11/20/24: Trump Taps Dr. OZ, MTG Threatens Blackmail To Protect Gaetz, Morning Joe Collapse, Laken Riley Trial

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All right, good morning, and welcome to Counterpoints. How you doing, Emily, I'm doing great.

This is our last show together before Thanksgiving, so just know Ryan that I'm thankful for you, and thankful for everybody who's watching.

Thankful for you too, Thankful for all of you. And you know, don't burn your porch down deep frying your turkey.

We were just talking about this.

Ryan and producer Griffin are obsessed with deep frying turkeys apparently.

But we also have good and not on wood.

Yes, now Breakingpoints dot com where you go for a premium subscription. But if you can't cover the premium subscription, not the best use of your money right now, you're spending all of it on turkey deep friars, Ryan, What can you do?

Look, if you share our stuff that is almost more value, almost more valuable than at breaking points premium description, like like it, subscribe and also importantly share it, like make sure that we're spreading this, because right now is the most important time to kind of get this in front of people, because the iron is hot. People are like, wait a minute, We've been lied to for so long, and what's going on with this Mika and Joe thing?

What I thought these were the resistance.

Leaders, Yes, and now they're like angling for cabinet positions.

The time is ripe.

So the time is ripe. The mainstream media has discredited itself. I think if you've been watching this program over the last several years, you have been much better informed than any of your peers. So you can either keep that by keeping it a secret and then you can be the smart one in.

Your social group, which is one way to do it.

Just one way to do it, or you can share this, you know, more generally and also in the comments section. It's always nice of people say when the news actually starts in the A block.

Because often Brian will monologue, and Brian does have a great monologue prepped for the end of the show that's going to be about why Democrats lost.

I'm really excited for that.

We're going to start with new Trump appointments, also late last night, naming an education secretary. We're going to walk through all of that and actually, on the.

Point when they're even getting funnier, almost.

There's a WWE connection. We'll get into that just a moment. We'll be talking about Matt Gates and to the point you were just making Ryan, I mean, I think this has been covered very.

Poorly by media.

There's just a lot more context that makes the story, whether you love or hate Matt Gates, actually more interesting. So we'll be talking about Matt Gates today. We'll be talking about the second day of Morning Joe outrage. Why is it worth talking about because it's fascinating to see how the inner circle of the Joe and Mika world is reacting to them. We'll be talking about the ongoing trial of Lake and Riley and the murder of Lake and Riley, and we have a guest Ryan talking about Israel.

Yeah, Aviv Retigerr is a very high profile journalist in Israel. I would describe him as kind of a bit to the right of net Yahoo. So we'll it will let him, you know, plant himself on the on the spectrum. But that's I don't think he would even consider that to be an insult. We're gonna we're gonna talk to him at the at the back end of the show a couple things. It will maybe we'll get to talk to

It's it's a historic vote in.

The sense that the the Senate never allows kind of floor votes on blocking weapons to Israel. There's a there's a particular provision of law that allows any Senator to get such a measure onto the floor. Bernie Centers has gone through that very complicated process to make that happen.

So that's going to happen later today.

The advocates of it are hoping for maybe twenty votes max. Like they're not expecting it the past, but they think if they can get above twenty, push closer to even thirty, that at least it sends a shot. One other thing we won't get a chance to talk about, but since we won't be doing a show before then November twenty fourth, it's going to be a revolution in Pakistan.

So it's going to get wild.

First.

Imran Khan has called for massive nationwide protests and particularly focused on Islamabad. I'm hearing that in Pakistan the government, now military government, is basically barring buses from bringing people to Islamabad, shutting down gas stations, doing everything they can to try to prevent millions of people from descending on

Although then it you have to talk about people like Tulsi Gabbard and others that will be around Trump who might deal with these questions before they even get to Trump.

Well, yeah, but who knows, who knows where she comes down on that question. It's going to be it's going to be extremely interesting. Yeah, Rick and Grinnell, who's very close advisor that Trump has played foot seat with.

The im Ron Khan kind of movement.

Very interesting, all right, Like right before the election, he was like retweeting photos of himself with like im Ron Khan or whatever. It was like really sending subtle He wouldn't quite say anything positive, but he was sending very subtle signals that were picked up loud and clear. So in Ron Khan is thinking like, this is my shot that we're going to We're going to kick it off now and we're going to stay in as Lamabad until Trump is inaugurated and see what happens.

Well, if you care about this issue and want to stay tuned to Ryan's coverage here on Breaking Points, because it is truly incredible.

Coming to coming to a climax looks like fascinating.

All right, Well, let's start with the A block and Trump's decision to nominate Howard Lutnick, who was we can put this up a one who was under consideration, very seriously under consideration for Treasury Treasury secretary. He's now being nominated for Commerce Secretaries, the CEO of Canter Fitzgerald. He had been pushed by Elon Musk as a disruptor for the Treasury secretary job. Trump is apparently very nervous about

Ryan.

He doesn't necessarily want to spook the markets too much by putting a disruptor like people think Lutnick could be. I'm not sure how true it is that Lutnick would be a disruptor, to be honest, but he's at commerce now. It's sort of a loss for him.

Yeah.

I think Trump was spooked when some of his Gates like and Gates appointments kind of book the market and started creating a lot of volatility. There's this famous anecdote from when James Carville and Bill Clinton first took power in nineteen ninety two. They came in with these I'm not going to call them ambitious plans, but they came in with plans and they were immediately confronted by their economic advisors saying, if you do X, Y and Z,

It's still true.

And so I think and Trump under intuitably understands interest rates because his entire real estate game play for decades was just an interest rate in cash flow play. So he like, he really has a feel for interest rates

So yes, I think.

You're right that he's.

Being dragged around by his tail by the bond market here in.

Latink was the co chair of the Trump transition, and he's been sort of stumping for Trump on CNBC and has for a while, which Trump is also reportedly not

One question I have for you.

Ryan is what does he bring from Canter Fitzgerald in terms of like either baggage or advantages going into the commerce job.

Well, it's it's the pedigree, the credibility.

Trump wants somebody who has, you know, went to the right schools and worked at the right banks to signal to the markets that this person's not a crank. But he doesn't want the guy from like Birch Gold as his Treasury secretary, Mike Lindell, Mike Lindell as Commerce secretary, like that's that's just that's not going to fly. And so so it's not about baggage like he's I think

That job, but Trump is probably it's.

A cabinet level pick and it doesn't really report to any agency. But what he's suggesting is Lutnik is going to be the direction of trade, not not whatever neo liberal banker I'm forced to appoint.

This goes with try I think this goes with your theory. Though he's everyone expects this to be Robert Leittheiser. It seems like the most obvious appointment that Trump could make, and I wonder if he is slow walking it because he's trying to dish it out to the markets and a different clip to avoid anything.

I think I think the markets wouldn't freak out about Lightheiser, like because he's the.

Devil they know, true, and the devil they don't know.

Because they know that light Hazard's not actually going to do twenty percent tariffs on everything.

How dare you that he's going to do much more targeted.

And the way you do it, you do tariffs on everything, and then you waive it for Europe and Africa and Southeast Asia and India and South America, and by the end you're like, oh wait, this is just just this is just China and Antarica that are getting hit with this.

Uh.

There's also some talk that maybe Lightehezer gets a trade zar position which kind of almost is over top of US tr But I think the basic point is, yes, he did he this is this and Marco Rubio or one of the times he blinked now maybe comes in with some you know, radical Treasury secretary nominee, but I wouldn't think so, because this was he He was looking for somebody who had credentials and bought into a lot

Speaking of whether Trump is blinking on some of these, let's put a two up on the screen. He made another nomination later last night, after passing.

Her over for Commerce.

Tara Palmery wrote, I'm hearing that Linda McMahon is the lead contender for Secretary of Education. She's coit of the co chair of the transition with Lutnik actually, and former head of the Small Business Admin during the first term. I'm hearing that by Friday all of the major cabinet postings will be announced. Now. Trump made that official hours after palm Mary reported it. It was like eight pm something like that. So Linda McMahon is not somebody who has

Yeah, she won, And I remember this because she ran for Senate in two thousand nine. Yea, yeah, hilarious. She spent fifty million dollars. Yeah, of her and Vince's money. Founders of WW to run for Senate, and it was just an utterly insane campaign and it was winnable because there was it was in the backlash period against Obama winning. You know, a year later Republicans Scott with Scott Brown won a Senate race in Massachusetts, so it wasn't an

So basically that's her experience. I think she's been on the board of some schools. Yeah's most rich people have been on the board of schools.

I mean, you give money to the school and they put you on the board.

Could show up at the animal ball without Yeah, it would not be.

On the board if you're giving the amount of money that they're giving to these schools.

Yeah.

So but anyway, all that is to say she was in the running for Commerce. So Trump gives Commerce to her co chair in the Transit Lutnik, and then slot and Linda McMahon into the education role. Betsy Devas obviously was his education secretary last time around. In Devas, who had a rocky confirmation, actually was spent decades and decades deeply and in education policy in a way that frankly was terrifying to people who opposed school choice and voucher systems and all of that.

And I'm sure published a book about her called Schoolhouse Wreck.

I remember this, Yes, that's right.

So if you're on the left, Betsy Devas has decades of experience in education policy is actually like a huge threat Linda McMahon incoming Donald Trump says we're going to send education back to the States. That was part of his statement nominating McMahon last night. That should be much less terrifying to anybody who is opposed to like conservative reforms to the Department of Education, because I don't understand.

How she'll have like the appetite.

For like pretty radical change, to be honest with the appetite and like the know how for that doesn't seem like it's a deep, un abiding passion of hers, and it doesn't seem like, I mean, there will be people the Department of Educations are more from the Devas camp.

But yeah, yeah, I'd say less terrifying from the LEF perspective than Devas. But it seems like the play here is that this is this is a win for kind of the Maga world because she's close ally of Trump.

She's going to do what Trump asks.

Uh, She's definitely going to buck him with her own education ideas, which means that.

Does she have education ideas?

Seriously, that's the point.

Yeah, and then the Maga world it does have education ideas. Let's say, and Chris Rufo is he is he welcomed back into Maga world after his supportive yantus, He's back in.

Yeah, everyone's walking back in on except as long as you weren't like a Jeb person.

Okay, but even then, even then.

Yes, it's a it's a big rainbow coalition come back together.

So for people like Rufo, I feel like this is a victory because it's a kind of we secretary who's going to then be able to be pressured to do particular things or will.

Be because she doesn't have the conviction to go along with a Rufo will block it because it seems unpopular. I mean, I think that could definitely cut both ways, and I would imagine if you are a RUFO.

And that's why I think.

This is an example of Trump blinking because the one area of policy other than taxes that the conservative movement has a very robust ecosystem in his education policy. And there are a lot of very radical people in that space who have a lot of ideas, especially just germinating over the last half.

Decade, have a lot of ideas about.

Reform for the Department of Education and want to go like run wild as Trump says he's gonna.

Let Bobby do at HHS and.

Would love to do that at education anyone with Linda McMahon. So in a sense, yeah, maybe she's really malleable and

She was a little delicate about it.

But all that is to say, I don't know what Linda McK I genuinely just don't.

Know culture warriors, the culture warriors would have wanted.

And there are a lot of culture warriors on education and the right.

Yeah, so actually maybe I just bullet We'll see. Nobody knows why any of this is going to go.

So even Randy Weiningerten put out a fairly antidyne statement about Linda McMahon and said we look forward to learning more about Linda McMahon instead of saying like this is just another example of ton.

They'll probably rush to confirm her. Well, let's hurry up, and because who knows what could be coming elsewhere. So Trump has yet to name Baltimore real estate developer Stringer Bell as HUD secretary. He did name doctor Oz to run the centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. I stole that from somebody online, the hilarious pick. So yeah, doctor

And so this is actually a pretty layered and interesting.

Debate here, as the lever points out, because doctor Oz is so you know, stink and filthy rich. He owns a bunch of United Health Group and CBS stock, which and they make a lot of money from Medicare advantage. Medicare advantage is a privatized form of Medicare, which you know, if you're watching this and you're over sixty five or you have parents who are over sixty five, there's a fifty percent plus chance that you're.

On Medicare advantage.

I think it's something about fifty two percent of people on Medicare are actually getting Medicare advantage now. And you know, from the left posture on Medicare advantage for many years was that it is just straight up bad. And one of my first investigative stories fifteen twenty years ago was a dig into the way that insurance companies were using Medicare advantage to rip off both Medicare and patients and doctors and everybody.

Else just to make profits for themselves.

Under the Biden administration, there has been a crew of people running cms that have that have really cracked down on a lot of a lot of that, and so it's not I don't think it's as principled an arguments as it used as it was framed as before, because there are ways, and Florida has shown the way of

The problem comes in with.

You know what the rules are, who's in charge, who has the who has the power in that political economy, and if you actually are regulating it in a serious way, that having a having private brokers involved isn't necessarily the worst thing in the world. And for doctor Oz to say he wants medicare advantage for all, that's fascinating.

That's basically like.

A public a publicly funded private health insurance option, which compared to our current system, would be a fast improvement.

Now that interesting, You say that, Oh, like he's going to get.

It through, and it was.

It was his response to Fetterman being for single pair when that was more popular back in twenty twenty two.

So Medicare Medicare advantage in practice is something that's criticized. You can criticize Medicare advantager in practice, but if we expand it to Medicare advantage for all, because it creates a private public option type dynamic that would be better than the current system, thus.

Give more coverage to more people, and so.

Not that he'll really have control over this.

So Medicare advantages is bad when it's run by.

Scammers who go around to old people and say so. Basically, the way Medicare advantage runs is you say, all right, Medicare will pay you x amount, pay this company x amount, which is equal to supposed to be equal to what Medicare is paying for per individual, plus a little bit.

And then you are going to do a better.

Job for less money, because that's what the private sector says it can do. And so it's at its worst when people go around and say we're going to give you vision, we're going to give you dental, we're going to give you hearing, and then when you sign up for it, you find that the actual coverage when it comes to those areas is skeletal best, and it's just designed to trick you into signing up for it. Now you're stuck and it actually has narrow networks, and you're

Okay, we're going to take a health first approach.

And there are companies that are doing this that are saying it is in our financial interest because we're getting let's say, you know, twenty thousand dollars to take care of this person's health care for the year. If we can get their health problems at the front end under control and then they go to the hospital, less they go to the doctor, they could get sick less, they need fewer medications, then we save money.

So therefore we are going.

To invest in you know, exercise, nutrition, preventive medical preventive medicine.

Like making sure that it's easy to go to the.

Doctor to get a check up, like those those things that then they argue save money in the long run. If that, if that's the version of medicare advantage that prevails, who would argue against that, Because it's not that people want lots of medical care Yeah, people would.

Rather be healthy.

Nobody wants to go to the right.

You don't want your bills to be high. Yeah, and if you can align those incentives, that's interesting. So maybe when doctor Oz sits down with the people who are at CMS now and they show him what they're doing, he might be like, you guys are doing good work here.

Us now the same thing.

It doesn't seem he's.

Going to push Medicare advantage hard. That means by the end of Trump's term. I've seen estimates that have said seventy five percent of people could be on Medicare advantage, which is okay, you're basically fully privatized Medicare at that point, which is scary.

He doesn't this rule.

Obviously, you would need Congress to do anything really dramatic, So he can essentially like go like so's.

He can do a lot without Congress.

To overhaul the American healthcare system.

He would Oh yes, yes, he couldn't do Medicare advantage for all, but he.

Could sort of tinker with the regulatory policy significantly in order to incentivize Medicare advantage plans.

Yeah, there's there.

Are small tweaks you can make that could juice sign ups, like just making it the default, putting it on the website and pushing it, pushing a little harder to seniors subsidies.

Probably, it's a different direction.

Tweaks, tweak the you know, tweak the benefit of.

It interesting, very interesting, but so it's ripe.

For corruption, but also also could make things better, Like we shouldn't pretend that regular Medicare is perfect.

Yeah, don't kill me for that. It's not, okay, Bernie, Yeah, Bernie would agree.

Bernie absolutely agrees with not not necessarily that Medicare advantage needs to be is the answer. But but that Medicare as it is needs serious supplementation.

Yeah, that's why he's always arguing needs to.

Have dental because Medicare doesn't currently cover dental vision of hearing.

Yeah, it's a serious this.

And that's the way that Medicare advantaged.

Creeps in Yeah, no, I mean, I honest, leftists like you and Bernie pretty clear eyed about the problems there. Speaking of problems, should we move on to America's sweetheart Matt gains So The ongoing saga of Matt Gates's nomination to head up the Department of Justice keeps taking turns by the hour, it seems, because every reporter in Washington is now on the Matt Gates beat and is now working hard to get to the bottom of the ethics investigation, in particular, so we can actually put b one up

Interviews, but not just those. There's more.

Epstein wasn't slash isn't the only asset. If we're going to dance, let's all dance in the sunlight. I will make.

Sure we do. She's right, so sort of openly.

Threatening blackmail, and in a way that I think whatever Donald Trump and his allies are doing to senators, they are having some success so far, because we have a mash up here of Senator Mark Wayne Mullen of Oklahoma, who was the source of the claim. He publicly came out. He was like on the steps of the Capitol giving

Let's just roll this clip.

I think the president wants a hammer at the DOJ and he's seen Matt Gates as a hammer and all these other appointments he is. He's very confident and where they're at and can deliver the administration that he's wanting. His picks have been maybe unconventional, but we hired an unconventional president, and the American people wanted that. They don't want politics as usual, they want someone that's going to shake up Washington, DC. You got to think about this guy.

So there you had Mark when Ull after the Trump pressure campaign, and then before the Trump pressure campaign, when Matt Gates hadn't been nominated to head up the Department of Justice, just openly talking about what everyone who has worked with Matt Gates will tell you was common among Matt Gates among you know, the circles that Matt Gates was clearly running in which were unsavory to say the very least.

This is sort of.

What's amusing about some of my friends who are supportive of Gates' nomination. They see him as a disruptor, saying, you know, Joel Greenberg is an unsavor character. He's in prison and he's lie. It's like, well he was. Matt Gates is arguably Matt Gates's best friend. It doesn't speak well of Gates, that Joel Greenberg is a bad person. Necessarily, let's check in on a representative and Paulina Luna. We have a mashup to roll here. From Let's roll this.

The Republicans asking for this House Ethics Report to be released, it's people like Senator John Cornyn of Texas. He it'd be hard to describe him as anything but aligned with MAGA. Are you suggesting that there's something in his stock portfolio that's questionable?

I'm suggesting that John Cornyn, I, to my knowledge, made statements that was actually anti MAGA about President Trump and saying with the new elected Senate leader. But I will say that Fune has since changed his tune and it seems like he's more aligned with MAGA and President Trump when.

They asked for when they asked for the House Ethics Report, do you think that there's something corrupt about that? When they're asking for testimony, when they're asking for this report again, a bipartisan report, do you think there's something unethical about that?

I think that what's unethical about it is that this has been shut down, that they're not requesting reports on other people who are knowingly under investigation. Currently and that those I find it interesting that these actual allegations come out a peculiar timing while he's being nominated to be the attorney general. To be clear, I do think mac

A Congressman, I just want to clarify something you said. You got direct first hand accounts from Dog and the FBI when they declined to prosecute him criminally. Were you able to review the testimony yourself.

What I can tell you is they came out in a public statement actually had dropped charges against Representative mat Gates.

That's what I mean by that.

And Frankly, what I'm finding is these baseless allegations when people go out there and smear reputations. This happened to Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

So not true, of course, that the ethics report was just brought out was just like sort of made public when Matt Gates was nominated.

This was the.

Department of Justice investigation goes back gears and the ethics report obviously was set to be released a couple of days before it's I was actually named the nominee.

It seems pretty clear he resigned. There's no reason to resign the end of your term other than to prevent the release of this. So it was actually it's actually kind of the reverse, Yeah, that it's not that these allegations are surfacing because he was nominated. His nomination and his subsequent resignation buried potentially buried them.

Well, if he doesn't get confirmed, he's resigned, so he's not in Congress.

It's hilarious. He's resigned from this term.

He could get swore gets sworn back in January because he was re elected.

Yeah, so it's the funniest resignation. That funny, it's like a two month resignation.

But if he gets sworn back in pointless and is so obvious why he did it, but.

Then the ethics probe can is back in play. Assuming he doesn't get confirmed, then the ethics probe of a sitting member of Congress is back in play.

They have to start it all over again. Be hilarious.

I don't think so, but I wonder that they've probably never had that specific dilemma before. Yeah, Ryan, though, there's a lot of other context to this, Lest we fall into, uh, the sort of camp that most of the mainstream media is in, which is just reflexively treating this as though it's a cut and dry sexual misconduct situation. There is a lot more going on beneath the surface, especially with

This is B five And let me explain why I think the people watching this show are adults with their own kind of complex moral worldviews and are able to hold together multiple thoughts in their head.

Yes, we'll find out the headline. Let's talk about this because this is buckle up. This is this is wild And.

If you're listening, the headline is house probe to Matt Gates relies on witness as DJ found lacked credibility.

Right, all right, so go read the Molly Hemingway piece like this is it's a good piece, very viral. It's gone viral for good reason. It's and it is sourced to public documents. This is it's not the kind of thing where you have to take Molly Hemingway's.

Word on anything here.

They are the point that she's making here, and you correct me if I'm wrong. Here is that the two women that were just referenced in that New York Times article are publicly, according to a jailhouse snitch. By the way, you got it, always be skeptical of jail house snitches who are telling you something, usually so that they can, you know, get themselves out of whatever trouble they're and

So where would.

Now that, Like I said, you'd be skeptical of a jail house snitch if you want this is what they got.

This is what the snitches.

Said, and therefore we need to know more about these two sources that the New York Times is talking about. Are they the same ones that Greenberg allegedly said, We're willing to lie in order to back up Greenberg and harm Gates. Greenberg is serving eleven years for sex trafficking and all sorts of other scammy, scummy stuff.

He was like the tax collector of Seminole County.

Yeah, and and to your he pleaded guilty to underage, sex trafficking, wirefraud, stalking identity thuft, producing a fake ID card, and conspiring defraud US government.

Pleaded guilty.

Yeah.

Just despicable human being and has previously concocted claims against political opponents for sleeping with minors. There was I believe it was a teacher who was running against him for tax collector, as I guess as a Democrat, and he created this elaborate scheme where he created a fake email and emailed the school and made these fake claims about this teacher to try to destroy the person, not just the person's electoral chances against him, but the person's entire life.

And Greenberg actually apologized for this.

So it's like, this is not in dispute, Like we know for a fact that this is a card that this guy play. Now, why say we are treating our audience like adults here able to hold complicated and contradictory thoughts in their mind. Is that this guy was like Gates's best bud and they were at parties with with like high schoolers and college girls like, which is gross.

Yes, in their mid thirties.

In their mid thirties, like get a grip. But it's not a crime, and that's not what they're being accused of. So you can think that they're gross dudes. But the question here is did they do did he? Did Gates do this crime?

Exactly?

The Justice Department, according to people that familiar with this matter, found the witnesses not to be.

Credible and drop the charges.

So they apparently found the jail house snitche to be credible.

And this is the Biden Justice Department, right, and this is part of a plea deal with Greenberg. By the way, they wanted to get Gates so badly that they struck this plea deal with Greenberg. So that could reflect on the credibility of everything that he's admitted to.

Of course, but he still got a long prison sentence.

And this is the Biden Justice Department that has been targeted by Matt Gates over note, like, Matt Gates is one of the harshest, most vehement critics of the Biden Justice Department, of the Justice Department in general. So if there's anybody that they would want to get and like do it quickly, it would have been Matt Gates. They tried, and they were leaking salacious stuff about this investigation all along the way, and ultimately couldn't get him.

They couldn't get him.

And there's a lot of where there's smoke, there's fire in this case. There are tons of VENMO transactions between Matt Gates and his two female accusers.

Right, there's a new one that's like seven hundred dollars, it's up to ten thousands.

The memo says like tuition reimbursement.

Yes, I have them read this is gross stuff. Like, yeah, exact.

Gates has said that people are mistaking his generosity to his ex girlfriend for paying for institution.

Yeah no, I mean you can literally look at the Venmo transactions.

It's right there, you can see it. And again, this is a guy at best.

He's in his mid thirties and he's hanging around flying these girls around the country and paying them on Venmo. One of them reportedly lied and said she was over eighteen when she was seventeen. Either way, they're very young women. And you know, that's a different question than.

H and as Mark Capudo reported in Politico in this article in twenty twenty one or three, whenever it was, they went on this trip to the Bahamas, all these creeps and the Customs and Border patrol stopped the plane when the private plan when it landed because there were such young looking women on the plane, and like they were like, this is creepy. It's a bunch of old dudes and some very young women. They turned out to

They were eighteen, Like that's pretty pitiful.

On the other hand, the charges that they were seventeen and so far the claim the charges don't look like they're sticking. Yeah, and you wind up with these situations like Sunny Houston got herself into yesterday at the View. I don't think we have that clip handy, but I don't know if you saw this. She was forced to do like a legal read, because if you say with certainty that these things happened, yep, you're not on very

Do Yeah, yeah, I mean so this is also a really impossible story to follow because the details are just it's layers and layers and layers.

Yeah, and one.

Of the words handle thing possible.

Very panhandled one of the women, the one where I referenced lying about our age that was reportedly to Greenberg, just to clarify. But all of this gets back to whether or not Matt Gates had sex with a seventeen year old when he was in his mid thirty and.

Seventeen year old.

This is Greenberg was like trafficking ye to other to his friends and stuff.

And that's what it gets to, right, So there's that question. There's also just ample, ample evidence that Matt Gates, if you are hardcore MAGA, is not the person that is going to successfully uproot the Department of Justice compared to what somebody like Jim Jordan could do or somebody who

Like He's not.

The only person. He wasn't the only option. I think he was an option though. To make a point that we are going to, as Trump says, we are going to go wild, like we are going to dismantle this department. We are absolutely deadly serious about it. And that's why

To your point, Ryan, all of that stuff can be true.

Matt Gates can be excellent on Lina Khan and anti trust, and be excellent on surveillance and all of those seriously very important topics that nobody in the political establishment. They might pay lip service to it once in a while or they might not, but they're not serious about actually creating change.

Matt Gates seems to be.

He's one of the boldest proponents of anti trust reform on the right. He has actually put his money in his mouth as he has stuck with it a main consistent, not waffled like the people we had tight cerws on. He has, you know, break up big tech in his book. He cannot stand lean a con I know this is like, this is rare, and there's something about Matt gatesby at the Department of Justice that would be somewhat satisfying from a policy perspective.

But but it's that it's easy to get.

Caught, I think in the meta conversation and not just sort of the simple for draining the swamp.

You know what's uh, what's make.

And maybe you're right to the point that.

The left's best hope might be that he's just not equipped experientially to run an organization of this size in the way that he wants, right, Yeah, I mean and and when I mean the left, I mean people concerned about what he's going to do when it comes to weaponizing the Justice Department in defense of Trump's worst instincts. The left would be happy that if he actually succeeded in pushing forward surveillance reform, anti Trump stuff, that kind of thing.

Yeah.

So no, I mean, there's obviously he was I think he was targeted for political reasons. I think he's continuing to be targeted for political reasons. I think the media has a total double standard when it comes to Matt Gates.

I think we do have a whole lot of awful politicians.

I'm not sure that from a conservative perspective, that practically or morally justifies Matt Gates.

I just disagree with that argument.

But hey, yeah, and just because it seems like the claim that he slept with a seventeen year old is not well found, it doesn't mean you have to like the guy and think that he's a morally upstanding figure.

It also, to me seems like he's so ripe for blackmail when you're leading a department like this.

Part of the reason I atudy of blackmail guys where everything's already out.

That's true, but I don't know that everything is already out, that's true.

Good lord, he brought Chuck.

Johnson to the State of the Union known FED Chuck Johnson to the State of the Union one year.

And there's a lawsuit against him for not being a FED other from some like AI Silicon Valley antagonists of his huh that he's falsely claiming to.

Be as falsely claiming to be a FED.

That's according to this lawsuit.

Incredible stuff.

Yeah, So Magiz did.

Out Peter Tiel as a FED, and Peter Tiele then acknowledged that he had been doing that.

Magis is entangled in a very interesting web of personalities and anyway, that's I think. I hope that people will leave this segment more well informed than anyone leaving the segments done by our next subject here, which would be Morning Joe. Let's pivot to Mourning Joe. Hard pivot to Mourning Joe. We have to roll this clip of them every day.

Now.

It's sort of like reality television, which is always what Morning Joe actually, I think has some of the best production quality and television like it's so casual they understand why people watch TV, even if the content is terrible. The production is generally kind of compelling at Morning Joe because it's like reality television, and that's what we are seeing play out on the show this week as they are just absolutely playing up the attention.

They've received for kissing the ring.

At Moral Lago or the attention they're not getting too Yes reviewers, it's.

A little bit of both.

So let's roll this clip from yesterday's edition of Morning Joe.

Yesterday saw for the first time what a massive disconnect there was between social media and the real world, because we were flooded with phone calls from people all day literally around the world, very positive, very supportives, going understand what you do, et cetera, et cetera. But once in a while I would get a text for a conference.

And go, oh, man, I hope you're doing okay.

And I call him back and I go, well, Eddie Glauds went up and we go Eddie.

Are you on Twitter?

And he goes, I am my god, I'm not.

So We've had a good day. Miki just had a wonderful event. That is fantastic.

They're just like leaning into each other. Desk is too far and we don't have.

Any Starbucks like that. They always up Starbucks.

Well, yeah, they're sponsored there.

We have Stager's weird African coffee.

Yeah, but we also got our own faces.

We have our own faces, which.

We should go buy in the mug store that we got over there.

By the mug. So that was the point of the segments to sell mugs.

And so yeah, obviously this comes after they went down to mar A Lago kissed the ring. Their their audience recoiled because their audience has been told for the last eight years this is Hitler reincarnated by them, Yeah, by them, told by them, And so now they're saying, well, we better go ahead and kind of you know, kiss and makeup and hey one, so we should all be friends and that just doesn't clash, like if those two things just do not work together. And so their their audience

And so from Mika.

And Joe's perspective, that shows that Twitter is not real life.

Which, by the way, it's the year of Our Lord twenty twenty four. They're just coming to this realization. They cover politics every single day.

In this case, I think they're wrong. I think the people in their cell phones are not real life. Yes, Twitter is actually much closer to real life in this sense than the fact that they're All of their friends around the country are like, yeah, sure.

This is working for you.

Let's roll, well not roll, but put up C two here is this is an interesting kind of way that they're responding to this. Our friend of the show, Aaron Ruppar, who has some irrational hatred of me that I've never quite know of you.

I didn't know that.

It's quite bizarre.

Many such cases, many such cases, so he writes, Morning Joe has turned off replies to tweets, and hasn't been posting clips of the show. The trip to mar A Lago not going well.

This is Pete Ruper, he noticed before anyone the morning Joe wasn't posting clips.

I agree with Rupar here, This is a fair observation. If you're a show that is afraid to be seen, that doesn't bode well because your job as a show is to be seen.

Yeah, so let's put the next element up on the screen. Just continuing on with this theme, this is also resistance, Ron Foblkowski. If Trump has them that intimidated that they need to retire MSNBC hosts piled on CNN earlier this year, but their code of silence on this is gross. Have some courage and integrity. Is that too much to ask?

Over the past week, I heard.

From two entirely separate, very reliable sources with some vivid detail that they are absolutely terrified of Trump. Entirely separate, very reliable sources. I wonder if those sources were Joe and Mika, or if there were people like Joe and

So, and what's fascinating about that is that the show goes from six to ten, God bless them, and because they most of the country's still sleep at six am, the audience for the program builds, builds throughout the day and then falls kind of toward the you know, after people have, you know, things to do. But what the media ie records that they obtained show is that they go on and they say, hey, everybody, guess what cool news We went down to Marlago.

Trump's Okay, their audience collapsed.

Thirty percent of those in the twenty five to fifty four demographic had stopped watching by the next hour. That's significant, Yeah, because normally you're growing up and now you're losing thirty eight percent.

And thirty eight percent is a lot.

I'm not a math major, but it's a lot. And so clearly what happened was people were like, are you fing kidding me?

Click right? Not dealing with this right?

If you want your resistance content from the people who've been giving it to you for eight years, and now all of a sudden they're telling you that actually, which you know, we're not going to beat up their audience. But throughout the twenty sixteen campaign, it was quite obvious that that Mika and Joe were like longtime friends of Donald Trump and loved the fact that he was running because it was incredible for the ratings.

It was constantly calling in and flirting with them literally, yes, literally.

Flirting with them, and then he actually shocked them by winning, and then their relationship soured.

And so here we are.

Right and they say they did all of this because, in their sanctimonious way, it.

Was absolutely worth it, quote, absolutely worth.

It to get Donald Trump to come out and make a statement saying he supports a free and fair press, and that is essential. This is their argument, is that it was worth their time to go kiss the ring because they got him to say nice things about the press. And that's just absolutely essential the work that they've done so to support the.

Media to hear.

And maybe you agree with everything that they're saying, but what is clear is that they're only saying it out of fear, right uh, and and because things have not gone their way, and to me, they should just then step down, like if if you if you are acting out of fear rather than out of your true, genuine impulses that you want to share with the audience.

Let somebody else do they do the gig well.

Interestingly, Comcasts officially announced that it plans to spin off NBC universal cable channels into separate, publicly traded a separate, publicly traded company.

That's official.

Now, yeah, that broke crystal text of it this morning.

Oh boy.

Yeah, So, I.

Mean that's a about what that means.

It means an interesting future ahead of MSNBC because the NBC News and NBC MSNBC tension seems to be higher than it ever really has been in their history. By the way, the ms and NBC gener it stands for Microsoft, Microsoft NBC, Microsoft NBC. It's sad that Microsoft didn't just buy and MSNBC back because we would be in for the same Joe and Mika bullshit.

Because that's what I mean.

That's the real problem with MSNBC is that they have spent years, like you said, they wanted it to be known they were very close to Donald Trump, they had access to power. They always thrived on that access to power. They broadcast from the middle of Manhattan in thirty rock and they want you to.

Know that they want it to be clear that.

They are talking to the movers and the shakers and that they're friends with them. And that's what you see when they're in their quarters up streaking their Starbucks is this is just friends chatting. And you never really get much like disruptive content, even when they frame sort of things like.

Oh maybe this wokenws stuff is going so going a little bit too far as disruptive.

Right, So now they like it's fascinating to see what will happen with MSNBC. Does it become just the network of people like who tune in for George and Jen Rubin and the niche partisan content Nicole Wallace whatever else, Jensaki? Is it going to become that network? Or is it still going to try to be a news network? I mean, I think it's a pretty interesting question if you're the executives looking at the future.

Yeah, and basically you're just going for people over forty five and fifty at this point, Like the idea that you're going to get any new people under that age to start watching cable news, I think at this point most smart people recognize is a fantasy. So then it's like, well, okay, well, how many of those people are democrats and independent leaning democrats are democratic leaning independence and.

Can you can you can you can?

Basically can you convince cable companies to continue carrying you and paying you, because that's for people that don't understand the way that cable companies make money. It's not mostly through the advertising. It's from your cable bill that you pay to the cable company. A piece of that goes to Fox or MSNBC or CNN. And the way that they maintain that is by maintaining their relevance. That people say, if I'm getting cable, I want these cable news channels.

I'm paying for basic cable I need I want the news right like that? What else?

What else am I doing? What else do I want here? I can get the rest of it anywhere else. So as long as there's a minimum threshold number of people who want MSNBC as part of their cable package, and that and that that is understood.

Through surveys of their users and angry phone calls.

Then the cable companies will keep paying them these kind of these very lucrative amount of money because think about how much money you pay every month for cable, if you still get cable, it's a lot and a huge chunk of that then goes back to these networks.

That's why there's this incentive to be nicheified.

And so that's what you know, Scarborough and Mika Brazinski are really trying.

They're popping right now in a very uncomfortable way.

This audience, this niche audience that they've cultivated in a bubble, which is listen. I don't think niche audiences are necessarily a bad thing. I think they're really dangerous in politics, but they're cool in like music, and they're cool in all kinds of like different cultural sphears. Like I think it's great that we have a medium environment where you know, Shane Smith can come back and do his show for Vice and like there's some type of audience for it.

Because they publish.

This Tom Cotton oupbed people cancel their subscriptions, or Washington Post same thing. People are canceling their subscriptions because the Post made a decision to go back to the pre nineteen seventy six standard of not endorsing a presidential candidate

Of a lot of people ustration because people.

Tune in over and over again when a lot of people.

People don't work in politics, like they just want the comfort food. And if MSNBC was giving people comfort food, it wasn't really doing news unless you know it was maybe some connection to NBC News, some of their reporters coming on whatever. So as soon as you start dishing out vegetables, you're going to lose your audience, because that's not why they patronize your product anymore. And so that's a huge, huge conflict for them going forward. And they're

Yeah, let's move.

On to our next block.

This is the ongoing trial of the murder of Lake and Riley, which is taking place down in Georgia. We can put the first element up on the screen. This is the ride up from the New York Post. You can see a picture of Lincoln Riley on the screen there if you're watching it. Lakeln Riley was twenty two. And I'm just gonna read a little bit from an

The Augustine University student was.

Found dead in a wooded area on the Athens campus on February of twenty second. Hose Abara, twenty six, is accused of murdering Riley after prosecutor said she quote refused to be his rape victim. It Bara an undocumented migrant who was charged with malice murder and felony murder in connection with her death, which became a rallying cry for

I guess you know, it's a horrific tragedy. Yeah, it always makes me uncomfortable when people when when a particular tragedy gets its attention because of who the assailant is rather than and and because it fits a political agenda, like people who were born here in this country commit horrific murders actually every day. Yeah, and they're victims are no more, no less worthy of of our attention. And

It's it's the it's the worst nightmare of.

People who are running early in the morning as just as the sun is coming up, that's something that some murderer is going to jump out of the bushes like, and it's it's it's it's out of that a kind of storybook fear that fortunately is rare, but when it happens, it's.

Going to it's going to get elevated.

And then when it turns out that the person was here I legally, then it's going to be weaponized. So yeah, we'll get a verdict in the next couple days probably, Yeah.

And that's the thing with this trial is that it's really playing out like a true a pretty traditional true crime trial does these days, where you're hearing I mean, you're seeing the mother's last text messages to Lake and Riley and just the all of the sort of heart wrenching details that come out, and.

Try his brother is supposed to testify. He's been he's been called.

And he won't.

He's not testifying. Josse Obara is not testifying. So it's a yeah, his brother's supposed to testify.

It And according to one of the witnesses who was and it was complicated that he said he basically acknowledged that his brother did it and that if the woman said anything about it, he'd kill her too.

And he's supposed to. So part of this is that the prosecution arm sorry, the defense seems to be pointing its fingers subtly, as some people have said, at the brother. That's part of the defense is suggesting that it was in the Barra So it's yeah, it's a very complicated trial. It's no surprise that it's getting as much attention as it is now.

In the New York Post, the quote from the brother was all kill you too or something like that, yeah, which suggests that he's saying that he was the actual killer, not the brother.

Yeah, and he was getting some federal benefits it borrow was. That's why, I mean, we probably disagree in the implications of this because I agree with you that there is a lot of evidence that people who come into the country illegally actually commit crimes at a lower rate. And while that might be true, I mean, there's competing research on it. The research that I've looked at it seems to lean more heavily into the direction that it's a lower rate.

Of crime committed.

But there's partisans on both sides doing this research, so it's hard to actually get to the bottom of that. What I would say, though, is, you know, I think most Americans would look at I have the CBP numbers up in front of me right now, the fiscal year twenty four one thousand cases of people who are in the country illegally committing assault, battery, domestic violence, twenty eight hundred cases of driving under the influence, thirty cases of

But when you need to know the denominator, how many people are here illegally is it?

Is it twelve million? Is it twenty million?

Right which we literally don't know. We genuinely don't have a clear number on that question. But if you are the family of Lake and Riley and you're looking at an alleged trende Aragua member who was getting taxpayer funded flights from Kennedy to Atlanta JFK to Atlanta, and you know he's already in the country, it's not legally in the country, that's already a question. It probably will reflect

And so that's the extent.

To which I think it reflects on That is like that question of fairness. So we probably disagree on that, but that's I think why the trial resonated with so many people in the election.

Yeah, for sure.

We have this clip of Chad Wolfe, who was a Trump administration. He was DHS under Trump, wasn't he? I think he was like acting or was he? Yeah, he was acting Secretary of DHS. I don't think he was ever formally confirmed. Here's how he reacted on Fox News for a taste of how we can see the Trump administration handle list down the road.

Well, it's beyond awful because any any criminal act, particularly this one committed by newly alien, has won this preventable. They shouldn't be here to begin with, and they were facilitated. This individual appears to be a facilitated by the Bike administrations border security policies. Right, He's from Venezuela. He gets in on a parole, he gets flown and transported to

So, you know, it'll be obviously a powerful talking point for the Trump administration in the months ahead as they decide. You know, the question of mass deportations, which is we continue to hear from Trump administration officials or incoming Trump administration officials themselves, is very much on the table.

Now.

Mass deportation is not a technical clinical term. We don't know what mass deportation would actually be. Were told that it would start with the quote unquote worst of the worst, the people who are here and already have rap sheets or have been, you know, coming in and out and trafficking whatever it is.

Now, that's a very difficult thing to do and of itself.

So we don't know, Yeah, what's going to happen if they Trump empties out the jails and prisons to ports people who are here illegally but we're serving sentences. They then come back into the country, get around his magical wall, commit a crime.

Are we going to get wall of wall covers of that.

You think, I mean, it's a pretty and will that then be held against the Trump administration?

Yeah, I mean.

Because it wouldn't happen if the person had been left in prison.

Yeah, Republicans have held the Republican administrations feed to the fire over immigration. I mean, this was actually part of the problem with the corn In versus Thune versus Rick Scott conflict we talked about last week is people were absolutely furious about how Cornyn and Thune had handled the immigration bill under Langford and McConnell last year. So maybe, but obviously it's always different when it comes to Donald Trump.