Deepfakes Are The New October Surprise

America’s Lawyer E119: Major corporations and their lobbyists have found a loophole that allows them to wine and dine members of Congress without violating federal laws prohibiting those activities. The FBI has been caught AGAIN, spying on American citizens that were protesting against the military industrial complex, and this time they tried to prosecute them as terrorists. And disgraced former Senator Bob Menendez is begging a judge to toss out his felony convictions because he says that Congressional rules allow him to be corrupt. All that, and more is coming up, so don’t go anywhere – America’s Lawyer starts right now.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Hi, I'm Mike Papantonio and this is America's Lawyer. Major corporations and their lobbyists have found a loophole that allows them to whine and dine members of Congress without violating any federal laws prohibiting those activities. It's a stretch. The FBI, well, they've been caught, again, spying on American citizens that were protesting against military industrial complex killing natural resources, basically. And disgraced former Senator Bob Menendez, is begging a judge to toss out his felony convictions because he says that Congress allows for such things, allows for that kind of corruption. All that and more, it's coming up. Don't go anywhere. America's Lawyer starts right now.

Many years ago, laws were passed that prevented corporations and their lobbyists from engaging with lawmakers directly through expensive dinners and lavish vacations, but it didn't last long. They found loopholes, and they've been exploiting those loopholes for years. I've got Farron Cousins with me to talk about that. Farron, every time we thought, 2007, we thought, oh, finally Congress is doing something about K Street. Well, I looked at that. Even the limitations they had on that, they were meaningless, but now they've taken this to such new heights. It's crazy.

Well, and a lot of people forget what happened or maybe they even weren't around in politics in 2007. We were We covered it extensively. The Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed, just money flowing so flagrantly from the lobbyists directly to the politicians that the politicians said, okay, we got to at least pretend to do something because everybody's watching us. So they pass these laws that say, okay, lobbyists, you can no longer send us on trips. You can no longer send our staffers on trips. No more. That's not allowed. You cannot pay for it. But if you have a nonprofit, the nonprofit can absolutely pay for that and that is the loophole that these lobbyists have been exploiting since day one of that legislation being passed to the point where Politico pointed out there have been over 17,000 trips for congressional staffers paid for by these so-called nonprofits, where they show up and they party with lobbyists at a luxury resort.

Okay. What they do is they try to make it look like they are educational, come and we're gonna educate you about the medical crisis in America. We're gonna talk to you and have speakers, both sides, all the sides of the issue make a presentation. And so these staffers, of course, again, I can't stress enough, these people come to Congress sometimes, House of Representative, they get there with holes in their shoes. They are so poor. They've not accomplished a thing in their life. And all of a sudden, they're really nobodies. But a party says, hey, why don't you run for whatever, House of Representatives, why don't you do that? And all of a sudden they show up in Washington, and some corporations say, wait, let me get this right. You're gonna let me take my wife to this vacation in Hawaii where you're gonna buy us all these extravagant meals and spend all this money on us? Really, you're gonna do that? Yeah. Now, we don't want to talk to you about politics. We want to just educate you. Yeah. But we're gonna do that.

Right. And the education is basically the education you would get from George Orwell's 1984. And what it is, is they'll take you in there and say, hey, healthcare in America is is bad. But not because we've let insurance companies run it or corporations run it. They're saying it's bad because we have too many regulations.