M, the S, W, media.

Hello and welcome to the Daily Beans for Tuesday, December 24th, 2019. I'm your host A.G.

and today we have a wonderful interview with Andrew Torres from the opening arguments podcast about how Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post and Amazon alleged he was blackmailed by David Pecker from American Media Inc.

and potentially breaking his non-prossecution agreement with the Southern District of New York in the now famous Hush Money Campaign Finance crimes that aren't in the Southern District of New York anymore but have moved their way to the Manhattan District Attorney's side vans and are just about to be decided in the Supreme Court.

This interview originally aired in an episode called Bezos Exposes Pecker on February 10th, 2019. I hope you enjoy it.

Hello and joining us for the interview today is co-host of the opening arguments podcast and real-life lawyer Andrew Torres. Andrew, welcome to Muller She wrote.

Hey, G. Thank you so much for having me on.

We're really delighted to have you here. I love your podcast and I think this is going to be pretty epic. So the discussion I wanted to have with you today is about the story that broke this week about AMI lawyers allegedly blackmailing Jeff Bezos or Bezos.

He's the owner of Amazon in the Washington Post and a known political enemy of Donald Trump by basically threatening to release photos related to his extramarital affair unless he went on the record saying that AMI's motives were not, you know, what AMI was doing was not politically motivated.

Can you tell us your first of all just your top line reaction to these allegations in that media article that 10 page media media article that Bezos wrote.

Yeah, so let me say it this way, right, I among my day job includes I represent a bunch of podcasts. So it's literally true to say that I've that dick jokes for a living.

I've kind of a strange legal career and this is the most bizarre correspondence between lawyers that I have ever seen in my entire life.

It absolutely has sort of all the makings of extortion around it and you know, I mean like when you start to pour through it, you see completely contradictory statements right like you see AMI's lawyers on the one hand saying it was perfectly legitimate for us to capture, you know, naked photos of you, you know, Jeff Bezos.

And for us to publish it, but by the way, we're happy to enter into an agreement to not publish a thing that would obviously make us a lot of money as a tabloid press.

I mean, it's just it's it's crazy. It's insane. I've never seen anything like it.

Yeah, and speaking of gosh, that email that really odd exchange. Well, I can't remember the name of AMI's lawyer again, but is he now as he jeopardizing his, his, you know, his bar.

Membership in doing this kind of thing. I mean, it seems straight out to me. It seems like extortion.

Yeah, so so a couple things. I mean, I want to I want to talk about extortion. The deputy general counsel who's on the email that contains the proposed terms is John fine, not somebody I know.

In terms of could he get disbarred? You know, you typically don't get disbarred as a lawyer. I mean, it's one of the shames of of our profession.

You can do all sorts of horrible things, but so long as you're not coming gling client funds, you typically get, you know, censured or reprimanded or whatever.

I don't know if I'm sure there are some I don't know of a case that involves a lawyer getting disbarred for being super shady.

But that being said, right, it I I share your take on things, right? Like the the federal extortion statute, right, says that's 18 USC 875 says that it's a crime to intend to extort a thing of value by threatening to injure the property or reputation of someone.

...