The Adam Mockler Show - Trump tried to destroy his life…

Episode Date: August 15, 2026

Full article: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/15/us/politics/prosecutors-examined-firm-with-tie-to-judge-in-trump-hush-money-trial.html?eafs_enabled=false&login=google&auth=login-google Click below for premium Adam Mockler content: 👉 https://adammockler.com/subscribe 👉 https://www.youtube.com/@adammockler/join Adam Mockler and Mike Nellis break down Mike's wild journey over the past year. JOIN THE COMMUNITY: Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AdamMockler/ Discord: https://discord.gg/y9yzMU3Gff Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adammockler/ Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/adammockler.com/ Twitter: https://x.com/adammocklerr/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@adammockler Contact: [e-mail] Business inquiries: [e-mail] Adam Mockler - Mockler Media LLC Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, everybody, this is one of the wildest stories I've heard in a while. Friend of the show, Mike Nellis, was targeted by the Trump administration and the Trump DOJ in a purely political attack. The story is rather harrowing because when the government's coming after you, your last bulwark is a legal team and potentially the audience that he has built, but he is fighting back, he is pushing, and I'm going to let him break down the story in the stream that we did earlier today. As always, make sure you drop a like.

You can subscribe to Mike Nellis and I below. Thank you all and watch until the end. They have been trying to destroy my life for the last couple of years. They've been trying to destroy the judge's life for the last couple of years as well as his daughter, who is my former business partner and a very good human being who does not deserve this. So the long and short of it is, and some folks know this because I've talked about it publicly before. Over the last couple of years, Laura Lumer, who was very close to Donald Trump, created a insane conspiracy theory about my business that I founded Authentic,

which is a digital fundraising and advertising firm for Democratic candidates. We work with all the party committees. We work with a bunch of big-name Democrats, including some folks that are considered, you know, big enemies of Donald Trump like Adam Schiff and a few others. And Lumer has this crazy theory that honestly isn't even worth talking about the actual conspiracy theory, but it has to do with us trying to bribe the judge, which doesn't make any sense on any level. And for a while we ignored it because it was just something on the Internet.

She would tweet about it, like, who cares? She's just a random person. But because she has such cachet with Donald Trump and the Republican Party, party, she was able to convince the House Judiciary Committee in 2024 to subpoena our business and start investigating our business, which was not right, forcing us to spend like $100,000, if not more at the time to defend the business. They subpoenaed and asked for a bunch of records that didn't make any sense and had nothing to do even with the conspiracy theory. They asked us for stuff that didn't even exist, including communications between me and the judge, which is not a person

that I know, and is just totally insane. And then we fought back and basically won against that. We challenged them to hold me in contempt. And they didn't because. as Jim Jordan is a coward. And then fast forward a year after that, this is a year ago now in the middle of 2025, we find out that we're being subpoenaed by Trump's DOJ. And I have to be careful about what I can

or cannot talk about because the matter is ongoing. I would encourage folks to read the New York Times story. There's certain things in there that I can't confirm or deny. But this is something that's been going on for a while, and I believe that it's an attempt to do a couple of things. The first thing is they would like to destroy my business. They would like to destroy my credibility.

They would like to go after the judge and his daughter. which is very unfortunate. They also are using it as a fishing expedition to go after my clients. Like they're asking for confidential messages between me and my clients. And I'm a private citizen. I run a private business. I have the right to be politically active. I have the right to run this business. My clients haven't done anything wrong. My staff hasn't done anything wrong. And the basic premise of it is that we did something improper related to fundraising around Donald Trump's fraud case, which Donald Trump raised more money over his fraud case than anybody else did. Like I can show you all kinds of examples of them doing stuff that was, you know, very great.

gross around that, like selling T-shirts with his mugshot on it and stuff like that. So basically, this has been a whole thing. And over the course of that year, I have faced death threats. Members of my team have faced death threats. It's been disruptive to people's lives. It's been horrible. I had to buy a gun and I had to learn how to fire that gun. And I had to get a concealed carry license and I had to redo all the security at my house. And I had to talk through with my wife and my son, like what it would look like if somebody came to our house because Laura Lumer once sent me a threatening message in the middle of last year that mentioned my son. And that went mega viral because they had to have the cops coming to my house.

So this has been something that's been happening to me for a long time. And Adam, I'll kind of close the loop on this part of it here, was just to say, the only reason I'm even a content creator in this moment is because of this thing. I was a perfectly happy private citizen working in my business, doing my work for my clients. And this crap started. And I was like, you know what? If I'm just going to get dragged into this, I'm going to do it for real. And I'm going to go speak out about what they're doing because it's a pattern with Donald Trump.

He abuses the power of the federal government to go after his political enemies, anybody who stands in his way. It doesn't matter if it's me, Brian Tyler Cohen and David Packman, who they put on their enemies list. Don Lemon, who's an independent content creator that's doing awesome work right now. And they had him arrested because they claimed that he violated some law about being in a church, which was absurd. They're going after James Comey. They're going after Tish James. They're going after anybody, Southern Poverty Law Center.

So it's no different than that. And it's gross. And most importantly, all these people at the DOJ, most of whom are like good, hardworking career civil servants that are trying to serve us, they're not focused on taking down drug dealers or terrorists or drug traffickers or sex trafficking. like the Tate brothers. What they're doing is they're going after Donald Trump's enemies, and that's not right. It's a waste of your taxpayer dollars.

Yeah, first of all, what a story. I'm sorry to you have to go through that. And that's probably like 10% of it because I can't even tell you. I know a bunch of shit I can't tell you right now. Yeah, I'm sorry you how to go through that. I know Laura Lumer has been attacking you for a while, and on behalf of everyone, thank you for fighting back so valiantly against this administration. I want to go really close up in one second and talk about the personal impact it's had,

but just to zoom out, as you said, this is Donald Trump's entire strategy. Honestly, the more I think of it, his authoritarianism is only confirmation that he is unpopular and desperate. He doesn't have to float the idea of declaring a national emergency and seizing ballot boxes if he were winning.

He wouldn't have to go after every single political opponent like Act Blue or like your firm or even just people he perceives as opponents, like trying to consolidate CNN under the Ellison, an umbrella. It is all an attempt to try to consolidate power and hold on because he is unpopular and he betrayed the American people. And again, thank you for being on the front lines fighting back in that manner. I just want to ask you, what is the, what's the personal impact that you felt of this? Yeah, well, I want to say, like, the first thing is, like, we're not victims. Like,

and I don't want to be treated like a victim of this. I actually, I think the people who I feel the worst off are like my wife and my son who have been dragged into the middle of this and, you know, my seven-year-old is no idea what the hell's going on. And I'd like to just keep it that way, frankly. I just want him to feel safe. I feel bad for my wife. I feel bad for some people in my family who have been harassed. I feel bad for my staff that have been harassed.

And, you know, I don't talk about it too much because it's her private business, but my former business partner, like she's been through the ringer here too, and I feel awful for her. I mean, before I talk about the personal stuff, I want to make one more point that's just a building on what you just said is one of the things that I believe the Trump administration wants to do is to make us all too afraid to stand up to that, right? It's the concept of compliant advance, which I think you hear from liberals a little bit too much. It's become kind of something we just shout at anybody who doesn't do what we want them to do.

But when they shot Alex Pretti three, four, five times in the back, it was to send a message that you shouldn't be out there protesting ice. And when they attack people and when they give ICE agents, these new electrical gloves that they have, it's a message, don't go out there and don't be protesting and don't be filming and don't be, you know, recording on what we're doing. When they go after Don Lemon, they want in the back of your head for an independent content creator that's out there trying to report on what's going on with Mitch McConnell, what's going to. on with the Epstein files, like what Katie Fang is doing right now, they want you scared. And I think that's part of what this is. So they cast the widest possible net to scare and harass people. And so in my personal life, yeah, I've had some really scary moments. I've gotten some incredible death threats from Lumer, but also from Lumer's cadre of people. I got a letter that was sent to my house, which was scary as hell that somebody had my personal home address,

had to do a bunch of work to try to get that removed. Lumer actually doxed my personal address on X. X did nothing about it. Now, the bad news for Lumer was she posted an old address of mine. So I actually had to get on the phone and call the new owner of that home for my first home in Chicago and explained to a florist who the hell that I was. And I felt really bad for her because she didn't deserve to go through that because she's a civilian far more than I am. I mean, I'm a civilian too for that matter. But it's just, it's crazy. And like the financial and the mental drain has been significant. Like, we have had to spend two separate times now because there's, there's the fight against the House Judiciary Committee and there's a fight against the DOJ. I haven't tallied it all

up. But I believe it's well over $100,000 each time. Like, these, These lawyers are expensive. We hired really good lawyers that are here to defend us and help us. They've done an excellent job. So the financial strain is significant on the business, which makes it then harder for me to support my staff. It's been disruptive because there's been times where instead of consulting for my clients or advocating, like, I'm an elected official here in the city of Chicago, like doing my elected official worker creating content. I've been on the phone with lawyers.

I've been trying to explain what's been going on and trying to make sense of what they're trying to do here and compile documents and information. That's been real. I feel like I haven't been able to be like a particularly good founder and owner of the business at times. And I actually took a step back at the beginning of this cycle from the day to day more so than ever before, partially to focus on that but also on content creation. And I just feel like this is constantly taking 10, 15 percent of my mental energy away from me. And it just sucks. And nobody should be made to feel this way by their government.

And what annoys me probably the most is there's so much criminality in Washington, D.C. right now. and they're not prosecuting any of it. Like, nobody in the Epstein files has been prosecuted. They're fighting tooth and nail to make sure that we don't even know the names of the people who trafficked the kids and abused the kids, which is disgusting. Donald Trump has created a cottage industry for pardons out there. He just made his personal attorney, the permanent head of the DOJ for as long as Trump is in office, I imagine.

And he, by the way, appeared at a campaign rally for Trump yesterday, which is really inappropriate. Like, if Merrick Garland has shown up a campaign for Joe Biden, that would have been really messed up and Republicans would have been really upset about it. So it's banana republic shit. It's a waste of taxpayer dollars. And again, more than anything, it's like it's one thing if I had screwed up and broken a law or actually done something wrong and it needed to be investigated to see if there was criminality to it.

It's another thing when a known lunatic named Laura Lumer makes something up about your business. And then it gets so far that it goes to the House Judiciary Committee and now all of Congress is doing something about it. And it gets to the president of the United States because she whispers sweet nothing in his ear. I mean, they have mentioned me in legal. When they're trying to get the fraud case overturn, they, like, share my tweets with the judge as if that's going to, like, help them.

They go, this guy did this thing and it's crap, but they just used it as another arrow in their quiver. And then now to have the DOJ do it, just it's disgusting. And it's draining and I'm exhausted by. I'm glad I get to kind to talk about it. I can't really do you guys most of what I want to tell you, but it's... One more time. Thank you for talking about this.

Thank you for fighting. Everybody, if you want to keep supporting Mike Nellis, make sure you hit the subscribe button both on YouTube and on Substack. You know, you brought something up that really... Like, to me, this not only highlights how weak the Trump administration is, how scared they are of losing, the fact that they have to attack their political opponents in this manner, across the spectrum, but it also highlights how they're trying to basically divert attention away from their own corruption, as you pointed out. You made a really good point that this is the most

corrupt administration in American history. It's banana republic shit in the sense that they're trying to pull sleight of hand. I mean, right now, Trump is selling early access to. to his truth social posts, where he talks about the Iran war and where he pumps stocks. So if you're an investor, you can pay $100,000 per month in order to get early access to the Donald Trump Truth Social, and then Trump will tweet out

about the Iran War or the Strait of Hormuz or something of that sort. And people can basically bet on that. They can use that to invest. It's so incredibly corrupt, but he's trying to pull our attention away from that. He's creating a slush fund for January 6thers, people that committed crimes against our country, against our constitution, people who try to

interrupt the peaceful transfer of power, but then he tries to go after political opponents in order to divert attention away. And it gets to a point where it's like mad king paranoia. And what I mean by that is, like, a mad king is defined as somebody who is in such a paranoid state of mind. They begin to hyper fixate on things around them, paranoid things around them, fixing things, and trying to increase their security and they're not focused on the American people. When the reflecting pool was fixed and it was botched by contractors that Donald Trump hired,

he tried to manufacture a political enemy out of it. And it was so manufactured and faked that even Janine Piro, Donald Trump's right-hand woman, who is the district attorney in D.C., said that it was just a botched job. They dropped all of the charges against their perceived vandalists. And it kind of reminds me of this case. They can manufacture an enemy

because they want to try to divert attention away. And it gets even more dangerous when it comes to stuff like the water treatment attack that happened last month on a water treatment center and a few different states. In Minnesota and a few other states, had a water treatment attack done by the Iranians. Donald Trump didn't want to admit

that he made the country less safe, so he came out and blamed, it on Tim Wals. Again, he creates a manufactured perceived enemy because he wants to divert attention away from his own failures, a failure to fix the reflecting tool at the smallest level, or a failure to end the Iran war at the highest level. So Mike Nellis, yeah, I'm sorry that you're caught up and that Donald Trump is surgically trying to turn you into one of these perceived enemies.

It's really disgusting. I mean, it's gross. And I'll go like one step further. on something here too that I think about a lot, which I think beyond just diverting from his complete and total failure as president of the United States, because he's an absolute disaster. And at this point, 70% of the country understands that to the point that I was on Newsmax this morning and they were defending his ballroom because they didn't want to talk about the war in Iran or anything else. Like it was ridiculous. But, you know, he tries to create this idea. And he thrives off of it.

And when you talk to voters in focus groups, you hear it all the time is everybody's corrupt. Everybody's adept. Everybody's stupid. So it's okay that I'm this. corrupt and I'm the stupid. And you actually kind of, you find people give him credit for his corruption. They go, well, I mean, at least he's being honest about it. Like, we know about his corruption. We don't know about Joe Biden's corruption. Like, you get a lot of that and it's crap, but it is an intentional strategy to make you not believe in any political leader, to make you not believe in any institution, to make you not believe in any person so that he can be the arbiter of truth and justice and fairness in this country. And to about 20, 25 percent of the country, he is that. Like, they

believe that he could do no wrong. And that's when you see these videos of people at Maga Rally's where they believe every stupid thing that he says and they're sort of dead enders go into a fish concert for the thousand time. My apologies to anybody who's a fan of fish or Grateful Dead's the other one was when I was my grandpa. My grandpa's been a like 50 fish concerts.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, he loves it. What's your band? We're going to make a light for a second. What's your band if you were just going to go chase them around the country? Who would you follow? Over and over and over? Probably, you know, I really like Tame and Paula lately.

That's like the new generation of, you know, the type of trippy music. It's good stuff. How about you? Yeah. It would either be, Zach Brown ban or it would be Green Day. Those are really good answers.

Those are really good answers. I love Green Day. I would follow around like Eminem, but from 2002 when he used to be a bit more edgy. But either way, back to the story. Yeah, but it's just, it's he wants you to believe that everybody's corrupt and it's okay for him to be this way. But his level of corruption is unprecedented. Like, there has been abuses of power at the DOJ before.

There is nothing like what is happening today at the DOJ. Okay. In fact, it used to be just generally an unwritten rule that you didn't go after campaign staff and consultants. Like, the idea of them going after. after Act Blue. They've concocted a conspiracy theory about Ag Blue. The attacks on them are ridiculous. They concocted this thing about me. They're doing it to the Southern Poverty Law Center as well. It used to me that you just didn't do that. You know, and like you can go back and talk about

Republicans going after Acorn, which like Adam, you're probably too young to remember them. No, no, I remember that. That was Project Veritas that did that, right? Yeah, it was. And, you know, now they've got Nick Shirley out there arguing about like Somali daycares and all this garbage. And, you know, they treat him like he's a serious person when he, I don't think he has an independent thought in his head. but it's just going to get worse. And then the flip side of that, by the way, is that they will get really mad at us. And this is going to be the challenge that Democrats have to be prepared for heading into

getting back into power in the House and the Senate and hopefully the White House in 28 is, when we start going after the criminals in this administration, and Trump will probably pardon himself and his family on the way out the door, but he's not going to pardon everybody. When we start going after people, they're going to cry political persecution. They're going to say that it's lawfare. They're going to be like, oh, my God, I can't believe you're going after Tom Homan for taking a $50,000 cash bribe at a DC Cava, which is my favorite. corruption story here. I don't know why the DC-Cava thing just like really

sticks with me. When they scream about it, tell them to piss off. Because right now, not a single one of those conservatives is coming to my defense over a conspiracy theory. And I don't need them to come to my defense, but like it's crap. Like there's real corruption. And frankly, we should go after the corruption that's inside the Democratic Party too. Henry Quayar should probably be in prison right now. But you got to pardon from Donald Trump. That's screwed up, in my opinion. There's plenty of members of Congress that are insider trading right now on the Democratic Party side. Lots more on the Republican Party side, too. We've got to go after all of it. Like, it's time to just clean this shit.

up, make sure it never happens again. And yeah, that's the main mission right now of not only our feed, but there's a broad independent media apparatus being built that just didn't exist a decade ago. I guess I want to end this off by saying a decade ago when there was a message to get out there or when a politician wanted to break some sort of story or corruption piece, they would have to go either on TV or their campaign would release some sort of ad that goes through five layers of approval. Nowadays, we are changing the game. The plates are shifting underneath us

as politics continues to change. Like, we can just have Abdul al-Said on our show, for example. And Abdul can then talk about the corruption of other people, and it's not as based on TV ads or that. It is now us. There's no gatekeepers.

You can build your own apparatus and you can get beyond them, and that's what a lot of folks in the media don't understand. And I just want to say, thank you all for being behind our back as we built this. Thank you all for having the back of Mike, having the back of me. We will continue to over and over push for a better future where our country is focused on human dignity and democracy and helping the average person rather than sheer corruption and helping

men get away with their abuse, like Tate, like Max Miller, like a Bernie, or not, sorry, what's his name? The other, uh, I don't know. I go to Ryan Forney-A, because he's been accused of domestic assault multiple times. There's like dozens of them, dozens of them out there. Epstein, of that. Can I add one more thing before you close, buddy, which is just to say that, you know, we get to do this because of you guys. And like when we talk about building independent media companies, we mean it. There's no like billionaire or foreign government that's funny, either Adam or I. But, you know, if you would please make sure that you subscribe to Adam and I on every channel, substack, YouTube, wherever, make sure you engage with this video. For me right now,

because I've had a lot of people ask what we can do is like, we're going to be okay. I've got a good legal team. We're going to be fine. And I'm extremely confident, like 99.9% and I've done nothing wrong, 100% frankly. But what is helpful is the bigger our audiences get, the more people that engage with us, it makes it harder for them to come after us in a meaningful way. It also means that we have a platform to fight back, and that makes it more dangerous to go after us. When they came after me the first time, I had zero followers.

My Twitter account wasn't even public. It was just a private Twitter account. I went from that. Now I have like two and a half million followers. And like the more we grow, the more we build, the harder it is for them to come after us, more people get a chance to see it. And I just know that that's true. Same thing, what happened to Brian Tyler Cohen and David Packman, which I thought was

screwed up too. And Don Lemon as well. All they did was make Don Lemon stronger by going after him. Yep. I appreciate each and every single one of you. Thank you for having our backs. And we'll see you in the next one.