Verdict with Ted Cruz - August 22, 2025


Trump WINS as NY $500M Judgement goes to ZERO plus DEM Registration Plummeting, Sen Eric Schmitt on Fighting the Left in Court & Biden Auto-Pen Scandal Gets Worse

Topics
lawfare against Trump voter registration crisis Anthony Fauci deposition
Hosted by
Ted Cruz
Mentioned
Donald Trump Hunter Biden Eric Schmidt Joe Biden Letitia James Verdict Anthony Fauci Kyle Brosnan Elvis Chan Brad Wenstrup Terrence Richardson Jennifer Stewart Ferron Claiborne Caitlin Clark Cracker Barrel Michael Prescott Roger Marshall Ben Ferguson Jeff Landry Jen Psaki and 6 more
BONUS POD： Biden’s Last-Minute Pardons Spark DOJ Chaos plus Dems Scramble on Voter Data The Battle for Somaliland, Trump takes a BITE out of DC Violence & DOJ Warned Biden Over Legally Flawed Pardons Week In Review

Episode Stats


Length

35 minutes

Words per minute

186.77

Word count

6,698

Sentence count

435

Harmful content

Misogyny

6

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Ted Cruz and Ben Fergusons break down a major victory for President Trump in the Trump v. Manhattan Federal Court of Appeals. They also discuss a new book by Sen. Eric Schmidt, D-Missouri, about fighting the Biden administration and fighting the left in court.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 This is an iHeart Podcast.
00:00:02.620 Guaranteed human.
00:00:05.440 Welcome.
00:00:06.120 It is Verdict with Senator Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you,
00:00:08.960 and it's nice to have you with us wherever you're listening around the country.
00:00:12.180 We have got a lot of news that has been breaking this week,
00:00:15.460 including a major victory as a New York appeals court has thrown out
00:00:19.340 that half a billion dollar penalty against Donald Trump,
00:00:22.980 something that we predicted right here on this show.
00:00:25.520 Well, that's right.
00:00:26.040 There's an enormous amount we're talking about today,
00:00:27.800 but I want to say at the outset that this podcast is brought to you by Cracker Barrel.
00:00:31.780 They don't have crackers.
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00:00:33.980 They hate you and your family.
00:00:35.360 There's nothing that your values stand for that they stand for,
00:00:38.600 but they are happy to be woke and erase their entire history,
00:00:42.260 erase American exceptionalism.
00:00:45.000 That, of course, is not true for those of you who are hiring lawyers right now.
00:00:48.640 That is what's known as parody.
00:00:50.500 So that is not accurate.
00:00:52.200 But I will say what is accurate is what Ben just said,
00:00:56.080 that President Trump won a massive victory today in the New York Court of Appeals.
00:01:00.360 The New York Court of Appeals threw out the entirety,
00:01:03.440 every penny of the $500 million judgment that the rabid partisan attorney general in New York,
00:01:09.440 Letitia James, had gotten against President Trump. 1.00
00:01:12.800 We're going to break that down and explain to you exactly what happened.
00:01:15.860 We're also going to talk about an amazing story that the New York Times broke,
00:01:19.420 about how Democrat party registration is plummeting.
00:01:23.360 It is plummeting everywhere, in every single state in the union that measures party registration.
00:01:29.800 Democrat party registration is dropping through the floor.
00:01:33.000 We're going to give you those facts as well.
00:01:34.860 We've also got a special guest on today's podcast.
00:01:37.060 We've got my friend and colleague, Eric Schmidt, Senator from Missouri.
00:01:40.380 He's got a brand new book about fighting the Biden administration, fighting the left in court.
00:01:44.640 We have a discussion about the strategies that work to fight the left-wing woke lunatics.
00:01:50.300 And finally, we're going to talk about a story that broke as well,
00:01:52.620 about how the Biden Department of Justice raised serious legal questions from the auto pen in chief,
00:01:59.160 serious questions about the pardons that Joe Biden's auto pen signed at the end of his presidency.
00:02:04.920 We're going to talk about how those serious questions draw into real doubt the legality of those auto pen pardons,
00:02:12.500 all of that on today's verdict.
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00:04:05.300 All right.
00:04:05.620 So, Senator, we predicted this.
00:04:07.720 It doesn't mean that this lawfare was easy.
00:04:12.000 We did say that the appeals court, you thought,
00:04:13.920 would throw out the egregious half-billion-dollar penalty against Donald Trump.
00:04:17.620 The president saying in a post,
00:04:19.340 it's now with interest would be over $550 million judgment against him.
00:04:24.700 And the appellate court's thrown it out.
00:04:26.940 Explain exactly what happened.
00:04:28.400 Well, this podcast has covered at length the egregious lawfare that was waged against President Trump.
00:04:34.840 He was indicted four times by rabid Democrat prosecutors who wanted to stop the voters from doing what they,
00:04:40.600 in fact, did in November of 2024, which is re-electing him as president.
00:04:43.960 And then this case by Letitia James, another hard partisan who campaigned promising the Democrat primary voters, 1.00
00:04:51.420 if you elected her, she would go after Donald Trump, which is, of course, an absolute abuse of the justice,
00:04:58.640 the role of attorney general, fair and impartial administration of the law.
00:05:02.580 It is a weaponization of justice.
00:05:05.180 And she, in a mockery of justice, the New York trial court issued an order that, 0.93
00:05:13.320 as President Trump rightly pointed out, with interest in penalties would be worth over $550 million.
00:05:18.480 This was all for loans that President Trump and the Trump organization took from very sophisticated global banks.
00:05:27.300 And they claimed that he overstated the value of his real estate.
00:05:30.520 Now, mind you, there were no victims.
00:05:32.840 The supposed aggrieved parties were giant banks who were perfectly capable of valuing real estate on their own,
00:05:39.340 and they did value real estate on their own.
00:05:41.500 They lost no money, not a penny.
00:05:43.800 They said they were thrilled to do the loans and they would be eager to do more loans going forward.
00:05:47.380 And yet, the New York attorney general said, you've got to pay $550 million.
00:05:52.200 And the New York appellate division overturned it, and it reduced that penalty from $550 million to zero.
00:06:00.780 Zero dollars and zero cents.
00:06:02.680 It concluded that the disgorgement was an excessive fine that violates the Eighth Amendment.
00:06:07.620 This is exactly right.
00:06:09.400 And this is what we predicted on this podcast.
00:06:12.620 Look, one of the things about the verdict podcast is we make real predictions.
00:06:17.120 We make predictions that are sometimes out there, that are sometimes very few people are making.
00:06:22.560 Early on, more than a year before the election last year, I predicted Joe Biden will not be the nominee at the time.
00:06:29.520 This podcast was mocked.
00:06:31.140 Ben and I were mocked for being crazy tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorists.
00:06:35.540 That, of course, proved correct. 0.75
00:06:37.320 I want you to listen to what we said a year ago predicting the result that just happened this week.
00:06:42.880 Give a listen to what we said one year ago.
00:06:44.880 Letitia James, who is a left-wing partisan Democrat, she ran for office promising to get Donald Trump. 0.98
00:06:53.520 That was her campaign promise.
00:06:54.940 You elect me, and I'm going after Donald Trump.
00:06:57.420 I'm going to get him.
00:06:58.620 So this was not a fair and objective application of the law.
00:07:02.200 This was a political vendetta from day one.
00:07:04.800 Let me ask you this.
00:07:05.940 How is that not against the law to run for office saying that when you become what is supposed to be a steward of law and order,
00:07:16.600 that you're actually running to lock up someone you disagree with politically?
00:07:21.700 How is that legal in America today?
00:07:24.080 Well, I think that's going to be a very serious claim on appeal.
00:07:26.540 And I think there is a significant chance this gets overturned on appeal, but that's going to take a long time.
00:07:33.440 The prosecutor on her face is not fair, is not impartial, but is engaged in a partisan political vendetta.
00:07:42.420 She said that before she knew the facts, if anything.
00:07:45.400 I mean, this was a while ago.
00:07:47.040 This was February 19th of last year, like 2024. 0.84
00:07:52.120 And when we said it, people were like, this is ridiculous.
00:07:55.320 Well, it is.
00:07:56.340 And then we went back to it in March of 2024, and we talked about the specific legal claim that the New York appellate court just addressed.
00:08:03.420 And that was the Eighth Amendment, that it was an excessive fine.
00:08:06.540 And when we come back in just a minute, we're going to play what we said in March of 2024, laying out the legal ground that just has been put in place to set aside this absolute abuse of power.
00:08:19.540 Now, to be clear, this claim will go up on appeal.
00:08:22.140 There's one other level of appeals up to the New York Court of Appeals, the top appellate court in New York.
00:08:27.920 And so it's possible the New York appellate courts reverse it yet again.
00:08:31.840 I don't think they will, and I think if they did, it would go to the Supreme Court and be reversed once again.
00:08:38.760 So one way or another, this order is not going to go into effect.
00:08:43.420 Donald Trump is not going to have to pay a half billion dollars.
00:08:46.340 Today is a day for celebration because the New York courts actually did their job, and they corrected a grotesque injustice from an abusive district judge in New York.
00:08:55.320 I want to take you back to March 23rd of 2024, and I want you to hear what we had to say about this case on this show.
00:09:02.240 The impact, if Trump is not able to post this bond, the effect would be to deny him the right to even appeal the absurd partisan decision from the district court.
00:09:15.540 I got to say, this is such a profound abuse.
00:09:19.160 Now, that doesn't mean Trump would be out of options, because if the New York courts insist you've got to put up a half billion dollars in order to appeal this decision,
00:09:28.680 I am confident that Trump will appeal that and potentially appeal that all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
00:09:35.240 And the U.S. Supreme Court, he would have multiple arguments, constitutional arguments, including the Constitution prohibits denying an individual,
00:09:45.800 depriving an individual of property without due process of law.
00:09:49.400 And there would be an argument that this is such an excessive bond that it constitutes a violation of due process.
00:09:57.600 He would also have an argument under the Eighth Amendment.
00:09:59.680 The Eighth Amendment specifies, excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
00:10:09.920 Now, the Eighth Amendment typically applies in a criminal context, but given the magnitude here,
00:10:17.320 I would expect him to make both an Eighth Amendment argument and a due process argument,
00:10:22.360 and it is entirely possible that would prevail ultimately.
00:10:25.840 But what New York is doing, what the New York Attorney General is doing, is the conduct of a banana republic.
00:10:35.000 Conduct of a banana republic. 0.89
00:10:36.740 It doesn't sound crazy now at all, even though others said it was.
00:10:42.120 Yeah, look, and I want to say I'm glad that the New York appellate courts actually did their job.
00:10:47.040 They followed the rule of law.
00:10:48.780 The ground that I predicted in March of last year of excessive fines is exactly the ground on which they set it aside.
00:10:55.300 And I've got to say, Letitia James put out a statement today that I found side-splitting funny.
00:11:00.540 Her statement today, she said, quote,
00:11:02.580 The first department today affirmed the well-supported finding of the trial court.
00:11:06.040 Donald Trump, his company, and two of his children are liable for fraud.
00:11:09.160 The court upheld the injunctive relief we won, limiting Donald Trump and the Trump Organization's officers' ability to do business in New York.
00:11:15.120 It should not be lost to history.
00:11:16.420 Yet another court has ruled that the president has violated the law and that our case has merit.
00:11:21.740 We will seek appeal to the Court of Appeals and continue to protect the rights and interests of New Yorkers.
00:11:26.340 So she's celebrating that they said our case has merit, other than the fact that they took the fine from $550 million to zero.
00:11:36.680 That's an awfully weird decision to celebrate as a victory.
00:11:40.940 This was a crushing loss for Letitia James.
00:11:43.440 It was an enormous victory for President Trump, and it was an enormous victory for the rule of law.
00:11:48.660 And by the way, ironically, it was an enormous victory for the state of New York,
00:11:52.940 because I've got to say, if this had been upheld, you would have seen a significant exodus of businesses being willing to do business in New York,
00:12:01.580 because if the attorney general could simply go after any business and shake them down for hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars,
00:12:09.580 a whole lot of people would say, This is not a place I can do business.
00:12:12.540 And so this week's decision is cause for celebration.
00:12:16.980 Yeah, it really is.
00:12:17.660 And this brings us to another story that I think ties in perfectly.
00:12:22.100 Democrats are losing support, and they're now facing a voter registration crisis.
00:12:29.360 Democrats are facing a crisis as more than 2 million voters leave the party in just a four-year,
00:12:36.820 based on data and analysis coming from the New York Post, also the New York Times reporting on this, several others.
00:12:42.040 I go back to Letitia James, a great example of this.
00:12:45.560 When you go rogue, and you try to destroy people's lives, and you go after Donald Trump the way you did,
00:12:50.960 and you use lawfare, and all that we now know about, you know, the deep state and the corruption,
00:12:57.520 it's a great way to make people say, Maybe I don't want to be involved in this party.
00:13:01.200 Well, Ben, look, you're just a right-wing partisan.
00:13:04.660 Obviously, you're saying things that favor one side of the political aisle, but why should anyone trust you?
00:13:10.640 It's not like anyone else is saying this.
00:13:12.320 Oh, wait, wait, here is the New York Times, not exactly a right-wing partisan outlet.
00:13:18.000 Let me just read from the New York Times this week.
00:13:20.400 Here's the headline.
00:13:21.080 The Democratic Party faces a voter registration crisis.
00:13:25.820 The party is bleeding support beyond the ballot box, a new analysis shows.
00:13:30.580 And here's what the New York Times writes in the body of the article.
00:13:33.220 The Democratic Party is hemorrhaging voters long before they even go to the polls.
00:13:37.800 Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections,
00:13:53.520 and often by a lot.
00:13:55.140 That four-year swing towards the Republicans adds up to 4.5 million voters,
00:14:02.660 a deep political hole that could take years for the Democrats to climb out from.
00:14:06.700 The stampede, that's the word that the New York Times is using, the stampede away from the Democratic Party,
00:14:13.880 is occurring in battleground states, the bluest states, and the reddest states, too,
00:14:20.640 according to a new analysis of voter registration data by the New York Times.
00:14:25.660 The analysis used voter registration data compiled by L2, a nonpartisan data firm.
00:14:31.420 This is stunning.
00:14:32.920 All told, this is again reading from the New York Times,
00:14:35.020 Democrats lost about 2.1 million registered voters between 2020 and the 2024 elections in the 30 states,
00:14:42.200 along with Washington, D.C., that allow people to register with the political party.
00:14:48.260 Republicans gained 2.4 million.
00:14:52.620 That says an enormous amount that the Democrats are in crisis, that even the New York Times is saying so.
00:14:58.200 And I got to say, I don't know a single one of my colleagues in the Senate, the Democrat colleagues, who is asking, why?
00:15:05.000 Why is it that so many people are running away from our disastrous policies?
00:15:09.180 The Democrats continue to embrace those policies.
00:15:11.460 And I think as long as they do, you're going to continue to see this and you're going to see it even accelerate.
00:15:15.580 Yeah, it's going to accelerate.
00:15:17.840 And I also think part of this is the Democratic Party has let the extremists really come in and take over.
00:15:23.800 And now there's an identity crisis.
00:15:25.380 Are we Marxists?
00:15:26.300 Are we socialists?
00:15:26.980 Are we communists?
00:15:27.820 The old Democratic Party is dead.
00:15:29.860 Is that the feeling in Washington, D.C., around your colleagues as well?
00:15:33.700 Are they concerned?
00:15:35.100 Well, no, not among the Democrats.
00:15:36.580 Look, the Democrats seemed oblivious.
00:15:39.620 Here's a quote from the New York Times.
00:15:41.260 Quote, I don't want to say the death cycle of the Democratic Party, but there seems to be no end to this, said Michael Pruser, who tracks voter registration closely as the director of data science for Decision Desk HQ.
00:15:52.760 And it points out that the party saw some of its steepest declines in registration among men and younger voters, two constituencies that sharply swung towards Mr. Trump.
00:16:03.640 At the end of the day, this is not complicated.
00:16:05.380 When you embrace policies that are a failure, that cause inflation, that open borders, that threaten your families, when you take every 80-20 issue in America and the Democrat Party says we'll take the 20, people run away from your party as extreme and out of touch.
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00:16:49.440 One of the fun things about what you do is you've got colleagues that you know well, and from time to time, great books are written.
00:16:58.820 And one of your colleagues, Senator Eric Schmidt from Missouri, is with us right now, and he's got a new book out.
00:17:05.420 Well, we're glad to welcome Eric Schmidt to the podcast.
00:17:08.800 He has a brand new book.
00:17:09.780 It is entitled The Last Line of Defense, How to Beat the Left in Court.
00:17:13.920 And Eric is a good friend.
00:17:15.920 Before he was in the Senate, he was the attorney general of Missouri, and he was a warrior.
00:17:20.560 He was a warrior taking on the Biden administration, taking on big tech, taking on the radical left, and he built a very strong record as attorney general.
00:17:29.240 And that's the record he campaigned for Senate on, and when Eric launched his campaign for Senate, I endorsed him early on and came to Missouri, campaigned alongside him.
00:17:39.320 He ran a fantastic campaign.
00:17:40.960 He won decisively, and now he's a colleague of mine on the Commerce Committee and on the Judiciary Committee.
00:17:47.100 So we spend a lot of time together.
00:17:48.660 We have similar passions.
00:17:50.060 Eric, welcome to Verdict.
00:17:52.180 It's great to be with you guys.
00:17:53.180 Thanks for having me on.
00:17:54.380 All right, so tell us about the book.
00:17:56.020 You have a brand new book, The Last Line of Defense, How to Beat the Left in Court.
00:18:00.920 Tell us why you wrote it and why folks want to go out and buy it.
00:18:04.580 Well, yeah, it's really kind of a field manual from the front lines of this battle against the left-wing lawfare machine that I saw front and center in my time as Missouri attorney general.
00:18:13.680 And I know that we're kind of on the other side of the fever dream, guys, after President Trump delivered this historic victory.
00:18:19.240 We've got all these wins we're celebrating.
00:18:20.840 But if you go back, if you take that DeLorean back in time, just a few years, it was a time of lockdowns and compulsory COVID shots and, you know, open borders and DEI struggle sessions and ESG requirements and a censorship enterprise that was so vast.
00:18:36.080 I think it was the biggest affront to the First Amendment we've seen in our nation's history.
00:18:39.500 So when I was AG, we stood up and we fought back.
00:18:42.420 We took the COVID vaccine mandate all the way to the Supreme Court and we won.
00:18:46.520 We took the student loan debt forgiveness case all the way to the Supreme Court and we won.
00:18:49.800 We filed Missouri versus Biden and we uncovered this vast censorship enterprise.
00:18:55.080 We took the deposition of Fauci.
00:18:56.440 We took the deposition of Elvis Chan, who was pre-bunking the Hunter Biden laptop story for the FBI.
00:19:01.480 We took on mask mandates at local schools.
00:19:03.760 We pushed back against ESG requirements.
00:19:05.960 We went after local school districts for their CRT.
00:19:08.580 So we were in the middle of the arena and I wanted to write the book because there's a lot of lessons learned here.
00:19:14.060 We stood up, we fought back, and we won, and it's a playbook.
00:19:18.160 It's a playbook moving forward.
00:19:19.500 This isn't the last time we're going to see that from the left.
00:19:21.940 In fact, they're kind of engaged in law there right now.
00:19:24.780 So anyway, there's a lot to learn here, and I think the readers or your listeners will get a lot from it, from these sort of behind-the-scenes stories of how it took place.
00:19:32.720 Good. Let's talk about several of the topics that you dove into.
00:19:36.100 Let's talk about Anthony Fauci, and you talked about taking his deposition.
00:19:40.500 Tell us what you learned, and I have said many times Anthony Fauci is the most damaging bureaucrat to have ever lived.
00:19:47.300 I think you've said very much the same thing, but tell us about that deposition and what you learned.
00:19:51.060 Yeah, so this took place in November of 2022, just after I was elected to the U.S. Senate, and one of the key things that you'll appreciate this,
00:20:02.200 one of the things that we talked about in the last line of defense you can order on Amazon right now is that we sought discovery before the injunction.
00:20:08.760 Typically with these cases, you seek an injunction to get the government to stop doing what they're doing.
00:20:12.600 We sought discovery first. We knew it would get a lot of attention as far as the case.
00:20:17.580 Everybody labeled it a conspiracy theory that conservatives were actually being throttled in the platform.
00:20:22.140 We knew it was true, so we got to take the deposition.
00:20:24.620 Fauci comes in the room.
00:20:26.840 A fun little story, Jeff Landry, who's my colleague from Louisiana, had the RFK Jr.'s,
00:20:31.840 the real Anthony Fauci book on the middle of the table as he walked in.
00:20:34.740 I'm sure Fauci did not find that very humorous, but it kind of set the stage for the day.
00:20:41.260 And we went through, and what was really interesting about it was, he said,
00:20:45.000 I can't recall 174 times, sort of simultaneously as declaring he was the science.
00:20:50.160 He didn't like to be challenged.
00:20:51.560 And those depositions would take hours.
00:20:52.700 Like what kind of things could he not recall?
00:20:54.600 What kind of questions was he dodging?
00:20:58.480 So we initially started with, where did this virus come from?
00:21:01.640 And, you know, he was very adamant that it couldn't have come from the Wuhan lab, right?
00:21:05.900 Because he kind of funded the EcoHealth Alliance to fund the Wuhan lab.
00:21:10.840 He knew it would come back to him.
00:21:11.820 So he was very interested in making sure people didn't think that.
00:21:14.600 And then when he was confronted with statements about Isaac, well, no, it's a plausible theory, I suppose.
00:21:18.940 He was kind of basal.
00:21:19.820 Like, I don't remember saying that.
00:21:21.500 He discredited Ted anybody that challenged him on whether it was the lab leak theory or mask.
00:21:26.700 We presented him with an email, and we asked him if masks were effective.
00:21:29.720 And, of course, he said, yes, of course they're effective.
00:21:32.060 And we presented him with an email early in 2020, where a friend asked him, hey, I'm sitting on this flight.
00:21:36.840 You know, do you think I should wear a mask?
00:21:38.440 He said, no, no, no, masks aren't effective for this.
00:21:40.180 So he was just caught in inconsistency after inconsistency.
00:21:43.100 I think probably the most telling thing, honestly, we came back from a lunch break, and the court reporter sneezed.
00:21:49.360 And he turned to the court reporter.
00:21:50.720 This is in November of 2022, not April of 2020, and demanded that she put a mask on.
00:21:55.600 This was the guy in charge of our public health.
00:21:57.600 Are you kidding me?
00:21:58.580 It's just, it's totally insane.
00:22:00.640 And so I think that those are the kind of insights that I think people will get from the last line of defense.
00:22:04.940 It's just fascinating, but terrifying at the same time.
00:22:08.440 Well, and I will say, this podcast, when COVID, when the pandemic began in 2020, this podcast in March and April of 2020, was laying out chapter and verse, the evidence that was clear even then that the COVID virus originated in a Chinese government lab. 0.92
00:22:25.660 I think likely the Wuhan Institute for Virology.
00:22:27.980 We laid out the facts, and while it was being censored virtually everywhere else, verdict listeners had those facts right at the beginning.
00:22:35.240 Now, your most significant case was challenging internet censorship and big tech censorship.
00:22:42.940 Tell us about that case.
00:22:44.180 Tell us the facts you found, and tell us what happened.
00:22:47.440 Yeah, and I should say, too, that one of the things that we note in the book, we sued the communist China for unleashing the COVID pandemic on the world through that Wuhan lab, and Missouri has a $24 billion judgment now. 0.92
00:23:00.060 So that's just as an aside.
00:23:01.380 That's also in the book.
00:23:02.360 Wow.
00:23:02.500 Yes, the Missouri versus Biden lawsuit.
00:23:05.980 Well, Eric, I, for one, am looking forward to when you own the Great Wall of China.
00:23:10.000 I think it's going to be a nice wall, and, you know, folks from Missouri are a little redneck, so I'm not sure what you're going to paint on the Great Wall of China. 1.00
00:23:17.120 They always pay over there, no problem, right?
00:23:19.440 Well, we'll have to move that over to separate Missouri from Kansas. 0.99
00:23:22.240 Roger Marshall will be very disappointed, I'm sure, when we move that Great Wall. 0.64
00:23:25.720 By the way, Ben is from Memphis, so it's not hard for a Memphis guy to talk crap about Missouri, but feel free to pop back hard at him.
00:23:35.900 But, yeah, listen, Jen Psaki's saying we're flagging stuff for Facebook.
00:23:41.600 They started this disinformation governance board.
00:23:43.460 We had a hunch.
00:23:44.300 We filed the lawsuit.
00:23:45.420 We got discovery first in that lawsuit.
00:23:48.060 And, again, what we found was just shocking.
00:23:50.480 These secret portals between high-rating government officials and big tech giants take this down.
00:23:56.460 The CDC was telling them words and phrases specifically.
00:23:59.660 We took the depot of Elvis Chan, the FBI guy, who, again, was pre-bunking the Hunter Biden laptop story.
00:24:04.920 They knew it was real in 2019, and in 2020 they're telling them, hey, censor this because it's not real.
00:24:10.720 And that was verified by Yul Roth, who worked at Twitter.
00:24:13.640 There's just reams and reams of documents.
00:24:15.380 So the FBI was lying, and they knew they were lying.
00:24:18.600 They absolutely knew they were lying, and it was the first time anybody had them under oath to prove it.
00:24:23.180 And so this was a leviathan of government agencies aimed at the American people, meant to censor conservatives who question masks or efficacy of vaccines or the 2020 election or the Hunter Biden laptop.
00:24:36.320 We've got to make sure that never happens again.
00:24:37.900 So this book, I mean, a lion's share, honestly, the middle chapters are really dedicated to protecting free speech, exposing the censorship.
00:24:45.380 Regime that existed, and I'm proud to have stood up for that.
00:24:48.920 And we had some big wins along the way.
00:24:50.340 But this is the last line of defense, how to beat the left in court.
00:24:53.300 You can order it now.
00:24:54.040 It's really a playbook.
00:24:55.400 And it's war stories, yes, but it's a playbook for the future, too.
00:24:59.220 All right.
00:24:59.440 Talk to us about DEI and ESG, because you also, as AG in Missouri, were fighting against both of those and making a real difference.
00:25:08.080 Yeah, as attorney general, you have subpoena power.
00:25:12.100 And when we saw what was happening with ESG and this net zero banking alliance, which was really kind of really go after credit worthy applicants because they, you know, had had a portfolio of fossil fuels or whatever.
00:25:24.380 These banks decided that by 2050 they were going to have a portfolio that was carbon neutral.
00:25:30.120 Well, the only way you do that, Ted, is that you basically start denying credit worthy applicants loans, including the family farmer, because they have diesel trucks.
00:25:39.020 So we opened this up.
00:25:40.060 We had a suspicion this was violated antitrust.
00:25:42.280 We opened up this investigation.
00:25:43.700 Ultimately, they backed away.
00:25:45.220 And, again, it takes courage to go do that.
00:25:47.360 These are some powerful interests.
00:25:48.640 But what you find out when you do it, you can be really proud of it, and you can win.
00:25:52.820 Same with DEI.
00:25:55.520 Not only in corporate America, but what we found in school districts.
00:25:58.340 So we were taking on, obviously, the Biden administration's censorship regime at the highest levels of government, but also the local school superintendent in Springfield, Missouri.
00:26:07.220 We uncovered documents.
00:26:08.660 We had a hunch.
00:26:09.360 We got a tip from a whistleblower that they were, you know, spewing this poison to our kids, teachers, and staff.
00:26:15.460 Turns out they were, you know, engaged in things like the gender unicorn and the pyramid of oppression and all this nonsense to divide the classroom by race.
00:26:24.940 Other school districts then chimed in once we started finding out this out across Missouri.
00:26:28.720 This is in Missouri now.
00:26:29.980 The kids were being forced to do the privilege walk.
00:26:32.060 I mean, this is nuts.
00:26:33.980 But, again, what we have to do, Ted, you've done this your whole career.
00:26:38.600 We have to have the courage to stand up and fight, and we can't cede the courtroom to that.
00:26:42.360 So this book isn't written for lawyers.
00:26:43.760 It's written for people who are seeing this, and how does this all kind of come together, and what can we do to push back?
00:26:48.840 The court is a major battleground, and I will say there are lessons in this book that I think are really useful for the Trump DOJ, including using discovery, make the facts public, shine a light, get them under oath, hold them accountable, be aggressive, speak the truth, don't be afraid.
00:27:05.340 The book is called The Last Line of Defense, How to Beat the Left in Court.
00:27:08.740 It's by my friend Eric Schmidt, senator from the great state of Missouri.
00:27:11.520 You can get it on Amazon.
00:27:13.180 You can get it anywhere books are sold.
00:27:14.900 So go buy The Last Line of Defense.
00:27:16.520 And, Eric, thanks for joining us here on Verdict.
00:27:18.580 Thank you, guys.
00:27:19.120 I appreciate it.
00:27:20.420 One other big story we've got to get in here, senator, is Biden's auto pen.
00:27:25.220 We've got a new big update on this story.
00:27:27.060 And apparently Joe Biden deliberately ignored his own Department of Justice's warnings over legally flawed auto pen pardons.
00:27:38.140 And we also found out about how many pardons they were giving out.
00:27:42.020 And they claimed from the White House podium that these are all nonviolent offenders.
00:27:46.440 That was also a huge lie.
00:27:48.800 Well, that's right.
00:27:50.040 And I will say this is the sort of story why we do Verdict as a podcast, why we do it as a radio show, because this is the kind of story you will never see on CNN.
00:27:59.520 You won't see it on MSNBC or ABC, NBC, CBS.
00:28:02.920 It will not be covered by the corporate media because it is inconvenient.
00:28:06.260 We have talked about at length the problems with Joe Biden's auto pen, that the president does not have the authority to delegate presidential power to another staff member.
00:28:17.240 And when it comes to an auto pen, the critical question, whether a statute signed in law by an auto pen, an executive order signed by an auto pen, or a pardon or commutation signed by an auto pen, the critical question for whether it is legally valid is whether the president personally and directly authorized it, whether the president made the decision.
00:28:34.960 If it's a staffer who made the decision, it is not valid and is legally void.
00:28:38.720 Well, what broke is recently is this week is is that at the time that Joe Biden was using the auto pen or rather the White House staffers were using the auto pen, a senior career staffer in the Biden Department of Justice was raising real legal questions about it.
00:28:55.640 Here's the story on Fox News headline.
00:28:58.140 Biden's auto pen pardons disturb DOJ brass doc show raising questions whether they are legally binding.
00:29:03.720 New documents and communications between Biden White House staff and career officials of the Justice Department prompted scrutiny of the legality of former President Joe Biden's thousands of last minute pardons.
00:29:15.320 The oversight oversight project shared documents obtained from the Trump DOJ with Fox News Digital showing that a career prosecutor warned Biden's inner circle that the administration's pardon process was unorthodox and legally troubling.
00:29:30.660 In the most scrutinized email, then Assistant Deputy Attorney General Bradley Weinsheimer wrote a group email to several executive office staff members on January 18th asking questions about the more than 2,500 pardons.
00:29:48.180 Quote, the White House has described those who received commutations as people convicted of nonviolent drug offenses.
00:29:56.420 I think you should stop saying that because it is untrue or at least misleading.
00:30:04.160 That's what DOJ said to the Biden White House.
00:30:06.340 Mind you, they didn't stop it.
00:30:07.440 They continued to be untrue and misleading.
00:30:09.020 He continued, quote, as you know, even with the exceedingly limited review we were permitted to do of the individuals we believed you might be considering for commutation action, we initially identified 19 that were highly problematic.
00:30:23.420 He continued, he cited convicts Terrence Richardson and Ferron Claiborne, who were included in the clemency grants and noted that the DOJ received voluminous objections from the victims, families and law enforcement as the men had been sentenced to life imprisonment for drug trafficking offenses during which a police officer was killed.
00:30:46.920 Mind you, this is what the Biden White House said was a nonviolent offense, drug trafficking where a police officer was killed.
00:30:54.220 And beyond that, according to Oversight Project, Vice President Kyle Brosnan shows that DOJ was concerned about the, quote, vague construct of Biden's pardons and how they appeared to be, quote, illegally delegated to staffed.
00:31:10.340 That left the DOJ wondering at times which offenses for people with multiple convictions were specifically being expunged.
00:31:19.320 Later in the email, he was like, quote, look, I read the statement you put out in the president's name saying you've released a bunch of nonviolent drug offenders.
00:31:27.300 You've got murderers on your list today.
00:31:29.840 So I'm trying to figure out what the president wants here for this funky warrant.
00:31:35.140 That is incredible, isn't it?
00:31:37.320 I mean, funky warrant.
00:31:38.880 And that's coming again from his own DOJ saying we don't know what he wants.
00:31:43.100 We don't know what he's doing.
00:31:43.960 It doesn't make sense.
00:31:45.680 Yeah, this is the Biden DOJ.
00:31:48.000 Weinsheimer continued, quote, I think it is best that we receive a statement or direction from the president as to the meaning of the warrant language that will allow us to give full effect to the commutation warrant in the manner intended by the president.
00:31:59.620 And there was ultimately no no explanation for what the offenses or the or the proverbial descriptions were, according to the document tranche.
00:32:08.960 And instead, there was simply a spreadsheet of convicts attached to one of the emails that came from the U.S. Sentencing Commission.
00:32:18.760 But only the president has the power to grant pardons, not the Sentencing Commission.
00:32:23.540 Treating it otherwise would be an illegal delegation of presidential authority.
00:32:27.960 When you look at this, what does this mean moving forward for the investigation into the president's use of the auto pen and many things he may have signed that he didn't know about?
00:32:40.140 Right.
00:32:40.400 This was just anybody at the White House, pretty much, that had any type of power could just walk in there and get things done.
00:32:45.900 And what does this mean for all of the they claimed nonviolent offenders that they were they were pardoning?
00:32:52.540 We've also found out a bunch of that was very violent.
00:32:55.200 It was a lie.
00:32:56.480 Yeah, it was a lie.
00:32:57.180 They knew it was a lie.
00:32:58.280 Their own Department of Justice told them it was a lie.
00:33:00.740 They didn't care it was a lie.
00:33:01.880 They continued lying to the American people.
00:33:03.820 They knew that the New York Times would never call them out.
00:33:06.080 They knew that the corrupt media would never call them out.
00:33:08.240 So they could lie and lie and lie and know that know what nobody would know about it.
00:33:12.740 And and as a legal matter, that the Brosnan from the Oversight Project said, quote,
00:33:18.680 Biden did not pardon individual people, but laid out categories of types of people to release and left it to staff to figure out who meets that criteria.
00:33:26.260 Attorney Sam Dewey told Fox News Digital that, quote, literally no one, including DOJ officials, understands what the aforementioned pardon criteria are.
00:33:38.500 And he continued, quote, quote, you generally don't see people write emails like this.
00:33:44.340 This isn't a CYA.
00:33:45.820 This is I'm going to do a Pontius Pilate routine because this is a drug deal and I want to make sure it doesn't come back on me.
00:33:54.560 And the consequence of that is that the pardons, if they were not authorized by the president of the United States, they are invalid.
00:34:06.400 And so what I have urged the White House to do, what I've urged the Department of Justice to do is to go through the records of everything that was auto penned and determine there may be some.
00:34:15.920 The president does have the authority to direct someone to auto pen something that he's signing, whether a law or an executive order or pardon.
00:34:23.760 And if it's the president who's making the decision, the prevailing Department of Justice interpretation is that is legal and binding.
00:34:30.620 But if the president didn't make the decision, if it's a staffer who's making the decision, then it has no binding force.
00:34:37.920 And so what I've encouraged both the White House and the Department of Justice is to find those pardons, those executive orders, those statutes that were auto penned for which there is a clear lack of evidence that Joe Biden had awareness of it, made a decision about it, and then formulate and carry out a legal strategy to challenge and end up concluding that those statutes, executive orders, pardons and commutations are invalid.
00:35:03.140 I think the possibility of a legal determination of that is rising significantly, and the fact that you had senior career DOJ officials in the Biden administration ringing the alarm bells and saying you're lying to the American people and what you're doing is lawless, that is yet another stunning revelation that has come out this week.
00:35:22.700 Yeah, and it's going to be a story that's going to keep unfolding, and I can promise you we're going to cover it for you.
00:35:27.120 Don't forget we do the show as a podcast Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, so make sure you hit that subscribe or auto-download button wherever you get your podcasts.
00:35:37.500 Also, you can say, hey Siri, hey Alexa, play Verdict with Ted Cruz, and it will do it for you.
00:35:42.800 And the center and I will see you back here on this station next week.
00:35:48.120 This is an iHeart Podcast.
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