Legal AF by MeidasTouch - Trump’s Former TOP EXEC Makes STUNNING Admission

Episode Date: February 19, 2024

A former senior VP and head of construction for Trump who lead the team that built his beloved Trump Tower just admitted that Trump had lead a fraudulent company for years, and that he will say and do anything and lie to get re-elected. Michael Popok of Legal AF breaks down the fraudulent myth of Trump’s business success and how he dupes his followers. Thanks to Henson Shaving! Visit HensonShaving.com/LEGALAF to pick the razor for you and use code LEGALAF for 2 years worth of free blades! Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/meidastouch-podcast Legal AF: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/legal-af The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-politicsgirl-podcast The Influence Continuum: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/mea-culpa-with-michael-cohen The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show Burn the Boats: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/burn-the-boats Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 Political Beatdown: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/political-beatdown Lights On with Jessica Denson: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/lights-on-with-jessica-denson On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Uncovered: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/maga-uncovered Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Now, as Barbara Ress, she is a former executive vice president of the Trump organization where she worked for 18 years. She's the author of the book, The Tower of Lies, What My 18 Years of Working with Donald Trump Reveals About Him. Let me read you a little something from Judge N. Gorin's ruling, what he said about the Trump family's sort of inability to acknowledge any wrongdoing. He said, their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological. They're accused only of inflating asset values to make more money. The documents prove this over and over again. This is a venial sin, not a mortal sin. Defendant did not commit murder or arson.

They did not rob a bank at gunpoint. Donald Trump is not Bernie Madoff. Yet defendants are incapable of admitting the error of their ways. Instead, they adopt a see no evil, evil hear no evil speak no evil posture that the evidence belies does that sound familiar to you certainly last year you said to cnn you thought that donald trump was enjoying this process do you think he still is i don't think he's like he likes getting uh buffeted around and and things being said about him that are so awful, such as what was in the ruin. But I think that he is OK with it to the extent that he can spin it.

And he's already started that. And I think in his heart, he believes, one, he's never he's going to get away with it. And two, he thinks that, you know, he can make money off of this somehow or get more more fundraising more people to feel sorry for him oh my god look what they're doing to trump he must be president let's give him some money do you have a sense that that you know the emperor has no clothes is is the real donald trump has he been exposed now i'd like to think so but i'm not i'm not certain of that no No, absolutely not. Because, you know, exposed to whom?

To the rest of the normal people, intelligent people, thinking people, caring people? No, we knew all this before. We knew before he was even accused. But exposed to his supporters? No, no, nothing's going to change his supporters. And there are two kinds of supporters. The one that march in lockstep with mega guys and wealthy people who don't care what happens to the Constitution as long as their taxes are low and the taxes are low and there's no regulation. There's no regulation of anything. This is Michael Popak, Legal AF. I'm doing a series of hot takes about the myth and to puncture the myth of Donald Trump being a successful

business person. He's never been. He likes to talk about being a self-made person. He never was. He inherited all of his wealth from his father, Fred Trump, who was a successful developer, primarily in Queens, not in Manhattan, in New York. And you just heard there from Barbara Ress, who I don't want to be consigned to the trash bin of history. She is an important figure with insider knowledge into the inner workings of the Trump organization. She was, for the longest time, Donald Trump's senior vice president for construction for the few buildings that he did build, including Trump Tower and the Grand Hyatt redevelopment next to Grand Central Station in New York, his first project in 1980, she was on the construction team or led the construction team. She was considered to be one of the first women that ever led a major New York development when Trump Tower for 18 years, and overlapped a little bit with Fred

Trump, but mainly worked with Donald Trump. And she's on record, including in a memoir that she wrote called Tower of Lies, written in 2020, that Donald Trump will stop at nothing in order to get elected president or reelected president in this case, that he's all about lying and cheating. and that he's all about lying and cheating. And she specifically says and calls out exactly what we've observed in that clip that you just saw. I mean, it's not just about him being, as the judge has noted, pathological, along with the family in their cover up of the fraud that's at the heart of the Trump organization. But here, in contrast to, let's say, Michael Cohen, who also served for a long period of time as the in-house lawyer and

consigliere for Donald Trump, you have the impeachable reputation of Barbara Ress and her coming out and being a constant and frequent proper critic of Donald Trump. The scary part about her observation, knowing him so well, the psyche of Donald Trump, is that the lies and the mythology that he's created for himself is not easily punctured, as she noted about followers of Donald Trump. They fall, as you heard, into two camps. One, MAGA, who follow and lockstep anything he does. And secondly, business people who all they care about is low or no taxes and no regulation, and they could care less about the US Constitution or our democracy. I mean, when you hear, you know, commentators say it on Midas Touch or on Legal AF or me, you know, I'm a commentator. I'm somebody

who uses my analytic powers that comes from years of being a lawyer in the business world in and around New York in particular to talk about Donald Trump from my lens through my lens Barbara Russ she was there she knows where all the bodies are buried she said as you heard in the Ari Melbert interview she said um or yeah in the interview you just heard sorry she said there's nothing that she read in the opinion issued by Judge N'Goran that strikes her as being out of character with the person that she observed for the years that she worked for him. And that means the pathological cover-up, refusal to admit the truth, even when it's staring you in the face, even at the risk of great financial loss or penalty, doesn't matter to

Donald Trump. And apparently it doesn't matter to his followers. I mean, she hit the nail on the head, which is why I wanted to bring it to your attention again here on Legal AF, when she said, you know, he'll make money off of it. He thinks he can outrun this race, right? That the prosecutors won't catch him. This is an elaborate game of catch me if you can. And Donald Trump is just going to keep, you know, posing as a pilot and getting on the next plane and forging the next check until he makes it to the next town, hoping that the finish line for him is winning, not just running, winning the presidential election November 5th. And there, you know, other than the state prosecutions, like in Georgia, you know, he's got the prosecutions

and the prosecutors in the palm of his hand, and he can crush them and end them and pardon himself for all things federal. And he's just hoping that he gets there. And his supporters are giving him the boost that he needs. And he's grifting off the back of all of these lies. But as Barbara Ress said, or as I've said also in my prior hot takes, it's not the prosecutor's fault that he committed crime or the attorney general's fault that he committed persistent fraud. It's Donald Trump's fault. There's an old line, don't do the crime if you can't do the time. Blaming the judges, the prosecutors, the attorney generals, who's sleeping with who or not sleeping with who based on his indictments, who cares? This is about the lack of moral, the lack of conviction, the lack of character of somebody that's running to be the leader of the free world.

You can't just worry about your pocketbook, your purse, your bank account. Although, if you look at it, more jobs have been created under Joe Biden than under Donald Trump by far. More of the economy is humming. You're starting to see it where it matters at the grocery store, in your shopping cart, in your checkout totals, in your kids' clothes, in your back-to-school clothes, you know, come the summer at the gas pump. That's what matters to the American people. And I understand that. And it's not just your 401k, although that's humming. It's not the stock market. That's humming. You know, it's not the dollar versus, you know, other currency around the world, because that's doing great. But every measure of the economy under Joe Biden,

he's making his closing argument now by showing you how the economy has roared back, avoided a certain recession or depression, not depression, but a certain recession at least, bounced it back through management, through his Federal Reserve chairman. And in standing contrast, you've got people like Donald Trump, who's the people that know him the best are either completely critical and telling us about his moral failings, his fraudulent scheme, the larceny that's in his heart and in the fiber of his being,

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Barbara Ress, 18 years, head of construction for Donald Trump. Listen to the words that she's saying about him. Michael Cohen, the insider, insider concierge, who went to jail over Donald Trump, for Donald Trump, took a bullet for Donald Trump, if you will, professionally and otherwise, in doing his bidding. And then who's left? Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer Donald Trump hired and inherited from his father, already went to jail for 100 days for committing tax fraud under the watchful eye of one Donald Trump. And in addition to that, he's about to plead guilty

to perjury for having perjured himself in the Manhattan DA's, I'm sorry, the New York Attorney General's civil fraud case against Donald Trump that just went so south against Donald. Jeff McConaughey, controller, 20-year controller for Donald Trump, right? He avoided going to prison only because he cooperated in the Manhattan DA's case for tax fraud against Donald Trump. Everybody else in and around Donald Trump, lawyers included, except for the small band of current lawyers for right now, have all lost their bar licenses and or are about to and or have been indicted and or convicted of felonies for having represented Donald Trump.

And yet Donald Trump skates by, right, to his followers. Even the independents in the polling show that they're leaning ever so slightly towards Donald Trump based on what body of work. It was by every account an unsuccessful presidency, the Trump presidency, by every account, which culminated the penultimate failure was COVID and how he approached that and the economy related to it and the dead people, dead Americans resulting from it. But the ultimate, the nadir, Jan 6th, the attempt to overthrow democracy, that was on his watch. That was led by him. He was the commander in chief of his own insurrection. So that's the presidency.

You're supposed to measure the person by his body of work. Yes, he ran the more successful campaign against Hillary Clinton. And yes, he got elected by the majority of what he needed to in the electoral college. But after he got in, I defy you to name for me a infrastructure project, domestic project, welfare project, social welfare project, investment project, stock market, or anything else that would be indicia of a successful presidency on the domestic side that Donald Trump is responsible for. Healthcare, immigration policy, none.

Infrastructure, none. Chip investment, so that we make our own computer chips and we don't have to rely on our increasingly frenemies abroad for it. Oil independence, not him. Environmental protection, not Donald Trump. And then foreign policy. Every one of our NATO allies not Donald Trump. And then foreign policy. Every one of our NATO allies hated Donald Trump. None of them would have come to our aid if Donald Trump asked them to, if we needed help during that particular period of time.

Terrible foreign policy, hated by our allies. Tremendous amount of rebuild that Joe Biden's had to do during this period. And then the domestic front. And then you've got Joe Biden's body of work, which you're seeing every day at the gas pump and in the gas station. You don't have to call it Bidenomics. I don't care. It's a successful presidency by every measure, except the one thing he can't control is that he gets older like you and I do every day. And that's it. But when you hear somebody like Barbara Ress, who you may not have heard of before, but you should go out and read her book, Tower of Lies. Guess who the

subject of that book is? Written in 2020, right? Even before all of the indictments came out against Donald Trump. Pre-indictment book, you know? pre-Jan 6th book, just on the edge of the committee had even been issued its report yet when that book came out, and have that as a companion piece with all the information that Michael Cohen has given us. And then if you're looking for, if you're on the Trump side and you're looking for, who's an honest broker of information for Donald Trump? Everybody in his organization has testified against him, gone to jail for him, about to go to jail for him, or has written books or podcast material against him. And his lawyers have all

lined up to either plead guilty and or lose their bar licenses. What does that tell you about the measure of the person that you're thinking about voting to or voting for? Now, look, I know, to a certain extent, I know my audience, I know I'm preaching a bit to the choir. But the extent that this kind of messaging can be forwarded by you to people in your life that matter, have them think open mindedly about the person that they're thinking about voting for and who they're trying to put back into the presidency. You've got Joe Biden and his administration.

That's why it's called an administration. He has a lot of people around him that work with him, as does Donald Trump. And if you like Joe Biden's administration better than Donald Trump's administration, then you know who to vote for. So again, I'm going to continue to follow the fraud that is Donald Trump and the reason that people like Barbara Ress have come out against him. One place might as touch an illegal AF. Source, No Smoke, No Sunshine, Legal AF. The title means exactly what you think. We do it on Wednesdays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. Eastern time. We sit at the intersection of law, politics, and justice,

and we comment on it so you don't have to. You can just listen and enjoy, hopefully. So until my next hot take, until my next Legal AF, this is Michael Popak reporting. Love this video? Make sure you stay up to date on the latest breaking news and all things Midas by signing up to the Midas Touch newsletter at MidasTouch.com slash newsletter.