The Chris Cuomo Project - Who Really Wins If We Impeach Biden?

Episode Date: October 10, 2023

Chris Cuomo weighs in on Republicans' moves to impeach President Biden. He argues impeachment will only divide the country further and cautions both parties about the precedent they're setting. Drawing on the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, Cuomo says impeachment should be reserved only for the most egregious abuses of power. Follow and subscribe to The Chris Cuomo Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday: https://linktr.ee/cuomoproject Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Early warning, if the Republicans go down the road of impeachment with Biden, they better be ready for convictions for Trump. We don't fake the funk here, and here's the real talk. Over 40 years of age, 52% of us experience some kind of ED between the ages of 40 and 70. I know it's taboo, it's embarrassing, but it shouldn't be. Thankfully, we now have HIMS, and it's changing the vibe by providing affordable access to ED treatment, and it's all online. HIMS is changing men's health care. Why? Because it's giving you access to affordable and discreet sexual health treatments. And you do it right from your couch.

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all right? Now, so if you go to CozyEarth.com and you enter the code, enter the code Chris, and you can get up to 35% off your first order. CozyEarth.com, and the code is Chris. And the code is Chris. I'm Chris Cuomo. Welcome to another episode of The Chris Cuomo Project. I'm not saying that this is all political over here and this is really legal over here. Here's what I'm saying. This is about mood and atmosphere and momentum and what you make the currency of the day. And it will bleed.

And I can explain how we got here and my concerns going forward. Thank you very much for following and subscribing and giving me a shout on News Nation at 8 and 11 o'clock p.m. Eastern, five nights a week. Very good to have you here. Look, this is going to make a lot of people angry and they're going to twist it. Very good to have you here. Look, this is going to make a lot of people angry and they're going to twist it.

So please pay attention and don't be played for a fool or a sucker by the people who twist what I'm about to say. If they go down the road of impeachment because they feel they have the political cover and comfort, you did it to Trump. And this stuff sounds as bad as that stuff does. And it's actually more real than the Russia stuff, because even though people around Trump were taking stupid meetings with people they shouldn't have taken, who were offering them a back channel to Russian government, which is all kinds of red flags, no pun intended, they took those meetings, but it pretty much

ended there. I know a lot of people went away, but they went away for lying and other things that investigators found, not for being Russian agents, okay? Certainly, they didn't find the former president to be a Russian agent. So here they're saying, well, this is more real. The guy really made money. He really put it in the pockets of his family. He really shouldn't have made it. That part is going to be really hard to separate from just ordinary influence. Who really deserves money as a lawyer or as a lobbyist or as a consultant? Nobody didn't know anything about that industry. If you don't think that industries hire people because of who they know versus what they know, you're naive. Okay. Now I'm not saying it's right, but I'm saying that doesn't make it criminal. Does that make it ground for impeachment? Okay. Okay. Okay.

We've got to unpack this in two ways. Okay. The first one is the tasty way. If you go down the road of impeachment with Biden, okay, it's going to be a party line vote. That's what it's going to be a party line vote that's what it's going to be right almost absolutely so what does that do it creates more energy in the environment and by the way don't do the whole okuma with his energy energy is real okay and if you don't believe it is stand real close to somebody and see how uncomfortable you start to feel you will actually feel vibrations on your face as you get close to them. What is that? Are you a magnet? It's energy, okay? And energy is real. It's not just informing how we are with each other and how we feel within ourselves, but group, composite, community dynamics. And the more we make the atmosphere a gotcha game of political accountability based on your opponents prosecuting you for things, the more that becomes okay.

And if it's happening at the same time that you have all these different trials going on, you don't think it seeps in and makes people feel like, all right, this is where we're at. This is what we're doing. I'm no longer where I was when I started this process of, this is kind of weird to be taken down a former president for stuff that I've really never heard of anyone being accused of before. Crimes prosecuted in this way, let alone against someone this powerful at this kind of time, having this kind of impact on the public interest. But now I guess it's okay because they're doing

it in Congress too. That's not such a crazy leap. It's not such a crazy leap. And I'll tell you how we know this because based on what the temperature of the time is, you can have different outcomes. You're not going to see us putting any witches to the stake these days. Why? We understand spirituality, differences in opinion and philosophy different than we did back then. If you tried the Menendez boys today, remember, they went through more than one jury in that case as it was back then.

You don't think that jurors would hear them talking about a pronounced period of abuse at the hands of the father that continued from preteen into teen and beyond? You don't think that they could get one juror, when there was proof of it, when they had talked about it to other family members, to buy that, hey, this is the only way they could do it was by taking this guy out. They might as well shoot mom while they're at it. I mean, that's a little absurd as an extension to me, but I'll tell you what, you may get a different outcome today. And if you think about it, that's not crazy talk, all right?

Now, I'm not saying they weren't guilty of murder. Let's not go down a rabbit hole. I'm just saying that verdicts often reflect the vibe of the time, okay? Where people are at that time. Look at the difference between the Dred Scott case and where we wound up with Brown versus the Board of Education and how we feel today about diversity and equity and inclusiveness, or at least how we should feel under the law. Vibes matter. What you put out there matters. If they go down the road of impeachment on another fugazi witch hunt, and you can feel that way about Trump, but you better feel that way about Biden because

it's the same kind of thing. And the worst kind of bullshit is when you're trying to make believe that your bullshit doesn't smell like bullshit. Roses really smell like poo-poo-poo. You ever hear that song? Look it up. You may like to think your shit don't stink, but lean a little bit closer. Yeah.

Roses really smell like poo poo poo. Now, I love Andre 3000, but I love the point even more. Okay. Your own bullshit tends not to smell that great. You know, it smells so bad. All right. Oh, no. This time it makes sense.

This time it makes sense. I'm telling you, you go catapulting down this road of putting the country into the misery of another political prosecution. And that is by definition, a political prosecution. That's all impeachment is. Doesn't even have reviewability by the Supreme Court. The chief justice is there as window dressing. Okay.

So there is no review. There is no appeal. It's just politics and votes. And if you go down that road, you better be ready for guilty verdicts because you're going to have people who are in a different mindset based on the environment they're living in. Oh, you're saying they'll be biased and they'll be vindictive? No, but welcome to humanity. And no, I'm saying that you'll be conditioning. don't go after Biden because that will mean something really weird that may or may not happen in a convoluted way in a legal context that shouldn't have anything to do with politics. Again, wake up to humanity. Human beings are subjective. Okay. That's why the standard is beyond a reasonable doubt, meaning that you can't think of any story that makes as much sense or better sense than the prosecutors. That's inherently subjective. Okay.

What you're reading into it, how you're feeling about it. That's why you need a unanimous verdict. Anyway, humanity is built in. Okay. And that's okay. We are human beings. What I'm saying is beware. That's what I'm saying.

Beware because actions have consequences. And I'm not talking about vindictiveness. I'm talking about what you make okay, what you make acceptable. And by the way, you don't think all that going after Trump didn't catalyze and create momentum and a lot of the negative energy that led to a lot of the ugliness that we saw during the next set of elections. January 6th, actions have consequences. All right. That's not about blame. It's about explain. Actions have consequences, all right?

That's not about blame. It's about explain. We don't fake the funk here. And here's the real talk. Over 40 years of age, 52% of us experience some kind of ED between the ages of 40 and 70. I know it's taboo, it's embarrassing, but it shouldn't be.

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Check it out. Now, now, now. For this to be true, we have to be violating something that seems wrong in people's minds. And that's the second part of the point. Go down the road of impeachment with Biden. You're doubling down on what was done that some believe was wrong to Trump. Some don't.

Look, I have a position that's hard for a lot of you to accept. And that's OK, because it only really has to be acceptable to me, right? I'm not asking you for your vote. I believe that Trump did a lot of the things that he is accused of doing, okay? I believe there was collusion between Trump operatives, probably not Trump himself, and Russian stated assets, meaning people who said that's what they were. Why? Because they took the meetings,

because they asked them for things, because they encouraged the actions of people who said that they were acting on behalf of Russian intelligence. You're not supposed to do that. That is collusion. Collusion is not a crime. It's a behavior. All right. I see that as political malpractice. Do I think it's a felony? No, but I don't believe in the standard of felony or fine. I don't believe in it. And by the way, Mueller and his guys found about a dozen things they thought were prosecutable crimes, but they couldn't do it against the sitting president or they had some other reasons. Read the end of the Mueller report. That's where it is. But again, I didn't think it was worth your time and money

and energy. Why? You just said you think he did those things. I did. But I have a different understanding of this dynamic and its goals than many others, at least profess to. How so? No one is above the law. Is that true? Only in theory. Why? Because we see money, race, social status, ability to get counsel, which is kind of money, make big differences in how you are met by the criminal justice system and your experience within it. So no one's above the law, but not everybody gets treated the same way.

The irony, the irony of Trump supporters saying, there are two tiers of justice. No shit. Now you want to say that. Not when you see black guys who do like the wrong thing for a half a second and get shot as if that's a little bit too quick. And you want to like talk about how the police can do no wrong

and all this other stuff, but there's no two tier justice there, right? That's okay. That's okay. That the jails are filled disproportionately with poor people. That's, that's okay. Right? Because everything is fair, right? Every everything's fine, except when it gets to Trump and now it's two tiered. You're only going after him because of who he is. Really? Ask a lot of 5'10", 170-pound black men if they feel that that's also the case. Now you see what they meant when they talked about driving while black or doing anything while black?

Now you know it's just because it's me. That's why it went this way, my brother. That's what they were trying to get us to understand. Now you understand it through this perverse vessel called Donald Trump. It's just because it's him. That's why it went this way, my brother. That's what they were trying to get us to understand. Now you understand it through this perverse vessel called Donald Trump. It's just because it's him. That's why they're going after him. They don't like him. I believe that there are two tiers of justice.

I believe it's part of our ambition to change that. But you got to look at the person. You got to look at the types of crimes. And you do have to look at a more precious commodity that is almost always not at play the way it is with Biden and Trump. What is the public interest involved? Look, there's always public interest involved when you're prosecuting someone. That's why we care about murder stories so much.

And true crime, it matters. It's relatable. It's a reflection of what our community is about and what's punished and what isn't. Yes, but not as acutely, as dramatically, as potently, as dangerously as when you're going after somebody who's the presumptive nominee to be president of the United States. What you go after that man or woman for matters maybe even more than with regular citizens. I'm open to that. You can judge it harshly and say, no, that's bullshit. Okay. My only pushback to you will be, well, then I don't know what society you're living in. Yeah, but we're supposed to be

working against it. Yeah, I know, but you got to pick your spots on when to make your point. And I don't know that holding the democracy hostage by what may happen to Donald Trump is necessarily the best way to prove that no one's above the law when the guy is accused of a bunch of crimes that very rarely get prosecuted against other people. Now, I feel the same way about Biden, okay? And there's a reason that this makes sense. What a coincidence that they're also going after him for things that they rarely go after anybody else for. Why? Because I argue to you that both of these examples, and I know here it comes with the false equivalency and the right is so much worse and Biden is nothing compared to them and he just loves his son. I get it. I get it. In both instances, I ask you to take a breath Remember why the founding fathers agonized, argued over the Article II, Section 4 language

about impeachment and removable offenses, high crimes and misdemeanors. It comes from deep down in British common law, which was, of course, their extract and their experience, right? 1300s, 1400s, 1600s, 1700s, right? 1,300, 1,400, 1,600, 1,700. They were dealing with this, dealing with this. So a little bit of history, really. Honestly, it's helpful. Why do they have that stupid standard?

Why didn't they just list the crimes? Why didn't they just make it simple? Because it's not, and they left it amorphous because they wanted you to have to make the case that it mattered enough to do this because of what they had experienced and how people twisted it to fit into categories. And they agonized over this and they debated it and they didn't like what they had seen in the UK and the exceptions and the carve outs and the aristocracy and their overreach. So they kept it amorphous so that it really had to be something that stood apart, that stood on its own. It really had to be something

that made sense. So they threw treason, bribery. Why? Because that was like the worst shit they could think of. Why didn't they say murder? I don't know why. The best instinct on that is, if you look at George Mason of Virginia, when they were having the argument here, he argued for maladministration. So what we're going to do is go after you if you're not doing your job right, which sounded like it made sense. But then as they debated it, they were like, no, because then if you get enough guys who don't like your policy, they'll have you impeached because they don't like your policy and say

you're not running the government right. So they were like, okay, no malad maladministration let's stick with this other amorphous thing so that you really have to fit it in you know president ford another irony history's filled with them he pardons nixon they ask him what is an impeachable offense he says whatever congress votes on i actually disagree that should not be the standard of whatever matters to them in the moment that's actually the opposite of what the founding fathers wanted. They wanted something that would be consistent. Now, it has changed over time. There's no question about it, how it's been administered, how it's been reckoned in history. Our history, we only have a handful of them. And other than Johnson,

Nixon was like this weird breaking in thing, lying about it, using his guys. was like this weird breaking in thing, lying about it, using his guys. Clinton was lying about sex. Yes, he lied under oath. Johnson was about having guys who were on the take, which really cues most closely to what was going on. And then, of course, you have Trump, which there's a whole bunch of things all over the place of him definitely trying to mess with the election for his own benefit. But what Ford said is it's whatever Congress wants it to be is not what it was intended to be. It was intended to be a more rigid standard than that, something that really just blows everybody away. That's not what we're doing right now. These are not high crimes and misdemeanors. What do you mean he wanted to destroy the democracy? No. Trump legitimately

believed that he had it stolen from him and he was asking the guys to just re-rig it back because he is somebody who is as close to an amoral agent as I've seen in politics. And I'm not saying immoral, I'm not saying evil, I'm not saying bad. It's not for me to decide. It's that he doesn't give a damn about good, bad, right, wrong. It's advantage. It's payback. It's advantage. Okay?

I say it twice because that's how much it matters to him. And that's what it was about. Does that absolve him from criminality? No, but it's not going to get you on some big ticket, rigged the election, destroyed democracy kind of thing. They're going to get them on the documents if they want to. It's low fruit. But even that one, we've never seen this case prosecuted this way before.

It doesn't make any sense. He seemed to have the documents for no good reason. He was using them as scratch paper. It was stupid. It was pigheaded. It was stubborn and arrogant. And that can be maddening. But how many of these things, if Trump's son, it turns out, doesn't know what the hell he's talking about when it comes to fuel companies or anything like that, but they were paying him anyway because of who his dad knew and what kind of contacts they thought Hunter could and did get them. Does that make him that much different than hundreds of other guys? That's why they had to create Farrah. That's why so many guys skirt Farrah by hiring other guys who are registered under Farrah so it doesn't mess up their contact base. Is that really something

that you throw somebody out of the office of the presidency for? That's why that standard high crimes and misdemeanors, needs to be fleshed out and made each time to show that this matters so much that it goes beyond anything political. Do you really believe we're there in either of these things? And you don't believe by cheapening that standard, you're not going to encourage people to do the same thing. And no matter what they're judging, we certainly see it in our politics. You guys can't agree on anything.

You dismiss everything that doesn't benefit your side. There's nothing that can make sense to you if it's not to your partisan advantage. You don't think that that will also have an impact on the people who are trying these cases? Really? I'm not so sure. Oh, you're saying that very suck is yours and they're, no, I'm not. I'm saying they're human beings and you've made this okay. And it's not the standard that was intended. It's the opposite. They didn't want people going after their political opponents because they didn't like their politics. Now, do I think Trump has exceeded that? Yes. Yes, I do. I think he's done much of what he's accused of. Do I think it rises to the level of doing what it's doing to us right now and may do even more so, I do not know. I do not know. And I do not think the impeachment of him served this country well. And I think it actually empowered him politically. So you go down the road with Biden, get ready for it to be reflected in other bases of judgment in our society by other groups of people. Okay?

Get ready for some guilty verdicts to be coming against former President Trump, right, wrong, or indifferent. And if you want to look at them through the lens of what they were supposed to be, we've gotten far afield of what was supposed to matter. And I knew the Republicans were going to do this. Shame on them by playing the game of who is worse. When you promised and promised and promised, you were all about being better and stopping what you argued the Democrats had done. You're doing the same damn thing.

And I could argue even more so because you know already what it feels like to have it done to you and you're doing it anyway. What do you think? It's going to be coming to pass. This is going to be a big part of the election. They'll probably try and do it instead of an election. So be ready. Thank you for giving me a voice here on it. Thank you

for subscribing, following, checking me out on News Nation. You can research this all for yourself. Let me know what you think and we'll discuss. Be a free agent. Listen to me, decide for yourself. See you soon.