Damning evidence implicates Trump and Epstein

26:31Like there will come a point where there are so few outlets left that have opted not to collaborate with the Trump administration that do you just write off every single outlet? No, they're resisting. It's just corporate media, right? There are lots of people are resisting and people within those media organizations are resisting. You see it over and over again. And what's what's going to have to happen is, look, listen, I don't expect my courage to come from businesses. I never did with tech industry. They all they're interested in is making money. Like, let's be clear. And I've said that. And oftentimes when people come to me, they're like, what are they doing?

27:02I'm like, they don't care. And they're like, yeah, but what are they doing? I go, they don't care. They don't care. They care about shareholder value. And they think, until I was actually stopped by one of the big owners of one of these companies who is not in control of the company, but is a big shareholder. And they said, this is actually bad for shareholders, actually, what they're doing, ultimately, and made a very cogent argument to me about how it's bad. in this case it was for Apple it was like bad for Apple to do this it's bad for their brand they look bad and then of course it culminated in Tim Cook's appearance at the Melania documentary not good for his brand maybe he's taking it for the team I don't know what's happening with him but it's not it's not good all the time the question is what do you do about it I think ultimately these businesses know there is no they will they will they will shift their tone when they need to appropriately.

27:54They'll say they're sorry and we'll have to move on. I just think their audiences are dwindling. Look at the numbers at CBS News. Look at the numbers very clearly and what's growing and what's not. You're growing. My audience is growing like crazy. I think we went up 40 % last year. It was crazy. And so we're small, but we're mighty, right? That kind of thing. And so you're seeing the other audiences like the Washington Post fall off the cliff, right? by the decisions Jeff Bezos made. And they can try. They should make a product people want to listen to. That's my feeling. It's like, that's how you do well.

28:29So I don't know if we need to do anything, unless it's sort of egregious collaboration. Like in the case of Carr, I'd like to see all his emails. I'd like to see. Hopefully, I'd like to see some discovery. He's abusing his public service job, which is really quite, it's pretty egregious. He was wearing that pin once, but Trump, The whole thing is just kind of silly what's happening with him. But just the fact that CBS is going along and not telling him to go pound sand, go ahead and sue us. Investigate us. Let's go. Let's have it. They want to buy that company. So that's why they're doing it. I know that your co-host, Scott, is going on an unsubscribe spree.

29:08What is the unsubscribe? I mean, what Scott is saying is, which I have said, is this is a coin operated presidency. So let's start to fuck with the coins, right? that start to have fewer coins for them to shove in this incredibly corrupt administration. So what is our responsibility as consumers right now if we see a CBS, for example, engage in the behavior that they're engaging in? Well, look, we went on our tour and someone always asked the CBS question. I said to these crowds of thousands of people, I said, a show of hands of who just watched CBS News. It was almost zero. So I was like, so what are we worried about here, right?

29:46really. The current editorial director is making a bad product worse. That's pretty much what's happening, it seems to me. So I'm not so concerned with that. I'm more concerned with how we react to reporting it and things like that. So for Resist and Unsubscribe, it gives you another tool. You can protest. You can vote. The most important of all of them is voting, of course, and getting to the polls and not letting them take your vote away. I just did a podcast on voter rights and election suppression. You protest with your feet by showing up places. You talk to your representatives. You pressure them.

30:27But one of the ways, and Scott has, I think, correctly and quite elegantly pointed out, just stop using their shit. Everyone doesn't have to do the same thing. I think one of the problems with some of these protests is either they're too short, which is a day. It doesn't have an effect. Or people don't want to go all the way. So don't. Just do a little bit. I got rid of a bunch of Apple stuff. I had Apple Games. I had Apple One, a bunch of stuff. I didn't get my iPhone. And you don't have to judge people. Just do whatever part. But you can do significant damage by just getting rid of, I don't know, pick a streamer.

31:07What is Paramount Plus? Get rid of Paramount Plus. Just get rid of it. You don't like what they're doing to Stephen Gobert, get rid of Paramount Plus. Watch Steven on YouTube, right? If you don't like what Google's doing, don't want, no, that's free. So you're not giving them money. You know, that happens to be free, but, or don't, don't buy anything from their advertisers or don't, there's, you can actually pull hundreds of dollars off of you. And that iterates, as Scott noted, if AT &T was down just 30 ,000 subscribers,$6 billion came off their market cap. So tiny little things matter. Again, And especially with this coin-operated president who only responds to money.

31:46That's a very clear signal with Trump. You give him money, he does what you want. That's pretty much how it goes. And so we'll see if it has an effect, but it has to have a sustained effect. And you can go back to them later, by the way. You don't have to do like, I'm not using Amazon ever again. I'm just not using it this month. And in fact, I won't use it next month. and I'll buy it from blank, but local retailers or Walmart, if you like them, you know, nobody's perfect. And if you, you know, perfect, don't make perfect the enemy of the good, right? You can't be perfect. You need to just do a small thing.

32:22And again,$100 here,$100 there matters a great deal. It's just one tool. Let me just say, it's just one tool. I want to switch gears here to Epstein a little bit while we're talking about destroying the reputation. of people. Your reaction to the fact that Donald Trump has engaged in this systematic cover-up that has even drawn the ire of not just his former allies like Marjorie Taylor Greene, obviously Lauren Boebert resisted pressure when he hauled her into the situation room, but now even all these Manosphere podcasters, Sean Ryan, Andrew Schultz, Joe Rogan, you know, are all turning on him based on this issue.

32:59Do you think that this thing has staying power? I do. Many, many, many, many months ago, I think it was last year, Scott and I had a really interesting debate. And I said, I think this Epstein thing has legs. And he's like, oh, it'll be one of the next thing. And then the next thing I go, no, no. If you pay attention to the magosphere, essentially, Epstein was a, I called it, I think at the time I called it a load-bearing wall. You can't take it out. And especially with Green and others. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, this animates them in a way you don't understand. And also there's a real, real here, away from the QAnon lunacy, there's a real problem here with men abusing young women, right?

33:38Powerful men. And it's a narrative that's gone throughout time that's important. And like it's happened over and over again, but this is really significant. And by the way, it cuts across Democrat and Republican. Epstein was really connected. And I had experienced him in tech. He was always at TED. He was throwing dinner parties. He tried to get me to go to his house. He was with the tech people. And I thought, oh, wow, this is, at the time, was interesting, especially since he'd been convicted the first time. This was before the 2019 arrest. And so I just felt it had, and if you pay any attention to the magosphere, you know how important the Epstein issues were.

34:18And so I never thought it was going to go away. I still don't think it's going to go away. It's not going away until all their files are released. And there'll be various different effects on different people. Like Casey Wasserman is getting real pressure. He's thinking of selling his agency. There's more pressure for him to resign from the Olympics. In his case, look, he was there in 2003, which is before any of the arrests. So is that fair? I don't know. It's up to anyone to decide what they... Chapel Rhone doesn't want to affiliate with him. fantastic. It's whatever that artist wants to do.

34:50In the case of others like Kathy Rimmler from Goldman, it was just too much. She was too familiar with him. It was bad timing. Goldman didn't want to deal with it. You could argue that she was just trying to get business. Well, doesn't matter. This is whatever Goldman wants to do. They should decide what they're going to do. And so it's going to have repercussions all over the place, especially in the business sector. and as Scott has argued, we both argued whoever deserves to be criminally indicted needs to be fucking criminally indicted. That should be the top thing. And they have the Justice Department and has dropped the ball here, this current Justice Department particularly, because they have more opportunity to do something now.

35:30So criminally indictments, then there's a stack ranking of everybody else, right? How bad was it? Was it here? And then it's up to the various groups to decide, like private groups to decide what they think was too much, which was too much affiliation, which was just, I was at a party he was at, or else like you have the Howard Lutnick test who lied about it, like went out of his way to talk, to give him, to drape himself in virtue. We talk about virtue signaling. And then it turns out he had lunch with him. Like that's just mendacious liars. And that should note, he didn't do anything wrong, but he's a mendacious fucking liar.

36:08That's what. And by the way, like this, the administration is in a position where where they could do something about it. They released this list of a bunch of people that were contained within the files the other day, but purposefully included all the people who had passing mentions with co-conspirators because they were trying to muddy the waters and people are smart enough to see what's going on. Doesn't work. And I think one of the things that actually someone pointed out to me quite correctly with Donald Trump was that he wasn't just trying to muddy the waters. If he's in a group of people and he can slip out with everybody else, that's works for him.

36:37And this is actually good for him because he's still the focus. It doesn't matter. He's the president. He's still the focus. He was obviously friends with this guy for a very long time. And he's lying about when and where he broke up with him, whatever. He may have clocked him. That's fine. Who knows? But let's let the files come out and find out, right, instead of covering them up. But what he's doing is he's, you know, when you're – go with the crowd, you'll get in, right, that kind of thing. Like go walk behind the crowd. And so people are trying to escape if you're focusing on like a Howard Lutnick or someone else, or Larry Summers, or et cetera, et cetera, you're not focusing on him.

37:17And so every minute that you're not focusing on him, and these files are full of stuff to focus on and worthwhile to be focused on, you don't focus on him. So that's the chaos. Chaos is his favorite agency here. And so that's what I see what he's doing. And he uses online to do that, you know, getting to something I actually know about. What he does is he's a fantastic propagandist. And so what he's doing is creating not just don't use the term distraction. He's creating chaos in order for you to go like this because it's all worth looking at, by the way. not as if it's not i mean the the putting sharon i guess like it's just i think just pamphlet is stupid that's that's i'm coming you know i know everyone's like oh she's she's not just mendacious she's evil this and that i think she's just bad at which she's just a tool for trump that's it and that's why she's there not because she's strong but expressly because she's a loyalist she's obviously in a cult i mean i think i think marjorie teller gene pretty much clocks it they're incompetent cultists and it's not going to, I have other fights to fight and believe me, I don't agree with her on almost anything, but she's absolutely correct is that they're like, they're just like trip.

38:29It's like watching a group of people trip downstairs, except you're in the way and you get pulled down with them. Right. That's the problem. The rest of our country does. Highly recommend for anybody who's listening or watching right now to check out Pivot podcast or on with Kara Swisher. Kara. Subscribe for Scott. He'll make it make him happy. That's it. That's it. Cara, thanks, as always, for the time. I'm joined now by the Attorney General of Minnesota, Keith Ellison. Thanks so much for joining me. Hey, good to see you, Brian. Good to see you. Good seeing you, too. So there is a new announcement from the FBI that they formally notified the BCA, so state investigators in Minnesota, that they're not going to provide the BCA with any access to information or evidence that was collected in relation to the death, the shooting of Alex Preddy.

39:15So what are next steps for the BCA now, given the fact that clearly the FBI's goal in all of this is just to shut the BCA out so that they can call this thing a wrap and make sure that there are no consequences for this ICE agent? Well, there are clearly next steps to be had. Before I mention those next steps, let me just mention this is unprecedented. We are quite, quite prepared and have been working with federal law enforcement for literally decades. There is absolutely nothing new. It is routine for us to work together on the file together at the same time. And so for them to take this position is novel.

39:58It's new. And it raises serious questions around what do you plan on doing? And so I'll talk about the next steps because certainly there are several, but I don't want people to slide past the moment. You know, anyone watching your show might think, well, is it normal for the FBI just to exclude state investigators? No, it isn't. It's unusual. It's weird. And it feels like they're trying to cover something up. That's what it feels like to me. Now, to your question Look, we can take them to court That's lawfully That's something we can do And I don't want to be announcing What we're going to do Because then people say, well, when Once you say exactly what you're going to do Then you kind of telegraph What you're going to do And I'm not prepared to do that today But I can tell you that we've been meeting Working on it We're not going to stand for it And I want you to know, and anybody listening to your show, there's no way that the Minnesota Attorney General's Office and the Hennepin County Attorney's Office is going to let this go.

41:11We're going to get to the truth and get justice. Flat out, that's what there is to it. Now, you know, they can try to delay things, but they can't ultimately stop things. The only question is, why would they even want to? And so I'll leave it right there. Yeah, I mean, in terms of why they would want to, I think that that's abundantly clear. Every member of this administration has been trying to pre-clear every ICE agent for everything they've done because they want these people to feel like they can act with impunity. And so, which I guess raises this next question, what if there's evidence, for example, that was destroyed or tainted by the federal government before state investigators got the opportunity to get their hands on it?

41:57Well, that would, of course, be bad, but it's not fatal to the case, right? There's a lot of existing evidence. I mean, at the end of the day, when you're a prosecutor, you want all of the evidence, all meaning all, so that you can make a decision about charging. If you decide to charge, and again, at this point, it would be irresponsible for us to make that announcement. But if that were to happen, theoretically, we want to make sure that there's probable cause to either charge a matter out via complaint or charge it out via grand jury. And so that might exist now with evidence that's already out there.

42:40Right. Now, here's what I want to say, though. So somebody watching the show might say, well, why did you just charge it now? Because charging the case and actually getting a conviction is two different things. And if you charge a case out based on the probable causes you have now, you may find out later on that there are things that you wish you would have known. Now, that doesn't mean you wouldn't charge. It just means you have all that you have the whole file and you can see it all the way through to what you believe the just outcome is. So I want everybody to know because everybody wants to know what are these people getting charged?

43:19And I know that you want to know, but we cannot we cannot operate on the urgency of the moment. We've got to be looking at the conviction if that's where we end up. And so not having the file leaves the door open for defense counsel to be like, well, they didn't have this. They didn't have that. And kind of just poke holes in the case where we what we want to do is have a case that you that doesn't have no holes to poke. In terms of the the DHS shutdown right now, DHS has not been funded. That's the one agency that hasn't been funded. Democrats are holding out to to fund that agency until certain conditions are being met.

44:01From your vantage on the state side, what would be most helpful in terms of in terms of conditions that need to be met? You know, obviously having dealt with with the these these fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Preddy. Number one, a rule in place that where there is a state interest, the state will be involved in a joint prosecution and an independent investigation. Yeah. Where there's a state interest, the state has to be involved. And guess what? The states get to watch the feds. The feds get to watch the state keeping everybody honest and up above board and on the table. And so that would be one.

44:40Number two, eliminate the Kavanaugh exception to racial profiling. This has done tremendous damage to America. I believe Kavanaugh's little quip there was unconstitutional. He tried to fix it in a later decision, but even then, he's about internal as opposed to on the border. It was bad ruling from the beginning. It was this shadow docket statement that he made, and I believe greenlit a lot of harm that has happened to people across our country. That's two. Number three, there must be normal police protocols on people who say they're police. So ICE runs around with police on written all over. Well, that means no masks.

45:29That means body cams. That means identification, nameplates, numbers. That means that you have not 47 days of training, but real training on including de-escalation, racial profiling and all the rest. And so those are just three. I can keep on going, but let's just start there. And there, of course, are more. But I think that ICE is absolutely, ICE and border are totally out of control. So they are totally out of control. They are not dealing with the worst of the worst. They are abusing people who actually have legal status within the United States, but may not have permanent status. So I was at an interesting back and forth with some U.S.

46:23senators who didn't want to have the United States continue to deal with its treaty obligations for asylees, which I found shocking. But if you have an asylum petition and a work permit, you have every right to be in the United States. Are you on thinner ice than somebody with another kind of status? Of course you are, but you are not an undocumented person. But, you know, ICE can pick you up and say, that's over, out. You know, and these are the things we've got to come to agreement on. They cannot mess with people who have a status. We're going to have to have, everybody gets their due process rights.

47:03And so that's going to have to be locked in as well. And, you know, the use of guns. These people, they know how to shoot them, but they don't know how to not shoot them. And we need folks who understand de-escalation, proper handling of firearms. Can you talk for a moment about qualified immunity? Can you give a brief explanation of what it is and how that needs to be reformed in light of what we've seen? So there's a lot of kind of immunities, right? There's two that I think are relevant right here. When you sue and are seeking compensation, there is a form of qualified immunity that says, and it's, by the way, no legislature passed this.

47:45Congress did not do this. This is based on a case I think it's called Fitzgerald versus Harlow. And in this case, the judge just said a public servant, a federal employee, won't be liable unless there's a case signaling to them that what they just did is not, that you would be held liable for it. So if it's sort of something that they've that there's no case on, the courts have said that they get a pass because they weren't duly notified. Now, this is complete garbage. Why? Because you have laws, you have statutes, you have all kinds of reasons for people to be unnoticed, certain things they cannot do.

48:33But this this qualified immunity is stands as something of a bar for civil liability if there's not a case on point. Now, that doesn't mean that people aren't going to be held accountable. People are held accountable every single day. You cannot shoot people when you don't have any reasonable basis to do so. There are a lot of reasons that you can get through, but there is a lot of bad conduct that gets shielded by qualified immunity. Now, there's another kind of qualified immunity, and this is under the supremacy clause, and this has to do with a state criminally prosecutes a federal agent. There is a qualified immunity premised on the supremacy clause, and it says this.

49:19Look, if you are a federal agent doing your job and doing what is necessary and proper in the performance of your job, you have an immunity from state criminal prosecution. So if you're driving it, if your job is to drive a truck and you're a federal worker and you run and you get into an accident, it's, you know, it wasn't necessarily your fault. It wasn't intentional. You could say it was necessary and proper for me to drive the truck. And I did what was necessary and proper, meaning I tried to obey the laws of the road. So that's your defense. You have a defense there. Now, what if you see somebody who you don't like because of their race and you decide to use that state vehicle, that federal vehicle, to run them down?

50:04That's not necessarily improper to do your job. Or let's say that somebody, theoretically speaking, is at a protest. You knock them to the ground, pull their legally and lawfully possessed firearm off their body. So now you know they're not armed and you shoot them 10 times. Maybe that's not necessary and proper for the performance of your duty. So my point is, and I'm speaking theoretically now, but what I'm saying is just because these immunities are in place does not mean that these folks are going to escape responsibility and legal liability. One of them is in the civil context. One of them is in the criminal.

50:44But they both just give a public employee some protection in terms of when they do their job the way it's supposed to be done. But when they deviate from that, they have to face the music. Have you dealt with any other state AGs in terms of figuring out what the best way to collaborate is so that you're not just reinventing the wheel every single time? I mean, ICE is going to, you know, not just Minnesota. ICE has gone to my state of California. They've gone to Chicago. They've gone to Portland, gone to Washington, D.C. And so it doesn't we don't need to reinvent the wheel every single time if there's abuses at the hands of ICE.

51:23And so what kind of collaboration has taken place among attorneys general? Well, let me tell you, we meet on the phone at least two, three times a week. Our staffs are talking constantly based on their subject matter areas. And I mean multiple times a week. We have quarterly meetings that we go to that where we get together and talk about things. We don't really tell people when we're at those quarterly meetings for security reasons. Yeah. But we do meet face to face on a regular basis and we all know each other and get on the phone on a regular basis. So the thing is, we're talking three or four times a week on Zoom and we're meeting face to face at least quarterly.

52:07So we have a high degree of coordination and it's not just on federal accountability. It could be on antitrust. I mean, a lot of people are concerned about this, you know, the CBS, Netflix, Warner Brothers, Paramount, all that. People are concerned about that. And so we talk about these things amongst ourselves. We also talk about everything from wage stuff to, you know, like how some of the online platforms that, you know, like Uber, Lyft, all the rest, shipped, all the rest of them. We talked about how those interface with the law as it exists. We talked about nearly everything under the sun, consumer protection, women's rights, labor rights, civil rights.

52:52We talk about all this stuff all the time. And then we talk to people like you, Brian, like we get a lot of income incoming advice from folks who care, you know, and we interact with the groups like Norm Eisen's group, you know, Joanna Ludgate's group, Mark Elias's group, NAACP, Urban League, Lawyers Committee, American, the American Civil Liberties Union. And so we try to stay in touch. And then we all go to community meetings constantly. You know, your average AG, your average elected AG, well, there is a lawyer. But much of the work we do is engage the public and administer the office and give direction to staff lawyers who actually write the briefs and go to court and make the arguments.

53:45Well, I appreciate the work you're doing, and especially in conjunction with some of these groups like ELG and Democracy Defenders Fund and ACLU and all those other groups. So thank you for doing that work and for staying on top of this stuff, especially as it relates to the abuses at the hands of ICE. And I appreciate you taking the time today. Well, may I just say, man, free independent media podcasters like yourself, you guys are helping the people know what's going on. They trust you. They listen to your show. I listen to your show. And if you want to know what's up, you got to listen to this show.

54:18I appreciate that. Thanks so much. Thanks again to Ted Lieu, Kara Swisher, and Keith Ellison. That's it for this episode. Talk to you on Sunday.

54:34for YouTube by Nicholas Nicotera. If you want to support the show, please subscribe on your preferred podcast app and leave a five-star rating and a review. And as always, you can find me at Brian Tyler Cohen on all of my other channels, or you can go to briantylercohen.com to learn more.