Colin Kaepernick‘s lawsuit against the NFL has taken an interesting turn.
The former San Francisco 49er began kneeling during the National Anthem to protest police brutality and institutional racism, starting an NFL trend our racist president just couldn’t let go.
Instead of the peaceful protest leading to an important national conversation, Donald Trump picked it as a pet issue, calling out players as anti-American and ginning up his base with hatred.
Related: Trump Suggests NFL Players Who Don’t Stand For The National Anthem Should Be DEPORTED!
But that wasn’t all he did.
Kaepernick became a free agent in spring 2018, but despite having a solid year as a QB (beating the likes of Eli Manning in stats) he could not get hired by another team. Kaepernick eventually filed suit, saying the League had conspired to freeze him out, something many fans believed was a no-brainer.
But speaking of no-brainers, it now turns out Trump didn’t just make the atmosphere worse with tweets and speeches — he also made private phone calls that helped keep Kaepernick off the field!
In a sworn deposition given as part of Kaepernick’s grievance, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones revealed Trump called him and said:
“This is a very winning, strong issue for me. Tell everybody, you can’t win this one. This one lifts me.”
It was all about politics for Trump. Something to make him look good with his base. Ugh.
As Kaepernick’s lawyer Mark Geragos said on the Straight Aim legal podcast on Monday, it was this intimidation that pushed the League to circle the wagons — with his client on the outside:
“The only reason — and the owners will admit that — they haven’t signed him is they’re afraid of Trump, and they’ve colluded because of Trump.”
If he straight up called and told owners not to challenge him — while saying things like they should “get that son of a bitch off the field” who doesn’t stand for the anthem — it sounds like intimidation to us.
Especially because it worked — getting them off the field is exactly what the NFL did, as their new policy forces protesting players to stay in the locker room!
Geragos says the recent policy change is more evidence Trump used his political weight to mess with their business:
“This substantiates everything we have thought all along and just proves that they colluded. I think clearly the fact that they said [the vote] was unanimous, yet then it startled to trickle down that two of the owners abstained and then another said that he would absorb it, and then another owner called it idiotic and then [Golden State Warriors coach] Steve Kerr called it idiotic, I think it’s clear you can use that as a piece of evidence to show that they’ve colluded.'”
Do YOU think Kaepernick has a case??
[Image via Kento Nara/Future Image/WENN/Twitter.]
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