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Speaker 1: Welcome to Counterpoints. We always say that we have an
Speaker 1: amazing show today, really, really.
Speaker 4: Really, Bryan, it's so excited.
Speaker 1: It's incredible. There's so much going on in the world.
Speaker 1: Gold cards, yes, you can buy you if you have
Speaker 1: five billion dollars, don't blow it, because you can buy
Speaker 1: an American citizenship according to Trump. Coming soon, all right,
Speaker 1: coming soon to ocation.
Speaker 4: Here you all right, So we're going to start with
Speaker 4: news that actually House Republicans past the budget resolution last night.
Speaker 4: We're going to walk everyone through exactly how they got
Speaker 4: there and what it means, what it could mean for medicaid,
Speaker 4: what it could mean for all kinds of stuff. So
Speaker 4: that's going to be up first. Then we have lots
Speaker 4: of updates from DOGE. As is the case every single day,
Speaker 4: we learn more about what DOGE is up to. Sometimes
Speaker 4: these reports are conflicting, but we are going to get
Speaker 4: to the bottom of the last twenty four hours in
Speaker 4: doge world. Trump also introduced, as we just teased, a
Speaker 4: quite interesting idea about five million dollar gold cards that
Speaker 4: could replace visas.
Speaker 5: And Ryan has some reporting.
Speaker 4: A share from drop site on the bombing in Syria
Speaker 4: that just took place over the course of the last
Speaker 4: twenty four hours.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Israel launched an aerosault over Damascus and its surrounding areas.
Speaker 1: Because why not.
Speaker 4: That's and you had just on the ground as I
Speaker 4: was on the ground, right, Yeah, Boob had him on
Speaker 4: the show last week.
Speaker 1: He just returned from Syria. We filed a dispatch last
Speaker 1: night with Ali Unis. We're also going to talk about
Speaker 1: Ukraine agreeing that Okay, you know what, after all, we
Speaker 1: will sign we will sign a deal around rare earth
Speaker 1: minerals and exploitation of our oil and gas and our
Speaker 1: ports the part they removed the we're going to take
Speaker 1: five hundred billion of it, So good negotiation from Zelenski.
Speaker 1: That's a pretty big sticking point. Five hundred billion dollar
Speaker 1: sticking point.
Speaker 4: Well, it's still.
Speaker 1: No security guarantees. We've got Steve Bannon comments about what
Speaker 1: what Trump should do with that minerals deal as well
Speaker 1: that we'll get to it. And meanwhile, prosecutors are being
Speaker 1: rather shy in how they approach a domestic violence case
Speaker 1: where a Republican member of Congress was you know, according
Speaker 1: to police reports, bruised up his not wife, but girlfriend
Speaker 1: who lives here in DC, and she decides she is
Speaker 1: now deciding not to press charges, although there's so much
Speaker 1: evidence that seems like they really should be able to
Speaker 1: press are just the police were able to see the bruises.
Speaker 1: It's pretty which is that's at least like, hey, you're
Speaker 1: coming with us type of evidence.
Speaker 4: Yep, yep. But so we'll go into the sort of
Speaker 4: details of that story as everything we know about it,
Speaker 4: because it's kind of an interesting story about Ed Martin,
Speaker 4: who is in the news very much show in the
Speaker 4: news for saying that he sees himself as the president's
Speaker 4: attorney as DC.
Speaker 1: He's the US attorney for DC, and he's about as
Speaker 1: radical a figure that has probably ever been in a
Speaker 1: job like that.
Speaker 4: He's hardcore. Maga that he is.
Speaker 1: Hard or maga. He claims he was not in the
Speaker 1: Capitol right on January sixth, but he was there and
Speaker 1: has made his bones as the defender of the hostages
Speaker 1: as Trump calls them, and is now just on a
Speaker 1: complete rampage, except against a Republican congressman who may have
Speaker 1: beaten their girlfriends.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we'll see, we will dive into all of that.
Speaker 4: And man, do we have a good Friday show. I'm
Speaker 4: very sorry I unvirtunately have to miss it because I
Speaker 4: have to get out of flight. But Ryan booked Rohie Tropra.
Speaker 1: Yeah, road Chropra the former director of the Consumer Financial
Speaker 1: Protection Bureau and a former FTC commissioner. He kind of
Speaker 1: paved the way for the Lena Khan Andrew Ferguson bipartisan
Speaker 1: anti monopoly wing to take power in the FTC. Then
Speaker 1: he went over the CFPB, then he was ousted. He's
Speaker 1: going to respond to all of the various charges that
Speaker 1: he's gotten over the last several months. Jamie Diamond called
Speaker 1: him an arrogant pos I believe or arrogant sob Mark
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg andres and Mark Andreesen. He has all the right
Speaker 1: enemies and he has them all very angry. So we're
Speaker 1: going to ask him why and see if he can
Speaker 1: defend himself against these defamations.
Speaker 4: Super interesting. Ryan's going to pass a couple of my
Speaker 4: questions on so I'm excited to watch and hear how
Speaker 4: it goes. Let's start with our a bloc, which is
Speaker 4: that the House of Representatives passed a budget resolution last night.
Speaker 4: This is going to go through the reconciliation process to
Speaker 4: keep using this ridiculous parliamentary language. We can put the
Speaker 4: first element up on the screen. This was the vote total.
Speaker 4: Look at that razor thin margin. The vote was two
Speaker 4: hundred and seventeen to two hundred and fifteen. The one
Speaker 4: and only Thomas Massey, American hero in my opinion, was
Speaker 4: the only Republican to vote no. Not because Thomas Massey
Speaker 4: had any issue with the proposed tweaks to medicaid, of course,
Speaker 4: but because it adds to the debt, and Thomas Massey
Speaker 4: is a hawk on that and is always ideologically consistent. Now,
Speaker 4: what's interesting is that There were three Republicans throughout the
Speaker 4: day yesterday who said they were absolutely nos. Mike Johnson
Speaker 4: was able to flip two of them, Warren david Sel
Speaker 4: Trump with the help of Trump, Warren Davidson and Victorious Sparks.
Speaker 4: So now this bill heads over to the Senate, where
Speaker 4: it will have to obviously deal with some of the
Speaker 4: same concerns about Medicaid. Someone like Susan Collins is not
Speaker 4: going to be particularly excited to have to vote for
Speaker 4: what we can get into this in just a moment.
Speaker 4: What many on the left will say amount to cut
Speaker 4: to Medicaid and the right will say is we don't
Speaker 4: know the particulars of how they'll get to these cuts yet,
Speaker 4: but basically they'll try to add work requirements and all
Speaker 4: kinds of different things in all likelihood.
Speaker 1: Not to be the well actually guy, and we'll roll
Speaker 1: Massy in one second. Yeah, it doesn't quite go to
Speaker 1: the Senate yet. Oh no, you guys want to buckle
Speaker 1: up for little parliamentary lesson. Get out your number two
Speaker 1: pencils because this will be on the test. So the
Speaker 1: way that this absurd process works is the House floor
Speaker 1: votes on a budget resolution, which sets the outlines for
Speaker 1: what each committee is supposed to then produce. So it'll say, hey,
Speaker 1: you Ways and Means Committee, you do taxes, we want
Speaker 1: you to cut four point five trillion dollars in taxes
Speaker 1: over the next ten years. You at Education Committee, we
Speaker 1: want you to cut this. You know, over here in
Speaker 1: the Health Committee, we want you to cut this much medicaid,
Speaker 1: et cetera. Like they just give a flat line. They
Speaker 1: don't tell you tell them how to do it. They say,
Speaker 1: just do it. Then the committees all meet and they
Speaker 1: pass their individual pieces. Then the Budget Committee reconciles all
Speaker 1: of that into one place. Then they send that back
Speaker 1: to the House floor and then they vote yes or
Speaker 1: no on that, and then they kick it over to
Speaker 1: the Senate. And so the Senate is undergoing its own
Speaker 1: process of reconciliation as well. The difference being they are
Speaker 1: not dealing with that four point five trillion dollars in
Speaker 1: tax cuts. They're trying to only do the spending cuts.
Speaker 1: And that's why you keep seeing Trump saying that he
Speaker 1: wants one big, beautiful bill, and what he means by
Speaker 1: that is that he wants the tax cuts and the
Speaker 1: spending cuts all done together. Now, Massey, the reason he's
Speaker 1: a no on this is that you might have noticed
Speaker 1: that the numbers four point five trillion in spending, tax cuts,
Speaker 1: and what was it one point five or two point five?
Speaker 1: It's all made up. So it doesn't really matter what
Speaker 1: these numbers are because these are projected out over ten
Speaker 1: years and involve these projects that nobody takes seriously. One
Speaker 1: point five, yeah, one point five. So they're saying they're
Speaker 1: going So they're even in their rosiest scenario, they're saying
Speaker 1: that they're going to cut one point five trillion dollars
Speaker 1: in spending. Don't worry only bad things waste for an abuse,
Speaker 1: not the things that you like. Uh, And then they're
Speaker 1: gonna do four point five trillion in tax cuts. So
Speaker 1: here's here's Thomas Massey explaining why he voted no on this.
Speaker 4: Will you just talk to us?
Speaker 5: Are you still know?
Speaker 6: Is there anything they they convinced me in there? I'm
Speaker 6: a note, is there anything? Look what let me let
Speaker 6: me their own numbers. If the Republican plan passes under
Speaker 6: the rosiest assumptions, which aren't even true, we're gonna add
Speaker 6: three hundred and twenty eight billion dollars to the deficit
Speaker 6: this year. We're gonna add two hundred and ninety five
Speaker 6: billion dollars to the deficit the year after that, and
Speaker 6: two hundred and forty two billion dollars to the deficit
Speaker 6: after that under the rosiest assumptions, why would I vote
Speaker 6: for that?
Speaker 5: Thre are you solidly you know?
Speaker 1: Yeah, they convinced me.
Speaker 6: I was at lean no and tell this meeting now, all.
Speaker 1: Right, so Emily, what am I missing? That's a very
Speaker 1: persuasive argument from the right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean the only possible rebuttal to that from
Speaker 4: the right is that if this is your stance, you
Speaker 4: literally can't vote for anything because you will just not
Speaker 4: get anything, like yeah, right, he doesn't, which is perfectly consistent.
Speaker 4: So yeah, I mean, if you won't, I mean, it's
Speaker 4: it's obviously a sliding scale of like horribles. But basically,
Speaker 4: if that's your ideological position, you're consistent in it.
Speaker 1: Count argument is come on, bro, Yeah.
Speaker 4: The counter argument is really.
Speaker 1: We got to do something, broa do something.
Speaker 4: But that actually is the counter argument. That's literally the
Speaker 4: counter argument that you'll get from people like Mike Johnson,
Speaker 4: who used to be sort of freedom Caucus adjacent, like
Speaker 4: Massi's freedom Caucus adjacent, but those guys obviously now face
Speaker 4: looking at at this huge addition. As Massy pointed out,
Speaker 4: let's take a look at how Democrats are reacting up
Speaker 4: particularly to what's been going on, not deicaid wise, this
Speaker 4: is AOC let's roll a three.
Speaker 7: There's a fundamental math problem here. There is a constant
Speaker 7: reiduration of waste, fraud and abuse. Sure, that's great, What
Speaker 7: is the identified amount of waste that this committee is identified?
Speaker 7: Because what the order that's been sent down here is
Speaker 7: fined eight hundred and eighty billion dollars. Not there is
Speaker 7: eight hundred and eighty billion dollars of waste, fraud and abuse.
Speaker 7: It's it's fined eight hundred and eighty billion dollars. And
Speaker 7: so we have not heard a single concrete number of
Speaker 7: the amount of waste that's been identified. We have not
Speaker 7: heard a single concrete number on the amount of abuse
Speaker 7: that's been identified. And there's just kind of this vague
Speaker 7: magic wand around waste. To my colleague from California's point,
Speaker 7: and waste is being used as a very large word
Speaker 7: here because what's being suggested is that long term care
Speaker 7: is wasteful in America, that children's health insurance is wasteful
Speaker 7: in America, that poor people seeing the doctor is a waste,
Speaker 7: that all of these people are disposable, that the elderly
Speaker 7: are disposable. So I think the problem here is that
Speaker 7: the numbers don't add up. And anyone who votes on
Speaker 7: this budget this week is voting to cut Medicaid in
Speaker 7: America and voting to gut health care for Medicare recipients
Speaker 7: in America. There's just no other way about around it.
Speaker 7: And with that, I hoeld back.
Speaker 4: So that's obviously a temperature track from the left flank,
Speaker 4: let's tune into the center left flank. Here's how came Jeffries.
Speaker 8: Children will be devastating, Families will be devastated, people with
Speaker 8: disabilities will be devastated. Seniors will be devastated. Hospitals will
Speaker 8: be devastated, nursing homes will be devastated. So let me
Speaker 8: be clear. House Democrats will not provide a single vote
Speaker 8: to this reckless Republican budget, not one, not one, not one.
Speaker 8: They will not get a single Democratic vote. Why, because
Speaker 8: we're voting with the American people. They're voting with the
Speaker 8: American people.
Speaker 4: So Rain, what's really interesting about that is this Republican
Speaker 4: resolution as it heads through the reconciliation process has a
Speaker 4: really easy giveaway to Democrats in terms of like political unity.
Speaker 4: When it comes to medicaiding, Republicans are really bad at
Speaker 4: explaining quote waste from an abuse as not like pushing
Speaker 4: back on the allegation that that's a cut as opposed
Speaker 4: to reform. They're really bad at making that case. Like
Speaker 4: with medicaid. The media isn't being super helpful here, But
Speaker 4: if you dig into what they say they're going to do,
Speaker 4: it is more like cutting down on They say it's
Speaker 4: like waste, broad and abuse. But I feel like they say, okay,
Speaker 4: so you want to add work requirements and all of that,
Speaker 4: and we can disagree with it, but the word cuts.
Speaker 4: They should at least be like smart enough to try
Speaker 4: to find a work around politically to try and find
Speaker 4: a work around to that. But they don't.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I'll give you my theory on why I
Speaker 1: think they can't do it, And it's because they don't
Speaker 1: like the program. Yes, fundamentally yes, And in a lot
Speaker 1: of cases they don't like the people on the program.
Speaker 1: And in fact, Steve Bannon on his show had to
Speaker 1: remind his audience and Republican lawmakers with them that there
Speaker 1: are magas as. He says, there are magas on medicaid.
Speaker 1: Implicit in a lot, Yeah, that's right. Implicit in that
Speaker 1: is it's just not those poor democrats that you think about,
Speaker 1: poor black democrats that you think about, like in your
Speaker 1: head when you think about when a Republican is thinking
Speaker 1: about Medicaid, and a lot of people think about maning,
Speaker 1: that's what they think about. So he's telling them, Okay,
Speaker 1: if that's what you think about, I understand why you
Speaker 1: want to cut it. But it's not just them, it's
Speaker 1: also magas that are on it. So you start from
Speaker 1: that premise that they don't actually like the program and
Speaker 1: they don't like the people who are on the program.
Speaker 1: So the way that they want to cut the program
Speaker 1: is to reduce the number of people that get the program.
Speaker 1: And the way they do that is they throw up
Speaker 1: a bunch of paper work requirements and also this work
Speaker 1: requirement which would say you have to work twenty hours
Speaker 1: in order to get in order to get medicaid, and
Speaker 1: if you can't find work, you basically have to come
Speaker 1: to some community center and sit there with you know,
Speaker 1: on a computer or something and just wasting your time
Speaker 1: so that they can feel good about making you feel
Speaker 1: bad about getting the assistance that they're giving you. And
Speaker 1: so they tried this in Georgia and they spent like
Speaker 1: seventy million dollars on this like pilot program and it
Speaker 1: ended up just having sixty five hundred people in it.
Speaker 1: So it costs an enormous amount of money to set
Speaker 1: up these projects and programs to monitor all of these people,
Speaker 1: and then you don't actually you're spending enormous amount of
Speaker 1: money per individual when it would be so much easier
Speaker 1: just say hey, if you're under this threshold, you get
Speaker 1: this money. Now. The other way that you could cut
Speaker 1: spending on this program is to go after the businesses
Speaker 1: and the scam artists that are ripping it off there.
Speaker 1: And there is an enormous amount of waste in Medicaid
Speaker 1: and Medicare. One of them in the Senate on that front. Yes,
Speaker 1: one of the guys in the Senate, Scott from Florida,
Speaker 1: ran the largest medicare scam in American history. And the
Speaker 1: way you do a Medicare scam or a Medicaid scam
Speaker 1: is like I heard recently about a Medicaid one in
Speaker 1: New York where people were saying, like a dentists will
Speaker 1: do these others like say we'll give you a poster
Speaker 1: for free if you will come in and sign a
Speaker 1: piece of paper that says I pulled your tooth or whatever,
Speaker 1: and then I submit this. You could invest money in
Speaker 1: inspectors and probably AI at this point analyzing the different
Speaker 1: payment schemes and finding this fraud and targeting it and
Speaker 1: prosecuting and going after it. I think the reason that
Speaker 1: Republicans won't do that is it would make the program
Speaker 1: work better. And as I said in the beginning, they
Speaker 1: don't like the program that because what that would do
Speaker 1: it would solidify it, and it would make people feel
Speaker 1: better about the program, and so they would support it more.
Speaker 1: But there is indeed you could. So it's eight hundred
Speaker 1: and eighty billion that they're trying to cut over ten years,
Speaker 1: I think you could actually do that without hurting individual people.
Speaker 1: But you would have to stand up a serious program
Speaker 1: of investigation. Hey guess what, there's like one hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty thousand federal workers who are well trained that were
Speaker 1: just fired. You can hire them to do that at pennies,
Speaker 1: just continuing to pay their salaries. Actually, a lot of
Speaker 1: them are on administrative leave now or unemployment, so we're
Speaker 1: paying them anyway. We're just paying them not to work,
Speaker 1: So pay them, put them to work. Go find the fraud.
Speaker 1: You know, it was much easier to do medicare and
Speaker 1: medicaid fraud before we have the technology that we do now.
Speaker 1: Like if you're some like South Florida like scam operation
Speaker 1: and you've stolen a bunch of Medicare numbers that you
Speaker 1: can find online, what they do is they steal these numbers,
Speaker 1: they pretend that they sold wheelchairs to them, They charged
Speaker 1: seven thousand dollars for one hundred thousand wheelchairs. They cash
Speaker 1: the check, move the money, shut down, and then start
Speaker 1: up a new thing and do it again. I'm not
Speaker 1: a technologist, but it's got to be pretty easy to
Speaker 1: figure out how to make somebody prove that you actually
Speaker 1: did sell and have something to do with making wheelchairs
Speaker 1: or selling wheelchairs, Like did you do it or not?
Speaker 1: I mean, scooters is the big one.
Speaker 4: It's very sad how like these grifts are so convenient
Speaker 4: for the political establishment like this is also part of
Speaker 4: the reason and as part of the reason why democrats
Speaker 4: are hesitant to be super like to take a scalpel
Speaker 4: to medicaid too, is that there's all kinds of people
Speaker 4: who benefit from the system, the people who benefit.
Speaker 1: Least of all business owners, yes, exactly.
Speaker 4: The people who obviously need it most. And so as
Speaker 4: long as you have the inertia where the system feels
Speaker 4: like it's working well enough and people aren't rioting in
Speaker 4: the streets, then you end up with just like the
Speaker 4: worst system ever.
Speaker 1: Right, because Democrats are unwilling to go after it because
Speaker 1: then they'll get accused of cutting medicaid. In fact, in Obamacare,
Speaker 1: one of the good things that Obamacare did was cut
Speaker 1: Medicare advantage, which is this privatized version of Medicare which
Speaker 1: is absolutely rife with scams. And so they went in
Speaker 1: and said, we're going to pull out some of the
Speaker 1: bs profit from Medicare advantage, which is a thing to
Speaker 1: do for everybody except the scammers who are making that
Speaker 1: fake profit.
Speaker 4: Yep.
Speaker 1: And they spent the next ten years with Republicans complaining
Speaker 1: that they cut Medicare.
Speaker 4: It's amazing, right, like wait a minute, what But on
Speaker 4: the other hand, yeah, so this is the problem is
Speaker 4: like Republicans will say, like to AOC's point, where she's
Speaker 4: saying they don't like you know, this is poor people
Speaker 4: are disposable, Elderly people are disposable. The principle of ideological
Speaker 4: conservative response to that is actually they end up paying
Speaker 4: more for worse care. That's what the actual conservative argument is.
Speaker 4: And if you believe that, you also don't have many
Speaker 4: incentives to come up with a better solution, which is
Speaker 4: what we've seen for the past ten plus years of
Speaker 4: the Republican Party after the repeal and replace era, where
Speaker 4: there was nothing ever to reveal and replace with because
Speaker 4: Republicans couldn't agree on anything. There's just no incentives to
Speaker 4: either go fully, there's no good way to operate a
Speaker 4: system that aligns with the Republican parties don't aligned incentives,
Speaker 4: and it's like, sadly the worst possible. I mean, if
Speaker 4: you look at studies unhappiness, like they've gone into indigenous
Speaker 4: communities that have barely been touched by technology and found
Speaker 4: that one of the constants the two things that keep
Speaker 4: people happy community like knowing that you have family around
Speaker 4: you and friends around you. And health. So if your
Speaker 4: if you feel like you have your health covered, you
Speaker 4: feel comfortable with that, which most people in this country
Speaker 4: don't like one to five people are actually on medicaid
Speaker 4: in this country is a very very high number, and
Speaker 4: I'm sure it's a lot higher in some really deep
Speaker 4: red states. That's I mean, that's extremely precarious. It's not comfortable,
Speaker 4: it's very nerve wracking, and the people who make these
Speaker 4: policies don't understand that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so if you if you noticed when you
Speaker 1: had your number two pencil out and I was explaining
Speaker 1: this process. Obviously none of this is going to get
Speaker 1: done by March fourteenth, which is the deadline for the
Speaker 1: government shutdown. But that's actually a separate track, just too late,
Speaker 1: at a layer of complexity to this. So you might
Speaker 1: you've probably heard the news talking a lot aboutourteenth. If
Speaker 1: they don't pass budget by March fourteenth, then the government
Speaker 1: shuts down. That actually is not related to what happened
Speaker 1: last night. What happened last night is setting the kind
Speaker 1: of the ten year projections and the spending and tax
Speaker 1: policy for ten years going forward basically twenty twenty six on.
Speaker 1: So on a separate track, they're pushing forward with what
Speaker 1: they're trying to do with these budget cuts to solid
Speaker 1: it and to actually kind of codify that the dog cuts,
Speaker 1: which is what I think they should do. Like, you're
Speaker 1: going to do this, you do it the right way,
Speaker 1: to do it through Congress. Who knows what they'll be
Speaker 1: able to cobble together. The Republicans you tell me, seem
Speaker 1: to be signaling quietly, Okay, we're going to do a CR,
Speaker 1: which is a continuing resolution, Like we're going to complain
Speaker 1: between now and March fourteenth, we're going to say we're
Speaker 1: not going to do a CR. We're going to we're
Speaker 1: going to denigrate the entire idea of doing a CR.
Speaker 1: And then when we've tried everything else, on March thirteenth,
Speaker 1: at eleven fifty nine pm, we're going to do it,
Speaker 1: which is a continuing resolution which continues spending levels at
Speaker 1: a set level. Basically, I think they'll do it through
Speaker 1: September thirtieth, and then russ Vote, Elon, Musk and the
Speaker 1: others are going to take that amount of spending. And
Speaker 1: what they're signaling privately and somewhat publicly is that they
Speaker 1: see that as a ceiling. So don't worry. That's a
Speaker 1: big number and you feel like you've been betrayed again.
Speaker 1: We're not going to spend all that money we're going
Speaker 1: to impound a bunch of it. We're going to ask
Speaker 1: for recisions from Congress. But the impounded part will then
Speaker 1: draw lawsuits and it will go to the Supreme Court.
Speaker 1: And they think that that's when they'll get their chance
Speaker 1: to say that it is actually legal, contrary to the
Speaker 1: Empoundment Act for the President to impound congressional spending, and
Speaker 1: then that.
Speaker 4: Will overturn potentially the Impoundment.
Speaker 1: Act, overturn it, and then solidify this unitary executive theory
Speaker 1: that they've been trying to put into into practice. So
Speaker 1: that and then they go back by September thirtieth, but
Speaker 1: by then they hope they'll have passed their reconciliation tax bill. Right,
Speaker 1: Is that about what they're Is that what we can
Speaker 1: expect you think, Yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean, I think that's probably a pretty good sketch
Speaker 4: of what'll actually end up happening here. You know. The
Speaker 4: the also the mentality with the one bill versus two bills,
Speaker 4: and Mike Johnson won that out obviously, right so far right.
Speaker 4: John Thune wanted to do two bills instead of just
Speaker 4: one big beautiful reconciliation bill. Part of the thinking was
Speaker 4: that you'd be able to put a lot more of
Speaker 4: the tough stuff in the first bill with the promise
Speaker 4: of getting the tax cuts or something in the second bill,
Speaker 4: you would be able or you could do something the
Speaker 4: other way around, depending on your motivations. But that was
Speaker 4: a losing argument from Thune. So we'll see how they
Speaker 4: can keep these like really narrow majorities in the Senate
Speaker 4: in the House together to get these votes. It's not
Speaker 4: going to be easy at all. But once again, Trump
Speaker 4: is the factor that can get things across the line,
Speaker 4: because I mean we've seen this multiple times with nominations
Speaker 4: in the Senate. He's able to make that math work
Speaker 4: by threats. One thing that people have talked about is
Speaker 4: the America pac that Elon Musk set up that was
Speaker 4: instrumental in Pennsylvania. That is a sort of sort of
Speaker 4: damicles people have said, hanging over the head of Republicans.
Speaker 4: That's been able to get them in line so far
Speaker 4: throughout this first month of Donald Trump's presidency, his second presidency.
Speaker 4: So we'll see what happens with these votes. But that's
Speaker 4: very very powerful going forward. All Right.
Speaker 1: What I like about this show, and I think if
Speaker 1: you made it through this segment, I think you have
Speaker 1: a pretty good idea of what's going on here in
Speaker 1: a pretty weird situation. Should we see if we can
Speaker 1: keep that up with DOJE I doubt it.
Speaker 4: Let's take a trip to do Let's try though.
Speaker 1: All right, let's start with President Donald Trump, who decided
Speaker 1: that he was going to clear things up for federal
Speaker 1: workers because there's been a very confusing situation where Elon
Speaker 1: Musk emailed everybody in the government and said, you know,
Speaker 1: reply to your boss and see see omb and tell
Speaker 1: us the five things that you accomplished last week very quickly.
Speaker 1: The FBI, the CIA, you know, d n I, the Pentagon,
Speaker 1: lots of places that have national security applications. We're like,
Speaker 1: maybe it's not such a great idea to put all
Speaker 1: the information about what you did the last week into
Speaker 1: a public you know, basically a publicly available email. I
Speaker 1: tapped Ryan Grim's phone, which you will then be uploaded
Speaker 1: into some deeply insecure AI to have it analyzed. And
Speaker 1: Elon Musk's response was, hey, I said, don't send classified information.
Speaker 1: And they're like, okay, thanks that that still doesn't help.
Speaker 1: We still don't want all of our employees responding and
Speaker 1: telling Chairman she and deepseek exactly what they did the
Speaker 1: last week. So then Elon Musk said, all right, well,
Speaker 1: screw you. I'm going to ask again next week, and
Speaker 1: anybody who doesn't do it next week, they're going to
Speaker 1: be fired, despite what the Secretary of Defense or anybody
Speaker 1: else might say. So thankfully there is somebody in charge.
Speaker 1: Donald Trump decided to clear it up for everybody. Here's
Speaker 1: the man himself.
Speaker 9: Can you clarify, hopefully, once and for all, what your
Speaker 9: expectations are with this email the federal employees? What are
Speaker 9: you going to use that information for? And do you
Speaker 9: see it as voluntary like opm said or Mandy.
Speaker 10: Yeah, well it's somewhat voluntary, but it's also if you
Speaker 10: don't answer, I guess you get fired. What it really is,
Speaker 10: what it is is do people exist. We have this
Speaker 10: massive government with millions of people, and nobody knows who's
Speaker 10: working for the government who's not. So what they're doing
Speaker 10: is they're sending out a letter to everybody and they're saying,
Speaker 10: what were the things you did last week? I guess
Speaker 10: they asked for five and if people are working, it's easy.
Speaker 10: I could tell you five things I did last week.
Speaker 10: I could tell you five things I did six weeks ago.
Speaker 1: Right, Well, that's what I call government efficiency right.
Speaker 4: There, right, somewhat voluntary, but if you don't do it,
Speaker 4: you get fired.
Speaker 5: So it is somewhat volunteer.
Speaker 1: Okay, So the Secretary of Defense or the director of
Speaker 1: National Intelligence tells you do not do this thing. The
Speaker 1: president tells you it's somewhat voluntary, but if you don't
Speaker 1: do it, you're fired.
Speaker 4: I guess is that what he said?
Speaker 1: He was like, I guess, so do you do it?
Speaker 4: I think you do it. It doesn't hurt to do.
Speaker 1: It, well, except it hurts national security.
Speaker 4: Well if you, but he'd like, do it, but just
Speaker 4: be like, hey, to be clear, this is not actually
Speaker 4: what I did. No, there's no way to know. There's
Speaker 4: no right answer here. There's no right answer here. I mean,
Speaker 4: I think you obviously followed the directions of the department
Speaker 4: had and some.
Speaker 1: Managers have instructed their employees to say, here's the five
Speaker 1: things you should say, Like number one, I fulfilled the
Speaker 1: responsibilities as listed in my job duties. Number two, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I coordinated with my manager on my duties and completed those.
Speaker 1: Which is amazing that you'd create all of this wasted
Speaker 1: time for work and managers to do this, and elonfficiency.
Speaker 4: There actually have been sort of competing things from Elon
Speaker 4: Musk to who on the one hand, is saying that
Speaker 4: this is just a quote pulse check, like he's repeatedly said,
Speaker 4: this is just to make sure that you're not dead right,
Speaker 4: like you're not a fake person. We're cutting down always
Speaker 4: fraud andbs by just getting these responses back. But on
Speaker 4: the other hand, he's saying like, and we've seen it
Speaker 4: from the White House too. On the messaging is that like,
Speaker 4: we don't think people are doing serious work. So are
Speaker 4: you supposed to take it as just a pulse check
Speaker 4: or are you supposed to take it as an actual
Speaker 4: inquiry about the substance of your work. It's genuinely like
Speaker 4: pretty there are thousands of people who have faced this
Speaker 4: conundrum over the course of the past week. Some of
Speaker 4: them are very important jobs, others of them probably less
Speaker 4: important jobs. But if we have put B two up
Speaker 4: on the screen here, this is a script from NBC
Speaker 4: News that twenty one does staffers have resigned over a
Speaker 4: refusal to quote jeopardize American sensitive data. According to a
Speaker 4: letter that NBC News got, Ryan, did you read this
Speaker 4: the report, it's pretty it's pretty I don't know. I
Speaker 4: think all of this doesn't portend well for the future
Speaker 4: of DOGE, to be honest.
Speaker 1: So in defense of Doge, these are Doggie in defensive Doggie.
Speaker 1: These are people who were already in the doghouse ye
Speaker 1: when when the dog Pound boss showed up, because this
Speaker 1: was the US what was it called the Digital Services
Speaker 1: of the Digital Services, and they just repurposed it as
Speaker 1: as Doggy, and so these folks are you know, these
Speaker 1: are former Google, you know, lots of Silicon Valley tech
Speaker 1: people who decided they wanted to come work in the
Speaker 1: government and help the government become more efficient. That's why
Speaker 1: they went, you know, that's why they took this agency
Speaker 1: and converted it into the DOJE. And so these are
Speaker 1: not diehard Elon Musk fans, yes, or these are not
Speaker 1: Maga types.
Speaker 4: So I mean, it's arguably the deep state that he's.
Speaker 1: Targeting, except yeah, it's a fairly new deep state. But
Speaker 1: so it's almost surprising that they lasted this long. So
Speaker 1: I don't think it's that damaging necessarily to Doggy, because
Speaker 1: I think they can find some pups that'll come in
Speaker 1: and do their dirty work. Like there there are there's
Speaker 1: there's more than one big balls out in Silicon Valley
Speaker 1: that they can you know, there's no shortage of nineteen
Speaker 1: year olds on four Chan that that must can you know,
Speaker 1: recruit to come and do this work.
Speaker 4: The response from Elin Musk was, quote, these were dem
Speaker 4: political holdovers who refused to return to the office. They
Speaker 4: would have been fired had they not resigned.
Speaker 1: I mean, Katie Miller, Probably true.
Speaker 4: Katie Miller said, quote, these were full remote workers who
Speaker 4: hung trans flags from their workplaces. That's the Katie Miller
Speaker 4: response to.
Speaker 1: This, I gets what great are we in here? Probably true,
Speaker 1: might be true.
Speaker 4: So anyway, that's They also named the DOZE administrator yesterday,
Speaker 4: like I think it was the Washington Examiner finally got
Speaker 4: their hands on the name of the person who, Yes,
Speaker 4: a person who seemed to have been on vacation who
Speaker 4: was formerly a part of the us D. And this
Speaker 4: is interesting because Elon Musk was seen as the head
Speaker 4: of DOGE, and then the White House confirmed last week
Speaker 4: that Elon Musk was not even part of DOGE formally,
Speaker 4: but was employed by the White House and sort of
Speaker 4: oversaw DOGE in his capacity as a White House official
Speaker 4: as a special quote special government employee. So anyway, I
Speaker 4: guess I shouldn't have said that this doesn't portend well
Speaker 4: for the future of DOGE, but it does. Just there's
Speaker 4: there's an air of chaos around DOGE that doesn't bother
Speaker 4: the people involved in it at all. I mean, I
Speaker 4: think a lot of this was always intentionally, understandably going
Speaker 4: to involve chaos. Everyone certain knew that. But there's chaos,
Speaker 4: and then there's chaos that's inefficient, ironically, and in this case,
Speaker 4: I do think there's just I mean that the like
Speaker 4: the the email one is a really good example, there's
Speaker 4: chaos to the point of creating inefficiencies to the end
Speaker 4: of efficiency. Like in the process of creating efficiency, it's
Speaker 4: just been a very it was always going to be messy,
Speaker 4: but they're creating more work unnecessarily for themselves.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a it's weird, like why are they doing this?
Speaker 1: Why are they doing this weekly email thing? Like I've
Speaker 1: seen a lot of people be like, well, there's nothing
Speaker 1: wrong with like a worker telling their boss what they
Speaker 1: did the last week. It's like, Bro, you don't think
Speaker 1: that they were already doing that. I guess, I guess,
Speaker 1: I guess if you have bottom barrel levels of hostility
Speaker 1: towards all federal workers, and you think that managers aren't
Speaker 1: managing their workers and workers aren't actually doing any work,
Speaker 1: then you need to come in and tell them to
Speaker 1: do this. But if you checked in, you'd see, like,
Speaker 1: this is a bureaucracy. These are this is a giant bureaucracy.
Speaker 1: The one thing that bureaucracies definitely do is this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. What did you do, Like what did you
Speaker 1: get done last week? Like check you know, who did
Speaker 1: you check in with? What meetings?
Speaker 4: Half the work.
Speaker 1: Just having meetings about meetings, And it is the criticism
Speaker 1: of a bureaucracy.
Speaker 4: They spend too much time keeping track of that, right.
Speaker 1: And so now Musk is going to come in with
Speaker 1: another TPS report that they have to complete that is
Speaker 1: supposed to be in the name of efficiency. It's like,
Speaker 1: so it's so dumb. It raises the question, Okay, what
Speaker 1: do they really do, what's really going on here? And
Speaker 1: is it are they actually trying to create chaos Under
Speaker 1: the old argument that Democrats would always make about Republicans
Speaker 1: that they don't like government, and so then when they
Speaker 1: get in power, they make it not work and then
Speaker 1: they point to the fact that it doesn't work under
Speaker 1: them as reason that you should get rid of the government.
Speaker 1: Is it really just as simple as that old thing
Speaker 1: just now dressed up as a as a sleek cyber truck.
Speaker 4: Cer truck.
Speaker 5: Wow, that was beautiful, very poetic.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that was a very poetic time.
Speaker 1: Putting this stuff out for free.
Speaker 5: Yes, well not if you want it commercial free.
Speaker 1: If you want a commercial free taking points dot com.
Speaker 4: So Rokanna posted a video of a fired VA worker
Speaker 4: that just in this bigger conversation about inefficiencies, I mean,
Speaker 4: the email point. I think some of this obviously is intentional.
Speaker 4: I mean, the rost Bilt playbook was explicitly before the
Speaker 4: election to push trauma for bureaucrats, and so I mean,
Speaker 4: I think that's that's obviously the playbook and part of this.
Speaker 4: But again, there's efficiency, there's inefficiencies that are sort of
Speaker 4: inevitable when you're creating cast, and then there's inefficiencies that
Speaker 4: are hurting your effort to battle inefficiencies. So let's take
Speaker 4: a look at this video that Rokana posted of some
Speaker 4: people who have been affected by various cuts you enroll this.
Speaker 11: I'm a veteran I deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Speaker 11: Anybody who asked me, you know, I would have told
Speaker 11: them I was told them for Trump. But at this point,
Speaker 11: I mean, obviously I never would have expected things to
Speaker 11: go this far. So this was really a job that
Speaker 11: meant a lot to me. So it was a way
Speaker 11: for me to help veterans that are struggling.
Speaker 6: I served this country, but now under Trump's executive orders,
Speaker 6: I'm being discarded like I don't matter.
Speaker 12: I don't think anybody's opposed to the idea of government
Speaker 12: efficiency and really getting rid of wasteful practices, but doing
Speaker 12: it in such a chaotic manner that leads to people
Speaker 12: getting fires by the tens of thousands. This was my
Speaker 12: dream job, and it's just being taken away by an
Speaker 12: administration who doesn't care about science.
Speaker 4: It doesn't care about people who might be homeless.
Speaker 5: I literally sink in my chair.
Speaker 2: I had no idea that without due process, that I
Speaker 2: could just be terminated out of the blue.
Speaker 13: I was a highly performing individual.
Speaker 14: I would just ask President Trump and anybody else that
Speaker 14: might be in charge to reconsider your decision.
Speaker 1: The United States of America is not a social media
Speaker 1: or tech company, and it should not be run like one.
Speaker 4: Mister President, many of these people voted for you.
Speaker 13: I don't regret voting for President Trump, but the actual
Speaker 13: policy is being pursued. Just don't come board at all
Speaker 13: with the actual holes the administration.
Speaker 1: We want them reinstated. It's an absolute try.
Speaker 9: Obviously that the president's of other day, except that Elon
Speaker 9: Musk was a patriot. When we see how many veterans
Speaker 9: we have on the line that are being absolutely devastated
Speaker 9: by this.
Speaker 1: This has been devastating for our family.
Speaker 4: We have a mortgage. We have to favor preschool.
Speaker 12: Mine happened on February fifteenth, but the day before what
Speaker 12: many reporters are calling the Valentine's a massacre, my computer
Speaker 12: went black and I was unable to sign back into
Speaker 12: my computer.
Speaker 1: You know, I was the source of our families healthcare.
Speaker 1: It's put us in a pretty strenuous position right now.
Speaker 12: People getting fired and bringing back because they were fired
Speaker 12: without realizing how crucial their work is. It really leads
Speaker 12: to mistrust from the general public and steers people away
Speaker 12: from a career public service.
Speaker 13: I was anticipating having, you know, twelve weeks of fraternity
Speaker 13: leaves through my work with the USDA, I.
Speaker 4: Mean ren we talked about for months before Doggie actually
Speaker 4: went into effect. Those are actually went into effect, that
Speaker 4: there were going to be all kinds of tear jerking
Speaker 4: images of fired federal workers, whether they're on the streets
Speaker 4: with their ferns and boxes or talking in these video
Speaker 4: that Democrats put out that make the process complicate the
Speaker 4: politics of the process for Republicans now. A Harvard Harris
Speaker 4: poll this week found pretty widespread support for DOGE.
Speaker 5: I think to the.
Speaker 1: Worst polster in America should underscore although.
Speaker 4: To be fair, to be fair, other because it's Mark
Speaker 4: Penn's yeah, to be fair. Other polls have found similar results.
Speaker 1: If you ask should you cut federal spending and like.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Well, And the reason I bring that up is
Speaker 4: because to the extent Republicans are able to say this
Speaker 4: is just about waste frauden abuse, and they keep saying
Speaker 4: waste for an abuse, waste frauden abuse, then they can
Speaker 4: they can politically sort of win the battle and overcome
Speaker 4: the obstacles of having all of these tear drinking stories
Speaker 4: circulated through media and by Democrats. But those stories, the
Speaker 4: more powerful they are and the more sympathetic they are,
Speaker 4: they create a much higher hurdle to overcome for Republicans
Speaker 4: to make the case that this is just about waste,
Speaker 4: frauden abuse.
Speaker 1: Right, And if if they did all this and they
Speaker 1: made the government more efficient, and they and they like
Speaker 1: cut taxes for people, then you probably would have a
Speaker 1: decent chunk of the American public would be like, I'm
Speaker 1: sorry that this had to happen to these hardworking people,
Speaker 1: but you know, we have to live within our meets.
Speaker 1: Blah blah blah blah. They're not going to do that,
Speaker 1: Like I think, they're going to make the government much
Speaker 1: less efficient. They're gonna and they're going to anger a
Speaker 1: lot of people, uh in how they do it, and
Speaker 1: they're going to basically go on a round of grifting.
Speaker 1: So one of the one of the workers in there
Speaker 1: was from the VA. The the doge lead who's handling
Speaker 1: the VA is just in fulture as so much is
Speaker 1: going on that has barely gotten any attention. He's the
Speaker 1: co founder of ring m D, which is a telehealth company.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think of what would be a more
Speaker 1: direct conflict of interest than sending a telehealth tech guy
Speaker 1: into the VA to slash and destroy it. So we're
Speaker 1: gonna make sure all these veterans get much worse care.
Speaker 1: Oh and guess what, I have a telehealth company here
Speaker 1: that is willing to step into the breach. Sorry that
Speaker 1: you know, we shut down these different community facilities. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: We've extended way times and now you can't get in
Speaker 1: to see an actual doctor for six months. But guess what,
Speaker 1: I have a Zoom for you for the low low
Speaker 1: price of whatever he charges the VA. Well, don't you
Speaker 1: worry about it. We're just gonna We're just gonna have
Speaker 1: the VA right it checked directly to us, and we're
Speaker 1: going to walk away with enormous amounts of money.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, and some of this has actually been
Speaker 4: cuts to There have actually been proposed cuts to telehealth
Speaker 4: coverage too. Like it's all very across the it's all
Speaker 4: over the place. What's actually what the actual strategy is.
Speaker 4: And again, like they would say that's completely necessary. I
Speaker 4: actually agreed to some extent that they're going to be
Speaker 4: conflicting cuts because they're trying to do this like sweeping
Speaker 4: quote revolution according to Elon Musk, and there's a lot
Speaker 4: that can be cut. I saw an interesting post someone
Speaker 4: at the Manhattan Institute who said, imagine if Mitch Daniels
Speaker 4: were in charge of DOGE like you had this very
Speaker 4: it's an interesting catch twenty two because on the one hand,
Speaker 4: you don't have the I guess cultural capital and just
Speaker 4: like crazy will to do a lot of the stuff
Speaker 4: that Elon.
Speaker 5: Remember the government the very mild manner Tea.
Speaker 4: Party era governor of Indiana.
Speaker 5: Yeah, who was all about it?
Speaker 4: Sort of like a Coburn type of Tom Coburn type, who's.
Speaker 5: All about it?
Speaker 4: Uh, someone who would you know, like the Rand Paul
Speaker 4: annual Festivus list like these. This is you know, the
Speaker 4: bread and butter of somebody like Mitch Daniels. And it's
Speaker 4: kind of a fascinating hypothetical to think about, or just
Speaker 4: like a to think about what it would look like
Speaker 4: without Elon Musk, like Dose without Elon Musk, because on
Speaker 4: the one hand, you don't have the insane energy, but
Speaker 4: on the other hand you don't have the insane energies.
Speaker 4: Could you even have DOGE without Elon musk't know, but
Speaker 4: without Elon Musk it probably would be there would be streamlining.
Speaker 4: I would imagine there would be like more consistency.
Speaker 1: Last point on efficiency because we're not being a very
Speaker 1: efficient moving through this block.
Speaker 4: We don't claim to be the department of That's right
Speaker 4: media efficiency.
Speaker 1: Though, because of civil service protections, Musk had to go
Speaker 1: after people who were on probation. It's been widely reported
Speaker 1: that that means that they were hired within the last one,
Speaker 1: two or three years, but it also includes people who
Speaker 1: were recently promoted from one GT from one level to another.
Speaker 1: In that brief period during the promotion, you are back
Speaker 1: on a probationary period, even if you've been there for
Speaker 1: fifteen years. So think about what that means. All of
Speaker 1: the people that he fired without checking with their managers
Speaker 1: about how valuable they were, without even looking to see
Speaker 1: whether or not they protected nuclear secrets, were trying to
Speaker 1: prevent an outbreak of bird flu, any of these things.
Speaker 1: What they also did systematically is fired everybody who was
Speaker 1: you know, came into the government within the last couple
Speaker 1: of years, which means somebody over the last couple of
Speaker 1: years decided that this is a position that they needed filled.
Speaker 1: These are very hard jobs to get, like there is
Speaker 1: a it's a ridiculous ticket that you have to go through,
Speaker 1: and that would be a good place to cut usually
Speaker 1: and just you know, so you can actually hire fast.
Speaker 1: It can take like two years to get one of
Speaker 1: these jobs. It's incredible because they're trying so hard to
Speaker 1: root out corruption, and I think they've gone too far
Speaker 1: in the inefficient direction because corruption and efficiency and transparency
Speaker 1: and inefficiency kind of go together in an uncomfortable way
Speaker 1: that we don't like to talk about. So these are
Speaker 1: new people, but then also people who got promoted. So
Speaker 1: who did you not fire, Like people who've been in
Speaker 1: the same job for like twelve years.
Speaker 4: When some people have been rehired because they realize like,
Speaker 4: oh right.
Speaker 1: We do have to actually do something about bird flu.
Speaker 4: So again the inefficient inefficient. Now that to people like
Speaker 4: my friend's on the right, were like like, okay, so
Speaker 4: you are now like this is a just cause and
Speaker 4: you are now whining about the process, And I actually
Speaker 4: completely understand that, but I still my kind of arguments
Speaker 4: that would be we don't know how this all plays out,
Speaker 4: Like there's still a long way to go, right.
Speaker 1: They'd say, you got to break some eggs and make
Speaker 1: an omelet, and I'm like, cool, where's the omelet?
Speaker 4: Wait waiting for the outlet? All right, So let's pivot
Speaker 4: to this news that Kyle Cheney posted and be four
Speaker 4: about judges. Judges, judges, judges. This is the fight for
Speaker 4: the next couple of weeks. Obviously a lot of this
Speaker 4: has gotten tied up in the courts, but it just
Speaker 4: took an interesting turn. So Kyle Chaney says a federal
Speaker 4: judge gave the Trump administration about thirty six hours to
Speaker 4: pay out hundreds of millions of hundreds of millions of
Speaker 4: dollars for work performed by foreign aid contractors and is
Speaker 4: demanding details about potential defiance of his orders.
Speaker 5: Speaking of defiance.
Speaker 4: Of the judges orders, Elon Musk posted this yesterday.
Speaker 5: This is from this is be five.
Speaker 4: If any judge anywhere can block every presidential order everywhere,
Speaker 4: we do not have democracy.
Speaker 5: We have tyranny of the judiciary now.
Speaker 4: Elon Musk also, I want to point out weighed in
Speaker 4: on something that Nai Bukele posted, where he said, if
Speaker 4: you don't impeach the corrupt judges, you cannot fix the country.
Speaker 4: They will form a cartel, a judicial dictatorship, and block
Speaker 4: all reforms protecting the systemic corruption that put them in
Speaker 4: their seats, and Musk essentially posted an agreement with that
Speaker 4: point from Bukela, did you see musk posts on the strine. No,
Speaker 4: he reposted the Bukeli thing in agreement, and that to
Speaker 4: me is offensive, to be honest, because Bukele is making
Speaker 4: a very direct comparison between the judicial system in the
Speaker 4: United States and the judicial system in El Salvador. That's insane.
Speaker 1: That is pretty insane.
Speaker 4: I don't think our system is like perfect, and I
Speaker 4: do think there's some serious questions about separation of powers.
Speaker 4: But that's insane.
Speaker 1: That is insane. Now. Of course, it is true that
Speaker 1: throughout our two hundred plus years for being a republic,
Speaker 1: not a democracy, as the right loves to tell, but actually.
Speaker 4: It's not a democracy, there has been a push and pull,
Speaker 4: a tug of war between the executive of the legislative
Speaker 4: and the judicial branch.
Speaker 1: And you would see people like me who are angry
Speaker 1: about Supreme Court decisions or FDR for instance in the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties, who are angry about Supreme Court decisions hemming
Speaker 1: in the will of the people. During the New Deal,
Speaker 1: he threatened to expand the size of the court through
Speaker 1: a legislative action, and as a result, the Supreme Court
Speaker 1: back down and started allowing new Deal policies to go through. Hey,
Speaker 1: so this is kind of how it goes. These are
Speaker 1: different power centers. These are the checks and balances that
Speaker 1: are built right into the system. For Elon Musk to
Speaker 1: be surprised that a check exists in a system, Uh,
Speaker 1: I was going to say, it suggests that he didn't,
Speaker 1: you know, go through elementary school in the United States.
Speaker 1: But he did not go through elementary school in United States,
Speaker 1: so he should go back and check out some of these,
Speaker 1: like how a bill becomes a law, and the checks
Speaker 1: and balances and like all the things. Well, they're on
Speaker 1: the citizenship.
Speaker 4: Test though, So here's what he posted.
Speaker 1: Should have actually seen it then, unless he sent some
Speaker 1: gamer in to take a citizenship test for him.
Speaker 4: So bu Kelly posted, checks and balances don't truly exist
Speaker 4: unless the judicial branch can also be checked.
Speaker 1: Stops right there. Checks and balance exist, Salvador.
Speaker 4: But he said checks and balances don't truly exist unless
Speaker 4: the judicial branch can also be checked and balanced, and
Speaker 4: Elon Musk responded, the only way to restore a rule
Speaker 4: of the people in America is to impeach judges. No
Speaker 4: one is above the law, including judges that is what
Speaker 4: it took to fix Elfalvador. Same applies to America, and
Speaker 4: it is true that you have to be able to
Speaker 4: check the judiciary one hundred percent. It's true that you
Speaker 4: should be able to check to judiciary. Now Elon Musk
Speaker 4: going full Boukela here and the Trump administration, I mean,
Speaker 4: there's there are reasons to have strategically close relationships, as
Speaker 4: Mark Arrubia does with Bukele, But applying Bukeleyism to domestic
Speaker 4: politics is different than CosIng up to Bokelly on foreign policy,
Speaker 4: even if we disagree with that relationship doing it. Applying
Speaker 4: bu Kellyism to domestic politics is like it would be
Speaker 4: just have a completely different country, completely different system. And
Speaker 4: you can understand why people would say, well, maybe that's
Speaker 4: a slippery slope to just completely politicizing the judiciary branch.
Speaker 4: And I agree the judiciary branch has like problems with
Speaker 4: being already overly political, but it's not El Salvador.
Speaker 1: It's a very surprising thing for him to suggest, because
Speaker 1: you need two thirds vote in both the House and
Speaker 1: Senate to impeach a judge, and clearly Republicans don't have
Speaker 1: two thirds votes, so why float something you know, just happens.
Speaker 4: To shift the Overton window.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so he knows that. I mean, I don't
Speaker 1: know if he knows not. Like the in the first
Speaker 1: couple of years of our republic, and people look up
Speaker 1: the exact judge on this, there was a judge who
Speaker 1: was ruling against the Federalists, if I'm remembering the details right,
Speaker 1: and people were and the Federalists were mad about that,
Speaker 1: and they tried to impeach him based on his decisions.
Speaker 1: Not they didn't say he was corrupt. Alsee Hastings, late
Speaker 1: Democratic Congress and I think he's late, was impeached as
Speaker 1: a federal judge, but for corruption, and then he was
Speaker 1: elected to Congress. It was kind of funny. He's like, wait,
Speaker 1: didn't you didn't you get impeached and thrown out of
Speaker 1: office and then and then you won a congressional seat whatever. Okay,
Speaker 1: but that was for corruption. The founders basically in that
Speaker 1: first or second term or whatever it was of Congress
Speaker 1: rejected that resoundingly, and a lot of the Federalists or
Speaker 1: whoever it was that would have benefited politically from getting
Speaker 1: rid of that judge yeah, said no, on principle, we
Speaker 1: do not want to set a precedent that a judge
Speaker 1: should be removed because we don't agree with their decision.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well I'm not panic So yeah, I'm personally not
Speaker 4: panicked yet about this question because I think this is
Speaker 4: an intentional effort on behalf of the Trump administration to
Speaker 4: force judicial decisions about executive power and to and they've
Speaker 4: been very clear about this. RUSSBO has been very clear
Speaker 4: about this. They think executive power is atrophied, and they
Speaker 4: want to force the question into the courts to get
Speaker 4: definitive answers on things like the Impoundment Act, potentially to
Speaker 4: overturn acts of Congress that they think have unduly sapped
Speaker 4: power from the presidency. And some of that I actually
Speaker 4: disagree with. I did think that creates a too powerful executive.
Speaker 4: But on the other hand, I do think it's a
Speaker 4: serious problem that you have. And we've talked about this before.
Speaker 4: Sometimes at the EPA it doesn't happen as often to
Speaker 4: the left as it does to the right, But you
Speaker 4: have some bureaucrat who came through the revolving door and
Speaker 4: is making decisions that the president wouldn't be happy about
Speaker 4: to benefit the industry, to benefit oil and gas, industry,
Speaker 4: but that they came from. So there is a serious
Speaker 4: there's absolutely a serious question about how these executive branches,
Speaker 4: these executive branch agencies should be tethered politically to the
Speaker 4: goals of the president. On the other hand, there are
Speaker 4: things like the FTC for example, or there are places
Speaker 4: where you have to have some level of distance and
Speaker 4: the judiciary is kind of the intermediary there.
Speaker 5: So some of this.
Speaker 4: Is just going to get kicked into the courts, and
Speaker 4: it's going to feel kind of nerve wracking as it's happening,
Speaker 4: because you don't know exactly how Trump and Musk will
Speaker 4: wield those powers. It's hard to trust how Musk in
Speaker 4: particular will suggest people in doggy dose wield those powers.
Speaker 4: But on the other hand, there are some serious things
Speaker 4: that do need to be resolved, and having i guess,
Speaker 4: more direction one way or the other won't be the
Speaker 4: end of the world. In fact, it could actually be
Speaker 4: a good thing in some places of the government.
Speaker 1: And interestingly, we're seeing multiple power centers within the executive
Speaker 1: So the judge that we just mentioned sold told the
Speaker 1: executive that they have to restart a lot of this
Speaker 1: foreign aid funding or face contempt charges. But we've also learned.
Speaker 1: I think it was in the Wall Street Journal that
Speaker 1: Rubio and Trump approved spending around you know, feeding the
Speaker 1: feeding the hungry, and AIDS funding as he said he would.
Speaker 1: He said, if you if you really are just doing
Speaker 1: you know, poverty reduction stuff that isn't part of a
Speaker 1: deep state cabal, then I am going to give you
Speaker 1: a waiver and we're going to move move that money out.
Speaker 1: So they approved a bunch of that stuff, and then
Speaker 1: DOJE people came into the back end, and this is
Speaker 1: what people have been panicked about with the DOJE unchecked
Speaker 1: people and blocked.
Speaker 4: It again, authorized by the Secretary of State.
Speaker 1: Right, money authorized by the Secretary of States go back out,
Speaker 1: appropriated by Congress, authorized by the Secretary of State who
Speaker 1: was nominated and appointed by the President, confirmed by the Senate.
Speaker 1: And then Big Balls comes in or not. I don't
Speaker 1: want to slander Big Balls if he didn't anything to
Speaker 1: do with this. Some DOJE person goes in and just
Speaker 1: clicks a button and blocks it, and so the judge
Speaker 1: is saying, no, this, You've got to get this money moving.
Speaker 1: So it is who's in contempt. At that point, Rubio
Speaker 1: is like, look, I'm trying to spend this money. Now
Speaker 1: he's not trying to spend all of it. There's a
Speaker 1: bunch that Rubio doesn't want to spend it. The judges
Speaker 1: saying you have to spend and that's usad and that's
Speaker 1: going to be very interesting. But what do you do
Speaker 1: if the kids are like, no, I'm not going to
Speaker 1: not here to do it.
Speaker 4: H No, really, let's before we leave this block, kick
Speaker 4: it over to Representative Nicole malliots Hawkas of New York,
Speaker 4: who weighed in on Doge with some.
Speaker 1: Criticis reelection right, there's one of the few Republicans this
Speaker 1: is a chief target of Democrats.
Speaker 4: Yeah, she's in New York's eleventh district, which is actually
Speaker 4: kind of one of the interesting places. I mean, she
Speaker 4: she won pretty handily last time, but it's a She's
Speaker 4: one of those places in New York where you can
Speaker 4: kind of find mago world an interesting it places out
Speaker 4: surprise I think a lot of people in like DC
Speaker 4: Beltway media. So let's turn it over to Representative Malia Takis.
Speaker 15: When I see what happened last week with the nine
Speaker 15: to eleven healthcare program, that employees were fired and that
Speaker 15: grants were removed, from the program. That disturbs me, and
Speaker 15: it just shows that they're acting too rash and that
Speaker 15: they need to slow it down a little bit.
Speaker 4: And obviously you're going to start seeing more and more
Speaker 4: of the sort of dissent from Doge and Elon Musk
Speaker 4: and Trump may or might not understand that some people
Speaker 4: obviously have to stake out positions that put them at
Speaker 4: odds with those or at least publicly stakeout positions even
Speaker 4: if their votes end up in Congress looking different, and
Speaker 4: even if their sort of criticism doesn't have a ton
Speaker 4: of teeth because they're a single representative in a swing district.
Speaker 4: So some of that you'll start to see more and
Speaker 4: more cracks in the foundation, as we have of the
Speaker 4: course the last week, people like you know, expectedly Lisa
Speaker 4: Murkowski coming out against Doge. It doesn't mean that the
Speaker 4: Republican Party as a whole is having problems with Dose.
Speaker 4: That said, this stuff does make it harder for She's
Speaker 4: responding to political pressures that Doge will have to answer to,
Speaker 4: not just in swing district but all over the country.
Speaker 4: The debate over how astro turfed or not astro turfed,
Speaker 4: for example, what Rich McCormick got in a deep red
Speaker 4: district in Georgia. As we talked about last Friday with
Speaker 4: Crystal Ryan, that whether or not it's part of like
Speaker 4: it was organized by Indivisible or some left leaning group.
Speaker 5: Isn't really the point.
Speaker 4: The point is that the means they're able to suddenly
Speaker 4: organize a bunch of people to get people out to
Speaker 4: town halls because there is actually some like legitimate frustration
Speaker 4: in even red parts of the country.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so she represents Staten Island and then Republican
Speaker 1: leaning portions of like outer Brooklyn's interesting areas, to.
Speaker 4: Quote Steve Benn, a lot of maga on Medicaid.
Speaker 1: Let's move on to Donald Trump's suggestion that they up
Speaker 1: the price for American citizenship, because you actually already can
Speaker 1: buy American citizenship, but sort of through a process of
Speaker 1: like you have to like invest like a certain amount
Speaker 1: of money or in a property or something, and then
Speaker 1: that moves you up in the in the line. So
Speaker 1: this is not actually a kind of brand new idea
Speaker 1: from Trump, but like Trump likes to do, he's really
Speaker 1: saying the quiet part out loud and just signing it
Speaker 1: and putting a price tag on completely so this new
Speaker 1: Trump idea for gold cards, we're going to.
Speaker 16: Be doing something else. It's going to be very very good.
Speaker 10: We're going to be selling a gold card.
Speaker 16: You have a green card.
Speaker 10: This is a gold card.
Speaker 16: We're going to be putting a price on that card
Speaker 16: of about five million dollars and that's going to give
Speaker 16: you green card privileges. Plus it's going to be a
Speaker 16: route to citizenship and wealthy people will be coming into
Speaker 16: our country by buying this card. They'll be wealthy and
Speaker 16: they'll be successful, and they'll be spending a lot of
Speaker 16: money and paying a lot of taxes and employing a
Speaker 16: lot of people. And we think it's going to be
Speaker 16: extremely successful.
Speaker 10: Never been done before or anything like this, but it's
Speaker 10: something that we're going to be putting out over the
Speaker 10: next would you say two weeks out, do.
Speaker 16: You want to say a couple of words about sure
Speaker 16: a minute, you.
Speaker 17: Have to invest a certain amount of money in this
Speaker 17: country in order to qualify for.
Speaker 16: That goal card.
Speaker 6: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 18: So the EB five program was really you lend some money,
Speaker 18: but it was all it was full of nonsense, make
Speaker 18: believe in fraud, and it was a way to get
Speaker 18: a green card that was low priced. So the President said,
Speaker 18: rather than having this sort of ridiculous EB five program,
Speaker 18: We're going to end the EB five program. We're going
Speaker 18: to replace it with the Trump Gold Card, which is
Speaker 18: really a green card Gold. So they'll be able to
Speaker 18: pay five million dollars to the US government. They'll have
Speaker 18: to go through vetting. Of course, we're going to make
Speaker 18: sure they are wonderful, world class global citizens. They can
Speaker 18: come to America. The President can give them a green card,
Speaker 18: and they can invest in America and we can use
Speaker 18: that money to reduce our deficit. Why do we give
Speaker 18: out lotteries of green cards? Why do we give out
Speaker 18: EB five for green cards?
Speaker 4: Brian saying, that's Howard Lutna. Though, if you were listening
Speaker 4: to this and you couldn't see the video, that was
Speaker 4: the dulcet tones of Howard Lutlin explaining this.
Speaker 1: Here the former he was the head of what's the
Speaker 1: what's the private equity company? That was Gerald Old Trade Center. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a very interesting guy himself, and his story of nine
Speaker 1: to eleven is go find it if you can. Like
Speaker 1: he was, he would not be alive today if he
Speaker 1: hadn't taken his kid to kindergarten that morning he's the
Speaker 1: Commerce secretary. Yeah, and he was on his way to work.
Speaker 1: And I think they lost more than six hundred people
Speaker 1: at Canter Fitzgerald. So separate from that. So the EB
Speaker 1: five program, they're kind of right that it's right for abuse. Basically,
Speaker 1: you have to tell the government, you have to you
Speaker 1: have to convince the government that you're going that the
Speaker 1: amount of money that you're investing is going to create
Speaker 1: a certain amount of jobs. And the threshold for it
Speaker 1: is different. How do you, like, how do you define it,
Speaker 1: how do you how do you prove it? How do
Speaker 1: you actually make sure that somebody's actually doing it or not.
Speaker 1: It's all difficult, It's all, you know, just subject to
Speaker 1: different judgment calls. And so Trump's like, look, let's make
Speaker 1: it simpler. Write a check five million dollars pay to
Speaker 1: the Order of US Treasury. Yep, I guess they'll run
Speaker 1: a background check on your oligarch status. He said, well,
Speaker 1: he said, you know, or you're gonna let rush on
Speaker 1: oligarchs in. And he said, hey, some Russian oligarchs are
Speaker 1: not good people. I've met them. So I guess they'll
Speaker 1: they'll have the FBI do a little background check maybe
Speaker 1: or maybe not. I mean who knows so, and then
Speaker 1: and then you're in. And you know, if you're like
Speaker 1: from the US perspective, like, I can see lots of
Speaker 1: arguments around fairness and on and on, But from a
Speaker 1: just national kind of interest perspective, this seems like a
Speaker 1: smart move for the United States.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, Like this is honestly a way more transparent
Speaker 4: and transactional, like nakedly transactional way to improve an already
Speaker 4: transactional program.
Speaker 1: And I think you might have a decent number of
Speaker 1: rich people who would take it up for their kids. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like they like, if you can cut a check for
Speaker 1: five million dollars for no reason to the to the US,
Speaker 1: then you probably are already a global citizen because you
Speaker 1: can buy citizenship and like Cyprus or whatever, like less
Speaker 1: than that, and that gets you then citizenship in the EU.
Speaker 1: And you know, if you have citizenship in the EU,
Speaker 1: you have reciprocal trade, reciprocal travel privileges to the United States.
Speaker 1: So the only reason you might need this extra gold
Speaker 1: card would be, yeah, for your kids, So you give
Speaker 1: them a trust fund and you give them then citizenship
Speaker 1: that passes down because if your parents are an American citizen.
Speaker 1: I presume, now, should we make them buy a Gold
Speaker 1: card for every one of their kids and cousins and everything.
Speaker 1: Cousins definitely, but kids. Do the kids automatically get a
Speaker 1: Gold card out of this?
Speaker 4: That's a great question.
Speaker 1: If they weren't born here, that's a great question.
Speaker 4: But this is galaxy brain Trumpism, right. This is an
Speaker 4: idea that is so completely bizarre in Washington because it
Speaker 4: says we're just going to be transactional instead of we
Speaker 4: are going to mask our transactional process in the language
Speaker 4: of neoliberalism.
Speaker 5: He's like, no, five million dollars.
Speaker 1: Now, if you want it to be really neoliberal, the
Speaker 1: way that it should work is that you should be
Speaker 1: able to sell We're not going to print citizenships. Can't
Speaker 1: just create an asset bubble of citizenships. We have a
Speaker 1: flat number of citizenships out there, and if a rich
Speaker 1: person wants to buy it, they have to buy it
Speaker 1: from an American citizen.
Speaker 4: Bid.
Speaker 1: So, if you want to sell your American citizenship to
Speaker 1: an oligarch for five million dollars, you can do that.
Speaker 1: I bet you'd have a lot of people be like,
Speaker 1: now you have to figure out like, okay, we're now
Speaker 1: I'm a Now I am a country list like citizen
Speaker 1: of nowhere. So hey, Mexico, can I like come down
Speaker 1: and I have five million dollars, but I have nowhere
Speaker 1: that I can live.
Speaker 4: Just live in international waters and be funny if.
Speaker 1: You sold your citizenship and then at the ceremony, Ice
Speaker 1: arrests you and puts you in.
Speaker 5: Attention, I mean, I guess, but that's the thing.
Speaker 4: Like, so our visa program is obviously there's very compligated,
Speaker 4: but there are all different ways that elite companies are
Speaker 4: already gaming the system, and rich pople are already gaming
Speaker 4: the system. So Trump is like, if we're going to
Speaker 4: do it, like just streamline the process and be honest
Speaker 4: about it and stop like allowing these companies to poke
Speaker 4: different holes based on their privileges and their lobbying carveouts
Speaker 4: and all of that. So honestly, if we're going to
Speaker 4: have the system, whatever, five million dollar gold cards might
Speaker 4: as well.
Speaker 1: But we don't like people that become poor after they're rich,
Speaker 1: So shouldn't we charge them like a million a year?
Speaker 1: Keep it going, keep it going, And if you can't
Speaker 1: pay your million a year, then we're stripping that gold
Speaker 1: card from you. More of a subscription than like a
Speaker 1: country club. Like it's a big upfront fee, but it's
Speaker 1: not like you pay your upfront fee to the club.
Speaker 1: I mean, you wouldn't do that for mar A Lago,
Speaker 1: And so it's good. It's not good enough for mar
Speaker 1: A Lago. Don it's not good enough for the United
Speaker 1: States of America country club membership. Here, big upfront fee
Speaker 1: and then then an annual membership on top of That's the.
Speaker 4: Problem with that is you get to the renters versus
Speaker 4: owner's dilemma, which is serious. You don't want to have.
Speaker 1: These people are renters. We could, we can. It's safe
Speaker 1: to be xenophobic. Now Trump one vibe.
Speaker 4: Shift ye, Well yeah, ideally you want people to invest
Speaker 4: the long term health.
Speaker 1: Right A million a year. Yeah, but that's it just
Speaker 1: went up to two.
Speaker 5: You're doing the wall.
Speaker 4: Well, just got ten b there too. Now, well, we'll
Speaker 4: see how this goes. This is like one of those
Speaker 4: Trump ideas that he says and then you don't know
Speaker 4: if it will actually happen. But now in his second term,
Speaker 4: everything he says seems to actually be happening. So be
Speaker 4: on the lookout for the gold card. Maybe you could
Speaker 4: do it. Will you want a style.
Speaker 1: I think you would need legislation because EB five is
Speaker 1: legislatively constructed.
Speaker 4: Yes we've said that many times in the last month.
Speaker 1: But do your legislation. Like this is the thing like
Speaker 1: people like, oh, stop stop, stop saying you need Congress
Speaker 1: to do all this stuff. It's like, guys, you control
Speaker 1: both houses, you have Congress. Just do it.
Speaker 4: They're lazy, Just do it.
Speaker 5: Well.
Speaker 4: Some of this is intentionally testing executive power, Like some
Speaker 4: of this they actually want it to be. You want
Speaker 4: to prove that it should be the executives authority to
Speaker 4: do X, y and z. But some of it they're
Speaker 4: not trying to make a point, so they might as
Speaker 4: well just fold it into the.
Speaker 1: Reconcisation's with the CFPB gutting in the crudred percent parliamentarian
Speaker 1: be just fine with that.
Speaker 4: See all right, let's move on to the awful reporting
Speaker 4: that you guys have up at drop set.
Speaker 5: It's not awful reporting.
Speaker 4: It's reporting on something awful I should be clear about.
Speaker 4: Out of Damascus, Ryan, what can you tell us.
Speaker 1: You can put up this uh this d D one here.
Speaker 1: So Tuesday evening, Israel launched air strikes around around Damascus
Speaker 1: after a day earlier net Nyah who came out and
Speaker 1: claimed that you can put up D two here. Here's
Speaker 1: a drop drop site piece by Martazo saying all the units,
Speaker 1: I can put a link down there and people can
Speaker 1: go read it. So yesterday or Monday, net Yah who
Speaker 1: said southern Syria is now off limits for the Syrian government.
Speaker 1: It is they and net Yahoo referred to it, and
Speaker 1: so did Defense min Or Israel Cats who confirmed that
Speaker 1: Israel was the one that carried out these air strikes
Speaker 1: as a security zone quote unquote security zone. So this
Speaker 1: is a the facto annex station of Syrian territory way
Speaker 1: north of the Golan Heights, effectively saying anything south of
Speaker 1: Damascus is a no go zone for the Syrian government.
Speaker 1: This is a heavily Druze community. The Drews are a
Speaker 1: significant element of Israeli kind of pluralistic propaganda, where they
Speaker 1: will point to the Drews and say, look, you call
Speaker 1: us an ethno state, but here are the Drus who
Speaker 1: are living here in Israel and they have equal rights.
Speaker 1: And you'll have a lot of Drews who will say,
Speaker 1: we don't actually have equal rights, so you don't treat
Speaker 1: us as equal sitis, but we do get treated better
Speaker 1: than Palestinians. And then there's a whole hierarchy. There's the
Speaker 1: Palestinian who's a citizen of Israel, and there's the Palestinian
Speaker 1: who lives in different areas of West Bank. Palestinians, then
Speaker 1: further who live in different areas of West Bank, and
Speaker 1: then all the way at the bottom Palestinians who live
Speaker 1: in Gaza and have effectively zero rights, including the right
Speaker 1: to life. And so the Syrian government has truly bent
Speaker 1: over backwards to convey to Israel and to the United States,
Speaker 1: Europe and everybody else that they want no peace of
Speaker 1: this Axis of resistance. That Assad was a member of
Speaker 1: this access of resistance. I want a dubious reliability, but
Speaker 1: a member. Nonetheless, they overthrew a sod and they have
Speaker 1: said that they do not want any of the smoke,
Speaker 1: and you can't handle any of it. They're completely destroyed,
Speaker 1: and immediately upon taking power, Israel bombed all of their
Speaker 1: military bases, destroyed all their planes, all their anti aircraft, like,
Speaker 1: they completely wiped out any capacity for this new state
Speaker 1: to actually defend itself. They are an offshoot of al Qaeda,
Speaker 1: at which people love to point out has bombed everyone
Speaker 1: you can think of, going after everybody you can think of,
Speaker 1: except Israel. So there's never in this like al Qaeda
Speaker 1: Israel hostility. All of this was done in the vain
Speaker 1: hope of appeasing Israel, that Israel would say, finally we've
Speaker 1: gotten rid of the Assad family, which has been our
Speaker 1: enemy and and has refused to reach you know, full
Speaker 1: agreement with us, even though they did reach, you know,
Speaker 1: various different deals that are in place, and so finally
Speaker 1: we can now have a neighbor that we can coexist with.
Speaker 1: That there was that there was hope that Israel would
Speaker 1: see it that way. Israel does not see it that way.
Speaker 1: Israel sees it as an opportunity to expand the land
Speaker 1: that it controls. Continuing with this very confusing thing where
Speaker 1: on the one hand, this Israel has a right to exist,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, refusing to ever define where the
Speaker 1: borders of Israel end. Because if it has a right
Speaker 1: to exist but it doesn't ever define where its borders are,
Speaker 1: then does it have a right to exist in southern
Speaker 1: Syria and the southern Syria now Israel, Southern Lebanon now Israel. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: there's a a you know, mass invasion of the West
Speaker 1: Bank underway, which we can talk about in a second.
Speaker 1: But so this is putting pressure on the Syrian government.
Speaker 1: We can put up C three. So the these are
Speaker 1: protesters marching marching through Damascus.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 1: They are. They are chanting in Arabic, but the translation
Speaker 1: is Oba loved jilani bomm tel aviv Uh. This is
Speaker 1: and this is indicative of the public pressure that the
Speaker 1: head of Syria is under from the Syrian public to
Speaker 1: stop just rolling over for Israel. But it's not really
Speaker 1: up to him, and you can read the piece by
Speaker 1: Martazan Ali. They don't have the capacity to do anything
Speaker 1: against you know, they're they're still they're still fighting there,
Speaker 1: you know, with some you know, gangster elements of the
Speaker 1: assadig that are still around as basically you know, meth
Speaker 1: meth traffickers of Captagon traffickers. So the idea that they're
Speaker 1: going to take on Israel with any with any seriousness
Speaker 1: is a fantasy. The real concern that that Israel has,
Speaker 1: and this is talked about in the story as well,
Speaker 1: is that Turkey is the backer of this news Herian
Speaker 1: government and Israel is worried that Turkey is going to
Speaker 1: use the foothold in Syria to begin flexing muscles, and
Speaker 1: which is plausible. Yeah, it is plausible, and to re
Speaker 1: become the great power in the region because.
Speaker 4: They've indicated that.
Speaker 1: And also like this period from nineteen seventeen would follow
Speaker 1: follow the Empire until today is the anomaly in world history.
Speaker 1: You know, for more than two thousand years you had
Speaker 1: two empires that controlled the entire Middle East, the Byzantine
Speaker 1: Empire and then the Ottoman Empire two. Like that's an
Speaker 1: enormous amount of stability going back to BC. And so
Speaker 1: you can imagine, like, so nationalism was kind of forced
Speaker 1: on this region after World War One in a fake
Speaker 1: way where there weren't really random random borders and fake
Speaker 1: made up nationalities with people deliberately pitted against each other
Speaker 1: so that the West could keep them poor and struggling
Speaker 1: and extract their resources. If we actually cared about reducing
Speaker 1: the amount of conflict in the region, you'd probably go
Speaker 1: back to everybody, you know, unified under some type of government.
Speaker 1: This was the dream that kicked around as the kind
Speaker 1: of pan Arab socialist movement which said we're not Iraqis
Speaker 1: and Runians and Turks and Syrians and you know, we're
Speaker 1: all Arabs and Persians and we're all in this area together. Now,
Speaker 1: Turkey has a different idea back in the back of
Speaker 1: Ridiwan's mind where he's gonna say, well, how about we
Speaker 1: just bring back the Ottoman Empire m h. And then
Speaker 1: Israel's like, well, wait a minute, where do we where
Speaker 1: do we fit into that?
Speaker 4: That's off some red flags?
Speaker 1: Yeah, hold on, because this whole area over here of
Speaker 1: Palestine when it was in the Ottoman Empire was not
Speaker 1: an independent country called.
Speaker 4: Israel, And what do we know about So both hag
Speaker 4: Seth and Rubio, what can we assume or how can
Speaker 4: we assume they'll handle Israel's move here?
Speaker 1: Essentially, you know Ruby Ruby, Well, Rubio is an interesting
Speaker 1: case because he is completely hemmed in and has no
Speaker 1: basically no authority left and doesn't even seem like I
Speaker 1: was for a minute complaining that the State Department wasn't
Speaker 1: having daily briefings. I'm like, why would I want to
Speaker 1: go to a State Department daily briefing as if they
Speaker 1: have anything to share with us, which would imply that
Speaker 1: they know what's going going off. They have no idea
Speaker 1: they're learning from us what's going on Rubio.
Speaker 4: Because Trump calls the shots in a way that Biden
Speaker 4: didn't like. The Trump right, the Trump presidency calls the
Speaker 4: shots in foreign affairs in a way that Biden really
Speaker 4: let blink in call the shots. Yeah, very different.
Speaker 1: Rubio, in my this is my forecast got played in
Speaker 1: the most hysterical fashion. Like Trump plucked him out of
Speaker 1: the Senate so he can make his daughter a senator
Speaker 1: from Florida. And the second that she is a senator
Speaker 1: from Florida. Not the second, but give it forty five days,
Speaker 1: Rubio will be fired as Secretary of State, so he
Speaker 1: will have lost the Senate seat.
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 4: Trump seems very happy with Rubio so far, because.
Speaker 1: I mean, as long as Rubio keeps kissing his butt.
Speaker 4: But Rubio also like plays the role like Trump. We
Speaker 4: know that Trump sees these literally as casting decisions, and
Speaker 4: Rubio has really he keeps playing.
Speaker 1: His role, then he can stay in that role. So
Speaker 1: I think the US is just going to be as
Speaker 1: they have been for you know. Ever, just let Israel,
Speaker 1: you know, is Reel said it would withdraw from southern
Speaker 1: Lebanon as part of the ceasefire deal that we negotiated
Speaker 1: the time for that expired and they said they're not
Speaker 1: really going to do that. Uh, and they then, you know,
Speaker 1: go invade and bomb Syria. And right now they are
Speaker 1: launching that. They've sent tanks and a major military incursion
Speaker 1: into into Janine until Karum really trying to wrestle full
Speaker 1: control of the of the West Bank, displacing tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of people, seizing homes, seizing entire you know, villages
Speaker 1: and cities, and uh, you know, in the direction of
Speaker 1: complete annexation of the of the West Bank. So they're
Speaker 1: they're they're they're going for it.
Speaker 5: Seeback pastor resolution.
Speaker 4: What was that annexation of the border in Samaria for it? Yeah,
Speaker 4: so we'll see it.
Speaker 1: But I see packed away in on another country, like
Speaker 1: just getting to annex territory.
Speaker 4: I mean, I just say that because it's it's an
Speaker 4: interesting indication of where the people who are pressuring the
Speaker 4: Trump administration are right now, Like they didn't even really
Speaker 4: have to do, like they didn't have to talk about that,
Speaker 4: but it's a priority.
Speaker 1: So look, Israel has unlimited weapons from the United States,
Speaker 1: and it has the military capacity to throw throw people
Speaker 1: out of their homes and seize more land. It's twenty
Speaker 1: twenty five, and they're going to do that, So I
Speaker 1: guess I hope, I hope that they're proud of themselves.
Speaker 4: Well, Trump obviously is not the ideologue that Mike Huckabee
Speaker 4: has ambassador to israel Is and the people who Huckabye
Speaker 4: represents ideologically, which is a big chunk of professional Republican politics.
Speaker 4: But Trump has, you know, did the ceasefire, for example,
Speaker 4: as Biden was leaving office, helped the ceasefire, sent Steve
Speaker 4: Whitkoff to aid Blincoln in the ceasefire agreement, to the
Speaker 4: chagrin of the Hakapies of the world.
Speaker 5: So it's not as though they're fully in control.
Speaker 4: Trump, you know, will push back when he thinks it's
Speaker 4: detrimental to his goal of looking like the peacemaker in chief,
Speaker 4: as we hear the White House repeatedly refer to him too,
Speaker 4: but not always, so that'll be interesting when to watch
Speaker 4: for sure.
Speaker 1: I asked some people close to Trump what this exact question, like,
Speaker 1: what is Trump going to do about these efforts by
Speaker 1: then Yahoo to continue to expand territory and also to
Speaker 1: looks like he's trying to blow up the ceasefire and
Speaker 1: Gaza and they said, Look, wick Cough is very committed
Speaker 1: to making sure the ceasefire holds and that phase two
Speaker 1: is completed. But Trump is not focused on it. Trump
Speaker 1: is focused on Ukraine and getting and getting a deal there. Interesting,
Speaker 1: that's that, that's where his attention is. So let's let's
Speaker 1: talk about the progress, you know, toward toward that. And
Speaker 1: we can put this next element of the scream of
Speaker 1: the New York Times. US and Ukraine agree to minerals
Speaker 1: deal official say, And so to back up here, the
Speaker 1: Treasury Secretary went to Ukraine offered this deal like, hey, look,
Speaker 1: we will actually not you're not going to promise that
Speaker 1: we're going to do anything, but we will, you know,
Speaker 1: invest in some kind of resource extraction and in exchange
Speaker 1: for that, you give US five hundred billion dollars worth
Speaker 1: of rare minerals plus basically control over oil and gas
Speaker 1: in your ports. And Zelenski then leaked that to the
Speaker 1: lawmakers who came to visit, slammed it in the press,
Speaker 1: said he wasn't going to do it. Trump responded by
Speaker 1: calling him, you know, a tinpot dictator and say and
Speaker 1: then saying that it was actually Ukraine that provoked the
Speaker 1: war and now siding in the UN with Russia against
Speaker 1: a resolution that what condemned Russia for the invasion, right,
Speaker 1: basically adopting the argument that it was Ukraine's provocations which
Speaker 1: were real, not Ukraine's provocations. That's actually kind of to back.
Speaker 1: So they are mostly US provocations and NATO provocations. There
Speaker 1: were Ukraine provocations of course, like the Maidan ku in
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen, the far right seizing power there, banning the
Speaker 1: Russian language in the east. So then you get this
Speaker 1: civil war over in the east. You get Zelenski elected
Speaker 1: on a promise that he's going to reach a peace
Speaker 1: deal Donetsk and the rest of the eastern Ukraine. He
Speaker 1: comes under enormous pressure from the ultra right, and instead
Speaker 1: of that, he kind of ramps up the war in
Speaker 1: the east. And then Russia sends its actual troops instead
Speaker 1: of just its proxies into Ukraine. And so you can
Speaker 1: see how there's responsibility on both sides. But Trump very
Speaker 1: clearly angered by this rejection. It's like, actually, this is
Speaker 1: all Ukraine that started this war anyway, and so now
Speaker 1: Ukraine has come back and said, okay, well we'll agree
Speaker 1: to the deal, but we're not doing this five hundred
Speaker 1: million dollar thing we will create, they said, they'll create
Speaker 1: a pot or fifty percent of the revenues from the
Speaker 1: extracting of the of the rare earth minerals will go
Speaker 1: into a fund that will be used to redevelop Ukraine.
Speaker 1: But then we get all the rarests. So that's the
Speaker 1: that's the deal.
Speaker 4: What do you think, Well, I think it's actually pretty
Speaker 4: significant as a if it holds, which it may or
Speaker 4: may not because there's so much there's still a lot
Speaker 4: of moving parts. But if it holds, I think it's
Speaker 4: a pretty significant notch in the Trump foreign policy wins column,
Speaker 4: just because there was mass hysteria. First it was kicked
Speaker 4: off with the jd Vance speech in Munich, but then
Speaker 4: Trump's various provocations towards Zolensky over the course of the
Speaker 4: last week, which he said even like I had Victor
Speaker 4: Davis Hansen on my show yesterday and he was saying,
Speaker 4: or today and he was saying, you know, some of
Speaker 4: the stuff is actually crazy, Like some of what Trump
Speaker 4: is saying is it's wrong, and it's counterintuitive to what
Speaker 4: he's actually said himself about Putin.
Speaker 1: Starting the war like it.
Speaker 4: Which is why it's very obviously hardball, It's very obviously.
Speaker 1: Part of argument is that Putin would have done.
Speaker 4: It if Trump was there, exactly solicited.
Speaker 1: In that as im Putin did it.
Speaker 5: Wait, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: So that's that's where like some of this hysteria I
Speaker 4: feel like from the media and European leaders has not
Speaker 4: been It's just it's lacks all of this context about
Speaker 4: how Donald Trump negotiates, which is that even some people
Speaker 4: in like America versus Mago world were concerned that he
Speaker 4: was talking so tough about Putin after he won the election,
Speaker 4: and they're like, oh, great, Trump's been overcome by the neocons,
Speaker 4: and we should know by now that this is literally
Speaker 4: just how Donald Trump negotiates. Over and over again. He
Speaker 4: does the same thing. His position on Ukraine is actually
Speaker 4: one of the most interesting, which is that he would
Speaker 4: say all kinds of nice things about Vladimir Putin in
Speaker 4: twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, whatever, and then he
Speaker 4: was the one who was arming Ukraine more than Obama.
Speaker 4: And so it's clearly what he does publicly, what he
Speaker 4: says in his conversations with other world leaders is always
Speaker 4: like you can't connect it to the policy decisions that
Speaker 4: he's making or may make, because he's just doing the
Speaker 4: psychological it's his psychological attempt at manipulation, manipulation, manipulating other
Speaker 4: world leaders into getting deals. He acts like a he's
Speaker 4: in the middle of a business transaction. He's trying to
Speaker 4: get the property rights to someplace he wants to build
Speaker 4: up in Manhattan, like he's just trying to flatter people,
Speaker 4: or he's trying to piss people off to bring them
Speaker 4: to the table. And in this case it seems to
Speaker 4: have actually worked. It seems as though Zelenski and people
Speaker 4: who are pro Ukraine, who are saying Donal Trump is
Speaker 4: so awful, have actually come to the table to haven't
Speaker 4: seen the United States is backsliding into authoritarianism by siding
Speaker 4: with Putin. It's like, okay, you just cut a deal
Speaker 4: with it. Like obviously his leverage, his attempt to create
Speaker 4: leverage here was successful. So that all of that is
Speaker 4: to say, like the last couple of weeks of coverage
Speaker 4: of Donald Trump's negotiations in Ukraine, I think got the
Speaker 4: situation woefully wrong, and this is just proof that he
Speaker 4: was negotiating. But I think it was clear all along
Speaker 4: that he was negotiating.
Speaker 1: Well, so let's hear from Trump himself, who is asked,
Speaker 1: you know, what does Ukraine get out of this? Let's
Speaker 1: roll this.
Speaker 6: What does Ukraine get in charge?
Speaker 10: Three hundred and fifty billion dollars and lots of equipment
Speaker 10: and military equipment and the right to fight on and
Speaker 10: originally the right to fight. Look, Ukraine, I will say,
Speaker 10: they're very brave and they're good soldiers. But without the
Speaker 10: United States and it's money and it's military equipment, this
Speaker 10: war would have been over in a very short period
Speaker 10: of time.
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, related to this, by the way, did you see
Speaker 1: the news that Congo, which is facing this massive insurgency
Speaker 1: Rwanda back to insurgency, reached out to the US and said,
Speaker 1: you like rare earths, we have tons, We'll give them
Speaker 1: to you if you will sanction Rwanda for supporting the
Speaker 1: M twenty three insurgents. Here like taking us from the
Speaker 1: global police to the global mercenary mercenaries.
Speaker 4: Yes, and by the way, a fairly brilliant approach to
Speaker 4: negotiating with Donalds. Yeah, like that's we were just talking
Speaker 4: about the gold cards. Yeah, just like it's transactional naked
Speaker 4: mercenary in this sense, literally mercenary, but you know, he
Speaker 4: is sort of like figuratively mercenary in many other senses.
Speaker 4: So Trump is not the only one capable of doing
Speaker 4: successful Trump negotiations. So we'll see how that goes.
Speaker 1: And so Steve Bannon was asked about Trump's minerals deal
Speaker 1: by our old friend Michael Tracy at Sea Pac. Let's roll, Bannon.
Speaker 14: My advice is, walk the fuck away. I want to
Speaker 14: walk away so hard. I'm even prepared to say, Okay,
Speaker 14: maybe we don't even investigate, which I think we have to,
Speaker 14: but we have to walk away. I don't want their minerals. Okay,
Speaker 14: there's enough minerals in the rest of the world. What's
Speaker 14: the reasoning behind this proposal?
Speaker 4: Then?
Speaker 14: Why? I think President Trump looks at a rack and
Speaker 14: looks at the other places in Afghanistan, and I think,
Speaker 14: as the deal guy is sitting there, going look, remember
Speaker 14: in Iraq, in Afghanistan then didn't take the oil the
Speaker 14: net President already didn't take the minerals in Afghanistan. The
Speaker 14: net present value of our expedition it was nine trillion dollars.
Speaker 14: Think of what this country would be like that if
Speaker 14: the last twenty years we spend nine trillion dollars in
Speaker 14: rebuilding America, the factories. Who would have What would Detroit
Speaker 14: be like? What would Saint Louis be like? What would
Speaker 14: Baltimore be like? What would the Great Seas of the
Speaker 14: East be like? What would Detroit be like? If we
Speaker 14: spent nine nine trillion dollars on American citizens on the
Speaker 14: soil of the United States of America, this would be
Speaker 14: a paradise.
Speaker 4: We didn't.
Speaker 14: We pissed it away and let people steal it, and
Speaker 14: so many people dead, and countries ruin and culture's ruined,
Speaker 14: and the Christians eviscerated for nine trillion dollars. I think
Speaker 14: it says in President Drummers says, Look, if these guys
Speaker 14: did it, what we should do is at least get
Speaker 14: something for it.
Speaker 17: I mean, that's the way he exchanged for a security guarantee, though,
Speaker 17: which could necessitate or require some kind of US military action.
Speaker 17: In fact speak of World War two. It reminds me
Speaker 17: of the British, arguably very foolishly extending Poland to so
Speaker 17: called security guarantee that they didn't have the ability to
Speaker 17: even uphold, and then World War two gets declared once
Speaker 17: Hitler goes into Poland. Now that's a very extreme scenario,
Speaker 17: but a security guarantee. I mean, those don't have a
Speaker 17: great record throughout history.
Speaker 14: No, very few people understand that the reason that World
Speaker 14: War Two, which had been building in the same kind
Speaker 14: of way this is triggered in September nineteen thirty nine
Speaker 14: is because the Germans knew it, and the Germans also
Speaker 14: knew that the French and the British couldn't stand up
Speaker 14: to it, and that would give him every pretext roll
Speaker 14: across Western Europe.
Speaker 4: Just two bros talking about World War Two on the
Speaker 4: floor of Seapack. I saw Tracy walking in the Seapac.
Speaker 4: I was interviewing someone outside of Seapack. I saw Tracy
Speaker 4: walking and I was.
Speaker 1: Like, oh boy, to get some videos.
Speaker 4: Here it goes. And so this was obviously Bannon. This
Speaker 4: was taped with Bannon. I want to say, this is Friday,
Speaker 4: Thursday or Friday, so way before the news came out,
Speaker 4: just in the last twelve or so hours that Trump
Speaker 4: had successfully negotiated this deal. So it'd be interesting to
Speaker 4: see what Bannon says now that Zelenski is giving apparently
Speaker 4: the mineral rise.
Speaker 1: To say that it's successfully negotiated and it's like we'll see, well,
Speaker 1: we'll see, but obviously he got into a gree paper
Speaker 1: getting passed back and forth.
Speaker 4: But even like in yes, but even in to even.
Speaker 1: Have what they're saying they have is an open question.
Speaker 1: And it to Bannon's point, there's.
Speaker 4: Minerals everywhere, like in Russia, even as Putin well and
Speaker 4: in contested regions as well as Putin talked about the
Speaker 4: Domboss recently. And your point about the Congo is a
Speaker 4: good one. But no, I mean, even even in theory
Speaker 4: getting Zelensky, I shouldn't even say in theory, but like
Speaker 4: in practice gains Lensky to say, sure, after all the
Speaker 4: hemming and hung in the last week looks like a
Speaker 4: big Maga victory. And so does Steve Bannon say great,
Speaker 4: like this was well done by Trump, or does he
Speaker 4: say I don't want the minerals. I think it's actually
Speaker 4: pretty interesting because it's a contrast with the usai D
Speaker 4: draw down, and your point about US becoming the placement
Speaker 4: of the world versus the mercenary of the world is
Speaker 4: a really interesting one because some people in the usai
Speaker 4: D debate, like you actually sort of saw this play
Speaker 4: out when Mike Ben's went on Tucker Carlson Show, and
Speaker 4: Ben's was saying he was worried that a lot of
Speaker 4: MAGO world doesn't want to be precise and sort of
Speaker 4: take a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer to a lot
Speaker 4: of usai D in realizing that some of this is beneficial,
Speaker 4: like the empire is beneficial, And Tucker Carlson's was sort
Speaker 4: of like, I don't know, I'm kind of done.
Speaker 1: With all of it.
Speaker 4: And that's a pretty interesting tension that we see play
Speaker 4: out here. If you want the US to stop quote
Speaker 4: economically colonizing the world, this mineral deal feels like an
Speaker 4: extension of economic colonization to it. It sort of feels
Speaker 4: like Barisma as a matter of fact, except this was
Speaker 4: more nakedly transactional than Barisma usaid and all of that.
Speaker 4: So I think that's one of the trend lines actually
Speaker 4: to watch over the next couple of years is how
Speaker 4: Mega handles the question of economic colonization and empire right, and.
Speaker 1: Maybe they'll just eventually work their way right back to
Speaker 1: creating a new usai D soft power instrument, right, but
Speaker 1: just different. Yeah, And also one last part on that
Speaker 1: classic Steve Bannon riff, like he's on Afghanistan, Like I think,
Speaker 1: like he's just he's just nailing every piece of it.
Speaker 1: And then he throws in and all these Christians got killed.
Speaker 1: It's like, where did that come from? Like I thought
Speaker 1: the whole idea of Christianity was that we're all created
Speaker 1: by the Creator and like all equal in his eyes.
Speaker 1: So why does he have to emphasize that it's Christians
Speaker 1: there were Christians that were killed to like try to
Speaker 1: land the idea that people getting killed in war is
Speaker 1: a bad thing. Doesn't it also suck that when a
Speaker 1: Muslim gets killed?
Speaker 4: Yeah, of course right, I mean so.
Speaker 1: It's just like I always seeing that from Bandonits like
Speaker 1: I agree, I agree, agree, and then whoop and yes,
Speaker 1: I don't like when Christians get killed either, but also
Speaker 1: don't like when atheists or Hindus or Jews or Muslims
Speaker 1: or anybody gets killed.
Speaker 4: No, there's a charitable reading of that though, which is
Speaker 4: he's trying to appeal to conservatives who do see these
Speaker 4: regions as categorically like radical.
Speaker 1: Islam, appealing to the baser instincts.
Speaker 4: I don't think it hasn't necessarily be xenophobic. I think
Speaker 4: it's I think there is an instinct, like, especially after
Speaker 4: nine to eleven, for people to say everyone there's like radical.
Speaker 1: I guess a reverse version that the left would do
Speaker 1: is to say, hey, look, these medicaid cuts are going
Speaker 1: to hurt trans No, no, they're going to hurt poor
Speaker 1: white people trying to appeal yeah a mega.
Speaker 4: Person absolutely, yeah, I mean.
Speaker 1: Rather than making more universal argument.
Speaker 4: Right, right, But I think the left also does it
Speaker 4: in its own way.
Speaker 1: Because when they're appealing to their to the left yet.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but I don't think it necessarily has to be
Speaker 4: xenophobics as much as it's just I it could be,
Speaker 4: But I also think it could be, like there are
Speaker 4: a lot of people who don't. I actually think a
Speaker 4: lot of people, like for example, in the West Bank,
Speaker 4: genuinely don't understand how significant those ancient Christian communities are.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I mean, where's Jesus from.
Speaker 4: It's a good point.
Speaker 1: So let's let's move on to the scandal of a
Speaker 1: Republican congressman getting getting out of a domestic violence charge.
Speaker 4: It's awful story. We have an update in the unfolding
Speaker 4: saga of congressmen Republican Congressman Corey Mills, who is facing
Speaker 4: a SA allegations, serious assault allegations, and this is a
Speaker 4: really complicated story. It brings in the interim DC Attorney
Speaker 4: General Acting Attorney General Ed Martin, who's a pretty interesting
Speaker 4: character from Maga World. So I'm gonna bear with me
Speaker 4: as we go through the details. Is we don't want
Speaker 4: to get anything wrong on this. We want everybody to
Speaker 4: have the specifics of this story because it's a big
Speaker 4: one and it's an interesting one. I'm reading from a
Speaker 4: report in The Independent, which I think actually aggregated a
Speaker 4: lot of the different parts of these allegations. So right now,
Speaker 4: the police department has said this is an active criminal
Speaker 4: investigation and there's no further information on the case to
Speaker 4: provide at this time. But last Wednesday, Corey Mills is mistress.
Speaker 4: He is married. This is a woman that is not
Speaker 4: his wife. Twenty seven year old woman called the police
Speaker 4: to his apartment in Washington, d C. To hold a
Speaker 4: nine one one operator that she had been assaulted by
Speaker 4: Corey Mills. Mills quote vehemently denies any wrongdoing what's song
Speaker 4: and is confident any investigation will clear this matter quickly.
Speaker 4: That's according to his office in a statement to the
Speaker 4: Associated Press. Now Mills told Politico both myself and the
Speaker 4: other individuals said what they had claimed took place and
Speaker 4: never took place, and that's been reported multiple times. Now.
Speaker 4: The Independent says a police report that it was provided
Speaker 4: with describes the initial nine to one one call as
Speaker 4: alleging a simple assault with hands or feet involving the mistress,
Speaker 4: whose name is Sarah Radiani. She's the head of a
Speaker 4: group called Iranians for Trump, as the victim in this case. Now,
Speaker 4: a previous police report that NBC Washington got said that Mills,
Speaker 4: who she's apparently been with for over a year, grabbed her,
Speaker 4: shoved her and pushed her out of the door, which
Speaker 4: left her with bruises, and then she let the police
Speaker 4: listen in on a phone call between her and Corey Mills,
Speaker 4: wherein he allegedly told her to quote lie about the
Speaker 4: origin of the bruises. When police, according to the report,
Speaker 4: encountered her, she was physically shaking and scared. Now, the
Speaker 4: Independence says these are quote circumstances that would typically prompt
Speaker 4: an immediate arrest of an alleged assailant. The Independent goes
Speaker 4: on to say Raviani then recanted her claims, including about
Speaker 4: the origin of the bruises when officers said Mills would
Speaker 4: be placed under arrest. So when she was told that
Speaker 4: Corey Mills, Congressman Corey Mills would be arrested, she recanted
Speaker 4: his claims. People who have covered and worked with victims
Speaker 4: of domestic violence know that that's a familiar pattern of
Speaker 4: people who are victims of domestic violence. Unfortunately, that's it's
Speaker 4: incredibly traumatic as a like emotional process to go through.
Speaker 4: That can increase the pressures, and you know, it's enormously
Speaker 4: difficult to judge people in those situations who are legitimate
Speaker 4: victims of domestic violence. But obviously then and recanting the
Speaker 4: claims takes away some credibility from the claims. Now Mills
Speaker 4: has not been arrested, and this is interesting. Officers, as
Speaker 4: the Independent says, quote initially classified the cause of family disturbant,
Speaker 4: though after Commander's reviewed investigative materials, it was reclassified as
Speaker 4: a domestic violent assault investigation. But Raviani now says that
Speaker 4: there was no physical altercation at all. She was drinking
Speaker 4: and sleep deprived and that explains why she made the allegations.
Speaker 4: She says the bruises came during a recent trip to
Speaker 4: Dubai and we're not from Corey Mills. Now Ed Martin,
Speaker 4: who is the interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia, Columbia,
Speaker 4: so here in DC is really hardcore maga ideologue. Trump
Speaker 4: appointed him last month. He has The Florida Democratic Party
Speaker 4: will add this from the Independent has accused Martin of
Speaker 4: quote running cover ups for Republicans, but he is not
Speaker 4: obviously not bringing He's not arresting Mills.
Speaker 1: So far he has, yeah, he has paused the The
Speaker 1: d C asked d C, which is not charged, right, DC,
Speaker 1: which is not a state, asked Martin to sign off
Speaker 1: on an arrest warrant for Mills and the Mills office,
Speaker 1: uh not Mills office. Martin's office refused to do so
Speaker 1: and said they want further investigation here. What's what's so
Speaker 1: incredible here, it's it's not it's not unprecedent, but it's unusual.
Speaker 1: They have him on witness tampering and obstruction of justice,
Speaker 1: dead to rights because the police officers were there with
Speaker 1: Mills on the phone, with Mills telling his girlfriend Rabbiani
Speaker 1: to quote lie about the origin of for bruises. That's
Speaker 1: witness tampering and obstruction of justice, like just even if
Speaker 1: you don't have anything else, if you're hold to lie,
Speaker 1: and also obviously.
Speaker 4: And then you lie, then you change your story lie.
Speaker 1: Then obviously if if you're being if he is telling
Speaker 1: her to lie about the origins, that is also a
Speaker 1: confession of where they actually came from. And also it
Speaker 1: doesn't make any sense like she had According to the
Speaker 1: police report, which was altered twice, the bruises to the
Speaker 1: officers appeared to be fresh. Everybody in a jury would
Speaker 1: know what a fresh bruise looks like, and you would
Speaker 1: know what a bruise that you got in Dubai the
Speaker 1: day before looks like. And so then when she comes
Speaker 1: back and says, actually it came from somewhere else, not
Speaker 1: what I originally said. After she told she showed that
Speaker 1: she let the officers listen to the claim.
Speaker 4: But what did they hear? That's the thing, like, we
Speaker 4: don't even.
Speaker 1: Know, right, I mean, they should tell a grand jury,
Speaker 1: get an arrest warrant, but Martin is going to block that.
Speaker 1: Martin is the guy who yesterday the day before tweeted,
Speaker 1: I am the President. We are the President's legal team,
Speaker 1: and we look forward to defending the president at all costs. No, what, No,
Speaker 1: that's not what you are Well, it's.
Speaker 4: Sort of true in a technical sense if you look
Speaker 4: at what the role is like. In a technical sense,
Speaker 4: if you are in that position, it is your job
Speaker 4: to defend the executive branch and the constitution people versus Yeah. Right, yeah,
Speaker 4: So there's like a technical world in which that's right.
Speaker 4: The spirit of it, though, looks like from what he said,
Speaker 4: it looks like, what's the best way to put it,
Speaker 4: like special privileges to the president and then.
Speaker 1: Also to his wife beating oh, fellow party members. Because
Speaker 1: the key, as we talked about in day Block, they
Speaker 1: passed this budget by the skin of their teeth if
Speaker 1: one vote had gone in an opposite direction. So so
Speaker 1: does he.
Speaker 4: Now bring charges after the budget resolution vote is over.
Speaker 1: But they're going to need him again over and over.
Speaker 4: But they could replace him pretty easily.
Speaker 1: Takes a while, and so then you're down to vote
Speaker 1: for that stretch of time. So I would imagine they're
Speaker 1: going to just prop them up just because they want
Speaker 1: to vote, just like they did with George Santos even
Speaker 1: though they didn't want him there. He probably he said, look,
Speaker 1: i'll vote. You have a tiny majority I'll vote your way,
Speaker 1: just keep me out of prison as long as you can.
Speaker 4: Well, actually they regret now most I mean I think
Speaker 4: if you talk to most like Maga Hill Republicans, they
Speaker 4: will say they actually regret getting rid of Santos when
Speaker 4: they did, they could have actually used him.
Speaker 1: One they got Swozy in there.
Speaker 4: Well yeah, but also they feel like they could have
Speaker 4: used him longer on votes and it would have been
Speaker 4: more beneficial.
Speaker 1: So this time, yeah, let's see. It's if there's any
Speaker 1: equitable justice at all, or if if you're in DC
Speaker 1: and you're Republican, laws don't apply to you, and what
Speaker 1: Trump say, if you're if you're saving the country, you
Speaker 1: violate no law. Who's people assume that just applied to Trump?
Speaker 1: Why would Trump not apply that same rationale to anybody
Speaker 1: who's going to vote with Trump to quote unquote save
Speaker 1: the country. Corey Mill is going to vote with Trump.
Speaker 1: Corey Mills can violate no law.
Speaker 4: It's actually a really good callback, an important callback. If
Speaker 4: that's the mentality spreading in MAGA world, and there's again
Speaker 4: they will the charitable interpretation of it is you violate
Speaker 4: no law if you are acting in the spirit of
Speaker 4: the Constitution. And you're you eventually it's upheld right in
Speaker 4: the court of law whatever. But that's definitely not that's
Speaker 4: that's definitely not the the I would say best interpretation,
Speaker 4: or that's definitely not you can't just default to that
Speaker 4: charitable interpretation in the case of Musk in particular reposting
Speaker 4: that gleefully so especially we were talking about Bikelley early
Speaker 4: in the show and all of that stuff. So anyway,
Speaker 4: the last thing I want to say is it's rather
Speaker 4: interesting that she is the head of a group called
Speaker 4: the Iranians for Trump. That may or may not have
Speaker 4: anything to do with this, but it does add an
Speaker 4: element of potential foreign questions that are raised, espionage questions
Speaker 4: that can potentially be raised. But it also at this
Speaker 4: point just looks like there's clearly enough evidence if they
Speaker 4: have a police report where police are listening, the police
Speaker 4: are involved in a call, so they should have a
Speaker 4: record of a call. They have testimony of the officers
Speaker 4: who were listening to a call in which he instructed
Speaker 4: her to lie, meaning those bruises were not from Dubai,
Speaker 4: and then her story changes after the call. There seems
Speaker 4: to be plenty of evidence in that case to actually
Speaker 4: bring charges. Now, maybe Ed Martin and the police department
Speaker 4: knows something that we don't. That seems unlikely at this point.
Speaker 4: It is always a possibility maybe they know something that
Speaker 4: we don't. But at the same time, what we're seeing
Speaker 4: also does look like a fairly tragic, conventional domestic abuse situation,
Speaker 4: where you have a woman who is pressured and bullied
Speaker 4: out of holding to allegations that end up with her
Speaker 4: significant other going being arrested. So it's not a typical
Speaker 4: of how people who are experiencing that kind of trauma handle.
Speaker 4: The situation just appears on his face to be a
Speaker 4: really really sad story and one with political implications.
Speaker 1: And also somebody who runs Runnians for Trump. Yes, it's
Speaker 1: just interesting in itself.
Speaker 4: It's a very interesting group.
Speaker 1: Washington is Yeah, Yeah, Washington is filled with interesting people.
Speaker 4: It sure is, sure is Ryan. I'm really looking forward
Speaker 4: to the Friday edition of the show. I'm sad that
Speaker 4: I can't stick around for it. But this is a
Speaker 4: huge interview. I mean, Wall Street should be eager to
Speaker 4: tune in to Fry It counterpoints Friday this week.
Speaker 1: If you if you're a banker, plunk down your your
Speaker 1: your premium subs, so you can watch this watch this
Speaker 1: one early.
Speaker 4: Curious what his because so we had Doha Mechi on
Speaker 4: last week. People should go watch that edition of the
Speaker 4: Wednesday Show. But I'm curious what he makes of what
Speaker 4: he thinks. Andrew Ferguson will continue to do in his
Speaker 4: role at the FTC because he should have some good
Speaker 4: insight into the new Brandyceians, So the sort of progressive
Speaker 4: legal world and the maga legal world, the like new
Speaker 4: the conservative Yeah, the Conservatives, they mingle, they know each other.
Speaker 4: So that's an interesting Uh. I wonder what he thinks
Speaker 4: about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is the guy that Jamie Diamond called an
Speaker 1: arrogant s O B and Mark Zuckerberg said is just
Speaker 1: how to destroy America.
Speaker 4: So we will see how he responds to that, because
Speaker 4: I know you're gonna ask him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, stick around, we'll see you on Friday