Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here,
Speaker 1: and we here at Breaking Points, are already thinking of
Speaker 1: ways we can up our game for this critical election.
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Speaker 3: But enough with that, let's get to the show.
Speaker 4: Good Tuesday morning, everybody, and welcome to Breaking Points. Stager
Speaker 4: is still out on his honeymoon, but we have an
Speaker 4: amazing show for him.
Speaker 5: Indeed we do. We have lots to discuss.
Speaker 1: Kamala now appears to be the presumptive nominee. She has
Speaker 1: locked up sufficient delegate. She gave a barn Burner a
Speaker 1: speech over it. What was Biden HQ, which is now
Speaker 1: Kamala Harris HQ. We'll get into all of that. We
Speaker 1: also have some polls early indications of how she fares
Speaker 1: visavi Donald Trump as opposed to Joe Biden. We also
Speaker 1: want to take a look at a wild hearing yesterday
Speaker 1: with the Director of the Secret Service, who inexplicably still
Speaker 1: has her job. Hopefully that doesn't last too much longer
Speaker 1: because there is bipartisan outrage over the many manifest failures
Speaker 1: and inability to answer just basic questions yesterday in this hearing,
Speaker 1: so we'll bring you that. We also have the dearborn
Speaker 1: mayor joining us to talk about Bbi Na Yaho's visit
Speaker 1: to town and specifically about how he is viewing the
Speaker 1: shift from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris. So going to
Speaker 1: be very interesting to hear his perspective and that of
Speaker 1: his constituency.
Speaker 5: Today we're going.
Speaker 1: To take a look at the latest conspiracy with regard
Speaker 1: to Joe Biden.
Speaker 5: Where's Joe?
Speaker 3: Here's Joe?
Speaker 1: I mean, listen, it is a little weird. He haven't
Speaker 1: appeared in public.
Speaker 3: I will give them that, absolutely weird.
Speaker 1: But in any case, we'll give you the very latest
Speaker 1: about what is being shared and spread there, including his
Speaker 1: phone call into his former headquarters campaign headquarters. But was
Speaker 1: it really a phone call, Ryan, was it actually a recording?
Speaker 3: We don't know, voice memo.
Speaker 5: We'll take a look.
Speaker 1: Also, wanted to catch up with what's going on with
Speaker 1: the RKA Junior report that he asked for a Trump
Speaker 1: Cabinet position in exchange for an dodorsement, a quid pro
Speaker 1: quo that was too shameless, reportedly even for the Trump people.
Speaker 1: And so what that means for the race. And we've
Speaker 1: got jefs Stine and not a perfect call, I guess
Speaker 1: from a RFK Junior's standpoint, And we've got Diine in
Speaker 1: to talk about Kamala Harris. Who is she really? I
Speaker 1: think that is a big question mark. I don't think
Speaker 1: anyone can really resolve what are the indications about what
Speaker 1: her core policy commitments could be, if to the extent
Speaker 1: that there are any Taking a look at Jim Kramer
Speaker 1: apparently very happy with the shift from Biden to Kamala,
Speaker 1: which you know, you could take in a number of
Speaker 1: different directions. So anyway, we'll dig into all of that,
Speaker 1: given that she is now the presumptive nominee, and we
Speaker 1: could go ahead and start the show there, because as
Speaker 1: I mentioned, she gave this speech at what was Biden HQ.
Speaker 1: She's just basically taking his campaign over. She gets the
Speaker 1: benefit of his war chest. She has asked his campaign
Speaker 1: manager to now serve as her campaign manager. She's keeping
Speaker 1: even Chris Coons as a campaign co chair, adding Gretchen
Speaker 1: whitmer In as well, but let's take a listen to
Speaker 1: a little bit of what you had to say yesterday.
Speaker 6: I think we made the right decision. I know how
Speaker 6: hard you've worked, how many sacrifices you made, so many
Speaker 6: of you, so many of you up for you to
Speaker 6: your lives, for me, and the kind of commitments few
Speaker 6: people make for anything these days. But you made it.
Speaker 6: And I've been honored and humbled. I mean, this is
Speaker 6: from the bottom of my heart, my words of Biden
Speaker 6: for all you've done for me and my family and.
Speaker 7: You, and I know it's been a rollercoaster and we're
Speaker 7: all filled with so many mixed emotions about this. I
Speaker 7: just have to say, I love Joe Biden. I love
Speaker 7: Joe Biden, and I know we all do, and we
Speaker 7: have so many darn.
Speaker 1: Good reasons for.
Speaker 7: Loving Joe Biden, and I have full faith that this
Speaker 7: team is the team will be the reason we win
Speaker 7: in November. You all who are here, and as Julie
Speaker 7: always says, and I will quote the great Julie, we
Speaker 7: are one team, one fight. So in the days and
Speaker 7: weeks ahead, I, together with you, will do everything in
Speaker 7: my power to unite our Democratic Party, to unite our
Speaker 7: nation and to win this election. You know, as many
Speaker 7: of you know, before I was elected as Vice president,
Speaker 7: before I was elected as United States Senator, I was
Speaker 7: the elected attorney general I've mentioned to California, and before that,
Speaker 7: I was a courtroom prosecutor. In those roles, I took
Speaker 7: on perpetrators of all.
Speaker 8: Kinds, creditors who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers,
Speaker 8: cheaters who broke the rules.
Speaker 7: For their own gain. So hear me when I say
Speaker 7: I know Donald Trump's type.
Speaker 1: So, Ryan, what do you make of her first outing?
Speaker 1: A lot of enthusiasm there for her at Biden now,
Speaker 1: Harris HQ.
Speaker 4: Well, interesting that she's definitely leaning into the cop versus
Speaker 4: the predator kind of meme she was.
Speaker 3: She moved away from that in twenty twenty.
Speaker 4: She tried to say that she was a progressive prosecutor
Speaker 4: fit with the more progressive time of that era, but
Speaker 4: it did not match at all her record, right, and
Speaker 4: so the gap between that and her record was the
Speaker 4: thing that Ptolsy Gabbert drove a steamroller through and ran
Speaker 4: her over. There's now a bit of a backlash to
Speaker 4: that period of time, and so she's kind of re
Speaker 4: embracing the Kamlo the cop a little bit.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now she's also not a primary, really.
Speaker 4: Not in a primary, just going after Trump, and so right,
Speaker 4: she doesn't have to win over anybody in the party.
Speaker 4: She's spent the last twenty four hours with what Axios
Speaker 4: called shock and awe, I think accurately, like she's just
Speaker 4: a nobody running a run against her, and we see
Speaker 4: why the entire party, which loves order and hierarchy, ordered
Speaker 4: themselves behind her.
Speaker 3: She's raised what over one hundred million dollars.
Speaker 1: She's raised over one hundred million dollars from grassroots.
Speaker 3: Then and another from rich people.
Speaker 1: One hundred and fifty million from rich people at least,
Speaker 1: So we're talking about a quarter of a billion dollars
Speaker 1: in a roughly twenty four hour time period.
Speaker 4: And she's racked up all the endorsements she needs from delegates.
Speaker 4: She's got everybody lining up behind her, she's got all
Speaker 4: of her opponents dropping out. So you'll there will be
Speaker 4: a vote, yeah, although it won't be at the convention.
Speaker 1: Right, they are sticking with the virtual role call convention plans.
Speaker 3: For some reason, they continue to tell this lie that
Speaker 3: for ballot access reasons.
Speaker 4: You know, they're so far into the lie, and now
Speaker 4: it's less controversially go forward with it, right, but.
Speaker 1: They're disfy love it well because the other thing that
Speaker 1: they continue to be worried about is protesters with regard
Speaker 1: to Palestine.
Speaker 5: So you know, the original so.
Speaker 1: Ohio did have this rule, this law Ohio. The Republican
Speaker 1: governor and legislature there changed the law to make sure
Speaker 1: it wasn't a problem, but Democrats had already seized on
Speaker 1: this excuse of the law initially in order to try
Speaker 1: to avoid any sort of messiness with regards to pro
Speaker 1: Palestine protesters. Then it became very convenient for the Biden
Speaker 1: dead enders who wanted to, you know, make sure he
Speaker 1: could lock this up as quickly as possible. And now
Speaker 1: I think you're right. I mean, it continues to be
Speaker 1: convenient in terms of Palestine protesters, but also they're so
Speaker 1: far into the lie that we're like, I guess we're just.
Speaker 5: Doing this virtual world call thing.
Speaker 1: And they liked it last time around in twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: even though going back in life, looking at the online
Speaker 1: DNC is sort of like a fever dream.
Speaker 5: That's some weird stuff.
Speaker 4: There, and you've seen some of the you've seen some
Speaker 4: of the rationale for why the Biden dead enders were
Speaker 4: so confident that they could be so out there, you know,
Speaker 4: for Biden calling everybody who's trying to take him out racist,
Speaker 4: because they knew, from the squad to the Rachel Bittercoffers
Speaker 4: of the world that the second that Biden stepped aside
Speaker 4: would be just permission to forget all of it and
Speaker 4: just jump in, you know, with two feet For Kamala Harris. Yeah,
Speaker 4: Rachel Bidakoffer, who you know, doesn't even matter who she
Speaker 4: is Resistance Twitter.
Speaker 1: She's especially a Virginia political scientist just for Newport University,
Speaker 1: I believe.
Speaker 4: Analyzes elections using the different you know, data points, but
Speaker 4: has become like a leading blue and Envoye was one
Speaker 4: of the ones, just you know, most viciously attacking people
Speaker 4: about taking Biden out. She said, She said something this morning,
Speaker 4: like this the first morning where I didn't want to
Speaker 4: hide under my bed, under my covers, like all day long.
Speaker 3: It's like what you were.
Speaker 4: Attacking everybody who was trying to get you to this
Speaker 4: this place where you're now joyously participating in it. That
Speaker 4: was But the thing about joy is it just washes
Speaker 4: it all away. So Democrats are so happy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it's like.
Speaker 4: The celebration at the end of the Super Bowl. Everybody forgets
Speaker 4: what happened in Game two.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, Harry says that like all of these
Speaker 1: people who were vociferously arguing that Biden's greatest leader we've
Speaker 1: ever had, is outrageous that anyone would want to push
Speaker 1: him aside. The minute he does, they're like the happiest
Speaker 1: people on the planet and celebrating the historic nature of
Speaker 1: Kamala Harris Cannessy, which is, you know, legitimate. She will
Speaker 1: be the first black woman to be a major party nominee,
Speaker 1: so that is, you know, that is history making.
Speaker 5: It is a big deal. But to get back to.
Speaker 1: Your point, Ryan, we could put a five I believe
Speaker 1: up on the screen. We have a major update to
Speaker 1: this though this was yesterday, Kamala had crossed the one
Speaker 1: thousand mark in terms of committed delegates. Now she is
Speaker 1: at two thousand, six hundred and sixty eight delegates. That
Speaker 1: means she has significantly more than the majority that she
Speaker 1: would need. So she now really is the presumptive nominee
Speaker 1: given the support through the Chakanau campaign, I mean, really
Speaker 1: one of the only remaining holdouts who hasn't just fully
Speaker 1: endorsed her is actually Barack Obama.
Speaker 4: What about the brother from like Marshall Islands or whatever,
Speaker 4: who won the three delegates.
Speaker 1: In Guam or Oh, I think he's still holding out.
Speaker 3: We looked at his name, Jason Palmer.
Speaker 1: He was going to say, we looked up his name
Speaker 1: yesterday and I've already forgotten it.
Speaker 4: He's famous in the mainland according to his own campaigns,
Speaker 4: yet somehow we don't. We can't remember his name. But yeah,
Speaker 4: so Barack Obama and that guy are among the loan holdouts. Yeah, Obama,
Speaker 4: can you know, keep his elder statesman's image here?
Speaker 5: Do you think that's what he's doing.
Speaker 3: At this point?
Speaker 4: I mean I think he was genuinely hoping that there
Speaker 4: would be some type of open contest. Yeah, because also
Speaker 4: an open contest is where he gets to be the man.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right behind the scene maker.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Queen maker.
Speaker 4: It's not going to happen. So now it's pointless for it.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's you'll probably see him when it's like
Speaker 4: completely over.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: One last point on bit of Coffer before we move on.
Speaker 4: She was also the one arguing that it was completely
Speaker 4: illegal to get rid of Biden.
Speaker 5: Oh, which she was just wrong. It was illegal, Yeah.
Speaker 3: You can't do it.
Speaker 4: And now she's absolutely over which was the moon.
Speaker 1: So preposterous because he wasn't even the nominee yet, you know,
Speaker 1: he was the presumptive nominee. But there's a reason why
Speaker 1: he used that word because it hasn't happened yet. So
Speaker 1: the idea that he couldn't himself step aside and that
Speaker 1: that would be illegal to do was always preposter I
Speaker 1: still see Mike Johnson, you know, speak of the House,
Speaker 1: Mike Johnson out there claiming he's gonna mount some sort
Speaker 1: of legal challenges to Biden being swapped out for Kamala.
Speaker 1: But again, he wasn't even the nominee, so good luck
Speaker 1: with those legal challenges that those aren't going anywhere. But
Speaker 1: that's a that's a great point that a number of
Speaker 1: these people were making the point that this would be
Speaker 1: illegal and it would go to you know, it would
Speaker 1: be wrong, and Biden's amazing and how could you possibly
Speaker 1: want to do that? And now they're completely over the
Speaker 1: moon now that it is Kamala. Harris, just to run
Speaker 1: through some of the additional movement in her direction, we
Speaker 1: can put up a two. Pelosi did come out and
Speaker 1: endorse Kamala Harris, she didn't do it right away, so
Speaker 1: she and Barack Obama were initial, early significant holdowns, since
Speaker 1: they were also two of the most critical figures in
Speaker 1: terms of pushing Biden out of the race. But she
Speaker 1: says that today is with immense pride, limitless optimism for
Speaker 1: our country's future that I endorse Vice President Kamala Harris
Speaker 1: for President of the US. My enthusiastic support for Kamala
Speaker 1: Harris for president is official, personal and political. I don't
Speaker 1: really know all of the intra California politics within the
Speaker 1: Democratic Party, but it was my sense that she I
Speaker 1: guess she's more of a Gavin Newsom person, and so
Speaker 1: she was kind of holding space open in case Gavin
Speaker 1: had a chance to make a run at it. Once
Speaker 1: it was clear that everyone's consolidating quickly aroun Kamala Harris.
Speaker 1: She goes ahead and jumps in so she can be
Speaker 1: on the right side.
Speaker 5: There.
Speaker 1: Let's put the next piece up on the screen so
Speaker 1: we can get to some of the polling about what
Speaker 1: we know at this point. So this was a new
Speaker 1: national poll that came out and it has Kamala losing
Speaker 1: to Trump, but by less than she was losing to
Speaker 1: Trump previously, or rather less than Biden was losing to
Speaker 1: Trump previously. Trump here is plus two against Biden. He
Speaker 1: had been plus six, so you can see I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: plus four. I'm just screwing this one up all the
Speaker 1: way around. But Trump was plus four now he's plus two.
Speaker 1: So Harris somewhat outperforming Biden there, and that's kind of
Speaker 1: what we're seeing. We also saw Quinnipiac pole that came
Speaker 1: out this morning that showed a similar result. Trump had
Speaker 1: been plus three nationally on Biden. Now he's plus two
Speaker 1: nationally on Kamala. That changes within the margin of error,
Speaker 1: so not a huge swing. We see a more significant swing.
Speaker 1: We can put the next piece up on the screen.
Speaker 1: We see a more significant swing if you dig into
Speaker 1: some of this data of which groups are moving towards
Speaker 1: Kamala Harris. And one thing that was really interesting to
Speaker 1: me here Ryan is the fact that actually every group
Speaker 1: except people with postgraduate degrees moved towards Kamala Harris. So
Speaker 1: you see significant movement among Black Americans towards Kamala Harris
Speaker 1: viz A VI where they were with regard to Biden,
Speaker 1: you see some movement with regard to white voter, some
Speaker 1: movement with regard to Hispanic voters, significant movement with less
Speaker 1: than college degree, some movement with college crads, and no
Speaker 1: movement with post grades. So it's a little bit different
Speaker 1: than what I would have expected, frankly, but in essentially
Speaker 1: every group she outperforms Biden by at least some margin
Speaker 1: according to this poll.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think Democrats had kind of maxed out
Speaker 4: their postgraduate lead that they could.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they were because they'd already locked that one up.
Speaker 4: The postgraduate folks that read the news closely, they're on
Speaker 4: their phones all the time, checking Twitter or threads or whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and they knew how bad Biden was and they were
Speaker 4: still supporting him. Yeah, so now they're supporting Kamala who
Speaker 4: you got against Trump?
Speaker 3: Is basically how those they're.
Speaker 1: Sort of the most like partisan, locked in least swingy
Speaker 1: of the potential, they're not taking.
Speaker 4: In any new information and then deciding to vote for Trump.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Zero.
Speaker 1: They are the epitome of vote blue nombi.
Speaker 4: I could have been dead on election day and they
Speaker 4: would cast their ballot for Biden.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is the Rachel Bitakopfer vote basically exactly. All right,
Speaker 1: we've got another poll here. This was an interesting one.
Speaker 1: This is from Civics. We can put this up on
Speaker 1: the screen. They say, we started tracking Trump versus Harris
Speaker 1: two weeks ago. Normally the Info's paywall, but this is
Speaker 1: our sharing. So through seven twenty one, Biden was trailing
Speaker 1: Trump forty six to forty four nationally. Harris was ahead
Speaker 1: in this poll forty eight forty six. They say Trump
Speaker 1: is stuck at a ceiling of forty six. Harris gains
Speaker 1: from third party undecided voters, and then if you dig
Speaker 1: into the cross tabs here you get kind of a
Speaker 1: similar picture. It can put this next piece up on
Speaker 1: the screen. Young voters go from Biden plus eight to
Speaker 1: Harris plus twenty.
Speaker 5: So that's not surprising given.
Speaker 1: How disgusted young voters and particularly have been with regards
Speaker 1: to Biden's policy visa the Israel. Perhaps they're giving Harris
Speaker 1: more of a shot there in spite of the fact
Speaker 1: that obviously, you know, she was part of this administration.
Speaker 1: Independents go from Trump plus sixteen to they narrow that
Speaker 1: march into Trump plus eight. Harris also picks up seven
Speaker 1: percentage points among Black voters, eight percentage points among Hispanic voters,
Speaker 1: almost all from third party and undecided.
Speaker 5: So what do you think of this data here?
Speaker 1: Ryan?
Speaker 4: A lot of people were just refusing to vote for
Speaker 4: Biden but did not want to vote for Trump. And
Speaker 4: that is how we kind of have understood this election
Speaker 4: the entire time, that so many people just don't like
Speaker 4: either candidate. Yeah, but a ton of them just really,
Speaker 4: really really did not like Biden.
Speaker 3: But they're definitely not voting for Trump, or they're.
Speaker 4: Like they hadn't gotten themselves to the place yet where
Speaker 4: they were willing to admit that they were going to
Speaker 4: vote for Trump. And then Kamala Harris comes in, she
Speaker 4: has a burst of news.
Speaker 3: They were like, Okay, she seems like a fine, normal person, right.
Speaker 4: I I don't dislike her, and I'm not afraid that
Speaker 4: she's incapable of doing the job like Joe Biden. Plus,
Speaker 4: you're right, she wasn't the one Her administration was sending
Speaker 4: weapons and is sending weapons didn't real, but she was
Speaker 4: not the one out there bear hugging net and Yahoo
Speaker 4: and people understand in general that vice presidents are powerless,
Speaker 4: so she could benefit from that kind of just intuitive
Speaker 4: sense that people have that this was a Biden plan. Now,
Speaker 4: how she handles the net yah who visit is reflective
Speaker 4: of this. She doesn't want to be seen publicly with them,
Speaker 4: but she's going to meet privately with them. We'll talk
Speaker 4: about that later, right, But yeah, I think that's what
Speaker 4: it is. You what's your read?
Speaker 3: Does this what you would have expected to see? Yeah?
Speaker 1: This is about what I would have expected to see.
Speaker 1: Some of the pulling indicates she performs less well than
Speaker 1: Biden when it comes to like old white voters, where
Speaker 1: he has had a particular strength, And you know, that
Speaker 1: is a real negative for her because those are people
Speaker 1: who a lot of they show up. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of them, and they show up. So that was one
Speaker 1: of his strengths. But I do think that the fact
Speaker 1: number one, she's a way more committed and credible messenger
Speaker 1: when it comes to democrats core message about abortion. I mean,
Speaker 1: Biden has never been comfortable there, and all he can,
Speaker 1: as we've discussed, like all he really knows and cares
Speaker 1: to talk about these days is NATO anyway, but he
Speaker 1: doesn't even really personally agree with choice and has been
Speaker 1: bad on abortion his entire career. So you know, to
Speaker 1: ask him to be a incredible messenger there. I also
Speaker 1: think that there's an expectation Commlent not only has credibility
Speaker 1: to deliver the message, she has more credibility that she
Speaker 1: might actually do something on it, Like she might actually
Speaker 1: care about it and exert some sort of effort to
Speaker 1: do something about it. So that makes it more salient.
Speaker 1: That makes her a much better messenger. And I think
Speaker 1: it'll matter a lot how she plays this week, in
Speaker 1: particular with Bebe's visit, in terms of whether young voters
Speaker 1: who were like I can't vote for you know, I
Speaker 1: hate Trump, but I can't vote for an administration and
Speaker 1: president who is committing a genocide, whether they are able
Speaker 1: to you know, stomach voting for Kamala Harris given the complicity.
Speaker 1: But if she's able to strike some sort of a
Speaker 1: you know, arms length distance from from Bebe and express
Speaker 1: more empathy and just basic humanity towards Palestinians, I think
Speaker 1: that would go a long way. So we're going to talk,
Speaker 1: as I said before, to the dearborn Mayor today about
Speaker 1: how he is viewing things. It'll be interesting to hear
Speaker 1: from his perspective and that of his constituents how they
Speaker 1: are assessing all of this. But you know, the other
Speaker 1: thing with Biden is, yeah, the Democratic faithful, We're going
Speaker 1: to drag their buts the polls and vote for him.
Speaker 1: But there was no enthusiasm for this man. I mean,
Speaker 1: he did not have ever a like movement behind him,
Speaker 1: which is how also they were able to so easily
Speaker 1: push him out too, because he didn't have any sort
Speaker 1: of grassroots, true base of support. Very different from a
Speaker 1: Donald Trump, very different from you know, back in the
Speaker 1: Bernie Sanders days even tho I would say, different from
Speaker 1: Hillary Clinton, who genuinely had a group of women who
Speaker 1: were like really in for Hillary, right. He has never
Speaker 1: had that. He doesn't have that. He was a product of,
Speaker 1: you know, the sort of elite machinations behind the scenes
Speaker 1: that brought him in. We are seeing a genuine surge
Speaker 1: of huge enthusiasm for Kamala Harris.
Speaker 5: We can put this back up, we can put this
Speaker 5: up on the screen.
Speaker 1: The amount of money that she is raising is astonishing.
Speaker 1: So this Politico article describes her big donor money bomb.
Speaker 1: They're talking about one hundred and fifty million dollars that
Speaker 1: was raised into a super pack that will be all
Speaker 1: Kamala Harris all the time. In addition, we've put the
Speaker 1: next one up on the screen. They say that she
Speaker 1: raised eighty one million dollars in the first twenty four
Speaker 1: hours since she announced. This is now up over one
Speaker 1: hundred million dollars, so two hundred and fifty million dollars
Speaker 1: in the course of basically a day. And not only that,
Speaker 1: but huge number of these come from first time donors.
Speaker 1: I have the numbers in front of me, more than
Speaker 1: one point million, one point one million unique donors, so
Speaker 1: individuals in the country given to the campaign, sixty two
Speaker 1: percent of them first time givers, and more than fifty
Speaker 1: eight thousand people I'm reading from Ed o'keef by the way,
Speaker 1: on Twitter right now have signed up to volunteer for
Speaker 1: the Harris campaign since Sunday afternoon.
Speaker 5: I was we were talking before the.
Speaker 1: Show, Ryan, I was really floored by there was an
Speaker 1: organizing call among a group that organizes black women. They
Speaker 1: had forty thousand people.
Speaker 5: On this organizing call.
Speaker 1: And you know, having that's insane, like on a Democrat,
Speaker 1: for any group, for any time, et cetera, to have
Speaker 1: that many people showing up and saying what can we do?
Speaker 5: How can we support.
Speaker 1: That is night and day from where they were with
Speaker 1: Joe Biden, where people were basically on like a due
Speaker 1: march to November.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then they had a call with black men
Speaker 4: that had many thousands as well that raised more than
Speaker 4: a million dollars.
Speaker 3: That one raised several million.
Speaker 4: And I think your abortion rights point is so key
Speaker 4: because people understand that they're actually just think about this.
Speaker 4: Will there be a material difference in abortion access in
Speaker 4: a Trump administration versus a Kamala Harris administration? I think
Speaker 4: people just intuitively would say, yes, yeah, there actually will
Speaker 4: be a difference. Yeah, Like the Trump administration will work
Speaker 4: to shut down clinics, to empower attorney attorneys general who
Speaker 4: were trying to hunt women going across state lines, will
Speaker 4: will mess around with MIFA pristo. And even if Evan
Speaker 4: says he's okay with it, which is the conscious sect
Speaker 4: not the conscious the abortion pill that you can get
Speaker 4: by mail, there's also like are they going to try
Speaker 4: to constrict contraception? Like these are all if material things
Speaker 4: in IVF that you can imagine changing, And so often
Speaker 4: business Republicans vote out of material reasons because they think
Speaker 4: they're going to get a tax cut.
Speaker 3: But in general, people vote on vibes.
Speaker 4: And on emotion and on just kind of atmospherics of like,
Speaker 4: this is the party that I prefer over this party.
Speaker 4: But you're not exactly sure precisely how the policy is
Speaker 4: going to impact you directly. But when it comes to
Speaker 4: abortion rights, it stands the reason that there will be
Speaker 4: material difference between these two parties. And when it's on
Speaker 4: the ballot, like on a constitutional amendment or referendum, people
Speaker 4: come out and overwhelmingly in every state support abortion rights.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So I think a combined with the honeymoon that she's getting,
Speaker 4: rather than Trump getting a honeymoon out of his this convention,
Speaker 4: she gets the bump.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the RNC honeymoon bump.
Speaker 4: We'll see how much of it is a honeymoon and
Speaker 4: how and you know whether she can actually because she's
Speaker 4: still an underdog. That's what people need to remember, Like, yeah,
Speaker 4: completely over the moon for her.
Speaker 1: She's just less of an underdog than Joe Pisen, Yes,
Speaker 1: which is incredible because normally incumbency confers you with quite
Speaker 1: a political advantage, but obviously because of his age and decline,
Speaker 1: that wasn't the case. I also think that that may
Speaker 1: be changing because people are just so so dissatisfied with
Speaker 1: where the country is and where it's heading. It's almost
Speaker 1: more of a burden to be an incumbent and have
Speaker 1: to actually own the decisions in the state of the
Speaker 1: country as it exists under your presidency. But you know,
Speaker 1: TBD on whether that's really the case.
Speaker 4: I think in some ways Trump has all the advantages
Speaker 4: of incumbency without the disadvantages that you're talking about, because
Speaker 4: he's got the nostalgia as well.
Speaker 3: Well people think it was an incumbent.
Speaker 4: But they're like, yeah, things were okay then, right, but
Speaker 4: he's crazy and he's not in my face. But he's
Speaker 4: not my face every day like he was then.
Speaker 3: Yes, so you get you kind of get the benefits
Speaker 3: without the cost.
Speaker 1: I think that's right because one of the major benefits
Speaker 1: of incumbency a couple of them. One of them is
Speaker 1: the bully pulpit. Well, obviously Trump has the bully pulpit,
Speaker 1: like people are going to cover what he says. He
Speaker 1: can get cameras in front of his face whenever he
Speaker 1: wants to, he can drive the national conversation whenever he
Speaker 1: wants to. Outside actually of this specific moment where nothing
Speaker 1: was going to drive the news away from the drama
Speaker 1: with Biden and Biden dropping out, who's going to be
Speaker 1: his successor, et cetera. But the other advantage of incumbency
Speaker 1: is just the fact people see you in the job,
Speaker 1: you know, so it makes it easy for they don't
Speaker 1: have to use their imaginations to think about what that
Speaker 1: would be like. And so they've seen him in the job,
Speaker 1: they know what that was like. And he's got the
Speaker 1: bully the Trump bully pulpit. So I think you're right
Speaker 1: about that, that he has all the advantages of incumbency
Speaker 1: without being saddled with having to reckon with the decisions
Speaker 1: that are being made now the state of the country now,
Speaker 1: and you can put rose colored glasses over what his
Speaker 1: term was actually like, you know, now that we're four
Speaker 1: years down the road. So I agree with you. I
Speaker 1: think Kamala Harris is still an underdog. I think she's
Speaker 1: got a much better shot than Joe Biden did. She
Speaker 1: has her own challenges and weaknesses, But what we're getting
Speaker 1: from the Republicans is some of the attacks that they've
Speaker 1: tried to launch on her have just been like ridiculous, silly,
Speaker 1: embarrassing for them, bad etc. But what they're likely to
Speaker 1: mostly do is paint her as you know, coastal liberal
Speaker 1: out of touch with ordinary Americans. There's also going to
Speaker 1: fixate on she laughs too much, and her sort of
Speaker 1: goofiness and all of those sorts of things, and they'll
Speaker 1: certainly try to seize on otherising her like Jade Vance
Speaker 1: is already basically painting her as like a welfare queen.
Speaker 1: So they're going to do those sorts of things as well,
Speaker 1: which may they may not be able to resist going
Speaker 1: too far in that direction in a way that is
Speaker 1: very negative and off putting for them and reminds people
Speaker 1: of like some of the fringe views and extremism and
Speaker 1: a light coming off that ticket. But the other thing
Speaker 1: is going back to the abortion point, if that issue
Speaker 1: really does continue to be so central, the politics on
Speaker 1: that have moved so dramatically since Roe versus Wade was overturned.
Speaker 1: Now for the first time ever, I think, certainly in
Speaker 1: our lives, you have.
Speaker 5: A very clear supermajority in favor of abortion rights.
Speaker 1: Previously, this was a fifty to fifty issue, and so
Speaker 1: I talked at nauseum way too much yesterday about Andy
Speaker 1: was sheheer governor of Kentucky. But Democrats in Kentucky forever
Speaker 1: were getting killed on abortion. They were running away from
Speaker 1: abortion as fast as they possibly could. You have tons
Speaker 1: of pro life Democrats so that they could continue to
Speaker 1: get elected. Andysheer ran aggressively on choice in his gubinatorial
Speaker 1: reelect and it was incredibly successful. That's how much the
Speaker 1: landscape has shifted on abortion. So painting Kamala Harris as
Speaker 1: a cultural elite in some ways only further solidifies people's
Speaker 1: view that like, oh she's good, that means she's going
Speaker 1: to be good on abortion rights. Like that means she's
Speaker 1: going to be on my side, and where I am
Speaker 1: on abortion rights. I think part of why that issue
Speaker 1: has been so sailing and so politically powerful is not
Speaker 1: just because of the issue itself. It's because of the
Speaker 1: shock of having rights that existed and were taken for
Speaker 1: granted taken away, and so in one instant it blew
Speaker 1: up this very liberal notion of like, oh, progress is
Speaker 1: just inevitable, and the moral arca of the universe is long,
Speaker 1: but it bends towards justice. Then you have oh, my
Speaker 1: mom had this right, my grandma had this right, and
Speaker 1: I don't. This is something I can't take for granted
Speaker 1: in the way that my mother did. What the hell
Speaker 1: is happening here? And what else is on the table?
Speaker 1: So in any case, on that issue, I do think
Speaker 1: it's it's really clear that she'll be a more effective messager,
Speaker 1: more compelling, more credible, that she'll actually do something about it.
Speaker 1: She's been open to getting rid of the filibuster in
Speaker 1: a way that Biden was never open to getting rid
Speaker 1: of the philibuster. So there's some substance there, even as
Speaker 1: on a lot of the issues that you know that
Speaker 1: you and I also really care a lot about, like
Speaker 1: on economics in particular, certainly on criminal justice, on foreign policy,
Speaker 1: there's Kamala Harris is just a giant question mark of
Speaker 1: what she actually believes and what she would actually do
Speaker 1: if she was PROS in the United States.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Yeah, and I and the cynicism that people have
Speaker 4: justifiably that the system can't produce much other change. By
Speaker 4: voting makes abortion rights such a such a more salient
Speaker 4: issue because it's the one thing you actually can vote on.
Speaker 5: That's a great point.
Speaker 4: People thought like, well, if I could vote on to
Speaker 4: give myself a raise or to you know, strengthen unions
Speaker 4: or anything else, they would happily do that, but they
Speaker 4: don't actually believe that the system is going to deliver that.
Speaker 4: Controlled by oligarchs, right, but when it comes to abortion rights, like,
Speaker 4: oh this actually policy is going to change based on
Speaker 4: voting patterns here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so at least what we're saying in the early
Speaker 1: polling here, you know, it's Trump still with an edge,
Speaker 1: but less of an edge, closer to a toss up
Speaker 1: than it was with Joe Biden. Mccamal Harris still an
Speaker 1: underdog with some benefits over Biden and some definite drawbacks
Speaker 1: and coalition challenges as well.
Speaker 5: So we'll see where it goes from here.
Speaker 4: Fascinating hearing yesterday in the House of Representatives where the
Speaker 4: still head of the Secret Service, Kimberly Cheadle, came before
Speaker 4: the committee and I think just surprised everyone a that
Speaker 4: she was still in her job and b that she
Speaker 4: had so few answers. And we should be very clear
Speaker 4: here there are a lot of outstanding questions still about
Speaker 4: the attempt at assassination of Donald Trump. Virtually none of
Speaker 4: them were answered during this hearing, and in fact, only
Speaker 4: more questions were raised Let's roll a couple of the
Speaker 4: exchanges from the hearing here. I think this start with
Speaker 4: AOC here who actually really deeply impressed the right. The
Speaker 4: right was like shocked that they were enjoying like an
Speaker 4: AOC interrogation.
Speaker 3: Let's roll some of this.
Speaker 9: The individual used in AR fifteen in order to act
Speaker 9: out his assassination attempt. An AR fifteen has a range
Speaker 9: of about four to six hundred yards. My question is
Speaker 9: why does the Secret Service perimeter Why is the Secret
Speaker 9: Service protective perimeter shorter than one of the most popular
Speaker 9: semi automatic weapons in the United States.
Speaker 10: There are a number of weapons out there with a
Speaker 10: number of ranges. Again, an advance was completed the determination
Speaker 10: of the perimeter. I'm not going to speak to specifics,
Speaker 10: but there are a number of factors that are taken
Speaker 10: into account when we determine our perimeter. Some of it
Speaker 10: has to do with terrain, some of it has to
Speaker 10: do with buildings, some of it has to do with
Speaker 10: assets and resources that are available.
Speaker 9: And so what I'm hearing is that a perimeter was
Speaker 9: not established out in an outdoor venue that would prevent
Speaker 9: an AR fifteen, which is one of the most common
Speaker 9: weapons used in mass shootings from being able to be
Speaker 9: within the range of Secret Service protection.
Speaker 10: A perimeter was established, and even though there were buildings
Speaker 10: that were outside of that perimeter, it wasn't just that building.
Speaker 10: There were a number of buildings in the area, and
Speaker 10: there was overwatch that was created to help mitigate some
Speaker 10: of those buildings.
Speaker 11: I own an AR fifteen, and last time I shot it,
Speaker 11: I shot it one time. My whole life was six
Speaker 11: years ago. That is until Saturday where we recreated the
Speaker 11: events in Savoy, Texas, where you recreated what happened about her.
Speaker 11: I was lying prone on a slope roof at one
Speaker 11: hundred and thirty yards at six thirty at night, and
Speaker 11: I knew that he had a scope, but I know
Speaker 11: a kind red dot or magnified. So I shot eight
Speaker 11: rounds from both.
Speaker 12: You know what.
Speaker 11: The result was fifteen out of sixteen kill shots and
Speaker 11: the one I missed would have hit the President's ear.
Speaker 11: That's a ninety four percent success rate. And that shooter
Speaker 11: was a better show me. It is a miracle President
Speaker 11: Trump wasn't killed. Corey Comparatre's life is over because that
Speaker 11: damn shooter made it on the roof and it wasn't
Speaker 11: the roof. That was dangerous. It was a nut job
Speaker 11: on top of the roof. You know what else is dangerous.
Speaker 11: I believe you're horrifying an aptitude and your lack of
Speaker 11: skilled leadership is a disgrace. Your obvious skating today is
Speaker 11: shameful and you should be fired immediately and go back
Speaker 11: to garden to Rita.
Speaker 3: That's a reference.
Speaker 4: She was the Pepsi co did security for Pepsi before this.
Speaker 4: That's what the Dorito's reference gotcha was there? But an
Speaker 4: excellent question from AOC there, backed up by the Republican Congress,
Speaker 4: and then I already forgot his name. That with these scopes,
Speaker 4: like you, when you look through these scopes, that's something
Speaker 4: that's one hundred and fifty yards away, you could tell
Speaker 4: what kind of not he did in his tie. You
Speaker 4: could you could tell the brand of it if it's
Speaker 4: like flopping out. Trying to imagine what the shooter was
Speaker 4: able to see through that scope is just deeply frightening,
Speaker 4: because as the guy said, you know, he himself tried
Speaker 4: it and squeezed off fifteen out of sixteen kill shots.
Speaker 3: He's right that.
Speaker 4: From that distance it is a miracle that he didn't
Speaker 4: hit him and I really do think it was the
Speaker 4: crowd by, and we'll get and we're going to get
Speaker 4: to this clip in a second. The crowd by saying
Speaker 4: shooter on the roof, shooter on the roof. That then
Speaker 4: got the Keystone cops to like boost one guy up
Speaker 4: and you look at him on the roof, and then
Speaker 4: the shooter turned and like pointed the gun at the
Speaker 4: cop right, then turned and fired right because he didn't
Speaker 4: have enough time.
Speaker 3: To get himself set, get himself set.
Speaker 4: I think that's why he missed, if he'd have had
Speaker 4: thirty seconds to calmly aim, because he probably knew, he
Speaker 4: probably saw it. There's a Secret Service sniper pointing his
Speaker 4: weapon at me right now. So like difficult conditions. But
Speaker 4: so let's roll this this next clip, which is relevant
Speaker 4: to all this, cheetle.
Speaker 13: As you know, the shooter began shooting at six to
Speaker 13: eleven PM Eastern on July thirteenth. NBC reported that at
Speaker 13: five point fifty one PM, twenty minutes before the shooting began,
Speaker 13: the State Police informed the Secret Service of their concern. Now,
Speaker 13: the rally was not pause at that point, correct now,
Speaker 13: And according to NBC, just two minutes later at five
Speaker 13: point fifty three PM, the Secret Service notified it's snipers
Speaker 13: about the gunman. The rally wasn't paused at that point either, correct. No,
Speaker 13: let me show you some video footage by rally goers.
Speaker 13: If you could play the video on the screen up here.
Speaker 13: This was taken two minutes before the shooting start. If
Speaker 13: you could turn up the volume.
Speaker 14: We have.
Speaker 6: The words, ma'am.
Speaker 13: That doesn't look like suspicious behavior. That looks like threatening
Speaker 13: behavior to me. And the rally wasn't pause at that
Speaker 13: point either.
Speaker 14: Correct.
Speaker 10: I can tell you, as I stated earlier, sir, that
Speaker 10: the moment that the shift surrounding the president were aware
Speaker 10: of an actual threat.
Speaker 13: That's a threat right there. The guy's on the roof
Speaker 13: and everybody's yelling at him, yes and directing the officer's
Speaker 13: attention to him. The rally was not pause at that point. Correct.
Speaker 10: We are currently still combing through communications. And when communications
Speaker 10: were passed.
Speaker 15: Did they share with you how many shell casings were
Speaker 15: on the roof? They have shared with me the Did
Speaker 15: they share with you how many shellcasing were on the roof?
Speaker 10: Yes?
Speaker 15: Okay, how many were there?
Speaker 10: I would refer to the FBI.
Speaker 15: For how as many were there?
Speaker 10: And their information that they need to share in their investigation.
Speaker 15: So they've shared the information with you. You just don't want
Speaker 15: to share the information with us.
Speaker 5: Correct.
Speaker 10: We have concurrent investigations that are going on, So.
Speaker 15: They have shared this information with you. You know the
Speaker 15: answer to the question. You just refuse to answer the
Speaker 15: question from the member of Congress who has subpoenaed you
Speaker 15: to be here.
Speaker 10: Is there a different answer to that question. I was
Speaker 10: always willing to come here and testify before this oversight.
Speaker 10: Hearing beautiful, Then let's do that.
Speaker 15: Let's four once have your actions match your words. So
Speaker 15: you've been in the in communication with the FBI, you
Speaker 15: know the answers, and you refuse to tell us the answers.
Speaker 15: So I will ask you again, you know how many
Speaker 15: shellcasings were on that roof? What is the answer to
Speaker 15: that question? I think it's what is the answer to
Speaker 15: that question?
Speaker 10: I think it's pertinent to talk to you about the
Speaker 10: information that the Secret Service has.
Speaker 16: Would you agree that this is the most serious security
Speaker 16: lapse since President Reagan was shot in nineteen eighty one
Speaker 16: of the Secret Service?
Speaker 10: Yes, sir, I would.
Speaker 16: And you know, do you know what Stuart Knight did
Speaker 16: when he was in charge at the time of the
Speaker 16: Secret Service.
Speaker 3: Do you know what he did afterwards?
Speaker 10: He remained on duty, he resigned.
Speaker 3: Brutal, absolutely brutal.
Speaker 4: The middle one from that was Representative Lisa McLean, Republican
Speaker 4: of Michigan. Asking about the shell casings is key because
Speaker 4: there are a lot of questions about whether or not
Speaker 4: there was another shooter there, and also how many shots
Speaker 4: did he get off and comparing the number of shots
Speaker 4: to the audio, And if you want to put any
Speaker 4: of those questions to rest, you would count the shell
Speaker 4: casings on the roof and see if they match the audio.
Speaker 4: If they do, okay, basically case closed for her not
Speaker 4: to provide that answer for whatever reason she decided not
Speaker 4: to provide.
Speaker 1: It, and to not even give a reason, really why
Speaker 1: she admit that you know the answer and then just
Speaker 1: completely stonewall when pressed on it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and to not know that the guy resigned after
Speaker 4: the Reagan shooting, Like, how do you not know that?
Speaker 1: How did you not yourself resign? I mean, it really
Speaker 1: is perplexing. I have to think that if Joe Biden
Speaker 1: had like a shred of sense about him, she would
Speaker 1: be gone, Like I just it's unfathomable. To me, given
Speaker 1: all that we've learned since this shooting occurred about the
Speaker 1: security failures, you can see truly bipartisan outrage. Like when
Speaker 1: those Congress people were questioning her, you really couldn't tell
Speaker 1: who was a D or who was an R because
Speaker 1: they all were so flabbergasted by these security failures. The
Speaker 1: New York Times in another sign of how this is
Speaker 1: a deeply bipartisan concern.
Speaker 5: At this point, we could put up a tear sheet.
Speaker 1: B three, they compiled a list of some of the
Speaker 1: questions that she would not answer, the shellcasings being one
Speaker 1: of them. Here's some of the other ones. Why did
Speaker 1: the Secret Service not station an agent on that warehouse roof?
Speaker 1: She had previously said there were concerns because it was sloped,
Speaker 1: safety concerns.
Speaker 5: It was barely slope.
Speaker 1: Number one. Number two, I mean, that's just preposterous.
Speaker 3: Number two. Your job is that it jump in front
Speaker 3: of bullets.
Speaker 1: Your job is to put yourself in danger to protect
Speaker 1: your protectees. So I mean, it just crazy on that one.
Speaker 1: But here she just stonewalls. Then how many Secret Service
Speaker 1: agents were assigned to protect Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Won't
Speaker 1: answer that for some reason, who decided the warehouse roof
Speaker 1: would be outside the Secret Service's security perimeter, even though
Speaker 1: it was so close, even though you know AOC's pointing out,
Speaker 1: this is one of the most popular firearms in America
Speaker 1: and it's well within its range. How could this be
Speaker 1: outside the security perimeter? Won't answer? Why did the Secret
Speaker 1: Service allow former President Trump to take the stage despite
Speaker 1: people in the crowd pointing out a gunman on the
Speaker 1: warehouse roof?
Speaker 5: And we now know that they had identified.
Speaker 1: The shooter as a suspicious person nearly half an hour
Speaker 1: before the rally even began, So it is inexplicable. It
Speaker 1: is outrageous that he was allowed to take the stage,
Speaker 1: and then he was allowed to contin you up to
Speaker 1: the point where he's getting shot in the ear and
Speaker 1: nearly directly assassinated. Another question not answered, how did the shooter,
Speaker 1: mister Crooks get his rifle up onto the warehouse roof?
Speaker 1: Did he leave it there before the rally? We know
Speaker 1: he had made multiple trips now to the area before
Speaker 1: the rally, including and I'll put this tear sheet up
Speaker 1: in a little while, including apparently he was able to
Speaker 1: fly a drone multiple times over the fairgrounds to get
Speaker 1: a bird's eye view so he could really properly scope
Speaker 1: out what his target range was going to be. And finally,
Speaker 1: what additional security steps did the Secret Service take after
Speaker 1: the US learned about this alleged potential Iranian plot to
Speaker 1: kill mister Trump. So they had stonewalled on the shell
Speaker 1: casings on the perimeter on basics like how many Secret
Speaker 1: Service agents were assigned on the timeline about what they
Speaker 1: knew and when they say they don't haven't stored the
Speaker 1: radio communications, so that's probably lost to history over what
Speaker 1: the communication was like and when they knew there was
Speaker 1: a very clear active threat that was identified by the crowd.
Speaker 1: This is utter insanity that she's still.
Speaker 5: In the job.
Speaker 4: If I were Kamala, the first like major act I
Speaker 4: do is like I demand that she'd be fired. True,
Speaker 4: And then somebody would tell Joe Biden like, hey, by
Speaker 4: the way, you're still president, Kamala would like you to
Speaker 4: fire this director, and then he makes it, make it official.
Speaker 4: But she gets the credit for it, because imagine if
Speaker 4: we tried to do like a counterpoints Friday debate like
Speaker 4: should the Secret Service director resign? Ah hard it would
Speaker 4: be to find somebody like maybe Demetri would make that.
Speaker 1: You'd have to get her herself in yeah, to make
Speaker 1: a wildly inadequate case. I think she'd be the only
Speaker 1: one defending. And listen, I want to be clear too,
Speaker 1: I think there are many problems at the Secret Service
Speaker 1: that go beyond just her. Right, she clearly is the problem,
Speaker 1: and I think this testimony is a massive problem, But
Speaker 1: I also think there are structural issues there. Ken Klippenstein,
Speaker 1: a great friend and your former colleague, has you know,
Speaker 1: closely covered Secret Service. One of the things he's talking
Speaker 1: about is the fact that they have had such mission create.
Speaker 1: The number of things that are assigned to the Secret
Speaker 1: Service at this point have just you know, absolutely ballooned.
Speaker 1: It's caused them in some ways to take their eye
Speaker 1: off the ball. You've also had a number of scandals
Speaker 1: over the years about their behavior and lack of professionalism.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot going on there that predates this
Speaker 1: particular Secret Service director. But still, ultimately the buck stops
Speaker 1: with this woman, and the fact that she's still there,
Speaker 1: that she hasn't offered her resignation and hasn't been pushed
Speaker 1: out is just completely mind boggling to me. We could
Speaker 1: put this next piece up on the screen. The two
Speaker 1: members highest ranking members that the chairman and the ranking
Speaker 1: Democratic ranking member on this oversight committee, James Comer and
Speaker 1: Jamie Raskin, put out a letter calling for her resignation.
Speaker 1: They say, we call on you to resign as director
Speaker 1: as a first step to allowing new leadership to swift
Speaker 1: addressed this crist and rebuild the trust of a truly
Speaker 1: concerned Congress and the American people. But you're absolutely correct,
Speaker 1: Ryan the other day when you said, listen, if you're
Speaker 1: a Republican and you, you know, are thinking that there
Speaker 1: was malicious negligence or sometime type of other conspiracy going
Speaker 1: on here, who could blame you given this stonewalling and
Speaker 1: preposterous series of events.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and especially including with this Washing Post clip up here.
Speaker 4: This is confirmation of what we were hearing in the
Speaker 4: immediate aftermath of this that Trump has been and Trump's
Speaker 4: team has been requesting additional resources, and the team itself
Speaker 4: was requesting additional resources. And this comes a week after
Speaker 4: they claim to have learned of this Iranian assassination threat
Speaker 4: against Trump, and the Secret Service was denying these requests,
Speaker 4: which which sounds malicious and they can only be malicious.
Speaker 5: And they lied about denying their.
Speaker 3: Requests, and they lied about that because.
Speaker 1: These allegations and are very quickly after the shooting and
Speaker 1: the secrets are no, no, that hasn't happened. And now
Speaker 1: they had to go back to the Washington Post. It went, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: actually we did deny these additional security requests.
Speaker 4: And then, as you mentioned earlier, we're gonna put up
Speaker 4: this final element Wall Street Journal this not only did
Speaker 4: he have this scope and the range finder right that
Speaker 4: he brought into the rally, that he had a drone
Speaker 4: that he was flying over it.
Speaker 3: It's like just the.
Speaker 4: Level of incompetence on the part of the Secret Service
Speaker 4: here is absolutely staggering. It's actually one more indictment of
Speaker 4: the Department of Homeland Security.
Speaker 3: Which was a mistake.
Speaker 4: Like the DHS was created by Joe Lieberman I think
Speaker 4: was the chair of the Homeland Security Committee at the time,
Speaker 4: or was there a Homeland I think they created a
Speaker 4: Homeland Security Committee that created Department of Homeland Security and
Speaker 4: what And as a response to nine to eleven, they said, well,
Speaker 4: we weren't coordinating intelligence between the FBI and the CIA,
Speaker 4: and you know, these guys are flying planes over here.
Speaker 4: The different offices didn't communicate with each other. So we're
Speaker 4: going to create this giant agency called Department of Homeland Security,
Speaker 4: and that's going to solve this problem of noncommunication.
Speaker 3: It absolutely did not.
Speaker 4: It created the most broken, I think, cabinet level body
Speaker 4: that we have in the federal government.
Speaker 3: It was a mistake.
Speaker 4: It should be it should be I think unrolled, and
Speaker 4: the pieces should be moved into more logical places. This
Speaker 4: one used to be under the Treasury Department, and I
Speaker 4: think that's a smart place for it. Put the Secret
Speaker 4: Service back under the Treasury department, because then Treasury is
Speaker 4: not going to ask them to do anything else Department
Speaker 4: of Homeland Security. They're oh, Secret Service do this and
Speaker 4: that and the other, and like just spread their mission
Speaker 4: out wide with under Treasury. There you have one job,
Speaker 4: protect the people you're supposed to protect.
Speaker 1: Isn't one of the top things that they focus on.
Speaker 1: Counterfeit money, Yeah, right, into that may Yeah, that may
Speaker 1: stay in the treasure that's Treasury.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that clearly belongs to Treasury. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And this is, like I said, this is something kind
Speaker 1: of mistragging because he's he's very wary of the and
Speaker 1: rightfully so the conversation now about like, oh, they don't
Speaker 1: have enough resources, right.
Speaker 3: And just throw more money at them.
Speaker 1: It's not the resource. They have plenty of resources. Those
Speaker 1: resources are not focused in the right areas. And then
Speaker 1: there has been you know, it seems a lack of
Speaker 1: a slippage in standards and lack of professionalism, And then
Speaker 1: I think it's entirely appropriate to ask whether they from
Speaker 1: the top level just didn't care that much about keeping
Speaker 1: Donald Trump safe. And we saw efforts from Democratic legislators
Speaker 1: to pull his Secret Service protection, and you know, outrageously,
Speaker 1: up until this happened, RFK Junior didn't have Secret Service
Speaker 1: protection even though he was you know, repeatedly routinely asking
Speaker 1: about and there have been credible threats against him, et cetera. So,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't think it's unfair at all to
Speaker 1: ask whether protecting the former president just wasn't really a priority,
Speaker 1: wasn't really something they cared about. Because the profile of
Speaker 1: this twenty year old nearly near assassin, it's not impressive.
Speaker 1: It's not like this is some highly trained, super sophisticated sniper. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is someone who couldn't even make it on his
Speaker 1: high school rifle team freshman, right, right, apparently maybe improved
Speaker 1: over the years, but was so not stealth that you
Speaker 1: had dozens of ordinary rally goers spotting him long before
Speaker 1: he was able to squeeze off these shots against the
Speaker 1: former president. So it's not like this appears to have
Speaker 1: been some high level plot. So imagine if there was
Speaker 1: a high level plot, there's no way that they would
Speaker 1: have disrupted it. He is a sitting duck, and you know,
Speaker 1: by extension, probably anyone else that they're protecting is as well.
Speaker 4: Yeah, if Ron missed their shot, like if it's actually true,
Speaker 4: and if that's not like some fake intelligence right there
Speaker 4: trying to pull something off. Yeah, two Iranian assassins could
Speaker 4: easily pull off that against this secret service.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The other thing AOC banged away at a CHEETL four
Speaker 4: was her. She kept saying that she would have a
Speaker 4: report in sixty days. She's like, yo, dog, sixty days, right,
Speaker 4: were the height of like the presidential campaign.
Speaker 3: Sixty days.
Speaker 5: That's right.
Speaker 3: You don't get sixty days right.
Speaker 1: Now, That's exactly right. And part of this, too, is,
Speaker 1: you know, is the appearance of how weak the actual
Speaker 1: security was. I mean, part of security is like security theater,
Speaker 1: persuading people that it would be too hard to do this,
Speaker 1: you know, horrific thing, so I'm just not going to
Speaker 1: do it. And so because it was so laxed, because
Speaker 1: it was so easy for this kid to not kid,
Speaker 1: this twenty year old monster to fly drones and bring
Speaker 1: an arranged binder and wander around the fair grounds and
Speaker 1: climb up a roof with a rifle and even when
Speaker 1: the cops spot him, they do nothing about it. All
Speaker 1: of this, you know, that could potentially embolden others who
Speaker 1: have horrible ideas in their heads.
Speaker 4: Oh the other interesting background, and then we can move
Speaker 4: on to old baby yea. Some of the background of
Speaker 4: the resentment here is I think the Secret Service executives
Speaker 4: have felt resentful towards the Trump campaign for years for
Speaker 4: overcharging them for like you know, they basically they'd put
Speaker 4: them up at the Trump hotel and put them up
Speaker 4: at Mar A Lago, and then Secret Service will get
Speaker 4: the bills, the bill, and the bills would be like,
Speaker 4: because he gets to write the bills'd be like, wait
Speaker 4: a minute, three thousand dollars a night for this room.
Speaker 3: Come on, you serious?
Speaker 4: It doesn't cost that much and nobody's even renting it
Speaker 4: right now, and so that was just seen as like
Speaker 4: padding Trump's personal bottom line. So I'm sure that that
Speaker 4: played a role in the interplay between the like demands
Speaker 4: for more resources.
Speaker 1: And that's interesting, so very human, very human, you know, bitterness, pettiness, grievance, grudge, etcetera,
Speaker 1: leading to hump leading. Yeah, it's true, leading to utter catastrophe.
Speaker 1: All right, guys, As I mentioned before, bb Netnaho is
Speaker 1: in town. We're fortunate to be joined by the Mayor
Speaker 1: of dearborn of Delahamoud to talk about that visit and
Speaker 1: what we can read into Kamala Harris and whether her
Speaker 1: position will be identical to Joe Biden's visa Vigaza or
Speaker 1: whether she will create some space between them. Let's get
Speaker 1: to it, Mayor, welcome back. It's great to see you.
Speaker 14: Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1: So, as you well know, bb netnah who is in
Speaker 1: town even as an ICC or RUSS warrant looms over
Speaker 1: his head and ICJ has just ruled that the West
Speaker 1: Bank settlements are illegal. This has raised all sorts of questions,
Speaker 1: but in particular, we wanted to talk to you about
Speaker 1: how you were viewing the shift from Joe Biden to
Speaker 1: Vice President Harris as the presumptive Democratic nominee. Let's go
Speaker 1: out and put this up on the screen from Baraka Revid.
Speaker 1: How Vice President Harris is handling this BB visit this week.
Speaker 1: So apparently she is expected to meet with the Israeli
Speaker 1: Prime Minister at the White House separately from Biden later
Speaker 1: this week. However, she conveniently had a conflict in terms
Speaker 1: of his speech to the Senate, so she will not
Speaker 1: be in the set. She will not be presiding over
Speaker 1: the Senate for that speech. So, you know, what do
Speaker 1: you make so far of Vice President Harris's views with
Speaker 1: regard to Israel and whether or not she may be
Speaker 1: in lockstep with Joe Biden's genocidal support of the Israeli
Speaker 1: assault on Gaza, or whether she may create some distance
Speaker 1: between herself and the way he has approached the issue.
Speaker 17: You know, I think the idea that she won't be
Speaker 17: seated behind the war criminal in Natanyahu as he's addressing
Speaker 17: Congress is a positive step. Whether that decision was made
Speaker 17: recently or previously. We really raised to be seen as
Speaker 17: pertains the proper conversation and the talking points that you
Speaker 17: had on the screen. I think what's really lacking is
Speaker 17: the further emphasis and the need for the Palacinians to
Speaker 17: have a right to self determination and the idea now
Speaker 17: that the ICJ has really provided Vice President Kamala Harris
Speaker 17: with the shield and the sword to be an offensive
Speaker 17: in those conversations with Benjamin Eatania, who in private to
Speaker 17: talk about the need for Israel's withdrawal of Raza and
Speaker 17: the West Bank and the end of the occupation, to
Speaker 17: talk about potentially an offensive arms embargo and how we
Speaker 17: actually achieve a lasting, permanent ceasefire with the ultimate hope
Speaker 17: of adjust Palasinian state. So I think there's still a
Speaker 17: lot left to be seen on the table, and I'm
Speaker 17: hoping that there's a departure though from the current course
Speaker 17: that has been charted by President Biden. I think really
Speaker 17: now there's an opportunity for Vice President Harris to demonstrate
Speaker 17: there's a clear distinctual difference between where she stands on
Speaker 17: the issue and where the current president stands on the issue.
Speaker 4: For Michigan voters who are concerned about Gaza, how much
Speaker 4: does her link to the current administration make it impossible
Speaker 4: for her to make her case versus how willing are
Speaker 4: people to say, look Vice President doesn't actually have much
Speaker 4: say over what's going on.
Speaker 3: Let's hear what she has to say. What are you
Speaker 3: hearing from people?
Speaker 17: You know people, I would say that the door is open.
Speaker 17: I'm not going to say that the doors wide open,
Speaker 17: but there might be a crack in this door that's
Speaker 17: opened that.
Speaker 14: Biden once had closed.
Speaker 17: And what people are saying, at least the constituents and
Speaker 17: the conversations that I've been a part of, is that
Speaker 17: you want the Vice president, who is the presumptive Democratic
Speaker 17: national who's gonna be the presumptive Democratic nominee, to come
Speaker 17: out and willfully and boldly say and declare that she
Speaker 17: would like to see a permanent ceasefire, she would like
Speaker 17: an offensive arms embargo on the state of Israel given
Speaker 17: the ICJ and the ICC rulings, that she wants the
Speaker 17: unfedtered access to humanitarian aid, and that she's going to
Speaker 17: distance herself further from Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet of
Speaker 17: war criminals. And so I think these are the talking
Speaker 17: points and the policy decisions that people are eager to
Speaker 17: hear from the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of reading of the tea leaves of
Speaker 1: some of the comments she has made even as Vice president,
Speaker 1: and also some reading of the Tea leaves of some
Speaker 1: of the internal reports that she had been somewhat of
Speaker 1: a dissenter, that she had at least had some concern
Speaker 1: for Palestinian human rights. That I mean, we've just never
Speaker 1: really seen any empathy from President Joe Biden when it
Speaker 1: comes to Palestinians can put this up on the screen.
Speaker 1: Several of the ex Biden administration officials who had resigned
Speaker 1: over his Israel policy say they are more hopeful about
Speaker 1: how VP Harris would handle the Warren Gaza if she
Speaker 1: were president. One of those individuals said, quote, Frankly, it's
Speaker 1: hard to imagine any Democrat having a worse approach to
Speaker 1: the genocide than Biden, given his complete resistance to any
Speaker 1: shift over the last ten months. So, mayor how are
Speaker 1: you reading those signs? Given Kamala Harris's public remarks and
Speaker 1: some of the reports that have come out from her
Speaker 1: role inside the White House.
Speaker 14: I think hopeful is the right word here. I feel the.
Speaker 17: Same way, and many constituents and people are eager to
Speaker 17: feel that way as well. You know, ultimately, what's going
Speaker 17: to drive people to come out and cast their ballot
Speaker 17: in November. Is hope, the hope of having an aspiring
Speaker 17: candidate who can depart from the decades old democratic foreign
Speaker 17: policy agenda that has led us to endless wars and
Speaker 17: the unfolding genocide now in Aresa. And so if we
Speaker 17: want to advance transformative domestic policy that centers working people,
Speaker 17: that centers people's humanitarianism, at the same time, we need
Speaker 17: to have a foreign policy that's reflective of the same
Speaker 17: dignity that we have for Americans, that we should eliminate
Speaker 17: these geographic borders and say what we want for Americans,
Speaker 17: we'd also love to for others around the globe to have,
Speaker 17: including Palicanians, those in Asa, West Bank and Jerusalem. And
Speaker 17: so again we're hopeful. It's in the early days, and
Speaker 17: I think time will tell where exactly Vice President Harris
Speaker 17: falls on these issues. I think she is walking a
Speaker 17: tight rope knowing that she still is the vice president
Speaker 17: to President Joe Biden. We know very much where he
Speaker 17: stands on these issues. At the same time, she needs
Speaker 17: to create space as the presumptive nominee to demonstrate that
Speaker 17: she differs from the president on this issue.
Speaker 3: You know, one key question will I think will be outreached.
Speaker 4: And this is only her second full day as the
Speaker 4: presumptive nominee, and she had spent a lot of time
Speaker 4: kind of sewing up the delegates for the nomination. But
Speaker 4: I'm curious if you've heard from anybody in the Michigan
Speaker 4: community who has gotten outreach, you know, from either the
Speaker 4: Vice President herself or from people in her circle with
Speaker 4: some sort of an olive branch.
Speaker 17: You know, I can say that months ago I was
Speaker 17: in contact with the Vice President's team, and this is
Speaker 17: prior to any assumption that the president may step down
Speaker 17: as a Democratic nominee. I mean, it was a conversation
Speaker 17: where the messaging felt more empathetic and sympathetic to what
Speaker 17: was unfolding for the Palestinians. And I know folks in
Speaker 17: the community are now beginning to receive calls and invitations
Speaker 17: to participate in roundtables and to really hopefully have our
Speaker 17: thoughts jotted down not only at the table, but also
Speaker 17: in policy. And so we're hopeful to see what this
Speaker 17: next month and a half two months prior to the
Speaker 17: convention demonstrates, and obviously the long time between now and November,
Speaker 17: and as we're seeing each day brings an exciting new
Speaker 17: announcement of what's happening and unfolding on this presidential campaign trail.
Speaker 17: Each day seems to be a world of events unfolding.
Speaker 17: And so I can't tell you what tomorrow holds, but
Speaker 17: I think where we're all eager to see what happens.
Speaker 1: Lastly, I want to put Abby Martin tweeted this. You
Speaker 1: know I brought up this sort of hopeful signs for
Speaker 1: Kamala Harris. Let me bring up the not so hopeful
Speaker 1: signs for Kamala Harris. Abby Martin put this together. She says,
Speaker 1: Biden Leave's off is a disgrace, war criminal. Let's make
Speaker 1: no allusions about where Kamala stands on Israel. And then
Speaker 1: she ticks off regular APAC speaker compared to Selma and
Speaker 1: the US civil rights struggle to her pro Israel activism
Speaker 1: called BDS anti Semitic co sponsored resolution against Obama in
Speaker 1: support of illegal Settlement's former campaign director says her support
Speaker 1: for Israel es central to who she is. She hosted
Speaker 1: a White House event promoting Israel's atrocity propaganda about October seventh,
Speaker 1: after calling for immediate ceasefire and march. He then clarified
Speaker 1: she just meant Biden's temporary pause. Biden officials say, quote,
Speaker 1: there's no dispute on policy between Biden and Harris on Gaza.
Speaker 1: I'd love for you to reflect on some of those pieces.
Speaker 1: But also, you know, is it your sense that Joe
Speaker 1: Biden is just sort of at the center of democratic opinion,
Speaker 1: democratic party opinion on Israel, or is it your sense
Speaker 1: that he's uniquely bad and any just sort of normal,
Speaker 1: run of the mill Democrat would at least have more
Speaker 1: skepticism and more willingness to use the levers of power
Speaker 1: when it comes to bb Net Yahouo in particular.
Speaker 17: I think President Biden was one of the most extreme cases.
Speaker 17: And I think if we've noticed anything over the last
Speaker 17: ten months, that the center of the party has certainly
Speaker 17: moved on this issue. The plurality of Democrats, of Independence
Speaker 17: of Republicans have all been calling for a premanencies where
Speaker 17: plurality believed that wasn't polling to be a genocide. Yet
Speaker 17: we have not seen our president move with the center
Speaker 17: of the party, although he's done that and previous years
Speaker 17: as a time as Senator when really critical issues.
Speaker 14: Have changed over time, and so for the vice president.
Speaker 17: I'm very much aware of her history and her track record,
Speaker 17: either as you are senator or currently not as vice president.
Speaker 17: And I think though for the community, you know, the
Speaker 17: anti war community, the pro justice community, air community, or
Speaker 17: Muslim community, we are not blind to the idea that
Speaker 17: more than likely we're going to have a pro Israeli president,
Speaker 17: somebody who would strongly believes in the allowship with the
Speaker 17: Israeli government, regardless of who the Prime Minister or the
Speaker 17: cabinet is that is in power. That is just a
Speaker 17: de facto going to be the case. And I think
Speaker 17: what we're trying to do now is begin to create
Speaker 17: the room to charter a new course, one that uplifts
Speaker 17: more than justice two state policy, but that actually inks
Speaker 17: and is willing to put paper, put pen to paper
Speaker 17: to talk about exactly an exact timeline, but how we
Speaker 17: actually achieve a just state for the Palestinian people, but
Speaker 17: how we hold the Israeli cabinet accountable about how we
Speaker 17: usher in the ICC and I CG rulings and make
Speaker 17: sure that international law is actually upheld and respected, because
Speaker 17: more than just the genocide that's unfolding that's at stake
Speaker 17: is also America standing on the global stage, which has
Speaker 17: been seated greatly and tremendously over these last ten months under.
Speaker 14: The current president.
Speaker 4: And my colleague Jeremy Scahill over at drop site News
Speaker 4: wrote on this topic yesterday, if we can put this
Speaker 4: up on the screen, and he dug up this really
Speaker 4: extraordinary quote that I wanted to get your response to.
Speaker 4: It's from a private APAC conference in twenty eighteen. Kamala
Speaker 4: Harris was asked why she's so adamant in her support
Speaker 4: for Israel. She said, quote is just something that has
Speaker 4: always been a part of me. I don't know when
Speaker 4: it started. It's almost like saying, when did you first
Speaker 4: realize you loved your family or love your country.
Speaker 3: It just was always there. It was always there.
Speaker 4: You kind of read that in two ways, one being like, oh, wait,
Speaker 4: I don't have an answer for this.
Speaker 1: It sounds very Trumpian, yes, like which Bible verse do
Speaker 1: you like? Well, really all of them?
Speaker 3: And it's so private to me.
Speaker 4: I had a quick sound like that, like she never
Speaker 4: actually didn't have an answer to that question and never
Speaker 4: thought about it. On the other hand, it's wildly over
Speaker 4: the top curious. From your perspective, you were probably quite
Speaker 4: used to seeing the over the top statements of support
Speaker 4: for Israel from Democratic candidates over the years. How much
Speaker 4: stock do you put in rhetoric like that, given just
Speaker 4: how kind of pervasive it is.
Speaker 17: You Obviously it carries some weight. Tonality carries weight, the
Speaker 17: verbiage of the words that are used carries weight. But
Speaker 17: I think what I'm trying to do now, not only
Speaker 17: for the sake of the community represent but for the
Speaker 17: sake for the public, of the broader public at large,
Speaker 17: as well as what's happening in the Palcitinia that Oza
Speaker 17: and West Bank and Jerusalem, is that I'm trying to
Speaker 17: create room to have a conversation to see if there's
Speaker 17: a willingness to chart a new course. I think what
Speaker 17: I don't have the luxury of doing is sitting on
Speaker 17: the sideline and just writing off any individuals saying, well,
Speaker 17: the previous decision making.
Speaker 14: Has demonstrated that there is no room for change.
Speaker 17: We have to create room for change, whether that's through
Speaker 17: pressure points such as the Uncommitted movement, whether it's through
Speaker 17: pressure points like you saw calling on President Biden to
Speaker 17: step down, or now knowing that this is going to
Speaker 17: be a very tight race, meaning there might be opportunities
Speaker 17: to strike deals at the policy decision making table about
Speaker 17: how you coalesce a coalition of groups that wants to
Speaker 17: usher in a pro justice, anti war era and to
Speaker 17: do so that means there must be a stark difference
Speaker 17: and a new center for the Democratic Party on this
Speaker 17: policy of Israel and Palestine.
Speaker 1: You know, I did come up with, sorry, one more
Speaker 1: question for you, but I was just curious if you've
Speaker 1: thought about the potential vice presidential contenders who've been floated
Speaker 1: as being on the Harris ticket. You know, a few
Speaker 1: of the top ones you can think of are actually
Speaker 1: Tim Walla, who's governor of Minnesota, popped up in one
Speaker 1: A bunch of governors, Mark Kelly is another one, Arizona
Speaker 1: Senator Joshapiro Pennsylvania, Roy Cooper North Carolina, Andy Bisheer of Kentucky, JB.
Speaker 1: Pritzker of Illinois, or some of the names that have
Speaker 1: been flowed around. I think Gretchen Whitmery, your own governor,
Speaker 1: is mentioned occasionally, though less often than some of those others.
Speaker 1: I wonder do you have an opinion on where any
Speaker 1: of those contenders might stand visa vigaza.
Speaker 17: I you know, I think there's a few governors and
Speaker 17: I won't specify.
Speaker 14: I think that the news speaks for yourself.
Speaker 17: We have made remarks as it pertains to for potentially
Speaker 17: comparing the protesters on college campuses to the KKK that.
Speaker 1: Would be Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania.
Speaker 14: Yes, they very.
Speaker 17: Uh uh, you know, dystopian comparison to draw and something
Speaker 17: that is absolutely not supportive of by many of us
Speaker 17: in the progressive movement on the left or in the
Speaker 17: ABA Muslim American community. I think, you know, I leave
Speaker 17: it to the VP to vet who she believes to
Speaker 17: be her strongest nominee in order for her to have
Speaker 17: the best chance coming this November.
Speaker 14: But what I would say is, you know, there's.
Speaker 17: A coalition that has fractured, the coalition that ensured that
Speaker 17: President Biden received the winning amount of electoral votes four
Speaker 17: years ago.
Speaker 14: That coalition needs to be brought back together.
Speaker 17: But in order for that to happen now, the Democratic
Speaker 17: Party needs to be more than just a big ten party.
Speaker 14: It needs to be a party that actually.
Speaker 17: Puts pen to paper and ushers a new era on policy,
Speaker 17: whether there's domestic policy, global policy. We have to talk
Speaker 17: about where the new center of the party is and
Speaker 17: make sure that those values are reflected in the policy
Speaker 17: that we put forward.
Speaker 14: You know, personally, you.
Speaker 17: Know, we've taken a lot of criticism over the last
Speaker 17: ten months for having the goal to say that we
Speaker 17: put people over party and people over president. But I
Speaker 17: firmly believe that as Democrats, we should be a party
Speaker 17: that's not a cult. We don't follow an individual just
Speaker 17: because that individual may be popular. What we rather do
Speaker 17: is put our values at the forefront and lead in
Speaker 17: that manner. And that's what we're trying to do now.
Speaker 17: So regardless of who the presumptive nominee is, our values
Speaker 17: have not changed. We want to see permanencies far we
Speaker 17: want to see infront of the access to umanitarian aid.
Speaker 17: We want to see an arms embargo on the Israeli government,
Speaker 17: especially given that war crimes are being filed and charged
Speaker 17: against the Prime Minister in many of his cabinet members.
Speaker 17: And we want to see a just Palastinian state because
Speaker 17: a return to the status quo is unacceptable. So these
Speaker 17: are the values, at least on the global policy front
Speaker 17: as pertains this one issue as well, as we also
Speaker 17: care on many domestic issues, whether it's expanding access to healthcare,
Speaker 17: ushering a new green era, ensuring that our children and
Speaker 17: our grandchildren have access to a healthy future, talking about
Speaker 17: small business policy and.
Speaker 14: Centering workers' rights.
Speaker 17: So there's so much that we want to discuss and address,
Speaker 17: but the values should take center stage, and this idea
Speaker 17: of just following personalities has to really fall to the wayside.
Speaker 1: Mayor So grateful for your time this morning. Thank you
Speaker 1: so much for joining us.
Speaker 14: Thank you are good for having me.
Speaker 1: So as we've been tracking here, there have been a
Speaker 1: lot of questions about what exactly unfolded in Rehoboth Beach
Speaker 1: when Joe Biden resigned dropped down of the presidential race.
Speaker 1: Of course, maintaining has fut in the presidence you're dropping
Speaker 1: out of the presidential race. He is reportedly sick with
Speaker 1: COVID and has not actually been visibly seen in public
Speaker 1: since this stunning decision to drop out of the race.
Speaker 1: This has sparked a lot of conjecture and conspiracy about
Speaker 1: maybe it really wasn't him, Maybe he's so unwell he
Speaker 1: can't even do this anymore. Perhaps he's even already passed away,
Speaker 1: or he's locked in the basement, and it was some
Speaker 1: intern who got control of his account who put out
Speaker 1: this letter and then the endorsement of Kamala Harris. So
Speaker 1: Joe Biden decided yesterday to call in to the Kamala
Speaker 1: Harris sort of rallying campaign speech at what was Biden
Speaker 1: HQ now Harris HQ. Probably in part seeking to put
Speaker 1: to bed some of these rumors about where he's been
Speaker 1: and what he's up to, so he calls in to
Speaker 1: this rally. But this has not come close to killing
Speaker 1: the rumors about where is Joe Biden and the conspiracies
Speaker 1: and conjecture about where is Joe Biden because of a
Speaker 1: unfortunate slip up from Kamala Harris, who seems to come
Speaker 1: close to calling the phone call a recording instead of
Speaker 1: a life called This was seized on by many online.
Speaker 1: Let's take a listen to how that went down.
Speaker 7: It is so good to hear our president's voice.
Speaker 16: Joe.
Speaker 7: I know you're still on the on the call, and
Speaker 7: we've been talking every day. You probably you guys heard
Speaker 7: it from Doug's voice. We love Joe and Jail, we
Speaker 7: really do. They truly are like family does and we do.
Speaker 16: Everybody hear the.
Speaker 1: Cool I know you're still there. You're not going anywhere, Joe.
Speaker 14: I'm watching a kid.
Speaker 10: I'm watching a kid.
Speaker 14: I love it.
Speaker 7: I love you, Joe.
Speaker 1: So this is the latest evidence being entered into the
Speaker 1: the theory that he is I don't know, gone, no
Speaker 1: longer locked in the basement, whatever it is. Let's put
Speaker 1: this up on the screen. This is like, you know,
Speaker 1: one of the main tweets with the timeline that has
Speaker 1: gone viral backing up this conspiracy. Let's recap this historic
Speaker 1: days as Joe Biden suddenly resigns via its witter, White
Speaker 1: House staff find out one minute later, Joe biden resignation
Speaker 1: letters not on official letterhead. The Bidens signature is suspect.
Speaker 1: Steve Roschetti helped write the letter. I'm not sure why
Speaker 1: that is suspicious.
Speaker 3: You know he did, Yeah, he is stop.
Speaker 1: Aid for years anyway, Joe Biden tweets heart emoji response.
Speaker 5: Also not sure why that.
Speaker 1: Suspicious White House wipes Biden's schedule. White House Chief of
Speaker 1: Staff calls cabinet manageres comms. Frank Biden confirms health is
Speaker 1: a factor. Families suggests Biden may have terminal illness. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure what that refers to. Joe Biden holds no
Speaker 1: live press conference, where is Joe? Just another perfectly normal
Speaker 1: day in Biden's America. Ellis but the last piece up
Speaker 1: on the screen here, A bunch of high profile FIGNARE
Speaker 1: figures like Bill Ackman in particular, has been going wild
Speaker 1: with this, retweeting these sorts of accounts and you know,
Speaker 1: just going kind of all in on the Where's Joe
Speaker 1: direction line of inquiry. Alex Berenson here is saying this
Speaker 1: isn't good, the end wokeness account saying Biden dropped down
Speaker 1: over four hours ago. Yet we literally have zero evidence
Speaker 1: that he knows about it, not even a photo. The
Speaker 1: paperwork has already been filed. The cam pain cash is
Speaker 1: being transferred, endorsements for Kamala pouring in, yet we have
Speaker 1: no clue who sent that post Ryan, what it is?
Speaker 1: I will say like he should probably appear in public
Speaker 1: at this point, because it is getting a little bit like, okay,
Speaker 1: the vote for real, you know, what are you doing?
Speaker 1: But when I think the most likely explanation is he
Speaker 1: does have COVID, right, he is bitter and pissed off
Speaker 1: at everyone and doesn't really want to have to do
Speaker 1: anything anymore, just wants to hang out at his beach
Speaker 1: house in Rehoboth and sow his resentment.
Speaker 5: But anyway, what do you make.
Speaker 3: Of all this?
Speaker 4: It feels very weird until you consider exactly those two
Speaker 4: key points. The one key point we know he has COVID,
Speaker 4: or he has said he has COVID, no reason to
Speaker 4: believe he doesn't have COVID, because he wanted to show
Speaker 4: that he was able to go out of the campaign trail,
Speaker 4: and getting knocked off the campaign trail helped lead to
Speaker 4: his demise, which is something he didn't want, So why
Speaker 4: would he stage that.
Speaker 3: As an old.
Speaker 4: Man with COVID he would have appeared like even more
Speaker 4: decrepit than usual. And his speech where he announces his
Speaker 4: resignation he knows is going to be one of the
Speaker 4: most watched speeches in looking back at him from the future,
Speaker 4: just like we've all seen lbj's clip of saying I
Speaker 4: shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination
Speaker 4: of my party in nineteen sixty eight, we've all seen
Speaker 4: that by hundreds of times, just put in front of us.
Speaker 4: We've seen him say that more than we've people who
Speaker 4: aren't alive. Then I've seen that more than they've seen
Speaker 4: anything else. So he doesn't want to be the guy
Speaker 4: with COVID who can barely speak in that clip. But secondly,
Speaker 4: consider this, you always have to you always have to
Speaker 4: ask yourself, you.
Speaker 3: Theorizing your conspiracies, who benefits.
Speaker 4: Democrats would love it if Joe Biden would resign or
Speaker 4: not to be Macabua, but even die, because then Kamala
Speaker 4: Harris becomes president and she then goes in with these
Speaker 4: and come and see advantages without the disadvantages of having
Speaker 4: been the president for the rest of the terms.
Speaker 3: You can't blame her for the rest of that stuff.
Speaker 4: It's very difficult for people to envision a black woman
Speaker 4: as president of the United States. Having her serving as
Speaker 4: president of the United States would help get her over
Speaker 4: that hump, So they would like that. So why would
Speaker 4: they have that opportunity in front of them, but.
Speaker 3: Then engaging some conspiracy to cover it up.
Speaker 4: So that's where the Bill Ackman conspiracy and Laura Lumer
Speaker 4: and all that just kind of falls apart.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, what I appreciate it.
Speaker 1: What I appreciate about it is that like it's going
Speaker 1: to get disproven in like two days when he is
Speaker 1: back in DC and meets with bb Nan Yahu, you know.
Speaker 4: Which or he dies because everybody dies, that's true, at
Speaker 4: which point Kamala Harris becomes president and Democrats will be
Speaker 4: happy that she became president. Yeah, and they will mourn
Speaker 4: President Biden.
Speaker 1: That has been one of the things too, because you
Speaker 1: now have a drumbeat of like you know, JD Vance
Speaker 1: and these people who are saying he should resign, and
Speaker 1: I don't really understand the tactical consideration there wish for
Speaker 1: because it actually would benefit I think it would definitely
Speaker 1: benefit Kamala Harris to serve asident.
Speaker 5: I think Joe Biden should resign too.
Speaker 1: I actually agree with that because I think the fundamental
Speaker 1: point of if you're not fit to serve another four years,
Speaker 1: how can you, given what we've seen of you, make
Speaker 1: the case you're fit to serve today? I think that's
Speaker 1: entirely fair and legitimate. I just don't think it particularly
Speaker 1: serves their political interests to really push hard on that point.
Speaker 1: But they probably don't expect that he actually will resign,
Speaker 1: and so it's more of a ploy to illustrate that
Speaker 1: there was this cover up of his condition, which I
Speaker 1: also think is true and legitimate and a legitimate question
Speaker 1: that Kamala Harris is going to have to grapple with
Speaker 1: of what did you know of his decline and what
Speaker 1: were you hiding from the American public now. Fortunately for her,
Speaker 1: she was very much on the outskirts of the Biden administration.
Speaker 1: Like I don't think she was seeing him all that regularly.
Speaker 1: I think she was sort of shut out of that
Speaker 1: circle of close aids. After this felt that she didn't
Speaker 1: handle herself well, and she didn't handle herself well, especially
Speaker 1: in the early days of the administration. She's not one
Speaker 1: of these who's had this long, long term relationship with
Speaker 1: Joe Biden and not in the end was effectively the
Speaker 1: only people those with the only people who had any
Speaker 1: access to him. Over the past roughly year, we keep
Speaker 1: getting these anecdotes. There was a new one that came
Speaker 1: out that the last time he met with Congressional Democrats
Speaker 1: was back whenever they were trying to pass the infrastructure deal,
Speaker 1: Like that.
Speaker 3: Was a long time ago.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that was years ago.
Speaker 1: Was the last time that he met won Congressional Democrats
Speaker 1: and the meeting, his talk was such a disaster.
Speaker 3: Yeah, twenty one, right before the Virginia elections.
Speaker 1: He forgot eve That's right, he forgot even to make
Speaker 1: the pitch he was supposed to make for the trillion
Speaker 1: dollar infrastructure package.
Speaker 5: It was completely disjointed and garbled.
Speaker 1: To the point that after he left, Nancy Pelosi had
Speaker 1: to come and clean it up and say this is
Speaker 1: what he meant to say. And since then he never
Speaker 1: that was it. He never met with them again. We
Speaker 1: also learned what he hadn't met with his cat in
Speaker 1: some nine months, because the last time you met with them,
Speaker 1: they insisted that every cabinet member submit to them exactly
Speaker 1: precisely what they were going to say and told them
Speaker 1: here are the questions that Joe Biden is going to
Speaker 1: ask you. It was one hundred percent totally prescripted. So
Speaker 1: there are a lot of questions about, you know, all
Speaker 1: of these people and how they're implicated and cover up
Speaker 1: of Joe Biden's health. But but yeah, I think this
Speaker 1: this theory.
Speaker 5: It's also.
Speaker 1: Partly Republicans have been They didn't think that Joe Biden
Speaker 1: was going to step down. They thought he was going
Speaker 1: to hang in there, and they're kind of spinning their
Speaker 1: wheels right now about how to grapple with you know,
Speaker 1: he's out and now we have like a candidate who
Speaker 1: can speak and who has some enthusiasm behind her. And
Speaker 1: it's still a weak candidate, but we actually are going
Speaker 1: to have to run a race. Maybe Jade Vance was
Speaker 1: not the greatest pick. It's the vice presidential and so
Speaker 1: I think this is part of the spinning of the
Speaker 1: wheels that Republicans are doing right now to cope with
Speaker 1: the moment.
Speaker 3: Also, yeah, they haven't found their footing yet, not yet.
Speaker 5: They will, they will.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, some of the things they've been saying about
Speaker 1: Kamala har Harlott, Yeah, yeah, and her childlessness and whatever
Speaker 1: really off the rails as well. So I think maybe
Speaker 1: you and Emily, I think it'd be interesting for you
Speaker 1: guys to talk about that tomorrow.
Speaker 4: Counterpoints Washington Post Alison wild New reporting on RFK Junior
Speaker 4: and Trump. We can put up this tweet here from
Speaker 4: an old friend of the show. Liz Smith pulled this
Speaker 4: from her tweet. But yeah, so that. Washington Post reports
Speaker 4: Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kenny Junior helped talks this
Speaker 4: month with former President Donald Trump about endorsing his campaign
Speaker 4: and taking a job and his second Trump administration overseeing
Speaker 4: a portfolio of health and medical issues.
Speaker 3: According to four people familiar with the matter.
Speaker 4: The discussions, which began hours after the attempted assassination of
Speaker 4: Trump at a rally on July thirteenth, did not result
Speaker 4: in an agreement, amid concerns in Trump's orbit about the
Speaker 4: complications about promising a job in exchange for a political endorsement.
Speaker 4: According to the people who spoke on the condition of
Speaker 4: anonymity to describe private conversations and so Crystal, what the
Speaker 4: Post goes on to report is that the Trump people
Speaker 4: were concerned that he was too explicit in his quid
Speaker 4: pro quo request. It is standard practice in politics to
Speaker 4: drop out and exchange for stuff. That's what you do.
Speaker 4: When Pete Buddha Judge dropped out of the presidential campaign
Speaker 4: on the phone with Obama and decided that he was
Speaker 4: going to endorse Biden as part of that consolidation around Biden,
Speaker 4: it was very much understood that doing so put you
Speaker 4: in the good graces of the administration, and that those
Speaker 4: good graces would lead to some type of a good position. Yeah,
Speaker 4: but it is highly unlikely that either of them would
Speaker 4: have been crass enough to say I will make you
Speaker 4: Transportation secretary under Biden's administration.
Speaker 3: If you do this, because you're not supposed to do that.
Speaker 1: You're not supposed to say it out right.
Speaker 4: You're just supposed to be understood. Also, you don't care,
Speaker 4: like Bodach just doesn't care. Make me secretary of something
Speaker 4: and I'll and he'll make the most of it.
Speaker 1: Actually, remember he did care because they offered him o
Speaker 1: MB and he wanted something that would be more forward facing,
Speaker 1: because he wanted that ability to like, you know, travel
Speaker 1: around the country and be the Roman ceremony star. Which
Speaker 1: is funny because oeb has actual like more power.
Speaker 3: He's like, no, no, no, but no no, I don't.
Speaker 5: Want the power. I want the show of power.
Speaker 1: But anyway, proceed with your with your analysis here, right.
Speaker 4: So even the Trump orbit, which is the most quid
Speaker 4: pro quo that Trump sat down with the oil industry
Speaker 4: and said, give me a billion dollars and I will
Speaker 4: and then tell me what you want, like the most
Speaker 4: like explicit quid pro quo you can imagine. Uh, even
Speaker 4: they were like, whoa, this is a little bit much
Speaker 4: from RFK Junior. Here there's also the question why this
Speaker 4: is being leaked at this moment?
Speaker 5: What do you make of that?
Speaker 4: Uh, I don't know. Actually, well, because who does it
Speaker 4: benefit for this to leak? It doesn't Maybe it benefits
Speaker 4: Trump a little bit, but Trump wants I mean, Trump
Speaker 4: wants rfk's supporters to support him, right, and so maybe
Speaker 4: they're annoyed that he leaked that audio for sure, So
Speaker 4: maybe this is a way of undercutting RFK Junior with
Speaker 4: people who would be sympathetic to the Trump campaign.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1: It is interesting how this came about and does come
Speaker 1: on the heels. So we didn't actually get to cover
Speaker 1: it on the show because there was just so much
Speaker 1: else going on.
Speaker 5: But you guys probably.
Speaker 1: Saw there was a call between Trump and RFK Junior
Speaker 1: shortly after the assassination attempt, and the audio of that
Speaker 1: call got leaked in which you know, effectively Trump is
Speaker 1: looking for an endorsement and they don't really you know,
Speaker 1: come to conclusion there, and I think it was RFK
Speaker 1: Junior's son who leaked the call. R K Junior apologize
Speaker 1: for it, so we know we already knew that there
Speaker 1: was this communication unfolding between them. But you know the
Speaker 1: other thing in terms of RFK Junior is I wonder
Speaker 1: if he I wonder if he is concerned that now
Speaker 1: that you don't have Joe Biden on the ticket, that
Speaker 1: the appetite for third party may be reduced because some
Speaker 1: significant number of his some number of his supporters were
Speaker 1: people who were just disgusted with both choices, and a
Speaker 1: big part of obviously the problem with people out with
Speaker 1: Joe Biden is just his age. So now that you
Speaker 1: have someone new there, there's less just total you know,
Speaker 1: loathing and contempt for the matchup going forward. And you
Speaker 1: also have Trump's you know, on his.
Speaker 5: Side of the ticket.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of energy and excitement around him on
Speaker 1: the Republican side and after the assassination attempt, et cetera.
Speaker 1: So he may also be sensing that the very clear
Speaker 1: and I think very compelling to a lot of people
Speaker 1: pitched that he previously had some of that juice may
Speaker 1: be fading at this point, and so he's kind of
Speaker 1: looking for an out.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because the RFK Junior constituency largely gets his news
Speaker 4: from YouTube and podcasts and independent media because he's been
Speaker 4: blanked out of mainstream media so much. That also overlaps
Speaker 4: somewhat significantly with the Trump's potential support.
Speaker 3: Young men men in general who.
Speaker 4: Are disaffected by politics and so with Democrats no longer
Speaker 4: running such a repellent candidate in Biden, it does seem
Speaker 4: like the third party now is more of a threat
Speaker 4: to Trump than to Democrats.
Speaker 1: Well, to answer your question about who this story benefits,
Speaker 1: it's definitely Democrats because I mean Lismith's shared it because
Speaker 1: it paints him as, oh, this is someone who would
Speaker 1: be in a Trump administration, right, this is more of
Speaker 1: a Trumpian figure.
Speaker 5: He's not on our side.
Speaker 1: And obviously that's the point Liz Smith has been trying
Speaker 1: to make, you know, tying in whoever his donors are,
Speaker 1: and these donors who gave your Republicans and here's his
Speaker 1: views that code right wing. And you know, there's been
Speaker 1: the game being played on the other side, from the
Speaker 1: Trump side. They're trying to code him as all he
Speaker 1: supports all this environmentalist stuff and he's a radical left
Speaker 1: winger and here he supported Hillary Clinton, etcetera, etcetera. There's
Speaker 1: been this war over what his true partisan valance, how
Speaker 1: he really codes. And so the people this really benefits
Speaker 1: are Democrats who want to code him as, you know, as.
Speaker 5: A Trumpian figure.
Speaker 1: You know, if you're RFK Junior and you're looking at
Speaker 1: just pragmatically where you stand and where things are heading.
Speaker 1: It makes sense as a move because the Harris administration
Speaker 1: is not going to have you in any accountant because like,
Speaker 1: that's just not happening. You could imagine them taking him
Speaker 1: in exchange for an endorsement. Like, I'm actually kind of surprised.
Speaker 1: To me, the most surprising part about this is that
Speaker 1: they said no, that it was too naked, and they
Speaker 1: had qualms about it, and they were like, eh, this
Speaker 1: is a little bit uncovered. That's to me the most
Speaker 1: surprising part of this because on any other level, this
Speaker 1: makes a lot of sense for him. It makes a
Speaker 1: lot of sense for Trump, you know, getting the endorsement,
Speaker 1: and they could put him and whatever, you know, meaningless
Speaker 1: non important administration position and sort of bury him and
Speaker 1: have him not be that significant but get what they
Speaker 1: want out of the exchange. So to me, that's the
Speaker 1: most surprising piece of it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and your point makes me wonder like how this happened,
Speaker 4: because you're right, this does benefit Democrats. So why would
Speaker 4: the Trump campaign leak this? I mean, maybe maybe they
Speaker 4: were just drunk at a bar and the reporter has
Speaker 4: just got the story like that. Can that can happen sometimes.
Speaker 4: I also don't think the entire concept should be even stigmatized.
Speaker 4: It's like, if Kennedy really does like Trump, and Trump
Speaker 4: likes Kennedy and Kent and wants Kennedy in his administration, right, thinks.
Speaker 5: There's a fit as HHS secretary or whatever.
Speaker 4: I think they're a fit, and then he wants and
Speaker 4: Kennedy wants to endorse him in exchange for being HHS secretary.
Speaker 4: Should just be public about it, say, Kenny Kennedy is
Speaker 4: endorsing me, and I'm going to name him HHS secretary
Speaker 4: and if you like that, you should vote for us.
Speaker 4: Like that actually seems totally clean to me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I agree, because Kenny, it's.
Speaker 4: Not like Kenny trying to make money off of it,
Speaker 4: Like you know, he's married to an actress that's got
Speaker 4: real money and he's a Kennedy like he's doing okay, Yeah.
Speaker 3: He's fine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he wants to maintain his political relevance and you know,
Speaker 1: pursue the issues that he really cares about, and the
Speaker 1: Trump administration is more likely vehicle for that continuing political
Speaker 1: relevance than you know, him remaining out on his own.
Speaker 1: As I said before, there's no way, and how that
Speaker 1: Harris administration would take him in any capacity. So the
Speaker 1: chain of events is all very logical, and it is
Speaker 1: sort of funny that it's being spun as conspiratorial or
Speaker 1: I guess the problem for RK. Junior is he still
Speaker 1: wants to convince his supporters that, yeah, vote for me,
Speaker 1: and I'm in it till the end. And I don't
Speaker 1: like either of these, you know, By or Trump. I
Speaker 1: want to take away from both of them. We have
Speaker 1: a real path to victory. I mean, that's part of
Speaker 1: his real point. And we're going to meet on the ballots,
Speaker 1: We're gonna win. Here's the path, et cetera. And so
Speaker 1: it really undercuts that narrative for him to have this
Speaker 1: out in the public that he's basically looking for an out.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And it also goes against what we were told
Speaker 4: from people that were close to RFKA Junior in the
Speaker 4: beginning of this campaign, was that he that he wasn't
Speaker 4: going to go too far in supporting Trump because he
Speaker 4: wanted to maintain his social connections that he's built up
Speaker 4: throughout his life and his and his wife's social connections
Speaker 4: in the kind of in that California liberal universe, this
Speaker 4: seems like just going full.
Speaker 3: Break from that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. No, I mean I think in a lot of
Speaker 1: ways he already has, because like his family has in
Speaker 1: particular come out very publicly.
Speaker 3: Thinking he could do both was an error.
Speaker 5: There was no way that that was going to be possible.
Speaker 3: There's not a chance.
Speaker 4: There's a huber intent and arrogance to a lot of
Speaker 4: people that they think they can do things that are
Speaker 4: actually impossible.
Speaker 7: Yep.
Speaker 5: So there you go, all right.
Speaker 1: We wanted to take a look at Kala Harris's record
Speaker 1: such as it is, what we could glean about what
Speaker 1: a potential Harris would actually look like. You know, we
Speaker 1: read the tee Le's a little bit earlier about what
Speaker 1: she said with regard to Israel and Gaza. We wanted
Speaker 1: to bring in Jeff Stein, who, as you guys know,
Speaker 1: is fantastic economics reporter for the Washington Post, who's been
Speaker 1: taking a look at that record and what it is
Speaker 1: we can say and what we really don't know, which
Speaker 1: is most of all big question marks about what Kamala
Speaker 1: Harris might actually prioritize.
Speaker 5: Let's go ahead and get to that interview.
Speaker 4: Well Wall Street or at least Big Tech, or at
Speaker 4: least Jim Kramer is salivating at the possibility of a
Speaker 4: Kamala Harris administration. We're going to talk to watch Post
Speaker 4: Jeff Stein about that in one moment. First, want to
Speaker 4: play a little clip from CNBC Jim Kramer le let's
Speaker 4: take a look at his reaction to Kamala's rise.
Speaker 14: A few weeks here.
Speaker 3: Jim, these are very different people.
Speaker 18: Biden has been and remains unsophisticated about the way business works,
Speaker 18: specificated about the stock market by niature, picks people who
Speaker 18: have been historically bad for Wall Street, and you know Kahn,
Speaker 18: Jockie Canner, anti trust. That ends, that ends entirely. You've
Speaker 18: got a person who's from California. I'm regarding this actually
Speaker 18: as mega versus Mega mega. Tech does better with someone
Speaker 18: who's sophisticated, who understands California, who is not against tech.
Speaker 18: Biden has done everything in these agencies that he can
Speaker 18: to annoy to go after Tech.
Speaker 3: Let's never forget her brother in.
Speaker 18: Law is Tony West, who is a former General Council
Speaker 18: of PepsiCo that was with the Justice Department, is now the.
Speaker 3: General Council Uber.
Speaker 18: And you tell me if there's someone who's more sophisticated
Speaker 18: and knows more about business and the West Coast than
Speaker 18: her brother in law, who would be an amazing advisor.
Speaker 18: They're close, and I just keep thinking this is going
Speaker 18: to be globalist versus nativists, not nationalist. Nativist, yes, populist
Speaker 18: in terms of the Republican Party versus pro versus the
Speaker 18: Democrat international business. These are very big differences. And I
Speaker 18: have followed her career and followed Biden's career, and if
Speaker 18: anybody Biden didn't hurt the stock market at all, it
Speaker 18: is pretty amazing how well bidenministration stuff. But this whole
Speaker 18: idea that she's a clone of his is completely.
Speaker 3: Wrong, all right.
Speaker 4: Jeff Stein from the Washington Post, joning us Dowta, says, Jeff,
Speaker 4: thanks so much for joining us.
Speaker 19: Yeah, I always glad to be on. Thanks.
Speaker 4: So there's a lot to tease, apart when it comes
Speaker 4: to Kamala Harris's economic record, But let's start here with
Speaker 4: anti trust. You've got Jim Kramer of CNBC, who, luckily
Speaker 4: for us, perhaps is almost always wrong about everything.
Speaker 5: Two ways you can read those.
Speaker 4: So he's forecasting that if Harris were re elected, that
Speaker 4: he would fire Lena Coon. The FTC Chair and Fire
Speaker 4: Jonathan Cantor, who runs the Anti Trust Division in the
Speaker 4: Department of Justice, big folks of big business. He's not
Speaker 4: basing that on on any facts. He's he's asserting it,
Speaker 4: but he's asserting it based on the connections that she
Speaker 4: has and the and the kind of ideas that she's
Speaker 4: put for before. So it's not completely idle speculation or
Speaker 4: absurd at all. So starting on anti trust and then
Speaker 4: we can move on to other things. You know, what,
Speaker 4: what is your read on where Kamala Harris is on
Speaker 4: anti trust? And do you think that some of his
Speaker 4: some Biden's best appointees, Canter and Cohn would be on
Speaker 4: her shopping block?
Speaker 20: I mean, Jim Kramer, I know you were talking with
Speaker 20: this and you know what you just said. But he
Speaker 20: also predicted that Biden had no chance of dropping out
Speaker 20: of the race.
Speaker 19: I think there there.
Speaker 20: Is a lot of questions and totally legitimate questions that
Speaker 20: you're referring to. I mean, Tony West Harris's ties to
Speaker 20: California Silicon Valley elites, those are.
Speaker 19: Are very real.
Speaker 20: But I would be really surprised if a Harris presidency
Speaker 20: significantly retre did from the Biden anti trust policy.
Speaker 19: It is true that Harris has ties to.
Speaker 20: These elites that are you know, you would assume to
Speaker 20: be dispositionally opposed to what Biden has done an anti
Speaker 20: trust you know, not just Tony West, but David Pluff
Speaker 20: is now rumored to be back in the mix. You've
Speaker 20: you know, her husband is a white collar attorney, defense attorney.
Speaker 19: So there there's a there is a lot there.
Speaker 20: But I think it's worth pointing out that Ryan, you
Speaker 20: and I were looking at the people close to President
Speaker 20: Biden at the beginning of the administration, and there were
Speaker 20: a ton of black Rock or Blackstone or you know,
Speaker 20: you name it, Uber, former Uber executives Steve Vershetti and
Speaker 20: Bruce Red and Donaldlen, all these old Biden hands that
Speaker 20: seemed so fundamentally entrenched in the in the sort of
Speaker 20: Clinton Knight era and the Clinton Night wing of the party,
Speaker 20: people who had done welfare reformed that you know, that
Speaker 20: the left and others would find highly objectionable. That then
Speaker 20: were quite a avid advoct kits of expansions of offare state.
Speaker 19: Obviously those weren't approved, but.
Speaker 20: I think it's clear that Harris, you know, is signaling
Speaker 20: to the business community the business leaders I've talked to
Speaker 20: have said like, yes, we're we're trying to get better
Speaker 20: vibes from the Harrison administration, but I think it's too
Speaker 20: early to say.
Speaker 19: Unfortunately, like who's playing who here?
Speaker 20: And I would not be surprised at all if Harris,
Speaker 20: you know her, her record is really thin, like she
Speaker 20: hasn't had an executive position for very long, so we
Speaker 20: really just don't know which way she's going to go.
Speaker 20: She is also, I would say, just incredibly close with
Speaker 20: the labor unions s CiU in particular. We can get
Speaker 20: into that, but her political coalition for political allies is
Speaker 20: it's it's complicated in the way that I think Biden's
Speaker 20: were complicated, where you do have these people with really
Speaker 20: corporate resumes who end up appointing people like Lena Khan,
Speaker 20: who the anti trust community is really happy to see.
Speaker 1: How did Lena Khan end up in that position, because
Speaker 1: I think that tells us something about, you know, what
Speaker 1: we might be able to expect from a Kamala Harris.
Speaker 1: I mean, Joe Biden was no anti corporate lawyer. He
Speaker 1: was known as the Senator from MBNA because of his type,
Speaker 1: you know, relationships and willingness to do the bidding of
Speaker 1: the credit card issuers in his home state. He had
Speaker 1: a terrible track record on these issues, frankly, and then
Speaker 1: when he comes into office, you get these great appointments
Speaker 1: and a real shift. So is that reflective of just
Speaker 1: a shift in the center of gravity on these issues?
Speaker 1: Was it like because of ron Klain? I mean, where
Speaker 1: where did that come from?
Speaker 20: I guess you could get the Matt Stoler answer or
Speaker 20: the Matt Bruni answer, the two schools of thought on
Speaker 20: this question. The Matt Stoler answer obviously would be sort
Speaker 20: of what you first alluded to, that the Democratic Party
Speaker 20: has shifted considerably enough that this was sort of an
Speaker 20: important thing for buying, to fulfill to an important part
Speaker 20: of his base. I think the more cynical answer is
Speaker 20: that antitrust at the levels that it's being student Washington,
Speaker 20: while maybe sort of important for business formation and getting
Speaker 20: more competition in the market, is still kind of a
Speaker 20: solution that businesses want to see, right Like this is
Speaker 20: this is the Matt Bruni answer that anti trust reform
Speaker 20: and anti trust legislation is kind of popular in Washington
Speaker 20: has legs in Washington because it can be underwritten and
Speaker 20: supported by huge businesses. If you're like a second or
Speaker 20: third tier business, you're still not a worker.
Speaker 19: You know, you're still not someone who needs welfare benefits.
Speaker 20: You're actually often a very powerful entity, not someone we
Speaker 20: would think of as sort of a vulnerable, disempowered citizen.
Speaker 20: And so in Washington there is a ton of money
Speaker 20: behind the anti trust community, which I think is counterintuitive
Speaker 20: to people on the left who may think of anti
Speaker 20: trust and may be right that anti trust is this
Speaker 20: important anti monopoly tool by it really going back to
Speaker 20: the early nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 19: It's also been.
Speaker 20: Successful in part because there are powerful business and interest
Speaker 20: behind who want to have more competition, who want to
Speaker 20: themselves grow their market share. But that doesn't mean that
Speaker 20: they're necessarily small moment shops. It couldn't just mean that
Speaker 20: they're not the biggest players. So I think Harris's legacy
Speaker 20: or sort of what she would do on this is
Speaker 20: very interesting. I mean, I think it's quite clear that
Speaker 20: Donald Trump would be a lot worse on anti trust
Speaker 20: issues had his regulatory appointments to the FTC and elsewhere
Speaker 20: showed very little interest without with with with the important
Speaker 20: exception I think of tech, where you saw some actions
Speaker 20: on Google and some other big firms that Republicans and
Speaker 20: Conservatives things that aren't discriminating against them, other than that
Speaker 20: Trump had really took a light touch with, you know,
Speaker 20: regulatoration and regulation in general, including on untie trust.
Speaker 4: And the other layer of an answer to that question
Speaker 4: on a tactical level is that Elizabeth Warren made it
Speaker 4: a huge priority of hers to get Lena Khan and
Speaker 4: Jonathan Canter into those positions, and there was there was
Speaker 4: also a kind of parallel campaign in Washington that was
Speaker 4: I think orchestrated by a lot of the people that
Speaker 4: you're talking about to basically eliminate all of the other
Speaker 4: competition for the job. And they were easy to eliminate.
Speaker 4: And we did a bunch of reporting on each one
Speaker 4: of these candidates that was floated to be either FTC
Speaker 4: chair or anti trust anti trust share basically at the
Speaker 4: Department of Justice, and pointed out all of their conflicts
Speaker 4: of interest with big tech.
Speaker 3: Like so, the big big tech and.
Speaker 4: Other big business elements that wanted kind of pro trust
Speaker 4: candidates to get through had the problem that all of
Speaker 4: the lawyers that they wanted in that position had done
Speaker 4: very recent work with very unpopular monopolies, and all you
Speaker 4: had to do was kind of point out that they
Speaker 4: had done this work and then they would be kind
Speaker 4: of taken off the list. And if you notice, they
Speaker 4: were Canter and con were among the latest kind of
Speaker 4: appointments made. So it wasn't as if Biden kind of
Speaker 4: leaped at the opportunity to fulfill this play. He tried,
Speaker 4: He kind of tried to do everything else first and
Speaker 4: wasn't able to and then finally was like, you know what,
Speaker 4: all right, these these are the two left standing, and
Speaker 4: Elizabeth Warren really wants this to happen, and there's this whole,
Speaker 4: like you said, or you know, organized movement that is
Speaker 4: well funded behind it.
Speaker 3: So let's let's go ahead and do that.
Speaker 4: So that to me suggests I'm curious for your take
Speaker 4: on this that the same thing could happen in a
Speaker 4: Kamala Harris administration. That and we can put we can
Speaker 4: put up this Lee Leefong element in this next element here,
Speaker 4: because this goes to this exact point. She doesn't really
Speaker 4: have much of an ideology, youah, she has, she has,
Speaker 4: as as Leefon points out, she's been a tough on
Speaker 4: crime prosecutor. She's been a criminal justice reformer. She's been
Speaker 4: tough on the banks, she's been uh, she's been weak
Speaker 4: on the banks, like whatever is like opportunite At the moment,
Speaker 4: she's she's willing to do so. I think with the
Speaker 4: right pressure campaign, you could imagine that she could be
Speaker 4: dragged in the same position Biden was dragged to what
Speaker 4: what's your sense?
Speaker 20: I really like that framed the lead piece, and I
Speaker 20: have been trying to figure out what the hell I'm
Speaker 20: going to write this week.
Speaker 19: So I think that.
Speaker 20: The moment where it's like you have Marxist academics being
Speaker 20: like sharing coconut memes and being like, actually, maybe because
Speaker 20: of her dad and her mom or whatever, that there's
Speaker 20: like latent Marxist tendencies. And then Mark Cuban is telling
Speaker 20: Politico like, we have an ally here, and there's this
Speaker 20: like moment of good vibes among Democrats, and that seems
Speaker 20: to have like filtered out to the even like the
Speaker 20: not the blue mag of oyalist types like people on
Speaker 20: the left and right of the party are sort of
Speaker 20: after all the depression that people on the left felt
Speaker 20: with the Biden era and his verbal lapses, there's now
Speaker 20: this moment where like people are hoping that there's some change,
Speaker 20: that that Harris represents what they want to see. And
Speaker 20: I think the reality of politics not to be like
Speaker 20: too big of a bummer for people who are hoping
Speaker 20: to see in her something different. The reality of politics
Speaker 20: is that all these people can't be right. You know,
Speaker 20: at some point the unions or the business community is
Speaker 20: going to be disappointed. How long she can do this
Speaker 20: thing where she's sort of allowing people to see in
Speaker 20: her what they want to see. I guess, well, we'll
Speaker 20: have to wait. I mean, I get the sense. I
Speaker 20: would say. The one thing that I have felt pretty
Speaker 20: strongly about from my reporting is that she does seem
Speaker 20: to care quite deeply about what we would call like the.
Speaker 19: Care economy set of issues.
Speaker 5: I don't know if we want to get into this,
Speaker 5: but yeah, Payton.
Speaker 20: Leave, childcare, elver care, home care, these are things that
Speaker 20: you know, the Biden administration tried to pass. It failed
Speaker 20: as part of the build Back that Are agenda due
Speaker 20: to Joe Manchin and Kirsten Cinema. But what is interesting
Speaker 20: to me about that is that Harris, as a black woman,
Speaker 20: has formed for decades a very very close political alliance
Speaker 20: with the kind of unions that Biden has traditionally been
Speaker 20: weaker among, including sort of the service worker unions which
Speaker 20: are more heavily composed of immigrants and people of color
Speaker 20: and women in particular, belt to the building trades in
Speaker 20: the Midwest that you see particularly, you know, the National
Speaker 20: American Building Trades Union and the Teamsters, like those kinds
Speaker 20: of unions that are sort of doing construction and manufacturing.
Speaker 20: Biden had a very strong ind with them. It's not
Speaker 20: clear if Harris is that strong, but it seemed like
Speaker 20: her base. But also concurrently, the policy issues space that
Speaker 20: she's very invested in, very interested in taking up again.
Speaker 20: Who knows, maybe she gets into office and does something
Speaker 20: completely different, but the reporting I've done suggest that she
Speaker 20: has deeply invested in that set of issues, and she
Speaker 20: spent a lot of time talking to caregivers, talking to
Speaker 20: SCIU representatives, talking to the people who would benefit from
Speaker 20: those kinds of investments that were a noticeable failure in
Speaker 20: the first Biden administration.
Speaker 1: And so does it follow then that you would expect
Speaker 1: a sort of similar orientation of like the National Labor
Speaker 1: Relations Board under Kamala Harris? Has she been consistent because
Speaker 1: part of what Lee Funk's piece brings out is a
Speaker 1: lot of times when she was elected and you know,
Speaker 1: statewide in California or prosecute DA in California, she was
Speaker 1: more conservative, more on the right, and then she reforms
Speaker 1: herself in the sense and she reforms herself again to
Speaker 1: be more progressive because she thinks that's the lane that's
Speaker 1: open to her in the twenty twenty primary. So a
Speaker 1: lot of what you think of Kamala Harris depends on
Speaker 1: what era of her politics that you're looking at. And
Speaker 1: as vice president, she's just sort of wholly undefined because
Speaker 1: she's been on the ouns, you know, on the outskirts
Speaker 1: of that administration. It's not her policy, it's a Biden policy.
Speaker 1: You really can't say anything about her vis a VI
Speaker 1: what she has done with Joe Biden. But you know,
Speaker 1: do you see a consistent thread from the California time
Speaker 1: to the Senate time to the presidential time in terms
Speaker 1: of her support for labor.
Speaker 20: Yes, I think she has clearly from very early on cultivated.
Speaker 19: That set of unions.
Speaker 20: And you know, I don't know if that's suggest that
Speaker 20: she'll be good on criminal justice reform from a left
Speaker 20: perspective or foreign policy, But I do think I feel
Speaker 20: very convinced that that, particularly for the service worker, she's
Speaker 20: quite dug in on doing what it takes to help them,
Speaker 20: as they've helped her move up not just to the
Speaker 20: vice presidency, but you know, in earlier stages of her career,
Speaker 20: when she was running for office in California. I will
Speaker 20: just say, on this broader topic we're discussing, you know,
Speaker 20: I'm torn right because part of me feels like Biden,
Speaker 20: you know, had all of these votes that you know,
Speaker 20: your listeners and the viewers will be familiar with, you know,
Speaker 20: for the Iraq War and to deregulate Wall Street, and
Speaker 20: to you guys have lists.
Speaker 19: Credit card and student debt changes.
Speaker 20: That made it more difficult for people to decline bankruptcy
Speaker 20: and just discharge their debt. All these changes that suggest
Speaker 20: that Biden was really on the corporate wing of the party.
Speaker 20: And then in office he did a lot of things
Speaker 20: I think we all recognized were more left wing than
Speaker 20: we were expecting. Three hundred billion dollars in student debt
Speaker 20: forgiveness obviously struck down by the courts, but they I
Speaker 20: think they spared to say that they've continued fighting for
Speaker 20: that Obviously there's a lot of frustration with Gaza, and.
Speaker 19: You know, criticism of Biden over that.
Speaker 20: But Biden, at least, I think, in part because he
Speaker 20: was so centrist in disposition, an old white man who
Speaker 20: people saw as a centrist, was kind of able to
Speaker 20: make things that otherwise would seem more liberal, give them
Speaker 20: sort of a centrist vineir like like the mightas touch
Speaker 20: where things became centrist when Biden did them.
Speaker 19: I know a people disagree with that, but I think
Speaker 19: there's something to it.
Speaker 20: And I wonder if Harris's could have the opposite thing
Speaker 20: the thing we saw in Obama, where because her because
Speaker 20: she's a black woman, because of her identity, and because
Speaker 20: her political fear is not the same as Biden. It's
Speaker 20: been so afraid of losing the progressive base that he
Speaker 20: was very solicitous of them. If Harris's identity sort of
Speaker 20: reduces the need for her politically to assure that part
Speaker 20: of the party, maybe she will tax center in her
Speaker 20: policy implementation and disposition.
Speaker 19: I'm not sure what you guys think of that thought.
Speaker 3: But I think, yeah, it's probably true that.
Speaker 4: Centrist policies from her will be coded as left wing
Speaker 4: like they were under Obama and Biden can push you know,
Speaker 4: pretty far to the left end of the possible spectrum
Speaker 4: from what a president can do and still be coded
Speaker 4: centrist because he's Biden. I think that's I think that's
Speaker 4: a kind of irrefutable point, and it doesn't doesn't bode
Speaker 4: well for her ability to kind of govern. Unlikely she'll
Speaker 4: have a Congress to do much of that with, so
Speaker 4: maybe that won't be a problem for anyway.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well that's true, but of course there's still plenty
Speaker 1: that can be done at the executive level, and as
Speaker 1: Lena Conna Jonathan Canter are shown with the appointments mattering
Speaker 1: quite a bit. Jeff Sign always great to have your
Speaker 1: insights and your reporting. It's astonishing, honestly, how many years
Speaker 1: has Kamala Harris been in public office that we can
Speaker 1: We can't answer really the most basic questions about who
Speaker 1: she is. And I think it'll be interesting to see
Speaker 1: how she positions herself because it'll answer some of these questions.
Speaker 5: Is about whether it.
Speaker 1: Is about the person and their ideology or how they're
Speaker 1: perceived and how much bandwidth that gives them to do
Speaker 1: you know, quote unquote liberal things, or is it that
Speaker 1: there's a different moment that is truly moving past the
Speaker 1: you know, Reagan, Clinton, Obama neoliberal era where it's just
Speaker 1: you stick any normy democrat in there and they're going
Speaker 1: to be pro antitrust and they're going to be pro labor,
Speaker 1: et cetera. So it'll be fascinating to watch how all
Speaker 1: of sunfis.
Speaker 4: I'd edit that to say we do have an answer
Speaker 4: the question, we do know who she is, just not
Speaker 4: a satisfying answer.
Speaker 3: She's just a politician who's going to do what can
Speaker 3: meaning is like beneficial that day, true.
Speaker 1: Very true, Jeff, Thank you so much, So great to see.
Speaker 19: You and my pleasure.
Speaker 14: Guys.
Speaker 5: Thanks again, Yeah, our pleasure.
Speaker 1: All right, guys, thank you so much for watching. Ryan
Speaker 1: and Emily will be here for a fantastic counterpoints tomorrow
Speaker 1: and Sager will be back on Thursday. So our lung
Speaker 1: awaited soccer reaction to all of the events of this
Speaker 1: way I'm going to watch. I'm sure no one is
Speaker 1: more excited about being back here to share all of
Speaker 1: his thoughts on SAGERA. So so, Ryan will see you
Speaker 1: tomorrow and I will see you on Thursday.
Speaker 3: Bye, y'all, see you guys tomorrow.
Speaker 12: Bottot shot keep, keep shop, keep shout pish