Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics. Well,
Speaker 1: we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's
Speaker 1: best minds, and George Floyd's family has filed a two
Speaker 1: and fifty million dollar lawsuit against Kanye West. What a
Speaker 1: great show we have today, covers Woman Mickey Sharrell, who
Speaker 1: represents New Jersey's eleventh congressional district, stops by to talk
Speaker 1: to us about a host of issues that will speak
Speaker 1: to Rachel bad and Karen Demursim. We're gonna discuss their
Speaker 1: new book Unchecked, the untold story behind Congress's botched impeachments
Speaker 1: of Donald Trump. But first we have MSNBC anchor Laurence o'donald.
Speaker 1: Welcome to fask Politics, Laurence so o'donald, great to be here.
Speaker 1: I am so excited. I know it's weird to be
Speaker 1: interviewed when you interview, but you know, it's just very
Speaker 1: exciting for me. I might be more comfortable with it
Speaker 1: this way. I find the interviewer position unnatural. I guess
Speaker 1: that is extremely interesting. I've written to you and talked
Speaker 1: to you about this. I'm like so stuck on this
Speaker 1: idea that American politics seems to be getting worse. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well you're stuck on the correct idea. Congratulations, stay stuck there,
Speaker 1: and it's much much worse. And what's odd about it
Speaker 1: is unlike cancer, this stuff is supposed to get better
Speaker 1: over time. When I was growing up in a thoroughly
Speaker 1: racist environment in Boston, you know, in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: you could watch, you know, from the beginning of that
Speaker 1: decade to the end of that decade something you would
Speaker 1: call progress, I mean real progress, but it was it
Speaker 1: was still terrible by the way. You know, by the
Speaker 1: end of the decade, it was still terrible. But then
Speaker 1: you moved through the next decade, the seventies, and you know,
Speaker 1: things were rough and they were ugly. There was a
Speaker 1: lot of ugly stuff in there, but it was getting
Speaker 1: better and enlightenment was either taking over or dominating. And
Speaker 1: I just mean that, for example, just in the vocabulary
Speaker 1: of the way the world was, which is which may
Speaker 1: be hard for people to believe, but you know, in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties and seventies, racist language was the norm
Speaker 1: in white America. Anti Semitic language was the norm. I
Speaker 1: don't think they even felt mean in any way when
Speaker 1: they were using the N word. That was the word.
Speaker 1: There was no other word, you know, for a very
Speaker 1: long time. And I watched people who were stuck in
Speaker 1: that language move out of that language over a you know,
Speaker 1: fifteen twenty year period, and I watched life get more liberal.
Speaker 1: I watched Row versus way it happened. And so I
Speaker 1: was a kid, so I didn't really, you know, think
Speaker 1: about in real terms the way life was before Row
Speaker 1: versus Way. But but I understood as soon as it happened,
Speaker 1: you know that it was a big deal, and it
Speaker 1: seemed inevitable. It's it seemed absolutely inevitable. And you have
Speaker 1: to know ro versus way it is as you know,
Speaker 1: early nineteen seventies, just a couple of year years before that,
Speaker 1: it was ill legal, illegal to sell contraception in the
Speaker 1: state of Massachusetts. Okay, the place that everyone thinks is
Speaker 1: the most liberal place in the planet, And maybe it is,
Speaker 1: and maybe it was generally more liberal than the rest
Speaker 1: of the country then, but you know, right up until
Speaker 1: the late nineteen sixties, it was illegal to sell a condom.
Speaker 1: Having lived through all that and watched all that, and
Speaker 1: watched these kind of I wouldn't call them roadblocks to progress,
Speaker 1: but slow downs, you know, like the Reagan election. In
Speaker 1: the Reagan years become a kind of slow down to
Speaker 1: what would have been happening if Democrats were in office,
Speaker 1: but really just to slow down, you know. I mean,
Speaker 1: they weren't trying to reverse anything really that had happened
Speaker 1: in the progressive Enlightenment era. And so it's always been
Speaker 1: moving through my whole lifetime. It's always been moving towards
Speaker 1: this area of more enlightenment and more liberal freedom on
Speaker 1: things like you know, reproductive rights and all up. And
Speaker 1: to see it stopped and to see it reversed is
Speaker 1: just stunning. And so, yes, it is worse. It is
Speaker 1: worse right now than it was ten years ago. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I can't figure out if this is like my personal
Speaker 1: failing or if it's like a larger failing on the
Speaker 1: part of all of us. But I do believe that
Speaker 1: after Trump got defeated, I really thought, Okay, now we
Speaker 1: can start to put things back together. But the message
Speaker 1: that the Republican Party got was if you double down,
Speaker 1: the base will let you get away with anything. Well,
Speaker 1: of course, because the kind of elections that are decisive
Speaker 1: and decisive in the thinking of the losing party are
Speaker 1: like the nineteen sixty four election. You know, when LBJ
Speaker 1: just crushes the Republican Barry gold Water on a combination
Speaker 1: of factors including a massive kind of UH sympathy after
Speaker 1: the jfk assassination. You know, Ronald Reagan four Reagan one
Speaker 1: forty nine states, Richard Nixon won forty nine states on
Speaker 1: the Republican side, and Democrats, you know, had to seriously
Speaker 1: rethink what they were doing and how they were approaching it.
Speaker 1: When it's close, nobody rethinks anything, you know, and it's
Speaker 1: like what it's what it's like, Oh, if you flip
Speaker 1: sixty thousand votes in Ohio, John Kerry is president. What
Speaker 1: that tells you is the Democrats didn't do anything wrong
Speaker 1: in that election. They didn't do anything wrong at all.
Speaker 1: They got, you know, basically the same thing as the
Speaker 1: other side got, but the other side got the presidency.
Speaker 1: There was no lesson for Republicans in the last election
Speaker 1: that they've got to change everything. You know, they came
Speaker 1: pretty close, and Trump is a tremendous turnout machine for
Speaker 1: their vote, and so you would have had to see
Speaker 1: kind of a giant repudiation and you you would have
Speaker 1: had to see something like you know, Texas flip Democrat.
Speaker 1: You know, things like that have to happen if they're
Speaker 1: going to happen to pull the Republicans off the track
Speaker 1: there on that. I have a friend, David from who
Speaker 1: has this theory, and I'm not sure that it is,
Speaker 1: but it's this theory that if you lose three elections
Speaker 1: in a row, your party starts to really rethink things
Speaker 1: that would be this election. I mean, do you think
Speaker 1: that's fantasyland? I don't think any of our previous formulations
Speaker 1: work now. And so I get what David is saying.
Speaker 1: In the pre Trump era, you could certainly plot that,
Speaker 1: you know, you could. You could say, look, the Democrats
Speaker 1: lost three in a row, and then they went with
Speaker 1: this other concept, which was Bill Clinton. That might be
Speaker 1: hard for people to realize this, but he was outside
Speaker 1: of the main stream of the Democratic Party at the time.
Speaker 1: He was certainly outside of what had felt like the
Speaker 1: dominant Kennedy version of the Democratic Party, and he was
Speaker 1: presenting himself as a conservative Democrat. And that was just
Speaker 1: Betham amatically considered unlikely to succeed in the primaries. And
Speaker 1: it did. And that happened according to David's theory, after
Speaker 1: three losses in a row. But I think the Trump
Speaker 1: era changes all all predictability. And you know, the predictability
Speaker 1: of politics used to be like being the local weatherman
Speaker 1: in San Diego. It was just, you know, there's never
Speaker 1: gonna be a hurricane, there's never gonna be it's gonna
Speaker 1: be sunny. It's gonna be in the eighties. And that's
Speaker 1: the story for three hundred days a year. And there's
Speaker 1: gonna be a couple of days of rain here and there,
Speaker 1: and that's it, you know. And so we've gone from
Speaker 1: politics being like meteorology in San Diego to it being
Speaker 1: absolute and utter chaos, and none of the predictive tools
Speaker 1: work in the era of Trump. So that's a really
Speaker 1: good point and something I want to talk to you
Speaker 1: about because so we have all these polls. Now we're
Speaker 1: in this like anxiety provoking lead up to the election,
Speaker 1: to this midterm election. You know how much anxiety I'm
Speaker 1: feeling about the midterm election? How much we why as
Speaker 1: I I simply don't allow it. It's it's an active
Speaker 1: will and um because um it's maddening. You can't figure
Speaker 1: it out. So you know it's you know, a month
Speaker 1: ago you're going to get these poles sales at the
Speaker 1: Democrats have this advantage, and then you're gonna get one
Speaker 1: that says Republicans have. It's way too complex an electoral
Speaker 1: you know, chessboard to ever figure out, So I just
Speaker 1: ignore it until the election happens. It's it's just, you know,
Speaker 1: it's one of those things that you can, as I think,
Speaker 1: I suspect you do, spend most of your day agonizing
Speaker 1: about it if you allow it, or there's the sanity choice,
Speaker 1: which is ignore it and vote and hope everyone else
Speaker 1: does know. It's true. Historically there were times when you
Speaker 1: really could trust polls. That is not now. Well, look,
Speaker 1: the most shocking congressional election in history, by far, much
Speaker 1: more shocking than anything we've seen in this century, was,
Speaker 1: you know, Bill Clinton had been president for two years.
Speaker 1: The House of Representatives had a Democratic margin that was gigantic.
Speaker 1: I mean just you never even wondered about any votes
Speaker 1: in the House Representative. You had, you had a bunch
Speaker 1: of Democrats who you didn't need, you know, to vote.
Speaker 1: We had fifty seven Democrats in the Senate and there
Speaker 1: were very few clothes votes. You've rarely needed sixty votes for.
Speaker 1: And so we went into that election night, you know,
Speaker 1: with fifty seven Democrats in the Senate, a massive House
Speaker 1: majority of Democrats, which by the way, had been the
Speaker 1: House majority for my entire lifetime at the time. Okay,
Speaker 1: my entire lifetime. You hadn't had a Republican Speaker of
Speaker 1: the House since the nineteen fifties. There were no predictions
Speaker 1: about the Republicans winning anything. And the Republicans won the
Speaker 1: Senate and the House. They won the House of Representatives
Speaker 1: for the first time in my lifetime. And it's impossible
Speaker 1: for me to describe the shock to you of of
Speaker 1: what that was. I was working in the Senator time,
Speaker 1: and the way I found out was Bob Dole's chief staff,
Speaker 1: who was he was the Republican leader of the Senate
Speaker 1: at the time, called me up in the middle of
Speaker 1: the afternoon saying, we won the Senate. And I was
Speaker 1: absolutely stunned because no one had predicted it. There's no
Speaker 1: pundit who can raise his or her hand and say
Speaker 1: I predicted n So I lived through that. Okay. That
Speaker 1: is the reason why I have never once, never, once
Speaker 1: thought about congressional elections since ever, because it's just way
Speaker 1: too complex. And I saw this, I saw you know,
Speaker 1: a snowstorm in Hawaii in like the Republicans won the
Speaker 1: House of Representatives. That was it was just a commandment
Speaker 1: that I was not allowed to happen. And so you know,
Speaker 1: nothing that happens now is nearly as shocking as that
Speaker 1: in terms of surprising electoral results. No, and I that
Speaker 1: is a really good point, and I think important. And
Speaker 1: one of my favorite things about you is that you
Speaker 1: and I tried to do this too. Though I don't
Speaker 1: have the same kind of like command of history, but
Speaker 1: you do have this really important historical perspective which always
Speaker 1: bring in which is incredibly important because it's you know,
Speaker 1: you know, it's how we got here. But I'm curious,
Speaker 1: like with Marjorie Taylor Green, she was first a sort
Speaker 1: of I know, I hate talking about her because she's
Speaker 1: just not a person worthy of wasting time on because
Speaker 1: but she does show where the Republican Party is right now.
Speaker 1: Is sort of making overtures to McCarthy already that if
Speaker 1: Republicans win the House, she's gonna want to be on
Speaker 1: the judiciary. She's gonna want she you know, she is
Speaker 1: going to want to be a major player. She's owed that.
Speaker 1: How do you think that plays out, and more importantly,
Speaker 1: I mean, what does that say. It says that the Republicans,
Speaker 1: Congressional Republicans are the Yippies of the twenty one century.
Speaker 1: This is as if you know, Abby Hoffman was Speaker
Speaker 1: of the House, and you know Jerry Ruben was majority
Speaker 1: of the you know, because they were just wonderfully fun
Speaker 1: you know, protesters of the Vietnam War, and they were
Speaker 1: not the organized They weren't going for the organized, careful
Speaker 1: demonstrations that would make a point and change people's minds.
Speaker 1: They were going for chaos, like the camera will be
Speaker 1: attracted to chaos. We will. We will give them chaos.
Speaker 1: And so they tried to outdo each other all the time.
Speaker 1: You know, the Hippies were always trying to updo what
Speaker 1: they had just done. You know, their version of a
Speaker 1: peace protest was to levitate surround the Pentagon and levitate it,
Speaker 1: and they insisted at work that it went up like
Speaker 1: an inch or something. So arth Telly Green, It's that
Speaker 1: stuff was never permissible in politics. You know, in politics,
Speaker 1: you were doomed if they could ever attach the phrase
Speaker 1: flip flop to you, if it's ever like well, you know,
Speaker 1: he was in favor of this, and then he voted
Speaker 1: the other way. And with Republicans, you know, since Trump,
Speaker 1: it has just become this kind of circus act of
Speaker 1: being outrageous. The reward and the money, the contributions come
Speaker 1: from being outrageous and outrageous was what Rush Limbaugh discovered.
Speaker 1: A pot of golden Trump discovered an electoral pot of
Speaker 1: gold with Republican voters in being outrageous. And the mission
Speaker 1: of being outrageous is to outrage you. It is to
Speaker 1: outrage you know, the Manhattan Liberal Democrat. It is to
Speaker 1: outrage all liberals. Is to outrage all Democrats, and so
Speaker 1: it works for them. If Marjorie Taylor Green says some
Speaker 1: anti Semitic thing and she has done, and you know
Speaker 1: the Democrats condemned her, that actually works for her and
Speaker 1: she fundraises of that. Yeah, sadly, that's the poison that
Speaker 1: centered the system, is that, you know, one of the
Speaker 1: parties has an electorate. And by the way, it's entirely
Speaker 1: the electorate's fault. Okay, Marjorie Taylor Green did not create herself. Okay,
Speaker 1: the voters of that district said, we want a dangerous lunatic.
Speaker 1: We think that will be fun. Kelly McCarthy is the
Speaker 1: most cowardly human being who has ever taken an oath
Speaker 1: of office, and he's doing what his voters want him to.
Speaker 1: And so the problem is you've got these seventy million
Speaker 1: or so American voters who think outrage and Trump is
Speaker 1: the thing that they want, and that is a disaster
Speaker 1: and that is unfixable. The problem is the voters. No,
Speaker 1: but that's not if we We've had this conversation before.
Speaker 1: The problem is the voters, yes, but now what, Well,
Speaker 1: you have to win at the margins. That's the problem.
Speaker 1: So the struggle becomes you know you're gonna win by
Speaker 1: one point. There's never gonna be you know, one of
Speaker 1: these landslide things again. You know that's never gonna happen.
Speaker 1: So you have to go and win by one point
Speaker 1: everywhere you can. And you have to go and win
Speaker 1: by one point in every congressional district that you can.
Speaker 1: And very importantly, and this is the part that the
Speaker 1: media ignores, you have to go and win at the
Speaker 1: state legislature level by one point in every district that
Speaker 1: you can. There are some districts in Pennsylvania this year,
Speaker 1: you know, state legislative districts that can be won by
Speaker 1: Democrats by one point. If they do, you know, that
Speaker 1: has a remarkable effect in the country, which it should
Speaker 1: not have, right, but the effect that it has is
Speaker 1: it kind of assures that Pennsylvania won't go insane at
Speaker 1: some level and try to flip its electoral votes, you know,
Speaker 1: to a Republican through a legislative action down the road somewhere.
Speaker 1: It's just gonna be, you know, clinging to the wreckage
Speaker 1: that Trump has created for the foreseeable decades and trying
Speaker 1: to win by one point. Okay, does Donald Trump go
Speaker 1: to jail? No, Donald Trump will not go to jail
Speaker 1: because you cannot practically jail a former president. If you
Speaker 1: sentence a former president to jail, you're sentencing a minimum
Speaker 1: of twelve Secret Service agents a day to jail. So
Speaker 1: they're not going to do that. What will happen is
Speaker 1: if he has given a criminal sentence that includes a fine,
Speaker 1: and the confinement part of the sentence will be home confinement,
Speaker 1: which simply means he can't go do rallies. He basically
Speaker 1: has been living in home confinement, you know, since the
Speaker 1: president and he they would also say pick a home
Speaker 1: you know, because you can't go back and forth to
Speaker 1: New Jersey and stuff, and so to be home confinement
Speaker 1: and the Secret Service would then in effect become both
Speaker 1: his protectors and his jailers. Jesus, you know he'll have
Speaker 1: to spend summers in Florida. Yes, that's that is prison
Speaker 1: to Trump. That is correct, that's it exactly, Laurence o'donnald,
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for joining us. This is really great,
Speaker 1: my pleasure. Congresswoman Mikey Sharrell represents New Jersey's eleventh district.
Speaker 1: Welcome to fast Politics, Mikey cheryld Well, it is great
Speaker 1: to be a fast politics. I really appreciate you have
Speaker 1: a me Molly. Yeah, you have to talk really fast.
Speaker 1: We do this all at wanted to help speeding to go.
Speaker 1: I love it. I love it. I'm always being taught,
Speaker 1: you know. I'm from Jersey, so I'm always being told
Speaker 1: to slow down. So first I want to talk to
Speaker 1: you about I'm going to congratulate you for having your
Speaker 1: district shift to safe democratic. Thank you very much. Not
Speaker 1: taking anything for granted here, But no, it doesn't feel
Speaker 1: like that kind of cycle. It just feels like so
Speaker 1: much is still up in the air. In a way,
Speaker 1: that my other races did not feel like this, like
Speaker 1: so much was still so unsettled with less than a
Speaker 1: month to the election. Yeah, it does feel like that.
Speaker 1: I mean, do you feel anxiety at all about like
Speaker 1: what happened in in the gubernatorial in New Jersey? Oh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think everyone in New Jersey is a little less
Speaker 1: scarred from that. Yeah, a point where you know, there
Speaker 1: are people in districts that are far more blue than
Speaker 1: mine that are spending quite a bit of money. And
Speaker 1: I was on the floor with them on the house
Speaker 1: and some somebody from California was like, well, turned to
Speaker 1: him and said, well, you're fine, right, And he's like, no,
Speaker 1: I'm spending millions. Like we're all we we all are
Speaker 1: really concerned that. You know, the electorate feels very uneasy.
Speaker 1: People feel oh like that they I mean, let's face it,
Speaker 1: families have had a really tough couple of years. I
Speaker 1: have four kids for school aged kids. We've had a
Speaker 1: rough couple of years. And I think we're still um,
Speaker 1: we're still finding our footing even after COVID and then
Speaker 1: of course to come out of COVID and then have
Speaker 1: the economy and the economic problems we're having and then
Speaker 1: as a woman, and I don't think it's just women,
Speaker 1: you know, as we talked to people across my districts,
Speaker 1: it's really everyone. But to really feel like the protections
Speaker 1: and the freedoms that you've enjoyed for fifty years now
Speaker 1: just suddenly have gone up in smoke. And these weren't
Speaker 1: just sort of laws, but but constitutional protections. The feeling
Speaker 1: that your rights were and should be embedded in our
Speaker 1: constitution and to see that that's now just gone and
Speaker 1: your children aren't going to be able to rely on that.
Speaker 1: And I have, you know, a daughter in high school,
Speaker 1: you know where is it okay for her to go
Speaker 1: to college? Now? I I talked to women, what if
Speaker 1: you get a you know what if you're doing great
Speaker 1: at your job here in Jersey and you get a
Speaker 1: great promotion and they want you to move out to Ohio?
Speaker 1: Is that okay? I have a ten year old daughter.
Speaker 1: Do I want to raise a ten year old girl
Speaker 1: in Ohio? Right now? After we saw the horrible, horrible
Speaker 1: situation where a ten year old was raped and impregnated
Speaker 1: and the state basically said the response was that that
Speaker 1: child had to bear a pregnancy to term. I mean,
Speaker 1: I mean these are the things that people are sort
Speaker 1: of grappling with. Yeah, it's interesting to me because the
Speaker 1: thing that I don't think Republicans saw coming when they
Speaker 1: were so hot to take away or bodily autonomy was
Speaker 1: that doctors would not treat women. And you're seeing this
Speaker 1: in these red states. Yeah, and yet they're not addressing it.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is you know, I remember there was
Speaker 1: a program I was listening to about a woman who
Speaker 1: two times had a pregnancy that unfortunately fairly late in
Speaker 1: the pregnancy, they couldn't find a heartbeat. And I think
Speaker 1: anyone who's had a child, and many people have had miscarriages,
Speaker 1: you just know that that devastation and that fear. And
Speaker 1: so she she had that experience twice, once before the
Speaker 1: protections under row were lifted in the dab's decision, and
Speaker 1: once after. And the treatment at the hospital was night
Speaker 1: and day between being admitted and being cared for and
Speaker 1: given pain medication and mental health support. And then the
Speaker 1: difference was the second time being based sickly sent home
Speaker 1: and her husband was afraid that she might bleed out
Speaker 1: and die, and almost no sympathy for that at the hospital.
Speaker 1: And it's just shocking and and yet when you talk
Speaker 1: to Texas legislature, you know you hear story from Texas
Speaker 1: Texas legislators. Well, that wasn't the attention. I'm sure it'll
Speaker 1: work itself out. I mean, can you imagine if you're
Speaker 1: pregnant right now in Texas thinking, oh, okay, just wait
Speaker 1: till it works itself out, and let's pray to God
Speaker 1: I don't die in anytime. Yeah, no, I can. And
Speaker 1: in fact, we're seeing this in Alabama. We're seeing this
Speaker 1: in lots of red states where doctors are refusing to
Speaker 1: treat because they're worried about losing losing their licenses, which,
Speaker 1: if you go back to seventy three, was the reason
Speaker 1: that ultimately Row was decided so broadly was because you
Speaker 1: had doctors who were afraid to trade. You had Republican
Speaker 1: politicians deciding women's health. So I do think it is
Speaker 1: a really important subject. But I even want to get
Speaker 1: like further into this with you, because you have that,
Speaker 1: but then you also have like there are some like
Speaker 1: there are some real extremists in the Republican Party. In fact,
Speaker 1: forty eight out of fifties states have election deniers running
Speaker 1: in the Republican Party. I mean how do you like
Speaker 1: just talk to me about this, like terrifying precipice we're on.
Speaker 1: Oh gosh, you know, I'm so sarcastic usually, And when
Speaker 1: you said there are extremists in the Republican Party, I
Speaker 1: wanted to say something snarky, but I didn't because it's
Speaker 1: so scary. It's just not something that you can poke
Speaker 1: fun at, because it's really really threatening to our country,
Speaker 1: is really threatening to what we believe in. I think
Speaker 1: what people are missing here. And I've been thinking, as
Speaker 1: you can imagine, because I was on the floor of
Speaker 1: the house on January six, and I was in the
Speaker 1: group in the balcony and the gallery we call it,
Speaker 1: and when that was the last group to be evacuated
Speaker 1: because on that floor we could not find a safe
Speaker 1: route out for a while. And and so I've been thinking,
Speaker 1: you know, so much about that day and the aftermath,
Speaker 1: and then watching the hearings and and how intentional all
Speaker 1: this was and thinking about it, and I think what
Speaker 1: people are missing, this critical piece that people are maybe
Speaker 1: taking for granted, is this idea of why democracy is
Speaker 1: so critically important. It's and and the reason we respect
Speaker 1: our founding father so much for for bringing our democracy
Speaker 1: into being is because for the first time in hundreds
Speaker 1: of years, there's a group of people putting that much
Speaker 1: faith in human individuals, saying your voice is important, your
Speaker 1: thoughts are important, and you, each and every one of
Speaker 1: you can decide what kind of government you want, who
Speaker 1: you want in government, what you want to do with
Speaker 1: your life, the job you want, you know. After after
Speaker 1: they came from places and their ancestors came from places
Speaker 1: with some monarch that was supposedly chosen by God and
Speaker 1: was better than everybody else in leadership, they decided, no,
Speaker 1: we're gonna put our faith in humans with the understanding
Speaker 1: that they're equal and they each have a voice and
Speaker 1: a right to speak and a right to you know,
Speaker 1: engage in the marketplace of ideas, so together we can
Speaker 1: all come up with a path forward here. And what
Speaker 1: people seem to me to be sort of indiscriminately willing
Speaker 1: to throw away is that idea. And and I think
Speaker 1: people feel in some of these places and on the
Speaker 1: far right, that they're willing to do it because they're
Speaker 1: going to get their guy into power, and their guy
Speaker 1: is never going to leave, and it's going to be
Speaker 1: some autocracy that that we have to suffer under But
Speaker 1: I would just direct you to what life is like
Speaker 1: under Putin. I would direct you to consider what it's
Speaker 1: like when you don't like what the government's doing and
Speaker 1: if you speak out on it, you could go to
Speaker 1: jail for years, or what it's like when you you
Speaker 1: don't get to have a free economy. Everything is filter
Speaker 1: it up to the top to the oligarchs and they
Speaker 1: take everything and you you can't have any sort of
Speaker 1: robust economy or middle class. I just I think people
Speaker 1: are not taking into accounts sometimes. And this is really
Speaker 1: a struggle because I grew up during the Cold War
Speaker 1: and it was so obvious when you looked at the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union. But people are not understanding what sets democracies
Speaker 1: apart and why it is worth everything we have to
Speaker 1: protect it. Yeah. I want to talk to you about
Speaker 1: January six for a minute, because one of the things
Speaker 1: you said early on that actually came back, has come
Speaker 1: back many times, is that you saw a member of
Speaker 1: Congress giving a reconnaissance tour. Can we talk about that
Speaker 1: for a minute. Sure, you have a background in national security,
Speaker 1: you know what you're talking about. Can you expand on
Speaker 1: this a little bit? I entered into the military basically
Speaker 1: when I started at the Naval Academy when I was eighteen.
Speaker 1: I went to the Naval Academy for four years and
Speaker 1: then served in the Navy for almost ten years. And
Speaker 1: I served in places all over the world, and we
Speaker 1: would always have security briefings, even you know, in Pencil Caul, Florida,
Speaker 1: I remember getting a security briefing and, um, you know,
Speaker 1: you talk about seem strange things if if they're the
Speaker 1: same person is sort of loitering at the gate for
Speaker 1: no reason and maybe taking pictures of odd stuff. Report that,
Speaker 1: you know that look for the thing that sticks out
Speaker 1: and seems odd to you and don't assume that it's nothing.
Speaker 1: You know, you have a duty to report to protect
Speaker 1: in this case when I was in the military, that
Speaker 1: you know, national security. And so on January five, the
Speaker 1: Capitol which had been closed to visitors, and I I
Speaker 1: don't you know, I think people kind of hear that,
Speaker 1: but maybe don't get it. You know. Ben mccadams, who
Speaker 1: was a member from Utah, had his daughter and my
Speaker 1: daughter who were the same age, and he was showing
Speaker 1: them around the capital and he was stopped and told
Speaker 1: that he could be in the capital. But the two
Speaker 1: girls couldn't and they were fifteen, they were, you know,
Speaker 1: not adults, you know, they were they were and Archise said,
Speaker 1: you know this, this is my kid, this is representative
Speaker 1: shows and they said, no, it's closed, so they had
Speaker 1: to leave. So it's really notable on January five to
Speaker 1: see these tour groups and to see them going in
Speaker 1: weird places and the tunnels, you know, and really kind
Speaker 1: of you know, quite frankly boring places when everything shut,
Speaker 1: the offices weren't open, and wandering around in these kind
Speaker 1: of odd places where you don't normally see these kind
Speaker 1: of groups of tourists, So especially when the capital was closed,
Speaker 1: and I, you know, I noted it and I thought
Speaker 1: it was odd. And then the next day the attacks happened,
Speaker 1: the attack on the Capitol happened, and people then started reporting,
Speaker 1: um like I just remember Jim Clyburn saying, and I
Speaker 1: remember it because it was true. He goes and they
Speaker 1: came right up to my office, right they knew where
Speaker 1: the offices were, and you guys don't even know where
Speaker 1: his office is and where my office is, and you
Speaker 1: guys can never even find my office. I remember thinking
Speaker 1: to myself that's right. I don't know where his office,
Speaker 1: so I know he was right, and they found it
Speaker 1: right away, and they had had prior intelligence. So I reported,
Speaker 1: and I said, and I simply said, I want to
Speaker 1: know who let those groups into the capital and what
Speaker 1: they were doing. And because of that, some representatives filed
Speaker 1: an ethics complaint against me and the thirty other members
Speaker 1: who had filed that request, saying we were impugning the
Speaker 1: reputation of the House for simply asking what those groups
Speaker 1: were doing in the Capitol the day before it was attacked.
Speaker 1: And you never named who that congress person was right,
Speaker 1: because I, to be frank with you saw congress people
Speaker 1: and saw groups. And I know full well that if
Speaker 1: I saw a group of possibly buying supporters, I might say, hey,
Speaker 1: how are all of you doing today? You know, exciting
Speaker 1: to see you here? So I wanted an investigation. Sure enough,
Speaker 1: the investigation happened with the January six Committee. And then
Speaker 1: it turns out that one of the people, and this
Speaker 1: is what just shakes your faith in what's going on
Speaker 1: in some quarters of the far right, one of the
Speaker 1: people that was caught on tape giving a tour and
Speaker 1: one of the members of his tour actually attacked the
Speaker 1: Capitol the next day. One of those people was Representative
Speaker 1: louder Milk, who filed an ethics complain against me. Very
Speaker 1: louder Milk, that's the shamelessness that you see in certain quarters.
Speaker 1: Well it makes sense. I mean, that's the thing with
Speaker 1: these Republicans is like they do stuff like that. I mean,
Speaker 1: remember Biden gave the speech about election deniers, and immediately
Speaker 1: they were like, Biden is a Nazi, you know. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is just the way they're doing it now. By
Speaker 1: the way, louder Milk, I mean, these backbenchers who you
Speaker 1: would never know existed if it wasn't for the fact
Speaker 1: that they're involved in trying to overthrow the United States government.
Speaker 1: Has there been any punishment for any of the people
Speaker 1: not as of yet. Um, we've seen I think the
Speaker 1: January six Committee doing a really great job getting to
Speaker 1: the bottom of this. This is why we have to
Speaker 1: all work so hard to bring people together, because right
Speaker 1: now what's troubling is I think that's disqualifying. I think
Speaker 1: somebody lying about what he was doing in an investigation
Speaker 1: into why our capital building was being attacked. To me,
Speaker 1: that would disqualify you from serving in Congress, and certainly
Speaker 1: seems to be a violation of your constitutional duty, and
Speaker 1: so you would think the punishment at the least would
Speaker 1: be that he would be voted out of office. I
Speaker 1: don't get a sense that's necessarily going to happen, and
Speaker 1: so we will have to see going forward, as we
Speaker 1: continue to gather more information what the repercussions might be.
Speaker 1: But certainly it is troubling that some of the things
Speaker 1: we're seeing now are being weighed very differently in different
Speaker 1: districts across the nation. So talk to me a little
Speaker 1: bit about your opponent. He looks like a standard issue
Speaker 1: white guy, but tell me more he does, yeah, that
Speaker 1: very short hair. He's sort of not just sort of
Speaker 1: a standard issue white guy. He's a standard issue Republican
Speaker 1: right now. And that I mean, his positions are all
Speaker 1: over the map. He doesn't share the values of my
Speaker 1: district and New Jersey, you know, despite the fact that
Speaker 1: he says he is. He's in favor of the court
Speaker 1: overturning Row, and he's in favor of allowing states to
Speaker 1: ban abortion with no exceptions. That he is in fact
Speaker 1: per choice. How does that work? It sort of reminds
Speaker 1: me of the Supreme Court justices and their Senate hearing
Speaker 1: saying that Roe is settled law right, and then getting
Speaker 1: into office and and just you know, doing whatever they wanted.
Speaker 1: I mean, he seems to me to be somebody who
Speaker 1: will whatever he thinks it takes to get into office,
Speaker 1: and then we'll vote in lockstep with Republicans in Washington.
Speaker 1: So you know, here in my district, we were impacted
Speaker 1: worse by the state and local tax deduction cap, worse
Speaker 1: than almost any district in the nation. And you know,
Speaker 1: it really impacts our schools, our ability to fund a
Speaker 1: public school system. It impacts some of our communities have
Speaker 1: a real commitment to diversity in my district, and they're
Speaker 1: very concerned because they're seeing more people of color move
Speaker 1: out of their district than move in, in large part
Speaker 1: because retirees can't afford some of their taxes. Right now, Um,
Speaker 1: we're seeing it hit middle class families. Affordability is and
Speaker 1: always an issue here. And so he has complained about
Speaker 1: UM the state and local tax deduction cap, but then
Speaker 1: said he's in lockstep with Republicans and said that he
Speaker 1: doesn't think the federal government should pay state taxes UM
Speaker 1: in support of salt. So he really seems as if
Speaker 1: whichever audience or whatever you know, people are telling him,
Speaker 1: or if he's he's seeing that he's not got a
Speaker 1: good pathway to win on one issue, he changes what
Speaker 1: he's saying. I just want to back up on salt here,
Speaker 1: because this is a very dumb issue that's near and
Speaker 1: dear to my heart. Salt was originally crafted by Republicans
Speaker 1: to punish blue states. Yes, and I'm glad it's near
Speaker 1: and dear toar heart because I love to talk about
Speaker 1: salt because I have a bone to pick with anyone
Speaker 1: who doesn't think that it's a progressive value. Because here's
Speaker 1: that there are very few states in the nation. I
Speaker 1: think about six that run a progressive taxation system, and
Speaker 1: New Jersey is one of them. And the way we
Speaker 1: do that is through state and local taxes, which we
Speaker 1: invest in some of the nation's best public schools, are infrastructure,
Speaker 1: remediating pollution sites, headstart programs, pensions, um, you name it.
Speaker 1: We are working hard in New Jersey to make sure
Speaker 1: that people have a secure economic future and also have
Speaker 1: a great pathway for their kids and their families here.
Speaker 1: And we do that through state, local taxes. So this
Speaker 1: is taxed income. And because of it, and because our
Speaker 1: economy is one of the economies that really fuels the nation,
Speaker 1: we often pay more into the federal system than we
Speaker 1: get back, unlike states like Kentucky where Mitch McConnell lives,
Speaker 1: which are always taking a lot of federal support to
Speaker 1: run the state, or states across the South like Mississippi
Speaker 1: and Alabama, who take a lot of federal funding to
Speaker 1: run their states. So this was, yeah, an attack on
Speaker 1: blue states, an attack on states that run these systems.
Speaker 1: And now you're double taxing people. And my favorite thing
Speaker 1: is how supposedly if we ran our states better, we
Speaker 1: wouldn't need assault deduction. You know, yeah, if you spend
Speaker 1: less money on education, you wouldn't need it exactly. Well
Speaker 1: that's what I say. I say, Well, look, if you
Speaker 1: want to send your kids to school in Oklahoma, where
Speaker 1: sometimes the public schools are only going four days a
Speaker 1: week because they don't have the money, if that's how
Speaker 1: you want to run your state, then you know there
Speaker 1: are states that would do that for you. I mean,
Speaker 1: even the blue states that don't spend on education have
Speaker 1: really bad education. And I just think, you know, here's
Speaker 1: the thing. And here's part of the reason we fund
Speaker 1: the rest of the nation in places like New Jersey,
Speaker 1: because we put so much money into education. And so
Speaker 1: we have wonderful companies here, but I often ask them
Speaker 1: because there it is, you know there, it's a high
Speaker 1: cost of living to be here, And I say, you know,
Speaker 1: why did you locate your headquarters here in New Jersey?
Speaker 1: And company after company after company has told me it's
Speaker 1: because they can't get an educated workforce like they find here.
Speaker 1: They simply can't find the talented workforce that we have
Speaker 1: here in New Jersey. And believe me, we have had
Speaker 1: companies that have been lured away, you know, by states
Speaker 1: that have offered them the world because they pay on
Speaker 1: the snow taxes, because they don't support education, and they
Speaker 1: don't support um a lot of the things we do
Speaker 1: here in their infrastructure. And those companies often come back
Speaker 1: because they just find that the grass is not always greener.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for joining us. This was really great. Well,
Speaker 1: I really appreciate. I did not know I was going
Speaker 1: to get to end up on my in my constant
Speaker 1: desire to defend salt. Rachel Bade and carn Diversion are
Speaker 1: the authors of Unchecked, the Untold Story beyond Congresses Botched
Speaker 1: Impeachments of Donald Trump. Welcome to Fast Politics. Rachel, Hello,
Speaker 1: Happy to be on, Molly and Karen, Yeah, Hi, nice
Speaker 1: to be with you. The book is Unchecked, and it's
Speaker 1: the untold story of Congresses botched, impeachment of Donald Trump,
Speaker 1: bodged impeachments. So when you guys started this book, did
Speaker 1: you think you're just writing about one impeachment. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: was literally sitting on my couch on January six, finishing
Speaker 1: Part three, one of the final chapters of the book,
Speaker 1: when the instruction started, and it was just like shocking,
Speaker 1: and it was like, oh my gosh, there's going to
Speaker 1: be impeachment talk about this, And of course that's what happened.
Speaker 1: We had to reopen our book and add a part four.
Speaker 1: But it actually worked out well. Not to say January
Speaker 1: six was good by any means. It was horrible, but
Speaker 1: the story it continued from what we were sort of
Speaker 1: the story we were telling before, which is this notion
Speaker 1: of like Democrats sort of not going all the way
Speaker 1: to take down Trump, Republicans putting their fealty to the
Speaker 1: president then former president above their scruples before their scruples,
Speaker 1: and the same characters that we had been sort of
Speaker 1: writing about for a long time. Jamie Raskin Pelosi shift, McConnell,
Speaker 1: you know their relevant once again, McCarthy, Yes, McCarthy, pential
Speaker 1: future speaker. I'm curious. There's so much in this book,
Speaker 1: and they're so oh many scoops. Uh. I think that
Speaker 1: the first thing we should talk about is this scoop
Speaker 1: about the first impeachment and the kind of strom and
Speaker 1: drum on Nancy Pelosi's side. Can you talk to us
Speaker 1: about that? Either of you are welcome to take that question. Well, um, yeah.
Speaker 1: We chronicle how basically Pelosi tried to be this block
Speaker 1: and bulwark against impeachment for our about nine months really
Speaker 1: really from the start of that Congress the being of
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, when Rashida Sili said, We're going to impeach
Speaker 1: the deep mother. I don't know how much I can
Speaker 1: say on the air, but an expletive welcome to expletive land,
Speaker 1: you can do it. When she basically told all the
Speaker 1: crowd of support as We're gonna impeach the motherfucker. Plus
Speaker 1: you had to squish that out. Then the Mulla report
Speaker 1: comes out, it has all these insinuations of potential obstruction
Speaker 1: of justice, and all of a sudden at that point,
Speaker 1: because part is constitutional lawlines and Congress say wait a second.
Speaker 1: And that's the moment when we start chronicling and following
Speaker 1: Jamie Raskin a group of his friends who are also
Speaker 1: lawyers in Congress, most of them fairly new members of Congress,
Speaker 1: saying we've got to do something about this, and going
Speaker 1: to Jerry Nadler and expecting that he's going to be like, yeah,
Speaker 1: let's go, and he's like, Pelosi won't go for this.
Speaker 1: She's so against impeachment. You're going to have to figure
Speaker 1: out a way to basically orchestrate a careful mutiny to
Speaker 1: make it such a strong majority of the Democratic Party
Speaker 1: that she has no choice but to actually go ahead
Speaker 1: with this. And we chronicle how there is basically a
Speaker 1: fight that occurs over several months. It's a political fight
Speaker 1: that occurs over you know, statements in the airwaves. It's
Speaker 1: a legal fight that occurs over the filings that the
Speaker 1: Democrats are trying to put before the courts to get
Speaker 1: information from redacted Muller Report, evidence that they think is
Speaker 1: going to help them create impeachment charges and Pelosi just
Speaker 1: trying to stop it, stop it, stop it, until it's
Speaker 1: too overwhelming and she can't anymore. And it's one of
Speaker 1: several episodes where Pelosi, you know, has politics on her mind,
Speaker 1: is worried about doing something that might be boomerang, worried
Speaker 1: about doing something that's hard votes for her moderate members
Speaker 1: to take and might jeopardize her majority over what her
Speaker 1: many people and her conference were telling her is doing
Speaker 1: the right thing. Yeah, you can't really overstate how much
Speaker 1: Pelosi's fear of impeachment really sort of impacted and sort
Speaker 1: of crippled these two impeachments of Donald Trump. I mean,
Speaker 1: it was something that as reporters who have covered her
Speaker 1: for a long time, and at the time of these impeachments,
Speaker 1: Karen and I were both you know, covering the Hill
Speaker 1: at this time. You know, we all sort of knew
Speaker 1: Pelosi at her office hated the idea of impeachment. They
Speaker 1: were worried again again, like Karen was just saying that
Speaker 1: it was going to really hurt the Democratic Party, that
Speaker 1: they could lose their majority, and they just didn't want
Speaker 1: to do it. But like we didn't realize at the time.
Speaker 1: I don't think how that influenced the entire strategy that
Speaker 1: we saw in terms of oversight of Trump, in terms
Speaker 1: of pulling punches after she was sort of pushed into
Speaker 1: impeachment and we can talk about this more on the pod.
Speaker 1: You know, she put it on a very quick timeline
Speaker 1: to have everything done by cool smiths so that her
Speaker 1: frontliners could pivot back to talking about legislation instead of
Speaker 1: investigating Trump. You know, she wouldn't let investigators dig deep
Speaker 1: during the impeachment inquiry on a bunch of allegations against
Speaker 1: the president, like that he was profiting off the Oval
Speaker 1: office or campaign finance volations for those hush payments. It
Speaker 1: was only allowed to be on Ukraine. And because of
Speaker 1: that fear again, she made a lot of these choices
Speaker 1: that we would later learn had significant impact on repelling
Speaker 1: moderate Republicans who you know, were privately concerned about what
Speaker 1: Trump was doing, but also they just didn't convince the public.
Speaker 1: Trump came out stronger after the first impeachment. How how
Speaker 1: did that happen? Well, we tell people how So do
Speaker 1: you think that that if she had made it a
Speaker 1: wider impeachment and not just about Ukraine, that it's possible
Speaker 1: he would have actually been removed. Well, we'll never know, obviously,
Speaker 1: because you can't sort of predict what never happened. But
Speaker 1: we do show in the book multiple examples of various
Speaker 1: shortcuts that Democrats took and how they impacted key Republicans
Speaker 1: during the first impeachment. For example, Jamie Herrera Butler, who
Speaker 1: just lost her primary for voting to impeach the second
Speaker 1: time around, she was really concerned about what Trump was
Speaker 1: doing in Ukraine, and she actually in the book we
Speaker 1: show the scene where she stands up and she pushes
Speaker 1: back on her leadership and says, why shouldn't I vote
Speaker 1: for an impeachment inquiry? Like she believed what he had
Speaker 1: done was wrong, And we show how the leaders McCarthy
Speaker 1: very much spin her up on all these sort of
Speaker 1: process issues that the Democrats had. Due process was a
Speaker 1: big concern. Uh. They weren't allowing you know, the president's
Speaker 1: lawyers to come in and cross examined witnesses. They were
Speaker 1: not going to get right, which would have ultimately made
Speaker 1: him more If you don't allow to process, it means
Speaker 1: that ultimately it can't work right. Well, it just made
Speaker 1: you know, it gave a sense for Republicans to argue
Speaker 1: amongst their fretting members that this unfair process, and so
Speaker 1: they were able to keep together. Um. And you know,
Speaker 1: I think in terms of would it have been different,
Speaker 1: we current and I have talked about this a lot.
Speaker 1: We think the second one. You know, if there had
Speaker 1: been different decisions in the second impeachment, potentially that would
Speaker 1: have been the one where you saw a conviction more
Speaker 1: so than the first. It was always going to be
Speaker 1: a long shot in the first, but you could have
Speaker 1: had more Republicans turning against the president and that's what
Speaker 1: they could have done if they couldn't have secured a
Speaker 1: conviction at least. But remember it's not just about whether
Speaker 1: it results in sixty seven votes to convict at the end.
Speaker 1: It's also in what shape do you leave impeachment after
Speaker 1: you're done with it? Right, So you know, if you
Speaker 1: go through an impeachment where don't fight for your subpoenas
Speaker 1: in court, where you don't have any buy in from
Speaker 1: the other side of the high aisle on the initial moves,
Speaker 1: right where where you rushed through the calendar because not
Speaker 1: that you know, it's it's that you don't need the
Speaker 1: time to actually investigate all the different leads what you're
Speaker 1: trying to get it done. By Christmas, you don't have
Speaker 1: to worry about talking about impeachment anymore when they head
Speaker 1: into the next campaign season. That creates a precedent for
Speaker 1: the next time of how it's gonna be done. It
Speaker 1: creates present for cut corners and for pulled puncheons for
Speaker 1: not using the full weight of Congress's oversight power and
Speaker 1: their investigative power. If you don't use it, you lose it.
Speaker 1: And that's kind of the argument that we're making is
Speaker 1: that with both of these examples, especially, we're in a
Speaker 1: state where they've just kind of written the playbook for
Speaker 1: how to do impeachment light, and that's what people who
Speaker 1: want to exploit that in the future will be able
Speaker 1: to do. The only thing, just to play Devil's advocate
Speaker 1: here is I mean, there was a moment before the
Speaker 1: second impeachment where they were like, wow, he just tried
Speaker 1: to have us all killed, where they might have been
Speaker 1: willing to, but I mean the first time, like you know,
Speaker 1: I mean the moment there there were not a ton
Speaker 1: of reasonable Republicans out there totally agree. You know this.
Speaker 1: This goes to though you know, do you even try though, right,
Speaker 1: do you try to get any of the reason of Republicans.
Speaker 1: Let's say you go after John Bolton and you have
Speaker 1: some sort of first hand witness testimony against the president.
Speaker 1: I don't know if we could actually say that there
Speaker 1: would have been zero House Republicans that would have gotten
Speaker 1: on board with that sort of a thing, you know,
Speaker 1: or that it wouldn't have made you know, Lisa Murkowski
Speaker 1: so upset about it, or Susan Collins that they wouldn't
Speaker 1: have added to the mit Romney vote. Right, But also
Speaker 1: remember it's not it's not just about you know, are
Speaker 1: you going to turn a single Republican or not a
Speaker 1: single Republican on that. If you're a Democrat and you think, look,
Speaker 1: the Republicans are all in the bag for Trump, they
Speaker 1: are never going to come across to our side of
Speaker 1: the aisle, you have a choice, right, do you do
Speaker 1: impeachment fast because you don't believe you're gonna win anyway,
Speaker 1: and do it or do you say, well, we're at
Speaker 1: least going to do it right even if we lose,
Speaker 1: so that like the structure and the system and the
Speaker 1: tool is completely you know, at fighting strength for the
Speaker 1: next time if we get another shot, and they made
Speaker 1: the former decision which tended to compromise the strength that
Speaker 1: they had going forward or or the president, that will
Speaker 1: exist for people to actually point to and say, well,
Speaker 1: if they did it that way, why can't I, for
Speaker 1: a less good reason, just making a case to the public.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, with Nixon, they never actually got
Speaker 1: to the impeachment vote because they did such a thorough
Speaker 1: job of fact finding. It took months, It took court fights,
Speaker 1: it took the chilens of hours of hearings to get
Speaker 1: those Nixon supporters to turn against the president. I mean, like,
Speaker 1: it's not easy stuff. But Democrats didn't even bother trying. So,
Speaker 1: I mean that's a problem that I think is a
Speaker 1: really good point I want to talk to you about.
Speaker 1: John Bolton. John Bolton is a really important witness explained
Speaker 1: to us what happens here. Democrats, they sort of came
Speaker 1: to a crossroads. They had done, you know, in the
Speaker 1: fall of twenty nineteen, they had called in all these
Speaker 1: sort of lower level witnesses who had testified that Trump
Speaker 1: was aware and was actually orchestrating this quid pro quo
Speaker 1: with Ukraine to try to get you know, leverage taxpayer
Speaker 1: money to go after Biden, his political adversary, etcetera. But
Speaker 1: they wanted to get again somebody a firsthand witness, someone
Speaker 1: from Trump's inner circle who could sort of put the
Speaker 1: quid pro quo in Trump's mouth. And there had been
Speaker 1: sort of this testimony by other official Fiona Hill, you
Speaker 1: guys remember her. She said that Bolton knew about this
Speaker 1: and called it a quote drug deal, and he was
Speaker 1: really concerned about it. And so just knowing John Bolton,
Speaker 1: Fox News personality sort of the godfather of you know,
Speaker 1: this very arch conservative, sort of thinking, arch conservative being
Speaker 1: in the yokon, etcetera. If they had gone after him
Speaker 1: and put him on the stands, they could have really
Speaker 1: turned some heads in terms of the public, Republicans voters
Speaker 1: to lean Republican, maybe some Republican lawmakers. So they're at
Speaker 1: this crossroads and they decide not to go after him,
Speaker 1: And the reason they gave publicly was that, oh, look,
Speaker 1: Trump's trying to steal an election. We have to move fast. Well,
Speaker 1: we have reporting in the book that there's this meeting,
Speaker 1: a series of meetings, really and the real reason they
Speaker 1: didn't want to do it is because of Pelosi's calendar,
Speaker 1: you know, she wanted impeachment done by December nineteenth, and
Speaker 1: they decided that there was not enough time to go
Speaker 1: to court to fight for people like John Bolton because
Speaker 1: of you know, Pelosi's decision to move quickly. They also
Speaker 1: thought if they actually fought in court for testimony, that
Speaker 1: they wouldn't be able to impeach Trump for obstructing Congress,
Speaker 1: and that was something they really wanted to do. Can
Speaker 1: you explain that a little bit? So they're thinking on
Speaker 1: that was obviously Trump had stonewalled Congress over and over again,
Speaker 1: something he had done that no other president had ever done.
Speaker 1: Would say he was going to ignore quote all the subpoenas,
Speaker 1: and he did. He gave them nothing. And so Democrats
Speaker 1: wanted to charge him during impeachment with obstruction of Congress,
Speaker 1: that they have a right to these documents and he
Speaker 1: wasn't giving them to them. But the problem they saw, though,
Speaker 1: was if they actually tried to enforce one of their
Speaker 1: subpoenas that you know, had been blocked, that there would
Speaker 1: be this lengthy court fight, and that basically moderate Democrats
Speaker 1: and all the Republicans would point to this ongoing court
Speaker 1: battle and say Look, this is still being litigated at
Speaker 1: the federal judge level, like we there's until a judge
Speaker 1: rules that Trump has to turn over documents. It's still
Speaker 1: up in the air. So therefore we won't impeach him,
Speaker 1: vote to impeach him on obstruction of Congress. That was
Speaker 1: a big concern. So Democrats didn't want to give people
Speaker 1: that off ramp, so they said, forget the court fight. Um,
Speaker 1: I want to ask you, I have another question about Bolton, um,
Speaker 1: which is which is this strange story, uh that Senate
Speaker 1: Republicans knew Trump was trying to leverage you coin aid
Speaker 1: and uh, can you tell us a little bit about
Speaker 1: this story because this is super interesting. I mean sure, Look,
Speaker 1: John Bolton is somebody who's got a lot of relationships
Speaker 1: with people in capital health and so remember at the time,
Speaker 1: there was a lot of stuff going off the rails
Speaker 1: on the foreign policy front, and he was talking with
Speaker 1: various members of the Senate, especially about Trump wanting to
Speaker 1: pull troops out of Afghanistan early, and they were doing
Speaker 1: everything they could to try to, you know, hold him
Speaker 1: back from doing that. And as they were having those conversations,
Speaker 1: Bolton is also telling them about, hey, there's this other
Speaker 1: of going on with Kray that you might want to
Speaker 1: look at too, which meant that figures like you know,
Speaker 1: Lindsey Graham were clued in early to stuff that was happening.
Speaker 1: And Ron and On right, and and Ron john too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so they had this early heads up and thought that
Speaker 1: you know that that is part of what motivated their
Speaker 1: initial maneuvers to try to undo it before it became really, really,
Speaker 1: really bad. At one point when Ron Johnson goes to
Speaker 1: you know, his Democratic counterparts on the Senate Flori to
Speaker 1: basically be like, I need your help. You need to
Speaker 1: do something in the appropriations bill because I'm not getting
Speaker 1: anywhere with the White House. And so it just shows
Speaker 1: you that like this was not that surprising, and it
Speaker 1: was also it shocked and repulsed a lot of Republicans
Speaker 1: or key Republicans that then would later, you know, excuse
Speaker 1: and dismiss it. This bit of data is fascinating to
Speaker 1: me because a it makes me think Ron and On
Speaker 1: is not an abject moron. And then he's actually, I
Speaker 1: know you guys are nonpartisans, so I'm not going to
Speaker 1: ask you. You can just listen to me safe partisan thing.
Speaker 1: That's shocking to me like he really was sort of
Speaker 1: trying to get Trump to do the right thing. I mean, look,
Speaker 1: Ron Johnson has always been somebody who's paid a lot
Speaker 1: of attention to Ukraine. He was in that little he
Speaker 1: was the only member of Congress I think, in that
Speaker 1: group that went to Zelenski's inauguration, and so, you know,
Speaker 1: before he became fully in the bag for defending Trump
Speaker 1: and protecting him from all accusations of any ill will
Speaker 1: or doing, he was somebody was pretty active about making
Speaker 1: sure that Ukrainians got recognized and trying to change Trump,
Speaker 1: change Trump's mind about it. So I think in that
Speaker 1: scene that you're pointing out, you're seeing kind of the
Speaker 1: last gasps of Ron Johnson trying to make the right
Speaker 1: thing happen before it's going to become such a political
Speaker 1: thing that he's going to flip and go to the
Speaker 1: other side. Yeah, but we should also mention, though, in
Speaker 1: that same anecdote we have in the book, he's too
Speaker 1: chicken to call foul publicly himself. You know, he goes
Speaker 1: to Democrats and we've got a problem, and you call foul.
Speaker 1: So I mean, yes, he was concerned, but did he
Speaker 1: he could have done more publicly, I doted to return,
Speaker 1: that's Charlie Sykes's name for him, not mine, by the way, okay, Um,
Speaker 1: I wanted to say one more thing about your question
Speaker 1: about Bolton and Republicans. I mean, we have reporting in
Speaker 1: the book that shows and indicates that the real reason
Speaker 1: Mitch McConnell did not want to call witnesses was because
Speaker 1: of a fear of what John Bolton would say. I mean,
Speaker 1: there was um, you know, he privately him and his
Speaker 1: staff had been asking the White House like, what do
Speaker 1: you know about what John Bolton says like or what
Speaker 1: he knows and what he could say, like is does
Speaker 1: he have any damaging information that could change the outcome
Speaker 1: of this trial? And over and over again we showed
Speaker 1: that Patsy Baloney sort of like dismissed him, don't worry,
Speaker 1: like there's nothing there, blah blah blah. And then when
Speaker 1: that New York Times story breaks in the middle of
Speaker 1: the impeachment, first impeachment trial, there was this total scramble
Speaker 1: by Mitch McConnell to sort of right the ship when
Speaker 1: he was starting to lose his members, who are like,
Speaker 1: how can we not call John Bolton? Well, he knew
Speaker 1: if John Bolton came in, they would be in big trouble.
Speaker 1: So he did his utmost and we have like a
Speaker 1: thorough TikTok in the book about how he got people
Speaker 1: on line to vote against witnesses. This is so interesting.
Speaker 1: Tell me something in this book that you were like,
Speaker 1: holy shit, I think. I mean, we've been talking a
Speaker 1: lot about impeachment one. I think that one of my
Speaker 1: more holy ship moments really comes from the end of
Speaker 1: impeachment to you know, we wek chronicle and minute by
Speaker 1: minute detail about how there was this moment where the
Speaker 1: Democrats who were prosecuting Trump in the second impeachment trial,
Speaker 1: got the Senate to vote for them, said saying that
Speaker 1: they could have witnesses called witnesses to the trial. And
Speaker 1: it's like this tale of you know, lost hours basically
Speaker 1: that could have made everything go in a different direction,
Speaker 1: where you know, Jamie Harry Butler wakes up on the
Speaker 1: West Coast to find out, Oh my goodness, yes, I
Speaker 1: told the world about the conversation Kevin McCarthy had with
Speaker 1: Trump where he said, well, Kevin, I guess they care
Speaker 1: a lot about more more about me than you do
Speaker 1: about on January six, right, But and she knows that
Speaker 1: people are trying to call her to get her to testify,
Speaker 1: and maybe she'll be the opening domino that makes all
Speaker 1: these other GOP witnesses come forward and fall right. But
Speaker 1: she calls the House Counsel Doug Letter, the person Pelosi's
Speaker 1: handpicked to be the lawyer for the House, asks for advice.
Speaker 1: He won't give it to her. He never passes on
Speaker 1: the message. Jamie Raskin, she's trying to find a lawyer
Speaker 1: to help her figure out what she should do. And
Speaker 1: then they fold their cards two hours later, and it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: my goodness, if you'd waited even just twenty four more hours,
Speaker 1: could things have been totally different? And there's moment and
Speaker 1: you know, and and had those all those Republicans come forward,
Speaker 1: the same Republican witnesses that are coming forward now for
Speaker 1: the January six committee hearings, you know, would that have
Speaker 1: been enough to change Mr McConnell's mind. And had you
Speaker 1: changed his mind, wouldn't have many more Republicans followed. So
Speaker 1: just these moments where like human failings and and misscommunications
Speaker 1: and letters that were like romance novel stuff right where
Speaker 1: it all kind of rides and falls on that, and
Speaker 1: that's what ends up leading you with a second impeachment
Speaker 1: precedent for doing it without taking all these measures, it
Speaker 1: leaves you in a second situation where Trump is acquitted
Speaker 1: for a second time, And how different could that impeachment
Speaker 1: have been? And then just like the setup precedent for
Speaker 1: the rest of the history of impeachment had been at things,
Speaker 1: just had there not been those miss connections. That was
Speaker 1: my holy ship moment too. I mean, like, I remember
Speaker 1: watching the final day of the trial from my house,
Speaker 1: and when Jamie Raskin walked on the floor and called
Speaker 1: witnesses and shocked everybody who thought he was going to
Speaker 1: just give his closing arguments. I remember running around my
Speaker 1: house screaming like, oh my gosh, I saw this coming.
Speaker 1: I saw the coming. Jamie Watkin is a huge, huge
Speaker 1: character in our book. He's the guy who's always like,
Speaker 1: we cannot leave a single stone unturned. We have to
Speaker 1: do our duty, we have to we have to investigate Trump.
Speaker 1: I'll pull all the threads and I you know, I
Speaker 1: was not surprised when he did that, But then like
Speaker 1: two hours later, all of a sudden, there folding and
Speaker 1: our reporting indicates that and we have this in the book,
Speaker 1: Like there was a lot of pressure on him from
Speaker 1: Chuck Schumer and Truck Schumer's counsel, who the previous weeks
Speaker 1: had been basically like outbeating Raskin and his team not
Speaker 1: to call witnesses and to do it in a certain
Speaker 1: way that McConnell wanted the trial to go. The White
Speaker 1: House turned away and snubbed Raskin's team when they were
Speaker 1: trying to get, you know, information about whether they could
Speaker 1: subpoena the Secret Service and would the Biden White House
Speaker 1: allow that, would they waive executive privileged so they could
Speaker 1: call in, you know, these Trump folks to testify in
Speaker 1: the trial, to try to turn Republicans away from Trump
Speaker 1: in his most vulnerable moment. And again they got snubbed
Speaker 1: by the White House. So that was just it's just
Speaker 1: so surprising because Democrats they talked about January six and
Speaker 1: how terrible it was for the country, and like it was,
Speaker 1: it was horrible, and yet when it came to actually
Speaker 1: trying to do something about it, they folded their cards
Speaker 1: too early. What about the night of January six, you know,
Speaker 1: there was there was Jamie Raskin and his friends had
Speaker 1: impeachment articles ready to go. They took them to Senny
Speaker 1: Lawyer and Nancy Pelosi on the House where we document this.
Speaker 1: What if she had said, instead of no, I'm not
Speaker 1: going to do that, said okay, let's do this now,
Speaker 1: when Kevin McCarthy was still angry, when all the Republicans
Speaker 1: were still hurt, before they had a chance to have
Speaker 1: Trump and his machine pulled them back from that brink.
Speaker 1: What if that had been the opening domino. Everything could
Speaker 1: have been different after that point to so interesting. Thank
Speaker 1: you both so much. That was great. Thank you, thanks
Speaker 1: for having us on, Molly Molly, John Fast, Jesse Cannon.
Speaker 1: I think we were an early canary in the coal
Speaker 1: mine of saying that if the House GOP retakes the
Speaker 1: House in the mid terms, the looney squad, Marjorie Taylor Green,
Speaker 1: bow Bert and all those freaks are gonna be running things.
Speaker 1: Certainly they think so. Marjorie Taylor Green, Polly math scientist,
Speaker 1: spokes stateswoman, Barrel hogs hog hunter, athlete, scholar, has decided
Speaker 1: that she leaves that she is the future of the
Speaker 1: Republican Party, and she has told one Kevin McCarthy that
Speaker 1: she's gonna have a big job in the Republican Congress
Speaker 1: if that comes to pass, and she considers herself, she
Speaker 1: thinks she should be on the judiciary. She feels that
Speaker 1: people have been quite mean to her, and so she's
Speaker 1: owed that by the way, I love these people. She
Speaker 1: feels she's owed that. She has decided that she is
Speaker 1: going to get hers. So this is the moment of Fuccory.
Speaker 1: Kevin McCarthy, a coward and a moron, will have to
Speaker 1: stand up to Marjorie Taylor Green, who is just a moron.
Speaker 1: We'll see how this plays out. I mean, good luck
Speaker 1: to both of them. It's a hard to pick a
Speaker 1: side here. Did you see in her debate the other
Speaker 1: night with Marcus Flowers that she said her husband has
Speaker 1: all the proof of voter fraud in the election that
Speaker 1: could overturn the election for Mr tru Is that the
Speaker 1: husband she allegedly cheated on. That would be him as
Speaker 1: opposed to her tantric sex guru. Right, congratulations, Marjorie Taylor Green,
Speaker 1: you earned it again. That's it for this episode of
Speaker 1: Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to
Speaker 1: your the best minds and politics makes sense of all
Speaker 1: this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard. Please send
Speaker 1: it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And
Speaker 1: again thanks for listening.