First They Came for John Bolton

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Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tony Euport. All right, buckle up. We're going to inform you, it's not all rainbows and butterflies out there today, guys. Not a fun show. We're going to talk about Trump's plan to deploy more troops who are now armed to more cities.

Government says they're now planning on deporting Kilmar Obrego-Garcia to Uganda because he won't plead guilty to charges that multiple judges have found flimsy at best. They also released the transcript of Ghislaine Maxwell's interview with the DOJ, which we'll dig into. Then we'll update you all on a few storylines that still haven't been resolved, even though they're getting less attention. And later, you'll hear Lovett's interview with the Atlantic's James Sirwicki on the Trump administration's move to take a stake in Intel and possibly other companies. Who knows? Who can say? But first, Trump and his administration have spent the last several days using the power of the state to target people who've criticized the president or just made him angry. By now, you probably know that on Friday morning, the FBI raided the home and office of John Bolton, Trump's first term national security advisor who's become a vote.

critic of his former boss. The reporting suggests it has to do with his handling of classified information, though they haven't released much information beyond a tweet from Kash Patel saying that no one is above the law. FBI agents on a mission. Highly irregular statement from the FBI director about a raid that's in progress, to say the least. The head of the Defense Intelligence Agency was also fired following the report that Trump's strike on Iran had only set back its nuclear capabilities by a few months.

which contradicts Trump's obliterated take. The president then spent the weekend threatening people who he thinks were unfair to him on TV. Chris Christie, Wes Moore, NBC News, ABC News. We'll get to all that in a minute. But here's Trump in the Oval Office Monday responding to questions about the Bolton raid. Search of John Bolton's home and office from Friday. Have you been briefed? I have not been briefed. No, I read it just like you did.

I was never a fan of his. I thought he was stupid. I thought he was, you know, a guy that only wanted to go into war. He liked killing people. I thought he was essentially a bad guy. More raids? I don't know. You'd have to ask the Department of Justice. They raided my house, I can tell you that. They did a big raid on my house. They took away everything that wasn't pinned down, and they took away some of that, too. How did it work out? Oh, I see. I guess it didn't work out too well for them, did it? They are very evil, very sick people, that group. And if they would have won the election, this country wouldn't exist as we know it. This country would have been a failed country.

In the background there, you hear the South Korean president's translator. So I would enjoy having seen the camera just trained on the South Korean president's face as he's hearing about the sick and evil people and the raids. Yeah, it's just a little embarrassing. It's like, oh, right. This is an international embarrassment. Oh, yeah. Oh, very much so. Also, every time you look up, there's more gold. It's so gold in there right now. It's on the walls, on the chairs, on the ties. Yes, it seems like a joke. It seems AI generated. It seems like someone did like as a joke. Hey, show me what Donald Trump's Oval Office might look like in 2015. That's what he's actually doing. Remember the...

the picture we did for the Correspondence Center when Obama made fun of Trump about what the White House would look like if Trump won. And it was like, we went Trump casino. We had like a computer generated image of the whole thing. Honestly, it wasn't far enough. We missed the mark. We should have done full gold. We made that in 2011. And that was with Jesse, who years later would help here and become the design head here. So there we go. Here we go. Things aren't as great now. What do you guys make of the Bolton Raid, Tommy? I mean, I think big picture, it felt like just another head on a pike.

You know, warning to my enemies. And we know he has an enemies list, thanks to Kash Patel putting it in his book. What was it called? The Government Gangsters or something like that? The Children's one? No. It's funny, that was a real question. I know, I know. It actually was a sincere question. I didn't know which book it was. Yeah, I mean, look, again, you know, John Bolton is Ben Rhodes' mentor, but I've never been a fan. I don't like his foreign policy, his politics is like kind of...

mustache, his vibe. But it does seem like he's getting punished. And it is really weird. Like initially, it did seem like this raid was gonna be based on the 2020 prosecution of John Bolton for putting things in his book that the Trump people said he wasn't supposed to. But now they're leaking to the New York Times that Bolton mishandled classified material, which the CIA learned about when it was passed along to the FBI. And again, that's very sensitive stuff. And there is some speculation out there that Bolton did some work for the government of Qatar. And maybe that is related. But who knows? Like Kash Patel and Pambandi, by the way, also did work for the Qatari government. Can I just ask you two? I mean, so the CIA angle, the New York Times reported this. I know the CIA collects intelligence overseas on foreign actors sometimes.

Americans' communication gets swept up in that. The idea that then the CIA director is going to take the communications that they, or information on the Americans that they found through monitoring foreign agents or actors and then just like hand it over to the FBI. Does that happen a lot? Well, there's a process for that. I mean, what you're kind of referencing is more like the NSA unmasking, which is like we intercept a call between an American citizen and some foreign person and like the identity is masked in some products and you have to unmask it. That's a big controversy in Trump 1.0. If the CIA figures out that John Bolton is a spy for the Russians through counterintelligence operations or whatever, they will pass that along to the FBI.

for prosecution, but it is incredibly sensitive. I mean, by law, they're not supposed to collect on Americans, spy on Americans. Yeah, and the Times article about it, you might think that the article could have been from another era if you didn't know the participants in it, because it makes a point of saying only limited intelligence was shared, that they were taking it quite seriously. But then you remember, this is John Radcliffe, who's a hardcore Republican, former member of Congress, and Cash Patel, who worked for Devin Nunes, who's also, you know, now runs Truth Social. These are just a couple of sort of Trumpy guys. And then, like, you know, Trump's saying, oh, like, I had no idea what this was going to happen. And then you think, okay, first of all,

Who knows if that's true? But even if it is, that's why you put Kash Patel at the FBI. That's why you put Radcliffe at CIA or DNI. That's why you put Pam Bondi as the head of the DOJ. They know what they're supposed to do. Yeah. I mean, look, who knows? Maybe John Bolton's a spy. Maybe he has committed a crime. We don't know. We'll see what happens. It's always the people you least expect. Someone who is universally beloved. This is why it's so obvious what they're doing, right? Is they are purposely targeting unsympathetic characters who do not necessarily have a base of support, right? John Bolton is a perfect example of that. The MAGA establishment.

not a fan. He has MS-13 politics. Liberals, liberals, not a fan. Right. And so who's going to, you know, who's going to worry about John Bolton? Who's going to stand up for John Bolton? But first they came for John Bolton. Right. But like, well, well, and I know like we all have to do the throat clearing when we even talk about it. Right. I just did it. Yeah. We all do it. I don't like his policies. But it's like, no, there's a guy who was a prominent critic.

of the administration. They have gone after him before. And now, surprise, surprise, they found something on him again, raided his house, bragged about raiding his house. J.D. Vance was interviewed by Kristen Welker on Meet the Press over the weekend. And he said, we're investigating him, which you just don't do. And even if it is all, even if it turns out that there is evidence that he committed some sort of a crime, like, of course, people are going to think that you politically, this is why no one can believe anything anymore. That what the Trump administration is doing is because it's, you have, like you said, you have Kash Patel, the head of the FBI, who, and Pam Bondi, who's just, you know, another.

advisor to the president, no independence there whatsoever. So you have that, you have Trump talking about it, joking about, oh, he's a bad guy. J.D. Vance said, we're investigating him. So like, of course, people are going to think this is a fucking political prosecution or investigation. And it also sends a chilling message to anyone else who's criticizing the president. Like, this could be you. Let's say it wasn't. Let's say this was a totally above board operation. You wouldn't live tweet it. You wouldn't go, you wouldn't do an interview saying we're investigating this person. You would actually go above and beyond because you cared so much about the independence, but they don't care about that. I will say, and look, I agree with all the throat clearing. It's important that we do it. But John Bolton.

made such a point of saying like, he's not going to support Trump, but he's going to write in Dick Cheney's name because both sides are unacceptable. And I'm just so, as a protest vote, I'm going to write in Dick Cheney and then, and then it makes jokes about the age of Biden at the time. Then Biden drops out. Then Cheney says he's voting for Kamala. And that leads John Bolton to be like, now I don't know if I can even support Cheney. And it's like, all right, buddy. Like I, you know, I give him credit. He's been a critic when everyone else has shut up. So I get John Bolton credit there. And I'm more like.

forest for the trees on this one. Like John Bolton, Dick Cheney, I don't care who the fuck it is. They are, they are, you know, they start shooting people in the street and disappearing people who like, I don't care what their politics are or what they've done. Like the government shouldn't do that, right? You're right. I'm sorry. I don't care either. No, no, no, no. I don't care either. I just, this is, I do think this is why he's picking these people. This is where we're talking about Chris Christie too. Like they're not, they're not picking the most popular people. This is why I've always been, you know, could eat my words on this, more skeptical. Like he's going to go fucking arrest Barack Obama because if you're being strategic about it, arresting Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Kamala, like that would, you know, that would send people into the streets maybe, but no one's going to the streets for John Bolton

former allies who turned against him. And the people involved in his prosecutions. Yes, on January 6th. Basically, he's gone after almost all of them now. So we haven't talked about Pete Hegseth firing the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

for what seems like releasing a report that contradicts Trump's preferred storyline about the Iran bombings, just like he fired the guy who released a jobs report that contradicts Trump's preferred storyline about the economy. I don't know. What do you guys think of the consequences down the road of the government silencing dissenting voices and information that displeases the president? Yeah, I mean, so the DIA, for those who don't know, it's one of the 18 different components of the intelligence community, and they specifically focus on military intelligence, military capabilities. And so...

Like you said, after we bombed Iran, they were kind of first out of the gate with this assessment that said that the bombing only sat Iran's program back a few months. That contradicts the total obliteration comments that enraged everybody. So I guess the message now is even collecting information that doesn't comport with what Donald Trump has said will get you fired. I mean, I guess we knew that from the BLS firing a few weeks ago. But like, play that for a minute. Imagine Trump is meeting with Xi Jinping. He decides, you know, they buy a bunch of Melania coin in advance or something. So he decides that China's good now. And Trump decides, OK, going forward, we're not allies. Taiwan, we're not going to talk about it. They're military, PLAs. Military, we're not going to talk about it. Human rights, shut up. IP theft, shut up.

Is an intelligence analyst who collects information about those things now going to get in trouble if they write them down and put them in a report? Because that is certainly what this seems to say to the uniformed military, to the military leadership. And also, Hexeth also fired a bunch of other senior Navy leaders, like the head of special warfare, with just sort of no commentary. We know Laura Loomer got the head of the NSA pushed out a few months ago. So yeah, I mean, very weird shit is happening.

Yeah, I look at, I think, speaking of Dick Cheney, we're old enough to remember that it was the Defense Intelligence Agency where Cheney and Rumsfeld went rooting around to try to find the right kind of evidence. So they go to the UN and claim that Saddam Hussein had a program of weapons mass destruction, you know, intelligence being manipulated to confirm the priors of the people who want to change, say, the Defense Department's name to the Department of War can lead to really bad places. It already has. It can again. And yeah.

Who's going to work in intelligence? Who's going to work in the defense department now? Why would anyone want to do that? Maggot sheds. Yeah. And like, why would they want to, like you said, it is writing the information down because you could see if they fired whoever they found leaking it, right? Because obviously the report was leaked. But that's not what happened. It's not, this is the leaker. This is the person who produced the accurate information.

Or the information. Led the agency that did, yeah. And by the way, like, who knows the conversations we're not hearing, right? Maybe it's because refused to produce a different report under pressure, refused to go along. I'm sure there'll be more reporting on this, but like, we have no idea what's going on in Pete Hanks, that's fucking Pentagon, other than leaks about how chaotic and messy it is and how he's getting rid of people that he feels threatened by and how it's overcome by paranoia. All great things. That's the most powerful military in the history of planet Earth. That's what you want there. That's what you want to talk about military. So Trump was clearly watching the Sunday shows, more than I can say for myself, and responded to an ABC News interview with Chris Christie by, let's see, he made fun of Jonathan Karl's hair. I have not seen lately. Yeah, I don't know what his hair looks like that's different. I think dreads were a mistake.

But he went on vacation to Jamaica and he did the thing. As one does. He mocked the show for paying him $60 million, just taking a little victory lap there. And then he called Christie sloppy and threatened to reopen the decade-old investigation into the former New Jersey governor's closure of the George Washington Bridge. He also threatened ABC News and NBC News, saying that they should be paying the government millions in licensing fees or else lose their broadcast licenses for unfair coverage of Republicans. Trump's government is already investigating Senator Adam Schiff, New York Attorney General Tish James, Fed Governor Lisa Cook, all for alleged mortgage fraud. And the president has, of course, called for the indictment and imprisonment of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, James Clapper, and others over a completely made-up...

allegation about Russian interference. So a lot of Trump's threats turn out to be empty. Sure seems like he's following through on quite a few lately. I know it's unlikely that, you know, this, like I said, any of these individuals is going to get people up in arms, but I don't know. It feels like all this retribution is being met with kind of a collective shrug. Yeah, it's not a great trend line. What's the statute of limitations on a bridge closer, by the way? I was trying to figure out the date, but I was like, what? This was like, it might've been a decade ago. It was a long time ago. Yeah. I mean, the broader point is like 99% of the time I go through life.

sort of implicitly assuming that we're going to make it as a country. Yeah, yeah, for sure. You know, and then every once in a while, I have a conversation with someone, as I did this weekend, where they're like, oh, I actually have a bunch of money in Bitcoin cold storage that I'm storing in a foreign country. And I think, huh, am I a boiled frog too? Tommy, I told you that in confidence. Yeah, John's using a Trump coin. It's probably going to go up in value. I'm counting on Intel stock. But yeah, this is, the enemy's list is, they're picking them off. I feel like there is this collective feeling among people who are paying very close attention. Like it does feel like a shrug. It's like, what is the shrug? Like, what does it mean to feel like?

We're not. Why aren't people caring more? Why is something happening? And I do think it's a bit of this human nature, which is we do this in our own lives. Like problems you can't solve are just problems you don't want to deal with, face, admit to the size of, right? Like you have to admit you have a problem that you could like. That's what happens with people that have addiction, whatever. You have to like face the problem and believe you can fix it. And part of it is all the points of pressure that might cause there to be pain or consequences for what Trump is doing here.

are not available to us because Congress is controlled by Republicans and they don't give a fuck. DOJ is fully captured, so they don't give a fuck. Journalism just doesn't go as far as it used to because people are in their own feeds and not consuming information. There's just a report came out that Americans no longer on average read one book a year. That's unrelated to this, but it's not good. It's not good. You know who's worried it up in arms? All the chat GPTs. All the chatbots. Yeah, chatbots. They know what's going on. They're the only ones left with information. Yeah, the chat GPTs, they're, you know, how many... They're about to resist. Poor GPTs. Poor abused GPTs. The things they know. The things they know. Only Americans knew. I just don't know what we're...

Yeah, like, oh, you're really upset about this. Well, the people that can fix it don't give a fuck. And so it's like, yes, right now people aren't up in arms in a way that feels like it's commensurate to the scale of the challenge. But that's why we got to like do the fucking hard work to get people to come out and we can win a house in Congress. And all of a sudden we have some power. There's people that will care. I also think people have a mistaken impression of how things operate in a regime, a dictatorial regime, which is they go with, you know, if the if the dictator is going after their opponents, you know, it's just agents showing up at their house and taking them away in the middle of the night. And that's that. And even as we were talking about these cases, you're like, I don't know. Did anyone?

Did anyone commit some little mortgage fraud? Do we know the evidence? Do we know if John Bolton is guilty or not? Maybe he is. This is what they do. They figure out, okay, everyone has probably broken the law somewhere in life. And also, we don't have to tell anyone anything for a while. So we can pretend, at least it's on the up and up, with a little wink and a nod, as they've been doing. And, you know, then people will wonder what's going on. They'll think maybe it's shady. And also, Trump threatens a million people all the time anyway, and has for a decade. I mean, we were talking about this in the meeting this morning, and I mentioned ABC News and NBC. And you were like, didn't he already threaten them a couple times? Is that new? And I'm like, yeah, maybe. But, you know, I'm going to take your licenses unless you pay me millions. Like, maybe it's a tweet now. Pretty soon it's going to be like, you

He's also, I gotta say, maybe he switched to a stronger Adderall. He's doing more following up. Like he's following up on stuff more. Like it used to be- He's got the people to follow. He's got the people to follow. Because it used to be, he throws out a tweet or post about how we've got a free Tina Williams or Peters, whatever her name is, that woman in Colorado. And it's just a fit of peak. I forgot about that. And Jared Polis doesn't need to worry about it because it's never going to be harsh measures. But there's somebody keeping track and they do follow up. They do come back at you. Yeah.

And then the last person we should talk about is he went after Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland. They've been in a back and forth over sending the National Guard to Baltimore. The murder rate in Baltimore is at a 50-year low. You know, still crime in Baltimore. Still, you know, Trump says it's the fourth most violent city or crime-driven city, whatever. So Moore invited Trump to come walk the streets with him. And Trump responded by calling Moore nasty and provocative. He used a tone. He used a tone that was nasty and provocative. Let's go take a walk. That's how every tech CEO has meetings these days. You know, it was very passive-aggressive. And Trump said he may cancel the funding.

that Congress appropriated to rebuild the city's Francis Scott Key Bridge. Although Trump described it as, I gave him the money and I might take it back, which I don't even think that was, I think it was appropriate in 2024. It wasn't Venmo. It's not his money. It's also, yeah, it's similar to the Bolton thing. If it even comes out, part of it is the process is the threat, right? Because Trump is so openly and brazenly saying, you won't get the money because I don't like you. That would not hold up. But then the process of holding it up would be the problem. Same for Bolton. Maybe no crime will be there, but he has to get lawyers, he has to uproot his life to fight it.

Yeah. And now, I mean, just imagine like a state losing funding you get from the federal government to rebuild a fucking bridge that collapsed through, you know, an accident. Yeah. Very important bridge, too. And I guess, you know, he just all of these threats are designed to send a message to every other elected official out there. Because like Gavin Newsom has decided to burn the boats and tweet funny memes all day long. But other states are going to worry about getting federal funding in the wake of a disaster or, you know, what other executive branch help they might need.

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So Baltimore may have to get in line for the military occupation because on Friday, Trump said that Chicago, New York, San Francisco may be next on his list. Sure enough, The Washington Post reported the next day that the Pentagon has already spent weeks planning a National Guard deployment to Chicago, a move that Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker both pushed back on quite hard on Monday. Meanwhile, National Guard troops in D.C. are now carrying guns. So an expected move, but, you know, it's here. And White House videographers are also accompanying federal agents during raids and arrests so they can...

Fill our social media feeds with content that owns the libs and, you know, stuff that the MAGA base can get off to. Guys, we own ourselves, us libs, okay? We take plenty of videos of ourselves. Yeah, that's right. It's our liberal tiers that help, you know. You're watching the, was the choir outside of the Abrego Garcia hearing today? Oh my gosh. Anyway, sorry. We watch too much Fox in our office. Trump is clearly enjoying himself as well. Here he is on Monday after signing executive orders aimed at ending cashless bail, prosecuting flag burners, and ordering, quote, further actions to stop the crime emergency in D.C. So it used to be called the Department of War, and it had a stronger sound.

Now we have a Department of Defense with defenders. It just sounded bad. He said, sir, on behalf of the Department of Defense, defense. I don't want to be defense only. We want defense, but we want offense too, if that's okay. So you'll make a decision. But you know, as Department of War, we won everything. Come to think of it, there's your trophy for the World Cup. I think what I'm going to do is place it right above the angel, right over there. That's solid gold too. We're going to put it right up there. Look at that. There's a solid gold trophy.

They know how to get to me. As you all know, Chicago is a killing field right now. And they don't acknowledge it. And they say, we don't need him. Freedom, freedom. He's a dictator. He's a dictator. A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator. I don't like a dictator. I'm not a dictator. I'm a man with great common sense and a smart person. Yeah, not a dictator, even though you wouldn't believe how many people are coming up to me. Mr. Trump, Mr. Trump, we want a dictator. No, no, no, not me. That's not me. I'm just common sense.

I did see someone on Twitter called the office decor Saddam Corps. Yeah. I think that's a good, it is very Saddam Corps. I think the new Department of War logo being kind of a southern old guy laying arm over a barrel and it says Department of War. I think it's Gildan the Lily. I think it's Gildan the Lily. This is like cartoonishly fascist. It is. It is. In a way that if you told someone about it, that it was happening, who had been asleep for 10 years, they'd be like, come on, that's too, of course everyone got that it was fascist, right? Like, how did people not know this? It's also like, man, you know, you guys are sending out your social media people to film these arrests.

Lenny Riefenstahl knew how to compose a fucking shot. You know what I mean? There's no pride in the product. If you're going to be fascist, learn the rule of thirds. Also, historically speaking, remember the Republicans who liked limited government and like...

personal freedom and talked about that stuff all the time. Not like the crazy libertarians, like the dude in New Hampshire who tweets insane stuff, like the libertarian wing of the Republican Party. Where are those people? They're just hanging out. They're just gone. It's just a small but mighty crew at the American Enterprise Institute now. And Cato, don't forget Cato. Every time I see a tweet from someone there, I'm just like, yeah, you got it. They're pro-immigration. I'm retweeting the Cato guys all the time. There's a comedian named Tim Dillon who we've talked about, I think, maybe on Rapid Response stuff on YouTube, but I don't think he explicitly endorsed Trump in 2024, but he was very critical of Democrats, had J.D. Vance on his show right before the election for this long interview. But Tim Dillon did this riff the other day on his show where he was saying how...

All of the things that Alex Jones has been worrying about for years are coming to fruition. The U.S. military in the streets, FEMA camps, evil companies like Palantir collecting all of our data and monitoring us. Where are the people who are worried about this? Like, again, I know Alex Jones is a performance artist, as he said about himself in court. But like, there's a lot of people who sincerely care about these issues. And where are they? Well, I think maybe they didn't. I know. I do think people like limited government, like New Hampshire is an entire state built on loving limited government. They're choosing to die right now. They are. I talked to this to Ricky later. You'll hear it. But like, OK, right, fine. They're libertarians. But they like order. They like law.

The president is seizing the means of production. You know, he's taking over. He's demanding shares in publicly traded American corporations, private companies. And they're nowhere. They're nowhere. It's communism. It might take more. I mean, I'm sure you talked about this with Siriki. I don't know if you talked about the wind story, too. This was unfucking believable to me because, again, it was a headline. I'm like, oh, Donald Trump shutting down wind projects. Like, oh, yeah, he doesn't like wind. So maybe he's like cutting funding from the government. No, no, no. There's there was like a wind farm that's 70 percent built, already set to generate like enough electricity for like just hundreds of thousands of people in Rhode Island. It's almost going to be done and just pulling the permits now.

Just the federal government saying we don't want wind projects and wind projects that are actually in the process of being constructed with private money. We're going to shut them down. To your point earlier about like existential problems that are hard to look in the face because they're so dire and nothing's happening to solve them. Like climate change is still a thing. Yeah. As we all recall, there was this group that looks at sort of the intersection of climate and business. They found that $22 billion worth of clean energy projects have been canceled in the first half of 2025. A lot of that is like car manufacturers scaling back EV production because we got rid of all the tax credits that incentivized the purchase of EVs. But like big picture.

electricity is just going to get more expensive. And wind generates, I think, about 10% of our electricity last year. Wind and solar, you get to about 20% of electricity generation in the United States. And he's just killing off those industries at a time when we're also building these giant AI data centers that take a city's worth of energy so that we can all- They can get a couple more boobs on those ladies. I made that same joke with Sir Wiki Later, fuck. Stay tuned. So the Grok can turn into Mecca Hitler in real time. Someone said this, our country is now building data centers and detention centers and camps. That's it. That's what the United States has come to now. There are-

coal power plants that are set to retire. And the people running the coal power plants have not asked for an extension. They were ready to shut them down. And the Trump administration is forcing them to stay open because they're not profitable. in many cases. It's the equivalent of rolling coal, right? It's not good for anybody. It doesn't do anything. It just makes the air worse to own the people driving behind you, the libs and the Priuses and the Tesla. Well, used to be Teslas behind you. And it's more expensive. Say you didn't give a shit about climate change. There's cheaper energy that we're now trying to get rid of for more expensive energy because Donald Trump doesn't like what windmills look like and thinks that our coal past is something that we need to return to. It's the difference between what they claimed, what Republicans said forever and what Trump actually is, right? Like, oh, they don't want to choose winners and losers, right? And the tax credits and all these things choose winners and losers. But Trump...

I mean, again, to your point about everything Alex Jones predicting coming true, he goes, he meets with the oil executives, he demands a billion dollars. And then he's like, not only do they try to subsidize fossil fuels more in their big, beautiful bills, some of which came out, but not all of it. They're not going to kill projects that are basically done. There's no justification, none other than to make energy more expensive and to push people towards dirtier forms of fuels, to drive up the profits of a dozen or two dozen companies. Just wait till the federal government shows up at gas stations and just starts covering the prices of gas so that no one knows. They'll charge your card, but they're not going to release the information. Spray painted. Because gas is going to be as cheap as it can be forever. Well, it's just you're competing.

with all these immigrants for this gas and they're using up the gas. So, back to the occupation. That's happening, too. Oh, one more thing on the Department of War, though. The President of Peace, Nobel Peace Prize guy, gonna end forever wars, gonna end all the wars. I'm a President of Peace, and now we're doing a war department? Yeah, I don't know. It's a throwback. Throwback jerseys are pretty hot right now in a lot of sports. The NFL, I own a couple throwback jerseys. Maybe we're just throwing it back. Does he think that we got mired in Vietnam because of a brand issue? Does he think it was because our logo and slogan didn't capture the vibe? Is that the problem? We didn't win World War II because we had a Department of War, and then we changed it, and we lost our mojo.

No, I don't think that that's what happened. Yeah, that's right. That's right. I am. So Republicans are already lining up in Congress to introduce legislation to extend Trump's takeover of the D.C. police from 30 days to six months. That can't really happen without 60 votes in the Senate, right, which they don't have. You do sort of wonder if they're going to try to somehow stuff that in a government funding bill and then dare the Democrats to, you know, shut down the government over it. Wonderful. And I don't know if I've made up my mind on how I think that's going to go yet. But what do you guys think? Like, is that a good thing to shut down the government for? Like, I'm sort of more and more in the Chris Murphy camp of you cannot.

You cannot concede to the normal parts of governing because they benefit from the normal parts and then they benefit from the abnormal parts. Like, oh, they want this so that it looks legal. Meanwhile, TikTok is still operating illegally. He's taken intel without any kind of congressional authorization. He's doing all kinds of things illegally as well. So why are you going to give him the patina of a legal imprimatur when he has like had shown no indication that he won't do it either way? Yeah. It's tough because that's almost like the argument. I know, I know. Because it's like, well, we can all vote and shut the government down over this. And then Trump can say.

well, I don't give a fuck about Congress. I'm just going to, maybe even if he couldn't take over the police anymore, he's like, well, I still got the guard. The guard can go anywhere. That's my prerogative. But like, we did this the last time. I know. And the answer is, if you can see that his abuse of power makes him more powerful in Congress, he's already won. And so you just can't do that. Yeah. And then he's just going to, I hear that, but I'm saying it's the other side of the argument. He's just going to park like an F-22 in Millennium Park to protect the bean and be like, I cut the murder rate in Chicago. And everyone's going to be like.

Thank you, sir. First bean he's gone here in years. You know what I mean? Oh, my God. He's never shown much care for the bean in the past. I shouldn't have played that AI country song for you this morning. Can I talk about something serious? Yes. All of a sudden, the National Guard is going to be armed. And there's not even an explanation for why this is suddenly different, right? Because they're going on. They're saying that their mission has been a great success, that there's been no murders in D.C. And so if the Guard can have guns, why didn't they have them at the beginning?

You waited. Why? To get us a little bit more comfortable. It admits to the reason they're doing it, because they knew it would look worse to start out with guns. They did not send some justification. It's not like the National Guard have felt unsafe and have been hounded. They're just looking at their phones outside the Washington Monument. Well, and they're also hoping that everyone's like, you know, all the libs made a big fuss about the Guard. They're just taking pictures with people. They're just standing around guarding the Monuments. Who cares? Meanwhile, you know, he signed another executive order today that was like, every state must get some of its Guard ready to mobilize for President Trump in case he needs to put down civil disturbances, which is the real.

you know, the goal here and fight crime, whatever else. So now, yeah, now they're going to have armed guards, armed National Guard troops in the streets of major American cities. And maybe it's fine for now, but also maybe everyone's going to, you know, shut the fuck up and stay home and not criticize Donald Trump anymore. Yeah, it's scary. It's really scary because we can do this the easy way or the hard way. If everyone just lets the guard there with their and just patrolling the streets with their guns, then you're all OK. But and they're right. And you can see the guard getting deployed with their guns to liberal areas right for an election or for midterms. Although that's the that's the next next thing to worry about. And really, it's just a cover, right? Because the guard is the guard. They're in camo. It looks wrong. It is wrong.

But it's the ICE agents that are going around doing more of the arrests. And it's the ICE agents that are the ones that are going to be standing outside of polling places. It's the ICE agents that are increasingly recruited from sort of the MAGA fanboy base with these enticements to get in to join. So like that to me is what's going to ultimately happen. You got the guard there. You have that. You have ICE there. And all of a sudden they're trying to pull precinct votes down by 10 or 12 in some liberal areas and enough to swing some close races. Yeah. You know what? I'm with Murphy. I just I just think I like and I know, you know, we're going to probably have a couple.

conversations about this as we get close to the government funding deadline. But it's like, so, you know, Democrats don't have a plan to reopen the government once they shut it down. And what if Trump just says, that's fine, I'm going to do whatever. Then people should know that the president of the United States has decided to operate without Congress and without the government funded. And it's just going to be a full, you know, like it's more probably more important for Democrats to tell people we have no part of this and we're fighting for it and we're fighting against it. And that's it.

I don't know. We're in extraordinary times now. We are only, what, seven months in? Yeah. We're seven months in. Look at where we are. Every CEO is marching into the Oval to pay fealty. There are troops on our streets. He's threatening to do more. Like, this is happening very, it's happening fast. It's happening right in front of our eyes. Do you think six months from now, that vote's going to get easier? Everyone's just lining up to give him gold. Gold trophies. Gold shit from Tim Cook. There's gold everywhere. Which everyone should watch the South Park episode to see what, in their view, happens with those various bubbles that get presented to the President of the United States. Yeah. Not the bean. Not the bean. Not the bean.

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And I'm Jennifer Palmieri, former White House Communications Director. Tune in on Mondays to Long Play Series on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. CNN reported over the weekend that unsurprisingly, most of the arrests in D.C. have been focused on immigrants. And as the Times reported last week, the summer surge in immigration arrests has been a direct result of federal agents going after people with no prior criminal records or convictions. That was certainly the case with Trump's most notorious wrongful deportation, that of Kilmar Obrego Garcia. And there have been some big developments in that case since we last spoke about it. If you remember, Obrego Garcia was brought back from Seacott, arrested by the feds on...

Dubious human smuggling charges in Tennessee, then released by a very skeptical judge so he could go home to Maryland while awaiting his trial. Apparently, the government then offered to deport him to Costa Rica if he pled guilty to their charges. When he refused, they told him they planned to deport him to Uganda instead. Then he showed up for a check-in on Monday morning and was immediately detained by ICE, which was expected. Luckily, Judge Palazinas ruled that he can't be sent to Uganda for now. Here's what Abrego Garcia had to say on Monday at the massive protest on his behalf before being detained by ICE.

in my eyes checking, promise me this. Promise me that you will continue to pray, continue to fight, resist, and love, not just for me, but for everybody. Continue to demand freedom. Thank you so much. I know Tim talked about this, Miller, when he interviewed Andre. But it's... Hernandez Romero, another stick-up prisoner. It is just, it's unbelievable that the people who have been wrongfully deported, ripped away from their families, tortured, beaten, like, have this kind of grace. And are saying, like, keep fighting for justice and all that. I mean, it's just, it's wild to me. Yeah, it also looks like, I was thinking the same thing. It also speaks to, like, what do we have on our side? Which is, yeah, people don't care about this enough right now. It just feels that way. People just aren't waking up to it enough, right? There just isn't enough political pressure. It just all feels too close. But at the same time, like...

The information is out there, right? Like the story is still, we can still tell the story. Like he doesn't, he hasn't had his thumb on the media. There's enough media, right? Like it is not, it won't be because of censorship that we don't stop this. It might be because of noise and nonsense and misinformation, but it won't be because the story couldn't be told. And I do think that like, as hard as that is, it does point a way here, which is like our job collectively is to figure out how to tell that story because there are moments like this where someone's talking about this openly and honestly, and they're not afraid to do that. And I do think that that is hopeful. Yeah. And I'll just be honest, he doesn't have the option to say what you really think probably, you know? I mean, this guy is like dealing with the capricious justice system that they're, what the United States is saying to this man is take a plea deal, admit guilt for crimes you don't believe you

or we'll send you to Uganda. That's not a justice system. It also shows the White House is they're picking deportation locations as a way of further punishing these people, right? They're like, oh, you want to go to Costa Rica? Okay, how about Uganda? If you don't like dictators, how about Museveni? We'll get to know him real quick. Which, you know, the other thing we should be thankful for, at least for now, is Judge Dennis, when she heard this, is like, this is why you cannot deport him to Uganda until at least we get through this trial. And I say, because the fact that you offered him...

Costa Rica and then decided to say no Uganda, like shows that you're just doing this in a capricious and punitive way. Well, and it shows, right, like they have been threatening to send people to all kinds. They have sent people to South Sudan. I think to the point of not being able to keep up with what the fuck they're going on. I think they're still in a holding facility in South Sudan. In this case, it's not just to send a message to other people of immigration. It is specifically to get out of their embarrassment.

of having drummed up these charges that can't be supported in a trial. They're afraid of a trial. Costa Rica's pretty nice. Please. Right. Please. If you're saying, he's so terrible. Don't you want him to pay for his crimes? No. They know a trial would expose how fucking ridiculous they are. And wrongly rendered him to El Salvador in the first place. Literally the only country on earth where they could not have deported him by law. Yes. The second part of it is, Zinis not only said, you can't remove this guy anywhere. He has to stay in the place he's in right now. She said, and this order counts, right?

because I know I'm just saying it out loud, but you, member of the bar, as a lawyer, who presumably wants to continue to be a lawyer, this order, you are not pretending this order doesn't count because it's not written down because that's what you guys tried to pull the last time when you claimed that an oral order from, what's his name, Blowsberg, whatever. Blowsberg. Blowsberg. You claimed that didn't count, so those guys got sent to C-COP because it wasn't written down. So this counts? He's like, yes. He has to talk to these people like children.

Like Aaron Children. Well, meanwhile, as this is happening, DHS tweets, we're thrilled that he's going to Uganda. They did it as a quote tweet of Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal. It's just like another troll. Like this man's life is just in furtherance of their trolling. Yeah. It's all for the content. One federal detainee who's being treated quite well by the Trump administration, despite actually being convicted for child trafficking, Ghislaine Maxwell. On Friday, the Justice Department released the transcript of her recent interview with Todd Blanche, Trump's personal attorney turned deputy attorney general. And you guys will be shocked to learn that a convicted criminal who's made clear she's looking for a pardon said that she's always known the one person who could grant that wish.

I don't know if you guys went through the transcript. You guys have any big takeaways from the Maxwell Blanche interview? I mean, the big takeaway is that it was just an absolute farce. Donald Trump's personal lawyer sets up an interview with a woman convicted of sex trafficking children with the sole goal. of absolving Donald Trump and his associates of any wrongdoing. And he asked, I think someone counted, he asked many more questions about Bill Clinton than Donald Trump, even though this whole controversy, the reason we're talking about this is because Donald Trump refuses to release the Epstein files and everyone's wondering why. And also like Blanche would drop lines of inquiry when it got close to Trump or when she mentioned like associates of Epstein being in the cabinet. And in the process though, Blanche gave Ghislaine Maxwell this opportunity to lie and rewrite history for herself. And she's a liar. She's an obvious motivation to lie. She got better treatment after agreeing to have this conversation. But in the process, you've got these Epstein victims and their families just getting...

going through this traumatic nightmare all over again. And for example, the family of Virginia Giuffre, who is one of Epstein's victims, who died by suicide earlier this year, released a statement saying, we're outraged. The contents of these transcripts is in direct contradiction with felon Colleen Maxwell's conviction for child sex trafficking. During DAG Todd Blanche's bizarre interview, she is never challenged about her court-proven lies, providing her a platform to rewrite history. And it's like truly a really disgusting, disgusting farce. Yeah, it reads more like a deposition in a civil case where Trump's lawyer is trying to gather the information.

that he needs in this civil case to help his client get out of paying any kind of restitution. But it doesn't read like an investigation, like a criminal investigation. It also is clear, like Blanche is not that prepared, right? Doesn't clearly know the fact. He's not there to create a body of evidence. He's there to exculpate Donald Trump. He didn't bring any of the lawyers in the Justice Department who are still working there, who worked on this case. The lawyers who said that Ghislaine Maxwell couldn't be trusted, didn't tell the truth, never admitted her complicity in this, showed no kind of remorse for what she participated in. But I do think for me that the second big takeaway is...

the other, like it's sort of the other side of that coin, which is because Blanche was Trump's personal attorney and basically is still acting as that. And because DOJ is not independent and because nobody takes Ghislaine Maxwell seriously and understands her motives. The fact that Trump is so corrupted and polluted this process with his own personal politics, it doesn't work. This doesn't end it. It doesn't do anything. It actually kind of, it didn't help in one way or the other. It didn't make a big splash that brought more attention to the story. It kind of came and went a little bit. But at the same time, the fact that she's saying all these things that seem to be positive about Trump doesn't matter. Like the story goes on. The need for deposition goes on. The demand for release go on. Well, they also...

Several judges now have said that the Trump administration's request to release the grand jury transcripts is an obvious distraction because they should know that there's nothing in the grand jury transcripts that would illuminate any... new information about the case. And also I think that they, the DOJ gave the first tranche of Epstein documents to Congress and, you know, Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, he was like, I don't know, like 90% of these pages have been public already. They gave us mostly public information. Yeah. And I think what, basically they've released like 1% or 3% of what is believed to be in the totality of these files. And obviously not gonna release like graphic images of underage people or anything like that, but there's a lot of documentation that is still out there that's not been released that they're clearly just trying not to release. And that is the part of that this is just a complete and total farce. I will say the one.

One sliver of good news here. Did you guys see that James Comer, the top Republican on the Oversight Committee, has finally decided, okay, maybe we need to hear from Alex Acosta. I saw that. And I'll tell you, we're all conspiracy theorists now. So they said they're going to, it's for a transcribed meeting. That's what it said. There's not going to be a recording of it, I guess. Maybe that's part of the agreement. I'm not sure. But at this point, how on earth can we trust James Comer and Alex Acosta? You don't think they'll button this up?

Well, I think they will, but that's the problem. The thing that's just worth noting politically about the release of this Maxwell transcript is basically every moron who went to the White House and held up an Epstein files part one binder when Pam Bondi first snowed them all into, you know, cheerleading, whatever bullshit PR thing she did has basically declared that the Maxwell. testimony is all they need to hear, right? So there's a subset of MAGA influencers who built their audiences on the back of pushing Epstein-related stuff, usually about Bill Clinton or Democrats, is now saying they're satisfied by hearing this disgusting woman who is serving a 20-year sentence, who herself abused underage girls. They think that what she says is gospel. It's fucking gross. Obviously, there's a ton of other shit going on.

as well. Trump got asked on Monday about why he's gone silent on Gaza, which the Israeli government continues to bomb and starve. He was asked about the Putin Zelensky meeting he said he was setting up, which the Russian foreign minister has basically said isn't happening. There continue to be horrific stories every day about more wrongful detentions, stories about more layoffs because of the tariffs, stories about an insane level of corruption in the White House, on and on and on. We wanted to bring up these stories in part because they were each at one point at the center of the political debate, dominating the news cycle, and then just as quickly moved on to the periphery of what the White House and D.C. and a lot of political press is talking about, which seems like a problem. But first, anything you guys want to say about where we are with these stories or any others I didn't mention? Tommy, you want to talk about?

Gaza and also the... Russia. Yeah. I mean, like, it's just, it's so frustrating because he just chums the water every day with some new outrage. And then he just is never held accountable for anything. There's no follow-up on anything. And I just do think it's worth noting that, again, during the campaign, Trump said he was going to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. It's August 25th. So we've missed that deadline by a bit. But even, you know, after the Alaska meeting with Putin, Trump said, okay, there's gonna be a bilateral meeting between Putin and Zelensky. That hasn't happened yet. And he said, we're going to figure out with the Europeans what a security guarantee for Ukraine looks like. That hasn't happened yet. So there'd be a trilateral meeting with Trump, Zelensky, and then Putin. Nothing about that. And even today, I don't know if you guys noticed, he was talking about Putin going to Alaska and taking that meeting as if it was some sacrifice for Putin. Yeah.

meeting. Yeah. And it couldn't have been a bigger gift of Putin to be welcomed back to the United States, into the international fold after invading Ukraine in 2022, the full-scale evasion. And then similarly on Gaza, there was this global outcry about the starvation in Gaza a few weeks ago. It seemed in that moment like Trump might pressure Netanyahu. But the opposite has happened. Again, Hamas just agreed to a temporary ceasefire deal. It was very similar to one that the Israelis had agreed to, I think, in July. But rather than accept it and rather than get out more hostages, Netanyahu has completely changed his negotiating posture and saying he needs a permanent agreement against all the hostages and ends the war. And again, those details, set them aside for a second. The key point is,

Trump, he's like bragging every day about how he's ending wars, but he's not doing anything to pressure Netanyahu to end this one. And the Israeli government is drastically ramping up settlement construction in a way that's going to just kill off any hope of a Palestinian state. Like talk of a two-state solution right now is incredibly naive and it will soon be, there just will be literally no hope of a contiguous Palestinian state given the settlement construction. And the Trump administration supports it. Full on supports it. So it's just, you know. So killed a bunch of journalists today. Yep. The Israeli government. And they sort of bond to hospital. And then also, as people are trying to rescue people, then they bond again right as the world was watching. It's a double tap. And he had to. And then Yahoo had to. Mishap. Called it a mishap. A tragic mishap, which he had to do because it was so thoroughly captured on camera and so obvious and wrong. And they had to claim it was a mishap. And you see Trump was asked about it. And he's like, oh, I haven't seen that in the news. It was like 11 o'clock. Which is like, who knows? Maybe. Maybe that's true. Maybe it's not. The guy doesn't pay much attention. He's just living in the present like all of us forever.

Well, yeah, like, you know, he wants, he finds the Epstein story distasteful. So he says, cover something else. And then Fox News dutifully starts covering crime more. Trump sees that. There's a lot of crime in D.C. I better do something about it. Kind of falling for his own, falling into his own like bear trap. And this is not what's on Fox News. It's not on what he is seeing. So it doesn't feel as important to him. So he moves on to the next thing. Yeah. And it's why it's one of the reasons I think he holds so many press avails every day, because he knows that if he's in trouble from whatever happened the day before or people are going to ask him questions, he's always got something new to announce, you know, and then people can talk about that. And, you know.

I know we had the whole distraction conversation, but it doesn't have to be a distraction from everything. But it is a like, we're moving on and I'm going to do something else now. Yeah, it's funny because it does feel like, oh, so are you guys saying that this is a distraction from Medicaid cuts? And I think it is not. But I think it's OK to acknowledge he is moving very quickly and he is doing a lot on multiple fronts because he knows that is destabilizing to the people that are trying to fight him. And because he doesn't care about results, he doesn't care about outcomes. He cares about the immediate press hit and the headline. He doesn't care about the consequences of launching so many initiatives, signing so many orders, claiming so many peace plans and processes all at once because he just has to get to the next day.

Yeah. And meanwhile, it's like you do start getting numb to the stories, right? There was an outcry over Abrego Garcia, over Andre Romero Hernandez and Seacott in general. And now, you know, they're out of Seacott and back in Venezuela and the deportations continue and people like legal residents keep getting swept up, you know, torn away from their families, U.S. citizens. ISIS continuing to like tase and beat people who have not done anything wrong, who are here legally. And it's just like there's so many of the stories you're just like, OK. And I do think like maybe, you know, I think sometimes like we try to figure out like, OK, what is the conversation where there's some like.

not to find hope in every terrible fucking story, but more like what's productive, right? Like, how do we be productive? How do we fight this? How do we fight this? And I think, and like, but I do think it's worth acknowledging that part of the challenge is going to be that over time, you know, the reason we're talking about Kilmar Obrigo Garcia today is because of a victory, right? Because he was brought back and the Trump administration is being fought on that and the line is holding on that case. Okay. But in the months since, he's also unleashed ICE across the country. Like, we can lose over time even while racking up these small victories because this, and this was, we talked about this from the very beginning, which is slowly but surely wins and losses.

your baseline moves and the country changes. And like, and I think it's just okay to be honest about the fact that that is a very real threat and more than a threat, it's something we're watching happen, which makes fighting him harder, but is just the reality of it. It's just figuring out what accountability looks like with this guy is so hard because, yeah, he does a million press avails in the Oval Office. And he took questions three times today, three separate times today, which is unheard of for any White House. But the White House is full of a couple of real reporters and then the dumbest people on the planet, like Marjorie Taylor Greene's boyfriend. And so Trump gets away with just asserting things over and over again that he's cutting all these peace deals. And then meanwhile, he has real leverage to force the Israelis to accept a ceasefire proposal from Hamas, and he's not taking it. And he continues to brag about ending a war in the Congo between them and Rwandan-backed rebels. Yeah, there was a Human Rights Watch report.

a couple days ago about how the M23 rebels were like the primary group killing people in the region for lack of a brief version of this. They killed 140 people last month despite this like peace deal Trump brokered. And no one just asked him that question. Hey, sir, I know you just said you just went on for 10 minutes about how, hey, some people think you're racist, but you did this peace deal with Rwanda and Congo, but actually there was a massacre last month. Are you aware of that even? You know, there's just like no journalism. There's no follow-up. There's no accountability in any way. And it's, I don't know, it's infuriating. Yeah, when at least half the questions to him are answered by him starting with, oh, I love that question. Thank you so much. What a great question. It's funny though, right?

It's this is like, yes, he gets ridiculous questions, but he's also taking more questions than any president, like certainly in our lifetimes, right? Like day to day, he takes a ton of questions. So it isn't like he is getting hard questions mixed in with these ridiculous ones as well. But they can't cover everything because A, some of them are taken up by these other people. And B, there's just too many fucking threats to follow on any given day. Yeah. And they punish the reporters who really go after him. And if you piss him off.

He yells at you. Like, remember when he screamed at, like, Peter Alexander and told him how bad he was? Then he moves on to, again, like, Marjorie Taylor Greene's boyfriend. Yeah, I was going to say, he's taken a lot of questions, but imagine him doing the same thing if the people shouting questions at him were Peter Alexander, Caitlin Collins, Tapper, you know, Kristen Welker, right? And they could follow up. And they could follow up. Jonathan Swan. Those people are mixed in, but they're not coordinated because someone's always ready to come in with, like, a haymaker of, like, Mr. President, your skin's never been better. But by the way, though, like, Vance is doing the Sunday shows, right? Like, there are opportunities to question them. There really are, right? Like, they are able to do this despite the fact that they do do those interviews and, like, see value in it.

Yeah, we haven't even talked about Vance's Welker interview with the full thing, but it is a good example of, like, he lies so effortlessly, but it's also so obvious and such bullshit. But when you feel like you need to cover all the news with him and you only have 20 minutes, 30 minutes, then you just have to move on. And I do miss the, some people did this with Trump once in a while. They're like, all right, we're gonna stay on one topic and we're gonna get into all your bullshit. And you're not getting up until we get the right answer. You know, like, I do think that's a, if I had Vance for a sit down, like, that's the strategy. I just, I would really want to focus on how he thinks World War II ended.

That's fucking nuts. You're a smart guy. What are you talking about? Well, he knows. He's just lying. All right, one last thing that's hopefully a little lighter before we get to the interview. For those of you worried that ICE's big recruitment push means that the masked agents roving your streets might actually be beta-lib cucks, Trump announced on the Oval Office today that he's 100% on the case. Now, they have to pass a toughness test. If they're not tough, we don't want them for this job. They might be great for other jobs, but not for this job. One paragon of American toughness is already submitting himself to the rigors of ICE. Noted Superman portrayer Dean Cain, if you haven't seen the footage of him doing the obstacle course, please enjoy.

This time, Dean Cain isn't flying there. He's going through that obstacle course and training to be an honorary ICE agent. He was working hard out there, and this is exactly what those recruits will do, is they're picked one by one, and they're at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick, Georgia. I love this. I just love that ICE training is like, okay, grab this sex doll and drag it a few feet. Okay, now slowly climb through about four feet of pipe, and then when you get to this obstacle that you're clearly supposed to climb over, just go through it. Slow motion? Here's a crying woman. Yell at her. Tell her it's her fault. Taze her.

Working hard or hardly working, Dean Cain. That was brutal. He's running at like 4.9 on the treadmill there. He's not moving too fast. It's been a long time since Lois and Clark. That's from the 90s. He is not fitting in that uniform. No, he's not fitting in the tights. When did Dean Cain play Superman? 1997. I looked this up the other day when he first came up. That was the last season of Lois and Clark. I love that show. I was gay. Listen, he was hot. He was. Did you guys see Tim Miller on Pierce Morgan with Dean Cain? It's worth watching because Tim really goes hard at him. But Dean Cain gets really, really mad that Tim keeps saying.

Ice is hiring a bunch of unqualified idiots, like former actors. And he gets really mad. At one point, he yells at him, and I was a former NFL player. So I was like, did he play in the NFL? Really? Apparently, Dean Cain was a really good athlete. He played at Princeton. He was a defensive back. And then he, like, signed with the Buffalo Bills but got hurt in training camp. But you can't call yourself an NFL player, Dean, if you just went to training camp. You've got to make the 53. Yeah, and now he just mopes through a ropes course. Like, what? Like, being at Ice is not a fun job, I don't think. Unless you, like, really like to, well. He's also 59. Is he going to, like, just go beat up people? Like, what does he want to do here? That sounds like. Right, well, that's the problem with who they're recruiting. It's like, you know, the, like.

Do we need a bunch of lips to go sign up for ice? Maybe. Oh, yeah. Well, now that, you know, you can be as young as 18, you can be as old as 60. They've changed the age limits and they're paying you money and they're forgiving your college loans. And then they're just going to, you know, they've cut the Wall Street Journal went and did a story where they watched ice training for six hours. And one thing they noticed is they've cut the training time from 16 weeks to eight weeks. And basically it's people who've never, you know, fired a gun before, had a gun before. And they're just like eight weeks of training. We're going to give you a gun. We're just going to send you out there. Crawl through that pipe. Crawl through that pipe. It doesn't matter how fast. Use your badge. Yeah. You have a week to crawl through the pipe.

Remember G.I. Jane when G.I. Jane refused to go along with the lower standards? She kicked the stool out of the way because she was going to hop the wall, the full wall. Yeah, yeah. I only remember Demi Moore shaving her head. That was it. That was like a controversy, right? Yeah, there was controversy around G.I. Jane. That's when he was playing Superman. I was going to say, Lois and Clark, G.I. Jane, Bill Clinton was president. Dean Cain was also in Beverly Hills, 902.0 at some point. Really? So says my G.P.T. I just checked that. Dean Cain. Your G.P.T. took a break from worrying about fascism. Yeah.

Anyway. Anyway. Good guy. All right. We're going to take a quick break. But two announcements before we do that. The newest season of Crooked's award-winning limited series is out. Shadow Kingdom Coal Survivor exposes one of the deadliest battles in United Mineworkers history. It's hosted by Niccolo Minoni, who offers new details about an infamous murder trial that rocked the country in the 1960s and reshaped the American labor movement. First two episodes are out now. Listen on the Shadow Kingdom feed wherever you get your podcasts. Or better yet, Friends of the Pod subscribers can listen to the full season of Shadow Kingdom right now. Join Friends of the Pod at crooked.com slash friends. Also, for those of you who watch the pod and don't love ads, you can now stream ad-free video of Pods of America and your other favorite shows with a paid subscription to Crooked.

Ad-free video is available now on Supercast, Substack, and YouTube. Visit cricket.com slash friends to learn more. This is an ad by BetterHelp. These days, it feels like there's advice for everything. Cold plunges, gratitude journals, screen detoxes. But how do you know what actually works for you? I guess you can try them all. With the internet and information overload about mental health and wellness, it can be a struggle to know what's true and what actions to take these days. Using trusted resources and talking to live therapists can get you personalized recommendations and help you break through the noise.

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I'm Erin Haines, journalist and expert on all things Southern politics. And I'm Jennifer Palmieri, former White House Communications Director. Tune in on Mondays to Long Play Series on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. On Friday night amid an epic news dump, Donald Trump praised Intel and its CEO while announcing that the U.S. government had just taken a 10% stake in the American chip manufacturer mere days after calling for that same CEO to resign immediately over his supposed ties to China. Joining me now to help figure out what the heck is going on here is James Sirwicki, who writes about economics for The Atlantic and Fast Company and who's been covering finance and business for decades. James, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me on. Let's just start with this. Can you just walk us up to the investment to understand what kind of position Intel was in and what the challenges were that it was grappling with?

So Intel is obviously the biggest American chip manufacturer. That is to say, they make chips in the United States. And you're all familiar with Intel Inside. They built an enormously successful business primarily by providing chips for computers, PCs, and the like. But over the last, I don't know, let's say decade, 15 years, let's say the last decade, they have really run into trouble because they are not making the kind of GPUs that the general processing units that companies like NVIDIA and AMD, advanced micro devices, make that are powering things like artificial intelligence and the like.

Intel has been trying to sort of recapture a part of that market and to become essentially what it once was. And it's invested a huge amount of money. I mean, I can't remember the number exactly, but it's something like $109 billion that it put into capital expenditures over the last five or 10 years. But but it's been struggling. And this has been an issue for obviously for Intel shareholders. And I think also it became an issue for a lot of American policymakers who saw it as a problem that America would not have a.

chip manufacturer that was making chips in the United States. And so as part of the Chips Act, which was passed into the Biden administration, the point of the Chips Act was to subsidize chip manufacturing in the U.S., not just for Intel, but for other companies as well. And but Intel was going to be one of the chief beneficiaries of this. And so that's kind of where we stood as of, I don't know, let's say a week ago. The other thing that's worth mentioning is you talked about the CEO. He's a new CEO who was essentially hired to replace the previous CEO who, you know, was basically let go because the company, while spending huge amounts of money, was not really.

delivering on the profit front, which is obviously what shareholders care about. So Intel isn't making the right chips. Like if you want to make a fake photo with seven boobs on a beautiful woman, 25 fingers, their chips don't do it. So they're in trouble. But they're about to get a bunch of money through a law passed by Congress through the Chips Act. A bunch of many billions of dollars. Yes. In a bill that Trump hates because of the Biden bill.

Yes. It's in that context that Trump calls for the CEO to resign. Then there's a meeting at the White House between the CEO and several members of the administration. The tone becomes much more conciliatory. And then a few days after that, we get this announcement. Trump is saying, great news. I just got a 10% stake in Intel and it cost us nothing. What was your reaction to that? And what have you learned about it? Like, what is this?

So there are a couple of things to keep in mind here. The first thing is that this is actually one case where Trump, I think, is actually telling the truth. So when Intel, in its press release announcing the deal, Intel sort of tried to frame it or sort of fudge it and make it sound as if the United States was putting new money into the company in exchange for this stake. Because, you know, what the U.S. government is basically doing is essentially taking 10, it's 9.9% of Intel. The U.S. government is going to own almost 10% of one of the most important companies, arguably, certainly historically, one of the most important companies in America. This is incredibly unprecedented.

There are definitely been times where the U.S. government has taken stakes, most obviously in 2008 during TARP. But they typically, in fact, maybe have always come in times of crisis where the companies were either we had a broader financial crisis or the company was really struggling until struggling, but it's still worth one hundred billion dollars. It's not on the verge of going under. So this was a really startling thing. And basically what I think the way to think about it is basically Trump and Howard Lutnick, who's the Commerce Secretary and has become sort of Trump's kind of fellow dealmaker. Effectively, I think Intel was coerced.

into giving the government roughly 10% of the company in exchange for those Chipsack grants that effectively it was already supposed to get. And the idea is like, we are going to release these grants to you. We will give them to you, but only in exchange for 10% of the company. So this is what's so strange to me about this, right? Howard Lutnick and the CEO film like basically a hostage video where they say, hey, he doesn't even need this money, but it's Gabe that he's getting it. We're so happy to be working together, whatever that means. The CEO makes a kind of unctuous statement of we're going to make Intel great again, which like made me want to...

barf. And none of it really computes, even on its own terms, right? Because as you said, Intel's not about to go under. It's a massive company. It's been able to get the financing to put in 10 times that amount of money into its own growth. If it wants to sell a 10% stake, it doesn't need to give the US government a discount on 50 million shares. It can get the financing through a loan. It can do it in a hundred different ways that don't involve giving the US government a stake. So what exactly is Trump, what do you believe is actually causing this if it's not just this pool of money from the CHIPS Act?

Well, I think the pool of money is important. I think Intel does want it. And I think, as you said, I think that video is very, very odd because, and it's worth watching, it's only a couple minutes long, because the Intel CEO says, we didn't even really want this money or need it. And then Lutnik says, yeah, they told me they didn't even want it, but they decided to basically take it in exchange for 10% of the equity, you know, because it was fair. And I'm like, wait, what? If they didn't want the money or need it, why would they give you 10% of the equity? So I think there are a couple things. I think, you know, they wanted the money. I thought the money was useful to them.

putting more money into their businesses or whatever some of the money interestingly was it was originally from the chips act and then it recently got diverted into this uh somewhat odd secretive defense program called secure enclave where intel is the exclusive provider of chips to just do this thing that we don't know what they're doing uh but that money was originally from the chips act so it's basically all chips act money so i think that was it i also say this is entirely speculative but um I think it's probably not a coincidence that Trump went from saying the CEO was going to be fired, should be fired to, you know, 10 days later, the CEO being like, oh, you know, we're going to work together and the like. And so I think it's it would not be surprising that there was a connection between those things. And let me just say one other thing, which is connected to what you said.

The video kind of embodies this thing that we've seen over the last few months, which is CEOs basically kowtowing to Trump. We saw Tim Cook do it. We've seen other CEOs do it as well. There is something about it that just feels just like creepy. And it really does feel like this is the kind of extreme version of it, where it's not just that the CEO is sort of paying obeisance to Trump. It's that he's actually giving Trump 10% of the company in order to kind of keep things copacetic between them.

Right. Well, that's what I'm getting at here, too, which is, OK, fine. Sure. Of course they want the money. But this is about more than that. This is about seeing value in a good relationship with Trump for a bunch of future business reasons that they may know about or may anticipate. This is also not rooted in law at all.

Like there's no right. Like there's no the Chips Act did not make any claims about the investment for equity. Congress has not passed any kind of law for how we hold stocks. We don't have a sovereign wealth fund, though Trump claims to. He wanted to create one. Letnick is out there saying there's a down payment on a sovereign wealth fund. Now, I've seen some people try to defend this and say, you're just a bunch of liberal idiots because you're going to turn down. You like the old way where we just gave companies money. We've been doing Tesla. We've been doing all kinds of things to help our industries. Why doesn't Uncle Sam get his beak wet? Why can't we get a taste of it? Can you just talk about like.

What is your reaction to that argument? Like, why are you so offended by this? It's just a good deal for America. There are a couple aspects of it. I mean, I think it's true. I assume there are people on the left in particular who are perfectly happy to see, you know, this company kind of a big company called on the carpet by the government and having to hand over money. From my perspective, I think there are a bunch of problems with it. The first is just the obvious problem of having the government be a major player in any business, right? Which is that it means that the government is invested in that business's well-being, which then means that the government may look out for that company. It may cut its extra deals. It may make it easier for that company to find customers.

do business with that company in a way that it otherwise wouldn't do because it doesn't want the value of its stake to drop. Alternatively, it's also the case that the company now has to think about the government, right? Because in theory, as you said, I have no idea. We have no idea how this thing is going to be structured or what rules are going to govern it. But in principle, it seems like, you know, Howard Lutner could decide tomorrow. He's just going to sell the stake, right?

crater Intel stock price. So Intel is going to have to like worry about, well, how do I make the government happy? If I'm building a new chip fabricating plant, do I have to put it in a place that the president will make the president happy or we'll make the next president happy or whatever it is. So those things I think are all really problematic. And then I think what follows from that is that other companies.

Intel's competitors are going to have to start thinking like, oh, do I have to make a deal with the president now so that I don't get screwed over on tariffs or, you know, the government doesn't come down on us in some way or another. You know, they're basically competing to one degree or another against the government now. And and so in that sense, I think this kind of thing feeds on itself and creates a sort of model where companies are just having to constantly pay too much attention to what the government is doing. There's one other aspect of this that I think people maybe don't really haven't really followed. And that is that.

Taking equity actually defeats the purpose of the subsidy. Like the point of the subsidy was that we wanted to incentivize chip production in the United States because we thought for economic and national security reasons, it was important for companies to invest here in the United States. Well, the point of the subsidy is like, we're going to reap all these benefits, social and economic benefits. So we're going to help subsidize the production. But if I'm exchanging, if I'm demanding the total value of that, and actually a little bit more than that in equity, there is no subsidy. And so now companies, if we have another subsidy program, companies are gonna have to say to themselves, I don't know, do I want to do this? Because if I do it, what's gonna happen? Is someone gonna come to me a year from now and demand?

10% of my company in exchange. And so I think it makes even that kind of policy less effective than it would otherwise be. It gets at how the way Trump does business is actually not beside the point, right? Like there are many objections to sovereign wealth funds, right? Like Norway, I believe has one. And as a point, it doesn't, I'm not sure if it's how ironclad this rule is, but it invests outside of Norway, right? It invests outside of the country to avoid the influence of politics domestically, even if the United States created a...

sovereign wealth fund, which would be quite silly given that we have a massive fucking debt, right? We don't have a surplus of oil wealth. But even if we did, there'd be all kinds of questions about the benefit to taxpayers, the way it distorts the market, the influence of politics. All of those would be questions. This is being done lawlessly, which means companies have no idea when Donald Trump will come knocking, which is, I think, like you describe it as creepy. It's un-American to have CEOs showing up at the White House with baubles and like pledging their fealty and using his slogan. But it speaks to me about how dangerous this is. And I'm wondering if you're surprised at all by how

first of all, how obedient these titans of industry have been and why there isn't any more of a kind of collective response from corporate America about how obviously stupid this will be in the long run for them to go along with it. I think it I think the reason I think the fact that there has been no collective corporate response speaks to some degree to the fact that. There is no easy mechanism for corporations to kind of work together. I mean, I guess, you know, their organizations like the Business Roundtable, whatever. But I think that each company is essentially trying to like look out for itself. And in doing so, the idea of a collective response just becomes kind of hard to pull off. But I think the bigger problem here is the one you kind of pointed to, which is this is the way Trump is basically running the economy, right? He's running it as essentially a tool of his own personal.

interests, right? Not personal, like necessarily enriching himself, but it's just, he's like, I love, he loves tariffs. So he's imposing all these tariffs. Companies are essentially going along with it until they, I'm sure they're hoping the Supreme court will, will overturn them. But if the Supreme court doesn't do that, then they'll just have to find ways to work around it. And I think it is, uh, un-American is, I think actually the right word. I mean, you know, the American economy was real, look, the government plays a role, big role in the economy, but I think the American economy was really built on the principle that you don't want government picking winners and losers and certainly don't want, don't want it picking winners and losers in this dramatic a fashion. And so I think the fact that, um,

you know, companies are going along with this, I think a lot of them just don't know what to do at this point and are trying to figure out how can I kind of manage this problem without actually kind of wrecking my business. And that's, I think, where they are at the moment. So as certainly members of the administration have now been out there saying this is going to be the first of many deals, the TikTok, which is continuing to function completely outside of the law, ties into this because Trump talked about the U.S. taking a stake in TikTok. Can you just talk about what happens next? And then a little bit also like about.

Republicans who I'm old enough to remember when Republicans thought seizing the means of production was a problem. Yeah, I mean, I think the overarching problem here is really this question you've kind of mentioned a few times, which is lawlessness. Right. I mean, Trump is doing all of this stuff effectively without any statutory and certainly without any constitutional justification. I mean, there's just nothing that really authorizes him to do to do what he's doing. And that applies, I would argue, not just to, you know, taking this 10 percent stake in intel, but it also applies to his entire tariff policy. Right. All of which is effectively conjured to a large extent, I think, out of.

out of thin air. And I think the real player here who has been totally silent is Congress. So you have plenty of Republican, let's say not Republicans, but sort of libertarians who have been, you know, invading against the tariffs and certainly are invading against this. The Cato Institute has been excellent on these issues all the way through. But Republicans in Congress are just happily going along with this, both or quietly going along with it, at least, both on the tariff front and on this. And I think until...

they stand up and I don't imagine them standing up. It's really hard to imagine anyone other than the Supreme Court stopping Trump and Lutnick from doing this. You know, I mean, Lutnick is just, this is just the way, Lutnick I think is just completely, they're just indifferent to the idea of like, yeah, they're just indifferent to it. It's like, you can't do this. Like, why, why can't we do it? We're just going to do it. It's a great idea. And you're like, but you don't have any, you have no legal justification or tools for doing this. It doesn't matter. It's so, like the amount of sway lawyers have in Democratic and previous Republican administrations, I think would shock, it would shock you if you compared it to what's happening here. Is there like,

Do Intel shareholders have any claim here? Because they were entitled, the Congress passed the money. The money was entitled, Intel was going to get the money and Trump interferes and then demands shares at a discount. But they have to have some claim to something here, right? Yeah, I mean, I assume Intel shareholders, some Intel shareholders will sue because, you know, effectively their stake was diluted by 10%. I mean, Intel, again, is trying to claim that no, no, no, the money, you know, was injected into the company. And it's like, no, come on, you were supposed to get this money. It was all set. Because Intel still has lawyers. There's still lawyers with some sway over there at the chip place. Yeah. And so I assume Intel shareholders will sue. I think the problem is that it may well run into the, you know.

business rule, business judgment rule, where the board will say, oh, we really thought this was in the best interest of the company. And so therefore there are, you know, you have to go with us and trust what we did. Now I find that I'm very skeptical of that, but there's a lot of deference to boards of directors in corporate law. But how can you claim it is in the interest of Intel to do this without basically saying it's a bribe? Because we did it because we think giving Trump this stock will produce ancillary benefits outside of this deal. Because as you point out, the stock is worth more than the $8 billion or $9 billion that's going to come via the Chips Act. So they have to come out there and say, giving Trump equity will produce a benefit. I don't understand. I'm not as good as their lawyers, but that to me is the first assumption.

No, I mean, I think that's true, because even if I'm sure, you know, Intel will try to argue or will argue that the Chips Act grants. Well, in theory, there was, you know, the Commerce Department could have turned them down or rejected us, blah, blah, blah. But even if you accept all that, as you said, or I guess as I said, there's a gap between the value of the equity that Intel gave up and the total amount of money that they were going to get from the government. And that is basically just a gift. I mean, it's just a gift. That's all it is. And so trying to explain to courts why they gave that gift. Yeah, I'm sure it will. They will have to construct some argument about, you know, the future value of the relation. It'll be really interesting to see if this goes to court.

actually try to make an argument along those lines. Because it does feel like that's basically what happened here. I mean, obviously the CEO can't say, I didn't want to get fired. So they will have to come up with some other explanation for it. But that raises all, his personal interest is different than that of the shareholders. He has an obligation to shareholders that's called into question by this too. Totally. I don't know. Anyway, tough year for the wisdom of crowds, James. Well, tough year for at least the part of the crowd that voted for Trump. Yes, tough, tough, tough. James wrote a book called The Wisdom of Crowds. It was a hit. James, any final thoughts on this? Do you think we should get a stake in TikTok as Americans? Are you enjoying the experience of being an Intel shareholder?

No, I'm not an adult shareholder. Well, yes, you are. Presumably you're a taxpayer. I guess I am now. I will be soon. But what I'll say about that, actually, let me say one thing about that, which is part and parcel of this whole thing. To me, one of the most frustrating things about this beyond the lawlessness and the indifference to any kind of sense of the rule of law is simply the fact that.

they tell us nothing. So like a good example of it, this is one version of it, right? We don't know how it's going to be structured. We don't know whether there'll be any rules on what we can do with this, what Lutnick can do with the stake. But go back to Lutnick's story about the $600 billion or whatever it was that Japan and South Korea were supposed to put in, are going to put into the United States as part of these trade deals. We've seen nothing. There's literally no paperwork. We have no idea what it is. Lutnick said that the president was going to be able to invest that money at his discretion. Again, totally unconstitutional, no statutory justification for it. But set all that aside, we don't know what it looks like. It's just something that these guys are telling us and we're supposed to just go along and be like, okay.

I guess that's the way things are. I mean, it really is extraordinary to me how indifferent to the law they are. And by the way, that is the experience of trying to understand what's going on in some of these arrangements. That also had to do with that SoftBank announcement, all these different announcements. You come into it and you say, have I just missed the brief? Did I miss the memo? Have I missed the documentation? Or is there really just nothing? Yeah. And it feels like there's nothing. I mean, you know, I mean, Lutnick was on TV the other day and he said he was talking about, I think, I can't remember what agreements. He was like, well, it's not like you're going to get a 250 page trade agreement or anything. I was like, why not? Why not going to see what it looks like? Well, and again, like we.

And given that they are doing this outside of Congress, presumably they would have some sort of sense of propriety to say, yes, this is outside of Congress. We're going to actually create a process to help you understand what's going on, because there is no law about what happens when Treasury seizes stock from Intel. Where does it go? Where do we hold? Where is it going to go? Are we opening a Vanguard? Yeah. Who's managing it? Like, I mean, literally, can Howard Lutnick wake up, you know, a month from now and be like, you know what? This is terrible. I'm just going to sell it. I mean, do that. I have no idea. And it is quite extraordinary that they just don't care. I mean, you know, it's that sort of recurring motto about about Trump is like nobody cares. And it just feels like I don't know. Everyone's like, all right, I guess that's just how it is.

Everybody except us. We care. And other people listening care. Yeah. And that's where we'll have to start. We have to start. James Siriki, thank you so much for your time. Good talking to you. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. That's our show for today. Dan and I will be back with a new show on Friday. Talk to everybody then. You guys are going to burn the flag, right? Mm-hmm. Do you guys see that the White House tweeted a Kilmar Abrego Garcia photo that is the Shepard Faire with MS-13 with the Obama logo on it? I thought they had done that way back when it was the first story. But yeah, they're... Why do they leave the logo on? I don't know. To send a message. To us. Message received. Thank you.

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Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. Longplay, our docuseries exploring the people and forces shaping the South, is back. Newslash, the South is the new political epicenter of the country. Democrats are way on their heels in this region, but Republicans are going through their own reckoning in the South, too. We're in the final stretch of the midterms, and the political map has only gotten more competitive, with new states and districts emerging as potential flips. So we thought it was time to get back out on the road and take a closer look at what's actually happening on the ground. I'm Erin Haines, journalist and expert on all things Southern politics. And I'm Jennifer Palmieri, former White House Communications Director. Tune in on Mondays to Longplay Series on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

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