Live from Music Row Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Maury County Mayor Andy Ogles in the studio to discuss the potential for the 2020 election results to be decertified and the consequences of unelected bureaucrats.
Leahy: I’m always glad to have that great, steady, calming influence of that find Southern gentleman Andy Ogles, the Mayor of Maury County.
Ogles: Good morning. Because, you know, it’s good to have that calm, thoughtful, responsiveness to the hot energy I bring when we’re looking at these election issues. I would love to get your reaction to this.
And we have a story at The Tennessee Star. I’ll read the headline and the first two paragraphs and then get your reaction. This is a national story, but it does have state impact because we’ve got the problem here of illegal aliens coming into Tennessee. And it’s causing difficulties and expenses from the state.
We’ll get to that in a bit. Let me look at this story. I want to get your reaction. Headline. Former Trump Campaign Advisor Boris Epshteyn Predicts States Will Decertify 2020 Election Results.
Boris Epshteyn, attorney and former strategic advisor to the 2020 Trump campaign predicted many states will decertify their election results for the November 2020 election. In an interview with Gina Loudon, our friend, Epshteyn said the series of audits that may occur could lead to the reversal.
Additionally, this is what he says. There is no language in the Constitution that prevents such a move. “The further we go on this freight train of audits from Arizona to Georgia to Pennsylvania, and the more deeply horrifying information is uncovered. Ballots missing. Databases missing in Arizona. Fulton County, chain of custody documents missing in Georgia and Atlanta. Pennsylvania, a total cesspool of disaster. The more that information comes out, the more Americans believe this was a fraudulent election,” Epshteyn said.
What do you make of this claim that states will decertify their election results?
Ogles: I think that the last statement is key. We’re in unprecedented waters here constitutionally. The question is, there is no mechanism. So what happens next? And so ultimately, you think, well, it’s going to get kicked to the Supreme Court.
Well, the Supreme Court has already dodged this bullet. They wouldn’t hear it. You only had two dissenting votes in that case, and it was Alido and Thomas. So if they decertify and there’s a case to decertify and it goes to the Supreme Court, What’s the standing? How do you get standing before the Supreme Court?
Leahy: Neither of us are attorneys. But I think you’ve asked a critical question. I do think that it’s entirely possible that Georgia and Arizona, and in particular, Arizona because the state Senate is Republican.
The state House is Republican, same as in Georgia, although they’ve been a little weak in Georgia, they’re controlled by Republicans. I think it is possible that a special session could be held or even a regular session in January.
And reviewing all this evidence, I think they could say we vote to decertify the election. Okay. What’s the impact of that? And the answer is in terms of legal mechanism, nothing. Now in terms of public opinion, however, and I think this is the angle they’re going at.
I think a growing belief that this was an unlawful election and in many cases, and we’re looking in Georgia more and more that they can’t produce chain of custody documents as we speak today, seven and a half months after the election, there are no chain of custody documents for more than 300,000 absentee ballots cast in that election where the margin of victory was less than 12,000.
Ogles: Wow. At what point does this one become criminal? But, you know, I’ve had the opportunity kind of here as COVID’s been waning to speak, quite frequently across the state. And I can tell you, overwhelmingly, as I go around and I’m talking to these various groups from Jackson to Knoxville and everywhere in between that people think this election was stolen.
And I think more and more of these audits are showing that there’s a whole lot of monkey business or incompetence that took place. But at the end of the day, we were defrauded out of a true and honest election.
Leahy: Well, that’s the mantra now from the Secretary of State in Georgia. Sloppy but not fraudulent.
Ogles: Yeah, right.
Leahy: Sloppy, but not fraudulent. And it’s not just The Georgia Star News our site in Georgia. Just the News. Did you see what they got? John Solomon’s group. They got a 29 page memo from this guy by name of Carter Jones, who observed what happened in Fulton County from November second to November seventh.
And it is just a litany of a massive chain of custody problems. We’ve only reported on the movement of absentee ballots, which, by the way, they still haven’t produced the 385 missing transfer forms for 18,000 ballots to us at The Georgia Star News.
Fulton County claims to provided or Georgia Public Broadcasting complains that they provided all the missing documentation to them on Wednesday in 48 hours of receiving a request from them.
Six and seven months after we’ve requested it. We don’t have any of that data yet. They still haven’t provided it to us. And by the way of the ones we looked at, five percent of those absentee ballots were delivered to the registrar before they were collected at the dropbox. (Ogles chuckles) Time travel. If you believe in time travel, you believe in the certification of that election.
Ogles: I mean, that’s like Pulitzer Prize-winning. You just proved time travel.
Leahy: Time travel!
Ogles: But, you know, Laura Baigert who was on this story for The Georgia Star News, she got a shout out from our former President Trump. That has to be an amazing accomplishment from a journalist’s perspective.
I mean, Trump is Trump. Whether you like, like Trump or dislike Trump, he’s in his own kind of stratosphere. And to be given a shout-out by the former President is pretty amazing.
Leahy: Well, he’s tracking this, and it’s important stuff. And what’s interesting is you get in the weeds on this stuff. But in an election where you have absentee ballots placed in drop boxes, what a formula for fraud that is.
By the way, the Georgia state legislature did not authorize the use of drop boxes. There were 300 around Georgia. 37 in Fulton County not authorized. It was an emergency election code rule passed by the Georgia State Election Board that put them in place.
They had a rule about how you track them. So it’s very complicated. But the chain of custody was broken on so many levels there. The way they worked it is you would put these ballots in a dropbox.
And then these election workers, some of them who worked for apparently, this attempt service called Happy Faces, who got the contract with Fulton County because they were represented by wait for it…Stacey Abrams. (Ogles chuckles)
Gee, what could go wrong there? But what we can trace is they took these ballots, apparently, to a warehouse. And they held them there until they were going to count them in the election. Supposedly they tracked the movement of absentee ballots from 37 drop boxes to the warehouses.
They’re also supposed to, although it’s not an election code rule, apparently, there were some instructions that there’s a mechanism for tracking the movement of absentee ballots from the warehouse a couple of days before the election to four miles away to the counting center at the State Farm Arena, and then back.
You’re supposed to put them in a box. Number the boxes and track all that. They haven’t done that at all.
Ogles: So you’re saying an unelected bureaucrat change election law under the nose of the legislature, kind of like CRT in Tennessee.
Leahy: Exactly like it. This is why this is kind of circling back to what is making people so angry.
Ogles: That’s right. Because our bureaucrats are doing things that they’re not authorized to do by law, and we’re being forced to live with it. And not just on the consequences of this election, but in everyday life and in everyday life here in Tennessee.
Ogles: That’s right.
Listen to the second hour here:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Live from Music Row Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio who analyzed White supremacy in relation to the current media narratives and federal officials wielding of power.
Leahy: We are joined in studio by the original All-Star panelist, Crom Carmichael. And as you know, it’s Wednesday. So, of course, it’s time for Crom to be in studio. Good morning, Crom.
Carmichael: Morning, Michael.
Leahy: Well, so much to talk about. So little time.
Carmichael: Yes.
Leahy: We’re talking a little bit about journalism in America. Where does it stand?
Carmichael: Well, I want to connect two dots. One is journalism in America. We talked about it Monday. And then on Monday, when I got home, I was reading The Wall Street Journal.
And there’s an article by Gerard Baker, and he essentially said exactly the same thing we were saying. And I’m going to quote a couple of things from the article. It says these days, proliferating lapses and journalism judgment and standards are not simply forgiven by the editorial establishment.
They are rewarded as long as they are the right kind of error by the right kind of person. He says even Jeffrey Toobin is in fact, the indispensable legal mind CNN evidently believes he is, his reinstatement last week must surely fill some of his colleagues with misgivings. I don’t believe that a single person at CNN has any misgivings about Jeffrey Toobin coming back.
Leahy: Because he’s in the club that’s vastly overpaid.
Carmichael: He’s in the club and they don’t care.
Leahy: As long as they have they get paid and they get their agenda out.
Carmichael: They have a narrative. And I would imagine that there are other people at CNN who are equally as disgusting as Jeffrey Toobin. But then it says, but his restoration to a more salubrious on camera roll is a helpful reminder of the rules that now govern the news.
The medium is no longer the message. The new reality is that the mission is the message. As long as your work furthers the mission, no failure in behavior, no error in reporting or editing, no corruption of the truth or evidence will go unrewarded.
All data and facts, all judgment about stories and people who produce them are subordinate to the mission. Now, I want to take all of this and tie it into this new thing of White supremacy. What is White supremacy?
How would one define White supremacy? Is it White people, primarily males, who are trying to use the government to have control over other people, especially minorities? Would that be the definition of White supremacy?
Leahy: Crom, yeah, it would seem to me that would be a good definition of White supremacy.
Carmichael: Then Merrick Garland and Joe Biden are right up there. (Leahy chuckles) They are right up there.
Leahy: I could see that one coming a mile away.
Carmichael: Oh, my gosh. I don’t know if you’ve seen what Merrick Garland is now trying to do in Arizona. You have an investigation in Arizona by officials in Arizona. Legal officials.
Leahy: Authorized by a state judge.
Carmichael: Yes. And Merrick Garland is trying to say that what they are doing is wrong. Now, let me say this. That’s a White supremacist if I’ve ever heard one. Because here’s another thing.
This shows you why Mitch McConnell and the Republicans were so wise and not even holding hearings for this political hack. He apparently was a circuit court judge. The Washington circuit.
He should understand the Constitution. He should know that states have the authority over elections, not the federal government. He should know that. But he doesn’t, apparently, or even worse, he knows it and is ignoring it.
Leahy: Let me just step back for listeners just to remind them when Crom was talking about Mitch McConnell refusing to hold hearings for him, it wasn’t a hearing for his confirmation as attorney general. He was nominated for the Supreme Court after the death of Anton Scalia.
Carmichael: Yes. Thank you for that. We are talking now two years ago.
Leahy: 2016. And rightfully, Mitch McConnell, the Republican majority leader, had told President Obama it’s an election year. You nominate somebody, we’re not going to hold hearings.
Carmichael: Right. And that’s exactly what Joe Biden had publicly announced in 1992. And that was even when a sitting President was running for reelection. In the case of 2016, you didn’t have a sitting President running for re-election.
But I really want to dig into this question of what is a White supremacist. Might a White supremacist be the head of the FBI who inserts, as we learned from Tucker Carlson last night.
Over a dozen FBI operatives into the organizations that were coming to Washington to listen to Donald Trump talk about the elections and whether or not there was cheating in the elections.
And now we’ve learned that the FBI from Tucker Carlson that the FBI, some of these people who insert themselves actually agitate and actually come up with ideas of insurrection, encouraged the insurrection and participated in it.
Leahy: There’s a word legal word for that. I think it’s called entrapment.
Carmichael: Yeah, I think so. I think so. And so now you have people who are sitting in jail in solitary confinement in Washington, D.C. who won’t be tried and whose lawyers are not being given access to the evidence.
Now, think about this for a second. Is Christopher Wray White? Yes. Is he trying to use the power of government to crush other people, some of whom are minorities, some of whom are women? One of the Capitol Hill agents shot and murdered.
Leahy: Murdered Ashli Babbitt.
Carmichael: Who was unarmed. A 14-year veteran and we can’t even find out who that person is. That person is not even going to be tried. Apparently, there was not even a Grand jury.
Leahy: How does that happen?
Carmichael: It when you have White supremacists who have power. And that’s what we’re looking at here. Whether or not they’ll be able to use that power to leverage taking over the government, I think, is in great question because I don’t think they can.
But I think they were trying to. We have Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema to thank. I think there are other Democrats in the Senate, but they wouldn’t stand up. Those two did. They stood up and said, enough, we’re not going to do away with the filibuster.
We’re not going to do away with our Democratic system. We’re not going to do away with our Constitution. And so because of that, Biden’s whole agenda has stalled. I don’t watch CNN.
And so I wonder whether or not they applauded Joe Biden for being able to walk up and down the steps of Air Force One without falling. Because for CNN, that’s about all he has to do to have a successful trip abroad.
Leahy: There’s something I wanted to point out first about the Australian media. The Australian media has observed the fawning of the American establishment media over Joe Biden in these G7 meetings in Europe. And they are just utterly disgusted by it. They’ve reported on that.
Carmichael: Yeah. You’ve heard the old baseball story about Shoeless Joe. I’m going to say, Clueless Joe. That’s a new name for me. I listened to some of his answers to very easy questions.
And one of the questions because Biden, showing how tough he was during the election, said that Putin was a killer. So a reporter asked him during the election campaign, you called Vladimir Putin, ‘a killer.’ Do you still stand by that? Do you still call him a killer? (Imitates Biden)
Leahy: I think your imitation of Joe Biden presents him more articulately than he really was.
Carmichael: (Imitates Biden) (Laughter) C’mon man. That was yesterday. What’s tomorrow? Who is tomorrow? It’s embarrassing on one hand. I just have a suspicion that the midterms and I have great faith in the American people, in crowds, the wisdom of crowds.
And I think that the people are looking at what’s going on now and looking at Biden. And by the way, he’s giving everything to China that China wants. Everything. So the fix is in there. In fact, domestically, I can’t think of anything that China would want Joe Biden to do domestically that Joe Biden isn’t doing.
Leahy: Open borders.
Carmichael: Open borders, trying to trash our Democratic process, trying to divide the country,
Leahy: Trashing Americans who supported Donald Trump while on European soil. By the way, Politico, talk about the media. Here is their headline two days ago about Joe Biden in Europe.
Biden Flourishing in Foreign Policy. I gotta look at the dictionary. It’s sort of like the Democratic definition of infrastructure. What is the Democratic definition of flourishing?
Carmichael: The answer is walking up and down the steps here Air Force One without tripping. (Leahy laughs) That must be it.
Leahy: That is very good Crom.
Listen to the full second hour here:
– – –
Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
