#176 Andrew Bailey - Suing China for $25 Billion, Abolishing ATF, Fauci and Soros Crimes

Andrew Bailey is a prominent figure in Missouri politics, currently serving as the state's Attorney General. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in English and later earned a Juris Doctor from the University of Missouri, where he also participated in the Army ROTC. His professional history includes deployment to Iraq, as well the roles of Assistant Attorney General, General Counsel for the Missouri Department of Corrections, and Deputy Counsel in the Governor's Office. Throughout his career, he has focused on protecting constitutional rights, advocating for victims, and addressing violent crime. Bailey's tenure as Attorney General has been marked by significant legal actions, particularly regarding COVID-19. He led Missouri's lawsuit against the Chinese government for allegedly hoarding personal protective equipment during the pandemic, seeking $25 billion in damages for the state. His office has also actively pursued cases related to consumer protection and First Amendment rights, including recent lawsuits against Starbucks for discrimination and Jackson County for infringing on free speech in counseling settings. As he continues his work, Bailey remains committed to safeguarding Missourians' rights and enhancing community safety. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://ShawnLikesGold.com | 855-936-GOLD #goldcopartner http://shopify.com/srs http://ziprecruiter.com/srs https://bunkr.life/ | Use Code SRS https://americanfinancing.net/srs NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org http://trueclassic.com/srs Upgrade your wardrobe and save on @trueclassic at trueclassic.com/SRS! #trueclassicpod https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/SRS Andrew Bailey Links: Office of the Attorney General - https://ago.mo.gov/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/andrewbaileymo/ X - https://x.com/AndrewBaileyMO Website - https://baileymo.com/ Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Born in Roma Fragrances by Valentino Beauty, the iconic fragrance duo. Donna Born in Roma Eau de Parfum is a feminine fragrance featuring juicy black currant, central jasmine, woody cashmerin, and warm vanilla. Its masculine counterpart, Womo Born in Roma Eau de Toilette, has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver, spicy ginger, and mineral salt. Shop at mazies.com.

• 1:13Shawn Ryan?

  Andrew Bailey, welcome to the show, man.

• 1:16Speaker 03

  Appreciate you having me on.

• 1:17Shawn Ryan?

  Appreciate you being here. So this has been, we've been communicating back and forth for a couple of months now and it's just, it's awesome to finally have you in here.

• 1:27Speaker 03

  Man, it's a privilege to be here. I've been following your show and be able to sit in the same seat as some really incredible people with some incredible stories and to get to be a part of it just means a lot to me.

• 1:37Shawn Ryan?

  Well, thank you for saying that. Thank you for saying that. And you are doing amazing things as the Attorney General for Missouri and really sticking it to the federal government when we needed it. It seems to be like... Every state needs a you. So, how do we, uh? I appreciate that. How do we make that happen?

• 2:00Shawn Ryan?

  But, uh, and we'll dig into that, but we got a lot of stuff to cover. Um, just talking to your team downstairs, it sounds like you got a hell of a life story. So, I was planning on just going over some policies and some stuff that you're, that you're, uh, kinda tackling as the Attorney General, but, but, uh, let's kick it off with, uh, with a life story. But, everybody starts with a, uh, with an intro here. So, Attorney General Andrew Bailey. You are the 44th Attorney General of Missouri, a decorated combat veteran, a prosecutor, and a staunch defender of constitutional rights.

• 2:41Shawn Ryan?

  You went to college at the University of Missouri on an Army scholarship, following the September 11th terrorist attacks on the United States. You were commissioned as an armored cavalry officer in the Army and later deployed to Iraq. Following your time in the Army, you attended law school and became a prosecutor to fight violent crime and protect Missouri communities. You've handled countless cases in both state and federal courts throughout your career, defending our constitutional freedoms and the most vulnerable while delivering justice to, for victims. You're focused on protecting the Constitution, enforcing the laws as written, defending the state, supporting the counties,

• 3:24Shawn Ryan?

  and training a new generation of service-minded attorneys. I'd like to remind everybody that you have a personal 90% plus conviction rate as a prosecutor, and probably more, more important than any of this stuff, you are a husband, a father of four with three adopted childrens, and a Christian.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, that's uh, that's right. Uh, getting to be a dad's the best thing that's ever happened to me and uh, my faith in Christ uh, guides me in everything I do. So it's uh, been a, you know, I always feel like I'm at my own funeral when I hear the, you know, my bio.

• 4:04Speaker 03

  It's weird hearing it, but yeah, it uh, it's been a wild ride. I've had some great opportunities and uh, excited about my future in public service. You know, we uh, I got appointed to, to this role two years ago and been charging hard. Uh, just one reelection, so I got at least another four years ahead of me in this role and it's a privilege to get to do it.

• 4:23Shawn Ryan?

  Congratulations.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  Thanks, sir.

• 4:25Shawn Ryan?

  Uh, it's really inspiring what you're doing.

• 4:28Speaker 03

  Appreciate it.

• 4:28Shawn Ryan?

  And I think a lot of people are taking notes, so um, before we get too in the weeds, got a couple more things. So, I have a Patreon account, which is a subscription service. Uh, these folks have been with us since the beginning. Without them, I wouldn't be sitting in here. Neither would you be. They funded this whole thing when it started in my attic at my house. Then we moved here, total upgrade of equipment. Uh, they're just awesome supporters. We've turned it into a community and, and now we're actually building a studio out of the woods that's gonna be about three and a half times the size of this one. So,

• 5:07Shawn Ryan?

  um, hopefully you get to see that. Get you back on here. And uh, so one of the things we do is we offer, we offer the community the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question. And so this is from Jeff. "With platforms like X and Meta easing their approach to content moderation and censorship, what do you see as the biggest emerging threats of, of free speech in the future?"

• 5:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think corporate censorship remains a problem. I think ever since Elon Musk took over X, he has revitalized and revolutionized the approach uh, to hosting a platform like that. But Meta, Google, YouTube, these are still problematic platforms. And, you know, we filed a law, a groundbreaking First Amendment lawsuit, Missouri v. Biden, that we took all the way to the United States Supreme Court to stop government censorship on big tech social media platforms. We uncovered the evidence where the Biden administration is yelling and cussing at the executives at Meta, demanding that they remove certain content during the COVID pandemic. And that's a violation of the First Amendment. We prosecuted that case, like I said, went all the way to the United States Supreme Court,

• 6:17Speaker 03

  uncovered so much of that evidence, numerous depositions, thousands of pages of documents, got a preliminary injunction at the trial court level, was affirmed at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The United States Supreme Court said that, look, censorship occurred, but remanded the case for further discovery because the evidence we had of censorship ended at a certain period of time. The evidence was cut off because we were moving up towards the Supreme Court, and so we weren't doing discovery, we weren't allowed to do discovery as the case moved up the process. So, we were back at the trial court level in November, the people elected President Donald Trump, who on day one, signed an executive order to dismantle the vast censorship regime that existed in the federal government. So that's a huge win.

• 7:01Speaker 03

  And again, so much of it came from that case, Missouri v. Biden. Proud of the work we did on that. But corporate censorship remains, and so we've got to fight back against that. You know, there's such a unique history to the development of the big tech social media marketplace. In 1996, Congress passed the Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, that is both a sword and a shield for these big tech social media platforms. It's a shield in that they are shielded from civil liability, they're not considered common law publishers, so they're not responsible for the content that they publish. But at the same time, it's a sword in that the statute explicitly allows them to moderate content. Now, the problem is that everyone that works at these big tech social media firms are

• 7:44Speaker 03

  like-minded individuals that want to silence voices that dissent to their worldview. And that creates a terrible censorship problem. And I would submit to you, the censorship that's going on today is worse than at any point in human history. When King George shut down a colonial printing press, the world knew he had done it, and he was squelching one medium of communication, the written word. But when a big tech social media oligarch de-emphasizes, deplatforms, shadow bans a user, it's not only the content producers' First Amendment rights that are violated, their voice that is silenced, but all the listeners as well that may not even know they're being denied access. And the nature of the censorship is so much more multi-dimensional.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  It's body language, it's imagery, it's spoken word, it's written word, it's all of the above. And so the censorship is more dangerous than ever before. I think we've got to take a serious approach. You know, Texas and Florida in 2021 both enacted statutes that sought to retool the content moderation formulas in law for the big tech social media platforms. Big Tech sued. That case went to the United States Supreme Court, and just in July, that decision came down. It's called the Net Choice Decision. It's a really fascinating opinion. But what it said was that the states weren't allowed to dictate content, because the content

• 9:08Speaker 03

  moderation itself was expressive and thus protected by the First Amendment from government censorship. So in Missouri, we've got a new plan. And I'm proud to announce, you know, just a week or two ago, we are going to use our consumer protection authority to protect the consumers that are on big tech social media platforms and encourage algorithmic marketplace competition to break up the algorithmic monopoly. Why shouldn't users and consumers of big tech be able to select their own algorithms from third-party vendors? Isn't that a better experience? No one would buy a name-brand truck if the company said, "Well, you can only use brand X tires on that truck." So we wouldn't tolerate that in the auto marketplace or any other marketplace, and

• 9:50Speaker 03

  yet somehow we're tolerating it in the big tech marketplace. So by promulgating this algorithmic choice rule, not only will we break up the algorithmic monopoly, we'll protect consumers and reinforce the First Amendment right to free speech and the free, fair, and open marketplace of ideas, where the competition of ideas will produce the best results. It'll enhance the consumer experience, because you'll get to select whichever algorithm you want to maximize your engagement and time on the product.

• 10:18Shawn Ryan?

  So break this down a little bit more, because this is something I think a lot of creators, including myself, have dealt with. Censorship and stuff, stuff like that for, for a long time. It's, it can be debilitating for business. It's, and it's demoralizing. You know, it's, it's, me and Joe Rogan talked a little bit about this and, and, and he, you know, like when, when Google demonetizes a, an episode, I mean, that's, you know, it's a big income stream for a lot of creators. And he says that that's how they do it. They, they, they kind of force their creators to not talk about certain things and push them out of that realm.

• 11:02Shawn Ryan?

  So you'll be able to tackle that?

• 11:06Speaker 03

  I believe so. And again, I think it's, it starts with breaking up that algorithmic monopoly. Uh, there's gotta be some, you know, somebody has to curate the feeds, right? Curate the content. That's gotta happen. But why can't the consumers determine who's curating that content? Instead of just allowing Mark Zuckerberg or nameless, faceless, uh, you know, oligarchs at big tech who come from Silicon Valley and share those values and may not share our values. Why would we outsource that responsibility to them instead of as consumers doing that ourselves or, uh, you know, being able to shop around in a competitive marketplace for those decisions?

• 11:40Shawn Ryan?

  How, I mean, how exactly will you do that? Cause my friend and attorney, Tim Parlatory, I've, we've had a lot of chats about this. I'm like, this is ridiculous. You know, they, they'll just pull an episode and it just disappears into thin air. And they won't even tell you what's wrong with the episode. They won't, they won't even tell you anything. And, um, I, I can get the demonetization, I guess, but I mean, it pisses me off, but I'm always wondering like, hey, Tim, do we have a case here? And he's like, well, not really.

• 12:15Speaker 03

  Section 230. That's the problem, yeah.

• 12:18Shawn Ryan?

  So you, so it would be amending the Section 230 law?

• 12:23Speaker 03

  So it's a really elegant approach. We don't have to deal with Section 230 at all. Congress would have to amend that. And getting stuff through Congress has proven pretty challenging. And so we leave Section 230 of the CDA in place. We get around the net choice decision, again, by using consumer protection authority to require big tech social media platforms of a certain size to allow when the users first engage, there'll be a screen where you can select your own algorithm. You can select your own filter. And as a parent, you know, again, I've got four little kids that are just starting to, you know, engage in screen time on different mediums. And so I might have the, you know, my 12-year-old, this is the content moderation I want for them to best protect my kids.

• 13:07Speaker 03

  As a Second Amendment guy, I want to see more gun content. And so I'm going to, I'm going to select a, an algorithm that's going to promote 2A content, you know. And so again, it protects the consumer, it supports marketplace competition, it gets around Section 230 of the CDA, leaves it in place, and it doesn't violate the First Amendment rights of the big tech social media platforms either.

• 13:30Shawn Ryan?

  So I see, I see a lot of these class action lawsuits going up, and I'm always, every time I see one, I'm like, Tim, why are we jumping in on this? But, so if they found any success in suing those companies?

• 13:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think antitrust litigation is really the best fount of legal authority. You know, again, it's an oligarchy, almost a monopoly in the sense that the marketplace is failing, it's not functioning, it's not a competitive marketplace. The startup costs are so great that these oligarchs control everything. And you've seen in the past where they will buy up competitors to avoid having to change that marketplace or compete in that marketplace. And so I think that the best line of attack there is antitrust litigation. That's something that has other states and Missouri have engaged in, specific to Google. But there's another fount of legal authority that we're going to use in Missouri and that's consumer protection law.

• 14:29Speaker 03

  And so a lot of people don't know what attorneys general do. You know, we, first of all, we have a criminal side of the house where we support our local prosecutors and prosecute the bad guys, catch cops, catch them. We help lock them up and then we do criminal appeals. We support and defend the state's conviction on appeal to make sure the bad guys stay locked up. Then we have a civil side of the house as well. We defend the state agencies when they get sued. And our consumer protection division is charged with ensuring that Missouri consumers aren't defrauded or victims of predatory business practices. And so that authority, again, is a, is a unique line to go after this issue. And we've done that by sending subpoenas to big tech, social media platforms when we

• 15:11Speaker 03

  have reason to believe that they are lying to consumers. And so, you know, at the end of the day, big tech, social media platforms have First Amendment rights of their own, but they don't have the right to lie to consumers. And that's where state AGs can come in with consumer protection law.

• 15:26Shawn Ryan?

  So when you do these, when you create these efforts, do you, do you get all these other attorney generals to kind of join the charge with you?

• 15:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, so much is done in consultation with my colleagues. You know, typically the Republicans band together and the Democrats band together. And I've got great working relationships with, with my colleagues across the country. But what's weird is that every state's laws are different. And that's why Missouri has been a leader on so many issues because Missouri is really uniquely positioned. If you think about just traditional conservative versus liberal ideology, typically, you know, it's government is a zero sum game. More government, less freedom.

• 16:13Speaker 00

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Born in Roma Fragrances by Valentino Beauty, the iconic fragrance duo. Donna Born in Roma Eau de Parfum is a feminine fragrance featuring juicy black currant, sensual jasmine, woody cashmerin, and warm vanilla. Its masculine counterpart, Womo Born in Roma Eau de Dualette, has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver, spicy ginger, and mineral salt. Shop at mazies.com.

• 17:18Speaker 00

  College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  And so conservative states limit the authority of their state attorneys general because they want to maximize freedom by limiting the role of government in everyday life. Blue states take the opposite approach. I mean, Letitia James in New York has every weapon in her arsenal that her General Assembly can give her to mess with people's lives, to prosecute President Trump, prosecute, you know, take him to court in civil law to try to seize his assets and undervalue those assets. And so, you know, blue states have maximized their ability to interfere with people's lives while red states have taken the opposite approach. Missouri's uniquely positioned because we were so recently a blue state. So it's like a retreating army has left the battlefield and dropped their weapons, and we're picking them up and learning how to use them against them.

• 18:34Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Who are your best friends? Come on. Who's always, what states are always leading the charge with you?

• 18:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, Brynne Bird in Iowa is a good friend. Liz Merle down in Louisiana. Lynn Fitch in Mississippi is a good friend of mine.

• 18:50Speaker 03

  You know, so many of them.

• 18:52Shawn Ryan?

  What about Tennessee?

• 18:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, John Scormetti is great. And in fact, I called him this morning to let him know I was in his home state. He's great. And John and I have a couple of mutual friends. You know, what's unique is that the way in which attorneys general are put into office changes from state to state. So obviously, at the federal level, the attorney general is just a cabinet official appointed by the president and confirmed by the United States Senate. In the progressive era, you know, usually in 1900 to 1930, the states started breaking those out. And by constitutional amendment at the state level, making the attorney general its own independently elected constitutional officer. In Tennessee, your attorney general is selected by your state Supreme Court. So different states do it differently.

• 19:37Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  And so, and again, it's hard to compare because different states have different laws and different states select their attorneys general differently.

• 19:46Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  But in Missouri, you know, by constitution, I'm my own officer and I'm elected by the people. The only reason I was appointed initially was because my predecessor and friend Eric Schmidt was elected to the United States Senate and it created a vacancy in the middle of a term. So our governor appointed me. And it was, I just happened to be at the right place at the right time. You know, I didn't. And it's also liberating. I'm not a politician, don't like politics, don't want to be a politician. I want to do the work. I want to be the attorney general. And I realize you got to be a politician to do it. But it's liberating because when you're not a politician, you're not beholden to interests that might stymie audacity or, you know, bold, decisive, transformative action.

• 20:28Shawn Ryan?

  Well, you're a damn good pick. Back to, back to the big tech, social media stuff. I mean, this TikTok ban. What, I'm just curious, what? The narrative or whatever, it seemed to have changed over the years and I don't know what I think about TikTok. We have a massive TikTok presence, but I mean, it seems like.

• 20:55Shawn Ryan?

  Whenever I bring my intelligence friends on here and then we talk about it, it is a, it's a spy apparatus for China. And so I'm just, I'm just curious, what are your thoughts on that?

• 21:06Speaker 03

  I thought it was from a legal perspective. It was really fascinating that Congress passed that divestment bill, basically saying that the owner of TikTok had to sell it under certain conditions by a certain time. And Congress and the president, Congress in passing the bill, the president in signing the bill, really made a national security decision, you know, to comport with exactly what you're saying, that this, as long as it's a Chinese asset, they're gathering data and spying on us without our consent, and that's dangerous. The owner of TikTok challenged the constitutionality of that divestment bill on the eve of the deadline by which he had to sell the asset. And went all the way to the United States Supreme Court and basically argued the same

• 21:49Speaker 03

  as in the net choice decision that was handed down this summer, saying, look, I got a First Amendment right to speak on this platform as the owner of this platform. And the court said, no, no, no, no. You have a First Amendment right to speak, but the people's elected representatives can make a foreign policy decision, a national security decision, and prevent you from speaking on this outlet. In other words, the government can't stop me from sending an email, but the corporation can certainly tell me I can't use this email account.

• 22:17Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  And so it's a really unique legal decision and legal landscape in which that was done. I am concerned, clearly, about Chinese infiltration into our culture and into big tech, social media companies like TikTok. And so I think that, again, I think Congress made a sound decision. And now President Trump's, you know, doing his best to navigate that, and I'm confident in his ability to produce a good outcome. I mean, we have a leader back in the White House that understands that you can't show weakness on the playground. If you show weakness, the bullies will just keep bullying you, and President Trump's not gonna let that happen.

• 22:54Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it seems like China... Is using our own, our own laws against us, not just with TikTok, but, but buying farmland, putting, putting power plants next to military bases. I mean, the list goes on, but I mean, you seem to be pretty previous with this.

• 23:17Speaker 03

  Well, and Sean, you know, just this week, uh, on Monday, my office went to trial in the first ever lawsuit of its kind, in a lawsuit against the Chinese Communist Government for the harm they inflicted on Missourians during the COVID-19 pandemic. And I think we're going to get a 25 billion with a B dollar judgment against the Chinese Communist Government. No other state has prosecuted a case like this. And we filed it. Uh, the trial court initially dismissed it and we took it up to the, we appealed it to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, got the case reinstated, and we're just in trial this last Monday. Uh, we've got a little bit of supplemental briefing to do, but I think we'll be submitting a proposed judgment that will likely the judge will sign. And then we'll be, it'll

• 24:02Speaker 03

  be up to us to execute that judgment against the Chinese government. But no, we're, again, Missouri, leading the way on this issue. The Missourians are still demanding justice for the harms of the COVID-19 pandemic. And so, uh, and look, people say, oh, you know, Bailey's crackpot legal theories. No, no, no, no. This is the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. It was a statute passed by the People's Electoral Representatives in Congress in 1976 that specifically creates a method by which states can sue foreign entities for damages. And that's what we've used and I think will be successful.

• 24:36Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that's amazing. So, when you sue the federal government or the, or the Chinese Communist Party, I mean, this is a question I have because I've seen you, you've sued a lot and, um, Where does, so if you get, if you win that case and you get 20, the state of Missouri gets 25 billion dollars, what, where does that money go? What's it allocated to?

• 24:59Speaker 03

  Well, the first thing, and again, this is all part of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. It creates a method by which you can execute a judgment against a foreign entity. We've got to identify, and we are working to identify assets that the Chinese Communist Government owns in Missouri and elsewhere. And we will work with the Marshal Service to seize those assets. They will be sold, and that money will be returned to the people of the state of Missouri. It'll have to be appropriated by the people's elected representatives in our General Assembly. And I keep, I keep saying the people's elected representatives because it's a rule of law issue for me. You know, the democratic process means something. It's not, we don't live in a totalitarian dictatorship, unlike in China. You know,

• 25:39Speaker 03

  here, the way we get things done is that the people elect representatives who then pass laws, and then the executive branch, we then enforce those laws. And so, I realize I'm being repetitive using that term, but it's important for me to emphasize that point because I want folks to understand that, you know, that they've had a voice in this process that has led us to this point.

• 26:01Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. So whether it's the federal government, whether it's the Chinese Communist Party, whether it's Big Tech, whoever it is, the money gets allocated to the people.

• 26:11Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 26:12Shawn Ryan?

  That's amazing. I'm sure Missouri could use another 25 billion.

• 26:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, we've always got roads that are deteriorating, or, you know, our law enforcement needs additional assets and resources to shore up our criminal justice system. And so, I look forward to continuing to push that case forward to its eventual success.

• 26:30Shawn Ryan?

  I hope it happens. I hope it happens. Last thing, real quick, before we get started here. Everybody gets a gift.

• 26:41Shawn Ryan?

  So our vigilance league gummy bears, full of poison, toxic dyes, lots of sugar, but they taste good. They're made here in the USA. They're actually made in Michigan.

• 26:52Speaker 03

  Love it. Appreciate it, man.

• 26:53Shawn Ryan?

  Everybody gets one of those. Except the doctors. I don't give the doctors those. They're always, yeah. They don't like food dyes. I don't either, but those are good.

• 27:02Speaker 03

  I like gummy bears.

• 27:02Shawn Ryan?

  I will make an exception for those. But, um, so let's move in. I want to move into your life story.

• 27:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:09Shawn Ryan?

  So where did you grow up?

• 27:11Speaker 03

  Grew up in Columbia, Missouri. It's a college town right there in central Missouri. You know, at the time, in the early 90s that I was a kid, uh, it was a town of about 50, 60,000 people. It's now grown to, you know, north of 100,000 people. But at the time, it, it was a, you know, medium sized town. It had a small town feel and we saw a newspaper boy deliver newspapers at the end of the day. Milkman deliver milk in the mornings. Uh, but we had a lot of cultural influence because the, the state's flagship university, the University of Missouri is there in Columbia. So a lot of cultural experiences that other smaller towns maybe wouldn't get exposed to, but, uh, a great place to grow up. And, uh, you know, I have a brother, a younger brother, who's also now an attorney. And,

• 27:54Speaker 03

  uh, my mom and dad raised us to love the United States of America and love our state and, you know, to be, be patriotic and to why we have a constitution and that the rights in the constitution come from God, not man. The constitution's intended to protect us from the government. The government's supposed to protect our rights, you know? So those are foundational principles that I grew up with in mid Missouri.

• 28:15Shawn Ryan?

  What were you into as a kid? Buddy downstairs who's on your staff says, uh, you were, you were basically born, you were a born Captain America.

• 28:25Speaker 03

  That might be overselling it a bit. Uh, yeah, you know, I, I was a, a boy scout, was an Eagle Scout. Uh, I enjoyed fishing, enjoyed hunting, uh, spent a lot of time in the outdoors. You know, played different sports, but, uh, in high school got really into high school debate and so was on the debate team in high school. And, uh, you know, I grew up and got a little rowdy in high school maybe. And, you know, my mom, I wanted to join the military. I just-

• 28:54Shawn Ryan?

  Really? What do you mean rowdy?

• 28:55Speaker 03

  Well, you know, just, uh-

• 28:57Shawn Ryan?

  You're a partier? I grew up in Missouri. There's not a whole lot to do.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  There's not a whole lot to do as a, you know, a youth. Yeah. Um-

• 29:05Speaker 03

  You know, your parents tell you be home at this time and maybe I'm 10 minutes late the first weekend and then 20 minutes late the next weekend until, you know, getting yelled at at the front door there. But, you know, at the end of the day, I wanted to join the military. My mom was like, yeah, that's probably a good idea. You know, you need a little more growing up and this will be a good institution to instill some discipline. But she wanted me to go to college as well. So she really motivated me to sign up for an Army ROTC Scholarship in 1999 when I graduated high school. And I remember I was about to sign the contract with the Army and there was a major there who was the recruitment officer for ROTC. And I looked at him and said, now, I'm gonna get to go to law school before I

• 29:49Speaker 03

  go into the Army as a second lieutenant. Yeah, we do deferments all the time, won't be a problem. Year later, you know, two years later, 9/11 happens. And I really changed plans at that point. Realized that as much as I wanted to be a JAG attorney and wanted to practice law in the Army, there was a war on. And again, just my upbringing and kind of my patriotism, when you're graduating from Army ROTC, you list your, you know, the different branches in the Army that you're interested in. And so I put armor, tanks, number one, infantry, number two, you know, field artillery engineer, number three and four. So I really wanted to do a combat arms branch and ended up getting my first choice armor. So October of 2004, I reported to Fort Knox, Kentucky for Armor Officer Basic

• 30:34Speaker 03

  Course, the tank school, and was trained on the M1 Abrams main battle tank and graduated in that late, late winter, early spring in 2005. Reported my duty station at Fort Carson, Colorado and asked to be sent to Iraq. I was assigned to the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which is the last heavy armored cavalry regiment in the Army. And they had just deployed to Nineveh Province, Iraq. And so I asked to be deployed. They, you know, they sent me over to Iraq and-

• 31:08Shawn Ryan?

  Standby. Move it too fast.

• 31:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:10Shawn Ryan?

  Where were you when 9/11 happened? What were you doing?

• 31:12Speaker 03

  I was in college. I was a college kid. And actually, my buddy James, who's here with me today that you met, he and I were roommates in college at Mizzou. And I remember his mom called and told him that a plane had crashed in the World Trade Center and he needed to turn on TV. So he came down to my room- We flipped on the TV and we watched as the second plane hit the other tower and watched that live. And, you know, at the time, I'm sure this experience is shared by so many that it's like, well, what is happening? We don't know what's happening, but we know this is intentional. And very quickly, you know, watched President Bush articulate that we were at war with a terrorist organization that was intent on destroying innocent American life.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  And that, I was angry about that. And wanted to avenge the people who'd been killed.

• 32:05Shawn Ryan?

  You wanted to go to war?

• 32:06Speaker 03

  Wanted to go to war.

• 32:07Shawn Ryan?

  Why tanks?

• 32:08Speaker 03

  You know, there was, I always just grew up admiring George Patton and mounted warfare, you know, that it's just something that had fascinated me. And so, yeah, that's just where I ended up.

• 32:21Shawn Ryan?

  All right, so let's move to Iraq.

• 32:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:24Shawn Ryan?

  You get into Iraq.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:26Shawn Ryan?

  Well, what was your experience? What was it like when you got on the ground there?

• 32:31Speaker 03

  So I fell in.

• 32:33Shawn Ryan?

  As a leader?

• 32:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, as a officer. Brand-new second lieutenant. And I fell in on, and in the armored cavalry, it's called a troop, not a company, same size element. But my troop was deployed at a small troop-sized, company-sized forward operating base in Bage, Iraq, up in northwestern Iraq. And so it was just 180, it was all male, 180 American soldiers. We had a battalion of Iraqi army there with us on a separate part of that FOB. We were living in tents. You know, we had the old Vietnam-era shower tents where you maybe take a, you know, 30-second shower once a week. But we secured the small base we were on, did patrols in the town, in the small town of Bage.

• 33:17Speaker 03

  We screened the Syrian border, and then we trained the Iraqi army, Iraqi police, Iraqi Border Patrol. And I actually was an armored cavalry scout platoon leader. So in the Cav, you have one platoon of tanks, one platoon of Bradleys, another platoon of tanks, another platoon of Bradleys, headquarters, maintenance, and a section of mortars as well. And usually, the second lieutenant gets the tank platoon, because a tank platoon's only four vehicles, sixteen soldiers. You just came from Fort Knox where you're trained on that platform. But, they put me as a brand new second lieutenant as a platoon leader of a scout platoon. So I had six Bradley Fighting Vehicles. The military table of organization equipment calls for thirty soldiers. You know, staffing levels are a bit fluid, but, so

• 34:01Speaker 03

  it's a larger, larger platoon and a different weapon system than I had trained on. I'd never ridden in a Bradley, and then, you know, all of a sudden I'm a platoon leader. But trained on the twenty-five millimeter main gun there on the Bradley, and, you know, the unique part about what we were doing when we were doing cordon and search operations is that those tanks would move into a neighborhood and form the outer cordon, and then we would move the Bradleys in. And so I spent as much time on the ground in the stack with my guys, kicking indoors and searching houses and setting up traffic control points, as I did in the turret directing all of that.

• 34:37Shawn Ryan?

  What year did you get there?

• 34:39Speaker 03

  I was there oh-five to oh-six.

• 34:40Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, so we were there together?

• 34:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:43Shawn Ryan?

  That's when I was there. We did a bunch of work with Brad. We used Bradleys as an insurgent platform.

• 34:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:48Shawn Ryan?

  At times.

• 34:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:49Shawn Ryan?

  To conduct sniper operations. Did you see a lot of combat, or?

• 34:53Speaker 03

  So my platoon was-

• 34:54Shawn Ryan?

  It was a hard time?

• 34:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And we actually were selected to participate in Operation Restore Rights in Tal Afar, Iraq.

• 35:00Shawn Ryan?

  Where's that?

• 35:02Speaker 03

  It's up there in the Nineveh Province. It's a, you know, one of these ancient cities. I think it's in the, one of the books of kings in the Bible, it's referred to as Tal Afer. So it's one of these ancient biblical cities, but it had been completely overrun by insurgents. They had shot down a Kila helicopter. Actually, one of my best friends from college had been killed there, a few months before I got there. And he was kind of a mentor to me, and had been trained on tanks, graduated before me, trained on tanks, had deployed, and was in a Stryker vehicle that was struck by an IED, and it killed him and the rest of the crew in the vehicle. And so, I ended up, it was part of the offensive operation to retake that town, and got to work with some SEALs who were there as well.

• 35:44Shawn Ryan?

  Do you know what team?

• 35:45Speaker 03

  You know, it escapes me. It'll, it'll, it'll come back to me later, but those guys were fantastic. I mean, we had, there was a sniper.

• 35:55Speaker 03

  Insurgent sniper who, I mean, bad dude. And SEAL sniper team came in and really helped mitigate, you know, running counter sniper operations. You certainly felt a lot safer on the ground kicking in the doors and doing this port on and search operations, knowing that we had that, that cover.

• 36:12Shawn Ryan?

  So where, where does an officer, where are you placed in the, in the formation of a Bradley unit?

• 36:20Speaker 03

  So you, the turret of the Bradley holds two individuals. And so the, the vehicle commander of which the second lieutenant is one, rides in the turret in the commander's hatch of the vehicle. And then you've got a gunner next to you. You've got a driver that's in a separate compartment, kind of in the front slope of the vehicle. And then you, as you know, you've got that crew compartment in the back that can hold six, eight, 12 if you have to, dismounts.

• 36:45Shawn Ryan?

  Man, they took some, they took some nasties. I don't remember hearing, I wasn't part of any of that, but I remember hearing Bradley's getting struck by IEDs and the door wouldn't open up in the back and guys burned alive in there.

• 36:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. IED strikes that would split the, the back of the vehicle and, you know, the first day, one of the first days I was in Tal Afar on this operation, we were doing some battle handover with a unit and my, the, the troop commander rides in a M1 Abrams tank. And we were in a column and his tank was right in front of me and the insurgents destroyed the tank. I mean, it was a catastrophic killing of a tank. You're, you're up against an insurgent force that can take out a 72, 73 ton vehicle. I mean, really quickly, that kind of early twenties sense of invincibility evaporates when you, you could, you see that the insurgents have those capabilities and you realize, okay, if they can take out a 70 ton vehicle, they can take out a 32 ton vehicle that I'm in, in the Bradley.

• 37:44Speaker 03

  And so it really set the tone.

• 37:46Shawn Ryan?

  Any casualties?

• 37:47Speaker 03

  Uh, not in that IED strike. And in fact, my platoon did not suffer any casualties. We lost some of the Iraqi soldiers that we were with actually to sniper fire before the, the SEAL counter sniper team started, got there and was, was helping us out. But.

• 38:05Speaker 03

  Blessed to be able to bring my soldiers home after that deployment and you know that that operation really only lasted a couple of weeks a month that we were there in Talafar and then we were back in our small town of Bage on our small FOB to secure the town for the National Constitutional Referendum. Any engagements in a Bradley? Yeah, yeah, I got to use the 25mm a few times. You know, you can only shoot, the tank can shoot multiple weapon systems at a time, but the Bradley you can only really shoot the 25mm, so the weapon systems on the Bradley, you've got a 25mm chain gun that can shoot either armor piercing or high explosive rounds.

• 38:46Speaker 03

  You have a coax mounted 240 that's a 762 machine gun, but then you've also got two tube-launched optically wire-guided missiles. And I never got to shoot the toes, always wanted to shoot the toe missile, but there was an engagement where my gunner had identified that an ID trigger man was engaging with the 25mm and I was actually, I opened up the plenum chamber door that you use to fix a jam or load more ammunition in the 240 and was manually firing the 240 just to- You were? Yeah, yeah, just to maximize how many, how much lead we were putting downrange, so. Did you get him? Yeah, I think so, I think so, yeah, he, he had a bad day.

• 39:27Speaker 03

  Good, good, nice, nice. How many deployments did you do? Did two, the first one, you know, I got there a little late and so I stayed behind in Kuwait at the Kuwaiti naval base to help clean all the vehicles and ship them home. And then got home and they moved my unit from Fort Carson, Colorado to Fort Hood, Texas. So, and I was the only officer that moved with my troops, I signed for all the equipment, loaded everything up and moved it to Fort Hood, Texas. We drew new equipment, drew all new soldiers. We trained for about a year and then went back

• 40:07Speaker 03

  to Iraq on a second deployment. In that year, you know, we did an NTC rotation at Fort Irwin, California. We spent, I mean, we did gunnery, we did travel. We spent 200 days of that year in the field. And so it was a, you know, expedited timeline to refit, rearm, retrain, and get right back over as part of the surge. And so, second deployment, we were at Key West, just south of Mosul. And I was an XO and then a troop commander for a little while. And we were there for 15 months, 455 days. So that second deployment was a long one. And it, as

• 40:45Speaker 03

  you know, like, the mission had changed significantly from being actually on the boots on the ground with the Iraqis, training them, but also conducting missions ourselves. You know, the conventional forces by 07, 08, 09, the role was so much more limited, at least where I was at Key West.

• 41:06Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Anything significant during that deployment?

• 41:09Speaker 03

  You know, just the length. Oh, my gosh, it was a long one. We were there really more in a support role for the Iraqis. But, you know,

• 41:18Shawn Ryan?

  Did you guys go into Mosul at all? That was just a constant

• 41:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, that was a, yeah.

• 41:23Shawn Ryan?

  Hold duration.

• 41:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:26Shawn Ryan?

  Even after we pulled out, it was just agency and a couple of soft teams there. I mean, it was Mosul was crazy.

• 41:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, and it

• 41:36Shawn Ryan?

  Did you get any time inside?

• 41:38Speaker 03

  I didn't get, I did not go to Mosul. No, we had, some of our sister units were up there. Some, one of the other, one of the other elements of the regiment was up there. But we were, we were at Key West and we really, we did some work, you know, pushing out some other smaller FOBs just to try to add some stability, so that as the insurgents were being forced out of Mosul, that, you know, that we'd catch them, there would be a net to kind of catch that. But at the end of the day, you know, much more of a support role at that point in the, in the OIF cycles.

• 42:12Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah, definitely changed a lot with the Obama administration.

• 42:18Speaker 03

  Why did you leave the army? I wanted to go to law school. Uh, and so when I came home from the first deployment, they lined us all up. I've been on the ground for like 48 hours and they lined everybody up by rank and said, okay, you're going to go meet with an HR representative from the Pentagon to determine what your future's going to look like in the military. And I sat down with a, an individual and, and told them, you know, waited in line, sat down with an individual. And as you know, you, you come home from a deployment and you're amped up and kind of the, the problems of the civilian world and the, the, you know, the conus world are a little bit muted. Uh huh. And so I was, you know, pretty, pretty charged up and was like, hey, send me anywhere

• 43:02Speaker 03

  on earth. I'll go to Korea. I'll go back to Iraq, go to Afghanistan, put me on a mid-team or a bit-team, you know, put, do, do whatever you want, but. What's a mid-team or a bit-team? So those were transition teams. They were kind of cobbled together, uh, teams of different MOSs that were there solely for training, you know, being inserted into Iraqi units and training the Iraqis or Afghan. And so it was just a, a different, different than being in a line unit like I had been in, in the armored cavalry. But I was like, hey, sit, you know, send me anywhere on earth. I want to be a JAG attorney and the army has this fully funded legal education program that pays for your law school and you get to come, you, you go to law school, then you come back into the army as a JAG attorney.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  But there's a window of time, uh, that you have to apply for it and it cuts off. And I was like, if you got, if you send me to Fort Hood, Texas, I'm essentially stop lost and I, it will prevent me from being able to participate in the FLEPP program. And they're like, yeah, we don't care. We're sending you to Texas. So I was not going to be able, a, a career as an army JAG was not really an option for me. Uh huh. And, but I knew I wanted to go to law school and so, uh, got out of the army after I got home from the second deployment and. You know, growing up, my grandfather had been a law enforcement officer. And as a little kid, he used to take me to court with him to watch him testify. And so I just kind of grew up thinking working with cops to lock bad guys up in court was

• 44:28Speaker 03

  one of the coolest jobs on earth. And so that's really what I wanted to do. And so I really wanted to get to law school. And so I came home, transitioned out of the army, and I moved to the city of St. Louis. And I lived near the Anheuser-Busch Brewery in the heart of St. Louis, which is always a bit of a rough, you know, city. But it's gotten worse, you know, in the past few years. But, but at the time, you know, I was a young guy, just gotten out of the army. My buddy that I'd gone to college with got out of the army. He was going to the police academy. And I was, I worked as an armed guard at a courthouse in north, kind of North City, St. Louis. It's a courthouse and the juvenile detention facility is part of the courthouse.

• 45:09Speaker 03

  So I went from carrying an M4, you know, as a platoon leader, XO, company commander for a little while in Iraq, to wearing a revolver at the front door of a courthouse in North City, St. Louis.

• 45:24Speaker 00

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• 45:59Speaker 00

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• 46:33Speaker 03

  And did that, you know, for a little while until I could get into law school. Went back to University of Missouri in Columbia for law school. And was there for three years and really, you know, wanted to tailor my experience to getting out and becoming a prosecuting attorney based on my kind of experience, you know, growing up in court with my grandpa.

• 46:54Shawn Ryan?

  What was it like for you going to, going back to University of Missouri as a decorated combat veteran?

• 47:01Speaker 03

  It's an experience, you know, you, I was 30 when I started law school, which is a different age range than kind of the more traditional student. And again, you know, like the, the problems of everyday life are very muted after you come home from a deployment. And so, you know, you've got a younger generation who is convinced they, they know a lot about the world and it's just a little, you, you bring it kind of an older, more experienced perspective to things. One of my law professors was Josh Hawley, who's now a United States Senator, former Attorney General of the State of Missouri, and now a United States Senator. So I was trained by the best at Mizzou Law by Professor Josh Hawley and grateful to him.

• 47:45Shawn Ryan?

  Did you deal with any, did you have a tough time transitioning from combat to civilian life?

• 47:54Speaker 03

  You know, it, it was a challenge and again, you expect things to move at a certain pace and just the way you, as a leader in the army and a, you know, similar experience, the way you talk to your soldiers is just very different than the way civilians communicate with one another. And so getting, getting used to kind of the pace at which things move and the, the way in which you communicate with people to achieve an objective and how you motivate them, it's very different between the military and the civilian, civilian world. So that, that's always an adjustment, certainly, I, was my experience.

• 48:30Shawn Ryan?

  Any, any, any problems with, I mean, look, a lot of guys struggle with booze addiction.

• 48:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:37Shawn Ryan?

  You know, they get on Zoloft, they get on Benzos, the VA is notorious for handing that shit out. When did you have, did you have to overcome any of that?

• 48:45Speaker 03

  You know, I'm thankful I didn't. And I, my heart goes out to the, the men and women who do because I know they, you know, they're.

• 48:55Speaker 03

  They gave up something to serve a higher purpose and are now still paying for the consequences and that, you know, and that's, uh, that hurts. I, I did not have that experience. I'm grateful.

• 49:05Shawn Ryan?

  What do you, you know, so before we move into your, your career as a prosecuting attorney, what, since we're on the topic, I wanted to bring this up later, but I mean psychedelics are doing wonders on guys coming home from, from combat 20, you know, the longest war we've ever been in 20 plus years. And, uh, I'm one of those experiencers. Uh, I did an I begame treatment. It'll be three years this Valentine's Day and I kicked booze. It just totally transformed my life, all in positive ways. And so, you know, being the man that you are today, you have the ability to make tremendous difference, uh, in the state and

• 49:50Shawn Ryan?

  the, and in the country. I mean, what are your thoughts on psychedelic therapy?

• 49:55Speaker 03

  I think it's absolutely appropriate that, uh, different options be made available and that everyone be able to make their own decisions about which option for treatment best suits their needs and produces the best results. And I've seen bills move in the Missouri General Assembly last session, and I believe will be reintroduced and move again this session to accomplish exactly that. Um, I, you know, you, you talk about the VA and I think the VA has let warriors down.

• 50:26Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:26Speaker 03

  And there have been too many warriors that have not received the treatment they are owed because of bureaucracy and bad decision-making and apathy. And we owe, uh, those who have served in the global war on terror and any other conflict, we, those who have served, we owe them more. And, uh, VA, I, again, I'm encouraged that President Trump has put a renewed emphasis on that. And I'm, I'm hopeful that they will make available a spectrum of, of different treatment options to folks so that again, if people can make good individual decisions for themselves.

• 51:05Shawn Ryan?

  Is that something you could help lead the charge on?

• 51:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. Look, uh,

• 51:11Speaker 03

  We need more veterans in public office, I think, because of the perspective and because of kind of the the ability to make decisions under the rigors of the situations we've been in. And so being a leading voice on this and many other different issues, the more veterans we get in public office, the better off we're going to be and the more we can have these voices heard and the more we can lead on issues like this.

• 51:35Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Is that something that's on your radar that you think you'll participate in?

• 51:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

• 51:42Shawn Ryan?

  How would you do it?

• 51:43Speaker 03

  Well, you know, again, separation of powers matters to me and our General Assembly enacts statutes and we, as the Attorney General, then enforce the statutes that are passed. And so helping with technical advice or leadership advice as bills are moving through the legislative process is one way.

• 52:03Shawn Ryan?

  You think you'll be loud about it at all?

• 52:06Speaker 03

  I get loud about most things.

• 52:10Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. Well, so let's move into your career as a prosecuting attorney.

• 52:16Speaker 03

  Yep, yep. So in law school, you know, there's an academic component, but there's also a practical component. And I did what I needed to do on the academic side, but I was really focused on the practical component because I graduated tank school and then months later was a platoon leader in Iraq. And I remember, I remember at tank school, you know, you've got a bunch of recent college grads or second lieutenants were kind of smoking a joke and then one of the NCOs came up and was like, hey, guys, y'all aren't taking this training seriously. And, you know, there's nothing I can do or say that's going to motivate you, but just know, like, you're going to be in a different world in a month and soldiers' lives are going to be on the line. So you guys, you think about

• 53:00Speaker 03

  that while you're sitting here smoking a joke. And it really caught our attention. And, you know, that's one of those grab you- Grab you by the nose and kick you in the rear end kind of moments. And um, so I wanted to be able to walk out of law school, combat ready, ready to go try a case to a jury on day one. So I really focused on internships and practical experience. I worked defending the state's convictions on appeal at the, as an intern at the Missouri Attorney General's Office, so appellate law, which is a unique perspective because um, most trial attorneys don't want to write appeals because their courtroom jockeys not deep thinking appellate attorneys. Uh, not that they couldn't, that's just their preference. But when you're doing appeals, you're reading trial transcripts.

• 53:44Speaker 03

  And so you learn to see your voice in written word on black and white, in black and white, black ink on white paper. And so you learn how to speak in such a way to develop a record to protect a conviction on appeal, and you see a lot of mistakes. You see what works, you see what doesn't work, you see how people are describing things. Uh, you see how evidence is adduced. So that was a really great experience to learn the law, learn courtroom skills by reading briefs and appeals. I interned at several different county prosecutors offices and got real practical experience. And so it was cool. Graduated, went to work at the Missouri Attorney General's Office, and I spent about two years there. And I defended the state's execution methodology uh, in federal court.

• 54:28Speaker 03

  Uh, so the uh, death row inmates had filed an Eighth Amendment challenge under Section 42 USC 1983, the civil, federal civil rights statute. Claiming that Missouri's method of execution lethal chemical was cruel and unusual. And so I def- uh, you know, my, the ink's still out of my bar card and I'm in federal court defending the state's execution methodology so the state could continue to carry out the ultimate punishment. Um, did special prosecution around the state.

• 54:55Shawn Ryan?

  Did it hold up, did that hold up? Is there still executions in Missouri?

• 54:58Speaker 03

  Yep, absolutely. Uh, absolutely. We, we won that suit and uh, we switched from a three-drug protocol to a single-drug protocol and have successfully defended that in court. And the state uh, the ultimate punishment in the state of Missouri is still on the books for prosecutors to use and will defend it at the AG's office.

• 55:17Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of crimes constitute a, a death sentence?

• 55:22Speaker 03

  Uh, so that, that is uh, Murder in the first degree, you know, and typically the punishment is either the ultimate punishment, or it's life without parole.

• 55:33Shawn Ryan?

  How many people a year does Missouri execute?

• 55:38Speaker 03

  So, we have, it changes year by year, and again, it's, it's hard to, it's hard to find, to define that data point.

• 55:50Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 55:51Speaker 03

  Because, at the time that the state carries out an execution, we're usually ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty or more years from when the conviction was obtained.

• 56:00Shawn Ryan?

  That long?

• 56:01Speaker 03

  It takes a long time, because...

• 56:03Shawn Ryan?

  Did you say ten to thirty years?

• 56:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. The offender is entitled to a direct appeal, a motion for post-conviction relief, appeal for most, motion for post-conviction relief, state habeas corpus, federal habeas corpus. And so, all those different appellate remedies have to be exhausted before the state Supreme Court will issue a warrant to carry out the execution.

• 56:27Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, how, I mean, I'm for the death penalty, the thing that, I mean, how can you be sure, though, that they're guilty?

• 56:41Speaker 03

  You know, I, I think that Winston Churchill, you know, described democracy as the worst system on earth, except for all the other ones, or, you know, something to that effect, I'm probably butchering the quote, but, it, I look at our trial by jury system the same way. You know, the founding fathers had an experience in colonial America, and English common law, and English jurisprudence, that then they codified into the United States Constitution, and the right to trial by jury is one of the most sacred rights we have, and, you know, it's not, the right to serve on a jury, used to be a political right, and so...

• 57:22Speaker 03

  You just, you know, there are, there's ample due process safeguards in place. And most of the time, the juries get it right. You know, there, most of the times, the juries get it right. And we trust jurors to make sound decisions in the jury box, just like we trust voters to make sound decisions at the ballot box. And when you have a fair process, you produce good outcomes. Now, I, I stand by the proposition that I would rather 100 guilty men go free than one innocent man be punished. Uh, but the, the, again, our system is designed with ample safeguards in place to protect due process and protect the rights trial by jury and to ensure good outcomes.

• 58:03Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, how do we, how is the jury selected on something like that? So, because we've all heard the stories about, you know, the jury gets packed with, I mean, we saw with the Eddie Gallagher case.

• 58:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:14Shawn Ryan?

  You know, uh, Tim talks a lot about that. You know, they kind of packed the jury.

• 58:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:19Shawn Ryan?

  They, so how, how can you be, how is the jury selected? And how can you be sure that they don't have their own biases?

• 58:26Speaker 03

  Well, again, you're counting on, it's called a venire panel. The venire, you're, you're, those individuals summoned for jury duty, you're counting on them answering the questions that the attorneys are asking them and the judge is asking them, that they're answering those honestly. Um, and you have to sometimes ask multiple questions, multiple, multiple different ways to shake things loose. And if, if there's any doubt, then that juror gets struck for cause or, uh, you know, the, the judge is going to dismiss them. In death penalty cases, it's a bifurcated trial. So there's really two trials. Number one is the, the, the first trial is, did the bad guy do it? Did the defendant commit the crime beyond a reasonable doubt?

• 59:09Speaker 03

  The state has to prove each element of the offense beyond a reasonable doubt. That's the highest burden of proof in American or English jurisprudence. Then the second trial, if you get the, if, if yes, he did it beyond a reasonable doubt, now you move to the second trial. And the second trial poses the question.

• 59:30Speaker 03

  Do the aggravating circumstances outweigh any mitigating circumstances beyond a reasonable doubt, thereby justifying imposition of the ultimate punishment?

• 59:40Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 59:41Speaker 03

  And so there's statutorily enumerated aggravating and mitigating circumstances that the jury gets to weigh to determine whether or not the death penalty is actually appropriate? Like, was the commission of the crime vile and wanton? You know, was the body mutilated? Is there a pattern of like several murders that led us to this point? You know, how, what are the circumstances? Now, and then the defense attorneys get to put on their own mitigating evidence. Like, okay, well, the kid came from a terrible childhood, or he was abused, and he has this mental health disorder. And, you know, again, there are all these safeguards in place. And then, after, to the extent the jury finds beyond a reasonable doubt that the aggravating circumstances outweigh the mitigating circumstances, and the judge imposes the ultimate punishment

• 1:00:26Speaker 03

  based on what the jury has brought back, the Missouri Supreme Court conducts its own proportionality review. And that's unique to capital cases. That doesn't happen in other cases. Like, if I just committed an armed robbery and I'm sentenced to 15 years in Missouri Department of Corrections, the Supreme Court's not going to do an independent proportionality review. My case may never end up in front of the Missouri Supreme Court. But in capital cases, they do. And so the court, the seven judges of the Missouri Supreme Court are going to weigh everything again and determine, like, does, is the death penalty really justified here? Or are we just acting out of anger because something terrible happened?

• 1:01:02Shawn Ryan?

  Have you prosecuted anybody that wound up on death row and that was executed?

• 1:01:07Speaker 03

  So I have not personally prosecuted at the trial court level, but I have worked to defend the state's imposition of the death penalty for individual cases on in habeas appeals.

• 1:01:20Shawn Ryan?

  What does that mean?

• 1:01:21Speaker 03

  So appellate law is unique. So there's a direct appeal that says, in your direct appeal, if you're the offender and you're convicted, you're, in the direct appeal, you're saying something wrong, a mistake was made in the trial itself. Like, the judge let in hearsay evidence, or the judge denied, overruled an objection he shouldn't have. The jury instructions are wrong. After that, you've got a collateral attack on the conviction, a separate line of appeal. And it starts as a motion for post-conviction relief, and then it moves over to habeas. But those collateral attacks are really saying there's a constitutional or statutory defect in the conviction. So it's something that outside of the trial itself went wrong.

• 1:02:05Speaker 03

  So like, for instance, one of the most common claims is in 1985, the United States Supreme Court handed down this decision in Strickland v. Washington and said that the Sixth Amendment guarantee of the right to counsel in criminal proceedings includes the right to effective assistance of counsel. So you get a right to an attorney, and that attorney has to be constitutionally effective. So offenders will often raise claims of, hey, my attorney didn't object because he's constitutionally defective. This was ineffective assistance of counsel, thus my conviction has a constitutional flaw, and the case should be remanded for a new trial. And so those are usually the types of claims you see in motion for post-conviction relief

• 1:02:49Speaker 03

  proceedings and habeas proceedings.

• 1:02:51Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, so there are people on death row or that have been executed that you've been a part of the case?

• 1:02:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. In fact, one of the offenders that I worked on that case when I was Assistant Attorney General, he was then executed my first day on the job in January of 2023 when I was sworn in as the Attorney General.

• 1:03:12Shawn Ryan?

  What did he do?

• 1:03:13Speaker 03

  Murder. Killed his girlfriend. And he, in fact, this is the case, the seminal case in Missouri for adoption of what's called the forfeiture by wrongdoing doctrine, that is an exception to not only the rule against hearsay evidence, but the requirement that a criminal defendant be allowed to confront their accusers in open court. And it actually stems from Sir Walter Raleigh's case in Elizabethan England, when Sir Walter Raleigh was accused of treason against the Crown of England. And he shows up to trial, and the prosecutors have all these sworn affidavits from people they'd been torturing in the Star Chamber in the Tower of London. And Sir Walter Raleigh said, no, no, no, I get to look my accusers

• 1:03:55Speaker 03

  in the eye and question them, and the jury then gets to see how they respond to my question to determine whether or not they're being truthful or not. And that's where we get the, that's why the founders put the Sixth Amendment right to confrontation, the confrontation clause, in the United States Constitution.

• 1:04:10Speaker 03

  There's an exception, though. You have a right to confront the witnesses unless you procure through wrongdoing that witness's unavailability. You can't go shoot the witness against you and then complain that they didn't show up and you don't get to cross-examine them. And in this instance, the defendant, the offender, had murdered his girlfriend and her statements were allowed to come in at trial because he had threatened her in the past and abused her in the past and ultimately murdered her. And that wrongdoing procured her unavailability at trial.

• 1:04:41Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  And so it's an interesting doctrine. A leading case at the United States Supreme Court that I can think of is Giles v. California, where I think Justice Clarence Thomas really articulates the historical justification for that doctrine. And when I, later, after I'd left the prosecutor's office and ended up working for the Missouri governor, as part of the governor's crime package, we codified a statutory procedure by which prosecutors could use this doctrine. It was all based on my work on this case. And then on the back end, as Attorney General, that's the day the state ended up executing that individual.

• 1:05:16Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. How many people have you been a part of, sent in the death row?

• 1:05:21Speaker 03

  You know, as an Assistant Attorney General at that time in the state's history, there was about an execution a month for a year. And we only missed, you know, there were several. There were a few that the court stayed and those didn't move forward. They don't happen with as much frequency now. Going back to your original question, which is like, how many happen a year? Well, the Missouri Supreme Court won't issue the execution warrants as quickly anymore, just because it is very taxing on the systems and the people involved in those systems. And so, and again, the court wants to give the offender ample time to exhaust all appellate remedies so that no mistakes are made.

• 1:06:02Shawn Ryan?

  Are you notified when these guys are getting executed?

• 1:06:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:06Shawn Ryan?

  Does that bother you at all?

• 1:06:08Speaker 03

  No, I'm a proponent of the death penalty. I think that there are people who are evil enough and unrepentant enough that have committed exceedingly heinous acts that have punched their ticket.

• 1:06:23Shawn Ryan?

  Let's move on. So, through your journey as a prosecuting attorney...

• 1:06:34Shawn Ryan?

  You adopted three, three kids.

• 1:06:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:38Shawn Ryan?

  How did that happen?

• 1:06:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, uh, so, loved my job as an assistant attorney general. Um, it was very fast paced. I was traveling all over the state, not only defending the state's execution protocol, uh, but also doing special prosecution and civilly committing sexually violent predators, kind of the worst of the worst sex offenders, committing them to the Department of Mental Health for treatment for the rest of their lives so that they didn't reoffend and create new victims.

• 1:07:03Shawn Ryan?

  Do those guys get the death penalty?

• 1:07:05Speaker 03

  They don't, but they ended up, they end up, uh, commit, it's like, uh, they end up in Department of Mental Health for treatment for the rest of their lives. They never, they never, that treatment never ends.

• 1:07:13Shawn Ryan?

  Why, why, why aren't they, why?

• 1:07:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, no, I, I think that the laws need to be amended to expand use of the death penalty for other offenses, because other offenses are heinous enough. And when you're perping on kids, man, that, that is, uh, that's the worst, the worst in my mind. Um, I want Missouri to be the safest state in the nation for children. And you can see that in so much of the work we've done since I took off, took office. But, loved that job, loved doing the work. My, I married a gal that I met in Texas when I was stationed down there. She was tired of me being on the road every night. And so, uh, a friend of mine was elected prosecutor in, uh, one of the counties in the circuit where I'd interned. And I, I always knew I wanted to end up there. And she offered me a job, uh, in Warren County,

• 1:07:59Speaker 03

  Missouri. So my wife and I, uh, I left the AG's office, became an assistant prosecutor in Warren County, Missouri.

• 1:08:04Shawn Ryan?

  Where's Warren County? What's the city?

• 1:08:06Speaker 03

  Uh, Warrenton is the city.

• 1:08:07Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:08:08Speaker 03

  The county seat. It's right there on the I-70 corridor between St. Louis and Columbia.

• 1:08:11Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha.

• 1:08:12Speaker 03

  Uh, just, just west of St. Charles County. So, on the fringe of the St. Louis metropolitan area, still a very rural jurisdiction. Great place to raise a family though, man. It's, uh, we loved it. We settled in the southwest corner of the county. So Herman, Missouri has really been the closest town. It's where we go to church, kids go to school. But I worked at the courthouse in Warrenton. And as an assistant prosecutor in a rural jurisdiction, you end up having a couple different jobs in order to make ends meet. So I was an assistant prosecutor, working with cops to lock bad guys up, supporting victims' rights. Loved that job. I was also the attorney for the county juvenile office. And so a couple of times a month I'd be in court and all these kids in foster care just killed me, man. Like I remember there was an instance where a juvenile was begging the court to terminate his parents' parental

• 1:08:57Speaker 03

  rights because he wanted a home to go to for Christmas. Like they're kids that don't have homes to go to for Christmas. So I talked to my wife and we became licensed foster parents under the laws of the state of Missouri and ended up adopting a sibling pair, my oldest two kiddos. And we met them when they were three and two. And so I thought kids come to a potty trained in talking. I didn't know there was this, I didn't know there was this whole other side to it. But, you know, such a blessing for us to get to grow our family like that and to get to adopt two wonderful kiddos. I just love them to death. And God put us together as a family, you know, and that's something we talk about all the time. That it didn't matter where you came from, or, you know, the biology

• 1:09:40Speaker 03

  didn't matter. This was always God's plan for us to be a family. And it's really cool. After we had adopted them, the children's division then put a baby in our house, who's now my six-year-old, and we adopted him as well. And so we went from no kids to two kids overnight to then a third pretty quickly. And, you know, so it's a unique experience. And so many foster parents across the United States of America are going to understand this reference. But like, when the children's division shows up with a screaming infant at 2:00 a.m., you know, you get dressed and you drive 30 minutes to the nearest Walmart to buy a crib and diapers and bottles and all the things you need for a baby that most normal people just accumulate over a nine-month period. And so, you know, going from having

• 1:10:23Speaker 03

  two toddlers to then having a baby and learning to do the baby stuff, you know, you learn on the fly really quickly. But adopted our, you know, adopted him and he's now our six-year-old, just love him to death. And again, same, same deal. You know, it's like, we were always supposed to be together as a family. After that, two years ago, my wife got pregnant and we've had a biological son. So I've got a 12, 11, six, and two-year-old. So we're still doing the diaper thing at home, but got four little ones and it's a, you know, soft Tampa two cover zone defense at the Bailey household, but.

• 1:10:57Speaker 03

  I love being a dad, man. Getting to be a dad is the best thing that ever happened to me and my wife and kids and I have a lot of fun. And we still, we live in Montgomery County, Missouri, just, just west of Warren County. Herman's still the closest town, so that's where we go to church, kids go to school.

• 1:11:12Shawn Ryan?

  When, when do those conversations starts in your family about adoption? And how do they go?

• 1:11:21Speaker 03

  You know, the, we have allowed the children to really be the ones to want to start that conversation. And, and it, they're gonna kill me for telling this story, but my oldest two, the children's division introduced us at a Burger King. So they think the kids come, they thought that kids come from Burger King. So after we had adopted them, they went down to Texas to visit my in-laws. Children's division put this baby in our house. They come home from Texas, walk in the house, see the baby there, say, well, you went to Burger King without us? So, most recently, when my wife was pregnant, we had some really interesting conversations about where babies come from and what role Burger King may or may not play in that process, but,

• 1:12:04Speaker 03

  you know, we just really let the kids kind of drive when they're ready to have those conversations and it's, again, constantly promoting this idea that, that we believe, which is that, you know, before we were formed in the womb, before they were formed in the womb, God had a plan for us and it was always for us to be together as a family. And they're, they're Baileys, I'm a Bailey, you know, that's, that's, that's it.

• 1:12:28Shawn Ryan?

  So, I mean, what is the, how old were they when they asked?

• 1:12:32Speaker 03

  You know, I'm trying to remember and it, it's, it was really, my oldest two really got curious about it when we were adopting our third child. Because, you know, my wife and I were talking about that and there's always a little bit of anxiety because you've got this legal proceeding that has to happen. And look, they called termination of parental rights. The kid, there has to be a termination of parental rights for the child to then be available for adoption. So it's, the acronym is TPR. And TPR is the death penalty of civil law. The worst thing that can happen in criminal court is the ultimate punishment is imposed. Worst thing that can ever happen to anybody in civil court is your kids get taken away from you.

• 1:13:16Speaker 03

  And so those are, those cases are really tough. I mean, those, it's tough evidence. It's tough on, you've got foster parents, you've got biological families, you've got a guardian ad litem, you've got a judge that's got to make a tough decision, you've got a juvenile officer, you've got the children's division. So you've got all these folks and they're really, really tough decisions have to be made, evidence has to be adduced, and it's reviewed at so many different levels because again, we want to make sure that the things are done the right way and people's rights are scrupulously protected. And, uh, but there's a lot of anxiety for foster parents or adoptive families because it's like, well, is this gonna work? Is this gonna go through? Is the judge gonna rule our way? What are we gonna have to do? I, I was familiar with the court process, having been in court, but like my wife wasn't and I, my heart goes out to so many foster families who are going through that court process for the first time, or adoptive families who are going through that court

• 1:14:01Speaker 03

  process for the first time, and it can be intimidating and vexing. And, uh, so you, but you know, wife and I are talking through it and that, you know, the kids overhear those conversations and, and, uh, so that sparked some of that conversation.

• 1:14:14Shawn Ryan?

  How, what was the question?

• 1:14:16Speaker 03

  You know, I'm trying to remember now, and I can't recall for the life of me exactly how the question was posed, uh, or how the conversation was, went, but it was like, well, how did, how did we become a family? You know, where did we come from? Uh, what's, what's the history there? You know, that, that's really the line of questions. And it's, it's not a once in time conversation. You know, I'm sure as my kids get older, they'll have additional questions and, um, so it's, it's kind of an ongoing fluid conversation.

• 1:14:44Shawn Ryan?

  And that's gotta be a, whatever you're doing, we have to stop right now.

• 1:14:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:50Shawn Ryan?

  And have this conversation.

• 1:14:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:52Shawn Ryan?

  Is that how?

• 1:14:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. And, and you know, with kids.

• 1:14:58Speaker 03

  Their timing is not always aligned with what's going on in the house at that moment. And when you've got multiple kids, it's like, okay, well, I gotta get the food on the table. I gotta get the bags packed for tomorrow. I gotta get my stuff ready for tomorrow. I gotta, we gotta get to soccer practice. We gotta get to baseball. There's stuff going on and when the kids decide to, that, when that bubbles up in their minds and they want to have that conversation, you're right. Oftentimes it's, you got the, the pot on the oven, you know, boiling over because, hey, I need to focus right now on, on this serious topic of conversation.

• 1:15:30Shawn Ryan?

  Were you guys prepared for that?

• 1:15:32Speaker 03

  I don't know that you can ever be fully prepared for it. You know, it's something we had certainly thought about and talked through, but uh,

• 1:15:41Speaker 03

  I guess time will tell if we did it correctly or incorrectly. I don't know if there's a right answer, you know?

• 1:15:45Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. Will there be, I mean, I don't know the background to your kids and I'm sure you probably don't want to get into it on air uh, before adoption, unless you do, do you?

• 1:15:55Speaker 03

  No, I mean, look, I, kids don't end up in the foster system by accident. I was, you know, speaking broadly. It's just like, if a kiddo ends up in the foster system, it's because something terrible happened at home, something absolutely terrible. And I remember going through the foster training and, and it, in my mind, a kid would come out of, you know, it would enter the foster system and would end up in our home and it's like you had parachuted into Disney world. You know, pizza, cool movies, hanging out, hugs, stuffed animals, a warm bed at night, protection, safety, all the things kids covet and crave and need, all humans need. But to a kiddo who's yanked out of their home, they may be living in a trailer

• 1:16:39Speaker 03

  with no electricity and raw sewage on the floor and a doped out parent passed out on, on the couch. And the sheriff kicks in the door and yanks that kid out of there. But all they know is that was their home. And to the rest of it's deplorable. But to a kid who that's all they've ever known?

• 1:16:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:56Speaker 03

  That's, that's their home and now they're not there anymore. So imagine if, you know, I like to put it in terms of like, if someone dropped me in Cambodia and I don't speak the language and the, the, the, the culture and the way of life and the smells and the way people talk, it's all different. I mean, that's gotta, you know, I think that only touches the surface of what it must be like for kids to come into the foster system. So kind of recalibrating thinking around that and understanding that those kids, you know, have been through trauma and, uh, but if kids end up in the foster systems because something went terribly wrong and we need to find loving homes for those kids. And look, the ultimate goal of any juvenile case is hopefully reunification with the biological family. There are instances

• 1:17:38Speaker 03

  in which that can't happen because of, again, some terrible circumstance. And that's when you start looking at termination of parental rights and adoption. But timing is really critical. We know that outcomes for kids that stay in foster care too long, uh, are, are bad. They end up in the, uh, juvenile delinquency system. They end up, uh, in the criminal, adult criminal system. And so you, you know, kids need stability and they need loving homes and that needs to happen rapidly. In the state of Missouri, really you're looking at the year mark between, you know, about a 12-month period between when a kid comes into foster care and when the government agents that are now in control in the court need to make a decision to either reunify or terminate parental rights and, and find a loving home, home through adoption.

• 1:18:24Shawn Ryan?

  Would the reunit possibility that the, the biological parents would reach out to your kids?

• 1:18:32Speaker 03

  You know, in Missouri, there is a registry that, uh, kids who have been adopted can sign up for if they want to receive contact. And if the parents, then, uh, the biological families want to interact, they can submit through that registry. And, you know, I think every, everybody has to make their own decisions about that.

• 1:18:49Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:50Speaker 03

  Uh, you know, at the end of the day, I, I can't even begin to imagine how challenging that must be for an individual.

• 1:19:01Speaker 03

  Well, here's what I, you know, here's what I'm working on, which is making sure my kids know we love them, they're Baileys, they always will be, and we're their parents, and God predestined that. He planned that, you know, not predestination in like a Calvinist, you know, salvation is foreordained situation, but more like God, his sovereign will, you know, the plan was always for us to be together as a family. And I want my kids to fully understand that, know that, and that's what we work on every day. And knowing that they've got loving parents that care about them more than anything else.

• 1:19:38Shawn Ryan?

  You sound like a great dad.

• 1:19:42Shawn Ryan?

  Advice for fathers, from you.

• 1:19:46Speaker 03

  Parenting is tough. Yeah, there's like, it's a, and I know I constantly make mistakes. And my kids are so forgiving and loving. And time, you know, I think that it's easy to get wrapped up in the daily grind of, hey, I'm the breadwinner, I'm the patriarch of the family, I've got to be out earning a living, and mowing the lawn, and doing the dishes, and hustling the activities, and I gotta do, and you know, adults, adults need their own hobbies. And you need downtime, too.

• 1:20:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:27Speaker 03

  But, you know, I think I really try to maximize the time I get to spend with my kids because it's fleeting, and you can't ever get it back.

• 1:20:35Shawn Ryan?

  How do you do that? I mean, you're a husband, father to four kids, Missouri AG, I mean, I'm sure you're an extremely busy guy, the whole state's dependent on you. I mean, I thought you were going to be the AG of the country. I really did. And, and so I can't, I don't even, I have no idea what that would entail, but I know there were discussions about it, and, and a lot of people were rooting for you to be in there. But, but, but, but I mean, how do you, how do you define the balance with all that going on? How do you find the balance?

• 1:21:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a constant challenge.

• 1:21:16Speaker 03

  It's conscious, you have to be purposeful, you have to be conscious of it, you know, you have to block out time. I mean, there's times where I just, I have to turn my phone off and set it aside. And it's not that I don't care what's going on, I do, but I've got to devote my, I've got to prioritize, you know, time with, with the family. So the weekends, you know, we really prioritize spending time together on the weekends, going to church together on Sundays. We try during the week to do as many sit down dinners together as possible. And so we, it's, I mean, it's going to sound kind of anachronistic or old school, but this is, I mean, I really value that time. We'll sit down, we'll have a meal, and then we do a Bible lesson after the meal. And we don't, we're not, you know, seven days a week, it's almost impossible to be consistent across every day of the week with that, but we try to do that as often as possible.

• 1:22:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you know, I struggle with it as an entrepreneur, and I mean, it is, it is tough. And I ask, I ask a lot of my guests, you know, who are, who are high performers or, or extremely busy people, and that's pretty much everybody that comes on the show. And nobody seems to have, like, the key. I always feel a lot of guilt, you know, being a dad, just, just not being with my kids, you know, we do a lot of traveling. And, and I think at the end of the day, you know, I just look at it as, you know, are my kids, are they happy? Are they happy kids? And if they're

• 1:22:41Shawn Ryan?

  happy, then you must be doing something right. So that's, that's trying to, that's how I try to gauge it, is, is.

• 1:22:49Speaker 03

  Good formula.

• 1:22:50Shawn Ryan?

  Are my kids happy? And my kids are happy. Although my, my daughter gets.

• 1:22:57Shawn Ryan?

  But, but, yeah, so, well, let's take a quick break, and then when we come back, we'll get into some policies and what you're doing.

• 1:23:12Speaker 01

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• 1:23:51Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Andrew, we're back from the break. And we're going to get into some of the legal issues and the current battles that you're kind of doing right now. I know that you have a lot of stuff going on. So before we get too in the weeds on this, I need you to, you're at about a level 10? I'm at about a level zero with attorney talk.

• 1:24:14Speaker 03

  I'll dial it whichever way we need to.

• 1:24:18Shawn Ryan?

  Like you're talking to a preschool. But yeah, seriously, let's get into some of the legal stuff that you're doing right now, some of the current battles. What is the thing that you're, what would you, what's your top priority right now?

• 1:24:36Speaker 03

  You know, we talked about it. Protecting free speech, protecting a competitive marketplace for ideas where the competition of ideas produces the best results. And whether it's protecting free speech from government censorship or protecting free speech from corporate censorship, that's a top priority and something we're really focused on. And again, I think that the social media platforms have become the modern public square for conversation. So many people today, so many more people receive their information.

• 1:25:11Speaker 03

  From those outlets, because they don't trust legacy media outlets anymore. And I think that the influence of social media platforms on American culture and discourse is only going to grow in the coming days, weeks, months, years. And so I think that's something we've got to be, got to be working on.

• 1:25:29Shawn Ryan?

  You haven't, you, don't you have an investigation into Google?

• 1:25:32Speaker 03

  We do, yep.

• 1:25:33Shawn Ryan?

  What is that, why?

• 1:25:35Speaker 03

  Well, look, and this is all reported in the public domain, but Google has historically sent Republican fundraising emails to spam at a much higher frequency than Democrat fundraising emails. Now, why is that happening?

• 1:25:53Shawn Ryan?

  How, how does this come across your radar? I mean, how do you, how did you figure that out?

• 1:25:57Speaker 03

  Uh, again, we just, you know, we stay in tune with what we're seeing in the public domain and, uh, two, two different ways. Number one, we can receive a consumer complaint. So at the Missouri Attorney General's website, we have a complaint form that folks can fill out if they're a, a consumer who's been defrauded. Uh, but then we also, we, we just monitor what's going on in the world and, uh, what's, and, you know, you look at the fact that President Trump was almost assassinated.

• 1:26:26Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:26:27Speaker 03

  And they, they shot him in the head. And you couldn't find it on a search engine.

• 1:26:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:35Speaker 03

  Why, why is that? In the middle of an election cycle, like, we're not talking about, right now, there's not really a major election going on at the, the present time, because we're post-election inauguration, but that was in an election cycle. Why was it that the Hunter Biden laptop story was suppressed? You know, again, that was evidence we found in our case, Missouri v Biden. We uncovered that and put that out there in the public domain. That was information American voters deserve to have moving to the ballot box.

• 1:26:59Shawn Ryan?

  That was you guys?

• 1:27:00Speaker 03

  We, yeah, we helped uncover that, absolutely, in, in discovery in Missouri v Biden. Um, you know, why was it that you couldn't find articles on the assassination attempt against President Trump? Why is it that podcasts, popular podcasts that, where the President Trump appears on are hard to find?

• 1:27:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:22Speaker 03

  You know, where do you hide a dead body? Page two of a Google search? And so. Again, you look at it from a consumer protection angle, there's a potential anti-trust issue there as well that's part of litigation, but we intend to use the full spectrum of consumer protection law provided in state statute in Missouri to address those issues.

• 1:27:43Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, when it comes to investigating, where do you even start? I mean, especially, you're not a social media guy yourself. Are you big into tech?

• 1:27:55Speaker 03

  I'm learning as I go.

• 1:27:58Shawn Ryan?

  So, I mean, it's gotta be, I think that's a fear for a lot of people is, and you're doing amazing things, but you know, when it comes to, especially, I guess what I'm more talking about is when we see the senate or the congress, you know, talking about censorship and you got Mark Zuckerberg sitting in front of the senate, having a hearing, and you got people like Mitch McConnell who, you know, blanks out and has a stroke mid-sentence. I mean, these guys don't know what the hell to look for. We had Feinstein died in office. I mean, you have these dinosaurs that are in there that probably don't even know how

• 1:28:42Shawn Ryan?

  to open a damn email, and they're talking to a tech titan. I mean, how do you guys, and you seem to be extremely effective at it, so how do you start the investigation? Do you wrap yourself around a team that is extremely well versed in tech and SEO and all these other, in censorship and all these other things?

• 1:29:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's right. I think you start there. In Missouri, our, again, consumer protection law allows us to send subpoenas. It's called a civil investigatory demand. It has the effect, legal effect of a subpoena. So we start, and you start pulling that thread. And as you subpoena this information, you start putting pieces together, realize, okay, there's something else down here. Now we gotta subpoena that. Now we got more. And oftentimes what will happen is, you know, these, and again, I'm speaking in broad terms, but the corporations will like flood you with discovery. And they're just gonna swamp you with discovery. They may even churn the discovery, so it's like, not in sequential order, not in a linear order, and they're just dumping documents on you and trying to drown you in discovery.

• 1:29:45Speaker 03

  Or they'll drown you in vexatious discovery demands and...

• 1:29:51Speaker 03

  Defenses to your discovery requests if you're actually in litigation. And that's really the game in civil law is it's, you know, it the battlefield is the discovery process.

• 1:30:01Shawn Ryan?

  So they drown you in like with useless information. Hopefully you'll go where you want. Thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of shit that has nothing to do with what you're looking for.

• 1:30:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:30:11Shawn Ryan?

  And it takes you forever to sift sift through all that.

• 1:30:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's a would it be called a Fabian strategy, you know, uh, I think that's what they're trying to do is just wear you out, never become decisively engaged and and hope you'll you'll tire out and go away. Um, but we're, you know, we don't, we don't take shots at the Missouri Attorney General's office that we don't intend to hit. Uh, you know, we want to put lead on target. And so if we commit to something, we're going to follow through and relentless execution is part of that process.

• 1:30:42Shawn Ryan?

  So if you're successful on this Google and the Google thing, does that, will that only affect Missouri or will that be nationwide?

• 1:30:50Speaker 03

  I think it sets a ripple in the pond effect, a presidential effect for for others. And again, you know, what you see, you can, it's a domino effect. It's pulling the thread of a, a, you know, a fabric. You start to unravel it, you start to take it apart and it's for the benefit of the people of the state of Missouri is why I do my job, but it has a net benefit to people across the United States of America. I like to tell folks in other states that, you know, hey, I may not be your attorney general, but I can still represent you.

• 1:31:27Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm. So do you have other states jumping in with you on the Google thing?

• 1:31:31Speaker 03

  Uh, we don't on that particular one. And again, it's not necessarily out of a lack of desire or motivation on behalf of my colleagues. They've got their own cases and investigations going on. It's just that the the authority that I wield in the consumer protection space is really just unique to the state of Missouri.

• 1:31:48Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:31:49Speaker 03

  But we've partnered on so many different lawsuits with my colleagues and typically over the past two years, those have really been targeted at the Biden Harris administration, their usurpation of power, their attack on the United States Constitution, their undermining of the rule of law. And so in Missouri, we had north of 50 different lawsuits against the Biden Harris administration. And so many of those were in partnership with my colleagues across the country.

• 1:32:14Shawn Ryan?

  You mentioned the Hunter Biden laptop. What was on that laptop that really caught your attention?

• 1:32:20Speaker 03

  President Trump described as the laptop from hell, you know, and I don't know that I can pinpoint a, a single data point that's like, okay, well, that's the smoking gun. I think you got to take the whole thing. But the point is not, I mean, the, the point is that the FBI was in possession of that laptop and, and knew the deep state of the FBI had the laptop and knew of its authenticity, knew it was real. And yet they had run table drills with big tech, social media oligarchs with increased frequency in the days and weeks leading up to that story breaking during the fall of

• 1:33:00Speaker 03

  2020, in the middle of the election cycle in 2020. And they had conditioned and trained big tech to be prepared for what they said would be a Russian disinformation story related to Joe Biden's son. And on the eve of that story breaking, there was a communication between agents of the deep state and the FBI and big tech, and it was instantly suppressed.

• 1:33:21Shawn Ryan?

  What do you mean agents of the deep state?

• 1:33:24Speaker 03

  There were people that were working at the FBI and may still work there. Their names are probably numbered that did not want President Trump in office. They saw him as a threat to their power and their control. They think they're smarter than the elect, than the electorate, than the, the people who voted for President Trump. And they wanted to do everything they could to keep him from wielding power, the authority that we, the people, had given him under our constitutional structure.

• 1:33:53Shawn Ryan?

  Are you in contact with Cash Patel?

• 1:33:56Speaker 03

  I, I know Cash. Yeah, he's great. And we've been in contact in the past. I haven't talked to him in a while. I know he's going through his confirmation hearing today and I'm excited. He's going to be a great FBI director. He's got so much experience in that space and in that, that organization. And man, he, he knows how to get the job done.

• 1:34:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I'm really looking forward to him getting in there. I mean, do you think there's going to be any? I mean, by the time this comes out, we'll know, I think. But do you think they'll have run into any snags?

• 1:34:24Speaker 03

  I don't think so. I mean, I don't-

• 1:34:25Shawn Ryan?

  A very clean past.

• 1:34:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, he's, he's someone who's a proven patriot, someone who's a proven effectiveness on national security issues, on legal issues, and from a law enforcement perspective. And so I think the Senate would be well served to get him confirmed and get him on the job. And there's, there's gonna be a lot of work to do, but I know he's up to the task.

• 1:34:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. You know, also, speaking of the Bidens, what did you think about all the pardons? You know, was, was it the day before he pardoned Milley, pardoned, shit, who else did he pardon? He pardoned Milley, pardoned Fauci-

• 1:35:05Speaker 03

  His family, yeah.

• 1:35:06Shawn Ryan?

  Pardoned his family hours before, pardoned the J6 committee.

• 1:35:11Speaker 03

  Well, here, here's my question, Sean.

• 1:35:12Shawn Ryan?

  Cheney.

• 1:35:14Speaker 03

  How can he, how can those pardons be legally valid?

• 1:35:16Shawn Ryan?

  See, that's what I want to know. I thought, I thought, so I thought when you pardon somebody, it had to be for a very specific crime.

• 1:35:24Speaker 03

  Well, this is, so it is, I will say this, and the difference between the United States Constitution and the, the clemency authority given to the President of the United States, and the clemency authority codified in the Missouri State Constitution given to our governor, it changed in, I think, 1875 in the state of Missouri. Our, the, our governor used to have pardon power for state offenses that was parallel to the United States President's power under the federal constitution. And that, that changed after the Civil War. And in Missouri, the Constitution was amended to limit the governor's clemency authority to only after a conviction. President of the United States has the ability, the

• 1:36:08Speaker 03

  authority, constitutional authority to pardon before, uh, before a charge is even filed, before a criminal charge is even filed or a prosecution is commenced, which is unique. But there is an overbreadth issue. Like, if you go so, so broad, it's so vague, like, it becomes this, like, ultimate get out of jail free card. So I think that's a problem. But I think there's a deeper problem. Think about when the two-tiered justice system that Cash Patel spoke of, sitting in this very chair on your show, and how he saw how President Trump and President Biden were treated differently in instances where they were accused of having secret documents. Now, I agree with Cash Patel, hopefully he'll be Director of Patel, that President Trump

• 1:36:50Speaker 03

  had the authority to have the documents. This was the most bogus witch hunt of them all. And thank goodness Jack Smith was struck down in court and is no longer employed by DOJ. But think about what happened with Joe Biden. So President Trump, they raided Mar-a-Lago. They put the evidence out to make it look more inculpatory. Take pictures of it. Rake him over the coals. And with Joe Biden, they say, look, he's an old man. He's too enfeebled. He can't, he doesn't have the mental acuity to form the mens rea, the mental state, to commit an intentional act, or an intentional criminal act. That's what Biden's own DOJ

• 1:37:34Speaker 03

  said about him. Well, if that's true, how could he sign a legal document? How could he sign a pardon paper? How could he sign a clemency document?

• 1:37:43Shawn Ryan?

  I think a lot of people are wondering that.

• 1:37:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. If I sign, if I'm out of my mind and sign a testamentary instrument, a will, that will can be challenged in court. It's not valid because I didn't know what I was doing when I signed it. Well, his own attorneys, Biden's own attorneys at DOJ said he wasn't, didn't have the mental faculty to commit a crime. So how could he possibly have the mental faculty to excuse other people from criminal behavior?

• 1:38:04Shawn Ryan?

  Now, I mean, I don't know any of this stuff, but I've heard grumblings, I've heard rumors that, you know, just because that they were pardoned by the federal government, the states could still go after. Is there any truth to that?

• 1:38:20Speaker 03

  It's absolutely true. Yeah, the president's clemency authority extends to federal offenses, but the state is its own sovereign, and those individuals could still be guilty of state offenses.

• 1:38:30Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think anybody will go after them?

• 1:38:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I hope so.

• 1:38:33Shawn Ryan?

  What states would? What states would have that power?

• 1:38:35Speaker 03

  You know, it's states, any state where an element of an offense was committed within that state.

• 1:38:40Shawn Ryan?

  So Virginia?

• 1:38:42Speaker 03

  Virginia certainly is one. You know, and you got to look at everywhere the Biden crime family conducted business, you know, was there a fraudulent transaction? And again, look, I mean, at the end of the day, it's about reciprocity it's about equal protection under law but it's also about the rule of law and doing it the right way unlike the left who abuses the system to obtain specious convictions convictions are not legally valid by abusing law and perverting law and moving the law beyond its plain text and original understanding we on the right believe that the rules should be consistent and fair and predictable

• 1:39:23Shawn Ryan?

  I mean a lot of people want to see these people burn for what they've done especially Fauci you know and so I mean what

• 1:39:36Shawn Ryan?

  man I don't even know what I'm trying to ask here but I mean what would you like to see happen could they still investigate would it be worth the time for the federal government to investigate Fauci the J six committee Millie I'm not even sure what that's for yeah the Biden family which I just interviewed Kalin georgescu he's one of the one of the candidates in Romania that got censored for

• 1:40:03Shawn Ryan?

  Russian influence you know again Russian influence maybe maybe not I'm sure they're meddling in the in the in that election I mean yeah you know that we're building we aren't NATO is building the biggest base ever in Romania he doesn't want it I'm sure Russia doesn't want it so I mean I could definitely see that but then it comes out today up Biden was taking money from Romania yeah I mean so I guess what I'm getting at is you can't really it doesn't sound like the federal government can really go after you know these guys but can they still expose what they've done is there is there any is there a reason to do that I mean I think everybody would like to know

• 1:40:47Shawn Ryan?

  I mean could you still conduct the investigation and and present it to the people and be like

• 1:40:52Speaker 03

  absolutely

• 1:40:52Shawn Ryan?

  this is what happened

• 1:40:54Speaker 03

  well because criminal liability isn't the only liability these people face I mean that should absolutely still be on the table certainly from the state level but there's professional licensure involved there's civil liability you know like

• 1:41:11Speaker 03

  Think about my lawsuit against China again, like this is a first of its kind where we've sued China for inflicting the COVID pandemic on the United States of America, and then hoarding PPE and depriving Americans and the government of the state of Missouri from being able to access the PPE that we need to respond to the pandemic they caused. What role did Anthony Fauci play in that? We now know, based on recently disclassified documents, that the CIA even believes that the COVID-19 came from a lab in China, not randomly jumping from animal life to human life at some marketplace in Wuhan. Well, wasn't Fauci helping suppress some of that information?

• 1:41:54Speaker 03

  And was he, what was his involvement in that research and in that lab in China? And so is there civil liability there? And again, I think people still demand justice for the wrongs that were perpetrated against the American people, not only by the Chinese government, but by the deep state like Anthony Fauci. And so, you know, I think making that transparent through an investigation and airing that, it's not a bad thing. It can only be a good thing. And there might be additional liability points beyond the criminal code.

• 1:42:27Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, so in a picture perfect world, you would like to see the federal government conduct the investigations through all the people that were pardoned and have that information revealed to the American public.

• 1:42:40Speaker 03

  I think we have a right to know. And I think that, again, first of all, I have grave concerns about the legal validity of any legal document that Joe Biden signed after he was determined by his own Department of Justice to be, to lack the mental acuity for an intentional act. So, yeah, I think we need to understand what happened there, what went wrong, and are there systems in place to redress grievances that are still available to us?

• 1:43:10Shawn Ryan?

  What would you do if you were the AG?

• 1:43:15Speaker 03

  Well, let me say this. You know, Pam Bondi, who is President Trump's nominee, who may very well be confirmed at this point, is going to be a fantastic United States Attorney General. I mean, I got to meet her and just think the world of her. She was the Attorney General of the state of Florida previously, so she's seen it from the state level. She's an incredibly gifted and talented attorney. She's a great manager and motivator of people, and she's going to have a large organization that she's going to have to not only clean house, eliminate the deep state, but reorganize and reprioritize missions to maximize the role that the DOJ is supposed to play. And so there's going to be a lot on her plate.

• 1:43:59Speaker 03

  She is up to the task and will get it done. And, you know, I think that...

• 1:44:05Shawn Ryan?

  I'm asking if you, though.

• 1:44:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:07Shawn Ryan?

  If you were in there.

• 1:44:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:08Shawn Ryan?

  Not Pam Bondi. If you were in there, I'm just curious about how you think and what your strategy would be.

• 1:44:14Speaker 03

  I think you got to find resources to address these issues and to, again, to investigate these matters and to lay the information in front of the American people. To do otherwise is a form of censorship of information.

• 1:44:26Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:44:26Speaker 03

  And look, censorship is the lazy tool of a weak mind. And it's counterproductive. People don't trust their government if they don't think they're being told the truth.

• 1:44:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:34Speaker 03

  And I think we look back at COVID and what happened and Dr. Anthony Fauci, and we feel like we were deceived and lied to.

• 1:44:44Shawn Ryan?

  Would that be a top priority of yours?

• 1:44:46Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:44:47Shawn Ryan?

  What would some other top priorities be?

• 1:44:50Speaker 03

  So I think there are three strategic objectives that have to be secured now. I think the top priority has got to be the border. If we don't have a border, we don't have a country. And the Biden-Harris administration not only allowed illegals to cross by refusing to enforce the immigration code, but they actually perverted the immigration code to find legal loopholes to allow people in under the parole process that we've had to file suit against to put a stop to. And the parole... In the immigration code, there's a provision that allows the government to allow people into this country for a limited time, limited purpose on an individual basis. Well, Biden-Harris said, no, no, we're going to use that to allow in X number of Haitians, X number of Guatemalans, X number or Y number of Hondurans.

• 1:45:37Speaker 03

  They created a visa program that was never authorized by Congress. That's a perversion of the law and abuse of the law. It undermines the rule of law and it hung an open sign. It not only allowed in people who had no legal right to be here, but it hung an open sign that created the poorest border problem. It's making Missouri communities and communities across the United States of America less safe. So we've got to secure the border. We've got to deport criminals who have violated the laws of the United States of America. That's got to be strategic objective number one. Strategic objective number two is the right to free speech. And again, it's dismantling the vast censorship enterprise in the government that was instant. It started with the deep state, but it was then energized by President Joe Biden.

• 1:46:19Speaker 03

  President Trump's already begun doing that with his executive order on day one. But we've got to have a free, fair and open marketplace of ideas. We've got to end corporate censorship as well. And then really the third strategic objective in my mind is ending the weaponization of government. And we saw that abused and it was counterproductive to the left. And I think that's why President Trump delivered this historic landslide election. And thank goodness, the American people saw through that. But we've got to end the weaponization of governments. I think as Attorney General, those have to be the three strategic objectives to be secured if we're going to save the country.

• 1:46:52Shawn Ryan?

  Do you think that those are her top priorities?

• 1:46:54Speaker 03

  I'm sure they are. Now she may articulate them differently, but you know, that's the formula for the Make America Great Again movement that President Trump has started and is continuing on today.

• 1:47:07Shawn Ryan?

  What about, what about stuff with Big Pharma?

• 1:47:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, were we lied to there too? I think there's, there's questions that need to be answered. Are we still being lied to about the efficacy of vaccines? You know, specifically the COVID vaccine that seems to not be a vaccine at all. And so what was, what incentives were in place that caused that to happen? And were there, it's all about holding wrongdoers accountable and putting systems in place to ensure that it doesn't happen again.

• 1:47:44Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, there's a lot of talk about, there's a lot of talk about, you know, pulling, not, not enabling or taking away the right for Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, Moderna to advertise on media channels. And so, I mean, I'm kind of curious about your thoughts to that.

• 1:48:07Shawn Ryan?

  I don't think it really does anything.

• 1:48:08Speaker 03

  I don't either. I like, just, it's a weird marketplace because just because I see an ad for a vaccine on television doesn't mean I can then go personally buy that. There's an intermediary in the form of a medical professional that has to administer, prescribe and then administer.

• 1:48:24Shawn Ryan?

  I think, I think where I'm going with this is, is, you know, because those are some top advertisers, I mean, I just watched, I never watched legacy media, ever. I get all my news from interviewing folks like you.

• 1:48:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:40Shawn Ryan?

  And, but, me and my wife were in a hotel a couple of weeks ago. I did decide, I was like, oh, let's flip it on. Let's just see what they talk about. I turned on Fox News. It was like three out of five ads were pharmaceuticals, you know, and so what I'm kind of getting at is because, because those are obviously their top advertisers, then they control the narrative and it's if you don't talk about this, then we don't advertise with you. Now, if we make it illegal for them to advertise on legacy media channels, they also have, God knows how many lobbyists. Isn't a big pharma has the second biggest, is it the second biggest, I think, big oil is the number one?

• 1:49:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me.

• 1:49:23Shawn Ryan?

  It's one of the top three. Would you say that? And so, wouldn't they just use their lobbyists to funnel money to the legacy media some other way, some other how, and to, to continue to influence media channels to, hey, don't talk about this, talk about this, you know, there's, there's, business always finds a way around the law, it seems like. And so, I mean, how do you, how do you do it?

• 1:49:52Speaker 03

  So I think, and you've done so much work exposing how

• 1:49:58Speaker 03

  Taxpayer dollars in the public coffers go to things we don't want them to go to, and it shouldn't be happening. And you've exposed that in some of your shows. How much of that's happening with the medical industry and with Big Pharma now? And I think those are questions we need to answer. I think that if you, actually, yeah, I think that Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address is one of the most prophetic and intriguing speeches ever given in American politics.

• 1:50:26Shawn Ryan?

  Military industrial complex.

• 1:50:28Speaker 03

  Everybody remembers it for the military industrial complex. But there was another part of that speech where President Eisenhower said he expressed concerns about the influence and the relationship and the marriage between federal dollars, big federal dollars, and medicine and science, and how you would create this elitist culture that would substitute their judgment for ours and would not have dissenting voices to test the veracity of what they're saying.

• 1:50:56Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh. He said that in 1960, is that right?

• 1:51:01Shawn Ryan?

  Something like that.

• 1:51:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, that's a close, right? Didn't we see that on full display in 2020?

• 1:51:06Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:06Speaker 03

  And in 2021, and in 2022. And is that going on now? And so, like, let's break up that relationship. Let's, let's break that up, and let's have a competitive, open marketplace where consumers make their own decisions rather than being spoon-fed based on this elitist culture and group think.

• 1:51:26Shawn Ryan?

  How do you do that, though?

• 1:51:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, again, I think you got to follow the money. Like, what is funding these entities now? Are there federal dollars going to that? Can we cut those off? You know, these are decisions that really have to be made in Congress through the, the budget process, but that's, that's where I would start.

• 1:51:42Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, could the company just, I mean, I'm just spitballing here. I don't really know how it works, but, you know, we talk about the lobbyists, we talk about the advertising, they control that space. Hey, don't talk about this. You know, what about, I mean, what if, what if a company just held a lot of CNN stock?

• 1:52:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:01Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I mean, then, hey, we're going to relinquish all of this stock if you continue this narrative. I mean, I just don't, there's so many ways that they could get in there. They're probably doing all of this already. It's probably not just advertising. And so, I, you know, I, in my opinion, I think the only way to actually do it is to, and I don't know how you, it would, you just talked about this with, um...

• 1:52:28Shawn Ryan?

  Dr. Paul Saladino, you know, I mean, it seems to be like, the only way to do that would be some type of an education program and educate the people. But I still don't know, you know what I mean? Where it's like, hey, you're seeing all these advertisements. We all know legacy media is bullshit. They're all moving towards podcast form. It's ridiculous. It's like, oh, well, shit, we fucked ourselves up here. Let's just copy what the podcasters are doing. But I think it's already done. But at the same, at the same token, I think there needs to be some type of a re-education. I hate saying that term because it sounds horrible.

• 1:53:04Speaker 03

  Well, counter-speech. Maybe that's another term, is the best remedy for disfavored speech is counter-speech. So how do, like, can we, yeah, I mean, offer an argument in contradiction to what we're being spoon-fed? You know, from a legal perspective, and this is something I'm excited about. You know, I think Vice President Vance has been a big proponent of, again, using antitrust law to break up these unprecedented and dangerous consolidations of power that are manipulating the marketplace and ultimately harming consumers and the American people. And I think that's another fountain of legal authority. You know,

• 1:53:44Speaker 03

  I would think that this administration would reinvigorate the DOJ's antitrust section of the DOJ to start looking for targets. That was, you know, done under President Teddy Roosevelt to great effect, after the Sherman Antitrust Act was initially passed into law to break up some of the large trusts and corporations. And I think it's time to reinvigorate that body of law.

• 1:54:12Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, do you think Big Pharma plays a role in, in, is, are they the reason that natural medicines like psychedelics aren't hitting the market? Because it wipes out opiate addiction. It helps wipe out...

• 1:54:29Shawn Ryan?

  Benzos, you know, like I said, I did it, totally cleaned me out.

• 1:54:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:34Shawn Ryan?

  And, and, and, I mean, how do you, I mean, you can grow that, a lot of this, you can grow this stuff in your house if you want to. It's not, you know what I mean? It's, it's not out of the realm, which would be a huge cut in their income.

• 1:54:53Speaker 03

  If that's happening, the legal question, and I, it's the answer is that it is. You know, the, the legal question becomes, have they formed a combination in restraint of trade? Are they buying up outlets that might have been competitive or silencing, uh, buying up outlets that would offer a competitive counterpoint, counter-speech? If that's happening, you got an antitrust suit and you're off to the races.

• 1:55:21Shawn Ryan?

  Well, the food industry's doing it. I mean, we see it and every time somebody comes out and, uh, with a, with a new, with a, with a natural deodorant or a natural toothpaste or a, or a food that doesn't have any additives in it, you see Coca-Cola goes and buys it, you know, Purina goes and buys it, whoever, you know, they go and they buy the company and use the same marketing and it, it, it tricks people into thinking that that particular product is still healthy for the consumer when in reality, they put in the additives so it has a longer shelf life and we're right back to square one trying to find the next thing. And so is it, is that what you're talking about with pharmaceuticals?

• 1:56:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, look, if, uh, if corporations, there, there are anti-competitive practices that are defined in the case law, interpreting the Sherman Antitrust Act, and that violate both federal and state law and are the target of antitrust lawsuits. And if that's going on, then that's, that's a, a great vehicle to fix the problem. Uh, yeah, counter-speech, I think, I agree with you, is, is one great option, consumer awareness certainly, uh, but antitrust litigation's another option.

• 1:56:38Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. Let's move back into your, your lawsuit against China.

• 1:56:44Shawn Ryan?

  You'd mentioned that they were hoarding PPE equipment.

• 1:56:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:48Shawn Ryan?

  I thought it was ridiculous that we have a virus that came from China. Everybody's wearing a mask that says made in China.

• 1:56:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:55Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I mean, what, what other PPE, were they, were they hoarding respirators and?

• 1:57:01Speaker 03

  All of it. Yeah, it's not just masks. It PPE, as you know, is, is so many different products that they, they were producing and holding. But isn't that the play of the, of a communist government?

• 1:57:13Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:57:13Speaker 03

  To like, create a problem and then manipulate the marketplace that has the solution to the problem? And that's what you saw and that was the evidence we put on. And look, the, the, again, that recently, uh, declassified CIA document pointing to the lab leak is the most likely source of the pandemic, just increases the Chinese Communist Government's culpability. And it further emphasizes Missouri's need to, uh, execute that $25 billion judgment we intend to obtain.

• 1:57:40Shawn Ryan?

  When do you think you'll be awarded that?

• 1:57:43Speaker 03

  So the, the trial court has asked for some additional briefing that we're gonna try to complete in the next week, uh, week to two weeks. And then I would anticipate within the next 30 days, we'll get a judgment. And, and, and again, a judgment's a piece of paper.

• 1:57:56Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:57:57Speaker 03

  Uh, you gotta go execute the judgment. Luckily, the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act provides a, a method, a procedure by which you can execute that judgment.

• 1:58:06Shawn Ryan?

  So what, you may have just answered this, I'm not sure, but let's say you are awarded and, and you win the case. What court is that in? Is that in a federal court?

• 1:58:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:58:16Shawn Ryan?

  Is that in a state court?

• 1:58:17Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:58:18Shawn Ryan?

  Or is that in some type of an international court?

• 1:58:21Speaker 03

  We're in, uh, federal court. It's, uh, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. Uh, it's a, that was the best venue because it's a, a claim under a federal statute against a, a foreign sovereign. And again, this isn't some crackpot legal theory. It's the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, a statute that was passed in 1976, signed into law by the time President Gerald Ford. Uh, and so there, there's a, the, the people's elected representatives in Congress contemplated that states might have lawsuits against foreign entities and, and created a, a process. Uh, one of the examples.

• 1:59:00Speaker 03

  There was an instance in the Falklands War where an Argentine missile struck a commercial merchant vessel and sank it. And so the corporation then sued Argentina for the destruction of their property. And the court identified, like, look, that claim fits under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. That's one example. Missouri's the first state that I know of to really raise a claim that infliction of a pandemic and then hoarding a PPE is a claim that fits under that statute. So it's kind of, in that respect, it's a novel legal argument, but it's been, again, tested all the way up to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. And I think, and again, I think it'll be successful.

• 1:59:40Shawn Ryan?

  So do you, honestly, do you think, if you win this case, do you think China's gonna pay 25 billion?

• 1:59:47Speaker 03

  Not at all. And my proof is that they haven't participated in the lawsuit at all. I mean, they were granted due process under our laws. They do business in the United States of America. They know, they have to be aware that this statute is on the books, that they have some liability under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. They were served with process when we initiated the lawsuit. They're aware of it. But that's how little they think of these United States of America. They couldn't even be bothered to show up to court with 25 billion dollars hanging in the balance. And doesn't that also point to their culpability? If you had a defense, you had an opportunity to show up and put it on, and you didn't do it.

• 2:00:29Shawn Ryan?

  So what happens then? Who holds them accountable? How do you get them to pay?

• 2:00:33Speaker 03

  We find assets. We find Chinese assets.

• 2:00:36Shawn Ryan?

  You did mention that.

• 2:00:37Speaker 03

  And then, yeah, and then we take that judgment, and we say, hey, federal government seize that property, sell it, and we'll take the check, and we'll credit it towards that 25 billion dollar judgment.

• 2:00:46Shawn Ryan?

  Does China have a lot of, hold a lot of assets in Missouri?

• 2:00:49Speaker 03

  There are some. And again, we're still in the process of identifying assets, but they don't only have to be in Missouri. We can work with any willing partner across the United States of America to seize assets.

• 2:01:00Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of assets?

• 2:01:01Speaker 03

  Real property are the best assets because they're easily liquefiable. But, you know...

• 2:01:11Speaker 03

  Any kind of asset.

• 2:01:12Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. So, how do you, how do you find out if the, if the state owns, if the Chinese state owns?

• 2:01:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, you gotta search the, the registration on those to determine who owns them, you know, and every state registers property interests differently, uh, you know, Secretary of State's Office for Business Entities, uh, you know, uh, Recorder of Deeds for Real Property.

• 2:01:36Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I would imagine it's shell company after shell company after shell company after shell company. And so, how do you sift through all that?

• 2:01:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's gonna take time and it's gonna take a dedicated team of professionals, but again, you know, we didn't.

• 2:01:49Shawn Ryan?

  What would be an indicator?

• 2:01:51Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, there's a lot of open source information and so again, you start pulling on that bread.

• 2:01:57Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, okay. Let's move into IBM.

• 2:02:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:02:01Shawn Ryan?

  What do you got going on with them?

• 2:02:02Speaker 03

  So, we filed a lawsuit under the Missouri Human Rights Act against IBM's DEI program. Uh, and so, there was this instance in which the president of IBM was video, on video, you know, threatening his subordinates, threatening his team of executives, that if they didn't promote people of certain racial classifications over others, that they would not be eligible for their bonuses. This isn't some mid-level, mid-tier office bureaucrat promoting DEI. This is the president of the company on tape. Uh, that's just corporate racism and it's never been legal and was never a good idea.

• 2:02:43Speaker 03

  But in Missouri, under state statute, the Missouri Human Rights Act, the Attorney General's Office is given enforcement authority to prevent those kinds of racist policies from permeating, uh, the workplace. And so, we filed suit in state court and are moving that suit forward. IBM has filed a motion to dismiss and I think we're in court in the coming days on that, so we'll see where we go. But, look, there are other remedies available and at the end of the day, we're gonna use every tool in our arsenal to harpoon the, the, you know, the corporate DEI whale, cause it, we, I'm not sure where we got off track, but it should have never ended up like this, you know, racism has always been wrong. Uh, America and certainly Missouri are meritocracies. People should.

• 2:03:28Speaker 03

  Obtain positions and matriculate through organizations based on their merit and how good they are at their jobs, not based on their skin color.

• 2:03:36Shawn Ryan?

  Is IBM headquartered in Missouri?

• 2:03:37Speaker 03

  They're not, but they have offices in Missouri. And so my lawsuit, you know, can only fix the problems for IBM's employees in Missouri. But our hope would be, it would be an impetus to dismantle the DEI programs across the corporate spectrum.

• 2:03:54Shawn Ryan?

  Do you, so with the IBM case, again, I'm just curious, how many other people are jumping on board with you? And so do you do the research to figure out where all IBM's doing this, what states are involved, contact their attorney general to see if they want to jump on board with this?

• 2:04:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a, there's a team of attorneys that are in kind of, it's a network of communication across the states. There are organizations that oftentimes will help facilitate that communication. You know, I'm not sure if other states have taken action against corporate DEI. I know other states have joined us and we've joined other states in going after public DEI programs at the state, federal, or local level in government. But this suit, you know, is, is unique. But again, Missouri's unique. Not every state has given their attorney general enforcement authority under their civil rights laws, but Missouri has. And so when I say again, that, you know, that we were recently a blue state where the

• 2:04:56Speaker 03

  attorney general was empowered and given authority to do things, and now we're a red state. And that's one of the weapons that's been left behind on the battlefield that we're using to fight for, fight for Missouri workers. I mean, think about this, these employees at IBM in Missouri have been subject to this. And how many of them missed out on opportunities because maybe they were the wrong skin color? And it's not just black and white. I mean, that's the other thing, like it's people of Asian descent as well, who were harmed by these, some of these DEI policies. And so we've got to get out of that world and I'm proud of the work we've done in this lawsuit, using the authority we have to fight back.

• 2:05:32Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about, real quick, this just popped in my head, all the executive orders that Trump just signed and with the stroke of the pen, just basically eliminated all of Biden's executive orders. Where I'm kind of going with this is, and I've talked about this with, with my friend, my attorney, Tim Parlatorti, several times, talked to Eric Prince about this.

• 2:05:55Shawn Ryan?

  It seems to be that the pendulum is just going farther and farther and farther. And so, yeah, while it's, I think a lot of these executive orders are great that, that, Trump put in, you know, he eliminated everything Biden did. Biden, I'm pretty sure, if I remember right, he eliminated all the executive orders that Trump put into place. And so, great for four years.

• 2:06:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:06:17Shawn Ryan?

  All these executive orders. Next guy comes in. He's on the other side. He just immediately with the stroke of a pen eliminates all of those executive orders. I mean, what in, in your mind? I guess there's a couple of questions. One, is there anything, anything else that could be done other than these executive orders? Um, two, what's more important? Is it state, community law? Is it, is it local, state, and then federal? Or is it, should we be concentrated on, should we be concentrated on federal law?

• 2:06:56Speaker 03

  I think President Trump has exactly the right answer to all of this.

• 2:07:01Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:07:01Speaker 03

  First and foremost, he is, I believe, based on what I'm seeing and hearing from him and his team, interested in closing the door behind them, that they are building something to last. They're gonna make America great again and put the structure in place to keep it great against domestic enemies in the future. And there's a lot, lot to unpack there, but one of the things he's doing is reasserting the role that states play, which is the proper constitutional answer to the question. Our founding fathers' experience with a tyrannical monarchy of England taught them that we should have a centralized authority of limited power

• 2:07:44Speaker 03

  diffused over three co-equal branches of government with checks and balances. That's the separation of powers doctrine, you know, that's implicit and textually based in our United States Constitution. And then that states have residual power and states need to be laboratories for the democratic process and the guarantors of individual liberties. So, and under the Biden administration, Biden and Harris.

• 2:08:09Speaker 03

  Really exponentially grew the administrative state, the bureaucratic agencies, the alphabet soup of bureaucratic agencies, EPA, DOE, Department of Labor, ATF, they grew these agencies and those agencies, the statutes that create those agencies, give them rule-making authority to promulgate and put into place administrative rules. And those agencies did that to great effect and it hurt Missourians and it hurt the people of the United States of America and it did damage to our constitutional structure. The founding fathers were rolling over their graves at the idea that some fourth branch of government not contemplated in our constitution and unaccountable to the electorate can pass rules.

• 2:08:52Speaker 03

  Let me give you an example of where that hurt Missourians, for instance, and let me talk about agriculture. So in Missouri, a friend of mine, he farms and he's got a field, row crops, and it's near a, it's on the bank of a creek, so the creek kind of creates the boundary for one of his fields. And every year, that field erodes into that creek bed and it just keeps eroding, eroding. Well, his ability to provide for his family and make a profit is diminished with the erosion of that field because there's less tillable land. So what did he do? He crawls into the creek bed, he picks up rocks from the creek bed. He didn't import rock from elsewhere, he used the very rocks that are in the creek bed to put them to shore up the bank of that creek to try to prevent further erosion.

• 2:09:37Speaker 03

  And the Biden-Harris EPA and Army Corps of Engineers comes in and says, whoa, you just violated the Clean Water Act under the Waters United States rule. You owe a penalty and you gotta go in there and take all those rocks out and put them back. And if you don't, we're gonna sue you and potentially imprison you. Wow. This is insanity. This is absolute insanity. This is government-run amok and the little guy, his rights are trampled on and if he's gonna fix that problem, he's now gotta pay for an attorney and fight it in court and he may not win. To make all of that worse, before last summer, from 1985 until the summer of 2024, there was the Chevron decision in place. And the Chevron decision, again, this was the brainchild of, I believe, Chief Justice

• 2:10:22Speaker 03

  William Rehnquist in the 80s, who was looking for some kind of consistent way in which federal courts could deal with challenges to these administrative agencies and the rules they were making. And so he came up with this idea that, look, federal courts will just defer to an agency's reasonable interpretation of their own statutes. Well, that was an abdication of the Article III authority provided to the federal judiciary in our Constitution. The courts were saying, "We're not going to do our jobs. We'll just let these bureaucrats do whatever they want." And again, you take my friend, the farmer, and this is how it's hurting real people. And last summer, the court overturned the Chevron decision and said, "The courts are

• 2:11:03Speaker 03

  no longer going to give the jump ball to the federal bureaucrats." So, a couple of things have happened. Number one, that's a major sea change in the law that now justifies the President, President Trump and his administration taking a hacksaw to that apparatus of the bureaucracy. Get rid of it. Get rid of the rules. Get rid of the people enforcing the rules. We don't need them, and they're no longer to have deference in the United States Supreme Court. And return that authority to the people and the states.

• 2:11:35Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. Interesting. Let's talk about the Second Amendment. What do you have going on in Missouri with the Second Amendment?

• 2:11:43Speaker 03

  Man, we are energized to protect our right to keep and bear arms. And it's not only in Missouri, the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, but it's Article I, Section 23 of the Missouri Constitution, which explicitly protects not only the right to keep and bear firearms, but ammunition and accessories as well. And it preempts local control. So municipalities can't pass burdensome regulations and ordinances to restrict the rights in the Constitution. It also says that anything the state does that could be construed as a limitation on these rights is subject to strict scrutiny, which is the highest level of scrutiny under constitutional analysis.

• 2:12:25Speaker 03

  And it creates a legal obligation of the state to protect the right to keep and bear arms, which then gives me standing to go into court and sue when a municipality passes an ordinance that restricts gun owners' rights.

• 2:12:39Speaker 03

  So we're full steam ahead on that and we will go after any locality that violates our state constitution. But we've also got what's called the Second Amendment Preservation Act that the people's elected representatives in our General Assembly passed and our governor signed into law. And it's really as much a codification of the 10th Amendment anti commandeering doctrine as it is about the Second Amendment. And what it says is that we're not going to let the federal government coerce, cajole, and co-opt state and local law enforcement officials to do unconstitutional gun restrictions. Soon as the governor signed that into law, Biden's Department of Justice sued the state of Missouri.

• 2:13:23Speaker 03

  So I've been defending that law and just last week, we asked the United States Supreme Court to review that case. So we have a on file at the United States Supreme Court, a petition for writ of certiorari asking the court to deprive the Biden-Harris Department of Justice of standing to move that lawsuit forward and allow the people of the state of Missouri to speak through their elected representatives to set that policy position in state statute.

• 2:13:49Shawn Ryan?

  Now, how was the federal government able to sue you for state law?

• 2:13:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's the whole point we made.

• 2:13:54Shawn Ryan?

  Didn't have to entertain that case? I mean...

• 2:13:56Speaker 03

  That's the whole point we made in court is that they don't have standing. The law limits state officials, not federal officials. So how are they harmed? They may not like what the law says or the policy position, but that's not a constitutional basis to overturn or to strike down our law. And the question before the courts is, do states still matter? You know, the 10th Amendment, people always forget about that one, but the 10th Amendment says that any authority not given to the federal government or denied to the states is enjoyed by the states and the people of the states. That's the constitutional basis of the Second Amendment Preservation Act in Missouri state statute. And again, it doesn't limit federal officials. So how can they prove standing? How can they prove they're armed?

• 2:14:39Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Is Missouri an open carry state?

• 2:14:42Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Yeah.

• 2:14:44Shawn Ryan?

  Is that new?

• 2:14:45Speaker 03

  Uh, that's been around for a little bit. I mean, hey, look, we love our guns in Missouri. I mean, that's part of who we are as people. And, uh, yeah, I look at the Second Amendment and it says, "The right to keep and bear arms shall not, the rights shall not be infringed."

• 2:14:59Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:15:00Speaker 03

  I start with the last words, "shall not be infringed."

• 2:15:04Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think of the ATF?

• 2:15:05Speaker 03

  Get rid of it.

• 2:15:06Shawn Ryan?

  You think just get rid of the ATF?

• 2:15:08Speaker 03

  Get rid of it.

• 2:15:09Shawn Ryan?

  Should people have full auto weapons?

• 2:15:11Speaker 03

  I do not believe that gun restrictions are legal under our constitution. Let me explain why. And again, I go back to those principles I learned as a kid. The rights in the Constitution come from God, not man. The Constitution exists to protect us from the government, and the government is supposed to exist to protect our rights. And yet, here we are as taxpayers, funding the ATF, who has a consistent and documented pattern of violating our rights.

• 2:15:46Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:15:48Shawn Ryan?

  Suppressors, class three items, full auto, I mean, in a picture-perfect world.

• 2:15:55Speaker 03

  The founding fathers owned cannons.

• 2:15:57Shawn Ryan?

  How does this look? Is there a background check?

• 2:16:00Speaker 03

  You know.

• 2:16:00Shawn Ryan?

  What would you like to see?

• 2:16:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, these are policy decisions that have to be weighed in deliberative legislative bodies. But I think you got to look at the original understanding of the Second Amendment. And then you refract it through the prism of the passage and adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment. And I'm sorry, I get nerdy, law technical, but, but this is important. The, the Bill of Rights originally only restricted the federal government. And it wasn't until after the Civil War that the Fourteenth Amendment was passed, that then the rights in the Bill of Rights were also, those restrictions were also applied against the states. So what did the Second Amendment mean at the time of founding?

• 2:16:44Speaker 03

  And then what did it mean to the drafters and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment? And that's the interpretive methodology. That's how the United States Supreme Court has read the Second Amendment. Uh, which is great for freedom-loving and gun-owning Americans. Because there has to be what's called a historical antecedent to the right being claimed today. You look at, what is the right claimed today? Is it similar to or dissimilar from the rights that the founders would have understood at the time that they wrote the Second Amendment? To me, that's where that debate should be taking place.

• 2:17:13Shawn Ryan?

  Is abolishing the ATF, is that on the table?

• 2:17:16Speaker 03

  I don't know. You know, I'm, I'm not sure, uh, that that's something that's being weighed or considered. That's my personal policy preference. And again, I have no interest in funding government agencies that are only intended to deprive us of our constitutional rights.

• 2:17:29Shawn Ryan?

  Would that fall under the AG?

• 2:17:31Speaker 03

  Uh, the ATF is a subcomponent of the Department of Justice.

• 2:17:35Shawn Ryan?

  So it does?

• 2:17:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:17:38Shawn Ryan?

  I hope they abolish it.

• 2:17:39Speaker 03

  I totally agree. Get rid of it. Get rid of it.

• 2:17:44Shawn Ryan?

  Alright, let's, I want to move into, we had a good conversation at breakfast about George Soros. And all of his funding, all of his funding for DAs.

• 2:17:58Shawn Ryan?

  How was that, I mean, this is a huge topic in every state, everybody knows it's happening. I don't know how he's funding everybody, or, or, but, but what, what's his goal? What's, what's going on here? I know you have fought against this and have fired several DAs?

• 2:18:16Speaker 03

  The Soros-backed prosecutor in the city of St. Louis who was unlawfully refusing to do her job. And was destroying the criminal justice system in the state of Missouri and did unmitigated and immeasurable harm to the city of St. Louis, eastern Missouri, and the state region as a whole. Uh, I think that when Soros pays to elect prosecutors who abuse prosecutorial discretion, it is an illegal nullification of the law. In other words, since the time of the founding, prosecutors are provided discretion to determine, based on evidence,

• 2:18:58Speaker 03

  what charges should be filed, whether a charge should be filed, what charge should be filed, and ultimately what the disposition in the case should be. So you get a police report, you read the police report, you decide what statute, what law was broken, and then you decide, okay, is this a prison thing? Or is this like a probation and treatment thing? Or is this somewhere in between? Uh, and those are the decisions that sound exercising a prosecutorial discretion. But what the Soros, Soros and his organization, what they're promoting, is an abuse of prosecutorial discretion. So instead of making individualized decisions based on evidence and police reports, those Soros-backed prosecutors are saying, we're not going to enforce wide swaths of the criminal code, of criminal law. For instance, I'm not going to prosecute people for, uh...

• 2:19:44Speaker 03

  offenses, uh, property offenses where there's not a human victim that was physically harmed. Well, now, hold on, you can break into my house and steal all my stuff, but if you don't hurt me in the process, you're not going to charge that offense? And let's see how that played out in the city of St. Louis. This woman was in office from 2016 until 2023. She had a 96% non-prosecution rate, 96% of reported crimes. So at some point, people stopped calling the cops because they know nothing's going to happen. And at some point, the cops stop, stop authoring police reports and send them to the prosecutor if they're not going to get prosecuted. So I think that 96% non-prosecution rate probably underestimates how little she was actually doing.

• 2:20:27Speaker 03

  Of the 4% of cases she was actually charging and getting into court, 35% of those were then subsequently dismissed by the court because she couldn't be bothered to show up to trial.

• 2:20:38Shawn Ryan?

  Can you talk about, I mean, I used to live in St. Louis. We talked about this and you, in, in, I mean, I went there a couple of years ago to, to meet with our mutual friend, Andy Frizzella. I couldn't believe what I saw. I mean, it was, it was like a, a totally different city, every, every part of it. Downtown, the outskirts, all of it, it's just, it's gone downhill.

• 2:21:04Speaker 03

  It's really sad.

• 2:21:04Shawn Ryan?

  Really gone downhill. And you gave an explanation of how crime, because of, because of the Soros-funded attorney, it kind of started in St. Louis proper, moved out to the counties, moved out to the X, to, to the outer counties. And can you talk about that a little bit?

• 2:21:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean,

• 2:21:24Shawn Ryan?

  like how that affected that city?

• 2:21:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:21:27Shawn Ryan?

  It's not just St. Louis.

• 2:21:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:21:29Shawn Ryan?

  This is happening all over the country.

• 2:21:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, and we're all worse off for it. Uh, and I feel terrible for our men and women in law enforcement who are putting their lives on the line every day to try to keep our streets safe and are not getting the support they need from the Soros-backed progressive prosecutors. But St. Louis is an interesting example because what we learned is that crime doesn't care about jurisdictional lines. It's a regional problem. Crime doesn't care that there's 114 counties plus the city of St. Louis in Missouri. Crime doesn't care that there's 46 different judicial circuits in the state of Missouri. The homicidal murderers that had basically overtaken the city of St. Louis because the prosecutor wouldn't do anything about them, then drove out the petty criminals to the county and to

• 2:22:15Speaker 03

  the collar counties. So, we were seeing in Warren County dopers who were stealing wheels and tires off of cars, and they were doing it in Warren County because they didn't want to get shot doing it in St. Louis City. They didn't want to live around the homicidal murderers either. And, when you drive away all the people, when crime depopulates an area, there's less people to rob, those robbers are going to go somewhere else. Those thieves are going to go somewhere else. So, it was absolutely a regional problem. And that one woman was completely, the Soros-backed prosecutor was completely undermining the criminal justice system for the entire state of Missouri. I took office on January 3rd, 2023, and in less than 45 days in office, I filed the lawsuit that ultimately got rid of her. The legal term, it's a Latin term, it's called the writ

• 2:23:00Speaker 03

  of quo Veronto. And it is a lawsuit intended to demonstrate that the person is unlawfully holding office. And my argument was, she's not doing her job, she's unlawfully refusing to do her job. And that alone is a basis for removal. That had never been tested in the courts. So, again, it was a first of its kind in the nation, bold transformative action, but it worked. She filed, the Soros-backed prosecutor filed a motion to dismiss my case, saying, "This claim is not actionable, is not cognizable, under the quo Veronto statute." And the judge said, "No, if the state, if the Attorney General can prove what he's saying, that you're not prosecuting cases, that you're not notifying victims, that you're not moving your cases along, that you're not filing new charges, those are enough to remove you."

• 2:23:45Speaker 03

  When he denied her motion to dismiss, that's now the imprimatur of law on those claims, and it has a ripple in the pond effect, because it gives us precedent to use the quo Veronto if ever another Soros-backed prosecutor were to appear in Missouri. Is that the only one? Are there more? That's the only one we know of. And certainly, that is the worst-case example I've seen. I know that other states have similar examples, but typically, they're in blue states that you see that. Different states have different mechanisms to remove a bad prosecutor. Like, for instance, in Florida, I know Governor DeSantis has removed Soros-backed prosecutors under his legal authority, under their state laws. But in Missouri, it's the Attorney General that has the authority to file the writ of Quo Uranto.

• 2:24:30Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it sounds like, the way you describe it, it sounds like a blast radius of criminals.

• 2:24:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:24:35Shawn Ryan?

  And so, I mean, so it sounds like, because every state's different, they couldn't take your module and apply it to their specific state.

• 2:24:43Speaker 03

  Well, I think what they could absolutely do is take our definition of what is and isn't prosecutorial discretion and use that as a basis to remove a Soros-backed prosecutor who was refusing to do their job. I think they could absolutely take that and say, well, in Missouri too, let me say this. In Missouri, victims have constitutional and statutory rights. And when a prosecutor is denying those victims of crime, their rights, that is also an actionable way to remove a Soros-backed prosecutor. So, again, the blueprint, it's not an exact technical diagram that they can replicate, but at least some concepts that could be used in other states.

• 2:25:26Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that really devastated that city.

• 2:25:29Speaker 03

  Destroyed it.

• 2:25:30Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, how do you think they'll, I mean, how long is it gonna take to get it back to what it was?

• 2:25:36Speaker 03

  Under her time in office, more than 500 businesses left downtown St. Louis. That's lost, and we, look, that's something we can measure. We'll never be able to measure how many conventions, how many trade shows, how many tourists didn't come to St. Louis and didn't spend their dollars there. How much economic development opportunity did we miss? We'll never know. And, look, we can change things, we can start prosecuting criminals, we can start locking criminals up, getting them off the streets, we can show a decrease in criminal statistics, and we can show data points, but they don't matter if the businesses don't feel safe. I'm really excited that our governor, Mike Keough, has made fighting crime his number one priority.

• 2:26:20Speaker 03

  And he just gave his State of the State address this week and really outlined a detailed plan to support law enforcement and shore up the criminal justice system, start going after the bad guys.

• 2:26:30Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:26:32Shawn Ryan?

  I think they'd have incentivized the businesses to come back, you know, through tax and all these other things. Do you think that's on the table?

• 2:26:39Speaker 03

  I think so. Yeah, I think so. I think one of the things that's unique about Missouri, too, is that, you know, in Kansas City and St. Louis, it used to be that those police departments were run by a board of police commissioners that had to be from those places, but that were appointed by the governor and confirmed by the senate. And that's really a structural mechanism to take the politics out of policing. And that still exists in Kansas City. And when those police officers are sued in civil law, my office defends them. And so they get consistent indemnification, consistent civil defense, which then empowers them to go do their jobs. The legislature eliminated the board of police commissioners in St. Louis

• 2:27:23Speaker 03

  and returned control of the police department to the mayor. Not a good outcome, because now politics are back in policing. And it's not the men and women in uniform. That's not the problem. It's the the politics at City Hall that have injected themselves. And I'm deeply concerned about a lack of consistent representation for the men and women in uniform who are putting their lives on the line every day on the streets of the city of St. Louis. They need consistent and competent legal representation in civil suits. And I want to provide that. One of the governor, our current governor, Mike Keough, his legislative priorities is to restore that board of police commissioners. And I think that's that's one piece of the puzzle.

• 2:27:59Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Wow. What, what, I mean, why Soros doing this?

• 2:28:04Speaker 03

  He hates America. I think he absolutely hates America. He hates what we stand for. He hates the rule of law. And this is his way of destroying it from within.

• 2:28:15Shawn Ryan?

  It's working.

• 2:28:16Speaker 03

  It's absolutely working.

• 2:28:17Shawn Ryan?

  Are any other states doing anything like this to reverse it?

• 2:28:22Speaker 03

  Again, I, you know,

• 2:28:23Shawn Ryan?

  You did mention Florida.

• 2:28:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think Florida is another example, but it's few and far between. I'm not sure that there's been another attorney general that's removed a Soros-backed prosecutor.

• 2:28:31Shawn Ryan?

  Man, man. I don't know if we have them in Tennessee, but I hope, I hope they're listening to this. I really hope they're listening to this. But back to the Second Amendment, kind of right to self-protection, right to self-defense. I mean, what are the laws of Missouri when it comes to self-defense?

• 2:28:51Speaker 03

  You know, in Missouri, it's, and I'm, again, I apologize, man, I nerd out on the law stuff, but it's really interesting to me. So in Missouri, If you are charged with a crime and claim self-defense, that is what's called a special negative defense. So in criminal law, there's two types of... The defendant never has to take the stand. The defendant doesn't have to say anything, doesn't have to take the stand. The state can't comment on the defendant's right to remain silent. I can't, as a prosecutor, I can't get up and say, "Hey, if he was innocent, he'd take the stand and tell you about it." And most attorneys during the jury selection process will ask prospective jurors, "Are you gonna hold it against them if you don't hear from them?"

• 2:29:36Speaker 03

  To filter out folks that might be predisposed to require the defendant to violate their own right to not take the stand and present evidence against themselves, self-incriminate. But there are two defenses. One is an affirmative defense. And if the defendant wants to, the defendant... Basically, it's a legal excuse. "Yeah, I did it, but there's this affirmative defense. There's this legal excuse." And if you use an affirmative defense, the defendant bears proof by preponderance of the evidence, so the lowest burden of proof, to show that they're legally excused from criminal behavior because they had this affirmative defense. So like parental kidnapping. If you and your wife are divorced, and she's got the kids, and the custody agreement says she has the kids this weekend, but you go and get the kids because she's doing something unsafe with them,

• 2:30:19Speaker 03

  you may have... be guilty of, you know, child kidnapping, parental kidnapping, but you have this affirmative defense that gives you an excuse, and so you're acquitted. The difference with self-defense is this is a special negative, which is a stronger defense. And if you, as a defendant, are accused of a crime, and you whisper, you inject into the trial in any way, shape, or form a self-defense argument, the state then has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt you didn't act in self-defense. How do you prove a... How do you prove a negative beyond a reasonable doubt? How do I prove you weren't afraid for your life if you shot somebody? So it's a really strong protection for people to defend themselves, their property, and their families.

• 2:30:59Shawn Ryan?

  What about, like... Do you have the right to defend somebody else's livelihood? Where I'm going with this is New York City, Daniel Penny. You know, that guy stood up for somebody, killed him. They charged him with murder, right?

• 2:31:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:31:18Shawn Ryan?

  So what is the...

• 2:31:22Speaker 03

  How would that have gone in Missouri? You, you have a right in Missouri to defend yourself or another. So if you reasonably believe that your life or the life of someone else is imperiled, you have the authority to act, you have the legal authority to act. Now, listen, police may show up, police are gonna do an investigation, prosecutor may or may not decide to file a charge, but just, you know, at the end of the day, you're protected by the statutes of the state of Missouri that create that special negative defense that if you believe you acted in self-defense, the state would, to convict you is gonna have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt you, you didn't fear for your life, or you know, that you didn't fear for the safety of some third party. What about property? Uh, you have a right to defend property as well.

• 2:32:05Speaker 03

  If you remember in St. Louis during some of the riots, the BLM and Antifa nonsense that was going on in the summer of 2020. Are you talking about the guy in the pink shirt? Mark McCloskey, a friend of mine. He's your friend of yours? Friend of mine, yeah, he, so Mark McCloskey is an attorney in St. Louis. And your audience will remember, during, Antifa and BLM rioters broke into a gated neighborhood and were marching up the street shouting threats and trespassing. And in the middle of their, you know, 4th of July weekend or whatever it was, their lunch, he grabs an AR-15 and stands on his property and didn't do it in an angry or threatening manner. He merely did it to demonstrate that he was prepared to defend himself and his property.

• 2:32:47Speaker 03

  And that enraged not only the BLM and Antifa protesters, but the Soros-backed prosecutor who was in office, who then charged him with unlawful use of a weapon for exercising his constitutional rights. Now, at the time, I worked for our previous governor, uh, Mike Parson. And, you know, we saw that, like, she's violating their rights. And so as soon as they were convicted, I drafted the clemency paperwork that the governor signed to exonerate the McCloskeys, because all they did was defend their property from angry rioters. So if they would've come on his property, could he have defended it? Yep, certainly, he has the right to defend himself and his property if he believes his life is imperiled, or his wife's life is imperiled, or the, the lives of, of a third party are imperiled. So your life has to be in danger?

• 2:33:32Speaker 03

  You, you have to reasonably believe that you're gonna be harmed. Now, the, to use lethal force, you can use other force, non-lethal force, to protect your property.

• 2:33:46Shawn Ryan?

  What if they entered his home?

• 2:33:48Speaker 03

  Different story. I mean, I think, again, that fact, if somebody's in my house without my permission in an angry and threatening manner, I'm fearful that they're there to do me harm.

• 2:33:59Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:33:59Speaker 03

  And that is a fact that goes towards my decision and ultimately my self-defense.

• 2:34:04Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, okay.

• 2:34:08Shawn Ryan?

  Covering a lot of ground here. Is there anything else? What else you got going on?

• 2:34:15Speaker 03

  You know, we stay pretty busy.

• 2:34:17Shawn Ryan?

  Sounds like it.

• 2:34:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. You know, we like to do the, the, the big stuff well, but I also like to do the little stuff well. After we removed the Soros back prosecutor, in one year, we, my office increased criminal prosecution by 133%.

• 2:34:32Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:34:33Speaker 03

  That's on the criminal side. Now, on the, the civil side, consumer protection, the first year I was in office, my consumer protection division collected more than $32 million in settlements and judgments on behalf of defrauded Missouri consumers. That's real money back in the pockets of working Missouri families. My second year in office, last year, 2024, we collected north of $400 million in settlements and judgments in our consumer protection division. So we're setting records, not only on the criminal side, but on the civil side as well. And so just, you know, I want to do the job. I want to do it the right way. I want to deliver results and, and wins for the people of the state of Missouri.

• 2:35:10Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think your, your biggest snags are, your biggest hangups, your biggest challenges?

• 2:35:16Speaker 03

  You know, recruitment and retention is always a challenge. You've, it is tough to find public service minded individuals who are willing to work for a lot less, work a lot harder and work for a lot less than what they would get in the private sector. Uh, but I've got a dedicated team of professionals. We've got about 300 employees at the Attorney General's office. We've got offices in Jefferson City at the State Capitol, in St. Louis, Kansas City, Springfield, Cape Girardeau as well. And we've done a lot. We started a practicum with University of Missouri Law School, just 30 minutes up the road in Columbia, and those law students are provided the opportunity to come work at the AG's office. And they get class credit. We kind of get an all-hands-on-deck approach, but it gives us a chance to kind of vet them and see what their interests are

• 2:36:00Speaker 03

  and recruit them. And it's been a great pipeline. It's allowed us to staff up. We instituted a, when I took over, I realized we had a lot of, I had a lot of lieutenants and a lot of privates, but not a lot of sergeants. And so that kind of mid-three to five-year attorney who's tried a few cases and is ready to train that next new attorney, we didn't, we were missing that institutional knowledge and that demographic. So we instituted a mentorship program where we bring in senior counsel from law firms across the state, and they meet with my trial teams and help mentor my trial teams. That's resulted in seven complete defense verdicts in civil defense cases in a 15-month period. That's zero dollars, zero taxpayer dollars paid out to the plaintiffs. And so I can demonstrate that the mentorship

• 2:36:43Speaker 03

  program is producing tangible results in the courtroom. It's also reduced our turnover rate. So in 2022, like 67 attorneys left the office. 2023, my first year, 40, 44 attorneys left the office, and I think last year, only 20 attorneys left the office. So we're recruiting better, we're retaining better, we've got a, we're training better to deliver better wins.

• 2:37:09Speaker 03

  Future aspirations. You know, I, I'm so blessed to get to do this. You know, it's, if you, if you, if you don't believe in God, you would see it as an accident that I'm here. And the part of the story that, you know, we didn't talk about, but I think is relevant to answering that question is that after my wife and I, I only ever wanted to be a prosecuting attorney. Loved that job. Was working in Warren County, adopted kiddos. And when you go from no kids to two kids overnight, you start adding up your bills, and all of a sudden you realize you can't afford to be in this, I couldn't afford to be an assistant prosecuting attorney. And so I left that job and went to work for the Missouri Department of Corrections on June 1, 2018, the same day our previous governor took office. And he didn't have

• 2:37:51Speaker 03

  a staff when he took office. And he saw me working at DOC and pulled me up to be on his staff. So I was just at the right place at the right time to get a chance to work, you know, at the, at the summit of power in state government. And worked for the governor for several years, and then Eric Schmidt ran for United, the sitting Attorney General ran for the United States Senate and was elected, and that created an opening that the governor appointed me to. And so it's just being at the right place at the right time has provided me with these opportunities. And so, who knows where the road leads and you know, what opportunities will be there in the future, but I'm really humbled at the opportunity to get to do this and it's the show me state, results matter, and I want to keep fighting and winning for Missourians.

• 2:38:33Shawn Ryan?

  Well, you're doing a hell of a job. If you were to get appointed to a federal position, AG, maybe FBI, I don't know what else, would you take it?

• 2:38:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, you know, I think the world of President Trump and his administration, and if those opportunities presented themselves, I think it's absolutely something you do. And it's again about answering the call of service. We're at such a historic and critical juncture in our nation's history, and I'm really excited about the president and his team being in power and the people having selected them to wield the authority to make America great again. And I'm hopeful and optimistic about the future with him in the White House and his team around him. He's got some great folks and they're going to do a fantastic job. And yeah, you know, Vice President Vance was in Iraq the same time we were in 05-06

• 2:39:30Speaker 03

  timeframe, and so you've got that kind of next generation, you know, four years from now. And you, the hope would be that he would be willing to run for president and would just keep the, keep the train rolling. So that's, that's my, my hope.

• 2:39:43Shawn Ryan?

  Right on, man. Well, Mr. Bailey, it's an honor to interview you and you're just doing amazing things for the state of Missouri and, and for the country, because it's, it's a blast radius, you know, blast wave that seems to be going off, and you're definitely leading the charge in a lot of positive ways, and I just want to say thank you for that, and thank you for being here.

• 2:40:04Speaker 03

  Hey, thank you, my friend. Appreciate you and, and your willingness to engage on these issues and cover these important topics that people might not be able to hear about otherwise. So thank you for what you do.

• 2:40:15Shawn Ryan?

  My pleasure. Best of luck to you.

• 2:40:17Speaker 03

  Thanks, sir.