Transcript
Frangela (Frances Collier and Angela V. Shelton) (0:01)
Hi, I'm Frances Collier. And I'm Angela V. Shelton. And we're Frangela. You know what you mean in your life. The Final Word podcast. Yes, you do. That's right. It is the final word on all things political and pop cultural, where we make real news, real funny, where we inspire you so you can resist. Subscribe and get a new episode of the Final Word podcast each week. It's the news we think you need to hear. That's right. We think you need to hear it. Okay.
Alison Gill (0:28)
Yeah.
Frangela (Frances Collier and Angela V. Shelton) (0:29)
It's what we say.
Alison Gill (0:30)
So.
Frangela (Frances Collier and Angela V. Shelton) (0:30)
That's right. And because all we do is give. Every Thursday, you can listen to our hysterical podcast, idiot of the Week. We round up the stupid. Because you know what? Somebody has to.
Alison Gill (0:40)
Okay? All we do is give. MSW Media. Hey, everybody, it's Ag. And welcome to Refried Beans, where we play an episode of the Daily Beans podcast from the same week either one, two, or three years ago, so we can see how far we've come. So please enjoy this episode from days gone by and note the date in the intro.
Alison Gill (1:07)
Refried beans.
Martin Sheen (1:08)
I like refried beans. That's why I want to try fried beans, because maybe they're just as good
Alison Gill (1:11)
and we're wasting time. Hello and welcome to the Daily beans for Monday, April 3, 2023. Today, Jack Smith has amassed a mountain of new evidence in the documents obstruction case. Founding member of the Fugees Pras Michelle, is on trial for his crimes related to the Jholo 1 MDB case. Preparations are underway for Donald's arraignment in Manhattan this Tuesday. And the Manhattan District Attorney's office has sent another heated letter to House Republicans. I'm your host, Alison Gill. Hi, everybody. Dana's out. She's going to be out for a while. So it's just me today. Although I do have some pretty cool guest hosts lined up for this week. So just some funny stuff going on over on Twitter. I don't know if you know if you spend any time on Twitter, but Elon had said he was going to take everyone's legacy blue check mark away. He was going to take the stars off of the sneetches bellies on April 1st. And then he didn't. Although he did take away New York Times check mark. The actual New York Times took away their check mark. While, by the way, Fox gets to keep theirs, even though they have admitted to lying about stuff on TV. And so that was supposed to happen April 1st. It didn't happen for everybody. And so today I went to check, you know, if you click on the blue check mark in somebody's bio, you can see whether they're a Twitter blue subscriber, whether they pay for that check mark or whether it's a legacy check mark. It says this is a legacy blue check mark. It could be notable or not. And then the Twitter this is. If you click on it and they're a blue subscriber, it says this account is verified because it subscribes to Twitter Blue. So something happened today, on Sunday where he changed that verbiage. Now, if you click on the blue check mark, whether you've paid for it or whether you're a legacy blue check mark, whether you earned it, it just says this account is verified because it either subscribes to Twitter blue or is a legacy blue check mark. So he's kind of lumped everybody in together. So now you can no longer tell who is verified because they subscribe or who is verified because they were a legacy blue check mark. It's absolutely ridiculous. He's making shit up as he goes along. He's such a narcissist. He thinks that, you know, you ever had that boss, the new boss who comes in and thinks they have all these great new ideas, but they've already been tried out and failed, but they want to do it anyway, and then it fucks shit up. And then you have to say, look, we already tried that. We have the best practices. This is why we do it this way. Now that just seems like what he's doing. He just, he gets an idea, it backfires on him magnificently. Because nobody was going to pay for the White House wasn't going to pay for that check mark. CNN wasn't going to pay for the check mark. Once he took away all the check marks. I certainly wasn't. And most people weren't. They were like, fucking take it. Fine, whatever. Now it'll be the sneetches without the stars on their bellies that are the legacy blue check mark accounts or whatever the fuck. It's so ridiculous. But he just keeps making. So he made that decision. It fucked shit up. People were mad. It backfired on him. So now he's made the decision, I guess maybe not to take away legacy check marks and just call everybody a blue check mark. Well, it's either legacy or Twitter blue. It's absolutely ridiculous. He's like a fucking nine year old. And the wheels are falling. It's like a Tesla. It caught fire spontaneously and the wheels are falling off. So that's happening over on Twitter and everybody is laughing about it. And also later in the show today, I want to let you know I'm going to be talking to CNN senior legal analyst Joan Biskupic. She's been covering the Supreme Court now for over 25 years. She has a new book out tomorrow called Nine Black Inside the Supreme Court's Drive to the Right and Its Historic Consequences. So I'll chat with her. And we have tons of news to get to from over the weekend, as you can imagine. So let's hit the hot notes. Hot notes, all right, from Barrett Dawsey and Stein at the Washington Post. Absolutely devastating news for Donald Trump in the special counsel investigation into his obstruction of the government's retrieval of classified documents from Mar A Lago. We knew that boxes had been moved from the storage room downstairs thanks to surveillance footage subpoenaed by the Department of Justice. But what we are now learning is that Jack Smith apparently has evidence that Donald looked through some of those boxes himself. This is a significant development in the case. Let's read some key passages from this amazing story. Amazing reporting from the Post. In the classified documents case, federal investigators have gathered new and significant evidence that after the subpoena was delivered, Trump looked through the contents of some of the boxes of documents in his home, apparently out of a desire to keep certain things in his possession, according to people familiar. Investigators now suspect, based on witness statements, security camera footage and other documentary evidence, that boxes, including classified material were moved from a Mar A Lago storage area after the subpoena was served and that Trump personally examined at least some of those boxes. In addition, authorities have another category of evidence that they've got. They consider it particularly helpful as they reconstruct events from last spring emails and texts from Molly Michael. She's an assistant to the former guy who followed him from the White House to Florida before she eventually left the job last year. Michael's written communications have provided investigators with a detailed understanding of the day to day activity at Mar A Lago at critical moments. Investigators have also amassed evidence indicating that Trump told others to mislead government officials in early 2022, before the subpoena when the National Archives was working with the DOJ to try to recover a wide range of papers. The Post says here that might not constitute a crime, but I say it does. Obstruction has to be against an official proceeding and the National Archives has cops and investigators. So prosecutors have collected evidence that Trump ignored requests from multiple advisers to return the documents to the Archives over a period of a year. He ignored requests from multiple advisors to do that Then he asked advisors and lawyers to release false statements, claiming he'd returned all the documents. And then he grew angry after being subpoenaed for those same documents. Investigators also have evidence that Trump sought advice from other lawyers and advisers on how he could keep documents after being told by some on his team that he could not. According to people familiar, they have collected evidence that multiple advisors warned Trump that trying to keep the documents could be legally perilous. So he knew. Now, investigators have also asked witnesses if Trump showed a particular interest in material relating to General Mark Milley, that's chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And how do they know that? Were some of the documents found in his desk documents about Mark Milley? Well, here it says prosecutors have been asking witnesses if Trump showed classified documents, including maps, to political donors. Did the donors know that he had some interest in Millie documents? Can he show classified documents to donors? I mean, it's just the amount of evidence here is overwhelming. And I'm going to talk about the implications of this evidence in depth with Andy McCabe on the next episode of the Jack podcast, which you can listen to for free. There's a new episode out now, but this information won't be coming out until the next episode of Jack, along with whatever other Jack Smith news we get this week. It's already heating up to be pretty interesting on the next episode, which comes out next Sunday. All right, up next from Carol Lenning et al at the Post. Former President Trump plans to fly to New York Monday and stay the night before appearing in a specially secured Manhattan courthouse to be arraigned on still unspecified criminal charges. An advance team of Secret Service agents, mostly comprised of New York field office agents, conducted a site tour of the courthouse Friday to map Trump's path in and out of the building. Please, no ramps or umbrellas. An official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that dozens and dozens of agents will be required to secure the former president's travel between Mar A Lago and his Florida home and private club and New York. Now, according to some reports, he was supposed to come on Thursday, but Secret Service said that that was too fast, which doesn't make any sense. But whatevs, the next step in the criminal proceeding is Trump's arraignment, which multiple people involved with the plans have said will happen on Tuesday afternoon, 2:15 p Eastern Time. The former president will be fingerprinted, photographed, and then brought to the courtroom of Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchand upon surrendering before the proceeding, where he is expected to enter a not guilty plea during arraignment if the charges have not already been unsealed. They will be unsealed at the time of arraignment. Multiple news outlets have asked they've petitioned Judge Merchand to unseal the charges ahead of of the arraignment for the reason being the public's right to know. Intense public, you know, need to know. Now. In securing Trump's safety, Secret Service agents will be primarily responsible for his entry to and exit from the courthouse. Now a court security officers will manage the former president's movements once inside the building in the company of Trump's security detail. And New York police officers will secure the outside streets surrounding the courthouse and along Trump's motorcade route through the city. The streets around the courthouse will be blocked off to traffic and street parking will be suspended. Court security officers who had scheduled vacation days or time off have been asked to report for duty anyway. No vacation for you. All hands on deck. So that's what's happening Tuesday. Tomorrow, 2:15pm Eastern in New York. In a related story from Axios, the Manhattan district attorney's office, in a letter on Friday urged House Republicans, committee chairs for some of the House Republicans to denounce former Trump's harsh rhetoric. The letter comes a day after a New York grand jury voted to indict him, prompting a bombastic reaction from the former guy. The letter to the Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan and Oversight Committee Chair James Comer and House Administration Committee Chair Brian Steele cited Trump's warning about death and destruction in response to an indictment. You could use the stature of your office to denounce these attacks and urge respect for the fairness of our justice system and for the work of the impartial grand jury. That's what Bragg's general counsel Leslie Dubeck. Instead, she said, you and many of your colleagues have chosen to collaborate with Trump's efforts to vilify and denigrate the integrity of elected state prosecutors and trial judges and made unfounded allegations that the office's investigation is politically motivated. They keep calling it Soros backed, and the truth of the matter is Soros gave a million dollars to a political fund that then divvied it up amongst Democrats in New York. So Soros never directly contributed to Alvin Bragg's campaign. Dubeck then urged the trio of Republicans to refrain from these inflammatory accusations and let the criminal justice process proceed without unlawful political interference. The letter also aimed to counter the reaction of Trump's Republican allies in Congress to the indictment. Quote, like any other defendant, Mr. Trump is entitled to challenge these charges in court and avail himself of all processes and protections that New York State's robust criminal procedure affords, she wrote. Also, she continues saying, what neither Mr. Trump nor Congress may do is interfere with the ordinary course of proceedings in New York State. So that Leonard went out. It's a five page letter. I highly recommend you read it. It's pretty incendiary. All right. For those who've been listening to my murder board dot connecting since the early days of Mueller, she wrote. We are now in the early stages of the trial of one pros. Michelle this is from Paul Duggan at the Post. A quarter century ago, as a member of the pioneering hip hop trio the Fugees, Pras Michel basked in the glow of two Grammy awards the group received for its mega platinum 1996 album the Score. This was the peak of his celebrity. After he, Wycliffe, Jean and Lauryn Hill Split up in 97, Michel's solo career waned. He was running out of money. He shifted to other profit making ventures, including a prosecutor said Thursday, illegally funneling $2 million in stolen foreign money into a U.S. presidential campaign. It was Obama's campaign and scheming to quash an FBI investigation of the corrupt Malaysian financier who supplied the cash. Pras Michel, who turned 50 last fall, was rap royalty back in the day. Now, clad in a dark suit and a striped tie, he sat in a federal courtroom in Washington on trial in one of the many legal cases arising tangentially from a gargantuan crime, the looting of roughly $4.5 billion with a B from Malaysia's state owned investment and Development fund, known as 1mdb. The scandal has touched scores of people, some famous whose names are likely to be heard in testimony in U.S. district Court over the next month. Leonardo DiCaprio, Kim Kardashian, Steve Wynn, the casino guy. Many people have become entangled in this money, wittingly or unwittingly, in what authorities say were plots to launder vast sums of pilfered money, gain influence in the White House during the Obama and Trump administrations and short circuit, a years long Justice Department probe related to Malaysian embezzlement. Some defendants charged in the sprawling investigation have made deals with prosecutors, one of them, Elliot Broidy. He was described by Lockhart in court as the Fixer, she said. The Fixer sought to use his access to President Trump in 2018 to advance one of several criminal conspiracies tied to the thievery in Malaysia after Broidy pled guilty in the case admitting to illegally lobbying for foreign nationals. Trump pardoned him on his last full day of his presidency. Pras Michel has pled not guilty to a 12 count indictment that accuses him of money laundering, campaign finance violations, acting as an unregistered agent for foreign nationals, witness tampering and lying to banks in one scheme. In 2012, Michelle received almost $18 million from Joe Low, the Malaysian financier. Authorities have described Low as among the looters of the Malaysian Sovereign Wealth Fund 1 MDB. They say he used the stolen money to pay for a lavish lifestyle in the US including bacchanalian parties with celebrities, supermodels and movers and shakers in New York and Hollywood and elsewhere. He met Jho Low, met Pras Michel at a Manhattan nightclub. Jho Low, now charged with numerous federal crimes himself, is a fugitive from justice believed to be in China. In court filings, prosecutors said Jho Low cozied up to DiCaprio, allowing the actor to gamble on his tab at a Las Vegas casino, giving him pricey artwork, a Picasso, namely, which he had to give back, and arranging financing for the 2013 movie The Wolf of Wall Street. DiCaprio starred in that film. He was also co producer. By 2017, however, the Fast living financier was under investigation in the United States and other countries in connection with the 1mdb embezzlement. Quote, Lowe was in trouble and Lowe needed help. That's what Lockhart said in her opening statement. So he turned again to Prasmichel. This is where Broidey the fixer came in, Lockhart said. After Trump took office in 2017, Broidey was named deputy finance chair of the RNC under Steve Wynn, the casino mogul who was the finance chair. And as Prasmichel tried to come up with a way to assist Jho Low, he was introduced to Elliott Brody by an acquaintance. According to the indictment, Lockhart said the fixer, Broidy, for a price, agreed to urge federal officials to shut down the Justice Department's one MDB related investigation of Jho Low. The conspirators deal with the Malaysian money man, quote, an $8 million retainer fee up front and an additional $75 million success fee if the matter were resolved within 180 days or 50 million if the matter was resolved within a year. That's what the indictment says. It says their written contract was disguised as a legal fees agreement for helping Lowe with a civil forfeiture case. The true purpose, though, was to secure Broidey's services, to lobby the administration and the Department of Justice to end the investigation. While that effort failed, Lockhart said the conspirators took another approach to help Jho Low. This involved a labyrinthine plot to curry favor with the Chinese government in hopes that Beijing would assist Jho Low in resolving his global legal woes. And to that end, Broidy again lobbied the Trump White House, this time seeking the deportation of Guo Wengwei. That sounds familiar. He's the yacht guy where Bannon was arrested. It almost worked. She said the fixer himself met with the president at the White House seeking Guo's extradition. Ultimately, even though Guo wasn't deported, Michelle received over $70 million from Jho Low. Guo has since been indicted by a federal grand jury in New York on an unrelated financial fraud case. That's all happening. All right, everybody, I'll be right back with Joan Piskupic. We're gonna discuss her new book, Nine Black Robes. Don't go anywhere. We'll be right back after these messages. We'll be right back.
