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It's the new year and time for the new you. You've thought about running for political office, but don't know where to start. Before you start any planning, you need to secure your name online with a yourname.vote web domain. This means your constituents will know they are learning about the real you when they surf the web. Secure your domain from godaddy.com today. Welcome to another episode of Breaking Battlegrounds with your host Sam Stone. Chuck Warren out of studio off in the
sky blue yonder today. But we have in studio with us and we are so excited to have helping co-host the program today, former state legislator Michelle Ugenti-Rita. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm happy to be here. And folks, as always, we have a fantastic lineup of guests for you today. Towards the end of the program in our final segment, we're going to have Dan McLaughlin continuing the conversation about the Bragg indictment of Donald Trump. But
But first up, someone I am very excited to talk to, Dr. Greg Autry, clinical professor of space leadership, policy and business in the Thunderbird School of Global Management, affiliate professor with the Interplanetary Initiative at Arizona State University. He has an folks. This guy has an amazing background at the convergence of science, space science and commerce. We're really excited to have him on the program because, frankly, he's
Humanity is on the verge of a next great exploration, I think, that's going to totally transform, hopefully for the better, humanity. Absolutely. And Greg has also served on the NASA agency review team and as the White House liaison to NASA under President Donald Trump. So welcome to the program, Dr. Greg Autry.
Hey, glad to be here. Sam, Michelle. Welcome. So Greg, tell us a little bit about your work and some of the things that you've been focused on. And then I want to get more specifically into what is the future in space for humans and also the kind of geopolitical conflicts that are going to be coming along with it. So we'll get into that in just a moment. But tell folks a little bit more about your background, because I think you have one of the most fascinating stories.
sort of resumes and experiences of people I've met in the last few years.
Yeah, you know, if life isn't going to be interesting, don't do it. So I actually started out as a video game developer with a company I launched in high school. I owned a company that did clinical software development for Kaiser Permanente, programmed medical devices, worked on some torpedoes at a Honeywell defense plant. And then I moved in. So you're saving people and snuffing them out at the same time. Yeah.
I'm sorry. I'm putting you on the spot. Peace through superior firepower, Sam. You don't have to snap anybody out if everybody knows you can. That's the Reagan maxim right there. Absolutely love it.
Yeah, yeah. Weakness invites aggression. It's the current maxim, I think. But we can get into that. Anyway, I moved on to teach entrepreneurship at the University of California, Irvine, after completing my MBA there, as well as macroeconomics. They convinced me to stay and do my PhD at Irvine. And an interesting thing happened. The professor that was going to be my my
my graduate PhD advisor, uh, took the opportunity to go to rice for a couple of years and I ended up without an advisor. And, uh, uh, Peter Navarro stepped up to, uh, to be my PhD advisor. Uh,
Peter and I had worked together and written together for some time, but then we began teaching macroeconomics together, and we wrote a book called Death by China in 2010, which turned out to be really influential in resetting American expectations of what that relationship meant.
For years we'd been sold that China is going to be our friend in the global marketplace. And if we make them rich and powerful, they will liberalize and become good actors on the world stage. We made them rich and powerful.
We did. And what we got was a rich and powerful authoritarian dictatorship that is now a peer level of military aggressor. And I've learned about this. And COVID. And COVID, yeah. Let's not forget that. Yeah. Thanks, China. So we warned about all that. Got a lot of criticism in academia because academia loves China for a variety of different reasons. Not least of which is the funding. Yeah.
Yeah, the funding at both the institutional level and, frankly, people who are individually co-opted with inappropriate funding, but they own our higher education institutions. Another topic I could get into, we made a movie, Death by China. It's on Amazon Prime, if you look for it, narrated by Martin Sheen. I'm going to have to watch it. I didn't know that had been turned into a movie.
Yeah, it had. I really enjoyed it. I was the producer on that. Peter directed it. Anyway, Donald Trump endorsed the book. I had mailed off books to about 50 influential people, and he was the one that showed the most enthusiasm for it. And I went off to teach at University of Southern California, where I taught entrepreneurship, and I focused on, during this whole period, studying the commercial space industry, which was emerging in
In Southern California at that time, people probably might have seen the Virgin Galactic announcement by Richard Branson in 2005. SpaceX and Blue Origin were founded in 2003. That's exactly when I began to study that industry. So I became really well connected in that industry early on when nobody took it seriously, I remember. Mm-hmm.
Going back to my school, I'm saying, you know, there's this commercial space thing happening. I'm studying it. We should do a course on this. And I got back the attitude, no, no, no. Space is just for government. It's a military industrial complex activity. That's not an appropriate place to study entrepreneurship. And I'm like, I've met this fellow named Elon Musk, and I think you're going to hear from him one day.
I think some people are hearing more from him these days than they want to. What do they want to? And I can tell you, I spent some time with Elon and an hour long interview with him. I saw the BBC just did that. I did one with him a few years ago. It's an amazing tour de force of conversational entertainment and, and gamemanship. So anyway, yeah,
In 2016, I get a call about joining the massive transition team, the agency review team, part of the broader presidential transition team. And I was pleased to run off to D.C. and help set our current national agenda in space, which includes the Artemis program, returning to the moon.
We made the recommendation to re-stand up a National Space Council, which was done under the Vice President. Vice President Pence ran that, and we made the decision to recommend a Space Force be created so that we could have a more focused approach to our existing military space assets. Then I was asked to stay as White House liaison in 2017, which I did for a short period before returning to USC.
And in 2020, the president asked me to replace Jeff DeWitt, who was the chief financial officer at NASA. Jeff, as you of course know, was treasurer of Arizona before that and then has returned to Arizona politics. And so I was nominated to be the chief financial officer at NASA. Unfortunately, the Senate had a meltdown in 2020 and
Mr. O'Connell never scheduled a floor vote on my confirmation hearing. So I ended up not knowing where to go. I was
I was teaching, doing some work at Oxford for them in the UK. I had a kind of relationship with Imperial College there where I'm a visiting professor now. I was working with FIT, the Florida Institute of Technology, on a summer program at Kennedy Space Center, International Space University, which is a French-based group. There's...
I mean, before you continue, because your resume is just beyond insane. I mean, quite frankly, it's not the kind of thing that folks who are listening to talk radio oftentimes get to hear from.
I want to focus a little bit on what is humanity's future in space? Where is this going? Because I think the creation of the Space Force was insanely necessary despite the criticism, but far beyond that, there is enormous opportunity out there for us. Yeah. So let me just finish that. So I wanted to start a space education program because I think the future of humanity is at a tipping point that is –
perhaps the most important one in all of our history. So I ended up at Arizona State University. I looked closely at Embry-Riddle, but Arizona had a real interest in creating a cross-the-university domain interdisciplinary space approach, and they do some great things there. And I was super impressed. My friend who ran the
Pluto program, the New Horizons program, Alan Stern recommended me to Lindy Elkin-Tatton, who's the VP at ASU, and I was really impressed with what was going on. So I joined the Thunderbird School of Global Management there where I'm running the first program to educate space policy and management leaders in a dedicated graduate program. And the reason is because we are at this moment
that is, I think, the equivalent of the age of exploration, the 15th and 16th century. And at that moment in time, we could have ended up with a very different future
The Chinese, in particular, had a vast fleet of ships in the 15th century that were exploring the world. They went all the way from China into the Middle East and down the coast of Africa, and they were going out in the Pacific. Some people think they might have made it all the way to the Americas in as early as 1420. That's not clear, but nonetheless, they were capable of doing that. They were doing trade with India before the Europeans got there.
And if they had continued that, and if the Europeans hadn't stepped up, we'd probably be living in a world where you and I would be speaking Mandarin.
But what happened was the Europeans stepped up and began to explore the world and exported their culture. And the Chinese made the fateful decision to step back. There was a death of the third Ming emperor who was promoting this program. And the bureaucrats in China basically said, we're not spending money on this anymore. And luckily for Europeans, the European powers did. They did.
Luckily, the Spanish stepped up and funded Columbus, and we ended up with a world where we have the values that we have today. So what does the commercialization of space kind of look like? That's what I want to really delve into. We're now at the point where we're going to explore and expand into the space.
the solar system. We want to bring the values of America and the enlightenment with us. And it's super important we commit to that and stick with it. Because if we don't, we're going to have the reverse of that. And we're going to end up with the communist Chinese government doing that. What America brings to this is commercialization, right? So you've got people like Elon Musk building rockets cheaper, faster, and more productively than the government ever did. Under the space shuttle, you flew once every two months, maybe.
It costs a billion dollars or more a launch. It costs $80,000 a kilogram to put something in orbit. Musk is flying every week. It costs $5,000 a kilogram to put something in orbit, and the pace is increasing while the price goes down. This is creating an incredible economic opportunity for all sorts of businesses to access space in a way they couldn't.
We have just about a minute before we go to break here, Greg. What is the first area? And probably this is a longer answer, so we can touch on it more when we come back here. But what I want to get into when we come back is where are the first areas of commercialization? What is that going to look like? What sort of industries are those going to be? Yeah, well, we already have it. We just don't often think about it. So you're carrying around in your cell phone, of course, a GPS receiver, which is talking to GPS satellites, right? That's right.
Every factory in the world is timed by GPS signals. Every financial transaction is timed by that. You're using it for communications. You're using it when you go to Google Maps and click on satellite view and look at the territory there. It's amazing to think how much that has changed in the last few years. We're going to explore that a little bit more with Dr. Greg Autry when Breaking Battlegrounds comes back in just a moment.
Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your host Sam Stone. Chuck Warren out of studio today. Thank you to Michelle Ugenti-Rita for joining us. And on the line with us right now, Dr. Greg Autry.
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All right. Continuing on with Dr. Greg Autry. Greg, when we went to break, we were talking about how space is already being commercialized. We see it in our lives every day and what a change that is with GPS and satellites, all the things that are going on. I want to touch more on that. What is the future of commerce and space? And then obviously also the strategic implications right now because –
Even if people don't seem to recognize it broadly in society, we're in a new space race. We're back to, in some sense, the 1960s. We are.
We are. And what's interesting about the commercial part is that it has changed the whole paradigm. So space has always been a domain of national defense concern, going back to when the Germans developed the first rockets with the Wernher von Braun and when the U.S. and Russian programs started. But if you look at the war in Ukraine, Ukraine has been able to leverage commercial space assets to basically outperform the Russian governmental space assets. So they've used
satellite imaging from commercial companies like Maxar and Planet to track Russian troop movements and bridge building and do damage assessment of their own attacks.
They've used Elon Musk's Starlink system to maintain command and control and allow people behind the lines to communicate where the Russians have attacked the Ukrainian Internet. This has not gone unnoticed on the Russians and Chinese, and they are going to have a hard time catching up with American ingenuity and commercial vigor. So this is our secret sauce that's going to let us win Space Race 2.0 versus the authoritarians.
So that's, I think, an important concept for people to understand because everything that happens in China, even if it's commercial activity, is still government activity. And it's subject in some form to government control, which means it isn't as free to develop new technologies, develop new ideas as U.S. commercial activity is.
Yeah, and for a specific example, there's several commercial companies that call themselves commercial that are building rockets and launching them in China and trying to get even American companies to put their satellites on them. All of these companies are flying three-stage solid rockets, mobile platforms that look exactly the same. And why is that?
Because they're actually Chinese military intercontinental ballistic missiles that come right out of a Chinese government factory and are handed to these companies because China wants to create a commercial space industry. And being the central planners they are, this is the way they think they're doing it. These companies have 3D renderings of what they're going to build in the future, which are all copies of basically SpaceX rockets. But what they're flying now is ICBMs.
Do you see real commercial travel into space? I know we've had celebrities and billionaires launch themselves, you know, into space. But I mean, but do you see this on a on a regular kind of commercial level for the everyday person?
I do indeed. And last year was kind of the tipping point there. We saw SpaceX and Blue Origin make real commercial flights for paying passengers. I actually know several people that were on several of those flights. Now, they were expensive, but they're a lot less expensive than they were in the past. Would you get on one of those flights?
Oh, sure. In a moment. I don't think that's that it isn't without risk. But I served as an advisor to the Department of Transportation on their commercial space transportation committee at FAA. And I was the chair of the safety working group, the group that oversaw that issue and advised FAA on that.
ideas behind what they'll need to do when they will have to regulate the industry eventually. So I'm fairly familiar with that. It's not riskless, but nothing fun is. I could kill myself skiing, frankly. That happens all the time. I mean, so there's obviously a novelty and something spectacular about saying that you've been in space, but why would you...
What would be the rationale of going into space commercially? Do you envision visiting places? Is it just to say that you're in orbit? I mean, I'm just curious what you think the future commercially looks like in the next 50 to 100 years. I know that's kind of looking far out, but I think you kind of have to when you're talking about this level of exploration. Sure.
Yeah, and it requires a long-term thinking that the United States sometimes isn't so good at doing. We really need to think in decades. But right now, there's a huge demand for just, I want the experience of being in space. Right. And there's a lot of people there. And the number will grow bigger as the cost comes down. I think eventually you'll be able to do this for $50,000, which is a lot of money, but it's the vacation of a lifetime. Yeah.
People are spending... Are you landing on a planet? What are you doing? No, gosh, no. No, no, no. In most cases, you're doing a suborbital space flight like Alan Shepard did, and you're going up for a few minutes and seeing the Earth, and from above, experiencing a few minutes of weightlessness and coming back down. Wonderful. In some cases, you're doing a few orbits or going to the International Space Station. Mm-hmm.
Someday people will go to the moon. But the point being, tourism and what we call sovereign astronauts or countries that can't afford to build rockets and spacecraft want to have astronauts. So there's a lot of business and American companies like Axiom are lining up customers from around the world, whether that's the Saudis or the government of Chile or Taiwan, you know, wants to send an astronaut. They're going to put them on an American commercial vehicle.
Eventually, though, we're going to have point-to-point travel. You're going to be able to fly from Phoenix to Tokyo in 40 minutes. There you go. On a rocket that will go outside the atmosphere on a ballistic trajectory and then come back down, much like an ICBM but with a peaceful purpose. Wow. ICBM with a better landing. Yeah.
There you go. And that will require some really interesting geopolitics to make happen, but it's technically very feasible. Obviously, if I can throw a large payload with a bomb in it, I could also throw an express FedEx package or some people in that direction.
That's incredible. It's unbelievable how fast this started to evolve really when Elon Musk got involved. But really, it's the commercialization that seems to be driving the technology at this point, much more so than government.
Yeah, and it's not just Elon. To be fair, Paul Allen, Bill Gates' business partner, was heavily involved in this before he died. You've got Jeff Bezos. You've got Richard Branson. And in my opinion, you have to think seriously. If you think that group of people are wrong, that's highly unlikely. Conservatives may have their disagreements with some of those folks, but they're not stupid by any means.
I mean, these are some of the smartest people on the planet. They are. And if you spend time with them, you'll find that they're kind of crazy, disruptive libertarians. I think most conservatives would probably like them more than they think. A lot of conservatives have suddenly realized they like Elon Musk more than they think because they've actually started listening to him instead of being told about him by somebody else.
That's a great point. And to your former boss, that was, I thought, the difference when he won the 2016 election was that he got out in front and let people hear from him directly. It wasn't being filtered. Right. And then the news got smart and they cut him off for the second one. And that really, I think, affected it. We're going to be coming back in just a moment with more from Dr. Greg Autry.
For Chuck Warren, I'm Sam Stone. Michelle Ugenti-Rita in the studio with us today. Jeremy in the booth. Jamie, as always, our technology specialist, making sure all this comes out on time. We'll be back in just a moment. Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your host, Sam Stone. Chuck Warren out of studio today. In studio with us, Michelle Ugenti-Rita. And on the line, Dr. Greg Autry.
All right, Greg, so let's get into it. Why the average person should give a damn about space exploration, about the commercialization of space exploration. We left off with talking about the potential of traveling what would take, you know, a day, several days in a matter of hours. To me, I think that's huge. But let's dive into other things that the average person would care about as it affects their lives.
Yeah. Well, obviously, as I mentioned, we care about the national security issues and we care about carrying American values into the future of humanity. But the average person should care about jobs, investment opportunities, financial growth and great new products in space forever.
offers all of that, everything from limitless, actually clean energy to medical revolutionary devices that are going to extend and improve the lives of so many people. We can grow livers in space made from your own stem cells so that you can have a liver transplant when you need it instead of waiting for somebody to die and not have to be dependent on immunosuppressant drugs when you need that. Space lets us do that? Sure.
Space lets us do that because when you try to grow an artificial liver on Earth, you get a liver pancake because of gravity. It doesn't grow into three-dimensional organs. But in space, guess what? And we're working on retinas to replace the people who have things like macular degeneration to restore their vision, cancer treatments. There are some amazing things medically happening.
New materials that can't be made on Earth, like metallic foams and perfect crystals, fiber optic cables that are better. They're going to transform industries across the board and give us consumer goods that you can't imagine. And there's going to be a lot of jobs involved in that. So you actually see a space manufacturing future coming.
Yeah, it's called ISM, In-Space Manufacturing. And there's a lot of people working on some amazing things. They're testing them now on the space station with support from NASA and a program called INSPAA, In-Space Production Applications. But they're going to move to commercial space stations, which are going to be flying in the next couple of years.
So that kind of begs me to go on. Yes, you're going to see America, I think, take over manufacturing in this new sector because nobody else is ready to do it yet. We really need to push that and maintain that competitive advantage. And that makes me think about ownership. Who owns the space? How does. Oh, wow. Do we have an hour? I wanted to launch that question in the shortest segment. I was told not to do that.
The U.S. signed under a treaty in 1968, which is kind of a socialist view of space belongs to all humanity and you can't own anything in our sovereign territory. This is somewhat problematic. The U.S. since then has been working hard to interpret the treaty in a way that allows commercial companies to do what they need to do. But we could do a whole segment on the complexities of that issue and the geopolitics around it. It's a huge topic. Yeah.
Yeah, it's incredible how much this is going to become the next contest of great nations, I think. It absolutely is. How aggressive is China? How much are they putting into this and how big a threat? Super aggressive. Super.
Super aggressive. And the head of their lunar program very clearly said that he recognizes that the Apollo program is what caused the U.S. to be the ascendant global technology power of the late 20th century. The Internet, the personal computer and the cell phone revolution, all these things stem from investments that were made in the space program and from engineers and scientists that were trained or inspired by it.
And so they want to replicate that in China because they want to own the future of humanity, and they want to take their totalitarian, authoritarian, anti-religious, anti-individual model into space to ensure that the future of humanity looks like it does in Beijing today.
In this race, who's winning in this race to commercialize? We are. We are, absolutely. America, good. I'm wiping my brow right now. Slow down. Yeah, we are far ahead both in governmental as well as military and in our commercial sector most assuredly, but we have to keep it up. Absolutely.
Yeah, this is, I think... Rush our competition. Yeah, absolutely. Our competition is relentless, ruthless, and determined. We're going to let Greg go here in just a moment. I've got to do another sponsor read coming up here. But I really bring this back to the 1960s and the sort of sense of national unity that was created behind this mission to get to the moon.
And I really think it's important that we start talking about recreating that. Maybe this is an area where left and right can start to agree again. We have real opportunity. Greg, I was...
It was an international agreement, too. Everybody respected America for that at a time where they didn't like us for a lot of other reasons. Love it. Greg Autry, thank you so much for joining us today. Folks, you can follow him on Twitter at Greg W. Autry. Make sure you put the W in there. You're going to get the wrong person. Greg, thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate having you. Take care. Bye-bye.
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right about the same time. Breaking Battlegrounds back in just a moment.
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Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your host Sam Stone. Chuck Warren out of studio today. In here with me, Michelle Legente-Rita. Thank you so much for joining us today, Michelle. My pleasure. I'm having fun. And on the line with us now, Dan McLaughlin, senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at the National Review Institute. We had him on last week. We were talking about the first three pieces in a five-piece series he has been writing about the Trump indictment in New York. What's that? I'm just joking.
Nobody's heard about any such thing. There's nothing going on in the world. At all. Yeah, no. Dan, thank you again so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. Really appreciate having you here. Can you real quick recap the first three pieces and then I want to get into the most recent two that you've done.
Yeah, so basically, I mean, to recap the Trump indictment, at least the first Trump indictment, perhaps we should call it, but the one we have so far. The Trump indictment that's landed already. There's more in the wings. Yeah, there's more that may be coming. But this is the Manhattan district attorney. So it's New York state law.
And essentially they've indicted him for the hush money payments that were made by Michael Cohen, Trump's lawyer, to Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election to cover up her alleged affair with Trump, $130,000. And, you know, Trump repaid Cohen, basically,
Basically, Cohen sent him invoices saying, you know, this is legal fees. Trump repaid him. He paid him twice as much, in fact, as Cohen had laid out to Daniels in order that Cohen could list this on his taxes as legal fees and pay taxes on it, which he should not have owed. So he overpaid his taxes.
And could then, you know, overpay his taxes and not, you know, come out having lost money for having done so. And to some degree hide what the money was used for. Yeah. I mean, the theory, the legal charge here, and we'll get into the details of that in a minute, the legal charge here is falsifying business records.
So the argument is that the invoices, Trump's checks, and the recording of those checks on the general ledger of various entities of the Trump organization constituted false business records. And Trump has been charged with 34 of those. So the first...
uh... the payments were actually made to daniel from twenty sixteen before the election the repayments of cohen were made throughout twenty seventeen now the federal limitations is five years for a felony or two years for a misdemeanor uh... and so the first part of my theory for the discussed the fact that look all this stuff happened more than five years ago certainly quite a bit more than two years ago uh... so
you know brett requires some fairly creative lawyering in order to say that the stuff isn't all barred by the statute of limitations and if you can't prove that he's got a felony charge of each other the misdemeanor charge uh... no about a creative lawyering can't save it so the second part of my theory dealt with the fact that uh...
you know, what exactly is the felony here? And, you know, and Bragg never really says, but he seems to be trying to say that these things should have been reported as federal campaign finance, you know, that this is a federal campaign finance violation, that essentially this amounted to, you
you know campaign expenditures uh... and and so i could walk through some of the problems with that in the third part of my period i focus specifically on the fact that uh...
that the felony that supposedly was being covered up, because it's a federal law felony, if in fact that is what Bragg is charging, you know, it may be something that the law simply doesn't allow Bragg to try to use a backdoor state law way to enforce federal law because, you know, the executive power of the United States is vested in the president and the attorney general and not
the district attorney of the county of New York. And the reason that covering up a felony is important, just to be clear,
is that false business records are a misdemeanor. They become a felony if you show, in addition, that the false business records were done to cover up some other crime. So, you know, that's kind of what I covered in the first three parts of my series, and then got into sort of the last two big problems with this case.
I want to start there. And for folks, make sure you go to nationalreview.com and check these pieces out for yourself. Make sure you read them. So I think these are, Dan, I think you've done some of the most thorough work explaining this and really getting into the meat of the subject here. The ridiculousness of the Trump indictment part for the missing fraud.
Yeah, so, and again, I'm trying as best as I can to sort of wade through the legalese here and make it comprehensible to people who are not lawyers, which I hope I've done, but...
You know, one of the things... I'm not a lawyer and I got it. Yeah, well, one of the things that the false business records statute says is that, you know, you have to prove the defendant did this with intent to defraud. And the courts have additionally read into that because it's a traditional element of fraud that the fraud has to be material. In other words, you have to... Like, it's not material, for example, if you lie to somebody about something unimportant or if you lie to them about something where they already know the truth. Um...
which is very often one of the problems that prosecutors have had going after Trump, because Trump tends to puff up a lot of stuff to people who already see through it. Um,
So it really is a question of where's the victim, right? Trump basically is accused of lying to his own checkbook. That's really what this comes down to, right? Because the invoices go to Trump. Trump writes checks. They get recorded in the general ledger of what appears to be two accounts in the Trump organization that are just Trump's own money. So they're not like his operating businesses. And so the question is,
how do you show that he had intended to defraud anybody? Yeah, he lied in his records because he was trying to cover something up that he was embarrassed about. The whole point of making the hush money payments is that he was embarrassed about this stuff, whether it was political embarrassment, not wanting his wife to know, or some combination of the two. Well,
Well, I want to I want to stop and touch on that point real quick, Dan, because there's been some reporting come out, come out since. Actually, I saw it. I don't know if it came out before we talked to you or after. But going back that this had actually been published, published many years earlier in a small paper. And I think it was like Alabama or something like that, that that all this had come out. And Stormy Daniels had apparently been telling this story to people earlier.
about Trump for many years. Yeah, although the simple fact is, I mean, he did pay her $130,000. So he was trying to keep her from, you know, poking this up into somewhere where it would catch national attention. And look, obviously, a guy with Trump's history
there's going to be people telling stories, and some of those stories are going to be true and some of them won't be. But the essential problem here is that when you say intent to defraud, I looked through all of the cases where the courts have ruled on prosecution under this statute, and they're always looking at like,
You know, it's it's either it's a business putting this in some sort of, you know, either either somebody's doing like an insurance fraud or benefits fraud where they're actually submitting a false document to somebody. Or it's like, you know, cops and nurses who are misreporting things in their log books that are intended to conceal stuff from their own employers.
There's a variety of different fact patterns, and even the one time when they used this in a prominent campaign finance case under state campaign finance law, they were arguing that not that it was some secret record, but that the Brooklyn Assemblyman actually had an illegal obligation to file something under state law that he didn't do, which is not the theory that's charged here. So one way or the other, if Trump
it's just lying in a private document that he didn't intend anybody to see. I don't see how legally this can stand up as an intent to defraud case. I mean, and, and, you know, people might say, well, why would you ever lie in a private document? But people do that. Um,
You know, I mean, if you're like if you're if you're running, let's say you're you know, you're running some sort of classified national security operation. You might you might put code words for things in your documents, not because you're trying to lie to somebody, but because you're worried that if this thing leaks, somebody might find out the name of your informant or that the.
details of some weapons system. You know, I used to do mergers and acquisitions cases occasionally when I was in legal practice. And if you had a company that was trying to take over some other company, you write a legal memo to your client, which is intended to be private, privileged, confidential. You would still use code names. Bankers do this, too. Use code names for the companies, not because you're trying to defraud anybody, but because in case this memo gets mislaid and somebody sees it,
But, you know, you don't want them to figure out what company is trying to buy some other company. So it's just lying in a private document that you never intend anybody to see. I don't see how that stands up in court as intent to defraud within the meaning of the statute.
Yeah, it seems like it's really this case has been stretched as far as they can possibly creatively take it at this point. Yeah. And, you know, it's one thing to say, well, you're stretching the statute of limitations or you're stretching, you know, certain like issues of federal state relations. Those are important legal questions and some of them have important consequences. But he's also stretching to make the crime at all. Right. If he doesn't show intent to defraud, he's got no crime.
Yeah, to me, that has been the central issue to this the whole time. Who's been harmed by this? Who's the victim? Other than Melania. I mean, there must have been. Obviously, there was a rationale for why he did pay off Stormy Daniels. But the real question, I guess, is.
Is that illegal? Is there some kind of illegality with that? And there's a couple different courts. There's a court of public opinion. There's the actual court. And that makes me want to ask a question. Do you think he can get a fair trial? I mean, it is hard to get. I mean, first of all, you know, in theory, you want a jury of people who are unfamiliar with the defendant, which is... He has to go to space.
Right. I'd be afraid to go in front of a jury of 12 people in the United States of America who have never heard of Donald Trump. There are such people, but I've never heard of them. Yeah. Boy, that's a great point. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, you're just going to have to, you know, look, I'm sure there's going to be a huge fight over, like, jury selection. Like, you know, can you find anybody, you know, are you allowed to ask them who they voted for and all that sort of thing? I mean, it's sort of, but it's sort of, I mean, that is an issue that comes up in political cases all the time, though. What is unusual is that, I mean, the strategic disadvantage often that happens to Republican politicians is,
is that typically these cases, you know, even with like a senator or a governor who represents a red state, often the big prosecutor office that will go after somebody is in the bluest part of the state, the city, right? Absolutely. And so, you know, that can be a problem. Yeah, absolutely. Dan, we have just about two minutes left before we get to the end of the program here. I want to touch on the fifth column in the series, the indictment itself, part five, the indictment itself.
Tell folks what that's about. Yeah.
Yeah, so there's two different legal problems. I won't get into all the weeds of this, but with the indictment, which boiled down to, on the one hand, it takes the same crime and breaks it into too many different counts, right? For example, you know, on February 14th, 2017, Cohen sends an invoice, Trump writes a check, it gets listed in two places on the general ledger, and they charge that as four separate felonies. I mean, that's ridiculous, like charging him for every zero on the check, right?
But on the other hand, you know, if you're going to be able to, like, give notice to the defendant and manage the case and even figure out for double jeopardy purposes whether the jury is unanimous and all, you have to charge –
You not only shouldn't charge the same crime in too many different counts, you also can't charge too many crimes in one count. And that's the problem with Bragg not saying what crime he thinks Trump was trying to cover up, right? Because if he's throwing a bunch of different theories at the wall, Trump doesn't know how to defend himself against them. He could be surprised at trial.
And if Bragg throws out a bunch of different theories, he could end up with six jurors thinking one thing, six saying another. And you've got a jury verdict that looks unanimous, but really isn't. So there are Fifth Amendment problems with both of those things and restrictions on them under New York law. So, you know, I think that is yet another problem that Bragg has legally. Yeah, I would tend to say that.
They're getting into a place with this case where almost no matter what, the outcome gets appealed by either side. And this one's going to not stop with the jury decision. But I want to thank you for coming on again today, Dan McLaughlin. Folks, you can follow him on Twitter at Baseball Crank. Obviously, check him out at National Review Online, doing fantastic work there. Dan, thank you so much for joining us, folks.
Breaking Battlegrounds will be back on the air next week, but be sure to tune in for a podcast-only segment. Michelle and I are going to bounce a few things back and forth. Download, share, like those podcasts. Those are the lifeblood of radio these days. We really appreciate you tuning in every week. Breaking Battlegrounds will be back on the air next week.
Welcome back to the podcast-only segment of Breaking Battlegrounds. Folks, thank you so much for tuning in, downloading, subscribing to this podcast. We really appreciate it. Fantastic discussions today, Michelle. Loved it. Yeah, no, those were really good stuff. I thought Greg Autry...
You know, it's so interesting. I think a lot of times radio podcast shows like this, we spend a lot of time talking to politicians or people who are covering politicians or working around politics. I always find it fun to talk to somebody who isn't really directly involved in that world but is involved in business, commerce, industry, entertainment, something where their expertise –
goes far beyond what we find in politics most days. Absolutely. But ultimately, it's going to boil down to politics because, right? I mean, because all of that is going to need to be sorted out politically. So when you're it's going to be regulated, highly regulated, and the people in those industries are going to want to be protected by government and
It's all going to be political. Now, I got to say, I'm with you. I would sign up for a space flight if I was going somewhere. Like, if I get to go to a space station and spend a couple of days on it, I'm in. Actually, I'll take that risk. To be honest...
You couldn't pay me $10 million to get on a rocket ship. And if I need to feel weightless, I'll jump in the pool. Well, not to give away too much because we're definitely never supposed to bring up a lady's age, but I think you and I are about the same generation, which means we grew up in the need another seven astronauts era of NASA.
With the Challenger, you know. Oh, I do remember that. Yeah. Right. I think I think for for our generation, that really sort of scarred space for a lot of kids. It's like folks don't remember. They had every classroom in America because you had Christy McAuliffe, a teacher who was on that flight. There's some teachers I could think about. I'd want to put on that.
Red for Ed, I've got a few here. How many people can they take? Yeah, right. How many seats do they have? But yeah, no, I think that really scarred a lot of people from our generation because literally they had every classroom in America live tuned into this thing when the Challenger blew up. Oh, it was horrific. Yeah. I mean, what I thought was interesting was the science component when he brought up the
growing organs in space livers and eyeballs that's amazing that's a sci-fi movie if I ever and you never think about the difficulty of doing that kind of thing people have talked about you know creating organs from existing DNA for people but I would have never thought about that you know you end up with a
a pancake instead of a functioning organ. That's right. No, it was very fascinating. And I love how we ended it, which was America is dominating right now and we need to keep it up. And that's exactly the position that we need to be in. And that's what we do best. We thrive under pressure. And I'm excited to see what unfolds in the next couple of decades. That's
That's not a story you hear enough. No, it's inspiring. That's right. I think the other thing, too, and I've actually been taking I know this is kind of tangential, but I've been taking some solace in what's going on in Ukraine in terms of the technology problem.
imbalance between us and the Russian forces. Right. I mean, the Ukrainians are essentially being fighting with a tiny fraction of U.S. technology, technological warfare capability. And yet that's still far too much for the Russians. And the Russians and Chinese share a lot of commonalities in their military tech still. So I think that I think that's actually good news, regardless of what anyone thinks of the Ukraine conflict.
Well, and this is what we should be talking about, and this is what should be dominating Twitter, and not, you know, men playing in women's sports, unfortunately. That's occupying way too much attention because it's outrageous, but this is an inspiring story. He was very...
His resume is compelling. I just wanted to put my resume in a drawer. No, look, I take one look at a resume like that and I'll feel inadequate for the rest of the weekend here. I mean, this is going to be terrible. I like to travel. Right. I once built a volcano at a science fair. Right, I know. Baking soda volcano. I think that's impressive. I do. I mean, this was...
It's interesting when you talk to someone like that because they're operating on a different level than so many of the people that we meet and interact with in a day. One of the things I had talked to him in the past, which I found really interesting, is he had a student out at – I think it was USC. But they created from –
From the leftovers, the cuttings from both the SpaceX program and from NASA and some of the military stuff, the cut graphite parts. They're cutting and molding this graphite for all these rocket ships and so forth and so on. They found a way to take those and use them and to make them graphite nanotubes.
to run faster computers. Okay. We need people like that. Yeah, no. I mean, this is amazing stuff when you see this. I probably got that story entirely wrong. It's been like a year since you told it to me. I like the way you said it. It sounded... It sounds good that way, right? If I'm right or wrong, I don't know. Eh, it's radio. But I love hearing stories like that. And I do think on our side as Republicans right now, because there's...
We're sort of cross-cultural more right now with the education systems, right?
Well, we're at war with the institution. Right. You know, not with educating children and wanting to push, you know, our generations to make sure that they, you know, aspire to whatever level that they want to in terms of their educational endeavors. But we are at war with the bureaucrats. Who are running the universities. Yeah. And one of the things I think we forget sometimes is how valuable education
Those research universities are. I know. I know. It's a good point. There's a lot of there's been a lot of negative commentary on and well, look at just how universities have been behaving lately. Oh, they're out of control. I mean, it's, you know, these D.I. driven bureaucracies.
But that doesn't take away from how important their missions are and how important higher ed is and how important it is to feed these hungry minds as they go on to make things, develop things. I mean, we need that in a sophisticated, thriving culture and society. Yeah, Greg brought up that the mission to the moon, essentially Apollo, all that drove
Right.
And one of the things I know I'm kind of all over the place with this today, but it ties into something I think in immigration that again on our side we need to start paying attention to and being a little more nuanced when we're bringing people here for these scientific positions. We need to vet them carefully.
But then we need to give them the opportunity to stay and contribute here as American citizens and not send them back to China and anywhere else. With all of their wealth of knowledge and educational expertise that we invested in. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's American taxpayers and American ingenuity that created that opportunity.
And yet too often we're sending those folks back home to use what they've learned against us. And I think we've got to start thinking about the world as a competitive marketplace, you know, militarily, economically in every area. Once again, I think the ideas of this sort of happy all one world, which were really kind of dominant in the 80s and early 90s. I think we've gotten some reality checks about that.
We need to attract the best and brightest and then keep the best and brightest, whether that's here locally, nationally, but definitely internationally as well. Yeah. And one of the things I like about this program and having Greg on, so we're on the air here in Arizona, in Florida, in Texas, in Colorado. Those are actually kind of the leading space states right now. I was just going to say that. That's right. Yeah.
I mean, it's been Arizona's really taken a huge Florida's obviously the longtime leader in that Texas with SpaceX. But Arizona right now is coming up like a rocket. No pun intended. But I like that dark skies. We are. That's that's absolutely intended that. Yes, I did.
And I loved it. That was great. Now let's finish up with Trump. The Trump and Diamond. What did you think? Well, first, I love what Dan has done with these pieces. Broken it out. Yeah. You can understand it. Yeah. I think, and I wish everybody in the country would take the time to read his five pieces left and right because they're not political. They're really just kind of a statement of facts. And obviously he's a former attorney. He knows what he's talking about here in a way that most of the press does not. Look, this, I,
I think this is a joke, this indictment of Trump in New York. And if you're a Democrat, what kind of gets me is like, why would you want this, which is such a farcical indictment? When you have cases that at least... Have more merit on its face. Or at least might have some merit. Something. I mean, there might be some meat on those bones. I don't know. I've heard conflicting stories and I'm not an attorney. I can't say. It really has jumped the shark, unfortunately.
And I think it's hit a lot of Americans. Did you see, I forget who the president was that tweeted, I think one of the Latin American presidents or African presidents tweeted out something about it and just said, you know, if this happened in any other country in the world, what would they be saying? What would the people in the U.S. be saying about it, where the chief political opposition running for president is being indicted on political charges? And then he followed up and said America can't
lecture the rest of the world on democracy anymore. Well, yes, we can, but... We can and we will. Yeah, right, exactly. So that aside, the point that he was making is an astute one. I mean, you'd be calling it a banana republic, right? Because it looks like you've got a political agenda, a
pushing behavior, you know, with the AG's office in a way that has nothing to do about with upholding the law and everything to do about getting at your political opponent. If Alvin Bragg had made his announcement wearing a really ugly green jacket with giant shoulder boards and 73 medals he didn't earn, it would feel far more accurate and appropriate. Right, right, right. Exactly. We celebrate that for whatever reason. Yeah. Unreal. Well,
Michelle, thank you so much for joining us today. It's always a pleasure. Anything else you want to chat about with our audience? I mean, I don't know. I mean, I just for me right now, what is dominating my thinking is this women's sports bananas. I'm glad you bring that up. I want to talk about it because it's so outrageous. It's so mind blowing that we even have to discuss it, frankly, because there are some things you think that are just...
obvious. And I thought gender was one of them. You would think, I mean, it seems like about one of the most, it seems like one of the most obvious things on the planet. I mean, here's the thing. Nobody is actually complaining. I mean, no, no one would actually sign up for this essentially, but no one's complaining about a female, you know, biological female who wants to transition or pretend. I don't, I mean, I'm not big on this stuff, but
to be a male and wants to compete with males in sports, good luck. Well, that's the thing. The environment takes care of itself because you can't stay, you wouldn't be competitive. No, you get slaughtered. Right. Right? But you have these men who are fringe competitors. Right. Who all of a sudden now are dominating the,
In the women's sports. And it's all over the place. When the first couple examples of this, and I talked about this a couple of years ago when we had those Connecticut runners. Right. Who both were ranked in like the 300s in this state, right? Like these are, these are low, these are,
Back of the pack boys who go to go transition. I'm using air quotes here, folks. You can't see it, but I'm using air quotes transition into girls. And now they're number one and number two in the state of Connecticut. And they've got scholarships that are taken away from actual women to go to university to run. And we have institutions that are condoning this.
That's mind-boggling to me. And the athletes, the female athletes, the soccer player Megan Rapinoe and these... Absolutely. Are you kidding me? You know, I said this. I put out a tweet to this effect, but I think it's up to women to think
handle this situation, even though I think everyone should be appalled. We have to boycott events where this is condoned because it is a matter of fairness. And this goes against biology. This goes against competition because competition is based on, you know,
similar people at similar levels competing with one another. And obviously there is a physical advantage males have. And so to ask the public to somehow ignore that
Well, I mean, for example, every so often like the U.S. women's national soccer team will play like the under 17 boys and just get annihilated. Right. Right. Like there isn't a watch. There isn't a WNBA team that could beat a top high school men's team. Right. Like a top high school men's team would slaughter the WNBA champion. And that's obvious to anyone who watches this.
That doesn't mean women's sports is not worthy of having and watching and supporting and enjoying. Well, absolutely. But there's something deeper going on. There's just the unfairness component to our athletic system. But then there's like this okayness with ignoring facts and science and what actually is, you know, truth.
The truth is not something that's subjective. You know, facts are not subjective. They exist. And everyone is acting like you could just make up what you want. And that's a real problem for the fabric of our society on a larger scale. It's insane. I mean, this idea that facts don't matter, feelings are, you know. I identify or my truth, whatever that means. Truth is truth. Facts are facts. That's right.
Whether you agree with it or not, it's not any more valid because you don't agree with it or agree with it. It exists outside of you. We'll let that be the last word. That was perfect. Folks, Breaking Battlegrounds, back next week. The political field is all about reputation, so don't let someone squash yours online. Secure your name and political future with a yourname.vote web address from godaddy.com. Your political career depends on it.
