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We have a truly spectacular show today, don't we Emily.
That was as enthusiastic.
That's really amazing.
At a lower volume, it's amazing.
It's gonna be amazing.
No, Joe Biden has said that he has decided how he's going to respond to the Iraqi militia attack on US troops that were for some reason in Jordan, reservists for some reason in Jordan, which through our own blunders, ended up killing three service members. Biden is now saying he's going to respond, he has not done so.
As we go to go to air yet, we're.
Going to talk about the kind of the propaganda war that's going on in the US media around both the October seventh atrocities as well as the atrocities that have been carried out since then.
What else we got?
Yeah, because you and your colleagues have a really interesting story. Stay tuned for this about what happened inside the New York Times with an episode of The Daily related to the conflict in her own Palestine. So I'm excited to
get into that. Right, the squad is having a really bad week, and as our resident expert, actually not even our resk, but resident expert the media is expert on the squad, We're going to talk to you about some you know, maybe blenders or investigations between ilhan Omar, Corey Bush, and Jamal Bowman.
Scandals are hitting three of the six members of the squad. And I kind of ginned this up myself so that I could promote my book a little bit longer.
It was pretty clever.
I instigated a Department of Justice investigation into court.
You foiled the complaint.
I mistranslated ilhan Omar's speech before a group of Smalley Americans in Minnesota, and I dug up Jamal Bowman's old nine to eleven poem.
Well, you actually had that already though, because you read it often.
Yeah, but I held it back just so I could push the book a little bit more.
If you stay tuned for anything today.
None of that was true, but those are the scandals that we're going to talk about.
H Yeah, we're going to go into a clip of Republican Congressman Mariel Viral Salazar, who's from Miami area, getting grilled in an interview, and this is a clip it was going pretty viral, but it also speaks to some much broader issues in Washington, d C. So stay tuned for that as well. And finally, we're going to play a clip of Ejing Carroll on Rachel Maddow's show. Again
that is super viral for some really I think bad reasons. Obviously, Trump got hit with an eighty three million dollar payment, so Egan Carroll was discussing, you know, what she's planning to do with some of the money, and I think Ryan her comments might as you could see on her lawyer's face. We'll get into this, but they might bear they might have some effect on the case itself because Trump is appealing and.
If we have time, we're going to get into both the new sanctions that the State Department slapped on Venezuela and how those contrast with the lack of sanctions placed on Pakistan, despite the fact that Pakistani secret courts just sentenced Imran Khan for a second time in just as many days. This time, the first sentence was ten years. Next trumped up sentence was fourteen years. State Department completely fine with that. State Department has a problem when it
happens to Venezuela. If we don't have time to get to that in this two hour show, we'll do something extra and catch it later.
Yeah, we have a clip of Ryan actually, yes, the State Department on that. Let's start with President Biden discussing Iran yesterday. Here's this clip from Joe Biden outside the White House.
We'll respond responsible the sense of the supplying the weapons to the people.
Who are giving.
Well, we'll have that discussion.
I don't think we to wider war and the movileast.
That's not what I'm looking for you, Okay. So we also have a clip from the Pentagon responding to some similar questions. Let's roll a two here.
I wouldn't say that the conflict is spreading in that we've seen over one hundred attacks on US forces. Unfortunately, over one hundred attacks on US forces in Iraq and Syria and of course now in Jordan. We don't want to see a widening of this conflict. We don't see this conflict widening as it still remains contained to Gaza. But this attack was certainly escalatory in that it killed three service members, three of our US service members, And
as the President has said, we don't see conflict. We don't want to see wide a widening of a regional war. But we will respond to the time and place of our choosings.
Not spreading when troops literally have died in another country.
Well again, but they've also been launching these attacks since October seventeenth, and again we can't discount the fact that these attacks are incredibly dangerous put our service members at risk, but they have not, up until yesterday, inflicted lethal harm. They have been predominantly minor injuries and minor damage to infrastructure.
It is interesting that we feel like we have to respond by escalating when typically this attack would have been intercepted and like she said, it would have caused minor damage. We would have knocked the drone out of the sky. Maybe it hits a fence, and they have to fix a fence post. But because we screwed up and our defenses presumed that this drone was actually a US drone that had been out flying around Jordan and who knows where else, that we let it get too close to
the base. When it got too close to the base, it killed three soldiers. So it's very interesting that we feel like, yes, they did launch it, but if we had intercepted it, like we had intercepted every other other one, we would not feel like we had to attack iron.
Yeah, it's a great point that our own incompetence, and I think this is what's so scary about being fanned out across the Middle East in ways that actually you and Ken clippenslaying and the intercept in general has been I think dogged at tracking down and pushing these questions about who's in Yemen?
What do you mean?
We're in Yemen? That's I think what's so dangerous.
Meming and we're in Jordan.
Best seller made a good point to Daily you know, you know where American troops are not dying Afghanistan, And people have been saying for years now, leaving troops in Syria, leaving troops all spread out all over the Middle East, is just giving targets to these milicias.
Say you make a mistake, like in this case, three service members die.
And now we're required to go to war over it.
Right, right, And so then you have the pressures. You have all of that, and just because of our own incompetence and because we were fanned out across the Middle East in different ways. Now again the fault is with the people who are sending drones to us for killing the service members. That doesn't excuse the incompetence at all, and it doesn't excuse us having this strategy that makes us so vulnerable to getting into wars, because, like you said, like these pressures can change in an instant.
And meanwhile, as Cristal Osaga talked about yesterday, the negotiations over some type of resolution to the hostage crisis in the war itself can continue, each side rejecting offers and offers and counter offers. Meanwhile, we can put up this next element here, Hamas appears to be regrouping in northern Gaza, and a sign of Israel retreat, retreating, and the war effort going quite poorly on the ground for the IDF.
Now if you remember, the State Department won a concession from Israel that United Nations surveyors would be able to go into northern Gaza and just check out the situation and come back.
With the report on what it would take to.
Get house to the standing population to be able to go back to their homes. Matt Miller at the State Department yesterday said that that that is now on hold because of so many Hamas militants resurfacing in this area. Israel is saying publicly that Hamas is even policing the area.
And this comes after Israel said maybe a dozen different times that they had operational control of Northern Gaza, which was in the face of so many analysts saying it's not possible, like with just simply with the civilian population against you, with the tunnel, with the tunnels, you know, remaining operational, despite the fact that they're now flooding them again, Israel flooding them with water again, something like eighty percent
of them are still functional. And the Israeli economy is buckling under the weight of all of this because not only are they have they now cut off their main source of low wage labor, which is you know what West Bank Palestinians and Gazen Palestinians that are not allowing into the country anymore, but hundreds of thousands of their other Israeli workers have been called up and are fighting
the war. So you've got entire companies that are just basically empty of workers, and you can't run an economy for long under those conditions, especially when tourism, which is a major part of the economy, is also spiraling.
Your point about Hamas returning to northern Gaza is such an important one. This is quote from that Guardian article that we just had up on the screen from Michael Milsteen of the Institute for National Security Studies, which is basically a think tank that's in Israel. It's based in Tel Aviv. He said, Hamas controlled these areas, so there's no chaos or vacuum because it is the workers of Gazam municipality or civil rescue defense forces who are effectively
part of Hamas, who are enforcing public order. Hamas still exists, Hamas has survived. The IDF version is that in the northern part of Gaza, the base, sick military structure of Hamas was broken. That only works with a conventional army, but not for a flexible guerrilla operation like Hamas. We're already seeing individuals as snipers, setting booby traps and so on, so many casualties in northern Gaza over the last few months for that goal of eliminating Hamas. A lot of
people died in the interest of eliminating Hamas. This is, I mean, beyond tragic to realize that. You know, again, we've been questioning whether that was a possibility when you have, as Michael Milstein puts it, a quote flexible guerrilla operation. And I think we're going to be seeing increasingly that the answer to that is what people suspected. It was not possible to wage that kind of war and quote eradicate Hamas.
I think and Saga has made.
I think early on this Worsaga was making some comparisons to Vietnam and the vietcom and I think those are apt in the sense that you could also say it in comparison to the American Revolution, like the idea that the British were going to come over here or the US were going to go over to Vietnam and we were and they would just magically pluck out, you know, Sam Adams and John Adams and go find you know, Thomas Paine and kill them. And you know, flat in Philadelphia.
Granted they didn't have drones, they did not they did not have drones. They had fire and torture, and they used it pretty ruthlessly. But because the the gorilla army of the American revolutionaries was part and parcel of the the kind of the patriotic resistance, you know, to Britain, like you're not going to just get rid of it, Like that's not going to happen in Vietnam.
You're not. You're not going to.
Identify a list of Vietcong, you know, capture and kill all of them.
And then all of a sudden you just.
Have appliant Vietnamese population that is happy to you know, live under whatever American puppet you put over there like that, and they would keep putting up, you know, back in during the Vietnam War, they kept putting up the casualty figures. Look, we just killed another ten thousand Vietnamese, and that would be and victory is about to turn a corner. There's a light at the end of the tunnel. They kept saying,
just to kill a few more. But if the if the if the Gorilla army is an organic part of the population, then you're not going to be able to do that. And at the same time, critics of the Palestinians who say, well, there are no civilians, like President Herzog has said, there are no civilians, they all support Humas. If that's true, then how are you going to up group Hamas like you either believe. If you believe that, then your strategy has to be to completely clear out
every Palestinian or your strategy will fail. And I think that for a lot of that was their strategy. But now they're running up against the international resistance to just clearing out all the Palestinians.
And we're talking about tens of thousands of deaths based on Estmens that we have right now. And still Hamas now returning to northern Gaza and apparently operating or re establishing some of those operations that existed just a few months.
Ago while they're still waging their military campaign. This isn't aname after they've kind of backed off.
Right, Well, I guess, I mean to some they have backed off, but they haven't. They haven't ceased fire.
Yeah, let's look at Kamala Harris being pressed by Katie Kirk on what we have been very clear is perhaps the biggest problem with the United States involvement in this conflict in terms of the philosophy, the kind of underlying philosophy that the US is bringing to the conflict. Let's roll this clip.
We've been very clear humanitarian aid must flow from day one. I will tell you one of my areas of priority included let's think about the day after, because we must stay focused on an eventual to a state solution.
Well, having said that, I want to tell you something which I'm sure you're well aware of that BB Netanyahu, Prime minister, who recently said he rejected US calls to scale back Israel's military action in the Gaza Strip or to support a Palestinian state after the war. He even said that Israel quote must have security control over the entire territory west of the Jordan River, which includes Gaza. So given those positions, how can you possibly come together?
How can the US and Israel come together to solve this? And should aid to Israel be conditional?
So I'll start with the principles that we are applying to this discussion, which we've been very clear with Israeli government about one as it relates to the day after. There should be no reoccupation of Gaza, there should be no changing of the territorial boundaries of Gaza. That the Palestinians are entitled to an equal measure with Israelis security and prosperity.
Doesn't sound like vvt Ya who agrees with that.
We're the United States of America. I'm telling you our position, and we take our role in this discussion very seriously.
There may be disagreements.
That doesn't mean we're going to change our mind.
So should AID that and Vice President be conditional? If the Prime Minister of Israel is stating this, should that AID not come if there's not that kind of flexibility that you're seeking.
We are right now in a position of negotiating with Congress to follow through on a commitment we made for AID, and we are taking it one day at a time in terms of what is happening in the region and how we are addressing the issue. But that's where we are right now.
So I don't feel like you really answered my question. Well, but do you think it should be conditional? I know you're carrying out that's not our position, right now not right now.
It's like that confession was extracted through torture. Practically, just say it.
You know, Kamala Harris is mad when she's laughing.
It was impressive though, the way that Katie Kirk there just doesn't move on and just insists on getting an actual answer out of her. Yeah, that was I thought that was impressively done. And you know, especially after Kamala Harris said, well, I think I've answered your question, It's like, did.
You I'm not quite sure Katie kurrk committing random acts of journalism.
I'm quite sure that I heard an answer there, but that but the substance of it is also so important. There could not be bigger gap between the two positions of Net Yahoos, which is, you know, Israel ought to control have security control over everything from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and the American position that Israel should not and that there should be a path toward
a two state solution. Right like that's now Net Yahoo's is actually much more grounded in the reality of the fact that there are seven hundred and fifty thousand Israeli settlers in the West Bank and that Israel is pursuing control not just of the res crossing, but also of the Rafa crossing with Egypt.
They are gunning, They are trying to make that.
Reality, the kind of final reality on the ground, Like their vision is much closer to happening than our vision. So in that sense, you know, you know, his posture is in the lead. But for years we've kind of had to pretend that that's not really what he thinks, and that there's actually a major constituency in Israel for a two state solution.
If we just continue to say that, if there is.
Yea and if you've zoom out to thirty thousand feet and tried to explain the United States support for this war to people in another time or another era, they would say, oh, so you are aiding Israel and their goals for Gaza, their goals for the territory. I mean, that's the most common sense conclusion, is the most common sense conclusion from a nation giving another nation billions of
dollars to prosecute a war. But in fact we're on vastly different pages about why the war is being or we say we are, yeah, well yeah, I mean I think though that, I mean, Joe Biden's been a two State solution guy for decades. He's, you know, mister two state solution. He walks around like mister two state solution. And it's just an incredibly I think it's very frightening. We've talked about this a lot, but it's just the fact that this isn't the conversation the media is pushing
every single day. And it took Katie Kirk like three months to get Kamala Harris to confront that central tension is pathetic.
Right, And the key thing is, Okay, what we say doesn't mean much. What we do is what matters. There was some leaked report in NBC News that Biden is now considering you withholding some weapons in order to put pressure on Israel, which flies in the face of all these people you see saying, well, Biden can't do that.
And of course Biden can do that.
But to do what and why? I mean, it's just that's the question that Biden and Kamala Harris absolutely can't answer for Israel to defend itself. Okay, so again, to what ends does that mean that Israel controls the entire area or what are your conditions actually aimed at achieving?
Right?
The way that people think about it here in the US is that unconditional support for Israel empowers the right wing because it allows the right wing to say, look, we don't have to compromise at all with the Palestinians. We can do the maximalist version of what we want and the US will be behind us the entire time. And that undercuts the Yesha Tid Party Benny Gantz, people who in the past have not today, but in the past have spoken favorably about a two state solution. They
don't even talk about it anymore. But if the United States came around and said, look, this is the deal, like we're cutting off aid tomorrow unless you move forward on an irrevocable path on a two state solution and you cut a deal with Saudi Arabia, the UAE cutter everybody else.
And you just have to do this.
That then empowers the political position inside Israel that says, look, we don't have a choice, we have to do this. That moves voters, it moves and it moves politicians.
That's the theory.
What the theory so far has been held up by reality because our unconditional support for Israel has only moved the Israeli kind of political spectrum, you know, inexorably to the right over the last thirty years.
It makes it's more logically consistent to be a one stater at this point, like NETANYAHUO, than to be whatever the hell Kama.
Who's like, Look, it's not going to happen. Let's just give everyone equal rights and citizenship within the exact same area that Nanna who just outlined.
It's a clear and consistent and like sort of coherent internally coherent end goal. And that is not what we're getting from this administration whatsoever. We don't have any clear benchmark of what it means to eradicate Amas, and no clear benchmark of what would happen after eradicating Amas. And yet we're pouring so much money into this conflict that is spilling so much blood. Again, just a scary place to be.
We're getting an absolute pressure cooker situation in the West Bank. Let's roll video here of this arraid of a hospital by Israeli assassins in Janine.
So what you're seeing here.
Are is a group of Israeli commandos dressed up in medical garb, some of them dressed as women wearing a job with silencers on their assault weapons, strolling through a hospital. Now now now they're showing footage of the room where they assassinated three Palestinians. There's a blood stained pillow where it seems that somebody was executed in their bed.
We were told they were sleeping when they were.
And Israel has since said that one of them had a gun on them, but the hospital has said there was no exchange of fire, so that the gun, the only guns that were fired came from the Israeli commandos.
There.
One of the western outlets, I think it was the BBC put put assassination in quotes and said that the Palestinians you know, described this as an as a quote assassination. In their next paragraph they mentioned that the commandos used silencers. I think we can take the quotes off of assassination. If you if you sneak up on somebody, uh and and assassinate.
Them when the yes, all three of the people who were killed have been claimed by terrorists has claimed.
One of them was apparently a spokesman for the for A Hamas military wing and the other two were a commander. And yeah, right, these are all like these are like there doesn't seem to be any question that these are Hamas figures. Doesn't also doesn't seem to be any question that they were in a hospital.
Which is an assassination. That's it's an assassination.
Israel has security control of the West Bank, like they occupy the West Bank. There was nothing stopping them from going in as a police force or even as a military force in actual military gear. And you're even seeing from Israeli politicians and others saying that that would have been just from a tactical propaganda perspective, a savvier way to do it. You surround, and you surround them if if there is if they fight back, a gunfighting you
know happens in boom. Unfortunately, we had to kill these three militants, but to go in dressed as kind of nurses and doctors.
You can see them in this picture with Ben Givier. By the way, we have next picture is Edmar Ben Gavier posing with some of the people that were part of this operation that you just saw on the video.
Yes, there and they have changed back into some type of commando garb.
There no longer dressed in their kind of medical gear.
But yeah, when the when Israel has been spending so much time, you know, accusing Hamas of embedding itself with civilians for them to kind of disguise themselves as civilians and go into a hospital that's under their control in the West Bank.
With as I said, the.
West Bank currently has a pressure cooker situation because workers are not allowed to go from the West Bank into Israel. Not only is that hurting the Israeli economy, Israel under Van Gavier's actually under Smotrich's direction, has seized all of the funds that belong to the Palestinian authority to pay unemployment benefits. So people are you know, suffering financially badly in the West Bank. You're seeing a lot of Palestinians
getting killed in the West Bank. Beyond this, this type of situation, so you can only imagine, you know, where this is headed. There doesn't seem to be any effort to try to find any peaceful resolution any way out of this. It just seems to be an endless ratcheting up of tensions.
From the propaganda point of view, I think, you know, Israel can make the case that here you have a very clear cut example of militants being embedded with the civilian population. Their soldiers going in and having this precision strike on three guys with no civilian casualties that we know of yet, and then you know, and no casual to their own troops. I mean, I think there's a case actually that is sort of flipping what we were just talking about and saying if.
They hadn't dressed up as nurses and doctors, I think they'd be in a little stronger position.
I mean, but from their point of view, they can say it was a successful mission with casualties.
Only for the killed three people, yeah.
Who were terrorists embedded in the hospital.
The State Department was pressed on this yesterday. Let's roll some of.
That something that you think is problematic or is it something that you look at with envy, like this is some kind of great mission, impossible mission that we wish that we could also do.
So I'd say that we strongly urge caution whenever operations have the potential to impact civilians and civilian installations that of course includes hospitals. We do recognize the very real security challenges Israel faces and it's legitimate right to defend its people and its territory from terrorism. Israel of course has the right to carry out operations to bring terrorists to justice, but those operations need to be conducted in full compliance with international humanitarian laws.
Well, do those operations include going into hospitals and murdering people in their in their beds, regardless of whether they're so you know that they are suspected or so even known pariss So okay.
So there was a lot in the premise of that question. Obviously they we do know that they went into Well you.
Do think, well, I went in and killed the complete people who were completely innocent. So let me say that this did think that, then you would be condemning it, right, We certainly would.
But I would say that Israel has said that these were Hamas operatives. They have said that one of them was carrying a gun at the time of the operation. So I'm not able to speak to the facts of the operation. You'd have to to pass some kind of legal judgment know all of the facts of the operation.
But as a.
General matter, they do have the right to carry out operations to bring terrorists to justice, but they need to be conducted in the hospital. So we want them to conduct their operation in compliance of their national humanitarian law. We would generally say that we don't want them to carry out operations in hospitals, but under international humanitarian law, hospitals do lose some of their protections if they are being used for the planning of terrorist operations, for the execution of tariffs.
Now, hospitals the actual hospital building does, but I mean going in disguised as you know, women and doctors and whatever is something different. And then going in and picking out people in particular rooms beds and killing them seems to be something different.
There's a great line of questioning that pushes the State Department for consistency on this question of the rules based order essentially, and you know the hospital thing. Brian, can you explain or go into a little bit more about the rules based order that the United States and Israel are sort of talking about all of the time as it applies to Hamas and as it applies to operations in Palestine elsewhere where is this or what is that context?
On the other end, Yeah, the AMAS is a gorilla army, and so Azol is routinely accusing it of embedding itself among a civilian population, which was the case here. Including it's an interesting question if a terrorist is going for treatment at a hospital. Does that count as kind of hiding among the civilian population or does that count as like they needed treatment?
Yeah, I suppose. We don't know exactly what the case is. We don't know exactly what they were doing.
We can we can tell that one of them was lying on the bed because in the hospital the blood, the blood stain and the bullet hole goes right through the pillow. So somebody was hurt enough that they're in bed getting treatment.
And it has been said that they were getting treatment and that's how they knew that they were in there. So Alon Levy, who's the spokes Israeli spokesperson, was in a Twitter fight with Jannis Vera Faucus, who is the former Greek Foreign foreign Greek Finance minister, who was accusing him of breaking the breaking the rule of law. Vera
Faccus said, here's the latest incident. Israeli undercover soldiers agents entered Janine hospital this morning and shot dead three injured Palestinians in their hospital beds while being treated rule of law, western style. Want to talk about terrorism, Alon Levy responded, Israel eliminated three terrorists trying to hide in the hospital and then dug up their ancestors in.
A weird way. He says. I bet when this man's ancestors accused Jews of the original medieval blood libels, they also felt similarly smug and morally superior.
But at least their excuse was that they were illiterate speaking of propaganda battles. I don't see who he's winning over there.
Yeah, no, I don't. I don't either. And you know, this is again it reminds me of what we were just talking about with Kamala, Harris and Biden versus like net and Yahoo, where if you have a problem, as the United States, like if if you have a problem with the rule of law, the rule based international order, say that, don't pretend to be upholding the rules based order when you can't answer questions, which was the case
with Matt Miller there. I mean, it just it would make so much more sense to say, well, we think that this particular rule against war crimes is wrong, that this doesn't make sense. It's impossible when you're fighting a gorilla operation, as you were saying, right, that's way more morally consistent than treating yourselves or you know, conducting yourselves in a way in one way and then having your
propaganda battle be all about rules based international order. When you get into a sort of conversation like that and don't have clear answers the again, the you know, honesty and war. These are questions that you know, have have puzzled people for time and memorial but in this case, it's just very grating to hear the constant, you know, propaganda about the rules based internback international order.
And to follow up on a story that we covered last week, Israel was under fire for desecration of cemeteries across across Gaza. Their initial rationale, they said, for desecorating these cemeteries, was that they were trying to dig up graves and find the remains of hostages. The new explanation that they have is that there were actually tunnels that
underneath these cemeteries that they were working to destroy. There was a CNN was the one that the Western media, American media that exposed this last week, because there was a CNN embed as they were with them as they were destroying all these cemeteries. Now they're following up again and there's a a fascinating story from CNN and watch to the end of it.
Here, let's roll that.
We're asking the general if we can actually see the shaft to the tunnel, but the answer is no.
So there's all kinds of.
The machinery which I want you to.
Just to take pictures of the security, Mark Forcemith.
What about if we don't film it, we just look with our eyes and when you might fall in all think and collapse.
Well, you have to walk to the edge.
The edge is not secured, can collapse this machinery.
So on, that's not something I'm going to take a risk on. Sorry.
The Israeli military later provided this drone footage showing the tunnel shaft we entered and another one nearby. CNN geolocated the footage using this satellite image. This outline shows where the Cemetery one stood, and these are the two tunnel entrances, clearly outside the graveyard. As for the tunnel, they say they found here where the Cemetery one stood. The military never provided any evident.
And so yeah, if you're watching it, it's if you're listening to it rather than watching it. Yeah, the images were outside of the cemetery. And you know, good for CNN. For usually CNN there would say CNN could not independently verify the Israeli officials claim. Here they said they provided no evidence, while also showing that the evidence they did provide was a lie that it was outside the cemetery. I would say that this is suggestive of the Western
media taking a little bit of a turn. But in fact, the Western media has spent the last several days just talking about, you know, the the twelve alleged Hamas terrorists or ten of them Hamas, one is Lamichi had one apparently a civilian that ran over who worked for UNRWA, and which which has led to the pausing of funding by the US and like a dozen other countries to the.
LEGI agency, the leaked messages from on.
Which we'll talk about in a minute.
Yeah, right. The Intercept has some excellent reporting on internal turmoil at the New York Times over an episode of their extremely popular podcast The Daily, which is a source of news for people around the country, a primary source of news actually for people around the country. Also Airson NPR. Now, Ryan tell us a little bit about what you guys found when you looked into these internal conversations at the New York Times. Yeah.
I think the context here is that The New York Times has been so successful at navigating the transition to digital media, and so much of the rest of the mainstream media has been so bad at navigating that transition that The Times now has almost a dangerous concentration of power among kind of liberal audiences. A major story in the New York Times and an episode of the Daily
can by itself establish a narrative. It doesn't even need what the New York Times also has, which is a megaphone capacity where they do reporting and then it's picked up on by CNN and MSNBC, ABC News the rest of it, and so it disseminates that way just on
its own. It now has the capacity to kind of shape millions of people's understanding of how they ought to think about the world and what they understand has happened, and oftentimes based on the reporting that we've done about the New York Times newsroom, this massive world changing decisions are made in seconds by kind of mid level editors just plucking something off of the New York Times internal slack, turning it into a headline that then becomes a controversy.
For l three days. It's like, why the re order put this in slack? I grabbed it and made it a headline why is the world kind of freaking out? And so.
The piece that we have up in the intercept that I did with my colleague Daniel Boguslaw, which you can put up here, is about how The Times at the end of December did a major piece called Screams Without Words about about Hamas using secon violence as a as a weapon of war on October seventh, systematically using it. Inside the New York Times, a ton of reporters and editors kind of pushed back and said, you have to be very careful with this story because it does not
seem to stand up its main claim. Was there sexual violence on October seventh? Absolutely can you can you claim that it was systematic and perpetuated by Hamas deliberately based on what is in this reporting, And a lot of reporters anders are pushing back saying, no, you can't, you can't make those And.
That's really interesting that you have the reporters and the editors at the New York Times pushing back.
Onwards, and the reporters are themselves saying that they're confident that there was sexual violence, yes, but they're saying this story itself does not stand up for a variety of different reasons that are out there publicly.
And The Times was promoting this story. I mean, this was a big spread, This was a huge story for them, and it makes sense then they wanted to jump into The Daily, that they wanted to take it and feature it as a center for an episode of The Daily, and that's where the staff pushback became untenable. According to your reporting here right.
Right, it was scheduled to air in early January, about a week and a half after after the original story came out, but under pressure, producers and fact checkers with The Daily started looking closer at the story and they put it on ice. And we're now into you know, tomorrow will be February, and it hasn't run yet, and we may still we may still see an episode of it.
But what we learned was that the original script, which chewed very closely to the original New York Times story, which had a lot of certainty, and was sourced to a lot of people, you know, who have changed their stories and have said like just completely wild things that have been you know, publicly discredited.
Like one person I think said that there was that they.
Found a pregnant woman who'd had a like a fetus cut out of her, and Israeli government itself like defunked a lot of these claims. So the same people who the Israeli government have backed away from were like the names were a lot of name sources for The New York Times here.
So and what was a problem for the story in particular is when one of the family members I spoke to The New York that was a problem.
A family member came out publicly.
Said that this reporter would you guys get into Joe Cohn and his background as sort of an advocate for the state of Israel politically his father as well, which is very interesting context. I think doesn't mean that his reporting can't be completely accurate and honest, but it does add some context here to what happened. But when you have a family member saying that's not what I thought I was telling the reporter, it was pretty devastating for the story itself.
Yes, and and other issues that have been raised elsewhere, And so the Daily wrote a newscript which was much more kind of open ended and asking questions and was what from people that I've spoken with were familiar with a much more responsible piece of journalism and approach the approach the issue in a much more sensitive way, but that hasn't aired yet, And because The Times is in a bit of a jam because if they run the original one, the original script, then they're kind of republishing
a lot of errors that have since been exposed. If they run a more circumspect, kind of dialed down, responsible version, that raises all of these questions, it's a concession about, well, why haven't you corrected the original one? Are you backing
off of the original one. So for the reporters involved here, the only way out is through, and so they were assigned a news story that came out earlier earlier this week, one of the most bizarre pieces I've seen in the New York Times, because the headline was about the United Nations sending investigators over to Israel to examine atrocity allegations. But after just a couple of paragraphs, it turns into kind of a re reporting and an interrogation of the
original story. Yet it was written by the same reporters. I've never seen kind of a group of reporters assigned to go kind of question their own reporting, and unsurprisingly, they checked their own work and found it to be solid, although one of their sources won't talk to them anymore.
It's a fascinating piece. People can people can check it out, but it shows it just is a glimpse into the kind of war over the messaging related to this, related to this conflict, because you know, so much of the justification for the ongoing onslaught is rooted on the barbarity of October seventh, and it's it feels like the actual barbarity that was on display for everyone to see didn't seem to be enough for some propagandas that they had to like ratchet it up, and you start seeing things
like forty beheaded babies and on and on.
The things that are just were not true. But by the time we realize that they're not.
True, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed based on justifying their killing based on things that we've then learned didn't happen.
So this next element involves the Wall Street Journal. We'll put this up on the screen. It's a So this is the Wall Street Journal. Intelligence reveals details of you and agency staff's links to October seventh. The subhead is around ten percent of Palestinian aid agencies. Twelve thousand staff in Gaza have links to militants, according to an intelligence DOS. This next part of the element you can see is on the right side of the screen. That's the author
of the story. Who is again, this is the author of the story served in the IDF. So you can understand the intelligen dossier finding its way to a former IDF member who's writing for the Wall Street Journal. Ryan Again helpful context.
I think it's interesting if you try to imagine that you're a Palestinian reading the Western press.
And you're like, what the hell is and it's just.
You see all of these people who served in the IDF or whose children are currently serving in the in the IDF doing the reporting. It's not like you can only imagine if there were a reverse situation like you simply can actually you simply cannot imagine if there was a reverse.
Well, the allegations of some especially like freelancers who got you know, early reporting footage.
Yes, that's that's a very good point. And Israel said they were going to kill those people, yes, yes, right right, because they were journalists who were photographing. October seventh, there were a.
Couple of allegations that did seem like the journalists, in the interest of access, it would be the most charitable version of that argument, did have links to Hamas. And again, this is the entire conversation we have about the intertwinement of the civilian population and the military population in a tiny swath of land like Gaza that creates very real challenges for Israel morally and creates like a really difficult situation. And that's no excuse. I don't say that as an
excuse whatsoever. I'm just saying this situation on the ground is not like in other wars. It's not the same thing. It's a different thing. And that's something that you know, with this media coverage, it's tough because it's again I think people with biases can do perfectly good reporting. Sure what we see I guess, but what we see happening
is people being really cagey about their biases. And I think that's a huge problem when you're and I'm sure we agree on that point that when you're not upfront and open about the fact that you served in the idea of you are totally prosionist, you are all of these different things. Fine, but being open about that I think would help people say, oh, this intelligence dossier you're reporting on, and I think UNRAWA does have really real problems.
Put this Jeremy Skalhale tweet up on the screen as well. In the same way I was just talking about. This is Jeremy Scahill saying, incredible quote. We haven't had the ability to investigate the allegations ourselves. Secretary of State Anthony Blncoln seaid of Israel's charges against UNROWA employees. Blincoln then ads, but they're highly highly credible. That I imagine is about
the dossier specifically, but in general. There was also reports from an open Israeli advocacy group, un Watch, that leaked a bunch of messages from unrwall workers after October seventh, seeming to celebrate what happened. And again, this is what we're talking about the challenges of having Western media with a lot of people who maybe fought in the IDF, whose parents fought in the IDF, and then having the task of reporting on all of this. It's just a completely different situation.
Yes, and the ten percent figure I think should be taken with a grain of salt there where they say that ten percent of connections to militants that's in the subhead in the actual article says connections to either the political or social wing or Hamas is you know, the de facto government of Gaza.
And so I think fifteen percent of the population is like an actual member.
So how I mean sounds like a vast undercount any would you.
Would think it might be.
And then they say that they have a close half, have a close relative or something that's involved with Hamas. Most most people have hundreds of relatives because the birth rates there are through the roof and people can't leave. So within just two generations, yes, you've got three hundred cousins living in the same neighborhood if one of them is involved with Hamas, which is the government of the area.
Then boom of the thirteen thousand or so employees inside Gaza of UNRA and you hit a number like that.
Which makes it really hard again to prosecute a war while talking about the rules based international order and then having this massive level of civilian and military entwinement, as these stories do straight without committing some really egregious violations.
And it also shows why Israel made a mistake by propping up Hamas absolutely that Israel allows you know, insisted actually that that cutter continued to prop up Amas so that they would not have a partner for peace. They wanted to divide that NAYAHUO was very clear about this.
They wanted to divide the Palestinians between the Palestinian authority in the West Bank, Hamas running Gaza forty chess because then Netnyahu would not be under any pressure to negotiate with Palestinians towards statehood, because Hamas doesn't want to negotiate towards statehood.
So they both had.
An incentive to keep each other in power. And one thing that frustrates me about some on the on the left and in the supporters of the resistance who say, who are supportive of not necessarily Hamas, but like you'll find them defensive about Jimas, like why are you defending an organization that net Yahoo wants in power? Come on,
why are you being being a sucker for net Yahu here? Yeah, it's also take ya who had his word, like they are an obstacle to a to uh dignity and and to like a resolution of this conflict and.
Take Palestinians at their word, because a whole lot of Palaestinians hold that exact same perspective and say, yeah, yeah, who's right. Hamas is an obstacle uh to.
And but if you back Palestinians into a corner and don't give them any other options, then they're like, well, this this is what we've got. We've tried thirty years the peace process, and every single year can editions materially and civilly got worse.
The underlying tension we talked about earlier in the show, where you have the United States and Israel on vastly different pages about a one state solution or two state solution while spending from the US perspective billions every year in this region and now so much more on the line. It is just a quagmire. There's no other way to put it. And there's basically no light at the end
of that tunnel. Let's move on to the squad, Ryan, because this is in some ways a more interesting, not more interesting, a more a lighter story because we have poetry from Jamal Bowman involved, we have mistranslations involved, and we have I guess security turned husbands involved in the likelihood. Ryan, what is the name of your book.
By the way, the book is called The Squad, and it's going to need the paperback version is going to need another chapter for everything we're seeing just this week.
Yeah.
The context, of course.
Is that you know, Apak is putting together an unprecedented level of spending to try to wipe out the Squad in Congress. Meanwhile, they're facing a cascading number of their own scandals that we will talk about Corey Bush, Jamal Bowman, and Ilhan Omar in this segment.
Let's start with Corey Bush.
It was reported yesterday that she's under DJ investigation over her campaign spending on security. After the news was broken by a punch bowl, she came out and acknowledged that the investigation is happening and said that she will be found to have done nothing wrong.
Let's roll a little bit of Corey Bush here.
I hold myself, my campaign, and my position to the highest levels of integrity. I also believe in transparency, which is why I can confirm that the Department of Justice is reviewing my can spending.
On security services.
We are fully cooperating with this investigation, and I would like to take this opportunity to outline the facts and the truth. Since before I was sworn into office, I have endured relentless threats to my physical safety and life. As a rank and file member of Congress, I am not entitled to personal protection by the House, and instead have used campaign funds as permissible to retain security services.
I have not used any federal.
Tax dollars for personal security services. Any reporting that I have used funds for personal security personal security is simply false. In recent months, right wing organizations have lodged baseless complaints against me, peddling notions that I have misused campaign funds to pay for personal security services.
That simply is not true.
So, Emily, what's the best case that you've seen in in the right wing press kind of against her at.
This point, Well, it does look like there was. So this can go in a couple of different ways. So from her perspective, she can say I need to spend a lot of money on security. She had a security guard who turned into her husband, who she says was making fair market rate, and you know, it looks.
Like, sureity's expensive, so it's probably gonna be eye popping number.
But go ahead, Yeah, so's she spends more than other people do on security. And okay, but she can make
the point that she's a member of the squad. The squad is very high profile, and that necessarily means she's probably going to be spending more money on security than other You're sort of running the mill member of Congress for being a member of the squad who has, you know, sort of an ideological and ideologically high profile departure from the political establishment in Washington, d C. So you can see how that argument and of itself, you know, isn't
can go both ways. You know, she's she's spending a lot of money on security. Maybe it's because she was involved with her husband and paying him more than fair market rate. We'll see. I mean, that's what they're investigating. I think it's a perfectly legitimate investigation. I'm glad that she's cooperating with it. We will see.
How she was previously investigated by the Office of Congressional Ethics.
It is currently they're both investigating.
I thought that I thought that that one concluded. Well, she said that they concluded that she had followed the rules.
She says that the House Committee and Ethics are currently reviewing the matter. As yesterday.
She said that Okay, so Previously she'd been reviewed and they had found that she was okay.
Maybe now with the new news, they're taking a.
Closer look into it because the DJ would have access to more information than OSEE would.
And you know that the House Ethics Committee is so you never really know when they're their timelines. They're very secretive, they're totally closed off. So maybe there was something else that they were investigating at Coreybush was aware of. That is what she's referring to there. So again, I mean, we'll see. I don't think we have conclusive evidence in any direction. I'm glad they're investigating it, but this is just so minor. It's just it is the allegations.
We're talking about Warren Peace, and then we're going to have a race determined, like.
For members of Congress. I'm saying this as a conservative, like this is not disqualifying whatsoever for members of Congress. Now, the right has made a lot of her being a sort of defund the police person and a lot of the squad being defund the police people and then paying hired. That's a clean hit. I think that's a I was just gonna say that's a much cleaner hit. So we'll see where this goes. But again, she does have a primary challenge, right that's being funded by a pack.
There's there's a lot he yes, what's his name, Wesley Bell was running for senate jump jumped out of the Senate race and into the House race.
After October seventh.
One, it appeared that, you know, Bush could be vulnerable to a well financed challenger. He announced he had raised six hundred thousand dollars. There's a PAC has already been spending. APAC was spending against her before she had an opponent through its super pac so that yes, they're absolutely coming
for her. So this will wind up I think in all of the super pac ads that because Marie Newman, who APAC took out in twenty twenty two because she represented a huge kind of palestinating population in Illinois, had a congressional ethics review underway, and they made that like the focus of their massive spending against her. So if you have thirty seconds and you know, if to do an ad and you got a million dollars to spread it, you can make someone look really really bad. We'll see
whether or not people believe it. And also you know, maybe maybe they actually will see. Yeah, everyone's innocent of proven guilty. Maybe maybe they did make some stakes and how they and how they did.
This mistakes are intentional, uh, you know, funneling of money. But again, this is so members of Congress commit so many egregious ethical violations. I say this not I completely think that they should be looking into it. If there's good journalism in the space, I welcome it, and I welcome the ethics investigation. I'm glad she's fully cooperating. Again, like, this is just not on the same level as other congressions.
And there's a there's an interesting class issue here in the sense that you know, Bush was in poverty up until she got her first paycheck basically as a as a member of Congress, and wealthy members of Congress uh yeah, right, she was in and out of homelessness. Wealthy members of Congress, you know, find ways to get fantastically rich through their quote unquote public service, and their consultants find ways to buy boats with all sorts with yea, with campaign money.
And they just happened to know the precise legal ways that they're able to get insanely rich. I'm sure much richer and many more boats these than the people who are alleged to have taken a little extra security money for allegedly not doing enough security work.
And as Sam Goadoldig outlined here just a couple of weeks ago, and his firm outlined here just a couple of weeks ago, the Squad and the Freedom Caucus represents some of the lowest income districts in the country, whereas the more Centrists represent the higher income districts in the country. And so yes, you see the class issues I think play out in different questions like these, which is a good prism to look at them through. We should move on to ilhan.
Omar, number two in the barrel.
Yes, we're continuing our tour through the scandals of the Squad and this last week of January twenty twenty four with this video of ilhan Omar. This is a vo so we can start running it because she's she's speaking a different language. She says my answer to Somalians was, and she's speaking to Somalians that the US government will only do they will not do what we want and nothing else. They must follow. We Samalians must have that
confidence in ourselves that we call for. We live in the US pay tax in the US and have a real voice. The US is a country where one of your daughters is in Congress to represent your interest for as long as I'm there. Basically, Somalia will never be in dangers. It's waters will not be stolen by Ethiopia or others. The US would not dare to support anyone against Amalia to steal our land sleeping comfort, knowing I'm here to protect the interests of Somalia from inside the
US system. So that's translation that was on the bottom of the video. She's speaking to her constituents in Minnesota that are of Somalian heritage and.
Right, and so there's a fight over exactly what she said because she was.
The words I just read. Actually, there's whether or not those are accurate. Translation of what she just said is at the heart of this.
And so she was speaking in Somalia and so so a couple of Somali analysts have posted their own translations of what they say that she said, and Omar reposted one of those. So I think that's a fair one to go by. And in the Spectator article they quote and it's also on Twitter. You know, she said quote while I am in Congress no one will take Somalia's. See, Somalia belongs to all Somali's. Somalia is one. We are brothers and sisters, and our land will not be balkanized.
Our lands were taken from us before, and God willing, we may one day seek them.
So what that is a reference to.
Is on January first, the Ethiopia basically cut a deal with the breakaway republic unrecognized breakaway republic of Somali Land where Ethiopia would recognize Somali Land which broke away from Somalia and in exchange, Ethiopia would get access to roughly twenty kilometers of of c because Ethiopia has been landlocked, you know, forever and or for decades, and it is a it is a source of kind of domestic you know,
and national shame that they don't have. And they also have claimed quite reasonably that it holds back economic growth and not have not be able to build a port city.
So they cut a deal.
UH.
This is an MoU between Ethiopia and Somaliland Somalia. UH does not recognize Somaliland does and believes that it will you know, retake Somalia Somaliland at some point, and so it is deeply hostile even you know, potent, you know, we could see a hot war at some point, deeply hostile to this MoU this agreement between Somaliland and Ethiopia. And so here Omar is taking sides in that question, saying, no, we're you know, the US is not going to recognize
this mo ou uh. They're not going to recognize mollyland, and we as a Somali American population are going to exert our lobbying influence here in the US to make sure that they that they don't do that. We could now she's she's getting criticized, and we can put up
this next element. She's getting criticized for engaging in kind of what what people call kind of greater Somalia ideology, which and if you look at this, this kind of map that we have up and if you're only listening on the podcast, the blue is kind of creeping into Kenya and creeping into Ethiopia, creeping you know, uh, and obviously taking back Somaliland up up close to Djibouti.
There.
That's the kind of the this like grand vision that some people think she was making a reference to when they say when when she said that our lands were taken for from us and one day we will we will get them back. And so you know, you've got Kenyon's Ethiopians and Somaliland.
People are like, I don't know, how about not about we don't do that.
Yeah, I don't know about that.
So that's that's the context of this of this current controversy.
So a lot of people on the right reacted to a translation which now does appear to look like it's a mistranslation. I'm obviously not a language there.
Was less irredentist and less kind of aggressive than the original translation, but it does still embrace the idea that nobody's going to take Somali, you see. So it is strict opposition to recognition of this MoU.
And one of the things the right actually latched onto even more than that in the original translation was Omar referring to herself first as Somali, then as Muslim, and then as American.
And that's what that was a mistranslated.
Wa it appears that was a mistranslation. Again, I'm not an expert in the language here, but Elan Omar herself shared the translation that you just discussed, so she seems to say that's what she was referring to. But that's what really had people on the right saying to port
her she should be expelled from Congress. She sees herself, I will say, that's a real hypocrisy problem when she's talking about in this even in the good translation or the better translation, for her talking about our country, our country, our country, when she's referring to Somalia, and then talking about quote this country when she's talking about the United States.
I just it does seem as though and I think this is perfectly natural for someone who fled their war torn homeland and loves their native country, I understand it. I think it's a problem for somebody who criticizes the dual loyalty is real point, and I think it's just speaking of clean hits. I think that's kind of a clean hit.
And I'm all for Somali Americans lobbying their government well for whatever interest they want to lobby for. One extra piece of context that has people concerned about this is that the greater Somalia ideologies is so stated most with former Somali presidents Site Barry, who Omar's father was served under as a colonel, and the and Barry launched a horrific genocide of hundreds of thousands of people.
Awful, awful person.
And so.
Any association with that, any any kind of hearkening back to that era, which which she's not necessarily doing, but because it's in the context of this greater smile, it has people been Wait a minute, that's.
A little militant in that big context. Yeah, now we move on to Jamal Bowman.
Jamal Bowman a more fun one.
Yeah, this one is the more fun one. Let's put Jamal Bowman's poetry.
Was a Jewish insider that broke this? I think it was, It may have been.
Yeah, So here's Jamal Bowman's poetry. If you're listening, we'll read it for you. Two thousand and one, and he's using the he's made the stylist.
Used that but ten fifteen years ago or something, right.
It's twenty eleven, so long time. So he's using slashes. Two thousand and one. Planes used as missiles target the twin towers. Later in the day, Building seven also collapsed. HM. Multiple explosions heard before and during the collapse, and we can go out. You used to have a blog or something, so you think he keeps doing allegedly two other planes, the Pentagon Pennsylvania hijacked by terrorists, minimal damage done, minimal debris found. It's pretty i mean, typical nine to eleven
truth theorism. But the poetry, the vehicle of poetry, and i'd say very contemporary stylistic poetry is particularly interesting in
the case of a sitting Congressman, Jamal Bowman. But you made a really good point before we started that he's a normal guy in ways other members of Congress aren't, which has actually always been my hot take on Marjorie Taylor Green, which is that as wrong as she has done so many different things, the Beltway is just visceral hatred of her and their visceral hatred of nine to eleven Trutherism, for example, which I think has been debunked.
I'm sure I'll get comments on that. But for the record, you know that is so it is so much more in touch with Americans around the country have no trust and no faith left in any institutions or any government. That a lot of people really do believe this because you have given them no reason to trust your side of the story. You know, it's it's just a it's kind of a normy thing.
Yeah, The late great Michael Brooks made a great point once where he said that basically Joe Rogan and that type of person actually represents the real center of America, Like that's the that's the centrist viewpoint, which is contradictory, confused, distrustful of government, whereas we kind of think of like the New York Times and CNN as the centrist institutions, but they're actually not, like they represent a different segment of the population that it's the Rogan types that are
right there in the middle.
There's wine Mom centrism and Rogan Centrism, and they have some Venn Diagram overlap, but not a lot.
And right, Jamal Bowman is a normal person, like it was an independent before before running for Congress. He thinks for himself, and that type of regular person in America is going to fall prey to some of these conspiracy theories.
Like that's going to happen.
And so when I saw that, it's like didn't necessarily.
Like shock me checks out. Yeah sure, yeah, And I think.
You like in the poem maybe commended Loose Change, which is Alex Jones documentary.
Because Alex Jones sort of started on the left, Yeah, yeah, with it, and that's how he got that, that's how he first got famous.
Right.
It was really popular on the sort of like fringe left during the Iraq War because he was questioning like the military industrial complex, so he definitely had a lot of.
Reach and Loose Change was this YouTube documentary that just had was just an absolute phenom, Like millions and millions of people.
Watched it, and it has this like.
You know, if you can capture somebody's attention for an hour and you can cherry pick, you know things, I'm sure people get mad at me too well, but like the building seven people are going to be in our comments, oh for sure.
But again that is like one of the big problems here is that our government is not transparent when they always say that they're being transparent and we really can't trust what they say. So like that's part of the issue is that even when you know through good journalism and other you know, sources of primary information, primary slist information and footage and like you can put the store were together. But again, when the government, who you should not trust is telling you trust us.
So Bowman is also facing an APAC backed challenger George Latimer, Westchester County executive. His race could hinge on redistricting, and so this type of thing would be more damaging in some parts of New York than other parts of New York. We'll see how those lines get drawn. Who comes out ahead there. Let's move on to Maria Salazar down in Miami.
Let's take a trip down the coast.
Give us a credit to this local reporter here from New York.
City to Miami, where Republican Congresswoman Maria Alvius Salazar was grilled by a local CBS reporter about something that is actually very common here in Washington, DC. Watched this clip last month.
You were at FIU and you present a check for six hundred and fifty thousand dollars to help small businesses at FIU. But you voted against the bill that gave the money that you then signed a check for and handed and had a photo op, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of twenty twenty three. Right, you voted against that bill.
Right now, you have to give me more details. But I do know that every time I have an opportunity to bring money to my constituents.
I do so.
I I just said four hundred thousand dollars.
But look you what you voted against.
You voted against the Chips and Science Act.
Right, listen, right now, I need to I need to ask my staff forty million dollars that I have brought to this community, are you proud of me?
Are you proud of the forty million dollars?
How much?
But how are you proud that I wrote the Dignity Act? Haven't I let's talk about.
The America's Wait wait, wait, let me one second.
Tell me the money that you talk about, the forty million dollars that you bring back to the district. Sometimes that money comes from bills that you voted against. You voted against the Chips Act, and yet you praise the fact that the South Florida Climate Resistiam's Tech cub is going to be started in Miami. Right you voted against the infrastructure bill, and you talk about all the money
that comes back to the airport. So at the same time that you're taking credit for the money that you bring back to the district in Washington, you're voting against these projects on party line votes.
Listen, I that was I think last cycle.
I cannot really remember right now, but just look, just look at the America's Act, which is what I'm going to vote. You don't want to explain why, I mean right now, And I'm not trying to be a politician. There's so many bills that I've introduced that I know that bills that you voted against.
That understand. But it's okay, so I voted. Sometimes I don't, but let's look at the positive. I'm not trying to be a politician. I also like, I need to touch.
Her body language.
She's just leaned back. She's chill the whole time. She's like whatever, Yeah, sometimes I vote for it, sometimes I don't.
Who cares? The money is here?
Well, okay, so.
There's a lot to bugging me about it.
Again, like if you weren't watching this the clip itself, this was this was a pretty ill clip. But her body language right, and you're right, she just doesn't care. Because actually, what a lot of people don't remember about Mariel VARs Salazar is she had a really successful career as a journalist that she parleyed into her run for Congress.
And she's foll some of her and Fidel.
Yeah, so we have this vo she's she was one of the few reporters ever to do an on camera interview with Fidel Castro, one of the few American yeah to do and she did, yes so very and you can see if you're watching, you can see a very young Mariel VARs Salazar. Uh so, Miami eighties there, yeah, Miami eighties grilling Fidel Castro. And she's very proud of that interview. I've heard talk about it before.
Adelle.
You're taking credit for all of this infrastructure spending when you voted against against.
That's very funny. So ring you've been covering this longer than I have. This is the oldest trick in the book, voting against the spending. Uh well then and then later touting it in your district.
The Republicans did it a ton during obama stimulus too, universally opposed his stimulus. But then of course when there's a ribbon cutting, you know, you can't keep a politician away from that because everybody likes when new stuff gets built.
Oh yeah, or there's like the and again like actually, some politicians have in different cases legitimate arguments here. Not that I grew with the arguments, but what they'll say is with the child tax credit, that was passing the
Trump tax bill in twenty seventeen. Democrats negotiated on that in the Senate side, and so they might say, you know, I helped get the child tax credit even though they voted against the bill, because they were involved in the back room negotiations, you know, pushing for the child tax credit. And it's possible that Mariel Viro Salazar was pushing this pork to get into a bill she knew she would
ultimately vote against, just trying to make it. And this was the excuse a lot during the Obama years, trying to make an inevitable, bad bill as good as it possibly can be for your constituents. I think if that was what happened, though, we probably would have heard her use that argument.
I love that she's like, I don't know how I voted on that? Is that was last cycle? That was less, get out of here less. I don't you want to hear about the bill I've introduced that's going nowhere? Can't we just talk about that? Can we just talk about that? Instead?
She flipped it around. Aren't you proud of this bill?
It's called the America's Bill? You against the America's Bill? Yes, I mean come on, what's wrong with you? She'll probably win in a rop, right.
You know that.
I think her original win was pretty close, but she I mean, once you're in, it's easier to stay in.
The Other thing is the area is trending pretty red.
She's also very friendly with leadership, so she's she was kind of elected in a cycle where there were a lot of like upstart, trumpy maga people, and I think she weirdly got lumped in with that because she was anti socialist running in a heavily Cuban district, and so she talked a lot about the kind of red meat socialism issue. But she's pretty friendly with leadership and not exactly as red meat as a lot of people would
have her would peg her. And that friendly with leadership part matters a lot in the re election part because that determines where some of the money goes.
Yeah, she's going to get that four hundred thousand, I FIU is going to get that big check.
Yeah, yeah, is going to get We should we should see if she'll come on the show and talk to us about that, actually, because she would be an interesting guest. She as a former journalist, is she knows what she's doing on TV. I'll say that, yeah, And you know Ryan Graham Castro, what's the difference, right, It's a fine line between Ryan grim and Fidel Castro.
There you go, as I always say, good writer, right Fidel.
Sure, we'll give him that baseball fan.
So Egen Carroll got to see you Love Carroll.
So this clip of Egen Carroll on MSNBC is worth watching because Donald Trump has eighty three million dollars on the line he was awarded. She was she was worried eighty three million dollars in damages.
And a definitely top of the last defamation.
Yes, on top of the last defamation. But she she's not the best spokesperson for her own cause, and that has been the case basically since she made these allegations against Donald Trump. She kind of went back and forth on whether on whether the allegations constituted rape or not. People will remember that clip she said, you know, I won't call it rape because there are women down at the border, and I don't want to do a disservice to what other women are experiencing. She just seems to
be eccentric. We'll put it at that. So let's take a look at that eccentrism that was on display in this interview with MSNBC.
You've talked about using some of Trump's money that you're about to get to help shore up women's rights.
Do you know what that might be, what that might look like?
Yes, tell me, I had such such great ideas for all the good I'm going to do with this money. First thing, Rachel, you and I go shopping to get completely new wardrobes, new shoes, motorcycle for crawling, new fishing rod for Rachel.
What do you want? Penhouse? Rachel, penhouse? And France? You want France? You want to go fishing in France.
No, that's a joke.
That's her lawyer over there saying that's a joke.
You heard her lawyer laughing nervously and then tacking on to the end of that answer quote, that's a joke. Her lawyer was on air with her, which was probably for the best.
Do you think she'll actually ever see Trump's money or is he going to figure out ways to not pay?
I mean, the more she goes on media, the less opportunity she probably has to get that money. Because Donald Trump is appealing and Donald Trump is appealing the case and this doesn't help at all.
But I mean, if the judgment is affirmed, she could set the money on fire. I mean, actually, I get it's technically against federal a lot of burn money, but she could take Rachel Matt out fishing in France, like right, who It's not is the appeals Court's supposed to care what she does with the money?
No, I mean I think in theory no, But I think does it help people with the credibility question when she says that. I mean, I guess it depends on how much of the media people see. And they deemed her original allegation credible. So and that, by the way, it did too. Yeah, the jury deemed her original allegation to be credible. And that's how the defamation suit obviously was premised, is that she had a credible allegation. So what Donald Trump said about the allegation constituted defamition and
defamation to the tune of eighty three something million dollars. Now, there are also one of the things that is included in Trump's appeal is that they have the conflict with the judge. Did you see this? So I'm reading from NBC News here. This is Trump's Laura Alena Haba on Monday file a letter with the court in New York citing the New York Post story that said US District
Judge Lewis Kaplan and Carol attorney ROBERTA. Kaplan, who are not related, had worked at the major law firm Paul Weiss, Riffkin, Morton and Garrison in the nineteen nineties. An unidentified former partner at the firm, which employees around one thousand lawyers, told the Post that Lewis Kaplan had been quote like her mentor, and then Hobba told the New York Post that the situation was quote insane and so incestuous. Quote this is news to us, she told the paper on Saturday.
If you're an attorney and you're saying that's news to you this far into a case, probably not great.
Well.
Trump doesn't get good attorneys because he doesn't pay them. Yeah, and so yeah, you get what you pay for.
It's a pretty good way to put it.
Yeah, he gets complete hacks who were just willing to work for him on the prayer that he'll somehow pay and on the hope that the exposure will actually help him. You remember, for his second impeachment he had that slip and fall attorney from Philadelphia who just went winged it on the Senate floor.
Mm hmm. No, yeah, he doesn't get the they're not sending their best to borrow a phrase. And again that could be why actually if you go through the Egene Carrol. So we've talked about this a little bit. We don't need to litigate it. She did go back and forth on whether what happened constitute or rape. She has the story about it happening in a busy department store in the middle of the day.
Years ago, but in a dressing room.
And yeah, although part of it I think was like pinned outside the dressing room and then into the dressing room. It's a either way. She has gone back and forth on whether it was rape.
Trump most hilariously undermined himself when he likes to go around saying as if it's a defense against rape, that she's not my type, which bizarrely like concedes the fact that he would happily rape somebody if it was if they were his type. But then they showed him a picture of Eugene Carroll and he misidentified her as his wife.
Right, So even his.
Bizarre claim that you know, he didn't rape her because she wasn't my type. Fell apart when it's like he was caught like thinking that it was his wife.
It's his wife's not as type.
Yeah. I mean again, it's like, does anyone question that Donald Trump not Millennia, but was Evana? It was like aggressive with women at the at the very least. No, And that's like, again, it's just these accusations Trump himself, Yes, yeah, exactly, he will tell you that with with some pride. But the accusations themselves are different than that question. But again,
Jerry said they found them credible. So maybe that New York based Jerry is just really really favorable to each and Carol and Trump has bad lawyers, and maybe that's how she does end up seeing those eighty three million dollars. I don't know Ryan, that this is the thing that Trump even three dollars, this is what he sees for like.
His campaign money.
I eighty three points million dollars is a lot of money. And they're just competing reports about Donald Trump's finances obviously, so right.
And Trump remember said he was going to work for free as president and then and then or then said he was going to donate his money and ended up just pocketing it.
It's like the four hundred thousand dollars salary.
So raised his questions about how actually liquid he he actually is, if he needs to kind of if he actually needed that presidential salary that he claimed he wasn't going to take. Yes, it looks like we do have time to get to the news out of both Pakistan and Venezuela. So yesterday Matt Miller at the State Department announced that we were snapping back sanctions on on Venezuela.
We had we had relieved sanctions on Venezuela in in a negotiation in order to get back some American uh you know, prisoners that were held there.
We wanted them to extradite somebody here.
They extradited that that person, and they wanted some other kind of commitments around uh election, transparency, democracy, other other reforms. Uh Maduro then claimed that there was a coup attempt against him, arrested a bunch of people and banned the opposition party, you know, heading into an upcoming election. That ban of the opposition party was ratified by the Venezuelan courts,
which will become relevant in this In this segment, later. Meanwhile, over in Pakistan, which has an election on February eighth, grassroots members of the PTI, which is kind of the biggest kind of party opposition party in Pakistan, are just being arrested and massed when they sign up just to run for like lower level offices, and the opposition party leader, former Prime Minister im Ron Khan, earlier this week was sentenced to ten years in a totally bogus case around
the mystic alleged mishandling of a classified document that we actually published over the intercept. He was not our source, he had nothing to do, he had nothing to do with it. They never proved the data is complete kangaroo nonsense. And then today they sentenced him to an additional fourteen years for another completely ridiculous case.
This one is called is like a state gifts case.
So for background, Imran Khan was a famous cricketer, extraordinarily wealthy. His next phase in his career after cricket was as a philanthropist. That's how he became doubly popular in Pakistan, you know, building hospitals, universities.
Et cetera.
And so then they charged him with taking gifts from like foreign like say Pakistan goes on a Pakistan primary goes to like Bangladesh and they give him like some gift, like a watch or something. They are accusing him of like keeping this stuff illegally.
He says he did all the paperwork.
The idea that a guy who is like massively rich and a philanthropist is trying to like pill for a watch is as absurd as you can imagine. He's tried in secret, like nothing about the case made any sense, and they're banning him from running for office for ten years and essentially banning the PTI from the ballot. It's complicated the way the court did it. The State Department meanwhile,
no sanctions whatsoever. So yesterday at the State Department briefing, there are a lot of questions that were thrown at Matt Miller about this. And here's how I framed it to him, and here's his response.
As you said earlier, that that's a matter for the Pakistani courts. When it came to Venezuela, that's a political matter.
It seems the.
Venezuelan courts of course approved you know, Maduro's banning of the party. Now you could say that court is under Maduro's thumb, it's a kangaroo court. But in Pakistan the prosecution was held in secret. Just recently, his attorney in Ronkon's attorneys were kept out of the courtroom and they took attorneys from the prosecution team and made him and put them on the defense team. Like, nothing about that prosecution seems less than kangaroo So why would Venezuelas be
a political case? But when it comes to Pakistan, that's a matter for the Pakistani courts.
So there are different situations and we have not yet made that conclusion with respect to the Pakistani legal process. When you look at Venezuela, we are looking at the entire history of the Maduro regime in cracking down on democracy and most importantly in this case, failing to carry out the commitments that they made to allow candidates to run. It's a commitment that they made that the country has renigged on, and that's why we're able to make the assessment.
In that case. There might still be a determination on the Pakistan question.
I just I don't have anything to preview, but it's not one that we've made at this time.
So Matt Lee, Yeah, So Matt Lee, the AP.
Reporter followed up immediately after this and said, wait a minute, So Venezuela does not have independent courts, but are you saying that Pakistan does. He's like and he said, my phone's dying here. But if I looked up the State departments Human Rights report on Pakistan, would I find that the State Department feels like the Pakistani courts are completely independent and trustworthy.
What would we do as a country without him?
In those briefings, I know, it's it's it's fun to watch him.
I'm glad you're in there now too. You started going a lot more.
Yeah, it's it's it's great, it's great to be in there. They're very they're no there.
They don't necessarily answer the questions, but you know you can, you can. You can put things to them in here and hear how they respond. So the if people are actually wondering what the difference is, Yes, you know, Venezuela is a is an adversary. You know, Maduro is an adversary of the United States, and the military backed government in Pakistan is an ally of the United States. And Imran Khan was seen to be either adversarial or too.
Neutral, and we wanted to cooperate on weapons production because we were in a hot war with Russia.
Yeah, he famously.
Gave this speech to a large rally in response to the EU demanding and the US privately demanding that Pakistan support Ukraine and not and not take what the US called aggressive neutrality when it came to Ukraine and Russia. He gave a speech where he said, we are not your slaves. And that kind of rhetoric chafes the West, like what are you talking about? You do you do what you're told? And now he's in prison.
How has October seventh given Imran Khan's Khan's relationship with the broader sort of Muslim world and his sort of followers, his base, How has that shifted how the State Department treats i Ran Khan's base. I mean in.
Pakistan perhaps second to Airdawan, but not but actually maybe not, Like Imran Khan was probably the most popular Muslim elected official in the world because you know, Airdiwan was not also a famous cricketer. On top of everything that else that that Khan did, ideas and so and so so Khan. If Imron Khan you know, were in power now, he would be kind of a loud voice when it when it came to the Israel Gaza question.
Instead, he's you know, completely muzzled, just one.
Of the least discussed but most important sort of subplots. So the hot war is happening right now in Geo Apology, and.
We interviewed the uh Pakistani ambassador over the intercepted for podcast Intercepted and Deconstructed.
The Pakistani Ambassador.
To the United Nations you you and permanent representative, and we asked him about Israel Gaza. He actually had served under Khan and serves under the current government and he and he was like, look, the Palestinian cause is extremely popular in Pakistan because and I asked him, you know what why Pakistan had joined the coalition, you know, battling the Hoothies.
He's like that, He's like, that would be just completely.
Untenable for us to do, like that, what the Hoothies are doing is popular in Pakistan. Yeah, but the Pakistani government isn't isn't being vocal about any of that.
Less aggressive neutrality.
Yes, like yes, exactly, passive neutrality.
Well, I'm really glad we had time to get to the story. And again, so glad they're going to those briefings and we get to watch them respond, even when it's a non answer. A lot of non answers are super helpful.
Should be one later today.
I'll be there, all right. We'll be watching for that, and maybe we'll have something to talk about next week, Ryan, when we're back with Counterpoints in a week from now. On Wednesday, again, remember to subscribe, because if you subscribe to the premium version of the show, you get all of Counterpoints right in your inbox. Get it early, you get the full video, as opposed to the few videos that are are posted to the channel throughout the day
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