Speaker 1: So here we go. Welcome to the Big Podcast. Hi,
how are you doing? Happy Friday? On this thirtieth day
of January. Wrapped this month up pretty quickly. Year of
Our Lord twenty twenty six. My name is Tom Sullivan.
And no, really wasn't New Year's like a couple of
days ago. So we locked. We got a lot to
go over today. I guess we could start, certainly not
the most important. You're always supposed to start with the
most important story, but this is the one that is
the most timely because of the government's supposed to down
at midnight tonight. And I don't know, does anybody really care?
This is they have agreed to Basically, they have these
various appropriation bills and they've passed a bunch of them,
but they have six more to go, and so they've
agreed to do five of the six and then the
sixth one is a Department of Homeland Security, and they
don't want to fund that because they because of ICE.
But we've talked about it over and over. Now others
are mentioning it as well that ICE has already been
funded from the Big Beautiful Bill. They've got their money
until twenty twenty nine. So you can do. They also
have a that's crazy in Minneapolis today. They've got something
called the National shutdown strike, and they got a pretty
decent crowd in Minneapolis that are walking the streets and
holding up most of the signs looked like they professionally
made most of them say the same things. But regardless,
the people are out and it's cold, and they're they're
it looks like a fairly nice day, but a cold
day in Minneapolis. And I don't know what the shutdown
is supposed to do either. I don't understand the Democrats
wanting to not fund Department of Homeland Security because they
want to hurt ICE, and yet ICE has already been funded,
So by not funding DHS, they're not they're not accomplishing it.
Nothing drives me crazier than somebody who doesn't accomplish anything
in their job. And that's what they're doing. They're just
they're just pouting. I guess, so the national shut down,
there's no national shutdown strike today in Minneapolis, that's what
they're calling it. But the same thing, who are they hurting?
Are they hurting Ice?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 1: Are they hurting the merchants? Yes? Are they hurting people
that are out on the street their employers. Yes, I
would assume the employers would not pay them for today,
but hey, everybody does their own thing. Mark Wayne Mullen,
the Republican senator from Oklahoma, was asked about this whole
government shutdown.
Speaker 3: Then we're still kind of negotiating through this process. The
Democrats aren't really negotiating good faith. Their demands for DHS
is unreasonable. I mean, you walll Ago, you showed a
clip of Patty Murray. Patty Murray even said earlier this
week that shutting down DHS doesn't prevent ICE from doing
their job. In fact, it only prevents people from getting
relief from FEMA. And so what the Democrats are proposing
is ridiculous. If we shut down DHS, first of all,
that's only about three percent of the government. ICE is
still going to be funded for the next three or
four years because of appropriations we put in on one
big beautiful bill. What it does shut down is FEMA,
it shuts down Seekert Service, it shuts down TSA, and
it shuts down our Coastguard. And so we're trying to
get a hand passed. President Trump has come out and said, listen,
I'll work with Chuck Schumer. I'll work with the Democrats.
I'll do what we can, but what the likely path
is will probably end up having to spin off the
five bills, which will fund roughly ninety six ninety seven
percent of the government, and then we're trying to do
at least a short term cr for two to four weeks,
possibly we've asked for actually six weeks, and try to
work out their differences here. It's actually absurd with this
political theater that the Democrats are doing here with DHS.
Speaker 1: It does seem like theater to me too, but that's
what they want to do, and then they'll try and
point the fingers and say it's the Republican's fault. It
doesn't matter to me. I don't know. Maybe you care.
I'm not all that interested. But because of the deadline
is tonight, I thought we would at least start with that.
We have a lot of court hearings today, and I thought, well,
we'll get these knocked off as well, because it does
seem strange of what's going on in court. Let's start
with did you hear the Don Lemon, the former CNN?
What was his show ten o'clock at night? It had
very well it doesn't matter. He was he was let go.
They tried to put him in the mornings, that did
not work. So he's looking for something to do to
make a living, and so he's he's proclaimed that he
is a journalist and this will be this will come
out in the wash. Did he coordinate with the group
that went in the protesters that went in and disrupted
the church service a couple of weeks ago in Saint
Paul Minism there was the protesters went in, and there
is a law that says you can't do that. You
can't do that to abortion clinics or the churches. And
so if he went in to report on it after
they were already in there, or did he coordinate with
them so we could go in with them, I think
that's going to make a big difference. Because he proclaims
that he is a journalist, and so they arrested him
this morning and three others that are so called journalist.
But maybe I come from a different world, but the
world that I live in, I'm not a journalist. I've
been in the media for a long long time. I
am not a journalist. I am an opinionated talk show host,
podcast host. That's what he is. The people that are
on it on any of the cable channels at night,
I don't consider themjournalists. They're opinion people. I mean, Colbert
likes to think of himself as as a journalist. He's not.
He's an opinionated talk show host. The people that write
the opinion columns for newspapers, in my estimation, are not journalists.
Journalists are people that go out and report on the
facts of a story. They get both sides, they report
what they know and that's it. They leave their opinion
out of it. But anyway, so Don Lemon has been
arrested and I don't know what the status is. He
was arrested last night in Los Angeles, and like I said,
there's three others and you would think CNN was there
squawking like a stuck pig today all about how he's
a journalist and how you know journal Even if you
are a journalist, which I dispute in this case, you
can't go in. You can't break the law. A journalist
doesn't give you some special card that says I can
avoid obeying the law. Can you imagine my old days
of highway protecting the highways and byways, Highway patrol, pull
somebody over and they show me their journalism card. I
would have laughed at them anyway. Jonathan Turtley, the law
professor of at George Washington University Law School, has this
to say about it.
Speaker 4: Well, First of all, the Face Act itself does pose
jeopardy for all those arrested. The Attorney General of Minnesota, Allison,
said that this only applies to abortion clinics. That was
completely false. It does apply to places of worship like this,
and in fact, when they have applied it to abortion clinics,
including Allison, they have adopted the broadest possible interpretation of
those criminal provisions. Now, with regard to Don Lemon, I
think that he has a claim here that he will
be he was acting as a journalist, and I think
a lot of judges are going to find that persuasive
because they tend to avoid really hitting that trip wire
when it comes to journalism. Now, the problem, of course,
is that Don Lemon really stretches that meaning that of
a journalist. He's one of these journalists believe in advocacy journalism,
which blurs again the line of what is a journalist
and what is an advocate. So that's going to end
up having to be litigated. Some of us have written
for years. I just wrote a book on this not
long ago, really contesting advocacy journalism is killing journalism in
the United States. He is really the face of that movement.
Speaker 1: Couldn't agree more. There's so many people out there that
claim that they are journalists, the whole advent of podcasts.
People say they have a radio show. No, they have
a podcast even close to being the same. They have YouTube,
YouTube show. Oh, I have a television show.
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 1: There's all these people claiming that there's something that by
general definition, historical definition, they are not. So we'll see
what happens with Don Lemon. He was supposed to show
up in court today. I don't know the results, but
he's hired Abby Lowell, very expensive Washington DC lawyer. I
hope he has saved his money from his days working,
because he really isn't been. He's been looking for attention
and this certainly will give him some. You know who
Jose Antonio Ibara is probably not. He's the guy who
was charged and convicted of killing Lake and Riley. Remember
her twenty two year old University of Georgia student who
was out jogging and he is from I remember, right, Venezuela.
It was in the country illegally. Well, he's been convicted
of murdering her, so today he demands a new trial.
Brian Claypool, who is a defense lawyer, explains what his
claim is.
Speaker 6: Look, the software used by prosecutors in this case is
called true TRUELL and what does that mean. It is
a probabilistic geneo typing type of software. It's used when
you don't have adequate DNA marcists, where you have scant
DNA that cannot be tied directly to somebody, then you
use this software instead to create a probability that somebody's
DNA matches the crime scene. And what happened in a
Barr's case is this information wasn't shared quickly with defense lawyers.
Defense lawyers were not allowed to hire an expert to
challenge it. And I think one of the issues here,
and it might have traction for a new trial, is
that this is based on algorithms, right, kind of like
what you see on social media. And the problem here
is their secret this is like secret evidence, and that
it's not be shared with anybody because it trademarks. So
I think there's a due process argument here for Ibara
that that information needs to be shared with his lawyers
so they can challenge it on cross examination. Because there's
been a lot of bugs that have been determined as
well in this Typler software.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, listen, I think Jose Antonio Orbara should
spend the rest of his life in jail, if not worse.
But if they were using some kind of phony Baloni
software to convict him, what's wrong with these prosecutors using
this stuff? So he may wind up getting a new
trial even though everybody in their brother knows he killed
Lake and Riley. They had evidence up the yin ye
one more court case that also is a head scratcher. Luigi, Yeah,
Luigi was back in court here in New York today.
The guy who was charged with murdering Brian Thompson, the
former CEO of United Healthcare, gunned him down, shot him
in the back on West fifty fourth Street outside the
Hilton Hotel. And it was all because of the fact
that he has beef with insurance companies, even though he
did not have a policy with United Healthcare. But he
figured out where Brian Thompson was, where he was going
to be. They publicized it on their website. They were
going to have the annual investors conference at the Hilton
Hotel in December of twenty twenty four, the date, the time, everything,
and so Luigi set out to basically stock Mister Thompson
waited across the street. They have video of him sitting
over there. This is like six o'clock in the morning,
it's dark, it's cold, but he was waiting for Brian Thompson.
Brian Thompson came walking down the street and Luigi allegedly
recognized him. You've seen the videotape. He steps out and
as soon as mister Thompson walks by, he shoots them
in the back. Thompson falls, He walks over and shoots
them two more times. We see it on videotape. We
see the murder. And yet a judge today decided that
the murder charge was not going to be allowed. Donald Rotuna,
who was not on this case but as a defense lawyer,
was talking before the judge's ruling.
Speaker 7: What the judge is going to have to rule on
is whether or not this stalking element rises to the
level of a violent crime, which then raises this to
the level of the murder with the firearm. That is
then a capital offense.
Speaker 1: Pardon me for my ignorance about the law. But stalking
somebody so that you can shoot them in the back
three times see to me like that is a violent thing.
But apparently Paul Morrow was in the courtroom today to
find out more about this case.
Speaker 8: So as we spoke about after the last hearing, the
atmospheric certainly seemed from the judge that those two counts
were going to go. The way it is set up
at the federal level is to get a murder charge,
you need what's called the federal hook. That is to say,
you need another crime of violence that admits the murder charge.
The decision by the judge was that stalking is not
a crime of violence. It can be in some instances,
but apparently not here. She decided that it is not
a crime of violence that takes out the murder charge
that carried the debt penalty. The two charges that remain, however,
do carry life imprisonment without parole. The other decision was
that she denied the defense's motion to suppress the evidence
from the bag that man Gione was carrying. So the
bag containing the pistol and the manifesto, all of that
coming in, but as of now, no death penalty.
Speaker 1: All right, So they don't want to do the death penalty,
but I mean to throw out the murder charge. Did
I not see that murder on videotape? I thought I
saw a murder. I must have been confused. So Carrie Urban,
who's also she's a DC lawyer, she weighed in as well, Oh.
Speaker 9: So interestingly in her rationale and the decision, she says,
I realized this. She basically says, I realize this is absurd,
and I realize this is counterintuitive and there's no denying
that this was violent conduct. And then she blames the
Supreme Court and says, but I'm bound by what previous
courts have said. And this is where it gets complicated
and very technical. So the stalking statute issue, and the
stalking was necessary in order to get the death penalty.
It was part of the other charge.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 9: It talks about causing fear and emotional distress. That's not
the same as physical violence. And since the crime of
violence was essential to get the death penalty, there had
to be a second thing, and that's what they attached
to the murder through the firearm. There had to be
a crime of violence. She's saying, well, the statute doesn't
say that this has to be violence. It can be
fear that's not violence. It can be emotional distress that's
not violent. Stalking doesn't have to be violent, therefore it's
not a crime of violence. Therefore, if that fails, then
the charge is attached. Tould fail and here we are
with no death penalty.
Speaker 1: This is exasperating. It makes a mockery of the law.
The man was murdered. We saw it on videotape. He
was shot three times in the back, and there wasn't
a predicate of violence. What is shooting somebody in the
back if that isn't violence?
Speaker 9: Because the issue here is not that he was shot
dead in cold blood on the street, it's that the
prosecutors were trying to get the death penalty. In order
to get the death penalty, which is a sentencing enhancement,
it's like enhancing the charge. There had to be a
second crime, a crime of violence. The crime of violence
they chose was stalking. If you read the text of
the statute, there's not violence in it.
Speaker 7: So did they make a mistake?
Speaker 5: Should they not have pursuit.
Speaker 9: So I think it's what fit the best, and I
would actually and I want to point something out here.
You know, it was the Biden DOJ that brought these
charges initially, and they intentionally chose this approach. But I
believe they chose it because doing it this way allowed
the prosecution to ask for the death penalty, which is
what Pambondi did. And that's notable because to my recollection,
I think Mark Garland only asked for the death penalty
in one other case, so they knew how So this
is a bipartisan effort, I would say, from both the
Biden administration and the Trump administration to bring justice to
this guy and these families in the way of the
death penalty and the judge through it out.
Speaker 1: So you can see, they're making it next to impossible
to get the death penalties. What they're doing that that
shooting you somebody three times in the back isn't violence,
I don't know what is. Why can't the judge just say, okay,
you're guilty of murder and in the sentencene, I'm going
to and she her death. But that apparently isn't the
way the law works, which again is making a mockery
of what you and I saw with our own two eyes.
This isn't exactly a court case, but it's close to one.
Kind of surprising because today Todd Blanche, the Deputy Attorney General,
came out and said, because they've been getting a lot
of heat about the Epstein documents, and they said, I
guess a week or two ago they said, we've got
a million more to go. Well, today Todd Blanche came
out and said, there you go. Here's your every file
that we have in the government on Epstein. Here's what
Blanche had to say.
Speaker 10: On November nineteenth, twenty twenty five, directing the Department of
Justice to produce all documents, files, records, videos and images
related to the investigations and prosecutions of Jeffrey Epstein, and
just laying I'm here today to talk about the Department's
compliance with its production obligations under the Act. Around I
think right now and continuing throughout the day to day
as the indexing and uploading completes, we are producing responsive
materials under the Act. We are also releasing today a
letter we are transmitting to Congress, and various internal protocols
associated with our review. I want to take a moment
to thank the professionals at the Department of Justice who
met twice daily, sometimes more, for the last seventy five
days to get to where we are today. The leadership
teams from the Office of the Attorney General, from the
Deputy turn of General's Office, the Associate Attorney General's Office,
the Criminal Division, the National Security Division, the FBI, the
Southern disc of Florida, the Southern of New York, and
the Northern disc of New York all gave up many
hours every single day on top of their other, of course,
full time obligations, to fulfill the President Trump's promise of
transparency to the American people. I also want to think
that more than five hundred lawyers and professionals across all
those divisions that I just mentioned, and others who worked
long days, nights, weekends, Christmas, New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, nights, weekends,
and holidays to complete this production. These highly trained reviewers
spend their careers putting bad guys in jail and effectuating
the mission of the Department, and to a person, they
work tirelessly to protect victims and comply with the Act
since its passage. So thank you to all of them.
Speaker 1: Okay, so they had a lot of people, and they
did a lot of work, and they work Christmas and
New Year's and everything else. What did they produce today?
Speaker 10: Today we are producing more than three million pages, including
more than two thousand videos and one hundred and eighty
thousand images in total. That means that the department produced
approximately three and a half million pages in compliance with
the Act. Just a quick note about the videos and images.
The two thousand videos and one hundred and eighty thousand
images are not all videos and images taken by mister
Epstein or someone around him. They include large quantities of
commercial pornography and images that were seized from Epstein's devices
but which he did not take, or that someone around
him did not take. Some of the videos though, and
some of the images do appear to be taken by
mister Epstein or by others or around him.
Speaker 1: Okay, so that's wise. They did not disclose the commercial porn.
But I wonder what when you look at who in
their right mind is going to spend the time to
go through three million pages, three and a half million
pages of documents, two thousand videos, one hundred and eighty
thousand photos, I'm sure there will be a few people assigned,
some rookies that the bottom of the of the latter
in the media, that will be assigned to go through
all this stuff. But nobody's going to be looking through
all this thame. I think people already have their assumptions
on what kind of person Epstein was, So I think
the big debate isn't about the fact that he was
a creep. The big debate is about how did he die.
I still stay with the fact that and the reason
I say this is because the former New York medical
examiner was at the autopsy said this guy died, it
was murdered. He didn't die of suicide. So that's still
also probably will never ever be answered. So those are
court cases, a lot of them today. What about Minnesota?
So last night Christinome came out and talked about was
asked about the fact that she made that statement that
was ridiculously wrong and full of error about what happened
when not only Renee Good but also with Alex Petrie.
But so she was asked about it last night, I thought,
I played this is her answer to why her information
was so wrong.
Speaker 5: That situation was very chaotic, and that we were being
relayed information from on the ground, from CBP agents and
officers that were there. We were using the best information
we had at the time, seeking to be transparent with
the American people and get them what we knew to
be true on the ground. We believe that we can
always do better, and we seek to do that every
single day, and we want to make sure that we
not only improve protocols on the ground in chaotic and
volatile situations like this, but that we continue to find
the truth around this situation and get the facts to
the American people. And I'm grateful that the President had
the wisdom to send Tom Holman in there to have
conversations again to see if he can get the leaders
of Governor Walls and Mayor Fry to commit to honoring
our detainers and to keeping our officers safe while they
do their work. We've been asking them to do this
for months. They have refused to agree. We're hoping that
Tom has an opportunity to restart those conversations and see
if we can get them to help clean up the
streets of Minneapolis.
Speaker 1: A lot to impact from what she just said. First
of all, she first started off with it was chaotic. Well,
if it was chaotic, that should be a red flashy
light to just hold off until you have better information.
Don't go blab in your mouth until you have Just
tell people we are we're gathering information. We will let
you know when we know. Then she immediately went, this
is why she's why I don't care for her. She
has not an ounce of leadership skills. She blamed the
officers in Minneapolis for giving her bad information. That's what
she did. Did you ever hear her say I apologize.
Did you hear her say I am sorry? She instead
said it was chaotic and we got information from the field,
from the officers in the field, and it turns out
she's blaming them. What a loser. She has no leadership skills,
I mean none. It's fascinating that with the positions that
she has held that she hasn't obtained a little bit
of leadership skills. But I don't see it. Carlos Amanez,
who is the former mayor of Miami Dade and also
a congressman from South Florida. He is a Republican, and
he says he shared with the President his comments about Christinome.
Speaker 11: Well, I think I've voiced my concerns in my opposition
to the crackdown. I mean, look, I have no problem
with deporting criminals. I have no problem with deporting gang members.
I have no absolutely no problem deporting people that have
active deportation orders. I do have a problem in deporting
you know, grandmothers and people that have been here for
a number of years. I think there's got to be
a better way. And so I think the American people
voted for securing the border than arresting gang members and
criminals and people active deportation orders. I don't think they
voted for the extent to which the ICE operations have
have panned out so far. I've expressed that to the administration,
and I think that we need to find a better way,
a more reasonable way, because look, frankly, you're not going
to deport what twenty twenty million people. You can't and actually,
we need a lot of these folks to do jobs
here in the United States, and if you actually deport
them all, then labor costs are going to go up,
and actually is going to go against what we want
to do, which is actually drive down costs. And so
there has to be a compromise, and we need to
find it. I mean, you know, I actually had a
conversation with the President about three four weeks ago and said, look,
we need to do something. We need to we need
to alter the coast. It's not the course. I mean,
it's not changing one hundred and eighty degrees. There's a
lot of the things that you're doing are absolutely correct,
but there are you know, around the edges. There are
some things that you know that are that are problematic
and problematic for a number of reasons which I've just stated,
and we need to change that. And then he asked
me to see who I could work something up for him.
Speaker 7: I have.
Speaker 11: I've sent it to the administration and I'm waiting a
response to see when we can go ahead and start
talking to them about changing Look, you know what Homan
did in Minneapolis yesterday and what he said, but he
was he's kind of changing the way that ice is
working up there. I think that's kind of indicative to
me that there's going to be a course correction here
and it's going to happen pretty soon.
Speaker 1: Well, we'll see, because even though Tom Holman said he
had a good meeting with Minneapolis and Minnesota officials yesterday,
today they're backcracking, going no, no, no, no no, We're
not going to release anybody to Ice from our jails.
So we'll see how that turns out. But they basically
are stabbing Tom Homan in the back today. The FED
announcement came out today. President said he was going to
make a FED chairman announcement before the end of the month.
Last night he was at an event for the Milania
movie and he was asked about it.
Speaker 5: What exactly tip that person over the.
Speaker 2: Edge as you say it tomorrow, But just an outstanding
person and a person that will be too surprising to people.
A lot of people, a lot of people think that
this is somebody that could have been there a few
years ago. It's going to be somebody that is very respected,
somebody that's known to everybody in the financial world. And
I think it's going to be a very good choice.
Speaker 1: So that was last night and today he made the pick.
Kevin Walsh. Kevin Walsh is already a former FED governor.
He was a member of the FED Governor's Group back
in two thousand and six to twenty eleven. That was
during the meltdown, the financial crisis of two thousand and eight.
And he was part of that. He had been appointed
to the FED by George W. Bush, one of the
youngest members ever to serve on the board. He also
was a critic of the FED when he left the
FED Reserve, and he said, look at this large scale
asset purchases not good. Near zero interest rates had run
the risk of distorting markets and undermining long term price stability.
And he was absolutely right. He voted against the second
round of FED bond buying, known as quantitative easing. He
is a professor at a Stanford. He got his undergrad
degree at Stanford. He went on to get a law
degree from Harvard. So he's got all the pedigree. But
in addition to all of that, he married into the
Estay Lauder family. His wife is the heir of the
Estay Lauder company. So yes, lots of money and good
education and is well liked in the financial world. So
I got to give President Trump but kudos on this one.
I think he is an excellent choice to be the
FED chairman. So before we finished one funny and one
oh bit on the funny side, President Trump was talking
during the cabinet meeting. I think it was just during
the cabinet meeting. He was talking about the fact that
reporters are saying that he falls asleep at these at
all kinds of different meetings, but this is Yeah. He
brought it up at the cabinet meeting about why he
closes his eyes as he says.
Speaker 2: They had a press conference. It lasted for three hours,
and some people said he closed his eyes. Look, it
got pretty boring. In all things, I love these meetings.
I love these there's a lot of people. It was
a little bit at the boring side. But I didn't sleep.
I just closed him because I wanted to get the
hell out of here some of them, and I didn't sleep,
By the way, I don't sleep much.
Speaker 1: Okay, A for honesty at least to the point where
it was kind of a funny thing about the fact
that the meeting was boring and he wanted to get
the heck out of there. On the obt side, Katherine O'Hara,
I don't know if you know her name. I did
not until I saw who it was. Katherine O'Hara was
the mom in Home Alone, and she was also in
She had quite a movie career. She was in Beatlejuice.
What else was she in. Oh yeah, she's also one
of the stars in Shit's Creek, A Nightmare Before Christmas.
The list goes on and on and on. Anyway, a
very brief illness. She passed away at her home in
Los Angeles, seventy one years of age. Sagoon Odowalu is
a Hollywood entertainment reporter.
Speaker 12: Well, morton't be right that this is such a gay
in Hollywood, because Captain o'howar was funny in multiple countries.
She came from Canada and in the eighties was part
of SCTV, a comedy troupe that included John Candy, Rick
Moranis Martin short you know, and Eugene Levy, who she
would work with numerous times throughout her career. And she
was timeless in a way where maybe you knew her
from Tim Burton movies like Beetlejuice, or you knew her
from the Home Alone movies, or from Shit's Creek, or
from the Christopher Guest improv movies like Best in Show,
which is still one of my favorite movies. She touched
so many aspects of Hollywood television screen and then worked
with people like Seth Rogen on the studio that was
on Apple TV and cleaned up at the Emmys. She
will be missed. She was immensely talented and just wildly funny.
Speaker 1: The other part about that which I kind of perked
up my ears. So many people were saying, and she
was so young, she passed away at seventy one, way
too early, and I'm thinking, yes, I agree. So Wall
Street today market's decided to sell off a little bit
the now Jones industrials down one hundred seventy nine to
forty eight thousand and eight, ninety two, SIP down twenty nine,
NAZDAC down two hundred and twenty three, Gold after having
some enormously big gains in the last week, down four
hundred and forty one dollars today to four thoy nine thirteen,
and Oil up another thirty cents or so just under
sixty six dollars for one barrel of oil. Thank you
for coming by today, Have yourself a wonderful weekend. We
will be back on Monday. Hope to see you then,