The Megyn Kelly Show - Did Fani Willis Lie on Stand, and Alec Baldwin's Trial, with Judge Joe Brown, Marcia Clark, Mark Geragos, and Charles Cooke | Ep. 728

Episode Date: February 21, 2024

Megyn Kelly is joined by Judge Joe Brown, former TV host and lawyer, to discuss the relevance of when Fani Willis’ affair with Nathan Wade began, her paying Nathan Wade more than his peers, her lack of important disclosures to the court, her attitude while testifying last week, whether her comments about money could open her up to IRS violation issues, whether Willis lied while on the stand during her testimony, the key element of how she kept cash, and more. Then National Review's Charles C.W. Cooke joins to discuss President Biden finding a new way to move forward with his "student loan forgiveness" plan, his desire to override Congress and the courts, why this shows the Biden campaign and the Democrats are panicking, Biden's age as a major election issue, the death of Alexei Navalny, the Washington Post attacking Nikki Haley's high school, a biological male injuring girls in high school basketball, and more. Then it's Kelly's Court with Marcia Clark and Mark Geragos to talk about whether Gabby Petito's parents have a case against the parents of their daughter's killer Brian Laundrie, whether his parents were obligated to share what they knew, the Alec Baldwin movie set shooting case and how it will be affected by the "Rust" armorer on trial now, whose negligence will be found at fault, the orgasm cult criminal case, and more.Brown- https://jjbbbq.com/Cooke- https://twitter.com/charlescwcookeClark- https://www.instagram.com/thatmarciaclark/Geragos-https://twitter.com/markgeragos Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. We've got a packed show for you today. Later, we will be joined by an all-star Kelly's Court panel, Mark Garagos and Marsha Clark, the best. They are here for the latest legal headlines. And there are some big ones, developments in that rust shooting case with Alec Baldwin as one of the trials is kicking off. And also Gabby Petito's parents going after the parents of Brian Laundrie. We'll get into exactly what's happening there. Plus, Charlie Cook will be here on the latest political updates.

But we start today with the Fannie Willis hearing down in Georgia and whether she could be facing not just ethics charges, but potential criminal or IRS problems in the wake of her testimony late last week in Georgia. And you may know Judge Joe Brown from his long running TV show. He's a former lawyer and Tennessee criminal court judge. He was a prosecutor. He was also, I think, running defense for a time on the defense side, I should say. And he put out a fascinating video recently on what he saw as the potential IRS violations revealed in Fannie Willis's testimony last week. Judge Joe Brown, such a pleasure to have you. Long time fan. How you doing, sir?

Well, good morning, ma'am. How are you? Is everything all right with you today? Everything's great with me. I think it's great with you, too. I don't think it's that great with Fannie Willis, however, who not only offered up what seemed to me like a bunch of cockamamie nonsense on how she allegedly reimbursed all these expenses in cash, but may have opened up a hornet's nest of ethical and even legal problems for herself. I'll tell you this, Judge, I want to get into your thoughts and what you said on your show the other day, because I thought it was interesting. But this just breaking, Phil Holloway, who was on our show yesterday, who's down there in Georgia covering all this and is a lawyer. The Fulton County Board of Ethics is going to take up

multiple ethics complaints against Fannie Willis in the beginning of March. People are coming in out of the woodwork now to raise various ethical issues about what she testified to and what they know about her. And you saw some problems with her testimony the other day, too. So how did you what's jumped out at you? First thing is she might not have had to testify in the first place when she walked in through the sheaf of documents down on opposing counsel's table, put hand on hip, walked up with attitude, doing steak charm thing with her neck. At that point, the lawyers for the DA's office were arguing that she did not need to testify. She decided to override those lawyers. And one important aspect of this case is she was not on

trial. She was merely being a witness at that point. And then she put herself into a position where you have the spectacle of the chief prosecuting officer for a major American city, Atlanta, needing to take the Fifth Amendment. So, you know, one of the things that's interesting is that she had given evidence that there was a tax lien on her home. Now, to clear those up, you have to deal with some affidavits and satisfy IRS that you should be placed on an installment payment plan. All right. Then she's talking about she's got $15,000 in cash in the house. Then we have all of these cash transactions that should have been receipted and recorded.

They weren't. You have the 501k she talked about. She got out and she used that for campaign purposes, but that was taxable income once she removed it from the account. She didn't report that. So we've got a real live mess going on here in terms of tax fraud, tax evasion, and that kind of thing. We've got a specter of money laundering here that raises itself. We have a number of issues that she brought out. Nobody had developed them before that actually, ironically, put her under the spotlight that comes from the Georgia RICO statutes that she's proceeding against Mr. Trump on Durham. So my, my, you get on the stand and you are prosecuting somebody and you blurt out stuff under oath, recorded, everybody looking.

It makes you look like you need to be prosecuted for the same statute. Now, on the thing that people are getting sidetracked on, well, she had this affair. It just happened. You know, they ran into each other on the job. No, she had this affair going before he got brought in as a special prosecutor. Well, it really doesn't make any difference because if she was dealing with him before he got appointed, she should have approached the judge in camera and advised him of her ethical conflict. And if it developed afterwards, as soon as it did, she should have walked in and talked to the judge in Cameron. That means in his chambers confidentially about it and giving him

the option of saying, well, he's got to go because you're signing off on his claims for reimbursement. So you do have some say saying what's going on. And because of what you said about your intentions toward Mr. Trump before the election even occurred, we needed an independent counsel. So this is bad. Now, if the court said, well, I think you can stay on, but we're going to have to reveal this to the other side, she might have had second thoughts and said, well, okay, we'll let it go. And some other DA's office can come in and go through all of the changes relative to this case. But I don't want to have it so badly. I'm just got my hooks in it. I'm not going to let it go. I don't tell. So either way, if it started before he got on his special

prosecutor or it started after he was already on the affair I'm talking about, it's bad because she should have brought it to the court's attention. Now, very good point. Let me just stop you there just to organize the thoughts for the audience. I'll take them in reverse order. That's a very good point about how she should have gone to this judge once the affair started by her own admission. You know, we have reason to believe it started long before she hired him. But let's say they're right that it happened in 2022 after

she brought him on board. No question at that point, she was paying him well above what the other prosecutors were making that she had brought in. And she was certainly paying him well above what any prosecutor in her DA's office was making. So by any measure, more than people who worked as DAs under her were making. And she was enjoying the fruits of that labor. There's no question they were taking trips together. He was footing the bill. She now says she was reimbursing him, but there brought in this person. I am now in a romantic sexual relationship with this person who is getting paid above market versus my own DAs and versus the other two prosecutors who I've brought in. And it has the potential to look at least like a conflict of interest for me and judge. It's up to you whether I should withdraw from this case or what should happen from this case. She should happen in this case. She had an obligation to bring it to the court's attention.

All right, exactly. Nobody had to ask her. Under the canons of ethics, she had a need to come in and advise. Now, here's the other thing, too. She signs off on this, and you have to get a perspective for the exorbitant amount of money he was being compensated for. This case has not even been set for trial. He already been paid roughly twice what the attorney general of the United States of America gets paid per year for handling all of the business of the country. He has been paid so far more than what the president of the United States gets paid

per year. So keep that into context. You multiply, well, don't multiply, but if you add up all of what the other prosecutors have submitted as a bill, it isn't even a third of what he's been compensated so far. And this thing has not even had any hearings on it in essence that are of significance. So we've got a potentially enormous bill that the state of Georgia, the county of Fulton, that means Atlanta, the people that live there are going to have to foot because, look, out of the same fund, you have to pay other attorneys who've been appointed when there's a conflict and say the public defender's office cannot be appointed. And see, you have to keep in context. She is not on trial at this point. So she might wind up in that condition. But this is a hearing to determine whether or not the Fulton County DA's office is removed from the case

and another office is appointed. Now, the practical matter that everybody in America is concerned with is, is this going to go to trial or be set for trial before the election or after the election? If before, then you tie up a candidate who is the favorite candidate for a lot of people in this country, and you disrupt his ability to campaign, which is kind of out there. Somebody, New York here, another New York, somebody, Florida, is trying to get into, oh, wowee, whoopee, I'm going to take over for the country and save it, and I'm going to take this guy out so the rest of them don't have to be tempted

to vote for it, which is kind of crazy. One or two or three or five people try to override 640 million people. It's kind of strange. So that's not right. But the other thing is, is if another district attorney's office gets involved, they may say the same thing that happened with her. H.U.R., the special counsel for the U.S. Attorney's Office, or the Attorney General, and say, well, under the circumstances, we declined to prosecute. Now, you may not need a special prosecutor if you bring in another office. That would save a lot of money and expedite the matter, and I'm sure that entity would say, we need a time. We need the time to get

up to speed. Sure. How long you need. So that's after the election. So for some reason, I saw one of the dumbest things I've ever seen a lawyer do, which is this person came in and instead of acting like you see CSI and all of this stuff that people have looked at for the last 50 years where the district attorney, the staff is learned and efficient and the boss is really heavyweight. He knows how to or she knows how to get things done. She admonishes her staff about you've crossed the line. We have somebody that came across like maybe a high school graduate, no insult, down in the hood, sitting in a beauty salon, running a mouth off. And that was not good. Let me give you one soundbite that I saw you guys raise on your show that I saw you react to.

And there was something off putting about it. She was asked Fannie Willis about the fact that first of all, she had a forty six hundred dollar tax lien against her and she was giving him allegedly all these cash reimbursements at the time. $4,600 tax lien is looming over her. So Ashley Merchant was asking her about it and asking, well, here's what happened. And you reacted to this on your show in stop five. Watch. You had a tax lien in 2022, $4,600. If you say I did. And you did not use this cash that you had to reimburse Mr. Wade to pay that off, correct? No. I went shopping too when I didn't pay at all.

I mean, it's basically a, you know, screw you. I'll do what I want with my money no matter how in debt I am. Well, I had a former first cousin in law who was a chief IRS criminal investigator. And she said that she often had her staff watch these things to pick up clues that they should investigate. So I'm sure somebody was listening and somebody is feverishly trying to get a promotion, raise or whatever it is, who's going to be on the team to investigate. Now, I just happened to have a I happened to have a friend, Wesley Snipes, and I participated in the proceedings against him. He got three years in a federal penitentiary, not for tax fraud, not for tax evasion. IRS testified that he'd overpaid his taxes by a quarter of a million dollars and had a refund check for him waiting there in court.

Now, the interesting thing was, is what he did three years for his failure to file a complete set of returns. So this not only is not an incomplete set of return filings, this is no filings at all. And she was in private practice, so I assume she had to deal with taxes at some point. And we have no documentation, no receding. We've got cash transactions that need to be reported. We've got problems here in that the state of Georgia demands a little bit more when it comes down to reporting how the taxpayers' money got used. So what did you do here? And then that little gratuitous thing, throwing in and like, the thing when she got asked about, she held up this document. She was waving it around. And she started talking about what she had to say. And she's not a

Southern gentleman like Mr. Wade. Why do you throw this in? And see, the other thing is the trier of fact is the judge. Why do you try to piss the judge off? What is wrong with you? Have you ever tried a case? I looked at this and I said, you know what? This woman, I do not think this woman has been in front of a jury often. And when I tried criminal cases as a defense lawyer, and I think I had 42 first degree murder cases where death penalty was demanded, where I was lead counsel on, and a bunch more other than that. And I had several thousand trials in my career. And I ran into some fine lady lawyers, at least five of them that I dealt with or I mentored or who practiced in front of me when I was a judge and now judges. There's at least one lady, fine lady, that is on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.

I'm her mentor. By the way, I thought she would have made an excellent nomination for the Supreme Court. And another somebody I'm aware of, a fine lady lawyer, been around for a while, is on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in D.C. She should have been nominated. They are excellent trial lawyers. They would not have been nominated. They are excellent trial lawyers. They would not have done this. But there's a certain select small number that do this. And you could always beat them because they would put their egos in this. And instead of trying the case, they would try to

beat you. So the strategy and tactic is during the trial, you let them try to beat up on you. And then at the end, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the prosecution had the obligation of proving their case beyond a reasonable doubt into a moral certainty. However, what you saw was opposition from the prosecution was trying to beat defense counsel. So she tried to jump counsel. That's me. And put on a good show. But she forgot to try her case. And you'd walk your client and they'd be like, how'd you do that?

Because you were fool enough to try and make it a personal thing between me and you. And I hardly know you. Just hearing you describe it is so familiar, now having watched it for two days. That's exactly what was happening. Here's another soundbite in which she's got this sort of, oh, who do you think you are, to Ashley Merchant, who was trying to pin her down on this tax lien and all the alleged cash she was doling out

while she was almost $5,000 in debt to the government. Watch here in soundbite four. But you were saying that you had amounts of cash. You still had that lien in 2022 when you were dating Wade and going on these trips. So the cash that you gave him, that could have been used to pay this tax lien off. You're going to tell me how to pay my bills? This is not relevant as it relates to why we're here today. Mr. Merchant, if you are, are you trying to establish that she was insolvent in some way? I definitely was trying to establish that she did not have these mass amounts of cash that she's talking about, yes.

You saw it there, right, Judge? You're going to tell me how to pay my bills? Also, the judge and the counsel that was questioning her missed one thing is relevant to testing her credibility, too. Right. We saw that repeatedly. And you were you were picking up on, you know, the cash thing and whether this could potentially create problems for her legally. But how if if it's true and she had all this cash that she was given him, how is it potentially unlawful? Well, in other words, what happens is she's testified to forty five hundred twenty four hundred fifty dollars. But we don't have receipts. We don't

have any idea how much. So what I've found is that when there are large amounts of money that need to be laundered, a lot of times you will sit there and get in the idea that we will have some showing and not all of it. But you see, she put her foot in her mouth by doing what she did because it opened the door. She didn't have to say that. See, the deal is, if she kept her mouth shut, he's got the money. We don't necessarily know what he's done with the money. It got approved. He can do with it what he wants.

IRS may want its taxes. The state may want its taxes. Business income subject to taxation. She tells us she gave it to him as a gratuity. She tried to cover it by saying, I'm proving to him that I don't need to be paid for. Well, what about the DJ in your house you're paying for? And what about Wade?

And you're trying to do what? Buy your sex? You know, like once somebody posted on X an interesting comment, it was the trick paying her gigolo. So that looks bad all the way around when you get yourself in that mess. Well, I agree it looks bad, but I can see potential other charges. But I don't see, you know, you're allowed to give gifts. You can give, I don't remember what the number is. But you have to report them. Yeah, you got to report them over a certain amount.

And see, the question then becomes is did he claim them as income and he would owe taxes on them? So what happens is now you've implicated him. And by the way, she gratuitously attempted to throw him under the bus quite a few times. But you notice during his testimony, he was saying, I do not recall that, or I don't remember that. So that's like you get when you have an experienced, well-coached witness, and you've got an organized crime case that you're trying or defending as a lawyer or you're prosecuting or you're sitting as judge presiding over. Now, what you saw there is a case where the judge is in the hot seat because everybody in America is paying attention to it. I was there. I was the

last judge on the James Earl Ray matter. In other words, did James Earl Ray actually kill Martin Luther King? And considering that he never confessed, he just entered a plea saying, I didn't do it, but it's in my best interest to do so. Everybody was paying attention, and that was back in the mid-90s. So I know what it is to sit on a hot seat where everybody in the country is looking at you and having to dot all the I's and cross all the T's. And I think this judge did an outstanding job. And I just want to make a remark here. It's kind of off of the immediate point, but a contrast between this judge and that disgraceful idiot in New York that

firing Mr. Trump. Yes, 300. I don't like to say his name. 385 million. And that's not going to stand on appeal because the verdict was inconsistent with the proof. There was no proof in that record that I heard that showed any kind of fraud. It's like, I write you a check, you take it to the bank

and cash it, and somebody comes in later and says, I wrote you a bad check, and you say, no, he did not cash it. Yes, he did. Well, under oath, I got my money, I presented the check, it cleared. And then the judge, who's trying it, not a jury, saying, I find that this woman got a

bad check. Well, where is the proof of the bad check? Right. I'm not complaining. Evaluating Mel Argo, the golf course, at $18 million and claiming the amount that was stipulated by Mr. Trump was excessive. Well, hell, they have houses around that golf course that cost $18 million. Right. He's doing the very same thing he accuses Trump of doing in the reverse. He says Trump overvalued and misstated the size, for example, of his New York City apartment in saying,

I have a bunch of assets worth a bunch of money. But then the judge in response undervalued all of Trump's assets like Mar-a-Lago, which is the sprawling, beautiful, spectacular waterfront estate, which he says is worth $18 million. I take your point. Tax fraud that potentially could be at play here. All income, according to where we checked with a financial and tax expert, all income must be reported to the IRS from whatever source derived. And a kickback, a kickback is illegal income that would also have to be reported. A kickback is a type of bribery. It's an illegal payment intended as compensation for preferential treatment.

Could be money, could be a gift, could be anything of value. So the implication here is that she received kickbacks from Nathan Wade, payments intended as compensation for the preferential treatment he got by getting this high value position with her. The kickback to her was something of value, these trips, the gifts and so on. And that this income by her would have had to be reported to the IRS, legal or illegal. And it doesn't look like she has now. That's what you're going. But now here. Well, go ahead. when I was a trial lawyer, defense lawyer, I had clients that were accused of robbing banks

and they threw in tax evasion charges because they didn't report the income from the bank robberies. So, yeah. No way. Yeah. Wow. That's amazing.

You know, and also in the federal system. So if the bank robber has to do it, Fannie and Nathan in the federal system. Fannie and Nathan have to do it. But now there's nothing else. One other thing, too. Biden, you can thank Biden for this. He and Eastman got a thing passed back about 1981, 79, 81. Making a false statement to a federal officer or agency is also a federal felony.

And I had the problem with clients got 19 counts on an indictment. You walk him on 18, and on 19, they get him for making a knowingly false statement to a federal agent or agency because they made a false statement. It might even ring as little as we are here, sir, because we are investigating so and so and so. And the client says ill advisedly, I don't know what you're talking about. Well, it is told him. So they get him on that and the judge jacks him up on the sentencing. So she's got problems. And this, by

the way, again, is a method. It's complicated, but people used to launder money. Right, which is... And see, there's a spectacle here where did all this money come from was it the dnc providing her with money or an incentive to go after mr trump since she said campaigned on i'm gonna get him sitting president he's still in office and you're campaigning for DA, I'm going to get him. He hasn't

even been involved with election day, November 2020, for any of this to happen. So, you know, it's kind of interesting because, you know, this is the other thing. I've been a prosecutor and you have an obligation to support justice, which means you're honoring the interest of justice. The state wishes to dismiss the charges against the defendant. When you're predisposed up front, that's like a barrier. Chief of Police for Joe Stalin, secret police, said, find me an individual and I'll find the crime. Just for the audience, money laundering is basically they ask whether you engaged in a transaction in an effort to hide the source of those funds. Typically, I actually, when I practiced law, did a couple of these cases with the mob and they would create like a beauty parlor

or a funeral home. And that was basically what they used to wash their money that they got through their illegal activities. They weren't really, they were in part legit operations, but really they were only there to do one thing, which was wash the dough. All right, there's one other thing about Fannie. Two other questions, actually, I want to go into with you. All right, go ahead.

She gets up there and she starts talking about how she was so broke. She had run prior to winning the role of D.A. She had run for this judgeship and she lost. And she talked about how she had loaned her own campaign fifty thousand dollars and then she lost. And her campaign allegedly paid back eight,000 of that loan to her. But that would have left her in the hole. So this was only in late 2018, almost 2019, which is three years before she allegedly has wads of cash, thousands and thousands sitting in her home. So we don't know where, where did that come from? Cause you just told us you're almost $50,000 in debt to your old campaign.

And now on top of that judge, there is an article out today talking about how, uh, this is the Georgia star news about how she did not comply, allegedly, with her reporting obligations on either one of those loans she made to her campaign. One for $19,000, she was late in reporting it, and then one for $30,000, which it appears, according to this piece, she has never reported at all. And yet she received a campaign repayment for eighty five hundred. All of this could cause legal headaches for her and also just makes it sound implausible that she was all this money in debt to her campaign, that she owed five grand to the government in a tax lien. And yet we're supposed to believe she's got thousands and thousands of

dollars in cash at her home that she just kept doling out to her lover who does have receipts for all the payments he made. Yes. And see, the other thing, too, the money she got from her 501k, that became taxable income that she did not report, did not pay taxes on. Now, because she used used to fund her campaign. Yeah. So she did not pay taxes on it. And she donated it to her campaign. That's not tax deductible either. So she's in a mess. So when you get the reimbursements for the campaign, the way it looks is she got the 50K out of the account. That's taxable. When she gets the various supposed repayments from the campaign, they add that on top. So you just mentioned, Counselor, the $8,500. So what we've got now is $58,500. Then you add the other. So it multiplies and you have a real live mess and none of that

got reported and no taxes got paid so that we know of that we know that we know of and um how do we know this one of the dumbest moves yeah one of the dumbest dumb crook moves i have seen in a long time and in 50 years of doing this, since I got out of UCLA, where Mr. Floyd, Attorney Floyd, went, I have seen few stunts this dumb. He's one of the other special prosecutors. No, Mr. Floyd is her father. Oh, her dad. John Floyd.

I went to school with him. Okay. And he was an aggressive, up-front guy. He was very articulate. He said he's had at least a thousand trials, I believe it. He showed it. But he couldn't help her because she's got a big mouth, and she is that kind of witness where it's like

give you an example i had a client he was a mechanic for a trucking firm and we had proved this injury and we had everything going we looked like we were going to get a half million out of this thing and any further questions the judge asked uh i said no sir and the defense representing the country company said no sir and the judge said sir you may step down. This fool stands up, takes one step, says, oh, yeah, I guess I forgot to tell everybody I got hurt before this happened. Oh, boy. What did you just do? You didn't even tell me about that. Where did you open your mouth?

Silence is gold. This is why you started off by saying she should have taken the Fifth Amendment on some of these things and not felt the need to shoot her mouth off because she was getting herself in trouble. And see, she lied to the court on multiple occasions. She's inconsistent. And what she lies about is a lie or it's not and if it's not a lie she's still in trouble because if she's telling the truth she did not realize apparently what kind of hole she was putting her in and if she was lying she was telling the truth but she contradicted herself so now as an officer of the court you have told a lie to the court and see, you know, counsel is an officer of the court. You represent that court. That's right. You have special

standing. It's like you go in and get certain drugs. It's class schedule. Well, schedule one, you're looking at 25 years in a federal penitentiary, but if your doctor prescribes it for you, you're okay. So it's like this with lawyers. You have a public trust factor. And then I did not mention this, but the worst part of this is remember this phrase, the appearance of an impropriety. In other words, as a lawyer, as a prosecutor, you're not just held to account for doing something wrong. You are forbidden to give the appearance that you have, even if you

did. So one way or the other, however we take what this woman did, it gives the appearance of an impropriety, which, by the way, is actionable by a bar committee. So this this judge said that he gets it. He said that right at the outset that I'm going to have a hearing on this because there's enough evidence for me to find potentially a conflict or the appearance of a conflict or of or of impropriety. The question I also wanted to ask you was in that same vein, Nathan Wade, also an officer of the court, very clear that he lied in his divorce proceeding in those sworn interrogatory answers where he said, I never had another woman on the side while married to my wife, which he's still technically married. And he's already admitted under oath that he had an affair with Fannie Willis. So he lied. He lied under his sworn interrogatory answers and then tried to go back and amend them after he saw Ashley Merchant's

motion two weeks ago. And his amendment tried to plead privacy, a privacy privilege, which isn't even a correction of what he originally answered. And I look, even a civilian is not allowed to lie in their sworn interrogatory answers. But he's got the double barrel of he lied and he was an officer of the court while he did it. So what do you think is going to happen to Nathan Wade? Well, technically, the problem would be resolved by whether or not he was acting as an officer of that court when he gave it, and also as to whether or not it was perjury, depending upon Georgia's law, which I haven't checked recently. But some states have

a provision where it's not perjury unless it remains as a lie that materially affects the outcome of the matter or the determination of an issue. So technically, I guess he could go back in, fess up. He'd probably get reprimanded by the bar for the appearances, and he would escape perjury if he fessed up, so to speak. But that, it depends on Georgia. So how does that play for you? If you're the judge in this proceeding,

you're Judge McAfee and you see Nathan Wade saying, I swear the affair didn't begin until 2022, but you know he's already lied about this affair in sworn interrogatory answers in his divorce proceeding. You know, do you think it makes you more or less likely to believe his testimony on the stand? And, you know, the judge has got away credibility now. Nathan Wade and Fannie Willis on the one side versus this Robin Yerty, the friend. And maybe maybe the divorce lawyer, too, seems to have said, at least out of court,

that there was this pre-consular. Here's what's going on in the judge's head. It's what he would charge a jury, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. If you've heard inconsistent or contradictory testimony from a witness. And you have come to doubt the credibility of that witness's testimony relative to one aspect of the case, you may infer from the doubt that has been created that the witness is not being truthful as to any of the testimony that has been given. So if you find somebody lied about it, in other words, one instance, and he got cold busted for it, you can infer that that shades his testimony,

drops its credibility, and you're entitled to disregard all of it if you find any of it has been falsified or compromised. And see, another thing, too, Miss Annie Fannie, you get up there and you're supposed to be the head prosecutor. Don't you remember the instructions that the judge will give a jury as to how they are supposed to evaluate and assess the credibility of the witness. I know in Tennessee it goes, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you may look at and evaluate the demeanor and bearing of the witness on the witness stand, et cetera, et cetera. And you go into that. And when she put that clown show on, the jury is entitled to disregard her testimony, diminish the value of her testimony, or knock down their assessment of her credibility. But no trier of fact, which under American law is what 12 people on a jury say, that's the reasonable person.

You have one individual, the experienced judge. Yeah. And he's he. What are you doing to yourself? Here's the last question. I bet you were dangerous in a courtroom. So anyway, I'm listening to you. Go ahead.

Not as dangerous as you judge. Your resume is unbelievable. It's crazy. I would have loved to have seen some of those cases. Oh, well, go ahead. I was one of my most famous lines. Go ahead. On Friday, we had Nathan Wade's former law partner, friend and onetime divorce lawyer take the stand. And Ashley Merchant, lawyer for defendant Roman, was trying to get him to admit that he knew this affair was going on long before 2022. He kept saying attorney-client privilege. Every discussion ever, attorney-client privilege. Well, we know not every discussion was privilege, but it came down to, let's say it was privilege. Let's say the only reason he knew about their affair and it was

going on in 19, 20, 21 is through attorney-client privilege. And you're the sitting judge. And now you've had Nathan Wade take the stand and say in your courtroom under oath, the affair did not begin until 2022. You've had Fannie Willis, the sitting district attorney in your county, take the affair and say the affair did not begin until 2022. But you know, because in camera, you've talked to this lawyer, Terrence Bradley, and he says, Judge, it was happening in 2021 and maybe even 19. I saw it with my own eyes, but it was technically privileged because I only saw it because Nathan Wade told me in our attorney client relationship.

Which privilege rules the day, the attorney client privilege or the obligations as an officer of the court not to allow a fraud to be perpetrated on his honor. Okay. Now you have two things going here. One, you have the fact that none of the parties you have interested are actually parties to this issue except Wade, but nobody is on trial. It's a civil matter. It's an administrative motion. Should they be removed? Now, Fannie Willis is a witness. The law partner is a witness. Wade is an interested party, but he hasn't been charged with anything.

Nobody's asking for money damages, and he's not facing any penal sanction. He's a witness, and you know you can call witnesses in a civil matter. Even if they have an interest in the outcome, they still have to testify. Now, in your head, you can exclude all of what comes out as an inference with the attorney-client privilege being asserted, which is appropriate, but you also have to consider in this matter the clear testimony from who? The friend girl who says, we discussed this. Yes, we discussed this. So in the civil proceeding, unlike the overlay shadow of beyond a reasonable doubt on what has happened with Mr. Trump and the other

multiple co-defendants. What happens here is it's just by the preponderance of the evidence. And when you assess the preponderance of the evidence, you can give weight to the testimony as you see fit. And in determining the weight that you give to a witness's testimony, you may assess the demeanor and the bearing of the witness on the stand and the mold, manner, and fashion of the testimony. And Ms. Fannie's testimony, you can pretty much discount if you choose without stretching things if you were the trier of fact, meaning the judge. So you can say, I don't buy anything she claimed. And considering that there is evidence that the two of them have a romantic relationship, that would infer that there is a

great commonality of interest. So one of the parts of the charge on assessing the credibility of a witness is, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you may assess the interest or lack of interest that a witness has in the outcome of the proceedings. So the judge can properly, just like if he was a jury and hadn't heard any of this attorney-client privilege recitation and anything back in chambers, they would be entitled to say, Wade and Willis have a commonality of interest in the outcome of this. He's made $650,000, $695,000, $700,000, and it hasn't even been set to trial. She's gotten a piece of this action. So we can discount their credibility. So the one person that's not been impeached is the friend girl. So that would be the principal evidence that the judge or the jury could rely

upon. All right. I have less than 60 seconds. I got less than 60 seconds left. Prediction on what this judge is going to rule? Are they staying on this case? I don't think so, because it solves a whole lot of problems if they go. And I agree with you. The judge seems fair, seems like a straight shooter. So we'll learn more, we think, this Friday when he's expected to either take additional testimony or summary arguments, summations of sorts for a hearing. I guess it's a little unusual, but he might do it. We'll find out. Judge Joe Brown, please come back. It's so fun talking to you. And I apologize for not calling you counselor. I did not realize. Well, I moved on to greener pastures, as I know you did, too.

But I remember my 10 years as a lawyer fondly. Once a lawyer, always a lawyer. You have the training in your head. Thank you, Judge. All the best. To be continued. My dear. Thank you.

What a pleasure. What a treat. Okay, coming up, Charlie Cook and then Kelly's court back into the courtroom. Twenty twenty four is a totally unique political year from the Fannie Willis case against Trump to his various other legal woes. And today, the family of President Biden is facing a series of headlines about their own actions as the president's brother heads to Capitol Hill for a deposition and attorneys for his son, Hunter, seek to dismiss the tax charges against him. Joining me now, Charles C.W. Cook, senior writer for National Review and host of the Charles C.W.

Cook podcast. Charles, great to have you back on the show. So you would think that with all of his family members enmeshed in various pay to play scandals, corruption scandals involving the Biden name, the president would be in a near panic with thirty nine or thirty eight percent approval ratings. And it appears you would be right if you thought that. Because what is he doing today? One of your very favorite things, Charles. This is one of your very favorite things. He's, quote, forgiving more student loans. This is I don't mean to this is like it's mean of me because Charles really doesn't like this. He doesn't like this topic. But here's what's happened. Refresher for the audience. Supreme Court blocked Biden's sweeping student loan, quote, forgiveness plan last June. And ever since

then, he's been trying to do an end around that prohibition. He's canceled debt, quote unquote, for almost 3.9 million borrowers, totaling about 138 billion in relief. We're supposed to believe that that has no consequence. He just waved it away with his magic wand. So good on them. And what was the rest of us who, you know, the losers who paid their debt and knew today is the Biden administration is now going to forgive another 1.2 billion in student debt for 153,000 borrowers enrolled in its new program. The relief is going to go to borrowers who have been in repayment for a decade or longer and who originally took out 12 grand or less. So I think this is a moment for us to applaud those people on just waiting out the system long

enough that they finally got a president who wants their vote badly enough. He's just going to take out his magic eraser. What do you think? I swear you're trying to give me an aneurysm. I mean, we're still doing this. President Biden's response to being slapped down by the Supreme Court last year was to say, I'm going to find another way. That's not hyperbole. Go look at his statement. Immediately after the court offered its ruling, he said, I'm going to find another way. And he has. The numbers here are staggering. He said it was one hundred and thirty seven billion dollars already, I'm going to find another way. And he has. The numbers here are staggering. He said it was $137 billion already, I think. According to Penn Wharton, that number is going to go up above $400 billion,

closer to half a trillion dollars. That is a mind-blowing number. He is doing via other means what he was not allowed to do in one fell swoop. And it makes it difficult to discuss the legalities of it because some of it's legal, some I think it's not, some of it's rulemaking that is suspect. But I think what is so irritating to me about this, the law aside, is that this seems to be Biden's obsession. We're told that he can't secure the border, but he can do this over and over and over again. Why? There is no group in the United States less deserving than those who have been through college. It's not because I dislike people who went to college.

I went to college. But those people are doing better than everyone else, Megan. Look at the stats. Make up a stat and Google better for college graduates, employment prospects, career earnings, home ownership. Divorce rate is lower for people. Health outcomes are better. We already spent nearly $300 billion pausing student loan repayments during COVID, again,

to help the best of people in our society. And now Joe Biden, without Congress, is trying to spend nearly half a trillion dollars over 10 years to not cancel loans, not forgive loans, but to transfer the liability for those loans, which have already been spent. The product has already been received to people who didn't go to college. I find it baffling and revolting. And I can only conclude that it is an attempt to buy votes in an election year. If you look at the letter that he's sending out today, which was previewed in the press, it's, I have done this, my administration, me.

He doesn't mention Congress. He doesn't mention the legislature. He doesn't give a statutory reference. It's me, I, mine. And it's obvious that it is the product, as you said at the outset, of a panic. Yeah, 100%, it is an attempt to buy votes. I agree with you entirely. And he should be in a panic, not only because of the Biden corruption things, which are heating up, but I mentioned

his poll numbers. Of course, there was the her H.U.R. report. And just today, you know, we get a glimpse of the president and they've been putting out these weird videos, Charles, you know, we get a glimpse of the president and they've been putting out these weird videos, Charles. You know, he can't do live events, apparently. I mean, we're going to see him at the State of the Union. We'll find out whether he can just read off a prompter. But he can't do like a Trump rally. Forget it. He certainly couldn't do a live debate.

So they've been putting out these little prepackaged videos of him sitting with a black family trying to say your dad really loves you or your grandpa. Okay. And now today we get a bit of President Biden addressing NATO and the death of Alexei Navalny, which we should talk about it. We haven't gotten to that yet on the show. And what's interesting about the video is that it's two minutes long. There are roughly 30 edits in his two minute video. Do we have a clip of this, you guys? Trying to see if we do. Yeah, we do. OK, watch a short clip.

An attack on one is an attack on all. That's what NATO's Article 5 says. It's a simple but powerful concept and embodies why one of America's greatest sources of strength is our alliances. They're not only important to us, they're important to the rest of the world. Now, there's a reason why we had six cuts in 15 seconds. And if you keep watching, it gets worse. That reminds me of the fake outtakes at the end of Talladega Nights, the Ricky Bobby movie,

where they can't get through two or three seconds without laughing. So it's all edited in a weird way. And it's sad. It's sad. It's amazing to me that the White House and the Democratic Party and much of the press believes that this is the sort of thing that it can bully people out of noticing. The last number I saw was 86% of Americans think that Biden is too old to be president again. Americans don't agree on 86% of anything. That is an enormously important statistic. The approval rating of Social Security is lower than 86 percent, the third rail of our politics. is because it's transparently obvious. And it's quite sad. But it is transparently obvious when you watch the man. He is not like any president that I have ever seen. He's not like any world leader, for that matter,

that I have ever seen speak in public. This is uncharted territory. And this is what it's like now, let alone what it would be like by 2028, 29, if he were to get a second term and then survive it. And I don't say that flippantly. The majority of Americans, I think maybe 65, 66%, don't think he would survive a second term, either because he would die or because he wouldn't be able to finish the job. We're just not used to this as a country. We've had all sorts of presidents and all sorts of political moments.

And what people are being asked to vote for does change over time. Sometimes elections are about the economy. Sometimes they're about terrorism or foreign policy or crime. But we've actually not since at least 1944, when Franklin Roosevelt ran for his fourth term, had a president whom a large proportion of the country worried might not make it. Of course, Roosevelt did actually die in 1945. It's quite difficult to tell how worried Americans were

because we're in the middle of a world war. There was a great deal of goodwill for Roosevelt. He'd been president for a long time. Polling wasn't particularly good. The press was much more able to cover up his condition and so on. But people were worried. If you go back, you will find news coverage of it. This is uncharted waters. I've never seen anything like it. The highest percentage of Americans who thought that a president was not able to do the job because he was too old, or at least a candidate, was Bob Dole in 1996. That was about

25%, one in four. 86%? Well, yeah, because look at the guy. And it's only going one direction. That's the thing. I've talked about this before, but when John McCain was running, he called himself a maverick. And one of the criticisms of John McCain was that he was too old. And it might have been Stephen Colbert. I can't remember. It was one of those late night John McCain was that he was too old. And it might have been Stephen Colbert. I can't remember. It was one of those late-night hosts, but they said, he really is a maverick. He gets criticized for being too old, and what does he do?

He keeps aging. That's what we're about to watch with Joe Biden, too. So, you know, we have an election now where we have Joe Biden's team promising that they're going to keep calling out the crazy from Team Trump. That's their plan for the next year. Keep calling out the crazy. I guess they're not finding much purchase in the criminal trials. And so they're going to go back to Trump's rhetoric, which, of course, is criticizable. And so we've got somebody who's almost 200 who's going to try to say, I know I'm old, but I don't say really crazy stuff like about NATO

and so on. I mean, we'll see. We'll see how the American public responds to that. Let's spend a minute on Navalny because I do this, this one. I, it, it matters to me. I know I heard you talk, talk about your trip to Moscow when you were young. I of course went there and interviewed Vladimir Putin and Putin, you know, he's been after Navalny for some time now. He was poisoned a few years ago. He was an opposition leader. He's one of the few very, very brave men to challenge Putin in Russia and had quite a coalition of followers. He was poisoned. He went back to Russia willingly, knowing that they were going to put him in prison, which they did. And now suddenly at age 47, he winds up dead, mysteriously, sudden death syndrome. Like that's a thing for anybody who's

not, you know, weeks old. And it seems obvious to everyone that Putin was behind this. And what does it tell us? Does it give us any more information that we didn't have about Vladimir Putin? Well, it confirms a lot of what we think about Vladimir Putin. It should serve as a reminder. I don't think it gave us new information per se, but certainly he hasn't changed. And the nature of the Russian state under his dictatorship has not changed. The first thought I had, Megan, was how blessed we are that whenever there is someone like Vladimir Putin, and there are a lot of them, not in America, but there are a lot of them in the world. We see these men and women step forward. In every country, these

people, they come from somewhere and they present themselves as an alternative, even when they know that doing so will lead to their probably being killed or tortured or their family being hurt. And Navalny was another example of this. A remarkable story. And he was, if those letters that were published or anything to go by, remarkably calm about it toward the end, just before he was murdered. And murdered is the right word. I've seen a little bit of debate over this.

I, of course, do not know what happened in that cell, and I wouldn't presume. But even if he died of neglect, even if it was his being in the cell for that long that led to his death, you still have to blame Vladimir Putin and the Russian government for putting him there. In much the same way as you had to blame Lenin or Stalin if someone got shipped off to the Gulag in Siberia and then froze to death. Had he not been there, he would have been alive. So whether or not he was actively killed a few days ago, or whether this was the indirect result of his having been put in that jail for a long time and treated badly, He was killed for his opposition. And it is appalling. And anyone in the United States or elsewhere who wonders, well, maybe Vladimir Putin is not so bad, needs to recognize this,

that this is a tyranny. And the guy who stood up to Putin was killed, not incidentally, but because he stood up to Putin. And there are many examples of that kind of behavior. I mean, when I interviewed Putin in Russia, we talked seriously about having a plane on standby because he has been known to kill journalists who get in the crosshairs of Vladimir Putin. I mean, this was an actual discussion we had at NBC, like how necessary is it and how upset might he get? And so, and so it's, you know, this is what we're dealing with over there. Um, there's no reason to have a love affair with Vladimir Putin just because he's not woke. Um, there is in the political world, a story making headlines today from the Washington post. They are upset that Nikki Haley went to an all white high school, not all white, but almost all white. I think they've forgotten she's not white,

but they're very mad that Nikki Haley left the school she went to quote for most of her childhood where roughly half of her classmates were black. She gets no credit for that, you see. We only want to hang it around her neck, like an albatross that she began her sophomore year of high school in the fall of 86, 20 miles to the north to a radically different environment, Orangeburg Prep. At her new high school,

she was one of the only non-white students. The horror. And turns out that some of the classmates said in interviews they were not adequately instructed about South Carolina's history of divisive racial issues from Jim Crow to the KKK to lynchings. And then they point out neither Haley nor officials at Orangeburg Prep responded to questions from The Washington Post. Thus, it could not be determined what she was taught there. So what do you make of it, Charles? She didn't go to a high school that had enough brown faces, even though she was one. Yeah, that's the key. Even though she was one. This is a good example of the Calvin ball that is played by the press when the topic is race. If Nikki Haley were a Democrat, the very fact that she had gone to an all-white school as a non-white person would have been the story. And it would

have shown us something brave and admirable about her that she managed despite being outnumbered. And we would have sympathetic talk about how she didn't look around and see anyone who looked like her. There wasn't adequate representation, but she learned a great deal and became the woman that she now is. Likewise, this idea that the school didn't have good enough education about South Carolina's history, and that this in some way works against Nikki Haley is weird. I don't think that the paper knows what was taught at all. So I hope what was taught was that America is a wonderful nation that is based on the greatest creed that has ever been written on parchment, but that it has very often failed to live up to that. And as a result, South Carolina in particular,

was a hotbed of slavery and bigotry and discrimination until it wasn't. That's what I hope that they were taught. But even if they weren't taught that, that's not Nikki Haley's fault. How can that possibly be important to anyone? And again, if she were a Democrat, then it would be, well, she did what she did despite this. But somehow this is supposed to have, I don't know, infected her. Well, listen to this, Charles. Exactly on point. Listen to this.

They say her formative years in Orangeburg, okay, so sophomore, junior in high school, are a largely untold chapter in one of the most complex and contentious parts of her journey from a minority woman in the South to the would-be leader of a Republican party that largely discounts systemic racism in the United States. There it is. You know, I do find this whole area very interesting. I grew up, as you know, in England, and I was born in 1984. And when I was born, England had a queen,

Queen Elizabeth II, and Margaret Thatcher, who was the prime minister. And for a while, I honestly didn't know whether men could be in positions of authority because for most of my first few years, I mean, Margaret Thatcher spent six years as prime minister after I was born until she was finally deposed. There was the queen and then the prime minister, and they were both women. And I had assumed that everyone, left or right, thought that it was at least somewhat inspiring that Margaret Thatcher was the longest serving prime minister in post-war British

history. But they don't. That doesn't count. It's only some people. And I see the same thing at the moment with Nikki Haley. In any other universe, a non-white person who grew up in a former Confederate state in an all-white classroom and then became the governor of the state and helped dismantle the old boy network would be praised for that. That would be a story that was worth telling and would be told. But she's a Republican. And at the time of her governorship, she was a Tea Party Republican as well. So it's not, it's not told. And in fact,

we're now getting these push headlines from the Washington Post that imply there's something nefarious about it. It just, it, it bothers me because I don't know what the rules are. Exactly right. And on that, in that same vein, Clarence Thomas gets a lot of the same guff. No, no credit from the left for his amazing accomplishments. Everything he's done is seen through their racial prism. They've called him an Uncle Tom and so on. And that brings me to John Oliver, who, what a funny guy, made the following offer to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Watch this. So that's the offer. A million dollars a year, Clarence, and a brand new condo on wheels. And all you have to do in return is sign the contract and get the fuck off the Supreme Court. Talk it over with your totally best friend in the whole world, because the clock starts now. 30 days,

Clarence. Let's do this. Nice, right? Now, can you imagine if that were a white male Republican comedian like Greg Gutfeld making such an offer to Katonji Brown Jackson or Sonia Sotomayor? I don't think they'd be laughing. Yeah. So I have two thoughts about that. And they're the have two thoughts about that. And they're the same two thoughts I had when I first saw it. One, that's not comedy. I don't know what it is, but it's just politics. It's not a joke.

Where's the joke? Two, he doesn't actually seem to know why he hates Clarence Thomas. This seems to have been absorbed as if by osmosis. He just operates in this particular small clique within our culture. And he knows somehow that Clarence Thomas is bad. He said, oh, Clarence Thomas has spent years making people's lives worse.

He didn't say how. Is he upset with the affirmative action case, which has near 80% support in the public? Is he upset with Clarence Thomas's Second Amendment and First Amendment writings, which reflect popular positions? What is it? At the very least, he could make an argument, but he doesn't. And I just feel as if this is another good example of a completely unthinking late night television that is supposed to be smart because at the end of it, the guy delivering the monologue says the F word. And I don't, I just don't get it. Yep. Same. All right. Last thing before I let you go, the Massachusetts school, collegiate charter school of Lowell decided to play in a basketball game against the KIPP Academy,

K-I-P-P Academy, and had to call the game early because not one, not two, but three of their female players went down and got hurt thanks to a male player at the KIPP Academy on the other team who hurt them. And this is a trans player, a man pretending to be a woman, to the point where the coach saw repeated girls go down getting hurt and made the call to end the game early. Now they say the players feared getting injured and not being able to complete in the payoffs of the playoffs. And now the school, the collegiate charter school of Lowell comes out to say, we support our coach's decision to call the game. However, they want us to know that they reiterate their values of both inclusivity and safety for all students. Okay. So E and equity,

they, they mentioned equity too. We, we want, we like our state laws regarding equity and access and inclusivity. So they want this to keep happening. And for the girls to just getting, keep getting hurt. And when I guess you have three to end the game. So the girls will not know the feeling of victory. They will only know the feeling of injury because equity and inclusivity is what's important to them. And not safety, which is the other word they mentioned, which is in direct conflict with those other two values. I mean, look, this is a perfect example of when ideology that at its inception is abstract and intellectual meets reality. When people started saying a few years ago in newspapers, look, men can become women and women can become men. And there are no real differences between the sexes and those who think otherwise

are bigots. It was easy. You just sit down in front of your computer and you type it out and then you email it and then it goes up online. The problem is it's not true. And it is obviously not true when you start playing sports, according to that principle, because men are on average stronger than women. Someone is going to die. We've now seen this in a bunch of sports. We've seen this in lacrosse. We've seen it in soccer. And we've seen it here in basketball, in volleyball. We're going to eventually push this so far that someone is going to die. And there is obviously a line, I don't know where it is or when it will happen,

beyond which we cannot put women in a game with men. For example, if you put women into an NFL game, they would die. I'm waiting for this, not with any hope whatsoever. I'm waiting for this watching through my fingers because it is so stressful and bizarre, but someone is going to die. And when it happens, then the ideology is going to be exposed, I think, in a way that it hasn't been before as sheer lunacy and not just the indulgence

of a rich society. So well said. It's chilling, but you're right. And I watch these clips and all I can think is, where are the parents? What parent would allow his or her daughter to play against a six-foot male like that, who's clearly post-male puberty, who clearly is a danger to their daughters? Is your desire to be seen as inclusive and pro equity greater than your desire to protect your child. You're more worried about taking barbs from your community members for not

being woke than you are about your own daughter's wellbeing. Something's wrong with your priorities. I don't know. I don't understand these parents, Charles. I don't, they need to't understand these parents, Charles. I don't. They need to be shamed and called out repeatedly because they are part of the problem.

Yeah. And I have a friend whose daughter is a superb athlete. And I think about this with her. I mean, I don't know if she'll go on and be a collegiate athlete. But she is a fantastic athlete within women's sports. But obviously, if you put a six foot three guy in, he would really hurt her. And I don't actually personally know anyone who thinks that that isn't true. That's the other part of this. I don't know

the parents you're talking about. I don't know the schools or the school boards or the coaches that we're discussing here. I've actually never met, this is unusual because I have lots of friends who are sort of left-leaning and I know so many people who disagree with me on this or that or have completely different policies. But on this one, I don't actually know anyone in my personal life who thinks it is a good idea

to put men up against women in these sports. And I want to know where they come from. Are they bred in a laboratory? Well, you know, what's happened is quietly these trans activists have gotten the laws changed in state after state to require this kind of thing. And they're working on changing it right now, changing Title nine. And Joe Biden's going along with it. And so when people weren't paying attention, they made this basically mandatory and without activist parents to push back and say, we don't care what you did when we weren't paying attention during COVID. We're paying attention now. And we don't care that the

law says you have to play. Our daughter doesn't have to play against you. And we will walk and the whole team will walk. And all that will be standing there is a man pretending to be a woman trying to exploit our daughter's opportunities and then see who's going to enforce the law against us. I just there has to be some pushback or we're going to be stuck with this status quo and more and more women and young girls are going to get injured. Charles, thank you. Or miss out on opportunities, which is the other part of it. That's the thing. Thanks for having me. Like, I mean, yeah, yeah.

No, but pick up on that point one more time because I do think there's a value. I wasn't a huge school athlete, but I did play. I played on the basketball team and I played on the field hockey team. I did, mom, even though you deny it, I showed her how to school your book proof. She's like, you never played field hockey.

I did. Anyway, and I did cheerleading, which was competitive and it was fun. But anyway, there is a wonderful feeling of completion and accomplishment when you win. And it's second to none. You can't achieve it by coming in second or third. You have to have the feeling of being number one in order to appreciate what that feels like and what it does for your self-confidence.

And yes, some ego, all of it. Building a little swagger into a young woman's or a young man's step from wins in competition is a good thing. And to take that away from these young women, just because we need to be equitable or inclusive of men, men who have all the advantages over women physically, it's just grossly unfair. And as we see here, unsafe.

I'll give you the last thought on it, Charles. I can't really improve on that. As you say, it's not just about physical danger. It's about taking away people's ability to do the best that they can. And this is what we saw with Leah Thomas, the swimming debacle. It's not particularly dangerous to swim against a man. But if you are a woman, it's quite difficult. And there are people right now who should have had gold trophies

and should have been recorded for posterity as the best swimmer of their class who are not because a man who was in his own realm, what, number 400th in the country, decided that he would enter their competitions and he started winning. And there's a cost to that. It's not just physical.

Honestly, if this came to my school, I think I'd storm the court. I really think even if it weren't my child, I'd just run out there like a streaker, you know? You'll come with me. We'll do it together. We'll give him something to look at great to see you my friend all right thanks for having me

coming up next what a show today we've got our kelly's core all-stars marcia clark and mark garagos and some big updates in some big cases including as i mentioned at the top uh gabby petito's parents suing the parents of her boyfriend and murderer. And also, uh, one of the cases in that rusk onset shooting involving Alec Baldwin goes to trial jury selection today. We'll tell you what's happening. I'm Megan Kelly, host of the Megan Kelly show on Sirius XM. It's your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations with the most interesting and important political, legal, and cultural figures today. You can catch The Megyn Kelly Show on Triumph,

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Subscribe now. Get your first three months for free. Go to SiriusXM.com slash MKShow to subscribe and get three months free. That's SiriusXM.com slash MK show to subscribe and get three months free. That's SiriusXM.com slash MK show and get three months free. Offer details apply. Now we turn to our Kelly's Court all stars. Marsha Clark is a former prosecutor and New York Times bestselling author and Mark Garagos is a trial lawyer and managing partner of Garagos and Garagos. Welcome back, Marsha. Mark, great to have you.

So let's start with what's happening in the Gabby Petito case, where she was this young woman who was, we believe, strangled to death by her boyfriend, Brian Laundrie. They were from Florida, but they had traveled to various national parks in their van, promoted this all over social media as van life. She was absolutely beautiful in every sense of the word. And notwithstanding the fact that they'd been stopped for a domestic violence incident in which a witness saw him hitting her. The cops let them go, separated them briefly, but not much was done. Not blaming the cops, I'm just giving the frame of reference. And ultimately he killed her. He killed her in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. Then he went home to Florida in the van where his parents lived. And there was a period of time, I can't remember, it was a week or so, where we didn't know where Gabby was,

what had happened to her. Her parents were saying, we can't reach her. We're very worried about her. And it is that period of time that has led to this lawsuit Because it turns out Brian had spoken to his parents, had called them on the phone even prior to arriving back home, is my understanding, and had clearly made some admissions to them. And now Gabby Petito's parents, the parents of the victim, are blaming Brian Landry's parents for not coming right out with it, saying your son had told you what he'd done to Gabby. You knew or had reason to know she was dead at that point. You didn't come tell us. In fact, you made public statements that seemed to suggest the opposite. And Marsha, it's an emotional distress case, right? Intentional infliction of emotional

distress where the one set of parents is going after the other set. By the way, I forgot to mention Brian Landry wound up dying by suicide. He took his own life with a gun in an alligator preserve or swamp down in Florida. So what do you make of this case? The tough one. I think that it's possible that the victims will prevail, the plaintiffs will prevail here on an emotional level. How much the jury votes in terms of damages is going probably to be the more, the way they balance ultimately the equities in this case. Because bear in mind that Brian Landry's parents are saying, I didn't know he meant that he killed her. They say that he never came out and said such a thing at all, that at most he said she's gone.

And then the mother comes the closest to saying, well, you know, I thought because he asked for a lawyer also in the context of those conversations, she thought, well, maybe he hit her. Maybe there was a domestic violence situation and she took off and he's afraid he's going to get sued, which is not unreasonable. I can imagine a parent saying, you know, I can't believe my kid would do this. He's not like this guy was homicidal, was in and out of prison, has any kind of history. So it's not unreasonable that they would resist the conclusion that he killed her. Pretty extreme. So, I mean, I think it does kind of hinge on whether you believe them when they say, we didn't know what he had done. We didn't know she was dead. And I think they're going to get some degree of compassion from the jury on that regard. But so is the plaintiff

saying, you know, you should have told us what you knew. You should have been more forthcoming. But I think that probably they win on, you know, the emotional appeal in terms of a verdict, in terms of the SU caused emotional distress. And maybe you should have known, remember, it's a preponderance standard, not beyond a reasonable doubt. So it's pretty low. And then I think they balance it out in terms of the monetary reward. Among other things, Mark, their lawyer, the parents of Brian Laundrie, their lawyer came out and said on September 14th, 2021, on behalf of the family is our hope that the search for Miss to having their lawyer issue that statement, had spoken to Brian that Brian had made repeated calls, including one that lasted an hour, one that lasted 22 minutes, saying, she's gone. As Marsha points out, she's gone.

I need a lawyer. I might need a lawyer. And the dad is trying to say, just help me, just help me. And the dad is trying to say, and just help me, just help me. And the dad is trying to say that he was very panicked. Brian was saying he didn't know what to do. And I didn't know what he meant by Gabby's gone and I need a lawyer. I mean, okay. So I don't know if we believe that Mark, but I will say this. Does a parent have the obligation? Let's say he didn't believe, let's say he believed he was saying she's dead and I did something and I need a lawyer. Does a parent have an obligation to come out with that, you would have privilege. Here you have kind of these statements

that can be taken two ways. Normally, a judge, I will tell you in California, most judges would not let this get to pass a summary judgment or what's called a demur. Normally, this would be thrown out. Here you've got a very emotional, as Marcia was kind of detailing, you've got an emotional draw to this. But in most jurisdictions and with most judges, they would say this is way too amorphous to attach liability to. And it can be interpreted in a number of ways. And you don't have necessarily a duty, if you will, to tell them one way or another. When you say, we hope she's reunited with the parents, does that mean her remains or not her remains? Those kinds of factual issues. It's a very tough situation. I think legally, it's not a tough situation emotionally. I think if you get

to in front of a jury with a case like this, you could probably prevail and get a jury to really hang their hat on this and come back with some incredible damages just because of the emotion here and wanting, you know, jurors do have a tendency, like most people, to want to hold somebody accountable. You don't have him anymore because he committed suicide. You've got the parents there. You want to hold somebody accountable. And I suppose it comes down to whether or not they are believed as to what they knew and when they knew it. I don't know, Marsha. I have to say.

So they already sued the estate of Brian Landry, the killer. And they got what's described as a symbolic $3 million judgment, meaning he wasn't worth any money. So they got this money, but they're never going to collect. So now they go to his parents to sue for emotional distress. And while I have nothing but empathy for the Petitos, I can't help but feel like, God forbid, your own child called you and said, I'm in trouble. I'm panicked. I need a lawyer. She's gone. I don't think I'd, I don't, I think I'd want to help my child. I think I'd, I'd be scared. I just, I don't, I hate to say this, you know, and I'm God forbid, but like, are we really going to make parents financially responsible for not turning in their kids or like going to the

cops with it or going to the victim's parents who they did know. I get all that. I don't, that's a slippery slope. I agree. And the problem is, for example, let me just give you another example of how the parents could be held liable is if they knew their son was violent towards this woman, they provide him with a gun. And then you say, OK, wait a minute. What do you think happens next? One plus one equals two. But that's not the situation here.

This is a situation where, as I said before, this kid has no prior had pardon me, the deceased had no prior record that we know of of violence. Yes, there was a recent report of domestic violence between them that doesn't necessarily mean uh that he when he calls to say she's gone and we had a fight or whatever that he killed her and if you're a parent you're certainly going to resist that conclusion on a very basic emotional level um having had nothing else to hang on to in terms of well he did it before so i can see where he'd do it again. Not so in this case. So yeah, I can see the parents not wanting to, and I don't really know legally speaking, and I think Mark is right about this, they probably would not have

gotten past a demur or a summary judgment motion in most courts with this claim, because you can't prove what the Landrys knew, what they understood from the cryptic remarks that he did make. And you have the other side of it, which is what I was saying, the emotional appeal goes both ways. And a parent is going to say, I don't want to turn in my kid when I don't really know what happened. I'm going to go say arrest him for murder when I don't really have a confession at per se. I think a natural reaction of a parent is to say, I'll help you. Tell me what you need. And that's what they did do. He said he needed a lawyer. They got one. And they didn't seem to be deliberately hiding anything so much as unclear on exactly what was

going on. So it's a tough, I think it's a very tough case for a jury to sort through because of the dueling emotional appeals on both sides. I know because these parents, of course, you know, I realized their son was a murderer, but they loved him. They lost him too. They have suffered. It wasn't their fault that Brian committed this murder, um, any more than it's the fault of any parent when there's child does something terrible. I don't think the whole case makes me uncomfortable. I don't, I don't see it. I have to be honest. I don't see a liability for the, for the laundry parents in this case. Uh, okay. Let's talk about rust, uh, that this movie that Alec Baldwin was making

when he shot cinematographer Helena Hutchins. Um, he pointed the gun. He denies that he actually pulled the trigger. He was shooting a scene and he did not expect the gun to be loaded. I think we can give him all that, But there's still a question about whether he was criminally negligent in handling it and pointing it at her. And we believe pressing the trigger, though he again denies that. This is the trial of the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who she's gone first now as a criminal defendant. And it's underway today. They're picking the jury. And they're going to say, Marcia, that she had an obligation to make damn sure there were no live rounds on that set, never mind one in the gun next to the dummy rounds that was handed to Baldwin. So how do you like the chances the prosecution has against her? And how do you think

this is going to affect Baldwin, who comes second? He comes after her. Right. So that's really important. This order is going to make a big, big difference. And it's a big score for Alec Baldwin. He gets to see how the case plays out. He gets to see how the witnesses who are going to be some of the same witnesses called in his trial, how they play to the jury. Where are the weak spots? Where are the strong spots. Those lawyers for Alec Baldwin, I promise you, are going to be either in court or watching the footage, if it is telecast, avidly taking notes constantly and consulting with each other about what to hit, what points to miss, what, you know, exactly how to structure their case. So they're getting to go to school on her trial. Now, in terms of how it plays out against her, it depends on how her defense lawyers are able to

show others were involved. Others could have basically set her up for the fall by putting the live rounds without her knowing about it on set or in the gun. It seems unlikely that they would prevail this way because she's the armorer. It is her ultimate duty to make sure that any firearms are properly maintained and kept on set. And so it would be her duty also to check and make sure that no live rounds are there. So no matter who might have slipped in live rounds, and I don't believe anybody did it on purpose, but, you know, by accident slipped in some live rounds. And then of course it comes down to how negligent was she in not catching that mistake? What I wonder is why any live rounds were even available because you don't need them. If you think there's a big difference in the

sound, then go put them, don't ever bring them to set, go shoot them somewhere else and see if you can really detect the difference in terms of the recording capabilities. But I don't ever bring them to set go shoot them somewhere else and see if you can really detect the difference in terms of the recording capabilities but i don't see any reason why any live rounds should be there so there are other people involved that's where the defense for the armorer will go they stuck them in there and i didn't have a chance to look and by the way she's gonna she's also gonna suggest she's yeah she's gonna suggest that the guy uh seth kenny who provided the rounds who was he was supposed to give her the ammo. She can't she she's ultimately responsible for the guns and the ammo on set. But somebody's got to supply them.

She says it was this guy. They're already pointing the finger at him, but he hasn't been charged. But the thing is, Mark, the prosecution, I guess, is going to start arguing that she was boozing, quoting him from The New York Post, and using marijuana and cocaine, including the night before Alec Baldwin fatally shot Hutchins. The judge in the case in New Mexico ruled that the special prosecutors can present text messages in which she alluded to drug use during her time off the set, but right around the time of the shooting. And even after the police interviewed her, there's a suggestion that she gave a friend a small white bag or bag with a white substance saying, keep it safe just for hours after she was questioned. So they're going to try to paint her as, you know, drugged up, irresponsible. There's an allegation she had live rounds in her hotel room. And, you know, the jury probably will want someone to blame.

This is not like the Laundrie parents. She actually did have some responsibility for this gun. Yeah. And you have somebody squarely who was supposed to be responsible. Your producer sent me something that I did not know, which was apparently the prosecution is also trying to not let her use her own name or the name that she's now calling herself, which I thought was interesting. I suspect that if I'm Alex Spiro or one of the Quint Emanuel lawyers who's representing Baldwin, that you're going

to be doing mock juries after every single witness and see how they play out and who they want to blame and what they're going to say. I think that this is even better. Marsha will probably tell you normally a prosecutor loves the second trial because it gives them the advantage. They know exactly what the defense is going to do in the first trial. Here, you may flip it on its head. This is something that they welcome. I mean, they don't welcome, obviously, Alex Baldwin being indicted a second time, but they welcome the idea of getting a dry run, seeing what people are going to testify to and watch and see if she takes the stand,

because I think she's in a position where she may be kind of forced to do that. Yes, I think she probably will take the stand. I mean, how else is she going to cast the finger at everybody else? Because she's going to blame the guy who supplied the ammo. And she's definitely going to blame the prop supplier, the person who oversaw the set and was supposed to like manage everything on set and practice time. And she's already saying that Alec Baldwin didn't take the practice time with her seriously enough. He was distracted. He was on his phone the whole time. So I can see how this plays in a civil case, right? Like you have to apportion responsibility, Ivy armor, maybe I have 30%

responsibility, but deep pocket Alec Baldwin has the other 70. But in a criminal case, I don't know that any of that matters. Does it matter if she can get up there, Hannah Gutierrez read and say, I might be a little responsible, but the woman who maintained the set is more responsible. And the guy who supplied the ammo is more responsible. Like that. Does that work, Mark, in a criminal trial? I will tell you, first of all, there's two there's two huge variables here. Number one is jury selection.

And number two is, do they put her on the stand? As you indicated, she almost has to. The one variable is how much does the prosecution bring in of her previous statement that she made to the police? They can put that in. And depending on how much of that they put in and how much the defense gets to put in of other. If she takes the stand, if she's sympathetic, if you picked a jury that is attuned to that, then she's got a shot. The thing is, Marsha. Yeah, go ahead. Well, I have to agree with Mark.

I mean, of course, jury selection is where you win or lose any case. But but I want to point out one thing in terms of pointing the finger at others. Even though you don't apportion guilt in a criminal phase, you do have beyond a reasonable doubt as your standard. To the extent you can point fingers at others who may have been responsible for some of the setup and the situation she was in and the fact that she was rushed in production, which she made a big point of in some of her statements, saying they were pushing me and pushing me to get things done quickly. And then Alec Baldwin wasn't paying attention and blah, blah, blah. To the extent you can push off responsibility on others, that may create reasonable doubt

in terms of what her actual negligence was, whether it was criminal negligence or not. So, yeah, it does matter. And, of course, the way she comes across if she takes the stand, let me suggest to you, if I were her lawyer, I wouldn't want her to because she did make these prior statements and she did talk to the police. Anything she says that's at variance with all those other statements can be used to impeach her and that will hurt her credibility enormously so she can sit back at council table and put on the testimony of all the others on set who will carry her water for her so to speak and say yes seth was responsible for this and x was responsible for that y was responsible for that you chip away at the at the case that the prosecution has to prove

of her guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The thing about her father is weird. Apparently, I think it's Jack Reed. I can't remember his first name, but he's one of the most famous, if not the most famous armorer in Hollywood. And he's her stepdad, not her biological dad. But she says she was raised by the guy. And now the prosecutors are saying she shouldn't be able to call herself Hannah Gutierrez Reed. She should just have to stick with Gutierrez because I don't know, because what? I don't like because it's too prejudicial in terms of her competence. It's craziness. It is so crazy. He is famous. He is famous. Let me tell you, I have a very dear friend who works at Prop House, knows him well, knew him well. And he's somebody who is revered in the business. So it's a big name. Don't get me wrong. I know why the prosecutors want to keep it out. Others will testify to how important a guy and how iconic he is. He is.

Well, that's ridiculous that she can't use the name it's crazy that's like you know what one of our children not being able to use our last names because it's like oh well no you can't say clark nobody will ever think you did anything wrong gary goes well they'll by the way they'd say gary you can use gary goes by the way it's we're in new mexico we're not in hollywood it's not as if you're gonna board i or the jury and they're going to say, oh, yeah, Jack Reed, I'm giving her a pass. It's so true. I've got to get this last case in because we only have three minutes left. But I must ask you about the orgasm case. It's a lighter moment for us here on the court. So Gwyneth Paltrow's orgasm guru. I mean, doesn't everyone have one of those?

Of course, yes, one does. Yes, they are in court. There are two of them, I guess, who are in court and going on criminal trial because they have been operating a, quote, sexual wellness empire called One Taste that is allegedly a cult forcing workers into sex and followers into debt. Now, Netflix did a whole film on this and is also being sued by this pair. Here's a little bit from the trailer so the audience can get a flavor of what we're looking at here. We have a pleasure deficit disorder in this country. I think that there is a cure, and that cure is female orgasm.

She really was a celebrity to me. I'd seen her TED Talk 30 times. One Taste was a fast-growing startup in the health and wellness and sexuality space. It was all about exploring orgasm, exploring pleasure. It went from utopia to a hellhole. People were getting hurt. People were getting hurt badly. Ex-members would describe something that might look at and think like, oh, you were being told to have sex with a customer in the hopes that that would pay

money to the company. Okay. I don't mean to put the heart, the cart before the horse here, folks, but they say that by 2017, One Taste was promoting coaching courses and retreats for up to $60,000 a year, $36,000 for Daydone. She's one of the defendants, Nicole Daydone, personal teaching in stroking. Now, if you pay $36,000 for Nicole de Doon to teach you how to stroke, isn't that a buyer beware assumption of the risk type situation? How do you claim you've been criminally defrauded? Mark, would you like to take that one? I will paraphrase Richard Pryor about cocaine. It's God's way of telling you you got too much money. There is, there is. To have a PDO, which is a pleasure deficit disorder.

I mean, really? That's where we're going? No, what you need is a new boyfriend. That's what you need. So what, is this serious, Marsha? I mean, like forcing the employees to have sex i mean can that even happen like there's also the option of quitting how does this turn into a criminal case this is an excellent question megan i do not have an excellent answer because exactly the

option is there's a door you know how to open it walk outside you know i don't know i don't know what they're going to say uh it'll be it's more like a civil case really um when you talk about it because it's it's employment discrimination and hostile work environment kind of stuff where you say you know what i was pressured to have sex or i was going to lose my job okay i get that that's a civil claim don't see how they're going to prove a criminal case about this at all. And I do think that it is, I think Mark put it well, you do have too much money if you're spending it on this. Who doesn't have a pleasure deficit disorder? It's ridiculous.

They say they boasted that OM, their method was beyond tantra, sexuality in the post new age. They offered hands-on orgasm training courses for thousands of dollars. You can get that at the little massage parlors in Times Square for far cheaper. You do not have to pay 60 grand for this, you guys. Thank you. We'll continue to follow that one. We'll be sending you out to the trial for day-to-day dispatches. Yeah. We'll be right there. Front and center, Megan. And we'll be sending you out to the trial for day-to-day dispatches. Yeah, we'll be right there. Front and center, Megan.

And we'll be repeating your line that get a better boyfriend. See you, team. Thank you. Marcia and Mark, the greatest. And thanks to all of you for joining us today. What a show. Tomorrow, rootless. Maybe we'll ask them what they think about these lessons.

See you then. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.