Rush transcript below.
[2:16] DINESH: The 34 felonies are not really 34 felonies. In fact, they’re not felonies. I don’t think at all as I’ll explain but they are 34 business entries. And the business entries are so routine as to be almost comical. Apparently, these are communications and payments from Michael Cohen, not from Tump, but from Michael Cohen to Stephanie Clifford (also known as Stormy Daniels).
This is literally the kind of stuff you have:
– Counts 1 – 4: February 14, 2017
– Counts 5 – 7: March 17, 2017
– Count 8: April 13 to June 19, 2017
Apparently, Michael Cohen was making these payments one by one. Month here, a month there with a couple months in between and each of these is now elevated to a felony count. It’s the same thing over and over, the same payment.
It’s almost like if Michael Cohen had written one check and written $130,000, there’d be only one count in the felony.
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[3:58] You’re trying to lock up for years – not only the guy who was formerly in the White House but the leading candidate of the opposition party.
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[4:42] The first point I want to make is the copy and paste nature of the indictment.
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[4:54] What is the underlying crime to which the indictment makes repeated references?
Turns out the indictment keeps talking about the fact that there’s an underlying crime but it never says what that crime is. So, there is a kind of garbled quality to all these. People are saying, “Well, you keep copying and pasting the same thing over and over. Every business transaction is treated as a sort of separate felony. But a felony – what is the nature of the felony?
Is it that Trump had an illegal liaison with Stormy Daniels? Is that the crime? Seemingly not.
Is it the fact that Trump did a hush money payoff? That’s not even the crime alleged in the indictment. So, if it is not illegal to have done this. If it’s not illegal to have done the payoff, is it alleged that Trump took campaign finance money and used it to pay Stormy Daniels when that was not allowed under campaign finance law? That’s not in the indictment either. So, it’s none of the above, so what really is the violation?
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[6:16] …I want to lay out what is his [Bragg’s] theory of the case. What is he trying to say? So, what basically he is trying to say is that Trump violated something called New York’s False Records Law. So what’s the false records law? It’s a law that basically says that if you’re operating a business, you can’t keep false records, you can’t keep false books. Now, obviously, by and large, the law is aimed at discouraging people from keeping wrong books because you don’t want to hide – because of the tax implications. So you might think that Trump here is accused of not paying his taxes or accused of cooking the books for tax purposes.
[6:52] In fact, the indictment goes to Trump overpaid his taxes. He paid more than he should have but he kept false records supposedly to hide this hush money payout. And the problem for Bragg on that theory is that – even if this is true, even if Trump kept false records and you’d have to prove that he intentionally did that, he’s the one who directed it even though he was President at the time. So, as President – these are payments by the way that go back to 2017 – it’s as if Trump was keeping the books of his own company. No, he had delegated the running of his company to others. Then even if he kept false records, keeping false records according to New York law – look it up – is a misdemeanor. It’s not a felony.
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[7:38] …Alvin Bragg tries to take misdemeanors or 34 misdemeanors and somehow conjure them into 34 felonies.
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[9:14] Where do you get the felony? The felony is you have to attach this violation to another law that Trump supposedly violated that is a felony and here Bragg is taking refuge in Trump’s supposedly violating a federal crime which is federal campaign finance laws.
Now, that is not specifically said in the indictment. In fact, Bragg says, “I don’t have to mention what the federal crime is. I’m not required to do that.”
And yet how do you get from a misdemeanor to a felony unless you alleged a felony crime? Well, it’d be a felony crime to violate the campaign finance laws but Trump is not accused of that. He certainly hasn’t been convicted of that. People who looked into it at the federal level decided this is something that’s even not worth going after.
And so here you begin to see the problems that are faced by Bragg. Bragg has to convince New York courts to let the prosecution go forward. The New York courts – and, you know – I’m not saying I know the outcome at the local level – you could have an extremely left-wing judge, an extremely left-wing jury but Trump is certainly going to appeal. He’s going to appeal to a higher court.
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[10:29] Does Trump have a chance to go to the U.S. Supreme Court or is he stuck in the NY courts because the NY supreme court is Democratic leaning, leans to the left. If that’s all Trump could appeal to, then he might be stuck.
But that is not all that Trump can appeal to. He could very well get a reversal in the New York courts themselves. But even if he doesn’t get a reversal in the New York courts, because the way to get to a felony is to allege a federal crime, Trump can go to the Supreme Court and say that this is a federal matter. It certainly affects a man, Trump, who is running for federal office which is to say president of the United States and there is a rule in the Supreme Court jurisprudence, it’s called the Rule of Lenity, Rule of Lenity. (…)
[Rule of Lenity: “When a law is unclear or ambiguous, the court…”]
It means that if you have a law – in this case we are talking about a New York state law– that doesn’t make it really clear that if you do this, you’re committing a felony. Then the law is meaningless and can’t be enforced as a felony because no person who read the law would know we’re talking about a felony. So since the New York law talks about the false records as being a misdemeanor and nowhere suggests that you’re facing felony charges because of it, this creative legal theory of taking these misdemeanors and kind of — you can say – hitching them to – or bootstrapping them onto a federal law and claiming that taken together these misdemeanors have now been elevated into felonies. No one reading it, no common person reading this, would get that out of the law. It doesn’t even say that and so the Supreme Court could on that basis alone, say, “Listen, this is nonsense.”
And the Supreme Court has already proclaimed that the Rule of Lenity is a valid law and the only question is would the court A) take the case and B) apply the law in this way.
I think if you are talking about Trump being disqualified somehow from running for the presidency or Trump being incarcerated, the Supreme Court would have to take it up. There’s no way the Supreme Court could let it be in and say we’re just going to pass on this one. The implications are too severe.
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[13:03] You’ve had massive campaign finance violations by Hillary [Clinton]. She used campaign finance money to pay for the Steele dossier and then her campaign tried to hide that fact by paying the money to a law firm and then listing it merely as legal expenses. And she got a modest fine, $113,000, I believe. End of the matter.
[13:23] Obama got huge donations from large donors and tried to hide them by camouflaging them as small donors. He was hit with a campaign finance violation.
By the way, these are very serious violations. They exceed my violation by a factor of a 100 or a 1,000 or 10,000. And yet again, the Obama people settled this quietly with the fine. End of matter. So, this is the point. When the left goes and we hear Never-Trumpers go, “Everyone is accountable under the law.” You got to explain why the law is being used in this discretionary, selective and highly ideologically motivated way. That’s the heart of the matter. That’s what I was up against and that’s what Trump is up against now.
[15:06] As I mentioned, the heart of Bragg’s case is to take the violation or the alleged violation of New York’s False Record Act, which is in and of itself a misdemeanor and hitch it to a not-mentioned federal felony violation, which is a violation of the campaign finance laws.
Let’s look at the two parts of this for a second.
The first one: the false record part of it. Turns out – if you read the False Records Act – it has a statute of limitations and the statute of limitation is very clear: 5 years. Now, let’s do the math.
When was Trump’s final payment to Cohen? These are the payments to Cohen that are supposedly the reimbursement. Trump listed these payments as just legal fees to Cohen but Braggs says, “No, no, these aren’t really legal fees. He didn’t provide any services for these fees. These were reimbursements.” But the last payment was in December 2017 and that is more than 5 years ago. 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 and here we are in [2023.] So right away, the law even if it was violated – let’s remember, violated as a misdemeanor – the law is now inoperative. The date is passed. If you wanted to bring this case, you should have brought it and you could have brought it before, but you chose not to. Too bad for you.
[16:43] So New York courts are themselves in an awkward position. They will have to somehow contend that this five-year statute of limitations are somehow not operative, because Trump has – What? He left the state. He’s living in Washington, D.C. He is president at the time. He is doing other things. And somehow the law can still be applied. So that’s the first problem. It’s a very pretty serious problem.
[17:09] There is a second problem and that is that: Where is the campaign finance law violation in the first place? In order to hitch your misdemeanors to a federal crime, well, you gotta have a federal crime and you have to have a crime that is at least – even if the crime wasn’t prosecuted and wasn’t convicted – you have to have committed it. So the question is where has Trump committed that crime? If the payments were not a federal crime then Trump can’t be charged with a felony version of the New York law and the case against him completely collapses. In fact it must be – it must be dismissed.
[17:51] So this is a reckless act by a completely out of control – I would argue – vicious but also extremely dumb New York prosecutor, Alvin Bragg.
[18:09] Yesterday, I saw a lot of comments to the effect that this is really puzzling. Why would Bragg accede to something that’s so foolish. Isn’t Bragg supposed to be a smart guy? Didn’t he go to Harvard? Didn’t he go to Harvard Law? Let me say right away. Going to Harvard, at least in the last 30 years, is basically meaningless.
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[19:14] …Bragg would have somehow felt that he is making a move here to gain – to curry favor with the left. Remember, a couple of his prosecutors had resigned because he had looked at this case and said there’s not a whole there. So it could be Bragg that feared that he would face serious opposition from the left. Maybe a challenge from the left at some point. And so this is a – in that sense a purely political case. In other words, Bragg from a legal point-of-view goes, “I kind of know there’s not a whole lot of there, there, but I’m gonna push ahead with it anyway.” Why? Let’s look at the timing of it. This is something that Trump brought up and I hadn’t thought until I heard it from Trump’s mouth speaking from Mar-A-Lago.
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[20:07] Trump made the point. He goes, “These guys want to stretch out this trial and have it when? Very conveniently in January of 2024. Aha! It happens to be a presidential year. It happens to be, what, a month or a month and a half before the Republicans primaries. So quite clearly, this is a carefully calibrated action that, although it’s a legal action, is a legal action aimed at disqualifying Trump from the – even if Trump were to appeal and win that itself would take time. So you might have a guy, Bragg, may go, “I can get a New York conviction and that’s all that matters. It doesn’t matter if I’m overturned on appeal, because I might be able to get Trump out of the running.” So this is the kind of games that the left likes to play, the kind of evil and vicious games.
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[22:10] DINESH: It is time, it is beyond time, for Republicans to start doing to Democrats what Democrats are quite obviously and brazenly doing to Republicans. And what this means I think is it is crucial now for DAs in Republican states to start indicting prominent leftist and prominent Democrats. I say this without – realizing that this is not always an easy thing to do. It provokes resistance from leftists at the bar. They try to go after you, disbar you, file complaints against you. They’ve been doing this against Trump lawyers, for example, and harassing them, making their lives miserable. And so there might be – Republicans tend to be a little scared, and a little bit diffident, a little bit shy. Or in the past they’ve had the view, “That’s not our job, Dinesh, you know. We don’t want to turn our office into a weapon of political prosecution.” Well, guess what? Alvin Bragg is doing that and what is the best way – the only way to deter the left from doing what it’s doing? Well, it is to show them a taste of their own treatment. I’m applying here the bully principle, the only way to stop a bully – a bully who enjoys beating up smaller kids – is for a bunch of the smaller kids to get together and go, “You know what? Let’s ambush this guy in a dark alley. We’ll teach him a lesson and then the next time he’s going to be more reluctant to bully us in the playground.”
[23:41] Where do we go with this? Where do we start? Who do we go after? Well, the obvious candidates are, of course, Biden. There’s wide circles of corruption with Biden and all you have to do is link it to something that’s happening in your state. And there you go. You’ve got a case. Bring an indictment. Bring indictments against Mayorkas at the border there’s no reason you can’t – the Texas Attorney General can’t find a reason to indict Mayorkas. Now again, this will run into legal obstacles, it’s going to be challenged, it’s gonna be fought over. But that’s okay. The indictment still – it drags out. This is what the left has taught us. Drag it out, make sure that the guy is brought in, make sure that he’s arrested, make sure that he’s fingerprinted, make sure that the cause of action is under state law even if it s hitched to some kind of federal offense.
[24:34] Bill and Hillary Clinton should be both indicted for their crimes under the Clinton Foundation. Think of it: stealing money from Haiti, collecting money and offering basically U.S. foreign policy in return. There are all kinds of violations. Again, you need to be a legal guy to be able to go through this stuff, go through the business records. Normally, we don’t even take the trouble to look. It takes investigative reporters like Peter Schweitzer to put this stuff out. Well, you know what, they’ve done it. So now, the DAs can take the lead, take the information available and pursue it further, pursue discovery, get more information. So go after Bill, go after Hillary, go after Joe Biden, go after members of the Biden family. It’s not limited to Joe. This is a family-style mafia. They split the proceeds. Indict them all. And don’t stop there. There’s plenty more targets here. And again – there’s in fact a luxury of targets. You ‘re almost at a kind of legal shooting range. You’ve got a lot of different options.
Rosie O’Donnell has violated the campaign finance law on at least 5 separate occasions. I don’t know if the statute of limitations has passed but even if it has, you could find some reason to revive it. Maybe Rosie moved to a different state. Do exactly – again, take a page out of the playbook of Alvin Bragg.
[25:56] What about [George] Soros. Here’s a guy who is a Nazi collaborator. In his teen years he accompanied this guy who’s confiscating Jewish art and Jewish money and Jewish furniture. And he claims this was a formative influence and in a way kind of it has been because this guy has been a worldwide menace ever since. He’s caused crime and mayhem not just in the United States but around the world. There should be 40 different ways that this guy can be indicted. Why hasn’t somebody already indicted him?
[26:23] And then, of course, there are the 51 intelligence officers who interfered in the 2020 election. They all lied and said that they were convinced that this Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. What was this but election interference trying to get Joe Biden across the finish line? They probably knew – all of them – that this was real. Their idea, “That’s okay . We’ll find out after the election once Biden is already in there. Let’s keep the American people from knowing about this and if they do know about it, we will be on hand to lie about it and convince them that it’s something other than it is.” All these guys are crooks. All these guys are really traitors. All these guys need to be indicted.
So my message to the GOP is time to get up. It’s time to move into action. It’s time to indict.
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