YouSaid · the spoken record

Billy Corben

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40
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2024-10-07
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2024-10-07
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Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Love is a hero, I think. I think Lev is a hustler and a bad guy who is also redeemable and redeemed. And his repentance is inspiring to me and makes me believe that anybody who is in the depths of this can come out of it.”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Them seeing what it takes when you're, you know, what it's cost people like Lev. I mean, Lev is served time in prison. Love almost lost his family. Love has been destroyed by this. I hope that that makes us recognize the ways in which we all can fight against this, to recognize the nobility of the people who do wage these fights. I hope that these sort of stories encourage us to stand up for the people who wage these fights. I mean, people like Stormy Daniels, people like Lev Parnas, people like the historical heroes that you mentioned from the ultra series and stuff. Those are people who paid a personal price for in some ways, saving this country or trying to save this country. And we should have their back and we should support them and we should recognize the way that they're personally destroyed by these things and try to backstop them so that doesn't happen. There hasn't been a civil war over these kinds of things, right? We're not having mass violence. We're having individual people have their lives destroyed for trying to do the right thing. And the rest of us can try to mitigate some of that damage by recognizing their heroism and standing up for them.”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “I think the commonality for me in all of these stories that I've been telling, and some of them are sort of obscure things from history that I'm trying to bring back, some are characters from history that I think have resonance in terms of what we're contending with today, is to shine a light on people who stand up against stuff like this, whether they were involved as bad guys in the first case and were repentant or whether they were crusaders against it from the beginning and to show what their tactics are to try to fix problems like this and to stand up against tyrants and would be dictators like this and corruption and crooks like this, but also to show that not one tactic usually works to take these guys down. Demagoguery is a recurrent thing in history and all over the world because demagogues are effective. Dictators are more the norm than democracy. But learning what it takes to stand up to them.”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “It's very, very dark, and I think he wants to do it very, very fast. And JD Vance will be much better at accelerating that sort of a plan than Mike Pence ever could have been”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “What Putin wants is what he calls a multipolar world. And if Trump is elected president again, it'll be the end of Ukraine because he'll cut off support to Ukraine immediately. We will have a multipolar world. We'll have Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping free to invade whoever they want and to reestablish more of an empire than their individual countries. It'll be lights out for Taiwan. It'll be lights out for Ukraine. And then it'll be lights out for the countries that are, I mean, I'm sorry Moldova, right? I'm sorry Lithuania and Latvia and Estonia and Poland. I'm sorry there's no reason to think of those things as stopping. Trump has said they can do whatever the hell they want to our NATO allies because he doesn't believe in NATO. And so you end up with the United States as a sort of Spanish American war era regional backwater ignoring the rest of the world and dictators taking over and the United States becoming that kind of a country because that's what he admires.”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Yes, even people who are in the depths of it. If you give them true information and trust them as human beings and believe in the human capabilities of the human spirit, people can come out the other side of it. And so you have to find ways to keep telling these stories even with all the disincentives to do it.”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “The people who most love him won't care. I think that you need to fight against that because I am an optimist about human redemption. And I believe that people can be decolonized. And I believe that even”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “January 6th thing, but this first impeachment about Ukraine, it's just not memory hold, it's there. It's just that we can't sort of keep it front of mind with the latest scandalous worst thing that he said. It's also, I think, true that for his critics and for objective observers of how dangerous he is, there is this thing, there's this nagging voice in the back of your head which says the people who like him won't care. And so because his acolytes are more like acolytes than voters because it is this idea that he's this transcendent figure that's going to end politics and offer you some new form of future where he benevolently gives you all the things that you want. It's true that the scandal and the corruption and the pettiness and the incompetence does wash off them. He could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, not lose any voters. And so I think that that's a disincentive for people to cover it and tell these stories because they think”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “I mean, if you want your crime to be forgotten, commit a bigger one next. I mean, I think that's essentially what's happened is that it's such a fire hose of scandal. I mean, let's talk about just within the last couple of months, the Washington Post published a story about how there's very credible and compelling, like cinematically dramatic evidence that Trump took a $10 million cash bribe from Egypt, where the Egyptian intelligence services took all of the U.S. currency that they had in Cairo, put it in a box, and brought it over to Trump when he needed $10 million for his campaign. That wasn't even a one-day story. Trump hasn't released his tax returns, neither has JD Vance, by the way. He hasn't, you know, the second impeachment, it was about the...”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “It's a challenge to governance because they're so often right. I mean, if you gain power through illegal means, it's really hard then to say that the law should constrain you once you're in power. But that's the challenge to the U.S. system right now, is to take somebody and say, yeah, no matter what you've done, ultimately the system's stronger than you.”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Simultaneously, secretly signing a letter of intent to build Trump Tower Moscow while saying I have no business interests in Moscow. I think it's the same sort of thought, you know, yeah, I'm not supposed to be doing this and I'm going to lie about this because clearly I recognize I should lie about it because this looks really bad. But what are you going to do? Stop me being willing to do it shows that I'm willing to break the laws, which shows that the laws are not applicable to me. And so it's all, it's kind of a...”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Well, you know, I'm not an expert in Trump's early business stuff because I just find it, it just feels repetitive and salacious and it's all infected by the kind of press that he got as he was coming up in New York real estate, which was so credulous and tabloid-y, I get it makes me nauseous. But I do what you glean from the way that he came up through business is that, you know, that might makes right. That it doesn't matter if it was illegal or you were not allowed to do it, you have done it. And then when you go on and move on to other things, who's going to hold you to account for having done it if you were so brash to do it in the first place? That shows you can. might make right thing and the you know when when when trump was running for office running for presidency”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Mob operation. Yeah, bad things happen. The impeachment is important because it was a fact-finding exercise and documented so much of what happens. But I think the really damning thing about it is to know that no criminal charges, no criminal investigation ever followed the factual revelations of the impeachment process. So all of this stuff was proven. I mean, we've just made a film showing the receipts for all of this stuff. And Rudy Giuliani was never prosecuted as a foreign agent. He very clearly was a foreign agent. And among all the other crimes that we saw, that we have full record of. And that's a function of the corruption of the Justice Department during Trump's presidency.”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Yeah, I mean, now that we know that that was the first of two impeachments and we know how they both went down, I don't think that Republicans in Congress were ever going to use the impeachment process to significantly discipline Trump no matter what. So I don't know. I mean, maybe him testifying live would have made a difference. That said, the people who did testify live were stunning. I mean, hearing from Ambassador Yovanovich, hearing from Colonel Vinman, I mean, remember, that's Colonel Vinman giving that indelible testimony about how his father said, you know, in America, bad things aren't going to happen to you. You can speak the truth here. And then as soon as the impeachment effort fails, not only Colonel Vinman, but his twin brother, they both get frog marched out of the White House and lose their jobs. And so, yeah, bad things do happen to you when crooks run the U.S. government. It turns out that when the U.S. government fails and is taken over by what seems more like a small time sort of two-bit comment.”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “And they seem to have the president on speed dial. Or do I talk to these bureaucrats who do not have names anybody has heard of, who don't have a relationship with the president and who just seem to have the official imprimatur of the U.S. government? But maybe that doesn't mean anything anymore. I mean, the damage that they did to us in our relations with other countries' sensitive allies is still resonating.”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Whenever they would take a meeting with somebody in the Ukrainian government or somebody in Ukrainian intelligence or whoever it was who they were trying to get this scam pulled off with, then the US State Department, the actual US government, would follow up and say, whatever they told you to do, please don't do it. And so they created a perception among powerful people abroad that the US had a real government and also a shadow government, thus creating a dilemma for people who are trying to get the US government to do something. Well, do I talk to the con men with the guys with the open shirts and the gold chains? Because they seem to think that their speech”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Yeah, and technically there's a law against American citizens doing for. In ways that are contrary to the interests of the U.S. government. It does seem like the State Department Was aware that this was going on in part because there's evidence that they followed Levany Gor and Rudy around and cleaned up after them.”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “While he's serving in the White House, Qatar comes in and bails out his family real estate firm from the terrible purchase decision. And while he's in the White House, he sets up his new investment firm, which gets $2 billion from sovereign wealth funds in other countries. And then turns out years later, just reported in the New York Times recently, it's paid no fees.”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “And I think that that sense of tradition also extended to Lev's kind of patriarchal attitude as well. And so he was like, you know, I know best and I'm doing things for this family and I'm doing things for this country and I'm bringing us pride and I'm bringing us money. And I think that he just was unreachable. There's a moment where Svetlana says like, oh, we're not getting him back people when she was kind of relaying what was occurring back in those lost years of Lev. So what I don't know is how they endured. I don't when I say I don't know. I know. I just don't quite understand, to be perfectly honest. But he... Was lost.”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Always overseas and always, and the power going to his head the way it was, you know, Lord knows what was happening in Ukraine and Vienna and Paris and Israel and everywhere they were going on behalf of Rudy Giuliano”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “I will. So I want you to explain that one of you. He certainly has done everything he possibly could to alienate her and their children and his entire family, all of his children.”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “Yeah, I think you're right. I think she steals the show. And one of my favorite tweets, I think there was multiple tweets who arrived at this conclusion having watched the documentary, which is The Moral of the Story is, had he listened to his wife, none of this would have happened, which really, really is the moral of the story, I think. And they have a very she also her family fled, the Soviet Union, Ukrainian Jew. And she has a very traditional view of marriage. How else to explain the fact that they're still married?”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Freelance is very polite. And it's not just that it's stupid or incompetent or unprofessional or embarrassing. Which it is. All of which it is and hilarious, all of which it is. But it's also Russia. I mean, what happens is that Russia as Lev comes to realize every single person who fed them what they were asking to be fed, which was supposed dirt on Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, was connected to Russia and Russian intelligence. Because you go over there and you say, hey, I'm looking for this thing that'll help Trump and I'm, you know, and you know me through our organized crime connections and all this stuff. And so the Kremlin, which has, which has made a decade-long project of doing everything it can to help Donald Trump and to try to dismantle the US system of government, they see the floodgates are open and then they fill them. Right.”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “This turns into this kind of caper that's exactly what this is. Or to paraphrase John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani's drug dealer, however you want to refer to what was going on there. That was in a different context, but I think it applies to this scenario as well.”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “That's what this is. And as evidenced by that audio recording as well, that this is how the worst of what you think was going on in the Trump administration was happening and even worse than that, the way business was being conducted. Svetlana Lev's wife makes the point very clearly in the documentary that had this been a Hillary Clinton administration, a Barack Obama administration, a Joe Biden administration, George Bush administration. He says normal people, I think, is what she says. Any normal person would not have had anyone like Lev within 5,000 miles of the White House, let alone the president of the United States and his private attorney, who is being retained for the purpose of maintaining attorney-client privilege between really his very small collection of clients. Donald Trump, Levin Igor.”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “We should rehow, use you, my mobster lackey, says that we should get rid of America's chief diplomat in the region. Sure, sure we do. I mean, the thing about corruption is that it not only says something important about the politician who is being corrupted. It also allows the person who is corrupting the politician or who is engaged in corrupt behavior with them to become a big mucker, right? Right. And so you empower the worst people in the world by giving them access to people with lots of power. And so Lev then becomes a big deal in terms of Ukraine and sway because he's got corrupt access to Trump through his check”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “Political appointee. And of course, who are Lev's contacts in Ukraine, from whom he is getting dirt made up stuff that's not true about Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, right? He's getting stuff from bad guys in Ukraine. And bad guys in Ukraine understandably would want a career stand-up US straight arrow diplomat like that out of there. They'd much prefer to have, you know, some Trump world crony or nobody or somebody who wasn't going to be in their way. And so he's in circles where, yeah, you'd want somebody who represented straight up American good governance out of the way. He conveys that to Trump. And Trump instantly with no vetting, with not even understanding how to spell Ukraine is like, oh, yes.”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “The thing to me that is amazing about that exchange, especially as you hear Lev sort of narrate it and say, I'm just repeating gossip. Well, where is he hearing gossip that Maria Yovanovich is bad? Maria Ivanovich is an esteemed career U.S. diplomat who's very skilled, who's working in a country that is an important ally to us, that has been invaded by Russia, that has, it's a fledgling democracy, it's trying to defeat its corrupt and sort of Kremlin circle past and become a NATO candidate, become a Western focused European based allied nation. And so it's a sensitive country. She's a very skilled diplomat and she is doing the right things for the career diplomat.”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “And there was nothing that happened once they started doing that, once they started writing those checks, there was nothing that happened in Republican politics that disabused them of that knowledge. They believed that it was working.”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “Yeah, I mean, it's maybe a Florida story, but it's not a Florida problem. I mean, he's also his relationship with Kevin McCarthy, his relationship with Pete Sessions, his relationship with Devin Nunez, his relationship, you know, it's all of these guys. And they had ended up on the Republican side of the ledger because that's where they thought that their $50,000 checks, their donations were going to buy them the influence they needed to run a few different business ideas that they had, one involving an energy company in Ukraine. Oh, weird, where did that idea come from? One involving the marijuana business, one involved, like they had, they had this idea that if they could buy themselves the right friends, which they felt among the Republican politicians they were meeting, it was an open door for that, then they could get these, they could get the business deals that they needed. You know, it's former Soviet Union style.”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Among other things, his personal financial disasters start sort of sticking to him. And that leads to a very interesting and important part of the story as told in the documentary where this great Haitian American lawyer who's the cutest little bugs butt in the world, Tony, ends up basically attaching himself to him and finding love and documenting loves, financial life in a way to try to collect for one of his debtors. And that ends up being important in terms of building the feds, ultimately building a case against.”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “He made good friends with this guy Igor, and Igor's one of Igor's business was called Mafia Rave. That was a nightclub. This is not a very above board guy. He gets, ends up in Florida doing the same boiler room penny stock fraud stuff and starts having”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “It was a bag man for the organized crime. And he was super cute, but he was a bad guy. And he went from there into boiler room penny stock fraud, which was very lucrative for him. And also the law hot on his heels the whole time, the places that he was working at kept getting shut down. He went back to the former Soviet Union and did import export, which, you know, every red flag in the world. He buys on admission, said that, you know, he was”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “He had nothing to do with politics at all. He came over to this country, lived in Brooklyn. His father was involved, his family was involved, his associates were involved in, as he puts it, Russian organized crime. He was not going to school, not working a normal job. He was hauling cash around for...”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “That kind of thing. Huey Long, but also, you know, a sort of monarchical thing. I mean, there's a reason that his supporters joke around that, you know, they can't wait for Baron. You know, they can't wait for, maybe Don Jr. isn't going to be the right one. It's certainly not going to be Eric, but Baron's already six foot eight. We're ready for him. I mean, they want it to be, they want politics to be over and just to be in the hands of the strongman. And that's a crossover, I think, between a sort of messianic religious and messianic political.”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “I think that on the political side of it, I think part of the cult feeling is that he's offering something that is not politics. He's saying, if I am in charge, then politics is over. And instead, we will have, I mean, if you're JD Vance, you put it really slickly and you say, we'll have common sense. If you're Donald Trump, you say it in your messianic way, I alone can fix it. You won't have to vote anymore. You won't have to think about these things anymore. Once and for all, we will vanquish our enemies. So he's offering this transcendence.”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “Things are presenting things on the air that we're going to be unverified or unverifiable and we Took the receipts that he had, which was essentially, you know, and I'd ask him if he knew”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “But then we sat down and did the interview, and Lawyer didn't talk at all. Lev talked the whole time, and it was just bombshell after bombshell after bomb.”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “He wanted to do the interview, but the lawyer would be sitting there and probably Lev wouldn't say much. The lawyer would do the whole thing.”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “There's a reason you Talk to people once they're indicted and before they go on trial, it's terrible for their legal defense. So I Wanted to make sure that he had a lawyer”

    2024-10-07 · On with Kara Swisher · Rachel Maddow and Billy Corben on Mobsters, Russia, Trump and the 2020 Election · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT