Episode 52: America This Week, August 18, "Indicted Hard With a Vengeance"

So Priceline takes your money and then you get to the counter at one, just vibrating from overexertion on your drive. And they tell you we don't have any hotel rooms. They shouldn't have done that, and I said, Well, can you give me a refund? He says. No, Priceline has your money, not you, so then I get on a chatbot with Priceline.

They didn't even have a phone number that I could call. So I get on a chatbot and I go through a 20-minute chat with a chatbot that has a name. It was like, Wendy or Dennis or something.

They give me my money back and then Matt. Then I go on another service, another app to get a room. That's another hour down the road into the darkness.

It's 100 organic rug, woven from human hair, not all of it head hair.

But I started out trying to braise this particular Super 8, so don't divert me. Here, it's got majestic pictures of the Grand Teton mountains. It has enough blankets and the pillows aren't those weird foam kind that bounce your head off, you know, the ones that when you lay on your head, just won't stay on? Because unless it's perfectly centered, it's pushed off by the bounciness of the foam.

The people that I encountered last night seemed like stunned and somewhat catatonic. Low-level workers who probably aren't paid very well. It just felt like I'm going to end up sleeping in a ditch.

I'm on an expense account so I can buy a room and so on. But I was like, I can't bear this anymore. I don't want to leave home. I want to go back and pull a pillow over my head and vow never to go on the road again. And I love the road.

I have gypsy blood, I've written a novel about air travel, I've got a book that I'm writing now about.-.

Objectively, people are more suspicious. People who work in any corporate setting have no responsibility and no discretion left anymore. They just refer you to the app, you know?

And the very last thing I'll say about this was that the ease with which Priceline gave me $100 extra credit suggested to me that. It's just the cost of doing business. That every night, thousands and thousands of people book rooms that they then get there to find don't exist, and Priceline just has a button for that. Now, they just push it.

I appreciated the $100, but at the same time I was like, this should be harder, you should be more upset about this. This shouldn't just be routine.

Some money they can recover out of delinquent credit card payers, but it's the same kind of thing they're not really.

They probably are doing this routinely, over and over again, knowing that they'll get something out of it in the end, right?

Or, I mean, this is even darker. But you know, I love the jury system, I love the idea of it, but if anyone I met last night is on a jury anywhere, you know, I feel for them.

Oh.

Man, that's so sad. It's true, though, right? I mean, you know, why not be suspicious of it when you see the way things work? I used to think America was a pretty competent country, all things considered, compared to some other places in Russia. You basically figure in an 86 error rate into everything that happens, right?

But that wasn't the way things were in this country. Now, it kind of is right.

Things are falling apart, dude. I mean, the error rate might not be to 86, but it's definitely like 46 and rising. It's a coin toss. Pretty much every sort of transaction, or, you know, encounter with any responsible party can be anticipated to go wrong. You know, you need a plan B now for everything, okay?

That's all I'm saying. Whether it's 46, 86 or 26, you better have a plan B, because if you're going through life assuming competence, you're going to end up sleeping in a ditch.

But anyway, you're absolutely right. Why do we assume that, you know, we've put this weird boundary or barrier around vote counting? That allows it to still go on when we can't even get hotel rooms.

And, you know, the Iowa Caucus.

And anyway?

Yeah, but, but, you know, in context of the of the price line fiasco I just went through. I would imagine that. If you're president of the United States and you have reason to believe you've been maybe robbed or there's been some skullduggery, it's not exactly felonious to worry, you know, everything else aside.

You know, it's funny. I feel like we did this topic already with the previous indictment, but this one is even, it's even weirder, this Georgia indictment. It's got 41 counts, so what is? what's his overall count, by the way?

No.

Giuliani Giuliani, Sean Micah, Tresher. Still, I don't know who that is. There's a whole bunch of people I don't even recognize in this indictment, Cheeseboro, who's in the other indictment, Eastman, who's in the other indictment, Giuliani, who's in the other indictment.

I think we're basically looking at the same theme with this case as with the January 6th case, except this one is even more extreme in that direction. So there are overt acts, there are things in here that are troubling, maybe even deeply troubling, right? About Trump's behavior. But wrapped around that is this construct where they keep talking about false statements as overt acts. Now they're.

Basically, my understanding is that they're using a version of a criminal solicitation charge and basically saying that the lying is an element of the crime. But in order to convince somebody to do the bad thing or to execute the desired outcome. But increasingly, it feels like they're trying to criminalize false statements themselves.

And so again, I'm torn.

When she says, it cost $200 something, but it was $299.

OK, that's a false statement. When someone says, when I ask them how hot is it outside? and they say it's 90, but it's really 87, that's a false statement.

What kind of false statements are they talking about here? They're talking about ones with intent, right? I mean, ones that are knowingly false, that are contra to actual beliefs and are meant to serve a nefarious end.

And I don't quite get it in that context, how they're going to prove this. I mean, what a jury will say, I don't know. How do you prove again Trump's state of mind?

Once he's been informed of that and continues that that's not the case by the right people, and continues to make that claim. Now. It's knowingly false statements, and so then they bring in everything that he says that, you know, is deemed a false statement. So quite obviously that Ruby Freeman, Shane Moss and an unidentified man were quite obviously surreptitiously passing around USB ports. As if they're vials of heroin or cocaine at State Farm Arena to be used to infiltrate the crooked Dominion voting machines. So let's see again, it's the State farm thing.

This is, this is, let's see. That's Giuliani making that representation to members of the Georgia House of Representatives present at a House Governmental Affairs Committee meeting.

So then there, you know, Kenneth Chesebrough sends an email with attached documents to another one of the co-conspirators. And in the attachments there are, there are false statements, so they keep the crime. The actual crime should be just be, for instance, trying to get the, you know, the false electors appointed or trying to get.

That's what they do. I thought that was the process. I mean, false electors suggests they're grabbing people off the street and saying you want to be an elector, or whatever. I mean, putting forward slates of alternate electors is how you challenge is what you do in anticipation of challenging election results. Because if you're successful, then those electors vote and the others are disqualified or something. That's how I understand it.

But, you know, in any case, here's my overall feeling about this. I'm not in any position in a couple of days to understand these indictments.

The overall sense I got reading it was they took a lot of individual actions, small actions, preserving hotel rooms, you know, talking to people and so on. And they bundled them into a conspiracy, but I wasn't sure reading it, where the conspiracy originates. Is it Trump who came up with this idea? is it someone else who convinced Trump who spearheads it?

What it looks like is a kind of cloud of people who don't believe the election was real. Doing a bunch of things and trying a bunch of things to challenge it and making a bunch of statements whose totality I don't understand. Because sometimes there's just like a quote in the indictment, like a sentence, and you have no idea where it came from. Or, you know, Trump said. X Well, I don't know in the context of what.

So I didn't get a sense of a sort of master conspirator organizing others, like as you would in a mafia case, say, you know?

You know, it's number three. Scott Graham Hall placed telephone call to Robert David Shealy. Number four, Scott Graham Hall placed a telephone call to Robert David Shealy. Robert David Shealy placed a telephone call to Scott Graham Hall. Blah, blah, blah, so and so. There's 23 of these, and then it's just telephone calls.

And they say these were overt acts and furtherance of the conspiracy. And then you keep going through this document and it's one thing like this after another, where somebody is saying something that they that they're claiming are false statements and they start off just as they did with the other indictment, with false statements, that's the first paragraph in the indictment.

Hang on a second, let me find it here. So yeah, so. Introduction Defendant John Trump Donald Trump John Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3. And it says, at all times relevant to this count of the indictment, the defendants, as well as others not named as defendants, unlawfully conspired and endeavored to conduct and participate in a criminal enterprise in Fulton County, Georgia and elsewhere.

And that says. The criminal activities were including, but not limited to, false statements and writings impersonating a public officer, forgery, filing, false documents, influencing witnesses, computer theft, computer trespass, computer computer invasion of privacy. Blah, blah, blah. But then it moves on to introduce the crime, and as it did in the last indictment, in the January 6 indictment, it starts off with false statements.

And then the second paragraph starts off with false statements, false statements and to and solicitation solicitation of higher ranking state officials.

This is central to their whole theory of everything, rather than starting off with something like impersonating an officer or forgery. Something I can understand, it starts off with false statements. And I just, I keep getting the feeling that, that, that the lying is is what they're trying to convict on, or or even. And which is a problem because you have to prove that he's lying. I mean, a defense would be, I really believe this.

And they're already right, they're already lawful articles about how we we can't go for the sincere belief defense and that sort of thing. So I don't know.

And now, I mean, we. We live in a society in which there are a lot of false statements in the major newspapers, there are a lot of false statements on television, they're in television news.

A lot, some get prosecuted, some get punished, some get censored, some don't. It's hard to tell what the line is. But the world of falsity and truth, which in some ways I thought we were past in our postmodern era, is suddenly a very literal basis for all kinds of decisions. And in this case, we're supposed to know that Donald Trump and his advisors knew something to be false. Decided they were going to set that aside and try to lie their way through it in order to get some outcome.

But the evidence of that is what I don't see here, I mean, it's asserted, but but what is it? But as I read, read through the whole thing, I was like, What is the evidence that they said? I know this is a lie, but if we tell it, we can get this person to do X and achieve our outcome.

Donald Trump because I want to defend the principle of not just free speech. But now, in this case, you know, the right to maybe advise a political leader from different points of view. Like, who is the privileged person who told the truth where he was supposed to stop, you know? In other words, is there is there a truth bot that if you ignore it, you are there, you know, you are thereby lying. Where did they find who is the official in all this, who is so sterling that to ignore them is to tell a lie?

Another one would be, why? Why do they have to be proving a conspiracy? Why does it have to be all these different acts that are tied together in one gigantic enterprise like, for instance?

Number four in their list here harassment and intimidation of Fulton County election worker Ruby Freeman, member of the Ruby Freeman episode. Yes.