Trump says Iran war will end ‘when I feel it in my bones’

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When are you gonna know when it's over? Is uh when I feel it. Okay. I feel it in my bones. The war will end when the president feels it in his bones. Reports that the Trump administration underestimated the Iran War's impact on the Strait of Hormuz. Patently ridiculous. Tonight, the global impacts of Donald Trump's war as his cabinet scrambles to clean up the mess. Then

Jerome Powell today is now bathed in immunity. A stunning judicial rebuke of Trump's power grab of the Fed as his favorite prosecutor melts down. Oh cut it out. Do you know how many convictions we've got? Cut it out. And Congressman Robert Garcia on the news, his committee will interview the prison guard from the night of Jeffrey Epstein's death. Honestly, most people on the committee uh aren't confident uh one hundred percent that that Epstein's death was by suicide. It all in starts right now.

Good evening from New York. I'm Chris Hayes. Donald Trump is sending more American service members to fight the U.S.-Israel war with Iran. Today the Pentagon announced it is sending what is called an expeditionary unit to the Middle East. 5,000 troops and several additional ships, a U.S. official with knowledge of the matter tells MS now. Crucially, that could mean boots on the ground.

Uh, U.S. service members deployed in Iran, something Trump and his officials have quite pointedly refused to take off the table. Just listen to what Treasury Secretary Scott Besson said to our partners at Sky News immediately after he was abruptly called into the Situation Room mid-interview. Okay, not a problem at all. See you shortly, Mr Secretary. Mr Secretary, I I have to say it's a first, I'm sure uh a last as well that uh an an interviewee's been pulled away to go to the situation room.

How's the president? Was he was he stressed? Uh no. The the the the president is in great spirits. Uh the Iranian mission is proceeding well ahead of schedule. And you know, I have to tell you, Wolf, that I've uh teenage Teenager who's considering uh military service and I can give this team my highest compliment from President Trump. to the head of the joint chiefs, to Secretary of War, I would they say that I would trust my child's life in their hands.

Kind of a strange thing to volunteer unprompted immediately after meeting in the situation room. At the very least, it does not signal any kind of imminent drawdown. There have already been deadly consequences to this war of choice. Thirteen American service members have died. That includes six who just lost their lives yesterday when their refueling aircraft went down over Iraq. US Central Command says that was not the result of hostile or friendly fire.

We're seeing the human cost to all this as countries throughout the region are releasing their own death tolls. In Iran, at least fourteen hundred, fourteen hundred people have died, nearly seven hundred more in Lebanon, fifteen in Israel, more than seventy five others in the surrounding Gulf states.

They almost certainly will not be the last as the regional conflict drags on to over a dozen countries with no clear end on the horizon right now. I mean The Pentagon's escalation comes as the White House scrambles to figure out a coherent response to Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz. All week on the show we've been making the case, but the administration simply didn't prepare for the possibility Iran would close the strait as a result of this war.

And we now have even more evidence that's the case. CNN actually reported the Trump administration, quote, significantly underestimated Iran's willingness to close the Strait of Hormuz, according to multiple sources familiar. They also reported a closed-door briefing with lawmakers where, quote, multiple sources familiar with the session said there was no indication there were any near-term solutions.

White House calls the report 100% fake news, and you can make of that what you will. You can also just look at the evidence you see in front of your eyes. Does it look like this was planned for? There's been additional reporting in the New York Times that they did not see this coming, and even Trump's own Secretary of Energy concedes: the U.S. is not prepared to begin escorting ships through the

Whatever you think of that plan, it is this White House's preferred strategy, which invites the question if they really were prepared for the Ron to close the strait, why didn't it have those ships in place sooner. Meanwhile, The Financial Times reports that European leaders are just kind of striking out on their own in an attempt to negotiate individual bilateral deals with Iran to get the strait open for them.

For his part, I gotta say, Secretary of Defense Pete Heggseth says, ready? Listen to this, the strait is already open. If you don't mind getting shot at, that is. I want to emphasize what the chairman said about that. The only thing prohibiting transit in the straits right now is Iran shooting at shipping. It is open for transit should Iran not do that. Yeah, exactly. Yes, that's the whole point. We understand.

And so as we enter the third week of this war, the narrative of its origins are becoming clearer by the day. It really does look, based on all the evidence we have, what we're witnessing, the White House thought this would be a quick and easy military victory. They were, of course, coming off the recent operation to abduct the president of Venezuela, sovereign country, and stick him in a jail cell in Brooklyn. And that operation, at a tactical level, went incredibly smoothly.

And they appear to have think thought that in part due to an intense lobbying campaign by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Yetanyahu, a man who, as he announced when the war started, has been wanting this war for about as long as I've been alive. And in trying to convince Trump that they had another kind of Venezuela-like operation in their grasp. Benjamin Yetnahu was assisted by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

And he might be the only person on earth who has wanted this war as much as Netanyahu, maybe even more. I mean, and Graham has not been shy about this. I mean, he's been bragging about his scheme to the Wall Street Journal, quote. To help make the case on Iran, Graham traveled several times to Israel in recent weeks, meeting with members of the country's intelligence agency.

They'll tell me things our own government won't tell me, he said. He spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, coaching him on how to lobby the president for action. Netanyahu showed the president intelligence and persuaded Trump to go ahead, Graham said.

For what it's worth, Netanyahu made the same case for the war in Iraq a quarter century ago. He was brought in to testify before the House one year after the September eleventh attacks. Back then he said the imminent victory in Afghanistan was secure an easier victory in Iraq. Now here we are with Venezuela as the sort of precursor, and then Iran. And here we are again in a regime change, war of choice in the Middle East with no clear exit plan. And when I say no clear exit plan,

There has been no articulation, zero. Well, that's not true. A set of contradictory and ever-shifting articulations of what the objective is. And if you press the president himself, the commander-in-chief, the person who ordered the beginning of this war, and who will be the person who says when it is achieved those objectives, he admits. Quite openly, that he has no clear tangible end goals, that it is all just vibes.

And it's all gonna work out. Look, we took an excursion. Uh we had the greatest economy ever, we still do, and we have to do a little excursion to get rid of Mad mad people, crazy people. We have virtually unlimited ammunition and we're using it. We're using it. We we can go forever. When are you gonna know when it's over? Is uh when I feel it. Okay. When is the war over? When I feel it, when I feel it in my bones.

Think about that. That's it. That's the end point. That's the strategy outlined by America's Commander in Chief. It's hard to imagine the family members of our armed forces stationed in the Middle East, where the thousands more are soon to be deployed, and the thousands more who might come after that will be satisfied to wait until Trump feels victory in his bones.

Congressman Adam Schiff's a Democrat of Washington, he's the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, and he joins me now. Um let me let me ask you if you feel like you have any sense. of what the end point would be, what would be a point at which the objectives of this war had been achieved.

Okay. Uh no. Uh we have a sense of the vague goals and directions that they want to go to, but there's no specifics to those. And it's really falls into two baskets. One is degrading Iran's military capability. Which is basically what we've been doing for the last two weeks, blowing up their missiles, blowing up their launchers, drone factories, everything else. But we have yet to be told either how we have progressed in that goal or what the end point of it is.

And I've asked this question repeatedly in all manner of unclassified settings. And they always say, we are far ahead of our objectives. And then when I drill down and say, okay, great, what does that mean? Um, they say, well, we don't have specific numbers for you yet.

So now how they know that they're far ahead of their objectives if they don't have specific numbers is a pretty fair question to ask and they don't have an answer for it. Unquestionably, we have degraded their ability by how much and how much more do we need to go? They don't give a specific answer on that. But second and even more importantly, merely accomplishing that doesn't accomplish much because Iran was pretty significantly degraded before this war started.

We remember what's happened to Hezbollah and Hamas and the fall of Assad and the twelve day war where Israel blew up a lot of stuff in Iran. They were degraded. The issue was to make sure that they would not want to build back. And that's where you get into the second basket, which is regime change, however you want to define it.

Either this group completely goes and a whole new group comes in, or whoever is there is sufficiently cowed by this war that they will stop being hostile to us. And there is no plan towards achieving that. In fact, by all report, It's not even coming close to happening. The the new Ayatollah is even more extreme than the old, and the hardliners seem to be firmly in place, and nobody

has a plan for changing that. So those two go we don't know how to get there or even where there is. So yes, it's very vague. Meanwhile, the cost of this conflict As has been widely reported, is enormous in terms of lives lost, certainly disruption to the economy, you know, global prices of oil. Cost is high, benefits are creeping up, not specific, with no identifiable endpoint.

What is your reaction to the announcement today of the deployment of this Marine Expeditionary Unit and and the possibility? I mean, there there have been lots of signals being sent both publicly and I think behind the scenes in the reporting that they are considering the deployment of troops. Um does this look like a step towards that to you? It does. Look, there's two ways this can go at this point. One, Trump can try to declare victory and try to end it.

That'll be hard. Well, I mean, Trump is very good at exaggerating his accomplishments. In fact, I have never seen anyone who's better at that. So I suppose he could try that. Now i it's hard for all the reasons I outlined earlier. He could do that, or two He could escalate to try to get closer to those two vague goals. And the main escalation would be putting troops on the ground. And the other thing that worries me, based on what we saw in Latin America and what we've seen in the Middle East.

Трамп він деплоє сфорси і на ласт є. He uses them. Um, we've not seen an instance where he's taken this sort of forward leaning step and then pulled back. So it's very concerning that he might try to escalate with ground troops towards towards what goal? We've heard rumors about they want to go in and try to secure the nuclear material, which is uh that's not an easy thing to do even in a non hostile environment.

Um, you know, there's the talk about Carg Island, whether or not we want to seize that, or maybe some sort of special forces effort to topple the regime. I can tell you from having been in briefings that discussed all of that over the course of the last fifteen years.

Nobody thinks that that is militarily achievable, but there's a huge risk that Trump might double down on on this incredibly bad decision to start this war. I mean, you're the ranking member of the Armed Services Committee. I I'm just a The guy with the cable news show. I I don't I don't pretend to have strategic insight. Everything that you've Said there sounds nuts to me, for frankly. Uh i in terms of I mean, just just as it hits my ears and from what I've read and the people I've talked to.

On on the question of Carg Island, which has become this again, there's this weird kind of um like risk board game cosplaying by everyone about like, oh, we're just gonna go and grab this island and then we'll have control of their oil. Uh and there's

News. The president announced tonight that that that that US forces hit Carg Island's military installations, but spared the oil depot. That's a place where I think about 90% of domestic Iranian oil production is is sort of processed or transited through. There's a lot of talk about what it would mean if if that were taken out. He basically said in a post that the US armed forces have hit their military installations, but because he's being a nice guy, they didn't hit the oil, but that's next.

And does that feel to you like an escalation? No, absolutely, because keep in mind part of the goal here originally was to let the Iranian people know that a war is against the regime, not against you. But if you kill their economy and starve them, they're gonna start to view it differently. But look, the overarching issue here, Iran is a problem. They've been a problem for a long time. That's why I say we've been in this these briefs for a while. How do you deal with that problem?

Um you can contain it in a variety of different ways, but containing problems is unsatisfying. Now, to me, containing problems becomes a lot more satisfying when you see examples of when you got frustrated and thought, okay, we're just going to eliminate this. And then you see that it's not as easy as it looked, and you drive up your cost.

But that's what we've been looking at, even on the nuclear program. All right, what can we do to eliminate this problem? Let's stop containing it. And the answer, sadly, was nothing. Okay, short of engaging in a full scale war. And if we did that, we'd probably wind up with a bloody civil war in Iran and chaos that wouldn't improve our situation anyway. And that's always been my position on Iran.

Big problem, smarter to figure out how to contain it, instead of diving into a military conflict that every bit of analysis shows wouldn't yield the result that we want because of simply how difficult a problem, like the Strait of Hormuz. Okay, you do this, that gets shut down. That's a major pain point that is hard to overcome. It just wasn't something that we could fix with the military. And Trump came bubbling into this saying, you know, our military is so strong they can do anything.

Yeah, we've analyzed this for a long time, and this was something that the prevailing opinion was: no, they can't do. The cost would be astronomical. wouldn't achieve the objective. There's different costs, obviously. We're seeing gas, you know, shoot up and and uh Brent I think closed at above a hundred dollars a barrel uh today.

Um that's the the the gallon gasoline, finished gasoline prices in the US, which you've seen has gone up uh quite a bit since the start of the war. On the cost to the Treasury, there is gonna be some there's talk about a supplemental war uh appropriations bill. Um are you a yes or no on that as of now? I'm a hell no, because yeah, I'm not in favor of this war. And I'm sure as hell not in favor of continuing to fund it, because that kind of helps perpetuate the war.

Um you know, get get that under control, stop the war and figure it out. But even then, giving Trump more money with his proven record of abusing that power, not good. And also let's keep in mind, this is a full-scale Middle East war now. All right. This is even a wider war than Iraq. Well I mean this is spread. We got the war between Israel

um and Lebanon going now at full scale. We've got the Kurds in the north have been dragged into it. Uh a French service member was killed. Five others were injured on an attack in Erbil. We have 14 different countries that have been dragged into this war. You know, I've used this analogy before, but Trump is basically a bull who has stumbled into the world's largest, most densely packed China shop, and it is spreading.

Uh and and causing enormous amount of pain, death, casualties, economic pain. So as I said, the cost is outweighing the benefit. All right, Congressman Adam Smith, thank you for your time tonight. Thanks, Chris. Coming up, Congressman Robert Garcia and his committee announced today they will interview the prison guard from the night that Jeffrey Epstein died. He's here to explain why. That's next.

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Today, the House Oversight Committee sent a letter to the prison guard who was on duty the night Jeffrey Epstein died, calling her for a deposition on March 26th. The guard, Toa Noel, was one of two people actually prosecuted in 2019 for falsifying documents claiming to have checked on Epstein the night he committed suicide. The charges were dropped in a 2021 deferred prosecution agreement.

For nearly seven years there have been qu questions and then a whole sort of wild set of conspiracy theories about the circumstances of Epstein's quite infamous pretrial death in federal custody in twenty nineteen. And in two weeks members of Congress could hear from the last person believed to have seen him alive.

California Congressman Robert Garcia serves as a ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee and he joins me now. Congressman, I gotta say I saw the series and I was like, whoa, okay. Uh well I I guess there I guess there's real questions here and not just murmurings and not just rumors. Like why how did this come about? Why do you want to talk to this person?

Yeah, look, we support uh this this interview and I'm glad that's uh we're actually moving forward. I think first it's really important that as a committee that we stay focused on facts, on evidence, on having a serious investigation. Yet the same time it's really clear there are a lot of questions, inconsistencies. I've talked to a variety of experts and folks that have pretty different opinions about what may have happened or how Jeffrey Epstein may have died.

Now look, we know there have been investigations. They those investigations have come out conclusive that it was a suicide. We understand that. At the same time, there continue to be more reports. about what bodyguards may have known, uh inconsistencies about some payments. And the reality is is we're talking about someone that was really the last person to see Jeffrey Epstein alive.

And so having a conversation and having serious questions, just to ensure that we are following every single piece and part of this investigation and the evidence, I think is important. So we support this interview and I look forward to being there. Okay, so when you say investigations, my understanding is the Department of Justice itself conducted an investigation into the circumstances, right? And its its conclusion

And that was that investigation initiated under Donald Trump's DOJ and and completed by Joe Biden's DOJ? Is that am I getting that right? Right. Uh look there there had actually been multiple uh investigations that happened. Um the the two serious ones that look obviously looked at the actual at the death. But

Since then, uh there were some independent investigations that were looked at. I know that obviously other folks from Epstein's family hired um uh hired someone to look at the uh at the death. There have been I've I've talked to different, for example, coroners and others. There were a lot of mistakes that were made as it relates to Epstein, what happened leading up to his death, how his body was handled after his death.

And the actions of the actual security guards, who clearly made serious and critical mistakes. Now this creates a an a real cloud around that investigation and around the DOJ's conclusions. So I think it is important to set the record straight, ask some tough questions. Understand what this guard may know.

And at the end of the day, this is a person that did and spent time with Jeffrey Epstein in his last hours and days. And so getting any sort of information here is important. And look, the one thing about this investigation I think is true for all of us. is it is continues to be shocking in what ends up being revealed. And so I'm at the point now where I will go and look at any lead if it can get us closer to the truth.

We we were showing that video. This is a sort of infamous missing minute video. There's a video is d uh that was Given out of the Department of Justice, it's a camera. It's not exactly quite on his cell. It's sort of like the hallway off the cell. Um, there is a person that walked from the guard station to the entrance of the unit. Um is it is the person you're Penaing that guard? Is that the person who's on that video? Uh I I mean I think that's one of the key questions.

Um and there are some inconsistencies about who was there. uh and certainly some inconsistencies in the testimony uh of the guards themselves who actually there were conflicting testimonies that were made between the guards that were actually there. And there there is agreement. There is I think general agreement that there were huge mistakes made there at the prison by the car by the guards.

And so I think we need to get to the bottom of it. I mean that's the honest truth is let's get to the bottom of what exactly happened and provide more transparency for the public. Yeah, I mean obviously if a prisoner uh harms himself, that th that's that's an enormous uh enormous mistake th you know, i i um if something else happened, a uh you know, arguably an even larger one. Um

I I have you here and I want to ask you about another development today that that happened uh in a uh i legally, which is um the the the president's wholly invented pretextual case against the chairman of the Fed, Jay Powell, seems to have kind of collapsed. A federal judge, Judge Bosberg, overseeing it, issued a order quashing the subpoena.

Which is really rare, saying that a mountain of evidence suggests the government served these subpoenas to the board to pressure its chair into voting for lower interest rates or resigning. On the other side of the scale, listen to this, the government has produced essentially zero evidence to suspect Cheer pal of a crime.

Instead, indeed its justifications are so thin and substantiated, the court can only conclude that they are pretextual. The court therefore finds the subpoenas were issued for improper purpose and will quash them. It's very rare to get a federal judge saying that. What do you think of that?

Uh I mean I look I think the opinion was pretty stunning. Uh what what a rebuke of the DOJ uh of this of this case, these subpoenas. I mean, this is completely made up in fiction. I mean at the end of the day, this is all about retribution. This is about Donald Trump attacking his enemies.

Going after political enemies, whether it's members of Congress, whether it's members of the j judiciary, the Fed, whoever Donald Trump doesn't like or isn't his way, he's going to use his US attorneys, he's gonna use the DOJ. To try to go after them. And then this ridiculous press conference that was held after by US Attorney Pierrot. I mean, and the comments і was it was bizarre and a strange rant. Look, the judge did the absolute right thing and pushed back aggressively.

That is what we should expect from the judiciary at this moment. We need this check and balance on the executive. And in many cases, the courts I think here are doing the right thing. All right, Congressman Robert Garcia, California, thank you so much. Still ahead, Trump's top attack dog was added again. What it means that the Secretary of Defense is promising no mercy. Next.

Svenska ostklassiker finns med på prickarna när du fyller år, på BB efter förlossningen och i vardagen när alltid precis som vanligt. En liten del av den stora och en stor del av det lilla. Här går Präst och greve, svenska ostklassiker för små och stora traditioner. Parodontax Active Gum Repair är en daglig tankkräm som börjar reparera. Svullet och inflammerat tandsköp inom en vecka. Jämfört med en barn.

Nej, det är inte på kartan just nu med flerbarn. Vi är nog med lägenheten och Pedro fyller snart sju att. Sait, det fint. Nu kommer den första. Vi säger: Vi finns här när du vill ha ett bra barnssparande. Välkommen till läret. One of the strangest aspects of the Iran war, uh and there have been a lot, has been the bizarre performances by weekend Fox News anchor and secretary of defense Pete Heggs.

He he's been odd and becoming i increasingly histrionic, berating the press with weird cliches and rhyming slogans and and even like gloating about threats of a corporate takeover by a Trump ally, as if he were playing some hackneyed villain. With every passing hour, we know and we know they know. That the military capabilities of their evil regime are crumbling. They can barely communicate,

let alone coordinate. We will keep pressing, we will keep pushing, keep advancing, no quarter, no mercy for our enemies. For more fake news from CNN. Reports that the Trump administration underestimated the Iran War's impact on the Strait of Hormuz. CNN doesn't think we thought of that. It's a fundamentally unserious report. The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.

Ben Rhodes served as Deputy National Security Advisor for President Obama, now co-host crooked media's pod save the world. Claire McCaskill serves as a Democratic Center of Missouri. She's currently an MS Now political analyst, and they both join me now. Um Claire, first one thing that jumped at a lot of people today, and I I don't f I don't think he meant it literally, but he is the Secretary of Defense is when he said in that clip, there will be no quarter.

You know, no quarter is sort of famously uh a violation of laws of war, famously a war crime. This is what the DOD manual and commission says. Any person subject to this chapter who with effective command or control.

Um orders or otherwise indicates to those groups that there shall be no survivors or surrender accepted, with the intent to threaten an adversary or conduct hostilities such that there'll be no survivors or surrender accepted, shall we punish as a military commission under this chapter. It it does seem problematic to have the Secretary of Defense literally saying there will be no court.

Yeah, I mean, first of all, it shows how ignorant he is about the ethos of the American military and what makes us the best military in the world. You know, he's like a twelve year old playing video games. It's embarrassing. He's not serious. He's not He is not respectful of the losses that the American people are enduring, and most importantly, the lives we've lost.

And maybe I can, I'm gonna just take a second, Chris, because the thing that really sums it up for me is just imagine this is what happened. He during the middle of a war kicks the photographers out of the Pentagon. Now keep in mind photographers in the Pentagon just take pictures of him at a podium. They're not taking pictures of war plans or weaponry or anything like that. Because they published unflattering pictures of him.

That's all you need to know to understand how out of his depth he is in this position and what a high price we're paying for it. Yeah. It's just it and and partly, Ben, it's also just the There's something so surreal and glib about the way that the administration has communicated about the war. From Donald Trump, I'll feel it in my bones, to Pete Heggseth to um these these. really disgusting and insulting things they keep posting these cringy video games making war seem like a video game.

Hegzeth doing some version of slam poetry. I I I I I don't have the words for why I find it so unnerving, but I'm not wrong that it's strange, right? You're not wrong, uh, but I think it's unnerving because it's essentially the worst case scenario. Um we knew when Trump got elected and appointed people like Pete Heggseth that the danger was that these were fundamentally unserious people. they were fundamentally incompetent people, uh, and that they had a whiff of cruelty about them.

And all of that is coming to the fore now. Any other administration, even ones I disagree with, like the Bush administration, you could feel the weight of war on George Bush's shoulders, um, or even Donald Rumsfeld's shoulders, right? There is no sense that Pete Hexeth is losing sleep over the over a hundred Iranian school children who were killed um on Donald Trump's uh orders to launch this war.

Uh, you have no sense that he's reflected on the fact that his constant braggadocio about how we've loosened the rules of engagement and ended the woke military may have contributed to the fact that Uh we with our tax dollars paid for the killing of those Iranian school children. Uh there's no sense that They have reflected on the consequences they've unleashed on the entire world. Gulf states with missiles raining down on them, 800,000 Lebanese displaced.

The risk of a wider regional war that goes on, the risk to Iranians who, if they rise up as Donald Trump casually told them to do, they could be slaughtered. There's just it's a combination of the absurdity of this.

And Claire's right, this kind of teenage boy performance that we're seeing as and and by the way, we should have known when he renamed it the Secretary of War that we were not dealing with serious people. You know, it's like it was all like this gets to be fun. I want to be the Secretary of War, not defense.

It it is absurd, but it's also the the life and death consequences of war. And I will tell you, maybe in this country to some people it makes sense that the weekend anchor of Fox and Friends is the Secretary of Defense. Every other person around the world that's looking at this is like, what kind of country is this that has someone like this in this position?

I I think it was a political story that J. D. Vance privately was was sort of opposed to this, which I thought was kind of interesting and telling, right? Like Okay, we're starting to get the the beginning of the seeding of ground. And it's interesting if you look at, you know, JD Vance loves to mix it up on on Twitter.

Um he just posted about the six service members that we lost yesterday in the the the refueling plane. He's posted about the dignified transfer, um, obviously both important and and and appropriate. Um, but then there's a post about going to turning point. There's posts about the Save Act, very noticeably absent. Is the kind of like JD Vance chesty mix-it-up about the Iran war online. And I think it's it's pretty interesting. What do you think?

I think it is interesting and what's gonna be fascinating is to see i if this is him preparing to try to get the nomination, knowing that this war is not really popular even with MAGA. uh a lar large swaths of MAGA that that voted for Trump and people who weren't MAGA and voted for Trump that he's trying to position himself to run. But in the process of doing that, Chris, he's also irritating Trump. And all of a sudden Trump is talking a lot more about Mar Marco Rubio than he is J.D. Vance.

So this whole thing that's going on between the two of them is gonna be fascinating just with p political eyes to see how it works out. Um, it's not fascinating when you think about what's going on in the war. It's um it's it's it's silly stuff on the side because um we have got ourselves in a mess and real people are dying every day.

Yeah, and this this sort of escalatory trap we've been talking about, Ben, uh right before he came on air, the president announcing that that US forces bombed what he said were military targets in this Karg Island, an island where about ninety percent of Iranian domestic oil production a sort of transit and and process. Um he said basically I I have sort of withheld from bombing the oil targets.

But, you know, unless they I guess lest they let ships through the Strait of Hormuz, I'm gonna I'm gonna take out their oil infrastructure. And I know you've spent some time thinking about talking about Carg Island. How do you interpret this in terms of a path towards more or less escalation or, you know, cessation of hostility.

It's a path to escalation, Chris. I mean, this is the logic of uh launching a regime change war where you don't know how it's gonna go. You and I have talked about this for many years. Anyone who looks at Iran knows that this kind of regime, given its ideology and its depth, is not going to come out and have an unconditional surrender. And so what is left?

Nothing is left but escalation. So they don't submit in the first two weeks, so you start bombing Carg Island. Well, this is a regime that's made clear that the more violence and chaos they face, the more they want to spread violence and chaos to their neighbors. into the global economy because that's their survival strategy.

So this doesn't disincentivize them, it incentivizes them to just continue the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz. Um they have uh an ally in the Houthis that could start firing missiles at the Red Sea oil traffic. They have escalatory cards to play too. Um and and I think what is so dangerous about this moment is Trump in his kind of frantic grasping for something he can call a victory, just keeps bombing more things.

But, you know, you can't engineer the politics inside of Iran with an air campaign that the Iranians know is probably time limited. The Iranians know that Trump is under political pressure. They know that he's feeling the squeeze of world prices. Why would they stop doing that? And so this is the inevitable logic of escalation that takes hold when you have no plan, you have no clear objective, and you have no exit strategy. Ben Rhodes and Claire McCaskill. Great to have you both. Thank you both.

Still to come, some exclusive MS Now reporting on the dark money infiltrating a key democratic primary. That's next.

On Tuesday, a bunch of races will be on the primary ballot in Illinois, including a crowded race in a safe Democratic district in Chicago's northern suburbs, where Jan Jikowski's retiring, the state's ninth congressional district. There are three candidates who are sort of the main candidates top of the polls, uh, in the Democratic r race to replace Jachow Jackowski.

And dark money groups have poured millions of dollars into this one race, including super PACs backed by APAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Now MS Now has exclusive reporting that finds that one dark money group is offering to pay influencers$1,500 from an undisclosed source to post content attacking one of the top Democratic candidates. Brandy Zarazzi wrote this story. She's a senior enterprise reporter for MS Now and she joins me now. All right.

So walk me through what you found. Okay. So um a couple nights ago, this uh influencer with about a hundred thousand um They call her micro influencers, right? There's tons of people like this. She gets an email from this guy, Matt Anthes, and he works at this company called Advocators. And so he says, hey, you wanna be in part of this campaign? I'm gonna give you$1,500. All you have to do is post one post on TikTok and Instagram. And the post has to be basically trashing Abu Ghazala.

Cat Abagazala who's one of those three candidates. That's right. Um and is I think You know. Lane of this primary, I think it's fair to say she's very online. She is an activist, she's at Broadview all the time, she's being indicted right now, which I know you covered on your show. She worked at Media Matters, she covered online influencers. Yeah, she is very much of the internet. And so um this this brief, he's like, here's the

Here's the brief because she's great. Amanda was great. She's like, well show me the brief. got the brief and the brief said, you know, we're not asking you to endorse any candidate, which now makes them be able to flout FEC rules, right? So we're not asking you to do any candidate. We just want you to tell people to explore their options and not be swayed by any influencers. Like

Cat Aboghazala, here are six things that you can say. Please highlight more than one. And so it's very like easily flouting the rules. So they have all this stuff that, you know, I sent to um Canada Aboghazala, and she's like, this is slanderous, this is not true, these are false claims. And so Amanda said, No, thank you, you know, thank you, but no thank you when she found when she tried to get she tried to find out who it was. And again this guy, Matt, said Well

It's this like really important Illinois organization. It's not an official organization, but they're very powerful. You'd know'em if you saw them and you'd like'em. And he she s he said that the company was called Um democracy unmuted. Can we show the website? Oh, it's a great website too. This is Democracy. Now again, Democracy Unmuted is the source of the funds being channeled through this guy that's going out to pay influencers to not endorse a candidate.

but to use talking points to attack one of the three candidates from an unknown source. Democracy Unmuted has an ill night voter awareness campaign. Yeah, and the website is The website is it started was star started two weeks ago. It's got like some big words and it says democracy, fight, things like that. And then it's it's a you know it's a

crap website. It's got a jot form at the bottom that goes to nowhere. I filled it out and it's like thank you and then nothing. It doesn't go to your email. I don't know what they did with my email now. Um, I'm probably on a list. But so it's it's it's a crap website. And so um she says no, but we checked it out and we did some searching and it seems like um some other influencers ended up taking that money.

Oh, do you have it? We do. So I'm gonna show this. I think we have this is um this is an influencer from Missouri who goes by the name the woke ginger. Indeed. Uh he has a red red hair, as you'll see. And uh here here's what his video sounds like. Your vote in the primary on March seventeenth will determine who represents you in Congress. 16 candidates running to replace Jan Schikowski at the end of her term as she retired. So it's important to look past viral personalities and asked. And why?

So look past viral personalities, ask one who won't write is from the memo, right? That like I think word word for word. That's word for word. Okay. We should note, um the woke ginger just posted something saying he uh that we have a message from the woke ginger. uh saying that he's he's taking it down, it didn't meet his standards. He does not say that he was paid for this, but it

You can draw your own conclusion. Yeah, I mean I reached out to him yesterday after I saw it. I I grabbed the video first from his page and then reached out to him and said, Is this a video where you paid for it? And then he took it down immediately and said, you know, has a sorry message. He apologized to candidate Abogazala.

And he said, you know, it did not meet my standards. When I asked if he was paid, he said I was not paid and I said, Wait, were you not offered money or were you not paid? And then and then he just didn't want to talk to me anymore. But Um he seems he seems like a nice fella with a million followers doing his thing. Now I I just want to be clear here, like um We're we don't know who this came from. We still don't know. Like the the way that dark money works is so insane and insidious.

There I wanna show what the super PAC spending has been like for Illinois Nine, which has been enormous. Um and there's been a ton of it. Uh as you can see, I think it's like uh is it like what is that, five million dollars total? No, almost six. Uh Laura Fine has been the beneficiary of like the most of that with elect Chicago women, uh, which is uh super pack aligned with APAC. They've put a lot of money into the race on her behalf. Daniel Biss, you can see.

um has some money, but he's also been attacked by some of that super pack, as has Kat Kat Abu Ghazala. But the point is that We don't know anything. Like, this is not under FEC regulations, and we're just at the beginning of this kind.

Yeah, I mean dark money has been around for a while, right? But like the dark the amount of dark money that's happening right now is massive. And I think it's really important to pay attention to the online creator space because it's the place we're gonna see this dark money go. The guy that runs this. marketing firm, his big thing that he keeps touting on his websites is

Um leveraging the power of AI. What does that mean? Okay, you're gonna leverage micro influencers and now you're leveraging the power of AI to do what? Can I just say I mean two places that people get information right now? Particularly between the ages of 18 and 35 is social media and chat GTPT. And ChatGPT announced they're taking act.

So it's like, buddy, I don't know, like y you there's gonna be hundred there's billions of dollars of dark money pouring into these races right now in the primaries and in the general election. It's gonna like Who knows where it's gonna go and why? And we can't track it. We don't know.

We don't know. And unless there's like campaign finance reform out the WESIO, which it doesn't seem like that's coming anytime soon. Or you ferret it out and call it out at least. A hundred percent. And I'm uh that is the thing that I'm I'm always hopeful for real people, but people like Amanda informed that's gonna come forward and say this isn't right and sort of peel back and show us how

us how it's done. I think that's what we're gonna have to rest on. Yeah, nice work, Amanda, and nice work, uh, Brandy Sadrozny. A as good a reporter as you will find. Um, this will not be the last one of these tour. I mean, this one really, this is not the last. This is the tip of the iceberg. Thank you. Thank you.

Ahead, she was a key witness in Donald Trump's first impeachment over Ukraine tonight. Fiona Hill is going to join Gensaki to share her incredible expertise on what exactly Trump is doing in Iran. That's next. We'll be right back. That does it for all in. You can catch us every weeknight at eight o'clock on MS Now. Don't forget to like us on Facebook. That's facebook.com/slash all in with Chris.

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