Indictment Watch

indictment watch for Donald Trump and associates. Now, I don't want us to hold our breath around this, right, and this is how I get into the conversation with Glenn, which is that you know, for those of you who have been listening to the show for the past couple of years, Glenn has been coming on weekly, right, laying out all of the legal ease and all of the

investigation surrounding Donald Trump and company. It's years, friends, and you know, every couple of months we find out new egregious criminal activity that has gone on, whether it's inside of the administration, whether it was previous to Donald Trump becoming president. We know that everything that this man touches this shit. But somehow he remains a freeman, you know,

and that is evidenced by our injustice system. Because if Donald Trump were any other person, if he were a woman, If he were a gay person, If he were black, we know he'd be dead, so let's not even go there.

If he were Latin next, if he were any other a part of any other identity groups outside of being a rich, white, sis hetero man who is also the former president of the United States, even being twice impeached, even with the man admitting his crimes on fucking audio, whether it's I can grab them by the pussy, whether it is find me eleven seven hundred and forty votes though, and we'll do the rest. I mean, I don't know

what else Donald Trump would have to do. But you know, the other day, I was watching Alex Wagner on MSNBC and she says the truest thing that I have ever heard. She was the only true statement that has ever come out of Donald Trump's mouth is that he could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and watch his poll numbers rise. He also would still be a freeman, and somehow an investigation would be opened against the person

that he shot. As opposed to Donald Trump, I'm so fucking tired of bombshell report over here and bombshell had line over here, and oh my god, can you believe this, Because without indictments, without a tryal, all of this is in fact a fucking witch hunt, right, Not in the way that Donald Trump says that it's a witch hunt, as if there is no factual evidence that shows criminal activity.

But if you're not going to actually persecute a person who is essentially a political mob boss, lying, stealing, grifting in broad fucking daylight and on tape, and you can't nail this motherfucker, then everything that you are doing is just a dog and pony show. It doesn't have any merit, right. It gives you the perception of justice, the perception that

nobody is above the law. But if you can't convict someone like Donald Trump, who is caught on tape committing fucking crimes, and you continue to raise the bar, raise the bar, raise the bar where he brought the bar of democracy and of justice to the fucking sewer, that now we've turned the bar into a plunger. I don't know where we go, but I know that the direction that America, our justice system, our democracy, our social safety nets,

our freedom is all being rolled backwards. And without indictments, without conviction, without accountability, America will free fall off the cliff that we are hanging on to with our fucking fingernails. Coming up next my conversation with our friend Glenn Kirshner that what happens if and when Donald Trump is indicted?

What can we expect if anything? Folks, you know that whenever I have the opportunity to have our friend MSNBC legal analysts and the host of Justice Matters, Glenn Kirshner, joined woke f I am thrilled, particularly at a time folks, we are prerecording this, but as reports are coming out,

we don't know if it's gossip, i's real reports. Who knows, but possible indictments for Donald Trump are imminent and that is illegal term and Glenn, I want to start out with the fact that we've been hearing a lot in the media from Michael Cohen again, Donald Trump's former lawyer, who went to jail for his former boss because of payments that were given to Stormy Daniels and escort by Michael Cohen. Two Stormy Daniels on behalf of Donald Trump.

Both of them have been before for Manhattan Grand Jury. Give us the cliff notes, the reminder, the review on what entanglement we are looking at when we're looking at the Manhattan District Attorney's case right now, so Daniellett feels like Alvin Bragg's shop. His prosecutors are at the absolute end stage of the grand jury investigation into the hush money payments to Stormy Daniels. The reason I say that is because the most important witness, Michael Cohen, who was

Donald Trump's co conspirator. He committed these crimes with Donald Trump, at the direction of Donald Trump and for the benefit of Donald Trump. He went to prison six or seven years ago. Donald Trump has yet to be held accountable. Feels like we have two systems of justice at work there. But because they have now placed him before the grand jury for two days, and they also have interviewed Stormy Daniels, We're not sure the reporting was it was a zoom interview.

We don't know if she's been presented to the grand jury. She is actually not nearly as important as Michael coe and the co conspirator. He can bring kind of the inside baseball to the crime that he and the crimes that he and Donald Trump committed together. But you know what, really the most important data point that tells me that they are at the absolute end of their investigation. Is they invited Donald Trump to come in and testify before

the grand jury. Danielle, First of all, we rarely do it. We don't do it in violent crime cases. We do it in these large white collar crime cases sometimes. And what we do is we give the target of the investigation the opportunity to come address the grand jurors and say, ladies and gentlemen, prosecutors have it all wrong. I didn't do anything wrong. I didn't commit any crimes. Not surprisingly, Donald Trump did not take the prosecutors up on that invitation.

So there really doesn't seem to be anything left for brag or his team to do other than ask the grand jury to vote out indictments against Donald Trump. What nobody knows at this moment is precisely what charges will be included in that indictment. We have heard lots about falsifying business records, which undoubtedly Trump and Cohen did because they lied and said that these were legal expenses. Well, no,

they weren't. But the concern here is that falsifying business records under New York law is only a misdemeanor, and there's no way Donald Trump as a former president of the United States is going to face a single misdemeanor count. Nobody's going to indict a president for that. But the law of New York also provides that if you're falsifying business records to either facilitate other crimes or to cover up other crimes, or both, well, then now they have

blossomed into felony crimes. So what I suspect is when we see this indictment, it will probably include three four five separate counts. One will be falsifying business records, but you may have campaign finance violations of New York state law. You're almost certainly going to have violations of the tax laws of New York because Trump falsely tried to take these things as business deductions when they were hush money payoffs. So you know, all of this I think is soon

to be revealed. As you say, we're pretaping this, so you know, by the time it's out, maybe the indictment will already have issued. But that's when a lot of these questions can get answered concretely. What I think is really important to lay out, which is what you just did, is state that we've been waiting for years at this point, right from the find me eleven seven hundred and forty some odd votes to the lie about the election, to

the Stormy Daniel case. We've been waiting for years, and I think to the point that you just made, which is that we've been waiting because there's been a lot of fear about what does it mean to indict a former twice impeached president of the United States. So the assumption, then, Glenn, is that if there are whispers now that an indictment is imminent, it isn't gonna be some low balling stuff, right,

It isn't gonna be some lightlifting indictments. So the question that I have for you is, again, we don't know exactly what they will be, but would your assumption be that it would carry some charges, some criminal charges, meaning that if Donald Trump goes to trial, jail time would be a part of this. Or are we looking at a situation which is what we saw with New York Attorney General Tish James, which is all of these civil

suits that is about a fine. So the good news is the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, Alvin Bragg's shop is exclusively in the business of bringing criminal cases that will carry at least the possibility of imprisonment, whereas Tish James deals almost exclusively, not exclusively, but almost exclusively with civil matters which are about money, which are about fines and penalties, back taxes, and she can do certain things like bar people from doing business in New York, sitting on boards

in New York, that sort of thing. So once this indictment drops, it will almost certainly include felony charges that will carry with it the possibility of imprisonment. Now, whether a judge is going to be up to the task of incarcerating a former president of the United States is an open question. I sure as hell hope the judge is.

Because if you go through all of this angst and all you do is sentenced Donald Trump for these consequential crimes to home detention, for example, you are sentencing him to stream Netflix and get DoorDash. That's no kind of punishment and it's no kind of deterrent for a future high government official who wants to break the laws of the United States for any reason, including trying to unlawfully

retain power. But here's the other thing. We may see a series of indictments coming out of Alvin Bragg's shop, Because even if the first indictment is only about the Stormy Daniel's hush money payments and all of the crimes that can be charged as part of that criminal scheme, and as I say, there may be four or five or more crimes that can be pulled together in one indictment, I don't think that's the end of the road for

Donald Trump. Criminally. The reason I say that is because we know that Alvin Bragg flinched when it came to bringing charges against Donald Trump. When his prosecutors Pomranson done recommended that he'd do that. They told him, we've been investigating him for more than a year, we've got the goods, we've got enough to convict him, and Bragg said, Nope, not gonna do it. We don't quite know why that is, but it may be that, you know, he hadn't been in the job that long. He wanted to take a

step back. He wanted to really absorb for himself what the universe of evidence was. What he opted to do at that point, Danielle was only indict the Trump organization right for a fifteen year long criminal scheme to defraud in the first degree massive systemic tax fraud and he went to trial in that case. What did that give

him the opportunity to preview? It gave him the opportunity to preview all of the witnesses who testified in the Trump organization prosecution that would also have to testify against Donald Trump if he ended up being criminally indicted for that same fifteen year long massive tax fraud scheme that you know he was running as the top of his

own dang organization. So maybe he was looking at the Trump Org prosecution to be his trial run kicked the tires of the witnesses, and those witnesses held up because the Trump organization got convicted across the board of everything. I have a feeling after this first indictment drops the hush money payment indictment, you may then see a second indictment drop for the whole shebang everything Donald Trump did

while he was heading up Trump Org. How does Alan Weisselberg, Trump's former COO, who was also convicted right and is currently serving time, how does he play into possibly being used as a witness against Donald Trump? Because he's been COO of this company for over a decade I think close to two, and we know that he was convicted,

how does he play here? So here's how he plays in Remember, Alvin Bragg cut him an incredibly sweetheart deal because he was indicted on multiple felony charges, including that same fifteen year long criminal scheme to defraud in the first degree. He pleaded guilty to it all, and he got this incredible sweetheart deal. He would serve only five months, which drops down to one hundred days in jail with credit for good time served. He walked away having committed

massive fraud and getting only the tiniest possible sentence. Now, I don't want to be cavalier about it. One hundred days or five months in Rikers is no picnic, right, But that is all he had to do as a result of his guilty plea, and he testified at the trump Board trial. But it sounds like he played games. As we say in DC, he played the fifties. He had one foot in both camps, one in the prosecution's camp,

one in Donald Trump's camp. So here is now Bragg's decision that he has to make with regard to Allen Weiselberg. Do I continue to try to use him as a really crummy cooperating witness the way I used him in

the Trump Board case. Or now that I have kicked the tires of all of the other witnesses that would have to testify against Donald Trump if I indicted him for the fraud, should I also indict Alan Weisselberg along with Donald Trump both again, So both of them are sitting at defense table for the next round of trials. And you know what, Weisselberg got himself a taste of the inside of Rikers and I'll bet he didn't like it. And this time he may say, you know what, I

don't want to be indicted again. I will completely flip against Donald Trump. So you know, all of this could certainly be three dimensional chess. Maybe that's what Bragg has been doing. Maybe not. I think we have to wait and see and what do we think Glenn again, because I just want to remind folks there are multiple investigations going on in Trump world. You just ran through New York, which we think is the one that is most likely with the whispering that is happening. There is also Fannie

Willis in Georgia in Fulton County. Now, one of the reasons why I think that it could be Georgia going first, as opposed to Manhattan DA Alvin bragg Is because the Republican Party just voted right to be able to replace district attorney anywhere in the state that they don't like. Well, there's only one district attorney in the state of Georgia that is currently investigating one of their cronies. So and they don't care about how things actually look. This version

of the Republican Party, you know, optics be damned. Will it shock us all or will it just be like, you know, six of one, half a dozen of the other. If it's Fannie Willis that goes first, and this is about the fake electors and the find me eleven seven hundred and forty votes, it won't shock me because it feels like they are neck and neck right now with respect to where Bragg is in his investigation at the tail end, where District Attorney Fannie Willis is in her

investigation at the tail end. And I'll tell you what the Atlanta Journal Constitution published yesterday was pretty blockbuster because they interviewed five more of the Grand jurors. And I urge everybody to go to the Atlanta Journal Constitution read the deep dive piece because they interviewed these five grand jurors, and the article started with, you know, some real ugliness because they talked about Mike Flynn being called before the

grand jury to testify. They had to bring bomb sniffing dogs into the courthouse into the grand jury room to make sure none of Mike Flynn's associates had done anything dirty.

They had marshals and deputy sheriffs with automatic weapons out in front of the courthouse, on the courthouse steps, the Fulton County Courthouse to make sure none of Mike Flynn's supporters did anything And the article started with, you know, the authors, the reporters recounting how a treasonist former army general who pleaded guilty not once but twice to line to the FBI, and who was then part by a corrupt president who also happened to be his criminal associate,

walked into that Georgia grand jury and pled the Fifth in vote, this fifth Amendment right against self incrimination to cover up the crimes of Donald Trump. This is Donald Trump's America. But then the article starts recounting the experience of these twenty three jurors who put their lives on hold for eight months to do the extraordinarily hard and important work of evaluating the evidence against Donald Trump and

his criminal associates. I urge everybody to read it, because when you can almost hear the voices of these Grand jurors, they said things like I would go into my car at the end of every day and I would cry because of what I was learning inside that Grand jury room regarding guys like Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani and how they devastated the lives of people like Shay Moss

and Ruby Freeman and others. And they said, we took our job so seriously because we knew we had to get this right and listen to their stories, and they were allowed to give these interviews. They didn't do anything improper. But if you read that article and then it ends with a quote from one of the Grand jurors that says, what's coming, It's gonna be massive. It's gonna be massive.

The Grand jurors said it twice. This leads me to believe, Danielle, that we're not gonna see a bunch of sort of singles, standalone indictments of a handful of people. We're going to see a big, old conspiracy indictment probably a Rico conspiracy indictment out of Fannie Willis. And I think part of the reason we haven't seen that indictment yet because remember five six weeks ago, she said her charging decisions were

imminent anytime. I am preparing to indict a conspiracy a whole bunch of defendants Before I do it, what I do is I go to each defendant through their defense team, obviously right, and I say, you have one last opportunity. You want to see your name as a marquee defendant on this big old indictment that is about to drop, or do you want to make a different decision plead guilty, flip and agree to testify truthfully against all the other

co defendants. That may be what Fonnie Willis is doing right now before she ultimately drops this big old indictment. But which one is going to drop first? I think it's a push. I don't know if we're going to see New York first or Georgia first. Let me stick with Georgia for a second, because I want to get your thoughts on what it is that the Republicans in

Georgia are trying to do. So I want to set up a scenario, which I think is a fairly real one, which is that let's say, you know this week that it is Georgia, that Fannie Willis drops a stealth net over Trump, Graham, Flynn, Juliani, you know, run through all the names of the co conspirators, and then the GOP

comes in and fires her. So, first of all, I haven't done a deep dive into the particulars of the new Georgia legislation, but based on what I have reviewed, it looks like that process that they would have to pursue to ultimately try to remove a district attorney will actually take some time to play out. I don't think it's a sure thing. I also continue to have faith in most of our courts, in most of our judiciary

that they would strike something like that down. So I don't think, yes, it's a concern, because what the Republicans have learned is they can weaponize legislation for their own nefarious political purposes in a way that we've never really seen before. You know, I don't want to get off track, but you know, the Democrats sit there and they're like, well, we can't really do much about the proliferation of automatic

weapons because the Second Amendment. We can't really do much about hate speech that's designed and intended and likely to incite imminent violence because we've got this fifty year old precedent called the Brandenburg Test. Do you think the Republicans sit around and say we can't revoc a woman's constitutional privacy rights because Roe v. Wade. No, they just do it.

We should be doing the same thing. We should be doing it, honestly, but in a very forward leading manner, and then we go into court and defend the legislation or the executive order or the executive branch agency regulation that we pass to try to do good. Trump and company do it for evil. The Republicans are doing it for evil. We can do the same thing for good without violating the Constitution. But you know, we don't seem to be willing to fight that way for reasons I'll

never understand. But so I don't think it's a done deal that even though this legislation has passed, and I guess it's been signed into law now by the governor, I don't think it's a done deal that they will succeed in yanking Fannie willis out of that job. So last question for you, Glenn. Again, folks, we are pretaping this, so at the time of you listening, the indictments could

have absolutely dropped. We don't know. But Glenn, here's a question that I have, which is headlines, all of our phones blink and blink and blinkin right, it has happened. What do you think goes on outside of our front doors? You know you're sitting in you know, the DMV in the DC metro area. We know these people stormed the

Capitol Building on behalf of a lie. Right, what do you think that the sentiment, the air, the energy in our country is if and when this actually happens, popping corks nationwide, Marty Grass, That's literally, that is literally what I believe will happen. You're gonna see partying in the streets because accountability has finally come to a criminal former president. Now,

will there be pockets of violence. But here's the thing, Yeah, January six was lightning in a bottle because that's when Donald Trump had all of his power on his platform and the whole Republican Party behind him to kind of support his come to DC on January six will be wild mission to try to violently overturn the results of an election. I don't think you can get that lightning back in the bottle. That doesn't mean you won't see

pockets of violence. What I fear is that Donald Trump will use his third rate social media platform, the true social which I love because when he posts something it gets like three thousand likes. He will use that to say, come to Georgia, come to Atlanta for my arraignment will be wild. Come up to New York City for my

arraignment will be wild. I don't think that will resonate, that will inspire, that will in sight the way January six died because he had lied to people and convinced them that that somebody had stolen their vote from them, somebody had stolen their election from them. Now, the fact that all these years later, I'm being prosecuted, so come

up here and you know, will be wild. They're gonna be like, yeah, we did that last time, and it's got a thousand of us in prison, and we just heard a report that a thousand more of us are getting locked up. You have you never pardoned any of us? Yeah, no, we're not doing that again. You may get little, minor pockets of violence, and I don't want to dismiss that I am not worried because at their core, I think

the Trump supporters are weak folk. Yeah, all right, well, Glenn Kirshner, let me tell you, if it does happen, I will be popping not one, not two, maybe three bottles because this has been several years, several years in the making, and so we will have to touch base with you again once we actually know where things land. As always, friend, appreciate you and your analysis. Thanks Daniel, I'll talk to you soon. That is it for me today, Dear friends on Woke a f as always, Power to

the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.