The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz - #BecauseMiami: See You at the Crossroads
Episode Date: July 26, 2024Vice President Kamala Harris is now running for President after Joe Biden decided not to pursue re-election. Billy Corben and Roy discuss what that means. Amy Donofrio, a teacher in Duval County, lost... her job and almost had her teacher's license stripped because she hung a Black Lives Matters flag in her classroom (she ironically taught at what was formerly named Robert E. Lee High School which is 70% Black). She joins us to talk about her recent court victory. And the parents of an OnlyFans model, who was arrested for murdering her boyfriend, was also arrested for illegally accessing his laptop. Lawyers Jude Faccidomo and Mycki Ratzan joins us to talk about those charges being dropped. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Coming off another consequential week in American history, and just last week, Roy, on the program, we were talking with John Morgan, a major donor and fundraiser for Joe Biden, who seemed
pretty confident that Joe Biden wasn't going anywhere.
I didn't seem as confident, as you may have been able to tell from the tenor of that interview.
I was not hedging my bets.
I was pretty confident that Joe Biden was going to do the right thing here.
As I said, he saved the Republic once, you know, four years ago, and he may have just done it again.
Obviously, his vice president, Kamala Harris, has been effectively anointed the presumptive
Nominee at the Democratic National Convention next month as she should be and what are your thoughts? Well, it's a
Better than the alternative. I probably say glass half full kind of guy. Yeah. Well, I'm drinking this glass right now. Hmm
so
You said as she should why did you that? As I mentioned to John Morgan
last week, I said, listen, this can't really be about petty party politics and ego and quote unquote
whose turn is it next and the succession of things. The most important thing is to field a team that
can win and a candidate and a running mate and a ticket that can beat Donald Trump. So, is that what we got?
As the vice president, obviously she should not be overlooked
as being a candidate if the president should not seek
a second term, which Biden is not.
So this is the situation that we are in.
She is basically a number one contender.
That said, Roy, it certainly, to use maybe another popular sports term, like a
momentum shift here.
You now have Donald Trump as the oldest candidate ever nominated for president, definitely experiencing
some confusion, cognitive decline, fell asleep, not only at his criminal trial, but fell asleep
at the Republican National Convention
Which had Biden done that next month the Democratic National Convention would have sparked a million think pieces right about his fitness for office
But Donald Trump just did it fell asleep at the convention
He fell asleep. I think during the whole Cogan's speech right right out of right out of the accuracy
The idiocracy is a documentary Roy
but You also have him selecting a running mate direct from Gilead right from Handmaid's Tale
And they have published a 1000 page
Report online a plan online about their vision for America, which is one of the bleakest
Most toxic things I've ever read.
Page after page after page, there is a vision for this country that sets us
back to the dark ages. And in my opinion, if Barack Obama, he's got to save us
again, if Barack Obama gives a speech either now or at the convention
introducing Kamala Harris as the nominee, let's call it the crossroads speech and I think Aaron Sorkin should write it and this is the
America is at a crossroads speech Roy. We have a chance now to stop Biff from
getting the sports almanac and getting to the DeLorean. We have a chance to vote
yesterday versus tomorrow. A vision for America that gives more Americans more rights and therefore government less
power or a vision that abdicates our responsibility and abdicates our role as a superpower to
Russia and China in the name of isolationism so that we can increase the size of government
in order to deprive hundreds of millions of Americans of fundamental God-given rights. Doesn't seem like much of a
choice and it seems like Barack Obama is the guy who could make that case and
close that deal. So I think honestly one of the biggest challenges in 2016 and
2020 was Donald Trump was sucking up all the oxygen with respect to the media.
Now the Democrats are the story and there might not be any such thing as bad publicity
because the conversation is around the Democrats
and the possibility of hope and change
for the future of this country,
which I think makes it a much more positive race
than the race that, you know,
the American carnage party right now.
And also remember in 2016 nobody in America wanted to see
another Bush v. Clinton race remember during that primary season nobody wanted
to see it and Donald Trump to his credit he put the Bush dynasty and the Marco
Rubio's the Ted Cruz's he put them to bed okay in that party turn the page on
that now nobody in America really
wanted to see a Biden versus Trump ticket again, and Biden, to his credit, made that
happen. And now it certainly seems like there's a real momentum and a real possibility that
we can turn the page on Trumpism. The Republicans are going to be Republicans, that's fine,
but can we just say, Nicolas Maduro right now is running for president in Venezuela
using the rhetoric of Donald Trump, using the demagoguery and the propaganda of blood
bath and all this shit.
If you don't vote for me, I'm the only one who can save us who can fit.
Like all that kind of, that craziness.
But like, he's a f***ing third world dictator and this is the kind of rhetoric
that we've got from a presidential candidate as well like aren't we just ready to move on from
this the republicans too i feel no you say there's a shift in momentum as soon as she got the
nomination you saw all the donations come in to her coffers and you saw all the unions to back her
I mean, we've never seen anything like that and that's short of a time span crazy record-breaking
Donations to in a single day. I think it topped like nine figures or something ultimately on day one
It's madness and if you're talking about galvanizing young voters, talk about galvanizing minority voters, talk about galvanizing independent and undecideds, I
mean this is just a shift that allows everybody to say, okay we have a real
choice here, you know, we got at least one candidate with a pulse and whose
fingers I think are on the pulse of America. I think Kamala knows what's up.
Donald Trump is stuck in some other space and time
that I just think is not consistent with the views
of the vast majority of Americans.
He will always get that 30 plus percent of his base,
I get it, but let me tell you, and this is a scary thing,
we got a documentary coming out that covers in some part
the Trump administration's coming out at MSNBC in September
called From Russia with Lev.
It's about Lev Parnas and the first impeachment
of Donald Trump, remember there was two?
So this has kind of been memory-holed
in all the craziness of the telenovela that is this country.
But we've been having trouble getting E&O insurance,
which is not a thing we usually have.
Insurance companies don't really want to insure us
or any projects, by the way, that deal with Trump world,
or they wanna offer like crazy money
like for the premiums and the deductibles.
And the reason is, is Donald Trump always sues.
The lawsuits are frivolous
and they're always losers and meritless.
But the problem is he sues because he's,
you got a bunch of donors paying his attorney's fees.
So why not create these nuisance lawsuits?
And even though they win,
the insurance companies still have to pay to defend them.
And here's the interesting thing about it is,
are you saying the journalists and documentary filmmakers
cannot comment or criticize a man who is the former
and maybe the future president
of the United States, a fundamental fundamental right, so fundamental it's
not the Second Amendment, it's the very first amendment in the Bill of Rights, Roy.
It reminds me of Florida and climate change. Climate change is going to
destroy Florida, not meteorologically or geologically, it's not when the storm
comes and destroys us.
It's gonna be when the banks
won't write 30 year mortgages anymore
because they're not bullish on the future of Florida.
It's when insurance companies,
which are now, insurance is already unaffordable,
but when they just leave the state,
which a lot of them have been slowly but surely,
just saying this place is uninsurable
because the actuaries know what's up.
They can kind of predict the future.
And when the actuaries are saying Florida doesn't have a future, that's when Florida
gets destroyed by climate change before climate change destroys Florida.
I'm saying the same thing is happening here with the country and our civil rights and
our freedoms.
And that is because the slow creep of fascism
is not when they come to your door,
collect you and put you on a train.
It's when the insurance companies say,
you can't insult one of the most famous people in the world
because we're not going to help protect you
from his frivolous actions.
That's scary.
That is a loss of freedom.
That is a red flag on the road to fascism and dictatorship.
Just what you said, it is a loss of freedom.
And all of the flags are there.
Project 2025 is right there.
It's a free download.
On the one hand, I don't recommend you read it.
It is utterly petrifying. And the vision for this country is not conservative. It's
not libertarian. It is authoritarian. And at moments, just anarchist about what it
would do to this country, our people, our government, and our rights. It is not
small government. It is not conservatism. It is not libertarianism. I cannot
reiterate enough. It is bonkers. So you have to read it because this is the platform of only one
of two political parties in this country that have a chance at running it come November.
And I think the choice is very clear, not Democrat versus Republican, but vision versus
vision. The policies and ideas that one party has are just much more popular.
No one wants to see an end to Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid or bodily autonomy
or civil rights. It will be one of the biggest wealth shifts in the history of this country
from the people who have no wealth to the people who already have all of the wealth. It is a bad plan for over 99% of the country,
and it boggles the mind that anybody in that 99%
could have any interest whatsoever in it.
I assure you, there is no communist threat to this country.
The threat we have is crony capitalism,
because that is a perversion of the free markets and that kind
of corruption is what not only destroys the economy but it destroys democracy.
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I was taught that the chiefs of the tribes in Africa sold their people into slavery.
If it had not been that way, there would not have been any slaves
anywhere in America. Robert E. Lee or anybody else to have owned. So don't blame Robert
E. Lee. Maybe you should be after your ancestors.
Communism slowly destroys a nation by removing all icons such as Aunt Jemima's face from pancake mix, Civil War statues, other things like
historical school names. It says in the Bible Jesus himself never condemned
slavery. In fact, he said slaves have an obligation to obey their
master. The It wasn't it was a Florida school board meeting in Jacksonville Duval County public schools
Where a high school named for Robert E Lee the student body of which is 70% black
Decided that maybe they didn't want to attend a high school
Whose name honors a Confederate general himself a slave owner of upwards of 200 human beings and
They started a movement in their frustration dealing with the racism that they confront.
And in fact, a teacher of theirs at the high school, Amy Donofrio,
decided to support her students.
She had their backs. They started an organization
that became so prominent and popular in their open and honest discussions
about how race is treated in their community and in our country that they got
Invited by then president Barack Obama to the White House to talk about it Amy amongst the various
paraphernalia and black history
artwork in her room
had the audacity to hang a black lives matter banner and
That's basically when the shit hit the fan.
She showed support for her students.
She got targeted.
And basically for the last nearly three years,
they've made her life a living hell.
The Florida Republican Party has basically terrorized her.
They removed her from her classroom,
much to the chagrin of her students.
They ultimately terminated her
and have tried to strip her of her teaching license.
This is a teacher who, to my knowledge,
has zero complaints from students or parents.
In fact, they protested her removal from the classroom.
And she just finally, finally,
a Florida administrative judge said,
you cannot revoke her teaching license because she did not do anything wrong.
I think perhaps that's some small solace because she doesn't have her job back
and she's not where she belongs in a classroom with her students
who love her and miss her.
Amy Donofrio is here with us on Because Miami.
Thank you for being here. How do
you feel? Do you feel vindicated at all by this or is it a bit of a mixed blessing here?
It's been a lot. It's been the hardest three years of my life. It's a complicated feeling.
I'm one hand, I'm really thankful. I'm thankful for a ruling that affirmed what is such a basic but important truth,
which is that affirming black students is our responsibility as educators,
not something we should be targeted for discipline for.
I'm so thankful that our community was vindicated because this wasn't just me fighting this fight.
The whole community, students, parents,
community members rose up so it's our win. But I struggle
because I also feel a lot of grief for what our community had
to go through for what was lost, for what should have never
happened. Frankly, it's a mix of emotions.
There were thousands of students who signed a petition in support of you.
It seemed very clearly, however, that you were a target.
You were going to be the face of so-called woke teachers that the DeSantis administration
wanted to make an example out of to send, I would guess, a message of fear to your colleagues, basically to STFU,
as the kids may say or may type.
I mean, to do the exact opposite of what they claimed
the Don't Say Gay and Anti-Woke laws would do,
which is to send a deliberate chilling effect
to violate your constitutional rights.
Is that what happened here?
I'm gonna tell you right now what happened here
is that we're in a state that brags about parent rights
and consistently dismisses the rights of black parents.
Even in a state where 64% of students in public schools
are students of color,
and that's where these laws are being passed,
but they're not being applied uniformly,
they're not being applied fairly, they're not being applied fairly.
And the voices I saw over and over again,
not just in my situation, not just situation with the flag,
but I have seen consistently in this state
that the desires of black parents
for their precious children, for their students,
overwritten again and again, and I am disgusted by it.
I am furious about it.
And so I'm thankful that we won,
but this should have never happened.
And there's so much damage that has been done.
Our community just should have never had to go through this.
The community made it so clear
when the students started the petition,
they got almost 20,000 signatures in like 24 hours. I mean, it was uniform these there were no
parent complaints. There were no student complaints about the
flag. There's a lot of complaints about the flag being
removed about me being removed.
This is the Black Lives Matter flag that you're that you're
right. Let me ask you why did I understand it had been up for
some time before it suddenly became an issue or a cudgel to
get you fired. But why did you
hang it in the first place?
Because of the racial trauma students were expressing to me happening in our educational
space. And I thought, you know, some of the things students were saying, we're just devastating
to hear they're saying things like, I had this favorite teacher in eighth grade, and
I thought she really liked me. And then one day she called me the N word. And that's not
that unbelievable to think about when you consider we have a city with an active
KKK chapter that virtually every year in MLK Day plasters the neighborhood that our students have
to walk through to get to our school. And so I'm just hearing from these students what they've been
through and I'm just thinking my, what a burden to learning.
What an inhumane thing to have to walk into our school,
walk into a classroom and gear yourself up
to protect yourself from.
And I just, like everything else in my classroom
was about my students, wanted to feel safe and affirmed.
And I, to this day, don't understand
how there could be anything controversial about that.
Do you have any other legal recourse that you might have on hand?
Is there a chance that you can sue for a wrongful termination?
There are things to explore legally.
I'm, for the moment, just taking a deep breath.
It's just been a brutal process for the last three years.
There are things to explore for sure.
Amy, you kind of talked about the environment in which your
students are trying to be educated in despite the fact
that their school was I should say, Roy, formerly Robert E.
Lee High School, it is now Riverside High School. But I'm
looking at images right now, in front of Duval County Public
Schools, of the counter protesters, if you will, trying high school, but I'm looking at images right now in front of Duval County Public Schools
of the counter protesters, if you will, trying to protect the name Robert E. Lee that are
flying Confederate flags, the flags of treasonous slave owning terrorist losers, mind you.
When I say losers, I don't mean that in like the pejorative, like you're a loser, bro, but like they literally lost the war.
And so it seems clear to me that with these flags planted in the grounds outside of the school board
and the experience, the hostility that your students were feeling over the course of their
public school education and what you experienced in this targeting, you refer to it as an effort
to create quote, an environment of fear, end quote.
How do your colleagues feel about this?
I mean, are they just shutting up and falling in line
because they realized they could be subjected
to the same harassment and targeting
and terrorism that you were?
I think it definitely created a chilling effect
at the time.
And I think some of that has gotten worse as the attacks have gotten
worse over the years. But I also think that to have this win in Florida that we had last
month with my case with the flag is hope generating. That's what I've heard from other teachers
and educators. I think it just shows what, you know, teachers are advocates for our students.
We are fierce for our students.
We love our students.
And I've been hearing a lot of good feedback about how it's increasing some fight because
we've been pretty beat down over the last few years for sure.
I want to go back to one of the images that we showed on the screen on YouTube for the
audio audience.
There is a guy sitting down with the Confederate flag. He's also, he has his arm in the air, kind of like the
okay sign, thumb and index finger collected and the three fingers up. He has a white
power sign up in the air and that's intimidating the students there.
Yeah, you know this is about history and heritage, Roy. It's not about hate. That's what they say.
But in the one hand, he literally has the Confederate flag,
and in his other hand, is throwing up a white power sign.
Let me take it up a level for you.
He was in our school auditorium.
We had these name change meetings to see how people felt about changing our name,
which really were meetings to host white alumni
who attended prior to our 1972, I believe,
desegregation of the school.
And in these meetings, he and others
are flicking students off,
are doing that hate symbol at students,
and it was going unchecked by our school district.
And a few days after I report it reported and say this is racial abuse of
students. This should not be happening on our watch and our school is when I was removed.
My question would be does that person have a child going to school otherwise?
He doesn't even live in our district.
That's trespassing.
in our district. He doesn't even live in our district.
That's trespassing, isn't it?
Well, not if you're an old white man, Roy.
It's not trespassing.
Come on now.
So I want to play a clip here from Richard Corcoran,
who was at the time of this speech.
Well, he was a former speaker of the House,
the State House of Representatives here in Florida.
He was at the time of this speech the
Florida Secretary of Education and he is now the president of New College, which
we've covered extensively here, which experienced a total hijacking. I think he
is one of, if not the highest paid college presidents in the country, better
compensated than the Harvard president and the price per student that he has
paid is absolutely outrageous.
This is all that's the sick thing about all this is this really just a money grab through
all the demagoguery and racism and misogyny. It's really just a heist movie. The story,
well, the whole story of America lately, but Richard Corcoran has zero education experience,
but became the education secretary of the state of Florida, having spent zero seconds in a classroom, okay,
as either a teacher or an administrator,
is suddenly running the schools
from a purely ideological perspective,
and he's making a speech called Education in Freedom,
here in the free state of Florida,
and he is proudly talking about how they are targeting
this woman and other teachers
to violate their freedom of speech.
We're passing a rule this coming month.
You can indoctrinate students with stuff that's not based on our standards, but you have to
police them on a daily basis.
It's 185,000 teachers in a classroom with anywhere from 18 to 25 kids.
I've censored or fired or terminated numerous teachers for doing that.
I'm getting sued right now in Duval County, which is Jacksonville because it was an entire classroom
memorialized to Black Lives Matter.
We made sure she was terminated and now we're being sued
by every one of the liberal left groups
for freedom of speech issues.
I'll say to her, look, let's not even talk about
whether it's right or true or good what you have there.
My issue is when you're a third grade teacher
and only 42%, 41% of your kids are on grade level,
why don't you do me a favor, get them on grade level
and then we'll have that discussion.
Wait, I'm sorry, third grade teacher,
you're a high school teacher, aren't you?
Like, it's such a bait and switch, it's such a strawman.
It's so disingenuous and dishonest
and you can't really have an educated or good faith debate about
policy or education if you have people who are just going to lie or not going to accept
the basic facts of a situation.
Also incidentally Amy had not been fired, she had not been terminated yet.
So what he said was just an outright lie.
But he admits to, I'm not sure if he meant censor or censure, but he admits to doing one or both to multiple teachers
for no other reason than they're not towing the line that he wants and to Amy's earlier point
they're not doing what the parents want. They're doing what a certain subset of parents or in the case of some of these folks
they're not parents at all.
They're just coming in to assert how they think that young people should be educated in 2024 in Florida. And I'm sorry, I could go on forever
about this, but Amy, I want to give you the last word based on that nonsense that Richard
Corcoran was going on about. No less he went to Gilead, to Hillsdale College of all places
to make this speech.
Oh, I mean, the speech changed my life forever, resulted in endless, felt
like threats. But to me, the worst part about it was it was insulting to my students. My
students not only achieved, but they were exceptional. They presented at Harvard four
times. They've presented at the White House. We've given a TED Talk. We have a group we've co-founded to address inequities
at Black Student Space called the EBAC movement.
It is a shame that rather than congratulate them
and give them the support that they deserved,
they were diminished in his speech.
And that is the greatest tragedy to me.
But that's why as teachers, we're standing up,
we're fighting and we will continue
to fight for our students in Florida. I can tell you Richard Corcoran belongs nowhere near a classroom,
neither does Ron DeSantis for that matter, but they wouldn't even want to go near a classroom.
This is a very difficult, very difficult job and made that much more difficult by the environment of fear and hostility
and denial of facts and disingenuousness that the state of the free state of
Florida has created. Amy Donofrio, thank you for being here. I'm sorry as a native
Floridian who was born in in Lee County not named for Spike as I like to remind
people. I apologize.
And most importantly, I hope you end up where you belong,
which is back in a classroom,
supporting your students who obviously miss you terribly.
Thank you, me too.
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Major developments in a high profile case
involving OnlyFans model Courtney Clenney
and her parents after charges were dropped today in their computer case. The three were facing
charges after prosecutors say they illegally access a laptop belonging to
Christian Obamsele. Police say Courtney Clenney killed Obamsele in their Miami
apartment. This was back in 2022. Finally, truth has prevailed.
Also, I'd like to say that this has been an ordeal
for Deborah and myself for five months,
especially the last two years,
with Courtney being held unjustly
for a crime that she did not commit.
But it's an ordeal we would gladly go through again
a hundred times over if it would provide justice
for Courtney.
The OnlyFans murder case is a sensational, scandalous, Only in Miami case that is working its way through the court system.
Courtney Clenney and her boyfriend Christian Obimseli were pandemic refugees who moved
to Miami from Texas. She was an OnlyFans model.
The boyfriend was a cryptocurrency trader and her manager.
So just like classic kind of like Miami pandemic characters.
She wound up in 2022 stabbing him to death
during a heated argument.
At first the police, Miami Police Department
called it self-defense.
Then after some pressure from Obamsele's family,
wind up charging her, bringing her back to Miami,
charging her with murder.
There has been allegations of domestic abuse
flying back and forth from both sides.
And then a crazy thing happened last year.
Miami-Dade prosecutors arrested her parents in Texas
and extradited them back to South Florida
on computer hacking charges,
which even at the time with the facts we knew
sounded a little bizarre.
And now, just this past week,
a judge threw out the entire computer hacking case
against Courtney Kenney herself and
both of her parents saying that the prosecutors violated the attorney client privilege by
looking at thousands of emails and text messages between the Clenneys and their attorneys,
which is outrageous.
And this is just the latest scandal to hit the Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office and
as I call it Miami-Dade's Injustice
Department as run by Katherine Fernandez Rundle for the last 31 years.
And we've talked about scandal after scandal involving secret deals with hitmen, prosecutors
being caught on recordings, trying to allegedly arrange hits of witnesses in cases, just craziness. And so we have now with us the attorneys responsible
for representing the Clinties in this matter,
Jude Fatshidomo, his partner, Mickey Ratson.
Guys, first of all, Mickey,
what were these charges to begin with?
What did this even stem from, this alleged computer hacking?
So interestingly enough, the charge is titled unauthorized access to a computer hacking. So interestingly enough, the charge is titled
unauthorized access to a computer device.
You talk about hacking as being sort of
what everybody would think,
but when you talk about unauthorized access
to a computer device, if I have a password,
my husband has a device and I have the password
to his device, how is that unauthorized?
And so from the beginning, it was very troubling that they filed these charges
because these are charges that we rarely, if ever have seen in Miami-Dade County,
and certainly not under the facts and circumstances of this case, where with
the defense team, the Clenny parents said, hey, we have
this device.
Maybe it would be something that would be useful.
And the lawyers at that time handled this exactly the way you would want an ethical,
responsible, professional criminal defense attorney to handle it.
Find out if the device works, turn it on, put the password in, close it,
and let's give it to a forensic analyst to find out what's on it. If there's something that's
exculpatory, we would still have to provide it to the state. If there's something inculpatory,
we would have to provide it to the state. But before you look at it, you have no idea what's on it. So to take this, that extra step to charge parents, parents,
it seemed like such a classic overreach. And from the beginning, we could never figure out why what's
what was the purpose behind this for the state to go after the parents. And to date, I still can't
answer that question. Jude, what was on the laptop?
And was it something that should have been turned over to the prosecutors?
First, to answer the first question, nothing is on the laptop.
And as Mickey said, there are Florida bar rules that if something comes into the possession
of the defense attorney that may have evidentiary value for the state,
it would then trigger those rules.
It never got to that point.
What's important to remember is where this laptop originated from.
So in the apartment, you have the death of Obam Selle.
Crime scene comes in two separate crime scene units, Miami-Dade PD and City of Miami working
together, process the scene and release it.
They're not going to leave an apartment that's the scene of a homicide with evidence in it.
So they collected anything of evidentiary value. They then turned to our client, Kim Clenny,
who's Courtney's dad, and we're like, hey, this is your problem. Now clear this out because the apartment complex was throwing them out of the building.
So Mr. Clenny comes in with the unwelcome task of having to clear out this unit.
And one of the items left behind by crime scene was this laptop.
So what's interesting is that the state suddenly says, Oh, this is a key piece of evidence. This is not a bloody knife.
This is not evidence of a homicide.
This is a computer that was left behind by Miami-Dade and city of Miami
crime scene.
So the defense attorneys did exactly what defense attorneys are supposed to do.
Investigate your case and build your defense. It's not a crime.
Mickey, the judge found that there was a violation here of attorney-client privilege.
What did the state attorney's office in Miami-Dade get access to? Was it on the computer? You referred
to it as overreach, prosecutorial overreach earlier. What did they see and read and access that the judge found
basically negated the entirety of the case
and threw it out?
I think from the judge's perspective
and from reading her order,
it's a little bit less about what they saw
and more just about the violation in and of itself.
But to answer that, the state attorney's office
did a search warrant on Deborah and Kim Klenney's
iCloud.
So you can imagine what an iCloud contains.
Everything, your pictures, your life, everything is on the iCloud.
In addition to whatever they saw, there were communications back and forth between the lawyer and the
Clint East as part of a joint defense team about this entire case.
Well, of course, there's emails or could be text messages backed up photos.
That's absolutely nuts.
I mean, like, you did a judge sign off on that warrant to access the parents iCloud
accounts. Yes. So it was a signed warrant. judge sign off on that warrant to access the parents iCloud account?
Yes, so it was a signed warrant.
Now, we didn't get this far because the very first motion we filed was granted.
But had we proceeded with the case, that warrant very much would have been the target
of another motion because we think it materially misrepresented to the judge who signed it,
what the actual circumstances were. Because as Mickey said, it sought the iCloud accounts
of two parents not charged with any crime of a criminal defendant charged with a homicide.
It's not a financial crime. Just in and of itself,
the idea that the parents are now subject to the overreach of the state is troubling.
But if you look at the actual warrant, what's really bothersome is the timeline. It allowed
the search of the parents iCloud account from November of 2020 through, I believe it was April of 2023.
The homicide happened April of 2021.
So somebody has yet to explain to me why you should be able to look at two private citizens,
iCloud personal account.
Crazy.
From two years before the actual crime that you're claiming there may be evidence of.
It's crazy.
Mickey, I have to ask, this is not an isolated incident.
Even recently in the Miami-Dade State Attorney's Office,
is this indicative of a pattern or practice
of prosecutorial misconduct?
What's been called the quote unquote
win at all costs mentality of that office?
Constitution and the law itself be damned.
I mean, we've seen prosecutors remove from cases
in just recent months.
What do you think?
Isolated incident or is this a serious problem?
You know, it's so hard to answer that
because when you look at everything that's happened,
not just with our case, but with other cases,
it's easy to say, hey, listen, this is a pattern of misconduct.
And certainly lawyers that have been involved in some of these other cases,
you know, feel that pretty deeply.
It was it was like Jude and I both said,
there's so many questions here that we couldn't answer.
We definitely had a young,
overzealous, aggressive prosecutor who decided that he
was going to figure out a way to get around this instead of following the ethical rules
and obligations that all of us as lawyers have to follow. And you know, to say that
I'm sorry to interrupt. I just want to, you know, you already sound like you're making excuses for that.
I mean, like you say young, by the way, by the way, when you're young,
I feel like you're that much closer to law school.
You're that much closer to have been recently educated on the ethics rules.
Like I find that younger lawyers tend to be more in tune with that.
Is there not just a blank check, so to speak, or a policy at the state
attorney's office that you just do whatever the hell you want to do,
just win the damn case.
No, in our case in particular,
which is really what is super problematic,
is the viewing of attorney-client privilege materials.
I mean, this is not something that doesn't happen
all the time in cases across this country, right?
There's every instance prosecutors are going to come
across some attorney client privilege,
especially when you're subpoenaing large,
vast amounts of information.
You're going to come across it.
There's policies and procedures
about how this should be handled.
And was it handled that way?
It's not difficult.
Was it handled that way?
No, of course not.
All right, June, last question.
We got like 30 seconds, but is there a concern now
with this state attorney's office proceeding
with this prosecution when it appears
that they've been privy to possibly thousands
of text messages and emails between the attorneys
and their clients in this defense?
I wouldn't say it's just a concern.
It's an impossibility.
There's really no way that they can ethically
remain on the case. The judge has definitively found that they breached that privilege. There
were 4,000 plus messages. I don't care if they read 4,000 or if they read 10, they're
behind the curtain at that point. And there is no way that this office can seal itself off sufficiently so to make it an ethical prosecution of the
homicide. The proper thing for them to do is to recuse
themselves and have the governor appoint an administratively
assigned alternate office.
Mickey Ratz and Jude Fatshah-Domo, obviously,
Courtney, Clint East cases remains to be prosecuted the
murder case.
But honestly, on behalf of Miami,
I'm sorry for these parents.
Whatever Courtney may have or may not have done
or is guilty of, they're already going through it.
There's already two families destroyed
as a result of this tragedy.
And they did not deserve to be dragged from their homes
and schlepped here to Miami to answer for false charges from unethical prosecutors. It's,
it's a shame and I'm sorry it happened, but.
Hashtag because Miami.
Hey, it's Mike Ryan. How do you like to grill your barbecue? Tell me,
I'll be quiet. I'll stand back. I'll listen for approximately two and a half seconds.
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