00:03:31.320For four years, you've been abstaining from going on CNN.
00:03:35.640And in the last four years, CNN's ratings have gone to hell in a handbasket so bad that they drew just 83,000 viewers ages 25 to 54 during the week of May the 13th to the 19th.
00:03:49.780That is the lowest rating they've had since 1991, according to the Nielsen ratings.
00:03:56.280And then all of a sudden, you showed up on CNN yesterday for an interview.
00:04:01.000Are you trying to save the network, sir?
00:04:44.040I was going to be on for two segments.
00:04:45.600My team said the first segment, they'll play nice.
00:04:47.540They'll actually let you talk about what you're here to talk about, and you'll have a reasonable conversation.
00:04:51.080And the second segment, she'll get all nasty, and she'll perform for all of their left-wing stakeholders.
00:04:57.040And that's exactly what she did, and she was snarky and interrupted me and didn't want me to answer.
00:05:01.480And, you know, played the same gotcha game that we're seeing the media do.
00:05:05.460Their favorite thing right now to do to Republicans is say, will you swear on a stack of Bibles?
00:05:12.380Actually, they don't say a stack of Bibles because lefties don't believe in Bibles.
00:05:15.760But if they did, they would say, will you swear on a stack of Bibles that no matter what, you will fully accept the election results in 2024?
00:05:24.520And, you know, I laugh and say, well, no, who on earth would do that?
00:05:28.500Of course, I will accept them if they're legitimate.
00:05:30.480But we have in every state, we have laws in place to challenge voter fraud when there are irregularities.
00:05:35.960We have elections that are challenged all the time.
00:05:38.040The courts overturned election results when there's fraud.
00:05:40.220Like, what imbecile would say, even if something's illegitimate, I'll accept it anyway?
00:05:45.540I'll accept it if it's fair, if it follows the law, absolutely.
00:05:51.440But I'm going to fight to uphold the law.
00:06:13.660All right, let's get to the bigger issue here.
00:06:15.620And that comes up with the Biden nominee.
00:06:18.820You had one heck of a time with this Biden radical nominee, Sarah Netborn.
00:06:25.140I want you to set the stage for this nominee that was coming before you guys in the Senate.
00:06:30.520It's a nominee for the judge for the Southern District of New York.
00:06:33.420Obviously, there's going to be someone that's pretty liberal.
00:06:35.400But this went off the charts radical and is now putting women's lives at risk in prison because of decisions that this judge has made in the past.
00:06:47.160So we had a hearing this week with a total of five Biden district court nominees, and all five of them were quite left wing.
00:06:55.720And in fact, what Dick Durbin, who's the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, did is he stacked them all together because this one in particular was so egregious that I think Durbin knew that she would draw all the fire.
00:07:07.460And the other four would basically skate by because you only have a limited number of time to cross-examine.
00:07:12.480And so this one's record was so bad that the others got very little scrutiny.
00:07:17.020But this particular judicial nominee is a woman named Sarah Netborn, and she is a magistrate judge in New York that Biden has nominated to be a federal district judge in New York.
00:07:30.920And that means she's the pick of Chuck Schumer.
00:07:33.680And I got to say, even for Biden nominees and Biden nominees have been hard left.
00:07:38.420They've been much more radical than than Obama nominees ever were.
00:07:43.040Even for Biden nominees, this nominee was wildly outside the mainstream.
00:07:48.940And well, look, rather that rather than relive it, we should just just just play the cross-examination.
00:07:54.460Yeah, it's gone viral on social media.
00:07:57.040More than 38 million have watched this on X so far.
00:09:01.480And also criminal deviant conduct, which the record doesn't disclose what that was exactly.
00:09:07.560Then, after serving in prison, Mr. McClain was released for parole, but then violated the terms of parole by having internet and was sent back to prison.
00:09:17.820One year after being released again, he was convicted of having child pornography.
00:09:37.600And this individual, six foot two, biologically a man.
00:09:42.680And a minute ago, you said that when this man decided that he was a she, you said this individual was, quote, I wrote it down, sober and entirely a female.
00:10:12.740So you took a six foot two serial rapist, serial child rapist with male genitalia, and he said, you know, I'd like to be in a women's prison.
00:10:27.320And your answer was, that sounds great to me.
00:11:36.420I know you went to Brown, but it sounds like it's in a college faculty lounge with no bearing on reality.
00:11:43.420The Bureau of Prison argued what I'm saying right now, that if you put this person in a female prison, there will be a risk of sexual assault to the women.
00:12:06.540But there are no signs that Petitioner is at risk of reoffending.
00:12:10.440The record is devoid of evidence of incidents of violence or assault during Petitioner's incarceration when she was the perpetrator, only the victim.
00:12:17.500A theoretical risk of sexual assault by the prisoner without more cannot support the BOP's position.
00:13:09.320I have to say, if I were the father of one of those women, and you decided that my daughter's cellmate was going to be a six-foot-two man who over and over and over again committed violent sexual assault,
00:13:24.740I would say the entire justice system is absurd, and it is clear on your record your political ideology matters a heck of a lot more than the rights of those women that you endangered.
00:13:37.860I think you're a radical, and I think you have no business being a judge.
00:13:40.880Senator, I want to take a moment and explain to people the strategy when there is a judge that is nominated in this scenario.
00:13:53.000One of the first questions that the team that is supposed to be helping here, right, on the Biden side would say is,
00:13:59.460okay, hey, let's look at a record, are there any liabilities out there, are there any cases that you can't explain,
00:14:06.440are there going to be things that are going to embarrass us or hold us up,
00:14:09.740is that now, like, completely gone from the nomination process if you're on the left, on the Democrat side,
00:14:15.940where, hey, it doesn't matter how radical you are, if we like you and we think you're one of us,
00:14:20.420we'll just nominate you no matter what you've done in your past?
00:14:23.700So, Ben, I'll say it's worse than that.
00:14:25.400The more radical you are, the more of a plus it is.
00:14:27.660They're deliberately looking for people who do things like this.
00:14:31.480The fact that this woman is a left-wing radical who sees this transgender six-foot-two man
00:14:38.060who claims he's a woman and wants to be in a women's prison and says,
00:14:41.360great, puts ideology above the law, puts ideology above the rights of women.
00:14:47.480By the way, to today's radical leftists, there's a hierarchy of whose rights matters.
00:14:53.600And to the left, transgender people rights matter more than women's rights.
00:14:58.920And so the women's rights just don't matter at all.
00:15:01.440And, you know, it's very easy for a privileged leftist to say this because, you know what,
00:15:05.840this judge, she didn't have a cellmate who was a serial rapist.
00:15:09.380She was just subjecting other people to that.
00:15:11.920And so it made her ideology feel very good.
00:15:15.540And qualified her is what you're saying.
00:19:36.880The Democrats are just like the Politburo.
00:19:39.600And on this judge that said that you should not restrict where sexual predators live, I said, I don't care how blue a state you live in, whether New York or Connecticut or New Jersey or Hawaii or Vermont, whatever state you're in.
00:19:55.180I promise you, gather 50 or 100 of your constituents, get them together and ask them, hey, do you think pedophiles should live next to a kindergarten?
00:20:18.700And it's sad that these are the people getting these jobs and then they could sit there for years on end affecting people's lives in a major way.
00:20:25.220And we're going to talk about the Trump trial in a minute.
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00:22:29.040Senator, I want to move into the Trump trial now because I think it's a perfect example of the radicals that get on these courts and what can happen.
00:22:38.920We know that the federal government seven, eight years ago said no to even taking this case on.
00:22:46.520They chose not to move forward with it because they didn't think there was anything there.
00:22:50.520And then you've got an activist judge or activist DA in Alvin Bragg who says, hey, hey, vote for me and I'll go after Trump.
00:22:57.020And then he finds the perfect judge, the perfect place in Manhattan where 90% of the people vote against Donald Trump last time.
00:23:05.140You go to trial and all of a sudden we find a crime that's been committed now.
00:23:09.480But it wasn't Donald Trump that committed that crime.
00:23:11.980It's the key witness for the government who had to admit in court that he took money, stole money from the Trump organization.
00:23:20.840How is this trial not at that point just immediately canceled saying, hey, we're going to have a mistrial.
00:23:25.260What's over? Well, listen, this has been a partisan circus from day one.
00:23:29.620As you noted, the district attorney is a hard left wing Democrat partisan.
00:23:34.060He was elected with with money from George Soros.
00:23:37.820He came in with an agenda, an agenda to get Donald Trump.
00:23:41.740And it didn't matter what the charge was.
00:23:43.940He was going to try to take Trump down so that they got particularly creative in this this case to to to create a prosecution where there was no crime.
00:23:53.320Now, we all know about the the alleged affair with Stormy Daniels and the hush money.
00:23:59.040And and that is salacious, but it's not, in fact, criminal.
00:24:38.840They don't have the jurisdiction to prosecute.
00:24:41.500So they then have a different New York statute that makes it a crime to keep fake fraudulent books.
00:24:48.400And the problem is that that crime is ordinarily a misdemeanor.
00:24:53.260But in this case, they elevate it to being a felony.
00:24:55.640How by saying, well, the fraudulent books are in furtherance of a crime, in this case, the federal crime that the federal government declined to bring.
00:25:04.720And so it is literally a non-crime on top of a non-crime because the payment to the lawyers that allegedly went out to Stormy Daniels were labeled as legal expenses.
00:25:18.620And that's what they're claiming is the crime of covering up the non-crime of the campaign finance offense.
00:25:25.020Now, their star witness is Michael Cohen.
00:25:27.860This is a lawyer who has lied over and over and over again.
00:25:35.440He's someone who has a long history of lying.
00:25:38.380But even with that long history of lying, I really didn't think he would sit on the stand and admit himself to being a felon, to having stolen from Trump.
00:25:51.160And I'll tell you what, listen to what CNN's legal expert, Ellie Honig, said on this.
00:25:59.060I think the revelation, though, this morning about the theft of $30,000, which was doubled because they covered his taxes, so $60,000, it came out in a glancing, unclear way on direct.
00:26:11.440It came out like a bomb earlier today.
00:26:14.220I don't know how much they can do to fix that.
00:26:16.620At a certain point, it is the fact Michael Cohen did steal this money.
00:26:20.900And what makes that really so important, Wolf, is it's not as if Michael Cohen was just stealing on the side.
00:26:38.380It turns out Michael Cohen was stealing from him within that $420,000.
00:26:42.160Does Michael Cohen's acknowledgment, admission that he stole tens of thousands of dollars from the Trump organization, potentially open him up to further criminal prosecution?
00:28:12.560And I have to say, I'm still kind of reeling from the revelation that Michael Cohen stole money from the Trump organization.
00:28:20.920And that wasn't, at least to my knowledge, that the prosecution didn't get that out earlier because it's not as though the prosecution is going to be helped by further evidence that Michael Cohen is a shady character.
00:28:35.460I mean, let's, I'll get to the newest stuff in a second, but like, I mean, what's just, what's your reaction to that news?
00:28:42.520Because that was just kind of stunning.
00:28:44.060I'm shocked that we are hearing it for the first time on day three of cross-examination of Michael Cohen, that the prosecution did not take the sting out, did not front it, because it goes to the heart of the actual case.
00:28:54.220It's not just about establishing him as a liar.
00:29:00.480But going to the heart of what you were telling your employer about what money you were owed and the extent of it, we're talking about $420,000.
00:29:09.460We've already seen the payment structure here.
00:29:25.500This was mentioned today, that he only gave Redfinch $20,000 and handed them in a brown paper bag, by the way, just thinking about how odd that is.
00:29:36.440Redfinch is this political organization that apparently, according to Michael Cohen, helped them goose these bogus internet polls about which candidate is in the lead, etc., etc.
00:29:47.700And also, according to Lanny Davis, provided adoring fans for Trump's announcement of his candidacy in June 2015.
00:30:09.420Remember, all that we have so far to link Donald Trump to these payments, in part, is the statement that, quote, unquote, he approved it.
00:30:17.540We also know that we have information about where the checks were, how it was signed.
00:30:23.000But remember, Makani, that was one of the comptrollers of the Trump organization, taking notes from Allen Weisselberg about the money payment.
00:30:30.500So this is part of what we're talking about.
00:30:32.740Why this is so important here is because the heart of the matter is that Donald Trump was complicit, caused to have this happen, and knew about the money that was going.
00:30:43.880If they can establish Michael Cohen as somebody who is not to be trusted about the amount of money as well, then they might be able to suggest that Donald Trump had no idea what he was truly paying.
00:30:53.320By the way, I think it's pretty clear Donald Trump had no idea what he was paying.
00:30:56.740Otherwise, why would you be giving this money to a guy that is all of a sudden a bunch of the money is disappearing?
00:31:02.000Like, it completely blows the case out of the water.
00:31:05.340The prosecution's argument is Michael Cohen is a liar, but he's a thief, too.
00:31:42.580Well, you know, the courtroom is where I began as a writer and a reporter a long time ago.
00:31:49.740So this is a homecoming for me in terms of a workplace.
00:31:54.100The shocking thing at the end of that cross-examination, and I just can't tell you how, just how stunning it was, because it's the thing that I was waiting for.
00:32:03.100I saw everything Todd Blanche, I've seen every minute of cross-examination, I've seen every single question he's asked, and he sat down and ended his cross-examination without asking a single question about the $130,000 that appears on the Allen Weisselberg notes about how they were structuring the payment to Michael Cohen.
00:32:29.380He asked about the $50,000 that's irrelevant to the $130,000, and that's where he very effectively got Michael Cohen to say, to agree, that yes, he stole $30,000.
00:32:42.980Later, when Cohen was asked about that on redirect by the prosecution, it didn't really sound like stealing $30,000.
00:32:50.900It sounded a lot like Michael Cohen doing the little that he could within that calculation to rebalance the bonus he thought he deserved, and it still came out as less than the bonus he thought he deserved and the bonus he'd gotten a year before.
00:33:06.640I mean, I love how he's like justifying the stealing because he thought he deserved the bonus.
00:33:13.060You know, trying to rebalance the bonus.
00:33:14.760You know, if you steal from your employer, you're just trying to rebalance what they're paying you because you know you're worth more, so steal away.
00:34:18.120Listen, on the merits, this case is frivolous.
00:34:20.360And I will point out also that the judge, one of the things he did is he blocked the Trump campaign from putting on the witness stand the former chairman of the FEC, Brad Smith.
00:34:31.220Brad Smith is a law professor, is one of the most well-respected campaign finance experts in the country.
00:34:37.720Campaign finance law is famously complicated.
00:34:40.800And Brad Smith was prepared to testify that paying hush money does not constitute a campaign expense.
00:34:51.280If that's correct, the entire case goes out the window.
00:34:55.620So after the judge blocked him from testifying, Smith did an interview, did an interview with the Washington Examiner, where he described what he would have testified to.
00:35:09.520And Smith said, here's what Smith said, quote, judges instruct the juries on the law, and they don't want a battle of competing experts saying here's what the law is.
00:35:20.220They feel it's their province to make that determination.
00:35:23.260The problem, of course, is that campaign finance law is extremely complex, and just reading the statute to people isn't really going to help them very much.
00:35:32.580The goal of his testimony, Smith said, was, quote, to lay out the ways the laws has been interpreted in ways that might not be obvious.
00:35:40.560As an example, Smith cited the phrase, quote, for the purpose of influencing an election, which has been heard during much analysis of the trial.
00:35:48.800Quote, you read the law, and it says that anything intended for the purpose of influencing an election is a contribution or an expenditure, Smith explained.
00:35:58.940But that's not, in fact, the entirety of the law.
00:36:02.920There is the obscure and separate from the definitional part idea of personal use, which is a separate part of the law that says you can't divert campaign funds to personal use.
00:36:12.380That has a number of specific prohibitions, like you can't buy a country club membership, you can't normally pay yourself a salary or living expenses, you can't go on vacation, all those kinds of things.
00:36:23.460And then it includes a broader general prohibition that says you can't divert campaign funds to any obligation that would exist even if you were not running for office.
00:36:36.120Quote, we would have liked to flag that exception for the jury and to talk a little bit about what it means.
00:36:42.240And also, we would have talked about, quote, for the purpose of influencing an election is not a subjective test, like what was my intention.
00:36:52.740So, hiring campaign staff is for the purpose of influencing an election.
00:36:57.960Renting space for your campaign office, buying ads, maybe doing polling, printing up bumper stickers, travel to campaign rallies, renting venues for campaign rallies.
00:37:06.100All those things exist only because you're running for office.
00:37:09.800But under the personal use rules, a lot of things candidates do running for office are not considered campaign expenditures.
00:37:16.660Things like paying for a weight loss program or a gym membership, nicer clothes, teeth whitening, or all that sort of thing.
00:37:24.780It may be true that you do those things in part to help get yourself elected, and you might not do them otherwise.
00:37:31.720But they are not obligations that exist simply because you're running for office.
00:37:39.940And what he argued is that, in this instance, I can tell you, it is my personal belief, is that clearly paying hush money or paying for a nondisclosure agreement does not constitute a campaign expense.
00:37:58.320That's what the former FEC chairman would have testified to.
00:38:01.180Quote, to use an example I've often used, it's not a campaign expense if a business person is running for office and his businesses are getting sued.
00:38:09.940And he goes to his company's lawyers and say, I wish to settle these lawsuits against us.
00:38:14.300We've got some wage employment lawsuits and a woman is alleging sexual harassment.
00:38:35.900Well, he cannot use campaign funds to pay that settlement, even though he's clearly doing it for the purpose of influencing his campaign.
00:38:44.900It's kind of similar to what went on here, Smith continued.
00:38:49.160Quote, so my personal belief is that this clearly would not have been a campaign expenditure, never had to be reported, and therefore was not misreported.
00:39:01.880The jury can't hear a word of that because it demonstrates, he didn't say this part, but because it demonstrates that the prosecutor's case is utter and complete garbage.
00:39:12.840Unbelievable bias in this case, and it's another example of that.
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