Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
Speaker 1: where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
Speaker 1: today's best minds and Governor Greg Abbott and did water
Speaker 1: break requirements for construction workers in a heat wave? We
Speaker 1: have a star studded lineup for today's show. Mother Jones's
Speaker 1: David Korn stops by to talk to us about Noah
Speaker 1: Labels and all of their fuckery and their hope to
Speaker 1: throw the twenty twenty four election to Trump. Then we'll
Speaker 1: talk to the Washington Post Katherine Rampell about all of
Speaker 1: the Republican fuckery towards the irs. But first we have
Speaker 1: the host of the Enemy's List fan favorite the LinkedIn Projects,
Speaker 1: Rick Wilson. We have the band back together.
Speaker 2: Welcome back, Rick Wilson.
Speaker 3: I am back and glad to be here.
Speaker 1: We're delighted to have you, always so much fun and also,
Speaker 1: more importantly than any of that, you are today he Trump's.
Speaker 3: Target once again. I am Donald Trum's targets. We're running
Speaker 3: some ads in Bedminster, one basically calling him a spy
Speaker 3: because he's violated the Espionage Ack like famous spies in
Speaker 3: American history. And the second head is called Rats, where
Speaker 3: we're basically just doing what we do. Is yet anytime
Speaker 3: Donald Trump is disrupted and distracted, it's good for America.
Speaker 3: So the second head is our famous whispers girl saying, Donald,
Speaker 3: the rats are all around you. They're selling you out
Speaker 3: because we know how paranoid he is. So yeah, he's
Speaker 3: raging on truth social this morning, his dollar store social
Speaker 3: media platform. It's a good day. Anytime Donald Trump threatens me,
Speaker 3: it's a good day.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about this for a second. Where is Donald
Speaker 1: Trump right now?
Speaker 3: He is in Bedminster, New Jersey right now at his
Speaker 3: mid tier golf club.
Speaker 1: But I read the Times newsletter this morning, really smart,
Speaker 1: and it talked about how even though this polling is
Speaker 1: very good for Donald winning, that he's very likely to
Speaker 1: win the nomination. You really can see in this cracks
Speaker 1: of like some people getting their sort of heads back.
Speaker 1: Do you agree with that? What do you think?
Speaker 3: Look in twenty twenty at the Lincoln Project, we modeled
Speaker 3: three to eight percent of Republican voters in nine key states. Okay,
Speaker 3: we determined those people were persuadable, and we got five
Speaker 3: point eighty five percent of those votes. We did really
Speaker 3: well in our in our model. Little surprise, how well
Speaker 3: it went, because you know, Republicans were all coming home
Speaker 3: at the end to Trump. Our model has become much
Speaker 3: more sophisticated and granular in the intervening years, and now
Speaker 3: the model is like between seven and eleven percent. Now
Speaker 3: that's not a ton of people, but it's decisive in
Speaker 3: a closely divided nation and in the electoral college states
Speaker 3: where it's going to turn on those states that have
Speaker 3: very very competitive races. So we believe that several things
Speaker 3: caused that expansion. One is Dobbs, which absolutely peeled off
Speaker 3: Republican women like nothing else I've ever seen.
Speaker 1: Say that again, I want you to talk about abortion,
Speaker 1: because that's something where I've always, always, always always been right,
Speaker 1: and I feel that everyone has not listened to me.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 3: Well, here here's the thing. Between twenty and twenty five
Speaker 3: percent of Republican women are either mildly or somewhat or
Speaker 3: are fully pro choice okay, And it's mostly mildly pro
Speaker 3: choice okay, like no third trimester blah blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 3: About fifteen to eighteen percent of Republican men are somewhat,
Speaker 3: are mildly or somewhat or fully pro choice, Okay, so
Speaker 3: when Dobbs hit, it was like a nuclear bomb going
Speaker 3: off because the dog caught the car. And now they've
Speaker 3: recognized that a part of the party coalition. They've always
Speaker 3: been sort of like, yeah, we got to have those
Speaker 3: guys in the coalition, but we don't love them. The
Speaker 3: evangelical crazies, right are going to look at Dobbs and say, well,
Speaker 3: now we can set up snitch programs so women get
Speaker 3: reported for having abortions. So the side that overshoots on
Speaker 3: abortion is the side that loses, right, the side that
Speaker 3: overshoots on the issue, and the Republicans at this in
Speaker 3: this part of our history are overshooting it by many,
Speaker 3: many miles, right right, all right, Now, this should not
Speaker 3: be interpreted as as an excuse for Democrats not to
Speaker 3: message on it correctly.
Speaker 1: Right, But that's what you're seeing.
Speaker 3: The Kansas model prove the case, and our current survey
Speaker 3: work is proving the case that it's not abortion per
Speaker 3: se that's changed that number. It's the sense of wild
Speaker 3: government overreach and the snitch programs and the six week
Speaker 3: abortion bans. I mean, the six week abortion ban is
Speaker 3: defund the police for Republicans.
Speaker 1: Right right, right, Oh, I love that.
Speaker 3: It's like a narrow part of the party thinks that's
Speaker 3: the greatest thing ever. But most people who hear it go,
Speaker 3: what the fuck are you talking about?
Speaker 2: I just want to get into this for one second.
Speaker 1: One of the reasons why it seems like Republicans right now,
Speaker 1: and again it's not all Republicans. I think the base
Speaker 1: is ry much with him, but the quote unquote thought leaders,
Speaker 1: the National Review crowd, right, the people who've read a book.
Speaker 1: Those guys are freaking out because they know he doesn't
Speaker 1: have the numbers, and that's why they're trying to get
Speaker 1: third party candidates running.
Speaker 3: Well that and look, the National Review guys in particular,
Speaker 3: they are like the worst desantist stands you've ever seen.
Speaker 3: I'm aware they are obsessed with Rond de Santas. I
Speaker 3: think his ship doesn't stink. That he's the tallest, handsomest
Speaker 3: man in the room.
Speaker 1: Five point nine is the new six to one, right, and.
Speaker 3: That he's that he's brilliant and ready to lead them
Speaker 3: boldly into the future. Now that, of course, has collided
Speaker 3: with two realities. One, he's a bad candidate. And I
Speaker 3: say that objectively as somebody who's been in politics for
Speaker 3: thirty five plus years, and they've seeing candidates good, bad,
Speaker 3: and indifferent. He is on the lowest quartile of candidate performance.
Speaker 3: He's not charismatic, I'm not being I'm not being partisan.
Speaker 3: I'm not gaming the Republican primary anyway. I could say
Speaker 3: he's not a good candidate.
Speaker 1: He's Ted Cruz without the charm.
Speaker 3: He's Ted Cruz without the charm. He's Jeb Bush without
Speaker 3: the smoldering sensuality.
Speaker 1: Let the record show I laughed at Jeb Bush without
Speaker 1: the smoldering sexuality, but I didn't want to because I
Speaker 1: see Jeb Bush joke is low like Ted Cruz. Okay,
Speaker 1: but Jeb Bush, like please clap, the man doesn't even
Speaker 1: exist anymore.
Speaker 3: He's not Josh Hawley without the thick cloud of testosterone
Speaker 3: musk around him.
Speaker 1: Oh Jesus Christ, we're opening the door to a lot
Speaker 1: of Problemsdcast. That's right, But I think that's a good
Speaker 1: point so the national but you're seeing I mean, I
Speaker 1: think this like anxiety that the RFK Junior prop.
Speaker 3: Up Steve Bannon's monkey and.
Speaker 1: The Twitter bros. You know, Jason Killococcus or whatever is
Speaker 1: now spent three hours with RFK Junior and was like,
Speaker 1: why won't Biden give me three hours? Why it's a mystery.
Speaker 1: Why will the random guy who has nothing to do
Speaker 1: give me three hours but not the president of the
Speaker 1: United States. Math is hard when you're a tech bro.
Speaker 3: Math is very hard when you're David Sacks or Jason
Speaker 3: Calcanus or any of the.
Speaker 1: Other Love that David Sacks pilot.
Speaker 3: Fish swimming around Elon Musk's shark like anus.
Speaker 1: I have to tell you that crew. Now Rick is
Speaker 1: laughing at his own joke. Is the ability to crack
Speaker 1: oneself up is something I've never had personally, but David
Speaker 1: Sacks those crew have.
Speaker 2: They're trying to.
Speaker 1: Get famous off of Elon Musk having purchased Twitter. God
Speaker 1: bless them. I mean, that's the other thing is they
Speaker 1: hate the media and they hate celebrities.
Speaker 3: They don't hate the media and they don't hate celebrity.
Speaker 2: They want to be the media.
Speaker 3: They desperately want to be in the media. They desperately
Speaker 3: want to be celebrities. Listen, let me say something. If
Speaker 3: if MSNBC called it David Sacks and said you were
Speaker 3: going to offer you a contributorship, he'd be on that
Speaker 3: so fucking fast. So yeah, he'd be on that speed
Speaker 3: of fucking heat.
Speaker 1: He'd be wearing his Montclair hat on MSNBC.
Speaker 2: Right there you go, Yes, no question. Those guys.
Speaker 1: They just think that now that their buddy bought Twitter,
Speaker 1: they're going to be able to take over the media ecosystem,
Speaker 1: and God bless them.
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, I don't know about you, Molly,
Speaker 3: but Twitter is insufferable right now.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean he just made it very hard to use. Yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: it's not as hard to use if you're Elon because
Speaker 1: you have somebody who does it for you. But for
Speaker 1: the rest of us we have to use her own Twitter.
Speaker 1: It's very hard to use now.
Speaker 3: No, But I mean I think the thing that they
Speaker 3: did deliberately was added this ability for the fucking troll
Speaker 3: armies to just take over the fyp you know, take
Speaker 3: over your feed and one of these boggacy that he's like,
Speaker 3: you were afraid of our intellectual power. I'm like, no, dude,
Speaker 3: trust me on this one. That is the least of
Speaker 3: my lories. I'm afraid you're going to continue to post
Speaker 3: memes of Hillary Clinton dressed as the Devil.
Speaker 1: But let's just talk about intellectual power, because we're going
Speaker 1: all over the place here, But this is pretty great.
Speaker 1: Maria Barbaroma, you may have remembered her as one time
Speaker 1: mattering the money. Honey had James Comer on her show,
Speaker 1: and James Comer said that people who watch MSNBC have
Speaker 1: a very low IQ.
Speaker 3: Yeah, James Comer has the intellectual horsepower of a fucking
Speaker 3: go kart.
Speaker 1: I thought I would miss Louis Gohmert.
Speaker 4: Exactly where he is.
Speaker 3: He's dumb even on the Gomert scale, and the Gomert
Speaker 3: scale is widely used by scientists to measure the progress
Speaker 3: of I mean, he is slow.
Speaker 1: Yes, the Gombert scale used to measure both teeth and intellect.
Speaker 3: You know, some molly, some focal never lose a toe,
Speaker 3: but then again some focal. He's Comer Slackjohn Yokel.
Speaker 1: I'm telling you Comer is an incredible politician. I am
Speaker 1: delighted to see him. My favorite thing that happened. And
Speaker 1: there were two incredible Republican politics stories that we did
Speaker 1: not see because they were drowned out by Trump's.
Speaker 2: Federal indictment is second indictment.
Speaker 1: One was Republicans fighting with each other over a gas
Speaker 1: stove messaging bill incredible stuff, and the other was right
Speaker 1: around the time of the federal indictment Truck Brasley came
Speaker 1: out and said they were tapes of Hunter Biden. Right,
Speaker 1: do you remember this?
Speaker 3: I did.
Speaker 2: There were a Hunter of Biden tapes.
Speaker 1: And more recently we discovered that the Hunter Biden tapes
Speaker 1: may or may not exist.
Speaker 3: And may or may not be real.
Speaker 1: Well, they may they may not even be fake.
Speaker 2: They may just not be.
Speaker 3: Anything right, they may not exist at all at all.
Speaker 3: But here's the thing. They live in a separate universe
Speaker 3: and so on Oaan and Fox and every other goddamn
Speaker 3: place in the world. They're being fed a steady diet
Speaker 3: of bullshit every day. They're being told that this isn't
Speaker 3: really Donald Trump criming. The real criminals are the Biden
Speaker 3: family who have taken fifty jillion bazillion dollars in China. China.
Speaker 1: China paid them a lot of money. Why did China
Speaker 1: pay them money for Barisma?
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, of course, and obviously that China was trying
Speaker 3: to help Zelenski.
Speaker 2: Right Zelensky. It all comes back to Zelenski.
Speaker 3: The conspiracies always become more baroque with time.
Speaker 1: I want to point out another thing that happened this week,
Speaker 1: which was a little bit below the radar because we
Speaker 1: have to now focus on the things that are that
Speaker 1: the other incredibly fucked up things Republicans have been doing.
Speaker 1: I want to talk to you about this Don Junior
Speaker 1: email scandal. If this were Chelsea Clinton, we would be
Speaker 1: talking about this every fucking day.
Speaker 3: If Chelsea Clinton had said the things in an email
Speaker 3: that Don Junior is now proven to have said in
Speaker 3: an email that was published, that there would be a
Speaker 3: batshit never ending Fox Memories day, there would be House
Speaker 3: Oversight Committee hearings for a billion years. It would not,
Speaker 3: in any way ever ever stop. So the madness of
Speaker 3: these things.
Speaker 1: Is like efensive emails among businessmen. Donald Trump Junior spark
Speaker 1: fight in hedge fund case. One of the things that
Speaker 1: Donald Trump Junior. You'll remember Donald Trump Junior.
Speaker 3: As friend of the Jews, so I've been told.
Speaker 1: So I've been told because his sister married a Jew,
Speaker 1: so obviously he cannot be anti Semitic. We all know
Speaker 1: this because that's how it works, except that in this
Speaker 1: he says we're having Jews over, it'll be kosher.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, you know, almost like don't like punching
Speaker 3: Don Junior because he's so obviously impaired from a staggering,
Speaker 3: staggering set of pharmaceutical challenges that that it's like.
Speaker 1: In this way, he is like everyone else I grew
Speaker 1: up with.
Speaker 3: Continue It's like shooting fish in a barrel. And he's
Speaker 3: also just not terribly bright.
Speaker 2: I don't know what you're talking about.
Speaker 3: I just find the guy. I find the guy just pathetic.
Speaker 3: I mean, he's just he just makes me sad sometimes
Speaker 3: watching him, because you know, he's down there in Jupiter, Florida,
Speaker 3: and his buddy Skeeter just just came up through the
Speaker 3: gated community to check in. And the guy at the
Speaker 3: the guy at the gates like ice skate, and Skeeter's like, man,
Speaker 3: I gotta, I gotta, I gotta a door dash for
Speaker 3: don for Donny Junior man, and and the they wink
Speaker 3: and Skeeter drive in. He sort of stands at the
Speaker 3: door for a minute. They have that awkward transaction.
Speaker 1: This is we've hit the Rick Wilson does fiction part
Speaker 1: of the podcast.
Speaker 3: Listen. I like a little fiction now and then I
Speaker 3: never forget that, never forget that piece that we did
Speaker 3: about Hillary again Jared Murder.
Speaker 1: So let's just talk about this so that Republicans in disarray.
Speaker 1: Trump's federal indictment. The Justice Department completely fought themselves, rolled
Speaker 1: the dice Scott, Judge, Eileen Maga.
Speaker 3: Cannon, and the other thing. I a piece about this
Speaker 3: yesterday in Resolute Square. People are underestimating why a suthford
Speaker 3: A jury is trouble. It's not just that there are
Speaker 3: a lot of Magas down there. And by the way,
Speaker 3: they're smart enough to play the game down there. They're
Speaker 3: like sophisticated enough to play the game. Well, no, I
Speaker 3: am a Republican, but I'm not a crazy person. The
Speaker 3: chance of getting somebody who will blow up the whole
Speaker 3: jury pool easy, It's high. And the other thing is
Speaker 3: people done in Miami, in the South part of Florida.
Speaker 3: Folks from outside this world don't understand. People from Moscow
Speaker 3: come to Miami and go, Wow, this place is fucking corrupt.
Speaker 3: People from Mogadishu go you know, the rule of law
Speaker 3: really applies better back home than it does here. People
Speaker 3: in Miami do not have the same standard of the
Speaker 3: rule of law that the rest of the country does.
Speaker 3: They are tolerant of corruption. It is part of the
Speaker 3: ecosystem down there. God love it. I love Miami, like
Speaker 3: like nothing, you.
Speaker 1: Know, right, you're gonna have a not corruptury seems like
Speaker 1: a zero.
Speaker 3: Right, the idea that this people are gonna go. Yes,
Speaker 3: so he had some documents in boxes? What the fuck? Man?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, let's go, let's go. Come on, I'm done right.
Speaker 2: We've always had documents in boxes.
Speaker 1: I mean that was the defense that you Hewitt made
Speaker 1: like two hours after the thing came out. As serious
Speaker 1: people are telling us that there's a serious case. You know,
Speaker 1: we have serious lawyers saying this and that, and Hewett
Speaker 1: goes he didn't even try to sell them.
Speaker 3: I am stunned at a level.
Speaker 2: Are you stunned? I'm not stunned.
Speaker 1: The fucking this is what they do.
Speaker 3: No, No, here's the thing. Here's the thing. I'm stunned
Speaker 3: that anybody doesn't expect, now the Republican machine to rally
Speaker 3: around the most absurd possible defenses. One of my favorite
Speaker 3: civil wars the last few days Andy McCarthy and Mark
Speaker 3: Levin fighting over Trump the amazing amazing. Like Andy McCarthy,
Speaker 3: a relatively serious lawyer, says, you know, Trump doesn't have
Speaker 3: a defense. It's done, and you know, so the civil
Speaker 3: war inside the Republican Party over Trump's defenses and how
Speaker 3: to defend him is fascinating. And again that there is
Speaker 3: that sort of gentry conservative media at National Review, et cetera.
Speaker 3: They hate Trump aesthetically, they don't like Trump aesthetically, it's.
Speaker 2: Right, but they want to win. They'd rather win than lose.
Speaker 3: That's right, that's right. And so what will happen if
Speaker 3: Trump is acquitted in this case, or if DJ pulls
Speaker 3: the plug because it gets too close to the election,
Speaker 3: What will happen at that point is that every one
Speaker 3: of them will bend the knee, right.
Speaker 2: All right, which we saw this happen already National.
Speaker 3: Review, Dan and Rich and all the rest of them.
Speaker 2: Well, baseball Crank go along with it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh that's Dan, Yeah he'll go along.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh then that's Basebook. I didn't even know what
Speaker 1: baseball Crank's name was.
Speaker 3: Yeah, every single one of them will. And I'll give
Speaker 3: you exactly what it will be. While we have reservations
Speaker 3: about Trump's character and behavior, Joe Biden is a communist, lesbian, Marxist,
Speaker 3: wickan child predator.
Speaker 2: If only except for child predator, that's some good.
Speaker 3: Who is also senile. In this case, we must protect
Speaker 3: America and hope that Trump has learned his lesson. And
Speaker 3: all of them, including Chris Christy and Susan Collins, they'll say, well,
Speaker 3: while I hesitate to vote for Trump, if I vote
Speaker 3: for Biden, America will go full communist and he'll seize
Speaker 3: the means of production and the krulax will be killed
Speaker 3: in the fields. It's just that fucking crazy.
Speaker 1: David Corn is the DC Bureau chief of Mother Jones
Speaker 1: and author of American Psychotis.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Fast Politics, David Corn.
Speaker 1: Good to be here, Always delighted to have you.
Speaker 4: I'll try to keep up with the fast speed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, don't know. Cursing, David Corn, talk to me about
Speaker 1: what's going on.
Speaker 2: Just t to our universe.
Speaker 1: In the universe it is Kevin McCarthy fundraising off Donald J.
Speaker 4: Trump discuss I really thought at some point in time
Speaker 4: that we would get a break from the last seven
Speaker 4: years of craziness.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 4: I've been covering politics for decades. I don't want to
Speaker 4: say how many decades, and it wasn't always like this,
Speaker 4: young people out there. There used to be times when
Speaker 4: the news cycle, well you didn't have to pay attention
Speaker 4: to it. Things would come and go. You know, people
Speaker 4: might be wrong, but they weren't crazy wrong. And the
Speaker 4: amount of crazy happened intimidually. But now it's turned into
Speaker 4: a fire hose with an endless supply of crazy water.
Speaker 4: And every day, you know, if you're covering this, you
Speaker 4: could literally have a dozen or two things to ride about.
Speaker 4: Talk about mastic eight. It's just nuts. And of course
Speaker 4: when you have these spasms like the Trump indictment, it
Speaker 4: only puts everything from you know, from a level of
Speaker 4: nine to eleven or even higher. And so one of
Speaker 4: the small little things that popped up in the last
Speaker 4: couple of days in this post Trump felony indictment period
Speaker 4: is that Kevin McCarthy. And you know, we can laugh
Speaker 4: about Kevin McCarthy. We saw how he barely became speaker
Speaker 4: and how he's become completely a toady for Trump after
Speaker 4: criticizing him following January sixth. Think about it, this guy
Speaker 4: is second in line to be commander in chief. You
Speaker 4: would think that that would make him act somewhat responsibly
Speaker 4: at least some of the time, not all the time,
Speaker 4: but some of the time. Yet we see little evidence
Speaker 4: of that. You know, when after the indictment. A reporter
Speaker 4: caught up to him and said, well, what do you
Speaker 4: think of this? And he goes, bathroom doors have locks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was amazing that bathroom doors are somehow safer
Speaker 1: than Biden's garage. Because but again, I think it's important
Speaker 1: to mention Biden returned the documents, Pence returned the documents,
Speaker 1: and Donald Trump told his lawyers to lie about the documents.
Speaker 4: Listen, you know, having covered the government for years, you're
Speaker 4: going to find in a mess of documents in the
Speaker 4: White House or any place else, the occasional inadvertent classified
Speaker 4: document or something else misplaced. And the whole key thing
Speaker 4: is when that happens, you give it back. It's very
Speaker 4: very simple, you give it back. And that's what Trump
Speaker 4: didn't do. But then you know, not only was McCarthy
Speaker 4: being absolutely absurd justifying what Trump was doing holding classified
Speaker 4: material in a bathroom with a chandelier, we must add
Speaker 4: it was athom chandelier. Chandeliers in your bathrooms, but I
Speaker 4: certainly don't, and I think most Americans don't. Most American
Speaker 4: bathrooms are un chandeliered. But in addition to all that,
Speaker 4: he sends out a fundraising email calling Tuesday the day
Speaker 4: of Trump's arrangement one of the darkest days in US history.
Speaker 1: This is Trump's federal arrangement, not Trump's state level arrangement.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the federal arrangment Tuesday, and McCarthy's out there calling
Speaker 4: it the darkest day in the United States history and
Speaker 4: repeats all these lies that Trump has been telling and
Speaker 4: the Trump crowd has been telling, saying that Biden has
Speaker 4: capped classified information for decades, not true, not decades, and
Speaker 4: that this is a persecution and an unfair prosecution, and
Speaker 4: that it was Biden who indicted Trump, not twenty four members.
Speaker 3: Or however many there were, of a.
Speaker 4: Grand jury of civilian Florida's of Floridians. So you know,
Speaker 4: he's out there protecting Trump with absurd defenses. He's out
Speaker 4: raising money off this, and it really shows that the
Speaker 4: whole Trump thing here for the Republican establishment at least,
Speaker 4: is based on money. It's really really based a lot
Speaker 4: on money. What happened after January sixth when Mitch McConnell
Speaker 4: and Kevin McCarthy both slammed Trump for inciting the riot
Speaker 4: and being responsible for it, That's what Kevin McCarthy said.
Speaker 4: Then within weeks they both turned and had nothing to
Speaker 4: say about it. Kevin McCarthy ran down Tomorrow Lago and posed,
Speaker 4: grinning with Trump, I'm your guy. He bent the knee
Speaker 4: was because they realized that the base, the Republican base,
Speaker 4: was sticking with Trump, and if they'd done Trump, Trump
Speaker 4: would tell the base not to vote for establishment Republicans rhinos,
Speaker 4: but probably even more importantly, would tell the base, don't
Speaker 4: send them any money, not to the Republican Actional Committee,
Speaker 4: not to the republic Senatorial Campaign Committee, not to Mitch
Speaker 4: mcconnoll Mark, to Kevin McCarthy, not to the Republican Creational
Speaker 4: Campaign Committee, all these things. And while they get a
Speaker 4: lot of money from corporate interests and packs and all that,
Speaker 4: they get tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars
Speaker 4: from these small donor Republicans who get twenty emails a
Speaker 4: day various Republican causes, and they are fully in the
Speaker 4: pocket of Trump. They respond to all these lies that
Speaker 4: he puts out their rubs. I call them troops Trump roots,
Speaker 4: and they could not afford to lose these people. And
Speaker 4: now McCarthy is out there exploiting them and pushing disinformation
Speaker 4: to grind as many bucks out of them as he can,
Speaker 4: while Trump is doing the same thing. Haven't raised over
Speaker 4: seven million dollars since the indictment news broke last week.
Speaker 1: So here's McCarthy fundraising on Trump. Two questions, Does Trump
Speaker 1: mind because historically we've seen that he doesn't like this,
Speaker 1: And then also, right, that's his money, Right, it's my money.
Speaker 4: I think this is a question of a rising tide
Speaker 4: lifting all boats. Trump is, you know, scoring a lot
Speaker 4: of money at this point in time. He doesn't mine
Speaker 4: all these Republican entities raising money off the indictment as
Speaker 4: long as they're selling the same bogus narrative that Trump
Speaker 4: is being persecuted. This is the worst thing that's ever
Speaker 4: happened in American history, forgets slavery, and so they're all
Speaker 4: singing from that page. I think that's fine by him
Speaker 4: because a lot of other Republicans and Republican causes and
Speaker 4: right wing groups, I mean, they're all, you know, those
Speaker 4: the fish that sort of attached themselves to Wales, you know,
Speaker 4: and or eat this. You know, this s gum off
Speaker 4: what I forget and we can listeners, here's your homework assignment.
Speaker 3: How do Google you know?
Speaker 4: I think it begins to let it always something out. Anyway,
Speaker 4: all these other Republican and writing groups, that's what they are.
Speaker 4: They're parasites. They're you know, Trump's a big whale getting
Speaker 4: all the money from the base, and they're they're sweeping
Speaker 4: up the crumbs and the stuff that he doesn't quite collect.
Speaker 4: And that is the Republican bio ecosystem.
Speaker 1: So here's a question for you. You have a guy called
Speaker 1: Asa Hutchinson. He is trying to run. You have a
Speaker 1: guy called Asa Hutchinson. He was the governor of Arkansas.
Speaker 1: He is trying to run as a non corrupt Republican.
Speaker 1: It's a quite a narrow lane. He shares it with
Speaker 1: a very corrupt but also anti Trump but also worked
Speaker 1: in the Trump administration, Republican by the name of Chris Bridgegate. Christie.
Speaker 1: I want to ask you, as Hutchinson asked the RNC
Speaker 1: to make part of the pledge b that if the
Speaker 1: candidate gets indicted criminal A back up.
Speaker 4: A second, right now, the Republicans have a pledge. You
Speaker 4: have to pledge. If you're running in the Republican primary
Speaker 4: and want to be in the debates, you have to
Speaker 4: pledge your support. Whoever the candidate will be at the
Speaker 4: end of the day. And a sashin on this call
Speaker 4: with the RNC said, what can we amend that to say,
Speaker 4: you don't have to support the candidate if they are
Speaker 4: convicted of a crime.
Speaker 3: And they all said, the RNC on this call, no.
Speaker 2: Right, because that's our guy. Is that the saddest thing
Speaker 2: you've ever heard? Or have you heard sadder things?
Speaker 4: I'm sure I can think of sadder things. I mean,
Speaker 4: it's a sad candidacy. Face Utchinson, I mean, the whole
Speaker 4: who is it?
Speaker 3: What's his name?
Speaker 4: One of the writers for the National.
Speaker 2: Review baseball crank. That's the only one that exists. The
Speaker 2: other ones aren't real.
Speaker 4: Christopher Cook, the one with a British accent who always
Speaker 4: sounds reasonable because he has a British accent. I think
Speaker 4: I'm getting his name. Right after the indictment he put out,
Speaker 4: the peony federal indictment, he put out a tweet saying,
Speaker 4: aren't you people sick of this? Isn't it time to
Speaker 4: move on? Shouldn't be talking about policies that make America better?
Speaker 4: Conservative ideals that will bring about a renaissance in this country?
Speaker 1: Hilarious?
Speaker 3: And I'm the oh lad, I think maybe it's Charles.
Speaker 4: I feel so sorry for you. You are so deluded if
Speaker 4: you don't understand what's happened to the Republican Party and
Speaker 4: the larger conservative movement. These people don't care about such
Speaker 4: things of which Asa Hutchinson speaks and the National Review rites.
Speaker 4: They just don't. They want Trump. I mean when he
Speaker 4: said I could shoot some on Fifth Avenue and it's
Speaker 4: still well for me. I mean, they want someone who
Speaker 4: will shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue. That's what they're looking for.
Speaker 4: They're looking for someone who lies and cheats and steals,
Speaker 4: as long as it's to own the Libs, and as
Speaker 4: long as that person mirrors their sense of grievance and resentment,
Speaker 4: whether it's economic resentment, are racist resentment, or cultural resentment.
Speaker 4: They don't care that he promised the best healthcare system ever.
Speaker 4: But if he's going to get out there and slam
Speaker 4: transgender rights and go on about the deep state, that's
Speaker 4: what they want. They don't want a guy who will
Speaker 4: deliver policy wins for them. Infrastructure Week. They don't care
Speaker 4: about Infrastructure Week. They don't care if their towns and
Speaker 4: cities are getting more jobs because of government policy. That's
Speaker 4: not what they want and their tribal leader and the
Speaker 4: American president. So it's kind of sad for me to
Speaker 4: watch these principal Republican policy See minded people believe that
Speaker 4: they can talk sense to the Republican base and the
Speaker 4: politicians that serve it.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about no labels.
Speaker 3: No labels.
Speaker 1: They have a label, it's called Republican.
Speaker 4: There's so much that they've done the last couple of
Speaker 4: weeks that's mind blowing. And I had a big scoop
Speaker 4: that went viral on Twitter the other day that showed.
Speaker 3: Me the tremendous interests that people have in this group.
Speaker 4: No labels, you know, started in twenty ten, twenty eleven claim,
Speaker 4: you know, Democrats are too left, Republicans are too right.
Speaker 4: We need common sense, bipartisan centrism. And they got some
Speaker 4: members of Congress on the right and left to Republicans
Speaker 4: and Democrats to work together. And they are okay, fine,
Speaker 4: go ahead and do that, raise money for that whatever.
Speaker 4: But now they have working on a project to get
Speaker 4: on the ballot in states across our great land so
Speaker 4: they can then put a residential nominee and vice presidential
Speaker 4: nominee what they call a unity ticket on the twenty
Speaker 4: war ballot. Now, their idea is like, well, we only
Speaker 4: do this if the Republicans are too extreme and the
Speaker 4: Democrats are too extreme, and we can win with a
Speaker 4: centrist ticket that consolidates the Republicans and the Democrats. Of
Speaker 4: course that's nonsense, that it won't win, and most political
Speaker 4: analysts and I have to agree with this, but people
Speaker 4: who run the numbers and the nominees were Biden and Trump,
Speaker 4: it would likely draw more votes from Biden. Therefore it
Speaker 4: could help elect Trump and spoil the race for Biden.
Speaker 4: They claim that's not what their intent is.
Speaker 1: It clearly is what their intent is.
Speaker 4: They're a dark money group, meaning they don't reveal who's
Speaker 4: funding them.
Speaker 3: Although over past.
Speaker 2: Years largely Republicans.
Speaker 4: We have seen that big Republican pro Trump donors, including
Speaker 4: Harlan Crowe remember him, the Nazi member of Billire collecting
Speaker 4: billionaire benefacturers. Yeah, remember that guy, Clarence Thomas.
Speaker 3: I lose my breath just identifying who he is.
Speaker 4: But he gave money to old Labels and other billionaires
Speaker 4: of that ILK have given money and they won't reveal
Speaker 4: their donors. It's the very suspicious, very question while they
Speaker 4: do have never Trump Republicans like your Power, Rick Wilson's
Speaker 4: and other Democrats very worried. All they have to do
Speaker 4: to screw up the election is get a Joe Manchin
Speaker 4: who won't say whether he will or won't accept their
Speaker 4: nomination on the ticket, and then if he draws ten
Speaker 4: twenty thousand votes in some key states Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia,
Speaker 4: the most likely come from Biden, and that could give
Speaker 4: Trump a way to win the electoral College vote. Once again,
Speaker 4: that's the worry about them. The story that I did
Speaker 4: this week to bring it back to the most important
Speaker 4: thing me. The story that I did was I was
Speaker 4: looking on their website, just sort of thinking about various
Speaker 4: story ideas I might do on them, various articles looking
Speaker 4: for leeds, and I clicked on the donate but here
Speaker 4: help us donate money to us, and it took me
Speaker 4: to a website run by a group called anadot a
Speaker 4: n E d O T.
Speaker 3: I said, Huh, I've never.
Speaker 4: Heard of these guys, but it's not my expertise.
Speaker 3: I'll look them up.
Speaker 4: And I took a few Google searches to realize that
Speaker 4: anadot is a right wing online tech company that processes
Speaker 4: donations and its clientele is mostly almost entirely the far
Speaker 4: right Maga Republicans. People like it tries to raise money
Speaker 4: from Marjorie Taylor Green, Jim Jordan, Lauren Bobert. It works
Speaker 4: for Turning Point USA, for the Susan b Anthony, which
Speaker 4: is anti abortion, focus on the family. And you know,
Speaker 4: it not only works for them, it actually has a
Speaker 4: has a service in which it tries to encourage direct
Speaker 4: payments to these organizations. So here is a group No
Speaker 4: Labels that says we don't like the extremements of the
Speaker 4: right or the left, but every time you give them
Speaker 4: one hundred bucks four dollars or so, of that goes
Speaker 4: to this tech firm that's working to amplify and support
Speaker 4: far right Maga Republicans, ultra conservatives, and folks like Marjorie
Speaker 4: Taylor Green and Jim Jordan. It seems completely out of whack.
Speaker 4: And the funny thing was Annaot wouldn't talk to me.
Speaker 4: And I tried a gazillion times to reach somebody at
Speaker 4: No Labels to get an explanation, and again and again
Speaker 4: and again they did not return my calls. They did
Speaker 4: not return my emails, and I got some on the
Speaker 4: phone and they said, oh, you need to talk to
Speaker 4: our communications deputy, Marianne Martini.
Speaker 2: She's not real and.
Speaker 4: I don't know she exists on Lincoln's I think she's real.
Speaker 4: And I said, okay, it's through to her. They said, oh,
Speaker 4: well you can't, but you can email her. I said great,
Speaker 4: and I said, can you give me her email address?
Speaker 4: They said no. Now, two listeners out there, this may
Speaker 4: not sound so bizarre, but we covered politics so many
Speaker 4: years I have never come across a political organization as
Speaker 4: a reporter. If you ask for the email of their
Speaker 4: communications spokesperson, they won't give it out. But they didn't,
Speaker 4: and I left a message and Mary Anne Martini, remember
Speaker 4: that name, Mary Ann Martini not email me back, did
Speaker 4: not call me back. So, for whatever reason, they are not,
Speaker 4: you know, being transparent or accountable about the firm or
Speaker 4: about where their money comes from.
Speaker 3: So we'll see.
Speaker 4: At the end of the day, they may not put
Speaker 4: anyone on the ballot and this may all blow over,
Speaker 4: but right now they are setting up to do that,
Speaker 4: which is why Rick Wilson and others are very worried
Speaker 4: about them.
Speaker 1: They're trying to get mansion to run as an independent right,
Speaker 1: that's the goal.
Speaker 4: That seems to be the goal. He is affiliated with them.
Speaker 4: He won't say one way or the other whether he'll
Speaker 4: do this. You know, I don't like making predictions. My
Speaker 4: hunches that he knows he's sort of to know that
Speaker 4: he can't win running.
Speaker 1: Of course he knows he can't win, but that doesn't
Speaker 1: matter necessarily.
Speaker 4: But I don't know. Being blamed for the restoration of
Speaker 4: Donald Trump is a pretty heavy thing to have on
Speaker 4: your resume at the end of your career. So I
Speaker 4: don't know if he would go for this or not.
Speaker 4: But of course he won't say so until the very,
Speaker 4: very very last minute, because you know, like a lot
Speaker 4: of these folks, if power to not say you get
Speaker 4: booked on shows, people you know are more kind to you.
Speaker 4: Chuck Schuert may want to make sure not to piss
Speaker 4: you off. You know, he has no interest in not
Speaker 4: in saying that he won't do this. So we probably
Speaker 4: won't know until sometime next year.
Speaker 2: Incredible stuff. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1: I hope you'll come back.
Speaker 3: You know what, there's one way to get me to
Speaker 3: come back, ask.
Speaker 2: Thank you, David Hi.
Speaker 1: It's Molly and I am wildly excited that for the time,
Speaker 1: Fast Politics, the show you're listening to right now, is
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Speaker 1: Katherine Rampel is a columnist at The Washington Post.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Fast Politics, Katherine.
Speaker 1: Rampal, thanks for having me. Very excited to have you
Speaker 1: and for the Washing Post. You have a very interesting
Speaker 1: story this week. I feel like what's happening with the
Speaker 1: IRS right now, and what's happening with this sort of
Speaker 1: politicization of the IRS is so weird and just like
Speaker 1: kind of a little bit terrifying. And I remember that
Speaker 1: you are the person who went to the IRS to
Speaker 1: that cafeteria, right.
Speaker 6: Yes, I have been on the let's give more money
Speaker 6: to the IRS bandwagon for like over a decade.
Speaker 2: Will you start by telling us about the cafeteria.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, After many months of pleading, I got permission to
Speaker 6: visit one of the Internal Revenue Services processing centers where
Speaker 6: they I know, this is like every reporter stream.
Speaker 1: I can't even imagine how hard it was to get there.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yes, yes, I mean they take textpayer privacy very seriously.
Speaker 6: And also, as you can imagine, the IRS periodically gets
Speaker 6: threats against it, et cetera. They don't really want strangers
Speaker 6: wandering around. But basically, I've been writing for a really
Speaker 6: long time about how we need to give more money
Speaker 6: to the IRS, not only for enforcement but also for
Speaker 6: basic IT modernization, because they are using software from the
Speaker 6: Disco era, and a lot of the work that's done
Speaker 6: processing tax returns is still done manually, like with red pens,
Speaker 6: and then they have somebody manually typing into a computer.
Speaker 6: They didn't have scanners at the time that I visited.
Speaker 2: Okay, so a year ago they didn't have scanners at
Speaker 2: the IRS.
Speaker 6: Yes, So I had heard all these crazy stories about
Speaker 6: how antiquated their it was, and I had been writing
Speaker 6: about for many years, like we need to invest in
Speaker 6: the administrative capacity of government, including in the IRS, And
Speaker 6: I finally got permission to go visit again.
Speaker 2: This was about a year ago, and it was wild.
Speaker 6: It was like the weirdest Willy Wonka tour you can imagine,
Speaker 6: because again like this, this is a place that is
Speaker 6: usually closed off to outsiders, and they have all of
Speaker 6: their own strange lingo for different things, like there's the
Speaker 6: thing that opens the mail that's called the nibbler. They
Speaker 6: literally manually would cut open envelopes that they receive and
Speaker 6: then they would cut them open along three sides and
Speaker 6: then hold it up to the light to see if
Speaker 6: there was anything inside that might have been missed. And
Speaker 6: that was the candler. So there was all sorts of
Speaker 6: stuff like that that was just fun. But it was
Speaker 6: also really sad in a way because again, we are
Speaker 6: the richest country in the world, and we just did
Speaker 6: not invest in having a government that is even in
Speaker 6: the late twentieth century, let alone the twenty first century.
Speaker 6: And when I was there, you mentioned the cafeteria. The
Speaker 6: reason why that was significant is that the agency was
Speaker 6: so backloged due to a combination of again really really
Speaker 6: old it and COVID. Like in many offices right in
Speaker 6: many industries, public and private sector, there had been major
Speaker 6: disruptions because of the pandemic, but they were very severely
Speaker 6: disrupted by COVID, as you can imagine, and they had
Speaker 6: tons and tons of these paper tax returns because a
Speaker 6: lot of people do still sit in their TEX returns
Speaker 6: on paper that they could not get through. And everywhere
Speaker 6: you walked on this campus, which is like basically a
Speaker 6: giant warehouse, there were just stacks of unprocessed tax returns,
Speaker 6: including in the cafeteria. The cafeteria it was no longer
Speaker 6: really functioning as a cafeteria. It looked like a giant
Speaker 6: corn maze almost of the stacks of paper tax returns.
Speaker 2: And you took a picture.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it just was a sort of incredible moment of like,
Speaker 1: this is an institution that Republicans are trying to kill.
Speaker 6: And they've been trying to do it for many years.
Speaker 6: Like I said, I've been on this beat for a while,
Speaker 6: roughly around the Tea Party revolution, So twenty ten that's
Speaker 6: when Congress led by Republicans really started gutting the irs.
Speaker 6: And I think from then to maybe about ten years
Speaker 6: after that, their budget fell around twenty or twenty five percent.
Speaker 6: I forget the exact number in inflation adjusted terms, and
Speaker 6: that's part of the reason why they had not been
Speaker 6: able to invest I mean they had obviously they're still
Speaker 6: using technology from the nineteen seventy so they had not
Speaker 6: been investing for a long time in upgrading their IT.
Speaker 6: But also they ended up cutting back on enforcement. They
Speaker 6: ended up cutting back on customer service. You know, if
Speaker 6: any people listening out there ever tried to call the
Speaker 6: IRS during that period, you know your call never got answered,
Speaker 6: or if it did, you know you might have been
Speaker 6: waiting on hold for an hour, which is unfortunate because
Speaker 6: if you're calling the IRS, it probably means you're trying
Speaker 6: to pay your taxes correctly.
Speaker 2: And honestly, I knew have a question.
Speaker 6: So anyway, so the whole thing was really wild and
Speaker 6: as I said, using this really dated technology leading to
Speaker 6: a very frustrating experience for honest taxpayers and an easier
Speaker 6: way for dishonest tax payers to get away with their dishonesty.
Speaker 6: And the piece published like in August of last year,
Speaker 6: so I visited I think in late June maybe, and
Speaker 6: then it finally ran in August, and it was around
Speaker 6: the time that the Inflation Reduction Act passed, which is
Speaker 6: significant because the Inflation Reduction Act invested eighty billion dollars
Speaker 6: long term in the Internal Revenue Service and gave them
Speaker 6: the ability to plan right like, rather than than dealing
Speaker 6: with the whims of congressional appropriations from year to year,
Speaker 6: which you know, again, they could massively fluctuate from one
Speaker 6: year to the next, and it was very difficult to do,
Speaker 6: like an IT upgrade, which might require several years and
Speaker 6: stages of upgrades that had been challenging to do. So
Speaker 6: this was the opportunity for the agency to finally invest
Speaker 6: in those longer term investments.
Speaker 2: Again.
Speaker 6: Both they bought scanners amazing, Wow, they bought scanners, and
Speaker 6: they hired a bunch of customer service representatives and grave
Speaker 6: and you know a lot of that stuff. A lot
Speaker 6: of those kinds of investments require training. So you might
Speaker 6: hire someone today, but they can't actually begin work for
Speaker 6: several months, or they can't begin interfacing, I guess with
Speaker 6: the public for several months because they need to get
Speaker 6: trained on taxpayer privacy and whatever else.
Speaker 1: And now with this debt ceiling deal, explained to us
Speaker 1: how that's changed.
Speaker 6: So the Republicans, after the Inflation Reduction Act was passed,
Speaker 6: almost immediately began trying to undo the investment in the IRS.
Speaker 6: And even before this debt limit deal, when you know,
Speaker 6: was was finally resolved, like one of the first acts
Speaker 6: that the Republican House did this term, you know, after
Speaker 6: assuming the mature already was they tried to defund the
Speaker 6: IRS and they wanted to take away most of the money,
Speaker 6: particularly from the enforcement efforts. So when I say enforcement,
Speaker 6: what I mean is basically audits, exams, appeals, all that
Speaker 6: kind of stuff. Through the negotiations over deficit whatever, you know,
Speaker 6: like Republicans were claiming that they really cared about holding
Speaker 6: the debt limit hostage because they cared about our long
Speaker 6: term fiscal health, which to me is a contradiction in terms,
Speaker 6: because holding the debt limit hostage and threatening a global
Speaker 6: financial crisis will only make US debt look riskier and
Speaker 6: make it harder for us to burrow whatever. That's a
Speaker 6: whole other thing. One of the things that they demanded,
Speaker 6: ostensibly in the name of reducing deficits, reducing spending, was
Speaker 6: to at least partly defund the IRS. And again, the
Speaker 6: IRS is a little bit different from other agencies, and
Speaker 6: that when you spend a dollar or you know, you
Speaker 6: spend if a government spends a dollar I don't know,
Speaker 6: on a Medicare bill. That may be a dollar well spent,
Speaker 6: but it is a dollar out the door on net
Speaker 6: gross and net. Let's say when you spend a dollar
Speaker 6: on the IRS. It's a little bit different because the
Speaker 6: IRS brings in money both through those enforcement efforts i e.
Speaker 6: Enforcing the tax laws that already exist when people break them,
Speaker 6: whether deliberately or not. You know, I guess I should
Speaker 6: be careful. Not everybody who underpays their taxes is a
Speaker 6: tax cheat per se. People make mistakes, but when the
Speaker 6: IRS gets money, it uses that money to bring in
Speaker 6: more money, unlike most other forms of government spending. And
Speaker 6: so the effect on deficits, on our long term fiscal health,
Speaker 6: on fiscal responsibility, whatever term of art you want to use,
Speaker 6: is actually quite bad if you take money away from
Speaker 6: the IRS. And the way that this deal was structured,
Speaker 6: it's still kind of vague. As you may know, there
Speaker 6: were like some side deals that went on with this
Speaker 6: debt limit agreement. There's some stuff that was actually in
Speaker 6: the bill that both chambers of Congress passed and the
Speaker 6: President's signed, and then there's like some gentlemen's agreements kind
Speaker 6: of things about what they're going to do with future appropriations,
Speaker 6: and most of the clawback of funding from the IRS
Speaker 6: is in that ladder category, so they haven't actually, we
Speaker 6: haven't actually seen the full extent of where that money's
Speaker 6: coming from. Most likely it will come out of future
Speaker 6: enforcement efforts, because that's the thing Republicans most want to
Speaker 6: go after, and that is frankly hardest, I think for
Speaker 6: even politicians who are not anti IRS to defend right,
Speaker 6: because like, it sounds scary when Republicans say, oh, all
Speaker 6: of this money is going to be used to hire
Speaker 6: eighty seven thousand gun toting IO agents to you know,
Speaker 6: bang down your door whatever.
Speaker 2: Do they have guns?
Speaker 6: See, there is a very limited subset of IRS agents
Speaker 6: who are carrying firearms.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, I mean, why should they be different than
Speaker 1: everyone else in this country?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 6: Well, it's like if you're protecting a witness who is
Speaker 6: testifying in court, for example, Okay, in some heated case,
Speaker 6: there are some people who have that job, who work
Speaker 6: for the IRS, who are armed, and the IRIS actually
Speaker 6: does a lot of other stuff that I think people
Speaker 6: don't necessarily realize that they do. So you may recall
Speaker 6: that last year when Russia invaded Ukraine, there was this
Speaker 6: effort to like seize all of these Russian yachts and
Speaker 6: things like that. Actually the IRS was tasked with doing that,
Speaker 6: I mean, I think in conjunction with some other agencies.
Speaker 6: So they do a lot of like sort of law
Speaker 6: enforcement d type stuff, even if it's not the core
Speaker 6: part of their business that most people associate with the
Speaker 6: Internal Revenue Service, So there are a few that are armed.
Speaker 6: But you know, if you get audited, like you're a
Speaker 6: Joe taxpayer and you get it audited, I do not
Speaker 6: think the agent showing up at your door is going
Speaker 6: to be you know, armed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well that's something explain to us.
Speaker 1: How really, funding the IRS is a good idea.
Speaker 6: If you want people to pay the taxes that they
Speaker 6: already legally owe. That is, we're not talking about raising
Speaker 6: tax rates. We're just saying, whatever the laws already are,
Speaker 6: we want people to pay to pay that amount. So
Speaker 6: like nobody feels like a sucker because they're the one
Speaker 6: dope abiding by the law and their next door neighbor
Speaker 6: is cheating a tax man, right, in which case the
Speaker 6: honest person in the long run is going to have
Speaker 6: to make up for the shortfall. If you want to
Speaker 6: collect the taxes that are already owed, if you want
Speaker 6: to make it easier for people who are trying to
Speaker 6: follow the law to follow law, because we do have
Speaker 6: a really crazily complicated tax code, which is a whole
Speaker 6: other thing, and that's Congress's fault, that's not the IRS's fault.
Speaker 6: You want people at the agency to be able to
Speaker 6: answer the phone and to respond to mail, and to
Speaker 6: have ways of answering questions. That requires money. And the
Speaker 6: piece that I wrote this week, which I think is
Speaker 6: the reason you wanted to have this conversation, was about
Speaker 6: some really fascinating new research from a group of economists
Speaker 6: at Harvard, the Treasury Department, and the University of Sydney
Speaker 6: that looked at internal IRS records to see basically what
Speaker 6: the ROI was on different types of audits. So, like
Speaker 6: I said, you give IRS a dollar, they bring back
Speaker 6: more than a dollar because they use it to collect money.
Speaker 6: This team of researchers used internal accounting data from the
Speaker 6: agency and also records from the results of like seven
Speaker 6: hundred thousand audits to figure out, Okay, well you is
Speaker 6: a dollar to audit a poor person. How much money
Speaker 6: do you spend like how many audits can you do
Speaker 6: and how much money do you get back for audit?
Speaker 6: And if you use a dollar to audit a rich person,
Speaker 6: same deal. And they basically found that, yeah, it is
Speaker 6: more expensive upfront to audit higher income taxpayers because you know,
Speaker 6: if you're Donald Trump, you have a really complicated tax
Speaker 6: return and a bunch of partnership returns and other things
Speaker 6: that are really hard to sift through. That requires many
Speaker 6: hours of examination from government employees to figure out where
Speaker 6: you might have done something wrong. And it also generally
Speaker 6: requires a little bit more specialized skills from those IRS employees. Right,
Speaker 6: the kind of person that you might need to employ
Speaker 6: the IRS to audit Trump is different from the kind
Speaker 6: of person or the level of training, level of whatever
Speaker 6: sophistication degrees, whatever that I'd be necessary to audit like
Speaker 6: a low income person who has a very simple tax return.
Speaker 6: And so they did find that it costs a lot
Speaker 6: more money upfront for those reasons. You know, mostly that
Speaker 6: it requires many more hours to audit high income people,
Speaker 6: but the amount of money that it comes back is
Speaker 6: ginormously greater. So for like the bottom half of the
Speaker 6: income distribution on average, the IRS basically breaks even. They
Speaker 6: spend a dollar auditing you know, the local plumber or whoever,
Speaker 6: or school teacher, like, maybe they get about a dollar
Speaker 6: back on average. You know, some people maybe they pay more.
Speaker 6: They maybe they owe more, and some people maybe they
Speaker 6: owe nothing more or even you know, maybe they overpaid whatever.
Speaker 6: On average, the IRS basically breaks even. Not the case
Speaker 6: at the very top of the income distribution. So for
Speaker 6: the people in like the top one percent, for every
Speaker 6: dollar that the IRS spends auditing them, they get back
Speaker 6: on average about three bucks. The top point one percent
Speaker 6: they get back over six dollars. And again that's accounting
Speaker 6: for the fact that people are going to appeal and
Speaker 6: preach people in particular, sometimes the IRS will lose those cases. Still,
Speaker 6: on average they get back six bucks back, and that's
Speaker 6: just what they get from the audit. The other really
Speaker 6: interesting findings from this research was that what matters even
Speaker 6: more in terms of baying for the buck from the
Speaker 6: spending on auditing is not what they get back from
Speaker 6: the audit itself, but how the tax payers behavior changes
Speaker 6: going forward. So when you audit Donald Trump, if they
Speaker 6: ever conclude the never ending audits, of course, maybe you
Speaker 6: get a few bucks back. But what really matters is
Speaker 6: that in the decade after the audit, Donald Trump starts
Speaker 6: falling the law right right right and stops or Don
Speaker 6: Trump or whoever, but you know, stops taking dodgy deductions
Speaker 6: that they shouldn't be taking, starts reporting income that maybe
Speaker 6: they had been receiving under the table, or stops reporting
Speaker 6: as a dependent a child who doesn't live with them
Speaker 6: most of the year. Whatever the thing that they were
Speaker 6: doing that turned out to be wrong again, whether that
Speaker 6: was an honest error or deliberately cheating Uncle Sam, they
Speaker 6: generally stopped doing it. The amount of additional tax revenue
Speaker 6: that comes in from these sort of chastened taxpayers is
Speaker 6: roughly triple what gets recovered from the initial audit and
Speaker 6: requires basically nothing more from the IRS. Right the IRIS
Speaker 6: has done its audit, but now these people are following
Speaker 6: the law going forward, and the RIS doesn't have to
Speaker 6: get on the case anymore. So all of which is
Speaker 6: to say that when you take money away from the IRS,
Speaker 6: it costs a ton of money, especially if the line
Speaker 6: item that you are taking money away from is auditing
Speaker 6: the rich. The headline number is basically for the highest earners.
Speaker 6: Every additional dollar that Congress could give to IRS could
Speaker 6: bring back twelve dollars in return. When you include those
Speaker 6: deterrence effects and you include you know what gets recover
Speaker 6: from the audit all of that, that's an enormous return
Speaker 6: on investment. Like any rich person can tell you, you know
Speaker 6: the rich person is being audited. They'd be like, that
Speaker 6: would be a great return if I could get twelve
Speaker 6: dollars for every one dollar I spend.
Speaker 1: So interesting. Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 6: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2: Act Jesse Cannon.
Speaker 3: My junk fast.
Speaker 5: We're going to bring Rick Wilson in for a special
Speaker 5: moment of fuckery right after this. But I think you
Speaker 5: want to address what's been going on with Joe Rogan
Speaker 5: RFK Elon and doctor Peter Hotez.
Speaker 1: Elon and Joe Rogan wants doctor Peter Hotez to debate
Speaker 1: demented anti vaxer RFK Junior, and so I have an
Speaker 1: offer for Joe fear factor bug eater Rogan. You can
Speaker 1: debate me anytime you want. So, Rick Wilson, let's talk
Speaker 1: about our moment of fuck ery. Do you guys want
Speaker 1: us to podcast again? Listeners? If you want Rick and
Speaker 1: I to start a podcast again, tell us, tell us Rick,
Speaker 1: send Rick lots of text messages. Rick.
Speaker 3: Yes, if you were to take.
Speaker 1: A moment that was your most fucked up moment, perhaps
Speaker 1: a person who is who has sparked your ire who
Speaker 1: would it be?
Speaker 3: God? This week?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Look, I mean I think I think the pinnacle of
Speaker 3: all of this this week has to be you know,
Speaker 3: Trump himself. He continues to play this fucking game with
Speaker 3: America that he's above the law, that he knows he
Speaker 3: will never be held to account. At some point, it's
Speaker 3: like it's like a morally offensive grind on everything, and
Speaker 3: I seriously, I do it kind of weighs on me sometimes.
Speaker 2: Like the death of American democracy weighs on you.
Speaker 3: I wish there was some sort of shame factor that
Speaker 3: still existed in American society, but there's not.
Speaker 1: You want mine, yes, because mine is part of yours.
Speaker 1: This week, Donald J. Trump, perhaps you've heard of him
Speaker 1: after he had his federal indictment. On the way out,
Speaker 1: she went to a famous restaurant in Miami called Versailles, right, yes, indeed,
Speaker 1: and at Versaill in the Palace of Versailles, not to
Speaker 1: be confused with the Versailles in France. He told the
Speaker 1: group that he no, indeed, he told the group that
Speaker 1: he would treat It was all his treat.
Speaker 2: People then ordered and he properly left.
Speaker 1: I feel like that is the lesson of trump Ism
Speaker 1: right there, like Burla Scone all his treat and then
Speaker 1: he leaves.
Speaker 3: So I was in Italy two weeks ago and this
Speaker 3: one guy said to me, he goes. You know, Trump
Speaker 3: learned everything everything he had about criminality from berlo He goes.
Speaker 3: But the thing about Burla Sconey was he was a
Speaker 3: real crook. But he would also pay for dinner. Trump
Speaker 3: has never paid for a dinner. Is fucking life. I
Speaker 3: promise you I will say this too, Molly. I mean,
Speaker 3: if you're in Miami and you go to Versailles and
Speaker 3: you don't eat a croquetta or as I say, I
Speaker 3: will eat my body weight in croquetta's, and that's a
Speaker 3: lot of fucking croquettas. And he didn't take any croquettas
Speaker 3: to go, didn't get a media note, che or a
Speaker 3: Cuban sandwich hot and pressed or anything. Right, he stops
Speaker 3: at a goddamn McDonald's drive through on the way back
Speaker 3: to the airport, and he's McDonald's on the plane. It's
Speaker 3: just like it's like the well done steak of visiting Miami.
Speaker 3: You don't eat a well done steak. You don't get
Speaker 3: McDonald's when you're in Miami, one of the greatest food
Speaker 3: cities in the country. That's so inffo lesson and.
Speaker 1: There it is our moment of fuck gery, Rick Wilson.
Speaker 2: I hope you will come back.
Speaker 3: I will certainly come back, as you know. And I
Speaker 3: think I'll have you on the on the enemy's list
Speaker 3: again soon because people liked you.
Speaker 1: I can't imagine why. That's it for this episode of
Speaker 1: Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to
Speaker 1: hear the best minds in 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 again,
Speaker 1: thanks for listening.