The Daily Beast Podcast - Jan. 6 Officer Says U.S. Must Be Saved From Trump’s Return

Episode Date: November 26, 2023

Former Capitol Police Officer Sgt. Aquilino Gonell tells The New Abnormal that democracy is on the ballot in the next election and that America must be protected from a second Trump presidency. Plus former Daily Beast journalist turned communications consultant, Timothy Burke, talks about the FBI raid at his home following the leak of embarrassing videos of Tucker Carlson that ended up in the hands of Vice News and Media Matters for America. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Kedden, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears.

Hello and welcome back to a special bonus episode of the new abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here. Sergeant Aqualino Ginell is here to talk about his new novel, American Shield, the immigrant sergeant who defended democracy, all about his experience growing up an immigrant in America, his time in the Army, and eventually serving with the Capitol Police on January 6. Then, journalist Tim Burke joins us to tell us all about the time the FBI rated as House seized all of his electronics and how this ties into Fox News and Kanye West anti-Semitism. But first, let's have some fun.

Folks, I am very excited to welcome to the new abnormal Sergeant Akalino, Ganeau, who is the author of the new book American Shield. And if his name sounds familiar, it should. As your testimony in January of 2021 sent shockwaves, I think, through the country. as you testified about your experience facing down the insurrectionist terrorist mob that would take over the Capitol building on January 6th, 2021. Sergeant Connell, talk to us about why now for your book American Shield? Why do you think that it is important to have this book, essentially you're an expansion of your personal testimony and story on the record now? One of the things that people need to realize is that my book,

because American issues, not just about January 6th, is about the story of an immigrant like myself from the age of as a little kid all the way to age 12 when I immigrated to United States, the struggles and obstacles and diversity that I'll become, trying to learn the language, trying to become a better person, family issues. There's a lot of layers that makes this incredible book worth reading. Then you have the commitment of public servants joining the military, going overseas and defend the country at the United States in the military being deployed to Iraq. And open my return, I also returned back to college, finished my degree, graduated, and then I became a police officer at the capital

where I stayed almost 17 years. And once again, I defended the United States and the capital from the mob. And I think especially it's important now for people to know exactly what I did. I'm not only myself, but my colleagues as well, because the same person who incited the violence of January 6th and in the courts and everybody knows who that is, that person is continuing to lead the polls in the Republican field to be the nominee for president again. And if he did that, all those things, breaking arms, breaking the law, and citing the violence, demonizing immigrants. And that was when he was constrained when he had guardrails and had a lot of people mostly watching over him. And he was restrained from doing his dark impulses now that he's, you know, unafraid of what would happen if he does certain things now that he learned, go away.

around laws and manipulate laws and bend it or break it. Also, with the help or the bravery of any Republican to stop him from doing those impulses, now it's going to be a lot worse. Because if you listen to what he has said in the campaign trail, it's like run up all the immigrant. I'm going to tell you, I'm your ramification. I'm the person who's going to fight for you, but he's not fighting for the American people. He has not put out a platform how he's going to make all the people lives better. All he's trying to do is being a vindict of person. And that shows every single time that he opens up his mouth.

I want to take a step back and talk about your experience as an immigrant in this country from the Dominican Republic. I am a child of immigrants. My family came to the United States from Jamaica in the 1970s. And every family has a different story, has a different way that they were, that they tried to assimilate into American culture in a way to advance and make a better life for their families. Can you talk about what it was like to come here and then make the decision to enroll in the armed forces to essentially protect this country, our democracy, but not be treated in the way that you should have been? As I write in the book, American Shield, I mean, it's us immigrants, we have this unique perspective that whenever we are in our own country, native country, we hear America degree, America principle, America values, the line of opportunity, everybody being treated equally. I mean, not, you know, saying that that has always been the case, but at least the expectation in the majority of times that is the case. So once I learned that as a little kid that promotion, that advertised, I bought into that

and those principles. And then once I got to Brooklyn, I know initially my inclination for joining the military was to get an education, to fulfill, continue my education. But then once 9-11 happened, then that seemed to me like irrelevance. Like my education was, no, no, let me get back. I want to go overseas. I went to avenge what happened on 9-11. My decisions were, you know what, let me give something back to this country who has

giving me so much opportunity to a point that once I retire, I continue my education. I became a better person. After I left the military in 2007, I find that joining the police officer as an extension of my service. So half of my life, I'm 44 now. I spent almost half of my life being a public servants, a in the military and 17 as a police officer. I think when people, you do the right thing.

The expectation is that you're going to be treated and rewarded for it. Yeah. It has not been the case since I spoke out against what happened on January 6, 2021. Since my testimony in July of 2021, a lot of people ridicule me or say that I'm a crime. I was crying, baby. Yes, I was crying because more than fucking 50 people assaulted me. Sometimes one-on-one was a group. If you were attack and beat up like we were, our number and everything, I'm sure you fucking would be crying too. So people don't see that. People don't realize that.

That is a moral injury upon himself because I kept my oath. I kept my duty. I did my job. And yet, the former president just last, I think about last week, he said, the people, The very same writers who attack me and my colleagues are hostages. And these are people who attack police officers in full uniform, including myself in the right of gear. So if they are hostages, if they are patriots, what does that make me? The hostage taker, the murderer, you know what I mean? So am I the bad guy of the story?

No, I know I don't. But the way they are questioning it makes a scene is like, we are the bad guy. And even though they saying that now, especially Republican and letty officials, they're saying that now with a time difference, you know, two years, almost three years out, the separation from that day. But on that day on January 6th, they were running for the lives. And the only reason why they escaped and made it to their home and to the safe house was because action like that myself and my colleagues did to protect them.

And yet, today, they make all kinds of excuses, downplay, and even support the same person who sent them to be the target of an assassination on Congress. And that on itself is a moral injury that I cannot understand because God forbid if I was still working right now at the Capitol and looking back in a way, I'm glad I'm not there because if there is something else happening at the Capitol, I'm not only going to have to worry about the people that I've been threatening us, and the people inside. Right, right. But now I have to worry about, do the Republican congressman and elected officials,

they have my back? Are they going to help me close the door or they're going to strangle me or keep me away from that door from securing it? And that's scary because I don't trust them anymore. Sergeant, you make such a valid, valid point because I think back as a person that was viewing that day on television, not in it, but watching it. And even when I watch those videos and I see those members of Congress that were running and I see how they were fearing for their lives and you can look and freeze frame. And I think now about whether or not like you're saying, given the situation now three years out, if an attack were to happen again, whose side are they on?

Do you think that the media has done enough to really make the case to the American people that we don't know whose side these people are truly on? Are they on the side of democracy, which obviously they've shown they aren't? But have we made the case? Have we made it clear? And is that the reason? You know, I know that your entire story is American Shield. But one of the important aspects of that is how you fought with your body and your life for democracy. Do you think that it's being made clear that Republicans are not for democracy?

To understand they had not. I mean, you have mentioned in my book a couple passages. You know, you had the same people who on my day of testimony in front of Congress, They, instead of listening to us, the police officer, these Republican officials, they decided to go and do a press conference in front of the Justice Department to demand that these political quotation mark, political prisoners, should be released. These are the same people who were targeting their colleagues that they were targeting them, that they were assaulting police officers. And now they were like, well, you know, you should release them. because they didn't do, they weren't violence. And if you look at, it's a disinformation and misinformation,

a strategy that they had willfully chosen to do. Just last week, the new speaker of the house, Mike Johnson, he just released some of the tapes. But he didn't timestamp them. He didn't, oh, these are peaceful things. Okay, at what time was that? After we clear everybody else that we were actually taking anybody else, but he's not showing where the violence it was,

where I was, where I almost died, not once, not twice, but multiple times. And he has weevily chosen not to show the footage from the chambers when they themselves were running to safety, when the officer took them and led them to the safe area. And those videos and pictures, they had not released them because they know that there's nothing that they could say to condone what happened. And they know, I know I had the... proof. I have videos, pictures, and all my injuries and the medical bills and the trauma. They cherry pick certain things because it fits in the irony and that's one of the reason why I chose

to write American Shield to tell my story because you had certain personalities on especially on Foxy and the fire right that claim that I'm lying. Lying about what? About my injuries? I could care less about a metal or an interview or a book. I'd rather have my my, my, my, my health, I'd rather have my job. I was ascending to even to the rank of lieutenant. I couldn't even hold that position because of the injuries that I sustained. And again, you have the moral and mental trauma. Again, if this was done by a Blackline Matters or Latino group,

I'm sure that they will hold us accountable for letting those people in, or as they say, that we let them in or attacking, you know, they claim that the border is wide open, and there's an invasion, but the same thing happened in the capital, and they call it peaceful protest or political discourse. You can't have it both ways. You either have an invasion of a border and an invasion of the capital or a peaceful protest or peaceful, you know, entry into the country.

You can't have it both ways. So I think the argument in the media also need to hold those accountable for key question, what did they do on that day? who do they talk to, request the Freedom Information Act to get their phone records and things like that. There are certain things I can control, but there are certain

things I could do, like showing up to court and trying to hold those people accountable, especially those more than 50 people they assaulted me, and I had done that in the past, and I'll continue to do that. Just next month, I'll be in court. There are the last two weeks ago, there was

two former military members that attacked me and I gave my testimony. And the disgusting thing is that they had used their military service to try to get some leniency about it. One of them I even had was working for the State Department at that time when he chose to take a part into the mob and he was trying to say, well my PTSD the other person also, you know, my PTSD led me to and the lawyer

for him was describing all the things that happened to him. and all the bad things and going to war. I have my prepared remarks and I tell the job, you know what? I don't even read my prepared remarks because I find it discussing that incredibly that this person is using his PTSD in the way the VA and all this stuff, all his obstacles. He described me. That did not compel me to take on an insurrects.

That did not compel me to remove myself from the door from the tunnel where I would defending the Congress people. That's them. They chose to believe whatever the snake oil salesman was selling and they bought it. Yeah. The last question that I have for you is about the upcoming election in 2024. And the fact that we have people right now who are saying that they are not going to vote for Joe Biden, that they are angry at this current administration for a host of things. What do you say to those people about the importance of this upcoming election and the fact that democracy is on the line as it was in 2021. As I discuss this in American Shira, it's one thing for you to be dissatisfied with

certain things. And the other thing is you already seen what happened when you don't show up to vote. The Hillary Clinton people, they find out the hard way. They took up to the street to protest. But guess what? It was too late. A lot of people stay home. A lot of people didn't vote.

And that's what led to the former guy, the same guy who mistreated people, the same guy who was trying to shoot peaceful protests, especially Black Light Matters and Antifa. There was the same guy who's threatening now to run up a lot of immigrants, regardless whether they thought it's good or not. The same guy who's trying to send the military and the police to campuses to run up people who disagree with him or the policy. the same guy who put kits in cages of the border. On and on and on, people used to forget that the satisfaction, the chaotic way that this person was running the country, they seem to forget a lot of those things. And I hope that regardless of whether you agree with Joe Biden or not,

the country is not in chaos as it was in the past on a daily basis. It was like, what the fuck did this guy just said today? Why this is trending today, why not? And especially the Latino community and the black community, you had to realize that this person had passed and has in mind to pass a lot of, in the past, he had produced a lot of policies that are anti-Africa-American, anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic. So for me to remind people, it's kind of like, okay, they never lived it,

but they did live it. To me, is it disingenuous that they seem to forget. Yes, you may not agree with the United States supporting Israel against the attack on Palestine. But guess why? That's a policy issue. If you think the next guy is going to do a lot of anything for you or things better for you, you must be out of your mind. Because in the last four years, he was in office, whether he helped you, nothing. You know, he didn't care whether you got COVID or not.

He didn't care whether you had flu on your table. Now he's going to tell you everything that you hear. But guess what? You've seen this movie before. You know how it's going to end. And he started his inauguration with American Carnage. Guess what? Yep.

That's how he ended up with American Carnage at the same place, at the same capital, with us fighting for our lives, fighting for this country. And if you don't think that that's scary enough for you, then will to happen and stay home. If you stay home, then you don't have nobody else to blame but yourself. 100%. Sergeant Gannel, I thank you so much for writing this book, folks.

The book is American Shield that is out now that you should get a copy of and get a copy for your friends, for your family, and heed this message of now is not the time for your protest vote and to stay home. Sergeant Gannel, thank you so much for making the time for the new abnormal. really appreciate you. Thanks for having me. And the book is also going to be available in Spanish next month. It's called Escudo Americano, El Sajento that Defendio La Democracia. I hope you enjoy my story. It's a life of sacrifices. A lot of looking out for all the people, not just

myself. And once you read it, I think you will understand where I come from and all the sacrifices that I had done for this country. And we're trying to keep it our democracy. Thank you. Appreciate you. Thank you so much. You probably remember back in October 2022 when then Fox News is Tucker Carlson aired an interview with Kanye West, followed a few days later by Vice publishing parts of the interview that warranted that included Yeh making multiple anti-Semitic comments along with other absolutely bizarre claims. Flash forward to 6 a.m. on May 8th of this year, when the FBI raided the home of Tampa City Councilmember Lynn Hurtack and her husband Tim Burke, who used to work for the Daily Beast and Deadspin and now runs Burke Communications and spent the next 10 hours seizing the couple's electronic equipment despite not charging either of them with a crime. Tim Burke joins me now to explain the connection between these two things and tell us what has happened to him since then. Tim, thanks so much for being here. Oh, absolutely, Andy.

So let's start with just some basic simple facts. So you are the person. You got the unaired portions of the Yeh interview and gave them to Vice. And then later you gave some behind the scenes footage of Carlson to Media Matters, right? That appears to be what I'm alleged to have done. The reality is that I've spent a lot of time in my career tracking down video things, whether it be when the Georgetown basketball team got into a fight with the Chinese military squad in an exhibition game or all kinds of other things. along the way, you know, we had to track down video when we made the Netflix documentary about

the Manteo story that Jack Dickey and I did 10 years ago. There's a lot of this stuff. And most of it is just identifying where things get publicly broadcast, whether they are like a known location or not. And so, you know, I'm always looking for places that might be broadcasting openly, things that could be potentially of a newsworthy nature. And certainly when, you know, I found that Fox was airing their live taping of this interview with the artist formerly known as Kanye West. I said, well, okay, that that's potentially newsworthy. You know, we started recording. And after the interview, you know, obviously realized that they had cut out all of the dark,

dark, horrible anti-Semitic stuff that he had said in the interview. And that became its own sort of news story in two ways, that one of the most famous entertainers on the planet is a vicious anti-Semite and also that Fox News would be willing to instead of make a news story out of that, help cover it up. So this is why the FBI raided your home, right? We think, or do we know that? Well, that's sort of the trouble over the last six and a half months has been that officially the government has not put anything in the record other than a search warrant was established for probable cause of violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and some wiretapping statute. have consistently refused to reveal any details of the affidavit that led to this search warrant,

and in fact, to supply us with sufficient information about the process of what's happened since this search. Obviously, as a journalist, I'm protected by both Florida's shield law, which, believe it or not, despite how awful the laws in many ways are here in this state, we actually have a very robust shield law protecting journalists and having our confidential sources or work information be seized by the government or compelled to be returned, but then also the Privacy Protection Act, a federal law that ensures that journalists and newsrooms can't be rated without approval from very high. And in some cases, the Attorney General themselves, levels of the Department of Justice. And we haven't been given any of that information. And the only way that we really know that this is about the Kanye Fox News thing is

from information provided by the government to my legal team in the course of us, you know, trying to figure out what this is all about. Okay. So before we get to what actually transpired or what has transpired since then, tell me what exactly did they take from you during this raid? Well, my newsroom is this sort of what we would call down here a mother-in-law suite. It's an accessory dwelling behind our house. And it's just kind of a big room. It's the kitchen and a bathroom.

And it's been my studio and newsroom for the past, gosh, I guess it's eight years now that I've been in here. And there's just a bunch of a bunch of computers, file servers, web servers, and a lot of things that capture video. And on the day that they came in here, they took essentially everything. They left the monitors. And we're saying, like, they took my iPhone four because it was like sitting on the desk because I had just posed to them in a, like a picture for Instagram, just on a, of my pride that it still worked. And so it was like sitting there and they took that and it took them a few months to return that.

They took a bunch of other old phones, some of which have been returned. I haven't gotten my phone back or my previous phone, the iPhone 7 that I used up until the end of last year. I just finally replaced my phone with a new iPhone 14 and then they took it. So they took those things. They took reporting notebooks. They took any spare hard drives they saw sitting around. They took every computer in sight.

And over time, the oldest of all of those things have been returned. So I do have, let's see, what I have, I have a 2009 MacBook Pro. Oh, God. I have a 2010 MacBook Air. And like I said, they returned my wife's computer. And they took a little mini PC that I'd been using as a station. And I had to get that back. And a few other really, you know, five or six-year-old backup.

drives. So you gotta be careful because it's like saying, you know, they took all this stuff and they haven't returned to anything. The reality is that there's a lot of back and forth going on what they have really returned and in what condition that's been. They have been, you know, asking me repeatedly to provide them with blank hard drives so that they can provide me with copies of all of the stuff that they took. And I've been doing that for months with this back and forth and then, oh, you know, please wipe one of those drives and bring it back to us, not realizing I guess, or knowing and not caring, that you took all of the storage that was in this office. Right.

And again, I work with video and archiving. So we're talking like close to 90 or 100 terabytes of storage that were seized, of which I think four terabytes physical have been returned. So I don't have anywhere to copy all of this stuff of mine that you're returning to me. And even then, it's really difficult to ascertain what's been returned because the filed date, modification date and all that have all been changed. Sometimes they're changed in bizarre ways. Like a folder of download stuff of things that I was working on about the Ukraine-Russia war was backdated to the year 2020 before the war had started. There's a map showing, you know, the past year territory taken in Ukraine and it's dated like, whatever, April 2020. So, and if you're somebody like me and you do all of your work based on dates, you know that this is when this thing happened.

And so the date of those files is really essential to locating it and being able to reference it. And all the dates are modified or things get returned over, you know, different drive volumes and things like that. It's essentially impossible. So, you know, the government might say, well, we've given him back, you know, everything. But they haven't really given me back everything. A lot of it has been based on what day things were uploaded. And sometimes it's a matter of me knowing, oh, okay, like, I bought this Steely Dan album in, like, July last year. And so if I have that album and the stuff they've returned me, then I know that stuff from that era has been returned.

I have to do that kind of mental gymnastics. And again, it's on a bunch of hard drives that I don't have the computers to which they go, right? So so much in my time is spent just going through all this stuff to try to itemize what has been returned, if it's usable or not. And it really hasn't. Like if you take somebody's car, but then you, you know, give them back a car stereo, but it's not the car stereo that goes to that car. And you need a car to use it. You haven't really gotten anything back.

Right. No, that's perfectly put. Okay. So let's get to what actually went down here. Explain how you were able to get this footage. You say that you, or your attorneys say, that you neither hacked anything nor had anything leaked to you. I assume the hacking would be. a crime. I'm not sure why something being leaked to you would be a crime on your end.

But you say neither of those things even apply. So how are you able to get this video? So there's a service that has largely replaced like satellite trucks and microwave trucks for doing transmitting of remote broadcasts to studios. And that service uses, I'm not sure it's IP-based or some other transport protocol. But what I discover is that this outlet, this vendor, that is used by Fox News and lots of other organizations. This vendor was broadcasting a preview version of every single stream that was live on a publicly available location. And that, you know, by changing the numbers and scanning through, you could see, you know, what was being broadcast from any specific location at any time, and many of those were related to Fox News, including much of

Tucker Carlson, of course, stopped broadcasting from Fox Studios after they had been doing his show either from Florida or from his cabin in Maine ever since then, actually probably for quite some time before that. So those cameras, you know, were live and streaming to whoever, you know, knew the URL or could figure out the URL all the time. And it's just a matter of if you found it and, you know, thought to be recording it. And, you know, finding those things, whether it be a place where, you know, Russian broadcasts of American sports are streaming from or, you know, other international. I did a lot of this when war first broke out in Ukraine and identifying where all the

Ukrainian television stations could be found streaming on the open internet and recording all with that. It's what I do. It's what I help clients and newsrooms with is, you know, I'd have a client who really wants to focus on U.S. Senate actions in the Midwest. So we want to know, you know, every place that Amy Klochchar is going to be speaking or Ron Johnson or whoever. And so, you know, we find the static URLs for where the various Senate committees broadcast from with the U.S. Senate or local TV stations in the markets in those cities and where they have all their live streams from. That's just what I do. It's the sort of niche that I carved out for myself. And we've successfully launched a number of new news organizations on the basis of that. And I'm proud of the work that we've done.

And this is really just sort of, you know, I think in line with that. And specifically for my own, reporting, my own work on maintaining the presence that I had on what used to be known as Twitter. And that's the kind of heartbreaking aspect of all this is, you know, they seized my phone, which meant that all of my two-factor authentication and they seized my computers and everything, any backup codes that I had. I couldn't get on Twitter for, gosh, I guess two months, right? The only service I could be on was blue sky because that was the only service that didn't have a two-factor authentication built in.

And so I was able to log into that. And by the time I finally got access to my phone, the FBI gave me access to my phone for, like two minutes so that I could transfer my authenticator app codes to a different device. And by the time that I got back on Twitter, like it had been killed, Elon Musk had killed it. And my ability to take my audience of people who follow me for that news coverage and really get them to a different platform, that opportunity had kind of been lost. Okay. So you got this information. You're kind of like Kelso in the movie Heat. Neil McCauley asks him, how do you get this information? And he says, this stuff just flies through the air. They send this information.

You know? I made that exact reference to my lawyer when I was first trying to expect. I made the heat reference, yeah. Yeah. So that's you. So somehow you end up getting, well, we can't even say you've been charged with a crime because you haven't been charged with a crime right now, right? This investigation is still ongoing.

Obviously, you and your attorney, Mark Rash, have been in contact with the Justice Department. What did they tell you? They don't tell us much. Almost all of our communications are with regard to document production and returning the things that they, you know, we insist that they should never have taken. I mean, it took four months, five months for me to get these reporting notebooks back. And, you know, those things weren't even listed and aren't even in any way relevant to the search warrant. And those notebooks contain, you know, memorializations of my conversations with confidential sources going back to 2016 or 2017. Wow.

There's some pretty sensitive stuff that they sorted through and should never have taken in the first place and before I could get them back. So that's what like so much of this has been about. So, you know, we have legal stuff going on at a couple different angles because, you know, Mark is my outside attorney working out of Bethesda. I have my local attorney, Michael Maddox,

who is dealing with things at the local level directly with the prosecutor. You know, we're looking at hopefully having on a new appellate attorney just for our appeal to the 11th Circuit of our Rule 41 motion for the return of my equipment. while at the same time we're filing all these back and forth motions about the document production. You're right. I haven't been charged with anything and they haven't even identified that they're going to attempt to charge me with anything. And yet I have spent or am indebted to an obscene degree with a legal team that's working tirelessly for me because of all of the stuff that we've been put through as a result of this seizure.

and a seizure that we maintain is not legal because of my status as a journalist and that this material should have been subpoenaed. There should have been a hearing. We haven't even got a hearing, right? It's been six months since the entire newsroom was seized, and we haven't even gotten to see a judge about it. And in other court circuits, like the sixth or seventh or eighth, you know, they've made decisions that have said the government can't seize things people need to do their jobs without a hearing. Or in the case of an incredible you would never believe who, you know, hopefully one of the heroes in my case is going to be in terms of getting my stuff back.

Mike Lindell, the pillow man, recently won his suit to have his materials and phone and computers that had been seized to get those returned. And he has been charged with a crime, right? So six and a half months out, you know, it's like a regular part of your life at this point. the first couple weeks, it was in a days and just, you know, I was sure that this was going to be over quickly because I said, oh, you know, this is what this is about. And I said, well, okay, yeah, none of this, none of these things that you say were criminal or criminal. There's no crime here. I didn't break any laws. Then you start getting the kind of paranoia setting in. If the government had access to everything you've ever done on a computer for the last 20 years, you know, how many MP3s are they going to ask,

do you own the CD too? How many of your, you know, like, log in, your Netflix, are they going to look, you know, are they going to demand a receipt for your Netflix login? Oh, my God. And it, it sort of feels like that's the degree to which we have gotten with this. So before I let you go, I want to mention that a coalition of over 50 journalism organization, civil rights groups, First Amendment groups, et cetera, including the ACLU, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Reporters Without Borders, have sent a letter to the Justice Department demanding transparency and accountability for the raid of your home and for the investigation that you are under right now. I imagine that might be small comfort for having your life turned upside down, but at least you know you have some support. And you also, you have a legal defense fund that people can contribute to.

Right. I'm incredibly grateful for all those organizations. And I do want to point out it's not just, you know, nonprofits and groups that are dedicated to supporting press freedom rights or civil liberties. It's the three companies that own the CBS ABC and NBC stations here in my town of Tampa. You know, they signed on the newspapers, news organizations recognizing that this is a challenge to, if we don't stand up to this, then it means that the government can raid any journalists home, take their work product, take their confidential source communications, and hold onto it indefinitely. And that's like a really scary thing. It ought to be scary for anybody, not just who's in journalism, but who cares about truth getting out to the public. And so a neighbor who has experienced with these things is created a not-for-profit corporation.

And there's a bank accountant. To help get my lawyers paid, it is Tim Burke legal fund.org. And they try to update it with whatever news that we do have with regard to this status of my case or stories that have been run. We'll probably put this podcast up on there. You can send donations through Cash App or Venmo or PayPal or you can send checks and you can do it anonymously. I really appreciate the help that people are giving. It's just astonishing how much, you know, I have an incredible legal team, but it is all encompassing. It is taking up all of our lives just to do all of these filings and try to get our story in front of the one person who, you know, can set this right.

And so we're just going to keep working on getting there because this is like beyond whatever punishment I could face for committing, allegedly committing some crime. This is about making sure that we don't allow the government to interfere in people who are doing journalism. And right now that's happening. I was literally in the middle of working on a very big and relevant story when all those materials were seized and they haven't been returned yet. And that's the very definition of prior restraint. And we just can't allow that to happen. Absolutely. Tim, I hope that there's some kind of speedy and satisfactory resolution to this and that you are able to get your life back.

Tim Burke, thank you so much for being here. Thank you very much, Andy. I appreciate it. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder. Want more great listens?

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