Legal AF by MeidasTouch - Trump’s Former TOP EXEC Makes STUNNING Admission

Episode Date: February 19, 2024

A former senior VP and head of construction for Trump who lead the team that built his beloved Trump Tower just admitted that Trump had lead a fraudulent company for years, and that he will say and do anything and lie to get re-elected. Michael Popok of Legal AF breaks down the fraudulent myth of Trump’s business success and how he dupes his followers. Thanks to Henson Shaving! Visit HensonShaving.com/LEGALAF to pick the razor for you and use code LEGALAF for 2 years worth of free blades! Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/meidastouch-podcast Legal AF: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/legal-af The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-politicsgirl-podcast The Influence Continuum: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/mea-culpa-with-michael-cohen The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show Burn the Boats: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/burn-the-boats Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 Political Beatdown: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/political-beatdown Lights On with Jessica Denson: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/lights-on-with-jessica-denson On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Uncovered: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/maga-uncovered Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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or visit connexontario.ca. Please play responsibly. Now as Barbara Ress, she is a former executive vice president of the Trump Organization where she worked for 18 years. She's the author of the book, The Tower of Lies, what my 18 years of working with Donald Trump reveals about him. Let me read you a little something

from Judge Ngoran's ruling, what he said about the Trump family's inability to acknowledge any wrongdoing. He said, their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological. They're accused only of inflating asset values to make more money. The documents prove this over and over again. This is a venial sin, not a mortal sin. Defendant did not commit murder or arson. They did not rob a bank at gunpoint.

Donald Trump is not Bernie Madoff. Yet, defendants are incapable of admitting the error of their ways. Instead, they adopt a see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil posture that the evidence belies. Does that sound familiar to you? Certainly. Last year, you said to CNN, you thought that Donald Trump was enjoying this process. Do you think he still is? I don't think he's like he likes getting

Buffeted around and and things being said about him that is so awful Such as what was in the ruin, but I think that he is okay With it to the extent that he can spin it and he's already started that and I think that he is okay with it to the extent that he can spin it. And he's already started that. And I think in his heart, he believes one, he's never, he's going to get away with it. And two, he thinks that, you know, he can make money off of it somehow, get more fundraising, more people to feel sorry for him. Oh my God, look what they're doing to Trump. He must be president.

Let's give him some money. Do you have a sense that, you sense that the emperor has no clothes? Is the real Donald Trump, has he been exposed now? Like to think so, but I'm not certain of that. No, absolutely not. Because exposed to whom? To the rest of us, the normal people, intelligent people, thinking people care and people know.

We knew all of this before. We knew before he was even accused. But he exposed to his supporters. No, no, nothing's going to change his supporters. And there are two kinds of supporters. The one that Martin Locke, Locke Step, and Mega Guys, and wealthy people who don't care what happens to the Constitution as long as their taxes are low and the taxes are low and there's no regulation. There's no regulation of anything. Yes. This is Michael Popak, Legal AF. I'm doing a series of hot takes about the myth and to puncture the myth of Donald Trump being a successful business person. He's never been. He likes to talk about being a self-made person. He never was. He inherited

all of his wealth from his father, Fred Trump, who was a successful developer, primarily in Queens, not in Manhattan in New York. And you just heard there from Barbara Ress, who I don't want to be consigned to the trash bin of history. She is an important figure with insider knowledge into the inner workings of the Trump Organization. She was, for the longest time, Donald Trump's senior vice president for construction, for the few buildings that he did build, including Trump Tower and the Grand Hyatt redevelopment next to Grand Central Station in New York, his first project in 1980. She was on the construction team or led the construction team. She was considered to be one of the first women that ever led a major New York development when Trump Tower was done

in 1980 and 1984. She served as the senior vice president for construction for the Trump Organization for 18 years and overlapped a little bit with Fred Trump but mainly worked with Donald Trump. And she's on record, including in a memoir that she wrote called Tower of Lies written in 2020, that Donald Trump will stop

at nothing in order to get elected president or reelected president in this case, that he's all about lying and cheating. And she specifically says and calls out exactly what we've observed in that clip that you just saw. I mean, it's not just about him being, as the judge has noted, pathological, along with the family, in their coverup of the fraud that's at the heart of the Trump Organization.

But here, in contrast to, let's say, Michael Cohen, who also served for a long period of time as the in-house lawyer and consul here for Donald Trump, you have the impeachable reputation of Barbara Ress and her coming out and being a constant and frequent proper critic of Donald Trump. The scary part about her observation, knowing him so well, the psyche of Donald Trump is that the lies and the mythology that he's created for himself is not easily punctured, as she noted about followers of Donald Trump, that they fall,

as you heard, into two camps. One, MAGA, who will follow and lockstep anything he does. And secondly, business people who all they care about is lower no taxes and no regulation, and they could care less about the US Constitution or our democracy. I mean, when you hear, you know, commentators say it on Midestouch or on Legal AF or me, you know, I'm a commentator. I'm somebody who uses my analytic powers that comes from years of being a lawyer in the business world in and around New York in particular to talk about Donald Trump from my lens through my lens.

Barbara Russ, she was there. She knows where all the bodies are buried. She said, as you heard in the Ari Melbert interview, she said, um, or yeah, in the interview, just her, sorry, she said, there's nothing that she read in the opinion issued by judge and Goron that strikes her as being out of character with the person that she observed for the years that she worked for him. And that means the pathological coverup, refusal to admit the truth, even when it's staring you in the face,

even at the risk of great financial loss or penalty, doesn't matter to Donald Trump. And apparently it doesn't matter to his followers. I mean, she hit the nail on the head, which is why I wanted to bring it to your attention again here on Legal AF when she said, you know, he'll make money off of it. He thinks he can outrun this race, right? The prosecutors won't catch him.

This is an elaborate game of catch me if you can. And Donald Trump is just going to keep, you know, posing as a pilot and getting on the next plane and forging the next check until he makes it to the next town, hoping that the finish line for him is winning, not just running, winning the presidential election November 5th. And there, other than the state prosecutions like in Georgia, he's got the prosecutions and the prosecutors in the palm of his hand, and he can crush them and end them and pardon himself for all things federal.

And he's just hoping that he gets there and his supporters are giving him the boost that he needs. And he's grifting off the back of all of these lies. But as Barbara Russ said, it's, or as I've said also in my prior hot takes, it's not the prosecutor's fault that he committed crime or the attorney general's fault that he committed persistent fraud. It's Donald Trump's fault.

There's an old line. If you don't do the crime, if you can't do the time, blaming the judges, the prosecutors, the attorney generals, who's sleeping with who? We're not sleeping with who? Based on his indictments, who cares? This is about the lack of moral, the lack of conviction, the lack of character of a somebody that's running to be the leader of the free world.

You can't just worry about your pocketbook, your purse, your bank account. Although if you look at it, more jobs have been created under Joe Biden than under Donald Trump by far more. The economy is humming. You're starting to see it where it matters at the grocery store in your, in your shopping cart, in your checkout totals, in your kids clothes, in your back to school clothes, you know, come, come the summer at the gas pump. That's what matters to the American people. And I understand that. And it's not just your 401k, although that's humming. It's not the stock market, that's humming. It's not the dollar versus other currency around the world

because that's doing great. But every measure the economy under Joe Biden, he's making his closing argument now by showing you how the economy has roared back, avoided a certain recession, or not depression, but a certain recession at least, bounced it back through management, through his federal reserve chairman. And in stand and contrast, you've got people like Donald Trump, who's the people that know him the best are either completely critical and telling us

about his moral failings, his fraudulent scheme, the larceny that's in his heart and in the fiber of his being, and we have to listen to it, right? Here's the thing. Everyone knows how annoying cheap razors are. They cut you. They irritate you. And and heck they frustrate you. And don't get me started with subscription razor services, can you say, beh.

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Barbara Russ, 18 years head of construction for Donald Trump. Listen to the words that she's saying about him. Michael Cohen, the insider, insider consul, he went to jail over Donald Trump. Listen to the words that she's saying about a Michael Cohen, the insider, insider consul. Yeah, he went to jail over Donald Trump for Donald Trump, took a bullet for Donald Trump, if you will, professionally and otherwise, um, in doing his bidding. And then who's left Alan Weisselberg, the chief financial officer, Donald Trump hired, um, and inherited from his father already went to jail for 100 days

for committing tax fraud under the watchful eye of one Donald Trump. And in addition to that, he's about to plead guilty to perjury, for having perjured himself in the Manhattan DAs, I'm sorry, the New York attorney general's civil fraud case against Donald Trump that just went so south against Donald. Jeff McConnie, controller, 20 year controller for Donald Trump. Right. He avoided going to prison only because he cooperated in the attorney in the Manhattan DA's case for tax fraud against Donald Trump. Everybody else in and around Donald Trump lawyers included, except for the current, the small

band of current lawyers for right now have all lost their bar licenses and or are about to and or have been indicted and or convicted of felonies for having represented Donald Trump. And yet Donald Trump skates by right to his followers. Even the independence in the polling show that they're leaning ever so slightly towards Donald Trump, based on what body of work it was by every account an unsuccessful presidency, the Trump presidency, by every account which culminated the penultimate failure was COVID and how he approached that and the economy related to it and the dead people, dead Americans resulting from it, but the ultimate, the nader, chancex the attempt to overthrow democracy that was on his watch.

That was led by him. He was the commander in chief of his own insurrection. So that's the presidency. You're supposed to measure the person by his body of work. Yes, he ran the more successful campaign against Hillary Clinton. And yes, he got elected by the majority of what he needed to in the electoral college. But after he got in, I defy you to name for me a infrastructure project, domestic project, welfare project, social welfare project, investment project, stock market or anything else

that would be indicia of a successful presidency on the domestic side that Donald Trump is responsible for. Healthcare, immigration policy, none. Infrastructure, none. Chip investment so that we make our own computer chips and we don't have to rely on our increasingly frenemies abroad for it. Oil independence, not him. Environmental protection, not Donald Trump.

And then foreign policy, every one of our NATO allies hated Donald Trump. None of them would have come to our aid if Donald Trump asked them to, if we needed help during that particular period of time. Terrible foreign policy, hated by our allies, tremendous amount of rebuild that Joe Biden's had to do during this period, and then the domestic front. And then you've got Joe Biden's body of work, which you're seeing every day at the gas pump and in the gas station. You don't have to call it Bidenomics, I don't care. It's a successful presidency by every measure, except the one thing he can't control is that he gets older like you and I do every day. And that's it.

But when you hear somebody like Barbara Russ, who you may not have heard of before, but you should go out and read her book, Tower of Lies. Guess who the subject of that book is written in 2020, right? Even before all of the indictments came out against Donald Trump, pre indictment book, you know, pre Jan 6th book on the, just on the edge of the, of the committee had even been issued its report yet when that book came out and have that as a companion piece with all the, all the information that Michael Cohen has given us And now and then if you're looking for if you're on the Trump side and you're looking for who's an honest broker of information

For Donald Trump will everybody in his organization has testified against him gone to jail for him About to go to jail for him or has written books and or to go to jail for him or has written books or podcast material against him. And his lawyers have all lined up to either plead guilty and or lose their bar licenses. What does that tell you about the measure of the person that you're thinking about voting to or voting for? Now look, I know to a certain extent, I know my audience, I know I'm preaching a bit to the choir, but the extent that this kind of messaging can be forwarded by you to people in your life that matter, have them think open-mindedly about the person that they're thinking about voting for and who they're trying to put back

into the presidency. You've got Joe Biden and his administration. That's why it's called an administration. He has a lot of people around him that work with him as does Donald Trump. And if you like Joe Biden's administration better than Joe, then Donald Trump's administration, then you know who to vote for. So again, I'm going to continue to follow the fraud that is, that is Donald Trump and the reason that people like Barbara Russ, I've come out against him, one place might as touch an illegal AF. That's your source. No smoke, no sunshine. Legal AF, the title means exactly what you think we do it on Wednesdays and Saturdays

at 8 p.m. Eastern time. We sit at the intersection of law, politics, and justice, and we comment on it so you don't have to. You can just listen and enjoy hopefully. So until my next hot take, until my next legal AF, this is Michael Popak reporting.