Parler May Have Broken Bribery Laws By Offering Trump Ownership

According to a shocking new report, the Trump Organization negotiated a deal with Parler to make the conservative social media outlet Trump's exclusive online tool in exchange for a 40% stake in the company. This was while the President was in office, and since his tweets were official declarations, Parler and the Trump Organization likely violated anti-bribery laws. Farron Cousins explains what happened.

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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

According to a shocking new report from Buzzfeed news, the conservative social media alternative to Twitter parlor actually met with officials from the Trump organization and attempted to hammer out a deal where in Donald Trump would agree that parlor would be the only social media he would use. And in exchange parlor would give the Trump organization a 40% ownership stake in parlor. This all happened by the way, while Donald Trump was still the president of the United States. As far as we know this happened prior to the insurrection, certainly happened prior to Donald Trump being permanently banned from Twitter. This was something that his organization allegedly without him involved in it. Uh, cause you gotta gotta mention that. As far as we know, there is no indication in these reports. In fact, they specifically say Trump was not involved in these conversations.

So anyway, the organizations over there, having conversations with parlor parlor says you get him to only use us. We give basically him because he owns the Trump organization, 40% ownership, stake, um, according to legal experts, this is 100% a violation of anti-bribery laws. And here's why, um, Donald Trump, as he and his own staff have said, uh, said that his tweets were official presidential statements. So if a another outlet cuts a deal with the president of the United States, offering them money to only use their outlets to make their, uh, presidential announcements, boom bribery, both parties would be guilty at this point just as I think, uh, the Trump organization and parlor would both be guilty on this one. So now we need investigations. And here's the funny thing is like we already have so many different investigations still going on with Donald Trump, with the Trump organization. And now clearly this thing, because the deal yes did fall through, but you're still gonna have to look at it because you got to find out what the intent was. And you also have to send a message to future politicians that Hey, things can still be illegal. And I think that's the big lesson that nobody's learned over the last four years. In fact, I think they've learned the opposite. I think people are starting to realize politicians play by a different set of rules.

And we, we can't have a functioning government when we have these individuals at the presidential level, in the house level, in the Senate level, just breaking the law all the time. I mean the insider trading that we saw just a year, nobody got punished for that. Nobody, nobody actually got punished for that. And there were varying degrees and there were multiple different individuals involved. It wasn't just Kelly Leffler, you know, Leffler ended up becoming the face for it because she was the most public one who didn't get punished. But Feinstein, Diane Feinstein, a Democrat was also involved in that and accused of doing the same thing. Nobody gets punished all of the crimes that Donald Trump very obviously committed, you know, even in the Mueller report, they said, yes, we've got 10 instances of obstruction of justice, at least no punishment. And now this story, why wouldn't they go to make this deal?

Because they know nobody gets punished anymore. It's the same thing when you're dealing with a, uh, a bank, you know, that that caused the, the economic burndown, you know, doing all this fraud with the mortgages and the robo-signing and all of that stuff that you hear all the time, nobody went to jail. So what happens? They get the little slap on the wrist. They Connie, you know, dig their foot in the dirt and say, um, I'm real, sorry. I won't happen again. And then a few years later it happens again because nobody gets punted. And as long as we just perpetuate this cycle, it's going to continue. And the next one to come after Trump will be far worse than him and so on and so forth. It'll just get worse and worse, worse and worse until finally we started enforcing the laws we have on hand, because if we don't enforce those nothing's real anymore and nothing matters.