifically at the case of Raskin and the similarities to what Adam Schiff was doing, it really raises questions, Roger, because there we have those guys did.
00:17:17.360Well, Raskin did satisfy some of a mortgage.
00:17:20.540His goes back to a house that he had in the 90s, which is very interesting.
00:17:25.100And he's doing a lot of refinancing of it.
00:17:28.040At one point, he even gets into a zero dollar deed where he's transferring the property from himself and his wife to himself and his wife.
00:17:50.680I'm just in a mode where I'm going through and I'm gathering the evidence.
00:17:54.860And the thing that strikes me as weird, just as an initial matter, because I started to break this down, you know, using artificial intelligence, I can do a lot of analysis of this data that I would never be able to do myself.
00:18:06.220And it turns out that in the case of Adam Schiff and Jamie Raskin, I found sort of the similarities in what they were doing.
00:18:13.260And it turns out that between the two of them, they were saving between one hundred and fifty and two hundred dollars a month on their mortgages.
00:18:20.860And it just strikes me as odd that someone is sophisticated.
00:18:41.840This has got to be an initiation right into a criminal network that's involved in crimes so vast that the theft of multiple millions of dollars is they just don't even have the bandwidth to think about.
00:18:56.500So that's what I'm interested in learning is why did these guys do this?
00:19:03.280I think the answer we have about a minute and a half to go here, but I think the answer is they did it because they can.
00:19:09.900They did it because we have, until Donald Trump's re-election, a two-tiered justice system in which Donald Trump has put through horrific trials on trumped-up, ridiculous charges in New York.
00:19:22.980But criminals like Adam Schiff, like Letitia James, like Jamie Raskin get sweetheart deals that the average person could never get.
00:19:32.900They violate multiple laws, but they are never held to account.