OA687: Trump Sues Woodward, Gets Close to Making a Valid Legal Argument

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:02 Thomas: And welcome to Opening Arguments. This is episode 687. I'm Thomas, and Andrew will be away from the podcast for the time being, but we are very lucky to have Liz Dye here filling in. Thank you so much, Liz. Really appreciate this, and it's great to talk to you.

0:00:20 Liz: Great to be here. Thanks for having me. It does not.

0:00:22 Thomas: Doesn't stop. The news waits for

0:00:25 Liz: It does. Not.

0:00:25 Thomas: No one. And we've got some very interesting stories to cover today. Off, Trump has another lawsuit, a fresh lawsuit. And I that means he's definitely going to win. I'd be scared. His percentage is almost displayable is how high his batting average is. If you have enough digits in the calculator, I think, you know, like I think you can see the percentage. Is it this time?

0:00:41 Liz: Yeah. Okay. This is a banner day because we get to talk about a Trump lawsuit that's not entirely stupid. It's just mostly stupid, which is like a huge improvement. Donald Trump is suing intrepid cub reporter Bob Woodward, a fresh-faced youngster new in town who just happened to stumble into the White House 19 times and record a tape of the sitting president. Obviously, we all know who Bob Woodward is. He's the OG Washington insider. He broke the Watergate scandal along with Carl Bernstein. So like, he's not new, nor is his publisher, Simon & Schuster, or its parent company, Paramount, which are also named as defendants. Like, they've been around the block once or twice.

0:01:09 Thomas: Yeah.

0:01:25 Liz: Now, once or twice, yes, Bob Woodard has written one or two books about presidents. In fact, this This is his third. The book Rage, which he published in September of 2020, is the third one that he published about the Trump presidency, because apparently people are reading that shit. Not me, because Christ, no. But people are. And apparently there was such an appetite that in 2022, he released the recorded interviews of Trump as a standalone audio book called The Trump Tapes. And that's what Trump is suing over, because he claims he never gave Woodward a release to publish the recordings, or as he put it in his lawsuit, he never gave permission for the, quote, systematic usurpation, manipulation, and exploitation of his precious gruntings.

0:01:24 Thomas: No kidding. I mean, with this exact kind of thing, I have to imagine they've been in court before. Yeah.

0:02:15 Thomas: I I mean that would be a weird thing to have given permission for. I'd

0:02:19 Liz: Yeah, a weird waiver. And I'm going to, you know, just caveat, like, Bob Woodward did not start yesterday. He did not fall off the turnip truck yesterday. So, So, I he would have crossed that T and dotted that I, I don't know. As between the two of them, anyway, this case contains all the like usual bluster we've come to expect from Trump lawsuits. And God knows that is like my actual job. So I've read a bunch. Attacks Bob Woodward's previous book, Rage, as a failure, which it wasn't. It sold 600,000 copies in the first week alone. And he claims that Simon & Schuster and Woodward, quote, conspired to and did collate and cobble together more than eight hours of raw interviews, by which he means they edited them. Of course, it's filed in the Northern District of Florida in Pensacola, where none of the parties reside. So it's a tortious collation and cobbling.

0:02:33 Thomas: Yeah.

0:03:14 Liz: Good luck.

0:03:14 Thomas: Is that a tort?

0:03:16 Liz: I mean, it is if you read this lawsuit. Suit.

0:03:19 Thomas: I've been cobbled. Did you, you all saw that? He cobbLED me.

0:03:20 Liz: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So presumably they filed it in the Northern District to get as far away from Judge Donald Middlebrooks as possible. Remember, Middlebrooks, I think we talked about this last week here, slapped Trump and his lawyers with a million dollars of sanctions in that stupid RICO lawsuit against Hillary Clinton. And and they did manage to get away from Judge Middlebrooks, but they did not manage to score either one of the justices of the judges Trump appointed in the Northern District out of the four current sitting. So he had a pretty good percentage, but instead he drew Judge Clyde Vinson, who's a Reagan appointee on senior status, which is if you, you know, sometimes you're kind of semi -retired, but you take cases. I think that was like Judge Raymond Deary, who was the special master in the, yeah, exactly,

0:04:01 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And senior status, I remember that from when a lot of, I think, uh, are, were pressuring judges to maybe take senior status while they could be replaced by Biden, right? Where it's like, you're still kind of a judge, but they can start working on appointing your replacement. Placement.

0:04:23 Liz: Exactly. But judge, and also like there are quite a few senior status judges in Florida, because you're not trying to retire to Florida from Florida. They're already there. So there's a whole bunch of them and he got one. So he landed on Judge Vincent's docket. Judge Vincent is like no one's idea of a liberal squish. He's the one who invalidated the Obamacare individual mandate. And he's pretty terrible on criminal sentencing. But he's not like a hack. He's not Judge Cannon, and he's presumably like not who you're looking to draw if you have shenanigans in mind. And spoiler alert, this is Donald Trump. He has shenanigan in mind?

0:05:02 Thomas: Can I ask you, Liz, in experience of covering this stuff for a long time, have you seen any judge as bad as Judge Cannon? Yeah, I don't think there's a single other judge in all of the stories we've covered that have been just purely in Trump's corner in a way that was genuinely disturbing. So I'm glad to hear because I know you know a ton about this. I'm

0:05:11 Liz: Oh God, no, no. Absolutely not.

0:05:27 Liz: No. I mean, I think that he, I that perhaps there will be some state level judge that would be as crazy. And, and there's that guy Kazimierczyk or whatever in Amarillo. That's the one that they, they keep filing. That's why every case is now filed in Amarillo, Texas, because he's the one that they're going to get. And he's that like lunatic. But he's not been, I mean, he's been giving a lot of nationwide injunctions, but he hasn't, nobody was like Judge Cannon. That was, they broke the mold when they made her.

0:05:56 Liz: They're gonna have to retire her number. So, okay.

0:05:55 Thomas: They broke the mold before they made her.

0:06:00 Liz: It was definitely a broken mold. It was all over the floor. In this lawsuit, lawsuit, this Woodward lawsuit. It's got all this like, I mean, it's the same crazy shit where he yells inanities. I mean it's not as crazy as a lot of them. He says that the only reason that the book was successful is that Woodward wasn't telling anything new. It was who was doing the telling that made the difference. Accordingly, President Trump has been harmed. If you can figure out that logical leap, you are a better man than me.

0:06:27 Thomas: Oh, does he just want in on the money? He wants in on the sales.

0:06:31 Liz: And he just wants the money. Oh yeah, Yeah, he wants the money. Also, Trump has filed a claim under the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act, essentially the state's consumer protection law. And I guess like his theory is that he's a consumer and S&S sells books. So ipso facto proctor hoc, he's got a consumer protection claim that happens to entitle him to be an attorney. He's like, it's so dumb. It doesn't it doesn't make any sense. It's not, you know, they didn't sell him a lemon. He thinks that they cheated him out of, you Know, his share of the royalties. Um, like he, he loves to file under the FDU TPA, like he loves the file under Rico and it's like never the FD U TPA and it never freaking Rico. Um, mean, if he sued Twitter and YouTube and Facebook under the FTU TPI on the theory that they were kind of selling him a service, which was like stupid and failed, but that was even less stupid than this.

0:06:32 Thomas: Okay, yeah.

0:07:23 Liz: Um, you know, it's, it got his usual crazy shit and, and he's also making the, so he claims that it's a breach of contract. That's his main claim. But he's not attaching a copy of the contract and he's not telling you which specific provisions of the contract were hypothetically violated. He just says that it was breached and he should get all the money so make of that one what you will. And while we're talking about the money and running down all the bat shit, Trump says that what he needs is $50 million or to be exact $49,980,000 Stuffed.

0:07:54 Thomas: In unmarked bills to be done.

0:07:58 Liz: In his g-string, you, first, Thomas, no.

0:08:01 Thomas: Also accept rubles, by the way.

0:08:03 Liz: Calculated that by saying it was two million, uh, yeah, definitely soiled, the more soil the better. Um, he calculates that the book is going to sell two million copies because that's what, um, previous, whatever it was, I don't think it was Peril, I think it was the one before that, like Fear, or whichever one of, uh, the Woodward books that actually sold really well. So he says that's two million, there's going to be two million copies, copies of this audio book of him ranting sold times the $24.99 sticker price. The theory is that he's such a big seller, we're all going to fork over $25 to listen to him some more. And he should get the entire purchase price, not like a percentage of the royalties or whatever. I mean, that's not how book sales work. I feel like Jeff Bezos is going to take a bite and, you know, well, Books is going to tell you it's

0:08:21 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. The

0:08:53 Liz: It's all ridiculous.

0:08:54 Thomas: Margins are nothing on books, especially if Amazon's involved.

0:08:58 Liz: Right. So I don't know, you know, why does he think he gets the entire sticker price? Like that would be his damages. That's crazy. But so let's talk about what's not crazy about this case with the caveat that I am not your go-to girl on copyright law. It turns out that Trump is sort of correct in his brief when he argues that the U.S. Copyright Office works from a premise that each party to a recording retains an interest in his own contributions.

0:09:11 Thomas: Ah, Okay, sure.

0:09:22 Liz: So, okay, so let's take this recording of you and me talking. I would own my words, I would owe the copyright to my words and you would own the copyright to your words. That how you were planning to market this? I

0:09:27 Thomas: Really? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Who owns the remix is what I... That's important. I need to know.

0:09:40 Liz: Believe that would be Sean Coombs, Puff Diddy.

0:09:43 Thomas: Timely.

0:09:43 Liz: I don't know. I have to, I told you I wasn't, I wasn'T really big on copyright law, so you'll have to check it out. But okay, here's what the U.S., the compendium of U.

0:09:46 Thomas: Yeah. But that wouldn't be to,

0:09:51 Liz: S., well,

0:09:51 Thomas: I guess, yeah. To walk into the joke or whatever, to not walk into it. But yeah, that wouldn't really be how it would work. I

0:09:58 Liz: It wouldn't accept if you were the U S copyright office, then maybe you would say something like this. The U S Copyright Office will assume that the interviewer and the interviewee own the copyright in their respective questions and responses, unless one, the work is claimed as a joint work. Two, the applicant, that is the applicant for the copyright, provides a transfer statement indicating that the interviewer or the interviewee transferred his or her rights to the copyright claimant, or three, the applicant indicates that the interview was created or commissioned as a work made for hire.

0:10:21 Thomas: Hmm.

0:10:30 Thomas: Sense.

0:10:30 Liz: So that like what they're saying is you and I each own our own share of this recording. I like I give het to you, Thomas. You can have it. I'm not saying anything that interesting. Cool. There is, however, case baselaw that goes the other way, presuming that the party who records it owns the recording unless otherwise specified.

0:10:35 Thomas: But as a default. Oh, thank you.

0:10:49 Liz: And that is kind of the premise.

0:10:46 Thomas: Hmm. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah.

0:10:50 Liz: Yeah. No kidding. Because like, how else would you, you know, like if you were a congressional reporter and you were recording a soundbite, like then the public figure would own it. That doesn't make any sense.

0:10:55 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And multiply this by [number] through the years. I mean, so many instances of reporters shoving a recorder in someone's face all throughout, you know, as long as that's been around. It would be hard to believe that it would be sustainable to have to litigate that or have someone sign something every single time, but I don't know, I guess stranger things have happened.

0:11:20 Liz: I mean, and Trump is constantly putting his voice out there everywhere. And I mean I guess if we wanted to get really weird and technical, like, well, who did it belong to? Because I mean wasn't he He acting, you know, was he acting in his official capacity? He certainly likes to argue that about the presidential records. I mean, this is all dumb, right? We're going down a rabbit trail. Clearly, it can't work that way. Like, it cannot possibly be that he owns it. Although, although, this isn't the craziest position Trump has ever taken. And in my reporting, I did speak to a former federal prosecutor named Mitchell Eppner. He's a current trademark lawyer at the firm Rottenberg, Lippman, Rich, PC. And he told me that while certain aspects of the latest lawsuit are ridiculous, including the place where it's filed, the fundamental claim that Donald Trump holds a copyright interest in his answers in the interview is actually a respectable position that the Copyright Office agrees with. So congrats, Donald.

0:11:47 Thomas: Sure.

0:12:10 Thomas: A new record. We should really You just

0:12:16 Liz: You got one.

0:12:17 Thomas: Accidentally held a respectable position on a single legal issue. I'm sure the office threw him a party and yeah.

0:12:22 Liz: Well, I'm sure it was. Yeah. Yeah. I'm surer it

0:12:26 Thomas: But I mean, I'm pretty sure you had in in there unless otherwise signed or stipulated, you know, in which I have to imagine Woodward, Bob Woodward, who has done this a time or two, had thought of that.

0:12:26 Liz: Was a new one.

0:12:38 Liz: And who knows who Donald Trump is, right? Like, this is the third book he's written with Donald Trump. He knows that guy is a litigious nutbag. So I, you know, I don't know. Um, and like naturally Trump takes the most insane maximalist position. And he says that he owns the rights to the entire recording, right? He wants to get all $25 from, you Know, the money that you and I are each going to buy our own copy of this, um, of this famous, um work and listen to it every, every day. Um he he says that he gets all of the money, which is just a nonsensical position. Or he says maybe he'll get a pro rata share on his contribution. I don't know. Maybe he gets like the vowels or whatever. It's stupid.

0:12:40 Thomas: Yeah.

0:13:01 Thomas: I don't Know if we need to care that much about this, but like, do we know what percentage of the book his speech would even be? Cause it's not like the whole book would be, it's like he read, narrated the audio book, right? He just probably answered some questions or the whole books, just his answers to of questions, yeah.

0:13:32 Liz: Know, interestingly, I was thinking about this when I was reading because they made reference to other aides being in the room, right? So, okay, Woodward is asking the questions and he probably says like, well, would you have breakfast, you know, and Donald Trump goes on a whole diatribe about crooked Hillary or whatever, You know, it's like a seven minute thing until some aide breaks in and says, you know, Mr. President, maybe you want to like shut up or whatever he says. But so if Hogan Gidley breaks in and says something, does Hogan Gidley then own... Hogan Gidley was a memorable member of the press corps. He was a dapper fella. So Hogan, Hogan Gidley, if he breaks and says, if he's on the tapes saying, Mr. President, whatever, does he then own 1% of the tapes?

0:13:52 Thomas: Ah,

0:14:13 Liz: And, right, I mean, and is it, you

0:14:12 Thomas: There You Go Yeah, That Was A Crucial Contribution to the overall production, you know, I do a little acting, Liz, not sure if you know this, and uh, they always say if you get a bit part, you know, like a like a small role in the background, you want to in your head create the story of how the entire show is about your character, because, and might sound selfish, but it's actually the opposite of that because caring enough to deliver a good performance for a one line bit role is actually really kind to your fellow performers. And I feel like maybe this guy, Snidely Whiplash, what was his name? Skeets Magoo Miller. No, some journalist you read. Was that a reference?

0:14:43 Liz: Know, does it matter? Hogan, Hogan

0:14:51 Thomas: I don't know.

0:14:52 Liz: Gidley. Hogan Gidly.

0:14:53 Thomas: What is this reference? Is this an old timey thing that I don'T know? Or is this a real guy?

0:14:56 Liz: No, that's his real name. No it's his real name, it's this real name!

0:14:57 Thomas: Oh, oh, okay. So he came in, applied

0:15:01 Liz: He was, yeah,

0:15:01 Thomas: For the job, And he's like, hi, my name's Hogan Gidley. And they're like, you already have the job. Your name is alone is fine. You win. It's the job, my

0:15:08 Liz: You could have basically named him Loafers McNo -socks, like, he was, he looked exactly the way you think he did.

0:15:11 Thomas: Point is I imagine his interjection was so compelling that he should have definitely some ownership of this product.

0:15:14 Liz: Huh? For sure, a hundred percent. You get yours, Hogen Giddle Giggle. So no, but actually I do know what you're saying about the theater because one of my children used to do it and my kid was like a corpse in our town. So he would have to sit there dead on stage. If you know what I'm talking about, there's like that creepy scene at the end.

0:15:30 Thomas: Ah, there you go. Oh, that is a, that Is a tearjerker. That Is a Tearjerker of a show. Let's not get into our town right now. Okay. OK, Scrover's Corners is springing back.

0:15:39 Liz: I know, I know. But like you haven't lived until you've spent many a night in the theater watching your kids sit there as a dead child on stage, night after night, community theater, God bless.

0:15:50 Thomas: Jeez. Yeah, yeah. But there is nothing more immature than especially and you would think this would only be in kids theater or high school theater, but it's actually forever in all of theater. The person who thought they deserved the bigger role, taking it out on the tiny role they have and just doing a shitty job. It's classy. It's very classy.

0:15:55 Liz: Um, the lead when I was in like the ninth grade, they were so, they were so mean to me in high school, I won't talk about that now, luckily I changed my name, so if you're listening, oh, yeah, no, I was, yeah, yeah, I was a music major for hunts, oh yeah, always, yeah, yeah, don't

0:16:11 Thomas: Oh, really? But you will sing about it. No, you're not. Was it a musical? What? This is great. Okay. More on this later. This is fantastic. I love this.

0:16:26 Liz: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Okay, so bottom line with Trump, we don't know, because, you know, it's Donald Trump, he, um, talks a lot of shit. We've, we've never seen the contract. You don't know what it says. I don't know what is says, you know, presumably Simon and Schuster knows what it says, and they were like, I don't think so. They made a statement that was basically like, sure, okay, fine, if you want us to come into court on this one, fine. I mean, I'm not sure what Woodward is going to say, because I don understand how he's subject to the to the jurisdiction of a Florida court, like, he didn't do anything in Florida. I mean, that's one of Donald Trump's favorite things to be like, wasn't it, like, we talked about this last week, that he, in the in the case where he got sanctioned, the reason that he said all of those, like, Hillary Clinton and, um, James Comey, were subject to the jurisdiction of the Florida court was that, um, I think it was like Florida is a state and a big one at that

0:17:01 Thomas: Interesting.

0:17:14 Thomas: They knew. Yeah. Yeah. They had knowledge that Florida was an important state. I think it was something like that. And we have long talked about one thing I've learned from the show that's really fascinating, and I think lay people tend to not know, is kind of the order of operations here. You know, when you talk about a motion to dismiss, or you talk about, you know, like, what's the first step, how, and and of course the other side always wants to get out of this as fast as possible, as easily as possible, and if the only defense that Woodward had, hypothetically, I know this wouldn't really be how it would work, but if the only thing they were going to say was, forget all the jurisdiction stuff and all that crap, if he was going to say, we have a contract, it's this, that would mean they would at least have to get through to discovery, which is often a pain in the ass and is kind of part of the point of suing someone, right?

0:17:19 Liz: Exactly, exactly, so, Right, but he's gonna say, uh, you're in, you ain't my daddy, I'm not, I'm not doing any business. I mean, Simon and Schuster, I'm sure, has like offices in Florida, so, so they're not going to be able to get out, presumably, although they are, I think, a Delaware corporation. But Bob Woodward doesn't, as far as I know, live in Florida. I think he's like a resident of D.C. or Northern Virginia, wherever. It is in Florida, and if so, the first thing he's going to say is like, you ain't my daddy, and we'll see how that goes. I don't think that Judge Vinson is going to be willing to play and loose on that one, but we will see. And, you know, if we wind up seeing the contract, I assume that Simon & Schuster is going to say, like, get out of here, that's not how it goes. But it'll be fun. I mean, look, props for one that's not completely batshit crazy, right? This is better than the RICO. You are learning. Good job, Donald.

0:18:06 Thomas: Right. Yeah.

0:18:53 Thomas: Well, okay. That's, that's my, that's my question. My understanding from kind of the recent, this that we covered, was perhaps Trump would cut back a little on this, because it seemed like he got slapped down, seemed like you was going to have to pay a lot of other legal fees. And I thought the news after that was, all right, he dropped a bunch of stuff, because this is just terrible and he doesn't want to pay more legal fees. Is this was this something that was already around, or did he just truly not learn the lesson of having to pay other people's legal fees?

0:19:24 Liz: Well, he definitely dropped the one that was going to be in Judge Middlebrook's court, because Judge Middlebrooks, when he sanctioned them, kind of rattled like a snake about to bite you, and said, like, this other case that you have pending against me is part of your pattern of frivolous and vexatious litigation. Ahem. And that was one that they dropped like immediately, because they knew that that Judge Middlebrooks was going to come down on them like a ton of bricks. The other one that they dropped was an appeal kind of related to that case, like, not to backtrack too far, but remember, this is the one where the New York Attorney General, Letitia James, is trying trying to prosecute Trump. And Trump kind of sued her in a bunch of different courts to make it stop, including like a Florida state court. And that got removed to federal court, the one that they dropped, while he was acting a fool. He sued Tish James in federal court, trying to ask a federal court in the Northern District of New York to stop the state investigation.

0:20:20 Liz: And you don't have to be a lawyer to go like, you know, to know that that's not how any of this shit goes. So he lost in the Northern District of New York, who was like, what are you talking about? This is already being adjudicated in another court. Get the hell out. And they appealed that case to the Second Circuit and that was pending. And that was one that they dropped because it was just like too stupid in any way. That was when they were trying to stop the investigation. And now we're already under prosecution. So it's basically moot. They have have not dropped their appeal of Judge Middlebrook's dismissal of that idiot Rico claim against Hillary Clinton. They really should?

0:20:58 Liz: Yeah, I don't know why. No, no, no. They dropped another case. They drop the Florida case against the New York AG. Anyway, I that what they are learning is that if they wind up in front of a really hostile judge, they should beat a hasty retreat. I'm not sure that they've taken a lot of other lessons, although I will caveat that one by by saying that Trump appears to have staffed up in the New York AG case and in the E. Jean Carroll case. He appears to Have hired some differently competent lawyers, which is to say, competent lawyers. He's hired some pretty good lawyers for those cases. I'm not

0:20:58 Thomas: Oh, I thought they did, oh, okay, oh, okay,

0:21:32 Liz: Saying that they're like good cases.

0:21:33 Thomas: He's like, you know, all right, let me try, just just to try, just to see, this one time, I'll hire like a lawyer, and you know, been to school and knows what anything is, and just, I'll just see if that works, yeah, yeah, and I'm wondering if the theory could be like, all right, we got to try to fund these other pieces of crap somehow, like, maybe we'll get a settlement out, like, if we make enough trouble with Simon and Schuster, maybe we will get a settlement out of this one. That'll help us do a bunch of other bogus crap. Could that be it?

0:21:36 Liz: Yeah, right, right. Right, I will, right I'll continue to file batshit cases, But maybe I'll get a better lawyer? Question mark? I don't know. I don' think they're worried about money. They raise all the money that they need from the PACs, which is like, correct, right? Like, just the way we talked about it, right, we talked about it last week, that they're, that he fundraises off them. I mean, so if he paid, you like, one of the PAC's paid like $11 million in legal fees last year, and I suspect suspect some of it was to January 6th defendants who cheerfully went in and pled the fifth, like we talked about with the Cassidy Hutchinson one. You know, I think that he's not worried about the money. He's got the money

0:22:10 Thomas: Okay. That's, you know, that's true. And all of these dumb lawsuits are probably a net gain when you look how he fundraises off of them.

0:22:42 Thomas: Sad.

0:22:43 Liz: Said, vaguely said, correct.

0:22:45 Thomas: Wish judges would start taking into account this fundraising crap. I know we've, we've talked about it before, but like it just, there's not a sanction large enough in this land, apparently, to put a stop to this. And there should be. So this sucks. But that's, that's excellent. Great breakdown. Sucks. That lawsuit still sucks. But it is the best lawsuit that Trump has ever filed by far. And I feel like it will instantly be dismissed. But that's, that's my prediction. What's your, what's your prediction on that? You

0:23:12 Liz: God, I don't know. I mean, depends what the what the contract says, as if indeed there is one, you

0:23:15 Thomas: Don't think you'll get out based on the jurisdiction stuff, or will it be like, well, books are sold in wherever that is, so, oh,

0:23:22 Liz: I think that Simon & Schuster probably has an office. I mean, look, I don't know. I think then it really just depends on the contract, but we will see. I would suspect, let me just break in one more thing. I would expect if there is a contract, it has a forum selection clause, and that forum is not the Northern District of Florida.

0:23:26 Thomas: Okay. Well, That's Very interesting, that's very okay, and we'll keep an eye on that. All Episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Right, look, in honor of Valentine's Day coming up, reminder, reminder, talk about the things that factor into finding the right person to be in a relationship with. Their personality, chemistry, loyalty, trust, similar life goals and values. Bad, there's not some sort of technology that can easily find the right person for you, but if you're hiring, there is technology that that can quickly help you find the right person for your open role. And that is ZipRecruiter's matching technology.

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0:25:12 Thomas: Right, and now we're going to talk Hunter Biden's laptop, hopefully is the word that comes after the Hunter Bidens that we're gonna talk about, about. What's going on here? This is a mess. Update us on the mess that this is. Is this real? I still don't, I still never knew. There was a laptop. The story about it was, oh, it was found in a treasure chest underground. It was just nonsense. Some guy said it was dropped off in a repair store and he just left it. And then he logged in and he saw Hunter Biden's stuff. And like, I guess that's possible. When I expressed doubt about the story, I did get a bunch of techie listeners, uh, emailing in that were like, well, it's not that impossible actually because this happens all the time and any competent techie person can break in and look at all the files, and they probably do because they're being, being jerks. And okay, but also I've also heard that like, no, this is obviously a bogus front for however Russia supplied you with this, uh, this laptop. Know that's a lot, but where do we begin on this?

0:26:11 Liz: Okay. I'm going to come down at the end and say, I Think Everybody Here is Right, Right. But let's back up for a second and talk about how this laptop got to where it is, because that actually that does matter. And it didn't come down from underground, but it was close. There's like a troll in this story. So, OK, in 2019, Hunter Biden wanders into a strip mall computer repair shop in Delaware. And the repair guy is like this weird leprechaun troll dude named John Paul McIsaac. He constantly wears a Tam O'Shanter.

0:26:42 Liz: And Right. Fine. Just go with it. Just go with that. Right. He knows that the laptop belongs to Hunter Biden, but Hunter Biden never returns. And has no way of contacting him. He can't find the Secret Service. But you know who he can find is Rudy Giuliani, obviously.

0:26:54 Thomas: Of course. Yeah.

0:26:59 Liz: So what he does is, you know, he does what any any God fearing patron, a patriot would do. He downloads all the salacious bits off the drive and he gives them to Rudy Giuliani, as all your reputable repairmen would. Which, Rudy, Steve Bannon, and Robert Costello, the lawyer that they all share, and whom we've talked about at length on this podcast, work to spread the contents of the hard drive, which they've christened the laptop from hell. Yeah, I hope you can get a reverb on there. And they've sent it, they send it all over conservative media. And for the most part, they're not getting any takers, because no one can prove where it came from and whether the stuff on it is genuine, which is the problem that you're alluding to, right? Like, who the hell knows where this came from? It came from, like, a troll in a Tam O'Shanter. Who the hell does? Rudy is totally squirrely. He won't let anyone do a forensic examination of this hard drive.

0:27:08 Thomas: Yeah,

0:27:54 Liz: He's like, I'm printing you out this hard disk. Which is not a way to authenticate it. Everybody passes. The major networks pass. Fox and the Wall Street Journal pass. But the New York Post says yes. And they put it out in October of 2020 with some, like they've assembled this whole backstory, or Bannon probably has assembled this full backstory about Hunter Biden. And he kicks up business to his father through this complicated influence peddling scheme. And it's like, less preposterous than the fantasies that Rudy Giuliani had been flogging about, you know, the Bidens in Ukraine and the whole bond scheme and whatever. It was less preposterous than that, but it wasn't like a lot less preposterrous. And so they put it out and you saw it got censored, although it partly got censored by Twitter because it contained non -consensual nudes.

0:28:17 Thomas: I was waiting to ask, but I'm sure it's going to be the thrust of the story possibly. Uh, no pun intended. What the, uh yeah, like the part where you're like, well, I think what I'll do is take these nudes that don't belong to me and distribute them to people, that feels off to me, yeah

0:28:45 Liz: Yeah, it does feel off. And as the Republicans have geared up to make a whole big deal out of this and Elon Musk has made a hot mess about it getting censored. The reason that the laptops got censored in part, and the story itself was because A, it contained non -consensual nudes, and B, it contains images of Hunter Biden's minor children, which they had put in there to kind of authenticate it. But that violates Twitter's terms of service. So there been a lot of criticism of the suppression of this story, but it didn't indeed make sense to suppress it. And also, it had every indication of being, you know, foreign propaganda, right?

0:29:46 Liz: Still nobody knows where it is. Anyway, it came also with this story that the New York Post was flogging about some dude named Tony Bobulinski and the whole fraud scheme.

I don't know, this Bobulinski character was like Hunter Biden's bag man, whatever, if you breathed on this story it fell apart, and and it immediately fell apart, which is why nobody remembers Tony Bobulinski anymore outside, like, the frothiest, you know, wing of the wingers, um, so there, you know, then we were left with like, what is this?

And by the way, suppressing that story probably made it, you know, Streisand affected it into like immediate virality because everybody, you shown a big magnifying glass on it, um, images that were on there were gross. Like, to be clear, they were gross, you Biden's not a great guy. He's clearly an addict and he would have lived a very different life if his name wasn't Biden, like half of DC, he's making a living because people are paying for his proximity to power. And hello, that's what every member of Congress, you Know, the ones who are holding these hearings, that is what every one of them is going to do before they retire approximately 10 minutes after they leave office. They will become lobbyists because that is the entire jig of DC. Like, you know, for

0:29:45 Thomas: Yeah yeah yep yeah

0:30:58 Liz: Them to clutch their pearls at Hunter Biden trading on his name is, uh, yeah, I feel like probably not.

0:30:58 Thomas: No wait hold on, you're not, this isn't the first time in all of U.S. history that this has maybe happened, you're saying? Huge if true. Huge if true I

0:31:10 Liz: I don't know. What's, uh... What's John Boehner up to these days? You know, flogging Merlot and weed? Like...

0:31:15 Thomas: Pretty sure the entire left and probably entire lot of the right, uh, in terms of the citizens of this country would be happy to have a conversation on influence peddling and money and whatever. But that's, yeah, I mean, that's the idea that Hunter Biden is the main focal point at a time when Trump's children are literally being paid to work in the White House when they shouldn't be, is a little rich, a little richer.

0:31:39 Liz: Right. Um, right. Didn't... Didn't Jared Kushner just get two billion dollars from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund for nothing? Come on. I mean, we're talking about, like, a couple hundred thousand dollars for, um, for a hundred bucks. Like, come on. Um, and you

0:31:53 Thomas: Well, it's probably for his brilliant business acumen, though. I mean he did solve peace in the Middle East, didn't he? So it it makes sense.

0:31:57 Liz: Know what? Okay. To be fair, to be fair. He did go to Georgetown and he did go to Yale law and those people, you know, people who have that set of, I'm not saying that like he wasn't a legacy admit or whatever, but the people who have that sort of thing, they're not going to be able to get that set of credentials. Like there's a reason that people work all their lives and kind of, you know, send their kids to piano lessons and tennis lessons and squash and whatever to get them into these programs. And it's because you can write your own ticket after that. So it's not like it's preposterous to think that somebody with that set of credentials could earn $2 million a year, right?

0:32:31 Liz: Or whatever he was earning. And maybe even, you know, even if he was not in tip -top form because he's a drug Addict, right. He has a messy personal life. Addict's laptop is full of all these gross pictures of Hunter Biden having sex and smoking crack. You've seen them. I've seen them. Fox has them on loop for two straight years now. And finally, this week, his lawyers decide to do something about it. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's because the House is going to kick up to hold hearings about this laptop. And so kind of ignoring it and hoping it will go away is no longer an option. Anyway, they send letters to the Attorney General of Delaware and the head of the Justice Department's National Security Division saying that there were laws broken by Rudy, Costello, Bannon, Leprechaun, and a couple of other people, including this nasty little shit named Garrett Ziegler. Zieglar was nominally working at the White House for our pal Pete Navarro, but he really appears to have been working on the Trump 2020 campaign and then on Navarra's idiotic efforts to overturn the election.

0:32:38 Thomas: And being

0:33:30 Liz: He also famously let Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Mike Flynn and the Overstock nutter in for that Oval Office showdown with the lawyers on December 18, 2020. So Ziegler is a piece of work. Anyway, Zieglar has gone on to establish a charity. You can hear the air quotes. And that consists of him making speeches and hosting stolen data from the laptop on a Web site. Or as he puts it, his mission is to finish our comprehensive dossier on crimes found on the Biden laptop.

0:34:00 Thomas: Naked is a crime, I believe, in most jurisdictions, right? Yeah.

0:34:04 Liz: How I've conducted my life

0:34:06 Thomas: It is for me. Yeah.

0:34:06 Liz: And I never am. Yeah, yeah, same. My kids too. Um, so Hunter Biden's lawyer writes this letter to the IRS as well and says, hey, this kid is not operating a charity and clearly he's not operating at charity. Um, and you know, maybe you should look into this. The fourth letter goes to Tucker Carlson, everybody's favorite Nazi and also the general general counsel at Fox. And it tells them if

0:34:30 Thomas: Do you have a favorite Nazi? I don't know. I don't know if that's a thing.

0:34:33 Liz: I did, it would be Tucker Carlson.

0:34:35 Thomas: Yeah, that's fair. I just don't think that's the thing that a lot of people are like, Like, all right, gun to your head, who's your favorite Nazi? Top five list, like that one movie, High Fidelity. Top five lists, favorite Nazis.

0:34:49 Liz: Um, Tucker Carlson and the General Counsel at Fox get a preservation letter telling them not to destroy any documents relating to this bizarro conspiracy theory about Hunter Biden paying $50,000 a month in rent to his father at the Delaware residence, where they recently found a handful of classified documents. And if you're going like, what the hell? I've never heard that. You know, spend a little more time on 4chan.

0:35:10 Thomas: No, decline.

0:35:11 Liz: No, no. Yeah, pass. I'm going to tell you about the theory, but just spoiler alert, it caused great tumescence among the Republican caucus, particularly James Comer that hayseed Nitwit, who's now in charge of the Oversight Committee. The theory goes like this. It came from some no -name account on Twitter that had like 7,000 followers, and it was picked up by the New York Post's Miranda Devine, one of Trump's favorite reporters and the author of a book actually called Laptop from Hell. So the theory was that, you know, that Biden is paying $50,000 a month to his own dad. And then, you Know, then they got to say like, oh, you Now, Biden, President Biden's not declaring this income. And where is Hunter Biden getting all this money? And, you know, but Devine at least kind of understood in some sense that this was just some rando on Twitter.

0:35:12 Thomas: Oh,

0:36:01 Liz: And she sort of caveated her, you Know, her tweets saying like, whoa, if true. And actually, it wasn't true. What really it emerged eventually that the application really said that he had paid $50,000 a quarter not to rent his father's house, but to rent office space at the Swedish embassy in D.C. um that Breitbart the Daily Caller and really and um representative Elise Stefanik all picked picked up the story um Breitbard and the Daily Collar retracted it because it was it was you know clearly false but Stefanik's tweet is still up I guess she's covered by legislative privilege anyway Tucker Carlson continued to flog this story long after it was debunked and now Hunter Biden and his lawyers are threatening to sue Fox and Carlson for for defamation, since they knew it was false or they were reckless as to whether it was false.

0:36:51 Liz: And clearly, you know, under the New York Times, the Sullivan standard, to public figure, which Hunter Biden clearly is, they'd have to have been known, they have to Have known or been reckless as To the truth of the allegation, and he says that they were. Don't know whether he's actually going to sue Tucker Carlson. And it's weird, because they have this history. They used to like live next door to each other and their wives used to socialize. And and Tucker Carlson asked Hunter Biden for help to get his son Buckley into Georgetown, I think. Yes, his son is named Buckley.

0:37:14 Thomas: Yeah, of course. Yeah, of coarse he is.

0:37:26 Liz: And of course, like this is a guy that, you know, and he said, like, I feel sorry for the guy because he's an addict, which like he is. Not sure that feeling sorry for The Guy would be to like put his dick pics on TV every night. Right. But maybe he and I have different standards of friendship.

0:37:38 Thomas: Yeah, it's really disturbing to see. Yeah, yeah. It's really, really disturbing. It's disturbing to how people can, I oh, yeah yeah, get my kid into this college. I'll thanks sport, you know, and then just completely turn around as though he's only Tucker Carlson's only reason for doing anything is his horrendous agenda. It's just, it's, it'S weird to see. It's disturbing to see so little integrity and only a dedication to a cause and no fat, you Know, facts be damned relationships be damned. I it's It's it's really troubling.

0:37:50 Liz: Mm hmm. Right, right. I mean, I can understand how he doesn't think that normal people in middle America, particularly the ones who are of a darker hue than he is, count. But you would think that a guy who was in your world, and and Tucker Carlson and Hunter Biden were clearly in the same world, you would think he could have like a modicum of humanity for this guy that he's known for a long time and who did him favors, and he did favors. But nope, clearly not.

Humanity completely excised, surgically removed, stuck in the freezer next to the frozen peas. Anyway, so we shall see what happens here. None of these letters are binding, right? Like it's not like Abby Lowell, who's Hunter Biden's lawyer and was also actually Jared and Ivanka's lawyer. Abby Lowell is everybody's lawyer in D.C. not like Abby Lowell can force the attorney general to investigate. And indeed, let's be clear, there already is a pending investigation of Hunter Biden. Just to just to backtrack here, we're going to have, like, we're, it's going to be peener 30 for the next, like, two years in the House, that we're gonna, we're going to hear so much about Hunter Biden's dick pics and his stupid Laptop.

0:39:20 Liz: But like there has been, there has been a federal investigator. Bill Barr put a a attorney in Delaware on this case and they've been investigating this case for nine or two years now and nothing happened. So I'm thinking if he was going to get charged like they charge him. What are you going to charge him with being a gross addict? Like who's

0:39:08 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean,

0:39:39 Liz: That guy hurt besides himself?

0:39:40 Thomas: I will say that there's a lot of times in the last whatever, six years, where we're like, well, you know, they've got to charge them eventually, right, when it comes to different things, so I don't know, you know, who knows, but I, I'm just so surprised, do you think there's been, is there any indication of any, any meaningful investigation of of the crimes that are possibly being committed against Hunter Biden in this case? Is that, you know, as do we know if anything has happened at all?

0:39:40 Liz: Right.

0:40:04 Liz: Well, that's what what they're asking. What they'RE asking. I don't know what Delaware property lies on The law of, you know, abandoned property. They've always said they the the laptop leprechaun and and Giuliani have always said that they it was abandoned property and they were entitled to do with it what they will. I have no idea whether that's true. And to be fair, I'm not, you know, Abby Lowell and Hunter Biden are not making reference to any specific statute that they say was vis-a-vis, you know, these laptops. They're just saying it was ours and you stole it. I mean, they are making some reference to like theft of data and computer fraud, but it's not clear to me who owned the laptop because that's probably going to be a Delaware property law question. And God bless, I did not have to take the Delaware bar and I do not take any bar. There will be no bar exam questions.

0:40:10 Thomas: Hmm.

0:40:53 Thomas: OK, you're firm.

0:40:54 Liz: I mean, I did take the bar.

0:40:55 Thomas: No bar. You don't have to take any. You know, I don't know. One day you may need to read a bar question. I don't know. Would you be open to that possibility?

0:40:57 Liz: Yeah. I mean it's a possibility, but I, uh, I took the bar when I was pregnant with my first child and I don't have to do that shit anymore.

0:41:09 Thomas: That's that's amazing. I don't know how you did it.

0:41:11 Liz: That kid can vote. Yeah. That kid could vote. I, I'm done now. So yeah,

0:41:13 Thomas: Wow. Right, Liz, thanks for that breakdown. Always, I think I ask this every time, what do you anticipate being the next step here? Can you give us, if not any predictions, I mean, can you tell us what to look out for in terms of this Hunter Biden story?

0:41:31 Liz: Think what the lawyers would like would be for there to be some kind of criminal investigation opened so that that would kind of bollocks up the congressional investigation, right, like as you've seen now, there are pending investigations, criminal investigations that. In the January 6th events, and the House Oversight Committee and whatever the rat fuckers are in House, particularly, and somewhat also in the Senate, would like to get eyes on those pending investigations. And the Justice Department would like to get not eyes on the pending investigations, because Congress leaks and is not helpful. So I think what's likely to happen is probably nothing. I don't think this is going to work. Work. If there is an open and pending investigation, it will make it a little bit harder for Congress to find the things that it wants to know about going on with this supposed laptop.

0:42:27 Liz: Really, it's not a laptop. It's just some files. And most of them were totally corrupted over being copied and copied and God knows what was stuck in there.

0:42:35 Thomas: They said they printed it out, right?

0:42:36 Liz: Printed it out and also like the the the post has said that I think like 22,000 of the 129,000 emails on there could be authenticated so like to go back to what you were saying at the beginning is this authentic? Well I mean that's one of the kind of classic right right that's a classic disinformation technique is to seed things that are real real and verifiable with things that are not real and not verifiable and hope that some of the disinformation slips through. So partly because nobody knows where this came from and partly because of chain of custody being like filtered through Steve Bannon, nobody knows what piece of that, what's real and what's not real. And so none of it can be, you

0:42:49 Thomas: Yeah. Some of it, right. Yeah.

0:43:18 Thomas: Yeah,

0:43:25 Liz: Can't really really go by any of it. Well,

0:43:26 Thomas: I'm still in disbelief. I'm Sorry, I can't get over it. How do we not know where this came from? How, how wasn't there some sort of investigation by either side of the aisle, I don't know, or at least by Democrats to like try to figure out where this came from? Because it feels like, you know, there's digital evidence of where stuff, you know, I'm not an expert, but I feel like there's a lot of ways you can forensically look through stuff on hard drives and figure out maybe where it came from, right?

0:43:55 Liz: I mean, you could, except that it's like probably been sitting in Giuliani's like pants pocket for two years now. I mean.

0:44:01 Thomas: Sure. There's a Lot of spills and stains on it, but they could filter that out, you know, they could like- all right, we know where that came from, we can account for that.

0:44:05 Liz: Yeah, no, sure. He's he drools. Yeah. Let me let me aside from that. Let Me let me suggest something else. Perhaps there is a little strategic ambiguity for both sides here. Right. Like if if Hunter Biden says, yeah, that's my stuff, then he's having to say, yeah. That's all my stuff. And probably some of it is not not his stuff. And if say exactly where they got it, then they have to say it's stolen or they have to, if they have vouch for the chain of custody, that they are going to have to acknowledge the fact that some of it's probably fake. So what happens is it kind of sits there in this netherworld, not really claimed by anybody, but everybody kind of taking from it or certainly the right taking from what they want. But if the right is now going to conduct these investigations on it as if it's real, then it behooves Biden or Hunter Biden at this point to come forward and say, OK, yes, at least some of it is mine.

0:44:18 Thomas: Okay, yeah,

0:45:07 Liz: The data on it is fine. You know, he doesn't have to vouch for the chain of custody to say, "Those pictures of me having sex with prostitutes or those pictures with me at Easter dinner with my children, those are mine, and you have stolen them and expropriated my images. And he can he can make the play to say some of it is mine. And the rest of this, which you are talking about my businesses is not mine. I'll give you an example. Is an email where he is talking about Ukraine and he's talking about it in substantial detail. And Ron Johnson, and I want to say another Senator, it could be Ted Cruz because he's such a piece of shit, could have been him. They both were like, oh, this is definitely proof that he was getting classified briefings, because this is at such a high level that it proves that he Was getting classified Briefings on Ukraine from his father. And people were like, you know, no, the post had a really good fact check on it that where they said, like, no, that's that doesn't prove it.

0:45:18 Thomas: Yeah yeah we went to Wikipedia .com

0:46:03 Liz: Or, you know. You got somebody with a Bloomberg terminal or you got somebody who is experienced in these kind of things like it's I mean, they're right or Or whatever, they do try and pretend that either Hunter Biden is like a devious mastermind who's, you know, looted the Ukrainian economy, or that he's like, you know, a stumbling drunk sleeping in a dumpster.

0:46:03 Thomas: Slash Ukraine," and everything was, yeah, from Ukraine, yeah, right,

0:46:29 Liz: And really neither one of those, like, he's a pretty educated guy. He's clearly smart. Not sure that he is like so much of a painter since, you know, he is selling the paintings, which is so ridiculous. But whatever. I mean, is

0:46:28 Thomas: Right, yeah, can I just say, if he is all the things and is doing all the things alleged, I mean, I got to say I'm jealous of his work ethic. I don't think I could do half that stuff and party that hard. I don't know, that's impressive. I'm just saying, I am just calling it like I see it, okay?

0:46:55 Liz: Think they're all jealous of him, but I'm not sure why. Anyway, it might have been some of those images on Fox. Anyway, the point is that these kind of dipshits in the Senate, and God knows Ron Johnson is a huge dipshit, look at these emails that he was sending and say like, oh, this is clear that he got classified stuff. So that's not true. I think some of that is going to come into view now if he's going to have to, I mean, if Hunter Biden is goingto have to claim some of it, because, you know, if he is suing to to say you stole it from me, he has to at least claim some of it. But then the then they're going to have to fight about what where the rest of it came from. But since the Republicans have control of the House, it's you know, it was a fight that everybody's gonna have to have. So I guess we're gearing up to do it. Yay, dick pics.

0:47:45 Thomas: Yeah, I didn't think that was where this was going to end up, but okay, sure.

0:47:48 Liz: Mean, it is definitely where it's gonna end. I promise you, it's going to be two years of yay, dick picks. I

0:47:53 Thomas: Don't I think that'll play well. I really don't. Like, I know it's salacious and the Republicans like to make a lot of it, but I feel like Like if they're trying to have, you hearings or something, it's going to look pretty disturbing to for their obsession of that. But, you Know, I've overestimated this country before. So, oh,

0:48:10 Liz: Nobody wants that stringboard shit. We're all I was so tired of that. Like, nobody has time for that. We lived through COVID. We're just like trying to get back to normal. I think that they, I think if you're asking, they often overplay their hand because they're like, you know, in this nth degree of like with the socks case, you guys talked about the sockscase, right? Like, who the hell knows what the socks cases like, I know what the sockscases because that's my job.

0:48:25 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Nobody. OK, sorry. Yeah, just Liz. That's

0:48:34 Liz: Just right, just me and Cal. Cal knows what a sockscase is. But like, nobody knows what the socks case is. And I think that this is going to be kind of like the socks case, because like, nobody knows their stringboard theory of like, how, you know, Hunter Biden was the mastermind of, you know, Ukraine, like, it nobody has time for that shit, you know, just fix the economy, or like, don't fix the economy or, you know, ban abortion, this is that's what you're going to do. I do not think this is going to get that much play, I think that they are going to waste their time on it. And nobody on our team is carrying water for Hunter Biden anyway.

0:48:34 Thomas: Why you're on the show.

0:49:06 Thomas: Yeah.

0:49:06 Liz: Like, oh you're gonna tell me that he's sleazy.

0:49:07 Thomas: You know, I was going to say, OK,

0:49:08 Liz: Like, oh gosh, really?

0:49:09 Thomas: Fine. No, not under Biden. I don't care. It's like that old Simpsons. I have to do a Simpson's reference if I have to. Where there's the strip club and they're showing all the candid photos somebody got of who's going to the strip club. And they're like, ah! This person! Ah! This person is Barney. And then Mo says, oh, Barney! Just because nobody's surprised that he was there. It's like that. Oh, Hunter Button. Yeah, I don't care. I don'T. Nobody cares. I don't care.

0:49:10 Liz: Yeah, it's by law.

0:49:37 Thomas: If he did crimes, go due time. Times, and that end of that. But I just want to say thanks so much, Liz, for this. That was excellent. And I really, really do appreciate it from the bottom of my heart. And I know the listeners do too. So thank you very much.

0:49:31 Liz: Yeah, I don't care. Right. Anytime. Anytime. All right, see

0:49:55 Thomas: That's, that's our show. Will see you when we see you, for the next one are a little up in the air, but one thing's for sure, OA continues on, and we'll see you next episode. Thank you for listening.

0:50:06 Liz: Ya, was

0:50:06 Clip: I move for a bad court thingy. You mean a mistrial? Yeah, that's why you're the judge and I'm the law talking guy.

0:50:15 Liz: Know, was I super subtle? No, I was not super subtle. Kiss my ass, I'm not subtle. You didn't hire me for subtle.