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Breakingpoints dot com. All right, welcome back to Counterpoints. So we put a one up here. The global elites Emily have all gathered in Davos. Shouldn't we be broadcasting from there? You think I was going to pretend that we were here. We brought this up or it's a green screen. We're here at Davos. We just got eggs with Klaus Schwab.
It's not the same this year without all the Russian oligarchs throwing their parties off the off to the side, because they really did throw the ragers, right, Really, have you been to Davos. I've never been to Davos, but that was always the word word on the street back when I was at the Huffington post. My old boss Arianna obviously was a celeb at Davos. I was going
to say, that's absolutely love Davos. Yeah, And when I was there, it was Davos was still on the edge of like having some cred with like hipsters, because like people like the tech hipsters, like this was there's there was still enough of a whiff of utopianism in the tech world that that you'd have people people like talking earnestly about how they're going to make the world a
better place. Actually today they're still over there talking earnestly about how they're going to make the world a better place, whether you want it to be a better place or not, or they're gonna make it one. Now very you know, basically nobody takes them seriously anymore. Now. They just see it as kind of what it is, a gathering of global elites trying to like keep together the structures that
have propped them up. This theme, as as that article just mentioned, was how much they're failing and how it's all falling apart, and that they're trying to reglobalize or deglobalize and then reglobalize or stitch back together. This this dream that they had of this of this globalized world which only includes the flow of global capital and global elites. Yes, does not include kind of opening up the world in any kind of broader ways. Right now, that's a good point.
And actually, on that point, we want to start with a clip from hilariously a panel on disinformation that was I believe, moderated by Brian Stelter. Now, this is funny for a couple of reasons. I have absolutely no objection to Brian Steltz being on a panel about disinformation. In fact, I think it's a great spot for Brian Steltzer to be on a panel. But if he's reckoning with the being a serious purveyor of disinformation throughout the course of
the Trump administration, of course that's not what happened. Instead, it was a panel about how the global elites can rain in the masses via new censorship legislation. You had to have a Democrat pushing back. Weird. Check it out. Here's the clip. That's why you're saying, the rules have
to be set up in a way not to be abused. Yes, Congressman, should we learn in the US something from the structures that the Europeans have adopted well, look, I think in general, the US has a lot to learn in terms of data regulation internet regulation. You're way ahead of us in that regard. But we believe very strongly in free speech. I believe very strongly in free speech, and I think there is a healthy concern in the United States that the EU might be be going a little too far.
So I think you look at this from both perspectives. Yes, they're ahead of us, and they're doing some smart things that I know when I use the Internet in Europe and I get all the warnings about cookies and whatnot, that actually makes me feel safer. That makes me feel better, And a lot of American consumers want that level of security on the Internet for your own data, privacy and whatnot. The EU legislation I think should be a non starter
at least in terms of censorship. And yet you have a journalist sort of like Brian Steltz kind of nod incredulously, like it's a very interesting conversation to be had. Were you surprised that Seth Moulton pushback, Well, yeah, and I think there's two points of European kind of Internet regulation. So on the one hand, like he said, the data stuff where big tech really is blocked or and it also required to do a lot more transparency around the way that they collect and cash in on your data.
Surveillance capitalists. Right, that's some good stuff. They're pretty tough. So like big tech warning, l we're going to go out of business. We're going to be bankrupt if you keep doing this to us, Like whenever you hear those kinds of noises from big tech, like, Okay, well, maybe this is actually a regulation worth paying attention to. But Europe does not have the same kind of affinity culturally for free speech that we have in the United States.
We're almost unique. We've seen that actually from Prince Harry and Megan Markle, who I believe they're on an Aspen Institute board that deals with these issues, and have said, you know, I don't know what the deal is with the First Amendment here in the United States, and what the heck is this. It's a very weird place to start from for a lot of people that wait, we start from the place that you can say whatever you want. Yeah, it sounds impossible. How can that be? That'd be so
dangerous to society? How do you control the peasants? How do you control, yes, right, and so, uh, that was interesting to see Molton kind of saying, you know what, we got a a trivia question he ran for president. I actually completely it was on stage four the like Midnight Debate. Yeah, one or two of them. But I think you your preface to this conversation about the sort of arc of Davos makes a really good point, which is that what we've seen recently is I think a
more naked, an intentional effort to rain in populace. And this is a sort of theme of Davos recently is you know, sort of how can we rig the system, how can we sort of uh copy, copy and paste laws from one place to the to the other so we can feel secure in the in the fact that we have these mechanisms in place to control people to our liking. And they obviously make this argument, and you can see one of the good things about Davos is that you can see many of them sincerely think this
is for the greater good. They think they're speaking on half of the good of the public. And it's great because you can see that, you can see what they think they're saying, you can see what they're working through in their own heads and it's never airing on the side of freedom. Yeah, and at a minimum, they think that the reforms that they're offering up and the ideas that they're throwing out there are going to stave off
this populist revolt. So oftentimes at Davos you'd have people saying, you might not necessarily want to do this thing, a wealth tax, you know, whatever it is, but you should do it or else the pitchforks are coming for you.
That would that would often be their relationship with populism, And Davos has all sorts of kind of activists that come out there, often kind of foundation funded activists who are who then deliver that message to the elites, to the elites out there, but oftentimes they just don't know
how to deliver it. And actually, if we could put up a three my colleague over the intercept Ken Kleepenstein Flag Flag disc panel on retirement the World Economic Form, what's their headline that we desperately need to disrupt our approach to retirement saving and nobody, I just don't I don't think that they understand how frightened people get when
the global leites start talking about disrupting your retirement. They still have this attitude that they're going to do good for a great number of people and that and that they're going to say that and that we're going to believe it, rather than that we're going to say, oh, so, now you want to steal our retirement, like you see it, you see a profitable way to kind of siphon a little bit more blood out of out of this stone. Now. Of course they're not wrong that in general there's a
retirement crisis, that people need more security. But their solutions that they that they talk about here are, you know, get banks to make more financial products, you know, for for working class people, which is going to translate into banks just hitting working class people with fees throughout their whole And this is why I was I think is increasingly used the word credibility earlier, like it's increasingly lost credibility because the same people who got us into the
Great Recession are the same people who are trying to now get us out of this the growing pains of populism, or the cultural pains, the economic pains of populism. And you can see under the surface at things like Davos exactly where their motivations are for something like that. And in another let's let's actually roll this video because it is pretty interesting. If we roll a four it ties into all of this when it comes to social security.
As congressman, I forget that some Republican, it's some Republicans public. Here's the video for what reason? The age of retirement. You know, that's interesting that you asked that question. People come up to me the act that's on the table. You're there, maybe I know, Okay, Literally nobody is saying that to him. That was Rick Allen. He's from Georgia. A chance he owns a car dealership. Yes, if you're listening and not watching, I think Rian just picked up
on something esthetically that makes a lot of sense. Nobody is coming up to him and saying that. And you know what's interesting is that actually, at the same time Republicans are making this message nobody wants to work anymore. He's saying people want to work more. Now I agree that people want to work generally. I think the right
overplays this idea that nobody wants to work. But you can't have both of those things at the same time, and I think I would be I would be shocked if more than just a couple of people who were in different sets of circumstances. Maybe they were tired, and then the market tanked because of the pandemic, which I know happened to a lot of people. But I would be surprised if any folks were genuinely coming to him and saying, let me work until I'm sixty eight. I
just let me work until I'm seventy. Why not? I did Google? And then there is a Rick Allen who's the owner of a GDA vehicle Fleet sales in Atlanta, Georgia. If you're right about that, I think it's a different risk case. There are a bunch of members of Congress who have owned car dealerships and are still own car dealerships.
But the right, of course, yes, like work often does provide meeting to people, and if people want to continue working longer into their life, of course, I don't think there's anybody who would really support a mandatory retirement, except for pilots or you know, other professions where you're like, okay, you know, maybe maybe it's time you do something else. You can keep working, just maybe don't fly, maybe don't
fly the planes anymore. But I love how he goes from what you pointed out rightly is an obvious lie that people are coming up to him and saying, Congressman, I would just wish that I could work more. Is there's something that Washington can do about that forced me to force me to work longer into my life. I don't want to do it of my own volition. What I want is you to want to be incentivized. That he goes into and they says that you're going to use our head and we're going to incentivize people to
work longer. And but what he means by incentivizing somebody to work longer is basically raising the retirement age of solid security and otherwise otherwise making people more economically insecure deeper into their life, because then they're incentivized to go out and get more money. And this is what the Davos blog posts that can picked up on is talking about.
They're saying people are living longer, thus we need to create a pathway for people to work longer, as opposed to let me, let me just try something out on everyone. Maybe the benefit of living longer is having more time as you're older to make decisions about leisure, to actually like that's the point of the industrial system. You can debate all of these different things about industrialization, but one very clear point of the reform that have happened is
that you earn a retirement. That is a huge part of our system that we have agreed as a society is a worthwhile ambition for people that they bust their butts for forty plus years, for decades, provide for themselves, provide for their families, provide for the communities, and then they retire as their body gets older, as their mind
gets older, and they can enjoy life. So perhaps instead of saying the opposite, right, instead of saying, you know, we're going to make you work now that you're living longer, we have to find a way for you to work longer, maybe what we should think is, now that you're living longer, we have to find a way to make your decades
of work sustain you into the future. And So to bring this back into the news cycle, you've got House Republicans, not just Rick Allen in the back bench there, well, you've got some leading House Republicans who've consistently flowed the idea that cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid ought to be part of some type of reckoning with the devasit and the dead around the debt ceiling that you had McCarthy say, I think during the election, like that's something
we're going to look at. Yep, and been you had a lot of like Rachel Bouvart and other like what are you doing, Like we're done with this? Shut the hell up, stop, don't don't do this, don't talk about it like it's this is not a winner for you. People don't want people's And there's also so much more precarity than there was in people's lives even twenty years ago. It's getting to a place. And also people are older. Yeah,
the Republican basis older. The American public, it's older, like we're an aging society, and so they're going to go after people's retirement in this way, the way that Bush tried to do in two thousand and five after his election strikes me as a political blunder. But you know, the Trump's tax cut was a giant political blunder, but they did it anyway because it was what they wanted. So what's your sense on how serious they are about about really pushing forward on this in the context of
a debt sealing crisis. I think this is really the thing to watch on the right right now because they're in this transition period and kind of developing a new prioritization, a new set of priorities. They sort of understand, at least people who are involved in the conversation about where the party should go, understand that Paul ryan Ism, like you were saying in the latter half of the Bush administration, was a political blunder. That the tax cut bill is
a political blunder. That is basically a point of consensus in the conservative movement right now that the tax cut bill was completely misprioritized. That like, maybe that's fine, like it actually did. Millionaires are good with a corporate tax cit Like you can make an argument that it creates jobs,
et cetera, et cetera. But we're in a state of cultural crisis, and if all you can talk about is cutting corporate taxes and just sort of doing Remember Paul Ryan said he was going to do this very populist thing, which would be to get the tax code downe to a postcard. You'd be able to file your taxes on a postcard. It didn't come anywhere close to that. Because as soon as you try to do that, lobbyists latch
onto it. And if you're Paul Ryan, you don't know the power to resist that or the will to resist that. So what's happening is this question of priorities, and this narrative that is congealing on the right is that these spending cuts when you're talking about sequestration, when you're talking about negotiating tough with the debt ceiling, which is imminent, that's on the table, that's going to start happening, like now it is happening. What are you going to say
that by an administrations thing? We're not negotiating period. Republicans are saying, well, how do we sell this because we are going to negotiate because there are serious arguments about spending there, like you said, aging population totally outpacing the growth of the economy in terms of social security, Medicaid, Medicare. And one of the questions is is this about tyranny?
And that's the word that keeps coming statism, tyranny. That the gas stove argument, right, Jim Jordan tweeted last week God gun, guns and gas stoves, And that's the argument that they're starting to land on that a bigger government means more control in your life. Basically, that is not medicaid, that is not Medicare, that is not social security. So if your priority is cutting down big government tyranny or
is it the debt? Right, which one is it? Because if it's big government tyranny, you're not going to want to start with that. There's also just such an extraordinary amount of blasphemy though, and that whole gat God, guns and gass, I mean God and then guns, like, okay, we love, we're all we're all one, we're all one people and guns. Then you're gonna slap slap that next to it. Okay, but that's fine, you've been doing that
for long. And then gas dows. Doesn't that so radically diminish the like you're talking about the the infinite, the greatest like force on the planet God putting those on the same plane, the Trinity, the Holy Trinity. Yeah, like, come on, well, but that's what they're trying to do. This argument is that it's all part of the same thing. It's all part of the and Jim Jordan didn't say this, but it's all part of the Davos agenda. Jim Jordan on an acid trip. Think about it, all right. So,
and by the way, we have an update. Rick Allen would have been my second guest. He owned a construction company. Oh okay, that's close. I was close. We got one more thing to show you, guys. Yes, this is a good one. And here's here's Davos in a nutshell, Kirsten Cinema and Joe Manchin surrounded by billionaires. Let's roll that difference for the American people in the last two years. We still don't agree on getting rid of the filibuster.
That's correct, Thank you. They high fived if you if you're listening, what you what you missed is play that one back. Yeah, mansion jumping in and saying we still don't agree on getting rid of the filibuster. And then they just come together for a beautiful moment. Yeah, nice little, nice little high five. They're former Democrat Kirsten Cinema. Yes, I forgot about that. It's just the news cycle move so quickly. All right, let's move on to the news
about Solomon Paya. This is a developing story that really caught a bunch of traction yesterday. So he was arrested by it b one here, yeah, b one. He's arrested by Albuquerque police on Monday. They call him the quote mastermind between behind a recent string of shootings that were targeting Democratic lawmakers' homes. I'm reading from the Albuquerque Journal right now. The suspect is a Republican who unsuccessfully ran for office. He ran for a state representative slot back
in November and claimed that his election was rigged. He seems to have a peer. He seems to have been at January sixth. He's accused of paying four men to shoot at the homes of two county commissioners and two state legislatures. We actually have video of his arrest. We can roll that on the screen. You see right there, he's being arrested by a police in Albuquerque. Ryan, what do you make of the situation? So, I mean, first
of all, people should understand that. So he got something like twenty five percent of the vote, and there are you know, maybe thousands, if certainly more than a thousand of these types of races around the country where you'll have a fringe basically a fringe candidate. The party doesn't want to put anybody out because they know they're going
to get absolutely hammered. No people run. People who do run those campaigns kind of run them for practice to say like, all right, let me see what it's like to kind of hire a campaign manager to do call time, to go to town halls and eat the rubber chicken. Let me see if I let me see if I enjoy this knowing that I'm going to lose by fifty points. And then you're going to have some complete lunatics who are going to run for these positions. And so it
appears that he was one of these. The police say that, or the New Mexico news media say that he may have even accompanied these hit men that he allegedly hired on some of these In one of the in one of the shootings, what ten or twelve year old girl sleeping in the sleeping in the home and three bullets went through the bedroom, which is just utterly horrifying. Nobody who is running for office signs up for that. Nobody,
nobody deserves that. And so I do think we have to ask the question, like, what what is it that's that's driving this, this sense that the stakes are so high that it requires firing bullets off into people's houses. And there's got to be some mental illness I was going on here, but but as but that, We've always had mental illness, right, although we have higher rates, higher rates of it probably, but we've always had significant rates, you know, non trivial rates of mental illness iness country.
So what what is it that's that's producing this. Yeah, that's one of the interesting questions that I was actually going to ask, is you know, whenever there's, like you said, a lunatic, you know, the shooting from the Bernie Sanders supporter of the congressional baseball practice, or the pipe bombs that were mailed to CNN or what I think there were pipe bonds that were mailed to the CNN, whenever there's a lunatic who appears to just sort of be
somewhere on the map, maybe leaning left me, maybe leaning right, it gets really wrapped into this narrative about one side's deep seated problems. And this story absolutely had I mean, this was blanketing MSNBC yesterday, which I keep on in the background of course to see my girl Andrew Mitchell what she's up to, got to keep up with Stephanie Ruhle.
But it's being used in that respect basically like this is indicative of a broader trend on the right, and whenever it's a lunatic, I just hesitate to do that. I think it's entirely fair to say January is indicative of something deep seated and something broader. I would say the same thing about riots in twenty twenty, and I think people on both sides would probably have no problem actually saying that in an honest conversation. But this guy,
he's also a felon. And you have this red flag question that was raised actually by the House Republican leader who says, this is yet another example of a convicted fella unlawfully gaining access to firearms which they are barred from owning or possessing, and using the weapon in a manner that causes public harm. And we land again on this question of like, can we function as a society anymore?
Can we do the basic things not just as a government, but as a society that are needed to have any sense of coherence, And it seems the answer to that is increasingly no. I think that point about the guns is a good one and goes to the question of
why is this happening more? Because if you have if you have more anger, and you have either a stable or a slightly rising level of mental illness, but you have three times more guns than you had in the past, then you're going to be more likely to see gun violence, you know, flowing out of that and there it's kind of a fantasy to think that you could have three four hundred five hundred million guns in a country with three hundred and thirty million people and that you would
then be able to precisely keep those weapons out of the hands of every single felon or every other person that hasn't Like, if you're going to have a culture that has that many guns, this is going to be a result of that. But you're right that in the wake of one of these shootings, you see everybody scouring kind of the social media feed of the person who did this, this one. They didn't have to go far because they're trying to divine where the political leanings are, Like, oh,
ran for office as a Republican. He was out of January sixth, and it was gonna go ahead and put that one in the R column over here. But you're right that it is a it is a contest, and you'll see people saying like, oh God, I hope this wasn't one of our guys other whether that's left or right. You know, as as they're kind of waiting with bated breath to find information on the shooter set, then everybody can go into their battle stations and make their political points. Well.
And you just also, I think, really, something that's you said earlier actually that he was what's the word you used? Oh? That this is? What is it? That? Is there something
that's sort of seeding this more and more? And I do think there's plenty of reason to point to Donald Trump, specifically the lies that he told his own supporters between the election, the exaggerations and lies and like theories that he I think irresponsibly recklessly floated between the election and January sixth, and continues to float that I think is extremely serious. I mean, I'm on the right. I'm happy to admit that it's not even an emission. It's just
like obvious reality. And when you have someone that powerful, that powerful using his power, I think recklessly, Yes, you're going to get more of this because none of us know who to trust anymore. And the people who come out and say you can't trust anyone are the ones that are going to get trust, and then if you abuse that trust, I think that is a really dangerous and immoral thing to do, and I certainly think we
saw that. I think there are examples of that, you know, from folks on the left too, where there's just these nonsense narratives that aren't actually rooted in reality. But this is a really big one, and it is actually I think causing some serious cultural tension in ways like this, right, because if you believe that elections are legitimately being stolen by shadowy forces, then you can imagine why you would feel morally compelled to do something about that. That was
one hundred percent the case on January sixth. You talk to folks who were there, it was this idea that like they really truly believed that Congress was stealing the election out from under their noses in that building, which, for the YouTube sensor, by the way, they were not. No, they were not election. Joe Biden lawfully won the election, Yes,
thank you. And so a lot of that, you know, is completely downstream of somebody who's in a position of power and whose supporters say, well, he knows more than I do. He's the president, he has access to classified information, he has accessed to all these different things. So he's saying it, there's probably more legitimacy than even I know or the media knows. So it's just an abuse of that power. Speaking of YouTube. So Joe Rogan throughout an
interesting theory we're going to bat around today. Let's let's take Let's listen to Joe Rogan on his take on this drip drip coming from the Joe Biden team around the classified documents that keep turning up in his garage,
his closets, boxes elsewhere. I don't know. I don't even know jack about politics, but if I had to guess they're trying to get rid of him, that would my guess would be there trying to get rid of him, if all of a sudden his own aids are sending these instead of like taking these classified documents which you have located and go well, let's not do that again, and fucking locking them up somewhere his own aids self reporting. Dude, come that sounds suss well, no one self reported that
fucking laptop. I know that was that was Russian disinformation that reeks eva. They got a hold of the social media companies and lied to them they did whatever the fuck they could to keep that from happening. And even this, they discovered this before the midterms. Yeah, so they didn't release the information until after the midterms. He picks up
on something there. I think is important that the media is not picking up on, which is these these documents were discovered the first batch that we heard about at Biden's think tank on November second. When was the election, like that eighth or something something. Yeah, it was a few days later, so November second. We don't find out about any of this until January, and they turned them into the archives in a way, right, that's what they say.
And then the Archives alerted the Department of Justice. Right in the Department of Justice eventually decides to appoint a special council. Yes, but not immediately. They didn't have the FBI director go out and hold a press conference like with Hiller Clinton. Yes, And so I think a big part of the story we don't know yet is how this became public, why it became public, how it did,
and when it did. And then Walter Shaub is a sort of ethics analyst, ethics expert, told The Hill something interesting. He's saying, you know, one of the biggest problems for the White House here is that when they were asked about whether there were more documents, they said they just had the pen documents, and it turned out, of course, it seems they knew earlier than when they told the public that there were more documents, and that is the
big remaining open question. So does any of this point in the direction of what Rogan is talking about that perhaps, you know, the Demmo private Party realizes that Joe Biden is potentially senile, he's sort of passed his prime, He's not their best, their freshest, youngest, most politically expedient face right now going into a presidential cycle, and they sort of see an easy way out given what happened at
mar Lago, and I do. So let's take two of the other points that were made there, one of them being if this happened to a Trump kid, would the media go absolutely berserk on it? And I would say that it did happen to a Trump kid kid in law, and it didn't. They didn't go berzark on it. So I just pulled up so I could find the date, March twenty eighteen. I and my other colleagues over at the intercept reported there's our headline. Saudi Crown Prince boasted
that Jared Kushner was quote in his pocket. MBS told Confidence that Kushner discussed the names of royal family members opposed to his power grab right before he then locked up a bunch of those same family members in the Ritz Carlton torture. They were a bunch were tortured. One
died from torture. The Daily Mail subsequently also reported that Kushner had gleaned classified information on enemies or adversaries or skeptics of MBS within Saudi Arabia and given that intelligence to MBS, who then acted on it by rounding them up. So we don't have to ask the question of what would happen if one of Trump's kids had some classified
document scandal and what the media would do. Media did almost nothing with that, And it gives you a sense of how little and how inbed the media is with the Gulf monarchies. That they hated, that they hated Trump so much and loved any story that they could find that was going to nail Trump. And then they have one where this guy's dead to rights, like taking US intel, handing it to NBS who then uses it and so
at least one person winds up dead. Although MB is really the media really turned on MBS post Kashogi post kogi. Yeah right, But March twenty eighteen, they had, they had every opportunity to unleash on Kushner when we're doing this, and they covered it a little bit, and they like they would do a couple They did a couple of segments on our reporting, but it certainly did not become the kind of cycle that they could have that they could have made it into. Well, and that's a frustrating
part of this story. Whenever there's an opportunity for the corporate press to like latch theatrically onto a narrative to make them look like they're really tough, like they they are not lap dogs, they're watchdogs. They just take it with a plum and then it's trotted out by them as evidence they're really tough. They did this with some of the Hillary Clinton stories and they're like, yeah, listen, we do this to everyone. It's like, that's utter nonsense,
and you wrote it. And think about the stories that the corporate press latches onto and really really drive home. They are ones that are theatrical, but pure theater because they don't challenge any of the current power arrangements. They only kind of raify them in a lot of ways. So when it came to twenty sixteen, going after Hillary Clinton's email scandal, they were fine, They're fine doing that.
They lit her up for a year over whether she like you know, about her handling of classified information on this server. But who did that challenge? It challenged Hillary Clinton, but it didn't challenge any of the structural relationships that the United States has embedded with around the world. Russia Gate, what does that? Do you know? That just portrays Russia as malign and nasty and adversarial to the United States. Like that's already the status quo. Everybody already believed that
that was the case. But if you have a story that is going to require you to go up against Saudi Arabia, that is challenging the status quo power arrangement. And to Rogan's point, it's a very precarious position for a party to be in when their president loses the internal party consensus. And Trump is obviously an exception, I think to a lot of this, But you really start to see things disintegrate when you whenever you have that, internally, the party is like, ah, what do we do with
this guy? Which is interesting in Biden's case because if you are, you know, holding Biden to his own standards, He's passed a ton of legislation, some of his target legislation. He's he's made good on several big promises, and people feel like he's been productive, but also that he's sort of not very popular with the American people and is
obviously struggling on a sort of mental level. So if you start to lose the support, you potentially can get things like I don't think anything was planted or planned here, but I do think you get people who are excited at the prospect of saying, well, maybe he just this gives him an exit to sort of gracefully bow out, and things can leaks start happening, things start snowballing, And
I don't think that's a bad point. And Row, Yeah, I think taken literally, you could kind of reject Rogan's hypothesis, but I don't think you should wave it away that easily, because if you don't take it quite as literally as he means it, but in the way that you mean that Biden's weakening power sets up what people would kind of badantically call like a permission structure for those underneath him to say, like, you know what, you know, if there's a choice of how to handle a particular situation,
if somebody has an intense amount of power at the top and is cruising to re election, that changes your decision about you know what you're what you're what you're able to do, what you're willing to do in a particular moment. If you if you sense that somebody is weaker, almost a lame duck, and you're like, well, you know what, there's another document alert, you call the cops, Call the Washington Post, call the cops. Yeah, learning And Karine Jean
Pierre keeps getting asked about this. If we could, let's roll this latest with this latest clip from her last week. We told everyone who the film that we all can assume mar people could assume that the searches were complete and all the documents that don't recovered. On Saturday, the White House Counsel's Office said that five digital clasified documents could be found. Is it safe to assume now that all the documents are have been recovered? All the official records.
All the passite documents are the document the Council of the Antal Archives or more searches on your way to find out of your staming out there. So I understand your question. We have addressed multiple questions from here. Multiple questions have been answered by the President. I know that you all just spent about some of you, some of your colleagues, maybe you yourself. Seek was on the phone with my colleague for about forty five minutes. That addressed
a lot of your questions. I'm just going to continue to be prudent here. I'm going to let this ongoing review that is happening, this legal process that is happening, and let that process continue under the Special Council. I'm not going to comment from here. Yeah, I don't envy the position she's in last week, this week, and the week's ahead. Yeah, it's like because the second that she says nope, we found every single one, be like up underneath the kid's bed, he found another box of memos.
And then you get into the veep scenario where it's like, well, what did kjpo and when did she know it? Versus was she just intentionally kind of kept out of the loop or unintentionally kept out of the loop. And you know, again do not envy her position. Some of the Biden classified documents were about Ukraine, which brings us to our next next piece of news. Let's roll the clip here of the Polish Prime Minister warning of World War three.
Ukraine's defeat may become a prelude to World War three. Therefore, today there's no reason to block support for Kiev to procrastinate. Thus, I called for decisive actions by German government on all sorts of weapons to be delivered to Ukraine. Yeah, so this is they're calling for an increase in tanks. By the way, that has induced somewhat of a debate from Germany because Germany has to give permission the way this
works for their tanks to be sent to Ukraine. If it's a German tank, then they have to give permission. It's so angs it's leaning in the direction that they're going to do it. So here's Ben Wallace, the British Defense Secretary, who says there's a debate in Germany at the moment about whether tank is an offensive weapon or defensive weapon. Well, it depends on what you're using it for. If you're using it to defend your country. I would wager that is a defensive weapon system. This is all
coming on the heels. Is that just absolutely awful strike on the apartment building. We have some footage of that we can roll right now from Reuters. Look at that. How do you pronounce the name of the city, by the way, I don't. It's Apro, Yeah, denipro, yeah, den pro. So it's just incredible scene right there. There's actually video see that yellow kitchen that it just zoomed in on. Some news outlets got video from that kitchen before the strike of a girl's birthday party right blown out of
candles and you can see that it's the same yellow Yeah. Yeah, it's a It's a pretty striking juxtaposition of how life can be so normal at one moment and then devastated in the next with these technologies that exist right now from distances, people can be struck. And you also had at the World Economic Forum you had Joe Manchin saying that the United States commitment to this war was indefinite.
You had the Finnish Prime Minister saying that the only way, you know that the only way that this war could end is Russia loses it that your you have basically a global elite consensus on the in the West that negotiations around a ceasefire and talks to end this war are just not worth considering. It's just it's just not It's not not something that is going to be on a panel at Davos and kicked around as an idea
that anybody should take seriously. It's quite striking, like the only you know, the only possible strategy, it seems like for the West here is relentless support of Ukraine until Russia is defeated. Right, that's without kind of anybody presenting a picture of what that looks like, like how does that actually happen? And you'll have people like the finished Prime Minister say, well, Russia could just leave. That is true. Ye, Russia could indeed leave, And I think that they should leave.
I don't think they should have invaded in the first place. But we're also on planet Earth. They're not going to just pack up and leave. There is no realistic indication of that, and they continue to act. Their strategy is built around exactly that notion that someday the Russians can be induced to just pack up and leave, and you know, short of nuclear war, it's incredibly difficult in the real world to envision a scenario. And that doesn't mean appeasement.
It really doesn't need to. It doesn't necessarily mean appeasement. But the solution cannot be a long drawn out quagmire that's much better for defense contractors than it is for people living in the region, right, I mean, it's insane.
Strategy is insane because what they're really calling for is basically an endless kind of low grade war, right, and because they're fine with it now, because they make a bunch of money off of it, and it allows them to be the sort of theatrical warmongering on the sort of campaign stage. It allows them to funnel money to people who funnel money back to them, and it seems
like an all around win win. And you know, obviously, obviously nobody would disagree that there's strategic importance of Ukraine to the West, that this is an incredible im moral devastation of innocent people and of civilians, and that what Vladimir Putin is doing is an atrocity and is incredibly wrong.
But again, if you live in the real world, it doesn't mean you just hope and pay defense contractors enough money that Vladimir Putin says, I'm out right, and it seems like both sides are kind of comfortable with this low grade war that's going to leave you know, thousands dead every single year and make reconstruction externally difficult because you'll continue to have attacks like the one you just
saw in de Nepro. And Putin is just fine with it too, I think, because the big the big risk for Putin at this point because his main goal basically of installing a puppet regime in Kiev has failed, and so he doesn't want to come out a loser. He wants to be able to declare victory somehow, and so if the war never ends, then he then he never loses.
So for that reason, he'd be okay, you know, with basically keeping this war that was going on at Dombas starting in twenty fourteen, going basically the rest of our lives and then some. But that's another really good point, which is if you want regime change in Russia, you can surely change the regime. Fine, Let's say you wave your magic wand and you do something extra judicial and you just change the regime whateverything's fine, or that's the
outcome of a really a massive war that's waged. That doesn't erase sentiments in Russia, and it doesn't erase sentiments in the Dambas in Ukraine that are going to continue to be seeds of tension and turmoil over these sort of complications of this region and the battles. You know, like we can all agree about where we think the boundaries of Ukraine should be, we can all agree what
is an illegal incursion. That doesn't change the reality that people there don't always agree that people in Russia don't agree with that, and they don't agree to the point that they're willing to to wage war over the territory to make that point. So, I mean, none of that goes away with the strategy. The strategy doesn't deal with any of that. And there's an argument, of course, that it's the thing that sort of creates that just totally destroys the incentive that Putin or anyone else would have
to make illegal invasions and incursions like this. But I just don't see any evidence for that, because Putin is, he's taking losses and he's continuing to do it. If we could put up this next element too. Then this is among the fallout from this top top Zelenski advisor resigned in the wake of comments that he basically what he said he went on live television. He said that
it looked like and missile had been intercepted. Russian missile had been intercepted, knocked off course and landed in this building, which is the death toll is up to forty four at this point, including five children, whereas other officials have pushed back and said no, the evidence is that it was a direct hit from a Russian battleship, that the damage the building shows that it was a direct hit rather than something knocked off course, and so the advisors
stepped down as a result of this. Though I don't know if it's been conclusively shown what precisely happened. It's very very difficult to say. Yeah, well, we'll continue to follow that story. And speaking of Foreign affairs, let's move on to news about the Foreign Afair Committee's commitee. A final committeessignments were released yesterday by the new House Republican majority Slim majority, and there's some news on that front. When it comes to the Foreign Affairs Committee, let's put
up the tear sheet there. You can see Marjorie Taylor Green received a slot on the Foreign Affairs Committee. Gosar got his committee back, and Foreign Affairs Committee, I'm sorry, he's put on Homeland Security. If the debate is over, Ilhan Omar in Foreign Afairs, Marjorie Taylor Green is on Home the Homeland Security Committee, which is going to investigate and potentially impeach Alejandro Majorcas basically right away. Ghostar had also lost his committee assignments in the last Congress and
has them back. Now. This is also on the heels of news that Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Bobert we're fighting in the bathroom during Kevin McCarthy's speakership battle. Let's put that up on the screen. You can see. This is a story. I believe that this is a story
from the Daily Beast. Yeah, the Daily Base had this very gossipy piece of information that says, according to another source familiar, well in the bathroom, Green asked Bobert, you were okay taking millions of dollars from McCarthy, but you
refuse to vote for him for speaker. Lauren, the first source said, was in a stall and then upon coming out, confronted Bobert about taking that money, and the Colorado Republican that's Bobert was allegedly unaware that Green was also in the bathroom at the time, and that's when Bobert says, quote, don't be ugly, and according to another person, out like
a little school girl. Debbie Dingle from Michigan was apparently a witness to this event and has said she stayed silent the same as Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Bobert, except for adding that what happens in the ladies room stays in the lady's room. I guess that's a good rule, just sort of in general. But Ryan, the Marjorie Taylor Green Lauren Bobert drama played out during the speakership battle. Margor Taylor Green supported Kevin McCarthy ends up on a
sort of plumb committee assignment. I'm sure that's very much what she wanted. She got a slot that she wanted Homeland Security because it's going to be a part of this high profile investigation into the that they intend to land on the peachment of all Hunter and Maorcis. They have not been quiet about that. Kevin McCarthy shifted from what he told me in an interview in September, which is that we don't start with impeachment. You know, Democrats
made everything political. We're not going to do that, to a couple months later saying, yeah, maybe peach Mayorka. So this is going to be a really high profile Median narratives can be a really high profile set of hearings. And Marjorie Tiller Green got it, and it looks like her support for McCarthy, as was expected, paid off. But Bobert, too right, how do you mean she's getting on the
she's getting on the Oversight Committee. And a couple of other couple of other of the McCarthy critics and who held his speakership up also were rewarded with seats on the Oversight House Oversight Committee. And it began, if you remember, with McCarthy telling them in a private meeting, if you come at me, I'm going to kick you off of
your committees. And one of the pieces that they negotiated towards the end of it was you won't retaliate against us, right, not for this, And in fact looks like they're going to wind up with, you know, with some of the
Plumb Committee asignments that they that they wanted. So McCarthy tells this story a lot that he when speaking of the Oversight Committee when when Jim Jordan Ranford speaker and Kevin McCarthy drops out, Paul Ryan ends up speaker, Kevin McCarthy goes to the matt for Jim Jordan going on oversight eventually, and McCarthy loves the story because for him, it shows the sort of wisdom behind his strategy, which
is you give everyone a seat at the table. And he thinks of it in terms of, at least he said in an interview with me Moneyball, which is kind of interesting, but he thinks of it in terms of that you got all these great players, how do you make them work together? This I mean, he told me. And he wants to give people a seat at the table, make them feel heard. He meets with the Freedom Coccus people, he meets with the establishment you people, and makes them
feel heard. And so it's fascinating. Your point about Bobert getting sort of rewarded too despite not being an ally of his, is that clearly what he's trying to do is make those build bridges right, build bridges so that when he needs the leverage to say we are not doing this debt ceiling thing over X, Y and Z, they have a relationship, an existing relationship, and the ability to have those conversations and to do those negotiations. Now, I don't know that that's going to work out for him.
Maybe it makes sense and the sort of cost benefit sense to try, but I think that's probably what his idea is, like, these people do not want to get on board with me, so I'm going to, you know, sort of kill him with kindness in that sense. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, Right, And he got the thing that he wanted, which is to be speaker, right, and he's going to get this thing that he also probably wants a little bit of a showdown, the debt ceiling, which
we could talk about next. We got Alexander Hamilton. Let's talk about Alexander Hamilton. Help explain this. Why wouldn't we It's a Wednesday in January. Why not talk about Alexander Hamilton? Ryan, this is your point for today, although we're sort of gonna yes, this is this is my point for today. And so let's throw old Alexander Hamilton up there. And because everybody knows they ought to read the Federalist papers, right like, we all know that. Yeah, but it's not
we'll get to it eventually. But today we're gonna we're gonna help people ACTU. We're gonna read a little bit of Federalist papers, number thirty. So Alexander Hamilton, who wrote almost all of the Federalist papers, it was supposed to be a joint project. The other guys just didn't do
their assignments, didn't didn't turn their work in. He also was the first Treasury Secretary, and so you know his views on the debt ceiling are important, not you know, as both the treasure first Treasury Secretary and also as one of the framers of the Contentstitution. And so we put up number, you put up Federalist number thirty. Unred. Just read a couple of excerpts from this and get your take to see if there is any ambiguity here
about whether or not the debt ceiling is unconstitutional. That's my take that there is There really can be no such thing as a debt ceiling given our constitution, in
our framework. And so Hamilton writes, the federal government quote must embrace a provision for the support of the national civil list, for the payment of the national debts contracted or that may be contracted, and in general, for all those matters which we'll call for disbursements out of the national treasury money is, he says, with propriety considered as the vital principle of the body politic, as that which sustains its life and motion and enables it to perform
its most essential functions. A complete power, therefore, to procure a regular and adequate supply of it, as far as the resources of the community will permit, may be regarded as an indispensable ingredient in every constitution. From a deficiency in this particular, one of two evils must ensue. Either the people must be subjected to continual plunder as a substitute for a more eligible mode of supplying the public once or the government must sink into a fatal atrophy
and in a short course of time perish. So from there he goes on and he talks about, Okay, imagine that you're not allowing the government to have any access, any significant access to resources. What happens when a war comes? So he writes, to imagine that at such a crisis, credit might be dispensed with would be the extreme of infatuation. In the modern system of war nations, the most wealthy
are obliged to have recourse to large loans. A country so little opulent as ours must feel this necessity in a much stronger degree. But who would lend to a government that prefaced its overtures by for borrowing by an act which demonstrated that no reliance could be placed on the steadiness of its measures for paying. What he's so way to saying there is that if you default on
your loans, who's going to give you more money? What kind of a country could you be if people don't trust your word, Like, if you're setting your economic foundation on the idea that at any moment you could just decide for some political reasons that you're not going to pay back your debt, then you're going to You're going to be cast out basically of the international scene. And the way he puts it is quote the loans it might be able to procure would be as limited in
their extent as burdensome in their conditions. They would be made upon the same principles that users commonly lend to bankrupt and fraudulent debtors with a sparing hand at enormous premiums. So what he's saying is like, you're not going to get rid of debt. The United States is still going to borrow. But what it's going to do is it's going to go out and borrow and people go like, okay, how's twenty five percent sound? And then that creates a cycle.
Then because all of that, that's actually a cycle that HATI itself in because of the way that that France basically came back at them that all of their revenue, so something like three quarters at some point of their of their revenue was just going off the island to their creditors. And so when you do that, then you don't have anything to invest in developing your own country. And so it seems pretty clear just from that, and
there's a little bit more we could get into. Seems pretty clear from that that Hamilton, the designer, you know, one of the designers of the Constitution and the first Treasury Secretary, would would scoff at the idea of a debt ceiling that you could just that Congress could just say, you know what, we have appropriated money lawfully, but we are going to then separately say that you can't come up with the money in order to cover the appropriations
that we lawfully created. Hamilton, Like, that's no, there's no, We're not running a government that way. That's not like that. That's a joke. We're not doing that. And the argument from the right would be the debt selling was sort of lawfully constitutionally imposed through the system of government. And what you're saying, though, I think raises a question of the fourteenth Amendment, which was a huge debate over the course of the Obama administration. Bill Clinton, actually it was
a debate in the Clinton administration. Clinton said, Hey, I actually think I've talked to my lawyers. I think this blow right through it. Actually we have that. Can you put up the final element? Yeah, there you go. The validity of the public debt of the United States shall not be questioned. That's the key part of it. Shall. Everybody who's into government will tell you the difference between you know, shall and any other work like shall is the strongest word that you can write into law. It's
like that's it, Like this is it? This is how it shall be right or how it shall not be So what do you do with that, if you're the Republicans, the vality of the public dad of the United States shall not be questioned. So then is the debt ceiling of speaking of American pessimism? What's your point today? It's exactly that it's about American pessimism. And this is a basically Ryan and I are going to be doing something
a little less scripted as we go. We go forward with the monologues, maybe on a weekly basis, maybe sometimes we'll write it all out, but just so that we can kind of talk through some of these issues in a more free flowing way. I want to talk about David Brooks's recent essay in The Atlantic in which he's basically saying, if Americans feel pessimistic, they're wrong. This pessimism that has descended upon the American population is unwarranted, and he gives a few reasons for that. First, he says
it's a historical. He says, quote, the first problem with all this pessimism is that it's a historical. Every era in American history has faced its own massive challenges, and in every era the air has been thick with gloomy. Jeremiah's warning of catastrophe and decline pick any decade in the history of this country, and you will find roiling turmoil all all those same decades, you will also find, alongside the chaos and prophecies of doom, energetic dynamism and
leaping progress. Of course, this is true that you will always find these things alongside each other in the United States of America. He then goes on to cite a Gallop poll where seventeen percent of Americans said that America was on the right track in today versus sixty nine percent in two thousand. Think about that personal satisfaction in the meantime. David Brooks points out your satisfaction with your personal life that stayed pretty stable in the mid eighties.
About eighty five percent of people say that they're personally satisfied with their own life. So where satisfaction with the direction of the country plummets from sixty nine to seventeen percent, you have people remaining relatively satisfied with their own lives. Well, here's an important counterpoint to that, No pun intended. Arthur Brooks has written about the General Social Survey. He's also written about this in The Atlantic. He calls this one
of the greatest paradoxes of our time. All of this that David Brooks rolls out on these reasons for American optimism and dynamism, et cetera. Many of them are correct, not all of them are correct. Many of them are correct, But Arthur Brooks points out that one of the biggest paradoxes is that as our material comforts have increased, our
happiness has decreased. And a great source to look for this is at the General Social Survey, which has been tracking American happiness for a very long time, and Brooks points out that a long term, gradual decline in happiness. So this rise in unhappiness, both the decline in happiness and a rise in unhappiness, you can find in the General Social Survey from nineteen eighty eight to the present. So why on earth would that be happening alongside all
of these these trends and rising material happinesses. And I think that's really where David Brooks is missing the point. He's saying that this is distorting reality. This is the second point that he makes, that the pessimism is unwarranted because things aren't all that bad. Well, first, of course, on the ahistorical point, maybe people are pessimistic because they're less happy. Maybe they have all of these material comforts
and they're not making people happy. Therefore their pessimism is warranted. Now is it a distortion? Things are actually okay? This is what he says. The second problem with the decline narrative is that it distorts reality. He goes on to say, you know, I'm no Pollyanna. I basically think though that America today is objectively better than it was before, but subjectively worse. Objectively better, but subjectively worse. So this isn't the fault of the system. It's your fault for blaming
the system. When everything is good, he says, we have much higher standards of living in many conveniences, but when it comes to how we relate to one another, whether in the realm of politics, across social divides, or in the intimacies of family and community life, distrust is rife, bonds are fraying, and judgments are harsh. But that doesn't mean the future isn't going to be brighter than the present, or that America is in decline. The pessimist miss and
underlying truth. The society can get a lot wrong as long as it gets the big thing right. Thing is This is if a society is good at unlocking creativity, at nurturing the abilities of its people, then its ills can be surmounted. He talks about how it's so much easier to get water now than it was when you had to go. You just get it out of the tap now as opposed to go getting it out of the well. Productivity is up, the price and quality of
education compared to others in the world is up. Long term longevity trends are good, which I don't think is necessarily true. We have innovation infrastructure, we have small businesses booming, we have carbon emissions down, economic expansion, cheaper goods and
a small surge and manufacturing. This is ridiculous because he's cherry picking statistics that distort reality, right, Like you can cherry pick statistics that show decline or an increase, or the fortunes of America sort of increasing, but that's really not what's happening. Because I think the better statistics to look at is you have a reversal of life expectancy at birth and mortality about twenty five years in the past. We're like basically around the mid to late nineties on
both of those measures. That has not happened. You saw a dip in that when you had the the after World War One and with the flu epidemic, the flu pandemic in the late nineteen tens and nineteen around nineteen twenty, that did happen. Then it didn't last that long. It started to tick back upwards. But what we're seeing right now is a huge drop. And it is not distorting reality to be pessimistic about that. It's not distorting reality
to look at happiness dipping. It's not distorting reality to say, adult in childhood obesity rates have doubled in thirty years. How much of our health and happiness is connected to that. Things like heart disease, things like cancer, All of those things are directly, in many ways connected to those surging rates. We're talking about doubling in just thirty years. We're talking about rising loneliness, rising addiction on some counts, failing rates
in marriage, births, religiosity. All of those things are associated in the United States with happiness. So it makes sense that as those have declined, happiness has declined. And David Brooks says, you're distorting reality. The system is fine, it's you. The problem is with so he thinks it's top down, that it's not bottom up. And this is also just totally conflating two different arguments, right, that reality can be trending bad, but you can still have reason for optimism,
and he's saying those things are mutually exclusive. But those are different arguments, right, things can be bad and you can still have reason for optimism, as I think we have probably more reason for optimism in this country than in many other countries because we do still at present
have the freedoms I think to correct the system. But because we have the freedoms to correct the system doesn't mean the system isn't broken, and it doesn't mean the system hasn't failed, and that people are right to be pessimistic about that. And that's what he totally totally misses.
And this is the elite myopia, right that if you're experiencing hyper novelty as all of us are, the hacker that you all know as Guccifer, his real name is Marcel LeVar, was recently released from a Pennsylvania prison after serving time for his various various legendary exploits. He's now back in Romania, where he had launched his hacking career and was interviewed by my colleague at the Intercept, Sam Biddle. Sam joins us now to tell us more about Marcel. Sam,
thanks so much for joining us, my pleasure. And so back when you were at Gawker, Guchifer, So, how did Guchiffer get in touch with with you and with Gawker back then? Was there like an open tip line that was your email public? Like? What was and what was your interaction with him? Were you going back and forth back then with him? And then I want to get
into who he is for people who don't remember. Sure, So it's it's it's funny you mentioned that because when I was interviewing him, when I was finally speaking with him on the phone after all these years, he said that he had the hardest time getting anyone in the media to notice him, to respond to any of his
uh messages at all for a really long time. He said he was basically just like spamming not just Gocker, but the New York Times, Washington Posts, the Guardian, every outlet he could find in the English speaking world and beyond. And he just said that no one, no one cared, but yeah he would. He would send updates to Gawker and The Smoking Gun were his two favorite outlets, probably because we because you actually spot such a throwback refreshing
Gawker and the Smoking Gun back in two thousand and nine. Yeah, what were his messages like? Were they did? They looked arranged in all caps and that sort of thing. Or he would always they would always start with which I found to be very catchally with guccifer transmitting dot dot dot dot dog, which always which was like, you know, much like the name itself, just I think, a sort
of stroke of self branding brilliance. But it was always very crude and sort of di y and that like the images he would share, which he stole a lot of people's email accounts, you know, he watermarked them himself with this very crudely done sort of looks like he had been done in Microsoft paint. He would sign the images, I think, often with the spray paint can tool, just saying guccifer. So you know, this did not have the trappings of like a sophisticated intelligence operation, which of course
it was not. It was just a guy. And that's what I'm glad Ryan asked about the Gawker thing, is that's one of the things I picked up in this interview, which is not just an excellent interview but excellently written. It's so interesting, and the arc of this ban from from someone who's sending ostensibly weird email else to Gawker, to someone who had a huge influence just from his computer guessing passwords is incredible. So, Sam, if you could catch people up on the O G. Guchifer, this is
not Guchi for two point zero. This is a very different situation than how it I guess how it became, how it evolved over the years. What's his backstory and what did you learn when sort of reconnecting with him after all of these years and after all these changes in American and world politics. Absolutely. Yeah. So he was a taxi driver in Romania in a city called a Rod, which is about the size of Syracuse, sort of industrial town. He has no technical training whatsoever, sort of just a
computer amateur. But he was fascinated by and remains fascinated by American politics and American the power culture of the American elite. So he literally just started reading their Wikipedia
entries and guessing their passwords. He had had a string of account break ins with some Romanian political figures, but in twenty thirteen, he started branching out significantly significantly to the US and had an incredible string of I think something like one hundred different targets victims and who's mostly AOL and Yahoo accounts he broke into. He was masterful and identifying people who were sort of adjacent to power,
like Dorothy Cooke Busch, sister of George W. Bush. That's how we got the incredible George Bush oil paintings that became a sensation and I think really unprecedented look into a former it in Psyche. And you know, he also perhaps most famously, broke into the email of Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton advisor, which is how he I think inadvertently revealed the fact that she had a private email account.
But you know, oh sorry, yeah, did he know that at the time, because it's it's fascinating how that came out. So Sidney Blumenthal basically was emailing with an account I don't remember it exactly, something like HDR twenty two ye or something like that Clinton a Clinton email or whatever. You know, Basically it alerted the world to the fact that, oh wait, Hillary Clinton has this personal email and then more importantly has this private server Clinton email dot com.
So what else is on that did he did he notice that or was that just in the dump that was sent to you guys and then and then it was just figured out subsequently. So he had shared a cash of emails with Gawker and and you know, and also published served up on the internet. It wasn't just it wasn't exclusive to us. Uh, you know, I don't believe that he highlighted the fact of the of the email in that initial outreach. I think that, you know, the emphasis at the time was here are messages from
you know, a close Clinton confidant, associated uh advisor. But I don't think that the existence, you know, it was supposedly about the substance of the messages, not the sort of metadata as it were that included her her contact for private contact. Well, and one of the interesting things you picked up on in in your piece is that there's this he obviously always had this kind of quest for notoriety, but he also kind of wants to be able to to be a private person and to i
don't know, absolve himself of of wrongdoing. And he admits that it was wrong to you know, and get into people's property without authorization, et cetera, et cetera. But Sam, how is he reckoning with going from a dude who's guessing people's passwords to somebody who absolutely reshaped the world from behind his laptop. Basically, I think he's conflicted about it,
which I think probably most people would be. I credit him for being sort of transparently an authentically self contradictory about it, right, Like he is, in a sense trying to have it seemed like he was trying to have it both ways. You would, you know, sometimes act contrite and then boastfull. And he also, you know, repeatedly downplayed his influence on recent history and then would take credit
for things. I think that going to prison in the United States for four years, over four years is a you know, generally horrible experience, and to go through that as a foreigner probably even more difficult. I think he is now. He seems sort of discombobulated now back in Romania with his family that he spent eight years away from. I mean, his daughter grew up without him because he spent a prison term in Romania and was an extradited
to the US. So he's been behind bars in one country another for a long time, and I think that experience of just suddenly being back with this family that you had been pulled away from for eight years is a really is a really devastating one. So, you know, it seemed to me like he was trying to sort of air on the side of being normal again, just
being a nobody again. You know, if I can play sort of armchair psychologist, I might say that's sort of under That seemed understandable to me after what he had been through. He talked a little bit about his motive to you looking at you know, it involved the Iraq War and an American decline and the Bush administration. Talk a little bit about why he originally did this and
how he viewed now how he views his motive. Sure, so you know, it's it's interesting because when he first was reaching out to us at at when he was reaching out to Gawker and other outlets, his emails were in terms of any kind of motive or ideology kind of incoherent. It was a lot of references to like really really worn out conspiracy theories, like you know about the Illuminati for example, and Blake. It was just sort of like throwback stuff. Uh and and you know, sort
of our heart to take seriously. But ten years later, you know, like I say in the piece, he's still is in a sense of conspiracy theorists, and that he thinks there is an elite pulling the strings behind the scenes, but not in a way that is you know, kooky, the way Illuminati stuff is. Yeah, you knows, as you mentioned. He he says now that what he was trying to do all along was look for, essentially evidence of systemic
corruption among the American elite. And he says that that's why he broke into the email of Colon pow and z that he Bluemanthal and Bushes and people who were famous in entertainment and and and so forth. He thought that watching from Romania, that the United States had lost
its way. He described admiring the US deeply as a Romanian living under under communism, and that you talked about looking to the US for guidance, and then in the twenty first century seeing the US as something no longer to be admired, as a country that had sort of lost his way, and he thought he would find an
explanation for what you call American decline. But I, you know, I think is the right term for that too in these emails, and he said, you know, he said openly on the phone, and he said, it was a failure. I never found what I was looking for. But that's what he says today was motivating him back then. Such a great line at the end of the piece where
you say Lazar is a conspiracy theorist. It seems in the same way everyone became after twenty sixteen, I mean helped to build the time I think, so, I mean, it's it's it's incredible the extent to which he has. He said that he spent a ton of time in prison reading. But the books he was reading that I note in the piece are like these sort of memoirs
of the deep status. Yeah, yeah, right, like the autobiographies of like Spy Agency, the Chiefs and like Mueller Report, uh Cinematic Universe people and like it was it was. These were all sort of like airport politics books that
he was just guzzling in prison. And as a result, you know, he he sounds like someone who has been watching CNN or MSNBC or Fox for the past uh well, probably less Fox, but you know, someone someone who's been watching uh Trump Russia coverage obsessively and like tweeting about
it for for years and years. Of course he wasn't he was in he was in prison, but you know, he he, he has sort of taken on this mode that I think, uh has become super popular in the US of you know, of believing in these great political conspiracies and you know, and as we've seen over the past several years, those often end up being, you know, if not as true as they were supposed to be at first, you know, having elements of truth in them.
And one takeaway from story I think is that if your elementary school is on your Wikipedia page, don't make that one of the answers to your femail recovery question. Yes, as you said in the piece, he was using email recovery questions of these super famous people as a way to hack into their their emails. So if it's publicly findable information, pro tip right there, I'm going to check your factor a good factory. Sam, Thank you so much,
my pleasure, Thanks for having me. Well, Ryan, we started the show with Davos, and we're ending on this note about Guccifer and how he was able to guess the passwords of sort of the Davos set and change the course of world politics by doing that behind his laptop screen. In Romania, he got locked up for years, he comes back out, and what we've seen transpire in the year since is the sort of desperate clinging to power. And that was some sort of a theme of today's show.
I think that's fair, actually coherent show. How about that actually go here and show. Yeah, we can tie it all together. Yeah, don't get used to that. But we'll see you back here next week Wednesday. As as you can tell, we're here on Wednesdays. These days Wednesday. It's good to be here on Wednesdays. There's so much, so much news. So we'll see you then, see you later