Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Make Them Riot, A man described by Jack Smith as a Trump campaign employee, agent and co conspirator, his identity redacted replaced by the ID number P five informs a colleague on the ground at the vote counting on election night twenty twenty in Detroit, make them Riot, do it? Do
it with three exclamation points. The full paragraph from the Jack Smith Opus number one revealed yesterday reads, on November fourth, P five, a campaign employee agent and co conspirator of the defendant, tried to sow confusion when the ongoing vote count at the CCF Center in Detroit, Michigan looked on favorable for the defendant. There when a colleague at the TCF center told P. Five, we think a batch of
votes heavily in Biden's favor is right. P five responded, find a reason it isn't give me options to file litigation and even if it biz sick, meaning even if it is. When the colleague suggested that there was about to be unrest reminiscent of the Brooks Brothers Riot, a violent effort to stop the vote count in Florida after the two thousand presidential election. P. Five responded, make them riot and do it. Exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point.
It's one hundred and sixty five pages of that. You open the file and the treason falls out and covers you like dust from the top of your bookshelf. All the evidence you need to prove Trump is guilty of knowingly trying to subvert the election and now knowingly trying to pretend he was just asking the kind of good questions any good president would when there was evidence of a crooked vote somewhere. Quoting again, contrary to the defendant's
public claims of victory. Immediately following election day, his advisors informed him that he would likely lose. On November seventh, in a private campaign meeting that included P two, P three, P. Four, and White House staffer P. Nine, who came to serve as a conduit for information from the campaign to the defendant, campaign staff told the defendant that he had only a slim chance of prevailing in the election, and that any potential success was contingent on the defendant winning all ongoing
vote counts or litigation in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. Within a week of that assessment. On November thirteenth, the defendant's campaign conceded its litigation in Arizona, meaning that, based on his campaign advisor's previous assessment, the defendant had lost the election.
November thirteenth, I suggested here last Friday that a particular Trump Post had given us a preview of Jack Smith's tack, that there must have been some tip off to his lawyers that what was in the Smith submission to Judge Chutkin, and that Trump was now scrambling to disprove what must have been Smith's basic premise that from the beginning Trump knew he had lost, and thus everything he did for which he is now charged, he did as a private citizen,
as a candidate, as a politician, as a criminal, not as a president, no matter how immune a corrupt Supreme Court would try to make him. That Trump Post read shocking breaking news, as exposed by the great John Solomon and the great work of Congressman Barry Loudermilk and the Republicans on the House Oversight Committee. The deep State chose to disregard my direct authorization of at least ten thousand National Guard troops to ensure that Washington, DC was safe
and secure on January sixth, twenty twenty one. These Deep State subversives disobeyed the president's directives, which would have prevented any unrest that day. January sixth, as it is known,
would never have taken place. Not only that the Deep State betrayed me nonsense, but Trump also again brought up his lie about Nancy Pelosi and troops that night in his spasm in front of some microphones at Trump Tower, and one of Trump's top ass kissers, Joe Kernan of CNBC, had said, quote, in the heat of that moment, at that point, I think he really did believe that it had been stolen at that point. I don't know if
he believes it anymore. If Jack Smith's tack were is that Trump knew all along he lost, and that everything afterwards, literally everything after November fourth, was insurrection or an attempted alibi for insurrection. Trump had to quickly revive the idea that he was just following the clues, just serving the nation,
just out there presidenting his big ass off. Having Trump staffer and Operative P five trying to start a riot at the vote counting in Detroit, not on January sixth, but on November fourth, kind of puts the bullet from a smoking gun through the heart of the I was just presidenting argument. So who is P five? There actually seems to be an answer. It would be nice if it were Rudy Giuliani. It's not He's got a different number,
or Roger Stone or somebody like that. But in fact the consensus is is it's a Trump dirty trickster named Mike Roman. The gadfly J Quoh wrote last December that Jacksmith had filed a four oh four B notice in his case against Trump about evidence probably not included in the charges that still went to Trump's motive or his
quote propensity to commit crimes. Now that the four oh four B notice pertained to a Trump campaign employee trying to start a riot at the counting center in Detroit on election night, quote noted that in June last year, CNN had reported that Mike Roman was cooperating with federal prosecutors in their pursuit of Trump. Just so happens, Mike Roman posted a video from the Detroit count of quote unquote challengers being ejected from the vote count Just so happens. Roman,
isn't some peripheral figure in Trump World. In twenty sixteen, he was Trump's chief watcher of the poll sites. In twenty twenty, he worked on the fake Elector's scheme. In twenty twenty two, he was indicted in Arizona, in Georgia and Wisconsin. Check his closets, see if he has any shirts with P five monogrammed in the collars. As I said, metaphorically, turned to any page in the Smith filing, and treason will fall off the shelf and hit you in the
effing head. There's mister P five. Even before the election was called for Joe Biden to indicate just how soon Trump campaign staff knew it was over, and just how
soon Trump campaign staff turned to violence. For a little grotesque snapshot of the brutality and the disregard for the country, though, and the constitution and human life, there are the stars of a little Later in the story, on page one hundred and forty two, the defendant further revealed the private nature of his desperate conduct as a candidate rather than a president, in an exchange that the government does not
plan to use it. He had with aid P fifteen Shortly after the two to twenty four PM tweet on January sixth, upon receiving a phone call alerting him that Vice President Mike Pence had been taken to a secure location. P fifteen rushed to the dining room to inform the defendant and hopes that the defendant would take action to insure Pence's safety. Instead, after p fifteen delivered the news, the defendant looked at him and said, only so what?
Just to give a little context as to what Trump was doing all that day, Smith now has Trump's phone log and witness accounts. He has a play by play of Trump attorney Kenny the Cheese ken chesbro ordered by Trump to come to DC for January sixth, actually going so far as Trump's proxy as to have quote marched with the crowd to the Capitol and breached the restricted areas surrounding the building as the nation teeter's on chaos. Trump himself is in the White House dining room. Fox
News is on the monitor. Trump is on his phone scrolling through Twitter. Smith has all of Trump's tweets and so what everybody's had those? He's had them analyzed textually, and in the filing, Jack Smith asserts they are proven private conduct, not presidential actions. Quote the phone's activity log show that the defendant was using his phone, and in particular, using the Twitter application, consistently throughout the day after he returned from the Ellipse speech. Then there is a different
kind of activity log. Jack Smith says he has previously undisclosed evidence of countless interactions between Trump and Vice President Pence, which he then outlines. A call between the defendant and Pence on November seventh, the day that media organizations began to projectden Is the winner of the election. Pence tried to encourage the defendant as a friend, reminding him you took a dying political party and gave it a new
lease on life. A November eleventh meeting among the defendant, Pence campaign staff and some White House staff, during which Pence asked when most of the lawsuits would be resolved, When does this come to a head unquote, and the campaign staff responded the week after Thanksgiving, A November twelfth meeting among the defendant, Pence campaign staff, and some White House staff, during which Pence recalls the campaign lawyers gave a sober and somewhat pessimistic report on the state of
election challenges. A private lunch on November twelfth, in which Pence reiterated a face saving option for the defendant, don't concede, but recognize process is over. A private lunch on November sixteenth, in which Pence tried to encourage the defendant to accept the results of the election and run again in twenty two twenty four, to which the defendant responded, I don't know.
Twenty twenty four is so far off. A November twenty third phone call in which the defendant told Pence that the defendant's private attorney P. Seventy six was not optimistic about the election challenges. A December twenty first private lunch in which Pence encouraged the defendant quote not to look at the election as a loss, just an intermission. This was followed later in the day by a private discussion in the Oval office in which the defendant asked Pence,
what do you think we should do? Pence said, after we have exhausted every legal process in the courts and Congress, if we still come up short, the defendant should take a bow. It's not a loss. It's an intermission. They're not jeering you, they're saying boo ump. And what happened after all this? After Pence turned his hair white trying
to convince Trump. Quote. On December twenty eighth, CC two that's co conspirator, co conspirator five, and co Conspirator six exchanged text messages in which CC two expressed concern that Gomer versus Pence, a lawsuit filed that day before, they asserted that Pence had the discretion to choose electoral votes during the certification proceeding would prompt a federal court to publicly reject and thus preclude the plan that the conspirators
were advancing in private. Thereafter, at eleven am on January first, the defendant called Pence to berate him because he had learned that Pence had filed a brief opposing the relief sought in Gomert. When Pence explained, as he had before, that he did not believe that he had the power under the Constitution to decide which votes to accept, the defendant told him that quote, hundreds of thousands of people are gonna hate your guts, and people are gonna think
you're stupid, and berated him pointedly, you're too honest. I will never admire Mike Pence, and I will never forgive him. And while I suppose I would immunize him for the trial. I will never say he did what the vice president of the United States should have done at that time, as opposed to say, the vice president of the Republican Party, which was to go public with these events as they
happened and secure the nation and thus himself. But I will confess it is almost poignant to see how long Mike Pence thought he could somehow find a human being inside Donald Trump's body. He must have still been trying when word got to him that some of Trump's supporters were out there outside the Capitol building and building the gallows just for him. Still, the Pence quote are not nearly as satisfying as the Amy Coney Barrett quote. That's right,
Amy Coney Barrett. Why that's Amy Coney Barrett's name, Justice Amy Cony Barrett, the Trump appointee. Smith's point number two, Even if the conduct were deemed official, the government could rebut the presumption of immunity. In any event, even if the defendant's efforts to convene fraudulent electors could be considered official, the presumption would be rebutted because quote, a president has no legal authority and thus no official capacity to influence
how the states appoint their electors. Un quote, and accordingly, there is quote no plausible argument for barring prosecution of that alleged conduct. Barrett Jay concurring, in part, while Congress has a limited role in the appointment of presidential electors, the president has none. The case and each part of the case, and each page of the Smith filing, the case against Trump is inarguable. It is moral and thorough
and legally impervious. And of course none of that matters anymore, because the point of Donald Trump is to enable individual human beings in this country to behave as if they were themselves, corporations to behave as if right or wrong, innocence or guilt, responsibility or subversion, or any other questions of the morality of an individual's personal conduct is irrelevant. That there are only two emotions remaining in the world, greed and a calculation about how much of this I
can get away with. There may never be a Trump trial because a Trump election would erase the chance of it, and with that would erase the entirety, the entirety of justice in the United States of America, and with that
erased the entirety of the United States of America. Perhaps worse yet, a Trump election might lead to everything in Smith's filing being addressed in some kind of sham trial somewhere in which the Supreme Court or whoever would replace Jack Smith and Tanya Chutkin when Trump disappears them, would go through each of these one hundred and sixty five pages and call everything P five did official and subject to presidential immunity, and state everything Mike Pence said communications
with his Majesty President Trump, which may not be quoted on penalty of death in the real United States of America, the one we still have. This is enough for anybody who reads it to demand not just that Trump be tried and convicted and imprisoned for life, but that even at this late date, right now, he'd be removed from
the presidential ballot by any legal means available. The problem is the real United States has already been damaged enough by Trump, Advance and Pence and the Supreme Court and every last one of them, that such a moral, patriotic action is virtually impossible even now, And if Harris and Walls lose on November fifth, it will be utterly impossible thereafter. If Harris and Walls lose on November fifth, it will be utterly impossible thereafter, unless with a day to think
about it, I'm beginning to doubt. I really understand now what jd Vance was doing during that vice presidential debate. Oh, he lied, he foretold in America dedicated to prejudice, hatred, superstition. He looked, as I said, like an Amway salesman, an eyeliner. But he rejected. If not Trump, certainly, then he rejected Trump's entire persona, his entire reason for being, the hatred that fuels Trump and so many who are enslaved to Trump.
At first glance, it sounded like a good way of selling the Trump agenda to those rejecting it out of hand because of the state of the Trump perversions. But at the core here Trump is insane, and with each passing day it is evident that his paranoia and his delusions of grandeur, and his conviction that he is omnipotent
and perfect, these things are increasing. Why would Trump ever go along with something like that performance by jd Vance that did not serve to sell the fiction of Trump perfection? Did jd Vance freelance that part? I'm gonna have to think this one through long and hard. But I wonder if JD. Vance revealed a side hustle during the vice presidential debate, is he could he be potentially running a coup against Trump. I don't mean something before the election.
I mean a coup with multiple landing points in the future, in which it could be Vance who takes over the Trump cult. If Trump is beaten, takes it over. If Trump really meant what he said about not running again, if he loses, takes it over by force. Even if Trump doesn't mean that, the great gaping hole in the entire decade long Trump conspiracy is that there is nobody
there to succeed him. His children are idiots. The congressmen are all Derek van Orden and Clay Higgins, and they all fail the central casting test in a different way. The other option, of course, is that if Trump wins, do you really think, having watched him, that this Vance would hesitate to lead a palace revolt to at some point next year twenty twenty six, twenty twenty seven to
invoke the twenty fifth Amendment. The moment Trump starts speaking in tongues, or he falls over during a speech, or he gets pushed over during speech. We have a lot of poll numbers about that debate now, and they divide into three categories. The first is a true interior number. CNN asked how many who watched felt the debate had led them to change their minds about which ticket they
would vote for, and the total was one percent. Since the television ratings have come in at forty three million, two hundred thousand viewers, one percent of that is four hundred and thirty two thousand view voters. Sounds kind of high. Actually, four hundred and thirty two thousand votes is a lot until you realize that the one percent that changed their minds counts those who were voting for Trump and are now voting for Harris, and those who were voting for
Harrison are now voting for Trump. Even if they split sixty forty towards Trump, say, the net impact would be that Trump gained eighty six thousand votes, like the maximum theoretical change last debate of the series eighty six thousand votes. Second poll number who won Nearly all polling by Everybody showed a tie or a virtual tie. The CBS poll was literally forty one forty one with eighteen percent undecided,
but to employ the old cliche. The game was not as close as the score suggested, because virtually all of the interior numbers favored Tim Walls. If needed, Are they prepared to be President prepared? Walls sixty percent, not prepared forty percent, Vance prepared fifty five percent not prepared forty five percent. That's a twenty to ten difference. Who did a better job talking about abortion? Walls sixty two thirty eight about healthcare, Walls fifty nine to forty one About
conflict in the Middle East? Tide about the economy vanced by two points. About immigration, advanced by four points. The cell of the Trump campaign economy and immigration, Vance only outpolled Walls by a total of six percentage points. There is no question Vance lowered his unfavorables Tuesday night. That was the idea. He's now at forty nine forty seven. He's above water. But Walls lowered his unfavorables too. He was fifty two to forty one before the debate per CBS.
That was plus eleven, and afterwards he was sixty to thirty five plus twenty five plus twenty five. The CNN poll asking the same question now has Walls at fifty nine percent favorable and only twenty two percent unfavorable. That's plus thirty Who in the hell is plus thirty seven anymore? I mean, do we need to talk about making Tim Walls the presidential nominee? I mean, can you do that? Could you somehow someday promote the vice presidential nominee and
make them the presidential never mind? Never? I never mind never I never I. Also of interest, here, Vance's whiney complaint about the rules where you guys weren't going to fact check did not universally go viral, but at least nobody with a reputation to uphold took his side when
the moderators cut him off for lying about the Haitian ohioans. Well, I guess I'm gonna have to define reputation because there is somebody who was once actually entrusted with a prime time hour on CNN who is insisting that Vance was right and the moderators were wrong. That's next. This is countdown. This is Countdown with Keith Olberman still ahead of us on this edition of Countdown. I saw her on TV somewhere recently, and then somebody actually mentioned him yesterday to me.
We used to go skiing with him. We're not friends with him anymore, And I flashed back to the day that featured both of them, the day that was the greatest fault off from possibility to reality in my life so far, because the day I die will be worse him. He was the guy who ran Countdown project at Current TV into the ground. I tried to hire Mattow and Hayes.
He hired jenk Yuger. She for once, I'm going to talk about somebody I did not go out on a date with Uma Thurman, and things I promised not to tell coming up first, there are still more new idiots to talk about in the daily roundup of the miscreants, morons and Dunning Kruger effects specimens who constitute today's worst
persons in the world. Lebron's Worst. Diamond Sports and Major League Baseball Baseball playoffs started on TV day before yesterday, so naturally, exactly what Baseball wants right now is stories about how at least eight of its team's telecasts next year just got canceled by the TV company that was supposedly going to carry them. Oops. It's Diamond part of Sinclair Broadcasting, the part that operates the Bally regional sports networks that took over when ESPN bought out the Fox
Regional Sports Networks. And then ESPN said, what the hell did we do that for? And during the endless court hearings about the bankruptcy of Diamond yesterday, the lawyer for Diamond suddenly announced that of it's remaining dozen contracts with big league clubs, it will only actually pursue and broadcast the games of one of them, the Atlanta Braves, so Anaheim, Cincinnati, Detroit, Kansas City, Miami, Milwaukee, Saint Louis, and Tampa Bay. Right now,
you don't have TV carriers for next year. Even though each of the teams thought they had contracts with Diamond, there were already three teams without deals for twenty twenty five, Cleveland, Minnesota and Texas. The thing is, Baseball admitted it knew nothing about Diamond doing this, about Diamond canceling the broadcast
until the Diamond lawyer said so in court. We were sandbagged, said Baseball's lawyer, which, if you know anything about how baseball is run under its commissioner, Rob Manfred, should not surprise you in the least. The other thing is of the eleven now homeless TV list clubs Cleveland, Detroit, Kansas City, and Milwaukee constitute one third of all the teams in
this year's baseball playoffs. These are the successful teams losing their TV homes because Baseball on TV is dying, because baseball has completely screwed up its business model, because baseball has emphasized making money today rather than giving up a little of it to push and market interest in the game as a whole, so that maybe you will watch a game even if it is not your team playing, or even if you don't have a bet down on the damn teams playing. The third thing is the people
behind all this are from Sinclair Broadcasting. And if that name sounds familiar, it should. It's the biggest bunch of conservative propagandist trumpest craphound going. And so if the fans of the Guardians, Rangers, Twins, Angels, Reds, Tigers, Royals, Marlins, Brewers, Cardinals and Rays need to blame somebody, blame the far right and its bottomless pit of greed and self interest,
they'll do something. They'll be on TV next year. But right now those teams have the identical TV contracts as do the Altunas of the eighteen eighty four Union Association Altuna Altuna had a Major League Baseball team, Altuna, Pennsylvania and by the way, Baseball. Also, while we're here, congratulations on putting those garish, greedy, ugly ads on the playoff
batting helmets like you said you would. Special congratulations on placing them just perfectly on the side of the helmets so that they are almost always totally obscured by the reflection off the lights in all the stadiums, so we can't read the name of the advertiser. So with the light streaks over it, the advertiser's name in big block letters looks like it's E fooe E foo ee e foy, leading manufacturer of beard curlers in the Midwest, I believe, brought to you by E fooee. Vita Jects. Why don't
you do ads for Vita Jects? Get that Vita Jects? Feeling lonesome roads the runner up worser. Speaking of bottomless pits of greed, there's Fox News, and we all know about it's greed and it's self interest, but often we overlook the fact that Fox News teams with stupid people, I mean with a name like older women. I'm actually reluctant to mock almost any other name in human language. But for God's sake, if you were a newscaster and your last name was spelled as m n, would you
change it? I mean, I thought about changing Olderman when I was still in college. I went on the air once as Keith Owen, and it sounded so stupid I went to screw it. I don't mind the name, but I mean, if your name was asma N, would you change it? I know he pronounces it Asman, but good grief, it looks like Assman, as in Good Evening. I'm David Asman with behind the scenes info. David Asman just does
not write as that choice would suggest. Brit Hume, the oldest and absolutely not the wisest of the Fox fascists, praise the work of the disgraced sexual harassment and abuse king Mark Halperin, who had criticized CBS fact checking in the VP debate, because, as Halprin knows from the end of his career, truth is fatal to evil bastards like Trump and Hume and Mark Halperin. By the way, you know how old Brit Hume is. He's two hundred and six.
In any event, Hume screenshotted some of Halprin's bitter new fascism, his revenge against the left wing media world that he thinks shunned him, when in fact Alprin is lucky he's not serving a life sentence for his actions anyway. Finally, to the point, David Asman responded to Hume praising this dick Halprin by saying Halprin was quote again, this is Asman writing one of the few who could write truly great books like A Soldier of the Great War and
also do great journalism. Sadly, no, A Soldier of the Great War is a book written by Mark Helprin h E l p r i N, who has never been Mark Halperin h A l p e r i N, Mark Helprin, who has never been accused of greeting fellow
employees at ABC News while he wasn't wearing any pants. Apparently, David Assman just assumed Mark Halpern bad Guy and Mark Helprin good Guy are the same person, because David Assman is a dedicated newsman who can't tell his ass man from his elbow man, which is the perfect segue to the winner the worst. Chris Effing Cuomo, Holy crap, the disgraced XCNN anchor has dropped down to the ranks of
the nicked. Night of News News Nation, the retirement home for ex newscasters where management tells them, no, you still have viewers, You still have an audience. If you didn't, why would we have all these lights on in here. This is a network which has nearly as many viewers as this podcast has listeners. Chris Cuomo, desperate broken, addressed
the VP debate moment where JB. Vance uttered the immortal words the rules were you guys weren't gonna affect check the debate equivalent of you're not allowed to stop me from lying. Cuomo explained, no, Vance wasn't lying. Quote. Vance wanted to correct something about how Haitians got into this country,
and he was right. Cuomo then played the clip in which Vance lied again about the legal status of the Haitians and again pushed the lie that nearly got a Trump loving Maga family in Ohio killed because the father and that family defended his Haitian immigrant employees in Springfield, Ohio. And then Cuomo came back from the bite and said, well, there you have it and look, Vance was right. Okay, there's nuance to it, But the bigger problem was why
was he moved on? We've got so much to get to, says who you know what I mean, what is the schedule here? So you have a list of topics, That's not what it's about. It's about how the American people can access these two men and the two theories and the narratives. And you got to let them have speak because now you created a story where you're the problem. Well number one, no, you don't have to let them have speak. If one of them is just lying and trying to get people killed, you don't have to let
that happen. Maybe if you knew that, Chris, you might still be working at CNN or ABC and not at News News Nation. News Nation is the smallest nation in the world in television terms. It's Luxembourg. And the other
thing is Vance was not right. Vance's argument is that laws were waived to allow these immigrants to come here and stay here, which means they're here legally, and that if he and Trump are elected, they will enforce those laws in different ways, and these people who are here legally now suddenly will not be here legally and they will be guilty of not being here legally and they
will be deported. And in the interim Vance's argument, his narrative, as this buffoon Cuomo calls it, is that the immigrants are eating cats and dogs. And if maga psychopaths want to go to Ohio and threaten them or kill them, or threaten or kill those defending them, or in this case, threaten or kill the fourteen year old daughters of those defending them, that's fine by him because he's JV. Vance, snake oil salesman. This is what Chris Cuomo claims, is
Nuance Advance being right. Now, it's two theories, and now, all of a sudden, on top of all of this, we're supposed to listen to Chris Cuomo about journalistic ethics
and political ethics. When Chris Cuomo's response to his brother's corruption as governor of New York was to ignore it on the air or to cover it up on the air and then privately offer media advice to his brother, and when CNN finally figured out Chris Cuomo was destroying their credibility on this vital story, instead of taking him off their network or least putting somebody else on the air for a few minutes every night on his show to cover the Andrew Cuomo scandals so Chris Cuomo didn't
have to do it. CNN's answer to this was to just have Chris Cuomo never mention the story at all, which was a passive aggressive way of downplaying the scandal even further and letting Andrew Cuomo get away with it a little bit more. But sure, Chris, you tell me what's right and wrong here? The statute of limitations on being right and wrong says, surely elapsed since twenty twenty, hasn't it. Maybe you'll get it right this time, since
this one doesn't involve any of your own relatives. I've mentioned before that the desire to be on television, especially when it comes to doing the news, is a psychological illness. I confess if you recognize this, yes, you're probably still
in control. If you don't, and it becomes not a desire but a need to be on TV, you wind up going on a channel that is propaganda for the far right dressed up as independent journalism that nobody watches, and you start spouting excuses for Trump and Advance and the rest of the fascists excuses so nauseating that if your father were still alive to hear it, he'd slap
you in the face. This is where Chris Cuomo is that and the fact that by looking at the tape of him saying this last night three or four times, I constituted a measurable percentage of his audience. Chris Cuomo, who is prostituting himself and whatever he thinks he used to stand for two days, worst person in the world. And now to the number one story on the Countdown and my favorite topic, me and I saw her on TV recently, so I flashed back and shuddered all over again. Yes,
it's things I promised not to tell. I suspect that until the day I actually die. No day will have started so well with such promise, yet ended so badly with such a clanging thud as Wednesday, July twenty seventh, twenty eleven did. Near midnight two nights earlier, I had just entered my New York apartment back from a New York Yankees game, when the last landline telephone I ever owned began to ring, Hi, Keith, it's uma, Yeah, how many UMAs could there be? It? Was the actress Uma Thurman.
We had texted briefly, we had never met, we had never spoken. We spoke for ninety minutes, and she was self deprecating and vulnerable and razor sharp warm, and she invited me to coffee on the afternoon of D Day, Wednesday, July twenty seven, twenty eleven, one of the producers I had hired to do the new version of Countdown on Al Gore's network, Current TV, happened to know Uma Thurman
from the gym. Erica Ferrari was her name, and she was great, and she and Uma Thurman had become close enough that Uma had unloaded all her relationship issues on Erica. And the next thing I knew, Erica was in my office explaining to me that when she explained to Uma where she worked and with whom, Uma said the Keith Olderman. And now I was being set up for drinks or dinner or coffee or something with Uma Thurman. So this
seemed like a good day. Then two nights earlier we had finally had had this marvelous, warm conversation, and Uma Thurman had suggested coffee and Wednesday in two thirty or so, in one of the two or three places in Midtown near my studio, and she'd text me with details and she couldn't wait. Slaneously with this, the CEO of the Current TV network, Mark Rosenthal, called me up and invited me to dinner on Wednesday, July twenty seventh, twenty eleven, going to be a busy day. Al Gore and Current
had hired me even before I left MSNBC. That was what that was all about. And I had met and gotten to know everybody in the organization over the following six months before we finally got the show on the air in June. We got off to a good start, even though Current TV was available only in low def digital cable. On its first night, Countdown on Current beat both MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell's Show and CNN's Elliott Spitzer Show, and the so called demo ratings measuring viewers eighteen to
fifty four. But by July twenty seventh, twenty eleven, so like two months later, it was evident to me that the network was run by four kinds of people. One the CEO Rosenthal, who used to be at MTV and knew what he was doing. Two some dilettants who did not know how to plug in a television, let alone put stuff on one. Three co owner Al Gore, who meant well but who had absolutely no judgment when it came to business partners. And four in a class by himself.
Gore's business partner Joel Hyatt, who had made one superb business decision in nineteen seventy seven that earned him billions of dollars, and he sold everything and then it earned him billions of dollars again. But he had literally never gotten anything right since nineteen seventy seven, while at the same time thinking he had never gotten anything wrong since nineteen seventy seven. He was a liberal. Unfortunately he was
a liberal Donald Trump. What was worse was that of all these people, only Mark Rosenthal understood how ruinously incompetent Joel Hyatt really was. Rosenthal had been president of MTV from nineteen ninety six through two thousand and four, and whatever you thought of all those reality shows and the Real World and stuff like that, they were successes. He knew what he was doing, and he knew Joel Hyatt didn't.
And Mark Rosenthal had invited me to dinner as soon as my show was over on Wednesday night, July twenty seven, twenty eleven, about seven hours after I was scheduled to have coffee with Uma Thurman as a dry run for a date, and Rosenthal told me he had figured out how we could in effect take control of the Current TV network away from this Joel Hyat and not only exploit the good start Countdown had made, but build on it and make Current TV into the liberal news network
we had been intending to create and knew would be a success. Dinner would be our chance for him to explain it to me, to hatch our plan. It was a big, big day. I think without me going into detail, you intuitively get the Uma Thurman part of what July twenty seventh, twenty eleven was supposed to be. But I need to put a little bit more meat on the bones of why it was so important at Current T. This is who this guy Hyatt was, that same producer who was doing her best to set up Uma Thurman
and me Erica. She walked in one day, white as the sheet of paper she was carrying at arms length, as if it had been printed in bubonic plague she had found while surfing around internet archives. A New York Times article about this Joel Hyatt an article from April thirteen,
nineteen ninety. You remember the movie Philadelphia, where the evil head of law firm portrayed by the actor Jason Robards had fired the head of his Philadelphia office played by Tom Hanks because the Hanks character had aids and Hanks's character got as he his lawyer, a character played by Denzel Washington. Well, this guy who co owned Current TV
with Al Gore. He was the Jason Robard's character he had fired from his law firm Hiatt Legal Services the head of his Philadelphia office, Clarence B. Kin after finding out Clarence B. Kane had a In fact, reality was actually worse than the Philadelphia movie. In real life, Clarence B.
Kane was also African American. The time story that Erica Ferrari handed me like it was printed on razor Blades, recounted how a federal judge had not only ordered Hyatt Legal Services to pay mister Kane one hundred and fifty seven thousand dollars plus costs, but how it had ordered them to pay him immediately, like in the next couple days. This was harrowing enough, but the final paragraph made my head swim. Quote. What pained him most, mister Hyatt said,
was the notion that his firm discriminated. He noted how it had, after all, named a gay black man to run one of its major offices, something no law firm its size has ever knowingly done. Quote. What's totally lost in the shuffle is that this is an organization in which anyone can succeed, he said. No one has written about that. That was this guy Hyatt in a nutshell. He fired a gay black man who was dying of AIDS. But he knew who the real victim here was himself.
And it's not like Hyatt had improved over the years. As I mentioned. The Night Countdown premiered on Current TV June twentieth, twenty eleven. We beat MSNBC and CNN in the ratings, but we didn't know it. The next day, our ratings showed that we had beaten CNN and just
missed beating O'Donnell on MSNBC. A few weeks later, one of those networks got a friendly reporter to write a story about how since the debut, our ratings on Current had sunk, which was to be expected and which was a totally legitimate competitive thing for the MSNBC guys to do, But the numbers were all wrong. The ratings for Countdown that were included in the pro CNN pro MSNBC story were somehow higher than the ratings we saw every day
at current. If I'm not clear about this, the story said that, say, on Monday, July eleventh, we had had one hundred thousand demo viewers. Buttings the ratings we got from the Nielsen company, they said that on Monday July seventh, we didn't have one hundred thousand demo viewers when I had seventy five thousand demo viewers. Well, something was really really wrong here. So when Hyatt called me for our weekly phone chat, I said, look, there's something wrong with
the ratings. And I explained the article to him and he said, oh, I knew they were going to do that, show how your ratings had dropped. And I said, no, you're missing my point. They say we had higher ratings than we actually did. Oh. I knew they were going to do that too, he said, with even more condescension. And I said, why would they do that? Why would they try to make us look better? Oh? I knew
they were going to do that too, just too. Then there was a long pause while Joel Hyatt made something up just to mess with us. I asked him, since he had personally purchased the ratings package from the Nielsen Company, the first ratings in the history of current TV, if he could just review for me what he remembered of the process. Well, I went in and made an excellent deal. I saved two thousand dollars on their initial price point.
This man was worth a couple of billion dollars. They wanted us to buy not just the live ratings, but something called live plus Divver. I thought for a moment Divver, I said, you mean live plus DVR. He laughed, Yes, that's it, Divver. What the hell is divver? You just use the live ratings, and TV everybody knows that. I explained to him that divver ratings were comparatively new, about
three four years old at that point. They added to the live rating people who would watch the show on their DVR within twenty four hours of having recorded it. He had bought the ratings that did not include all of those people, so that when we got what we thought were our ratings for our premiere night, when we beat CNN and almost beat MSNBC, but just missed. We
didn't just miss. The ratings package this idiot Higatt had bought did not include anybody who watched the show on their DVRs, and that cost us the chance to come out and say we beat CNN MSNBC the first night with this crappy, low deaf picture down on chair of channel hundred and three. But more importantly, it saved this billionaire idiot Hiatt two thousand dollars. So Mark Rosenthal was taking me to dinner hours after I was to have coffee with Uma Thurman to explain how we could get
rid of this idiot who thought DVR meant divver. Thus was July twenty seventh, twenty eleven going to be one of the turning points in my life. And then about one forty five, just when Uma said she was going to text me to tell me where to meet her for coffee, she texted me, all right, She texted me to explain her rehearsal was running along and she had
to postpone. And while I was reading between those lines and knowing that that actually met she was going back with her boyfriend or her her husband, or whoever, he was a company. Email came into all of our inboxes, and even before I opened it, I could hear mass groaning coming from my newsroom, Mark Rosenthal seven hours before our dinner to plot how to root around Joel Diver slash Jason Robard's in Philadelphia Slash. I saved two thousand
dollars Hyatt. Mark Rosenthal had been fired and he'd been replaced as CEO of Current TV effective immediately by co owner Joel Hyatt. Well, holy Divver, it'd be a better story if I never saw Mark Rosenthal or Uma Thurman again in my life, but it wouldn't be true. I saw Mark many times. And then four years later, I was at a New York recording studio doing the voice of the newsman character Tom Jumbo Grumbo on the Great animated series BoJack Horseman. When one of the other studio
doors opened an outstep to Uma Thurman, radiant, elegant. I introduced myself. She smiled, she said she was a fan. She laughed, and she said, you know, we must have coffee sometime. Dipper, what the dollar's Dipper? I saved eleven dollars. Oh my god, what a mistake. That was not leaving MSNBC. I had to leave MSNBC and not taking the money. I like the money, but boy, was this guy an idiot. I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. We're now back to five episodes a week,
posting nightly just after midnight Eastern. Once again, there is a Monday Countdown. Please send this podcast to somebody who doesn't listen but should, and as I bash Chris Cuomo's audience. Relative to the size of this podcast, this podcast has a larger audience than Countdown on Current TV had. Brian Ray and John Phillip Shaneil, the musical directors of Countdown, arranged, produced, and performed most of our music, and they update it continuously.
Mister Chanelle handled orchestration and keyboards. Mister Ray was on the guitars, bass, drums, and musical innovations was produced by Tko Brothers. Our satirical and fithy musical comments are by the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust. The sports music is the Olberman theme from ESPN two. It was written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc. Other music arranged and performed by the group, no horns allowed. My announcer today was my friend Stevie van Zant. Everything
else was pretty much my fault. That's countdown for today. Four weeks and five days until the twenty twenty four presidential election and the one thousand, three hundred and sixty seventh day since convicted felon drooling Jay Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically all government of the United States. Use the election, use the Jack Smith filing, use the mental health system, use presidential immunity if we have to to keep him from doing it again. Wow is douncan?
The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Bulletins as the news requires till the next one. I'm Keith Olrimman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, then good luck. Countdown with Keith Olriman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.