Governor Shapiro Discusses Leadership and New Book

0:00Ben Meiselas:I'm RJ Decker, a private investigator uncovering the Sunshine State's darkest secrets. Tuesdays, it's the premiere of ABC's hottest new crime show. RJ freaking Decker as I live and breathe. He's a private eye. It's not a standard murder. It's someone bigger. And a public mess.

0:18Governor Shapiro:Trying to get someone back to prison today?

0:19Ben Meiselas:You go to prison one time and suddenly it's all the jokes. RJ Decker, series premiere, Tuesdays on ABC and stream on Hulu. Tax Act is here anytime you want to easily file your taxes. Tax Act is here for the early birds who like to knock them out as soon as the season opens. And for the procrastinators who like to wait until the very last minute. Tax Act is also here for the middlers who file right in the middle of tax season. No one ever talks about the middlers, but Tax Act sees you and Tax Act respects you. Tax Act. Let's get them over with.

1:01Governor Shapiro:Rinse knows that greatness takes time, but so does laundry.

1:05Ben Meiselas:So Rinse will take your laundry and hand deliver it to your door, expertly cleaned. And you can take the time pursuing your passions. Time once spent sorting and waiting, folding and cueing, now spent challenging and innovating and pushing your way to greatness. So pick up the Irish flute or those calligraphy pens, or that daunting Beef Wellington recipe card, and leave the laundry to us. Rinse. It's time to be great. Take the exit. Turn right into the drive-thru. Nope, I'm making dinner tonight. You don't have time. Josh has practice. Oh, that's right. I'll just get a salad. And fries? No, just the salad.

1:41Ben Meiselas:But salad cancels fries. Salad only. Fries. Salad. Fries. Food noise isn't fair, but Mochi Health is. The affordable GLP-1 source that puts you on the road to successful weight loss. Hey, can I get the... Fries! Salad! Sorry. Learn more at joinmochi.com. Mochi members have access to licensed physicians and nutritionists. results may vary. Ever notice how ads always pop up at the worst moments when the killer's identity is about to be revealed? During that perfect meditation flow. On Amazon Music, we believe in keeping you in the moment. That's why we've got millions of ad-free podcast episodes so you can stay completely immersed in every story, every reveal, every breath.

2:26Ben Meiselas:Download the Amazon Music app and start listening to your favorite podcasts ad-free, included with Prime. Donald Trump just got the news he feared most regarding his cover-up of the Epstein files. His cover-up, as well as the horrific performing American economy right now, is crushing his poll numbers. They are at new lows, and this is at the same time that it has now been uncovered that Donald Trump is likely hiding still 98 % of the Epstein files, even with the production of the 3 million or so documents that were previously produced a week or two ago. And even with the unredacted copies that are still redacted that Congress got to see, there likely exists 98 % more documents, perhaps 50, 100 million documents that are still being covered up.

3:22Ben Meiselas:And that makes sense when you think about how widespread this Epstein class pedo sex trafficking ring is that Donald Trump is covering up. Here's what we're learning from Channel 4 News. A new investigation examining email sent between federal investigators and prosecutors has raised fresh doubts over the Department of Justice's claim that it released a full cache of Epstein files, suggesting the material made public amounts to just 2 % of the data gathered by agents. Channel 4 News from the UK goes on to say that federal investigators expected to process between 20 and 40 terabytes of data seized from Epstein's properties, including his Florida mansion, New York townhouse, and private island.

4:09Ben Meiselas:Note that the feds did not even go to the area where some of the most despicable conduct was taking place, which was the New Mexico ranch, the Zorro ranch. The broadcaster added that the emails between investigators discussing the data totaled up to 50 terabytes from the earliest stages of the investigation as of June 2020. To me, that means we're talking about 100 million documents, folks. So let's talk about Donald Trump's crashing approvals right now. Here's how it was just described moments ago by Harry Enten. Here, play this clip. Through and through. Let's take a look at another president, though.

4:46Ben Meiselas:President Donald John Trump. Look at this. I got four numbers across for you on this screen here. They are all second term lows for the given pollster. What are we talking about? AP Newark, 26 points below order. NBC, 22 points below order. Yahoo, YouGov, 20 points below order. Quinnipiac, 19 points below water. So we're ranging from negative 19 points all the way to negative 26 points. You know, Kate, there's this question that folks keep asking, you know, where is the floor for Donald Trump? And I'm not sure there is a floor because if there is one, Donald Trump, at least in term number two, has just fallen through it to another low level.

5:24Governor Shapiro:How does this compare with his first term and how does this compare with Joe Biden?

5:27Ben Meiselas:Okay, so we look at these numbers right here. One of the things that Donald Trump had been arguing, his proponents had been arguing, oh, you know what? He's doing better than he was doing in term number one. No longer is that the case. What are we talking about here? Okay, net approval rating at this point in the term. Look at this. 22 points below order on average when you average all the pollsters from the last side. That is actually lower. That is lower than he was at this point in term number one when it was 17 points below order. So he's doing five points worse, five points worse. And he's doing way worse than Joe Biden was doing at this point in his term number one when he was 13 points below order.

6:02Ben Meiselas:So the bottom line is this. Donald Trump is setting new records for himself in term number two, setting new records for himself compared to where he was at this point in term number one. And he's doing worse than Joe Biden, which is, of course, the comparison that Donald Trump does not want to be because we all know what happened to Joe Biden. His party lost the House in term number one, that midterm elections. And of course, Joe Biden was not reelected to another term. At this point, the numbers are no bueno for the president of the United States. What's driving this that you're seeing right now?

6:31Ben Meiselas:Okay, Kate, you know what? This is the segment. We have done it over and over and over again because he keeps setting new lows for himself. What are we talking about? Well, we're talking about independence. We're talking about independence. When you lose the center of the electorate, you lose the American people. Trump's net approval rating among independents. You know, at this point, you go back term number one, he was 17 points below water. Now, according to Quinnipiac, he is 27 points below water. I don't understand how this works out well for the president of the United States. When you are 27 points below water, underwater, with the center of the electorate, with independence, you lose, your party loses.

7:10Ben Meiselas:You know, I've made the comparisons before. You know, oh, he's more underwater than Greg Louganis. I've made the comparisons with all those different divers. And the bottom line is this. You can continue to make those. But over time, when you keep making those same comparisons, they run a little bit old. But at this point, I don't really know who to even compare Donald Trump to because he's just so low and he's so low with the center of the electorate. Can only be compared to himself. That's correct. Harry, thank you so much. Thank you. Now, what is Donald Trump doing today on President's Day as he's freaking out?

7:40Ben Meiselas:Well, he's sending emails like this to try to grift and raise money. This is Dr. Donald J. Trump. I've come to save the day. Read the memo. You might have noticed your Trump sustaining membership is on life support. Please renew ASAP before it's too late. Even CPR won't bring it back. And I think this is important for you to know, in addition to the fact that he's faking pretending to be a doctor. A lot of the people who he tries to trick are elderly people. I've called his email schemes elder abuse before. So when he's saying you're on life support and I'm Dr. Donald J. Trump is saying you need to give me money.

8:16Ben Meiselas:That's also the targeted audience as part of his scam as well. Also, just in this morning, as Josh Gerstein reports, Judge Cynthia Rufi, George W. Bush appointee, cites Orwell's 1984 as she orders Trump administration to restore slavery focused panels at the site of Washington's Philly House. The feds are wiping away the history of the greatest founding fathers' management. So here's what Judge Roof says. Again, George W. Bush appointee. She starts with a George Orwell quote. All history was a palimpset, scraped clean and rescribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible once the deed was done to prove that any falsification had taken place.

9:05Ben Meiselas:George Orwell, 1984. As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's 1984 now existed with its motto, ignorance is strength, this court is now asked to determine whether the federal government under Donald Trump has the power it claims to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts. It does not. And the court ruled against the Trump regime. Donald Trump this morning is also ranting and raving as we've now uncovered that 100 million documents, perhaps in the Epstein files, are still not produced. Here's what Donald Trump is posting. I'm opposed to the future boondoggle known as Gateway in New York, New Jersey, because it will cost many billions of dollars, more than projected or anticipated, much like Gavin Newsom's Railroad to Nowhere, which is many times over budget.

10:01Ben Meiselas:It's a disaster. Gateway will likewise be financially catastrophic for the region unless hard work and proper planning is done now to avoid insurmountable future cost overrun. Please let this statement represent the fact that under no circumstance will the federal government be responsible for any cost overruns, not one dollar. The federal government is willing to meet, however, to make sure that this does not happen. And also the naming of Penn Station. I love Pennsylvania, but it is a direct competitor to New York and eating New York's lunch to Trump Station was brought up by certain politicians and construction union heads.

10:38Ben Meiselas:Not me. It's just more fake news. Remember, Donald Trump has been withholding funding for the Gateway Project, which New Yorkers, New Jersey and and people from Connecticut are saying we need this project. What the hell are you doing? And Trump's like, but you got to name it after me. You got to name it after me. You know, it's interesting with Donald Trump freaking out this morning and the big case out of Philadelphia where a George W. Bush judge just ruled against Donald Trump. And you see Donald Trump whining about Pennsylvania. Why don't on President's Day we bring in the governor of the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Governor Josh Shapiro.

11:13Ben Meiselas:This was the interview I recently did with Governor Shapiro exclusively here on the Midas Touch Network. Let's bring in Governor Shapiro. Now I want to bring in Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. Gov, great to see you out with a new book, Where We Keep the Light, Stories from a Life of Service. Governor, author, author, former attorney general, which is what I want to talk about because I was showing some clips right there of Attorney General Pam Bondi's testimony. And I just think objectively setting aside political whatever as a matter of leadership, what the role of an attorney general is, which you talk about in the book.

11:55Ben Meiselas:Yeah. It's leadership. To me, I don't care what political party you're from. That was despicable and an utter failure of leadership.

12:03Governor Shapiro:You know, I write in the book about my time as attorney general of Pennsylvania and standing up for victims and ensuring that we enforce the rule of law without fear or favor. I write extensively about the work I did holding predator priests and other pedophiles accountable from local coaches and pediatricians and teachers to, of course, hundreds of predator priests that abused thousands of children. And in that experience, I got to know these victims, victims who, you know, for years, and there's a similar overlay with the Epstein case for years, went to the authorities and tried to get the authorities to believe them and listen to them, were turned away and thwarted by powerful people.

12:47Governor Shapiro:And then it's up to the attorney general. It's up to the chief prosecutor to listen to their stories, to stand for victims and to fight for them. And what I continue to see out of the Trump administration are a group of people that are there trying to protect the president, whose name thousands, although I think Congressman Raskin recently said up to a million times in these documents. and a whole bunch of other powerful people who were abusing young women and abusing the power that they had in life. And I think it is important that we have prosecutors that stand with victims that hold the perpetrators accountable.

13:24Governor Shapiro:And I'm not seeing that coming out of DC right now. Right.

13:28Ben Meiselas:Can you just imagine though, you're sitting there, you're in Congress, survivors are behind you. And by the way, you had a similar situation as a G you're waiting for a grand jury report. You know, you want to make sure it's public. The survivor community is leaning on you. You've got a very powerful, if not the most powerful interest, the church in the Commonwealth and you're being called upon in this moment. What do you, what do you do? she starts saying, well, the Dow is 50 ,000, even though it was not that when you said that, you know, and she had a burn book. Like it was, if your book is a testament to leadership service empathy, her performance was the exact opposite.

14:22Governor Shapiro:I think if you're in these roles, you've got to stand with victims. You've got to stand up for the rule of law. You've got to stand against the powerful who so oftentimes take advantage of the people. And there was a clear opportunity to do that yesterday. And that did not happen. It was a failure in leadership. But to me, it's in many ways, notwithstanding the importance of those hearings, in many ways, that was performative. It's the hard work that prosecutors do behind the scenes to stand up for victims. It's the hard work prosecutors do behind the scenes to hold the powerful accountable. And that is what I am not seeing coming out of the Trump administration.

15:00Right.

15:01Ben Meiselas:And in the book, you talk about other, uh, prosecutions, every, lots of people knew you standing up to Trump during the elections of 2020 and Trump tries to overthrow the results, which we could even talk a little bit about knowing what, you know, what you saw in Fulton County, where he recycled the same types of bogus declarations that he tried to push past. Let's do that. Then I'll go out of water. So you saw what he did, but in the system where he had to go to court, there was adversarial in nature. So you as the AG were able to say, this declaration is bullshit. This affidavit is, and then the judge goes, tell me about it, counsel.

15:48Ben Meiselas:And you go, I could easily show you. And then not only do these affidavits get rejected, but the lawyers on the other side get sanctioned and lose their license. Now Trump's reached this whole other point where they're submitting the affidavits just with the same stuff and giving them to magistrates as though this stuff is fact in situations where there's not an adversarial process.

16:11Governor Shapiro:You sound like Professor Ben right now. No, but let me give you a real life example of how this played out in Pennsylvania and juxtapose that with what we're seeing in Fulton County. Back in 2020, I'll just remind you, you and I talked about it a lot at the time. Donald Trump and his enablers sued me in Pennsylvania 43 different times to try and throw out the votes of legal eligible voters here in Pennsylvania. you. He went 0-43, I went 43-0, and we had a free and fair, safe and secure election. In one of those cases, there were these bogus affidavits, these bogus statements that the Trump folks were relying on that were introduced in court when they were asking the judge to try and throw out these votes.

17:02Governor Shapiro:Guess who the lawyer was at that time? It was Rudy Giuliani. And Giuliani went into court and lied. He lied with his own mouth. He lied with the introduction of these, you know, these affidavits and other statements. And in the end, not only did they lose the case and I won and we protected the voters here in Pennsylvania, but then we pursued Giuliani's law degree and we stripped him of his law license. I say his law degree, I mean his law license, which he no longer has because he lied in court. You can't do that. Now, fast forward to where we are today. The same conspiracy theorists that were sort of on the outside looking in, well, now they're on the inside.

17:47Governor Shapiro:And folks are relying on, folks in power are relying on those statements as the pretext for the search that we just saw play out in Fulton County, Georgia. That is dangerous. And it's going to take the courts some time to sort this through. I hope that when they do and they realize these are more bogus conspiracy theories, that someone loses their damn law license over this. The same way we were able to get Rudy Giuliani out of practicing the law because he lied in our court proceedings. That is not only wrong and unacceptable. It is not something we tolerate in practice of law.

18:24Ben Meiselas:You also talk about in the book real negotiations, not this Trump fake favored nations that Trump talks about where he says he's reducing prescription drug prices by 18 ,000 percent or 18 trillion percent. And then no one knows what the hell he's talking about. Or he launches Trump Rx, which is basically just utilizing, you know, which is still more expensive than the generic brands. And he's using the prices that were already being used by the pharmaceutical company. And when you do a study of what he's talking about, it's all it's all BS. But people who obviously who know the Commonwealth know this, but you take a trip through some of your cities like Pittsburgh and elsewhere, and you see the medical community there and the great research centers and facilities and pharma is all there.

19:14Ben Meiselas:You talk about in the book, having to roll your sleeves up, you know, in both the litigation posture and a negotiation process to bring down prices. And it was hard work, you know, but you brought it through the finish line. We did.

19:28Governor Shapiro:Look, your brother, Jordy, who's in Pittsburgh, knows this. In Pittsburgh, we've got these two big competing healthcare systems, right? And they're what we call vertically integrated. I won't nerd out on you and bore you to death with this, but think hospital system that owns the doctors owns the insurance company. And basically what the one healthcare system said was, if you've got an insurance card from the other healthcare provider, you can't come see our doctors. You can't come get world-class care from us. Hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvanians were on the verge of losing, literally days away from losing access to healthcare.

20:08Governor Shapiro:And I write in the book about a woman who was working behind the counter, the checkout counter at Sheetz, which is this unbelievable place where you go to not only fuel up, but where you go and you get a great sandwich, get food, whatever it is that you need. And she literally grabbed me and she said, you know, General, if you don't figure this out, my husband, who's getting his cancer treatments at this other healthcare facility, won't be able to get them anymore. Please, I'm begging you, please do something about it. And I went to work for her and thousands of others who are about to lose healthcare.

20:42Governor Shapiro:I brought those two healthcare giants together and did real negotiations, not the BS that Donald Trump does every single day. And we preserved healthcare access for hundreds of thousands of people in Western Pennsylvania. And so that woman working behind the counter at Sheetz, her husband and others like it that were depending on that life-saving care, continue to get it. That's what I try and do every day. Stand up for people, get shit done for people, fight for people, and use government as a force for good in people's lives. Instead of using government the way Donald Trump does for inflicting chaos and cruelty and a level of corruption unseen before on others we try and use government as a force for good in people's lives

21:27Ben Meiselas:you know and also fighting for your family and this is an area if people aren't interested in politics but maybe just want to know how people who have a job like governor are able to do a work-life balance and you talk about in the book yeah the struggles and and for and for those who don't know your background i won't name drop all of your four kids although they're all lovely and incredible, but you met Laurie in ninth grade, like a middle school sweetheart or early first year freshman sweetheart. And so you've all been in this together and everything from late nights and being attacked by Trump and fighting back and having to deal with that.

22:07Ben Meiselas:And also, I don't think people realize, I'm just going to be blunt about it, how close you were to being assassinated and killed. And I know it's a difficult, you talk about it in the beginning, but it was a closer call than people even, I think, appreciate how close it was. And you have your family around as well. And so the job itself being a target for things like that, and then having to fight, and talking about balancing it all. But that was a major part of his book. Yeah.