Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here,
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Speaker 4: Our good morning, and welcome to Counterpoints Emily.
Speaker 5: On yesterday's show, as you may or may not have seen,
Speaker 5: Crystal and Sager Saul the immigration policy debate with an
Speaker 5: hour long kind of fistfight. Today, maybe we can figure
Speaker 5: out Israel Palestine.
Speaker 6: It just might take a little bit longer than an hour.
Speaker 6: We might have give this one ninety minutes.
Speaker 4: All right, we'll let that one stretch.
Speaker 3: I think that should do.
Speaker 5: But so at the end of the show, we're actually
Speaker 5: he's not listed here, but we're going to have Representative
Speaker 5: Greg Kassar in the studio this morning.
Speaker 4: He couldn't get in early enough. That's one of the
Speaker 4: things about taping.
Speaker 5: It can compacted schedule with members of Congress and other newsmakers.
Speaker 4: You know, they can get here when they can get here.
Speaker 5: So after his interview airs, we'll have it up on
Speaker 5: YouTube and elsewhere, but it's not going to be in
Speaker 5: the full show that goes out to premium subscribers, which
Speaker 5: you can become one at breakingpoints dot com. Though I'm
Speaker 5: not really selling it since it won't have our interview
Speaker 5: with him. It will have our interview with my former
Speaker 5: colleague at the Intercept, Lee Fong, who testified at Congress yesterday.
Speaker 4: Yes, just kind of interesting and cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, life experience testified.
Speaker 5: If you don't have to be there under subpoena, it's
Speaker 5: probably fun.
Speaker 6: Oh that's the best way to do it, really the
Speaker 6: only way to do it.
Speaker 3: But yeah, Lee.
Speaker 6: Testified about his own reporting on censorship, and so I
Speaker 6: think we're really eager to ask him some questions about
Speaker 6: his experience in front of Congress, some of the questions
Speaker 6: that he got and some of his own reporting, and
Speaker 6: the other thing that we'd be remiss not to mention
Speaker 6: that happened just last night because there's a lot of
Speaker 6: breaking news. Republican leadership got rolled on two big votes
Speaker 6: in the House last night. We're going to dive into
Speaker 6: that in just a bit, but also WHI all that
Speaker 6: was happening for the New York Times, quote, Nikki Haley
Speaker 6: was out voted in Nevada's Republican presidential primary by quote
Speaker 6: none of these candidates. So Nicki Haley lost to none
Speaker 6: of the above option on the ballot just last night.
Speaker 6: The New York Times calls it quote an embarrassment and
Speaker 6: a contest in which she faced no direct competition. Now,
Speaker 6: the primary doesn't award any delegates. Nevada has a weird
Speaker 6: system going. So Trump is actually he said he wasn't
Speaker 6: going to take part in it. He's doing the party
Speaker 6: caucuses tomorrow in Nevada, where he's very popular. But we
Speaker 6: had to mention that Nikki Haley lost to none of
Speaker 6: the above.
Speaker 5: To that point, there's a big push in the Michigan
Speaker 5: Democratic primary, which is coming up in a couple of
Speaker 5: weeks for people to vote uncommitted. So we'll see how
Speaker 5: I think Biden's most serious opponent in Michigan will be uncommitted.
Speaker 4: So, yes, the none of.
Speaker 5: The above movement, which is from Brewster's Millions for the
Speaker 5: people who remember that movie from the eighties, Guy burned
Speaker 5: millions of dollars getting behind none of the above in
Speaker 5: the New York mayoral race, and it became a populist
Speaker 5: sensation because it really is a way for people to
Speaker 5: express their actual frustration with the system.
Speaker 6: And people were joking about Nikki Haley losing to none
Speaker 6: of the above yesterday. It was like she's going to
Speaker 6: win the primary obviously, But actually what happened was none
Speaker 6: of the above prevailed in a nail binder.
Speaker 5: Hate When that happened, just the worst, all right, So
Speaker 5: we have news out of the out of the Middle East.
Speaker 5: So early this morning, Reuter's broke the response from Hamas
Speaker 5: to the earlier deal that had been proposed by Israel
Speaker 5: through Cutter. Initial reports had come out that Hamas had
Speaker 5: rejected the Israeli proposal for whatever you want to call it,
Speaker 5: sees fire humanitarian pause. In fact, they came back with
Speaker 5: this proposal, which we can lay out in detail here
Speaker 5: and talk about this. So they propose three forty five
Speaker 5: day ceasefires, rolling in phases. So the first phase would
Speaker 5: see all Israeli women hostages, men under nineteen, men and
Speaker 5: boys under nineteen, the elderly and the sick would be
Speaker 5: exchanged for Palestinian women and children held in Israeli jails.
Speaker 5: During that time, Israeli troops would withdraw from Gaza and
Speaker 5: the reconstruction of hospitals and some refugee camps would begin.
Speaker 5: So then the second forty five day phase would see
Speaker 5: the remaining Israeli hostages exchanged for some amount of Palestinian prisoners.
Speaker 5: We don't know how many at this point that Hamas
Speaker 5: is demanding. There have been some maximal demands from some
Speaker 5: in Hamas saying every single person in Israeli in Israeli
Speaker 5: captivity at this point is really detention. That is something
Speaker 5: that obviously Israel is going to push back on and
Speaker 5: non starter and can make and an offer of fewer
Speaker 5: people they were keeping these folks you can have you
Speaker 5: can have these folks back. The third and final forty
Speaker 5: five day phase would see the exchange of the remains
Speaker 5: of those who have died on both sides, and it
Speaker 5: would then end with a permanent ceasefire. This is the deal,
Speaker 5: and actually we'll roll. When President Biden addressed the nation
Speaker 5: yesterday afternoon, he had already gone over this proposal, though
Speaker 5: it had not lead to the press. Here's how Biden
Speaker 5: responded to it.
Speaker 7: There is some movement, and I don't want to. I
Speaker 7: don't want to, I mean, choose my words. There's some movement,
Speaker 7: there's been a response from the there's been a response
Speaker 7: from the opposition. But yes, I'm sorry from Hamas, but
Speaker 7: it seems to be a little over the top. We're
Speaker 7: not sure where it is continuing negotiation right now.
Speaker 6: He's the person that is allegedly negotiating to Steele Ryan
Speaker 6: and he cannot get through a sentence in under what
Speaker 6: thirty seconds, an easy sentence. He needs somebody in the audience.
Speaker 6: I don't know if people caught that, if they're just
Speaker 6: listening to yell out Hamas when he was looking for
Speaker 6: the word Hamas, because he was bumbling and stumbling around
Speaker 6: to find it.
Speaker 5: Nobody would mistake me for like the most fluid speaker.
Speaker 3: But come on, man, well it's a little different, right.
Speaker 5: But I'm also not I'm also not president of the
Speaker 5: United States. He did seem to forget the name of
Speaker 5: amas Am. I am, I am I over reading that there.
Speaker 6: No, it's it's genuinely painful to watch, and then you
Speaker 6: know it's painful on his behalf. I mean, I think
Speaker 6: that's the human reaction when you hear that or watch
Speaker 6: that it's it's painful on his behalf. But then you
Speaker 6: have to remind yourself, Oh, this is a president of
Speaker 6: the United States, who is the person at the negotiating table,
Speaker 6: the commander of the commander in chief of the military.
Speaker 6: If I'm a member of the military and I'm watching that,
Speaker 6: it's terrifying to me. If I'm a member of the
Speaker 6: military's family, that's terrifying to me.
Speaker 3: It's just painful all around.
Speaker 4: Imagine how terrifying it must be for him too.
Speaker 5: He's up at the podium about to describe the counteroffer
Speaker 5: from Hamas and you can't find the word Hamas.
Speaker 3: Yeah, No, that's a good point.
Speaker 4: I would imagine his brain is just like going bananas
Speaker 4: at that point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 4: Anything the opposition.
Speaker 5: And then somebody's He's like, yeah, So before we get
Speaker 5: to kgp's response to this, the underlying kind of inability
Speaker 5: of the two sides to get to a deal so
Speaker 5: far is pretty fundamental. So yesterday the Jerusalem Post had
Speaker 5: a sentence in one of its articles that I wanted
Speaker 5: to read because I think it really gets at this
Speaker 5: at the divide. Here they wrote an issue between Hamas
Speaker 5: and Israel is the terror group's insistence that a deal
Speaker 5: must include an end to the gods of war, while
Speaker 5: Israel has stood on its principal position that it must
Speaker 5: be allowed to complete its military campaign to oust Hamas
Speaker 5: from the enclave. So, on the one hand, you have
Speaker 5: one party that wants to end the war.
Speaker 4: You have the other party that wants to end the
Speaker 4: other party.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you can imagine how that's going to be difficult
Speaker 5: to get to a place at the end where you
Speaker 5: reach a deal, like where's the common ground between those
Speaker 5: two positions?
Speaker 3: Right? And I mean it's interesting. The phrasing of the
Speaker 3: sentence is interesting as you're pointing out.
Speaker 6: And also, I mean it's tough because from the perspective
Speaker 6: of people who might be reading the Jerusalem Post, they
Speaker 6: would look back and say, well, there were people who
Speaker 6: were calling for a ceasefire on October eighth, October ninth,
Speaker 6: October tenth, or immediately saying preemptively, in fact, saying like
Speaker 6: October eighth, ceasefire. This is going to be bloody and devastating,
Speaker 6: and so before it even starts, cease fire. And so
Speaker 6: I understand that position that you know, there had to
Speaker 6: be some type of response, but it's getting harder and
Speaker 6: harder to your point, to say that the response has
Speaker 6: or to persuade the public that the ongoing response is
Speaker 6: within the realm of proportionality, years within the realm of reasonableness.
Speaker 3: When you have so many people.
Speaker 6: Dead, and you have Hamas going back into northern Gaza,
Speaker 6: you have the military mission of quote eradicating Hamas looking
Speaker 6: less and less likely every single day, and when you
Speaker 6: still have one hundred and thirty six hostages, or report
Speaker 6: yesterday from the Israeli governments that they had notified more
Speaker 6: than thirty family members of the remaining one hundred and
Speaker 6: thirty six hostages that their Level one passed away. They
Speaker 6: said most of those were likely on October seventh. It's
Speaker 6: hard to say, but this is making it very difficult,
Speaker 6: to your point, it makes Israel's position increasingly untenable.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And from the Hamas side, you've had senior Hamas
Speaker 5: officials who have given interviews saying we're only recognizing the
Speaker 5: state of Israel as a ruse, as a temporary ruse,
Speaker 5: and ultimately we think the entire land is occupied and
Speaker 5: we'd like to take it back. So in that sense,
Speaker 5: both parties and the negotiation you want the elimination of
Speaker 5: the other party. What they actually want matters less than
Speaker 5: what they can actually do, and Hamas doesn't really have
Speaker 5: the capacity to eliminate a nuclear.
Speaker 4: Power, right.
Speaker 3: They're both in the one party state train to your.
Speaker 5: Point, Yes, yeah, and elements of them both pretend that
Speaker 5: they support a two state solution, right, but not the
Speaker 5: necessarily the leading elements at this point.
Speaker 4: But it does put the It does put Hamas.
Speaker 5: In this weird position of being the one for a
Speaker 5: ceasefire and Israel being the one, you know, for continuing
Speaker 5: the war. And it puts the United States in the
Speaker 5: awkward position of saying, no, we want the war to continue.
Speaker 5: And so here's how Karine Jean Pierre at the White
Speaker 5: House yesterday kind of squared that circle. Separate topic on
Speaker 5: the hostage negotiations.
Speaker 3: You're a team who's been covering this old in Middle
Speaker 3: least says that Hamas is still insisting on a permanent
Speaker 3: cease hire.
Speaker 6: Is it still this administration's position that it opposes a permanency.
Speaker 8: What we have been working towards, and you've heard us
Speaker 8: say over and over again, we want to see a
Speaker 8: humanitarian pause. We want to make sure that we get
Speaker 8: these American hostages home and also hostage is more broadly
Speaker 8: obviously home to their families, and we want to make
Speaker 8: sure that we get that critical aid, the critical aid
Speaker 8: that Palestinians need into Gaza. It is important to get
Speaker 8: that aid, whether it's medical, whether it's food, we have
Speaker 8: to get that in and so we believe a humanitarian
Speaker 8: pause gets us there. You know, there is As I
Speaker 8: stated at the top, Hamas has responded to the framework
Speaker 8: of a hostage deal, and so we're going to review
Speaker 8: it and I'm going to be really really careful. I'm
Speaker 8: not going to dive into or telegraph information about their
Speaker 8: response from here, but we've been very clear that we
Speaker 8: believe that we need to get to another humanitarian pause
Speaker 8: because that humanitarian aid needs to get in and also plans.
Speaker 9: It is the administration's position that he permanents he is fighting.
Speaker 8: You have been very clear, We've been very clear from
Speaker 8: where we stand on the ceasfire.
Speaker 9: That has not changed.
Speaker 5: So the US is doing a kind of dangerous dance
Speaker 5: here where I don't know if you've seen some of
Speaker 5: this reporting, but effectively, what the US has been telegraphing
Speaker 5: is that through Katar Qatar, then over to Maas saying, Okay,
Speaker 5: this is what we're saying publicly that we want these
Speaker 5: humanitarian pauses, our official positions that were not for a
Speaker 5: permanent ceasefire. But if you can get to an extended
Speaker 5: humanitarian pause ninety days one hundred and thirty five days,
Speaker 5: as in this OS proposal, then the US will not
Speaker 5: allow Israel to relaunch the war. In other words, cool
Speaker 5: it down and it will stay cooled down. Amas is
Speaker 5: kind of pushed back with how can we trust that, Like,
Speaker 5: nothing that you've said, nothing that the US has said
Speaker 5: to Israel so far has led to changes in Israeli behavior,
Speaker 5: So why would this What do you make of that
Speaker 5: kind of this yawning gap between the public and private
Speaker 5: positions of the Biden administration.
Speaker 6: I mean, I think it's for one of the difficult
Speaker 6: things in negotiating here is that it's immensely difficult for
Speaker 6: either side to trust that the other side will execute
Speaker 6: on what they're promising to execute on, especially with the
Speaker 6: volatile context of the entire Middle East right now, where something.
Speaker 3: Can change in an instant.
Speaker 6: I mean, it's very easy to imagine another situation like
Speaker 6: what happened just a couple of weeks ago to the
Speaker 6: United States in Jordan, where three reservists were killed, completely
Speaker 6: changing the dynamics of what was negotiated and agreed on.
Speaker 3: I don't know what do you.
Speaker 6: Make of the idea that if there is an extended pause,
Speaker 6: that there will be an ability to sort of prevent
Speaker 6: the war from relaunching.
Speaker 5: It's interesting, It's it's plausible, and it's plausible in a
Speaker 5: sense that you can you can imagine that once the
Speaker 5: momentum goes towards reconstruction and aid coming back in that
Speaker 5: you can imagine how that can take hold and last.
Speaker 5: On the other hand, the context here is that Netnyah,
Speaker 5: who is extraordinarily unpopular, he knows that if he faces
Speaker 5: a snap election, he's probably going to get ousted, and
Speaker 5: he's facing corruption charges, which means that he if he
Speaker 5: gets ousted, uh, those those charges slap back in and
Speaker 5: he might wind up actually getting convicted of something. And
Speaker 5: so net Yaho is is the ultimate political survivor. And
Speaker 5: he also is no fan of Biden. So if we're
Speaker 5: talking four months from now, you know we're in the summer,
Speaker 5: and so it is. You can also see the domestic
Speaker 5: US politics where if Yahu he started the war in
Speaker 5: the summer or fall. That's probably pretty damaging for Biden
Speaker 5: because because he will have looked as though he failed
Speaker 5: in his diplomatic effort to get this war to an end.
Speaker 5: And then then Yahoo might think, well, now I've got
Speaker 5: Trump and I can roll the dice with Trump coming
Speaker 5: in a couple of months, and so that you know,
Speaker 5: Trump Trump is a classic live to fight another day politician,
Speaker 5: like just you know, people are always looking for his
Speaker 5: long term strategy when he doesn't really usually have one.
Speaker 5: It's just like just like his business strategy, just trying
Speaker 5: to stay you know, one day ahead of the creditors,
Speaker 5: and in his political strategy is the same, sting one
Speaker 5: day ahead of all of his opponents. Then Yahoo the same.
Speaker 5: So that's that's why you can imagine a world where
Speaker 5: it's solidifies. But you can also see how n Yahoo
Speaker 5: would have the kind of incentives to make sure that
Speaker 5: it didn't.
Speaker 6: And again why there's no trust on either side of
Speaker 6: that negotiation at this point.
Speaker 5: And yeah, and Hamas has criticized Israel for releasing Israeli
Speaker 5: detainees through the previous deal and then days later rating
Speaker 5: their houses in the West Bank and just bringing them
Speaker 5: right back in, Like what, hey, we kept up our
Speaker 5: part of the bargain. We released them. We didn't say
Speaker 5: we wouldn't pick them up, you know, three days later.
Speaker 5: So you had mentioned that if we could jump to
Speaker 5: the final element of the block that you had just mentioned.
Speaker 5: This is a report from Ken Klippenstein over at the intercept.
Speaker 4: You had mentioned the attack on the Jordanian base.
Speaker 5: I wanted to talk about this briefly because he said
Speaker 5: the headline here American base in Jordan, where drone killed
Speaker 5: through three US troops dogged by inadequate air defenses. I
Speaker 5: encourage people to read the whole story because, based on
Speaker 5: sources who served at this base, he really lays out
Speaker 5: how vulnerable this base was to this drone attack. The
Speaker 5: military explanation was that there was some confusion that they
Speaker 5: had a drone out there and they thought that this
Speaker 5: drone that was coming back to the base was an
Speaker 5: American drone. It actually turned out to be an Iraqi
Speaker 5: militia drone and three reservists ended up getting killed. That
Speaker 5: is the second question I'd love to have answered. By
Speaker 5: the way, why are reservists overseas at this base? Like
Speaker 5: if you're like if we're not at actual war. People
Speaker 5: who are in the reserves should be at home, like
Speaker 5: they should not be called They shouldn't be called up.
Speaker 4: We should we should have enough.
Speaker 5: Troops with a trillion dollar budget that we don't need
Speaker 5: to call up reservists and send them to Jordan. But
Speaker 5: then the other the other point, as you read through
Speaker 5: his story, you're like, we're putting all these American troops
Speaker 5: in harm's way, yes, and not giving them adequate protection. Yes,
Speaker 5: And spending billions of dollars on protecting the Israeli government,
Speaker 5: which then antagonizes and produces the conflict that then leads
Speaker 5: to our own troops getting killed without adequate protection.
Speaker 6: And remember, Biden didn't know where This is another thing
Speaker 6: that I'm surprised hasn't gone into play when people are
Speaker 6: talking about what happened to Jordan, is Biden didn't know
Speaker 6: where his Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin was for how long?
Speaker 3: Right, I mean, in all serious.
Speaker 5: We finally apologize for was like, well, wouldn't everybody else
Speaker 5: be fired for this?
Speaker 4: He's like, yeah, I.
Speaker 6: Mean you can see again, you can see why I
Speaker 6: have two hot wars, one of which spiraled into three
Speaker 6: American deaths. I'm sure there are plenty. I don't know
Speaker 6: the exact number of remaining hostages that are American, but
Speaker 6: you can't. I mean, it's just insane the level of
Speaker 6: incompetence every single day coming out of the Biden administration.
Speaker 6: And this if we put a three up on the screen.
Speaker 6: This was some news yesterday. I just mentioned this, but
Speaker 6: Israel confirmed the death of thirty one hostages as Homos
Speaker 6: was responding to those proposals. That was a confidential internal
Speaker 6: Israeli reviewed that the New York Times got its hands on.
Speaker 6: The Times adds the fate of a further twenty people
Speaker 6: is also in question, amid unconfirmed intelligence that they may
Speaker 6: also have died during their captivity. So that would bring
Speaker 6: the number of hostages somewhere around one hundred living hostages.
Speaker 6: And you know, lots of questions about who died and
Speaker 6: when will remain for Netan Yahoo for a very very
Speaker 6: long time.
Speaker 5: Ran yes, and also right, you're probably correct in reading
Speaker 5: the intelligence there that most of these probably died on
Speaker 5: October seventh, and we're still and their remains were taken.
Speaker 4: Back to gods.
Speaker 5: Also gads, as we've all seen from news reports, has
Speaker 5: been an extraordinarily dangerous place for everybody. And the hostages
Speaker 5: who have been released have told Israeli media that the
Speaker 5: thing that they were most afraid of was the twenty
Speaker 5: four to seven bombing campaign and that they were nervous
Speaker 5: that they were going to die under rubble.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they both.
Speaker 6: Felt really fired, right, They felt like the idea didn't
Speaker 6: know where they were was a quote that a couple
Speaker 6: of them gave after their being after they were released.
Speaker 5: Or hoping they didn't know where they were, because if
Speaker 5: they were, they knew where they were and were still
Speaker 5: bombing that area, then that's I think that's even harder
Speaker 5: to absorb that your government would be would willingly do
Speaker 5: that well.
Speaker 6: And again, I think to the point you were making earlier,
Speaker 6: it's hard for Israel to maintain, especially when obviously the
Speaker 6: country is focused on the return of the hostages. It's
Speaker 6: harder for Israel to maintain its position that it must
Speaker 6: complete the military operation when hostages have died frankly during
Speaker 6: the military operation, when there been hostages remaining for so
Speaker 6: long during the military operation, and when you have returned
Speaker 6: to hostages saying that they didn't have you know, they
Speaker 6: didn't feel confident the military operation was not going to
Speaker 6: result in their deaths.
Speaker 3: That's a really difficult position.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and the war itself continues to be extraordinarily dangerous
Speaker 5: also for IDF soldiers. The IDF has not confirmed this,
Speaker 5: but according to the Hamas telegram channel Alkasamber Gads telegram
Speaker 5: channel that posted this morning, seven IDF soldiers were killed
Speaker 5: quote in the vicinity of Al Hawas near the highat
Speaker 5: school west of Conunis.
Speaker 4: This is a this is.
Speaker 5: A telegram channel that is it's kind of the official
Speaker 5: channel that broadcasts you know, Hamas military news and often
Speaker 5: is is confirmed later.
Speaker 4: By by either I d F or media reports.
Speaker 5: So it's a it's a fairly reliable whether or not
Speaker 5: this is this is true. We'll find out in the
Speaker 5: next hours or or maybe days. But seven I d
Speaker 5: F soldiers killed in a single confrontation would be you know,
Speaker 5: one of one of the highest casually rates in a
Speaker 5: in uh, you know, in a day between you know,
Speaker 5: between uh you know, Hamas and and the I d F.
Speaker 5: And it comes just as you know, these negotiations are
Speaker 5: getting to you know, potentially a breakthrough place.
Speaker 4: And so it's just a.
Speaker 5: Reminder of how the world and everyone just needs this
Speaker 5: war to end. Meantime, we can put up this second
Speaker 5: to last element here. You continue to have and this
Speaker 5: has been going on for weeks now, but you you
Speaker 5: continue to have Israeli civilians UH protesting the UH the
Speaker 5: entry and we've got this UH got this footage up here,
Speaker 5: the entry of AID into gas And so what what
Speaker 5: what you're looking at here? And if you're watching, if
Speaker 5: you're listening on the podcast, what we're showing here UH
Speaker 5: is are just regular Israeli civilians who have gotten into
Speaker 5: a heavily militarized area like this is not this is
Speaker 5: not somewhere that I think civilians could sneak into without
Speaker 5: some sort of at least kind of acquiescence from the
Speaker 5: Israeli military.
Speaker 10: Uh.
Speaker 4: And and they're swarming AID trucks.
Speaker 5: And you've had a lot of ideaf sympathetic Twitter accounts
Speaker 5: and others who have celebrated these civilian actions UH in
Speaker 5: in reducing the number of AID trucks that have been
Speaker 5: getting into Gaza down sometimes into the single or double digits.
Speaker 5: And if we can put up this this final element.
Speaker 5: Vidaan Patel earlier this week that on Monday, the State
Speaker 5: Department spokesperson he was talking about, and it was it
Speaker 5: was kind of a boast. It was what the United
Speaker 5: States has done so far in order to get relief
Speaker 5: into Gaza. He said that, you know, on February fourth,
Speaker 5: two hundred and seven relief trucks entered Gaza in a
Speaker 5: single day.
Speaker 4: And he said, since October twenty first, I have a
Speaker 4: typo in there. I said, twenty fifth.
Speaker 5: Since October twenty first, ten five hundred trucks had made
Speaker 5: it in. So we're talking about November, December, January plus there.
Speaker 5: Aid groups have said you need about thousand trucks a
Speaker 5: day to get in just to meet the very basic
Speaker 5: needs of the Gaza population. That would be close to
Speaker 5: one hundred thousand trucks. People can do the math if
Speaker 5: they want. There that only ten thousand have gotten in
Speaker 5: explains why you have the dysentery, diuretic diseases that are
Speaker 5: spreading among children, the malnutrition and the starvation and the
Speaker 5: famine that we're seeing because ten percent of the of
Speaker 5: the minimum.
Speaker 4: Is going to lead to just absolutely catastrophic.
Speaker 6: Conditions, you know, and this is one of the toughest
Speaker 6: parts of the entire scenario, and that people in Israel.
Speaker 6: If people are wondering why you have the West Bank
Speaker 6: scenes out of the West Bank that look like that.
Speaker 6: We've all heard the complaints from Israel that the AID
Speaker 6: is sometimes hoarded by Hamas, it's sometimes misused by Hamas,
Speaker 6: and you know, found sacks and stuff, un rush sacks
Speaker 6: and tunnels and all of that, which there's obviously truth
Speaker 6: that Hamas has you know, not been entirely honest about
Speaker 6: where all the AID.
Speaker 4: Is, and there's no doubt about that, and so right.
Speaker 6: And so's it leads to this type of situation. And
Speaker 6: at the same time, you simply cannot allow, cannot allow
Speaker 6: tens of thousands of people, millions of people actually to
Speaker 6: live in those conditions, right.
Speaker 5: Because we're talking you know, Hamas is somewhere at this
Speaker 5: point between ten and thirty thousand fighters.
Speaker 4: There's two million people in Gaza.
Speaker 5: So the claim that ten to twenty thousand people could
Speaker 5: even hoard enough that it would lead to the starvation
Speaker 5: of two million people just doesn't pass the smell test,
Speaker 5: like that just simply wouldn't even be possible.
Speaker 6: But for Israel, the United States, and especially the Israeli
Speaker 6: government when it's dealing with the United States and these
Speaker 6: questions about a to the point you're raising about the
Speaker 6: political calculations of nen Yahoo, I mean it's very difficult.
Speaker 6: I mean, he's, you know, as I think poorly as
Speaker 6: Nya who has handled all of this. At least we
Speaker 6: can say he wasn't in an easy position or a
Speaker 6: good position.
Speaker 3: Part of that from his own fault.
Speaker 6: But the political tightrope that anyone who or anyone would
Speaker 6: have to walk here is not easy for reasons like that,
Speaker 6: for reasons related to that. It's just a to execute
Speaker 6: humane strategies on either side of this in the best
Speaker 6: of circumstances, if people wanted to do that would not
Speaker 6: be easy.
Speaker 5: Right, because the propaganda has demonized every single Palestinian as
Speaker 5: either a terrorist or potential terrorists. So then you're like, well,
Speaker 5: and also we're going to give them humanitarian aid, And
Speaker 5: so the publics went, I thought they were all terrorists.
Speaker 5: Why how can we possibly how can you give aid?
Speaker 5: Because and that's what you'll hear when they interview these
Speaker 5: civilians at the border.
Speaker 4: How can you give aid to these terrorists?
Speaker 6: And why would you give any aid that's going into
Speaker 6: the hands of enemies. It's just a it's a strange thing.
Speaker 5: Which you could actually flip that, you know, Israel saying
Speaker 5: we're not going to release these terrorists that we've captured
Speaker 5: that are our detainees to end the war. It was like, well,
Speaker 5: wait a minute, you said all two million people in
Speaker 5: Gaza are terrorists, So if they're all terrorists, what are
Speaker 5: these couple thousand matters to you?
Speaker 6: Well, and here's another We have another image of eight trucks.
Speaker 6: This is I think this one's a five. This is
Speaker 6: from Tom White, so he tweeted this morning a food
Speaker 6: convoy waiting to move into northern Gaza was hit by
Speaker 6: Israeli naval gunfire.
Speaker 3: Thankfully no one was injured.
Speaker 6: But if you're looking, you corrector of bunro There, that's
Speaker 6: the director vun Roar, So you can see the damage
Speaker 6: that was done to the truck if you're if you're listening,
Speaker 6: this is obviously just an eight truck with basically almost
Speaker 6: a whole halfway in the middle of it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so it is not the first food convoy hit
Speaker 5: by Israeli gunfire. H and as we started this block
Speaker 5: talking about the deal that you know that the counter
Speaker 5: response that that Hamas is offered, which includes allowing in
Speaker 5: more humanitarian aid it's always jarring to see that as
Speaker 5: part of these negotiations, because it is not acceptable, according
Speaker 5: to international law or basic morality or ethics, to have,
Speaker 5: you know, to negotiate over humanitarian aid in order to
Speaker 5: extract military concessions.
Speaker 4: Like you're not it's not even supposed to be in the.
Speaker 5: Same conversation, right, right that, Okay, we'll agree to this
Speaker 5: if you will agree to reduce the level of famine.
Speaker 5: Like that's just not that's like beyond what's supposed to
Speaker 5: be allowable.
Speaker 6: But here we are anyway, Yeah, here we are anyway
Speaker 6: heading into February, heading closer and coast of February seventh,
Speaker 6: which puts us close to closer to another anniversary of
Speaker 6: the attacks, and all of the anytime you hit the
Speaker 6: anniversary attacks, you look back, you look at the death count,
Speaker 6: and then you look at Chris and I were talking
Speaker 6: about this last week, the Hamas returning to northern Gaza,
Speaker 6: and you just think, my god, I mean, this is right,
Speaker 6: it's just a horror show.
Speaker 4: Let's move on to Trump here.
Speaker 6: In the United States, the President, it was determined yesterday,
Speaker 6: though he may appeal, is not im He doesn't have
Speaker 6: total immunity.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm sure he did appeal that they're going to.
Speaker 4: Hear it tomorrow.
Speaker 3: The appeal is totally expected.
Speaker 6: In fact, we have a neat little chart showing how
Speaker 6: the appeal can affect the timing of this case.
Speaker 3: But yes, so here's the charter right here.
Speaker 6: So if Donald Trump appeals the decision yesterday which rejects
Speaker 6: his claim that he's immune to these charges that he
Speaker 6: subverted the twenty twenty election, he interfered with a twenty
Speaker 6: twenty election, he is going to go to trial on
Speaker 6: this criminal indictment that accuses him of trying to overturn
Speaker 6: the election results.
Speaker 3: So if you're looking at that chart.
Speaker 6: You see pauses video, Yeah, you have to pause the video.
Speaker 6: There are all of these different timeline scenarios. And remember,
Speaker 6: of course that nobody needs to be reminded this is
Speaker 6: all playing out in the middle of a presidential election cycle,
Speaker 6: one in which reports this morning one from The Guardian
Speaker 6: says that the RNC wants Nicky Haley to drop out
Speaker 6: so they can completely consolidate behind Donald trum So the
Speaker 6: leading candidate for one of the major parties, one of
Speaker 6: the two major parties, is now caught up in this
Speaker 6: crazy timeline where you can end up going to the
Speaker 6: Supreme Court oral argument in the middle of March. You
Speaker 6: could just have a grant of a stay without any
Speaker 6: limits that could happen next week. You could have a
Speaker 6: grant of a stay with a ten day limit that
Speaker 6: could happen next week, and or you could treat this
Speaker 6: stay as a cert petition that could also happen next week,
Speaker 6: with oral arguments again happening in mid March. So all
Speaker 6: of this is dependent on what happens within the next week.
Speaker 6: And then we can go down to the next element.
Speaker 6: As the timeline is so long it didn't fit on
Speaker 6: one screen, that would put a Scotus decision somewhere in
Speaker 6: early April, with a trial beginning in July and concluding
Speaker 6: on October fifth. So all of these different scenarios, with
Speaker 6: the exception of one that ends in a petition for
Speaker 6: cert on May twelfth, end in the fall. So you
Speaker 6: would have a Scotis decision around April, a trial beginning
Speaker 6: in July, and then the trial ending in mid October,
Speaker 6: and then a trial beginning in June and concluding in September.
Speaker 6: So in three of the four scenarios you have a
Speaker 6: trial concluding based on the calendar in early to mid October,
Speaker 6: mid to late October, literally a week before the election
Speaker 6: possibly if it ends on October thirtieth in that time range,
Speaker 6: or in early September, right around Labor Day. So either way,
Speaker 6: the fall of a presidential election, you're ryan.
Speaker 5: And tomorrow the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on
Speaker 5: a related question of whether or not the fourteenth Amendment,
Speaker 5: which says insurrectionists can't run for president, applies to Trump,
Speaker 5: and so the Court, the Supreme Court will be hearing that.
Speaker 6: And this is before Yeah, we can put that up
Speaker 6: on the screen because the two things, when you hear
Speaker 6: them together, are completely.
Speaker 4: Confusing different cases.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and Scots Blood causes the biggest election case since
Speaker 6: it's ruling the Supreme Court's election ruling in bushby Gore.
Speaker 6: And again it's whether or not he can basically be
Speaker 6: taken off the ballot because of his role on January sixth,
Speaker 6: and scottis Blog says, although the question comes to the
Speaker 6: Court in a case from Colorado, the impact of the
Speaker 6: Court's ruling could be much more far reaching than they list.
Speaker 6: That main Secretary of State ruled in December that Trump
Speaker 6: should be taken off the primary about there, and that
Speaker 6: challenges to Trump's eligibility are actually currently pending in eleven
Speaker 6: under eleven other states. So if we go back for
Speaker 6: a moment to the ruling in this other January six case,
Speaker 6: the charts of the Trump cases that some of the
Speaker 6: news outlets have done, by the way, are insane, just
Speaker 6: to the tangle of different legal scenarios and all of
Speaker 6: the different things.
Speaker 3: It's just like absolutely crazy.
Speaker 6: Mike Johnson have speaker Mike Johnson, who had a very
Speaker 6: bad day yeshual it was caught by reporters walking through
Speaker 6: the Capitol complex and asked about the ruling. And here's
Speaker 6: what Mike Johnson had to say.
Speaker 11: Federal PUOs Court today just rule that President Trump does
Speaker 11: not have immunity. Do you group, do you think that
Speaker 11: he deserves total immunity from anything that he's done in office?
Speaker 4: I haven't seen that development. Was that the storm?
Speaker 3: Yeah, they just ruled this morning.
Speaker 1: I believe that they've been after President Trump for partisan
Speaker 1: political purposes.
Speaker 4: I think that's obvious and we call it law there
Speaker 4: and I think there's.
Speaker 10: No other way to describe.
Speaker 6: That's what Mike Johnson had to say. Now, the ruling
Speaker 6: itself was fifty seven pages long, it was unanimous. It
Speaker 6: was a three judge ruling in the US Court of
Speaker 6: Appeals for the DC Circuit, and, as The New York
Speaker 6: Times says, it was unlikely to be the final word
Speaker 6: on his claims of executive immunity. Now, the ruling itself
Speaker 6: is actually really interesting. Did you get a chance to
Speaker 6: read any of it right now?
Speaker 4: Not the whole thing?
Speaker 3: Now, it's so long.
Speaker 5: But it was like, yes, I was like, this seems
Speaker 5: like a lot of words to say what seems pretty simple.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 6: And so the Trump response was, if immunity is not
Speaker 6: granted to a president, every future president who leaves office
Speaker 6: will be immediately indicted by the opposing party. Without complete immunity,
Speaker 6: a president of the United States would not be able
Speaker 6: to properly function.
Speaker 3: And that's an interesting argument.
Speaker 6: It's a little it's it's an interesting argument because when
Speaker 6: you're reading this fifty seven page ruling, it's taking very
Speaker 6: seriously all of the Trump team's claims of immunity. And
Speaker 6: that's a particularly interesting one because it speaks to the
Speaker 6: nature of the system, that the system is getting a
Speaker 6: stress test in the Trump era of kind of hyper partisanship.
Speaker 3: So what are the limits. You know you have Ford
Speaker 3: pardoning Nixon. Would Nixon have had to go through this? What?
Speaker 6: We don't know because Ford pardon Nixon in any idea
Speaker 6: of a pardon is basically laughable in this political context,
Speaker 6: whether it was Hillary Clinton or any well, okay, so,
Speaker 6: but from the other party, I guess Ford Nixon is
Speaker 6: not the other party. But one of the key lines
Speaker 6: in the ruling I thought was quote for the purpose
Speaker 6: of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen
Speaker 6: Trump with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant,
Speaker 6: but any executive immunity that may have protected him while
Speaker 6: he served as president no longer protects against this prosecution.
Speaker 6: At bottom, former president trump stance would collapse our system
Speaker 6: of separated powers by placing the president beyond the reach
Speaker 6: of all three branches. Presidential immunity against federal indictment would
Speaker 6: mean that, as to the president, the Congress could not legislate,
Speaker 6: the executive could not prosecute, and the judiciary could not review.
Speaker 6: We cannot accept that the office of the Presidency places
Speaker 6: its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter.
Speaker 6: They also addressed one of the Trump team's arguments, which
Speaker 6: was about double jeopardy. They wrote, even if we assume
Speaker 6: that an impeachment trial is criminal under the double jeopardy clause,
Speaker 6: the crimes alleged in the indictment differ from the offense
Speaker 6: for which President Trump was impeached because they're talking about
Speaker 6: the impeachment judgment clause, which in the ruling quote states
Speaker 6: that the party convicted shall nevertheless be subject to criminal prosecution.
Speaker 6: That text says nothing about non convicted officials. Former President
Speaker 6: Trump's reading rests on a logical fallacy. Stating that if
Speaker 6: the president is convicted, he can be prosecuted does not
Speaker 6: necessarily mean that the president is not convicted he cannot
Speaker 6: be prosecuted. And as they're going through these fifty seven pages,
Speaker 6: these judges who, by the way, you had I think
Speaker 6: it was, Yeah, so Karen Henderson is an appointee of
Speaker 6: George H. W. Bush, and then you had to biden
Speaker 6: appointees Florence Pan and Michelle J. Michelle Childs. In this ruling,
Speaker 6: they're going through the founder's intentions when they were writing
Speaker 6: about impeachment, whether the founders intended it to protect somebody
Speaker 6: from these different prosecutions, and basically they mounted some pretty
Speaker 6: persuasive evidence.
Speaker 4: Right there in the constitution.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they sent that.
Speaker 5: They didn't did they mention the navy seal argument that
Speaker 5: the Trump team made in the ruling.
Speaker 3: I didn't see it in the ruling, but I could
Speaker 3: have skimmed over it.
Speaker 5: During oral arguments, one of the justices, one of the
Speaker 5: judges asked, Okay, well, what would happen if a president
Speaker 5: ordered navy seals to go assassinate his political.
Speaker 3: Oh they did mention that, Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 5: And the Trump attorney was like, that would be fine,
Speaker 5: like that, that would be a crime, but you can't
Speaker 5: prosecute it because of presidential immunity. And at that point
Speaker 5: you're like, all right, I just know as a matter
Speaker 5: of fact, that's wrong. That's wrong that the president cannot
Speaker 5: put together a death squad that kills his political opponents
Speaker 5: and claim immunity for that. That's not a demo. That's
Speaker 5: not a democracy. That's not a republic. That's not three
Speaker 5: different you don't have three coequal branches. If one branch
Speaker 5: can assassinate all the nine justices and then claim immunity
Speaker 5: for having done that, or can assassinate everyone in the
Speaker 5: in Congress against claim immunity for having done that that
Speaker 5: kind of gives one of the three branches slightly unfair
Speaker 5: hand when it comes to negotiating with the others.
Speaker 6: And it's funny because we're going to talk in the
Speaker 6: next segment about impeachment powers as it pertains to majorcus.
Speaker 6: But the system is really getting a stress test in
Speaker 6: these cases. And you know, we may disagree on this,
Speaker 6: I don't don't think any of that takes away from
Speaker 6: the fact that this is lawfair. I mean, I agree
Speaker 6: with Mike Johnson on that point that this is definitely
Speaker 6: just a concerted effort by a lot of like actually
Speaker 6: you know, nonprofit kind of dark money groups.
Speaker 3: On the left.
Speaker 6: It's not saying there aren't those on the right, but
Speaker 6: dark money groups on the left to make these ballid
Speaker 6: access challenges, and that you know, the the DOJ and
Speaker 6: the Biden administration have supported a lot of these efforts
Speaker 6: and put these efforts into the court. And you know,
Speaker 6: Trump's representatives have argued that this is disenfranchising voters.
Speaker 3: I also agree with that.
Speaker 6: I think, you know, you can have this conversation at
Speaker 6: the ballot box. I don't like begrudge anyone for having
Speaker 6: these debates about the constitutionality of what Donald Trump did. Again, though,
Speaker 6: I don't think that makes this any less of law fair,
Speaker 6: and I don't think that makes Tanya Chukin who's the
Speaker 6: judge that this non gets kicked back to, any less biased.
Speaker 6: I think she's completely flagrantly demonstrated her by I sees
Speaker 6: in this case in a way that would be inappropriate
Speaker 6: and a lot of other cases. But is you know,
Speaker 6: going to be allowed to stand in this case in
Speaker 6: all likelihood? So, ran, I think we've talked about this before.
Speaker 6: The individual cases are different, you know, some of them,
Speaker 6: even in the Trump orbit, are viewed as more serious
Speaker 6: than others. But there's definitely an effort to disqualify.
Speaker 3: Him rather than deal with him at the ballot box.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that seems that certainly does seem to be that
Speaker 5: what that strategy?
Speaker 4: Is there way to do it? Yeah?
Speaker 5: And if you know anyway, Yes, the whole thing's getting
Speaker 5: wild because if you look at the timeline for some
Speaker 5: of these you're talking, you know, potential verdicts in the
Speaker 5: late summer fall, it's gonna get it's going to be
Speaker 5: a bumpy ride, Yeah, from from here on out, that's
Speaker 5: for sure, you know.
Speaker 6: Yeah, exactly like twenty twenty felt like a banana republic, and.
Speaker 3: There's no escaping.
Speaker 6: At twenty twenty four will feel like a banana republic basically,
Speaker 6: no matter what at this point.
Speaker 5: Speaking of banana republics, the House of Representatives yesterday, not
Speaker 5: only did they blow up their border deal, which we're
Speaker 5: going to talk about here, they failed to impeach Ma
Speaker 5: Orcis by one vote, which we're going.
Speaker 4: To talk about.
Speaker 5: And they even put up their standalone seventeen billion dollars
Speaker 5: for Israel knowing that it would fail, and watch and
Speaker 5: watched it fail, perhaps the first vote in American history
Speaker 5: for weapons for Israel that failed to pass. The House
Speaker 5: of Representatives, like Pelosi, pulled some at least pulled at
Speaker 5: least one, but never put one on the floor that failed.
Speaker 5: I don't know of any effort that actually went onto
Speaker 5: the floor of the House of Representatives to send money
Speaker 5: and weapons to Israel and came back with a no.
Speaker 4: I can't absolutely incredible. You don't move.
Speaker 6: These votes to the floor if you were going to fail,
Speaker 6: unless you're Mike Johnson.
Speaker 5: So let's walk us through the incredible day of Mike
Speaker 5: Johnson yesterday.
Speaker 6: So Mike Johnson woke up this morning feeling pretty.
Speaker 4: Rough figure, right, It wasn't yesterday.
Speaker 6: Last night he brought two votes to the floor, the
Speaker 6: one Ryan just mentioned on Israel and one on his
Speaker 6: big effort, I mean House Republicans huge effort, not just his,
Speaker 6: the starter under Kevin McCarthy. They're huge centerpiece, you know,
Speaker 6: legislative centerpiece basically, even though it doesn't involve, you know,
Speaker 6: really passing legislation other than impeachment articles, which is to
Speaker 6: impeach DHS Secretary of Homeland Security Secretary ahdra Majorcus over
Speaker 6: his handling of.
Speaker 3: The southern border.
Speaker 6: Also Afghan refugees made it into the impeachment articles and failed.
Speaker 6: He brought both of these votes to the floor without
Speaker 6: having enough votes for them to pass. Because and this
Speaker 6: is incredible, deep worthy detail. And this is where Republican
Speaker 6: leadership is actually pointing the finger right now. They say
Speaker 6: Democrats told them al Green would not be voting. Al
Speaker 6: Green would not be voting. Democrat Algreen, who was having
Speaker 6: emergency surgery, would not be voting. So Republicans count on
Speaker 6: the vote was completely wrong.
Speaker 4: They thought they needed two to fifteen.
Speaker 6: Because yeah, they thought they need two fifteen because al
Speaker 6: Green showed up rolled in in a hospital gown in
Speaker 6: a wheelchair and voted against the impeachment of Mayorcis.
Speaker 3: So think about that.
Speaker 6: Mike Johnson now looks like he took the word of
Speaker 6: Democrats credibly and Democrats absolutely outmaneuvered, outsmarted him by rolling
Speaker 6: in al Green in a hospital gown and a wheelchair
Speaker 6: to cast a decisive vote.
Speaker 3: It looks for Mike Johnson.
Speaker 6: Not only does it look, I mean this trickles into
Speaker 6: the way that he is respected, the way that he's
Speaker 6: treated by his entire caucus. Basically pretty damn bad for
Speaker 6: Mike Johnson. Now this comes amid all of the fighting
Speaker 6: in the Senate over go ahead?
Speaker 4: Can we let's roll to Marjorie Taylor Green clip? Will
Speaker 4: we have it? Which? Which number is that?
Speaker 3: I believe we're all that's seven?
Speaker 5: We don't want to leave this Yeah without without some MTG. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I think it's seven C seven.
Speaker 3: Yeah, let's roll C seven.
Speaker 2: Hid one of these votes that they had, So was
Speaker 2: it something that people would see?
Speaker 4: Is that something that we're helping me?
Speaker 12: I'm glad. I'm glad you asked that, because well, we
Speaker 12: can basically look like, look at this as a game. Unfortunately,
Speaker 12: and their strategy and they hid one of their members
Speaker 12: waiting to the last minute, watching to see our votes,
Speaker 12: trying to throw us off on the numbers that we
Speaker 12: had versus the numbers they had. So yeah, that was
Speaker 12: a strategy at play tonight.
Speaker 6: It's just again deep worthy drama and Mike Johnson looking
Speaker 6: basically like he's out of his element. And that's something
Speaker 6: that you've heard from Republican circles. You've definitely heard that
Speaker 6: from sort of Freedom Caucus circles where people were initially
Speaker 6: favorable to the speakership of Mike Johnson.
Speaker 3: In fact, some Freedom Caucus.
Speaker 6: Members voted along with Matt Gates, to oust Mike Johnson
Speaker 6: or to oust Kevin McCarthy and bring in eventually Mike Johnson.
Speaker 6: Thomas Massy, who sort of Freedom Caucus adjacent, tweeted this
Speaker 6: morning that it now makes it look ridiculous the effort
Speaker 6: to get rid of McCarthy has resulted in so many
Speaker 6: different failures. Although I'm sure Matt Gates, who recently, I
Speaker 6: think just in the last like twelve hours, endorsed Kevin
Speaker 6: McCarthy for the head of the RNC amid some reports
Speaker 6: that Ron and McDaniel is seriously thinking about stepping down
Speaker 6: Matt Gates would say, well, the chaos was basically the point,
Speaker 6: because you know there was no hope of doing anything
Speaker 6: substantive anyway. That is again when you spend months pitching
Speaker 6: the impeachment of Aejondra Mayorcis as a substantive victory and
Speaker 6: then lose because Mike Johnson brought the vote to the
Speaker 6: floor thinking he had the right number of votes when
Speaker 6: Democrats were just apparently ostensibly lying to his face. It
Speaker 6: doesn't really get much worse than that. One person voted
Speaker 6: procedurally to make sure they would be able to One
Speaker 6: Republican voted against the impeachment as a total party party
Speaker 6: line vote in.
Speaker 5: Order to the three Republicans who voted no. Their argument was,
Speaker 5: he's a bad minister of the government. Yes, yeah, right, he's,
Speaker 5: but it's not illegal. It's not impeachable that like, he's
Speaker 5: basically carrying out what Biden once been due Biden was elected,
Speaker 5: and you can't impeach somebody for not.
Speaker 4: Doing that, not not sharing your politics.
Speaker 5: It's basically the three no votes, right, Ken bomb constitutional.
Speaker 5: They said, we're stretching the constitution because we're claiming he's
Speaker 5: stretching the law.
Speaker 6: So it was ken Buck, Mike Gallagher, and this is the
Speaker 6: things that wintalk. I think McLintock, tomcclintock, Jonathan Turley actually
Speaker 6: made this argument. Who's really popular and sort of right
Speaker 6: of center circles because he's been a staunch defender of
Speaker 6: Donald Trump's rights basically amid all of the law fair
Speaker 6: He's sort of almost a Dershowitz type figure in that space,
Speaker 6: erstwhile figure of the left or at least the center,
Speaker 6: who is, you know, constantly putting substance on these these
Speaker 6: arguments that are favorable to Donald Trump. Even he came
Speaker 6: out and wrote that these impeachment articles don't quite cut
Speaker 6: the mustard for Mayorcus. I had a super fun night
Speaker 6: last night and actually went through the impeachment articles again,
Speaker 6: and honestly, the impeachment articles do a really good job
Speaker 6: showing that Mayorcus has utterly botched the border.
Speaker 4: I don't know that they crime.
Speaker 6: I know they don't mention a crime except for violating
Speaker 6: the Violating his oath of office essentially is the charge.
Speaker 6: And it's one of the reasons, like Gallagher said, he
Speaker 6: voted against this because as soon as you start to
Speaker 6: sort of stretch those definitions you get into Banana Republic.
Speaker 5: You get you could hit any opposing party cabinet secretary
Speaker 5: with that.
Speaker 3: And that's the argue that Gallagher sort of prebud just.
Speaker 4: Name another DHS secretary. That's the other silly part of it.
Speaker 6: Exactly, yes, and well, the Senate's not voting to impeach
Speaker 6: America's I mean, it's just not too before we get
Speaker 6: to the Senate. One final point on that, Republicans would say, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 6: Democrats inflated the definition of impeachable offenses when they went
Speaker 6: after Donald Trump, and so we're giving Americas intentionally, strategically
Speaker 6: a taste of his own medicine. They might not say
Speaker 6: that aloud, but that's definitely part of the reason that
Speaker 6: they're sort of they say they're responding to the weaponization
Speaker 6: of impeachment, not weaponizing it themselves, responding to the weapon
Speaker 6: exactly they started.
Speaker 3: It is where we're going with this.
Speaker 6: Now on the Senate side, we can put this first
Speaker 6: element up on the screen. They are probably going to
Speaker 6: kill this so called bipartisan border deal that turned out
Speaker 6: not to be that bipartisan because if we put the
Speaker 6: next element up on the screen and you have even
Speaker 6: John Cornyan very very friendly with leadership. In leadership himself
Speaker 6: the latest senior GP Coffort's member, as Politico says to say,
Speaker 6: he opposes advancing the legislation this week, arguing that lawmakers
Speaker 6: quote need more time, but said, I'm pretty confident we
Speaker 6: can do better with a new president who actually will
Speaker 6: enforce the law.
Speaker 3: You might need a new leader of the Senate.
Speaker 6: Actually, we'll get into that in just a moment in
Speaker 6: order to do much better. Even Mitch McConnell has said
Speaker 6: that it would be wrong to move on this legislation
Speaker 6: because quote, the mood in the country has changed. I
Speaker 6: think that happened around two thousand and six, So I'm
Speaker 6: glad he's finally catching up.
Speaker 5: The mood in the Senate Chamber has changed as well,
Speaker 5: And we don't need to rehash all this because Crystalin
Speaker 5: Sager went through it. But from my perspective, I'm like, Wow,
Speaker 5: like Democrats on a silver platter handed the administration enormous
Speaker 5: amounts of power that could have been weaponized by Donald
Speaker 5: Trump to do absolutely anything. In Steven Miller, these tools
Speaker 5: and the hands of Steven Miller would have made what
Speaker 5: the first administration did on the border h Look, look, gentle,
Speaker 5: and now if Trump does get elected, he's going to
Speaker 5: have to try to use the current authorities. And Steven
Speaker 5: Miller has shown like a lot of creativity and willingness
Speaker 5: to stretch those you know, beyond you know what anybody
Speaker 5: could imagine before. But he's going to have to do
Speaker 5: that rather than having extraordinary powers that Democrats were ready
Speaker 5: to give to Stephen Miller, which is just a mind
Speaker 5: boggling like moment.
Speaker 6: Well, it's an interesting thing with this bill is that
Speaker 6: it basically tries to legalize things that have been caught
Speaker 6: up in the courts different executive actions, you know, not
Speaker 6: like technically eas but actual like executive authorities that have
Speaker 6: been used to do different things with asylum, and tries
Speaker 6: to finally legislate so that those things don't get caught
Speaker 6: up in the court determinating determining whether it's a fair
Speaker 6: use of executive authority. And so, yes, your point, it
Speaker 6: does expand executive authority in some pretty critical ways. Now,
Speaker 6: speaking to McConnell, the McConnell fellows over on Ruthless are upset.
Speaker 5: Ruthless is a pretty popular like conservative podcast, right.
Speaker 3: I guess if we have to call it conservative.
Speaker 5: It's like podcast, it's populated by former McConnell and McConnell
Speaker 5: orbit people.
Speaker 6: And yeah, McConnell orbit people, yeah exactly, and people who
Speaker 6: are in the Republican consultant space.
Speaker 4: Conservative.
Speaker 6: But yeah, yeah, he comfortably smug is on it, and
Speaker 6: smug is genuinely really funny. But they come from definitely
Speaker 6: the establishment Republican Party, like, no question about it. And
Speaker 6: they had a little meltdown over how Senate Conservatives reacted
Speaker 6: to the rollout of Langford's bill basically accused Mike Lee
Speaker 6: of protecting Hamas.
Speaker 3: Take a listen to this, and I'm being deadly serious
Speaker 3: about that. I'm talking about people like Mike Lee.
Speaker 2: Mike Mike Lee is a perfect example of the only
Speaker 2: thing that he really wants to make sure of is
Speaker 2: that we don't kill Hamas.
Speaker 6: And he went on to basically say that Mike Lee's
Speaker 6: the only job in the seting. That's Josh Holmes again,
Speaker 6: former longtime McConnell staffer who's now on the consulting side.
Speaker 4: Ran the super Pac.
Speaker 6: Right, Yeah, well, so that's Josh Holmes saying that Mike Lee,
Speaker 6: who opposes the border deal, is basically just caring about
Speaker 6: protecting Hamas.
Speaker 5: I guess it's nice to see that everyone across the
Speaker 5: political spectrum gets accused baselessly for supporting hamas I did.
Speaker 6: I will admit I did a little photoshop yesterday and
Speaker 6: I did put Mike Lee on the cover of Ryan's book.
Speaker 4: Maybe we'll add that that was a good one.
Speaker 6: So John McCormick, we can put this next element up
Speaker 6: on the screen tweets that a reporter asked Langford of
Speaker 6: Oklahoma how it felt to be run over by a bus.
Speaker 6: Langford replied quote and backed up just perfect.
Speaker 3: Now put the next element up on the screen.
Speaker 6: This is from my boss at the Federalist, Sean Davis,
Speaker 6: who's reacting to a statement that John Barrasso so along
Speaker 6: with John corn and these are like two Mitch McConn
Speaker 6: two of Mitch McConnell's, as Shan says, top lieutenant's top guys.
Speaker 6: Barasso yesterday came out and said that he was a
Speaker 6: no on the bill. Sean then waded in and said,
Speaker 6: there's a lot going on in this statement and what's
Speaker 6: happening basically we can just keep moving through. It was
Speaker 6: like John basically wrote an essay here because it's the
Speaker 6: dynamics are genuinely pretty interesting and actually speak to sort
Speaker 6: of the flip side and the Republican Party.
Speaker 3: What you wrote about in your book ran on the.
Speaker 6: Democratic side that a lot of people are feeling really
Speaker 6: badly for James Langford that McConnell. They say, essentially McConnell
Speaker 6: negotiated this failed bipartisan package with the goal of securing
Speaker 6: money for Ukraine, knowing that it's dead on arrival in
Speaker 6: the House. If you know, you don't that the additional
Speaker 6: Ukraine funding is said on the arrival in the House,
Speaker 6: if you don't do anything with the border. The House
Speaker 6: has insisted on passing HR two. So let's have James
Speaker 6: Langford go and negotiate. But people really personally like James
Speaker 6: Langford and they don't want to take their anger out
Speaker 6: on him because they feel as though Mitch McConnell worked
Speaker 6: with Chuck Schumer on this and that James Langford was
Speaker 6: used basically as a pawn by Mitch McConnell. Chuck Schumer
Speaker 6: himself said he'd never worked as closely on a piece
Speaker 6: of legislation with McConnell as he did on this piece
Speaker 6: of legislation that's out in the open here, So they're
Speaker 6: sort of like Barasso shifting to blame to Biden, saying
Speaker 6: that Biden failed James Langford, who just worked tirelessly to
Speaker 6: secure the border at all costs. And that's basically the
Speaker 6: spin coming from people on the right at this point.
Speaker 6: Really something Ryan to see these dynamics. We have video
Speaker 6: here of some of these senators reacting to the divides themselves.
Speaker 6: It is time for Mitch McConnell's.
Speaker 4: I think it is.
Speaker 1: Look everyone here also supported a leadership challenge to Mitch.
Speaker 4: McConnell in November.
Speaker 13: I think a Republican leader should actually lead this conference
Speaker 13: and should advance the priorities of Republicans.
Speaker 11: Senator Ted Cruz had a press conference around noon today
Speaker 11: said that you shouldn't have even tried to negotiate with Democrats,
Speaker 11: so this bill was designed to fail, and that it's
Speaker 11: time for you to step down as GEOP leader.
Speaker 8: What's your response to that.
Speaker 7: I think we can all agree that Senator Cruz is not.
Speaker 3: A fan, so mcconnogs, I think we can all agree.
Speaker 3: I'm not. I shouldn't do the accent, I won't.
Speaker 6: I think we can all agree that Senator Cruz is
Speaker 6: not a fan of the bill, and so Mitch McConnel
Speaker 6: seems pretty LOOSEI there.
Speaker 3: But again, one of the other chief.
Speaker 6: Complaints is that he's getting rolled like Mike Johnson by Democrats,
Speaker 6: not because he is weak in the same way that
Speaker 6: a lot of people on the House side think Mike
Speaker 6: Johnson is, but because he's old. We played that club
Speaker 6: of Biden earlier in the show, stumbling to get through
Speaker 6: a sentence about Israel Palestine. People feel like that's happening
Speaker 6: with Mitch McConnell as well, that he's both physically frail
Speaker 6: and intellectually frail men frail at this point and is
Speaker 6: getting steamrolled, is not responsive to constituents.
Speaker 3: Et cetera, et cetera. So pretty tough for miss McConnell.
Speaker 6: It looks like, based on what Cruz said, all those
Speaker 6: people there, Cruz is right, did not support they supported
Speaker 6: leadership challenges to McConnell. Last time that was up for
Speaker 6: a vote, I think it was like ten votes against McConnell's.
Speaker 6: So they're going to need to bring a lot more
Speaker 6: people over to that side. If those numbers start stacking up,
Speaker 6: you could potentially see McConnell step down to a position
Speaker 6: like Pelosi is now.
Speaker 3: I don't think he would just outright leave the Senate.
Speaker 6: But where the sleeves things is, as reports are, we
Speaker 6: can put this next element up on the screen. Republican
Speaker 6: senators are now floating the option of moving for a
Speaker 6: foreign aid package that is divorced from the border, which
Speaker 6: ran I think that's their only option.
Speaker 5: That's where this was headed the entire time, and so
Speaker 5: and Haggard he later clarified that he is not floating this,
Speaker 5: that people like Corny and Graham, Jony earnstar and so
Speaker 5: the idea would be, you you're combining money for Israel,
Speaker 5: money for Ukraine, and also money for you know, potential
Speaker 5: Taiwan war, and that there are more than sixty votes
Speaker 5: for that. So just give up on this whole border
Speaker 5: thing and just move it through. That appears to be
Speaker 5: where all of this is headed.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're right, this was predictable from the beginning.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And.
Speaker 5: It's fascinating that because they couldn't move that Israel money
Speaker 5: through the House, you know, Democrats voted it down because
Speaker 5: they say it's a stunt and they want Ukraine and
Speaker 5: Taiwan money in there as well. The Freedom Caucus though
Speaker 5: cited kind of fiscal austerity and populist nationalism, which is
Speaker 5: rather extraordinary development. To have a strong block of kind
Speaker 5: of hard right Republicans standing up to Apak.
Speaker 4: Quite a development.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that is really interesting. That's a great point, and
Speaker 6: that's what oh like, we've this has been a long
Speaker 6: and kind of chunky block with all of these elements.
Speaker 6: But again, it reminds me so much of the dynamics
Speaker 6: you write about in your book on the Democratic side.
Speaker 6: On the Republican side, there's this incredible tug of war
Speaker 6: that the media does a really bad job of covering,
Speaker 6: just sort of treating Mitch McConnell as though he's like
Speaker 6: a conservative stalwart, when in fact he is the most
Speaker 6: according to some surveys, disliked politician in the country. Republicans
Speaker 6: hate working with Mitch mcconnald at this point, Conservatives hate
Speaker 6: working with Mitch mcconald at this point. And now whatever
Speaker 6: goes forward, they have to contend with Mike Johnson being
Speaker 6: increasingly distrusted and disliked by a lot of conservatives and
Speaker 6: probably a lot of moderates aren't super happy with Mike Johnson.
Speaker 6: On the Republican side, right now, so that's a barrier
Speaker 6: to passing legislation. If you have that some of a margin,
Speaker 6: lose trust in leadership, their ability to pass this money
Speaker 6: is in serious jeopardy even if they divorce it.
Speaker 5: And you know, McConnell has long been called this like
Speaker 5: absolute genius in Washington. I've long been highly skeptical of
Speaker 5: that judgment. He's been very good at saying no to things,
Speaker 5: which is easy because all you need is forty one
Speaker 5: you can say no to things. He's been very good
Speaker 5: at for decades raising lots of money from very wealthy
Speaker 5: interests in order to give them you deregulatory policy and
Speaker 5: tax cuts.
Speaker 4: Yes, but there's no genius underneath any of that.
Speaker 5: Just saying no, saying no and getting money from rich
Speaker 5: people's and so that you can give them even more
Speaker 5: than they gave you.
Speaker 4: Like that's not hard. No, it really is take a
Speaker 4: genius to do that.
Speaker 6: No, But if you're good to the media, they're good
Speaker 6: back to you. And so if you drip leaks to
Speaker 6: them and dish out those leaks and you have Josh Holmes.
Speaker 4: You know, those guys are good. They used to be
Speaker 4: really good.
Speaker 3: But again, it's not that hard to just be nice
Speaker 3: to the media.
Speaker 5: Speaking of money for the Ukraine War, Tucker Carlson announced
Speaker 5: on Twitter that he's over in Moscow.
Speaker 4: Let's roll a little bit of Tucker here.
Speaker 1: We're in Moscow tonight. We're here to interview the President
Speaker 1: of Russia, Vladimir Putin, will be doing that soon. They
Speaker 1: are risks to conducting an interview like this, obviously, so
Speaker 1: we've thought about it carefully over many months. Here's why
Speaker 1: we're doing it first, because it's our job. We're in journalism.
Speaker 1: Our duty is to inform people. Two years into a
Speaker 1: war that's reshaping the entire world, most Americans are not informed.
Speaker 1: This war has utterly reshaped the global military and trade alliances,
Speaker 1: and the sanctions that followed have as well, and in total,
Speaker 1: they have upended the world economy. The post World War
Speaker 1: II economic order, the system that guaranteed prosperity in the
Speaker 1: West for more than eighty years is coming apart very fast,
Speaker 1: and along with it the dominance of the US dollar.
Speaker 1: These are not small changes. They are history altering developments.
Speaker 1: They able to define the lives of our grandchildren. Most
Speaker 1: of the world understands this perfectly well. They can see
Speaker 1: it ask anyone in Asia the Middle eas lest what
Speaker 1: the future looks like, and yet the populations of the
Speaker 1: English speaking countries seem mostly unaware. They think that nothing
Speaker 1: has really changed, and they think that because no one
Speaker 1: has told them the truth, their media outlets are corrupt.
Speaker 1: They lie to their readers and viewers, and they do
Speaker 1: that mostly by omission. For example, since the day the
Speaker 1: war in Ukraine began, American media outlets have spoken to
Speaker 1: scores of people from Ukraine, and they have done scores
Speaker 1: of interviews with Ukrainian presidents Zelenski. We ourselves have put
Speaker 1: in a request for an interview with Zelensky, and we
Speaker 1: hope he accepts. But the interviews he's already done in
Speaker 1: the United States are not traditional interviews. They are fawning
Speaker 1: pep sessions, specifically designed to amplify Zelensky's demand that the
Speaker 1: US entry more deeply into a war in Eastern Europe
Speaker 1: and pay for it. That is not journalism. It is
Speaker 1: government propaganda, propaganda of the ugliest kind. That we are
Speaker 1: not encouraging you to agree with what Putin may say
Speaker 1: in this interview, but we are urging you to watch it.
Speaker 1: You should know as much as you can and then,
Speaker 1: like a free citizen and not a slave, you can
Speaker 1: decide for yourself.
Speaker 6: So the news that Tucker was in Moscow was greeted
Speaker 6: with let's say, what's the right word for this rage
Speaker 6: in some corners of the media, scoffing, and some quarters
Speaker 6: of the media not entirely surprising. He should be noted
Speaker 6: that NBC News as recently as a few years ago
Speaker 6: had done an interview with Vladimir Putin. Here's a flavor
Speaker 6: of what some folks in the media had to say
Speaker 6: about Tucker's trip to Russia. Carlson is now just another
Speaker 6: far raid conspiracy pedler with a show on the Internet.
Speaker 3: He's no longer on Fox as we all know, and
Speaker 3: he's apparently been spending the last few days in Moscow
Speaker 3: for some reason. Who knows. We don't know why.
Speaker 4: He has to stay relevant somehow, so I guess we'll
Speaker 4: learn the coming days.
Speaker 3: Maybe. Yeah.
Speaker 14: Well, when I first heard that he was there, I
Speaker 14: just assumed he was there to get an award, because
Speaker 14: there probably isn't an American who has done more for
Speaker 14: Vladimir Putin in the last couple of years than Tucker Carlson.
Speaker 14: He's been he sided with Russia on the invasion. He
Speaker 14: was consistently bet rating Vladimir Zelenski and lifting up Putin,
Speaker 14: So that's how he got the interview. And I think
Speaker 14: Putin's expecting a friendly interview. You know, Putin actually order
Speaker 14: of the Kremlin. Did State TV to cover Tucker and
Speaker 14: to carry some of Tucker's comments because they viewed them
Speaker 14: as so helpful to Putin in this war effort. So
Speaker 14: I'm sure they'll have a warm a warm session, whether
Speaker 14: it's an award or I guess the interview would be
Speaker 14: his award award.
Speaker 3: The meeting of the Mutual Admiration Society over in that
Speaker 3: was a little smug.
Speaker 6: Aaron Burnett also criticized Tucker for basically being or She highlighted,
Speaker 6: let's say the State TV coverage of Tucker's visit to
Speaker 6: Moscow and previous coverage of Tucker and his comments on
Speaker 6: the Ukraine War as a sort of criticism of him
Speaker 6: going over to interview Putin. And here's Christian amenpor we
Speaker 6: can put this element up on the screen. Does Tucker
Speaker 6: really think we journalists haven't been trying to interview President
Speaker 6: Putin every day since his full scale invasion of Ukraine.
Speaker 6: It's absurd. We'll continue to ask for an interview, just
Speaker 6: as we have for years now. Because in that video,
Speaker 6: it's about five minutes long. We just played a clip
Speaker 6: of it. Tucker explains that he one of the reasons
Speaker 6: he goes over there is one of the reasons he
Speaker 6: went over there is because he doesn't feel as though
Speaker 6: Putin has gotten anyt he's given any access to Western journalists,
Speaker 6: because in his contention is that Western journalists have basically
Speaker 6: not tried to interview Putin.
Speaker 3: They've made up their mind about Putin.
Speaker 5: What do you make of that, Ryan, I mean, I
Speaker 5: think Christian Amanpur is one of the few that can
Speaker 5: credibly push back on that claim.
Speaker 4: She would absolutely be happy to interview Putin.
Speaker 5: And I think anybody out there who is critical of
Speaker 5: the concept of Tucker Carls and interviewing Putin should consider
Speaker 5: those a'men por comments, Amenporou would be eager to interview him.
Speaker 5: I think the question becomes, how does he do the interview?
Speaker 5: And he's under a lot of pressure to do a serious,
Speaker 5: hard hitting interview, and I hope that he does because
Speaker 5: that's the kind of interview the world needs to see.
Speaker 5: I think there's a chance he will do that because
Speaker 5: he treated this one differently than he has treated previous ones.
Speaker 5: In other words, so he previously interviewed Andrew Tate and
Speaker 5: that was a softball interview.
Speaker 4: I defended the concept of.
Speaker 5: Interviewing Andrew Tate, but giving him a softball interview that
Speaker 5: I don't defend. He did not explain ahead of time,
Speaker 5: defend or defend the decision to interview Andrew Tate like
Speaker 5: he just did. He just put this preemptive self defense
Speaker 5: of his decision to interview Vladimir Putin. And so he
Speaker 5: understands the pressure he's under there. So if he understands
Speaker 5: the pressure he's under and he still gives a softball interview,
Speaker 5: I think that'll be an interest call on his part
Speaker 5: to make. So the question should never be do you
Speaker 5: interview a public figure? It's how you do the interview,
Speaker 5: you know. CNN's Peter Bergen famously made his career by
Speaker 5: getting an interview with Osama bin Laden in a cave.
Speaker 5: It was a phenomenon at the time when he did
Speaker 5: it. It was this is nineteen ninety seven, so it was
Speaker 5: before September eleventh, But people in the no still understood
Speaker 5: Osam bin Laden to be like the world's leading terrorist.
Speaker 5: And but of course, if you have the opportunity to
Speaker 5: interview even Osama bin Laden, you take that interview, but
Speaker 5: you challenge him. So we'll see how the interview rolls out,
Speaker 5: and I think that will will determine whether you know
Speaker 5: what we can say about.
Speaker 6: The decision in Tucker said in that video he secured
Speaker 6: an agreement from Elon Muskin Acts to air the video
Speaker 6: in full the interview in full, which of course we
Speaker 6: still don't have the interview, were waiting for it to
Speaker 6: be released. But that's interesting too because Musk has actually
Speaker 6: cooperated with Starlink in Ukraine.
Speaker 3: In the past.
Speaker 6: And if talker errs, which is again this is We've
Speaker 6: talked about this many times.
Speaker 3: It's crazy that.
Speaker 6: Elon Musk is in this position of like immense geopolitical
Speaker 6: military power as essentially an unelected member of the business community.
Speaker 6: If Tucker airs an interview that's overly flattering to putin
Speaker 6: a lot of people were mentioning that he cut those
Speaker 6: comments of Kanye West going into like anti submitic conspiratorial
Speaker 6: territory from the interview he did with Kanye, asking if
Speaker 6: Kanye sounded crazy and then then rolling you know, cutting
Speaker 6: ostensibly cutting what made Kanye sound absolutely crazy. If he
Speaker 6: does something similar with Putin, perhaps that can add friction
Speaker 6: to his relationship with Elon Musk. If Elon Musk is
Speaker 6: forced to basically allow an interview that you know, he
Speaker 6: thinks is uncomfortable or needs a community note or something
Speaker 6: like that. I don't know if they have any agreements
Speaker 6: about that. But Tucker's business does really rely on X.
Speaker 6: It's called Tucker on X, the show is called Tucker
Speaker 6: on X, So there are legitimate business interests for Tucker
Speaker 6: to balance in doing a good job with this interview.
Speaker 6: I agree that the pressures is so high that to
Speaker 6: be overly flattering. To be fair, the media is going
Speaker 6: to say that this interview is overly flattering. No matter what,
Speaker 6: Tucker could do a great job. Tucker could be Christian
Speaker 6: I'm impoor and handle the interview the exact same way
Speaker 6: as she would from even sort of a blobby foreign
Speaker 6: policy establishment type way, and the media would pull out
Speaker 6: any different clips and say that this was reckless and
Speaker 6: Tucker was sucking up to Putin, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 6: So even if the interview like veers into territory, that
Speaker 6: it shouldn't a couple of times it was going to
Speaker 6: happen no matter what Tucker knows, It's going to happen,
Speaker 6: no matter what Tucker says, most Americans don't understand why
Speaker 6: Putin invaded Ukraine. Ryan, I think that's true in the
Speaker 6: effort to expose that, though.
Speaker 5: He does have to be right, and we're not going
Speaker 5: to get an answer to why Russian invaded Ukraine. We're
Speaker 5: going to get Putin's explanation and propaganda for why he
Speaker 5: invaded Ukraine, which is fine, Like we want to hear
Speaker 5: what propaganda all different sides are putting out and sort through.
Speaker 3: It, like right and there is.
Speaker 6: It is true that the media has basically given no
Speaker 6: airtime to Putin's propaganda, so that what Tucker is saying
Speaker 6: in that video is basically Americans don't even understand what,
Speaker 6: you know, the their billions of dollars are fighting or
Speaker 6: or fighting from Putin's perspective, like what it's you know,
Speaker 6: And I actually think that's perfectly reasonable because you know
Speaker 6: that's it's war. It's again billions of dollars, and you
Speaker 6: know there's there's so little coverage of that in the media.
Speaker 6: People are smart enough to decide from themselves. They don't
Speaker 6: need the government to protect them from whys from foreign leaders.
Speaker 6: Foreign leaders lie all the time like people can figure
Speaker 6: it out themselves. And Ryan, actually, this is a good
Speaker 6: transition to the next block on Pakistan, because you've interviewed
Speaker 6: controversial foreign leaders, including Imran Khan. You interviewed on this
Speaker 6: show on this channel, and people can go watch it.
Speaker 6: Imran Khan And that had to have been, in and
Speaker 6: of itself a high pressure and tricky task.
Speaker 4: That was it.
Speaker 5: I was a fascinating interview and I tried to press
Speaker 5: him on, you know, some of his own So Imran
Speaker 5: kan is a foreign Prime Minister of Pakistan who was
Speaker 5: ousted in a no confidence vote in twenty twenty two
Speaker 5: through pressure from the US State Department as well as
Speaker 5: the Pakistani military. But yeah, when I interviewed him, I
Speaker 5: pushed him on the question of you.
Speaker 4: Know, how does it feel to.
Speaker 5: Have kind of had some of the same tactics turned
Speaker 5: on you that you were using against some of your
Speaker 5: own opponents. Because he was criticized heavily during his term
Speaker 5: for cracking down on civil society, cracking down on dissent, censoring, censoring, censoring.
Speaker 4: The media.
Speaker 5: Now because he was ousted before his term was over.
Speaker 5: Pakistan was supposed to have a new election almost a
Speaker 5: year ago. Instead, it'll happen tonight US time, tomorrow, tomorrow,
Speaker 5: Pakistan time.
Speaker 4: February eighth. Pakistani voters are going to go to the polls.
Speaker 5: Have a new story up over at the Intercept, which
Speaker 5: is which looks at the incredible ways that the military
Speaker 5: backed government is undermining the election over there. They're utterly
Speaker 5: kind of almost fantastical and unbelievable.
Speaker 4: Kind of the lowest level thing that.
Speaker 5: The Pakistani government is doing to undermine democracy in Pakistan
Speaker 5: would practically be the most serious thing that anybody could
Speaker 5: have found in the twenty twenty presidential election. Like you
Speaker 5: want to complain about censorship, they're just absolutely just completely
Speaker 5: censoring everything in Pakistan. You want to complain about, you know,
Speaker 5: kind of Silicon Valley folks being nudged by DHS. They're
Speaker 5: threatening to close the entire shutdown the entire internet for
Speaker 5: the election on Thursday.
Speaker 3: So just.
Speaker 5: To give people a flavor of what pack the Pakistani
Speaker 5: government is doing, we're going to run through some of these.
Speaker 5: But first on Monday, the State Department was pressed yet
Speaker 5: again on it's kind of shrugging off of a lot
Speaker 5: of a lot of the concerns that haven't been raised
Speaker 5: about democracy after the State Department pushed in ron Khan
Speaker 5: out of power and they made their kind of most
Speaker 5: forceful comment to date. But all of that is relative,
Speaker 5: and you'll see how forceful this sounds. Here's van Am
Speaker 5: Patel at the US State Department on Monday.
Speaker 9: Continuing to monitor Pakistan's electoral process quite closely. Then, as
Speaker 9: we have said, we want to see that process take
Speaker 9: place in a way that facilitates broad participation with respect
Speaker 9: for freedom of expression, assembly and associations. We have concerns
Speaker 9: of the all incidents of violence and restrictions on media freedom,
Speaker 9: freedom of expression, including internet freedom and peaceful and a
Speaker 9: peaceful assembly and association. We're concerned by some of the
Speaker 9: infringements that we've seen in that space. Pakistanis deserve to
Speaker 9: exercise their fundamental right to choose their future leaders through
Speaker 9: free and fair elections without fear, violence or intimidation, and
Speaker 9: it is ultimately for the people of Pakistan to decide
Speaker 9: their political future.
Speaker 5: In the past, the State Department had just said, you know,
Speaker 5: we hope that there will be free and fair elections,
Speaker 5: and we urge there to be free and fair elections.
Speaker 5: This one gets a little bit goes a little bit
Speaker 5: beyond that, and it comes as you're seeing intense pressure
Speaker 5: from members of Congress.
Speaker 4: We're going to talk to Greg Gasar later in the show.
Speaker 5: He's one of those who's been putting pressure on the
Speaker 5: Pakistan military to respect democracy. But let's run through just
Speaker 5: a couple of these things that they're doing, because maybe.
Speaker 4: It's taste of what we'll get here one day.
Speaker 5: But so first of all, you can put up this Dawn,
Speaker 5: this element from Dawn, a major paper in Pakistan that
Speaker 5: writes alarm over quote snatching of PTI nomination papers and
Speaker 5: so PTI is Imron Kahn's party. So basically, rank and
Speaker 5: file candidates are taking their nomination papers, going to the
Speaker 5: office where they file those papers and just having them
Speaker 5: snatched and basically thrown away.
Speaker 4: They just can't run separately.
Speaker 5: Instead, they're just being arrested at the office for filing papers.
Speaker 5: And then they'll emerge, they'll hobble out of detention several
Speaker 5: days later, clearly having been tortured, and will announce that
Speaker 5: they're actually withdrawing. They don't intend to run after all,
Speaker 5: or if they do manage to get their papers in
Speaker 5: and get home, their homes and the homes of their
Speaker 5: relatives are raided over the next couple of days, and
Speaker 5: then they announced that there that they're not running anymore,
Speaker 5: so basically trying to make sure that there are kind
Speaker 5: of no candidates for anybody to vote for. One of
Speaker 5: the wilder things that we've seen is you saw a
Speaker 5: low level of fish shill blue the whistle on what's
Speaker 5: called the election management system, saying that it's having all
Speaker 5: sorts of funky issues that suggest that it's it's been
Speaker 5: hacked and been controlled from the outside.
Speaker 4: This is where they do the vote counting.
Speaker 5: Uh, the Pakistan military had put a this is supposed
Speaker 5: to be a civilian operation. They put a general, They
Speaker 5: put an acting general to oversee the thing does not
Speaker 5: necessarily inspire too much confidence.
Speaker 3: Never a good sign.
Speaker 4: Never good sign.
Speaker 5: We already talked about how they're they're threatening to you know,
Speaker 5: and there their real fears that they're going to shut
Speaker 5: down the entire government from like February seventh to ninth,
Speaker 5: so like during during the election in run, Khan has
Speaker 5: been banned from running for office, like he's not allowed.
Speaker 5: Like he's not allowed. He's in prison right now. Pretty
Speaker 5: fundamental problem for a political party, Uh, the PTIs. Every
Speaker 5: party has a symbol here in the US. I guess
Speaker 5: the Democrats have a donkey because it's the substantial portion
Speaker 5: of the Pakistani electorate can't read.
Speaker 4: They'll vote, they'll vote on the symbol.
Speaker 5: The PTI's symbol is a cricket bat because Imran Khan
Speaker 5: is a famous cricketer. Supreme Court they're ruled on some
Speaker 5: bizarre technicality that doesn't apply to any other party. They
Speaker 5: can't use their bat anymore. And so what they're what
Speaker 5: they're what they're forcing all of PTI's candidates to do
Speaker 5: is run as independents without any symbol, and so people
Speaker 5: are just gonna have to kind of guess, you know,
Speaker 5: which which candidate is the one that they're supporting. What
Speaker 5: that also means is that even if despite all of
Speaker 5: these obstacles, the Pakistani voters do choose PTI candidates to
Speaker 5: have a majority in the parliament, they're now all independents
Speaker 5: and they're not subject to these anti horse trading laws.
Speaker 5: So the military can go to them and put the
Speaker 5: same kind of pressures that they did on candidates not
Speaker 5: to run to switch parties, and so then they might.
Speaker 4: Hobble out of.
Speaker 5: Out of the ten after getting abducted and announced you know,
Speaker 5: I'm actually joining with this party instead not going to
Speaker 5: be with PTI anymore. And so that means even if
Speaker 5: they win, like the military has a backup plan. Meanwhile,
Speaker 5: there there have been PTI candidates who have been killed lately.
Speaker 5: There was an explosion at a PTI rally where I
Speaker 5: think ten ten people were killed. The I s KR
Speaker 5: claimed responsibility for that, which is the kind of an
Speaker 5: ISIS affiliate. But nobody can explain why an ISIS affiliate
Speaker 5: would be targeting a bunch of PTI rallies. And people
Speaker 5: have pointed out that there are links and there have
Speaker 5: been known links in the past between the I s
Speaker 5: I and these and these terror groups. And also the
Speaker 5: fact that it's reported that they claim responsibility for a
Speaker 5: bombing doesn't necessarily mean that they actually did a bombing.
Speaker 4: So you've got all these So you've got just random terrorist.
Speaker 5: Bombings of these PTI rallies when when there's actually no
Speaker 5: kind of direct political rationale that that ISIS would have
Speaker 5: to like target uh pt I you've also had police
Speaker 5: raids of candidates all all over the place, and you've
Speaker 5: even had reports and very credible reports coming out of
Speaker 5: kind of PTI strongholds, uh that police are pulling over
Speaker 5: all people and grabbing them and giving them just tickets
Speaker 5: by the boat load. And if you get a ticket,
Speaker 5: and Pakistan police can confiscate your ident, your ID, which
Speaker 5: you don't get back until you pay the ticket, So
Speaker 5: that that could mean like thousands and thousands of people
Speaker 5: could be without their ideas and then can't show up
Speaker 5: to vote. Just the most petty you like, pathetic, little
Speaker 5: stuffy tax stuff just doing like as somebody described it
Speaker 5: to me, they're like, if you can think of something
Speaker 5: that you could do to reduce the vote share from
Speaker 5: pt I. Uh, They're they're doing it. It's it's just
Speaker 5: wildly across the board. But it's but you are so
Speaker 5: Abigail Spamberger m HM just put out a sent out
Speaker 5: set a letter today to Secretary of State Anthony Blincoln
Speaker 5: warning about all this stuff you had, Abigail, which that's
Speaker 5: going to resonate because you know, because of her close
Speaker 5: links to the Intelligence Agency. The House Foreign Affairs, the
Speaker 5: chairman is Michael McCall. He's been vocal on this. Greg Meeks,
Speaker 5: the Democrat who's the ranking member on House Foreign Affairs,
Speaker 5: has also been vocal on this. So you're finally starting
Speaker 5: to see some costure pressure, right, right, was a big,
Speaker 5: big Pakistani population, that's right, and it's significant one in
Speaker 5: Virginia as well. And and Spamberger is running for governor.
Speaker 5: That's right in Virginia.
Speaker 6: So another headache for the Biden administration with in the
Speaker 6: Middle East, with an ally that is not going to
Speaker 6: be fun for them to continue to navigate, as the
Speaker 6: clip that you played from the briefing shows, Yeah.
Speaker 5: And it's like, we should get results tomorrow, but it's
Speaker 5: hard to take seriously the idea that we should wait
Speaker 5: and like even take you know, give any stock to
Speaker 5: what they're going to report the results are after And
Speaker 5: the real tragedy is there was a lot of pressure
Speaker 5: on PTI to boycott the election, like like, look, this
Speaker 5: is this is such a travesty of democracy, you can't
Speaker 5: even participate in this. But Pakistani people have fought so
Speaker 5: hard the last fifteen years or so in there with
Speaker 5: their democracy movement to push back on the military's power
Speaker 5: in that country and it's it's just tremendously sad to
Speaker 5: see all of the people who are investing their hopes
Speaker 5: and dreams in this system and putting.
Speaker 4: Their faith into this system, which is just telling.
Speaker 5: Them over and over again that that faith is misplaced
Speaker 5: and that their votes aren't going to count, and that
Speaker 5: it doesn't matter what you want.
Speaker 4: But you know, the politics Pakistan are volatile.
Speaker 5: The US has is interested in Pakistan, sometimes ignores it
Speaker 5: a lot of the other times. So we'll see, like
Speaker 5: the willingness of so many people to put their names
Speaker 5: on the ballot knowing that there's a good chance that
Speaker 5: they're going to get raided and tortured just for doing that,
Speaker 5: the willingness of so many people to turn out to
Speaker 5: vote is inspiring.
Speaker 6: At the same time, and without you know, drawing a
Speaker 6: direct comparison, it's interesting you started this block by saying,
Speaker 6: you know, for a taste of what could happen here
Speaker 6: at some point. That's actually a good transition to what
Speaker 6: we're going to be talking with Leefong about, which is
Speaker 6: some sort of censorship here in the United States that
Speaker 6: has happened. It's happening in full public view. He has
Speaker 6: some excellent reporting on it. He testified before Congress just yesterday,
Speaker 6: so we're going to get some snap reaction from Lefong
Speaker 6: on his experience in front of Congress yesterday. Right after this,
Speaker 6: we're joined now by independent journalist Lee Fong, who testified
Speaker 6: just yesterday day before the House Select Committee on Weaponization
Speaker 6: about some of his excellent reporting, which you can and
Speaker 6: should read and follow at lefong dot com. That's the
Speaker 6: link to Lee's substack.
Speaker 3: Lee, thanks for joining us, Hey, thanks for having me, of.
Speaker 6: Course, so we have a clip of you testifying that
Speaker 6: I want to get your thoughts on quickly. Let's roll
Speaker 6: Lea's testimony. This part of Lee's testimony in front of
Speaker 6: the House yesterday.
Speaker 15: More recently, in collaboration with Unheard and Real Clear Investigations
Speaker 15: and with my co author Jack Poulson, I reported that
Speaker 15: Maderna relaunched these efforts to influence vaccine discourse last summer,
Speaker 15: again working with public good projects, Maderna employed the services
Speaker 15: of the artificial intelligence firm talk Walker to monitor vaccine
Speaker 15: related conversations across one hundred and fifty million websites, including
Speaker 15: social media and gaming platforms like Steam. There are many
Speaker 15: other examples in my reporting beyond the Twitter files and
Speaker 15: Maderna documents that show overreach by government and corporate interest
Speaker 15: to stifle free speech. Last month, I revealed documents on
Speaker 15: the activities of Logically, a British artificial intelligence firm that
Speaker 15: is poised to shape the twenty twenty four election. Is
Speaker 15: important to underscore why the American public should be aware
Speaker 15: of this firm. Logically previously had contracts in the United
Speaker 15: Kingdom to combat misinformation during the pandemic, but like many
Speaker 15: other firms of this nature, they instead surveilled legitimate forms
Speaker 15: of speech, including thoughtful concerns about pandemic lockdowns. Logically boasted
Speaker 15: of a special partnership with Facebook to automatically suppress and
Speaker 15: label any content they deemed as misinformation, giving the company
Speaker 15: immense influence over content moderation decisions. In my official written
Speaker 15: remarks my testimony, I go into much greater detail about
Speaker 15: my record on these issues. Writing on censorship and surveillance
Speaker 15: of animal rights activists and labor union activists, I've profiled
Speaker 15: the various private contractors that began by spying on behalf
Speaker 15: of the FBI during the War on Terror, that now
Speaker 15: utilize artificial intelligence to spy on conservative anti vaccine mandate activists.
Speaker 15: More recently, I've reported on organized suppression of peaceful speech
Speaker 15: by pro Palestinian activists.
Speaker 6: So like Matt Tayeb, Michael Schallenberger, Amado Morris, and others.
Speaker 6: Before you lead, you were peppered by questions, as it's custom,
Speaker 6: by members of the committee.
Speaker 3: Tell us a little bit about that experience.
Speaker 6: What it was like sort of having your reporting befront
Speaker 6: and center at a hearing when you know some people
Speaker 6: on one side of the aisle have different.
Speaker 3: Motivations of people on the other side of the aisle.
Speaker 3: What was it like yesterday?
Speaker 15: Well, sure, you know, these committee hearings are a little
Speaker 15: bit substive, a little bit political theater. I used it
Speaker 15: just as an opportunity to showcase my reporting to talk
Speaker 15: about a principle that I hold deer, which is free speech.
Speaker 10: It was a good opportunity.
Speaker 15: I mean, having that additional platform to engage with the
Speaker 15: members was a good experience. And you know, it's not
Speaker 15: every day that you get to talk to a large
Speaker 15: number of Republican lawmakers about Palestinian free speech, about free
Speaker 15: speech on the internet. To criticize the Department of Homeland
Speaker 15: Security in the halls of Congress. You know, I really
Speaker 15: enjoyed it.
Speaker 6: Five years ago, you probably would not have expected that
Speaker 6: Jim Jordan and Republicans would have called you to testify
Speaker 6: in front of Congress.
Speaker 10: No.
Speaker 15: I mean this term is a little bit cliche sometimes,
Speaker 15: but it is a realignment on these issues. And we
Speaker 15: did get into interesting back and forth about that as
Speaker 15: the Democrats were kind of ignoring the substance of the hearing.
Speaker 15: Every time a Democrat member had the microphone, they would
Speaker 15: just talk about Trump and how Trump would be a
Speaker 15: dictator and how dangerous Trump is, and we need to
Speaker 15: talk about Trump and the election, not talk about free
Speaker 15: speech and social media censorship. And I just kind of
Speaker 15: detected a little bit of cognitive dissonance there, because if
Speaker 15: you're concerned about an authoritarian president a matter of the party,
Speaker 15: wouldn't you want to dismantle a government and law enforcement
Speaker 15: apparatus that allows the government to control what we can
Speaker 15: read on social media and in the news.
Speaker 5: Before we get into your most recent piece that is
Speaker 5: I think fascinating on this whole question of censorship, how
Speaker 5: did they respond to your pushback about Palestinian censorship, because
Speaker 5: it has been the most kind of blatant contradiction in there,
Speaker 5: and they're kind of censorship and cancel culture values.
Speaker 4: Well actually for this case.
Speaker 15: Well, look, I think there are probably some fair weather
Speaker 15: supporters of free speech. You know, it's easy to support
Speaker 15: free speech when your size is being censored. It's hard
Speaker 15: to stand up for your enemies or your political opponents.
Speaker 15: But that's where the real principle lies. But I do
Speaker 15: see a number of the Republican lawmakers kind of alarm
Speaker 15: bells going off in their head when I was talking
Speaker 15: about the issue, talk to about it privately, including about
Speaker 15: just this general principle of hey, we need free speech
Speaker 15: for everyone. You know, we're in an open society, a
Speaker 15: free society. We don't have the answers. We don't think
Speaker 15: the government should have all the answers either. We need
Speaker 15: to debate and discuss these issues.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think because of Trump, Republicans not everyone.
Speaker 6: Again, like they're obviously some fairweather people, but they're getting
Speaker 6: a taste of how the imperial presidency can be used
Speaker 6: against them. Not I mean, obviously the military and war
Speaker 6: and all that is different questions that's been going on
Speaker 6: for years. But like this new post nine to eleven
Speaker 6: security state, which is.
Speaker 3: You're reporting on DHS, you're reporting.
Speaker 6: Anstucts, you're reporting on all of these things that are
Speaker 6: under the umbrella of the security State essentially being weaponized
Speaker 6: in elections, which is fascinating.
Speaker 15: Look, it wasn't that long ago when Democrats were leading
Speaker 15: the charge against the Department of Homeland Security and expansion
Speaker 15: of the Security State, saying that, you know, the Bush
Speaker 15: administration will exploit this new agency created after nine to
Speaker 15: eleven to sway elections and suppress our civil liberties. Now
Speaker 15: the biggest cheerleaders for the expansion of the DHS are
Speaker 15: the Democrats. I mean, that's just kind of unfortunately how
Speaker 15: polarization works here in Washington.
Speaker 5: And so let's get into this new reporting, kind of
Speaker 5: a new Twitter files report that you put up earlier
Speaker 5: this week. It's such a funny, isn't the word? But
Speaker 5: it's also kind of funny. So New York Times reporter
Speaker 5: read Epstein. We can set the stage here. So it's
Speaker 5: early in the morning of the election in twenty twenty,
Speaker 5: and we're all waiting for Wisconsin's votes to come in,
Speaker 5: and he tweets out that do I have the exact
Speaker 5: tweet here? Says he says Green Bay's absentee ballot results
Speaker 5: are being delayed because one of the vote counting machines
Speaker 5: ran out of ink and an elections official had to
Speaker 5: return to city hall to get more. Then an election
Speaker 5: official responds, that's not true, they don't use inc and
Speaker 5: then the main election official account retweets that, and then
Speaker 5: you have a whole kind of pile on against redes
Speaker 5: of all of these people saying this is misinformation, which
Speaker 5: is is Twitter.
Speaker 4: It's fine, let him hash.
Speaker 5: It out, but then you have the kind of government
Speaker 5: hall monitors flag it for.
Speaker 4: Twitter itself.
Speaker 5: So pick up the story from there, because that, to
Speaker 5: me is where it gets deeply disturbing.
Speaker 15: Yeah, I mean, this should be an innocuous tweet. It's
Speaker 15: a reporter making an observation about the political process, something
Speaker 15: that he had seen firsthand, and rather than it just
Speaker 15: being a benign tweet, it set off alarm bells in Washington.
Speaker 15: Almost as soon as these local Wisconsin and election officials
Speaker 15: disputed the accuracy of this tweeteah like three in the morning,
Speaker 15: right three in the morning, four in the morning, something
Speaker 15: like that. It gets forwarded along to the Department of
Speaker 15: Homeland Security top Countering Foreign influence official at the agency
Speaker 15: forwards it along to Twitter in San Francisco and starts
Speaker 15: pressuring the tech company to take action. Now, of course,
Speaker 15: the DHS says, you know, we never force these tech
Speaker 15: companies to do anything. We don't censor speech, we don't
Speaker 15: police speech. But they say take action, and then Twitter says,
Speaker 15: we're escalating. DHS responds, thank you. So it's clear that
Speaker 15: they wanted a certain type of action. And what action
Speaker 15: did they take. They censored the tweet. The tweet was
Speaker 15: going viral and it was receiving It had about three
Speaker 15: thousand retweets initially. Once Twitter took action escalated the tweet,
Speaker 15: those retweets disappeared. Anyone who quote tweeted it, that tweet poof,
Speaker 15: it's gone vanished. It still carries a warning label now
Speaker 15: today if you try to read it, it says warning misinformation.
Speaker 10: It has a warning label.
Speaker 15: You still can't quote tweet it, you can't interact with it,
Speaker 15: you can't comment on it.
Speaker 10: It's still shadow band.
Speaker 15: I think is the right term for this, because it's
Speaker 15: it didn't get deleted, but it's all the sharing function,
Speaker 15: the you know, all the different type of tags that
Speaker 15: get attached to it. To block its visibility. Are there,
Speaker 15: and here's the rub. The tweet looks accurate.
Speaker 3: Yeah, tell us about this.
Speaker 5: This is the crazy part because that whole process is wrong, period.
Speaker 5: Even if Reid was wrong right, like to me, then okay,
Speaker 5: DHS and the elections will reach out to read and
Speaker 5: say you're wrong, right, could correct it. Like I've said
Speaker 5: incorrect things before, and I hear from the people who
Speaker 5: I report it on and they're like, that's wrong. I'm like,
Speaker 5: and they prove it's wrong, and I correct it like
Speaker 5: that and that's fine.
Speaker 4: Like that's how it goes, That's how it should go.
Speaker 5: But it turns out go ahead it Actually he was
Speaker 5: not wrong necessarily right.
Speaker 15: The local election clerk who disputed the tweet was acting
Speaker 15: under the assumption that Green Bay was only using the
Speaker 15: DS two hundred machine, which does not use ink, So
Speaker 15: she said it's impossible, and that's normally the case. But
Speaker 15: because it was twenty twenty and Wisconsin was expecting higher
Speaker 15: than usual turnout, they leased an additional vote counting machine
Speaker 15: that does require ink that is attached to an external printer,
Speaker 15: and there were some ink issues that night. So not
Speaker 15: only was the allegation based on a false assumption or misunderstanding.
Speaker 15: You know, they didn't verify, they didn't do any of
Speaker 15: the kind of basics when you're engaging any type of
Speaker 15: media work like this, and especially sensitive media work. And
Speaker 15: I think it just this issue reflects the larger problem
Speaker 15: of this censorship regime. You do have the case of
Speaker 15: and you know, I've documented many cases of this on
Speaker 15: my substack and so of others from the Twitter files,
Speaker 15: that there are politically motivated sensors out there, people who
Speaker 15: have a partisan or ideological bias. But there's also just
Speaker 15: the Hey, if you're hastily censoring people without doing any
Speaker 15: of your own fact checking, you're just taking the whatever
Speaker 15: kind of data is given to you by a government official,
Speaker 15: and you assume that that's the truth handed down from God,
Speaker 15: You're going to get it wrong.
Speaker 10: You're going to end up censoring truthful information.
Speaker 15: And I think the other big kind of impact of
Speaker 15: this is that Wisconsin, a lot of people did not
Speaker 15: trust the integrity of the ballot there, and so when
Speaker 15: you have the government censoring true information right about the
Speaker 15: vote count, that doesn't increase trust in our elections. That
Speaker 15: really contributes to the erosion of trust, because who do
Speaker 15: you trust here. If the government's saying, hey, we've got
Speaker 15: to protect the integrity of this vote, we've got to
Speaker 15: make sure there's no misinformation that lies to people, and
Speaker 15: then they're contributing to the lies.
Speaker 10: Who do you trust here?
Speaker 6: And that's why you have the free press in this ecosystem,
Speaker 6: so that there can be some modicum of trust and
Speaker 6: there can be some checks and balances. And you've reported
Speaker 6: on this with Maderna too. Can you get into and
Speaker 6: a lot of actually other cases, can you get into
Speaker 6: that distinction between outright censorship and suppression, which is something
Speaker 6: that the government and tack lean heavily on. Let's say
Speaker 6: this is not where where you can still find the information.
Speaker 6: You could still read the New York Posts Hunter Biden
Speaker 6: laptop story. It was just you know, algorithmically suppressed or whatever.
Speaker 6: Can you talk a little bit about how they rely
Speaker 6: on that distinction and weaponize really that distinction to defend themselves.
Speaker 5: And before you answer, I just want to flag and
Speaker 5: maybe we can put this up on post. But yeah,
Speaker 5: the tweet today reads some or all of the content
Speaker 5: shared in this post is disputed and might be misleading
Speaker 5: about an election or other civic process. You can learn
Speaker 5: click to learn more, or if you're a rebel, you
Speaker 5: can click view.
Speaker 4: Whoah, and there's the tweet after you click view.
Speaker 10: It's like an nsf W tag, but just for an
Speaker 10: election report from the New York Times. Report five.
Speaker 4: It says it has five reposts.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's like the parental advisory content to talk altum.
Speaker 10: Yeah, exactly, watch out kids.
Speaker 15: But yeah, you know, I'm just talking about this kind
Speaker 15: of broader issue of censorship. You know, my reporting differs
Speaker 15: a little bit from some of the other Twitter follows journalists.
Speaker 15: You know, I also took a focus on private sector influence,
Speaker 15: and you know that opens up some different legal questions.
Speaker 15: Perhaps it's totally legal for one oil company or pharmaceutical
Speaker 15: company to collaborate with the private platforms. It's to tell
Speaker 15: you what you can read and not read about their
Speaker 15: products or about the policies that affect them. But we
Speaker 15: live in a free society, or we I hope we
Speaker 15: live in a free society, and we need to have
Speaker 15: debates around this topic. And a lot of the censorship
Speaker 15: did not just come from the government. It came from
Speaker 15: companies like Maderna, Pfizer, funding lobby funded funding lobbyists who
Speaker 15: worked with NGOs who were helping craft the content moderation
Speaker 15: policies at Twitter, giving them actual lists of accounts to
Speaker 15: amplify and de amplify. In some cases, those accounts that
Speaker 15: they were targeting to be de amplified ended up getting banned.
Speaker 15: A few of these accounts did, uh, you know, promote
Speaker 15: messages about vaccines that were not true, messages about microchips.
Speaker 15: But some of them promoted messages that are legitimate areas
Speaker 15: for public policy debate, people criticizing the idea around vaccine passports.
Speaker 15: You know, this idea that the only way you could
Speaker 15: engage in commerce, go to a restaurant, have a business,
Speaker 15: was to show your vaccinated status. They took tweets like
Speaker 15: that and from groups that were funded by Big Pharma
Speaker 15: targeted those messages, so that that's just another form of censorship. Again,
Speaker 15: the legal area is different because it's not the government,
Speaker 15: but still it has the same impact, and it's.
Speaker 6: They're funded so heavily by the government that it's hard
Speaker 6: to divorce.
Speaker 15: Sure true, I mean Maderna taking their basic signs from
Speaker 15: NIH and big funding from Operation Warp Speed. What is like,
Speaker 15: what is the distinction between government and corporation.
Speaker 5: Here right while, I while I've got you here, I'm curious,
Speaker 5: how's the how's the substack life?
Speaker 4: How are things going?
Speaker 5: People should I'm a subscriber to the subtack. Everybody should
Speaker 5: should sign up. Lefong dot co, calmly fun, got substack
Speaker 5: dot com.
Speaker 13: We'll get you there, you microchip Ryan, But how are
Speaker 13: how are you liking it compared to you know, because
Speaker 13: the rest of your career has been in newsrooms for
Speaker 13: the like various newsrooms.
Speaker 4: Including The Intercept for a long time. Yeah, what's it?
Speaker 4: What's it like being out as an independent reporter.
Speaker 15: I'm still figuring out my path, you know. I launched
Speaker 15: the Subseact last April, and you know, just personally, it's
Speaker 15: been a journey.
Speaker 10: You know.
Speaker 15: I kind of started out at a more partisan left
Speaker 15: leaning site, sponsored Progress, sponsored by the Center for American Progress,
Speaker 15: and that didn't work out because I kept clashing with
Speaker 15: the editors and the people of the think tank, because
Speaker 15: I wanted to criticize the Democratic Party. I wanted to
Speaker 15: criticize and report on corporate interests that we're funding the
Speaker 15: Center for American Progress.
Speaker 4: And yeah, no that's not worry.
Speaker 10: Yeah, that didn't work.
Speaker 15: Out, and I joined a number of uh more progressive
Speaker 15: left magazines and outlets, and you know, they have their
Speaker 15: own kind of editorial freedom issues. You know, because of
Speaker 15: the polarization in Washington, a lot of right wing, right
Speaker 15: leaning outlets, You've got to be a good foot soldier
Speaker 15: in those ideological trenches. Same on the left, and you know,
Speaker 15: I just have to be my own man and be
Speaker 15: my own journalist, and I want to be able to
Speaker 15: call out wrongdoing, whether it's on the left, the right,
Speaker 15: or the center. It's difficult to report on groups like
Speaker 15: antifile with the extreme elements of the Abolish the Police movement.
Speaker 15: If you're on the progressive left and you know, serving
Speaker 15: the public interest, I have to call attention to those
Speaker 15: issues as well. So I like subsect for the editorial freedom.
Speaker 15: I do miss working in a team, though, I like
Speaker 15: working with editors and other journalists. I've brought in some
Speaker 15: friends to help me with some stories. I worked with
Speaker 15: my friend Jack Paulson on a big story on efforts
Speaker 15: to suppress and cancel people trying to talk about Palestinian
Speaker 15: human rights.
Speaker 10: So yeah, it's a mix.
Speaker 15: But if you know, really enjoying it, and if your
Speaker 15: viewers have an opportunity to subscribe, welcome their subscription.
Speaker 5: How have the readers repected to the Palestinian coverage Because
Speaker 5: Glenn Greenwald, another of our former colleagues, has talked publicly
Speaker 5: about how a lot of people who liked his criticism
Speaker 5: of kind of canceled culture and censorship previous to October seventh,
Speaker 5: all of a sudden found him to be problematic and
Speaker 5: we're leaving.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 15: No, I did lose a few subscribers writing about Palestinian
Speaker 15: human rights and free expression. I've lost readers pretty much
Speaker 15: with every story. You know, you gained, someone lose them.
Speaker 15: And I actually, to the credit of my subscribers and
Speaker 15: to my readers, a few people who said I'm quitting,
Speaker 15: I'm not subscribing to you anymore because you kind of
Speaker 15: wrote this story. A lot of them came back and
Speaker 15: I love your journalism and never mind. I changed my
Speaker 15: mind and I've communicated with it. You know, sub sex
Speaker 15: is a great platform because it really connects you more
Speaker 15: with the reader, and I enjoy the back and forth.
Speaker 15: I don't know if you know I'm not the arbiter
Speaker 15: of truth. You know, I'm trying to do my best
Speaker 15: to find the facts and put it in context and
Speaker 15: do the reporting and deliver it to the reader. But
Speaker 15: you never know, everyone has blind spots, and I enjoy
Speaker 15: communicating with the reader, communicating with people from different viewpoints,
Speaker 15: and yeah, it's been a really good experience on a.
Speaker 3: Scale of one to ten. Rank Ryan as an editor.
Speaker 6: Kidding, One last question for you is are you still
Speaker 6: picking apart Twitter file stuff? You're still going through those documents.
Speaker 15: Yeah, I've got a few others that I'd like to
Speaker 15: release later this year and you know, combining them with
Speaker 15: other documents. The one thing that I found interesting is that,
Speaker 15: you know, recently, I've been looking at some of these
Speaker 15: firms in Europe and there's new scrutiny there because in
Speaker 15: Europe and the UK there are stronger data laws kind
Speaker 15: of like our Freedom of Information Act requests, but you
Speaker 15: can request your own data. So for people across the
Speaker 15: ideological spectrum, mostly on the right, they've been making requests
Speaker 15: to their government, to private sector firms to find out
Speaker 15: if faith and censored, they've been canceled, and so they're
Speaker 15: doing their own kind of citizen journalist based on these
Speaker 15: data laws that we don't have so much in the US.
Speaker 11: Now.
Speaker 15: California has a mini version of this, and I've been
Speaker 15: getting into that a little bit and it's been super interesting.
Speaker 6: That sounds great, well, all the more reason to subscribe
Speaker 6: at Lee Fung dot com.
Speaker 3: Lee, thank you so much for joining.
Speaker 10: Us, Thanks for having me. Of course, we're going to
Speaker 10: wrap the show for now.
Speaker 5: We're going to interview Congressman Greg Kasar about the border bill,
Speaker 5: about Pakistan elections, about whatever else we want to get into,
Speaker 5: but that'll come after the show. We'll post it at
Speaker 5: YouTube and whatever else we post stuff. But otherwise, thank
Speaker 5: you Lee for joining us, and yeah, we'll see you
Speaker 5: next week.