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Our good morning, and welcome to Counterpoints Emily.
On yesterday's show, as you may or may not have seen, Crystal and Sager Saul the immigration policy debate with an hour long kind of fistfight. Today, maybe we can figure out Israel Palestine.
It just might take a little bit longer than an hour. We might have give this one ninety minutes.
All right, we'll let that one stretch.
I think that should do.
But so at the end of the show, we're actually he's not listed here, but we're going to have Representative Greg Kassar in the studio this morning.
He couldn't get in early enough. That's one of the things about taping.
It can compacted schedule with members of Congress and other newsmakers.
You know, they can get here when they can get here.
So after his interview airs, we'll have it up on YouTube and elsewhere, but it's not going to be in the full show that goes out to premium subscribers, which you can become one at breakingpoints dot com. Though I'm not really selling it since it won't have our interview with him. It will have our interview with my former colleague at the Intercept, Lee Fong, who testified at Congress yesterday.
Yes, just kind of interesting and cool.
Yeah, well, life experience testified.
If you don't have to be there under subpoena, it's probably fun.
Oh that's the best way to do it, really the only way to do it.
But yeah, Lee.
Testified about his own reporting on censorship, and so I think we're really eager to ask him some questions about his experience in front of Congress, some of the questions that he got and some of his own reporting, and the other thing that we'd be remiss not to mention that happened just last night because there's a lot of breaking news. Republican leadership got rolled on two big votes
in the House last night. We're going to dive into that in just a bit, but also WHI all that was happening for the New York Times, quote, Nikki Haley was out voted in Nevada's Republican presidential primary by quote none of these candidates. So Nicki Haley lost to none of the above option on the ballot just last night. The New York Times calls it quote an embarrassment and a contest in which she faced no direct competition. Now, the primary doesn't award any delegates. Nevada has a weird
system going. So Trump is actually he said he wasn't going to take part in it. He's doing the party caucuses tomorrow in Nevada, where he's very popular. But we had to mention that Nikki Haley lost to none of the above.
To that point, there's a big push in the Michigan Democratic primary, which is coming up in a couple of weeks for people to vote uncommitted. So we'll see how I think Biden's most serious opponent in Michigan will be uncommitted.
So, yes, the none of.
The above movement, which is from Brewster's Millions for the people who remember that movie from the eighties, Guy burned millions of dollars getting behind none of the above in the New York mayoral race, and it became a populist sensation because it really is a way for people to express their actual frustration with the system.
And people were joking about Nikki Haley losing to none of the above yesterday. It was like she's going to win the primary obviously, But actually what happened was none of the above prevailed in a nail binder.
Hate When that happened, just the worst, all right, So we have news out of the out of the Middle East. So early this morning, Reuter's broke the response from Hamas to the earlier deal that had been proposed by Israel through Cutter. Initial reports had come out that Hamas had rejected the Israeli proposal for whatever you want to call it, sees fire humanitarian pause. In fact, they came back with this proposal, which we can lay out in detail here
and talk about this. So they propose three forty five day ceasefires, rolling in phases. So the first phase would see all Israeli women hostages, men under nineteen, men and boys under nineteen, the elderly and the sick would be exchanged for Palestinian women and children held in Israeli jails. During that time, Israeli troops would withdraw from Gaza and the reconstruction of hospitals and some refugee camps would begin.
So then the second forty five day phase would see the remaining Israeli hostages exchanged for some amount of Palestinian prisoners. We don't know how many at this point that Hamas is demanding. There have been some maximal demands from some in Hamas saying every single person in Israeli in Israeli
captivity at this point is really detention. That is something that obviously Israel is going to push back on and non starter and can make and an offer of fewer people they were keeping these folks you can have you can have these folks back. The third and final forty five day phase would see the exchange of the remains of those who have died on both sides, and it would then end with a permanent ceasefire. This is the deal,
and actually we'll roll. When President Biden addressed the nation yesterday afternoon, he had already gone over this proposal, though it had not lead to the press. Here's how Biden responded to it.
There is some movement, and I don't want to. I don't want to, I mean, choose my words. There's some movement, there's been a response from the there's been a response from the opposition. But yes, I'm sorry from Hamas, but it seems to be a little over the top. We're not sure where it is continuing negotiation right now.
He's the person that is allegedly negotiating to Steele Ryan and he cannot get through a sentence in under what thirty seconds, an easy sentence. He needs somebody in the audience. I don't know if people caught that, if they're just listening to yell out Hamas when he was looking for the word Hamas, because he was bumbling and stumbling around to find it.
Nobody would mistake me for like the most fluid speaker.
But come on, man, well it's a little different, right.
But I'm also not I'm also not president of the United States. He did seem to forget the name of amas Am. I am, I am I over reading that there.
No, it's it's genuinely painful to watch, and then you know it's painful on his behalf. I mean, I think that's the human reaction when you hear that or watch that it's it's painful on his behalf. But then you have to remind yourself, Oh, this is a president of the United States, who is the person at the negotiating table, the commander of the commander in chief of the military. If I'm a member of the military and I'm watching that,
it's terrifying to me. If I'm a member of the military's family, that's terrifying to me.
It's just painful all around.
Imagine how terrifying it must be for him too.
He's up at the podium about to describe the counteroffer from Hamas and you can't find the word Hamas.
Yeah, No, that's a good point.
I would imagine his brain is just like going bananas at that point.
Yeah, that's a good point.
Anything the opposition.
And then somebody's He's like, yeah, So before we get to kgp's response to this, the underlying kind of inability of the two sides to get to a deal so far is pretty fundamental. So yesterday the Jerusalem Post had a sentence in one of its articles that I wanted to read because I think it really gets at this
at the divide. Here they wrote an issue between Hamas and Israel is the terror group's insistence that a deal must include an end to the gods of war, while Israel has stood on its principal position that it must be allowed to complete its military campaign to oust Hamas from the enclave. So, on the one hand, you have one party that wants to end the war.
You have the other party that wants to end the other party.
Yeah, you can imagine how that's going to be difficult to get to a place at the end where you reach a deal, like where's the common ground between those two positions?
Right? And I mean it's interesting. The phrasing of the sentence is interesting as you're pointing out.
And also, I mean it's tough because from the perspective of people who might be reading the Jerusalem Post, they would look back and say, well, there were people who were calling for a ceasefire on October eighth, October ninth, October tenth, or immediately saying preemptively, in fact, saying like October eighth, ceasefire. This is going to be bloody and devastating,
and so before it even starts, cease fire. And so I understand that position that you know, there had to be some type of response, but it's getting harder and harder to your point, to say that the response has or to persuade the public that the ongoing response is within the realm of proportionality, years within the realm of reasonableness.
When you have so many people.
Dead, and you have Hamas going back into northern Gaza, you have the military mission of quote eradicating Hamas looking less and less likely every single day, and when you still have one hundred and thirty six hostages, or report yesterday from the Israeli governments that they had notified more than thirty family members of the remaining one hundred and thirty six hostages that their Level one passed away. They
said most of those were likely on October seventh. It's hard to say, but this is making it very difficult, to your point, it makes Israel's position increasingly untenable.
Yeah, And from the Hamas side, you've had senior Hamas officials who have given interviews saying we're only recognizing the state of Israel as a ruse, as a temporary ruse, and ultimately we think the entire land is occupied and we'd like to take it back. So in that sense, both parties and the negotiation you want the elimination of the other party. What they actually want matters less than what they can actually do, and Hamas doesn't really have the capacity to eliminate a nuclear.
Power, right.
They're both in the one party state train to your.
Point, Yes, yeah, and elements of them both pretend that they support a two state solution, right, but not the necessarily the leading elements at this point.
But it does put the It does put Hamas.
In this weird position of being the one for a ceasefire and Israel being the one, you know, for continuing the war. And it puts the United States in the awkward position of saying, no, we want the war to continue. And so here's how Karine Jean Pierre at the White House yesterday kind of squared that circle. Separate topic on the hostage negotiations.
You're a team who's been covering this old in Middle least says that Hamas is still insisting on a permanent cease hire.
Is it still this administration's position that it opposes a permanency.
What we have been working towards, and you've heard us say over and over again, we want to see a humanitarian pause. We want to make sure that we get these American hostages home and also hostage is more broadly obviously home to their families, and we want to make sure that we get that critical aid, the critical aid that Palestinians need into Gaza. It is important to get that aid, whether it's medical, whether it's food, we have to get that in and so we believe a humanitarian
pause gets us there. You know, there is As I stated at the top, Hamas has responded to the framework of a hostage deal, and so we're going to review it and I'm going to be really really careful. I'm not going to dive into or telegraph information about their response from here, but we've been very clear that we believe that we need to get to another humanitarian pause because that humanitarian aid needs to get in and also plans.
It is the administration's position that he permanents he is fighting.
You have been very clear, We've been very clear from where we stand on the ceasfire.
That has not changed.
So the US is doing a kind of dangerous dance here where I don't know if you've seen some of this reporting, but effectively, what the US has been telegraphing is that through Katar Qatar, then over to Maas saying, Okay, this is what we're saying publicly that we want these humanitarian pauses, our official positions that were not for a
permanent ceasefire. But if you can get to an extended humanitarian pause ninety days one hundred and thirty five days, as in this OS proposal, then the US will not allow Israel to relaunch the war. In other words, cool
it down and it will stay cooled down. Amas is kind of pushed back with how can we trust that, Like, nothing that you've said, nothing that the US has said to Israel so far has led to changes in Israeli behavior, So why would this What do you make of that kind of this yawning gap between the public and private positions of the Biden administration.
I mean, I think it's for one of the difficult things in negotiating here is that it's immensely difficult for either side to trust that the other side will execute on what they're promising to execute on, especially with the volatile context of the entire Middle East right now, where something.
Can change in an instant.
I mean, it's very easy to imagine another situation like what happened just a couple of weeks ago to the United States in Jordan, where three reservists were killed, completely changing the dynamics of what was negotiated and agreed on.
I don't know what do you.
Make of the idea that if there is an extended pause, that there will be an ability to sort of prevent the war from relaunching.
It's interesting, It's it's plausible, and it's plausible in a sense that you can you can imagine that once the momentum goes towards reconstruction and aid coming back in that you can imagine how that can take hold and last.
On the other hand, the context here is that Netnyah, who is extraordinarily unpopular, he knows that if he faces a snap election, he's probably going to get ousted, and he's facing corruption charges, which means that he if he gets ousted, uh, those those charges slap back in and he might wind up actually getting convicted of something. And so net Yaho is is the ultimate political survivor. And he also is no fan of Biden. So if we're talking four months from now, you know we're in the summer,
and so it is. You can also see the domestic US politics where if Yahu he started the war in the summer or fall. That's probably pretty damaging for Biden because because he will have looked as though he failed in his diplomatic effort to get this war to an end.
And then then Yahoo might think, well, now I've got Trump and I can roll the dice with Trump coming in a couple of months, and so that you know, Trump Trump is a classic live to fight another day politician, like just you know, people are always looking for his long term strategy when he doesn't really usually have one. It's just like just like his business strategy, just trying to stay you know, one day ahead of the creditors, and in his political strategy is the same, sting one
day ahead of all of his opponents. Then Yahoo the same. So that's that's why you can imagine a world where it's solidifies. But you can also see how n Yahoo would have the kind of incentives to make sure that it didn't.
And again why there's no trust on either side of that negotiation at this point.
And yeah, and Hamas has criticized Israel for releasing Israeli detainees through the previous deal and then days later rating their houses in the West Bank and just bringing them right back in, Like what, hey, we kept up our part of the bargain. We released them. We didn't say we wouldn't pick them up, you know, three days later. So you had mentioned that if we could jump to the final element of the block that you had just mentioned. This is a report from Ken Klippenstein over at the intercept.
You had mentioned the attack on the Jordanian base.
I wanted to talk about this briefly because he said the headline here American base in Jordan, where drone killed through three US troops dogged by inadequate air defenses. I encourage people to read the whole story because, based on sources who served at this base, he really lays out how vulnerable this base was to this drone attack. The military explanation was that there was some confusion that they had a drone out there and they thought that this drone that was coming back to the base was an
American drone. It actually turned out to be an Iraqi militia drone and three reservists ended up getting killed. That is the second question I'd love to have answered. By the way, why are reservists overseas at this base? Like if you're like if we're not at actual war. People who are in the reserves should be at home, like they should not be called They shouldn't be called up.
We should we should have enough.
Troops with a trillion dollar budget that we don't need to call up reservists and send them to Jordan. But then the other the other point, as you read through his story, you're like, we're putting all these American troops in harm's way, yes, and not giving them adequate protection. Yes, And spending billions of dollars on protecting the Israeli government, which then antagonizes and produces the conflict that then leads to our own troops getting killed without adequate protection.
And remember, Biden didn't know where This is another thing that I'm surprised hasn't gone into play when people are talking about what happened to Jordan, is Biden didn't know where his Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin was for how long?
Right, I mean, in all serious.
We finally apologize for was like, well, wouldn't everybody else be fired for this?
He's like, yeah, I.
Mean you can see again, you can see why I have two hot wars, one of which spiraled into three American deaths. I'm sure there are plenty. I don't know the exact number of remaining hostages that are American, but you can't. I mean, it's just insane the level of incompetence every single day coming out of the Biden administration. And this if we put a three up on the screen. This was some news yesterday. I just mentioned this, but Israel confirmed the death of thirty one hostages as Homos
was responding to those proposals. That was a confidential internal Israeli reviewed that the New York Times got its hands on. The Times adds the fate of a further twenty people is also in question, amid unconfirmed intelligence that they may also have died during their captivity. So that would bring the number of hostages somewhere around one hundred living hostages. And you know, lots of questions about who died and when will remain for Netan Yahoo for a very very long time.
Ran yes, and also right, you're probably correct in reading the intelligence there that most of these probably died on October seventh, and we're still and their remains were taken.
Back to gods.
Also gads, as we've all seen from news reports, has been an extraordinarily dangerous place for everybody. And the hostages who have been released have told Israeli media that the thing that they were most afraid of was the twenty four to seven bombing campaign and that they were nervous that they were going to die under rubble.
Yeah, they both.
Felt really fired, right, They felt like the idea didn't know where they were was a quote that a couple of them gave after their being after they were released.
Or hoping they didn't know where they were, because if they were, they knew where they were and were still bombing that area, then that's I think that's even harder to absorb that your government would be would willingly do that well.
And again, I think to the point you were making earlier, it's hard for Israel to maintain, especially when obviously the
country is focused on the return of the hostages. It's harder for Israel to maintain its position that it must complete the military operation when hostages have died frankly during the military operation, when there been hostages remaining for so long during the military operation, and when you have returned to hostages saying that they didn't have you know, they didn't feel confident the military operation was not going to result in their deaths.
That's a really difficult position.
Yeah, and the war itself continues to be extraordinarily dangerous also for IDF soldiers. The IDF has not confirmed this, but according to the Hamas telegram channel Alkasamber Gads telegram channel that posted this morning, seven IDF soldiers were killed quote in the vicinity of Al Hawas near the highat school west of Conunis.
This is a this is.
A telegram channel that is it's kind of the official channel that broadcasts you know, Hamas military news and often is is confirmed later.
By by either I d F or media reports.
So it's a it's a fairly reliable whether or not this is this is true. We'll find out in the next hours or or maybe days. But seven I d F soldiers killed in a single confrontation would be you know, one of one of the highest casually rates in a in uh, you know, in a day between you know, between uh you know, Hamas and and the I d F. And it comes just as you know, these negotiations are getting to you know, potentially a breakthrough place.
And so it's just a.
Reminder of how the world and everyone just needs this war to end. Meantime, we can put up this second to last element here. You continue to have and this has been going on for weeks now, but you you continue to have Israeli civilians UH protesting the UH the entry and we've got this UH got this footage up here, the entry of AID into gas And so what what
what you're looking at here? And if you're watching, if you're listening on the podcast, what we're showing here UH is are just regular Israeli civilians who have gotten into a heavily militarized area like this is not this is not somewhere that I think civilians could sneak into without some sort of at least kind of acquiescence from the Israeli military.
Uh.
And and they're swarming AID trucks.
And you've had a lot of ideaf sympathetic Twitter accounts and others who have celebrated these civilian actions UH in in reducing the number of AID trucks that have been getting into Gaza down sometimes into the single or double digits. And if we can put up this this final element. Vidaan Patel earlier this week that on Monday, the State Department spokesperson he was talking about, and it was it was kind of a boast. It was what the United States has done so far in order to get relief
into Gaza. He said that, you know, on February fourth, two hundred and seven relief trucks entered Gaza in a single day.
And he said, since October twenty first, I have a typo in there. I said, twenty fifth.
Since October twenty first, ten five hundred trucks had made it in. So we're talking about November, December, January plus there. Aid groups have said you need about thousand trucks a day to get in just to meet the very basic needs of the Gaza population. That would be close to one hundred thousand trucks. People can do the math if
they want. There that only ten thousand have gotten in explains why you have the dysentery, diuretic diseases that are spreading among children, the malnutrition and the starvation and the famine that we're seeing because ten percent of the of the minimum.
Is going to lead to just absolutely catastrophic.
Conditions, you know, and this is one of the toughest parts of the entire scenario, and that people in Israel. If people are wondering why you have the West Bank scenes out of the West Bank that look like that.
We've all heard the complaints from Israel that the AID is sometimes hoarded by Hamas, it's sometimes misused by Hamas, and you know, found sacks and stuff, un rush sacks and tunnels and all of that, which there's obviously truth that Hamas has you know, not been entirely honest about where all the AID.
Is, and there's no doubt about that, and so right.
And so's it leads to this type of situation. And at the same time, you simply cannot allow, cannot allow tens of thousands of people, millions of people actually to live in those conditions, right.
Because we're talking you know, Hamas is somewhere at this point between ten and thirty thousand fighters.
There's two million people in Gaza.
So the claim that ten to twenty thousand people could even hoard enough that it would lead to the starvation of two million people just doesn't pass the smell test, like that just simply wouldn't even be possible.
But for Israel, the United States, and especially the Israeli government when it's dealing with the United States and these questions about a to the point you're raising about the political calculations of nen Yahoo, I mean it's very difficult. I mean, he's, you know, as I think poorly as Nya who has handled all of this. At least we can say he wasn't in an easy position or a good position.
Part of that from his own fault.
But the political tightrope that anyone who or anyone would have to walk here is not easy for reasons like that, for reasons related to that. It's just a to execute humane strategies on either side of this in the best of circumstances, if people wanted to do that would not be easy.
Right, because the propaganda has demonized every single Palestinian as either a terrorist or potential terrorists. So then you're like, well, and also we're going to give them humanitarian aid, And so the publics went, I thought they were all terrorists. Why how can we possibly how can you give aid? Because and that's what you'll hear when they interview these civilians at the border.
How can you give aid to these terrorists?
And why would you give any aid that's going into the hands of enemies. It's just a it's a strange thing.
Which you could actually flip that, you know, Israel saying we're not going to release these terrorists that we've captured that are our detainees to end the war. It was like, well, wait a minute, you said all two million people in Gaza are terrorists, So if they're all terrorists, what are these couple thousand matters to you?
Well, and here's another We have another image of eight trucks. This is I think this one's a five. This is from Tom White, so he tweeted this morning a food convoy waiting to move into northern Gaza was hit by Israeli naval gunfire.
Thankfully no one was injured.
But if you're looking, you corrector of bunro There, that's the director vun Roar, So you can see the damage that was done to the truck if you're if you're listening, this is obviously just an eight truck with basically almost a whole halfway in the middle of it.
Yeah, so it is not the first food convoy hit by Israeli gunfire. H and as we started this block talking about the deal that you know that the counter response that that Hamas is offered, which includes allowing in more humanitarian aid it's always jarring to see that as part of these negotiations, because it is not acceptable, according to international law or basic morality or ethics, to have, you know, to negotiate over humanitarian aid in order to extract military concessions.
Like you're not it's not even supposed to be in the.
Same conversation, right, right that, Okay, we'll agree to this if you will agree to reduce the level of famine. Like that's just not that's like beyond what's supposed to be allowable.
But here we are anyway, Yeah, here we are anyway heading into February, heading closer and coast of February seventh, which puts us close to closer to another anniversary of the attacks, and all of the anytime you hit the anniversary attacks, you look back, you look at the death count, and then you look at Chris and I were talking about this last week, the Hamas returning to northern Gaza, and you just think, my god, I mean, this is right, it's just a horror show.
Let's move on to Trump here.
In the United States, the President, it was determined yesterday, though he may appeal, is not im He doesn't have total immunity.
Yeah, I'm sure he did appeal that they're going to.
Hear it tomorrow.
The appeal is totally expected.
In fact, we have a neat little chart showing how the appeal can affect the timing of this case.
But yes, so here's the charter right here.
So if Donald Trump appeals the decision yesterday which rejects his claim that he's immune to these charges that he subverted the twenty twenty election, he interfered with a twenty twenty election, he is going to go to trial on this criminal indictment that accuses him of trying to overturn the election results.
So if you're looking at that chart.
You see pauses video, Yeah, you have to pause the video.
There are all of these different timeline scenarios. And remember, of course that nobody needs to be reminded this is all playing out in the middle of a presidential election cycle, one in which reports this morning one from The Guardian says that the RNC wants Nicky Haley to drop out so they can completely consolidate behind Donald trum So the leading candidate for one of the major parties, one of the two major parties, is now caught up in this crazy timeline where you can end up going to the
Supreme Court oral argument in the middle of March. You could just have a grant of a stay without any limits that could happen next week. You could have a grant of a stay with a ten day limit that could happen next week, and or you could treat this stay as a cert petition that could also happen next week, with oral arguments again happening in mid March. So all of this is dependent on what happens within the next week. And then we can go down to the next element.
As the timeline is so long it didn't fit on one screen, that would put a Scotus decision somewhere in early April, with a trial beginning in July and concluding on October fifth. So all of these different scenarios, with the exception of one that ends in a petition for cert on May twelfth, end in the fall. So you would have a Scotis decision around April, a trial beginning in July, and then the trial ending in mid October, and then a trial beginning in June and concluding in September.
So in three of the four scenarios you have a trial concluding based on the calendar in early to mid October, mid to late October, literally a week before the election possibly if it ends on October thirtieth in that time range, or in early September, right around Labor Day. So either way, the fall of a presidential election, you're ryan.
And tomorrow the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on a related question of whether or not the fourteenth Amendment, which says insurrectionists can't run for president, applies to Trump, and so the Court, the Supreme Court will be hearing that.
And this is before Yeah, we can put that up on the screen because the two things, when you hear them together, are completely.
Confusing different cases.
Yeah, and Scots Blood causes the biggest election case since it's ruling the Supreme Court's election ruling in bushby Gore. And again it's whether or not he can basically be taken off the ballot because of his role on January sixth, and scottis Blog says, although the question comes to the Court in a case from Colorado, the impact of the Court's ruling could be much more far reaching than they list.
That main Secretary of State ruled in December that Trump should be taken off the primary about there, and that challenges to Trump's eligibility are actually currently pending in eleven under eleven other states. So if we go back for a moment to the ruling in this other January six case, the charts of the Trump cases that some of the news outlets have done, by the way, are insane, just to the tangle of different legal scenarios and all of the different things.
It's just like absolutely crazy.
Mike Johnson have speaker Mike Johnson, who had a very bad day yeshual it was caught by reporters walking through the Capitol complex and asked about the ruling. And here's what Mike Johnson had to say.
Federal PUOs Court today just rule that President Trump does not have immunity. Do you group, do you think that he deserves total immunity from anything that he's done in office?
I haven't seen that development. Was that the storm?
Yeah, they just ruled this morning.
I believe that they've been after President Trump for partisan political purposes.
I think that's obvious and we call it law there and I think there's.
No other way to describe.
That's what Mike Johnson had to say. Now, the ruling itself was fifty seven pages long, it was unanimous. It was a three judge ruling in the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, and, as The New York Times says, it was unlikely to be the final word on his claims of executive immunity. Now, the ruling itself is actually really interesting. Did you get a chance to read any of it right now?
Not the whole thing?
Now, it's so long.
But it was like, yes, I was like, this seems like a lot of words to say what seems pretty simple.
Yes.
And so the Trump response was, if immunity is not granted to a president, every future president who leaves office will be immediately indicted by the opposing party. Without complete immunity, a president of the United States would not be able to properly function.
And that's an interesting argument.
It's a little it's it's an interesting argument because when you're reading this fifty seven page ruling, it's taking very seriously all of the Trump team's claims of immunity. And that's a particularly interesting one because it speaks to the nature of the system, that the system is getting a stress test in the Trump era of kind of hyper partisanship.
So what are the limits. You know you have Ford pardoning Nixon. Would Nixon have had to go through this? What?
We don't know because Ford pardon Nixon in any idea of a pardon is basically laughable in this political context, whether it was Hillary Clinton or any well, okay, so, but from the other party, I guess Ford Nixon is
not the other party. But one of the key lines in the ruling I thought was quote for the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant, but any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as president no longer protects against this prosecution. At bottom, former president trump stance would collapse our system of separated powers by placing the president beyond the reach
of all three branches. Presidential immunity against federal indictment would mean that, as to the president, the Congress could not legislate, the executive could not prosecute, and the judiciary could not review. We cannot accept that the office of the Presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter. They also addressed one of the Trump team's arguments, which
was about double jeopardy. They wrote, even if we assume that an impeachment trial is criminal under the double jeopardy clause, the crimes alleged in the indictment differ from the offense for which President Trump was impeached because they're talking about the impeachment judgment clause, which in the ruling quote states that the party convicted shall nevertheless be subject to criminal prosecution. That text says nothing about non convicted officials. Former President
Trump's reading rests on a logical fallacy. Stating that if the president is convicted, he can be prosecuted does not necessarily mean that the president is not convicted he cannot be prosecuted. And as they're going through these fifty seven pages, these judges who, by the way, you had I think it was, Yeah, so Karen Henderson is an appointee of George H. W. Bush, and then you had to biden
appointees Florence Pan and Michelle J. Michelle Childs. In this ruling, they're going through the founder's intentions when they were writing about impeachment, whether the founders intended it to protect somebody from these different prosecutions, and basically they mounted some pretty persuasive evidence.
Right there in the constitution.
Yeah, they sent that.
They didn't did they mention the navy seal argument that the Trump team made in the ruling.
I didn't see it in the ruling, but I could have skimmed over it.
During oral arguments, one of the justices, one of the judges asked, Okay, well, what would happen if a president ordered navy seals to go assassinate his political.
Oh they did mention that, Yes, absolutely.
And the Trump attorney was like, that would be fine, like that, that would be a crime, but you can't prosecute it because of presidential immunity. And at that point you're like, all right, I just know as a matter of fact, that's wrong. That's wrong that the president cannot put together a death squad that kills his political opponents and claim immunity for that. That's not a demo. That's not a democracy. That's not a republic. That's not three
different you don't have three coequal branches. If one branch can assassinate all the nine justices and then claim immunity for having done that, or can assassinate everyone in the in Congress against claim immunity for having done that that kind of gives one of the three branches slightly unfair hand when it comes to negotiating with the others.
And it's funny because we're going to talk in the next segment about impeachment powers as it pertains to majorcus. But the system is really getting a stress test in these cases. And you know, we may disagree on this, I don't don't think any of that takes away from the fact that this is lawfair. I mean, I agree with Mike Johnson on that point that this is definitely just a concerted effort by a lot of like actually you know, nonprofit kind of dark money groups.
On the left.
It's not saying there aren't those on the right, but dark money groups on the left to make these ballid access challenges, and that you know, the the DOJ and the Biden administration have supported a lot of these efforts and put these efforts into the court. And you know, Trump's representatives have argued that this is disenfranchising voters.
I also agree with that.
I think, you know, you can have this conversation at the ballot box. I don't like begrudge anyone for having these debates about the constitutionality of what Donald Trump did. Again, though, I don't think that makes this any less of law fair, and I don't think that makes Tanya Chukin who's the judge that this non gets kicked back to, any less biased. I think she's completely flagrantly demonstrated her by I sees in this case in a way that would be inappropriate
and a lot of other cases. But is you know, going to be allowed to stand in this case in all likelihood? So, ran, I think we've talked about this before. The individual cases are different, you know, some of them, even in the Trump orbit, are viewed as more serious than others. But there's definitely an effort to disqualify.
Him rather than deal with him at the ballot box.
Yeah, that seems that certainly does seem to be that what that strategy?
Is there way to do it? Yeah?
And if you know anyway, Yes, the whole thing's getting wild because if you look at the timeline for some of these you're talking, you know, potential verdicts in the late summer fall, it's gonna get it's going to be a bumpy ride, Yeah, from from here on out, that's for sure, you know.
Yeah, exactly like twenty twenty felt like a banana republic, and.
There's no escaping.
At twenty twenty four will feel like a banana republic basically, no matter what at this point.
Speaking of banana republics, the House of Representatives yesterday, not only did they blow up their border deal, which we're going to talk about here, they failed to impeach Ma Orcis by one vote, which we're going.
To talk about.
And they even put up their standalone seventeen billion dollars for Israel knowing that it would fail, and watch and watched it fail, perhaps the first vote in American history for weapons for Israel that failed to pass. The House of Representatives, like Pelosi, pulled some at least pulled at least one, but never put one on the floor that failed.
I don't know of any effort that actually went onto the floor of the House of Representatives to send money and weapons to Israel and came back with a no.
I can't absolutely incredible. You don't move.
These votes to the floor if you were going to fail, unless you're Mike Johnson.
So let's walk us through the incredible day of Mike Johnson yesterday.
So Mike Johnson woke up this morning feeling pretty.
Rough figure, right, It wasn't yesterday.
Last night he brought two votes to the floor, the one Ryan just mentioned on Israel and one on his big effort, I mean House Republicans huge effort, not just his, the starter under Kevin McCarthy. They're huge centerpiece, you know, legislative centerpiece basically, even though it doesn't involve, you know, really passing legislation other than impeachment articles, which is to impeach DHS Secretary of Homeland Security Secretary ahdra Majorcus over his handling of.
The southern border.
Also Afghan refugees made it into the impeachment articles and failed. He brought both of these votes to the floor without having enough votes for them to pass. Because and this is incredible, deep worthy detail. And this is where Republican leadership is actually pointing the finger right now. They say Democrats told them al Green would not be voting. Al Green would not be voting. Democrat Algreen, who was having
emergency surgery, would not be voting. So Republicans count on the vote was completely wrong.
They thought they needed two to fifteen.
Because yeah, they thought they need two fifteen because al Green showed up rolled in in a hospital gown in a wheelchair and voted against the impeachment of Mayorcis.
So think about that.
Mike Johnson now looks like he took the word of Democrats credibly and Democrats absolutely outmaneuvered, outsmarted him by rolling in al Green in a hospital gown and a wheelchair to cast a decisive vote.
It looks for Mike Johnson.
Not only does it look, I mean this trickles into the way that he is respected, the way that he's treated by his entire caucus. Basically pretty damn bad for Mike Johnson. Now this comes amid all of the fighting in the Senate over go ahead?
Can we let's roll to Marjorie Taylor Green clip? Will we have it? Which? Which number is that?
I believe we're all that's seven?
We don't want to leave this Yeah without without some MTG. Yeah, I think it's seven C seven.
Yeah, let's roll C seven.
Hid one of these votes that they had, So was it something that people would see?
Is that something that we're helping me?
I'm glad. I'm glad you asked that, because well, we can basically look like, look at this as a game. Unfortunately, and their strategy and they hid one of their members waiting to the last minute, watching to see our votes, trying to throw us off on the numbers that we had versus the numbers they had. So yeah, that was a strategy at play tonight.
It's just again deep worthy drama and Mike Johnson looking basically like he's out of his element. And that's something that you've heard from Republican circles. You've definitely heard that from sort of Freedom Caucus circles where people were initially favorable to the speakership of Mike Johnson.
In fact, some Freedom Caucus.
Members voted along with Matt Gates, to oust Mike Johnson or to oust Kevin McCarthy and bring in eventually Mike Johnson. Thomas Massy, who sort of Freedom Caucus adjacent, tweeted this morning that it now makes it look ridiculous the effort to get rid of McCarthy has resulted in so many
different failures. Although I'm sure Matt Gates, who recently, I think just in the last like twelve hours, endorsed Kevin McCarthy for the head of the RNC amid some reports that Ron and McDaniel is seriously thinking about stepping down Matt Gates would say, well, the chaos was basically the point, because you know there was no hope of doing anything
substantive anyway. That is again when you spend months pitching the impeachment of Aejondra Mayorcis as a substantive victory and then lose because Mike Johnson brought the vote to the floor thinking he had the right number of votes when Democrats were just apparently ostensibly lying to his face. It doesn't really get much worse than that. One person voted procedurally to make sure they would be able to One Republican voted against the impeachment as a total party party line vote in.
Order to the three Republicans who voted no. Their argument was, he's a bad minister of the government. Yes, yeah, right, he's, but it's not illegal. It's not impeachable that like, he's basically carrying out what Biden once been due Biden was elected, and you can't impeach somebody for not.
Doing that, not not sharing your politics.
It's basically the three no votes, right, Ken bomb constitutional. They said, we're stretching the constitution because we're claiming he's stretching the law.
So it was ken Buck, Mike Gallagher, and this is the things that wintalk. I think McLintock, tomcclintock, Jonathan Turley actually made this argument. Who's really popular and sort of right of center circles because he's been a staunch defender of Donald Trump's rights basically amid all of the law fair He's sort of almost a Dershowitz type figure in that space, erstwhile figure of the left or at least the center, who is, you know, constantly putting substance on these these
arguments that are favorable to Donald Trump. Even he came out and wrote that these impeachment articles don't quite cut the mustard for Mayorcus. I had a super fun night last night and actually went through the impeachment articles again, and honestly, the impeachment articles do a really good job showing that Mayorcus has utterly botched the border.
I don't know that they crime.
I know they don't mention a crime except for violating the Violating his oath of office essentially is the charge. And it's one of the reasons, like Gallagher said, he voted against this because as soon as you start to sort of stretch those definitions you get into Banana Republic.
You get you could hit any opposing party cabinet secretary with that.
And that's the argue that Gallagher sort of prebud just.
Name another DHS secretary. That's the other silly part of it.
Exactly, yes, and well, the Senate's not voting to impeach America's I mean, it's just not too before we get to the Senate. One final point on that, Republicans would say, yeah, exactly, Democrats inflated the definition of impeachable offenses when they went after Donald Trump, and so we're giving Americas intentionally, strategically
a taste of his own medicine. They might not say that aloud, but that's definitely part of the reason that they're sort of they say they're responding to the weaponization of impeachment, not weaponizing it themselves, responding to the weapon exactly they started.
It is where we're going with this.
Now on the Senate side, we can put this first element up on the screen. They are probably going to kill this so called bipartisan border deal that turned out not to be that bipartisan because if we put the next element up on the screen and you have even
John Cornyan very very friendly with leadership. In leadership himself the latest senior GP Coffort's member, as Politico says to say, he opposes advancing the legislation this week, arguing that lawmakers quote need more time, but said, I'm pretty confident we can do better with a new president who actually will enforce the law.
You might need a new leader of the Senate.
Actually, we'll get into that in just a moment in order to do much better. Even Mitch McConnell has said that it would be wrong to move on this legislation because quote, the mood in the country has changed. I think that happened around two thousand and six, So I'm glad he's finally catching up.
The mood in the Senate Chamber has changed as well, And we don't need to rehash all this because Crystalin Sager went through it. But from my perspective, I'm like, Wow, like Democrats on a silver platter handed the administration enormous amounts of power that could have been weaponized by Donald
Trump to do absolutely anything. In Steven Miller, these tools and the hands of Steven Miller would have made what the first administration did on the border h Look, look, gentle, and now if Trump does get elected, he's going to have to try to use the current authorities. And Steven Miller has shown like a lot of creativity and willingness to stretch those you know, beyond you know what anybody
could imagine before. But he's going to have to do that rather than having extraordinary powers that Democrats were ready to give to Stephen Miller, which is just a mind boggling like moment.
Well, it's an interesting thing with this bill is that it basically tries to legalize things that have been caught up in the courts different executive actions, you know, not like technically eas but actual like executive authorities that have been used to do different things with asylum, and tries to finally legislate so that those things don't get caught up in the court determinating determining whether it's a fair use of executive authority. And so, yes, your point, it
does expand executive authority in some pretty critical ways. Now, speaking to McConnell, the McConnell fellows over on Ruthless are upset.
Ruthless is a pretty popular like conservative podcast, right.
I guess if we have to call it conservative.
It's like podcast, it's populated by former McConnell and McConnell orbit people.
And yeah, McConnell orbit people, yeah exactly, and people who are in the Republican consultant space.
Conservative.
But yeah, yeah, he comfortably smug is on it, and smug is genuinely really funny. But they come from definitely the establishment Republican Party, like, no question about it. And they had a little meltdown over how Senate Conservatives reacted to the rollout of Langford's bill basically accused Mike Lee of protecting Hamas.
Take a listen to this, and I'm being deadly serious about that. I'm talking about people like Mike Lee.
Mike Mike Lee is a perfect example of the only thing that he really wants to make sure of is that we don't kill Hamas.
And he went on to basically say that Mike Lee's the only job in the seting. That's Josh Holmes again, former longtime McConnell staffer who's now on the consulting side.
Ran the super Pac.
Right, Yeah, well, so that's Josh Holmes saying that Mike Lee, who opposes the border deal, is basically just caring about protecting Hamas.
I guess it's nice to see that everyone across the political spectrum gets accused baselessly for supporting hamas I did.
I will admit I did a little photoshop yesterday and I did put Mike Lee on the cover of Ryan's book.
Maybe we'll add that that was a good one.
So John McCormick, we can put this next element up on the screen tweets that a reporter asked Langford of Oklahoma how it felt to be run over by a bus. Langford replied quote and backed up just perfect.
Now put the next element up on the screen.
This is from my boss at the Federalist, Sean Davis, who's reacting to a statement that John Barrasso so along with John corn and these are like two Mitch McConn two of Mitch McConnell's, as Shan says, top lieutenant's top guys. Barasso yesterday came out and said that he was a no on the bill. Sean then waded in and said, there's a lot going on in this statement and what's
happening basically we can just keep moving through. It was like John basically wrote an essay here because it's the dynamics are genuinely pretty interesting and actually speak to sort of the flip side and the Republican Party.
What you wrote about in your book ran on the.
Democratic side that a lot of people are feeling really badly for James Langford that McConnell. They say, essentially McConnell negotiated this failed bipartisan package with the goal of securing money for Ukraine, knowing that it's dead on arrival in the House. If you know, you don't that the additional Ukraine funding is said on the arrival in the House, if you don't do anything with the border. The House has insisted on passing HR two. So let's have James
Langford go and negotiate. But people really personally like James Langford and they don't want to take their anger out on him because they feel as though Mitch McConnell worked with Chuck Schumer on this and that James Langford was
used basically as a pawn by Mitch McConnell. Chuck Schumer himself said he'd never worked as closely on a piece of legislation with McConnell as he did on this piece of legislation that's out in the open here, So they're sort of like Barasso shifting to blame to Biden, saying that Biden failed James Langford, who just worked tirelessly to secure the border at all costs. And that's basically the spin coming from people on the right at this point.
Really something Ryan to see these dynamics. We have video here of some of these senators reacting to the divides themselves. It is time for Mitch McConnell's.
I think it is.
Look everyone here also supported a leadership challenge to Mitch.
McConnell in November.
I think a Republican leader should actually lead this conference and should advance the priorities of Republicans.
Senator Ted Cruz had a press conference around noon today said that you shouldn't have even tried to negotiate with Democrats, so this bill was designed to fail, and that it's time for you to step down as GEOP leader.
What's your response to that.
I think we can all agree that Senator Cruz is not.
A fan, so mcconnogs, I think we can all agree. I'm not. I shouldn't do the accent, I won't.
I think we can all agree that Senator Cruz is not a fan of the bill, and so Mitch McConnel seems pretty LOOSEI there.
But again, one of the other chief.
Complaints is that he's getting rolled like Mike Johnson by Democrats, not because he is weak in the same way that a lot of people on the House side think Mike Johnson is, but because he's old. We played that club of Biden earlier in the show, stumbling to get through
a sentence about Israel Palestine. People feel like that's happening with Mitch McConnell as well, that he's both physically frail and intellectually frail men frail at this point and is getting steamrolled, is not responsive to constituents.
Et cetera, et cetera. So pretty tough for miss McConnell.
It looks like, based on what Cruz said, all those people there, Cruz is right, did not support they supported leadership challenges to McConnell. Last time that was up for a vote, I think it was like ten votes against McConnell's. So they're going to need to bring a lot more people over to that side. If those numbers start stacking up, you could potentially see McConnell step down to a position like Pelosi is now.
I don't think he would just outright leave the Senate.
But where the sleeves things is, as reports are, we can put this next element up on the screen. Republican senators are now floating the option of moving for a foreign aid package that is divorced from the border, which ran I think that's their only option.
That's where this was headed the entire time, and so and Haggard he later clarified that he is not floating this, that people like Corny and Graham, Jony earnstar and so the idea would be, you you're combining money for Israel, money for Ukraine, and also money for you know, potential Taiwan war, and that there are more than sixty votes for that. So just give up on this whole border thing and just move it through. That appears to be where all of this is headed.
Yeah, you're right, this was predictable from the beginning.
Yeah, And.
It's fascinating that because they couldn't move that Israel money through the House, you know, Democrats voted it down because they say it's a stunt and they want Ukraine and Taiwan money in there as well. The Freedom Caucus though cited kind of fiscal austerity and populist nationalism, which is rather extraordinary development. To have a strong block of kind of hard right Republicans standing up to Apak.
Quite a development.
Yeah, that is really interesting. That's a great point, and that's what oh like, we've this has been a long and kind of chunky block with all of these elements. But again, it reminds me so much of the dynamics you write about in your book on the Democratic side. On the Republican side, there's this incredible tug of war that the media does a really bad job of covering, just sort of treating Mitch McConnell as though he's like a conservative stalwart, when in fact he is the most
according to some surveys, disliked politician in the country. Republicans hate working with Mitch mcconnald at this point, Conservatives hate working with Mitch mcconald at this point. And now whatever goes forward, they have to contend with Mike Johnson being increasingly distrusted and disliked by a lot of conservatives and probably a lot of moderates aren't super happy with Mike Johnson. On the Republican side, right now, so that's a barrier
to passing legislation. If you have that some of a margin, lose trust in leadership, their ability to pass this money is in serious jeopardy even if they divorce it.
And you know, McConnell has long been called this like absolute genius in Washington. I've long been highly skeptical of that judgment. He's been very good at saying no to things, which is easy because all you need is forty one you can say no to things. He's been very good at for decades raising lots of money from very wealthy interests in order to give them you deregulatory policy and tax cuts.
Yes, but there's no genius underneath any of that.
Just saying no, saying no and getting money from rich people's and so that you can give them even more than they gave you.
Like that's not hard. No, it really is take a genius to do that.
No, But if you're good to the media, they're good back to you. And so if you drip leaks to them and dish out those leaks and you have Josh Holmes.
You know, those guys are good. They used to be really good.
But again, it's not that hard to just be nice to the media.
Speaking of money for the Ukraine War, Tucker Carlson announced on Twitter that he's over in Moscow.
Let's roll a little bit of Tucker here.
We're in Moscow tonight. We're here to interview the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, will be doing that soon. They are risks to conducting an interview like this, obviously, so we've thought about it carefully over many months. Here's why we're doing it first, because it's our job. We're in journalism. Our duty is to inform people. Two years into a war that's reshaping the entire world, most Americans are not informed.
This war has utterly reshaped the global military and trade alliances, and the sanctions that followed have as well, and in total, they have upended the world economy. The post World War II economic order, the system that guaranteed prosperity in the West for more than eighty years is coming apart very fast, and along with it the dominance of the US dollar. These are not small changes. They are history altering developments. They able to define the lives of our grandchildren. Most
of the world understands this perfectly well. They can see it ask anyone in Asia the Middle eas lest what the future looks like, and yet the populations of the English speaking countries seem mostly unaware. They think that nothing has really changed, and they think that because no one has told them the truth, their media outlets are corrupt. They lie to their readers and viewers, and they do
that mostly by omission. For example, since the day the war in Ukraine began, American media outlets have spoken to scores of people from Ukraine, and they have done scores of interviews with Ukrainian presidents Zelenski. We ourselves have put in a request for an interview with Zelensky, and we hope he accepts. But the interviews he's already done in
the United States are not traditional interviews. They are fawning pep sessions, specifically designed to amplify Zelensky's demand that the US entry more deeply into a war in Eastern Europe and pay for it. That is not journalism. It is government propaganda, propaganda of the ugliest kind. That we are not encouraging you to agree with what Putin may say in this interview, but we are urging you to watch it.
You should know as much as you can and then, like a free citizen and not a slave, you can decide for yourself.
So the news that Tucker was in Moscow was greeted with let's say, what's the right word for this rage in some corners of the media, scoffing, and some quarters of the media not entirely surprising. He should be noted that NBC News as recently as a few years ago had done an interview with Vladimir Putin. Here's a flavor of what some folks in the media had to say about Tucker's trip to Russia. Carlson is now just another far raid conspiracy pedler with a show on the Internet.
He's no longer on Fox as we all know, and he's apparently been spending the last few days in Moscow for some reason. Who knows. We don't know why.
He has to stay relevant somehow, so I guess we'll learn the coming days.
Maybe. Yeah.
Well, when I first heard that he was there, I just assumed he was there to get an award, because there probably isn't an American who has done more for Vladimir Putin in the last couple of years than Tucker Carlson. He's been he sided with Russia on the invasion. He was consistently bet rating Vladimir Zelenski and lifting up Putin, So that's how he got the interview. And I think Putin's expecting a friendly interview. You know, Putin actually order
of the Kremlin. Did State TV to cover Tucker and to carry some of Tucker's comments because they viewed them as so helpful to Putin in this war effort. So I'm sure they'll have a warm a warm session, whether it's an award or I guess the interview would be his award award.
The meeting of the Mutual Admiration Society over in that was a little smug.
Aaron Burnett also criticized Tucker for basically being or She highlighted, let's say the State TV coverage of Tucker's visit to Moscow and previous coverage of Tucker and his comments on the Ukraine War as a sort of criticism of him going over to interview Putin. And here's Christian amenpor we can put this element up on the screen. Does Tucker really think we journalists haven't been trying to interview President Putin every day since his full scale invasion of Ukraine.
It's absurd. We'll continue to ask for an interview, just as we have for years now. Because in that video, it's about five minutes long. We just played a clip of it. Tucker explains that he one of the reasons he goes over there is one of the reasons he went over there is because he doesn't feel as though Putin has gotten anyt he's given any access to Western journalists, because in his contention is that Western journalists have basically not tried to interview Putin.
They've made up their mind about Putin.
What do you make of that, Ryan, I mean, I think Christian Amanpur is one of the few that can credibly push back on that claim.
She would absolutely be happy to interview Putin.
And I think anybody out there who is critical of the concept of Tucker Carls and interviewing Putin should consider those a'men por comments, Amenporou would be eager to interview him. I think the question becomes, how does he do the interview? And he's under a lot of pressure to do a serious, hard hitting interview, and I hope that he does because that's the kind of interview the world needs to see.
I think there's a chance he will do that because he treated this one differently than he has treated previous ones. In other words, so he previously interviewed Andrew Tate and that was a softball interview.
I defended the concept of.
Interviewing Andrew Tate, but giving him a softball interview that I don't defend. He did not explain ahead of time, defend or defend the decision to interview Andrew Tate like he just did. He just put this preemptive self defense of his decision to interview Vladimir Putin. And so he understands the pressure he's under there. So if he understands the pressure he's under and he still gives a softball interview, I think that'll be an interest call on his part
to make. So the question should never be do you interview a public figure? It's how you do the interview, you know. CNN's Peter Bergen famously made his career by getting an interview with Osama bin Laden in a cave. It was a phenomenon at the time when he did it. It was this is nineteen ninety seven, so it was before September eleventh, But people in the no still understood Osam bin Laden to be like the world's leading terrorist.
And but of course, if you have the opportunity to interview even Osama bin Laden, you take that interview, but you challenge him. So we'll see how the interview rolls out, and I think that will will determine whether you know what we can say about.
The decision in Tucker said in that video he secured an agreement from Elon Muskin Acts to air the video in full the interview in full, which of course we still don't have the interview, were waiting for it to be released. But that's interesting too because Musk has actually cooperated with Starlink in Ukraine.
In the past.
And if talker errs, which is again this is We've talked about this many times.
It's crazy that.
Elon Musk is in this position of like immense geopolitical military power as essentially an unelected member of the business community. If Tucker airs an interview that's overly flattering to putin a lot of people were mentioning that he cut those comments of Kanye West going into like anti submitic conspiratorial territory from the interview he did with Kanye, asking if Kanye sounded crazy and then then rolling you know, cutting
ostensibly cutting what made Kanye sound absolutely crazy. If he does something similar with Putin, perhaps that can add friction to his relationship with Elon Musk. If Elon Musk is forced to basically allow an interview that you know, he thinks is uncomfortable or needs a community note or something like that. I don't know if they have any agreements
about that. But Tucker's business does really rely on X. It's called Tucker on X, the show is called Tucker on X, So there are legitimate business interests for Tucker to balance in doing a good job with this interview. I agree that the pressures is so high that to be overly flattering. To be fair, the media is going to say that this interview is overly flattering. No matter what,
Tucker could do a great job. Tucker could be Christian I'm impoor and handle the interview the exact same way as she would from even sort of a blobby foreign policy establishment type way, and the media would pull out any different clips and say that this was reckless and Tucker was sucking up to Putin, et cetera, et cetera.
So even if the interview like veers into territory, that it shouldn't a couple of times it was going to happen no matter what Tucker knows, It's going to happen, no matter what Tucker says, most Americans don't understand why Putin invaded Ukraine. Ryan, I think that's true in the effort to expose that, though.
He does have to be right, and we're not going to get an answer to why Russian invaded Ukraine. We're going to get Putin's explanation and propaganda for why he invaded Ukraine, which is fine, Like we want to hear what propaganda all different sides are putting out and sort through.
It, like right and there is.
It is true that the media has basically given no airtime to Putin's propaganda, so that what Tucker is saying in that video is basically Americans don't even understand what, you know, the their billions of dollars are fighting or or fighting from Putin's perspective, like what it's you know, And I actually think that's perfectly reasonable because you know that's it's war. It's again billions of dollars, and you know there's there's so little coverage of that in the media.
People are smart enough to decide from themselves. They don't need the government to protect them from whys from foreign leaders. Foreign leaders lie all the time like people can figure it out themselves. And Ryan, actually, this is a good transition to the next block on Pakistan, because you've interviewed controversial foreign leaders, including Imran Khan. You interviewed on this show on this channel, and people can go watch it.
Imran Khan And that had to have been, in and of itself a high pressure and tricky task.
That was it.
I was a fascinating interview and I tried to press him on, you know, some of his own So Imran kan is a foreign Prime Minister of Pakistan who was ousted in a no confidence vote in twenty twenty two through pressure from the US State Department as well as the Pakistani military. But yeah, when I interviewed him, I pushed him on the question of you.
Know, how does it feel to.
Have kind of had some of the same tactics turned on you that you were using against some of your own opponents. Because he was criticized heavily during his term for cracking down on civil society, cracking down on dissent, censoring, censoring, censoring.
The media.
Now because he was ousted before his term was over. Pakistan was supposed to have a new election almost a year ago. Instead, it'll happen tonight US time, tomorrow, tomorrow, Pakistan time.
February eighth. Pakistani voters are going to go to the polls.
Have a new story up over at the Intercept, which is which looks at the incredible ways that the military backed government is undermining the election over there. They're utterly kind of almost fantastical and unbelievable.
Kind of the lowest level thing that.
The Pakistani government is doing to undermine democracy in Pakistan would practically be the most serious thing that anybody could have found in the twenty twenty presidential election. Like you want to complain about censorship, they're just absolutely just completely censoring everything in Pakistan. You want to complain about, you know, kind of Silicon Valley folks being nudged by DHS. They're threatening to close the entire shutdown the entire internet for the election on Thursday.
So just.
To give people a flavor of what pack the Pakistani government is doing, we're going to run through some of these. But first on Monday, the State Department was pressed yet again on it's kind of shrugging off of a lot of a lot of the concerns that haven't been raised about democracy after the State Department pushed in ron Khan out of power and they made their kind of most forceful comment to date. But all of that is relative,
and you'll see how forceful this sounds. Here's van Am Patel at the US State Department on Monday.
Continuing to monitor Pakistan's electoral process quite closely. Then, as we have said, we want to see that process take place in a way that facilitates broad participation with respect for freedom of expression, assembly and associations. We have concerns of the all incidents of violence and restrictions on media freedom, freedom of expression, including internet freedom and peaceful and a peaceful assembly and association. We're concerned by some of the
infringements that we've seen in that space. Pakistanis deserve to exercise their fundamental right to choose their future leaders through free and fair elections without fear, violence or intimidation, and it is ultimately for the people of Pakistan to decide their political future.
In the past, the State Department had just said, you know, we hope that there will be free and fair elections, and we urge there to be free and fair elections. This one gets a little bit goes a little bit beyond that, and it comes as you're seeing intense pressure from members of Congress.
We're going to talk to Greg Gasar later in the show.
He's one of those who's been putting pressure on the Pakistan military to respect democracy. But let's run through just a couple of these things that they're doing, because maybe.
It's taste of what we'll get here one day.
But so first of all, you can put up this Dawn, this element from Dawn, a major paper in Pakistan that writes alarm over quote snatching of PTI nomination papers and so PTI is Imron Kahn's party. So basically, rank and file candidates are taking their nomination papers, going to the office where they file those papers and just having them snatched and basically thrown away.
They just can't run separately.
Instead, they're just being arrested at the office for filing papers. And then they'll emerge, they'll hobble out of detention several days later, clearly having been tortured, and will announce that
they're actually withdrawing. They don't intend to run after all, or if they do manage to get their papers in and get home, their homes and the homes of their relatives are raided over the next couple of days, and then they announced that there that they're not running anymore, so basically trying to make sure that there are kind
of no candidates for anybody to vote for. One of the wilder things that we've seen is you saw a low level of fish shill blue the whistle on what's called the election management system, saying that it's having all sorts of funky issues that suggest that it's it's been hacked and been controlled from the outside.
This is where they do the vote counting.
Uh, the Pakistan military had put a this is supposed to be a civilian operation. They put a general, They put an acting general to oversee the thing does not necessarily inspire too much confidence.
Never a good sign.
Never good sign.
We already talked about how they're they're threatening to you know, and there their real fears that they're going to shut down the entire government from like February seventh to ninth, so like during during the election in run, Khan has been banned from running for office, like he's not allowed. Like he's not allowed. He's in prison right now. Pretty fundamental problem for a political party, Uh, the PTIs. Every
party has a symbol here in the US. I guess the Democrats have a donkey because it's the substantial portion of the Pakistani electorate can't read.
They'll vote, they'll vote on the symbol.
The PTI's symbol is a cricket bat because Imran Khan is a famous cricketer. Supreme Court they're ruled on some bizarre technicality that doesn't apply to any other party. They can't use their bat anymore. And so what they're what they're what they're forcing all of PTI's candidates to do is run as independents without any symbol, and so people are just gonna have to kind of guess, you know,
which which candidate is the one that they're supporting. What that also means is that even if despite all of these obstacles, the Pakistani voters do choose PTI candidates to have a majority in the parliament, they're now all independents and they're not subject to these anti horse trading laws. So the military can go to them and put the same kind of pressures that they did on candidates not to run to switch parties, and so then they might.
Hobble out of.
Out of the ten after getting abducted and announced you know, I'm actually joining with this party instead not going to be with PTI anymore. And so that means even if they win, like the military has a backup plan. Meanwhile, there there have been PTI candidates who have been killed lately. There was an explosion at a PTI rally where I think ten ten people were killed. The I s KR claimed responsibility for that, which is the kind of an ISIS affiliate. But nobody can explain why an ISIS affiliate
would be targeting a bunch of PTI rallies. And people have pointed out that there are links and there have been known links in the past between the I s I and these and these terror groups. And also the fact that it's reported that they claim responsibility for a bombing doesn't necessarily mean that they actually did a bombing.
So you've got all these So you've got just random terrorist.
Bombings of these PTI rallies when when there's actually no kind of direct political rationale that that ISIS would have to like target uh pt I you've also had police raids of candidates all all over the place, and you've even had reports and very credible reports coming out of kind of PTI strongholds, uh that police are pulling over all people and grabbing them and giving them just tickets
by the boat load. And if you get a ticket, and Pakistan police can confiscate your ident, your ID, which you don't get back until you pay the ticket, So that that could mean like thousands and thousands of people could be without their ideas and then can't show up to vote. Just the most petty you like, pathetic, little stuffy tax stuff just doing like as somebody described it to me, they're like, if you can think of something that you could do to reduce the vote share from
pt I. Uh, They're they're doing it. It's it's just wildly across the board. But it's but you are so Abigail Spamberger m HM just put out a sent out set a letter today to Secretary of State Anthony Blincoln warning about all this stuff you had, Abigail, which that's going to resonate because you know, because of her close links to the Intelligence Agency. The House Foreign Affairs, the
chairman is Michael McCall. He's been vocal on this. Greg Meeks, the Democrat who's the ranking member on House Foreign Affairs, has also been vocal on this. So you're finally starting to see some costure pressure, right, right, was a big, big Pakistani population, that's right, and it's significant one in Virginia as well. And and Spamberger is running for governor. That's right in Virginia.
So another headache for the Biden administration with in the Middle East, with an ally that is not going to be fun for them to continue to navigate, as the clip that you played from the briefing shows, Yeah.
And it's like, we should get results tomorrow, but it's hard to take seriously the idea that we should wait and like even take you know, give any stock to what they're going to report the results are after And the real tragedy is there was a lot of pressure on PTI to boycott the election, like like, look, this is this is such a travesty of democracy, you can't
even participate in this. But Pakistani people have fought so hard the last fifteen years or so in there with their democracy movement to push back on the military's power in that country and it's it's just tremendously sad to see all of the people who are investing their hopes and dreams in this system and putting.
Their faith into this system, which is just telling.
Them over and over again that that faith is misplaced and that their votes aren't going to count, and that it doesn't matter what you want.
But you know, the politics Pakistan are volatile.
The US has is interested in Pakistan, sometimes ignores it a lot of the other times. So we'll see, like the willingness of so many people to put their names on the ballot knowing that there's a good chance that they're going to get raided and tortured just for doing that, the willingness of so many people to turn out to vote is inspiring.
At the same time, and without you know, drawing a direct comparison, it's interesting you started this block by saying, you know, for a taste of what could happen here at some point. That's actually a good transition to what we're going to be talking with Leefong about, which is some sort of censorship here in the United States that has happened. It's happening in full public view. He has
some excellent reporting on it. He testified before Congress just yesterday, so we're going to get some snap reaction from Lefong on his experience in front of Congress yesterday. Right after this, we're joined now by independent journalist Lee Fong, who testified just yesterday day before the House Select Committee on Weaponization about some of his excellent reporting, which you can and should read and follow at lefong dot com. That's the link to Lee's substack.
Lee, thanks for joining us, Hey, thanks for having me, of.
Course, so we have a clip of you testifying that I want to get your thoughts on quickly. Let's roll Lea's testimony. This part of Lee's testimony in front of the House yesterday.
More recently, in collaboration with Unheard and Real Clear Investigations and with my co author Jack Poulson, I reported that Maderna relaunched these efforts to influence vaccine discourse last summer, again working with public good projects, Maderna employed the services of the artificial intelligence firm talk Walker to monitor vaccine related conversations across one hundred and fifty million websites, including
social media and gaming platforms like Steam. There are many other examples in my reporting beyond the Twitter files and Maderna documents that show overreach by government and corporate interest to stifle free speech. Last month, I revealed documents on the activities of Logically, a British artificial intelligence firm that is poised to shape the twenty twenty four election. Is important to underscore why the American public should be aware
of this firm. Logically previously had contracts in the United Kingdom to combat misinformation during the pandemic, but like many other firms of this nature, they instead surveilled legitimate forms of speech, including thoughtful concerns about pandemic lockdowns. Logically boasted of a special partnership with Facebook to automatically suppress and label any content they deemed as misinformation, giving the company
immense influence over content moderation decisions. In my official written remarks my testimony, I go into much greater detail about my record on these issues. Writing on censorship and surveillance of animal rights activists and labor union activists, I've profiled the various private contractors that began by spying on behalf of the FBI during the War on Terror, that now utilize artificial intelligence to spy on conservative anti vaccine mandate activists.
More recently, I've reported on organized suppression of peaceful speech by pro Palestinian activists.
So like Matt Tayeb, Michael Schallenberger, Amado Morris, and others. Before you lead, you were peppered by questions, as it's custom, by members of the committee.
Tell us a little bit about that experience.
What it was like sort of having your reporting befront and center at a hearing when you know some people on one side of the aisle have different.
Motivations of people on the other side of the aisle. What was it like yesterday?
Well, sure, you know, these committee hearings are a little bit substive, a little bit political theater. I used it just as an opportunity to showcase my reporting to talk about a principle that I hold deer, which is free speech.
It was a good opportunity.
I mean, having that additional platform to engage with the members was a good experience. And you know, it's not every day that you get to talk to a large number of Republican lawmakers about Palestinian free speech, about free speech on the internet. To criticize the Department of Homeland Security in the halls of Congress. You know, I really enjoyed it.
Five years ago, you probably would not have expected that Jim Jordan and Republicans would have called you to testify in front of Congress.
No.
I mean this term is a little bit cliche sometimes, but it is a realignment on these issues. And we did get into interesting back and forth about that as the Democrats were kind of ignoring the substance of the hearing. Every time a Democrat member had the microphone, they would just talk about Trump and how Trump would be a dictator and how dangerous Trump is, and we need to talk about Trump and the election, not talk about free
speech and social media censorship. And I just kind of detected a little bit of cognitive dissonance there, because if you're concerned about an authoritarian president a matter of the party, wouldn't you want to dismantle a government and law enforcement apparatus that allows the government to control what we can read on social media and in the news.
Before we get into your most recent piece that is I think fascinating on this whole question of censorship, how did they respond to your pushback about Palestinian censorship, because it has been the most kind of blatant contradiction in there, and they're kind of censorship and cancel culture values.
Well actually for this case.
Well, look, I think there are probably some fair weather supporters of free speech. You know, it's easy to support free speech when your size is being censored. It's hard to stand up for your enemies or your political opponents. But that's where the real principle lies. But I do see a number of the Republican lawmakers kind of alarm bells going off in their head when I was talking about the issue, talk to about it privately, including about just this general principle of hey, we need free speech
for everyone. You know, we're in an open society, a free society. We don't have the answers. We don't think the government should have all the answers either. We need to debate and discuss these issues.
Yeah, and I think because of Trump, Republicans not everyone.
Again, like they're obviously some fairweather people, but they're getting a taste of how the imperial presidency can be used against them. Not I mean, obviously the military and war and all that is different questions that's been going on for years. But like this new post nine to eleven security state, which is.
You're reporting on DHS, you're reporting.
Anstucts, you're reporting on all of these things that are under the umbrella of the security State essentially being weaponized in elections, which is fascinating.
Look, it wasn't that long ago when Democrats were leading the charge against the Department of Homeland Security and expansion of the Security State, saying that, you know, the Bush administration will exploit this new agency created after nine to eleven to sway elections and suppress our civil liberties. Now the biggest cheerleaders for the expansion of the DHS are the Democrats. I mean, that's just kind of unfortunately how polarization works here in Washington.
And so let's get into this new reporting, kind of a new Twitter files report that you put up earlier this week. It's such a funny, isn't the word? But it's also kind of funny. So New York Times reporter read Epstein. We can set the stage here. So it's early in the morning of the election in twenty twenty, and we're all waiting for Wisconsin's votes to come in, and he tweets out that do I have the exact
tweet here? Says he says Green Bay's absentee ballot results are being delayed because one of the vote counting machines ran out of ink and an elections official had to return to city hall to get more. Then an election official responds, that's not true, they don't use inc and then the main election official account retweets that, and then you have a whole kind of pile on against redes of all of these people saying this is misinformation, which is is Twitter.
It's fine, let him hash.
It out, but then you have the kind of government hall monitors flag it for.
Twitter itself.
So pick up the story from there, because that, to me is where it gets deeply disturbing.
Yeah, I mean, this should be an innocuous tweet. It's a reporter making an observation about the political process, something that he had seen firsthand, and rather than it just being a benign tweet, it set off alarm bells in Washington. Almost as soon as these local Wisconsin and election officials disputed the accuracy of this tweeteah like three in the morning, right three in the morning, four in the morning, something
like that. It gets forwarded along to the Department of Homeland Security top Countering Foreign influence official at the agency forwards it along to Twitter in San Francisco and starts pressuring the tech company to take action. Now, of course, the DHS says, you know, we never force these tech companies to do anything. We don't censor speech, we don't police speech. But they say take action, and then Twitter says, we're escalating. DHS responds, thank you. So it's clear that
they wanted a certain type of action. And what action did they take. They censored the tweet. The tweet was going viral and it was receiving It had about three thousand retweets initially. Once Twitter took action escalated the tweet, those retweets disappeared. Anyone who quote tweeted it, that tweet poof, it's gone vanished. It still carries a warning label now today if you try to read it, it says warning misinformation.
It has a warning label.
You still can't quote tweet it, you can't interact with it, you can't comment on it.
It's still shadow band.
I think is the right term for this, because it's it didn't get deleted, but it's all the sharing function, the you know, all the different type of tags that get attached to it. To block its visibility. Are there, and here's the rub. The tweet looks accurate.
Yeah, tell us about this.
This is the crazy part because that whole process is wrong, period. Even if Reid was wrong right, like to me, then okay, DHS and the elections will reach out to read and say you're wrong, right, could correct it. Like I've said incorrect things before, and I hear from the people who I report it on and they're like, that's wrong. I'm like, and they prove it's wrong, and I correct it like that and that's fine.
Like that's how it goes, That's how it should go.
But it turns out go ahead it Actually he was not wrong necessarily right.
The local election clerk who disputed the tweet was acting under the assumption that Green Bay was only using the DS two hundred machine, which does not use ink, So she said it's impossible, and that's normally the case. But because it was twenty twenty and Wisconsin was expecting higher than usual turnout, they leased an additional vote counting machine that does require ink that is attached to an external printer,
and there were some ink issues that night. So not only was the allegation based on a false assumption or misunderstanding. You know, they didn't verify, they didn't do any of the kind of basics when you're engaging any type of media work like this, and especially sensitive media work. And I think it just this issue reflects the larger problem
of this censorship regime. You do have the case of and you know, I've documented many cases of this on my substack and so of others from the Twitter files, that there are politically motivated sensors out there, people who
have a partisan or ideological bias. But there's also just the Hey, if you're hastily censoring people without doing any of your own fact checking, you're just taking the whatever kind of data is given to you by a government official, and you assume that that's the truth handed down from God, You're going to get it wrong.
You're going to end up censoring truthful information.
And I think the other big kind of impact of this is that Wisconsin, a lot of people did not trust the integrity of the ballot there, and so when you have the government censoring true information right about the vote count, that doesn't increase trust in our elections. That really contributes to the erosion of trust, because who do
you trust here. If the government's saying, hey, we've got to protect the integrity of this vote, we've got to make sure there's no misinformation that lies to people, and then they're contributing to the lies.
Who do you trust here?
And that's why you have the free press in this ecosystem, so that there can be some modicum of trust and there can be some checks and balances. And you've reported on this with Maderna too. Can you get into and a lot of actually other cases, can you get into that distinction between outright censorship and suppression, which is something that the government and tack lean heavily on. Let's say this is not where where you can still find the information.
You could still read the New York Posts Hunter Biden laptop story. It was just you know, algorithmically suppressed or whatever. Can you talk a little bit about how they rely on that distinction and weaponize really that distinction to defend themselves.
And before you answer, I just want to flag and maybe we can put this up on post. But yeah, the tweet today reads some or all of the content shared in this post is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process. You can learn click to learn more, or if you're a rebel, you can click view.
Whoah, and there's the tweet after you click view.
It's like an nsf W tag, but just for an election report from the New York Times. Report five.
It says it has five reposts.
Yeah, it's like the parental advisory content to talk altum.
Yeah, exactly, watch out kids.
But yeah, you know, I'm just talking about this kind of broader issue of censorship. You know, my reporting differs a little bit from some of the other Twitter follows journalists. You know, I also took a focus on private sector influence, and you know that opens up some different legal questions. Perhaps it's totally legal for one oil company or pharmaceutical company to collaborate with the private platforms. It's to tell you what you can read and not read about their
products or about the policies that affect them. But we live in a free society, or we I hope we live in a free society, and we need to have debates around this topic. And a lot of the censorship did not just come from the government. It came from companies like Maderna, Pfizer, funding lobby funded funding lobbyists who worked with NGOs who were helping craft the content moderation policies at Twitter, giving them actual lists of accounts to
amplify and de amplify. In some cases, those accounts that they were targeting to be de amplified ended up getting banned. A few of these accounts did, uh, you know, promote messages about vaccines that were not true, messages about microchips. But some of them promoted messages that are legitimate areas for public policy debate, people criticizing the idea around vaccine passports. You know, this idea that the only way you could engage in commerce, go to a restaurant, have a business,
was to show your vaccinated status. They took tweets like that and from groups that were funded by Big Pharma targeted those messages, so that that's just another form of censorship. Again, the legal area is different because it's not the government, but still it has the same impact, and it's.
They're funded so heavily by the government that it's hard to divorce.
Sure true, I mean Maderna taking their basic signs from NIH and big funding from Operation Warp Speed. What is like, what is the distinction between government and corporation.
Here right while, I while I've got you here, I'm curious, how's the how's the substack life?
How are things going?
People should I'm a subscriber to the subtack. Everybody should should sign up. Lefong dot co, calmly fun, got substack dot com.
We'll get you there, you microchip Ryan, But how are how are you liking it compared to you know, because the rest of your career has been in newsrooms for the like various newsrooms.
Including The Intercept for a long time. Yeah, what's it? What's it like being out as an independent reporter.
I'm still figuring out my path, you know. I launched the Subseact last April, and you know, just personally, it's been a journey.
You know.
I kind of started out at a more partisan left leaning site, sponsored Progress, sponsored by the Center for American Progress, and that didn't work out because I kept clashing with the editors and the people of the think tank, because I wanted to criticize the Democratic Party. I wanted to criticize and report on corporate interests that we're funding the Center for American Progress.
And yeah, no that's not worry.
Yeah, that didn't work.
Out, and I joined a number of uh more progressive left magazines and outlets, and you know, they have their own kind of editorial freedom issues. You know, because of the polarization in Washington, a lot of right wing, right leaning outlets, You've got to be a good foot soldier in those ideological trenches. Same on the left, and you know, I just have to be my own man and be my own journalist, and I want to be able to call out wrongdoing, whether it's on the left, the right,
or the center. It's difficult to report on groups like antifile with the extreme elements of the Abolish the Police movement. If you're on the progressive left and you know, serving the public interest, I have to call attention to those issues as well. So I like subsect for the editorial freedom. I do miss working in a team, though, I like working with editors and other journalists. I've brought in some
friends to help me with some stories. I worked with my friend Jack Paulson on a big story on efforts to suppress and cancel people trying to talk about Palestinian human rights.
So yeah, it's a mix.
But if you know, really enjoying it, and if your viewers have an opportunity to subscribe, welcome their subscription.
How have the readers repected to the Palestinian coverage Because Glenn Greenwald, another of our former colleagues, has talked publicly about how a lot of people who liked his criticism of kind of canceled culture and censorship previous to October seventh, all of a sudden found him to be problematic and we're leaving.
Yeah.
No, I did lose a few subscribers writing about Palestinian human rights and free expression. I've lost readers pretty much with every story. You know, you gained, someone lose them. And I actually, to the credit of my subscribers and to my readers, a few people who said I'm quitting, I'm not subscribing to you anymore because you kind of wrote this story. A lot of them came back and I love your journalism and never mind. I changed my
mind and I've communicated with it. You know, sub sex is a great platform because it really connects you more with the reader, and I enjoy the back and forth. I don't know if you know I'm not the arbiter of truth. You know, I'm trying to do my best to find the facts and put it in context and
do the reporting and deliver it to the reader. But you never know, everyone has blind spots, and I enjoy communicating with the reader, communicating with people from different viewpoints, and yeah, it's been a really good experience on a.
Scale of one to ten. Rank Ryan as an editor.
Kidding, One last question for you is are you still picking apart Twitter file stuff? You're still going through those documents.
Yeah, I've got a few others that I'd like to release later this year and you know, combining them with other documents. The one thing that I found interesting is that, you know, recently, I've been looking at some of these firms in Europe and there's new scrutiny there because in Europe and the UK there are stronger data laws kind of like our Freedom of Information Act requests, but you
can request your own data. So for people across the ideological spectrum, mostly on the right, they've been making requests to their government, to private sector firms to find out if faith and censored, they've been canceled, and so they're doing their own kind of citizen journalist based on these data laws that we don't have so much in the US.
Now.
California has a mini version of this, and I've been getting into that a little bit and it's been super interesting.
That sounds great, well, all the more reason to subscribe at Lee Fung dot com.
Lee, thank you so much for joining.
Us, Thanks for having me. Of course, we're going to wrap the show for now.
We're going to interview Congressman Greg Kasar about the border bill, about Pakistan elections, about whatever else we want to get into, but that'll come after the show. We'll post it at YouTube and whatever else we post stuff. But otherwise, thank you Lee for joining us, and yeah, we'll see you next week.