#2228 - Josh Dubin

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. What's up? What's up, man? Good to see you.
Good to see you. So, I guess we just get right into it.
The last case that we talked about, we had a very unfortunate incident happen after the podcast about a month later. Yeah.
The gentleman beheaded somebody. Allegedly, yes.
Allegedly. There's a lot of allegedly, but there's so many crazy things in that case.
The craziest thing was him trying to fool the security cameras with a wig. Like I guess he didn't know how high resolution cameras had gotten over the 25 years that he was in jail.
I mean apparently there's a lot he didn't know. The only reason I say allegedly is because I'd be a bit of a hypocrite if I started calling him guilty before he has a trial.
Of course. But based on the surveillance...
It doesn't look good. What do they say in Texas? It ain't too shiny.
It was so crazy because we went out with him that evening. We brought him to the comedy club.
He was hanging out with us in the green room. And then the news broke and then uh the comics were all like hey man what the what the fuck are you doing bringing that guy around i'm like well we didn't know i i mean who could have known he was gonna do that other than him i'm as i'm as uh i'm as shocked over it now as i was in the moment.
I mean, yeah, I don't, you know, there are no words. I went through, it's really not funny.
I mean, I'm only laughing out of sort of nervousness, I guess. Of course.
I mean, yeah, I was in St. Louis of all places, which is only memorable because that's where I was when someone called me and said, have you looked at the news? And I said, I was in court and I was on a break.
And, you know, I called him a miracle on this show. And the media shoved that straight up my ass.
Of course. But that's what they're going to do.
He was the only guy that you'd ever brought in that was actually guilty, that you felt was in jail for too long. He got a 50-year sentence, correct? 70.
70. And it was reduced to 25? It was just basically time served.
He did about 30 years. they resentenced him.
Look, I would be – I've had a lot of time to think about this and I know you and I have discussed it privately and I kind of went into a hole after this. this didn't happen to me

a lot of people say

I'm so sorry

some people have said other things

that weren't very nice. But the people that I, you know, regard their opinion were sorry that – it didn't happen to me.
My first thought was – I had two thoughts. Was that poor guy that got killed and it was a gruesome murder.
You know, it wasn't just beheaded. I think he was dismembered completely.
Well, he was trying to get rid of the body, right? Allegedly. Allegedly.
And my first thought was for him and his family. And then my, I think my second and third thought maybe in tandem was this tore down 50 years of work that a lot of people have fought really hard for and really need.
And I felt like I let you down. You know, you've given us an amazing platform to get stories out for people that really need help.
I think we've made a ton of progress. We've got some exonerations as a direct result of this.
Yeah, you didn't let me down at all. No, I didn't.
I appreciate that you felt like that. It didn't feel like that to me at all.
It was just, listen, there's a reality of prison life. There's a reality of being incarcerated.
There's a reality of taking a person who's convicted of a violent crime and putting them in jail with violent people for 30 years. There's just a reality.
And, you know, I don't know what history he had with this man that he allegedly killed. But, you know, it's like you can only take so much.
Yeah. I mean, listen, I don't know.
My first emotion, this is for me and my therapist, my first emotion is usually like guilt. So once I took a little bit of time and thought it through, I mean, of course, I come on your show and then you're splattered all over the news for something not positive.
Good news is I don't watch the news. I don't pay attention.
I don't listen to anything anybody writes about me. So it didn't bother me at all.
You're rare. So so look for me um i have to take a hard look at what i'm doing and um take the mirror out and look straight in it and say like what did i do wrong you did nothing wrong well well i don't think you did anything wrong you just you just listen the man had great qualities he like when you talk to him He He's very intelligent Very nice guy.
He just thought he could get away with getting payback on somebody. Yeah, look that's super gracious of you I'm not whether I did something wrong or not.
I typically go to blame And that's something that I have to that's a kink I have to work out in my personality, but let me just articulate it because I think the platform is so important to me and getting these stories out is so important to me. And I think that where I've landed is that he didn't let me down.
He didn't let... Look, I was the public face of his resentencing.
There was a lot of great people involved. And it wasn't just from the defense side.
The Center for Appellate Litigation had some amazing people working on his case. The district attorney of Manhattan agreed to this.
So on paper, even in their personal interactions with him, there was nothing that raised a red flag for anyone. He didn't let anyone down if he did

this, which people will draw their own conclusion, he'll have a trial. He didn't let anyone down if he did this but himself and the people that still need help.
And I have to swallow the jagged pill that this work comes with some letdowns.

The recidivism rate for people that have served long sentences like that is less than 1%. It just happened to happen on a case where I was involved.
I have no... Is it really that low? Yeah.
Wow. Yeah.
If you look at exonerations, resentencings of people that have been incarcerated for more than 20 years, it's that low. And, you know, the harsh reality is that if you put someone on a public platform and they then do what he supposedly did, it's going to make headlines.
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Look, no one could have imagined what's in the dark recesses of that man's soul, whether it's, you know, his group home upbringing and abuse, the prison experience. It's not to make an excuse.
He did it if he did it. If he's convicted and he did it, that's on him.
what I'm guilty of is giving a guy a second chance. And I am, why am I reluctant to say this? I can't apologize for giving someone a second chance and then, you know, they squander it.
All I can do is say, well, what could I have done better? I mean, I have a deep understanding, I think, of what incarceration means. I mean, I read this book.
I always get his name confused. Is it Henry Jack Abbott or Jack Henry Abbott? It's called In the Belly of the Beast when I was in college.
And it's a series of letters that this inmate wrote to Norman Mailer. It's a fascinating book.
And about what incarceration does to somebody from the standpoint of the practical day-to-day from the deep psychosis inducing confinement and everything else and two days before the book was released and it was reviewed by the New York Times the guy I snapped and killed someone in the East Village. And no one will know what it is like to be in there.
And again, I don't want to offer this as an excuse, but what it has caused me to do is reevaluate and say, look, maybe I need to take a much closer look at what sort of mental health counseling these folks are getting. Like Sheldon, I arranged for him to be speaking to a trauma therapist.
Should I have been on him more to be going to those appointments? Maybe. What was the circumstances with the guy that he allegedly killed?

I don't know if I'm doing it just because I'm distancing myself from it subconsciously, but I don't know all the circumstances. But apparently this was someone he knew from childhood and from in prison.
I've heard rumors and stories about the guy threatened his son to he slashed Sheldon when they were in prison. I don't know if you remember Sheldon had this big gash across his face.
But I don't know. And I frankly don't want to know at this point, because someone lost their life.
And that, you know, I think, unfortunately, for my mental health, I just wear that stuff. You know, if I felt even remotely responsible for that, which I do, and, you know, I have to, I can, I can be at peace with it, but I didn't cause that death.
And I don't, you know, I can take some responsibility for it in the sense that what could I do going forward? Whether it's people that are being exonerated for crimes they didn't commit, or if it's people that are getting resentenced, you cannot undo decades of confinement. You just can't.
And they all need mental health counseling, all of them. And I have to put that on my shoulders.
I just do because, you know, they all have issues and they come out and need mental health counseling. And there's a stigma attached to it, especially in the African-American community.
And there shouldn't be. It's no different than if you have a problem with your liver, you know, and you have to take medication.
I mean, I've always been upfront about the fact that I'm on medication. It's nothing to be ashamed of.
And it's especially warranted when you're in those circumstances. Again, none of this is to make an excuse, but I just think that there's a lot more emphasis that I can focus on assimilation more.

And I think that making sure that they have job training and that they feel safe when they get out. I mean there hasn't been one person who I've been involved in their case where even when they're innocent, they get out and it's a fucking shock.
and I need to be a lot more sensitive to that, I think, and pay a lot more attention to what they're doing, how they're doing. Again, I had the foresight to put Sheldon in touch with and ensure that we were getting him mental health counseling with a trauma therapist.
But, you know, I didn't want to meddle too much in that because it's on him to go so I mean that's where I land um for better or for worse well the guy really did slash his face if you've been in literal mortal combat with a person and this person is allegedly threatening your son or whatever you know there's only so much you can do to stop a person from seeking revenge i guess especially if they don't have any hope outside of the system and they they've been completely institutionalized which given the length of his sentence is reasonable to assume. Yeah, you're a lot more forgiving and understanding than a lot of people were and have been about this.
You know, I've had, there's been two schools of thought in the reaction. I mean, I got pretty nasty hate mail and I got a lot of words of encouragement.

I think the hate mail outweighed the words of encouragement.

Always.

But.

Psychologically, always.

I mean, by in substance, number and probably psychologically.

Yeah.

But that shit just gives me fuel.

You know, if you're sending me, fuck you race baiter you this you that you know oh yeah i got a lot of that how are you a race baiter um by telling the truth about the state of race and the criminal justice system in this country i i see the thing is the one the one force field i have around myself is when that's incoming i I'm able to say, okay, thanks for the fuel. Thanks for the fuel.
I'll never respond to it. Unless you're doing mental health counseling in a prison, unless you're a corrections officer, a police officer, know what it's like to be incarcerated, You have no fucking business giving me your shitty opinion about what you think I am or others that do this work.
Get in the fucking arena and do it yourself. And I, you know, so I take that with a big grain of salt.
I had, you know, I have enough common sense and practical sense to sort of let, to disregard that, but I have to be a big enough person to look at myself and say, well, what can I learn from this? And what could I do better? Because, you know, I was talking to Derek Hamilton, who's been on the show and the, the deputy director of the, the Perlmutter Center. And, you know, Derek said, look, mental health counseling when I was incarcerated was something that was like it flew in the face of the us versus them mentality.
I didn't think they could help me. And I didn't want to want the help.

I was mad. And there was a stigma attached to it that I was soft if I did it.
I didn't want people inside knowing. So I don't, we're trying to formulate a plan to normalize mental health counseling in prison.
So Derek and I are doing a town hall at Shawongunk, which is a pretty rough prison in New York on December 6th to try to get some of the inmates to understand that it's okay to ask for this help. I think when they see Derek and hear his story, it's helpful for them.
So I'm going to say something that's going to sound pretty controversial but i think you know one of the uh one of the conversations that i've had uh repeatedly i had it with jd vance i've had it with quite a few people is psychedelic therapy for veterans um people with severe ptsd because of war i think are the most deserving of psychedelic therapy and the benefits of it. And the fact that that stuff is schedule one and is illegal in the

United States, I think is absurd. It's ridiculous.
It's horrible. It's a massive disservice to those

people that put their lives on the line and went over and experienced horrific things that the average person like myself can only

imagine and you're not going to do a good job of imagining it i think prisoners could benefit

from psychedelic therapy as well i think there's a lot of people that could be rehabilitated by

changing the way they they view things literally changing their mind changing their perspective

and i think there's a lot of psychedelic therapies that could aid in that, particularly for people who, you know, they're not violent people. They're, they're just had their victim of circumstance, or they made bad decisions in their life, or what have you.
And they're stuck. And they're stuck both mentally and physically.

And if we want to use prisons as just a deterrent to crime, OK, I think we should probably put some effort towards rehabilitation, you know, sincere, significant efforts towards rehabilitation. And one of the best ways to do that is to try to change the way people view themselves and view the world and view themselves as a part of the world.

The fact that you would even think that that would be controversial, I think, is just a byproduct of the fact that anything that somebody articulates that's outside of like what's considered mainstream is rejected.

Unquestionably, the research is overwhelming. Overwhelming.
That psychedelics are one of the best, one of the best, most effective therapies for PTSD. My therapist has, you know, counseled people with PTSD coming back from war and, you know, has espoused not only the efficacy of it, but how remarkably different it is from conventional therapies in the most positive of ways.
And I could not agree with you more. I think that if you look at some of the European countries that look at their prison systems as a real rehabilitative model, I mean, we have to decide that.
We talked about the stats, and I'm not going to, you know, re-litigate that here, but look, we incarcerate people at a higher rate than any other civilization on earth. So we have to decide as a society, are we just going to throw people away and put them in cages and make them worse, even if they committed the crime? Or as you said, are we really going to try to rehabilitate people? Because some people are getting out no matter what, whether they have people like me involved and other great people that do this work, but they're going to get out.
Do you want them out like they were just an animal let out of a cage? Or do you want them out where rehabilitation is a cornerstone of their incarceration? Right. And it just doesn't happen in our criminal justice.
Well, there's a bizarre attitude in this country that we shouldn't do anything to make their life better while they're in there, you know, and that's something like psychedelic therapy is like that it's a luxury's a luxury, that it's something they don't deserve, that it's something that should be reserved for good people. Or that there's some like – it's for people that are like fucking off and the others that do drugs, that whole mentality.
Sure. Yeah, there's that too.
So, yeah, listen, I mean, you talk about like looking up at the mountain and saying, can I scale it? I think what you have to do, and I'm talking about this, all it takes is one state, one municipality, one person who says, that's interesting. Show us the literature.
We have this amazing policy director at the Perlmutter Center named Sarah Chu, and she's in the trenches having these arguments, having these fights, trying to get forensic labs, you know, ensuring that they have the proper training accreditation so that they're not introducing, you know, various forms of junk science. All it takes is just the effort going forward to try to start pushing that boulder uphill or else, you know, again, this goes to, you know, the incoming hatred in a situation like we had here is like, what the fuck are you doing to help try to make the situation better? Because just calling names and pointing fingers and saying you fucked up or this person that we threw away is not worth saving.
Listen, everybody has made some mistake that they wish other people didn't know about. You know, and it's not always homicide, obviously.
But a lot of people have done something that but for the grace of God go I, right? Where if somebody was looking, if law enforcement was was looking it could be you that was there and would you want a second chance would you want redemption would you want to help to overcome whatever demons and I just think why psychedelics aren't you know looked at ket, the little bit that I did going through a dark time, it, uh, it almost snapped me in a different direction. And I mean, I, you know, you urged me onto it.
I mean, you were the one that said you should really think about this. And my therapist urge me on to it.
And I think, you know, so I know that the literature is there. It's just we have to get past this whole.
It's so weird that you mentioned that. I was talking to a guy on the plane on the way down who asked me if marijuana legalization passed in Florida because we were talking about, you know, where are you from, this and that.
And he was telling me that he was from Colorado. And he told me that, you know, in Colorado, when marijuana was legalized, that there was this whole movement of people that were saying that it would be a gateway drug and that it was going to lead people down the slippery slope to doing other hardcore drugs.
And he said, you know, the gulf between smoking weed and turning into a meth addict doesn't exist. He said that the bridge between the two doesn't exist.
And if you start walking marijuana use and trying to link it to drugs that the U.S. government considers a problem, the link just isn't there.
So, I mean, I, you know, he was sort of trying to explain to me how he didn't understand how marijuana is any different than alcohol. And I said, well, go tell that to the state legislator in Florida.
I don't know what to tell you. Did it not pass in Florida? It got 58%.
And it needed 60%. Really? Yeah.
I don't get that.

I just don't get... Why would...
It's fucking more than half the people. That should be it.
Why did it need 60%? It was the same thing with the amendment on abortion. It needed 60%.
Maybe it was the abortion one that got 58%. I might be wrong about that.
But in any event, I don't, I don't understand the, the resistance to psychedelics as a therapeutic, both in mainstream society, let alone in the prison system. Well, it all goes back to 1970.
It all go back is it all goes back to the Nixon administration, the sweeping psychedelics act of 1970 that turned everything.

Schedule one that was designed to it was designed to cripple the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. That's what it was about.
It was about having new tools to imprison people that were anti-war, that were protesting the war. the Black Panthers, civil rights organizations, all these people that were doing drugs, you know, that were using psychedelics to try to achieve a different state of consciousness.
And that brought them to these ideas that we're all one and that war is evil and that the United States government is being controlled by the military industrial complex and complex and that this is a giant problem in our culture. But people were so weirded out by the Timothy Leary's and the whole tune in, turn out, whatever the fuck his motto was, drop out.
This whole thing of leaving polite society and being a loser and just like traveling around and doing drugs in a van like this is this was like the the perspective that people had that was going to take their kids and turn them into ne'er-do-wells and turn them into losers and that we were going to have a society filled with uh people that didn't understand the ethics of hard work and what made America great and all this bullshit.

Well. And that we were going to have a society filled with people that didn't understand the ethics of hard work and what made America great and all this bullshit.
Well, look, what's born out of that is this, you know, misunderstanding, I guess, is the best way to put it. Ignorance.
Well, it's propaganda. They're a victim of propaganda.
Well, look, also, if you think about, like, CoinIntel Pro, you know, all of a sudden you're spying on people that you think are others. You're legalizing that intelligence gathering that allows you to start violating people's civil liberties so that you can gain intelligence on them because the way they think is unlike you.
Right. the civil rights movement, it was all based on the fact that, look, we have a potential uprising here of people that are going to challenge the way we think and the way we do things.
So for people to call me a race baiter, right, I feel like I'm more of a truth teller and just taking the thread through history. And I have, at least I'll read and try to educate myself and get perspective if it wasn't a fact that brown and black men and women get incarcerated at a higher rate I wouldn't be talking about it and I'm just talking about facts so I think that it's's just this tribal misconception about these are drugs and they're bad versus you sit and speak to someone and take some, you know, pharmacologic form of therapy that has probably way worse side effects, can be addictive and can lead to a whole host of other issues that you then have to take something else to address versus just being having the openness to take a look at a different way to potentially help someone.
So I don't understand it. And the only thing that I can do is just to keep on being open-minded and, you know, try to figure out if there's other ways that we can convince the people that are in these penitentiaries and that run them to allow programs that at least give you a crack in the door to get in.
Well, I think the doorway to that is to first show the effectiveness with veterans and with other people that aren't incarcerated. And that once that gets established and once that becomes something, I think it's much, much more established now than it was when I first started talking about this stuff 20 years ago.
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Rated M for Mature. Probably when I had my first experiences was a little more than 20 years ago.
I think people had this very ignorant idea that was born out of propaganda. Because you have to think, 20 years ago, it was only 30 years removed from the Sweeping Psychedelics Act.
so you're dealing with a whole society that's been just programmed by propaganda and lies and that proper those propaganda and lies were established in order to villainize this one group of the population that was completely changing the culture the difference in the united United States culture from 1955 to 1965 was so dramatic. It was such an enormous shift.
Then you have the Vietnam War, the protests, all these things that were happening in the 60s, the music, everything was changing so radically and so drastically that the people in power had a very like an accurate sense that they were losing control and that change was inevitable and they threw water on it and they did a great job if you look at it from that perspective the difference between me it's terrible what they did but it was effective in from 1970... A great job of throwing water on it.
Yeah, a great job of changing culture, which was changing in a potentially beneficial way for everyone, to get us to recognize that we truly are all one, and that the way to make things better for everyone is to make things better for the most disadvantaged.

And this was the civil rights movement, right? And this was the anti-war movement. This was recognizing that people were being taken advantage by the military industrial complex and just sent overseas so that they could profit.
Amen. And the first, the first guy that I met that really like, um, changed my perspective on, on the world, especially in terms of what, what I could potentially do as a lawyer was Jerry Lefcourt.
Jerry Lefcourt was Abby Hoffman's lawyer. He was the lead attorney in the Panther 21 trial.
I was like a kid. I was in my late 20s and I was met with him to help him pick a jury on a case.
And I had read about him before and he saw something in me. We hit it off.
He became like my surrogate uncle. And he would something in me.
We hit it off. He became like my like my surrogate uncle.
And he would regale me with tales of his of the Panther 21 trial. And here's a guy that was kind of winging it in his late 20s and can feel the change that you're talking about happening.
and he could feel the weight against him, the pushback coming from the other side where he would get death threats. He would get bomb threats at his office where he could not even see his client in jail approaching trial and had to get on a cherry picker in outside the jail to be able to get even with the window so that they can communicate.
Jesus Christ. So Jerry left court, and he, by the way, got a full acquittal in the Panther 21 trial against all odds.
He was the first person that told me about coin intel pro and what the gut with the lengths that the government will go to um when they feel like their message their um way of doing things is being challenged and i think that you hit the nail right on the head which is This was like a flew in the face of Leave it to Beaver.

It flew in the face of leave it to beaver it flew in the face of you know yeah father knows best it flew in the face of what white America was trying to instill as a value system that should be followed by all people without question for all time. And people started to say, what the fuck is this about? I want to explore the messiness and the gray areas of what it means to exist as a human being.
And that expression, whether it was Richard Nixon, the people around him that got their backs up, you know, so if you are a student of history and you start to understand sort of why we're here rather than just looking here and forward, I think these things for me are a little bit easier to understand when somebody comes at me and calls me a race baiter for the work that I do, because I talk about the problem of race. I understand that that's born out of ignorance.
And I don't mean ignorance like you're a dummy. I mean, ignorance like you're- You don't have access to the information.
Yeah. Or you chose not to have access to it your perspective is incorrect read todd easy coats his book between the world and me it's a fascinating fucking tale it's a letter written from this you know black man to his 15 year old son and it is um it's a life-altering book for me because it puts you into his soul of what it has been like to grow up as a black man in this country and um it it stops me in my tracks when I think about it when I talk about it because it's like the only way that we can get to a more common understanding is to, you know, I think to read books like that and to talk to people.
And if you're so closed off and close minded, and again, I keep on sort of adding this disclaimer, and maybe this is my, my aversion to like getting attacked. I am not excusing if Sheldon did this.
I just think that it's not so simple as, oh, you let some guy, you helped some guy get out and get resentenced and look what he did and fuck all these people and fuck your movement. Okay, you're entitled to that opinion.
That's where I leave it. Yeah, you can't listen to those people.
You just, you know what you're doing. You're smart.
You can't listen. It's just that you're going're going to have those people they're always going to exist there's always going to be people with limited information perspective you know and limited information people sometimes are the loudest and the most vocal about it and and also the ones who are least willing to objectively assess how they came to the conclusions that they're so vocal and loud about.

You know, limited information people. That's a big thing.
That's why clickbait headlines work. Well, look.
I love that shit. That's why you get attacked sometimes by, you know, you don't know about it because you don't read it.
That's why you get attacked sometimes. Some people try to send it to me.
It's funny. Hey, man, fuck off.
Stop sending me that shit. You know, someone in my family, a cousin of mine, sent me a link to a story about you endorsing Trump and wrote, what the fuck? And I said, right, what the fuck? Why are you sending this to me? Like, first of all, what the fuck? What the fuck are you? What you're because you all of a sudden support this woman who, by the way, probably should have accepted the invitation to come on the show.

It might have been the difference between people getting to actually know who the fuck

she was.

But putting that aside, it's like I have to do a much better job of filtering that stuff out because the notion that, you know, you are going to be influenced by outside forces other than what you're doing like for you to say you know what you're doing I like to think I know what I'm doing and I feel like I'm doing good things and I just got to keep on working in that direction not let what happens slow me down try to learn from go forward. Look, I don't want this to come across as like constantly being like a situation where I'm every time I get on here, I thank you.
But I think the importance of this forum was made clear by having the president on, by having the vice president on, because it's the only open forum where you don't have to worry about being judged, about someone chopping up what you say and twisting it or leaving some remarks on the cutting room floor and it's also important because you don't give a fuck about what other people say or think and you just do what you feel is the right thing to do because I've told you privately I'll say it now again. It would have been the easy thing for you to do would have been to say, fuck this guy.
I'm turning my back. I don't need to have him on again.
So that was never going to happen. Yeah, well.
Listen, what you've done is amazing. And the people that you have brought on this show have changed a lot of people's perspectives about our justice system.
A lot of people. You brought on some incredible people and you've told some incredible stories and and as you said people have been exonerated for crimes that they didn't commit if you are a person who's listening to this and you would it you could be fucked by the system it's possible you could be trapped by a corrupt prosecutor it happens thank God it hasn't happened to you but if it did happen to you you would pray that there's a Josh Dubin in the world that pays attention to your case.
You know, I appreciate it. And I mean, I don't it's not just me.
There's a I understand a village of people. There is but a person like you.
Yeah, you know, and I think highlighting that and highlighting the need for that and understanding of how the system can railroad you and the system can really fuck you over. I think one of the things that we saw during the Trump campaign was the legal system being used against one of the most powerful people in the world and how they can get away with turning 34 misdemeanors, essentially one misdemeanor, but 34 versions of it, 34 writing in a ledger incorrectly that's a misdemeanor and is past the statute of limitations can be converted into a felony and turned against a guy who's running for president as lawfare.
It's just completely using the legal system to try to attack a guy and try to take him out of the race and also try to label him a convicted felon. So once you have this label, a convicted felon, you heard it on all the talk shows, convicted felon, convicted felon.
But enough people had a chance to look at the circumstances of the case and understand what he was actually being tried for. Paying someone off to not talk about how he fucked them? Is that what we're worried about? Are we worried about World War III? Is that what we're worried about? Are we worried about terrorist cells being established in the United States because our border's wide open? Are we worried about the price of groceries and people being able to feed themselves? That's what we should be fucking worried about, not whether or not some guy fucks someone.
Like, who cares? It's so interesting to me because the conversations that people in the legal community in New York were having at the time, I cannot tell you how many times. It didn't matter what side of the spectrum you were on politically.
But in New York, there's a lot of fucking Democrats. And I can't tell you how often I got this call.
What is the crime here? I mean, with regard to that particular case, first of all, the DA Manhattan seemed to realize that it was a futile endeavor to go after this guy and retreated. And then something happened.
And you remember the special prosecutors quit because they were furious, apparently, that the DA wouldn't go forward with the case. Then something happens in between.
And Alvin Bragg, the district attorney of Manhattan, proceeds with the case. So many legal scholars said, what is the crime here? I understand there's a series of misdemeanors that somehow gets flipped into a felony.
Legal scholars that had issues with it. And if they spoke about it publicly, they were attacked.
Alan Dershowitz was one of them. He was attacked.
Anyone that would speak out. And there's this fear for good legal minds to get behind defending a case like that because it's viewed in democratic strongholds like kryptonite.
Right. So, I mean, remarking on that case, yeah, it was weaponized against him.
And that's why I think it was this morning, the judge in that case, agreed to a joint motion by the prosecution and the defense to put everything on hold, because they're deciding whether or not they're going to dismiss that case. And if you remember, the drum that was constantly beat before this election was he'll never get out of these state cases, the federal ones we understand because he can pardon himself.
But the state cases, oh, those are going to be a problem. Well, not so fast, right? Because now, if it was that much of a crime and that people were so up in arms about it, why are they now considering dismissing it? And I think that it puts the lie to the notion that this was really something that we wanted to make an example out of and you can't engage in this type of conduct.
What conduct? It was obviously politically motivated. and it happens all over the country.
It happens all over the country on both sides of the aisle, though.

um we have i have a case right now that and for me to be able to say this is probably um you know i had to think is this is this the craziest fucking case i I've had and it has to be it has to be because the DA that is sitting in judgment of whether or not these four men that I'm going to tell you about in a moment right before the election for him to become DA gets indicted. He gets indicted for allegedly harassing a former employee and then trying to bribe her not to file a complaint against him, something like that, right before the election.
And all of a sudden, he is now embroiled in this. He loses the election a couple of weeks ago.
And he is now finds himself wrongful, according to him, wrongfully accused of a crime he didn't commit. Well, my client is a guy by the name of John Edwards.
And there were four guys. This is in Lorain, Ohio, Lorain County, Ohio.
It's John Edwards, Lenworth Edwards, Benson Davis, and a guy named Al Cleveland, New York guys in the early 90s who were selling drugs in Ohio.

They were going back and forth from Ohio to New York.

And one morning, a man by the name of Epps is found dead in the street.

His roommate is found about seven hours later, a woman named Marsha Blakely, dumped in an alley behind a shopping center. The case is cold for a month.
The police have hit dead ends. They have nowhere to go with the case.
The prosecutor's office offers a $2,000 reward for anyone with information about the case. Wouldn't you know that the next day, a man by the name of William Avery Sr.
walks in to the Lorain County prosecutor's office. They sit him down with the police, and he says, I have information about the case.
Now, this guy, William Avery Sr., was a known informant. The police knew him.
He had come and tried to give information about other cases, didn't pan out. He was also a drug addict.
And they sit with him for over an hour and they say to him, everything you're telling us has been in the papers.

So you're not giving us anything new here.

He shows up the next day with a son, William Avery Jr.

And he says he witnessed the murder.

So William Avery Jr. talks to the police.
At the end of that interview, he goes, what about the reward money? And the officer says, let's turn the tape recorder off and let's talk about that. they tell him we're not giving you the reward money because now you're telling us that information that's been in the papers and all you're telling us is that you saw Marshall Blakely assaulted in an apartment.
You're not telling us anything about the murder. The very next day, he shows up and says that Al Cleveland told him that he murdered Marshall Blakely.
So let's put a bookmark in it because I decided I wanted to do something a little bit different today. At the end of the episode, I'm going to give you a Twitter account.
I've submitted today a 40-page submission. All of the exhibits that are mentioned in that submission to the Lorain County prosecutor.
His name is J.D. Tomlinson.
So now I'm going to invite the public. Before you go writing a letter to him or calling him, you read the submission and look at the exhibits yourself.
Because what often happens is that in these reinvestigations, prosecutors' offices have something called a conviction integrity unit, where they say they'll reinvestigate the case. And the very first thing they make you do is sign a no media agreement, that you won't go to the media, because the last

thing they want you to do is what I just did, is to talk about the case publicly. So we're not in

a Conviction Integrity Unit. We're trying to appeal to a prosecutor, J.D.
Tomlinson, who from

what I understand has told Al Cleveland's wife, because I've spoken to her, her name is Roberta, great woman, came up to her in the summer at a barbecue and said, when I was a law student, I sat in on your husband's trial and it always bothered me. And I want you to come in and have your lawyers come in.

I'm going to do the right thing.

And now that he's been indicted, he has gone silent.

I haven't heard from him.

I've texted him.

I see he reads my messages because he has read receipts on,

and I guess he doesn't know that.

And I've asked him for his time.

I think in his wildest dreams,

he probably never could have imagined that the case was going to now become national news. He has between now and December 31st to do the right thing and exonerate them.
The incoming DA would never do it, I don't think, from what I've heard. So I'm going to invite the public, and I'll give you the link at the end, and I want tell you the rest of the story.
Because some of the things I tell you, you're going to say, come on, that can't be true. So I have the exhibit sitting in a folder for everybody to read.
But, you know, the, I think that the justice system has been weaponized against J.D. Tomlinson because he was coming up for a reelection.
There's all sorts of like personal animosity between him and the guy that just got elected. There's allegations, at least, that the guy that just got elected helped, you know, was somehow involved in, you know, getting him indicted by a special prosecutor.
I don't know if it's true or not, but it doesn't just happen on the big national stage. It happens all over the place and you just don't always hear about it.
Well, I think the fact that it happened on the big national stage the way it did and not just the case of the hush money, but also the case of Mar-a-Lago being overvalued, which is preposterous. That was one of the most ridiculous ones.
They listed it at, what, $17, $18 million? I would buy five of those if they were available for $18 million. You know how much money you would make for that kind of property? You ever been to this place? No.
I've been there a bunch. I've seen it.
It's fucking, it's magnificent. Yeah.
You walk in there and you feel like, you know, Marjorie Post bought it and had it designed. It's magnificent.
Forbes, I think, had valued it between $700 and $900 million. Is that true? Find out what the valuation was.
But like independently before all this shit it had been valued and i think trump valued it over a billion which of course he's gonna do and he's doing it to the bank right right trying to get a loan paid the loan off with interest everything was fine nobody there's zero victims involved in this and the fact that they want to say that it was actually, so what does it say here? Okay, 350. Okay.
So the club had revenues of $25.1 million for the calendar year of 2017, 22 in 2018 and 21 in 2019. 2022, Forbes estimated the value of the estate around $350 million.
I think Trump jacked it way higher than that. And I think I've read somewhere that someone had said between seven and nine, if you could, like, what a real estate evaluation would be.
Like, what it's actually worth in the state that it's at. I think there was an issue, though, that it was, wasn't it, like, listed as a national historic landmark or something like that, Jamie? Right.
So then you really can't do anything to it, which devalues it somewhat. But still.
I would think, listen. 18 million is fucking crazy.
There's no property like that anywhere. You feel like you're in Europe when you're there.
It is a magnificent place and has some of the best food in Florida. So I don't, and I don't know, part of the valuation of something like that seems to me to be a bit subjective.
It's now the home of the sitting two-time president of the United States. So yeah, but putting all that aside- Just the real estate alone.
There was a lot that was sold next to it or a home that was sold next to it. It was $50 million.
And it's not just Mar-a-Lago. Across the street, they have the beach club that sits right on the beach.
But the point is that they're meddling into, look, the bank could have said, well, we're going to send an appraiser out there. Right.
And we're going to determine whether or not we agree with you that it's worth that. That happens for anyone that's ever sold a home.
so again the point is there's no victory so so so so so so so so so so so

so

so going to send an appraiser out there, and we're going to determine whether or not we agree with you that it's worth that. That happens for anyone that's ever sold a home.
Again, the point is there's no victim. The point is it's not like he got this loan and then defrauded the bank and then defaulted on his loan and then pocketed the money.
No. No, he paid everything back with interest.
It was profitable for the bank. Everything worked out.
It's like this is a bullshit case. Everyone knows it's a bullshit case.
So that's another one that was in the news that everybody got a chance to see. Well, hopefully it opens people's eyes.
Look, there's a lot of white-collar crimes that I've been a defense lawyer on where you see the human cost of a prosecution, what it does to the person accused, but also their family. And to somehow crawl out from under the weight of the federal government, these take years and a fortune to defend.
And oftentimes you're thinking, why did they bring this case? What who are the victims here? And they come up with some loss calculation that's very theoretical. I'm talking about cases where you can't point to a victim that lost money.
And, you know, you wonder why some prosecutions are brought and others aren't. And you see, again, what it does to not only devastate families and the accused, but is it really deterring anyone? I would never, ever enter an industry where I was working with stocks, bonds, commodities, anything that was regulated in any way by FINRA, the SEC, because they'll – oh, it seems like they can make a case sometimes when there isn't a case to be made.
And hopefully, you know, regardless of what side of the political spectrum you're on, what happened to Trump should be eye opening to people because you don't have to agree with him or his politics or his policies to see what's happening today as we sit here when everything's being reconsidered. And you think about the massive expense that it takes to prosecute these cases.
That guy has I don't care what anybody says about him.

He's got to be one of the toughest motherfuckers you've ever met to stare down all of this. And most people would be in a puddle to stare down these prosecutions and the threat of going to jail and everything else.
That breaks a lot of people. Yeah.
And then two assassination attempts. Yeah.
Jesus Christ. He's built different.
Yeah, he is. I mean, the guy's 78 years old and I talked to him for three hours and he didn't pee before.
He didn't pee afterwards. Just sat here, talked, didn't lose any energy and then flew off to do a campaign rally.
Yeah, listen, I wish him all the success in the world. I hope he does well.
I got these, you can't vote for Kamala Harris after what you've said about her. You're right.
I voted for Jill Stein because this two-party system to me is fucked. You got to you got to like, you got to be with us or them.

And then there's all kinds of gaslighting that goes on.

You have to answer to people.

I just feel like there should be more choices, but that's a different.

Well, there certainly should be.

That's a different existential issue. You know, you spoke on the podcast about her history as a prosecutor and what she had done.

And I know they contacted you after that.

Yeah, I mean, what was happening, well, this was way back when,

I think it was days before she was selected to be the vice presidential running mate for Biden.

But I think it was Carpenter who was, is that his name?

He's a great congressman. He wears an eye patch.
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And right now you can get 10% off at tecova's.com slash Rogan when you sign up for email and text. That's 10% off at T-E-C-O-V-a-s.com slash rogan oh dan crenshaw dan crenshaw not carpenter dan crenshaw took a clip from the podcast and was circulating it on twitter um and it was of me being critical of her and you know and again that's a situation where she had so many opportunities during this campaign to just say, listen, I obvious I watched a little vignette about this family who was prosecuted for their truant child and it ruined them.

So all of this, I'm a prosecutor and I'm going to prosecute the case against this. That, that petrified me because I have sat in rooms with prosecutors that just want to be right and win.
And I would just say, please just open your mind a little bit. I was just, I just sat in a room with a conviction integrity unit and there were prosecutors in the room where and I can't sign one of those agreements.
So I can't name the case or the city or the borough, but where the prosecutor went to federal prison for bribing witnesses and is accused of the same conduct in this case where he was giving money to someone who has recanted their testimony. And the prosecutors sitting in the room were like, it wasn't that they weren't open-minded.
They had their mind made up before we got in there. And you feel like saying, can't you just listen? Just listen.
They just just want to win yeah and i think that that that is my problem with the two-party system is that it's you're either on this side or you're on this side right and there's no room for gray area between the issues right um i have i have a friend who i mean i i learned so much during this election i have a friend who is from Central America, and she was telling me, when Trump won the first time, I was furious. I couldn't stand the guy.
But when I came to this country, I saw my mom fight for citizenship, and I saw what she had to go through the right way for me to get citizenship. And she said, so I just can't vote for anybody but him.
So everybody has their own reasons for doing it. It doesn't mean it has to be all about a cult of personality and you're voting for, you're endorsing everything about the person.
And I think that, you know, having that understanding that, you know, look, a lot of people that I spoke to a friend of mine the other day that grandparents, you know, were in the Holocaust, his grandfather survived the Holocaust, and he voted for Trump, because he's like, I didn't feel protected by the other side, you know, as those grandson of people that went through that. So, yeah, I just think that watching a system get weaponized against someone in that way, it's upsetting.
And hopefully, like you said, it opens people's eyes to the fact that if they could do it to the president, it could happen to you. And it's so transparent.
It was so transparent. It wasn't like he committed a murder.
And there's a lot of evidence pointing to the fact that he committed this murder. No, it was just a crime that didn't make any sense.
You're going to spend millions and millions of dollars prosecuting this crime. You're going to parade it around for the whole world just so the Democrats can have this talking point convicted felon.
And you see it repeated over and over again on MSNBC and CNN.

These pundits want to say convicted felon they want to say that like what's the fucking crime tell me what the crime is but when you want to get smart and spout off facts why don't you tell me about the case because I've looked at it and it's fucking bananas and if it happened to you you'd be terrified because they just made a crime they made a felony out of something that's not a felony I mean listen the if you're looking for logic and reasoning and any of these you're not gonna find it I mean listen feel terrible. But I feel different about some of the cases.
Like, I feel like the, you know, the election case has the most substance to it. You know, standing up and saying the election's rigged, the election's rigged.
I have a problem with that. But, you know, obviously more than half the country didn't have as much of a problem with it.
That was one of the ones that I said was the weirdest where he didn't have an answer ready. That you should have an answer ready right away.
If I had been accused of something like that and I strongly believed that the elections were rigged, I'd be able to give you facts right away. But he can't.
Well, who's his facts? Rudy Giuliani and MyPillow? Well, that's the thing is like, I don't know how much time he has to investigate the cases, right? So he has probably people telling him things and who are these people and what is their evidence? What's their information? I would hope that if you have something that's so controversial, like you ran for president, you believe you should have won, and they rigged it, you should have data that you could spit out at any cocktail party. But he's doing the same thing that you're talking about CNN and MSNBC do, which is just repeating the same thing.
When people were standing in line voting a couple of weeks ago, he was saying this election was rigged, and poof, it must have they've straightened it out because he won but i don't what he was saying was they were trying to rig the election and uh what facts did he have to back that well there's the one thing of bringing in people um to the country illegally and then pushing for amnesty which was they were doing well yeah i just don't know the numbers on it and i don't know there's millions of. If you think about the amount of people that came into the country, right, and you think about how some of these swing states, their cumulative votes was like 75,000 that switched it one way or another.
And just you can imagine if you're bringing in millions and millions of people and you're moving them to swing states. Well, if that's true.
And the evidence against it was like, well, they're not all moving to swing states.

Well, okay, you can't tell people where they can and can't move once they come to the United States if they have family that's in Texas or if they have family that's in Arkansas

or whatever.

They're going to go wherever the fuck they want to go.

But a significant number of them were in the country.

If you're bringing in 10 million people, you have quite a bit of a buffer.

It's not a perfect system.

But if you're trying to let people in illegally and then give them not just protection, but

All right. you have quite a bit of a buffer.
It's not a perfect system. But if you're trying to let people in illegally and then give them not just protection, but also money, food, food stamps, housing, taking care of them, and then giving them an incentive to vote for the

party that did that to them when the other party wants to, they want to round people up in mass

deportation. Yeah, but putting party aside, what evidence did you see? Documentary evidence that

Thank you. wants to, they want to round people up in mass deportations.
Yeah, but putting party aside, what evidence did you see? Documentary evidence that people were registering to vote and how many of them? Well, it's not that they were registering to vote. The issue is that there's no voter ID, which is fucking insane.
You need an ID for everything. This ID- Where is there no voter ID? Harris won some states that require voter ID, contrary

to online claims, fact check.

So there's an online chart

that's incorrect that people are passing around?

See, this is exactly...

So what states did she win that have

voter ID? Well, she's good. There's certain

like deep state, deep

blue states. I hear you.
Colorado

and Rhode Island are two. But look what just happened.
So is so is that two is that the two vice president also won New Hampshire which requires voter ID but allows individuals without one to either have their identity confirmed by a designated official or fill out an affidavit Harris also won both Delaware and Virginia so there's a couple states that she won that have voter ID.

But these are these are like these deep blue states.

Fair enough. Look, I don't know.

The question is the swing states.

I don't know enough about it. And I live in a in a world where I need the evidence.

But backing up to the other election, look, I'm just saying if there was one case where I was like, come on, man.

You know what's weird about the one, the 2020 that we keep going back to is the amount of people that voted. That's what's really crazy.
Way more. Way more.
Way more. Way more.
And I don't know what to make of that. Well, it's the first time ever you have mail-in ballots that are used ubiquitously.
You know, that wasn't a thing before. Mail-in ballots were essentially for people that were overseas.
Well, I think COVID had a big part. Sure, it did.
But also never miss an opportunity. And if you wanted to cheat, that would be the way to do it.
And to try to keep voting mail-in ballots, keep voting by mail-in ballots when it's not necessary anymore. It's not a pandemic.
Sounds good. Seems crazy.
It does, but it's not. To me, I live in a world where you cannot say shit like that without backing it up.
But listen, whether – I don't – I have started to really veer away from having a strong political view and just putting my head down and doing what I can. So I don't – I mean I don't see the evidence on the prior election.
I see the claim repeated a lot. I just didn't.

I don't see the evidence either. But I do see evidence that people are trying to make it easier for illegals to vote.
That disturbs me. The pathway to citizenship has always been kind of difficult.
And when you talk to people that have done it the right way, it's very hard. They have to go up for review.

They have to hope that this person decides that they're a person worthy of being in this country.

And you had to be a person of extraordinary skill and talent where that talent and skill wasn't available in the United States. Listen, I recently moved out of New York to Florida.
And I got my driver's license and registered to vote pretty quick after I moved there. My wife didn't.
When we went to vote, they wouldn't let her vote because it hadn't been 30 days yet. So all I could say is that in Florida, they required an ID.
Yeah. And they didn't let my wife.
Well, California literally passed a law where you're

not allowed to ask for ID, which is crazy. Yeah, it is crazy.
That's crazy. Well, why would you do that? Andre, Andre.
What would be the most charitable version of why you would do that? Yeah. Andre, Andre Ward and I have been discussing California quite a bit recently.
And And it seems like it's a little bananas to live in California right now. It's fucking crazy.
Yeah. It's not going to get better either.
You know, a lot more people voted red in California. Have you seen the map of 2020 versus 2024? Yeah, I did.
It's a giant, significant shift. And if that keeps going,

the state's going to go red.

And I think if the state

keeps falling apart,

people are going to come

to their senses and recognize

that the policies

that they have in place right now

are fucking gross.

They're gross.

And you've got a bunch of bureaucrats

that are profiting off

of the homeless situation.

They're taxing the fucking shit

out of people.

The state tax is 14.

If you live in L.A.,

it's another one.

So 15% of all your money just goes to incompetence. It's the same thing in New York city.
I mean, you, you're giving to the state, to the city, you end up paying way more than if you make enough money, you end up paying way more. Here's the rub I don't get about Democrats, all right? This is the thing that bothers me about Democrats, and this is why I registered finally as an independent.
We hear about the American dream a lot, the American dream, the American dream. I was a son of a teacher.
Now I sound like a politician. I was a son of a teacher and a salesman.
Did you grow up middle class? What's that? Yeah, I grew up middle class. I grew up mid-middle class, right? And we had to grind it out and there were financial problems and everything else.
So the American dream is to make it on your own, to be self-made. And then you get to that point and you get demonized for it.
Now you need to give back in a way that how dare you not give more than half your effective salary, more than half your income if you live in California or New York. Right.
You give it away. Right.
52%, 53%. You end up feeling like, what the fuck? What did I do wrong? I give back in so many other ways.
Here's my take on that. Yeah.
If they were doing a great job and they were legitimately making people's lives better, I'd be fine with that. If there was a system where I had to pay 50% because I make a lot of money and I had to pay 50%, but that 50% was changing people's lives, they could show you all these success stories.
It's like revolutionizing the way poor people are allowed to make it out of that situation You didn't feel that in California?

I wasn't feeling it in New York

going to the state courthouse

You feel bureaucracy

You feel like corrupt politicians

who are profiting off of narratives

and they're

a bunch of dirty people who don't even follow

their own fucking rules, particularly Gavin Newsom

doesn't even follow his own rules

It's the guy that got busted in the middle of the pandemic

wearing no mask indoors, eating at the

French Laundry

Thank you. who don't even follow their own fucking rules, particularly Gavin Newsom.
Doesn't even follow his own rules. It's the guy that got busted in the middle of the pandemic wearing no mask indoors, eating at the French Laundry.
It's all bullshit. It's all bullshit, and the people felt really fucking prisoned by it.
They felt really captured by their government, and that's why a lot of people move. He's got great hair.
He does have great hair. Well, he's a great sort of version of what you would expect of a politician? Why does great hair get you so far? Well, people want great hair.
They want good genes. Tall and great hair means a lot to people.
Yeah, I don't fucking get it. We're stupid.
People are stupid. There's a lot of stupidity involved in why we choose things.
I read this article once about how there was a poll done of female voters when Bill Clinton ran the first time.

And they asked the reasons why.

And it was multiple choice.

And one of them was that he was good looking and had a full head of hair.

Yeah.

They want to fuck them. Yeah.
And apparently he wanted to fuck them. Yeah.
He was a great president though. I mean, in terms of policy, in terms of what did for the economy, guy was a great president, great orator.
I agree, except for the fact that mass incarceration kind of started with him. Yes.
The crime bill of 94. Yeah.
So I think that our prison industrial complex started with Bill Clinton. Well, it was kicked off by Joe Biden.
It is. It was just hilarious.
This is the guy running against all that. Yeah.
It's all bullshit. You know, I don't...
It was very interesting to me that this is playing out in real time with the incoming president. And I have this parallel situation going on in Ohio.
This is called a weave, weaving back to Ohio. And I want to tell you the rest of the story about the Ohio Four.
So this guy, J.D. Tomlinson, is the prosecuting attorney in Lorraine.

He's under indictment right now.

He's got two months left.

Like I said, he now knows, according to him, what it's like to be wrongfully accused of a crime.

So, watch this.

You have these four guys who, again, it's Al Cleveland, Lenworth Edwards, John Edwards, Benson Davis.

Yeah, you gotta look at that. four guys who again it's Al Cleveland, Lenworth Edwards, John Edwards, Benson Davis

yeah you gotta

light up for this one

so I told

you William Avery Sr. goes in

tries to get the reward money they tell him

fuck off

brings his son in the next day they say

to him no dice

then he comes back and says okay

Al Cleveland told me he committed the murder

Come on. Brings his son in the next day.
They say to him, no dice. Then he comes back and says, OK, Al Cleveland told me he committed the murder.
Comes time for their trials to begin and they're going to all be tried separately. And William Avery Jr.
gives this account of how this murder happened. and he says that he watches this woman, Marshall Blakely, get beat for 15 to 20 minutes

inside of her apartment. And that, you know, the reason he this woman gets beat is because Al Cleveland wanted him to work off a debt and beat her up.
And he said no. So then these four men bust in the door and this is how the crime occurs.

It comes time for the first trial of these four men. And William Avery Jr.
shows up as the prosecution star witness and he says, I want $10,000 to testify. you gave me two, I want $10,000.

And the prosecutors say,

we're not giving it to you.

And he says, then I'm not testifying.

The judge throws him in jail.

He's in jail.

He is cooling his heels, as they say.

And he says, you know, I made this whole thing up. And I did it for the money.
And no one believes him. And the judge says, what are you talking about? You're going to get on the stand and testify.
He says, no, I'm not. And now he's facing potential perjury charges.

The judge declares a mistrial. He then comes back with a news story to the prosecutors and says he witnessed the beating.
He witnessed other details of the crime. He then goes on to testify at all four of their trials.
After the first mistrial, they all get convicted. He then fully recants of his own volition, says he got off drugs, says he wants to straighten out his life.
He's in the process of cooperating with the FBI and the Secret Service.

Now, these exhibits are sitting in this folder.

You go to Twitter.

It's FreeTheOhio4.

FreeTheOhio4.

There it is.

And if you just click on that URL.

One person's following?

Zero followers?

There was a reason because I didn't put it up until right before the episode. I want to be the first person to follow it.
I'm going to get on right now and be the first person to follow it. If you click on that, it will bring you to a folder with this 40-page submission that I put in today and references to all of the exhibits.
So this is my first page. At the trials of Al Monday, that was his pseudonym, Al Cleveland's pseudonym.
At the trials of Al Monday and those charged with him, I testified under oath that I was an eyewitness to Alfred Cleveland, who I knew as Monday, along with other people I knew as J.R. Will and Shaquem, who was John Edwards, beat Marsha Blakely at Floyd Epps apartment and then murder her behind Charlie's Bar and Lorraine.
All of this was a lie. I never witnessed the murder of Marsha Blakely, was not with her or out Cleveland the night she was murdered.
I only done it for the money and everything was not true the entire case was built on this man there's no forensic evidence no eyewitnesses nothing so this is not to be believed what was the reason why they thought this woman and that other man were murdered they didn't know they had They had no theory. Police had no theory.
There's no connection to them? No connection to them. There was no theory, like drug deal gone wrong, something? Oh, that was what they ended up coming up with, was that she was a drug user.
Cleveland was a drug dealer. It must have been drugs gone wrong.
So something involving drugs gone wrong. So William Avery Jr.
is after they get convicted, is working as an informant for the FBI and the Secret Service. Now, prior to this case, maybe this is how obtuse I am.
I thought that the Secret Service's purview was the president, but apparently they have other investigative functions because he was working on some food stamp scheme as an informant the Secret Service tells the FBI and the testimony is in that exhibit file the Secret Service tells the FBI this guy William Avery Jr. he's not to be trusted he's lying to us and he's lying to us for money.
They contact the prosecutor. The FBI calls the prosecutor in Lorain County and says this guy William Avery Jr.
used him as an informant in that case against these four men. He's a liar.
And he does this for money. So they end up getting Al Cleveland's lawyers, John Edwards lawyers, Lenworth Edwards, Benson Davis, they end up getting an evidentiary hearing.
And William Avery Jr. comes to testify.
And he's coming to testify that I made the whole thing up. And he's in very exquisite detail.

His father, who obviously brought him there, threatened his life. He sat him down and smoked crack with him to calm him down.
He can't make this shit up. Wait till you read the affidavit.
He sat him to smoke crack with him to calm him down and told him, I need that reward money for my drug habit. He was a fucking junkie.
So he needs the reward money and he gets his son to go in there. And it's obvious if you watch the if you read the interrogation and his testimony that he's being led, they show him pictures of the apartment where this woman was allegedly beat.

He's getting details wrong.

They're there.

You know, he changed his story. He was telling conflicting versions of the story.
So at these post-conviction hearings where these men should have all been exonerated, he gets on the stand and before he testifies, the judge says to him, have you been advised? Do you have an attorney? He said, I don't think I need an attorney. And he tells William Avery Jr., well, you need an attorney.
We're going to appoint you an attorney because you're about to perjure yourself because you either did one of two things. You either lied and that put four men in prison or you're about to lie now to set them free.
Either way, you've lied under oath. Think about the mind fuck of this.
So this guy is coming to clear his conscience and the judge threatens him with prosecution. So he gets an appointed attorney and they go and ask the prosecutor, will you give him immunity so he can tell the truth? They say no.
His defense attorney asks the judge, will you give him immunity so he can tell the truth? And the judge says no. Oh, God.
And and they tell him we're going to charge you with perjury if you tell the truth he walks out of the courthouse okay after pleading the fifth and is interviewed by the local paper walking out of the courthouse that's in the exhibits and he says they're all I made the whole thing up. I've been trying to tell the truth here, but I can't go to jail for whatever time they're going to give me.
So here you have a guy that is the son of a known junkie. He has been, the prosecutors in this in Lorain County have told have been told by the FBI that he's not reliable, that he makes things up just to get money.
He's been caught in lie after lie after lie. And now he comes and wants to tell the truth and set these men free.
And the crazy and this judge puts him in this situation where he's he can't tell the truth or else he's going to get prosecuted this is what happens in this country this is the kind of thing that and these four men two of them are out two of them are serving life sentences al cleveland's wife roberta cleveland saw this da and he said he was going to do the right thing. He knew that the case was problematic.
And now, because he's worried about his own indictment, you know, he's not responding. So what we're asking for is your listeners to go through and read this very detailed submission that I've made along with the Ohio Innocence Project, the Ohio Public Defenders, and a great attorney by the name of Kim Corral, who you actually had a good laugh over one time, oddly enough, because she was at the White House when Kanye West was there.
She was apparently standing over him smiling, and you were like, look at this fucking girl. She just thinks that, like, how the fuck did I get here? She told me about it this morning.
Did she feel that way? Like, how the fuck did I get here? She probably did. She's super cool.
I spoke to her this morning. She's a badass.
And she was like, I've never met him, but he seems awesome. And he did have a good laugh at my expense when Kanye was in the White House.
So, yeah, there she is. That's her.
Do you remember this? Kind of. Kind of.
It's so funny. But she's.
Kanye in the White House. I forgot that.
She's awesome. But so we're asking your listeners to go and read the exhibits, read the submission.
And then I have a contact page. Call J.D.
Tomlinson. Write him a letter.
Look, these four men. Thank you, Jamie.
These four men certainly were drug dealers. Al Cleveland.
We've established Al Cleveland's alibi, John Edwards' alibi. Check this shit out.
His alibi witness was Damon John from Shark Tank. He testified at his fucking trial at post-conviction hearings.
Damon John back then was a hard

scrabble New Yorker. He was doing whatever he could to grind out.
This is before FUBU. And he was friends with Al Cleveland.
And Al needed to have a TV moved. And Damon had like a gypsy cab service, a car service in New York.
You lived in New York, right? You remember what it was like you call a cab service? Yeah. A car service.
And he was with Al Cleveland the day of these murders. Al Cleveland saw his probation officer the day after the murders.
People saw him all over New York when the murders happened. John Edwards was with his girlfriend, his girlfriend's family throughout the night from like 10 at night till three in the morning.
His girlfriend was pissed off at him because he was flirting with some girl in the bar. So these guys have alibis.
There is no question. They had absolutely nothing to do with this crime.
This woman, Marsha Blakely, was murdered, right? Here's one of the strangest facts in this case. She is seen all over town, all over town.
At the time, they claim that this guy, William Avery, originally claimed she was murdered. She's seen by family members, friends.
She's looking for crack. She's walking down the street way after this guy claims it happened.
How was she murdered? She was, throat was cut and she was run over by a car. All right.
So we've talked about tunnel vision before. And when the police think they have the guy, they had a problem on their hands.
They couldn't solve the crime. And they have these guys that are drug dealers in the area.
So they become easy marks for this. There is a blade sitting in a diagram found right next to Marsha Blakely's body.
They never tested it for DNA. They never collected it.
They never tested it. It was at a time when DNA is the early 90s.
DNA was around.

Her roommate Epps, Raymond Epps,

is found

a mile or two down the road

with his throat slit

and run over.

Same thing. Same thing.
No one's been

charged.

No one's been charged. It's an

unsolved case as of this day. Why?

Because they pinned it on

these other guys. Because they pinned it on these guys

I'm going to go ahead. been charged.
No one's been charged. It's an unsolved case as of this day.
Why? Because they pinned it on these guys. Because they pinned it on these guys.
And this guy, William Avery Jr., only came in with information about one of the murders. The cases were so clearly connected that the medical examiner pointed it out.
These people were killed in the same way. Why there isn't an outrage, a fucking outrage about this case is is beyond me.
When I got this case, I said, there is no way what you're telling me is true, that this guy has come and wants to clear his conscience and tells you exactly what happened. and the FBI told the prosecutors that he's a a liar and these guys are still, two of them are still serving life sentences and when you have to live stamped as a murderer, even in the free world, Al Cleveland is out and he's suffering.
I mean, I had to listen to his wife heaving.

She couldn't get a hold of herself because she went down to J.D. Tomlinson's office

and said, you told me you were going to help.

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That's simplisafe.com slash Rogan for 50% off and your first month free at simplisafe.com slash rogan that's simplisafe.com slash rogan for 50 off and your first month free there's no safe like simplisafe and he said i can't now i'm sorry i've been indicted the last time i exonerated someone look what they did to me because he exonerated someone else and his political opponents attacked him. You know, human beings, we sometimes get in our own way because of outside forces, what we think other people are going to say, think J.D.
Tomlinson's been voted out, he's been wrongfully accused of a crime, it's time for him to say, you know what, I'm going to do the right thing. All I ask is actually a meeting with him.
I want to meet with you between now and December 31st. Let me lay everything out for you as I have in this submission.
He's now going to have it in his hands. He wouldn't answer my text messages.
I'll give him a break. He was obviously

going through some serious personal issues, being under indictment, running for re-election. This is an easy thing.
This is just doing the right thing. There is no way that you could look at this evidence.
And this is why I think it's a good idea for rather than give a snapshot of a case and have to rely on some process with these conviction integrity units behind closed doors where they run the reinvestigation. I like the public being able to get invested and look at the evidence themselves.
Everyone loves a true crime story. So why not, as part of this, let the public help make the case.
And when they write a letter, they'll do it more forcefully or they call him and say, how could you ignore this? So I would just encourage everyone to go on Twitter and go to Free the Ohio 4 and look at the evidence. And if you ever – I've gotten so many reach outs.
How can I make a difference? What can I do to make a difference? This is it. You can write.
You can call. you know his cell phone number is online because he was running for re-election

you know let him know

that the public is watching and expecting him to do the right thing. You know, that's the best use I feel like I can make of publicly advocating for change is to help bring in the public and give them a vested interest in trying to help.
Well, this case, this is just an amazing example, right? I mean, you said this is the craziest case you think you've ever had. I don't think I've ever had a case ever where the sole alleged eyewitness

recanted a case ever where the sole alleged eyewitness recants and then is threatened with jail time is actually put in jail after trying to extort the prosecutors where there's no forensic evidence and it was the most incomplete investigation I have ever seen. What would be the most logical thing to do if this guy says, you know what? There was a beating at this house.
What would be the most logical thing for police to do? There was a beating inside this apartment for 15 to 20 minutes and this woman was brutally beaten. What are the police going to scan for evidence go to the apartment they go to the apartment right they don't spray it for luminol they don't see if there's use luminol is a a chemical agent that brings out hidden blood um you know they do nothing they go and do a scan the apartment, a visual scan and see nothing out of order.
They don't test that knife. And this is living.
Was there evidence that the woman was beaten? No evidence. Oh, there was evidence that she was beaten, just not in that apartment.
So she was beaten before she was stabbed. There was an eyewitness that saw her that night with like a black eye begging for money for drugs.
Oh, okay. After he allegedly saw her killed.
Oh. So she was living a street life.
Right. And there was suspicion that she was trading sex for money so that she could feed her drug habit.
So I just don't – I've never had a case where the FBI calls the prosecutor and says, this guy is a liar. And he goes in for reward money and for financial gain and he can't be trusted.
Never had a case where a judge says, if you tell the truth, we're going to put you in jail.

If you tell the truth, it's just as bad as putting these guys, you know, you either told a lie to put them in jail or you're now telling a lie to free them. I mean, I just don't get it.
I just don't get it. I don't understand why, you know, in almost half of the cases where there has been an exoneration based on a sole eyewitness's testimony, over half the people recant.
And the courts are very critical of these recantations. So in other words, if someone makes up a story and then they come back and say, look, I made that up because my dad was threatening me because the police threatened me, that's somehow viewed very, very critically.
Whereas the initial allegation, it's really easy to put someone in jail, real easy, real difficult to get them out. So do you think that's because the system is set up to not reverse convictions because it's bad for the prosecutor's record? It's bad for the confidence of the judicial system? Like...
All of the above. Yeah.
I mean, why did Kamala Harris block... Why did she block access to biological evidence from crime scenes? I think the rationale back then was, oh, well, it would lead to a flood of requests.
So fucking what? Right. Flood of requests from innocent people, perhaps.
Or people that maybe they're guilty and they want to take a shot. Who knows? But isn't that worth the price of wrongfully incarcerating people? And why is – there's so much politics that gets wound up in this.
I don't you know and for the life of me I don't understand why you know it doesn't see the light

of day more I testified before the House Judiciary Committee in Florida in connection with the Perlmutter case when their DNA was stolen. Their DNA was stolen and they were wrongfully accused of a crime, Ike and Lori Perlmutter.
And I testified before the House Judiciary Committee that stealing someone's DNA as a private citizen should be a felony. All right.
It was a misdemeanor. And, you know, it was one of my finer moments of oration, I think, because I got a 16-0 vote.
And I had a really interesting discussion. It's recorded.
I should find it and send it to you sometime. But there were Republicans that asked me, hey, what is it that we can do to help you more? Because this story is crazy.
And I said, well, there is something that you can do as part of this bill. We would like to make it not only a felony, but give defense attorneys that have a good faith basis to believe that it's an alternative suspect's DNA, the same right to collect that DNA as law enforcement.
And if they make a showing to the court that they have a basis to believe that this is an alternative suspect. So I had a former police officer who was a member of the Judiciary Committee say, look, I was a cop, and we used to do it all the time.
And his exact quote was, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. And I think if you can make a good faith showing, I want to support that.
When it came time for the bill to go to the Senate, the guy that was sponsoring the bill wasn't responding to me. I said, we got overwhelming support, not only to get the bill made from a misdemeanor into a felony, but also to allow defense attorneys, criminal defense attorneys with an adequate showing to collect the DNA of alternative suspects.

And I said, so we'd like to add that amendment.

And he just stopped responding to me.

And finally, I got him on the phone and I said, what's the story? Why aren't you responding to this? And he goes, it's not happening, Josh. It's just not responding to me.
And finally, I got him on the phone and I said, what's the story?

Why aren't you responding to this?

And he goes, it's not happening, Josh.

It's just not going to happen. And I said, why? He goes, I'm not going to go into that, but it's not happening.
So, you know, obviously there was some political pushback to it. He just wasn't going to have that part of this bill.
so you know I don't know what else you can do to push these issues, you know, other than get out there in the public and bang the drum about it and try to get people to pay attention. And this, I think, is a rare opportunity because it gives people, it allows them to invest in this.
It allows them to see what the evidence is and actually, you know, write a letter and say, hey, I saw the testimony of the Secret Service agent of this FBI agent under oath in these post-conviction proceedings. Why can't, how, what more would you need? You have the power to exonerate these guys and end this 30-year-long nightmare for them.
Why not do it?

Yeah, why not? Well, I'm hoping that this is one of those cases where the people get activated and the way you laid it out is so crazy. I mean, and with more evidence online that people have access to, I'm sure there's a bunch of people who are going to react to that.
I'm curious to see what the response is going to be. Yeah, FreeTheOhio4, at FreeTheOhio4 on Twitter.
And, you know, like I'm not a big Twitter guy. Or I can't say Twitter anymore.
I'm not a big ex guy. I still say Twitter.
Yeah, so, I mean, I guess I should get more into it. Yeah, we did.
One follower. We threw this up.
Hopefully that the number starts going up. Oh, they will.
As soon as it gets published, I'm sure we'll get a chance to see. It's going to be interesting to see how many bots lock onto it.
Yeah, and then it would be my dream to one day have the Ohio force sitting here and have a toast. Yeah.
Wow. What a story they have, huh? Yeah.
Jesus Christ. And, you know, the sad part about it is, like, I hope that people don't say, well, there were drug dealers at the time.
And, you know, again, that's not because you commit one crime doesn't mean that doesn't mean you're murderer also like it's the circumstances are different for every fucking human being and uh for you to think that there's no way that i would do a crime especially a crime like that like are you sure are you sure if you were in their shoes if you live their life?

You know we we all like to think that everybody's life is the same as ours

We only have one life that we can kind of reference when we look at other people's lives We kind of imagine what it would be like to live their life. We don't know people do desperate things in desperate times

Depending upon your environment depending upon how you grew up, what your influences were, what trauma you experienced, whether you were incarcerated at a young age. No one has any understanding of that other than the people that get trapped into the system.
They just don't. You know, tough on crime.
Yes, I think you should be tough on crime. I think you should arrest criminals and evil people that do terrible things and make society awful.
Yes. So do I.
But also you should definitely not arrest innocent people. You should definitely not imprison them and then punish someone who's trying to say, hey, the reason why these people are in jail is because I told a lie.
Yeah. I mean, I don't get the threat of punishing them.
And, you know, you, I hope you have the type of influence and following that just listen to that perspective, folks, right? You know, I have, in the last few years, developed a way deeper understanding of how relative trauma can be from individual to individual. I did not realize trauma that I had suffered until I started to travel those roads.
And then how it can impact behavior. So I'm trying to make better decisions about how I judge things because I don't want to say I don't make – I'm not judgmental.

We're all judgmental.

Everyone's judgmental.

Yeah, it's bullshit.

You have to be.

That's how you survive in life.

Right.

I have to form judgments.

But I'm trying to make more educated judgments rather than judging someone based on, you know, not having a complete picture of what they might have been through and also not being able to put myself as best I can behind their eyeballs or in their brain. Right.
It's hard unless you really make an investment. And I think the easy thing to do is to make a quick judgment and keep it moving.
Yes. Right.
And I think that words can be an excuse. The deep dive is too much of a time investment, too difficult.
And I've had to understand behaviors that I never thought I would ever have to consider. And I can tell you, at least in my experience, it forces you to become a more compassionate human being, a more understanding human being.
You get to know yourself better. Um, because if you're not just constantly trying to figure out more about yourself and others, what the fuck are we doing here? Right.
What the fuck are we doing here? Yeah. Yeah.
If you're not trying to figure out more about yourself, I mean, if you're the most enlightened person alive, tell us how you did it. You know, you don't have any searching to do anymore.
Tell us what you did. Because I never met anybody like that.
I can't thank you enough because, again, it's a rare occurrence these days that to be unaffected by the outside noise. And I promise you, I'll do better in making sure that I'm a little bit more plugged into the help people are getting when they get out, whether they have done it or not.
We've had two recent resentencings. One guy was paralyzed and blinded in prison.
And he's in a wheelchair and he can't see. And part of the reason he was paralyzed is because of poor medical care that he was getting.
It was a difficult decision to make initially because I said, shit, another resentencing, a guy that was found guilty. And then I saw the horrific medical treatment he was getting.
And I said, you know, this just isn't right. You don't just throw out a human being like this.
And what threat is he in a wheelchair blind? But, you know, I have to do a good job of making sure that people are getting the attention and care they need. It takes resources.
And, you know, we're thankful to everybody that continues to reach out and support any of these causes. The Perlmutter Center, you know, the Midwest Innocence Project is a great one.
The Ohio Innocence Project, those are all satellite projects. But the Freedom Clinic at the Perlmutter Center, we've had some terrific folks, including the Perlmutters, that have given us the resources we need to make a difference.
So I just have your – you're in my – I'm in your debt eternally. You're not.
You're not. I appreciate you very much.
and my thing about the outside noise is you should never put any effort or time

or focus into something that has no net benefit. There's no benefit in the outside noise.
It doesn't do you, especially if you are an introspective person. If you're a person who thinks everything you do is awesome, maybe it's good to see people shit on you.
Maybe it's good to see that some people don't like you. Maybe it's good.
Maybe it's good to hear other people's perspectives. Kind of like you put your ego in check.
But if you're a person that's introspective, and I know you are, if you're a person that is hard on yourself when you make mistakes, no one's harder on me than me. I'm very hard on me.
Oh, I know someone that's as hard on themselves as you. He's sitting across from you.
But it's, of course, correct. You know, if you look inward and you don't like what you're doing or what you've said or who you are, don't do that again.
One of the best things I did in the wake of this whole Sheldon Johnson incident is I turned my comments off on Instagram and turn my account private. I think I'll make it public again after today because I want to generate support for the Ohio four.
And but turning comments off is a nice thing because you can't believe the good stuff or the bad stuff. You just stay forward, Especially for people in the public.
The good stuff, you can get what they call audience capture. You know, you have enough people leaning you in a certain direction or giving you praise for a certain thing.
You start doing more of that, you know, and this is a manipulative tactic that's used online both for and against people. Hey, man, look, when I was on my way over here today, I was walking into the Uber, and a guy at the hotel goes, I hope you're going to talk that talk over on the JRE.
And I said, yeah, I am. And it turns out that he went to high school with Rodney Reed, who's on death row here in Texas.
And I got into an interesting conversation with him. He's like, man, his older brother could pop and lock.
I said, yeah. He goes, man, this motherfucker was popping and locking all the time.
He's telling me about him break dancing. And he's like, no, for real, you know, shining a light on this stuff gives a lot of people out here hope.
And I told him that, you know, I wrote a letter to the legislator here in Texas that's reconsidering that case. So it's just real cool, man, to get people behind it that really care about this stuff.
And, you know, the public can really help out.

You don't have to be a lawyer.

You don't have to be a psychologist.

You don't have to be a therapist.

You know, pressure does break pipes.

So reaching out to J.D. Tomlinson and making noise between now and December 31st.

And as you said, talking about things on this podcast have actually exonerated people.

Yeah, I thought this one was probably better off just me. Let me think real carefully about the next guy.
Yeah, I know. Jamie and I were both talking about, is he think he's going to bring somebody in? Fuck.
You certainly can. I mean, you definitely can.
Next time around. And if it's the Ohio Four, ohio four great hey listen the guys that have been on here are all thriving yeah bruce bryan yeah works at the queen's defender's office he has not been without challenges trust me but he's actually going i'll leave you with this bruce is going to hope hope that parole lets him because we're still working on his full exoneration, even though he was granted clemency on the innocence claim.
Bruce is going to Nairobi and Uganda to speak to prisoners there. And he's a climb advocate for the Queens defenders.
Derek continues to be a whirlwind of positive activity. He's just amazing.
He's getting people out left and right. Robert Johnson, who we had on, is continuing to do amazing things down in New Orleans.
and all of them are just thriving. They're doing well.
Not enough attention is given to the happy endings, right? Right. Than we give to the bad stuff.
Of course. I mean, that's just how people are, you know? Why is that? You know, first of all, they're afraid of crime, you know? So they highlight the instances where things are bad and things do go bad and they don't want to look at the disgusting aspects of the legal system.
They want people want to live life through rose colored glasses and have this perspective that the the bad people go to jail. But it's not just about crime.
Most of the headlines that get the most clicks are about someone having a fucking affair, somebody dying. Right.
There's not a lot of triumph in the news. Well, people like when other people's lives suck.
Why, though? Because it makes them not think about the suck of their own life. That's why they like it when a celebrity falls, like a P.
Diddy gets arrested, because they see these people living these lives they could never imagine like yachts and rolls royces and all that shit and then they see them get taken down like yeah because they were you know envious and it's also like it's a part of our culture is to celebrate wealth in the most disgusting and extravagant ways you know like i mean, I mean, how many social media personalities have emerged just all about, look at all the stuff I have. Look at all the things I have.
Look at all the famous people I hang out with. Look at all the girls.
Look at the yacht. Look at the car.
Look at the jet. Look at this.
Look at that. Look at all the things you can't get.
And when those people get got, people you know who you know who uh folks are probably clamoring gets got who if that's the basis and i don't agree who's that fucking guy's always got his shirt off he's taking pictures on yachts and shooting machine guns oh damn bill's there oh man yeah i. Yeah.
I'd like to peek into his brain one day. Yeah, there's probably a lot going on in there.
It's interesting how people do become famous for that, though. It's like showing your stuff makes you famous.
Showing a life that other people can't really imagine ever living. think of the hypocrisy and the in the inner conflict and turmoil that that exposes so in other words we want people to fail that's somehow innate in many of us it makes us feel better about ourselves yet you will have three million followers or 10 or 15 following someone that and i'm not talking about that guy whoever who is clearly just selling their looks or their lifestyle or whatever it is so yet we're drawn to it and we want to watch it and then when the person fails we want to fucking devour them to the point where they're a carcass laying in the street.
Sure. Celebrity marriages and divorces, that's another big one.
Love it when celebrities get divorced. Ha ha.
Ha ha, you're miserable too. Do you love it? No.
People love it. I find it fascinating when people keep getting married and keep getting divorced.
God damn, how many times can J-Lo get married before the next guy's like, hey, I don't know if this is going to work out.

Yeah, is it really Ben Affleck that's the problem?

Who's the problem?

Well, he's certainly a problem as well.

That guy Mark Anthony seems like a nice fucking guy.

Seems like a sweetheart.

She married a bunch of dudes.

But, you know, whatever.

She's obviously a lot of work.

You want a diva?

Good luck. That requires a lot of work.
I just want to understand it all. I just want to, like, me and my brother will sometimes go, what's it all about? It's definitely not all about caring whether or not J-Lo gets divorced again.
You know what I find difficult? I've been playing with this idea in something that i'm writing right now and it couldn't be more impression than than right now is the this notion of what the truth is i don't know what like we we had it happened to us right here are some of the swing states requiring id or all of them it's hard to keep a grasp on reality and the truth these days because there's information right that is intravenously injected into your veins it seems like so I have a hard time knowing what's true anymore well the news itself outright lies it's not like a conversation like we have where Jamie checks it in real time. And I saw a thing that said the swing state or the states that required Novartor ID were the ones that she won.
She won other ones as well. But when you have the news saying things, so they have researched it.
They do know that it's a lie. This is not like a live conversation like we're having where I didn't know we were going to talk about that at all, nor did you.
It just spontaneously came up. These people are putting narratives out there that are just flat out lies, and they're doing it all the time.
I mean, Obama did it during the campaign where he repeated that lie about Donald Trump talking about white supremacists saying they're very fine people on both sides. So just a flat out lie.
Oh, that was the unite the right. Well, it was all about the statue, the statues of Civil War people being taken down.
And he's saying, I'm not talking, he literally said, I'm not talking about white supremacists and the kkk they should be condemned he said i'm talking about people that did he say that in the same oh yeah oh you can see it so weird but go to never i never known jre companion instagram because on that page there is what obama said and then on same video, there is what Trump actually said. And it's disgusting.
It's a disgusting lie. And it's a guy who's as and he's talking about George Washington.
He said, George Washington had slaves. So Thomas Jefferson would take down Thomas.
Let's play it so you could see it here. said that there were very fine people on both sides of a white supremacist rally.
And you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people on both sides.
You had people in that group. Excuse me.
Excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did.

You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of to them a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park from Robert E. Lee to another name.
George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So will George Washington now lose his status?

Are we going to take down?

Excuse me.

Are we going to take down excuse me are we going to take down are we going to take down statues to george what how about thomas jefferson what do you think of thomas jefferson you like him okay good are we going to take down the statue because he was a major slave owner now we're going to take down his statue so you know know what? It's fine. You're changing history.
You're changing culture. And you had people, and I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.
But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. See, that's crazy.
Isn't that crazy? I have never seen that last part of it. Yeah, of course.
So here is my struggle with the truth on full display. I've never seen that part.
Because the news has said that lie over and over and over and over and over again. that the news, the mainstream corporate corporate controlled news that wanted this narrative that Donald Trump was a Nazi said that over and over and over again.

They repeated it. They compared him up until the election.
And Joy Reid was literally comparing him to Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini.

And spent a whole piece describing right-wing dictators,

that he is going to be a right-wing dictator, just like Hitler, just like Stalin. This is the lie of the media.
So this is one of the reasons why it's so hard to tell the truth. It should be illegal to do that.
It should be illegal to say that because it's not true. And you're changing the perspective of

millions of people, especially low information voters that look at Obama like a thing from the

past when time was sane, when the world was normal, a brilliant guy who was the president.

If this brilliant guy is willing to lie in front of everybody.

Yeah, but here's the thing. There's question they all lie trump trump included we talked about that earlier he lies also that this is like the right but did he lie about biden and what biden did did he lie about any of that no he's sure.
He's lied plenty. But in the context of a campaign where you're completely distorting the perspective of the person you're running against, not just who they are, but what they've done and what they've said and what they stand for.
He does the same thing, though. But did he do that with Biden? I believe he did.
How did he do it? I think that there were many times where he would accuse him of having created the problem at the border, that it was all his creation. People don't seem to remember that when Trump was president, his border policies of separating families at the border was not great.
It was not great, but do you understand that Obama had those exact same policies? I'm not disagreeing with that. I'm just saying you can distort it.
But you know that this is just what they do with children when children are, when parents are arrested, they separate the families. This is- It was, that happened under Obama, but under Trump, it wasn wasn't just separating the children it was separating them for indefinite periods so is there a difference in the way obama handled it in the separation i'm not going to speak to something right so that's a problem right so it's a problem if you're accusing him of that here's the here's the thing i think they all lie i don't have i don't i didn't follow it closely enough to say i think they all lie too but there's not a thing like that here I can point to where he was saying something about Biden that was factually incorrect.
Here's the thing that turned me off completely about the election this time and why I said fuck it I'm voting for Jill Stein a physician that probably is the least qualified of anyone only as like my form of saying I'll protest it. But Kam, Kamala Harris during the debate said that there's not a single, it was some remark.
American soldier. There's not a single American soldier deployed.
Deployed in a war zone. And then I saw videos of American soldiers in a war zone watching it like in parallel reality.
I said, what the fuck is she talking about? Well, did you see Dan Crenshaw post about that? Where are we right now? They were in a fucking foxhole or in a tent. Dan Crenshaw posted all of the soldiers, all the numbers that we have.
See if you can find that post. It's on his Instagram.
In response to that, Dan Crenshaw, who lost his eye in war. Yeah.
He was a Navy SEAL. He was the one that was circulating the clip of me being critical of her.
Well, it's a good clip. Yeah.
Solid clip. I stand by it.
Yeah. And you were correct.
I mean, and then the crazy thing is you had a conversation with her about that.

Yeah, I was on Zoom and she couldn't answer a question then and she can't answer a question now. She still refused to answer a fucking question.
That was the most frustrating thing. I mean, how about saying, look, obviously what happened at the border is a crisis.
It was not handled well. Here is what I plan to do different.
It's outside of at least her capacity or willingness to do something like that. But it was also the complicit nature of that.
The media was in on it because they were fact checking Trump constantly. They didn't fact check her on that.
Something that should be immediately fact, especially during a debate. I agree.
How did you not know? How do you not know that you're either lying or you don't know that we have troops deployed. Maybe you're right.
Maybe it is that Trump repeats things that he heard that are moronic and nonsensical sometimes. And that takes away from the great he can do.
He definitely does that. Right.
Like talking about people eating dogs and cats and the election being rigged. All sort of baseless shit takes away from the fact that, you know, the things that stick out to me and it's like, get out of your own way, bro.
He pardoned Jack Johnson. He he pardoned one of my clients.
I think that he he has done more and cared more about criminal justice reform than certainly than any other president in my lifetime. No one ever to highlight the good things yeah that that guy's that's why i just did it and i i just it's frustrating to me because it's like just don't listen to the last thing everyone told you because you can be great you can i mean the fact that he does what he wants and says what he wants and gets elected look at this this.
This is what Dan Crenshaw responded with. No U.S.
troops active combat zones? How did ABC let Kamala get away with that during the debate? U.S. sailors and Marines are fighting off Houthi attacks in Yemen.
Over 3,400 troops are engaged in Iraq and Syria. We have forces in Western Africa battling terrorists.
Just this year, three U.S. soldiers were killed and 40 injured in Jordan by an Iranian-made drone.
Nearly 1,000 troops are still deployed in Syria and 2,500 remain in Iraq under Operation Inherent Resolve. So that's crazy.
Yeah, it is crazy. It's a crazy thing to say.
But it also just shows you how corrupt the relationship is between the media and what we get to see. It's corrupt.
There's a bunch of people that had decided that they were going to fact check Trump continually and not fact check her. And they were doing this because they wanted her to look better than him because they wanted her to win.
Yeah, I mean, listen, the most I have, and this is why I mentioned, you know, it's hard to know what the truth is. Right.
The reason why I posted all the exhibits, the reason why I put the letter up, and the reason why I put the contact information up is that when you have a transcript and you have, you know, actual documentary evidence, that's hard to argue with. It's not a soundbite.
It's not a clip. So I feel like maybe part of what appeals to me about this work is trying to get closer to the truth, a truth that is a bit more provable.
I would probably have been very happy as a mathematician if I was any good at math. I stink at it.
But I think that there is, it's very difficult to understand. You know, I feel like I'm sitting here and I feel manipulated by the fact that I never, and it's really on me, that I didn't go and watch the entirety of that comment.

Right.

Because I literally don't think I've ever listened to the part where he says, obviously, the neo-Nazis and the people that were there for the wrong reasons need to be condemned.

You know, when I was watching recently, I was talking to the great Dubini about this.

He pointed out to me that comment about Liz Cheney. And then he's like, go watch the full clip.
Right, it's another one. And I watched the full clip and I was like- It's enraging.
This is so out of fucking context. So then you start to wonder, well, how much is my opinion of him been formed by my concern about other people lashing out at me? I mean, you should hear the shit I got when I when I spoke ill of Kamala Harris by, you know, I guess, call them the left.

I, you know, and it was like infuriating to me. So politics to me, it's too much of you have to serve so many different interests that you sort of forget who you are and what you stand for.
So that's what turns me off about it. And, you know, I don't think that that'll change.
That's why I sort of shifted to, this is the most I've talked about politics in probably five years. But that's why I've shifted to, let me just put my head down and get to work on what I can work on.
Yes. Well, I think that's very practical.
And I think what you said is very important for people to understand that a lot of what people say, they say it because they don't want people to attack them. They say it because they think that if they say it, it will clear them.
They'll be okay. If you say you support X, you might not even support X, but if you say you support X, you're not going to get attacked and the right people will leave you alone or agree with you and appreciate you or praise you.
Thank you for saying that. There's a lot of that out there.
There's a lot of people that don't speak their mind. Do you know how many artists that have reached out to me that are like fucking hippies, man? Like artists, like musicians, comedians that thanked me for endorsing Trump because they can't do it.
They said they want to, but they don't want to be attacked. They can't say it.
They think the country is going in the wrong direction. They think that this control of social media by the government, which we would have had pretty much fully if it wasn't for Elon buying Twitter, that this is a dangerous precedent to set, whether it's a right wing government or a left wing government.

And that what you see that's happening in the UK where people are being in prison for tweets and Facebook posts.

Yeah. And the UK is the part that's mind bending about it.
Mind bending. The whole thing is nuts.
And it's a dangerous path that we were on.

We were on that path. Trump has vowed to have free speech become a very important part of what he's standing for and that this censoring of information needs to stop and that we need to stop all government influence in what people have to say.
Yeah, look, that alone. That shouldn't be as revolutionary as it is.
I know it should be a core tenant tenet of what – I mean it's essentially the First Amendment. And I think it's so transferable to what I do in this context because a lot of the reluctance of prosecutors not to do the right thing or what their conscience tells them is the fear of the backlash.
Yes. How will it hurt my chances in a re-election? Of course.
What will it? And so that's what I hate about politics is you serve so many masters. Yeah.
And it's a dirty business. It's a dirty and you got to have you got to have nuts of steel.
Or you have to be a fucking sociopath. It's either or, you know, you have to be a blindly ambitious sociopath who can weave your way through these sort of social and political relationships and to get to the top.
For what?

I mean, imagine if one of those person does wind up becoming president that has no real thought or no real care about the country, no real ambition other than the blind serving of their own success? Well, I think that that's what, for people that are so like, it's hard to explain if you didn't live in New York. For people that are just like, oh my God, what's the next four years going to be like? And, you know, like it's a funeral.
Like get up and do something all four years that you think is going to help make society better. You do that, whether it's getting out and knocking on doors and making your – for whatever you're passionate about, Not just when an election is coming up, but get out and knock on doors, get out and get involved in some organization that you believe in, do something that you think will help lend itself to bettering society in some way.
What happens is every four years, there's this polarization and people get on one side or the other and they complain and bitch and then they wallow in it too often for too long a time. I think that the people that actually make the most change happen are the ones that can sit and talk with people that might have different beliefs than them and don't make them other than.
Absolutely. Right.
I mean, anytime I've made an emotional decision in business personally, it's never gone well for me. Right.
So people are going to have different points of view than you. I was talking to my cousin about it and I was trying to help her explain that just because you voted for Trump, that doesn't make you bad.
Or I said, you know, her whole thing was, well, if you have daughters, there's no way you can vote for him. I said, here's the fundamental flaw in how you're looking at this.
There are some people that are pro-life. That doesn't make them wrong.
That makes you have a different opinion than them. You have a disagreement.
And if the basis of your vote is that you're pro-choice and they're pro-life, okay, have a disagreement. I just don't understand how a singular issue like that, and I understand that.
Listen- I understand it from a woman's perspective. I'm a father of two daughters.
Yeah. I talk to my wife about it often, you know, especially going to Florida where the laws on abortion ain't the same as they are in New York.
And I understand it from a woman's perspective completely. And I actually disagree with, you know with overturning Roe versus Wade, but you cannot be that myopic.
You just can't because if you're that myopic, you're going to then find yourself in a corner on one issue, and life is a little bit more robust than that, isn't it? It's more nuanced. Yeah.
Yeah. That was the better word.
Yeah. It is more nuanced.
Well, listen, my brother, I love you to death. I appreciate what you do.
I love you back, man. I think the world's a better place because of what you do.
I really do. And I think you've changed a lot of people's perspective on the legal system.
And I'm glad that we didn't let what happened with Sheldon change that. And I think there's just so much more great work to be done.
Well, my continued profound gratitude to continuing to let me tell these stories. I promise the next time I bring a guest on, they will be well, they will be, they will be vetted.
Yeah. The guests will be vetted a lot more thoroughly.
You know, there's no way you could have known. There's no way I could have known.
And, you know, it was interesting because for 48 hours, I felt what it was like to be a headline. And then I was like, this sucks.
For the wrong reasons. It was like.
Well, I know you were in a dark place, but I'm glad you got out of it. Yeah, and it's not about me.
It takes time. Yeah, and I just, I'm really, really, really appreciative of this, and if that can't shake the foundation of this forum, I think we're going to just keep on making

great change happen and hopefully we

free the Ohio four and

keep on moving. Yeah, and I hope

we do do a podcast one day with them.

Deep love. Deep love to you too.

Goodbye everybody. Thank you.