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<\/p>\nRUSH: I want you to hear something. This is how bad this gets. Fox News has the eminently popular Judge Nap, Judge Andrew Napolitano. And he is paraded before the cameras as a judicial expert and analyst. And so he was on Fox last night, the Fox Business Network. He was on with Elizabeth MacDonald. And he made the point, well, I\u2019m gonna let you listen to what he says.<\/p>\n
He essentially gets something tremendously wrong here. But because he\u2019s on Fox, ostensibly conservative, the Fox audience hears this and they think it\u2019s a slam dunk. So the question that Judge Nap was asked, \u201cJudge Nap, former Trump attorney Michael Cohen sentenced to three years in prison, what is your take on Cohen\u2019s sentence to three years?\u201d<\/p>\n
NAPOLITANO: I don\u2019t think this is good for the president. And I don\u2019t think many people in the legal community take him seriously if he says I\u2019m exonerated. I realize there are arguments on both sides, there are people who don\u2019t think this is a crime, the president has argued it\u2019s not a crime. But a federal judge found that it was. What\u2019s the crime? The crime is taking corporate funds to confer a benefit on a campaign and not reporting it.<\/p>\n
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RUSH: Now, Judge Napolitano just said — and he\u2019s not right — that a judge found that the president had committed a crime. The judge found no such thing. The judge accepted a plea! Just because Cohen says he did this does not mean Trump did it! Just because Cohen says he did it in a plea deal does not mean the case has been decided! A defendant pleading guilty still has to go before a jury and make the case. And so do the prosecutors.<\/p>\n
The plea deal is not anything affirmative or final! And just because the judge accepts the plea deal doesn\u2019t mean the judge is ruling on the criminal activity that the plea indicates, in this case Trump. Well, Andy McCarthy saw this, and he was very frustrated by pretty much by what I just told you. He was on Lou Dobbs on the Fox Business Channel a little later and said this.<\/p>\n
MCCARTHY: I was quite surprised just a few minutes ago watching Judge Napolitano on the program right before yours say a federal judge had ruled that this was a campaign finance violation. That\u2019s not what happened at all. What happened was the Southern District charged what is very dubiously alleged to be an in-kind campaign finance donation. And Cohen elected, I think for strategic reasons, to plead guilty to that charge without challenging the underlying question, which is a profound legal question about whether it actually is an in-kind contribution or not. The judge didn\u2019t rule on that. Cohen\u2019s concession on that point is not binding on the president in any way.<\/p>\n
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RUSH: Nor is it binding on the judge! Cohen could have plead guilty that Trump ordered him to send the porn star to Mars in order to get her out of the campaign! He could have said that and the judge would have accepted the plea. It doesn\u2019t mean that\u2019s what Trump did. My point is that talking about legalities is the same thing as talking about any other technicality. There are experts and there are plebes.<\/p>\n
Experts have a way of speaking to make themselves sound authoritative and believable when they may not even know what they\u2019re talking about, or they may know what they\u2019re talking about and they can\u2019t keep their bias out of things. You just never know. But this kind of stuff is allowed to happen and it does happen because the people that hire these people don\u2019t know whether they know what they\u2019re talking about. I mean, anybody could be on TV or radio now.<\/p>\n
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It doesn\u2019t matter what kind of expertise you\u2019ve got. It\u2019s just, are you good TV? Do you sound like you know what you\u2019re talking about? Do people want to watch you? That\u2019s all it takes. Same with journalists. You don\u2019t even do journalism anymore to be on TV. You\u2019d better be a left-wing hack before anything else if you\u2019re gonna be a journalist with the New York Times, CNN, Washington Post. Journalism is the last thing anybody\u2019s looking for right now.<\/p>\n
“That\u2019s not the objective here. Journalism will only get in the way what we\u2019re trying to do, which is get Donald Trump.” But it\u2019s quite a serious thing to say that a judge acknowledged that Donald Trump committed a crime — a campaign finance violation — simply by accepting the plea of somebody who\u2019s trying to say whatever it takes to get a reduced sentence — in this case, Cohen! It doesn\u2019t matter what the defendant says or who he is.<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t matter what the plea is. A judge accepting it does not mean the judge is ruling on it and confirming it or affirming it. It is… This is a tough mountain to climb here in terms of the average, ordinary American trying to keep track of all this stuff — an you want to talk about built-in bias? The built-in bias for law enforcement cannot be denied.<\/p>\n
Law enforcement\u2019s just the same as the fire department, same as Santa Claus. They\u2019re all decent, it\u2019s all good, it\u2019s all fair. Nobody would waste time on the innocent and so forth. You know what the federal prosecutor conviction rate is? It\u2019s like 95%! That\u2019s what Ted Stevens and his lawyers beat, a 95% conviction rate in federal court. If you find yourself in federal court, and they\u2019re really lined up against you?<\/p>\n
You\u2019ve got a 5% chance of winning — while going broke, more than likely, in the process — if you choose to contest it, and who\u2019s got the money to compete with the United States Treasury? They don\u2019t. So here come the plea deals, and here come the process crimes, because prosecutors\u2019 offices are into stats. They\u2019re into convictions. Individual get bonused. They get hired with high-paying jobs in the private sector based on convictions and this kind of thing.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s just… I mean, it is what it is, and it\u2019s always been this way. There\u2019s nothing new about it. It\u2019s just that in this particular case, they already… For two years, they\u2019ve had their conclusion. For two years, they\u2019ve had what they know they want — their guilty pleas — and what they\u2019ve done is they\u2019ve spent two years trying to get there. However they can get there is what they\u2019re gonna do, because they know there isn\u2019t anybody that\u2019s gonna stop \u2019em. There isn\u2019t anybody that can.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
RUSH: Experts have a way of speaking to make themselves sound authoritative and believable when they may not even know what they're talking about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":294593,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[12,1],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n