Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here,
Speaker 1: and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of
Speaker 1: ways we can up our game for this critical election.
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Speaker 1: But enough with that, let's get to the show.
Speaker 3: All right, Welcome back to Counterpoints, Happy Wednesday. Emily Drishinski
Speaker 3: joined by my co host Ryan Grim who is still
Speaker 3: remote for the time being. Ryan, how are you.
Speaker 4: I'm doing good.
Speaker 1: I'll be be back pretty soon. Looking forward to seeing
Speaker 1: you and everybody in the studio, but also been nice
Speaker 1: to be away.
Speaker 4: Got to say, Oh.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I can't imagine it's a good time to be
Speaker 3: away from the swamp, that's for sure. Speaking of all
Speaker 3: of the all of the craziness in the swamp, We're
Speaker 3: going to be tackling all kinds of good stuff today.
Speaker 3: That would be starting with Georgia, the fallout from the
Speaker 3: latest Trump indictment. We have a lot to break down
Speaker 3: in terms of how Trump has responded, how his fellow
Speaker 3: Republican candidates have responded. We're gonna talk about Chris Christy
Speaker 3: in a recent poll in New Hampshire taking the edge
Speaker 3: over Ron DeSantis. He's actually leading Ronda Santis. We're going
Speaker 3: to talk about that in one pole. The likelihood of
Speaker 3: a government shutdown increases by the day. We'll probably see
Speaker 3: some real threats of that going into the fall. Kevin
Speaker 3: McCarthy as new things to talk about on that, We're
Speaker 3: gonna talk about the cycle of tragedy in Ecuador, which
Speaker 3: is an important place to look at US policy. It's
Speaker 3: an important place to look at what's happening in South America,
Speaker 3: Central America in general. And we're gonna be breaking down
Speaker 3: a little bit of both of our takes on what's
Speaker 3: happening with the Blindside controversy in Michael orr and the
Speaker 3: family who famously took him in whether or not there's
Speaker 3: truth to their story. We're going to get into all
Speaker 3: of it. I'm gonna be talking about Hillary Clinton weighing
Speaker 3: in on the Trump indictment in a very giggly interview
Speaker 3: with Rachel Maddow. And you're going to be talking about
Speaker 3: Pakistan again.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we've got to follow up on that.
Speaker 1: Shortly after we broke the news on the show here
Speaker 1: last week, the State Department was pressed on this secret
Speaker 1: cable that demonstrated that the US had in fact pushed
Speaker 1: Imran Khan out of power in Pakistan. In a recent interview,
Speaker 1: the outgoing Prime Minister has now authenticated the document. Because
Speaker 1: there were some people who would take a kind of
Speaker 1: three step approach. They'd say, this document is inauthentic, this
Speaker 1: document was leaked by Imran Khan, and it's a treasonous act.
Speaker 1: It was not leaked by Imran Khan. And also it's
Speaker 1: a nothing burger. So they were all three of self
Speaker 1: contradictory claims would be made it once and it seems
Speaker 1: like now they're finally giving up on the inauthentic claim.
Speaker 1: And we'll talk about the completely bizarre State Department response
Speaker 1: as well. But speaking of jailing political opponents, we've got
Speaker 1: number four for a good old former president Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: We've got rico charges. What do you make of the
Speaker 1: case that's being laid out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the Rico charges is specifically something I wanted to
Speaker 3: ask you about because you've covered cases like this for
Speaker 3: a while, and Fanny Willis is a big fan of
Speaker 3: Rico has used it in the past, and before we
Speaker 3: even get into that, I think it's worth mentioning. Donald
Speaker 3: Trump himself says we can put a one up on
Speaker 3: the screen here. He posted a truth social yesterday morning,
Speaker 3: so Tuesday morning, saying that a large, complex, detailed but
Speaker 3: irrefutable report on the presidential election fraud which took place
Speaker 3: in Georgia is almost complete and will be presented by
Speaker 3: me at a major news conference at eleven am on
Speaker 3: Monday of next week in Bedminster, New Jersey. Based on
Speaker 3: the results of this conclusive report, all charges should be
Speaker 3: dropped against me and others. There will be a complete exoneration.
Speaker 3: So Donald Trump is having a press conference where he
Speaker 3: is going to be, according to this truth Social post,
Speaker 3: putting on display, demonstrating and showing evidence for what he
Speaker 3: says is an irrefutable case that there was fraud in
Speaker 3: Georgia and all of the charges against him should be dropped.
Speaker 3: Now let's put a two up on the screen. There
Speaker 3: have been some interesting reactions from Donald Trump's fellow candidates.
Speaker 3: Vivek Ramaswami said he called this another disastrous Trump indictment,
Speaker 3: and he also said, as someone who's running for a
Speaker 3: President against Trump. I'd volunteer to write the amick is
Speaker 3: briefed to the court myself. Prosecutors should not be deciding
Speaker 3: US presidential elections, and if they're so overzealous that they
Speaker 3: commit constitutional violations, then the cases should be thrown out
Speaker 3: and they should be held accountable. Ron de Santis said
Speaker 3: he's going to end the weaponization of federal agencies like
Speaker 3: the DOJ and FBI. I think it's an example of
Speaker 3: this criminalization of politics. I don't think this is something
Speaker 3: that's good for the country. And then you know, you
Speaker 3: have your Asa Hutchinson's and Will Hurd who said things
Speaker 3: you know that this is like Donald Trump demonstrating he's
Speaker 3: fit for office, basically what you could expect from those
Speaker 3: to I think this is another great example of how
Speaker 3: Ramaswami has a better colm strategy. Is somebody running in
Speaker 3: the Trump lane or the Trump adjacent lane than Rotten DeSantis,
Speaker 3: who's supposed to be running in like the Trump adjacent lane,
Speaker 3: the Trump but not Trump lane. Once again, I think
Speaker 3: Ramaswami had a better messaging strategy there than DeSantis himself did.
Speaker 3: But as for the case itself, Ryan, I, as I
Speaker 3: read through the ninety eight page indictment from Fanny Willis
Speaker 3: had a pretty similar reaction to when I read through
Speaker 3: Jack Smith's indictment, which is that it's very dangerous to
Speaker 3: say you know that people were and this word comes
Speaker 3: up over and over again in both indictments, knowingly spreading
Speaker 3: false information. So this is I think the predicate of
Speaker 3: both cases, and in Jack Smith's case, and a couple
Speaker 3: of times in Willis's case, she does show that there
Speaker 3: were people who knew they were spreading false information in
Speaker 3: certain particular instances. She also, in Jack Smith, also accuses
Speaker 3: people Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani of knowingly spreading disinformation
Speaker 3: information they were aware was false in times where I
Speaker 3: don't think they've proved, and I doubt they have the
Speaker 3: evidence to prove that those people knew it was false. Now,
Speaker 3: I think it was grossly unethical because I imagine a lot
Speaker 3: of times they did realize some of this information was
Speaker 3: at best very very iffy. But to charge people for
Speaker 3: that without evidence, I think is a pretty terrifying precedent.
Speaker 3: There are cases where they're citing evidence in both of
Speaker 3: these indictments, and I want to be clear about that.
Speaker 3: I also think that as a predicate for you know,
Speaker 3: going after a political opponent, which is something that we
Speaker 3: have generally steered away from in this country. People weren't
Speaker 3: happy when Ford pardoned Nixon, and you know, we can
Speaker 3: go back and think about that, we can think about
Speaker 3: what Coomi did with Hillary Clinton, but we've typically sort
Speaker 3: of steered away from that in the United States. So
Speaker 3: if you're going to do it, I think it's sets
Speaker 3: a precedent that scares me a little bit to say, oh, well,
Speaker 3: of course they knew it was false without any evidence.
Speaker 3: In order to charge them with the conspiracy, and in
Speaker 3: order to charge them with the statutes that Fanny Willis
Speaker 3: is listing, you do need to prove that they knew
Speaker 3: it was false. So maybe she can do that. I'm
Speaker 3: pretty skeptical. What did you make of it, Ryan.
Speaker 1: I mean, if all that they were doing was spreading
Speaker 1: false information, I would one hundred percent agree with you
Speaker 1: and say that we cannot go down the road of
Speaker 1: criminalizing lies. Now, you have a First Amendment right as
Speaker 1: a politician to lie. All politicians lie. Now you don't
Speaker 1: have the right to do it on YouTube. Apparently you
Speaker 1: know they'll they'll take you down for that. But broadly speaking,
Speaker 1: under the constitutional umbrella, politicians have the constitutional right to
Speaker 1: lie their pants off, and they have a veiled themselves
Speaker 1: of that right for two hundred plus years, and they
Speaker 1: will continue to do it for as long as.
Speaker 4: This republic exists.
Speaker 1: But if the lies are linked up with action, and
Speaker 1: that action is it self illegal, then it does matter.
Speaker 1: And to me, the most blatant kind of illegal acts
Speaker 1: that are very hard to explain away, and hey, and
Speaker 1: is until Grubn guilty, these nineteen guys can and women
Speaker 1: can go before the jury and try to you know,
Speaker 1: explain away what they did. But to me, the hacking,
Speaker 1: you know, trying to bust into the Georgia voter database going,
Speaker 1: which they sort of seem to imply they had some
Speaker 1: access to legitimately, but it wasn't really legitimate, Like this
Speaker 1: was not kind of public access that they were exploiting here.
Speaker 1: And also the go you know, go and find me
Speaker 1: eleven thousand votes, and then also creating fake electors like
Speaker 1: if you create, if you make make if you run
Speaker 1: a fake ID business, if you run if you falsify
Speaker 1: mortgage documents, if you engage in that type of fraud,
Speaker 1: those are crimes, and so if they can prove that,
Speaker 1: I do think, then it does have to follow that
Speaker 1: it doesn't actually necessarily have to follow that they knew
Speaker 1: one hundred percent that the election was stolen, you know.
Speaker 1: And what I mean is this, like, let's pretend that
Speaker 1: we can get inside of Donald Trump's mind and he
Speaker 1: really did one hundred percent believe that, you know, he
Speaker 1: beat Joe Biden in Georgia. He also knows that you
Speaker 1: have a variety of legal paths that you're able to
Speaker 1: take in the United States that allow you to challenge
Speaker 1: what you consider to be, you know, an unfair or
Speaker 1: a rigged election, and that's mostly going through the courts.
Speaker 1: They went through the courts, they failed. They knew that
Speaker 1: that was the outcome. So even if at the end
Speaker 1: of all that they still believe that they were wronged,
Speaker 1: it kind of doesn't matter what you believe. Like, if
Speaker 1: you believe that you were unfairly convicted of burglary, it
Speaker 1: doesn't give you the right to break out of prison,
Speaker 1: even if you authentically believed and were even innocent.
Speaker 4: And so we have rules.
Speaker 1: You know, this is not Vietnam, as they say, and
Speaker 1: they didn't follow the rules. They went outside of it
Speaker 1: and used all of these the extra judicial, extra legal
Speaker 1: processes to try to overturn the like. So I think
Speaker 1: in some ways you don't even necessarily need to prove
Speaker 1: that they knew they were lying, although a ton of
Speaker 1: them knew, like a whole bunch of them knew. But
Speaker 1: what they absolutely knew is that the election had been
Speaker 1: certified and he lost by eleven thousand votes. They knew
Speaker 1: that rapid Berger told him that the news reported it.
Speaker 1: Everybody knew that he disagreed with it, right, But whether
Speaker 1: or not that was an authentic disagreement or not in
Speaker 1: some point besides.
Speaker 3: That's what I find frustrating, though, is that jump from
Speaker 3: it's likely that you know, So if Raffensberger is telling
Speaker 3: Donald Trump you don't have the votes, it's a pretty
Speaker 3: good piece of evidence that, frankly, you don't have the votes.
Speaker 3: This is a Republican talking to a Republican and in
Speaker 3: all likelihood you don't have the votes. And that goes
Speaker 3: to Rusty Bauers as well from Arizona, who was telling
Speaker 3: Donald Trump similar things. But Jack smithan Willis say, well,
Speaker 3: because Brad Ravensberger and Rusty Bauers had told Donald Trump
Speaker 3: and his legal team, what they thought about the vote
Speaker 3: totals he knew, and then everything he said differently from
Speaker 3: that was knowingly spreading false information because somebody had told
Speaker 3: him that. But the fact is, and as these indictment show,
Speaker 3: he has legal experts telling him different things. And to
Speaker 3: your point, Ryan, it's one of those it's like, what
Speaker 3: do we know about what Donald Trump actually believed? And
Speaker 3: that's where legally it gets in a different territory. For me,
Speaker 3: it just becomes it becomes really difficult to it becomes
Speaker 3: very difficult. The legal precedent for me becomes very difficult.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And if we can put up this next Axios element,
Speaker 1: we're looking at a wild twenty twenty four because you
Speaker 1: have all of these different court cases starting to line
Speaker 1: up with Iowa, New Hampshire Super Tuesday, the Democratic side
Speaker 1: of the Republican National Convention, and you're going to have
Speaker 1: them kind of weaving in and out of the political
Speaker 1: cycle in a way that's going to kind of never
Speaker 1: take this off the kind of news map for more
Speaker 1: than say a week. You're always gonna have some type
Speaker 1: of motion or decision coming down in one of these
Speaker 1: different cases. And so Emily, on the one hand, I
Speaker 1: feel like this helps Trump in the sense that it
Speaker 1: rallies Republicans around him, also feel like it doesn't necessarily
Speaker 1: help him with a general electorate, which key can where
Speaker 1: he continues to erode support. So I'm wondering what your
Speaker 1: sense is of the politics.
Speaker 4: We've never come.
Speaker 1: Close to having a presidential election unfold and anything remotely
Speaker 1: like this.
Speaker 3: No, And again to the last point that we were
Speaker 3: debating a little bit. It's part of what makes me
Speaker 3: wish that this were happening at the ballot box. And
Speaker 3: I come from the perspective that, like I wish we
Speaker 3: locked every politician up who did something bad, but the
Speaker 3: fact of the matter is we don't. And so when
Speaker 3: you have the public watching something like this play out,
Speaker 3: I think it creates a lot ranker. We're gonna be
Speaker 3: talking about this in the Hillary Clinton block coming up
Speaker 3: in a little bit, and we can probably go back
Speaker 3: and forth out it more then. But when you look
Speaker 3: at this calendar and you look at what's happened since
Speaker 3: the first indictment came down in April, Donald Trump's numbers
Speaker 3: and the gap between him and any other candidate has
Speaker 3: gone up. So it helps Trump in the primary, might
Speaker 3: not help him in the general. But the reason it
Speaker 3: helps him in the primary is that I think it's
Speaker 3: for the same reason it helps whatever candidate, likely Joe
Speaker 3: Biden is matched up with Donald Trump. This is the
Speaker 3: type of thing that energizes both bases, and then you
Speaker 3: have this middle of the country that's just like, well,
Speaker 3: what the hell am I supposed to do with this?
Speaker 3: I think Donald Trump is nuts, and I think he
Speaker 3: has done all kinds of extra legal things. The other hand,
Speaker 3: I'm looking at Joe Biden, who's got all kinds of
Speaker 3: issues of his own, whether that's cognitive problems, whether that's
Speaker 3: Hunter Biden problems, whether that's the economy frankly, and so
Speaker 3: I just I mean, it makes me, it pains me
Speaker 3: for the country thinking of looking at that axios chart,
Speaker 3: looking at the calendar going forward, which if you're listening
Speaker 3: to this, if you find that axious timeline, it might
Speaker 3: be worth looking up because it's incredible to look at
Speaker 3: how many court dates and how on earth even one
Speaker 3: person could balance a presidential campaign with these four indictments
Speaker 3: in all of these different jurisdictions. Over the next year
Speaker 3: or so, it is going to be I like, buckle up,
Speaker 3: because we're in for a pretty wild.
Speaker 1: Ride, a plus a golf schedule that he's got to
Speaker 1: work in there too. But the irony here, and I'm
Speaker 1: curious for your take on this. If he had done
Speaker 1: what every other president you know, ever throughout American history
Speaker 1: had done, which is to concede to the person who won,
Speaker 1: just say, you know what, Sleepy Joe got the best
Speaker 1: of me.
Speaker 4: I'll be back in four years.
Speaker 1: I feel like he would be the odds on favorite,
Speaker 1: not just to win the Republican nomination that was his taking,
Speaker 1: but to win the White House again. I feel like
Speaker 1: he'd be that Democrats would be running scared that Biden
Speaker 1: would be at least several points behind him.
Speaker 4: Instead, the guy's looking at various.
Speaker 1: Prison terms, and it's also hurting him with a general electorate.
Speaker 1: Do you where do you think he would be if
Speaker 1: he would have just said, you know what, he got me?
Speaker 3: No, I agree with that. I agree with that two things. One,
Speaker 3: I agree if he had done that with the presidential election,
Speaker 3: he would be in a much more strong political position.
Speaker 3: And if he had, you know, taken COVID more seriously
Speaker 3: all the way through, I think he would be in
Speaker 3: a stronger political position. And that's not to say I'm
Speaker 3: not trying to get into lockdowns or masking or anything,
Speaker 3: but just it devolved into something because in some sense
Speaker 3: he was being attacked as being you know, X, Y,
Speaker 3: and Z, and he lashed out and responded in ways
Speaker 3: that I think, you know, made it more difficult for
Speaker 3: the country to approach the serious crisis that was killing
Speaker 3: lots and lots of people. And so the problem is
Speaker 3: you just can't separate that from the things that make
Speaker 3: Trump politically successful. You know, the things that make him
Speaker 3: successful are also his downfall. It's like a Greek tragedy
Speaker 3: that plays out every single day on true social now.
Speaker 3: And so you can't really have I just don't see
Speaker 3: how you can have one, the one part of Trump
Speaker 3: without the other part of Trump, which is where again,
Speaker 3: like a problem with both of these indictments Smith and
Speaker 3: willis legally and I think just as like a strategy
Speaker 3: as well, is that it's saying that Donald Trump was acting.
Speaker 3: I think they're they're taking him as a rational actor.
Speaker 3: Who you know, when the Secretary of State who's a
Speaker 3: Republican tells you something, you are like, oh, that is
Speaker 3: a very good piece of evidence that I lost the election,
Speaker 3: whereas with Donald Trump, you see over and over again,
Speaker 3: and people I've talked to say, if he believes anything,
Speaker 3: it's that he won that presidential election because he had
Speaker 3: Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and their people chirping in his
Speaker 3: ear saying stuff, and that's who he chose to believe.
Speaker 3: He's like a you know, he's a Twitter boomer. He
Speaker 3: was a Twitter boomer. And so the the other thing
Speaker 3: I wanted to say, Ryan, is I agree with you
Speaker 3: completely on that Sidney Powell part about the Georgia voting machine.
Speaker 3: That is that's in the Fanny Walls indictment, and that
Speaker 3: is extremely diceing material that looks like it could be
Speaker 3: a real problem for her. Whether they got access to
Speaker 3: just like a password and it gave them access to
Speaker 3: the voting thing. That might be the case, but they
Speaker 3: knew that they weren't supposed to have it. It sounds
Speaker 3: to me from the evidence, and we'll see what evidence
Speaker 3: is presented in court, but it sure looked like they
Speaker 3: knew they weren't supposed to be entering the voter database
Speaker 3: from the back end there, and so I think that
Speaker 3: is a pretty serious part of the indictment. Too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's not technically, I guess classified information, but it's
Speaker 1: the same thing. One of the things that they're charging
Speaker 1: Julian Assan for is for helping Chelsea Manning kind of
Speaker 1: cover her tracks in when she was looking through Pentagon
Speaker 1: files to leak to Wiki leaks. And so you know,
Speaker 1: if for everybody who talks about two different tiers of justice,
Speaker 1: we have to remember that too, that if anybody who
Speaker 1: tries to kind of penetrate an election system without legal
Speaker 1: access to it is committing a crime like that.
Speaker 4: It's pretty pretty straightforward.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we can't have people. There's a great episode of
Speaker 3: Reno nine one one where they try to go in
Speaker 3: and change votes on a referendum for police. There's a
Speaker 3: reason we have that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can't have.
Speaker 4: That right country here, right, But.
Speaker 3: Just briefly, I want to dive into Fanny Willis because
Speaker 3: she's obviously front and center, as people have said, with
Speaker 3: the one of the most serious cases, probably the single
Speaker 3: most serious case against Donald Trump, because it does not
Speaker 3: involve a presidential part and it's a state it's a
Speaker 3: series of state charges, and he can't it can't be
Speaker 3: waved away by a Republican president or a kind hearted
Speaker 3: democratic president. There's nothing that a president can do to
Speaker 3: save Donald Trump from these charges, and obviously they're serious
Speaker 3: in nature. So that Fanny Willis is, if we put
Speaker 3: the next element up on the screen, A four, she
Speaker 3: has been The right is exploring Fanny Willis's history, as
Speaker 3: you know, it's sort of natural in a situation like this.
Speaker 3: But one thing that's come up, you see, this is
Speaker 3: from Newsmax. They say she's an activist Democrat and her
Speaker 3: father was a member of the Black Panthers, which they
Speaker 3: described their Ryan as you'll enjoy in parentheses, Marxist Leninist
Speaker 3: black power group. There you go. And so Fanny Wills
Speaker 3: to sort of come under the microscope, and the Telegraph
Speaker 3: did a pretty interesting deep dive on her, and I
Speaker 3: found interesting one quote they have here from a Georgia
Speaker 3: State University law professor who said she's really a tough
Speaker 3: on crime liberal, which is kind of a rare bird
Speaker 3: these days, but I think that's her brand. The Telegraph
Speaker 3: also notes, by her own admission, miss Willis is a
Speaker 3: fan of Rico. She has previously used Georgia's expansive racketeering
Speaker 3: charges to prosecute cheating teachers that's a case that actually
Speaker 3: got some national headlines at the time. She won eleven
Speaker 3: convictions and national media attention in relation to the public
Speaker 3: school test score scandal. As the Telegraph notes there. I
Speaker 3: think she also had rico charges against young thug and
Speaker 3: she won. She pursued those charges and I think she
Speaker 3: won in court now. Devin Franklin, an attorney for the
Speaker 3: Southern Center for Human Rights who spent twelve years in
Speaker 3: the Fulton County Public Defender's Office, said that using these
Speaker 3: laws drives quote, a narrative of violence in Atlanta that's
Speaker 3: not true, that's not necessarily reflected in the data, and
Speaker 3: has a tendency to sensationalize the cases. She's bent. Actually
Speaker 3: most of her career as an assistant DA down in
Speaker 3: Fulton County. That's, as people know outside of Atlanta. It's
Speaker 3: the most populous county in Georgia, so obviously a hugely
Speaker 3: important political center of the state. She she beat a
Speaker 3: primary fight against her mentor, Paul Howard, who had been
Speaker 3: Georgia's first black district attorney. And so she comes takes
Speaker 3: out her mentor and she says she was She actually
Speaker 3: said her father was a former black panther that comes
Speaker 3: from her. That's not like some weird digging. But I
Speaker 3: think that's when you have Newsmax calling her an activist
Speaker 3: Democrat and then the Telegraph saying she's actually a tough
Speaker 3: on crime liberal prosecutor. Those are obviously in tension right now.
Speaker 3: If you're an activist Democrat prosecutor, a lot of people
Speaker 3: think of you along the lines of like a Chesaboudine
Speaker 3: or Gascone. But that doesn't seem to be the case
Speaker 3: with Fanny Wills, who's like, hey, Ricos, let's just have
Speaker 3: a Rico party. And these things seem to be intentioned
Speaker 3: so that the picture of Fannie Wills to me, at
Speaker 3: least as somebody who's not you know, in Georgia following
Speaker 3: politics for the last couple of decades, that's sort of
Speaker 3: a muddied picture.
Speaker 1: They're using activists in a very liberal sense there, because
Speaker 1: if she were an activist kind of part straight up
Speaker 1: part as a Democrat, she wouldn't have gone after the teachers'
Speaker 1: union like she did.
Speaker 4: That was a really brutal case.
Speaker 1: Came after several schools that were that she accused of rigging,
Speaker 1: basically rigging their test scores. I think they were cutting
Speaker 1: into the packets, and like it was a mess and
Speaker 1: a really sad case, and it really shine a light
Speaker 1: on how far a drifts a lot of public schools
Speaker 1: had gone in Fulton County. And if she were just
Speaker 1: as straight up kind of partisan Democrat, she would never
Speaker 1: have taken on that that kind of case, and she
Speaker 1: certainly wouldn't have done it with the zealousness to bring
Speaker 1: in Rico, which then allows, to the point of some
Speaker 1: of her critics, allows you to criminalize some things because
Speaker 1: they're part of the criminal conspiracy that otherwise wouldn't be
Speaker 1: criminal acts on their own. And so she but you know,
Speaker 1: she's she's good at what she does. Like she's got
Speaker 1: she's got the record to show it, and you know,
Speaker 1: good for her dad. You know, Black Black Panther, you know,
Speaker 1: the Black Panther Party for Self Defense had you know,
Speaker 1: went in some crazy directions towards the very end, but
Speaker 1: you know, throughout much of its history was you know,
Speaker 1: a real real force for good and empowerment, uh and
Speaker 1: and particularly kind of stitching together civil society elements in
Speaker 1: the black community in the late sixties and early seventies.
Speaker 1: So h yes, but you know, you come after the
Speaker 1: foreign president, You're going to certainly, you know, get get
Speaker 1: the spotlight from you know, not just outlets like Newsmax,
Speaker 1: but everybody.
Speaker 4: So you know, I understand where that's coming from.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, although I think any efforts to sort of
Speaker 3: turn her into one of the like a Chesaboudine, she's
Speaker 3: not going to be successful and ran. Just before we
Speaker 3: move to the next topic, I just wanted to mention
Speaker 3: again that she has a critic in that Telegraph article,
Speaker 3: which is a really good deep dive, actually saying that
Speaker 3: she has a tendency to sensationalize cases, and that is
Speaker 3: definitely if you want to spend ninety eight pages going
Speaker 3: through the indictment. I definitely felt like that was a
Speaker 3: word that would accurately characterize the indictment itself. But I
Speaker 3: wanted to ask you Ryan about Rico just sort of
Speaker 3: in general, as someone who's covered Rico for a while,
Speaker 3: what it means that she's invoking it here given the
Speaker 3: history of Rico and mob stuff, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1: Plenty of people have already pointed out the irony that
Speaker 1: Rudy Giuliani is getting slapped with Rico, because you know,
Speaker 1: he very much. You know, rose to prominence using rico
Speaker 1: cases against in particular the mob in New York. And
Speaker 1: you know, if you're going if you're going to have
Speaker 1: a government, you're gonna have a democratic republic where you know,
Speaker 1: power is vested in the people that are elected by
Speaker 1: the populace.
Speaker 4: Then you can't have mafias.
Speaker 1: You can't have criminal conspiracies kind of running around outside
Speaker 1: the law and getting around the law by saying that, Okay,
Speaker 1: well you don't have you know, you don't have anything
Speaker 1: on us. You know, yes, it is clear that we
Speaker 1: are running drugs, running illegal casinos, uh, you know, running
Speaker 1: sex trafficking and human trafficking operations, trying to overthrow an election, you.
Speaker 4: Know, but you actually haven't.
Speaker 1: You don't have anything specific on us that can that
Speaker 1: can you know, pin a serious crime with this, And
Speaker 1: so you end up just slapping a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: misdemeanors together, even though you can prove that it was
Speaker 1: all collectively oriented towards this grand kind of collective conspiracy.
Speaker 1: So uh, to the extent that you can bring those
Speaker 1: laws to bear on, you know, entities that are trying
Speaker 1: to become private governments, and that's that's the interesting kind
Speaker 1: of link between a private gang of people that is
Speaker 1: trying to you know, overturn an election and a private
Speaker 1: gang of people that doesn't bother with elections and just
Speaker 1: kind of takes over a community by force. That's basically
Speaker 1: the same thing. And that's what a democratic society can have.
Speaker 1: Like we we have established ways that you you know,
Speaker 1: are are able to get into government and we don't
Speaker 1: have mafias like I mean we do.
Speaker 4: And so the you know, RICO is.
Speaker 1: Aimed at making sure that the people have control over
Speaker 1: their own sovereignty. So to me, you know, they can
Speaker 1: absolutely be abused in a lot of different ways and
Speaker 1: we need to be on guard for that. But in general,
Speaker 1: I think it's a necessary part of uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the people exercising their own sovereignty.
Speaker 3: That's why Ryan voted for Giuliani in the Republican primary in.
Speaker 1: Two thousand and eight America's mayor.
Speaker 3: All right, well, let's move on to Chris Christie in
Speaker 3: a new Emerson poll out of New Hampshire taking the
Speaker 3: edge over run DeSantis. Check this story out. We can
Speaker 3: put the first element up on the screen and I'm
Speaker 3: reading from the hill here. Former New Jersey Governor Chris
Speaker 3: Christias for past Florida governor Run DeSantis, and the critical
Speaker 3: early presidential primary state of New Hampshire. According to an
Speaker 3: Emerson College survey released Tuesday, Christy leipbrog DeSantis for second
Speaker 3: place in the Granite state, garnering nine percent support. DeSantis's support,
Speaker 3: on the other hand, fell to eight percent from seventeen
Speaker 3: percent in March. So check that out. That is a
Speaker 3: nine point decline for DeSantis. Christie's one point lead over
Speaker 3: de Santis. But this is actually a good point, and
Speaker 3: I'm glad that he'll put this because you don't always
Speaker 3: see this in news coverage. That is within the polls
Speaker 3: plus or minus three point four percent margin of error,
Speaker 3: well within the margin of error there, which is pretty important.
Speaker 3: What is still outside of the margin for air from
Speaker 3: the margin of error is that big decline for DeSantis.
Speaker 3: There's you cannot you know, math away that giant decline
Speaker 3: in the same pole of New Hampshire voters from seventeen
Speaker 3: to nine. That's really really brutal. Now, according to that pole,
Speaker 3: Trump still dominates the GOP primary field, as The Hill
Speaker 3: puts it, with forty nine percent support. You then have
Speaker 3: Tim Scott at six percent, Doug Bergham and Nikki Haley
Speaker 3: at four percent, Ramaswami and Parry Johnson at three percent
Speaker 3: and two perspective respectively, and then Mike Pence and Will
Speaker 3: Heard each at one percent support. Now we have also
Speaker 3: thirteen percent of voters saying they are undecided, which is
Speaker 3: a good chunk, but not enough to make up that
Speaker 3: massive margin between Trump and everyone else. What did you
Speaker 3: make of that, Ryan.
Speaker 1: Well, I heard you mentioning Will Heard earlier in the program.
Speaker 1: I think Will is running for president. He has not
Speaker 1: landed with much of a splash so far, but yeah,
Speaker 1: just an incredible you're the spin you're seeing from the
Speaker 1: DeSantis camp is that they really feel like they have,
Speaker 1: you know, clean shot at Iowa. You know that if
Speaker 1: they can, if they and if they can repel themselves
Speaker 1: out of Iowa with a victory, then that can reshape
Speaker 1: their momentum, which which is true, like if you could
Speaker 1: do that, it does do that. But he's got such
Speaker 1: a hill to climb and he's facing such significant headwinds.
Speaker 4: What are they.
Speaker 1: Basing this claim on besides just kind of hope that
Speaker 1: Iowa could have, you know, is a better place for
Speaker 1: them than basically everywhere else where.
Speaker 4: He's you know, you know, getting diffed.
Speaker 3: It's a place where you can Yeah, I mean, I
Speaker 3: think their theory is that it's a place where you
Speaker 3: can pour resources into and if you do the ground
Speaker 3: game right, then it's the momentum that will translate to
Speaker 3: the other states and sort of trickle down campaigning. And
Speaker 3: the example is that they go off of their consultant
Speaker 3: is Jeff Row who did this with Ted Cruz in
Speaker 3: Iowa back in twenty sixteen. Cruz wins Iowa comes out
Speaker 3: of that with a lot of momentum, And I just
Speaker 3: again look at that and shake my head and like
Speaker 3: from maybe it's easier to see the forest from the
Speaker 3: trees when you're not like when you're a journalist and
Speaker 3: you're looking at this from the outside. But Ted Cruz
Speaker 3: lost great. I'm glad Ted Cruz had a lot of
Speaker 3: momentum and Ted Crews barely beat Beto O'Rourke with the
Speaker 3: same consultant in Texas, And so I just don't it
Speaker 3: doesn't inspire if I were a Saintist donor, it wouldn't
Speaker 3: inspire a lot of confidence that that was the strategy,
Speaker 3: especially since it's Still, when you're looking overall at voters,
Speaker 3: it's such a huge margin. I would understand that if
Speaker 3: it was a much slimmer margin, But given that it's
Speaker 3: such a huge margin, I find that comple lely not persuasive.
Speaker 3: Let's show Chris Christy. He's got to be feeling good
Speaker 3: right now, because again, when you're looking at Chris Christy
Speaker 3: and when he entered the race, it was sort of like, okay, great,
Speaker 3: Like Chris Christy's not going to win well if he's
Speaker 3: taking nine percent support away from all of the other candidates.
Speaker 3: I mean, maybe that's why you have Mike pens in
Speaker 3: New Hampshire at one percent, because you have Chris Christie
Speaker 3: taking nine percent of the vote, and when you have
Speaker 3: everyone else sharing, you know, Trump's at forty nine percent
Speaker 3: and his next opponent is forty points behind at nine percent.
Speaker 3: When you have somebody like Christy eating into the vote,
Speaker 3: then that's a big I mean, that's a big chunk
Speaker 3: that would be spread out from other candidates. It's certainly
Speaker 3: not enough to make anything up. But when you're trying
Speaker 3: to get financial support, when you're trying to get momentum,
Speaker 3: media attention, et cetera, et cetera. Christy's taking some of
Speaker 3: that up. So let's see how Christy was talking to
Speaker 3: a voter in Iowa just this week.
Speaker 5: I didn't do everything that in my mind, in my heart,
Speaker 5: I wanted to do, because I was making a political
Speaker 5: calculation when you were to suggesting, well, if these people
Speaker 5: are so in trench with him, and they're going to
Speaker 5: go to hell and back with them, and you maybe
Speaker 5: need them to vote for you at some point, maybe
Speaker 5: you should just back off a little bit. Let me
Speaker 5: tell you. I tried it. It doesn't work. And when
Speaker 5: he says the stuff he said about me yesterday, don't
Speaker 5: going to bother you for a minute.
Speaker 3: I don't care, okay, right, And that's a good flavor
Speaker 3: of how Christy is approaching the Trump issue with voters.
Speaker 3: Is that how he's getting to nine percent.
Speaker 1: I guess it's just such an interesting way to speak.
Speaker 1: I tried it and it didn't work. It's not he's
Speaker 1: not saying it was wrong. You know, I went against
Speaker 1: my moral principles, and I realized that what I was
Speaker 1: doing was compromised, and so you know, damn it, I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna speak truth and let the chips fall. They
Speaker 1: were he's just laying it out in a purely pragmatic way.
Speaker 3: Just say I was a piece of garbage.
Speaker 1: I tried appeasing him except because I thought it would
Speaker 1: benefit me politically, and it didn't.
Speaker 4: It hurt me, and so I'm gonna now.
Speaker 1: Take a different approach to try to benefit myself politically.
Speaker 1: That's such a fascinating attempt to speak truth, because I
Speaker 1: do believe him, like I actually think he is telling
Speaker 1: the truth, but it's not a very kind of attractive
Speaker 1: or appealing truth about what it says about what's underneath there.
Speaker 1: Because what he's saying, not even implicitly, but explicitly, is
Speaker 1: that if appeasing Trump had benefited him politically, in other words,
Speaker 1: if he hadn't prosecuted Jared Kushner's father and created a
Speaker 1: lifelong enemy in Jared Kushner, then he would continue to
Speaker 1: violate his principles and appease Trump as long as it,
Speaker 1: you know, benefited Christie politically. And so I get it,
Speaker 1: that's true, that's how he feels, But I don't quite
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess it sounds the way he says it.
Speaker 4: It sounds like he's being honest with people.
Speaker 1: But what he's saying to people, is that I tried
Speaker 1: lying to you and it didn't work for me, So
Speaker 1: now I'm going to try something different, see if that works.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, that's exactly what he's doing. No, that's a
Speaker 3: great way to put it. He's like, I was lying
Speaker 3: to you then, but believe me, I wouldn't do that
Speaker 3: now I've learned that that it didn't work bad, right.
Speaker 4: Right, if it worked, I would do it like. That's
Speaker 4: the other thing he's saying.
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, yeah, that's exactly what he's saying. And again,
Speaker 3: I think, because I was actually thinking about this morning,
Speaker 3: I was like, Christy's a really shrewd politician. Like what
Speaker 3: he did in New Jersey. He like, on a political level,
Speaker 3: he had some strategic innovations and successes that I think
Speaker 3: are worth noting just from a political point of view.
Speaker 3: That doesn't, of course translate into like being a moral stalwart,
Speaker 3: but he at least like kind of understands the game.
Speaker 3: And I wonder if he sees Donald Trump being one
Speaker 3: of the few people in American politics who sort of
Speaker 3: leveled with voters, at least purportedly or is ostensibly leveled
Speaker 3: with voters and said, listen, I know the system because
Speaker 3: I've been a part of the system, and let me
Speaker 3: tell you it's bad. I wonder if Christy sees that
Speaker 3: from Trump, sees that it's been successful with voters, and
Speaker 3: thinks that he can do it. I still don't think
Speaker 3: Chris Christy thinks he's going to win the Republican primary.
Speaker 3: I think he's having a lot of fun sort of
Speaker 3: blowing it up, blowing up Donald Trump, if you know. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I think it feels like cathartic for him to be
Speaker 3: out there just trashing Trump with people who might otherwise
Speaker 3: support him. And I think it's kind of fun for
Speaker 3: him too, to muck it up for rond De Santis
Speaker 3: and everyone else, which, by the way, could be that
Speaker 3: could be something that actually just ends up handing the
Speaker 3: nomination to Donald Trump. And I don't know that Chris
Speaker 3: Christie genuinely cares that it goes to Donald Trump, because
Speaker 3: if this is if this is Chris Christie's pitch to voters.
Speaker 3: If anything, it's interesting that he's at nine and Mike
Speaker 3: Pence in this poll is at like what one percent,
Speaker 3: because Mike Pence has the strongest argument that he stood
Speaker 3: up to Donald Trump on a moral level. On January sixth.
Speaker 3: I mean that is like Mike Pence's bread and butter
Speaker 3: that he's leaned into and that's his pitch. Is that,
Speaker 3: like listen, at a certain point I had to say no,
Speaker 3: So that Chris Christy is more successfully making that pitch
Speaker 3: in New Hampshire not entirely surprising because he's not an
Speaker 3: evangelical conservative and he's more of like a Northeastern you know,
Speaker 3: sort of Maverick Republican than Mike Pence's, but it's still
Speaker 3: pretty interesting that like that's Pence's thing and Christy is
Speaker 3: getting into that lane.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you make an interesting point that, you know, Trump
Speaker 1: has been successful by being kind of a flagrant and
Speaker 1: craven and completely open narcissist, that the politics of just
Speaker 1: pure self interest and expressing your pure self interest has
Speaker 1: an authenticity to it that resonated with people. Whether that's
Speaker 1: just Trump or whether that can be kind of broadened
Speaker 1: out to other people like Christie is an interesting question.
Speaker 1: So maybe Christy is seeing that that, Like, look, Trump
Speaker 1: was just completely open about his cravenness and people liked it.
Speaker 1: People felt like it was raw, it was He's just
Speaker 1: being straight with them, And so maybe Christie's trying to
Speaker 1: follow him in that past.
Speaker 3: Before we run, I want to put B three up
Speaker 3: on the screen. I think this is one of the
Speaker 3: more interesting takeaways from that Emerson poll. You see, the
Speaker 3: most important issue that New Hampshire voters say it is
Speaker 3: on their mind is the economy. So thirty two percent
Speaker 3: said economy, jobs, inflation, and taxing taxes. Twenty one percent,
Speaker 3: in a very similar vein, said housing affordability. Twelve percent
Speaker 3: said threats to democracy. Then you get to healthcare, abortion, access, education, immigration, crime,
Speaker 3: something else, each between eight and five percent. But if
Speaker 3: you're looking at the two biggest ones, so more than
Speaker 3: fifty percent of voters in New Hampshire say that their
Speaker 3: top issue is the economy or housing. And I think
Speaker 3: of those in the pretty much in the same vein,
Speaker 3: because obviously one affects the other that I don't know
Speaker 3: what answer Republicans have. I never hear Republicans talking about
Speaker 3: the issue of housing affordability ever. I mean, that is
Speaker 3: just not something There are two things that voters care
Speaker 3: about a lot that Republicans never talk about, and housing
Speaker 3: and healthcare. It's not just that they don't seem to
Speaker 3: have a policy. Answer is that they aren't even talking
Speaker 3: about it. And you know, I think Democrats have their
Speaker 3: own issues that they don't talk about as well. But
Speaker 3: for Republicans looking at that, looking at how important housing is,
Speaker 3: they needed if they don't want to have success in
Speaker 3: a general election, not just a primary, they need an
Speaker 3: answer to that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, Democrats at least occasionally talk about it. They
Speaker 1: had a gigantic housing affordability piece of Build Back Better,
Speaker 1: which was in the range of several hundred billion dollars,
Speaker 1: which would have been you know, genuinely important from a
Speaker 1: policy on a policy level, it immediately got dropped when
Speaker 1: Mansion set He's only doing you know X on the
Speaker 1: bottom line. So at least they talk about it. But
Speaker 1: you're right, it is to have one in five New
Speaker 1: nsial voters saying that that's their top issue and to
Speaker 1: basically have no national conversation about any type of a
Speaker 1: federal legislation or federal approach to it is rather striking
Speaker 1: because housing is becoming the real kind of dividing question
Speaker 1: between the haves and the have nots, and it is
Speaker 1: it is becoming the thing that is just you know,
Speaker 1: making people feel so bleak about their about their future
Speaker 1: because even as you know, consumer prices start to level out,
Speaker 1: you know, if you're still you're still paying jacked up
Speaker 1: rents over from the last couple of years, you know,
Speaker 1: you're that means you're still falling behind relative to a
Speaker 1: couple couple years ago, even as your wages are going up.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's a huge, huge problem for both parties.
Speaker 1: But you're right, Republicans are just completely nowhere on that
Speaker 1: on that question. And it's interesting that it's in New
Speaker 1: Hampshire or not. It's not a state you typically associate
Speaker 1: with kind of out of control rents.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's almost.
Speaker 4: Mass Massachusetts people.
Speaker 1: I guess flooding in there, probably driving up in New
Speaker 1: Yorkers and others just kind of probably driving up home prices.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's not like they're building a lot.
Speaker 3: And I'll just also mention before we wrap that last
Speaker 3: we were talking about credit card delinquencies starting to spike.
Speaker 3: You're seeing the same thing with auto loane delinquencies. You're
Speaker 3: not seeing the same thing with mortgage delinquencies. But the
Speaker 3: economy is on shaky ground right now. And that's actually
Speaker 3: a good transition into our next topic, which is that
Speaker 3: Kevin McCarthy this week on a conference call with Republicans,
Speaker 3: said actually that he might go with a short term
Speaker 3: solution of funding the government in the fall, so meaning
Speaker 3: he would be potentially supportive of a continuing resolution in
Speaker 3: September that kind of kicks the can into December when
Speaker 3: it comes to funding the government. All this is to
Speaker 3: say that the threat of a government shut down is
Speaker 3: very real going into the fall, so real that Republicans
Speaker 3: are obviously already starting to talk like this. So let's
Speaker 3: run a clip here from Jeff Jackson, Democrat from North Carolina,
Speaker 3: who Ryan and I once misidentified as a Republican for
Speaker 3: like an entire segment. I think our brains were broken
Speaker 3: that day. But let's roll Jeff Jackson, Democrat from North Carolina,
Speaker 3: weighing in on the potentiality of a shutdown.
Speaker 6: Here.
Speaker 7: This man just came up to me at the airport
Speaker 7: and goes, hey, are you jack Jefferson. I said that's
Speaker 7: pretty close.
Speaker 4: Sure.
Speaker 7: He said, I got a question for you. Do you
Speaker 7: think we're going to have a government shut down this year?
Speaker 7: And I said probably yes. He asked why, and here's
Speaker 7: what I told him. The budget for the federal government
Speaker 7: runs out on the last day of September, passing a
Speaker 7: new budget is actually passing twelve separate bills, and in
Speaker 7: the House we've passed one. The other eleven bills haven't
Speaker 7: even come to a vote. But that's not because of
Speaker 7: Republicans versus Democrats. It's because there's an internal fight within
Speaker 7: the majority party about spending, but also whether to add
Speaker 7: a bunch of cultural issues like new restrictions on abortion,
Speaker 7: which is the official story. But here's what's really happening.
Speaker 7: This isn't about the budget. In the House, You've got
Speaker 7: a group of folks in the right flank who want
Speaker 7: to shut down the government. So they're asking for things
Speaker 7: they know everyone else in their party will say no to.
Speaker 3: Ah. Okay, so I think that's half right. I think
Speaker 3: he's right about the internal dynamics. But I also when
Speaker 3: you talk to people on the Hill and the sort
Speaker 3: of freedom caucus arena, it's not that they want to
Speaker 3: shut down the government like they just love the idea
Speaker 3: of shutting down the government. Republicans know politically they always
Speaker 3: get blamed for that. It is rarely good. Even if
Speaker 3: you're in a red district, it's rarely good for you
Speaker 3: to shut down the government. That said, they're also facing
Speaker 3: an immense amount of pressure from their base, and they
Speaker 3: look at again, this is their perspective, what's happening in
Speaker 3: the country, and say, we need to use our power.
Speaker 3: If we have a majority in the House and we
Speaker 3: don't push as hard as we possibly can by driving
Speaker 3: a taking a really hard line on defunding X, Y
Speaker 3: and Z, defunding DEI, CRT, whatever it is, then we're
Speaker 3: not using our power at all. If we're not negotiating
Speaker 3: for the sake of just going along to get along,
Speaker 3: then we're not going to get any wins. And we
Speaker 3: saw them find success with us in the speaker battle.
Speaker 3: They used a whole lot of wins out of Kevin McCarthy.
Speaker 3: They felt like they were stabbed in the back a
Speaker 3: little bit by McCarthy in the bill that was passed
Speaker 3: in the spring that they felt, you know, the funding
Speaker 3: bill from the spring. They felt not great about what
Speaker 3: happened with that. They thought that they could have kept pushing.
Speaker 3: But even then they still got some successes. They still
Speaker 3: squeezed some wins out of McCarthy in Republican leadership. In
Speaker 3: that case, Acxios had the story from the Republican Conference call,
Speaker 3: we could put C two up on the screen about
Speaker 3: what McCarthy said himself. He's saying that according to Axios,
Speaker 3: he wouldn't do a CR past early December. So that
Speaker 3: is according to four sources on the call, So that
Speaker 3: CR would if you have the government deadline as September
Speaker 3: thirtieth for funding, he wouldn't pass a continuing resolution that
Speaker 3: would fund it after early December. So that's kicking the
Speaker 3: can for like a few months. Ralph Norman, Republican from
Speaker 3: North Carolina said, right now, I would say know about
Speaker 3: the CR. He would says he's absolutely willing to force
Speaker 3: a government shut down. And then Bob Good of Virginia said,
Speaker 3: if we have a temporary shutdown of the government, what's
Speaker 3: the risk of concern about that happening? We shouldn't implement
Speaker 3: bad policy to avoid that. And that's what Jeff Jackson
Speaker 3: is talking about Ryan, right, is that attitude of saying, like,
Speaker 3: wellhy cost benefit here, it's you know, at a certain
Speaker 3: we can push far enough that it won't hurt us.
Speaker 1: Basically, the government shutdowns are sort of becoming an anger
Speaker 1: release valve for factions within the government. You know, they're elected,
Speaker 1: they have you know, significant basis of power.
Speaker 4: But they don't have a majority.
Speaker 1: They don't have you know, the Freedom Caucus obviously doesn't
Speaker 1: even remotely have a majority in the House of Representatives.
Speaker 1: Democrats control the House, Democrats control the White House, but
Speaker 1: they have angry constituents who you know, want them to
Speaker 1: post some ws And so the only thing that's kind
Speaker 1: of left, only two things that are left are some
Speaker 1: wins around the rules package set that aside.
Speaker 4: They got.
Speaker 1: They got some of those, they caused like a fort
Speaker 1: at Ay fight. But then after that, you can default
Speaker 1: on the government debt or you can shut the government down.
Speaker 4: You can't really default on.
Speaker 1: The government debt, as we learned in the last fight,
Speaker 1: because nobody has the stomach for it.
Speaker 4: Because the big.
Speaker 1: Money people and the small folks, your car dealers, everybody
Speaker 1: in the district is calling you and like, look, do
Speaker 1: not default on the government, Like do not seize up
Speaker 1: the global financial system, Like it's not it's not worth
Speaker 1: it for what.
Speaker 4: And so they they caved on that.
Speaker 1: And I thought that they would fight a little bit
Speaker 1: longer frankly than they did on that. But it became
Speaker 1: so clear that the risk was so great and the
Speaker 1: chance of them winning whatever they hope they were going
Speaker 1: to win was so little that they kind of you know,
Speaker 1: folded and moved on, and Biden kind of.
Speaker 4: Did out maneuver them.
Speaker 1: And so now that leaves them with the government shut down,
Speaker 1: and so to me, it's almost as if they have
Speaker 1: to shut the government down just to save face. And
Speaker 1: I think McCarthy has to punt to December because right
Speaker 1: now it's just too embarrassing. Like they said, we're going
Speaker 1: to pass all twelve of our appropriations bills, and as
Speaker 1: Jackson said, they've only done one so far. And so
Speaker 1: when you when the government is shutting down because you
Speaker 1: haven't done your homework or what looks like you haven't
Speaker 1: done your homework, then it's even more humiliating for you
Speaker 1: because then it's you know, political and ideological and also
Speaker 1: a competence problem because then all Democrats have to say
Speaker 1: is like you didn't you didn't pass anything yet. So
Speaker 1: at least pushing to December theoretically gives them the possibility
Speaker 1: to actually get these these appropriations bills together. Whether they
Speaker 1: can do that or not is not obvious, Like this
Speaker 1: is this is harder stuff than you would think, ironically,
Speaker 1: because it's it shouldn't be hard because it's not going
Speaker 1: to become law, Like they're just writing bills that are
Speaker 1: messaging documents, like there's no there's no world in which
Speaker 1: Joe Biden is signing off on whatever, just straight up
Speaker 1: whatever House Republicans come up with. There's no world in
Speaker 1: which it gets through the Senate, right, so it really
Speaker 1: doesn't matter to anybody's actual daily lives what's in the built.
Speaker 1: Yet it's still very hard to get two hundred and
Speaker 1: eighteen votes on twelve different appropriations bill. So I think
Speaker 1: they're hoping, like, we can punt this till December and
Speaker 1: then we'll have our work done. Then we'll have a shutdown.
Speaker 1: Freedom Caucus can do, you know, do what Jackson was saying.
Speaker 1: They can get a lot of interviews, they can show
Speaker 1: that they did everything they could. But at some point
Speaker 1: they're going to have to bow to the reality that
Speaker 1: they don't control the House. And even if they kind
Speaker 1: of control the fate of the Speaker and they don't
Speaker 1: control the Senate, they don't control the White House.
Speaker 4: And so that's where I think.
Speaker 1: So I think we'll get who knows, a couple weeks
Speaker 1: of a shutdown, maybe longer's what's your guests as to
Speaker 1: how this unfolds.
Speaker 3: Well, that's the thing, right, so finding agreement for these things,
Speaker 3: for these appropriations bill. So I think they have like
Speaker 3: eleven appropriation bill they passed one of a dozen of them,
Speaker 3: and they're in session. They come back September twelfth, so
Speaker 3: it's recess month, and that's why here in DC things
Speaker 3: are pretty dead and always are. In August, they're in
Speaker 3: session twelve days. That's like one appropriations bill a day.
Speaker 3: It's not impossible, but if you don't agree on which
Speaker 3: ones to pass, that means you have to do a
Speaker 3: lot of negotiating between now and then and in those
Speaker 3: just twelve days that you're in session. So it makes
Speaker 3: sense for McCarthy's perspective to do a short term like
Speaker 3: stop gap measure for the next couple of months. Figure
Speaker 3: out what they're going to agree on or disagree on
Speaker 3: when it comes to funding. Everyone sort of find their place,
Speaker 3: which buttons that they're actually going to push in this theater.
Speaker 3: Because again Republicans know they don't control the Senate or
Speaker 3: the White House. But to your point, Ryan, the question
Speaker 3: is whether they control the speaker, and they have shown
Speaker 3: that it's not so much they control the speaker, and
Speaker 3: it's not that the speaker controls them, it's that they've
Speaker 3: actually had this relationship where it's a push and pull
Speaker 3: that can explain and either of their faces more in
Speaker 3: McCarthy's face at any given moment, which is why he's
Speaker 3: negotiated with them. I think so he understands how fragile
Speaker 3: the relationship is and that can blow up at any moment.
Speaker 3: So it does make sense to sort of find consensus
Speaker 3: on the appropriation bills and then get to long term
Speaker 3: government funding. We have a couple more reactions from the Hill.
Speaker 3: We can put C three up on the screen. This
Speaker 3: is Tony Gonzalez with his read of the situation. I
Speaker 3: just got off a member call. It's clear President Biden,
Speaker 3: Speaker McCarthy want a government shutdown. So that's what Congress
Speaker 3: will do after we return in September. This is a
Speaker 3: member of Congress saying, quote, plan accordingly because he expects, frankly,
Speaker 3: the government to shut down based on all of these conversations,
Speaker 3: internal conversations that have been happening that both Biden and
Speaker 3: McCarthy see a shutdown as something that is in some
Speaker 3: sense politically helpful. I don't think that's the case with
Speaker 3: Kevin McCarthy. I do think it's the case with President Biden.
Speaker 3: Democrats again know that if the government shuts down, they
Speaker 3: have one huge advantage, and that is the media, which
Speaker 3: will generally take their side. And sometimes that's fair. Sometimes
Speaker 3: Republicans do want a government shutdown, and it makes sense
Speaker 3: for the media to blame Republicans because Republicans are saying, yes,
Speaker 3: blame us. But in some cases that's not exactly how
Speaker 3: it works out. We can put C four up on
Speaker 3: the screen. This is more from the Senate side. This
Speaker 3: is Schumer, in a press call, said he spoke with
Speaker 3: McCarthy at the end of July on need for CR. Quote,
Speaker 3: I thought it was a good thing that he recognized
Speaker 3: that we need to see r I'm supportive of that.
Speaker 3: And then Schumer says, I was glad that Speaker McCarthy
Speaker 3: had mentioned publicly the need for a CR. If we
Speaker 3: do this in a bipartisan way, I'm confident we can
Speaker 3: avoid a government shutdown. If the House Republicans and the
Speaker 3: Freedom Caucus insists on doing this partisan so extreme and
Speaker 3: gets no Democratic votes, they're heading us towards a shutdown.
Speaker 3: That's from reporter Mika Solmer. So, Ryan, what do you
Speaker 3: make of Schumer's comments there?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 1: And the problem Schumer wants to make sure that Republicans
Speaker 1: get the blame for any shut down. So he's going
Speaker 1: to say, look, yeah, whatever, you guys, If you guys
Speaker 1: can figure something out, we're here. We're here for you,
Speaker 1: we'll do a cr And I think we spend a
Speaker 1: lot of time, you know, talking about the Freedom Caucus,
Speaker 1: but just as important are the quote unquote moderate members
Speaker 1: of the Republican conference, which are to think of, yeah,
Speaker 1: like a Gonzales and people who won districts that Biden
Speaker 1: either carried or or that Biden was very close to. Uh,
Speaker 1: those are districts that are becoming even tougher for Republicans
Speaker 1: because of you know the activism around you know, codifying
Speaker 1: roll V wages. So you're going to have a huge
Speaker 1: turnout in those kind of centric in those swing districts.
Speaker 1: And so if the Freedom Caucus gets everything at once
Speaker 1: in these appropriations bills, which again will not become law,
Speaker 1: they're just kind of messaging documents, Democrats then have the
Speaker 1: ability to you know, pick through this entire budget that
Speaker 1: Republicans just approved and find things that are unpopular in
Speaker 1: it and hammer away at these vulnerable Republicans in these
Speaker 1: swing districts. And so for those Republicans who are up,
Speaker 1: who are facing serious re elections, they're like, why are
Speaker 1: you making us do this? Like, why are you making
Speaker 1: us take a difficult vote on you know, a bunch
Speaker 1: to let's say, much tougher abortion restrictions.
Speaker 4: Or whatever it is.
Speaker 1: That's not that's going to hurt us back in our district,
Speaker 1: and that isn't actually going to become law, and it's
Speaker 1: just going to like be a step towards a government shutdown,
Speaker 1: like what like what is the political upside for me here?
Speaker 1: And it makes them furious that they have to deal
Speaker 1: with this, and you're going to start to see you know,
Speaker 1: people like Gonzales kind of speaking out as we get
Speaker 1: closer this again, you know, firing back at the freedom calls,
Speaker 1: and the freedom clock is firing back at them, you know,
Speaker 1: calling them rhinos or whatever the whatever drama we're going
Speaker 1: to see unfold. But that that's that, I think is
Speaker 1: a scenario that Schumer's happy to see unfold. And all
Speaker 1: the while he'll be saying, look here we are, We're
Speaker 1: ready to do a cr We don't want, we don't
Speaker 1: want a government shutdown.
Speaker 4: Uh, but it's up to you guys.
Speaker 3: No, I agree. I think it's a pretty early but
Speaker 3: predictable kind of preview of the messaging strategy, which is
Speaker 3: very similar to what we've seen from both sides going
Speaker 3: back to like twenty fourteen, maybe even earlier than that.
Speaker 3: Let's move on to Ecuador. Very serious tragic news out
Speaker 3: of Ecuador, and roughly a month there have been three
Speaker 3: political assassinations. We talked a little bit about the assassination
Speaker 3: of a major presidential candidate last week, but again another
Speaker 3: political leader was assassinated in Ecuador on Monday. That would
Speaker 3: be Pedro Briones. They have, you know, they have presidential
Speaker 3: elections happening this Sunday, So a special presidential election is
Speaker 3: happening this Sunday. Pedro Briones is a member of the
Speaker 3: party of the front run of former president Rafael Korea
Speaker 3: So and the front runner in this special presidential election
Speaker 3: is Luisa Gonzalez from the same party. So that's violence
Speaker 3: across the spectrum in Ecuador. And one thing I want
Speaker 3: to mention before we get into that. A lot of
Speaker 3: times when you see, you know, the former Prime Minister
Speaker 3: of Japan was assassinated tragically last summer shinzo Abe. A
Speaker 3: lot of times when we talk about political assassinate assassinations,
Speaker 3: it's not connected to wider trends of violence throughout the
Speaker 3: country and Ecuador, it absolutely is. So this is from
Speaker 3: the Associated Press. The country's National Police tallied three thousand,
Speaker 3: five hundred and sixty eight violent deaths in the first
Speaker 3: six months of this year, far more than the twenty
Speaker 3: forty two reported during the same period in twenty twenty two,
Speaker 3: is a huge increase. That year ended with forty six
Speaker 3: hundred violent deaths, which was the country's highest in history
Speaker 3: and double the total in twenty twenty one. Ryan. One
Speaker 3: other thing I want to mention is that a lot
Speaker 3: of especially people of my fellow conservatives in the United States,
Speaker 3: Ecuadorians are rushing the southern border at the US in
Speaker 3: like huge numbers, extensively record numbers flooding upwards for some
Speaker 3: good reasons, and a lot of the messaging you hear
Speaker 3: from conservatives often is well, you know, fix your own
Speaker 3: country first, then come up here. Our country is directly
Speaker 3: tied to the violence happening in Ecuador right now. That
Speaker 3: is pushing people up to our border. And that's because
Speaker 3: a lot of the violence, the political violence in Ecuador
Speaker 3: is connected to Sinaloa, is connected to Jalisco, and these
Speaker 3: cartels are ballooning as a result of US policy, whether
Speaker 3: it's US drug policy, whether it's US border policy. Our
Speaker 3: policies are responsible in a big part for the explosion
Speaker 3: in Jalisco and Sinaloa, which are now destabilizing countries like Ecuador,
Speaker 3: which borders Columbia. Vice reports some forty five percent of
Speaker 3: Colombian cocaine is going through Ecuador now that has Ecuador
Speaker 3: has been and is There's a great Vice report in
Speaker 3: April that I mentioned it has been obviously borders Columbia,
Speaker 3: so cocaine has gone through Ecuador for a long time.
Speaker 3: But they say, if it was once a highway, it's
Speaker 3: now a super highway. That's the quote from the Vice
Speaker 3: report that I thought put it really, Well, what do
Speaker 3: you make of this? Ryan?
Speaker 1: You know, I think you're saying, well, the we don't
Speaker 1: know exactly who was involved yet with all of these assassinations,
Speaker 1: but it does appear that they're kind of narco trafficker related,
Speaker 1: that there's some type of kind of Bartel situation. The
Speaker 1: presidential candidate was very much known as one of these
Speaker 1: kind of anti corruption fighters, you know's going to go
Speaker 1: after the cartels.
Speaker 4: He was. He was assassinated even though he had a
Speaker 4: you know.
Speaker 1: In public after a rally in Kido, even though he
Speaker 1: had a security detail kind of all completely surrounding him.
Speaker 4: They assassinated him anyway.
Speaker 1: And so you're right that the size of these cartels
Speaker 1: UH and their access to weapons and their ability to
Speaker 1: kind of dominate violence is producing a lot of this
Speaker 1: violence and instability that is then making you know, economic
Speaker 1: development impossible and then is producing these massive kind of
Speaker 1: outflows of migration. It's not as if the Ecuadorians desperately
Speaker 1: want to live in the United States, like they know,
Speaker 1: the vast majority of them would prefer to live in Ecuador,
Speaker 1: but the a narco situation is making it untenable for
Speaker 1: so many of them. And you know, our our war
Speaker 1: on drugs, like you said, is the is the driving
Speaker 1: cause of that. And to put this in context, we
Speaker 1: can put the next next element up. In a couple
Speaker 1: of days, believe it's on the twentieth, there will be
Speaker 1: a presidential election in Guatemala as well. That this, this
Speaker 1: one's this one's wild, and not just because the left
Speaker 1: lefty candidate is named Bernie Bernardo Alvaro, who is actually
Speaker 1: the grandson of the first Guatemala's first democratic, democratically elected
Speaker 1: president from the forties.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 1: He was not even invited to participate in the presidential
Speaker 1: debates because he was considered of such an.
Speaker 4: Also ran candidate.
Speaker 1: Yet he finished second in the in the run in
Speaker 1: the first around of voting, which puts him into the
Speaker 1: runoff against a right wing kind of former first Lady
Speaker 1: who's who's publicly saying that if she's elected, she's doing
Speaker 1: a Boukelly style El Salvador crackdown. She said, you know,
Speaker 1: her quote is something like, you know, human rights are
Speaker 1: for victims, not for you know, not for people that
Speaker 1: are victimizing them. And so she's she's really, you know,
Speaker 1: really threatening this massive crackdown. Bernie, though, is if the
Speaker 1: polls are going to be believed up two to one
Speaker 1: against him, and this is so this is a kind
Speaker 1: of social democrat, left left wing and an anti anti
Speaker 1: corruption populist candidate who's dominating the kind of tough on
Speaker 1: crime I'm going to be a bou Kelly style. But
Speaker 1: now he's of course saying he's also going to be
Speaker 1: tough on crime. But interestingly, he's not saying I'm going
Speaker 1: after the little guys.
Speaker 4: He's saying, I'm going to break up the pharmaceutical.
Speaker 1: Companies, I'm going to break up the monopolies to control
Speaker 1: the telecommunications. I'm going to I'm going to make sure
Speaker 1: that the prisons are become uh, you know, places that
Speaker 1: are actually safe once again, because that's a that's a
Speaker 1: problem in Ecuador as well as Guate Malave. It the
Speaker 1: criminal justice system can't really function because even if you're
Speaker 1: able to arrest, prosecute, and imprison gang leaders, once you
Speaker 1: put them in prison, the gangs completely run the prison
Speaker 1: and they become just kind of recreation areas that are
Speaker 1: just controlled by those cartels or by the.
Speaker 3: Gangs, which is a huge problem in Ecuador.
Speaker 1: Right Exactly you have all the and so then you
Speaker 1: have riots and you have the trafficking operations just continue
Speaker 1: to function just out of the prison. So if you
Speaker 1: know that's you know, that's not a that's not a
Speaker 1: way to run any type of civil society. You're you're
Speaker 1: just at that point you've basically seated, you know, government
Speaker 1: power over to private actors. And so you know, he's
Speaker 1: saying that he's going to crack down in that sense,
Speaker 1: but he's not going to do a Boo Kelly style
Speaker 1: thing where he just pretends that human rights don't exist anymore.
Speaker 1: And you have you know, they tried, the prosecutors tried
Speaker 1: to throw him off the ballot, and it had to
Speaker 1: go all the way to Guatemala's High court say no, no, no,
Speaker 1: the guy's in the runoffs, like you have to let
Speaker 1: him in. You haven't heard much at all from the
Speaker 1: United States on this question of Guatemala. They vaguely said,
Speaker 1: you know, we support you know, there ought to be
Speaker 1: democracy and everybody should follow the rules. But you know,
Speaker 1: if that if Democrats, Republicans the United States are serious
Speaker 1: about root causes, that's the thing they love to talk about,
Speaker 1: root causes, then you know a guy who has you know,
Speaker 1: a mandate from the people on a social democratic platform
Speaker 1: saying that he's going to redevelop, you know, the economy
Speaker 1: of Guatemala and take on the private gangsters. You know,
Speaker 1: ought to have the support of all good people who
Speaker 1: are making these kind of root cause arguments if they
Speaker 1: actually mean them. But that also means allowing Guatemala to
Speaker 1: have some sovereignty rather than you know, having it continue
Speaker 1: to be a vassal state of the United States. So
Speaker 1: both of these elections are going to be interesting. But
Speaker 1: to your point, every you know, as these countries continue
Speaker 1: to be unstable, the situation the border is going to
Speaker 1: continue to be a crisis for whatever administration is in power,
Speaker 1: no matter what we do with that board.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is what drives me crazy. I understand tackling
Speaker 3: the root causes. I think that's probably the most important
Speaker 3: thing to do, and drug policy plays a role in that,
Speaker 3: but so to does our border policy. And that's because
Speaker 3: you know, you and I disagree on this, Ryan, and
Speaker 3: that's fine. But what the establishment Democratic Party does and
Speaker 3: the establishment Republican Party does is keep things sort of
Speaker 3: muddled to virtue signal and import cheap labor that they
Speaker 3: benefit from. And so you know, you go in one
Speaker 3: direction or the other. I think there's a Obviously, as
Speaker 3: a conservative, I think there's a pretty strong argument that
Speaker 3: you know, we need a clear asylum policy that is
Speaker 3: not being you know, over overwhelmed by what they're doing
Speaker 3: with CBP one at the border and what they're doing
Speaker 3: with you know, just basically kicking trial dates a couple
Speaker 3: of years down the road, letting people in and then
Speaker 3: disappearing into sanctuary cities at the same time. Even from
Speaker 3: the left perspective, if it was just let's basically open
Speaker 3: up the border, that does starve cartels of their ability
Speaker 3: to smuggle human beings, and you would need cooperation for
Speaker 3: Mexico and other places. But basically what I'm saying is
Speaker 3: that you can go in either direction. You can have
Speaker 3: a much more open border or a much more closed border.
Speaker 3: But what we have right now is an establishment that
Speaker 3: wants to you know, say they have both depending on
Speaker 3: what their audience is. And it has completely destabilized not
Speaker 3: just our country, but it is having a massive effect
Speaker 3: on these countries that are just south of US, smaller,
Speaker 3: already less stable for a lot of different reasons, some
Speaker 3: of which directly go back to US as well. And
Speaker 3: so our border policy, it's not just our drug policy,
Speaker 3: it's also our border policy, whether you go in one
Speaker 3: direction or the other, is having an utterly destabilizing effect
Speaker 3: on these countries. And in the same way that the
Speaker 3: Biden administration held tried to hold Haiti hostage, Haitian democracy
Speaker 3: as they like to talk about hostage to their border policy,
Speaker 3: which we saw and we've covered here. These policies are
Speaker 3: allowing cartels to grow into multi billion dollar multinational corporations
Speaker 3: essentially that have also government power, and that they've been
Speaker 3: seated like land and territory. And that is not just
Speaker 3: going to affect Central America, South America, it's going to
Speaker 3: start affecting the entire world. It's already having acute effects
Speaker 3: obviously in these regions, but it's spiraling in a really
Speaker 3: bad direction in ways that we don't seem prepared at
Speaker 3: all to deal with.
Speaker 1: And I think you're not going to solve any of
Speaker 1: these problems unless you do something about the cocaine trade.
Speaker 1: And what I mean by that is you would really
Speaker 1: need some type of NAFTA and staff to bring together
Speaker 1: South America and Central America, North America and come up
Speaker 1: with a way to just straight up legalize and regulate
Speaker 1: the cocaine trade, like we have tried this war on drugs,
Speaker 1: where we're, you know, just funneling money through these different
Speaker 1: corrupt systems and it doesn't do anything about the flow
Speaker 1: of cocaine, and it just props up these these vicious cartels,
Speaker 1: You're still even if you did that, you'd still have
Speaker 1: problems with the cartels, you'd have human trafficking, you'd have whatever.
Speaker 4: Bitcoin.
Speaker 1: You know, they're they're going to find ways to like
Speaker 1: operate criminally. But if you take out some of the
Speaker 1: biggest revenue drivers for them, you know, then what they
Speaker 1: end up doing is marginal rather than completely dominating in
Speaker 1: entire economies. And I don't know exactly what that regulatory
Speaker 1: regime would look like, but if we don't do something
Speaker 1: like that, we're we're just going to have you endless
Speaker 1: cycles of violence. And also, you know, from a pain
Speaker 1: user perspective, at this point, you're you're get you're getting
Speaker 1: a lot of fentanyl getting mixed in uh with with
Speaker 1: different drug products, and people people dying who aren't you know,
Speaker 1: out out at a club think that thinking they're doing
Speaker 1: a little bump of cocaine. Instead it's you know, laced
Speaker 1: with fentanyl and they're and they're overdosing and dying like
Speaker 1: that's you know, that that's not.
Speaker 4: An end result that anybody wants either.
Speaker 1: So it's not like anybody is really talking seriously about that.
Speaker 1: But I but if we actually want to deal seriously
Speaker 1: with the issue.
Speaker 4: I think that's that's really has to be part of
Speaker 4: the solution.
Speaker 3: All right. Well, revelations from Michael Orr of Blindside and
Speaker 3: then NFL fame have really rocked the country. Uh, they're
Speaker 3: they're pretty brutal towards the family that famously, as was
Speaker 3: documented in the blind Side played by Sandra Bullock and
Speaker 3: Tim McGraw, u took him in. Allegations actually though that
Speaker 3: the conservatorship, which was rather than an adoption. So there's
Speaker 3: some questions here about whether the conservatorship that Michael Orr
Speaker 3: was kind of pushed into allegedly by the family as
Speaker 3: opposed to an adoption, was a in and of itself
Speaker 3: a questionable move. He always thought that he was adopted.
Speaker 3: It turns out, according to allegations he's made in a
Speaker 3: new lawsuit, that may not be the case. Let's actually
Speaker 3: start with this. You can put the tear sheet up
Speaker 3: on the screen. This is a New York Times coverage.
Speaker 3: He says that in the this is the headline of
Speaker 3: the New York Times, that he was quote conned with
Speaker 3: a promise of adoption. It now appears that it was
Speaker 3: a conservatorship, and he's making allegations that the family set
Speaker 3: up this conservatorship basically to profit off of him in
Speaker 3: ways that he would not profit himself. That's the allegation
Speaker 3: that Michael Orr has made extremely sad obviously situation as
Speaker 3: the family relationship is devolving in public view. Let's actually
Speaker 3: play though this clip of Michael Orr talking about the
Speaker 3: situation himself. This is E.
Speaker 8: Two.
Speaker 9: You just said you feel like you've been missed, labeled,
Speaker 9: sometimes misunderstood, and I think, at least from what I've
Speaker 9: read in the book, a lot of that stems from
Speaker 9: how you were portrayed in the movie The blind Side,
Speaker 9: and that people might have the wrong idea of your personality.
Speaker 9: Number One, that you were this kind of shy wall flower,
Speaker 9: that you were timid and you had to be kind
Speaker 9: of like drawn out of your shell, when in reality
Speaker 9: you were a workaholic, you were hyper organized, and you
Speaker 9: were like, damn it, I'm making something of myself no
Speaker 9: matter what it takes after a rough background.
Speaker 6: Is that.
Speaker 10: The big one that you feel you were mislabeled as
Speaker 10: I think it took away the hard work and the
Speaker 10: dedication that I created from a child and going to
Speaker 10: school in the third grade, getting myself up first one
Speaker 10: in the locker room last one out, and I think
Speaker 10: the biggest for me is, you know, being portrayed not
Speaker 10: being able to read right second grade, I was doing
Speaker 10: plays and in front of the school, and I think
Speaker 10: that's one of the when you go into a locker
Speaker 10: room and your teammates don't think you can learn to playbook.
Speaker 10: You know, that way's heavy.
Speaker 3: I can imagine absolutely does, and he says that extends
Speaker 3: to all of his opportunities professionally. Basically, if you're known
Speaker 3: from the blind Side, in the Blindside purports to be
Speaker 3: and maybe the Blindside actually had some legal language that
Speaker 3: it was like roughly based on a true story. But
Speaker 3: either way, if that's what rockets you to fame. Obviously
Speaker 3: he was very talented in his own right, but that
Speaker 3: was that movie. As an Oscar Wimming film was beloved, controversial,
Speaker 3: but beloved by all lout of the country. You can
Speaker 3: imagine how that would affect everything and the reason this
Speaker 3: is coming to light now. Michael Orr said he was
Speaker 3: focused on football basically until about twenty sixteen and wasn't
Speaker 3: focused on the details. And after he sort of shifted
Speaker 3: his focus from football, he was able to dive into
Speaker 3: the details and start unraveling some of what he thought
Speaker 3: was an adoption and seeing where some of the money went.
Speaker 3: So he filed a petition to end the conservatorship on Monday,
Speaker 3: and or learned that the conservatorship didn't have the power,
Speaker 3: as NBC says, to make him a legal member of
Speaker 3: their family back in February. So this is all happening
Speaker 3: now because he's just starting to in his type of
Speaker 3: in his reasoning, kind of put the pieces together. This
Speaker 3: is from the petition. It says the lie of Michael's
Speaker 3: adoption is one upon which co conservators LeAnn Toe and
Speaker 3: Sean Towey I'd never learned how to pronounce that name,
Speaker 3: have enriched themselves at the expense of their ward the
Speaker 3: undersigned Michael or I think it's Touey Ryan. This is
Speaker 3: like obviously very very sad situation. The Tua family denies
Speaker 3: the allegations. They say, we love Michael at sixteen or seventeen,
Speaker 3: we'll love him at thirty seven, we'll love him at
Speaker 3: sixty seven. Both the son and the parents have said
Speaker 3: that there was an excerpt from the mom's memoir that
Speaker 3: came out talking about if there's a if there's a
Speaker 3: conception about Michael, it said, he's actually very smart. So
Speaker 3: I don't know how deliberate any of this was on
Speaker 3: their part. That will be litigated in court. I genuinely
Speaker 3: don't know. It could have been really malicious. It could
Speaker 3: not have been what's your sense of this? Ryan as
Speaker 3: somebody who you said when we took a break earlier,
Speaker 3: not a fan of the film.
Speaker 1: The film just brutal to me, the White Savior stuff,
Speaker 1: it's just without not like, not even any attempts to
Speaker 1: kind of cut it for public consumption, just straight you know,
Speaker 1: white Savior dope just injected right into the veins of
Speaker 1: the American public.
Speaker 4: That part of it to me.
Speaker 1: Was just like just too much, Like it felt like
Speaker 1: this is this is impossible, like that there has to
Speaker 1: be a little bit more agency on the part of Or.
Speaker 1: And you hear Or they're saying, like, look, when I
Speaker 1: was in third grade, I was getting myself up, getting
Speaker 1: to school, you know, a workaholic. He later in that
Speaker 1: interview says, I was already an all American kind of
Speaker 1: before I moved in, uh to their home. And so
Speaker 1: the one thing the New York Times reported is that
Speaker 1: there's some discrepancy over the question of how much money,
Speaker 1: uh the kids got the uh the parents are saying
Speaker 1: the kids got very little, the kids saying they got
Speaker 1: a little bit more than that. But broadly, broadly speaking,
Speaker 1: there was a deal that was struck, the film deal
Speaker 1: where the blood children uh did get cut in on
Speaker 1: the revenues of the movie, and an or did not
Speaker 1: or who was the you know, putative star of the
Speaker 1: film did not get cut in, while the while the
Speaker 1: while his you know, quote unquote siblings did And I
Speaker 1: think everybody across the spectrum could agree that that's weird. Now,
Speaker 1: the dad says that the conservativeship was set up in
Speaker 1: a way that would enable him to go to college,
Speaker 1: and there are some rules about income in college, et cetera.
Speaker 1: But you know, the movie didn't come out until you know,
Speaker 1: he's already in the NFL, so that that wouldn't have
Speaker 1: you know, that wouldn't have implicated that question. Uh So
Speaker 1: some of this does need to be litigated, but some
Speaker 1: of it also does seem clear like he should have
Speaker 1: been cut in on the movie. Like I think we
Speaker 1: and and the and the book, if if there was
Speaker 1: any kind of book, they're probably not book proceeds. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure but film proceeds absolutely if the kid, if
Speaker 1: if the kids that he's living with are getting cut
Speaker 1: in because of his story, Like it's not a it's
Speaker 1: not a movie because of them. As you know, I'm
Speaker 1: sure they're fine kids or whatever, but you know that's
Speaker 1: not that's not who they who we all flock to
Speaker 1: the theaters to see.
Speaker 4: It was his story, so he should have been cut
Speaker 4: in on that.
Speaker 1: And but you know, he also has a book coming out,
Speaker 1: so this is you know, and.
Speaker 4: This is what this is.
Speaker 1: Uh, this, this is drawing attention to that and uh,
Speaker 1: I'm actually looking forward to reading this book.
Speaker 4: Is he's you know, he's led a fascinating life.
Speaker 1: And not just a offensive lineman like a Pro Bowl
Speaker 1: or won a Super Bowl with the Ravens, like one
Speaker 1: of you know, one of the best offensive linemen in
Speaker 1: the league while he was playing and had had a
Speaker 1: very long and successful career.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and like many people in the NFL, came from
Speaker 3: a genuinely difficult background. And it is it is true
Speaker 3: watching the movie the kind of as you say, and
Speaker 3: this was the controversy surrounding it for a long time.
Speaker 3: The white savior narrative is really glaring and it's definitely
Speaker 3: a movie from another time that the movie would not
Speaker 3: be made in the same way today, it would not
Speaker 3: be received in the same way today, There's no question
Speaker 3: about it. And sort of diving down into the particulars legally,
Speaker 3: I mean, I think it's really sad that that has
Speaker 3: to play out publicly. But at the same time, if
Speaker 3: you know this was malicious and to your point, it
Speaker 3: is really weird. I actually think the conservatorship is extremely weird.
Speaker 3: To begin with, he was seventeen years old, I think
Speaker 3: when this deal was struck, and rather than adopting a
Speaker 3: seventeen year old I can understand the legal argument for
Speaker 3: going with a conservatorship. A lot of people are familiar
Speaker 3: with conservativeships because of what happened with Britney Spears, what
Speaker 3: played out with Britney Spears over the last ten plus years.
Speaker 3: But it does seem odd that they had a conservatorship
Speaker 3: over Michael Orr and continue to He is now filing
Speaker 3: a petition to end the conservatorship. That the whole thing,
Speaker 3: I mean, that in and of itself I find very strange,
Speaker 3: and it seems like it's possible the conservativeship. You know,
Speaker 3: maybe there were there were legal justifications. Their attorney, who
Speaker 3: I believe as a family friend, told them at the time,
Speaker 3: you know, you've got to do this for college reasons,
Speaker 3: et cetera, et cetera. Maybe that's the case, or maybe
Speaker 3: there were other motivations involved, and there were reasons why
Speaker 3: they didn't want to formally adopt him into their family.
Speaker 3: But to your point, there are some things that are
Speaker 3: just on the surface weird, and you know, at least
Speaker 3: from the sort of court of public opinion, I do
Speaker 3: feel like the ball is now in the Twoey's court
Speaker 3: to prove that they had, you know, no ill intentions,
Speaker 3: because these two things in and of themselves, Like you said,
Speaker 3: with the movie deal, that stuff is just patently bizarre
Speaker 3: on its face, and they're the sort of shift culturally
Speaker 3: I think puts them in their legacy like actually in
Speaker 3: Big Try going forward, I think the mom is doing
Speaker 3: motivational speeches. Leanne I think is her name. She does
Speaker 3: motivational speeches. I think they're still profiting off of the
Speaker 3: Blindside narrative in some pretty big ways. And if they're
Speaker 3: doing that and there's there's way more to the story
Speaker 3: than we realize, then they deserve justice. They deserve to
Speaker 3: be held accountable for what they did. So in some sense,
Speaker 3: it's sad this is playing out publicly because it does
Speaker 3: seem like there was a lot of love between these folks.
Speaker 3: But on the other set, on the other hand, if
Speaker 3: the public's being taken for a ride, good, let's let's
Speaker 3: have it play out publicly so there can be some
Speaker 3: justice served.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I want to see compare Orr's book to
Speaker 1: Michael Lewis's book, which I read back in when it
Speaker 1: came out two thousand and five or two thousand and six,
Speaker 1: And I'm curious if it was heavily sourced just to
Speaker 1: the twoies, or if he had, you know, if he
Speaker 1: accurately got Or's perspective in there. You know, Lewis is
Speaker 1: the best, you know, nonfiction kind of storyteller that we've
Speaker 1: had over the last at thirty years or so. He
Speaker 1: just you know, pumps out classic after classic. So I
Speaker 1: will be interested to see, you know, how how well
Speaker 1: it holds up and whether or not he just kind
Speaker 1: of embedded himself with with the parents rather or quote
Speaker 1: quote unquote parents rather than or. So we'll see that's
Speaker 1: that's something that that I don't know yet, but I'll
Speaker 1: but I'll be curious about I'm also curious to read
Speaker 1: his uh Sam Bankman freed. He's got that one coming out,
Speaker 1: so I guess he's got his hands full, although his
Speaker 1: subject is now indisposed having gone back to jail, So
Speaker 1: maybe you can focus on just writing it at this point.
Speaker 3: Yeah. No, I mean I think this actually could legitimately
Speaker 3: reflect in ways that are then maybe not so beneficial
Speaker 3: for Michael Lewis going forward. People may reevaluate his work
Speaker 3: depending on how or story compares with Michael lewis story
Speaker 3: and how well Michael Lewis is able to defend his work.
Speaker 3: I don't know, but if that's the case, this is
Speaker 3: not great, and it's it's not You can really see
Speaker 3: from Or's perspective, how of course this follow him throughout
Speaker 3: his career. The way he was depicted in the movie
Speaker 3: is he was he was treated as an idiot basically
Speaker 3: in the movie, and so you can understand how frustrating
Speaker 3: it would have been from his perspective to have that
Speaker 3: follow him throughout his career. That is just his frustrations
Speaker 3: are very easy to empathize.
Speaker 1: With, right, right, That was a poignant moment to hear
Speaker 1: say you're looking around room and you're you're wondering if
Speaker 1: your teammates think that you don't know how to learn
Speaker 1: a playbook, which is awfully important for offensive linemen.
Speaker 4: Everything falls apart, and.
Speaker 3: It's not like he needed It's not like he needed
Speaker 3: the movie to be successful. This is the point that
Speaker 3: you made earlier. It's not like, well, you know, it's
Speaker 3: just the price you pay for making it. No, I
Speaker 3: mean like he of course it made him more famous
Speaker 3: than he otherwise would have been. But his success in
Speaker 3: football is not due to the book in the movie.
Speaker 3: He stands on his own merits. So it's yeah, the
Speaker 3: frustrations are very very easy to empathize with.
Speaker 1: So I see and I'm excited at the bar here
Speaker 1: it says we got some Hillary content coming up.
Speaker 4: What's your point today?
Speaker 3: Yes, can't stop, won't stop. I want to start by
Speaker 3: playing some clips of Hillary Clinton on Rachel Maddow Show.
Speaker 3: Just as luck would have it, she was on Motto
Speaker 3: Show to discuss an Atlantic op ed she wrote recently
Speaker 3: called the weaponization of loneliness. On Monday Night, as the
Speaker 3: indictment Fanny Willis's indictment against Donald Trump was dropped. That
Speaker 3: was late at night. Actually it started coming out like eight,
Speaker 3: nine pm something like that. But let's start with this
Speaker 3: first clip. It's a little bit shorter, but it's just
Speaker 3: you can see Hillary and Rich Mattow having a little
Speaker 3: bit of a good time as the indictment is announced.
Speaker 1: Fancy meeting you.
Speaker 3: I can't all this.
Speaker 11: Yeah, this is not the circumstances in which I expected
Speaker 11: to be talking.
Speaker 3: To you, nor me Rachel.
Speaker 12: It's always good to talk to you, but honestly, I
Speaker 12: didn't think that it would be under these circumstances yet
Speaker 12: another set of indictments.
Speaker 3: Kayley mcananey on Fox News react to that clip just
Speaker 3: by being like, what do you you know you're laughing
Speaker 3: at this. It's not good for the country. And obviously
Speaker 3: Kayley mccanany was attached to the Trump administration, so it's
Speaker 3: especially not funny if you're Kaylely macanany. But at the
Speaker 3: same time, she does have a point about how funny
Speaker 3: all of this is and whether or not it's a
Speaker 3: good look for Hillary Clinton, somebody who actually avoided an
Speaker 3: indictment because James Comey said, you know, no reasonable prosecutor
Speaker 3: would bring this case against her, which was very debatable
Speaker 3: at the time, she's somebody who sort of skirted that
Speaker 3: and lost to Donald Trump. Then you know, perpetrated this
Speaker 3: fiction of Russian collusion in ways that were not tethered
Speaker 3: to a small but real problem of Russian interference in
Speaker 3: the twenty sixteen election. Haha, this is so funny, let
Speaker 3: me laugh in this nice MSNBC studio might not be
Speaker 3: the best look, but that aside. Let's dive into the
Speaker 3: substance here and let's watch more of the conversation between
Speaker 3: Mattow and Clinton from Monday Night.
Speaker 11: If bad actors tell us falsely that every election has
Speaker 11: stolen and that the only way an election is trustworthy
Speaker 11: is if they come out on top of it, then
Speaker 11: something it tells you something not just about that person.
Speaker 1: Or that moment.
Speaker 11: It maybe wounds us as a democracy and in a
Speaker 11: way that is hard to repair. What do you think
Speaker 11: about how we get better after the wounds that have
Speaker 11: been inflicted on us through this process.
Speaker 12: Well, I think you know, the truth matters. I think
Speaker 12: having these cases be brought and be brought in such
Speaker 12: professional manners will see how they unfold. Obviously, the trials,
Speaker 12: if there are trials, are going to be critically important.
Speaker 12: But the article you mentioned that I published about the
Speaker 12: weaponization of loneliness really does, in my view, point to
Speaker 12: the larger cultural concerns because the lack of trust, the divisiveness,
Speaker 12: the undermining of faith in ourselves, in each other, respect
Speaker 12: for our institutions, the rule of law, law, all of
Speaker 12: that has been deliberately inculcated within our body politic.
Speaker 1: You know, there were trends before.
Speaker 12: I mean, we have seen how people have become more isolated,
Speaker 12: less community oriented, less civically minded. Then we see how
Speaker 12: social media and technology has certainly accelerated a lot of
Speaker 12: those trends.
Speaker 3: So Hillary Clinton is low hanging fruit. I get that.
Speaker 3: I think it's still relevant to break down a lot
Speaker 3: of what she said there because she's representative of a
Speaker 3: class of elites who is now basically just unhappy with
Speaker 3: the world that they created. That's the big takeaway I
Speaker 3: think from everything Hillary Clinton just said there. And you
Speaker 3: know she said Richard Matto said, you know, the only
Speaker 3: way if we're in a situation where the only way
Speaker 3: people can feel comfortable with the elections, you know, an
Speaker 3: election is stolen if they lose it. The fact that
Speaker 3: Rachel Matto said that to Hillary Clinton earnestly in a
Speaker 3: way that wasn't pointing the finger at Hillary Clinton. I
Speaker 3: think is remarkable. There's a huge difference between Hillary Clinton
Speaker 3: and Donald Trump, and that Hillary Clinton didn't concede that
Speaker 3: she lost the election to Donald Trump the next day.
Speaker 3: She spent years after that casting doubt though on the
Speaker 3: outcome of the election, saying that Russia stole the election.
Speaker 3: Her campaign was a huge part of planting the seeds
Speaker 3: of doubt about Trump's legitimacy as president of the United States,
Speaker 3: and she continued to perpetuate the fiction of this grand
Speaker 3: vast conspiracy, to borrow a phrase about Donald Trump being
Speaker 3: an asset of Vladimir Putin in some very specific and
Speaker 3: very false ways. So, just to start Hillary Clinton again,
Speaker 3: we see her being somebody that is creating a world
Speaker 3: she doesn't want to take accountability for having created. She
Speaker 3: creates this world that she's then unhappy with. I don't
Speaker 3: think she recognizes how detrimental I shouldn't say I don't think.
Speaker 3: I know she doesn't recognize she never could recognize how
Speaker 3: detrimental the crisis of confidence and institutions, how much her fiction,
Speaker 3: the fiction that she was in a large part responsible
Speaker 3: for about Russia collusion how much that played into the
Speaker 3: loss of trust and institutions. By the way, it's always
Speaker 3: worth mentioning that even the birther Or conspiracy, which was
Speaker 3: famously perpetuated by Donald Trump, came from the Clinton campaign
Speaker 3: all the way back in two thousand and eight. I
Speaker 3: believe that was a Sidney Bloominhaal special. But nevertheless, Hillary
Speaker 3: Clinton has been sowing the seeds of doubt of distrust
Speaker 3: in our institutions for a very long time. And again,
Speaker 3: this is where the elites who are passing down the
Speaker 3: United States of twenty twenty three to their children and
Speaker 3: their grandchildren look around and are suddenly really unhappy with
Speaker 3: the world that they've created, although of course they're unwilling
Speaker 3: to take accountability for having created it. They'll take accountability
Speaker 3: for creating other things, but they won't take accountability for
Speaker 3: creating this world that they're deeply unhappy with.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 3: I actually want to say, I'm glad that Hillary Clinton's
Speaker 3: op ed the weaponization of loneliness that she echoed a
Speaker 3: little bit from in this Mattow interview. Genuinely, I'm glad
Speaker 3: that she's pointing some figures at civic breakdown and at technology,
Speaker 3: at loneliness, at isolation. I am genuinely very glad to
Speaker 3: hear that, because I think there are a whole lot
Speaker 3: of people who sit in those MSNBC studios, cable news
Speaker 3: studios and don't recognize exactly how much that's crept into
Speaker 3: the everyday lives of your average American. And so you know,
Speaker 3: half of the battle is omitting you have a problem. So,
Speaker 3: in all seriousness, I think it's fantastic that somebody like
Speaker 3: Hillary Clinton has come to the realization that there are
Speaker 3: serious trends. You know, when this was being written about
Speaker 3: by Robert Putnam in nineteen eighty, where was Hillary Clinton?
Speaker 3: When Bolling Alone came out? When What's the Matter with
Speaker 3: Kansas came out? When Coming Apart came out? All of
Speaker 3: these you know, essential pieces of scholarship that we're creating,
Speaker 3: that we're showing very real problems existed. What happened from
Speaker 3: the Clinton administration in the nineties, What we saw a
Speaker 3: lot of policy decisions that exacerbated the problems of civic
Speaker 3: breakdown in certain pockets of the country, of loneliness in
Speaker 3: certain pockets of the country. Let's just name too, NAFTA
Speaker 3: and WTL great for some parts of the country, very
Speaker 3: very destabilizing for other parts of the country. Let's look
Speaker 3: at all of the tech mergers that happened during the
Speaker 3: Obama administration that Hillary Clinton was a part of. Let's
Speaker 3: talk about Section two thirty, which was passed by none
Speaker 3: other than Bill Clinton himself, passed into law by none
Speaker 3: other than Bill Clinton himself, that allowed tech companies. And
Speaker 3: you know, there's a piece of legislation at the time
Speaker 3: that we didn't really know where the Internet was going.
Speaker 3: So it's somewhat understandable in the same way that you
Speaker 3: can look back and say, I get why there was
Speaker 3: so much excitement among elites for NAFTA and WTO. I understand,
Speaker 3: but the practical consequences have been way more serious and
Speaker 3: way more destabilizing than anybody from that sort of political
Speaker 3: establishment recognized that would be. And yet they still they
Speaker 3: don't want to take accountability for it, and they still
Speaker 3: blame everybody else. That's what Hillary Clinton is doing here,
Speaker 3: pointing her fingers at everybody else, instead of looking around
Speaker 3: and saying, oh, maybe the regime that I led and
Speaker 3: championed for so long had something to do with this.
Speaker 3: It's also remarkable to hear her talk about the rule
Speaker 3: of law, which, as I mentioned earlier, I mean she
Speaker 3: really just said there rule of law. We've talked on
Speaker 3: the show over the last couple of weeks. I mean,
Speaker 3: I think pretty much everybody here at Breaking Points would
Speaker 3: be super happy if they locked up every politician who
Speaker 3: did something bad. That's not what happens. So to hear
Speaker 3: Hillary Clinton, a supporter of Joe Biden who was overseeing
Speaker 3: or was the father of Hunter Biden, I should say,
Speaker 3: there are very serious implications about lack of rule of
Speaker 3: law when it comes to Hunter Biden, very serious implications
Speaker 3: about lack of rule of law when it comes to
Speaker 3: Hillary Clinton herself when it comes to Bill Clinton. So
Speaker 3: to hear her sort of waxed sanctimonious about rule of
Speaker 3: law is another example that again she's looking around and saying,
Speaker 3: you know, rule of law. Donald Trump felt so comfortable
Speaker 3: flouting rule of law in all of these different cases,
Speaker 3: and Republicans are now so comfortable with Donald Trump flouting
Speaker 3: the rule of law in all of these different cases.
Speaker 3: That is so disturbing, you know it is, But the
Speaker 3: only reason people are doing that is because rule of law.
Speaker 3: It's sort of a fight fire with fire. That's a
Speaker 3: lot of things. And I'm not saying that's right. A
Speaker 3: lot of people on the conservative side think that's right. Now.
Speaker 3: I don't really agree with that over in particular cases.
Speaker 3: But to see her just being like, oh my gosh,
Speaker 3: the mysterious rule of law, the breakdown and rule of law,
Speaker 3: it's just really really too cute by have to hear that,
Speaker 3: specifically from Hillary Clinton. And it's also remarkable to hear
Speaker 3: her talk about public trust for all of the reasons
Speaker 3: that we've already mentioned, so again, especially from Rachel Maddaw,
Speaker 3: the journalist in this situation, to be tossing a question
Speaker 3: to Hillary Clinton about how disturbing it is that people think,
Speaker 3: you know, it's only it's just an election is not
Speaker 3: stolen if I win, but if I lose, then it
Speaker 3: is stolen. To hear that particularly tossed to Hillary Clinton,
Speaker 3: to hear that from a network that has platformed Stacy
Speaker 3: Abrams however many times without ever asking her the question like, Hey,
Speaker 3: maybe do you think walking around saying that you're the
Speaker 3: legitimate governor of Georgia might be sewing some seeds of
Speaker 3: distrust in ways that are very unhealthy it's just again,
Speaker 3: it's the world they created that they are unhappy with.
Speaker 3: So that's one and two. It's that they're just unwilling
Speaker 3: to admit that it's the world that they created. They're
Speaker 3: unwilling to even see, recognize understand that it's the world
Speaker 3: they created. And it's not just from these sort of
Speaker 3: abstract questions about how Hillary Clinton talked about Russia and
Speaker 3: the media. It also goes down to policy decisions that
Speaker 3: she supported. Guess who was a major donor to the
Speaker 3: Clinton Foundation, the Sackler family. Some of this stuff Tech
Speaker 3: a donor to Hillary Clinton. Some of the stuff is
Speaker 3: concrete policy decisions that she supported, NAFTA, wto two thirty
Speaker 3: tech mergers under Obama. I get that she wasn't in
Speaker 3: control of tech mergers, but what was she talking about
Speaker 3: when it came to all of these different decisions. Where
Speaker 3: did she disagree? I mean, this is the woman who
Speaker 3: campaigned for president in two thousand and seven, two thousand
Speaker 3: and eight, campaign for president in twenty fifteen and twenty
Speaker 3: sixteen and was on the wrong side of a lot
Speaker 3: of these issues. So, in addition to just sort of
Speaker 3: the bigger questions about how Hillary Clinton has discussed these
Speaker 3: issues and public in ways that are severely detrimental to
Speaker 3: public trust. The issues where she has been untruthful, where
Speaker 3: she has outright lied over and over again that has
Speaker 3: contributed to a lack of public trust. The ways in
Speaker 3: which she has been treated by let's say, when it
Speaker 3: comes to case of the rule of law, her husband
Speaker 3: has been treated, the administration, the Obama administration she's served
Speaker 3: under has been treated. These are all really serious and
Speaker 3: they are all They have all contributed over time to
Speaker 3: places in the country that are super supportive of Donald Trump.
Speaker 3: Maybe because they were they bore the brunt of WTO
Speaker 3: and NAFTA in ways that other parts of the country didn't.
Speaker 3: You know, Hillary Clinton famously and on stage in India
Speaker 3: bragged about how she won in twenty sixteen states with
Speaker 3: the highest GDP, as though all those places that are unproductive.
Speaker 3: That is just who would want to win those states anyway?
Speaker 3: Who would want to be popular in those states anyway?
Speaker 3: That's for people like Donald Trump. So it just comes
Speaker 3: back to this lack of accountability. Ryan, and I find
Speaker 3: that really grating. All right, Ryan, I think you have
Speaker 3: an update for us on your fantastic reporting in Pakistan
Speaker 3: about the Imran Khan situation continuing to unfold. Over there, tell.
Speaker 1: Us more, you know, three different interesting updates here. One
Speaker 1: we'll talk about the State Department response. We're going to
Speaker 1: talk about the response in Pakistan. But more immediately, we
Speaker 1: have breaking news just out of Pakistan right now. The
Speaker 1: Pakistani government has charged Imran Khan, former Prime Minister, with
Speaker 1: losing a top secret Pakistani cable. He had previously said
Speaker 1: that he had lost this cable that proved a connection
Speaker 1: between United States pressure and his ouser have now filed
Speaker 1: charges against him, with the strong implication being that Imran
Speaker 1: Khan was the sort our source. You know, that he
Speaker 1: lost the document. Now we have it.
Speaker 4: Now. The problem with that logic is manyfold, and we
Speaker 4: can go through it here.
Speaker 1: One my colleague Martaz is saying, nor myself traveled to Pakistan,
Speaker 1: like we did not go to Pakistan, so we did
Speaker 1: not get a physical copy. We obviously got a digital copy.
Speaker 1: So the question of whether or not he lost it
Speaker 1: is absurd, it inconsistent, makes no sense. So we also
Speaker 1: were very clear in the story that our source was
Speaker 1: inside the Pakistani military. The source was not in Ronkan,
Speaker 1: it was not anybody in his circle. It was not
Speaker 1: any civilian functionary. We were very clear about that, and
Speaker 1: the fact that he lost the document doesn't have any
Speaker 1: connection to whether or not somebody.
Speaker 4: Else could digitally lead a copy.
Speaker 1: What's interesting, though, is that there was a kind of
Speaker 1: a three step move that at the State Department and
Speaker 1: also the kind of Pakistani elite were doing about this cable.
Speaker 1: So first they would say it's inauthentic, this is you know,
Speaker 1: we how do we even know that this is?
Speaker 4: This is real.
Speaker 1: Then they would say this must have come from Iran
Speaker 1: Khan and it's high treason. And then they would say
Speaker 1: this is a nothing burger. And if you think about it,
Speaker 1: like all three of those things can't be true together.
Speaker 4: Two of the three can't be together. One of the
Speaker 4: three can't be true together.
Speaker 1: It's either you know it either is authentic and it
Speaker 1: is either a treason as act, or it's a nothing burger.
Speaker 1: It can't be all of those three different things. Finally,
Speaker 1: it seems like they're moving away from questioning the authenticity
Speaker 1: of it. And we could put up this first element here,
Speaker 1: the outgoing Pakistani Prime Minister Shabbaz Sharif, who has had
Speaker 1: access to the document, so would know, you know what
Speaker 1: it says. Said this in an interview with The Guardian
Speaker 1: said Khan said he had the cipher but he had
Speaker 1: lost it. Now it has been published on a website,
Speaker 1: and so that is confirmation that the document is authentic. Now,
Speaker 1: within about an hour or two after our show posted
Speaker 1: last week breaking the news of this cable and simultaneously
Speaker 1: published at the Intercept, there was a State Department briefing.
Speaker 1: I want to play a couple of clips from that
Speaker 1: briefing to show kind of how they responded. And people asked,
Speaker 1: why wasn't it in the show? Why did it come
Speaker 1: out just a little bit after we were giving the
Speaker 1: State Department time to respond. What Matt Miller says from
Speaker 1: the podium here is very similar to what he said
Speaker 1: in the written statement that we included in the article.
Speaker 1: But it's interesting to watch him say it. So here's
Speaker 1: the State Department getting pressed on that cable last.
Speaker 13: Week, the cipher cable supposedly that's been that's been a
Speaker 13: reported just I know you've had some on record comments
Speaker 13: on this, but I wanted to ask you about the
Speaker 13: veracity of the comments. It's obviously a Pakistani document. Is
Speaker 13: the United States generally think that what was reported there.
Speaker 4: So a few things.
Speaker 6: One, yes, it's a report reported to be a Pakistani document.
Speaker 6: I can't speak to whether it is an actual Pakistani
Speaker 6: document or not. Just simply don't know. With respect to
Speaker 6: the comments that were reported, I'm not going to speak
Speaker 6: to private diplomatic exchanges other than to say that even
Speaker 6: if those comments were accurate as reported, they in no
Speaker 6: way showed the United States taking a position on who
Speaker 6: the leader of Pakistan ought to be.
Speaker 1: If you remember the comments that the State Department made
Speaker 1: privately to the Pakistani ambassador, they said, if the no
Speaker 1: confidence vote against Imran Khan succeeds, all will be forgiven,
Speaker 1: and they all will be forgiven.
Speaker 4: Was the way that the United.
Speaker 1: States was upset that he had visited, that he had
Speaker 1: visited Russia on the day of the invasion, that he
Speaker 1: had taken what they called a quote aggressively neutral stance
Speaker 1: on the Russia Ukraine War. So somehow the State Department
Speaker 1: is insisting here that by saying that if you take
Speaker 1: a particular action, which is throw the prime minister out
Speaker 1: through a no confidence vote, but all will be forgiven,
Speaker 1: that that is somehow not stating a preference about what
Speaker 1: will happen.
Speaker 4: I suppose you could argue that, hey, they're just stating.
Speaker 1: They're just stating facts here, like the same way that
Speaker 1: let's say, an armed robber might approach somebody and say,
Speaker 1: you know, if you don't give me your wallet, I.
Speaker 4: Will pull the trigger.
Speaker 1: Now, I don't have a preference over whether or not
Speaker 1: one thing or the other happens, but I'm.
Speaker 4: Just telling you, you know what the situation is.
Speaker 1: If and then if he turns over his wallet, you say, well, look,
Speaker 1: that was an independent decision that that person made to
Speaker 1: hand his wallet over. The press Corps did not completely
Speaker 1: accept that answer. Push back a little bit. Here's the
Speaker 1: next moment from that interview.
Speaker 6: We expressed concern privately to the government of Pakistan, as
Speaker 6: we express concern publicly about the visit of then Prime
Speaker 6: Minister Khan to Moscow on the very day of Russia's
Speaker 6: invasion of Ukraine. We made that concern quite clear. But
Speaker 6: as the former Pakistani ambassador to the United States himself
Speaker 6: has stated, the allegations that the United States has interfered
Speaker 6: in internal decisions about the leadership of Pakistan are false.
Speaker 6: As we've stated they're false, They've always been false. And
Speaker 6: they remain false.
Speaker 1: Okay, So now Miller here is making a very specific claim,
Speaker 1: and he made the claim to us in a comment also,
Speaker 1: but we did not include it because we thought it
Speaker 1: was too much of a false claim to just allow
Speaker 1: it to be said publicly. But since he's saying it
Speaker 1: from the podium, let's address it here. He's saying that
Speaker 1: the ambassador himself has said that there was actually no
Speaker 1: interference in fact in the document. In his own assessment,
Speaker 1: he says that don spoke out of turn here and
Speaker 1: that the Pakistan ought to complain officially to the United
Speaker 1: States about the behavior. What I think is going on,
Speaker 1: and I asked for a clarification for the State Department
Speaker 1: of this a week ago, and I re upped that
Speaker 1: request today. I think they have the wrong Khan here,
Speaker 1: So we put up this next element. A man named
Speaker 1: Osam Khan, who was the principal secretary to Imran Khan,
Speaker 1: was arrested and held for thirty days in detention by
Speaker 1: the Pakistani government. After that thirty days it attention. He
Speaker 1: put out a statement saying that Khan really trumped up
Speaker 1: the allegations that were in this cable and that actually
Speaker 1: they don't show that there's any US conspiracy that is
Speaker 1: consistent with what Miller is saying.
Speaker 4: He's the principal secretary.
Speaker 1: That is a different official, Asadmaji Khan was the ambassador,
Speaker 1: not a Zam Khan. So I have asked the State Department,
Speaker 1: did you confuse your cons here? I understand this, we're
Speaker 1: now talking three different cons But if you're going to
Speaker 1: make a claim that definitive that the ambassador has said
Speaker 1: that there was no interference, you got to make sure
Speaker 1: that you have of the right con here. I'll report
Speaker 1: back if I hear any of this, but there is
Speaker 1: no public record that we can find of a sad
Speaker 1: con going back on his initial assessment that is included
Speaker 1: in the cable that we published. And then you have
Speaker 1: a follow up from the AP reporter who's in the
Speaker 1: gallery here, saying, look, okay, you're saying that you're not
Speaker 1: expressing any preference, but you can imagine why people receiving
Speaker 1: that message might think that you are.
Speaker 4: So let's let's roll the full rest of this clip.
Speaker 6: If you take all of the comments in context that
Speaker 6: were reported in that purported cable, I think what they
Speaker 6: show is the United States government expressing concern about the
Speaker 6: policy choices that the Prime Minister was taking. It is
Speaker 6: not in any way the United States government expressing a
Speaker 6: preference on who the leadership of Pakistan ought to be.
Speaker 4: You can go.
Speaker 14: I think what I'm hearing is that essentially the substance
Speaker 14: of this report and the reported Pakistani cable back to
Speaker 14: Islamabad is accurate. But you're saying that, but it is
Speaker 14: not the US saying that Prime Minister Khan, then Prime
Speaker 14: Minister Khan has to should leave office?
Speaker 8: Is that is that correct?
Speaker 6: Close? Ish, I cannot speak to the close, and I'll
Speaker 6: explain what I meant. I'll explain what I mean by that,
Speaker 6: which is I cannot speak to the veracity of this document.
Speaker 6: What I can't sidly just finished what I can't say.
Speaker 6: That's even just even if those comments were all one
Speaker 6: hundred accurate is reported, which I do not know them
Speaker 6: to be, they do not in any way show UH
Speaker 6: a representative of the State Department taking a position on
Speaker 6: who the leadership they're commenting on.
Speaker 8: I can understand, though, perhaps perhaps you can understand why
Speaker 8: other countries might think when the US weighs in, even
Speaker 8: in a way like this, that it is taking a
Speaker 8: position so I mean, I can think a name like five.
Speaker 4: Or ten.
Speaker 15: Leaders who the United States has sought to oust, including
Speaker 15: some that has it has been successful in asking, although
Speaker 15: not only after a military invasions. So you know, it's
Speaker 15: not an unprecedented thing or for a country to think
Speaker 15: that the US is trying to pressure it into or
Speaker 15: trying to make it make its views known about who
Speaker 15: it thinks should be the leader of a country.
Speaker 6: Right, I will say that I can understand how those
Speaker 6: comments number one could be taken out of context, and
Speaker 6: number two, how people might have the might desire for
Speaker 6: them to be taken out of context and might try
Speaker 6: to use them to advance an agenda that is not
Speaker 6: represented by the content themselves.
Speaker 8: And do you think that's what's happening here.
Speaker 6: I think a number of people have taking them out
Speaker 6: of context and use them partially. I won't speak to intentions,
Speaker 6: but I think that's what's happened.
Speaker 1: And just so viewers understand the comments that he's talking about. Specifically,
Speaker 1: Donald Lue, the State Department official, said to the paxtan
Speaker 1: ambassador quote, I think if the note confidence vote against
Speaker 1: the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington
Speaker 1: because the rush of visit is being looked at as
Speaker 1: a decision by the Prime Minister otherwise I think it
Speaker 1: will be tough going ahead. So, Emily, you and I
Speaker 1: were talking last week before we had gotten the State
Speaker 1: Department response, and we were which is why we hadn't
Speaker 1: posted the video yet, and we were kind of guessing, like,
Speaker 1: how is the State Department going to handle this? Because
Speaker 1: they clearly are now caught doing the thing that they
Speaker 1: have said for more than a year that they did
Speaker 1: not do. And it turns out no that they can
Speaker 1: just continue to say that they didn't. It's hard to
Speaker 1: be stunned at my age in this field, but that
Speaker 1: to me was a rather dunning set of sentences for
Speaker 1: a public official to put together.
Speaker 3: Good on Matt Lee, by the way they ryan that's
Speaker 3: this reporting has been so important and just amazing to
Speaker 3: see the State Department dance around it. I know you'll
Speaker 3: continue to keep us updated on that, even all the
Speaker 3: way from Europe as we continue this month and beyond,
Speaker 3: so that doesn't for us. Today. It was a big
Speaker 3: show because there's we're four indictments in that Axios chart
Speaker 3: we showed earlier in the show. Every time in DC
Speaker 3: a political reporters sort of braced themselves, and you know,
Speaker 3: it's bittersweet, it's exciting, and it's also going to be
Speaker 3: a ton of work when you're covering a presidential election cycle.
Speaker 3: But this time is a presidential election cycle with foreign
Speaker 3: indictments that we'll be weaving in and out of each other.
Speaker 3: So there's a lot Especially when Congress comes back after
Speaker 3: Labor Day, it is just going to be peddled to
Speaker 3: the medal. There's so much news to cover, and we'll
Speaker 3: be back here every Wednesday breaking it all down for you.
Speaker 4: Never a dull moment, Never a dull moment.
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Speaker 4: Let's get a lad up