Trump Indictment: Episode IV - A New Hope?
That familiar refrain at Gaslit Nation: So many traitors, so little time. Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis made the time for a sweeping, detailed indictment of Trump and 18 others in his Kremlin Klown Kar for trying to overturn the will of the people of Georgia. You can read the annotated indictment here. And we finally got RICO! Charged with being the crime boss that he is, Trump faces a minimum of five years in prison if found guilty of racketeering.
RICO is historically used to break up organized crime as one of the indicted, Rudy Giuliani, knows very well. Trump's longtime friend and former lawyer Giuliani used RICO to go after the Italian mafia in New York City, which made room for Trump's longtime benefactors: the Russian mafia and their easy, endless supply of money. The Idiot Sons Don Jr. and Eric have even admited the Trump family's businesses depended on Russian money.
In this fourth (and counting?) Trump Indictment special, Andrea discusses some of the red flags, some reasons for hope, and what's next as a Russian mafia asset continues to run for president as Russia wages war against the democratic world, carrying out horrific war crimes and genocide in Ukraine.
For those in New York City, join Andrea, Russian mafia expert Olga Lautman, and historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the author of the bestselling book Stronmen: Mussolini to the Present, for a special live taping of Gaslit Nation on Monday September 18th at 7pm at the independent bookstore P&T Knitwear. There will be no livestream, unfortunately, but we'll run the episode soon after on Gaslit Nation. Patreon donors can join Andrea for a special in-person meet-up at 6pm before the event -- details to be sent out soon on Patreon! Thank you to everyone who supports the show and makes our independent journalism possible. We could not make Gaslit Nation without you!
Download Transcript
Fani Willis (00:04):
Every individual charged in the indictment is charged with one count of violating Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act through participation in a criminal enterprise in Fulton County, Georgia and elsewhere to accomplish the illegal goal of allowing Donald J. Trump to seize the presidential term of office beginning on January 20th, ‘21.
[end clip]
Andrea Chalupa (00:41):
Hey everyone, welcome to what is now the fourth Gaslit Nation indictment special in this red hot American summer. I'm going to give you a quick rundown of this latest indictment, but first I just wanna say hello to our YouTube viewers. Yes, Gaslit Nation is doing YouTube videos. And that's important because Elon Musk, Apartheid Barbie, has destroyed Gaslit Nation's reach on Twitter. He came in with whatever the fuck… his whole, like, far-right boys’ club—it's like a literal far-right boys’ club. There's been reporting on how some of these Nazi influencers are being paid and so on—and is boosting their traffic and suppressing stuff like ours that talks about Ukraine and Russia; all those topics that Elon Musk conveniently doesn't want you to know about. So, in order to rebuild the traffic we lost from the Elon Musk purchase of Twitter, we are entering/venturing into the brave world of YouTube, TikTok and so on.
Andrea Chalupa (01:50):
How do I feel about this? Well, as a mom of two little girls who, you know, is dealing with all sorts of stuff; the genocide in Ukraine, I have somebody in my family who I'm extremely emotionally dependent on/close to who is going through a horrible, horrible time with a terminal illness, has to be on oxygen and so on. So the last thing I wanna do is appear before you on camera. Really, the last thing I want. But I also believe that we have to reach—especially now—as many people as possible, and my desire to do that, my determination to do that, my determination to ensure that democracy prevails in this election, that people who are traitors to our country do not win in this upcoming election, all of that surpasses however the hell I might be feeling. I always believe that if you use your voice for a higher purpose, that is what will carry you.
Andrea Chalupa (02:43):
That is the wind in your sails. So just like I don't always feel like picking up the phone and phone banking, but I will do it, I will knock out 100 phone calls in a day, I will knock out a thousand phone calls in a midterm, I make those phone calls regardless of how I feel, how tired I am, no matter what else I'd rather be doing. So I'm sort of taking the same approach to appearing on camera before you. And I want you to take note of my hair on this day, [laughs] August 15th, 2023, because I have no doubt as we continue this, as we move along, this hair is gonna become like a full-on hair sprayed Fox News bouffant, just for the hell of it. Just for fun, just sort of to add a little bit of pepper flakes into this journey.
Andrea Chalupa (03:25):
Alright, so let's get to it. So, Fani Willis. The opening clip that you heard was Nazi Hunter, Fulton County Attorney General Fani Willis announcing the indictment of Donald Trump and 18! co-conspirators for a sprawling, sprawling organized crime operation trying to over overthrow the results in Georgia. As I've been saying on the show, representation matters. Fani Willis, a Black woman, an expert in RICO and surrounded by experts in RICO, came in with a very, very deeply well done, strongly, strongly baked indictment of Mafia organized crime boss Donald Trump. And the reason why it matters that a Black woman is doing this in Georgia, the heart of the civil rights struggle, is because it's Black communities, it's non-white communities, it's communities that have always been scapegoated—LGBTQ communities and so on—that are on the front lines of fighting an existential crisis right now.
Andrea Chalupa (04:32):
And the reason why so many other people have woken up to what Trump is trying to do (including Republicans, including independents) is because finally this authoritarian history that built the United States of America is impacting white people, too. So that's why you have this broad coalition. And it's really a reminder to us that diversity matters and representation matters. And I'm starting with that because I wanna highlight a Gaslit Nation listener. We're gonna shift gears for a second 'cause this is important. This needs our attention. Nicole Speer, a scientist and a council member in Boulder, Colorado, is running for mayor of Boulder right now. She wrote back in the day that her motivation to run for office in the first place, which is an extremely daunting thing to do (and she won her race), she wrote on Twitter that she was inspired to do so by Gaslit Nation, by this podcast.
Andrea Chalupa (05:23):
This is why we do this show. This is why I will turn on this camera even when I don't feel like it. It’s because of listeners like that. We're trying to reach Nicole Speers out there. The science believers, the fact-based thinkers, the ones with the good hearts, the Lion Hearts out there, that is who we need to run for office. And as hard as that is, as daunting as that is, Nicole ran for City Council in Boulder and won and now she's running for mayor and she's going to win, and we're gonna help her win. So please, please, please join me in donating whatever you can by going to nicoleforboulder.com. She's running against two establishment politicians who were able to retire around the age of 50. So, you know that they've got their own war chest.
Andrea Chalupa (06:14):
So we need to help her through grassroots power to build a war chest. And that is for Nicole Speer, a scientist and council member running for city council—sorry, who won her race for city council, who's now running for mayor, and we're gonna put her over that finish line. So please join me in donating at nicoleforboulder.com. That would mean so much to me and our community if we can all rally for Nicole Speer now and elect the mayor, woman mayor of Boulder, Colorado. Yay! And that is how we take back our democracy. That's how we strengthen our democracy. It’s community by community. So thank you so much, Nicole Speer, for running for office, for doing what needs to be done to protect our democracy where you live. And people can learn more about you and your amazing work by going to nicoleforboulder.com. Alright.
Andrea Chalupa (07:01):
So thank you, also, another announcement: Thank you to everyone who joined the Gaslit Nation live taping with the Risk! storytelling podcast on August 5th. We are going to do another one, another live taping in New York City. It won't be live streamed, unfortunately, but you can join us for that on Monday, September 18th at 7:00 PM at P&T Knitwear. That is going to be a live taping with me and Russian mafia expert Olga Lautman. And we have a new guest joining us, and that is historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who is the author of the bestselling book, Strongmen: Mussolini To the Present. Strongmen is a book that, if you love Gaslit Nation, you'd love Strongmen. If you haven't read it yet, Ruth is wonderful. So we're gonna be having a big discussion about what the hell do we do with a four-time indicted career criminal, wannabe authoritarian running for president.
Andrea Chalupa (08:01):
How do we rebuild democracy in America? How do we sustain ourselves in the fight? What resistance to these dictators work? How do these dictators work together in the na transnational crime syndicate? What do we do about all this? So that's the conversation that's happening Monday, September 18th at P&T Knitwear in New York City, anIndependent bookstore. And that's 7:00 PM with Olga Lautman and Ruth Ben-Ghiat and myself for a live taping of Gaslit Nation. And for our Patreon listeners who support the show, we're gonna do a special meetup with me before that taping. That'll be at 6:00 PM and I'll leave the details for the Patreon community. If you wanna join that special meetup before the live taping, go to patreon.com/gaslit. And I look forward to seeing everyone there. These live tapings are fun. I'm super nervous before each one. I think that no one's going to go except my husband who has no choice but to go to these things.
Andrea Chalupa (09:00):
And then I'm always so shocked when there's actually people in the audience and I get to meet people, I get to meet listeners, and I love it so much. And I'm thanking you all who come to these events. And I love, love, love hearing from you and talking with you and learning so much from all of you. Thank you. Thank you. Alright, so [laughs] now let's get to the indictment fund. As you probably heard by now, Trump and 19… Sorry, Trump and 18 others have been charged. Trump now faces 91 felony counts. They have until Friday, August 25th to surrender. This is a state case, so if Trump is charged he cannot overturn it if he becomes president. The RICO charges historically have been used to fight organized crime and the mafia. As I mentioned earlier, Fani Willis is a RICO expert who’s surrounded herself with other RICO experts.
Andrea Chalupa (09:50):
This is a very tight case. Yes, it's sprawling. Yes, it's ambitious, but it's extraordinarily play-by-play detailed, showing that Fani Willis, of course, brought the receipts. She knew what she was doing in bringing this. The RICO charges will include jail time if convicted with a minimum of five years. A minimum of five years. Fani Willis says she plans to try all 19 defendants together, which is going to be a Kremlin clown car of a circus of a trial, obviously. And, you know, Sidney Powell, Giuliani, Trump, all of these other poor bastards who… You know, these smaller fish that are probably sitting there looking like a deer in headlights because they betrayed their country. They really put their neck on a line for somebody who has no problem destroying whoever he needs to get to the top.
Andrea Chalupa (10:46):
So it's going to be wonderful to watch. It's going to be, obviously, very, you know, a lot of ups and downs and all that. And it's going to obviously play against Trump. And some of the reasons for that we'll get to. But here are the red flags. Trump can, of course, drag this out. Trump's team—lawyer goon squad team—could try to kick this to the federal courts, hoping they'll have better luck there because, you know, Trump, of course, famously packed the judges. He and McConnell were able to seize 30% of our courts. He's going to try to get this into the appeals process and so on and kick it to a higher court. The other red flags are that maybe this can just drag out and it's not gonna have any effect on the election.
Andrea Chalupa (11:33):
And the election is going to be extremely close in these must win races. You have Trump and his team trying to fundraise off this, obviously. They're playing the martyr card and that is going to infuriate their base and drive out their base. And the big advantage they have on the left is that they have the propaganda empire, the disinformation machine that is all being amplified by the Russian bot operation which is of course going to still be in effect because the Russians desperately need their boy Trump to win so that they can then continue their pillaging of United States, entrenching themselves deeper in the US, and weaken the West, the global democratic alliance, and seize Ukraine for once and for all and just strengthen themselves and live above accountability and so on. And it's going to be obviously a dark cloud over the world if it should get to that.
Andrea Chalupa (12:27):
So things are gonna be very tense from here on out. It's still early days, but those are the red flags. And of course you have threats of political violence against Fani Willis and her team and so on. So as promising as these charges are, things can go all sorts of ways. But here's the good news. With 18 charged besides Trump, that's a lot of opportunity to flip some of those idiots against Trump. Those who are lower fish on that totem pole would be more likely because they don't have his war chest, they don't have his sheen, they don't have his primetime power. So with 18 charged, some of those lower smaller fish could flip on Trump and could allow Fani Willis and her team to circle Trump and get him, nab the big fish, landing him five years in jail minimum.
Andrea Chalupa (13:22):
Fighting these charges—all of these 19 people including Trump fighting these charges—that is going to be incredibly expensive, which isn't a small thing. You might think, Well, Daddy Warbucks is propped up by all this dark money. And that is absolutely true. But regardless, it's still going to be a drain on resources; resources they need for these must-win races, including House and Senate. With Trump being the frontrunner in the Republican primary so far, we're talking about the rotten heart of the Republican party being on trial here in Georgia. And with this being one of four indictments, all of these political battles are going to continue to be a drain on the far-right war chest. They're going to spread. Yes, they're extraordinarily wealthy. I understand. They're masters of the universe, they're the oligarchs.
Andrea Chalupa (14:13):
But it still takes money away from other must-win races. And as we've seen, money alone doesn't win races but it's still gonna be a drain on them. And fighting… So let's see, it’s now very unlikely with this trial that's coming up in Georgia, it's now very unlikely that Trump wins Georgia, given that Georgians are gonna be in the heart of this media circus. And yeah, so Georgia, he lost it famously by the 11,000 votes. So it looks like we're gonna be within the margins of another Biden victory there, knock on wood. Another thing to look at is the recent bellwether election in Ohio where a coalition of voters in Ohio defeated a GOP effort to protect the abortion ban there. And that recent victory in Ohio is significant because it's a reminder that even in the heartland, in states like Ohio that were traditionally purple that have become more red, thanks to Republican gerrymandering and a lot of efforts Republicans have made investing in the all-important state level, even though states show that you have Republicans and independents who are tired of Republican extremism for going too far.
Andrea Chalupa (15:27):
So what this election is going to come down to, because remember the Constitution still allows Trump to run and the charges that Jack Smith brought in the third indictment were surgical, they're more narrow, so nothing here so far is stopping Trump from running. So that means it's going to, yes, come down to the Gaslit Nation phone banks [laughs] we're all gonna do, with each other, come fall and maybe even sooner in 2024. It's gonna come down to us and it's going to come down to communities like ours all across the country doing whatever they can, wherever they can. I know that does not sound fair. I know that's not fair. But as I've been saying on this show since the beginning of the show, Trump should have never been even allowed to run for office. A well-known Kremlin operative like Paul Manafort was the smoking gun; the clear signal to the American intelligence community that if Paul Manafort was running Donald Trump's campaign, that meant the Kremlin was running Donald Trump's campaign.
Andrea Chalupa (16:22):
So the establishment stopping us, saving us from Trump should have happened a long time ago. The FBI has no excuse because they knew. Ukraine brought the FBI in in early 2014 to help them hunt down Yanukovych’s stolen billions from Ukraine. Paul Manafort would've been somebody on their radar in doing that. So the FBI has no excuse. And I understand that all of these inside-the-beltway folks, these prosecutors are now making money off of book deals and they're going on cable news now, and they're not gonna be the ones to tell you this, but I'm telling you: This should have been stopped a long time ago. The establishment failed us. The intelligence community failed us. And Obama's foreign policy team failed us. And if you want to know more on that, just go to our transcripts page.
Andrea Chalupa (17:10):
We've been covering that for a very long time. So here we are, because too many people failed us. So now it's, again, coming down to us to stop a career criminal—a well-known Russian mafia asset, just look at the Mueller Report and the Senate intelligence report—one of the worst traitors that have ever plagued this country, a proud neo confederate, a grand master of the KKK from becoming president of the United States. Yes, it's coming down to us. It shouldn't be, but that's where we are. And as an independent film producer, somebody that had a steroid reality in the face over and over and over again just to get my film made, I had to stare into the dark abyss of my reality all the time. Like, here I have all these limited resources, I have all of this working against me, what am I going to do?
Andrea Chalupa (17:53):
I'm applying that same scrappy determination to where we are now as a country. Yes, it's coming down to us to stop him, but please, please, please look at Ohio, the special election Ohio, as an important bellwether, reassurance that enough Republicans and enough independents are tired of this extremism. And with all of these trials popping off now with these four indictments, the Kremlin clown car is gonna be on full display. You're gonna have Sidney Powell, Giuliani running their mouths. Paul Manafort, well-known Kremlin operative Paul Manafort running their mouth all over the propaganda machine of the Right. And their determination, their hail Mary pass, what they have to work with is to drive out the base with their nonsense on, “It's a weaponization of government,” with the martyrdom of Donald J. Trump.
Andrea Chalupa (18:44):
That's what they're going to use to infuriate their base, drive them out, and likely along the way, drive some of them to commit acts of political violence. But they're not going to reach the independents.. They're not gonna reach the Republicans that left the party. And I, I assure you, some of my optimism in talking this way comes from my own phone banking. I would talk to a lot of independents who had never voted in their life who were determined to vote because Trump scared them, because they had studied Third Reich history. They'd studied the rise of Hitler. They knew they had to vote, they knew they had to become active. That's what we're dealing with now across the country. And if you're feeling despondent, discouraged, and cynical about all this, join me in making phone calls and you'll hear from other Americans in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona and Georgia, that they are independents, maybe like you, they're former Republicans or Republicans, maybe like you.
Andrea Chalupa (19:37):
And they see very clearly, like you, what is going on. We are not alone in this. So please, please, please keep that in mind. Remember that. That's a fact. So that is that. Fani Willis… Phew [laughs]. Fani Willis, I… Yeah, this is now a Fani Willis fan account, a Fani Willis fan YouTube page. So, Fani Willis knows what she is doing. She telegraphed to the American people. She told them very clearly, like, “I understand that I'm sticking my neck out there. I'm risking my life for this democracy and for my country.” She thanked her security team for protecting her and her team. And she said, “They've been protecting me and keeping me safe. And they're gonna continue to do that.” That is not a small thing that she said because, as we've seen with the many lives that Donald Trump has tried to destroy, you know, especially with these election observers who are just doing their job and monitoring a polling place, we need more good people doing that.
Andrea Chalupa (20:35):
And they're being intimidated. They're being scared out of that work. Fani Willis knows the risk that she and her family and the people around her are taking by bringing justice and accountability. And she let us know, Yes, I know my life's on the line, but I’ve got good people around me and they're gonna stick by me, and I'm not going to be intimidated by this organized crime operation. That is what she said in her press conference. That is what I heard. And it's reassuring to hear that. And I hope to God that that team is hypervigilant, takes nothing for granted and understands how precious their charge is right now, who they're protecting… It's extraordinarily important. So I do have faith in the work they're doing down in Georgia. I do understand the historic significance of it and the larger journey of America's confrontation with our own authoritarian history in the march towards civil rights.
Andrea Chalupa (21:27):
And I do believe that this is something that is going to tip the scales in the favor of democracy as we move towards 2024. And I understand there's plenty of red flags. There's plenty of ways that the Trump Kremlin clown car can work this, manipulate this, and we're still early days. But so far, what we've seen so far is very promising. And that brings us to what needs to happen next. So, you have Paul Manafort wasting no time getting on Sean Hannity's Russian State TV program on Fox News and basically coming out with the talking points. As I already mentioned, Paul Manafort's saying, “Oh, Donald Trump's a martyr, just like me” and he's, of course, pushing his own book where he rewrites history and frames himself as a martyr for the cause, nevermind that he's a longtime Kremlin operative who worked closely with the Donald Trump of Ukraine, Yanukovych.
Andrea Chalupa (22:14):
And he did all sorts of things, including dividing Ukrainians against each other, playing up those culture wars, trying to stage these protests—these anti-NATO protests in Crimea—seeding the groundwork essentially for Russia's invasion/seizure of Crimea and so on and so on, even advising Yanukovych as Yanukovych had his riot police, his snipers shooting, killing pro-democracy protestors in Kyiv. And, you know, Yanukovych’s forces were working with Russian-trained snipers and other military on trying to violently suppress what was a popular uprising. And Paul Manafort was in the heart of that as the hand to the Donald Trump wannabe-king, Viktor Yanukovych, who had a sprawling McMansion paid for, built with stolen money from the Ukrainian people, okay? And how much of that money did Paul Manafort get? So, he's back. We'll play a little bit of a clip of how he's trying to spend this all so we get an idea of what we're in for.
[begin audio clip]
Paul Manafort (23:16):
All of these theories are meant… have one purpose: to derail Donald Trump. And what they don't understand is that the fair-minded Americans on top of those who believe in Trump are starting to see that this weaponization is a threat to their rights. And parents at school board meetings, Catholics at pro-life conferences, they're starting to see the infiltration of what is the abuse of Donald Trump's constitutional rights. And I think as a result, that's why he's getting stronger, not weaker, with these charges. But look, they're trying to keep him in courtrooms, probably this one they'll start trying to ask a November court date so that they can have November and January and March and May, you know, and try to have something happen that can expose him. Well, it's not fair. People see it. And I trust the American people. I trust that we're gonna find that even in Fulton County, where they're relying on Trump saying, “Try to find me 11,700 votes.” Well, what was he supposed to ask for? 6,000 votes? Of course he was gonna ask for the amount of votes that would win him the state.
[end clip]
Andrea Chalupa (24:21):
So I cannot emphasize how dangerous Paul Manafort is. I understand that the DOJ treats criminals like him as though they're nonviolent, but as I've said many times on the show, the Paul Manaforts of the world are extraordinarily violent. Anyone who has served, who has worked for or taken money from Russian oligarchs, they are on the payroll of the Russian mafia state, of the Russian mass murdering terrorist state. For instance, there are these two Russian oligarchs, including one of the fancier ones who cleans up very nice in the West, Mikhail Fridman, who were just sanctioned by the US for supplying/financing to Russia's war machine that's carrying out genocides across Ukraine, including the systemic rape of people (including children in front of their parents). That's who Paul Manafort represents. Paul Manafort is somebody who should still be in prison.
Andrea Chalupa (25:20):
Andrew Weissmann, one of the leading prosecutors on Mueller's team, wrote a piece for Just Security which I can link to in the show notes. He wrote a piece where he said, Hey, Paul Manafort's coming out with a book. Well, that the DOJ should look into how that clearly violates his plea deal and so on. And so Andrew Weissmann makes the case on how Paul Manafort should still be on the DOJ’s radar. And if the DOJ would wake the fuck up—Merrick Garland—and go after Paul Manafort, who is a clear traitor to our country, who is currently using Fox News to try to rally Trump's base, which we've seen has no problem turning to violence to try to overthrow our democracy and intimidate public officials, okay? So that's what Paul Manafort is doing.
Andrea Chalupa (26:02):
He did the same thing to help bring Yanukovych to power. He did the same thing to bring Trump to power, and now he's doing it again. And it's very clear that he's got a lot of money at stake because If he can get Trump elected again, Russia will be very happy with him and he would get a lot of that easy Russian money flowing to him, if it's not already flowing to him now. So Paul Manafort needs to be investigated. The DOJ needs to wake up. Jack Smith needs to, you know, bring his square jaw over to Merrick Garland and say, “Get on this because Paul Manafort's a national security threat. He has no business going on Sean Hannity and spewing his Kremlin talking points for a well-known Russian asset. Get on this yesterday.”
Andrea Chalupa (26:44):
We're sitting ducks if you don't finally bring Paul Manafort, the head of the torturer’s lobby, to justice. He's an inherently violent man. But I was impressed to see that he finally came to terms with the hair dye. He's not no longer using that sweaty, melty Rudy Giuliani hair dye, so that does show a tiny bit of growth. But he's still a career criminal. He's still a traitor to our country and he needs to be locked up. Paul Manafort understands the dark arts of all this stuff. We're gonna have extremely close elections in these must-win states in the blue wall of the Midwest, in Arizona, and even, yes, Georgia. And so Paul Manafort is someone who knows how to tip those scales. Like I said, he's going to cash in on that opportunity.
Andrea Chalupa (27:28):
When he goes on Fox News, the Kremlin sees this. The Kremlin knows that he's still in the game. So, do you understand? There's clearly going to be something transactional going around right now between Paul Manafort and the Kremlin with Paul Manafort out there, basically telegraphing, letting the Kremlin know, “I'm out here fighting for you because I'm out here fighting for Trump.” Alright? So yeah, we just… This guy needs to be locked up. He needs to be investigated. So I'll move on from that because I feel like I'm just gonna keep repeating myself in rage. So now Rudy Giuliani. Another highlight of Fani Willis' indictment is that Moscow's mayor… I mean, New York's mayor, Rudy Giuliani, was hit with RICO charges, the same RICO charges that he used to take down the Italian mob to make room for the Russian Mafia in New York City.
Andrea Chalupa (28:20):
Giuliani is someone who, like Trump used The Apprentice, Giuliani used his time as New York City mayor and taking down the Italian mob, really bragging about how, he's the RICO guy, and then he gets hit with RICO. So that's nice. It's a very cherry on the sundae there. Thank you, Fani Willis. And I wanna just sort of back into the significance of that. When Giuliani cleaned up New York City from the Italian mafia, what happened? The Russian mafia moved in. The Russian mafia came and started to grow. Why is that so significant? Well, I spoke to a longtime developer, somebody who was very active in Russia and other post-Soviet states in the early years, in the car bomb ‘90s and so on, who told me that Russia was the only country he worked in globally in working on these massive development projects, building buildings.
Andrea Chalupa (29:18):
And he said that Russia was the only country he worked in globally where the money tap was always on, where they always brought their own money. He never had to bring outside capital into Russia. The money was always there. Russia is a country, because of the corruption, because of all of the pillaging from all of their natural resources, because of the Kremlin's court of oligarchs that the FSB controls, because they together, you know, Putin and that whole sort of like FSB apparatus, which today makes Putin one of the wealthiest men, if not the wealthiest man in the world, given the entire pool of money that he controls with all of these Russian oligarchs combined, the money was always there. The money was always easy. That is what made Fred Trump.
Andrea Chalupa (30:06):
And that is what made Donald Trump. Fred Trump ate from that easy Russian money trough in building up Brighton Beach. Donald Trump built off his father's legacy by developing Little Moscow, Sunny Isles, Florida, making that into the Brighton Beach of Florida. And Rudy Giuliani made way for all of this by helping the Russian mafia push out their competition, the Italians. The Italians simply did not have easy money on the level of the Russians, and that's why the Russians were able to come in and entrench themselves in the US, and within a few short decades, help bring one of their assets to power. That is why early on on this show, I said the election of Donald Trump is a marriage between the Russian mafia in the West and the Russian mafia in the East. That's what we're facing. And Paul Manafort and Giuliani were key to making that happen. When Paul Manafort was going through all his legal troubles, where he was being squeezed by the Mueller team—who did not squeeze him hard enough, in my opinion, because the guy got away—he was able to have a case that could be pardoned and there's been no backup cases, no safety guards since, right? So, hey, Mueller team, you should have seen that pardon coming because Trump was dangling the pardon right before your eyes. And so you should have had some mechanism in place, something ready to go for when Trump would've hit one of the worst criminals that have ever wreaked havoc not just in the US but in Ukraine, you should have had something ready for that. And you didn't. So, I'm sorry, Mueller team, you did not go far enough with Paul Manafort. But when he was going through all that and he was busy, he was cooped up in prison, I asked on the show, “Who is going to be the next Paul Manafort? Who's going to go take Paul Manafort's business with pro Kremlin politicians in Ukraine?”
Andrea Chalupa (31:47):
And sure enough, it was Rudy Giuliani, he was out there trying to create some fake scandal on Biden. CNN even reported that he was going after my sister, pushing Zelensky’s team to invent dirt against her and Biden; my sister being Alexandra Chalupa, the independent contractor who'd warned anyone who would listen that if Paul Manafort was here managing Trump's campaign, that meant that Kremlin was here, and so on. So Giuliani is just, you know, Giuliani was just the new Paul Manafort, was just sort of an extension of that whole operation. And I wanna really stress to people how significant this is because what we're really talking about are not just threats to our democracy, but national security threats. National security threats. These are people that were serving the Kremlin's interests and it shows. It absolutely shows because in Trump's own Brighton Beach in Florida, Sunny Isles, the Little Moscow of Florida where there's all this dark Russian money, these LLCs buying up all of these condos.
Andrea Chalupa (32:44):
Recently the FBI just this last May did a raid on a Russian-owned condo in a Trump Tower building where they found, where they arrested these Russians who were trying to help the Russian terrorist state circumvent sanctions by smuggling them much-needed parts for their airlines. Okay? And so that just goes to show, that is the legacy of Fred Trump, that is a legacy of Donald Trump. They're traitors to our country. They sold us out. They sold us out for that easy, easy, easy, dirty Russian money. Fred Trump started this, Donald Trump built on it, and Don Jr. and Eric Trump have both admitted that they are dependent on Russian money. And, of course, Ivanka cashed in on this as well and built her legacy off of it. So remember everything that's happening with these indictments—this is the fourth one in this red hot American summer—everything that's happening with these indictments, it is not just a threat to a democracy, it is a national security threat.
Andrea Chalupa (33:39):
So wherever you're listening around the world, understand that we here in America, we're fighting for our country, we're fighting to protect the most vulnerable communities, we're fighting to protect people who are being violently scapegoated right now through all this genocidal rhetoric right now; the LGBTQ communities, obviously women with the abortion bans that are taking lives and so on. We are fighting for our own country. We're fighting to take it back. We're fighting to build, rebuild what we've lost. And we're also fighting for you, wherever you live in the world, because the global democratic alliance… I don't know if… American democracy cannot survive if Trump gets into the White House. And I don't think the global democratic alliance, I don't know what they would do if America falls. And I don't know… I shudder to think what Ukraine would do if America falls.
Andrea Chalupa (34:27):
And so what we're really fighting here in the United States, what Fani Willis is putting her life on the line to do is protect all of us. And thank you for that. This is a very strong indictment. It's a very promising indictment. And I know as scary as things are and overwhelming as things are, we're gonna keep doing what we've always done: We're gonna fight for the truth. We're gonna try to sustain and be as resilient as possible and self-care and take care of ourselves and take care of our community as much as possible. Refuse to abandon anyone. We're gonna carry each other through this and we're going to get through this. And I do believe with that Ohio bellwether election, that ultimately we're going to stop him again because… we have no choice.
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