Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. –  host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio.
At the end of the second hour, Carmichael examined Mayor Cooper’s actions against certain business owners in Nashville as a personal vendetta to destroy their business because they opposed his COVID restrictions.
(Mark Meadows clip plays)
Leahy: Crom Carmichael, that is Mark Meadows, chief of staff of the president, talking about the SCOTUS nomination. And really everything now really does turn the question that you posed in the previous segment. What kind of country do we want to be? What is this all about?
Carmichael: Another example that is in the same house, but not exactly the same subject that we were talking about is how the New York authorities up there are trying to bring a case against Trump’s organization and Donald Trump for misrepresenting the value of assets in making representations to investors and lenders.
Leahy: Now, this is the New York state attorney general who is doing a political hit job on the president.
Carmichael: Right. Michael, it’s so much worse than just that because he has no basis for his action.
Leahy: Well, it’s a she.
Carmichael: She has no basis for her action. In other words, there is not a bank that has claimed anything. There isn’t a financial institution that claimed I’ve been wronged. And this goes back to Michael Cohen. And what they did was the special counsel ended up indicting Michael Cohen for buying some taxi medallions on credit at a bank and then as the taxi medallions went down in value, which they did, he failed to update his financial statement and show that the collateral that the bank had was now less than it otherwise would.
Here is the point I’m trying to make. If we are all equal under the law, does everybody in the country have to live by that very same standard? And if so, we might as well just forget everything. Because everybody’s financial situation is in a constant state of flux.
So if you have even credit card debt and you’ve given the credit card information for you to check on before they make the decision of whether or not you should have credit then according to this theory that the government if it decides it doesn’t like you can come after you for failure to update your financial information.
Leahy: And what the attorney for Steven Smith who owns the honkey-tonk down here in town.
Carmichael: Kid Rock I think.
Leahy: He owns Kid Rock. Remember when this whole thing started in March, who said I’m not shutting down? Who challenged the mayor for a couple of weeks?
Carmichael: I think it was Steve Smith.
Leahy: It was Steve Smith, the owner of Kid Rock. The mayor doesn’t like him. This is the argument of his attorney in the federal lawsuit they’ve filed, this is a personal vendetta by John Cooper by trying to crush the business of Steve Smith and others that he doesn’t like.
Carmichael: And by the way, Cuomo did the same thing to nursing home people who called him out for forcing them to take COVID patients back into their nursing homes. He sent the health department over there to shut them down. And the question is whether or not, I don’t care what you think of a nursing home operator.
To just say if you are going to criticize me then I’m going to send in the government officials and I’m going to shut you down. Could Cooper do that Channel 4 News? Could they do it to Channel 17 to and do something to Dennis Ferrier for asking questions that Channels 4, 5, and 2 think are out of bounds?
Leahy: Very important questions that everyone wants to know.
Carmichael: Very important questions. These are questions inquiring minds want to know. These are legitimate questions about the authority of the mayor and the destruction of his policies.
Leahy: Crom, you know this intuitively. But I’m just going to say publicly here that you were prescient at the beginning of the COVID-19.
Carmichael: Thank you. Please don’t ask me to spell that word. (Laughter) I can barely pronounce it.
Leahy: Well, look. We talked about contact tracing. And you said it will be a disaster. And you are absolutely right. And I’ll tell you why. What we have seen right here in Nashville in the Metro Health Department and how the mayor has handled it is the politicization of contact tracing.
Carmichael: Yeah.
Leahy: That is what we’ve seen. The manipulation of data.
Carmichael: It’s not just the manipulation. If you have contact tracing you can just make it up.
Leahy: This is my point. I think they make it up and change it. This is the impression you get. This is why there needs to be a DOJ investigation of how the Nashville Metro government has put together its data on COVID-19 because it’s contact tracing.
How did this happen? Leslie Waller who is in the Metro Health Department has a master’s degree from Emory I think it is. Obviously a trained professional. Wrote an email to Benjamin Eagles on June 30th in a court document. She said on June 30th that 1,251 cases of COVID-19 have been traced to the construction industry. OK?
Fast forward to this past week. So Brian Todd who heads the communications at the Metro health department here said it was a mistake. It was 1,251, it was really 251. Really? I want to look at the work product. I want to look at all of the contact tracing data that’s been collected in the Metro Health Department. Because my suspicion it has been manipulated and misreported.
Carmichael: All they have to do to make that second statement correct is to erase 1,000 names from the so-called data. Because I don’t even trust the data.
Leahy: That’s my point. I want to look at that data.
Carmichael: Here is what I’ve said from the very beginning. Let us not focus on the number of cases. Let us focus on the number of deaths caused exclusively by COVID.
Leahy: Amen.
Carmichael: It’s a sad day when people die. Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. I don’t think she died of COVID. They haven’t done the autopsy yet. If they find, by the way she had COVID, then she didn’t die of pancreatic cancer, she died of COVID. And this is how ridiculous our government officials have become over politicization of an illness that’s an unhappy illness for some people. But not an extraordinary number.
Listen to the full second hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photos “Nashville Downtown” by Prayitno CC BY 2.0 and “John Cooper” by Nashville Mayor’s Office.
