Now all interviewers have their own style, and my style is to
try to get to the point and to be intensely curious.
And the key to interviewing is listening.
Take a look behind the curtain with a real whistleblower and
American patriot. Prepare to embrace the
uncomfortable truth because this program has no time for
comforting lies. Here is civil liberties
enthusiast, Second Amendment defender, and recovering FBI
agent Kyle Seraphim. Well, hello, my friends, and
welcome to Sunday. Sit down.
This is going to be a best of today.
We're going to dig into the archives and we're going to talk
about the story of Amy Nelson. She's a friend of our program.
She was introduced to me by Steve Friend.
And just like Steve, Friend's story is not over yet, Neither
is Amy Nelson's. Unfortunately, we had kind of a
vindication episode where everything looked like it was
going their way. And since the Trump
administration came in, despite all our high hopes, it didn't
all work out. So we're going to cover that
story. Before we do our next update, I
wanted to refresh our audience memory.
For those of you that are new to the program, make sure that you
are following us in the places that you can.
You can check us out over on Spotify.
That's really easy to do, but you can also find us on YouTube
on Rumble on X and on Locals subscribe wherever you guys are
listening. Make sure you like the videos.
We appreciate all that. And if you do want to see this
thing where you have a little bit more control, if you're
watching the live stream, you can always go over to
kyleseraphinshow.com. That will give you the access to
Spotify where you can skip through it all the time.
And you may hear some ads from them.
They're going to be the reason that we monopod monetize this
episode. Also find us over on Locals Kyle
seraphin.com. Easy place to get there.
Thanks very much for all of you that have supported our program
for the last couple years. Again, subscribe where you're
at. Don't forget to like it.
Look forward to sharing the story with you.
And then I'm looking forward to the update, which is coming very
soon with Miss Amy Nelson. We're going to get into it right
now, Amy K Nelson. Amy, welcome back again to the
Kyle Sarah Can Show. Thanks so much for having me,
Kyle. I'm so happy to be here.
I am thrilled to have you on. Let's give people a little taste
where we started, maybe where it went.
This has been a wild couple years. 2024 is the year of
victory, it feels like. I think it is.
I was looking forward to it and it's here.
It's, it's vindicating to see this.
It's we're still seeing evil happen all around the world, but
decent people are seeing results so much faster than maybe we
would have expected. Even though it feels like it's
1000 years. I just looked back and two years
ago I was working for the FBI today.
That's wild. I can't even.
I can't even imagine that. All right, give people a taste
of your story if you would. I don't want to set it up
because you're the expert. And then let's get into it.
Yeah, so my husband worked for Amazon Web Services for eight
years. AWS is a subsidiary of Amazon.
It is where the Internet lives because the Internet lives in
big warehouses here on Earth, not actually in the cloud.
He left in 2019, started his own real estate development
business. He worked in real estate, kind
of like helping source land where Amazon might build data
centers or where they could work with developers who built data
centers. So he leaves in 2019, starts his
own business. All is going well.
I'm an entrepreneur. We live in Seattle.
We have 4 little girls who are under the age of 6 so we're
incredibly busy and happy. And then the pandemic hit and a
couple weeks later we got a knock on the door with with by
two FBI agents and our lives were kind of shattered into a
million pieces. My husband was told he was the
target of a federal criminal investigation being run out of
the Eastern District of Virginia.
And the allegation was that my husband had committed a crime
called private sector honest services fraud, which is
depriving your private employer of your, quote, honest services.
And it wasn't really just the FBI coming to ask questions,
which I don't think they really often do.
They come with a point of view. And they had decided by that
point that my husband had committed this crime and that
they were going to convince him to plead guilty to those
allegations. Over the next few months, the
government seized all of our bank accounts based on these
allegations. In America, there's a practice
called civil forfeiture where a local, state and federal
governments can take your money based on the suspicion that it
is related to a crime. They do not have to charge you
with a crime or prove it. And it was, I mean, it was
beyond. They seized all of the money out
of my husband's business and personal accounts.
They seized my bank accounts because we shared money.
They seized my father's bank accounts.
My father was two weeks post kidney transplant and my husband
and I helped him with his medical bills so we were
transferring money to him. I didn't realize that had
happened as well. So it went even beyond your
family. It did.
And in fact, the most the craziest thing to me is that I
am was a lawyer before I started my own company is that the
federal government went into the client trust account of the law
firm my husband paid to represent him and seized all of
the money he paid his lawyers. I mean, it was done to just wipe
us out. Like you have no chance to
defend yourself so you need to come in and plead guilty.
Let's give everybody just a chance to digest what we just
said or what you just shared. And, and I also want to let
people know if you want to hear this part of the story, which
goes long form. It's emotional.
It brought tears to my eyes. It's one of the few interviews
I've done that that made me really emotional because it's so
awful and it's and it's so relatable to me.
We've got kids that are roughly the same age and knowing that my
former employer was out there just ripping people's lives up.
You always know that people get destroyed by investigations.
Usually they deserve it. There's a lot of people doing
bad things and you hope we we kind of believe that the the the
institutions are out there protecting us.
This is your your story has been so close to people like me and
Steve friend and Garrett and producer Phil when he started
like we just, I don't know. I, I, I cheered when I found out
the end of it, which is it's a this, this does end better
folks. But this is gut wrenching to
know that your federal government, the money that you
paid went after Amy Nelson's family and these agents were
being good Germans and they took everything you had and took your
family like all your family's money.
How do you defend yourself when that happens?
I mean, so the, the government was kind enough at the time, the
federal prosecutors to tell my husband's lawyers that my family
could have some money back to feed our little girls if my
husband would plead guilty. And I remember hearing that and
just I, I realized at that moment, I think fully that
America wasn't what I thought it was.
And my mother kept asking, you know, don't they care if your
kids can eat? And I said, mom, they is our
country and a parent. No, they do not.
The point is they don't want our girls to eat.
And then two weeks later, there was an FBI raid.
And we talked all about that before Kyle, but that was really
terrifying. But you know, what we did to
survive is we, we sold everything.
We sold our house, we sold our car, we liquidated retirement,
we borrowed money, we raised money and we worked really hard.
My husband and I are both entrepreneurs and we just like
we just worked. So we said we're going to just
keep making money and do the best we can.
We ended up moving in with my sister in California, all six of
us with her husband and her two kids, and then we went to Hawaii
to live with my husband's family for a year.
So we are just dragging little kids all over, you know the
place during the pandemic, moving them from schools, losing
childcare and working. I ended up getting a job with a
public tech company, a remote job, and then I got fired on the
5th day because they read an article about the civil
forfeiture. Didn't ask me a question, just
fired me. It's a liability.
And and so I, I kind of also want to put some perspective on
this. Number one, This is why I have
like not sympathy for you. I have empathy for you.
I have lived this whole story. And that's why that's why it
brought me to tears because I've also done that and moved in with
family and sold everything. I know exactly what that feeling
is and it's a terrible feeling. The second thing is knowing that
these people just went out there and did what is easiest, and you
can't even blame them. They just read what was
happening. They're like, oh man, I don't
want to get involved in any of that.
Crap like that sounds terrible. It's why we love the story.
And my audience has been following the story with Steve
Baker. The Blaze hired him in spite of
the federal government coming after him.
And I know you've probably seen some.
There's something so brave about corporations that are doing
that, and that's why this year is so special.
That's why it's so uplifting. I don't want to keep
interrupting you, but I I keep wanting to add like these
little, these little tangent jumps, like this story touches
so many other these themes that we keep seeing in this in this
podcast. I, I think I, I, I agree with
you and I think it is like that is, you know, when the federal
government comes for you or when someone with power weaponizes
the government, because that's what happened here.
You know, Amazon had actually accused my husband, my husband
of a crime to the DOJ. They had an intent, they went
in, they they made multiple pitch presentations to the DOJ
of like why they should charge my husband with this crime.
And they had a concrete financial motivation worth
hundreds of millions of dollars because of an action they'd
taken. But.
Let's clean it down that if you don't mind, because here's the
thing, we've gained a a significant audience since the
last time we've had you on. And I want to give some justice
to that. I at least want to whet their
appetite to go back and listen to the story.
Amazon lobbied the DOJ to take a criminal case.
People just handle how crazy this is to crush your family and
their their goal was to save $100 million or more.
More than that and and I think two things to start with, like I
have to skip to the end before we get to how this all happened.
Do we? I like, I like making people
just like, sit there like this. No.
I just want to skip to the point of this, that people, if you
people believe me because you believe me, Kyle, because you've
lived this story with me. But, you know, my husband was
never ultimately charged with a crime.
The DOJ returned the money it seized from us and in total, it
had seized $7,000,000 from businesses, investors and
families. And it returned all of that to
like 100 people, which is unheard of when the DOJ takes
your money. They're not they're not
apartment to give it back. Yeah, that's not their game.
More more importantly, you know, my husband wasn't charged, but
the DOJ had obtained federal criminal guilty pleas from 4:00
men for other men who Amazon had accused.
And those men had all essentially pled guilty to kind
of aiding and abetting my husband and violating his Amazon
employment duties last a month, two months ago.
Now, the Department of Justice vacated those guilty pleas,
which, you know, I read in an article when General Flynn's
plea was vacated, no former federal prosecutor could cite to
another example of that happening at the time.
So this investigation ended in like a fireball of mess, right?
Because Amazon had manipulated the government.
Essentially, Amazon had broken a contract with a real estate
developer. And the only way they could do
that was if the real estate developer pled guilty or was
convicted of a felony crime. They broke the contract on
February 19th, 2020. They had their first meeting
with DOJ on February 20th, 2020 to lobby for these criminal
charges. I mean, the paper trail is just
dumb, right? And I'll explain why I think
that that part of it really matters.
But, you know, they spent years trying to lobby for these
charges to get out of the liability they faced to this
real estate developer for the contract they broke.
And so they said that the real estate developer played my paid
my husband kickbacks, which did not happen.
And they really like, you know, it was this interesting
scenario, which I think happens a lot in the in the DOJ that,
you know, people with access go in and say XY or Z happened.
And then the prosecutors and the FBI agents work backwards to fit
the facts into whatever that person said happened.
Which is the exact opposite of what we want.
Like that's not justice. It's not, it's, it's ridiculous.
And I think that, you know, you know, when we say Amazon lobbied
the DOJ, Amazon ended up suing my husband in civil court.
And it turned out to be the greatest blessing.
It was terrifying when it happened because Amazon sued my
husband after the DOJ had seized our bank accounts.
So this point we're like, OK, not only do we have to fight the
DOJ, now we have to fight Jeff Bezos in in federal court.
But you know, I mean, I guess they didn't Google us.
We're like a whole family of lawyers.
I'm a lawyer, My father-in-law is a lawyer.
My father's a lawyer. So so we did it.
But, but I think, you know, we, the reason the civil case
matters so much is that we were able to get discovery from
Amazon. And one of the things we were
able to get was all of Amazon's communications with DOJ.
And in a normal world, when someone accuses you of a crime,
say you're indicted, you don't get to really see the
communications between the accuser and the Department of
Justice. And we got to see all of them.
And they are shocking. I mean, just shocking.
First, they're shocking in the scope.
Amazon met with DOJ over 100 times.
You would like to think that. One more time really slowly the
a large corporation sent their lawyers to meet with our federal
government the prosecuting and 100 times when they are are not
really the party at stake. Theoretically it's a violation
of federal law. So the United States is the
party. It would be United States versus
your your husband, not DOJI mean not not Amazon.
Correct, and there's. No daylight between them though,
it turns out. None.
And I think like one, one thing to step back right when we talk
about access, is it Amazon Web Services like hosts all the
secrets they secure, the secrets of the FBI, the Department of
Defense, the NSA, the CIA in their Internet warehouses, their
data centers. Like, I don't think there's a
way for the US government at this point to exist without
Amazon Web Services. And like that is a big big
problem. The other side of that is can
Amazon exist without the federal government monies?
Because we're talking about what, 10's and 10s of billions
per contract? If you look, no one talks about
this, but if you look at Amazon's stock, right, because
everyone, people forget that Amazon was not an incredibly
valuable company for a very long time.
If you look at Amazon stock when my husband started in 2012, I
think the stock was like $150.00 a share. 2013 Amazon got their
$10 billion CIA contract, which like, I have no idea how they
got that contract. Does anyone has anybody ever
written about it? And was it?
Was it called Jedi? Was that the name of the system?
No, that was a 2019 debacle. OK, that was.
Another one, yeah. First one, 2013 and their stock
started to soar. It was that that did it.
I mean, I Amazon, Amazon is a retail store.
What we, what we know and use doesn't really make much money,
but Amazon Web Services is a company's cash cow.
It's what made them more valuable than gold.
And I think that, you know, yeah, the.
The relationship is just so intertwined between the
government and Amazon. And I think that's why, you
know, when Amazon says we want to go accuse someone of the
crime, they expect DOJ to like, say, yes, Sir, what do you need?
How can we help you? And that is what happened here.
And that's the stunning and shocking, like literally it's
what happened. Like there are, you know, we
there are emails where, you know, we see the Amazon ask the
DOJ to seize my husband's bank accounts and just emailed over
my husband's direct deposit information that he gave Amazon
as an employee without a subpoena.
They just sent it. So Amazon had records, they
voluntarily provided it so that they could show DOJ what the
target. And then they told DOJ the
priorities. I remember you sharing some of
those, like the actual script there.
And it was like, these are our priorities, this is what we want
you to do. And then DOJ was like, yeah, I
got it, OK, 100%. Who was the attorney that
represented Amazon going over there?
Because I think that's also a good fun part of the story for
people. Yeah.
So the attorney that represented Amazon is a man named Patrick
Stokes. He had been a former federal
prosecutor computer in the Eastern District of Virginia for
a very long time, and he was seeking criminal charges in the
Eastern District of Virginia. He's now works in private
practice for a big law firm in Gibson Dunn that represents
Facebook and Apple and Amazon, all of them.
And he, you know, he went and lobbied his former colleagues,
as far as I can tell from the paper record I've seen Amazon
hired Patrick Stokes to do this. And like, you can't tell me that
relationship doesn't matter. Or they could have used any of
the thousands of other lawyers they've used, You know,
previously they had Pat, they hired Patrick Stokes and he
quite literally phoned the US attorney for the Eastern
District of Virginia, who he used to be a lawyer with and at
DOJ, his name is Terwilliger. And then they roped in at the
time, the deputy criminal chief Jessica Aber, who is now the US
attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.
And they just off to the races. You know, it's, it's wild.
I think, you know, I am a lawyer and I'm also a researcher.
I'm not an investigator at heart.
And the one thing that I know to be true, because I used to also
be very involved in politics, is that relationships matter
deeply. And you want to figure out where
the players are. And I did that very early on.
And I was like, holy shit, this is nuts.
Like all these people know each other and they.
Work together. And it's just, but like, if you
didn't know the system and you didn't know to do this, like you
wouldn't have any idea. I mean, there's a very crazy
part of the story, Kyle, that I don't think I've even told you.
One of Amazon's other targets was a man named Casey Kirchner.
And he, he had no money after DOJ wiped him out.
And he was the special agent Josh, Josh Huckel, who was the
FBI agent that worked on this, which is public information.
He called Casey and said I can get you a public defender
because they wanted Casey to have a lawyer because they
wanted him to plead guilty. They wanted to stand up.
Yeah, yeah. You need a lawyer to to navigate
that process. Casey did not plead guilty, of
course. And the public defender sent an
e-mail out to private attorneys saying, I'm a public defender.
I have this case in the Eastern District of Virginia.
I need help, pro bono help, free legal help.
Private lawyers often do that. One lawyer responded, and his
name is Frye Wernick, and he worked with a firm called Benson
and Elkins in Washington, DC, smaller office of of a big law
firm. Amazon's general counsel for
ethics and compliance, Usury Omar, used to work at that
Washington, DC office of Vincent and Elkins.
And the lawyer who replied, Frye Warnick used to work for Patrick
Stokes at the Department of Justice.
Amazon's new lawyer, Frye Warnick, did not disclose that
to Casey at all. And Frye Warnick said that he'd
had one phone call with Casey and he said you have no
defenses. You have to plead guilty.
Let's just breathe on that. The amount of conflict of
interest and corruption that has existed across the entire
spectrum of your case is actually really staggering to
me. The thing that I think is most
powerful about your story from my audience, who probably did
not or does not or has not voted the way that you did and didn't
think about the world that that that you see, that we see.
Look, I love I hate your story because it just it destroys the
credibility of the thing that people who work for the
government have done. They've sold themselves out for
a government pension and the all the people that said yes, in
your situation, that should have looked at it and been like, now
this is bullshit. I'm not going to do it.
I refuse that that that was an option along the way.
That could have been a D. OJ Finally someone said it.
And I, I don't know exactly who said it, but somebody did.
And I applaud them, but it was far too late.
Far too late. The the overwhelming smack down
that that that exists when the the judge vacate is vacates
perfectly good guilty pleas that were, you know, negotiated by
attorneys is incredible. As you said, no precedent.
This is more than one. This is not just General Flynn
and a political this is little people who get squashed by the
government on the regular basis. This is what they do.
Let's talk about your political history, where you came from,
like because this disrupted your faith in the same way it
disrupted mine. We came from different angles.
We all have a common enemy. The common enemy is big business
and big government. Saying human beings that that
are supposed to be the ones that are served don't matter.
I. Think, yeah, I, I mean, I, yeah,
I agree. And I, you know, yes, Kyle, I
spent my entire life as a, a card carrying Democrat.
Like I believed in the Democratic Party the way a lot
of people believe in a faith or religion.
And I also have my faith, but I believed in it deeply.
I as a child, I, you know, I spent time in union halls, I was
knocking on doors. I was a bundler for a Barack
Obama and I worked on congressional races for
Democratic candidates. Like I, I believed, you know, I,
I believed that the government was, and the reason I was a
Democrat is that I wanted to help people who couldn't help
themselves. I believe that the Democratic
Party was, was very good for children.
It was good for the elderly. It was good for, you know,
people who who who had less than less than I did.
Isn't that the historical position that the Democrats
tried to stake out anyway though?
I mean, I don't think that was. Yeah.
I mean, it was, I think that we. Used to disagree about like the
reason or the methods at which we help people, but I don't
think conservatives or Republicans.
I'm not a Republican either, so it doesn't matter.
But like Republicans didn't say, well, those people don't matter
or they just said, well, there's a better way to handle it, which
is private. You guys say that the better way
to handle it is public. That's a policy disagreement.
Yeah, it is a policy and and that's what I learned through
all of this, right? And I think there's like so much
power in that is that most of us want the same things, right?
It's just how do we get there? And then I now believe that just
the media and the government tries to distract us from actual
solutions with a bunch of BS so that they can actually serve the
interests of the people they're interested in serving, which are
billionaires and big corporations.
So but like it's. And and you've used the term
that I've not heard anyone else use and I continue to, I'll
credit you every time I do it. But like, we're talking about an
oligarchy the same way. Yeah, we live in an oligarchy.
Like it's dumb to say otherwise. We live in an oligarchy because,
you know, we live in a pay to play a system.
We are politicians need the political donations to win.
They spend an enormous amount of the time they are with that we
are paying them to govern. They spend that month, that time
out raising money. That is every politician.
And so, you know, they serve the interests of the people and
companies that donate them the most money.
And like of course they do. That makes sense, right?
Like they're their benefactors. And and I mean, I think also
really importantly, aside from our dumb campaign finance laws,
which have created in oligarchy, you know, we allow our
politicians to inside trade, which I just get angrier and
angrier about. Like everybody is a multi
millionaire in Congress and it's and they didn't go there as
multi millionaires. And I am so angry about it
because it's just, it's ridiculous.
Like they go there to get rich and then they get out and then
they lobby and it makes no sense.
And nobody's helping anybody. Like we have no practical
solutions. And now the government doesn't
even govern like, no party. Like what this the Congress has
done in the past few years is like, basically nothing, right?
Except fight and then yeah. Might be the best thing
considering how bad they are. I mean, it's true, but like,
it's, it is true on the one hand.
And on the other hand, like you look back to the government that
existed when we were kids, you know, in the 80s, like the
parties talked and negotiated. They got things done and it just
operated a lot better than it does now.
And I don't want to keep paying for them.
And it's just, it's ridiculous. It's so upsetting.
And, you know, I think we just allow it.
And then and then we fight culture wars, some of which are
important, some of which I think are a big distraction from the
fact that like, you know, we. Yeah.
Anyway. And then you look at our.
I could go, you look at our tax code.
Like what? I'm not kind to people that
dress up like women because I love women.
I think women are really important.
I'm raising several little ones and, and I know you are too.
And so we may not even agree on that position, but I don't think
that trainees are the biggest danger to my children.
I just don't, I don't think about it a lot.
Like, I mean, I certainly there I like and I think there's like,
I mean it, it goes like you could go down a whole rabbit
hole there because I. I do think it's distractionary
and, and, and when you said that the first time, I was like, I'm
100% on board with that. The other thing is, is since
that time, I've actually had some guy and he's a guy with
like earrings and a gauge nose ring and all the other weird
things that people do when they're confused about what to
do with their life. I don't hate this guy by the
way, but he took over and he was, he's teaching or he's
teaching the class that my girls were in.
I pulled him out of a YMCA gymnastics class because you had
three beautiful little girls and some of them have piercings and
they have little tattoos, whatever, but they're like
little girly girls and they're teaching little girly girls how
to do gymnastics. It's a hands on thing.
You know, they don't know how to do back bends.
They don't know how to do forward rolls.
So they're doing that. And then you got some dude in
there who's confused. That same guy in, in our
childhood in the 90s would have been like, he would have been
wearing black lipstick and he would had a really fat
girlfriend wearing pleather from Spencer's gifts.
He would have, I just know what he would have looked like and
then and then, and then if you had been in the early 2000s when
I was in college, like he would have been like with some really
gay looking guy and they would have worn little tiny matching
outfits and they would have been obnoxious then.
And now he's wearing whatever he's wearing sweatpants with
glitter and nose rings and tattoos behind his ear.
He's that guy. He's an empty vessel.
That's like, he's confused. So don't I hate him.
I hate that the culture did that to him, but he's not my enemy
and and it's a that's a distraction.
I just like, OK, you don't get to teach my kids.
Now I can't go to the YMCA. That sucks.
I got to go find like a cheer camp or something like it's.
Yeah, when I think they're like, I mean, there I think there are
things like they're definitely important conversations to be
had. Like I have four daughters.
Do I want people who have male genetics to be competing against
them when they're in 6th and 7th grade in sports?
I don't. I don't think it's fair.
Like, you know, but like, but, and that's a conversation that
shouldn't come into my life. I will.
I will think about it and deal with it, but.
Yeah, when it comes to you, you'll figure it out because
it's because you're, well, here's the other thing.
You have to have good priorities.
Your priorities are family, your kids.
We've seen this over the last couple years if we've been
watching your story. So yeah, you'll handle it.
I I handle it too. It's like, and I just don't go
to the YMCA. Oh well.
Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos, meanwhile, Jeff Bezos is over
here not paying taxes and making billions of dollars off of all
of us and weaponizing the Department of Justice.
And it's just, you know, and The thing is, so many people are
when my husband, you know, ultimately the reason I believe
the DOJ vacated the guilty pleas is that Amazon's lawyers just
lied about Amazon's employment duties.
And there's a whole problem with the statute that my husband was
accused under because it essentially allows a company to
say what is a crime, which isn't how criminal law is supposed to
work. But like, they, they really
quite literally lied about what my husband's employment duties
were. And the judge in the civil case
that Amazon filed ruled that he said that this isn't, these
aren't what Carl Nelson's employment duties are at all.
And the federal criminal guilty pleas said the false employment
duties. And so, but OK, so great.
So we, we were able to fight. We were able to have the
Constitution to do it, which is something else, right?
I mean, that is like I could throw up.
There were a lot of days I wanted to throw up.
There were days I didn't know I could get out of bed because it
was so terrifying for so many years for 13179 days.
And but like, so there's the constitution for it and the
constitution of like the people that love you, right?
Like we put our parents through hell.
We didn't, the government did. Yes, our elderly parents, you
know, our, our family members. Like, you know, my 97 year old
grandmother is praying the rosary every day, like hoping
that my husband doesn't go to prison for something he didn't
do. That's, that's third world
stuff, that's Banana Republic. One of the, one of the things, I
don't know if I I had this catch phrase in my head at the time
that we spoke last, but one of the things that I've gone out
there and I've said it a lot now, is that the, the country
that I grew up in would invade the country that I live in.
I've seen you say that I like it.
Here's the thing, Arresting journalists about weaponizing
government to go after political opponents, financial opponents,
people who are inconvenient to the big businesses, Like that's
literally what the Banana Republic is.
The Banana Republic is run by a company.
The company says, hey, these are the problems.
Go crush that revolution. They're screwing up our workers.
And they did that to you. They, they Banana Republic
themselves. Like we didn't make them do
this. No, well, The thing is like,
it's not just us. If you take just solely the
example of Amazon, over 75 Americans have been indicted for
federal Amazon crimes in the past five years.
And it's like what? Wait, what?
Like why are we using our taxpayer resources to like
criminally regulate Jeff Bezos marketplace so that Amazon has
gotten the DOJ to indict third party sellers, vendors, seller
consultants, employees like landlords, business partners.
They're like, we don't like these people, We're going to
crush them. And you know, there's you know,
I think people do a good job when they don't want to believe
someone of just de platforming them or delegitimizing them.
And I don't know Michael Sanchez, who's Lauren Sanchez's
brother, Michael San Lauren Sanchez's Jeff Bezos girl
fiance, right? But when under the belt, pics of
Jeff Bezos were leaked to The Enquirer did.
You say under the belt. Yeah, under the belt.
I don't want, you know. Pantsless.
Yeah, pantsless pictures of Bezos were like leaked to The
Enquirer, Dick pics. And Michael Sanchez, Lauren's
brother, got blamed for it. And I don't know what happened.
I know nothing. But, you know, Michael Sanchez
copies me on a lot of interesting things.
And he, because I've, I've been fighting publicly against Bezos
and Amazon. Anyway, he has, you know, he's
he has this recording of Jeff Bezos, which Jeff Bezos talks
about how he might sue the National Enquirer just to
bankrupt them for fun. And, you know, that's the kind
of personality that we're dealing with, right?
As somebody who's like, I will just crush you through the legal
system. And when the person with that
personality has access to the FBI and the DOJ, like, it's
pretty terrifying. That's movie villain type stuff
though. We literally see those in 80s
movies that we used to be like, this is what real evil looks
like. People who can really just go
I'm going to call you. And then we saw it like, it's
it's Gotham City. It's it's all of the worst sort
of cartoonish corruption. It is.
I mean, like in my mind, I think of Jeff Bezos like Lex Luthor,
right, with the bald, like, you know, it's just yeah.
And I think that one thing I would.
They would sue you for that. One thing I think is happening
in 2024 to talk about the year is that Americans of all
persuasions are starting to say things or see like Jeff Bezos
isn't our hero, right? He's not the hero of this
American story. Like his dad gave him 100, like,
you know, half $1,000,000 to start Amazon.
And he did. And Amazon is an arbitrage play.
Like it's, you know, like Amazon makes money on kickbacks from
people who sell on its platform and from the government and then
they don't pay taxes. It's not it's not a gritty,
wonderful American story. And and it destroyed thousands
of small businesses. I mean, it just wiped them out.
It's not the Riveter tow. No, it's not like it's like my
startup. Yeah.
You know, so it is like you, you just.
And I think that people are starting to realize that these
billionaires are not our friends and they don't care for us.
And they actually don't want us to have the information we need.
They don't want us to be successful.
You know, some, some people, you know, my husband was incredibly
successful when he went out on real estate and started his own
real estate development company. And you know, for Amazon to come
after him, it was like, no, no, you can only take the salary
we'll give you once you want to go off and build your own
company. Nope, no more slots available
for entrepreneurship in America. Like you're done.
I mean it just it makes no sense.
So this is the thing and and This is why I think there
there's such a big divide in this country between like rural
and urban areas. And follow me on this, if this
makes sense to you. The reason why people are so
unhappy when they live in cities and why they're so cutthroat is
because the pie's already been divided and you're fighting over
whatever leftover slices are. That's an inherently sort of
left wing sort of position to be in that there needs to, to be
fairness, we need government. We actually do need government
where there's a ton of people. And that's why people in the
rural areas are like, no, no, no, there's tons of like
America. Have you been to America?
There's lots of it. And if you only stay in the
place where the pie has already been divided and you're fighting
over scraps, then you want more government to be fair.
It doesn't turn out to be fair, but that's what you want.
And then if you're out there in the world where you're like, no,
no, no, we own a ton of land. I used to go shoot on on USA
property. If you look on the maps of The
Who owns the plat, it says property of the United States of
America. Like all of us own that land and
you can do all kinds of stuff. You can camp on it.
There's no rules. You just go out there and put
your RV and then you just stay there if you want.
Yeah, it's like, I think people, a lot of people want to be told
what to do because it makes them feel safer.
But the point is, if someone tells you what to do, someone
else is making up the rules and like, the rules are always
changing and you don't know what they are.
And like, just go, go, make, go live by what you think is right.
Right. And, and yeah.
And I, yeah, I don't know. It's, I, I hear what you're
saying. I think it makes a lot of sense.
Like, and I have lived in New York and Seattle and then I have
lived in more rural places and I've spent a lot of time like
northern Minnesota where there's no one, no one's up there.
And it's beautiful. And people are much nicer to
each other because they're not fighting.
They don't, they're not looking for that thing there.
So there was this Joe Rogan podcast I listened to and I
can't remember the guy's name. And I'm, I'm sorry, I can't give
him credit for the idea. But essentially he said there
are two basic types of societies that exist.
One is agrarian and one of them is hurting.
Have you heard this before? I have heard it before and we
are mostly in a hurting society at this point.
Which means that we are very tribalistic and that we are very
punitive and we're really aggressive.
But the reason that Western society exists is because we
invented agriculture. And then when you have that
physical land barrier, you need a government to come in because
it's the one that's the third party.
It doesn't care who's right or wrong.
It just says, you've outsourced justice to me, and now I'm going
to make sure that you haven't moved the marker stones or
stolen this. But if it's about, like, things
that we can't track, yeah, we're all mad about that.
We all feel like we're being conned anyway.
The idea is is that people who actually live in rural societies
tend to be like, OK with law and order because it's further
removed. It's not in their business.
Right. It's disinterested.
We want to. We want a government that's not
interested. Our government is interested
though. Oh my God, they're so
interested. And I think like I was thinking
about this the other day because I was talking with somebody, you
know, and with, with our society and with people with businesses,
like infinite, like infinite growth is not possible.
Like a certain point, a business can't grow anymore or we'll kill
ourselves trying to make it grow and working people to the to the
bone. And I was thinking about that in
a way. And I was thinking about the DOJ
and the FBI and you know, when it, when the FBI started way
back when in the like the precursor in the 20s, thirties,
you know, it was never meant to be this massive organization,
right? And, and now it is.
And like not only I think is an organization that tries to make
itself necessary by doing more and more and more and more and
putting more people in prison for wild things, right?
That like 100 years ago we would have been like, wait, what?
Like, that's not a crime. And but you know, they're so
punitive and they're so like, they just want to be necessary
and they want to keep growing. I'm like, why does the DOJ keep
needing to grow bigger and bigger?
Why? Right.
Like, what is the purpose of that?
Just to be a hammer? Like, is the world a nail?
I guess. DOJ.
The DOJ is government. Like all governments, all good
government agencies. Growth is the goal.
It exists because it's always existed.
And and you've, you've probably seen this, you've driven through
Oregon, right? They, they won't let you pump
your gas there, Correct. Yeah.
Correct. And I asked the guy in Jersey
one time who did the same thing and it blew my mind.
I was like, wait, what? So, but I know they do it in
Oregon as well. There's a couple states where
you can't pump your own gas. I said, why do you need to pump
the gas when I could do it now? By the way, that used to be the
standard in like the 50s and 60s and 70s.
People actually, they had self-serve and then they had,
you know, full serve, which I remember the end of that, which
is weird. Yeah, I did too.
We were little kids. They were kind of like.
Window yeah saw like the end of some of these things that's the
benefit of that analog childhood we saw all the time before
people were on their phones or the Internet it's.
Beautiful. Yeah, it really was.
It was so much better. This guy, I said why?
Why do people need to pump my gas if I can do it better or if
I could do it for myself? And he said people need jobs.
That's why the DOJ has to exist. People need jobs.
That's not a good reason. Dumb like that is not a reason
for something to exist like it is.
I actually really liked Vivek Ramaswamy's proposal about the
FBI because one of the things like when you have big
corporations or just powerful people who can, who can get
access to DOJ and have them, you know, hunt people down it.
One of the issues is that like, you know, Amazon went and said
all these things to DOJ for here's a here's a simple
example. They said that they had overpaid
inflated prices for land by like 10s of millions of dollars.
And the FBI and the DOJ and the prosecutors were like, OK, OK,
thanks Amazon for telling us that.
They didn't check. They didn't like check what land
prices were. They didn't check comparisons.
Like this is all public information on Google.
And they just didn't check it. They just took what Amazon said.
And they don't know that, like land that can be used for data
centers is far more valuable than land that can't be, you
know, it's like, because it's like gold.
It's like gold land anyway. And so one of the things about
the FBI is like you're asking FBI agents to become like
experts in these in these different fields that they're
tasked with investigating. And in some instances, I think
that's OK, but in a lot it's not.
And they're. Not experts.
Let's just go. Let me just go on record at the
spell. Anybody's idea.
You know, people get assigned. The old joke at the FBI Academy
is how do you get assigned to that field office and that
particular task? And the joke is that there's
drunk monkeys throwing darts at a board.
They took a guy like me. My background is paramedic
military. I'd done outside sales.
They're like Chinese counterintelligence.
That's where you're going to fit.
And I'm like, like, I don't speak Chinese.
I don't, I don't care about Chinese.
I'm not interested. Well, it's like, this is like
agent, agent Huckle said to someone once they the FBI agent
on the case, like someone had talked about like in commercial
real estate, they're like rebates and referral fees that
people could call kickbacks, right?
Like these are like they're perfectly legal.
And Huckle said to somebody, well, I asked my brother-in-law
is a broker and he said, no, I'm like, oh, so you OK, so you, you
asked your brother-in-law. So OK, send my husband to prison
because your brother-in-law who like what?
Bob? Bob just said Nope, that's not a
thing. Yeah, I asked the guy.
Is that what? We're doing, yeah.
I went down to the diner and I was like, hey, can you do this
thing? And he was like, Nah.
So that was it. That's, that's the worst
example. But I mean, that's exactly how
it works. My buddy, who spoke fluent
Russian and lived first in Siberia for two years, was sent
to the middle of nowhere to work on Indian crimes.
That makes no sense. No, it makes no sense.
It's like they have resources, they have accountants, they have
capabilities. They took producer Phil, who has
a background in accounting, and they made him an auditor.
That actually makes some sense, except the auditor's supposed to
be like a retirement gig, and nobody wanted to do it.
So rather than take people who have the most energy and are
most willing to go out and learn new things and do the most
aggressive type stuff, no, they don't take experts in the field
and have them do it. So your case is just another
example of mediocracy masquerading as prestigious and
competent. And and it's it's incredibly
dangerous, it turns out to actually have real think about
if your family wasn't made of lawyers, think about if your
family didn't have the ability to, to stick through this and
have that courage and conviction, you would just get
crushed. Your husband would plead.
Yeah, yeah. Or or he we, he would have been
indicted and we lost a trial because once you get indicted,
your chances like it's, it's much harder.
You're not winning an E, you were an EDVA, correct?
Yeah, which is like. One of the top three soft seats
for government to go bring prosecution.
It's DC, it's EDVA, it's Southern District of New York.
You're losing. Yeah, I mean, you're just like,
I mean you're. Surrounded by government people.
Yeah, and the jurors are former government people.
And they're like, well. Everybody.
And, and the adage is like, Oh, well, the FBI, I mean, if I
could give you a penny for every time I've heard the FBI just
doesn't show up at your house if you haven't done something
wrong. And I'm like, oh, yes, they do.
I guess they do with Amazon, Samsung.
Like, I just, I mean, I laugh about it now, but it was the
most painful experience and you know, and I think like.
We all have heard. You've heard my story a lot, you
know, And someday my husband will tell his story.
But like, I can't imagine being my husband.
I can't imagine living through what he survived.
I mean, he was the one who had to think about being taken away
from his four little girls. Yeah, he's got an open invite
here anytime. He's always got, you know,
whatever platform we have, this is too.
Yeah, he's he's incredibly strong, incredibly strong.
So are all of the other men that fought, you know, and then and
the other thing is it's just AI think, you know, I saw yesterday
that Senator Menendez, who's indicted for honest services
fraud, same crime, same crime, He's a Democratic senator.
He's been indicted in New Jersey.
And I think one of the reasons DOJ indicted him is because
they're going after Trump and they needed to like pretend
they're being balanced or something.
I don't like, I now look at all of this.
I'm like, this is a game. It's a game right with people's
lives. And he Senator Menendez was
indicted and one of the, the person who allegedly paid him
bribes, one of those people has pled guilty.
And people like, well, now, now Menendez is going down and I'm
like, I wish people understood that it is like a game of
checkers and that a lot of people plead guilty even though
they believe they committed no crime.
Because if it's like a group of people being accused, the
prosecutors will be like, well, if you plead guilty, you'll get,
you'll get the best deal, right? We'll we'll get to the.
Cable spot, we won't send you to prison or, you know, you won't
have to forfeit millions of dollars or, you know, it's, it's
a game, right? And like, and they make things
up and I I there's, you know, lots happened that I can't say
publicly yet, but I can say publicly that I received a phone
call out of the blue a few weeks ago from one of the people
central to Amazon's allegations that was really revealing about
how this process worked in the manipulation and the corruption
in it. And that story will eventually
be told. But it it's, I think there's a
lot of coercive plea bargaining and a lot of people are in
prison because, you know, they just get stuck in this game,
like the simulation of this video game.
You used to have utter faith in the government being the
solution for this stuff. You've obviously moved from
there. Where has it taken you?
I mean, where has it taken me? Like, well, I can say it's taken
me into my family and my faith a lot more.
And that like that is what I hold to be hold dear and like
know that there's the most solid foundation and all of that.
But I just like I'm very skeptical of the government of
both parties of the of the entire government, because I
think that it exists to protect power, not to protect its
people. And we have just lost our way
to. Self like an ice cream cone,
right that it it it has a tongue and it has ice cream, so it
licks. And it gives you I, I look at
through our, our, our history of a different lens.
Like I look at Ruby Ridge. I grew up not knowing a lot
about Ruby Ridge, but thinking that Randy Weaver Weaver was
like some cuckoo guy right out out there in the woods who got
his wife killed. Well, that's not true.
Like, I mean, that's a hot like that's not true.
And it's shocking to me, like the narratives that we're told,
like Randy Weaver was a guy minding his own business and
like, you know, like the whole sawed off shotgun all it's just
dumb. Like people lost their lives
over this dumb thing when like why can't Randy Weaver just live
his life? Why can't his family live off
grid? Why can't they, you know?
Who's he a threat to having a shotgun that's three inches
shorter, by the way? Nobody.
And I'm pretty sure they're not going into Chicago in the city
and having standoffs with all the people there with illegal
guns. You know that, right?
Like. Listening to you say that in my
head, I've got that picture of God.
Who is it? It's it's a it's like a a Jif or
a GIF. Yeah, I get a GIF.
And it's oh, who's the who's the guy that's in that, that now I'm
doing my wife's thing where I can't remember the name.
I I hate this by the way, he's he's going like he's going like,
yes, what is that guy's name? Who he was in good as it gets.
You know what I'm talking about anyway, I heard.
You're talking about? I can't remember.
Who it is? It's a famous actor just going
like, yes, you're red. Yes, it's Nicholson.
Yeah, yeah. And he's doing his classic thing
where he's like, yeah, he's like all crazy and and it's like
you're coming down the rabbit hole where all the the red
pillars are. I know, but I don't think you
and I end up in the same place where a lot of people do.
Yeah, my. Answer isn't go ahead.
I want to know your answer where.
Do you end up people you want to do in the place that I stand
right now is turn back to all the people I was aligned with
before and say you're being lied to.
And it doesn't mean you have to go be in a different political
party. It doesn't mean you don't have
to like kind of let go of your core beliefs about the world and
what you think is right. But like you're being lied to.
Stop just swallowing it because it's bullshit.
And like you, you play into it. You give them more and more and
more power. It's like nobody on the left
will look at January 6th, even to the point if you're talking
about protesters who stood outside the Capitol, who did not
go in, who did not walk into the Capitol, who were there because
they supported Trump, because they had questions, you know,
which is like, that's what that's what our country
encourages, right? Like.
That's literally the protected speech that we have.
Right. And so, and, and, and you can't
engage with a lot of people on that question of like, why are
these people being put in federal prison for years?
And, and like, they're just like, Nope, not having that
conversation. Like the narrative is that like
these people are evil and they're bad and they were trying
to overthrow the government and the revolution, which like were
they like, you know, it's like, and, but like, no, like, you
know, it's like you're like what?
And so, you know, I just like, and I'm, I'm talking about
people outside the Capitol, right?
Like I'm not going to like walk into the minefield, but I'm just
talking to people. Like anyway, it's just it's you
can't have a conversation with people because they're just
like, these are the media narratives and I'm going to
accept them and I'm going to give this power and it takes
away all the power that we have as people.
Take take this one for a second. Ready, Randy Weaver.
I'll. I, I agree with you.
Not a problem in the way that, you know, he's been villainized
on one side, he's been lionized on the other side.
He may have been a white supremacist, by the way.
I don't know. I know he was.
I. Don't even know.
But like, I was a lawyer and my, I was a First Amendment lawyer
and the guy that I went to work for, Floyd Abrams was like a
lion of the 1st Amendment. The first day I went to work for
him, he said, here's the thing I got to know.
Are you going to be willing to defend the KKK's voice as much
as you are the ACL U's? He's like, because if you can't,
you can't work for me. Yep, that's a OG liberal
position that is currently a white ring, a right wing
extremist position now, allegedly because our Overton
window has shifted so dramatically in those years in
your career, in your career time as a professional.
Yeah, like we're talking about as adults.
Yeah. And it, yeah, it's just, it's so
disturbing. So hear me out though, if we
agree that Amy Nelsey Nelson, Amy Nelson and Co Nelson family
was unjustly persecuted and prosecuted by DOJ because of
corporatism, because of oligarchy, because of all these
evil things and you say those are not legit prosecutions, then
I also go Bob Menendez has been hounded by DOJ.
Is he corrupt? Maybe I don't know.
I also don't trust where that where that allegation comes
from. Now he might be very corrupt.
That's real possible people having gold bars and jackets.
That's kind of weird. I can I can say that in my
experience, I don't know anybody that does that.
That doesn't mean that you're wrong.
You're allowed to put gold bars in jackets.
You're allowed to. There's all kinds of good things
that I do. I stash guns all over my house.
There's places that are safe that I know about.
That's my thing. Other people think that might be
crazy. It turns out America, you're
allowed to do that. So if you're going to undermine
and this is the problem with this is the 0 sum game is the no
piece of the pie to share thing that I think that you and I both
see very clearly. Just because we want to agree
with it doesn't mean that it's true.
And just if you're going to say that DOJ does illegitimate
things, all of it should be in question.
If you're going to say that drug convictions are evil and there's
mass incarceration, which I don't know if you sit there
anymore or not, but let's say that that's the case that you
hold. If you say the federal
government comes in and wrongly goes after a bunch of black
people and says and throws them in prison and uses all the
apparatus to crush these people who have no money, you can't
turn around and say, but it's also really good at getting
these really evil Trump protesters.
You got to just say that if it's evil, it's evil.
And all of it is suspect. And then we take them case by
case. And that's what I, that's where
I stand, right? All of it is evil.
And like, we need to, like, we need to question everything.
Like what I, I started down this path and stopped.
But like, one thing I like that Vivek Ramaswami had suggested
was that we dismantle the FBI and then we put those agents
into other agencies where they would fit, right?
Like if it's financial crimes, have the SEC deal with that or
the Department of Treasury. If it's, you know, like if it's
the border, like the Homeland Security, I mean we have the
whole Homeland Security have them do.
I hate Homeland Security I. Hope that I know I do too.
I think it's ridiculous, but like but I think it's an
interesting proposition right of like, you know, take it out of
the of the put it in other agencies that already exists.
But I mean listen, I do I do stand.
You know, I now think that everything the DOJ does is
suspect. I don't, you know, I, I look at
like, look what they did in our case where Amazon walked in, was
able to get all these meetings and try to put all these people
in prison. They destroyed businesses,
destroyed families. And then in the Olympic gymnasts
go in and like dozens of them and say, Larry Nasser raped us.
And they're like, and the FBI is like, because do children and
women matter? No, property matters.
Property and billionaires matter.
Do you know the worst thing is that the special agent in charge
of that field office, who supposedly personally was going
to handle it, ended up getting a job with US Olympic Committee?
Which is exactly how it works. I know that.
And I was like, I'm surprised. I don't know if you've watched
dope sick or like it's about the opioid epidemic.
And the guy at this isn't just DOJ, right?
The guy at the FDA who ended up like approving this very bizarre
pain designation for Sacklers drugs.
He went and worked for for new pharma for the Sacklers.
Like, you know, it's like he left and worked for them.
Like it's just. On the surface dumb.
You don't even have to go digging, you can just pick them
up off the top of the ground. Well, and this is the point,
like at the end of the day, where I am too with DOJ is is
this. And I will stand on this hill
for the rest of my life. The Department of Justice is
fully aware that it was lied to by Amazon's lawyers.
Whether that falls on the feet of Gibson Dunn or Amazon's
lawyers, UC Omar, Matt Jordan, Dennis Wallace, I don't know.
I don't care. I don't know who lied.
Someone lied. The Department of Justice knows
this. Federal judges know this.
This is true. And nobody at the DOJ will do
one single thing to hold accountable the people that lied
to it, that forced it to waste hundreds of thousands of
taxpayer hours in dollars that made a mockery of the system.
No one will hold them accountable.
And if that's and. There's no one who can.
But I believe someone at DOJ could say we should charge.
There are crimes they could be charged with.
Yeah, of course, but they're not.
What I'm saying is there's no one outside of DOJ that actually
has oversight on it. So it's the old who watches the
watchers argument. There's no one that can do it.
There's no independence. You know, this is the this is
the insane impotency and and that that that rage scream that
people have. And I see it in the political
left too. Look, there's a lot of injustice
in the world and we hate it, but there's no easy answer to it.
And it's not use the like, well, we just need to capture the
government and use it for our weaponized purpose.
That's the opposite of what Americans do well.
I know. And people are like, well,
people like my family's story. A lot of people be like, well,
we don't care about these rich people problems.
Like first of all, husband and I worked very hard.
We paid our way through like we were lucky enough to have our
parents pay for college. We both paid for grad school.
We worked incredibly hard. We built great careers.
They were taken from us and we have worked our way back through
scratch and claw. And we're like that.
But like, here's what I say. Fine, don't care about the
problems, you know, that that people in the upper middle class
have. But what I'll tell you is this
civil forfeiture, which was a big part of our problem,
primarily impacts people that don't look like me.
It impacts black people, brown people, immigrants.
And so like, if you want to change that, you should really
amplify my story, right? Because this is a great and easy
story to understand about the abuse of civil forfeiture.
But like nobody wants, nobody wants to do it because it's
terrifying to them. I've been told by reporters that
the reason, one of the reasons our story hasn't been like on
the front page of a lot of newspapers is because it's so
clear that DOJ was weaponized. And they don't want to give
credence to Donald J Trump's arguments that the DOJ can be
weaponized. And I'm like, then once again,
our then our media is like, the whole thing is dumb.
They're. All our enemy so dumb.
No, they're all our enemy. All right, you open the door for
the, the Trump stuff. I want to talk some of it
because anybody who watch the podcast know I, I actually have
people comment. In fact, today's show, they they
comment, they're like, why do you need to say that you're he's
not your favorite? It's like, because he's not my
favorite and I'm honest and I don't care.
What if you don't? If he's your favorite, he's
allowed to be your favorite. I'm not saying you're wrong.
You can have an opinion. Guess what?
And I do, and I'm very opinionated.
I'm an opinionated guy. I'm super judgy, too.
My wife keeps telling me she is, too.
That's why we get along. You know, we just sit out there
in our front window and watch people like, what are they doing
over there? You know, like the classic thing
you get to do when you're married.
You get to have a partner in judging other people.
You're nice to them, but you're like, what are they all about?
Like, why do they make, why do they drive a Tesla?
Why do they have that stupid Mercedes out there that they've
already wrecked? You know, that kind of stuff.
So we see Donald Trump doing his thing.
I don't think you were a Trump voter in 2016.
Is that correct? No, I was.
Not OK, I wasn't either, but not because I hated Trump.
I just, I also hated Hillary. I just saw them both and I was
like, these people are both awful.
It made me laugh that he won. I see Donald Trump do that now.
You've seen the DOJ come after you.
You've seen DOJ really tip its hand and then also apparently
cooperate with the state or the, you know, Fonnie Wills
prosecution out there in Fulton County.
You've got Alvin Bragg up in New York, you see two different
federal district where he's indicted in.
Does that change your opinion based on what you've had go your
whole family go through about him as a person or these these
cases? I think that Trump has been
targeted from the minute he won by the Department of Justice,
probably by the CIA. I mean, he's been targeted like,
right. Like I, I think he's been
targeted and I think that happens to people and it really
happened to him. And he, I think it's bananas
what DOJ is doing to Trump right now.
I think it was really stupid politically for them to do it
because it just like added to the legend because they just
can't comprehend that people would really like Trump and a
lot of people really do. Have you met those people like
Trump? Yeah, lots of people.
I mean, I live in Ohio. Like, half my family is deeply
Republican, right? Like it always has.
Been I'm really saying that is because there are people that
like Trump and we've met them. They're yeah.
Well, I know. And people like, like your like
my friends, some of my friends in Seattle and New York, like
just can't imagine it. And I'm like, well, people like
I know a lot of business people that love Trump, like very smart
business people who love Trump, right?
Like I know tons of people who love Trump.
And I think like, it's so transparently political what
Jack Smith is trying to do. When the when the DOJ made the
argument that they had a right to a speedy trial, I was like,
OK, we have jumped the shark here.
The right to a speedy trial is the defendant's right in
America. It has made the argument.
The government has a right. TOJ has never once argued for a
speedy trial ever. When they're prosecuting
someone. I mean, what?
Like oh, it's mind blowing. It's it's the opposite of the
technique that the government uses, which that will drag you
out until you quit because we could do this forever.
We're the government. We.
Literally make the money that we that we printed.
You can't. You can't outspend US. 13179
days investigating my husband right like never charged him
with Trump like and they I think they waited so long because they
were hoping he wouldn't run, which again, I'm like, were you
paying attention? Are you based in reality or are
you based on what you want reality to be?
He was always running. He was never not going to run.
He. Had to re adjudicate 2020 yes
that had to be done and even if you are a person that likes the
political left. I don't know how you can look
around and go whatever happened with COVID whatever you believe
about it. The wildest thing happened in
anyone's lifetime in modern history.
We shut down our economy. You now see that the people that
was like the the 20th surgeon general the United States.
I've, I've had him on the show. The other I showed pictures in
the other day, Jerome, Madam, he's wearing a mask in 2024 on a
plane saying people need to follow my example.
That dude bought into it and he can't let it go.
A lot of people got broken by Donald Trump.
Like I said, you didn't have to like the guy to know that real
people liked him. A lot of people lost their damn
minds. A lot of them.
A lot of people lost their minds.
I have all my mom will get mad if I talk about COVID but like
all I can say is I had a business that was based on
density right? Like a small business.
My business model was Co working.
It was based on how many people you could fit into a space, and
my business was worth $60 million that I'd built. 60,
yeah, yeah. And it was based on and it was
based on making the most out of space that was commercial real
estate. So that actually plays off what
your husband does, I imagine, right?
Yeah. And yeah, And it was just
decimated. Destroyed and how long?
When did you start the Riveter? I started the Riveter in May of
2017 and I built it to a company worth $60 million in 2 1/2 years
while I had two babies. I mean I worked and.
Let yeah, let me just let me ask this.
That was super easy, right? You didn't have to even do
anything. It just happens on its own.
Is that what people think? No.
How many? How many hours a night did you
sleep? How many did you sleep ever in
that time? Barely I would sleep like four
or five hours a night. I mean, I was I was in it like I
at my husband. My husband is super amazing.
And when I wanted to start this company, I was going to like
start a small business and my husband said, if you're going to
take the bat Amy, swing it as hard as you can.
So I went for it and I did it and it was, my business was
completely destroyed by COVID. Like my company was I guess
fortunate that we got 2 PPP loans, but like the PPP loans
were a Band-Aid that they couldn't keep a business built
on density alive during shutdown orders for years, for years,
right? And so, you know, I, yeah, it
was just, it was devastating. And then like there were a lot
of people who made a lot of money off of COVID and like
that. Isn't it interesting that the
biggest companies were fine? We had the culling of the small
upstart, the sort of the yappy dogs that were able to come and
challenge some of the big dogs. Yeah, yeah, that's what
happened. I mean, it's just, and it's
just, I, I don't know, like all these things and it's just I, I
read something on the Internet the other day that like the.
Worst place to read things? The CDC is like COVID is now
like the flu. I'm like, oh, OK, thanks now
thank you. Like, after all, like after all
of this, like it was, I mean, deep breaths.
But like, you know, the, the one of the main problems I think is
what they did is that when there is a virus that has a very high
kill rate and it spreads through the world, no one is going to
listen or trust the government. They did.
The boy who cried What? We literally learned about this
as children. They blew it, right?
They blew it. And so and and my husband's.
Because of Donald Trump, I think in many ways.
I tend to agree with you, Kyle on this like I think.
Like as a non, as a non Trump, I'm not a Trump or die guy.
Everyone knows this about the watch the show and like people
get mad about it. But like I don't have to be.
I want to be a clear minded person.
You can objectively see the media lost their mind, the
intelligence community's lost their mind, the governmental
apparatus lost their mind. The deep state, which is just
the administrative state, just a bunch of people that know each
other, that work in government, they lost their minds.
We need to stop calling it a deep state because it sounds so
like conspiracy. I literally just like the guys,
the guys that know each other that are in charge.
Like it's like, it's like it's the guys that know each other
that are in charge, like right, Like it's.
It's administrative. I, I always tell people like
everyone, when you say deep state, to me, it sounds like a
sexy term like this. Not not in the way that like E
Jean Carroll says, rape is sexy, which made me want to puke.
That was like the most nauseating thing.
Like, have you heard that, by the way?
Oh, yeah, she was on Anderson Cooper.
She was a total creep. So that Lady, she said, I think
people think rape is sexy. And you're like, that's the
nasty. Like, as someone who's
investigated rape crimes and treated victims, it makes you
want to puke. No, but deep state has sort of
like, at this, like, mysterious, kind of like it like, like dark
state, like, like something fun and interesting and mysterious.
Like, like my X-Files poster behind me.
Like, there's a bunch of dudes that are smoking cigarettes in a
room together and they're making the plans and they're doing the
TV stuff. That's not the deep state.
The deep state is like a dude who's got like a crappy old
coffee pot. It's got burned coffee on it.
There's a stain on his desk and they had government funding for
new desks, but somebody else got it.
Who made more money? That guy who has fluorescent
lighting from the 80s in some crappy building that has black
mold. They're the ones, but they all
know each other. It's it's Jim Baker from Twitter
who's been there since the 90s and DOJ then goes to Twitter and
of course he does whatever the DOJ says.
Like who? Who do you think his friends
are? Who are the people that.
Yeah, go ahead. Yeah.
One thing I noticed the other day on LinkedIn is that the new
general counsel of Norfolk Southern, the train company,
former federal prosecutor, you know, the train company that
derailed former federal prosecutor to protect the train
company. Like why is a former federal
prosecutor the general counsel of a train company?
Does he have experience in the train industry?
Is he like a? Is he a logistics lawyer?
No, he was a prosecutor. Like no, Nope, right.
So anyway, but like I I here's what I here's what I think about
Trump and COVID. But for COVID, Trump would have
been re elected in a landslide. I wouldn't have voted for him,
but he would at that, you know, at that time for sure.
No, but like he would have been re elected in a landslide.
A landslide. That is the truth.
Yeah, they did everything. That much is the truth, right?
Like he would have been. You don't even have to get into
contested election theories to know without that insane Black
Swan out of nowhere event. And they pulled out of the
chucks and the the casualties. And here's the thing, the only
casualties of getting rid of Trump was everybody who was a
small business that got decimated.
And all these people lost their faith in institutions and
complete destruction of like there's a guy named Amarilla
Slim. He's a a famous gambler and has
all of this folksy wisdom. And he says you can you can
shear sheep many times, but you can only skin it once.
They skinned the sheep with COVID.
They did. That's a that's a very good way
of putting it. I think it's a very, it's just
like there wasn't even like what you can tell now is there wasn't
even, there was no rational thought of very smart minds of
like, what do we do here? What is the smartest thing to do
here? It is like I, oh man, so I, I,
you know, I don't want to really get into Israel and Gaza, but
like, I studied national security studies in college, not
an expert, but I learned a lot about war.
And like, Israel was attacked by a terrorist organization who
continues to hold Israeli hostages.
And Israel's going to do everything they can to get them
back, right? And that's war and people are
going to die, lots of people, right?
But like, Israel did not start this particular act of
aggression. They did not, you know, like in
nor can we stop them. If you want, everyone's like
Biden needs to call us cease for I'm like, Biden's not the
president of Israel anyway. Right.
Yeah, Israel kind of does its own thing.
That's why it's still Israel. Otherwise there'd be no Israel.
So crazy, but but like I bring it up to say, you know, it's
like when I talk about was there like we cannot have a
conversation in America of what is the proportionate response
when there is a death, when there is a virus that could kill
some people. We aren't allowed to have that
conversation. It's like, no, shut everything
down, right? Wow.
And this is something I'm passionate about.
Like we have here in Ohio, we have like in Columbus, OH, we
have the highest rate of maternal mortality in the
country, you know, for certain populations, like no one gives a
shit. Like no one's like, oh, stop
everything. How do we save these babies and
these moms, right? But like, in this instance, we
just shut everything down to save.
I don't know, like I don't think we did the proper analysis.
It's I always say that there's a lot of first order thinking,
which is like, how do we stop this thing in front of us, but
there's no 2nd and 3rd order thinking.
Like what are the effects of that downstream?
That seems like a very OK, I'm going to I'm going to get into
this. This is good.
I have a female on to to talk about it.
There's a male instinct towards rationality that says, OK, yes,
that's really important, but also can we look at the
following effects? There's a sort of rationality
which we kind of attribute to the male side.
There's an emotionality which we need both.
I, I would not argue that either one is superior.
There's an emotionality that says, but, but don't you feel
terrible that this is happening? And those two things in a
marriage work really well as a balance.
My wife will come to me and say we should give money to this
cause. And I go, why this cause and not
other causes? Is there a better way to give
the money? Is just giving it directly to
the person versus giving it to a family?
Like are there better ways to accomplish this?
And we temper each other out and we make a good decision based on
the feeling and then also the sort of the thought and sort of
that, that cold, you know, evaluation, analysis, that's how
it's supposed to actually work for a lot of stuff.
I see the left as being a very feminine version that that
emotional driven. There's a lot of energy, there's
a lot of activity. There's this is so bad.
But when I look at things like that and then I compare it, You
just said Israel. I can do the same thing with
opioid deaths. We can do the same thing with
gun deaths. Do you care about Chicago?
That seems like a real problem. Why do you care about my AR15?
Who cares? It's never hurt anybody.
And by the way, kids aren't dying from AR15 wounds.
They aren't getting shot with two 2-3 and five 5-6.
They're dying from like 9mm and 22 and three 80s and other crap
guns that are out there in the world.
That's who's dying. So why don't we handle effects
in the order with how about medical malpractice kills more
than all those things, by the way, like like 500,000 people
die from that. Are we allowed to talk about
that? Or heart disease kills more
people because of bad lifestyle. And you know, we used to call it
the trifecta in, in emergency medicine, if you are
hypertensive, high blood pressure, if you are morbidly
obese, Right. And then what what is the third
one? Overweight, hypertensive and
then diabetes. Yeah.
So like, yeah, you're, it's all dietary, they're all lifestyle
choices. Like we don't talk about that.
No, we don't. Nor do we talk about like the
the food industry in America and the Pharmaceutical industry in
America that want us to be sick. Yeah, I know.
Like we had the worst outcomes for COVID and we have the most
money and most medicine. How much sense does that make?
It doesn't make any sense, right?
And it's like in, yeah, we have. I think it, I personally think
it all goes back to what I talked about the beginning was
pay to play government, right? Of like the government serving
the interests of the biggest companies and the, and the
wealthiest people and what they want and what they need and
maximizing shareholder value. And they kind of do everything
along those, those ways. Like when the NRA was very
powerful, you know, it had a very, very powerful influence in
DC. And like, listen, my, my husband
is a gun owner, right? Like I, you know, I believe in
responsible gun ownership and, and, but like, it's, it's the
lobbies, right? It's, it's just the like the
Pharmaceutical industry, like how much did they get away with
right? And like how much money did they
make off of COVID? And what?
What I say to people too is like you can't tell me it's not pay
to play when this is true is like think about Amazon.
They give equally to Democrats and Republicans.
They don't they have no ideology like they don't care.
They just want power in more government.
Contracts which equals winning. Yeah.
And so all of these things, yeah.
I, I feel like there's an American position in the middle
there. I don't know what that party is
called. Like I call it conservative
lowercase CI, call it because I do want the things that are
traditionally in this country. I'm not mad at liberals.
I'm not mad at people that disagree with like where we
should spend our money. Like we could have that debate.
Like you're not going to hurt my feelings.
You and I could. We probably don't agree on a a
ton of things like that are in the social sphere all the time,
but we wouldn't be mad at each other.
Like, I'm not mad at you, ever. Yeah.
I mean, it's like I, you know, I will, I will say and like this
probably like won't resonate very well with this, you know,
with this community. But like one of the reasons that
I was a progressive and had that line in the sand most of my life
was to be productive rights, you know, and it's like, I believe
like I don't want to go have an abortion, but I believe it's a
medical issue, right? And I didn't, I don't want
people to, I just don't want people to vote on it.
That's my position on abortion. I don't want it to be a
political issue. I don't want people to vote on
it. Like if you were vehemently
against it, I completely respect that and like, you know what I
mean? But it's like, and of course,
like I don't think there should be any abortions after
viability, all these things. But point being, right, like I
had this line in the sand, but like, I now look at that and I'm
like, well, OK, then I need to not have that happen in my
family if I care this way or like, or if I didn't care, you
know, let it happen. But like not have that be the
one thing that I vote on all the time, right?
Because then you're you let go of everything else.
And I think. Failure to have that ideological
consistency across the board is really, really hard.
And yeah, you and I disagree on abortion and that's OK.
Like we're, we don't have to be mad at each other.
I don't want bad things to happen to you because of it.
I want good things to happen. And then I want to change your
heart at some point or. And, and as you just said, you
don't actually believe in it personally for yourself.
You believe it for other people. That's such a, an interesting
sort of thing. We could do a whole podcast on
the number of people that have taken on the banner of other
people's problem and hey, that's a real discussion to have.
We could have that. Yeah.
And I also like people want is like safe reproductive choices,
right? Like where like people aren't
getting pregnant when they don't want to.
That's ultimately what everybody wants, right?
Like you want people to like. OK.
So you and I would agree that if we could go upstream that we
didn't have unwanted pregnancies, whatever that is,
more personal responsibility, better choice, we would agree on
that. A. 100 like most of and that's
the thing it's like. Everybody would.
That's where you get that's get there, right?
Like get to that point, right. So that's the.
The problem is, is what we've seen is that people have gone
downstream to it to the point where it's shout your abortion,
celebrate it like a sacrament, do all this ugly stuff and
people have good, good conscience and good faith.
Like they shouldn't want that. That's not a good position to
stake out, hence the safe, legal and rare.
I think you're probably still in that category.
Yeah, safe, legal and rare. OK, It's a Hillary Clinton
position, right? Like it's the, you know, the.
Clintons used to be like the Clintons today would be right
wing extremists. So I think that is true.
I think about that a lot, right? Like I, I do think about.
That that's crazy. Yeah.
And they were, they were like, they were the evil, evil.
But like, remember when Bill Clinton was president?
Nobody like they were like, he's like doing bad things.
The White House is, but the economy is good.
Like, the policies aren't terrible.
We didn't have that much contention.
And see, here's the thing, like going back to Trump that people
like, when I think about, like whether Trump will win.
Like Trump, yes, I think Trump will win.
And the reason is because people ask the one question that
matters in every election. Am I better off today than I was
four years ago? And most Americans right now
will say no. The Uber wealthy will say hell
yes for killing it. But like the most Americans,
aren't they? Marginalized people that are
even on the fringe, the theoretical people that they're
even if you're like a like a bleeding heart type who's full
of compassion, like you're hurting the poorest people in
America by bringing in more people that are poor at the
border. That seems to be very salient.
Like that's just obvious. Cesar Chavez used to fight
against illegal immigration. Like he's, he's look at the.
Communists. I dug into the border thing
recently because I was like, you know, I always ask myself, I'm
like, is this like, because what I'll read is like, the right
wing's going crazy over this. Is this really a thing?
And I was looking at it and I'm like, wow, what is happening?
And like, I believe in like, more legal pathways to
immigration because immigrants in America will, you know, have,
like, in the past 100 years have started some of those viable
companies, brought the most valuable innovations, right?
Like, we need more legal immigration in America, less red
tape, less bureaucracy. It's like, impossible.
But like, what the hell is happening?
What is happening at the border? Like, what is happening?
Like I don't even understand. It's called Cloward Piven.
Are you familiar with that strategy?
What? Cloward Piven?
That's what we're talking about. They overwhelm the resources
that you got to bring in the federal solution to it.
And that's almost always the worst.
And honestly, the the the closest that the government is
to you, the more accountable it is to you.
Yeah. So even people that want more
government should want it closer to them so that at least
responds to them. The federal government doesn't
care when you scream. They don't care about crushing
you, as you found out. They really don't.
They don't care. I think about it all the time.
I'm like, do you like The thing is, Kyle, is it ultimately, I'm
not 100% sure why like someone at the DOJ was like, we can't do
this. And not only can like we not
keep going forward, we have to unwind what we did, which as you
know. It's so hard to be somebody.
At some point you have to realize, like, where are we
right now? I think I, I think I know who it
was and I'll say it out loud to applaud him.
If it is this person, this AUSA, he's been in AUSA his whole
life. His name is Russell Carlberg and
like, I think it, I think it was him.
Was he was he recently brought on to the to the That's why if
you step, here's the thing. And I think he asked like the, I
think he asked basic questions about Amazon valuations and was
like. Brief me on this case.
And. Then when the answers are like,
we don't know why we did that. Like do you have this
information? Where did that come from?
They gave it to us. What about this?
They gave us that too. When that starts happening, I I
see this the same way that that this recent Supreme Court
decision comes down. It's 90 Trump.
Not because Catanji Jackson Browne thinks that Trump is a
good guy. I think she probably despises
him. I don't like what she has to
say. She seems foolish about a lot of
stuff. But like that doesn't matter.
The fact of the matter is that the legitimacy of your operation
is in question when you do batshit crazy things.
They try to pull him off a ballot without a criminal
prosecution. By the way, we have that statue.
You can charge him with that stuff.
Yeah, I agree. Like, listen, I agree with you.
And the one thing I will say about Justice Brown is that
she's a former public defender. And I think it is so important
to have a voice on the court that was not a prosecutor
because like in federal courts at the district level, some
insane percentage of District Court judges are former federal
prosecutors. And, like, they just believe
anything the government says, right?
And so I'm glad that we have that counter.
I don't, I don't hate it. I don't like I said, there's a
yin and a Yang. There's balance everywhere that
it doesn't matter what you're talking about the force,
there's, there's good and there's evil.
There's dark and there's light. There's always a balance.
And if without one we just have either, I guess we have just a
utopia which doesn't exist. That's nowhere, right?
We know that. That's what the word means.
So if you don't have utopia, then we have this fallen world
and it's got to have contrast and Shades of Grey and all the
other things like let's disagree, let's have good faith.
Let's all have the sort of, let's have that same common
values. I don't know if Katanji Brown
has the same values, American values.
I do, but I wouldn't put it past her to have them.
I don't think she doesn't know what a woman is.
I think that was a political posture.
I think she knows what a woman is.
I forgot about that. You can't be.
You can't be the first black female and not know what a
female is. Well, maybe she's just like, I'm
not stepping in this minefield because that that is a dangerous
thing. I think we are in America.
We're doing loyalty tests. I mean, I have had a lot of
people because, you know, I've been very publicly, very
progressive my whole life. And like with the first time
when I went on Glenn Beck or when I went on Tucker Carlson,
like I lost business. Oh yeah, right.
And people are like, how could you do this?
I'm like, first of all, like, how does me going on with Glenn
Beck mean that I identify with everything that Glenn stands
for, which like some of it I do, some of it I don't, right?
He's a journalist, right? Like, yes, he's not.
He's an opinionated journalist. Like he brings an opinion.
That's what he does, right? First of all, every journalist
does, FYI. And to think they don't is just
like a farce. But like also, but I also say to
them like, I'm, you know, Glenn is willing to hear my story and
so was Tucker. And the thing I say to people
now, like, isn't it interesting to you that you think these guys
are conspiracy theorists? I was right.
DOJ said I was right and they were the only journalists
because you were not a journalist at the beginning when
I started this. So like, no, but like that, that
had me on. That had me on.
You go where the where the microphone is.
If you need to tell your story and people need to get, you
can't do it by yourself. Fighting for your family, would
you be like, sorry little girls, sorry my daughters, I couldn't
go on Tucker Carlson. So daddy went to prison.
Like I'm not doing that. No.
And I think that like, listen, I agree with some of what Tucker
says. I disagree with some of what he
says. But I think it's super important
to have voices like Tucker Carlson out there questioning
the status quo question, making people question, you know,
everything because I don't think I don't see it happening a lot
of places anymore, right? And like.
Skepticism is a very American position.
I mean, I got in a battle with the Seattle Times recently
because so the Seattle Times like barely wrote about what
Amazon did to my family, which I think is bananas because my
husband was like a Seattle employee and there's over a
million Amazon employees in Seattle.
It's an awful lot more money coming in from Amazon.
To Seattle. But like, I mean, quite simply,
Amazon tried to put my husband in prison for something a
federal judge said my husband's employment contract explicitly
allowed him to do, and we had to spend millions of dollars
proving Amazon wrong. So weird.
Anyway, so Seattle Times, I guess it's like, not newsworthy,
but they actually said to me recently that the last article
they wrote about it, they said, well, like, the DOJ vacated
these guilty pleas, but Carl Nelson could still be charged
with a crime. And I was like, I just wrote an
e-mail. I was like, what are you doing?
Like the prosecutor said they're done.
They said in a public filing, they said it privately, like,
they're done. This is over.
And they were like, well, we think that the judge's decision
in Amazon civil case made DOJ walk away and Amazon's
appealing. So if Amazon wins, the DOJ could
charge your husband. And I was like, so you're you
the Seattle Times, your public position is that you believe
Amazon can convince the DOJ to can charge my husband with a
crime through civil litigation. OK.
I mean, at least you're open about it.
At least you admit it like. I don't know how many times I've
thrown my hands up while we've been talking, but I'm realizing
I've been throwing my hands up a lot because it's so crazy.
So. Crazy, it's so crazy, but here's
the upside. I do think there's an upside one
number one, I'm so thankful that prayers are have been answered
that your family was victorious in this.
I know that it's still really raw because I can see it on your
face. I can see the emotion there for
me if like I I know that elation often results also in just sort
of like meltdown moments where you're just like you're like,
what the hell just happened? Like it's like people that like
imagine for folks that are not have never felt this.
Everybody who's ever been in a moment where your car lost grip
with the road, hydroplane or ice and you're just spinning and
you're literally in the hands that are not yours, you're not
in charge. It's Jesus take the wheel moment
where it's like I'm flying across the world at a high rate
of speed. There's an incredible thing at
stake. It's my children in the car.
It's the property of the value of the thing that I'm in my own
safety. And then you stop and you didn't
hit a guard rail and you went over like a bunch of stuff, but
like there's no damage to the car.
You didn't even like pop a tire. And you're sitting there in the
middle of the median or something going like, holy shit,
what just happened? And you see and like all the
people that drive by, you are really slow going like holy
shit, like what just happened to her And everybody can see it.
That's the moment that you're in right now.
I feel like is that is that the face that I'm seeing?
It's the holy shit. You're sitting there in the
median and like the engine's still idling.
Yeah, And I'm like, did this really happen?
Did we survive this like that? Holy shit.
And everybody who's around it saw it too.
And they're all like, Oh my God. Yeah.
The problem is that everybody else just drives to their house
and parks and goes like, well I saw that crazy thing today.
Yep, back to my normal life. Yeah, and you're sitting there
like my entire life was almost just gone forever.
Everything almost just changed. I don't know how to pick up the
pieces. And like, I also still am
somebody who seeks justice and like, we're seeking justice, you
know? Yeah, you can't.
You can't not be furious. Your life is forever altered.
Forever. I mean, my kids like, Ohio is a
wonderful place and we live in Ohio now and my kids are growing
up here. But this is not where I would
have selected to raise my children.
We were raising them in Seattle, where we owned a home that we no
longer own and own. And someone else is raising
their family there. We worked so hard to build, you
know, and you're just like, it's.
Yeah. I mean, yeah, like even though
we won, Amazon dictated the terms of my life and they still
do even today. And I'm not.
That's not OK. And I can't stand for it.
I won't. So, and that's the best part
about it for you, but no matter what, you will never be able to
go down that same path with that same carefree attitude, with
that same sense of you. You'll never even be able to
take risks in the same way. No, I mean, it's really like
we've talked about leaving the country and living somewhere
else because I think there's there's a.
When you realize that at any given moment, the federal
government can just walk into your life and take every take
everything, it's it's just hard to feel safe.
It's hard to believe. You can build.
It's hard to it's hard to believe, right.
And so, you know, yeah, we will take risks in different ways.
But I but I will say, and I think my husband would say this,
like we'll never let what happened to us define our lives
forever, right? Like, the most important thing
for us is to make sure that Amazon doesn't do this to anyone
else and the DOJ doesn't do this to anyone else.
And So what does that look like? Those are the two questions.
What is what do those look like? And then also, like, I want my
daughters more than anyone to be compensated, whatever that looks
like because they deserve to be right?
Like, it's not. And.
What a what a people might call it conservative, but it's just
an American sense. It's a Western civilization
sense. Women and children, they're the
ones that we're supposed to protect.
Yeah. Once you've made babies in the
world, your job is to protect them.
That's your sole purpose. If you have to give your life
for it, so be it. There's a Western and and men do
it over in front of women. That's what's always happened.
There's nothing wrong with this this order of things.
Well, and it's like, you know, it's like people.
So you know this Kyle, but like 2 years into this, I started a
TikTok because I felt like nobody was listening to me.
And I just like thought TikTok was a dancing app, but I started
watching it and I'm like, there's some people like talking
into their, their phones and putting videos up.
So I started a TikTok and I didn't even ask Carl's lawyers.
I was like, I'm just doing this. And I have 200,000 followers now
who watch our story every day. And someone asked me.
And it's like a lot of like legal intricacies, but people
are interested in it. And someone asked me why I
started the TikTok. And the reason I started the
TikTok is that inevitably my daughters are going to grow up
and they're going to Google our family and what happened to us.
And all I want is a record that they know that I did every
single thing I could to fight because when I started it, I
didn't know if their dad was going to prison, you know?
And like, I was like, I want them to know that I I did
everything I could to help their dad.
And our memories are not perfect.
They're really bad. Actually.
We're really bad at looking back and trying to remember like
where I was. I, I literally like we're doing
this today on March 5th. So, you know, Full disclosure,
we'll play this in a week. I'm doing this on March 5th and
one two years ago today, I was allowed to go back into the FB
is field office because they changed the mask rules because
Joe Biden wanted to have the state of the Union and not have
like he didn't want to have people having to wear masks if
they didn't want to and have people refuse.
So he removed for a political reason that had nothing to do
with me. I was allowed to go back into my
office and then my office went, oh shit, Seraphin's back.
What do we do? They thought I was gone.
Amy, I was kicked out from November 23rd of 2021 until
March 4th of 2022. Imagine being gone from your job
and then nobody calling you and no one asking like what happens?
And then like the rules changed and I showed up with with no
warning. I was like, I'm back.
I sent an e-mail to my boss and said hey, the rules changed.
I'm coming to work. And he was like, oh, they
immediately transferred me to another squad.
They immediately started taking action against me.
They immediately were like scrambling because they thought
they'd accidentally, they thought they had done the thing
from office space where they solved the glitch and I didn't
get a pay like I was I was Milton and I wasn't coming back
anymore. I was down in the basement and
like suddenly I just showed back up at my old desk and they're
like, my boss comes to me. He goes, well, we've transferred
you from this squad to another squad and you are now in a
national security squad, even though you don't have to read
and you can't even do the work. We put you there so.
So did you just like walk? I mean, did you what did you do?
I just. Took my I just took my shit and
I went to the new desk. I had everything at home
already. I already knew this was coming.
So I literally set up my new desk in a place and then for six
weeks I had no work. They just sat me there trying to
figure out what the hell to do, knowing they've done the wrong
thing. But here's the thing, that was
two years ago. That was really recent.
You're talking about. Your story is 4 years.
There are things that happened at the beginning that you can't
remember. Our first interview, that
emotion, you can't recapture it. Yeah.
So your kids get to go back and see that video.
As awful as TikTok is, and TikTok is awful, for whatever
it's worth, it's Chinese spyware, but it's still.
Yeah. It's a record.
And the other thing is like I'm, and I'm really lucky for this is
because I was an entrepreneur. I talked to journalists a lot
and there was an amazing woman named Liz Brody.
And then like mid 2020, she was writing an article about one of
my investors and she reached out to me on e-mail and we started
talking and I was telling her about my company, the Riveter,
which had been decimated. But we were trying to pivot.
And the Riveter is still alive today, just does something very
different. But, and Liz at the time said
it'll be really interesting if you pull off this pivot, maybe
we should like talk every three weeks or so and I can record it
and then maybe there's an article down the road.
So I have, and about like 2 months into it, I was like, so
there's this thing I haven't told you about that's going on
in my life. And I started telling her all
about the Amazon stuff. And so we had.
Liz has years of recordings of me at the moment.
Contemporaneous recordings of your emotional state and.
I actually can't listen to them. I can read the transcripts, but
I can't listen to them still. All these years later, I still
can't listen to them because I'm like, that woman was in so much
pain and I just want to hug her and it's me.
Me. Yeah, me.
It's you looking back yourself going like I came out the other
end of this thing. Like I said, nobody else was in
the car with you. Nobody else felt what that free
fall was, just you and your husband and your kids.
Nobody knows what sort of damage was done and then they're going
to see the success, which is what you got.
But it's it leaves a mark, you know?
It really does. I mean, you've been through a
lot, like you lost the career that you loved and like you've
built something amazing in its place, but it's different and
like, you know, it's. Totally different.
It's not even close. And here's the other thing, like
I don't know how I don't know how this goes because this is
this is uncharted territory too. You, you guys, at least I see
what happened with you guys as sort of vindicating.
I'm hoping that they took that they did the same thing that
they took their ball and they went home and they're not going
to come after me the same way that they but I still could go
back into start from your square.
One of the the door gets kicked open.
I know, I know. I don't worry about it as much
anymore. I feel like I feel like we're on
the swing. I feel like good is winning for
now. Do you have that instinct?
I do. I do.
And I also think like, I mean, I think that Trump will win.
And I think it'll be really interesting to see what happens
with the DOJ when Trump wins. He's got to gut it right.
I mean, he says he's going to, I, I hope if he wins, I hope he
does the things, some of the things he says he'll do in terms
of like reforming the government.
So you know. You know, my my buddy Steve
friend and I talk about the best thing that could happen is
pulling the guns away from the FBI and making them just an
investigative agency that has to go to somebody else for
enforcement and has to go to somebody else for prosecution.
I mean, that would be great because I can tell you the scars
I have from the FBI raid in my home were the worst.
Great. Like it was worse than the civil
forfeiture was worse than everything.
Yeah, nobody knows what that feels like to see the door come
down or people come into your house.
The second thing is, is that I've, I've advocated is that you
get rid of all the special agents.
I don't care what you do with them.
Honestly, I just don't care. I don't care what happens to the
prison guards that worked at Auschwitz, and I don't care
about what happened to the cops that rounded up shoes and put
them in the box cars. And I don't care what happens to
the FBI. There's some friends of mine
that are in there and they're good people.
They'll land OK. I, I got no warning.
You know, I, I feel like they'll do OK or they won't and that'll
be fine too. But what I'd love to see is
local cops or state cops with 10 plus years of experience and a,
and a great history of honorable service getting moved in, being
accountable as federal deputies under Title 18 and Title 21 to
enforce and do the investigations.
And that way they also have concurrent state powers.
But that way they're accountable to an attorney general and state
laws, not federal. And then they can bring cases
and then US attorneys can bring it or not, I don't care.
That would make way more sense. I think that would that would
make good sense. And if you look back in the
origins of the FBI, like the first agents and the the people
that really built the agency, the good parts of the agency,
like they were state law enforcement, you know, like
that's that was the background that they came from.
And we're very, very disconnected from that now.
And so it's a very, you know, my husband always talks about how
like when they were performing the search warrant on our house,
he was like talking to the FBI agents that were there.
And he's like, so like, what'd you do before this?
And it was just like Wild and Sky was like, I was a bookkeeper
and I was really bored. And.
Now you it's like, so now you're an FBI agent with a gun in my
home over my honest services. Like it's like, that's the
thing. It's like, I mean, it's such the
drama, the drama of it, the drama of it, you know what I
mean? The like the, you know, I've
told you this and this is still such a hard part, but like when
my husband would not plead guilty, the federal prosecutors
kept saying that they were going to come into our home and arrest
him in front of our kids just some morning.
And when that when they came for the search warrant, that's what
we thought they were there for because they did search warrant
like two months after they told him he was a target of an
investigation, which made no sense.
And after that, you know, we would get up every morning at
like 5:30 and take the girls out of the house for two hours and
put our baby monitor in our window that it was attached to
our phones. And then when we come back, we
were just making sure they weren't there because we were so
afraid that I just didn't want the girls to see their dad
dragged out in handcuffs. They bring it up because the
theatrics of this are so ridiculous.
Like, my husband was accused of depriving his private employer
of his honest services. And they're like, we're going to
come in guns a blazing and drag you out of your house.
Like what? Well, how does that make sense?
Like, I don't like, I don't like Rodger Stone.
I don't like Rodger Stone. OK, but like, he was like a 70
year old man. No violent history.
And they like they sent frogmen into the water behind his house
when they raided his home to arrest him.
Like for what? Because it's a game.
Like we don't live in a game. We live in the real world.
And like that those kind of theatrics are ridiculous.
And I found. Out that we actually do live in
a game. Yeah, I mean, it does feel that
way. Like those theatrics are just
ridiculous. Just ridiculous.
There's no way around it. I'm anybody that gets exposed to
this stuff immediately. I mean, I I'm guessing you have
some sympathy for Steve Baker walking around for a misdemeanor
crime. He's in, he's in belly shackles.
He's. I mean, 100% I do, 100% I do,
right? Like, it's just, it's
ridiculous. And it's like he's putting on a
very brave face and public face. But like, you know, that is a
terrifying experience. Do you know what the
differences? Can I, can I tell you the
difference? Which I don't know that I've
discussed in any way. I I talked to George Hill, my
friend the other day who's a, a former.
He's a combatant. OK, You're a combatant.
You didn't know you were before this, but you were.
You're always a combatant. Would you agree?
Yeah, I would. I've never been tested.
But you're a combatant by, by your, by the type of disposition
you have. You would be the kind of person
that would engage. Many people have the ability to
dis, like their instinct is to disconnect.
Mine is to engage. I'm a combatant, you're a
combatant. We're fair game.
But you know. What?
It's it's unfair that we were, that we had to engage here, but
it is our nature to do what we're doing, what you and I.
Are doing yes, yes, I engage yeah, that's right.
That's I. I dig in.
Like, I didn't pick the battle, but I'm going to finish it kind
of thing. Like I didn't want him to have
this fight, but OK, game on. Will Bill Shipley, who's been
defending a lot of J Sixers, has that same combatant attitude.
He just published a piece over the Blaze called.
It's called Game On. I'll read it.
OK. That's the way that that you and
I are built. And that's probably why we get
along really well. Also, we're very, you know, we
see the injustice of it. And even if we don't agree with
the what justice looks like, we would at least want to have that
honest debate. Right.
But. But Steve Baker is not a
combatant. You know, this is this is where
it spills over. Yeah.
That's a really good way of looking at that.
There's another target who I won't name in Amazon's
investigation who is not a combatant.
And watching him go through this and like, he stood firm, but
like, he couldn't speak up. He couldn't, you know, like
fight outwardly because he's couldn't.
He was paralyzed by it, I think in a lot of ways, you know.
There's three things that happened in the sympathetic
responses. There's three possibilities.
The outcomes are fight, flight and freeze.
Two of them are active. One of them is passive
combatants involved in either fighting or flighting because
running away is a good strategy sometimes and getting involved
is another good strategy. But freezing is the most common
thing we see in our in in one. It's non combatants all freeze.
Yeah. Yeah, well, it's interesting.
I I when it started, I froze. I lost 20 lbs and I couldn't
stop shaking. And my mother, who is like the
strongest person I've ever met, she Facetimed me, you know,
sitting in the bathroom floor hiding.
And it'd been about 3 weeks. And she just on FaceTime, she
looked at me and she goes get up.
She's like, this is not my daughter.
She's like, get up and fight. And I was like, I don't know if
I can fight. She's like, I don't know if you
can win, but I know you can fight.
She's like, you got to go down swinging.
Amy, what are you doing? And at that moment, I just was
like, OK, I'm in, right. But I think I was just, it says
a lot that it took me down to my knees because I am, I am like, I
am someone who engages. I'm a litigator like I, I'm born
to fight. Like I chose a profession of
fighting. But like it, it was so scary
that I just like went down. People always think that, you
know, if something bad happens to me, then I'll win.
I'll, I'll, I'll, I got all this training and experience.
There's a reason why if you ambush Navy Seals, Navy Seals
die, OK? These are people that spend
their entire life with physical fitness and being combatants.
That's so all they, they yearn for that battle space.
Anybody who's ever trained around guys like this know what
I'm talking about. But if you get caught when you
are not in that space, there's Jeff Cooper's.
He's the father of like modern handgun technique.
He's a former special forces guy worked down in Latin America, a
bunch in in South America. And one of the things that he
talks about are the colors awareness.
There's white, there's yellow, there's orange, there's red, and
there's black. And in white, that means you're
so blissfully unaware the world is beautiful.
And then if something bad happens to you, you die.
Yellow means you know that there's danger, but it's not
near you, but you're aware that it exists.
And if something happens in yellow and you can't escalate,
you die. Most people who are like you and
me probably live in the orange, which means that we know there's
danger and it's probably anywhere, but if it comes up,
I'm going to have to escalate. But right now I'm like
moderately safe. And then there's people who live
in the red, those people burnout.
That means that there's imminent danger and the next thing that
happens is like lethality or attack mode.
I'm going to, I'm ready to fight at all times.
You can only live in the red for so long.
And then there's people get in the black.
They're overwhelmed by circumstances.
They've been in the red, they've been fought, they fought too
long and they, they basically get everything hits them at once
and they just, they're done. And we've got a lot of people
that are non combatants now that are living in like the red and
the orange and it's exhausting if you're not built for it.
And most people freeze and eventually some people are
overwhelmed by circumstances. They can no longer do it.
They melt down. I see a lot of people that made
sense and stop making sense in the last couple years because
they were like, I don't trust anything.
And now everything I believe is true.
And that's why there are Jewish space lasers that are melting
down Hawaii or whatever other crazy shit people believe in.
It's it's the worst thing that's ever happened to our society in
Western society, certainly in in recent memory.
And we're all living through it. I'm just really happy to see
that your family you get another shot at it and this is like the
like the best news that when I saw it that they had vacated
like that's a total victory for you it.
It was like I didn't, I, I, I hoped for it.
I believed it, but it was wild. And we found out about it on the
public docket. Like, it wasn't like the DOJ
reached out. We found about it, out about it,
as the public did. Of course.
God forbid they would reach out and like the kindness to tell us
they were doing that, no? They don't have that what?
What color do you guys live in right now on that color
awareness? Where have you gone from?
Well, I'm in orange still. I mean orange like orange like
I'm not. I can't live in constant fight.
I can't live in red. I can't right.
Like I have to like I can't enjoy my kids.
I can't laugh. It's like I just refuse to live
in red. Like it's not.
There are moments where I'm still triggered into red, like I
was sitting my desk looks out a window and I get up really early
at work because I work from like 5 to 7 before and then get the
kids ready for school and take them to school and walk the dog.
And I was sitting here and it was pitch black and a car drove
into a driveway like 6:00 in the morning.
And I just like, you know, and it was, it was Walmart
delivering a package because I don't order from Amazon.
It was Walmart, but like, but it was, I mean, I was, I was, I was
panicked and it took a much, I'm much more capable now of like a
regulating back down, you know, like no one's coming to get you
today. Everything is OK, you know, and
I no longer like I used to when I would go walk the dog alone, I
would tell Carl where I was going, where I would because
it's what's scary. It's scary, right?
Like Jeff Bezos hires former Spooks.
He talks about it all the time. Like, these people are capable,
you know, and they don't. And they're very angry at us.
Yeah, and ambushes are a technique that everybody is
susceptible to. Ambush, that's what.
That's why ambushes are successful.
Yeah, I mean, like, I know how to shoot a gun now.
Like I learned that over the last four years.
Like, I, I shoot very well, right?
You know, like I learned. Like these are the things, you
know, you learn. I changed.
But I live in orange, not red. I'm happy to hear it.
We're going to get you one of our we'll get maybe two of them,
the suspendables pens if if your husband wants to wear it.
Yeah, I would love them. I was jealous we were you.
Can't, you can't buy the black ones.
We send those to people that need them.
So we're going to send you guys some of those.
But if you guys want some of the white ones, we'll get a couple
of those as well. But.
I was listening to Glenn back yesterday and I didn't know
Steve was going to be on. And I was.
I was listening to Steve and I was jealous of Glenn's
suspendable pen. So thank you very much.
We'll make it happen. The Riveter is back up and
running. Yes, So what we do now at the
Riveter is we no longer have our Co working spaces that we work
with women and professional women to help them tell their
stories into the world. I believe storytelling can save
your life. I think it saved my life.
I you know, I think like you're a storyteller, Kyle.
It's incredibly important and for women, it can help you
advance in your career or if you want to start a business or if
you want to go back to work if you've been out for a while.
So we help women tell their stories.
And then your Twitter following is still acceptable.
It's nowhere near your TikTok, but I think that's where the
battle is The the battle's on Twitter for me.
So there's. Your I love Twitter.
Twitter is my Twitter don't tell TikTok.
But Twitter is my favorite because it's just like I like
the it's, it's, it's written word, it's smart, it's
interesting, it's. Snarky and cerebral.
If people stop doing snarky tweets, we probably could cure
cancer. But because there's so much
cleverness out there, all right, I'm going to throw your your
handle up here. But it's Amy under score K under
score Nelson and. That's where it is on all
channels. So it's TikTok as well.
Well, if anyone's on that platform.
And did you see, I have to know, Kyle, did you see that Instagram
and the Meta went down today because it's Election Day and
Meta went down a global, global adage.
We don't believe in coincidences at this point in our lives, do
we? No, we do not.
I don't believe in space lasers either necessarily.
I don't, I don't either. But yeah.
But yeah, I thought that was really, that was really
interesting. I'm like, OK, so yes.
All right, we will play this in a couple days.
And I'm so happy for your story and I really appreciate you
being my friend and coming on and talking to us about it and
sharing it and being vulnerable with it because I know that is a
vulnerability. And if people can follow you,
all those places, all of our prayers for your family going
on, and we'll get those pins your way home.
Thank you so much. Thank you.
Thanks Amy. And that is our Sunday sit down
with Amy Nelson archive grab best of look forward to the the
next update. It won't be nearly as positive,
but God bless her and her family.
God bless you and your family. Thanks for listening.
On these days, if you guys want to join us live for the Kyle
Seraphin Show, 0930 Eastern Time, 8:30 Central.
Every Monday through Friday, we talk politics.
We hopefully pull back the curtain just a little bit and
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At least I do. I have a laugh and it seems like
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Share it, give a friend a little heads up on this.
If this story touched you, let it touch somebody else.
And I'll see you guys again during the week.
Have a great one. Thank you for listening to the
Kyle Seraphin Show, streamed live weekdays on rumble.com/kyle
Seraphin. Follow Kyle on Twitter, True
Social and Instagram at Kyle Seraphin.