Ambassador Eisen Discusses Lawsuits Against Trump

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Speaker 3 And now, a scary story brought to you by Instacart. It's a quiet Sunday night.
Too quiet. As your head hits the pillow, a short, shadowy figure appears.

Speaker 2 Mom, you're bringing snacks tomorrow, right?

Speaker 3 Your soul leaves your body. You forgot, and the PTA parents will never let you forget.
But then you remember.

Speaker 3 You can get whatever you need for the week delivered in as fast as 30 minutes through Instacart. Take that, PTA parents.
For one less Sunday scary, we're here.

Speaker 5 The chair lays before the house an enrolled bill.

Speaker 6 H.R. 4405, an act to require the Attorney General to release all documents and records in possession of the Department of Justice relating to Jeffrey Epstein and for other purposes.

Speaker 4 Folks, it's official.

Speaker 4 MAGA Mike Johnson has caved after going through every possible permutation about how he was not going to transmit the House resolution to release the Epstein files to the Senate after the Democrats put that unanimous consent motion to the floor and received no objections from Republicans.

Speaker 4 Magamike spent the night trying to

Speaker 4 figure it all out. He was literally pacing through the halls looking absolutely shook the halls of the Capitol building.
A reporter caught up with him. It was like, what are you going to do, Magamike?

Speaker 4 Just look how frazzled he looked last night. Here, play this clip.

Speaker 7 Any reaction to Leader Thune seeing the bill without adding amendments or changing it?

Speaker 8 I am

Speaker 5 deeply disappointed in this outcome. I think

Speaker 5 I'm told, I've been at the state dinner. I don't know.
I was just told that Chuck Schumer rushed it to the floor and put it out there preemptively. It needed amendments.

Speaker 5 I just spoke to the president about that. We'll see what happens.

Speaker 7 So do you think he may veto it? You say you spoke to the president? I'm not saying that. Is he supportive of it in its current form?

Speaker 8 We both have concerns about it, so we'll see. I was standing in with the crown prince and we couldn't call him.
Are you frustrated on the majority leader?

Speaker 7 Are you upset with the majority leader?

Speaker 4 It goes, it goes, we're just hanging out with the crown prince. I mean, as Americans are struggling, living paycheck to paycheck.
We don't like this. Yes, I voted for it.

Speaker 4 We may veto it. We're hanging out with the crown prince, okay?

Speaker 4 And then moments before that, he was kind of saying that he was confident that the Senate was going to have his back, but Thun did not have his back here play this clip.

Speaker 9 I'll tell you, there's a handful of Republicans, Judiciary Committee members, and a few others who are really struggling, as I have been, about whether or not they could even vote yes today because of this, because we don't have an absolute guarantee that this will be fixed in the Senate.

Speaker 9 I have a high degree of confidence in that. And that's why

Speaker 9 I'll be voting yes today.

Speaker 4 He said the Senate was going to change it. The Senate did not change it.
The Senate received the bill to release the Epstein files from the House when it was passed.

Speaker 4 And I'll just show you, we have Haley Robson, a former Trump supporter and an Epstein survivor. Here's what she had to say about Megan Michael.

Speaker 11 Republican, you've spoken about that.

Speaker 11 I wonder what your reaction is to Speaker Johnson saying that this vote was a political show vote by the Democrats.

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 11 I was present in the room when they were doing the votes, as well as all the survivors. And I can say the only theatrics I saw was from him.

Speaker 11 I think some of his comments were on that fine line.

Speaker 11 This is not a hoax. There is no feeder coming from us or the survivors on our end.

Speaker 11 I'm appalled by him in general, and I've lost a lot of respect.

Speaker 11 By him.

Speaker 11 Just the back and forth with Adelita Grajalva, you will never convince me. She was a deciding vote at the time for the petition.
That's why you said that. Okay.

Speaker 4 Yes. Let's bring in Ambassador Norm Eisen from Democracy Defenders.
You have hundreds of lawsuits against this regime to hold them accountable.

Speaker 4 One such lawsuit involves, and there's a variety of methods that you're doing this, though, involves the FOIA request to release the Epstein files from the DOJ to hold them accountable.

Speaker 4 So, let's first talk about Magamai caving, but then the corollary, which is if Donald Trump does actually sign this thing, we know he's going to continue to try to cover it up.

Speaker 4 And so, what do we do to get it? Norm, it's great to see you on the Midas Touch podcast.

Speaker 12 It's so great to be on Midas Touch. And

Speaker 12 the reason

Speaker 12 that I love what you all do is because you are fighters and you exemplify the motto, be truthful, not neutral.

Speaker 12 And the place where we need to be the most truthful is about the biggest corruption scandal of the Trump administration, the cover-up of the Trump Epstein files. We know they exist.

Speaker 12 Now, this bill has steamrolled through Congress. It was incredible to see MAGA

Speaker 12 MAGA MIT crumble like a cracker

Speaker 12 on the steps there. That footage, he didn't know what to say.

Speaker 12 And then you have

Speaker 12 and then you have Chuck Schumer, very adroit

Speaker 12 in the Senate. He managed to get it through only one vote against it in the House.
Unanimous consent in the Senate. Excellent

Speaker 12 parliamentary legend,

Speaker 12 Senate magic by Leader Schumer, and now it's onto Trump's desk. But even if Trump signed this bill, we can't be confident that there won't be redactions of documents that hollow out

Speaker 12 the impact, that they documents won't be held back. And that's why we at Democracy Defenders Fund over 200 legal cases and matters.

Speaker 12 Maybe the most important is our case to say we're not going to trust the Trump administration. Lord knows they squandered that trust on day one.
We're going to have court oversight

Speaker 12 under the Freedom of Information Act to make sure that anything that is produced is complete. No documents are held back, no improper redactions.

Speaker 12 We're fighting in court to get the truth out, including to support the victims who

Speaker 12 really believe that these files must be released.

Speaker 4 You mentioned Senator Chuck Schumer, and that was a really well-done maneuver, making that unanimous consent and doing it lightning fire. I had the opportunity to speak to Senator Schumer yesterday.

Speaker 4 Here's what he told me. Let's play it.

Speaker 10 We got to make sure we get all of the Epstein files, all. They can't fuck around with this.
They can't say, oh, we'll give you this, but there are legal reasons we can't give you that.

Speaker 10 And we are going to be pursuing them relentlessly to get everything. Because I don't trust this administration.
I don't trust Bondi. I don't trust Cash Patel.
I don't trust the president.

Speaker 10 And they could screw around with this. It'll be all of our jobs to be on them and make sure that we get everything.

Speaker 4 Ambassador Eisen, if there was a common thread in the Epstein emails that the estate released, there was 23,000 emails, about 2,300 email threads, over 1,600 more than half involve Donald Trump in some shape or form.

Speaker 4 So they may as well be called the Trump emails.

Speaker 4 So we know, and as a litigator, one of the ways you're able to determine if there are gaps or missing numbers or Bates numbers that are missing is by kind of comparing third-party sources.

Speaker 4 So how do you go about, though, determining, and how should we, as the public, kind of figure out when they do these drips and drops of document dumps, we know they're not, they're going to hide the good stuff.

Speaker 4 What do we do?

Speaker 12 Well, you start with the documents that we're getting themselves and you look for

Speaker 12 are there obvious inconsistencies with what we know from the public record.

Speaker 12 You look at the redactions, what's being blacked out on the page. Does that make sense?

Speaker 12 But the most important thing you can do, and we've done it at Democracy Defenders Fund, use federal law, which requires the release of these documents. get the courts involved.
We've sued in court.

Speaker 12 So there's court oversight of the release and

Speaker 12 the judicial process assures that you're actually getting what you should be getting. And the Trump administration has helped us in that.

Speaker 12 They themselves have admitted the release of these documents is in the public interest when they were trying to get the Ghillain Maxwell grand jury files released to the public.

Speaker 12 They made that admission. We are hammering that admission in pushing for an order in our court.
We're going to win this case.

Speaker 12 We're going to do oversight to make sure that anything that is released according to the congressional bill is complete. No documents are held back, no improper redactions.

Speaker 12 That's what we owe to the public, to transparency, and above all, to the victims of the Epstein scandal. We must get those Trump Epstein files full, complete, and unredacted.

Speaker 4 You know, Ambassador Eisen, you refer to the Trump cover-up of the child sex trafficking Epstein ring as the biggest corruption scandal. There's a lot of close number twos, I think we can all concede.

Speaker 4 And any one of your hundreds of lawsuits involve one of those close number twos, which in any normal error would be far worse than I even think Watergate, just any of them.

Speaker 4 And it seems like every single day we get another example of that. I mean, let's just take this morning as you and I were recording this during a federal hearing in Virginia in the Comey case.

Speaker 4 Prosecutors in that case confirmed that the operative indictment in the case against James Comey was never shown to or voted on by the entire grand jury before it was presented in open court, which obviously Comey's lawyers argue that's a complete bar to the prosecution.

Speaker 4 We also thought that the biggest story of the morning from that hearing was going to be that prosecutors in the Comey case told the judge that they were under orders from the Deputy Attorney General's office not to disclose whether career prosecutors wrote a memo recommending against indicting Comey prior to Halligan going to the grand jury.

Speaker 4 The United States Assistant Attorney Tyler Lemmons told Judge Nakmanoff he had not gotten permission to disclose what he could consider to be privileged or work product material.

Speaker 4 So they haven't even turned over a memo from the career prosecutors who Trump fired and pushed out, where they said there's not enough evidence to indict James Comey and Letitia James and others.

Speaker 4 Just, I'm getting lots of questions from people, Ambassador Eisen, saying they're not turning over the memo. They somehow indicted James Comey without presenting the indictment to the grand jury.

Speaker 4 Like WTF, this has never happened before. Ben,

Speaker 12 it's exactly as legally effective as if you and I wrote an indictment of Donald Trump right here on the Midas Touch.

Speaker 12 She

Speaker 12 had never been before a grand jury. She's an insurance lawyer.

Speaker 12 The reason they put Lindsay Alligan there was because the regular prosecutors refused to prosecute the case, wanted nothing to do with it, because it's the charges against Comey are so bogus and made up.

Speaker 12 This is another example of where

Speaker 12 we have filed a legal brief on behalf of former judges to say to the court, this is a joke and it's a new low. The indictment wasn't even presented to the grand jury.
It's

Speaker 12 none of us have ever heard of anything like this. This case is going to be flushed by the courts.
It should be.

Speaker 12 We've already seen Donald Trump starting to lose some of these baseless criminal prosecutions. And this is another one that I think is doomed because of the incompetence.

Speaker 12 Who knows how much trouble we would be in if Donald Trump were a competent authoritarian? Instead, it's the gang that can't shoot straight, Trump and his cronies like Lindsay Alligan.

Speaker 4 Which kind of brings me to the last point. And I think it's a good way to talk about all of the litigation Democracy Defenders Fund.

Speaker 4 And everybody should go out and support Democracy Defenders Fund because you're doing great, great work.

Speaker 4 But the work that you're doing early on, we saw corporations, law firms, and we still do businesses capitulate, bend the knee.

Speaker 4 They would settle phony lawsuits and frivolous lawsuits that he would file. They would enter into weird settlements before cases were even filed.
And it was so disheartening.

Speaker 4 But here we are heading towards Thanksgiving, and groups like yours and others are fighting and winning. And the groups that have stood up have won.

Speaker 4 And not just one, they've exposed how weak and pathetic this regime is.

Speaker 4 Like we saw what happened in court when Lindsey Halligan, this horrible former insurance lawyer, showed up there and a federal judge knockmanoff says, What the hell did you do? And she's like,

Speaker 4 I don't know, judge. You just exposed these are scared, weak, pathetic humans, and that we just need to be strong.
And I think you're leading the way on that.

Speaker 4 So I just want you to talk more generally about what you're doing because we need fighters like you right now.

Speaker 12 Well, we knew Donald Trump was going to flood the zone with his assaults on the Constitution and the rule of law. So we decided to do rule of law shock and all.

Speaker 12 And at Democracy Defenders Fund, we have over 200, I think the exact count now is 225

Speaker 12 legal cases and matters, pretty much one for every day of the Trump administration. And together with our coalition, the Atlantic wrote an article analyzing the legal front as

Speaker 12 the part of the resistance that's working. And it is.
We've got Donald Trump on the run in the courts. But Ben, I'm going to return the compliment because it's not enough to win in the court of law.

Speaker 12 This is where you and the Midas Touch network have come in so powerful. You've got to win in the court of public opinion too.

Speaker 12 We do that at the Contrariate,

Speaker 12 where we talk about these, the cases and issues, and you do it on Midas Touch par excellence.

Speaker 12 There's nobody who does it better in broadcasting both the crisis for our democracy, but also the pushback that is working.

Speaker 12 So with voters having repudiated Trump in the referendum on November 4th, a landslide win, not just for candidates, but for democracy, with

Speaker 12 millions of people, the no-hands protests have built from 3 million to 5 million to 7 million, peaceful, lawful, massive protests coast. to coast.

Speaker 12 We're seeing all the pistons of the engine of democracy are really starting to work.

Speaker 12 What a difference from January 20th and that climate of fear and intimidation, and the people who weren't sure the lawsuit struck the spark.

Speaker 12 Independent media has been an important part of that. And look at the latest stampede for Trump.

Speaker 12 Only one member of Congress, one person in the House, voted to stop the release of the Trump Epstein files. Everyone else caved despite months and months of his pressure.
So let's keep it up.

Speaker 12 Court of law, court of public opinion. Let's do it together.

Speaker 4 And the one who voted against the release is Clay Higgins, who rants and raves at the corner of bars about ghost buses. Ghostbusters.
You ever heard about these ghostbusters?

Speaker 4 Anyway, everybody go to democracydefenders.org. You can take a look there at the active cases and the work that Norm and his team are doing.
Ambassador Norm Eisen, we should do this more often.

Speaker 12 Thank you, Ben. Invite me anytime.

Speaker 12 Big fan and great being with you today.

Speaker 4 Great to see it. Everybody hit subscribe.
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