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Episode One Hundred Fifty Nine: Below The Law · The Death Of Journalism

• 0:00
  Welcome to episode number one hundred and fifty nine of the Death of Journalism podcast.
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  My name is John Zigler. I'm your host on today's show, a
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  special unscheduled edition of the podcast, as I react to the verdict in the
• 0:13
  Trump trial and try to figure out what lies ahead. Plus Joe Biden keeps
• 0:18
  desperately playing the race card with impunity because of the verdict in the Trump trial,
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  we have decided to do episode number one hundred and fifty nine effectively about
• 0:30
  four days early, because otherwise anything I would have to say about this would
• 0:35
  be basically ancient history by the standards of the modern media. So essentially,
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  instead of taping on Monday morning of next week, I taped on Thursday night,
• 0:49
  the night of the Trump trial verdict, and so hopefully you'll be able
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  to listen to this sometime on Friday. I don't know how much I have
• 0:59
  to say about this that is unique. I probably have a little bit to
• 1:03
  say that you're not going to hear elsewhere. In fact, probably my primary
• 1:07
  point is really a mystery to me. Why it is that I'm the only
• 1:11
  one screaming from the mountaintop about my biggest problem with the entire Trump trial,
• 1:19
  and therefore the verdicts that came about late Thursday, when the jury, just
• 1:25
  before closing time decided, hey, you know what, we're gonna come up
• 1:30
  with a verdict here before we get the hell out of Dodge. And they
• 1:34
  decided to do that, and they convicted Donald Trump, as you i'm sure
• 1:38
  know by now, of all thirty four counts technically felony counts. And you
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  know, I was very disappointed. I was hoping for a hung jury.
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  I am generally a pessimistic person, and almost always when i'm even a little
• 1:59
  bit opimistic, that's when I tend to be wrong. And I felt like
• 2:06
  there was a very good chance that I would be wrong here. But I
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  was still trying to convince myself, you know what, a hung jury makes
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  the most sense. There's got to be two or three jurors on there that
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  are either Trump fans or who just don't feel right about the process and are
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  going to be able to stand up together and do the right thing. I
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  wasn't remotely sure that I honestly had no idea what the verdict was going to
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  be before the jury came forward. But once the jury decided that they had
• 2:38
  come to a decision about eleven or hours, maybe a little less than that
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  into deliberations, and right before the end of their first full day of deliberations,
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  I pretty much knew, okay, there's at least some convictions here.
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  There was still possible going to be a split verdict. I thought maybe this
• 3:00
  would be a fifty to fifty deal, because they'd at least try to make
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  it look good. They'd try to make it look like they were fair and
• 3:07
  impartial and really thought this through. But no, it certainly seems and I
• 3:13
  have not seen any kind of an interview with any of the jurors yet,
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  I don't have a thought about that in a second, but it certainly seems
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  that you can make a pretty strong argument that the timing of the announcement of
• 3:27
  this verdict is inherently suspicious and a good cause for at least some skepticism about
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  the validity of the verdict itself. And what I mean by that is,
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  so everybody, I mean, including the lawyers, the judge, the media,
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  and certainly myself watching at home, thought that we were not going to
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  get a verdict on Thursday, And I thought that was a pretty good sign
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  for a hung jury, because if you get through the first day and a
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  half of deliberations without there being a verdict, and it doesn't appear to be
• 4:09
  imminent that there's a verdict. And then you get into Friday. Now you
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  are at least in the realm where it sure seems as if there's at least
• 4:17
  a significant conflict. But when you all of a sudden, at the last
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  possible moment on Thursday, before the end of the day, say, hold
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  everything, judge, we've got a verdict. That is either a remarkable coincidence
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  or that's a group of people who really had very little thought about the other
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  side, that this was really just about going through the motions and hey,
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  you know what, we can get this thing done today and be out of
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  here. And that's what they did, and they came together and they obviously
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  voted unanimously to convict on all thirty four counts in the Trump trial. And
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  you know, I was rooting, as I said, for the hung jury.
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  If I had had to choose between conviction and acquittal, as far as
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  what I was hoping for, it would have definitely been acquittal, because even
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  though I loathed Donald Trump, I just don't believe that this process was valid
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  I don't believe this situation was legitimate. I don't believe the trial itself was
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  legitimate. And to me, it's very very obvious, and it's incredibly frustrating
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  that even people I considered to be very smart do not seem to understand the
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  very basic and obvious reasons why this process was illegitimate. It feels as if
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  there are a lot of people who have just become invested in this idea that
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  well, you know, we got to get Trump some way, somehow,
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  and this just happened to be the way. And yeah, it's it's a
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  New York jury, but there was a legitimate jury selection, and Trump's team
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  was able to get rid of a few jurors, and one guy on the
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  jury only got their news from true social so therefore it's somehow a fair jury.
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  As if wait a minute, what about the other eleven that got their
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  news from either liberal sources or somehow didn't get news at all. Why don't
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  you worry about them? And I mean it, it's just astonishing to me
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  because I'm a big believer in fairness. I'm a big believer in due process
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  for anybody, it doesn't matter who you are, it's the bedrock of our
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  entire judicial system that we treat everybody fairly as much as the system can possibly
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  allow. And I don't think that happened here. Yes, I believe Donald
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  Trump did the essence of what he was accused of. I believe he had
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  an affair with a porn star, and I believe there was a conspiracy to
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  try to keep that information from the public during the twenty sixteen election. I
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  don't know whether that was illegal or not. I have no idea. I
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  mean, as much as I've paid attention to this trial, I still don't
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  know for sure what exactly was the law that was broken. And there are
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  all sorts of technical concerns and problems with the nature of the conviction. I
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  mean, there's issues related to the statute of limitations, whether or not there
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  was an underlying felony. You know, the jury instructions were highly suspect and
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  very pro prosecution. We talked about that in episode one hundred and fifty eight.
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  But you know, I have never accepted the entire concept, the entire
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  premise that it is even possible to put on trial the Republican presidential nominee in
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  New York City in the middle of a presidential election. This is a remarkably
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  simple concept that seemingly the vast majority of people and basically everybody in the media
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  is completely incapable of grasping. And I'm completely totally flummixed by this. And
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  I did a TV appearance on Wednesday night on News Nation with Dan Abrams,
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  which I told you I would be doing that dealt in part with this exact
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  issue because I wanted it to. I told you I would bring it up,
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  and I did, And we're going to get to that in just a
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  moment. But before before we do that, I do I do want to
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  make one prediction about the jurors here, because because I'm inherently suspicious of jurors
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  in any high profile case, because you know these lawyers and this happened in
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  the News Nation appearance. These lawyers are so naive. They all want to
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  believe that the jurors do good work, and they're they're good faith actors,
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  and they're most to be trusted. It's very rare to see a situation where
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  the jury doesn't really take it seriously or is extremely biased. Yeah, I
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  get that, I get that, but all bets are off in a high
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  profile case where the incentive structure is very perverse, and then way way more
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  perverse than the average high profile case where someone might be looking to write a
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  book or do a TV interview when it's over with, put that on steroids.
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  In the Donald Trump case, because we're dealing with the midst of a
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  presidential election and you've got a pool of jurors in New York City, they're
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  obviously way more liberal than average, and so therefore their self injurists, whether
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  it's conscious or subconscious, whether or not it's overt or covert, it's human
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  nature that they're going to be influenced their self interest, which is to impact
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  the presidential election. And it is my prediction that assuming that any of these
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  jurors do interviews with media outlets in the coming days, my guess is that
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  they will. But I predict that we will see at least one juror do
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  an interview on a liberal news media outlet, whether that's mainstream ABCNBCCBS, or
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  on CNN or MSNBC, one of those five one, at least one juror
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  will do an interview that at least Trump supporters will look at and go,
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  aha, see, I told you so. This person was a partisan hack,
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  and this is not a jury that should be taken seriously when the defendant
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  is the Republican presidential nominee in the middle of a presidential election. That's my
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  prediction. I think that that will probably happened. It may happen more than
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  once, but I think it will happen at least one time. Now.
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  Of course, everybody put out a reaction to this verdict, and you know,
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  most Republicans said basically the same thing. I found that Ron DeSantis' reaction
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  was maybe the most interesting and probably the most well thought out. I mean,
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  here's a guy who had to be feeling like, oh my god.
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  I've tried to warn everybody. I told everybody we didn't have to do this.
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  We didn't have to have a guy who likely could be a convicted felon
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  by the time the voters decided to go to the polls in the twenty twenty
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  four election. It could have been me, a guy who's never come close
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  to committing a crime. But instead we chose a guy who can only serve
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  one term and who already lost to the guy he's running against, and is
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  going to be called a convicted felon. Eight billion times between now and November
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  by the news media. I mean, that is going to be you know,
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  you're going to get sick and tired of that, folks. That is
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  going to be a mantra. That is going to be a drip drip,
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  drip, drip, drip. Convicted fellon Donald Trump. That's going to be
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  basically his new first name in the vast majority of the mainstream news media.
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  But here was Ron DeSantis is very well measured and I thought well thought out,
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  responds to the verdict, DeSantis wrote on Twitter. Today's verdict represents the
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  culmination of a legal process that has been bent to the political will of the
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  actors. Involved a leftist prosecutor, a partisan judge, and a jury reflective
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  of one of the most liberal enclaves in America, all in an effort to
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  quote unquote get Donald Trump. That this case, involving alleged misdemeanor business record
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  violations from nearly a decade to go, was even brought as a testament to
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  the political debasement of the justice system in places like New York City. This
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  is especially true considering this same district attorney routinely excuses criminal conduct in a way
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  that has endangered law abiding citizens in his jurisdiction. It has often said that
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  no one is above the law, but it is also true that no one
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  is below the law. If the defendant were not Donald Trump, this case
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  would never have been brought, the judge would have never issued similar rulings,
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  and the jury would have never returned a guilty verdict. In America, the
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  rule of law should be applied in a dispassionate, even handed manner, not
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  become captive to the political agenda of some kangaroo court. Those are the words
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  of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the person who should be the Republican presidential nominee
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  right now, because you would not be referred to as a convicted felon going
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  up against Joe Biden. But he said it very very well, and you
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  know, kudos to Ron de Sandis. It's a real shame that Republican voters
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  decided that no, no, let's go go with the really old guy who
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  already lost to Joe Biden and who's going to be called a convicted felon a
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  million times by the media as we head into the election. That'll work much
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  better than the young governor of Florida who can serve two terms and as a
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  pristine record and is actually a real conservative. That's going to go down as
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  the most colossally stupid decision in the history of presidential politics, at least in
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  reality. I don't know who will be writing the history, but in reality
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  that's actually the case. And yet Desandas had the class and the character and
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  the intelligence to say it far better than anybody else. I saw in his
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  reaction to the verdict, and I echo DeSantis's view. However, even DeSantis
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  didn't really touched on but he didn't really focus on my primary issue here,
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  which again I think is remarkably similar, simple and very very obvious, very
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  clear cut, and should hit home with anybody of even remotely average intelligence.
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  That's why I'm so flummixed by why it is that seemingly almost nobody in the
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  media and even relatively few people online are understanding where I'm going with this,
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  which is the entire process. I don't care about the facts and the law
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  when the process itself is inherently illegitimate because of the timing and the venue.
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  You and when I went on News Nation with Dan Abrams the night before the
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  verdict, this would have been Wednesday evening, I was asked to come on
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  to talk about what we can discern about the jury based upon the surveys that
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  they filled out regarding their media consumption diet, in other words, what media
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  outlets they use to get their news. And you know, I thought it
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  was a smart move for Dan Abrams to ask me on, and this happens
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  about every other week. He knows that this subject is right in my wheelhouse,
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  and he had me on with two other lawyers. I'm I'm a lawyer,
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  but he's a lawyer, and he had two other lawyers with him.
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  And you know, frankly, this should have just been me and Dad,
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  because we would have had more time to get into this and probably would have
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  gotten to the bottom of this issue. And I would have at least have
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  a better understanding as to why even Dan Abrams, who I consider to be
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  exceedingly smart, very very fair and the best that there is in the media
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  business when it comes to breaking down this kind of stuff, why even Dan
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  objected to me when I tried to make this very point, which is this
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  is a due process problem. And at first I don't only think Dan understood
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  what or at least he misunderstood what I was trying to say. So what
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  I'm going to do here is I'm going to play the several minute long clip
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  where from the point where Dan introduces me, and for context, it should
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  be pointed out that Dan was really fixated on the fact that this one juror
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  apparently a male who got his news primarily from both x or Twitter and truth
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  Social, which on paper, I agree, certainly sounds like a conservative,
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  certainly sounds like a potential Trump supporter, and someone who could theoretically hold out
• 18:04
  for dear life for a hung jury. Well, as you're about to hear
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  in this clip, I was suspicious of that, skeptical of that, and
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  it turns out I was right, and Dan, who thought it was going
• 18:18
  to be a hung jury, I think more strongly than I did, turned
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  out to be wrong. Not that I thought that Dan's view of this was
• 18:23
  illogical, because it made some sense, But as you're about to hear,
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  I wanted to focus on the other eleven. I mean, you know,
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  I do think there's an inherent bias that you're about to hear where there's all
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  this concern about the guy who got his news from True Social, But what
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  about the people that were getting their news from MSNBC and CNN and the New
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  York Times. I mean almost everybody was a New York Times reader. And
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  to me, that's just as concerning from the other perspective, from a fairness
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  standpoint as somebody who might have gotten their news solely from True Social which is
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  at least was partially owned I don't even know who owns it now by Donald
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  Trump. And so, you know, that seemed to be a bit of
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  hypocrisy to me. What about the other eleven So, without going too deeply
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  into it, here is the clip, and then I'll further explain or ask
• 19:22
  questions about why it is that my very simple and basic point doesn't seem to
• 19:27
  be hitting home even when I'm talking to three lawyers. And maybe it's because
• 19:33
  they're three lawyers and they they they're too close to the situation to be able
• 19:37
  to see the forest through the trees. But here's what it sounded like on
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  News Nation Television with Dan Abrams on Wednesday night before the Trump verdict, part
• 19:48
  of Illinona Aton Goleman and joining us as John Ziegler, conservative commentator in the
• 19:52
  post of the Death of Journalism podcast. Right, John, you know conservatives
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  and media as well as anyone. You tell me someone gets their news from
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  truth social is there any chance that that person's going to convict? Very little?
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  But we have some unique circumstances here, Dan, because let's pretend that
• 20:11
  your thesis is correct, and I think there's a very good chance that it
• 20:14
  is. And I think it's a damning indictment of the modern news media that
• 20:17
  we can tell where people are going to write in a trial based upon their
• 20:21
  media diet. Because the media business model is so broken. Everyone preaches to
• 20:25
  their own choir. But let's pretend you're right about this one particular jerm.
• 20:29
  We have a eleven on one situation, and we have a judge that's going
• 20:33
  to be deeply invested in they're not being a mistrial for a lot of different
• 20:37
  reasons. That is a lot of pressure to put on one person to hold
• 20:41
  the fort against eleven other jurors. I'm a believa. I believe in your
• 20:47
  home jury theory, Dan, if there were two or three people to hold
• 20:51
  each other's hands and be able to withstand that kind of pressure. Trump voters
• 20:56
  are well known for being very passionate and very cult like. There's a chance
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  answer as one person holds out. But that's going to be against a lot
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  of human nature and a lot of pressure in this very unique case. Bernardo,
• 21:07
  you've been in the courtroom. There are a lot of reports that the
• 21:10
  Trump team is convinced that they have at least one, if not more of
• 21:14
  the jurors who are sort of siding with them, and how they were reacting
• 21:18
  to Todd Blanche's the defense attorney's closing argument. And I think that one juror
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  is our truth social person who watches the news on truth Social, because that's
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  a big concern. I just don't know how the prosecution let that slide.
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  I mean it was early on during jury selection, so you have the peremptory
• 21:33
  challenges, So I don't know why you ain't just use a parremptory challenge on
• 21:38
  number two because truth Social how much truth is well. But regardless, that's
• 21:44
  Trump's platform. You get your news from there. I mean not even John
• 21:48
  Ziegler gets his news from truth Social the way hold on, But Dan,
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  can we at least talk about the element in the room here. I'm in
• 21:56
  a very weird spot because, as you know, I loath Trump, but
• 21:59
  I am very concerned about the due process elements of this and the perverse incentives
• 22:03
  that we have created for these jurors that the media is completely ignoring. These
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  jurors have the power to impact a presidential election. Every single poll shows that
• 22:15
  their vote will impact wins. I don't believe, not possibly. I don't
• 22:19
  believe those plays. John. I don't believe those polls for a second.
• 22:22
  The people who say, oh, but if there's a conviction in one of
• 22:26
  the Trump trials, I'm more likely not to vote for him, they're not
• 22:30
  talking about this case. And I don't even believe them if they say that
• 22:33
  they are the notion that, oh, a conviction in the hush money case,
• 22:37
  this case has been a win for Donald Trump, no matter what that's
• 22:41
  But that's still a violation of due process. We're process issue. It's a
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  media issue. No, no, no, we're giving an incentive to jurors
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  who may think that their decision in this trial will impact a presidential election.
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  Again, we're not giving them anything that would be then deciding that instructions that
• 23:07
  they're supposed to decide the case on the law and the facts that they get
• 23:10
  in the in the courtroom. And we're all saying, oh, that's a
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  legal fiction. They don't really do that, and my experienced jurors actually try
• 23:17
  to do that. I don't have any idea the case is like this time
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  a reason to keep this guy on the jury. They have pemptory, so
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  there must be some reason to believe that this guy could be fair and partial.
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  And that's for the Georgia people. They're not jurors, they're voters.
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  They're just saying they weren't in the courtroom, right, they cannot possibly follow
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  the instruction to decide the case based on what they heard in the courtroom,
• 23:48
  based on the evidence and the law, because they weren't in the courtroom to
• 23:51
  begin with. But on this, on this issue, on with John,
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  this case is different than any other case. I think that the rules are
• 23:57
  thrown out. With regard to that, I agree with you Aton that in
• 24:02
  most high profile cases, the jurors do follow the law way more than most
• 24:06
  people think. I think in this case. I mean, there was a
• 24:08
  hung jury in one of Steve Bannon's co defendants in the fraud case over Build
• 24:14
  the Wall, where one juror said, I said, witch hunt. I'm
• 24:18
  not deliberating. It's done, it's over. And you know, look this
• 24:22
  is Manhattan, so there's less of a chance of that, but we shall
• 24:26
  see. Now. If you saw the video of that appearance, and I
• 24:30
  posted it on my Twitter feed a couple different times, so if you follow
• 24:34
  me on Twitter you can pretty easily find it, or if you go to
• 24:37
  the YouTube page for Dan and Abrams Live, you can also find it there.
• 24:45
  I am basically going apoplectic. You know, my facial expressions are all
• 24:48
  over the place. I am completely stunned that Dan is not understanding or seemingly
• 24:56
  not fully grasping my point, and at end I am shaking my head furiously
• 25:03
  hoping that Dan will come back to me so that I can expand upon this
• 25:10
  I think very very important point. And you may have been able to discern
• 25:15
  and pick up in the audio there that when one of the lawyers was answering
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  I think very naively about how we can trust jury's to do the right thing.
• 25:27
  I was asking about the O. J. Simpson case, in which
• 25:30
  Dan obviously is exceedingly aware of because that was a huge moment in his career.
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  And I think that Dan, even though he told me to back off,
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  I think Dan heard me and understood my point, because he then agrees
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  with me there at the end, saying he's with John. I'm with John
• 25:48
  on the issue of jurors in high profile cases. Interestingly, he thought they
• 25:52
  were going to go in the other direction. I think he thought there were
• 25:56
  going to be a couple of Trump friendly jurrs who were just going to ignore
• 26:02
  everything else about the case and just decide, you know what, this is
• 26:04
  a witch hunt and I ain't convicting no matter what. I was more skeptical
• 26:10
  in that I was hoping because I thought that was the best outcome for the
• 26:12
  country, because I didn't think there should be a conviction. I didn't really
• 26:15
  think there should be an acquittal in this case either because I thought Trump actually
• 26:19
  had done wrong. I just don't think it was fair to do this in
• 26:22
  the middle of a presidential election in New York City. But I was really
• 26:30
  very, very frustrated by the fact that even Dan Abrams, like I have
• 26:36
  an enormous amount of respect for, is not understanding this very simple and clear
• 26:42
  cut concept that you cannot trust anything in this process because it is inherently ill
• 26:53
  legitimate, because it's in New York City, and because you're giving the jurors
• 27:00
  a perverse incentive to influence a presidential election. How this is not obvious to
• 27:07
  everybody is completely beyond me. I do not have an understanding as to why
• 27:15
  this is such a difficult idea to get people to grasp, and I've experienced
• 27:21
  it dozens and dozens of times on social media in the last couple of days
• 27:26
  as I've tried to emphasize this. I mean, there are people who have
• 27:29
  no idea what I'm saying. They have no concept. They just can't even
• 27:33
  they can't even begin to understand the significance of what I'm saying. It's it's
• 27:41
  like I'm speaking another language. And to me, this is as obvious as
• 27:45
  it could possibly be. And it's not like this is an unusual circumstance.
• 27:52
  This is just very dramatic, and it's basically on steroids. I mean,
• 27:56
  it is not unusual for even mid range, high profile cases to get numerous
• 28:06
  continuances and delays and to have a venue change, because inherently there are circumstances
• 28:15
  that would make due process and a fair trial impossible. Well, those situations,
• 28:22
  I guarantee you pale in comparison to this one, where there is never
• 28:29
  in the history of the country and maybe the world, been a situation where
• 28:34
  jurors had a stronger self interest and a more perverse self interest than in this
• 28:44
  circumstance because whether or not they were correct or not. And this is where
• 28:49
  I really was confused by Dan. Dan seemed to think, well, because
• 28:53
  he doesn't believe that a guilty verdict would necessarily harm Donald Trump, therefore,
• 29:00
  that couldn't be an incentive for jurors to convict him. And I was if
• 29:06
  you look at my face, I'm like, what what do you It's irrelevant.
• 29:10
  It doesn't matter what reality is, it's just what's in the jurors minds.
• 29:15
  And there has certainly been enough polling data and enough news media coverage and
• 29:18
  speculation about what would happen to Donald Trump's candidacy if he was convicted that a
• 29:27
  it would be natural for a juror to go, well, hell, I
• 29:32
  want Biden to win. I don't want Trump to win. And he certainly
• 29:34
  seems like he's guilty here, Let's throw the fucking book at him because that'll
• 29:37
  be great. And by the way, it doesn't even have to be conscious,
• 29:41
  it could be subconscious. So just the idea that you could incentivize perversely,
• 29:51
  these jurors in New York fucking City, with the idea that they could
• 29:56
  dramatically, in theory, lewins the presidential election in the direction they want,
• 30:03
  inherently invalidates the entire process. I don't care what the evidence is at that
• 30:11
  point, I don't care what the law is. There are so many conservative
• 30:17
  commentators that are focusing on the minutia of why the case wasn't legitimate, and
• 30:22
  they probably most of them have good points. Megan Kelly and Dan Abrams were
• 30:26
  arguing last night about this, and I had no idea who was really right
• 30:30
  and who was really wrong. It was one of the strongest disagreements I ever
• 30:34
  seen, certainly between the two of them, because I know them to be
• 30:37
  friends. But it all felt irrelevant to me. You're all missing the point
• 30:41
  that you're all missing the elephant in the in the room here. Nothing matters
• 30:48
  if the process is illegitimate, and it cannot be legitimate in New York City
• 30:55
  in the middle of a presidential election because of the perverse incentive structure sure that
• 31:00
  it provides for the jurors. And I've been thinking a lot about, Okay,
• 31:06
  what's the best analogy I can use? Maybe maybe I'm just not using
• 31:10
  the proper method here to convince people that I'm right, because I'm being stifled
• 31:17
  at almost every at every point here, I mean, I'm getting nowhere with
• 31:21
  what I think is a very obvious and very strong argument. And you know,
• 31:26
  there are obviously some people who will probably already agree with me the things.
• 31:30
  It's a very valid point. But it really struck me that when Dan
• 31:33
  Abrams wasn't completely or even partially really buying what I was selling. And the
• 31:41
  best analogy I can come up with is this that a legitimate guilty verdict has
• 31:48
  to be a lot like water. H two oh. Right, water.
• 31:53
  The components of a water molecule are H two oh. And if you don't
• 31:59
  have hyden and if you don't have oxygen, you ain't got water. Okay,
• 32:04
  So for there to be a legitimate guilty verdict, and for that it
• 32:09
  has got to be water. You know, that's the analogy here. It's
• 32:13
  just like water, it requires both hydrogen, which for this analogy, the
• 32:19
  hydrogen in a guilty verdict would be the facts and the law. And I'm
• 32:24
  willing to see, even though I think there's many many problems in this realm,
• 32:30
  but just for the sake of argument. I'm willing to see the facts
• 32:32
  in the law. Okay, fine, so this case has hydrogen, congratulations,
• 32:40
  but it also has to have oxygen for it to be water. And
• 32:44
  in this case, the oxygen is the due process. That the environment in
• 32:49
  which the facts and the law were presented were fair, that it was a
• 32:55
  fair process, it was a fair trial. And in this case, there
• 33:00
  ain't no oxygen. There are no oxygen atoms in this molecule. Therefore,
• 33:07
  you ain't got water. So I don't care what the facts in the law
• 33:12
  say in this case. Again, I want to make clear, I think
• 33:15
  there are very legitimate questions about the facts and the law, specially given the
• 33:20
  nature of the witnesses against Donald Trump. But I'm just for the sake of
• 33:23
  argument, this whole situation does not hold up. It does not become water
• 33:31
  because it doesn't have both the facts in the law and basic due process.
• 33:37
  It fails on basic due process, which is something that is understood to be
• 33:46
  a bedrock of the entire judicial system. Again, this is why we have
• 33:52
  continuances. If this case have been brought in twenty twenty one or twenty twenty
• 33:58
  two, I've been you know why, because the jurors would not have as
• 34:05
  nearly as much of a clear cut incentive structure to try to take out the
• 34:12
  Republican presidential nominee, at least in the minds of many voters by deeming them
• 34:17
  to be a convicted felon thirty four times over, because in twenty twenty one
• 34:24
  or twenty twenty two, the Republican Party would still have the ability to nominate
• 34:30
  somebody else. But that's not the case in late May of twenty twenty four.
• 34:37
  And when you add in the very liberal jurisdiction of New York City,
• 34:44
  then it becomes even more ridiculous because I've heard people on Twitter scold but zig
• 34:50
  the Trump lawyers had the ability to get rid of a few of these jurors
• 34:53
  they helped pick the jury, well, the jury pull was completely polluted against
• 34:59
  them. If if ninety five percent of the jury pool is liberal to begin
• 35:06
  with, then the best you can hope for statistically is to have one,
• 35:12
  maybe two Trump friendly jurors. I think the Trump team thought they had those,
• 35:19
  but they clearly didn't. And the way I looked at the profiles,
• 35:22
  I only saw the one jur number two that looked like you could theoretically be
• 35:28
  a Trump friendly juror, and as I said on Dan Abrams show, that's
• 35:31
  too much to ask. Now. I have no idea at this point whether
• 35:36
  or not that juror objected at all, or whether they caved immediately, or
• 35:39
  whether that maybe they thought Trump was guilty on all thirty four counts. But
• 35:45
  it's obvious that if they did put up any resistance, it was not nearly
• 35:50
  enough against the other eleven. Because that's a very very very difficult to ask,
• 35:55
  especially in this day and age, especially in a very very high profile
• 36:00
  case that takes balls of steel. And I don't care how much of a
• 36:07
  Maga cult member you are. Again, I'm just presuming that the conventional wisdom
• 36:10
  about that juror is correct. We have no way of knowing that at this
• 36:15
  moment as of this taping, but let's assume that it is. I am
• 36:17
  not surprised at all that one person standing up against the eleven would cave in
• 36:24
  fairly short order, which is what I was implying in that New Nation appearance
• 36:30
  with Dan Abrams, and I think I was obviously right about that. But
• 36:35
  you know, the reality here is that this this jury, they may have
• 36:39
  thought that they were doing the right thing. They may have thought they were
• 36:44
  acting in good faith. That doesn't matter either, because their incentive structure was
• 36:52
  still perverse and fundamentally flawed. And so, you know, without continuance,
• 37:00
  is either getting this beyond the election or bringing this trial before Trump was the
• 37:07
  nominee. And there might be people to say, well, John, doesn't
• 37:09
  that incentivize Trump or doesn't he benefit from being the nominee. Yeah, but
• 37:15
  you know what, that's the way the cookie crumbles. If you want to
• 37:16
  preserve your judicial system, this is the way you have to do things.
• 37:21
  I'm sorry, you know, once hes the nominee, as opposed to just
• 37:24
  running once hees the nominee, I'm sorry, you cannot have a fair trial,
• 37:30
  especially in a very liberal jurisdiction like New York City. So you either
• 37:38
  got to move this thing beyond the election, or at the very least you
• 37:44
  have to change venue, which also happens all the time. I mean in
• 37:49
  much less high profile cases, much less politically charged cases, you have dramatic
• 37:55
  venue changes because it's understood that somebody cannot get a fair trial in that jurisdiction
• 38:04
  because of circumstances that you know are beyond the scope or the trial, and
• 38:09
  that is obviously the case here. It could not be more clear. And
• 38:14
  yet nobody in the news media except me that I'm aware of, has really
• 38:20
  even tried to make this point. And if you have a theory as to
• 38:24
  why this doesn't resonate nearly as much as I think that it should, I
• 38:29
  would love to hear it, you know, post it on the on the
• 38:31
  app message board or in response to this episode. I would be very,
• 38:36
  very curious. I'm sincerely curious, because I am totally baffled. I do
• 38:42
  not get it now. As far as what the impact of this thirty four
• 38:47
  account guilty verdict is going to be, I am in the camp of I
• 38:54
  don't know. I you know, I'm hardly bashful when it comes to predicting
• 39:00
  things that I feel confident about. I don't have a strong level of confidence
• 39:06
  in what the immediate political reaction is going to be to this verdict. If
• 39:13
  I had a gun to my head, I would say that, in all
• 39:16
  likelihood, we're not going to see much change. Now. I know that
• 39:21
  there are Trump fans out there that are saying, my god, this is
• 39:25
  the best thing that's ever happened to the Trump campaign. He's raising millions and
• 39:30
  millions of dollars from people who are pissed off, which appears to be true.
• 39:34
  Who knows. We don't have any numbers as of this moment, but
• 39:37
  that is a narrative that's clearly out there, and I believe it because I'm
• 39:40
  seeing a lot of anger on social media and they are people posting the amounts
• 39:44
  of money that they have donated to Trump's campaign because of this verdict that they
• 39:50
  believe to be illegitimate. I get all that I also see, and this
• 39:54
  is Twitter, and so it's very dangerous to evaluate too much on Twitter,
• 39:59
  but you know, it does work a little bit like a focus group,
• 40:02
  and in real time. I've had a pretty unique situation here because both before
• 40:09
  and after the verdict, the guilty verdict against Trump, I put out two
• 40:15
  tweets where I expressed that I loathe Trump, but I hate what's happening with
• 40:22
  regard to this trial. And then after the verdict they said that this was
• 40:25
  an abomination in a dark day for America. And for whatever reason, both
• 40:30
  of these tweets, for me at least, went viral. One of them
• 40:36
  had a last check, like half a million impressions or views, as they
• 40:40
  call it, although it's not really views on Twitter, and the other one
• 40:45
  had well over two hundred thousand. I think it was like almost three hundred
• 40:49
  thousand, So basically a total of three quarters of a million impressions or views
• 40:54
  for these two tweets that were basically the same. Now, for me,
• 40:59
  that's a lot of impressions for just two tweets because I only have like sixty
• 41:02
  one thousand followers on Twitter, and I'm toxic among the celebrity class on both
• 41:07
  the left and the right, so no one ever shares my tweets. So
• 41:10
  for something that I do to get that much traction is unusual. And what
• 41:17
  was interesting about this was not just that these tweets, you know, were
• 41:22
  seen by a lot of people, was the reaction to them. And I
• 41:29
  would say that there was a very strong positive reaction from people saying yeah,
• 41:34
  I'm in the same boat and adding that now I'm going to vote for Trump.
• 41:39
  Now that's always very dangerous. Are people looking for attention? Will they
• 41:44
  change their minds? Who knows? But an adotally, there was a lot
• 41:50
  of people in that camp who were proactively responding to my tweets saying, you
• 41:57
  know what, I don't like Trump, wasn't going to vote for him.
• 42:00
  But now this has gone too far, and I'm a Trump supporter for this
• 42:04
  election, I'm going to hold my nose. That's, you know, my
• 42:06
  paraphrase of what I would perceive to be dozens and dozens of people, maybe
• 42:12
  more than that, responding to each of these tweets. Now, of course,
• 42:15
  there were a lot of other people that were Some were upset with me
• 42:20
  for saying I hate Trump. Those were the Trump cult members. And then
• 42:24
  there are other people who are completely baffled as to how I could possibly hate
• 42:29
  Trump and hate the verdict because they're celebrating. I mean, my god,
• 42:32
  for these liberals, this is like a national holiday. They've been waiting for
• 42:37
  this for many, many years, and they are completely blinded. And when
• 42:42
  I respond, and I tried to respond to as many of these people as
• 42:45
  I could, and I finally just decided, you know what, this isn't
• 42:46
  worth it because no one's listening. But I tried to respond dozens of times
• 42:52
  when asked, well why, with basically the answer I just gave on this
• 42:57
  podcast, which is because it's an inherently unfair process to provide jurors with the
• 43:05
  self interest to convict somebody so they can influence a presidential election. This isn't
• 43:09
  difficult, people, this is very obvious. This is rudimentary stuff. And
• 43:16
  yet you know, the liberals were on Twitter were having none of it.
• 43:21
  I mean none of it. That was I was, you know, might
• 43:22
  as well have been saying the two plus two equals five to them. They
• 43:25
  just could not make that work in their brains. And you know a lot
• 43:30
  of them were trying to pretend that I was being insulting to the jurors.
• 43:32
  I'm not being insulting to the jurors. I'm just being aware of the nature
• 43:37
  of humanity. I mean, that's just reality. Again, were you alive
• 43:43
  during the O. J. Simpson case. The O. J. Simpson
• 43:45
  jurors decided to let a obvious killer of two people go free because they wanted
• 43:53
  to send a political message about Rodney King or the LAPD. That's not even
• 44:00
  anything close to the same thing as having an influence over a presidential election.
• 44:05
  That's on the razor's edge right now. Come on, people, If the
• 44:08
  OJ Jerry was willing to do it for really small potatoes, why the hell
• 44:15
  would this jury not be willing to do it to determine who's going to win
• 44:19
  a presidential election? Now? Is Dan Abrams right that it's really not gonna
• 44:27
  cause Donald Trump to lose the election and may in fact theorectally help Donald Trump.
• 44:32
  I think that that's possible, and I just outlined how anecdotally my experience
• 44:38
  on Twitter is seemingly consistent with that. But I will also say that there
• 44:45
  is a whole population of people that are not on social media, that have
• 44:51
  not been following this trial closely, that still only really know or what they
• 44:55
  think they know about this trial from mainstream news media coverage. They are not
• 45:00
  going to be merely as suspicious or cynical about the verdict, and they are
• 45:07
  going to be influenced by the fact that Trump is now called a convicted felon
• 45:12
  that is going to have influence over them. You might call these the nicky
• 45:16
  Haley voters, people that should be on Trump's side but clearly don't like him.
• 45:22
  And we're on the fence as to do I vote for Trump, do
• 45:25
  I vote for Biden, do I don't vote for j RFK, or do
• 45:29
  I vote for nobody? And I find it hard to believe that in that
• 45:34
  group of people you're going to see a rally around Trump effect. On Twitter,
• 45:37
  You're going to see a rally around Trump effect because those are people that
• 45:42
  are news junkies. They're passionate about this, even if they don't like Trump.
• 45:47
  They are aware of just what a load of garbage this whole thing was,
• 45:52
  and they're not influenced by the mainstream news media. But that is a
• 45:58
  smaller population. Think then the group of people that I'm referring to, so
• 46:02
  called swing voters, suburban moms, what have you. So my guess is
• 46:08
  that these two groups are gonna even each other out. I know that sounds
• 46:14
  like a cop out, but my guess is, in the next week or
• 46:17
  so, we're going to see a ton of polling, because every polling outlet
• 46:21
  is going to be like, Okay, here we go. Let's let's find
• 46:23
  out what the impact of the convictions were. And you're probably going to see
• 46:31
  one outlier on one side showing Trump improving, and you're going to see another
• 46:36
  outlier that gets a whole bunch of attention on the left showing that Trump's collapsing,
• 46:40
  and it's probably all going to even out. I think you're going to
• 46:45
  see some disparity. I think you're going to see some short term volatility and
• 46:51
  maybe some chaos, but I think in a couple of weeks time, we're
• 46:55
  going to find that very little, if anything, has changed. That's that's
• 47:00
  my guess, that's my educated guess that I think it's all going to come
• 47:05
  back to the mean now. Because this is such a close election, any
• 47:09
  kind of movement at all is inherently significant. And I've been saying for many,
• 47:15
  many months that I'm suspicious about the narrative that Trump is going to win
• 47:21
  Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, or Michigan, which he has to win at least one
• 47:23
  of those in order to win the election outright. And you know, this
• 47:29
  could be the difference between Trump squeezing out one of those states or losing all
• 47:35
  three of them by you know, a point or two that could easily make
• 47:38
  that difference. And I think we'll have some better idea about the reality of
• 47:44
  that in the next couple of weeks. But buckle up your seatbelts. They're
• 47:47
  probably going to see polling data all over the place for the next week or
• 47:52
  so. When you know, it'll take several days for these pulling outlets to
• 47:55
  go into the field over this weekend to find out what the reaction is to
• 48:00
  the verdict, and whether or not people's minds have changed. But my guess
• 48:04
  is in a couple of weeks, when we're talking about this on the podcast,
• 48:07
  we're going to basically be in essentially the same place. You may see
• 48:13
  some polls where Trump has improved. You may see some polls also simultaneously where
• 48:17
  he has lost some support. I asked this question on my own Twitter account,
• 48:23
  and I think the response is worthy of mentioned, so I'll do that
• 48:29
  now. I ask the question, what impact does Trump getting convicted on all
• 48:34
  accounts have on the presidential election? And I gave four options, and there
• 48:37
  were well over one thousand votes as of this taping, and so that's a
• 48:45
  decent enough sample size. Now, granted, you know, the people that
• 48:47
  are following me on Twitter are generally conservative, but they're also generally not Trump
• 48:53
  fans, and so you know this is not going to be indicative of the
• 49:00
  general population view. But I also think I have some pretty smart followers on
• 49:05
  Twitter, way smarter than average, and so they're giving their opinion about what's
• 49:08
  going to happen, not necessarily their own experience, whether not they're more likely
• 49:14
  or less likely to vote for Trump, but they're giving their analysis in their
• 49:19
  response, and the four possible responses were no real impact in the long run,
• 49:25
  it actually helps Trump's chances, it hurts his chances, it ends his
• 49:31
  chances. And of those four options, the one that was by far the
• 49:37
  most popular with almost sixty percent of the vote of over one thousand votes,
• 49:42
  was it helps his chances. It helps Trump's chances of winning sixty percent.
• 49:50
  Twenty percent said no real impact, and so the rest about twenty percent said
• 49:57
  it either hurts his chances. That was actually sixteen percent, and then only
• 50:01
  four percent said it ends as chances, So only twenty percent think that this
• 50:07
  is going to harm Trump. Eighty percent believe it's either going to help him
• 50:13
  or have no real impact. And I think if you're the Trump team,
• 50:15
  you'd probably take no real impact to this point, because one you're perceived as
• 50:22
  winning. I think it's a dead heat from an electoral college perspective, with
• 50:25
  maybe Biden having a slight advantage because I think he's likely to win the second
• 50:30
  congressional district in Nebraska based upon Steve Cortes's most recent polling that just got completed
• 50:37
  there, So I would make Biden a tiny tiny favorite. But if you're
• 50:42
  the Trump team, you're like, we'll take no real impact because if we
• 50:45
  can survive thirty four felony convictions, then basically that we know that our support
• 50:53
  isn't going anywhere. We can't go below where we currently are. If we
• 50:58
  can withstand being convicted thirty four times on felonies, then you know, that's
• 51:02
  a pretty good sign. And so I think that's the most likely scenario.
• 51:08
  Obviously, I'll keep an eye on this, I'll acknowledge if I'm right or
• 51:12
  wrong on this, and we'll have more updates on this, I'm sure in
• 51:15
  the coming episodes of the podcast. For the record, I do want to
• 51:20
  play Trump's response to the verdict, which, you know, look, I
• 51:25
  am very critical of Donald Trump as a human being. He has many many
• 51:29
  flaws. He has a few good qualities, and I think one of his
• 51:35
  better qualities came out in this response. Not necessarily from the substance of it,
• 51:40
  but he got out in front of the cameras with no notes, and
• 51:45
  he was not angry. I mean, he was clearly perterb but you know
• 51:51
  he was he kept himself in check. He did not let his emotions get
• 51:55
  the better of him. He was short, he was to the point.
• 52:00
  What I have said things differently, I'm sure I would have, but for
• 52:05
  him and his audience, I think he hit all the right notes, and
• 52:08
  his tone under the circumstances was remarkably good. And so I think he deserves
• 52:16
  some credit for that. And here's what that sounded like. Donald Trump's reaction
• 52:21
  to the verdict. This was a disgrace. This was a rigged trial by
• 52:27
  a conflicted judge who was corrupted. It's a rigged trial, a disgrace.
• 52:34
  They wouldn't give us a venue change. We were at five percent or six
• 52:38
  percent in this district, in this area. This was a rigged, disgraceful
• 52:45
  trial. That the real verdict is going to be November fifth by the people.
• 52:52
  And they know what happened here, and everybody knows what happened here.
• 52:55
  You have a still respect DA and a whole thing. We didn't do a
• 53:00
  thing wrong. I'm a very innocent man, and it's okay. I'm fighting
• 53:07
  for our country. I'm fighting for our constitution. Our whole country is being
• 53:10
  rigged right now. This was done by the Biden administration in order to wound
• 53:16
  or hurt an opponent, A political opponent and I think it's just a disgrace,
• 53:22
  and we'll keep fighting. We'll fight till the end, and we'll win
• 53:27
  because our country's gone to hell. We don't have the same country anymore.
• 53:30
  We have a divided mess where nation to decline, serious decline. Millions and
• 53:36
  millions of people pouring into our country right now from prisons and from mental institutions,
• 53:43
  terrorists, and they're taking over our country. We have a country that's
• 53:47
  in big trouble. But this was a rigged decision right from day one,
• 53:52
  with a conflicted judges should have never been allowed to try this case. Never
• 53:57
  and we will fight for our constitution. This is log from over, Thank
• 54:00
  you very much. Now, it should be said that for the most part,
• 54:05
  the news networks did show Trump's response in its entirety, although that was
• 54:09
  when it was live. Then later on they would chop it up into little
• 54:14
  clips, which I thought was not really fair because it wasn't a very long
• 54:17
  response, and considering all the negative media attention that this whole case has created
• 54:24
  for Trump, you would think he would at least deserve in a fair media
• 54:29
  world, you know, a minute and a half or two minutes to respond
• 54:32
  without being edited by the news media, but we can't do that in the
• 54:37
  modern era of the death of journalism. But again, I think that the
• 54:42
  Trump deserves at least a little bit of credit for keeping his anger and emotions
• 54:46
  in check and being somewhat substantive, although and really, you know, from
• 54:52
  his standpoint, rather strong in his response to the verdicts Joe Biden president and
• 55:00
  Biden did not give a speech, as had been rumored or reported or expected.
• 55:07
  Now it's a lot of possible reasons for why that decision was made.
• 55:12
  I actually think that the Biden team got lucky that they decided not to do
• 55:16
  this. You know, maybe they couldn't wake Joe up from a nap fast
• 55:21
  enough to get him to the White House to do this. But you know,
• 55:24
  for whatever reason Biden decided not to or his team decided not to have
• 55:31
  him speak from the White House in response to this verdict. I think that
• 55:36
  was a good move politically, especially after the debacle that occurred with Robert de
• 55:42
  Niro showing up just outside of Trump's trial and what I thought was a clear
• 55:45
  case of jury tampering and really an embarrassing situation where the Biden team looked very
• 55:52
  much like one it was trying to influence the jury. And two, it
• 55:55
  was trying to take advantage of this situation where an obviously Democrat liberal prosecutor with
• 56:04
  a very liberal judge and a very liberal jury. We're basically doing their dirty
• 56:08
  work for them by trying to get a situation that the Biden team clearly wants,
• 56:13
  which is the ability to call their opponent a convicted felon time and time
• 56:19
  and time again. And I guarantee you we're going to see that, you
• 56:22
  know, in the debate at the end of June. I mean, it's
• 56:25
  going to probably be a drinking game how many times Joe Biden refers to Donald
• 56:30
  Trump as a convicted felon. And you know, as far as what's going
• 56:34
  to happen with Trump, it should be pointed out that his sentencing isn't un
• 56:37
  till July eleventh. I think a lot of people are still under the impression
• 56:43
  that Trump is likely to go to jail or house arrest or something like that.
• 56:49
  The legal experts I'm watching, and this is not on Fox News channel,
• 56:53
  this is this is on non partisan news outlets, are saying that that
• 56:58
  would be basically on for this level of conviction. These are very low felonies.
• 57:05
  Trump has no prior record, there's no hint that he could be a
• 57:08
  threat to society or any sort of threat at all, and so it would
• 57:15
  be absolutely absurd. Of course, we're living in an absurd world. If
• 57:20
  Trump got sentenced to actual jail or prison time, I would like to believe
• 57:25
  that that's going to hold. My sense is that there's going to be a
• 57:30
  lot of liberals that are very disappointed when after sentencing Trump walks out of there
• 57:36
  and very little, if anything, has changed about his life. And assuming
• 57:40
  that that is actually the case, I think that that's when this whole thing
• 57:45
  starts to turn in Trump's direction, because he's going to go from sentencing where
• 57:51
  he walks out and he's going to go almost directly right into the Republican National
• 57:54
  Convention where he's the Republican presidential nominee and he's core and just from an imaging
• 58:01
  standpoint, I think that could work very very well for him. You know,
• 58:07
  they're going to be able to call him a convicted felon, but it's
• 58:09
  not going to really look like anything has changed in his life. It's not
• 58:15
  like we're going to see him in handcuffs or behind bars or he's restricted to
• 58:21
  Trump Tower or something like that. I mean, I guess that's theoretically possible,
• 58:24
  given the nature of this judge, But that would be in a weird
• 58:29
  way that might actually help Trump even more if it's very very clear that this
• 58:34
  is justice being meted out solely because he's the Republican presidential nominee. I mean,
• 58:42
  the lawyers I have seen on this are very very clear that this would
• 58:45
  be unheard of to put somebody in prison under these circumstances. So, but
• 58:52
  again, all bets are off given the nature of this particular case and Trump.
• 58:57
  But I do think that the fact that this jury convicted on all counts,
• 59:01
  combined with the timing of getting the heck out of Dodge on Thursday night,
• 59:07
  really does go to this narrative that this was not a serious jury,
• 59:12
  that this was not a fair jury. If this jury was even trying to
• 59:15
  be fair, they would have found him not guilty on at least a few
• 59:21
  of the verdicts, just to show that they had some semblance of credibility,
• 59:24
  that they they that they were being bending over backwards to be fair. I
• 59:29
  don't even know why they didn't. They didn't do that. That to me
• 59:31
  shows that this was a bloodthirsty partisan jury, because you would think there'd be
• 59:38
  somebody in there would go, are we sure we want to convict them on
• 59:42
  all counts? The only think that's going to look really bad. I mean,
• 59:45
  maybe not to say that out loud, but at least think that.
• 59:49
  But nobody was even willing to think that, and everyone just wanted to get
• 59:52
  this thing done at the end of business on Thursday so they could be done
• 59:57
  with this and then you know, probably he'd end up a few of them
• 1:00:00
  doing their media interviews and they'll get there fifteen minutes of fame. So I
• 1:00:06
  think that the unanimous verdict actually kind of helps Trump. I think the fact
• 1:00:10
  that it's a New York City jury helps Trump. I think the fact that
• 1:00:14
  he's not going to go to prison in all likelihood, you know, is
• 1:00:17
  probably going to help Trump. And I think having the sentencing right before the
• 1:00:22
  GOP convention could be fortuitous for Trump. But we'll see again what the political
• 1:00:28
  impact of all this is. And as I said, Biden did not make
• 1:00:31
  a speech about this, but he did make a speech just before the day
• 1:00:37
  before that did create a bit of interesting reaction, and it had a media
• 1:00:43
  element to it. And I'm referring to a speech that President Biden gave at
• 1:00:49
  a Philadelphia high school, a school that is almost entirely black, and that's
• 1:00:54
  why he went there one because he was insured to getting a crowd, because
• 1:01:00
  the students were forced to watch Joe Biden, the President the United States.
• 1:01:05
  It was you know, they couldn't even fill the gymnasium at this high school
• 1:01:08
  in Philadelphia. And that's what the students and the faculty, I'm sure,
• 1:01:13
  being forced to be there, which is interesting. But this was yet another
• 1:01:17
  example of Joe Biden playing the race card, and the Biden team literally scolded
• 1:01:25
  the mainstream news media or their version of the mainstream news media their allies in
• 1:01:30
  the media, for not giving the speech enough coverage. This is astonishing and
• 1:01:37
  very very telling about the modern nature of the news media and how the Biden
• 1:01:42
  team sees these media outlets as being on their team. This is from Fox
• 1:01:46
  News Channel, which obviously is not on the Biden team. They had a
• 1:01:50
  headline Biden campaign scolds MSNBC, CNN for covering Trump trial overquote unquote black voters
• 1:02:00
  for Biden Harris Rally. A campaign spokesperson complained about coverage for a trial that
• 1:02:08
  impacts one person, Trump, which of course is hilarious because it doesn't just
• 1:02:15
  impact one person, the Trump trial, it could impact the entire presidential election.
• 1:02:21
  But I digress back to Fox News Channel. President Biden's re election campaign
• 1:02:25
  scold an, MSNBC and CNN on Wednesday for ignoring a quote unquote black voters
• 1:02:31
  for Biden Harris rally in Philadelphia because they were too busy covering the historic New
• 1:02:37
  York versus Trump trial. During a rally that occurred during the first day of
• 1:02:44
  jury deliberations in former President Trump's New York criminal trial, Biden promised to nominate
• 1:02:51
  progressives to the Supreme Court if he wins a second term. While Trump's historic
• 1:02:54
  trial has dominated the news cycle for weeks, at least one Biden camp campaign
• 1:03:00
  staffer felt MSNBC and CNN should have cut away to show the current president's remarks.
• 1:03:07
  Quote the president just spoke to approximately one thousand mostly black voters. What
• 1:03:12
  the hell does that? What difference does that make? So in other words,
• 1:03:15
  it's more newsworthy because he's speaking to mostly black voters in Philadelphia. Although
• 1:03:22
  I doubt you know. This is a high school, so I don't even
• 1:03:24
  know how that works. But the spokesperson said, the president just spoke to
• 1:03:29
  approximately one thousand, mostly black voters in Philadelphia about the massive stakes in this
• 1:03:34
  election. MSNBC, CNN and others did not show it. Instead, more
• 1:03:38
  coverage about a trial that impacts one person. This according to a Biden campaign
• 1:03:45
  spokesperson, as they posted on x formerly known as Twitter. Look, there's
• 1:03:51
  two things that are of significance here. This is how the Biden team views
• 1:03:57
  MSNBC and CNN. There are on our team, there are allies. What
• 1:04:03
  the hell are you guys doing showing the Trump trial when our guy is speaking
• 1:04:09
  to some black high school students. Now, could you imagine somebody saying to
• 1:04:14
  a medioality, how could you be ignoring our candidates speaking to a bunch of
• 1:04:17
  white students? That never happened. So I don't understand what the added significance
• 1:04:23
  is to the idea that these are black voters. As if, my god,
• 1:04:27
  can you believe that the president is speaking to black kids in Philadelphia?
• 1:04:33
  The newsworthiness of this, it's inherently it's inherently absurd, but not as absurd
• 1:04:40
  as what Biden actually said. And I have talked a lot in recent episodes
• 1:04:45
  about how desperate the Biden team obviously is when it comes to the issue of
• 1:04:49
  black voters and the issue of race, and they are playing the race card
• 1:04:54
  hard, and they are doing so with impunity, and they're getting away with
• 1:04:58
  it because the mainstream news media is looking the other way. They're allowing Joe
• 1:05:02
  Biden to lie his ass off in incredibly divisive fashion to Americans, America's black
• 1:05:13
  youth at Morehouse College and High School in Philadelphia, telling young black people a
• 1:05:18
  complete and total, bald faced lie about the nature of race relations in this
• 1:05:25
  country, dividing this, dividing us on purpose because he sees it as his
• 1:05:31
  only path to re election, because he sees that the polls are showing that
• 1:05:36
  Black voters, especially young black voters, are not planning to vote for him
• 1:05:41
  in the same numbers that they have in every election in recent times for the
• 1:05:46
  Democratic candidate. And it's despicable, it's disgusting, it's outrageous, and the
• 1:05:53
  media is allowing it to happen. And I want to play two clips that
• 1:05:57
  are particularly egregious deals with Biden trying to play the race card with regard to
• 1:06:05
  the January sixth protests, Slash riot, insurrection, whatever you want to call
• 1:06:12
  it, and somehow comparing that to what he refers to as the peaceful George
• 1:06:18
  Floyd protests. So he's constantly invoking George Floyd to try to scare black people,
• 1:06:26
  and now he's labeling Trump as a racist because there weren't many blacks on
• 1:06:31
  January sixth, and that must be the reason why Trump is supportive of those
• 1:06:38
  who were arrested and charged that day. Although if you're spend any time on
• 1:06:45
  Twitter, there are a lot of Republicans that are pissed at Trump because he's
• 1:06:47
  not been supportive enough in their minds of those who were arrested and tried and
• 1:06:55
  convicted on January sixth, And he didn't pardon those people nearly the same way
• 1:07:01
  that they would have liked. And that fact, that's partially why they want
• 1:07:05
  him to be back in the White House so he can pardon some of these
• 1:07:09
  people. That's about the only true thing that Biden's about to say in this
• 1:07:13
  clip that I'm about to play for you. But here here is Biden making
• 1:07:16
  this bizarre, I believe illegitimate comparison between the January sixth insurrection and then his
• 1:07:26
  depiction of the George Floyd protests is somehow being peaceful, which is just total
• 1:07:30
  garbage, and saying this in front of this black high school in Philadelphia.
• 1:07:38
  What do you think he would have done on January sixth if black Americans that
• 1:07:43
  storm to think about this, why they would have happened? If black Americans
• 1:07:47
  had stormed the capitol. I don't think he'd be talking about pardons. It's
• 1:07:54
  the same guy who wanted to tear gash you as you peacefully protested George Sloyd
• 1:08:00
  murder. The same guy who still calls the Central Park five. You know,
• 1:08:05
  that kind of stuff from Joe Biden actually makes me long for Barack Obama
• 1:08:11
  as president. I mean that with all sincerity. It makes me long for
• 1:08:16
  Barack Obama. Barack Obama very rarely as president pulled that kind of crap because
• 1:08:23
  he knew he didn't have to, because obviously he was perceived as the first
• 1:08:28
  black president, and so that gave him the ability to very often be pretty
• 1:08:34
  rational when it came was supposed in comparison to Joe Biden when it came to
• 1:08:39
  race relations, and he not all the time, but by and large tried
• 1:08:44
  his best to not be divisive, and at times to even be unifying.
• 1:08:49
  Now, I'm I'm not going to put rose colored glasses on the whole thing.
• 1:08:53
  There were a lot of things that Biden that Obama did that I disagreed
• 1:08:57
  with, but in comparison with Biden, I mean, it is way worse
• 1:09:00
  when it comes to race relations now under Biden. Biden is being purposely divisive,
• 1:09:08
  purposely lying about race and to and it really infuriates me to tell young
• 1:09:14
  black people who are still trying to figure out what the reality of this world
• 1:09:18
  is. To tell them that the world is stacked against them, that the
• 1:09:23
  deck is stacked against them, that the country is an inherently racist country against
• 1:09:28
  them, is so wrong and so corrupting and so debilitating to them because the
• 1:09:38
  opposite is the truth. First of all, it's not true. And you
• 1:09:42
  know, if these young black people understood the truth of the matter, the
• 1:09:47
  reality is things have never been better for them from a racial standpoint. That
• 1:09:55
  if they work hard and they study and they get good great and they graduate
• 1:10:00
  from the right school, their path is paved. As a black person,
• 1:10:06
  especially as a black female, they can do anything they want. And to
• 1:10:13
  create a completely and totally opposite perception for your own political self interest is outrageous.
• 1:10:21
  It's infuriating, but especially so when it's Joe fucking Biden, who has
• 1:10:29
  a terrible record on this issue going back decades and has completely reversed his history
• 1:10:35
  when it comes to the issue of race. He's lying now, constantly making
• 1:10:41
  shit up about what he did in the nineteen sixties. That are statements that
• 1:10:45
  are contradicted by his own statements contemporaneously and in the decades after that. I
• 1:10:50
  really don't know if he even really believes he was part of the civil rights
• 1:10:55
  movement, or as you just said it so often now that he actually does
• 1:10:59
  think that that happened. That goes into the whole dementia issue. Regardless,
• 1:11:03
  he's a lying sack of crap about this, and he's lying to young black
• 1:11:09
  kids for his own selfish purposes, dividing us along racial lines in a way
• 1:11:15
  that is already very vulnerable a place where we were already very vulnerable on the
• 1:11:23
  issue of race and fissures between blacks and whites and all sorts of different races.
• 1:11:29
  It is the exact opposite of what a president of the United States should
• 1:11:33
  do, and what I believe even Barack Obama tried to do most of the
• 1:11:39
  time. But Barack Obama wasn't desperate to try to hold together the black vote
• 1:11:42
  so we can get re elected. He had a stronghold on the black vote.
• 1:11:45
  Joe Biden does not have that. And boy, they are pulling out
• 1:11:49
  all the stops, all the stops, including paying people off. And the
• 1:11:56
  way they're paying people off is by defying the US Supreme Court on the issue
• 1:12:00
  of forgiving student debt. And Joe Biden bragged about that in this same speech.
• 1:12:09
  Can you imagine Can you imagine for a moment, Donald Trump bragging bragging
• 1:12:15
  about defying the US Supreme Court in order to buy votes, because that's what
• 1:12:21
  Joe Biden is doing. He is stealing my money and your money, and
• 1:12:28
  he is giving it to people who took out loans that they either cannot or
• 1:12:31
  are unwilling to pay off the student loan forgiveness, where the Supreme Court told
• 1:12:39
  him he could not do this. And in this same race baiting speech,
• 1:12:44
  he bragged about defying the Supreme Court and then turned it in to a racial
• 1:12:47
  issue again, basically bragging that he's paying off black people for their votes.
• 1:12:55
  Those are my words, but I think that's a rational interpretation of what Joe
• 1:12:59
  Biden and said right here. Supreme Court blocked me from you leaving student dead,
• 1:13:04
  but they didn't stop me so far. I relieve Student definitely. Five
• 1:13:10
  million America, A significant number are block barers, so you can chase your
• 1:13:15
  dream, start a family, buy your first home, start a business,
• 1:13:19
  and so much more. All this is just so infuriating, and I keep
• 1:13:25
  saying constantly it's as if Joe Biden is trying to get people like me to
• 1:13:30
  vote for Donald Trump. And when you combine the outrageous conviction which I fermently
• 1:13:39
  disagree with, and the way that Biden is playing the race card, and
• 1:13:44
  all the problems with the socialistic economic policies and the problems with international policy,
• 1:13:50
  and the fact that Biden's eighty one years old and there's no way he's going
• 1:13:54
  to make it through four years, and that Kamala Harris will definitely be president
• 1:13:59
  at some point a second Biden turn. When you combine all that together,
• 1:14:03
  oh my god, I actually have to consider voting for Donald Trump. I'm
• 1:14:08
  not there yet. I don't know that I'm ever going to get there,
• 1:14:10
  but I have no one else to vote for, especially now that the Libertarian
• 1:14:14
  Party has shipped the bed and gone with a leftist whack job, and so
• 1:14:19
  I don't know what I'm gonna do. I've never voted for Donald Trump in
• 1:14:21
  my life, never have thought I never would. I'm about as close as
• 1:14:27
  I have ever come previously. Again, I'm not there yet. There's a
• 1:14:31
  long way to go between now and November. But Biden's trying his best.
• 1:14:35
  Biden is really trying his best, and it's disgusting and it's very, very
• 1:14:41
  frustrating, especially on the issue of race. And in speaking of the issue
• 1:14:45
  of race, they're going after Trump on another front. And the media has
• 1:14:50
  enabled this story in all sorts of ways. The Drudge Report, especially the
• 1:14:54
  Drudge Report, which I've mentioned previously, which played a big role in Donald
• 1:14:58
  Trump winning the twenty sixteen election, might as well be paid for by the
• 1:15:01
  Biden reelection campaign. Now the Drudge Report, even before the verdict in the
• 1:15:08
  Trump trial was all over, this regurgitated story from The Apprentice, the TV
• 1:15:15
  show that Donald Trump used to host on NBC, where there is a producer
• 1:15:20
  that worked on The Apprentice who has now had their NDA expire their twenty year
• 1:15:27
  non disclosure agreement, and they are claiming in a story that again has been
• 1:15:33
  out there for like eight or nine years and never been proven that somehow,
• 1:15:41
  during one of the first seasons of The Apprentice, Donald Trump referred to a
• 1:15:46
  potential winner of the reality show with the N word. And you know that
• 1:15:56
  would not be taken very seriously today, especially since this story has been regurgitated
• 1:16:00
  time and time again, and Donald Trump has been you know, this is
• 1:16:04
  the third time he's run for president. It's not like he's never been vetted.
• 1:16:09
  I mean, the way the media has reacting to the story, you
• 1:16:12
  would think that this is the first time Donald Trump has ever run for president,
• 1:16:15
  but this is this is the third time that he's been the Republican presidential
• 1:16:19
  nominee. This story has been known for a long time. It's gotten multiple
• 1:16:26
  lives. But the reason or the excuse, I should say the excuse,
• 1:16:31
  not the reason. The excuse that the media uses for reporting on this is
• 1:16:35
  that this producer, who of course is a liberal. This producer is claiming
• 1:16:41
  that there's a tape of Trump using the N word in reference to this contestant
• 1:16:45
  as they were trying to figure out who should be the first winner. One
• 1:16:48
  of the first winners of The Apprentice and my reaction to that is, okay,
• 1:16:55
  so where's the tape. If the tape existed, we would have heard
• 1:17:00
  it by now. To me, you claim that there's a tape because you
• 1:17:06
  know that your word alone is not going to be enough to make this a
• 1:17:13
  news story. But if you claim that there's a tape, and then you
• 1:17:16
  allege that Trump is the beneficiary of a massive cover up involving Mark Burnett,
• 1:17:23
  the producer, and I guess NBC would be part of this massive cover up
• 1:17:28
  on behalf of Donald Trump over eight or nine years to prevent this blockbuster,
• 1:17:33
  explosive tape of him using the N word from ever getting out. But if
• 1:17:39
  you make that allegation, then the media can rationalize, oh, that there's
• 1:17:44
  something to this, there's a tape. There's no tape. I can guarantee,
• 1:17:48
  damn t you this. We ain't gonna hear a tape. I doubt
• 1:17:53
  that this ever happened, but if it did, if there had been a
• 1:17:58
  tape, we would know about it by now. There is no possible way
• 1:18:02
  for that tape to remain hidden. We know what happened with the Access Hollywood
• 1:18:06
  tape, so you know, and not at an NBC connection. So how
• 1:18:12
  is it that this tape somehow has never seen the light of day. This
• 1:18:16
  is a bullshit media story that would not be reported about Joe Biden under the
• 1:18:24
  same standards. And I've never felt that Donald Trump was a racist at all,
• 1:18:30
  And for him to use the N word in front of a whole bunch
• 1:18:32
  of Hollywood people, He's not that dumb. I don't believe that that happened.
• 1:18:39
  But I'm positive that there's no tape of it. At the very least,
• 1:18:43
  I'm positive we're never going to hear a tape of it, and that
• 1:18:45
  the media is just jumping all over this because they like the narrative. And
• 1:18:51
  this is a class example of hypocrisy, double standards, media malpractice, and
• 1:18:57
  where Biden gets the benefit of the out and Trump does not. One last
• 1:19:02
  story I want to share on this episode of the podcast, and it relates
• 1:19:05
  to something I talked about in episode number one hundred and fifty eight, which
• 1:19:10
  is the entire bogus sam Alito flag controversy and boil Boy. You know,
• 1:19:15
  I say all the time, if you keep your eyes open long enough,
• 1:19:19
  the truth is going to come out. And it didn't take long in this
• 1:19:24
  particular case because I talked at the end of the last episode of the podcast
• 1:19:29
  about how the Washington Post exposed themselves as a bunch of frauds because they had
• 1:19:34
  determined that the original Alito upside down flag story was a non event because it
• 1:19:41
  was not related to January sixth. It was related to a dispute his wife
• 1:19:45
  had with neighbors, and they made the right decision in not reporting it three
• 1:19:48
  years ago. But then when the New York Times came forward and reported it,
• 1:19:53
  they basically had to apologize for the fact that they sat on this story
• 1:19:57
  that had no right to be published because it was a a news story,
• 1:20:00
  because they had nothing to do with a Supreme Court justice, nothing, it
• 1:20:06
  was a dispute with a neighbor by his wife. Well, that really exposed
• 1:20:12
  what was really going on here, that this was all politics and not about
• 1:20:15
  reality. But there's an even maybe better example with regard to the second flag,
• 1:20:21
  the so called appeal to Heaven flag, which you know, the idea
• 1:20:26
  that somehow the appeal to Heaven flag that Alito was flying over his New Jersey
• 1:20:30
  shorehouse is somehow an appeal to or a support of the January sixth insurrection is
• 1:20:40
  just beyond absurd. I mean, if you look at the video of the
• 1:20:44
  of the so called insurrection, there are only a couple of different examples two
• 1:20:49
  maybe at most that I can tell for sure of the Appeal to Heaven flag
• 1:20:56
  even being used two out of dozens and dozens of different flags. But this
• 1:21:01
  flag goes back to the Revolutionary War, has ties to George Washington, It's
• 1:21:08
  on stamps, it's been on the state capitals, including Minnesota. And isn't
• 1:21:15
  this really interesting? We now know that it has been flying over San Francisco
• 1:21:24
  City Hall until the controversy hit, and then it was quietly removed because those
• 1:21:38
  at San Francisco City Hall, I'm sure one, didn't want to get accused
• 1:21:43
  of somehow, you know, flying a right wing flags and somehow the Appeal
• 1:21:48
  to Heaven flag has all of a sudden become associated with the January sixth insurrection.
• 1:21:53
  But they also didn't want to disrupt the media narrative, so they quietly
• 1:22:00
  took the flag down from San Francisco City Hall, where it has been flying
• 1:22:06
  since nineteen sixty four. So the San Francisco freaking City Hall probably the most
• 1:22:14
  liberal place on the planet, at least in the United States of America.
• 1:22:19
  San Francisco City Hall has been flying the Appeal to Heaven flagged since nineteen sixty
• 1:22:26
  four. Nobody ever associated that with any sort of right wing or Trump insurrection
• 1:22:31
  as causes, and then they quietly get rid of it. I found it
• 1:22:34
  interesting that it has been flying there since nineteen sixty four, because just to
• 1:22:39
  show you just how unbelievably dramatically California has changed in basically one lifetime, even
• 1:22:48
  less than one lifetime in the modern era, in nineteen sixty four in San
• 1:22:54
  Francisco, they held the Republican National Convention. This is one of the more
• 1:23:01
  startling political facts of my lifetime, although it's no technically just outside of my
• 1:23:08
  lifetime. I was born in nineteen sixty seven, but close enough that in
• 1:23:12
  nineteen sixty four. This is just an amazing trivia question from my perspective,
• 1:23:16
  and also shows you just how dramatically California has radically changed from being a very
• 1:23:23
  conservative state to an absurdly liberal one in a fairly small amount of time,
• 1:23:29
  a short period from a generational perspective. In nineteen sixty four, the Republican
• 1:23:36
  Party held its national convention in San Francisco and nominated very freaking Goldwater, arguably
• 1:23:45
  the most conservative candidate in the history of American presidential politics, and he was
• 1:23:54
  nominated in sanfrin fricking Cisco in nineteen sixty four, and that's when they put
• 1:24:00
  up the appeal to Heaven flag. I have no idea if it was connected
• 1:24:04
  at all to the nomination of Bury Goldwater, probably not, but San Francisco
• 1:24:10
  City Hall took it down all because they didn't want to create an embarrassment for
• 1:24:15
  this anti Alito media narrative that is completely and totally full of shit, and
• 1:24:20
  this further proves it. So that'll do it for this unscheduled edition of the
• 1:24:27
  Death of Journalism podcast. In all likelihood, barring another major news story,
• 1:24:32
  we will take our normal three or four day hiatus from now until a Wednesday
• 1:24:39
  morning or sometime around then, taping so effectively, this episode will replace the
• 1:24:44
  episode that normally would have happened at the beginning of next week, and then
• 1:24:48
  hopefully after that we'll be back on our normal schedule into the future. Thanks
• 1:24:53
  as always for listening, Thanks for being a subscriber. Please tell a friend
• 1:24:57
  about this podcast. This is the Death Ofjournalism and my name is John Ziggler.