Judging Freedom - Banning TikTok and 2 Murder Cases unfolding

Episode Date: January 26, 2023

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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, January 26, 2023. It's about 545 in the early evening hours here on the east coast of the United States. We're going to do sort of a roundup of the interesting news in my end of the world today. And we'll start with the United States Senate, where Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri has introduced a bill to ban TikTok in the United States. I mean, this is crazy. The theory of the bill is that TikTok invades people's privacy. Come on, Senator Hawley, you voted in favor of the budgets for the intelligence communities, and we all know, I'm holding up my iPhone, that the NSA captures every keystroke on every mobile device and every desktop in the country. What does that mean?

The federal government of which you are a part, Senator Josh Hawley, is the biggest invader of privacy in the world and therefore in the United States of America. Moreover, sir, you are a graduate of Harvard Law School and a former clerk for the Chief Justice of the United States. Can you get better legal credentials than that in the early part of your career? Ought to know that the First Amendment says, in part, Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. So who the hell is the Congress of the United States to tell us what we can listen to and what we can use? I've had my problems with TikTok. Not too long ago, when the head of the Oath Keepers, Stuart Rhodes, was being tried for sedition before a federal district court judge in Washington, D.C., that's a conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States.

I argued that the government should not put people on trial for conspiring to do something that it was impossible for them to do. It is impossible for five people to overthrow the government of the United States, certainly even under the government's wildest, craziest theories. Therefore, he should not have been on trial. When I said that, and that was an argument made in the courtroom, that argument is made in almost every conspiracy case. When I said that, TikTok banned me saying, you're encouraging violence. I'm not encouraging violence at all. I'm encouraging judges to stay faithful to the constitution. And now I'm encouraging Senator Hawley to read the standard Supreme Court opinions interpreting the First Amendment. Don't offer legislation you know is constitutional. Just you can wave to the crowds at home and say, here's how I've tried to protect your privacy. Second story story tonight involves the FBI. Recently, the number of one person in the FBI office in New

York City in charge of counterintelligence, that person was in charge of FBI ascertaining Russian spies and spying on Russian oligarchs, was indicted. I'll tell you in a minute what he was indicted for. He retired four years ago, so he's not an active duty FBI agent getting indicted, but he was one of the senior people working for Bob Mueller. I'm sure it wasn't working for Bob Mueller, but working before Bob Mueller was appointed in charge of investigating Donald Trump and his relationship to the Russians. Okay, there may have been a there there. Mueller found a lot of data, found 167 communications between the Trump campaign and the Russians, but Bill Barr decided not to allow Mueller to ask a grand jury to indict. I get it. I get it. There are policy reasons why you don't want to indict the sitting president of the United States. But the person Jim Comey put in charge of all of

this has now been indicted for going to work for the Russian oligarch that he was investigating when he was an FBI agent and failing to report to the federal government that he was working for a foreign entity. This is not bribery, unless the agreement to do this happened while he was still working, but the money didn't start to come until after he left. But here you have the former head of counterintelligence in the New York City office, which is the biggest counterintelligence office that the FBI has. And this guy is indicted for accepting money from the very Russian oligarch that four years ago he was investigating. Now, the crimes are technical crimes, failure to report, failure to account, failure to tell the federal government who he

was working for. But come on, can FBI agents go to work for the people that they were investigating after they leave the Bureau? Of course not. Tyree Nichols, this is a terrible, terrible, terrible case in Memphis, Tennessee, in which this young man who was stopped for a traffic violation had the life beaten out of him by five cops. Here's the picture of the five cops. Tyree is African-American. The cops are African-American. This is not a white on black or a black on white. You see those five guys? They've all been indicted for murder, not manslaughter, murder for the senseless, useless, vicious, inhumane beating that they gave to Tyree Nichols because of some traffic violation and some miscommunications, apparently, between the late, then living, of course, Mr. Nichols and these five cops.

Very interesting. There's a new prosecutor in Memphis, and he's a left-wing Democrat progressive who doesn't believe that everybody should be prosecuted for crimes, but he was very aggressive on this one and indicted them for second-degree murder within two days of his having viewed the body cam. You don't want to see the body cams. I haven't seen them yet. They're coming out tonight. We're not allowed to show them on this program or TikTok and the others will punish us. But the body cams, according to the chief of Memphis police, will show, quote, inhumane barbarity by those five cops. Now, why second degree murder? Okay, first degree murder is planned, plotted, lying in wait. That's the old phrase. Intentional killing.

Second-degree murder is intentional killing without the plan or plot. So I think that second-degree murder is the appropriate charge here. Second-degree murder is a minimum of 20 years in jail. I cannot tell you the last time that active duty police were charged with second degree murder in the United States. Even Derek Chauvin, who slowly murdered George Floyd, was not charged with second degree murder. And this is just the state charges. The feds, who will take a little bit longer to investigate this, may very well charge them as well. And the feds may say to the state, you can go first, as happened in the Derek Chauvin case, or the feds may very well say,

no, we're going to go first. The state usually defers to the feds. The feds usually make the decision as to who goes first. In my opinion, they're going to let the state go first because the state of Tennessee, they don't have indictments yet, but they'll get them, is about to file the highest legal charges that can be charged against these cops. I don't know the facts in the case, but just going by what the chief of police said, you have a traffic stop and then you have acts of inhumane barbarity. Sounds to me like the second-degree charge is an appropriate one. And finally tonight, in a little town in South Carolina, Alex Murdoch is on trial.

You've heard me talk about this before. He is the most prominent lawyer, or was the most prominent lawyer in that town. His ancestors' paintings were in the very courthouse and courtroom where he's being tried. His ancestors in South Carolina were prominent politicians and judges. They had to take those paintings down. Mr. Murdoch comes from one of the most prominent lawyers in the area of Camden, C-A-M-D-E-N, South Carolina. Now on trial for first degree murder, allegedly killed, blew the heads off of his wife and child. There is no evidence to tie him to the murders.

There's no eyewitness. There's no weapon. Everything is circumstantial. Okay, what's circumstantial? Circumstantial evidence is eyewitness, is not eyewitness, not eyewitness testimony. So circumstantial evidence, for example, would show that his cell phone was near the scene of the murders before and after the murders occurred. That doesn't mean he committed the murders, but it's a circumstance demonstrating his likely presence in that area.

Not him, but his cell phone. Somebody else have the cell phone. We don't know. Today, the chief investigator for the state was on the witness stand, and he admitted that he was not very careful and may very well have messed up the murder scene. Take a listen. And you don't know what was in the grass that you may have disturbed around those shellheads? No, sir.

You don't know? No, sir. You may have disturbed something it's possible and you can see that you may have disturbed and destroyed evidence in that process microscopic or something i didn't see wow so the the the back of the person's head you saw was dick harpootlian uh dick is arguably the finest uh criminal defense lawyer in South Carolina and the person whose face you saw was the chief investigator admitting to cardinal sins for investigators

you didn't look in the earth around the so-called murder scene you walked through it and you may have disturbed it these are cardinal sins for investigators to have committed. Most investigators that I know and know of from the many, many jury trials that I tried as a judge wouldn't admit that even if it were true because admitting it will allow Harpootlian to say, in closing, how can you accept any of his testimony

when he was sloppy enough to admit that he didn't even look on the ground around him and he may have disturbed the crime scene before other investigators arrived. This is going to go on for about three or four weeks. It took three days to pick the jury only because Alex Murdoch and his family are so well known. The other odd thing about this case is what the state says the motive is. The state says the motive is that Alex Murdoch was a crook and was stealing money from his law firm and from others, and therefore he had to kill his wife and child in order to deflect public attention from his financial crimes. Boy, that's a head-scratcher to me.

As Dick Harpootlian told the jury in his opening statement, there is zero evidence of any problems in this marriage and in this wedding, and in this family. This was a loving family. There is zero evidence to indicate motive that is a rationally based motive in this case. We'll cover the case for you. We'll also cover the Tyree Nichols case, although that will not come to trial for a while. I hope you appreciate these summaries at the end of the day. Yesterday, we had about 250,000 of you watching. So keep it up. I love you. Judge Napolitano. Oh, more as we get it

on all these stories on Josh Hawley, trying to suppress the first amendment on this former senior management FBI agent, uh, indicted for a wire fraud and failure to report that he was working as a foreign agent for the guy he used to investigate on the five cops charged with the murder of Tyree Nichols and on the Alex Murdoch murder trial. Maybe we'll even be able to get the great Dick Harpootlian on the show. I don't know if the judge will let him do that during the trial, but knowing Dick, he's a camera hog, he'll be happy to come on when he's free to do so. More as we get it. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.