Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds, and Miami Mayor Francisco Suarez has dropped out of the GOP primary. We have such a fun show for you today and BR's full disclosures. Robin Farzad joins us to make sense of our very complicated economy. Then we'll talk to Martin Pingelli, the Guardian's Washington breaking news correspondent, about the latest fuckery with Leonard Leo and
his potential legal woes. But first we have former Senator and host of the Al Franken podcast, the one, the Only Al Franken.
Welcome back to Fast Politics. Al Franken.
Hey, Mollie, how are you doing.
Excited to be interviewing you.
So we talked about this Republican debate where now I feel like in the post first Republican debate cycle.
Way William Well, we were wrong a little bit, especially you and Mark thought to say, this is terribly and I thought he was for DeSantis actually okay, and he got a Genie bump. Ramaswami got an actual bump and well bump, but it was like the three of us were going, you know, really killed it was Nicki Haley And it's like it's like Republicans watching if there was a real democratic debate with a Field and they're going, they'd go, like, you know that mansion.
He really killed it because at least he talks.
Since and so you know, so Haley got a little teeny little thing, but it was Ramaswami and Desandas that actually, well, the Santa's got a little teeny bump, which for him is a bump.
I mean, Desanta's people are out there spinning DeSantis left and right. And remember you can't forget how many people in the mainstream media and the right wing media are working on Desanta's campaign.
Well, that hasn't stopped him from sliding and sliding and sliding. And I just thought he got his message out as well as he's ever done it and didn't make weird faces or anything. He just I thought he did his job buying, and he spoke to the base, the people who were there and the people voting Republican primaries. I thought he did well by himself. For the That's the best I've seen and wasn't good, but it was all the best I seen him.
But again it's a question of like Jeb bushamentum right, Like you can't make people vote for someone who has none of the attributes that people vote for when they vote for a candidate.
Well, which worries me about Ramaswami. And we see whether Trump it at any point. At any point Republicans go like, can we nominate a guy and by I don't know, maybe convicted of several things. By by I can mention I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.
Well, so I wrote this today my my Fanny Fair column, not to plug something else. But hey, man, we all do it about how the vake. He shows that the GOP base is really primed for another charismatic Charlotte And and it might not be Vivike. It probably won't be Viveke, but it could be you know, someone much much worse.
Who in the party would emerge as a charismatic Charlottean.
Then it's hard to think of a Republican senator who is charismatic.
I can think of a lot who are charlotte owns.
Yeah, you want to say, Ted Cruz, I can feel it at the tip of your top.
I don't know. I just want to see how the trials go, and I want I'm very eager for then. I guess this one in Atlanta is starting very soon.
So yes, the Atlanta I mean again, this man has numerous trials, also numerous trial dates, but also his millions and millions of dollars to spend on his legal fees. And we are at this car crash of politics versus legal. So there's a cow goes here that is sort of I think, a little bit unknown, right.
Yeah, no, no, no, this is nothing like this has ever happened before. But if you look at the Republican Party, now this is all goes back to the paranoid style of American politics.
Yes, Richard Hofstadter, who has invoked many times on this podcast.
Yeah, you go back to Joe McCarthy and Pat Buchanan and Gingrich and I wrote about Rush Limbaugh and Fox News and feet Party and you think about and it all ends up with Trump and a lot of it has to do with fake news and alternative facts. And remember alternative facts. That was Conway.
We call her Georgie's ex wife.
Well, okay, I don't want to go into someone's marriage. So the point is is that we're at a very very off boy. And these shootings also go back that the racism great replacement theory or the Tucker Carlson pushed, and the shootings of black people in Buffalo and Juus and Pittsburgh going.
Can we pause for a minute and talk about the assault rifle ban because you were involved in that, right, Yeah.
Well, I was there right after Sandy Hook, and I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe we couldn't get that passed. There's no reason for these things. There's no reason for these things. You do anything that you can do with us, he can't do anything you can do with us. All well, but there's no reason for this machine that kills people. And remember, we had an assault weapons ban in ninety four.
We passed it and it lasted ten years, and then Congress wouldn't renew it, and Bush said he would made some kind of Pablomese thing, which is he would decided if it had passed, but you know, it wasn't passing. And then ever since then, they started making the these weapons more and more and more efficient. So Sandy Hook, it was these kids. It was like twenty kids and like five adults and it was the saddest fucking thing I've ever seen. I met families, and I couldn't believe it.
I hadn't been there all that while I had been there actually a couple of years, but I couldn't believe that we couldn't get anything. We couldn't get background checks. After Valdi, there was something passed, But there's no reason for these. And I talked to some of my Republican former colleagues every once in a while and try to say, there's no reasons, no reason for it. Well, a lot of guys I use them for hunting. Why you don't need these for hunting? You don't People hunted fine before
before these existed. And you know this is this is this is all sick. It's all sick.
And I think also more importantly than that, I don't know why.
I'm sorry, I'm on the nose.
It is the problem that they don't want to come to the table at all, and.
They have a base it's for this, and Americans are for background checks. Americas are for all of this. But if you talk to somebody from Oklahoma, a Republican senator, any one of these states, they're just check out shit.
So this leads us to how Trump really seized power. Right is a lot of these Republican senators are rational. They just don't want to be primaried or get death threats.
Trump had his base, and Trump could destroy Jeff Flake and did and did, and so they all chickened out. Leavivich, who was on my podcast with you, yeah right road, thank you for your servitude, which is all about how every Republican politician they wanted to survive in Washington. Just I was there obviously when he got elected, and the next day or when we got back, they were amazed. The Republican senators were amazed. All but Jeff Sessions.
Why well, he had.
Been the first indoors I know, but why were the others amazed?
No, why was Jeff Sessions not amazed?
He's Jeff Sessions. See, he's brilliant. He's the only one who saw it. Wait, really, well, I didn't talk to each one of them, but riding the subway, I would just be talking to one of them and they'd be shaking their head.
I can't believe, I mean, but that is just incredible.
That was the end of this I mean, or the beginning of this period where it's just frightening and getting worse and worse and worse. We were holding our breath until next November that it can't happen again. And if it does, we're just it's a different it's fascism.
Right, No, no, I mean the stakes are impossibly high.
Yeah, the Sanda democracy with passion, and it's not the Third Reich, but it's it's hungry or it's or some Well Russia is pretty bad, but it'll be bad. And yeah, he'll go after his enemies and it'll be bad. And he's not going to be picking madness.
Right, No, no, right, that's a very good point.
He's gonna start where he ended off with these toadies.
But can Steven Miller take every position in the Trump white House?
He can be cheap of staff and yeah, because you know how hard Trump works. That's right, he's a good delegator. Right, Well, no he isn't. I take that back. But that's all we talk about, right, that's all Democrats talk about in a like Americans. What we're going to talk about, like how frightening a moment this is Unfortunately it's not a moment. It's a good year and whatever.
It's really like about eight years. We've just been on this fucking roller coaster. Since twenty fifteen we've been, or really twenty sixteen, because in twenty fifteen we didn't a lot of us didn't see any of this coming.
We didn't know right.
But now we're in this sort of absolute fucking nightmare of like, you know, will this guy get re elected and completely destroy the country again.
It's social media, it's a dark web. But it's the other versions of Fox which are worse. And Peter Agburn, who is the producer of my podcast and engineer, was in South Carolina for quite a while. His father is ill and his family just watches Fox, and oh my lord.
What's interesting to me about Fox is they have developed a line of propaganda, which is they say everything about Biden that the normal news used to say about Trump. So they say by is an authoritarian, Biden is a dictator, Biden is like they're just trying to hit Biden with everything.
Not only that he is senile, They show pictures anytime they can show him falling down, they will and basically say that he's not able to run. The gunman. I just Frank four has just written a book they called the last politician about Biden's first two years. And this guy is on top of his government, right, this guy has those forty years and sent you know, has that experience, eight years as vice president, and he actually knows what he's doing. And it's so ironic, of course that that
Trump never cared. There's a scene in the book where you know, he's checking on a flight from Europe to bring baby formula. This is Bien making sure that that flight g it. So the opposite, of course is true about in terms of his confidence and stuff compared to Trump. Of course they're going to go he's authoritarian. That's why he's prosecuting Trump and all that stuff. It's all lies. It's just that's what they do. Lies in the line, liars.
Tell them that's bigging up. We're really we're plug heavy today, but I respect it. So we have a number of books on our reading list here. But I did want to ask you as we are now in this kind of strange run up to you know, the House is coming back, the Senate is coming back. McCarthy, he's got
this four or five CE majarity. My man, he is going now to have this big It looks like there's a setup in the House about whether they're going to try and impeach Biden, which a lot of mag Republicans want, or they don't quite have a reason but they feel fair is fair, or they're going to shut down the government.
Seems like a great idea.
The people pay the price for the American people when you shut down the government, of course, right, I think that would be a bad idea for them, impeaching Biden. It would be interesting to see what the charges are, I guess, and if they can do it, I mean, can you hold everybody? And you hold everybody and they're bound to lose the House if they do that. I think I think they're bout to lose the House anyway.
It's going to be interesting because in the Senate it looks like it's going to be a real tough road for Democrats. But a lot just we don't know what happens between now and then.
Right.
I just would like for one second to talk about how since Roe has been overturned, every election Democrats have wildly overperformed. Again, I am not trying to make anyone able to sleep at night, because that's not what we do.
But I do want to point that out.
Yeah, well, certainly on every vote on the issue. And then you know, the Wisconsin vote really was serve on the issue the Supreme Court.
But even Ohio like that was a ten.
Point Kansas and then in Kentucky and in Montana. It used to be a single issue, remember the other way right Democrats didn't care about it so much because it was precedent, and all these nominees for Supreme Court said, oh, not only is the president's double president, and so we went out worry about it until it happened. But now, yeah, it's obviously a single issue and a single issue for men and women. So the single issue of it has
completely flipped. It should hurt them, hopefully will help us keep the Senate.
Oh, frankn thank you so much for joining us.
Always, thank you for joining me. When you join me and I join you.
Robin Farzaide is the host of Full Disclosure on NPR.
Welcome, I'm back, Thank you, Molly.
Smoltics.
How are you you? How are you? Swell?
Thank you.
There's a recent indicator that shows that unemployment is as low as it's ever been, and yet a fairly large percentage of the American public believes unemployment is high, make it make sense.
I'd love to cite the misery index if it was out there, some version of unemployment and inflation, because you're still feeling inflation. I feel that both the print you get from the gas station and maybe if you're at the grocery aisle and you remember what something might have
cost three four years ago. Even though the headline number might be down and we might be approaching the low single digits, from what you know the Federal Reserve is observing, it doesn't feel as fantastic as it is out there. Markets are not far from an all time high, inflation is subduing, unemployment is at decades low, but that seems to be cold comfort for small businesses because they can't
seem to hire anybody. Airlines and airports are clogged up, their labor bottlenecks everywhere, and it doesn't feel as amazing as the numbers I think would bear out.
So that's what I want to ask you.
This is like one of the I feel like under reported stories because it's so hard to understand. We have multiple positive indicators and yet many people miserable. So the theory that a lot of people have is that this is just hyperpartisanship, right, that the right hates the market because Biden is president and the left is happy. I mean, is it hyperpartisanship? Is that the way to explain what's happening? Or is it more complicated?
I think in fairness, if you think about Trump on the eve of the pandemic, President Trump, the numbers were great, and some people were openly saying, if he could just ride this into November, it should be a lot easier for the incumbent, especially considering the incumbent advantages. Of course, no one imagined COVID and the mishandling of COVID and
everything else that would happen to that. I mean again, back in March of twenty twenty, I think we saw unemployment spike to the mid teens in the matter of two weeks. We saw NBC News footage of breadlines of cars around the block looking again donations. It was very short lived and things snap back. I mean, we have had variants and outbreaks and slowdowns and trip ups along the way, but that feeling of freefall was largely arrested and he came out of that. But Trump wasn't the
beneficiary of that still. I mean, I think that people felt awful, the masking, the kids, the remote work, and there's certainly a feeling right now. If you fast forward three plus years after that, it doesn't feel like things are back to normal. We don't know the kind of the work from home normal. We don't know what the inflationary normal is. We don't know what the unemployment normal is. We have interest rates which are at multi decade highs, mortgage rates I think at a twenty two year high.
A lot of people locked out of the housing market that may have been on their best behavior, like I did a lever up, I didn't go crazy on crypto and NFT, And what's my vindication? What's my motivation right now? And that's really yeah, gotta be frustrating for the Federal Reserve because you take up rates. When you look at my hometown in Miami, you look at other areas, you look at Westchester County, whole prices are still super hot. And this is really vexing for the Federal Reserve.
So tell our listeners exactly what happened in Wyoming.
The big meeting last week.
Not big headline stuff. They're still monitoring inflation. There's news coming out of that that we might be a lot closer to the end of the interest rate hiking cycle, which has been pretty perilous. If you think about taking rates up more than five points in about a year and a half, that was so whiplashing that it brought out actually some of the biggest bank failures in US history.
We talk about this normal environment before, with unemployment and inflation, you wouldn't think it would be get the banking crisis that we had in the spring.
Let's talk about that banking crisis, because there was a lot of anxiety. It was a tech center banking crisis, I would like to point out started with Silicon Valley Bank, spread out to some larger banks, but I think all regional banks. But it was really there was a lot of anxiety that could have spread out even further.
Yeah, I mean already the original sin is if we had the too big to fail banks from two thousand and eight and two thousand and nine, I mean the likes of Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase, which were too big to fail and then became colossally too big to fail. They were the beneficiaries of all the different failures.
If you think about Washington mutual if you think about Bear Stearns, and that was happening kind of in mini replay again as people were taking their money out of smaller banks and kind of this self fulfilling prophecy and plowing it into JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo and these other two big to fail banks, and suddenly you have all these other banks out there having to come out and say, look, we're fine, we're good for the money.
But you could have a virtual bank run. You could have Twitter do what Twitter does, and suddenly it's self fulfilling prophecy. And I think, Molly, I think somebody should explore at some point to what it extent. And I know this will be controversial. PPP excess had to do with those bank failures because you had these enormous balances and no one had to be mindful of the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars insurance limit until it became
an issue. And as I said, we all have smartphones and you can move money in an easier, frictionless fashion. It wasn't like it's a wonderful life where you have to go in and a cost the bank manager, right right, right, And so those problems are still there. We recently had some credit agencies downgrade regional banks, and I think that this is this is a difficult thing. I think low interest rates help helps all sorts of borrowers, all manner
of financial institutions. But when you take up rates the way the FED has had to do over the past year and a half, invariably there's going to be significant collateral damage.
Yeah, I want to talk to you about that for a minute, because so many things happened this year that were caused by deregulation. So againp loans we can talk about.
I'm happy to talk about them.
Clearly, that was one of the large or scams perpetrated on the American people.
But again we had to do it, and there were good parts of it.
You know, the child tax credit was really good, lifted all these people out of poverty. It has now gone, of course, But I want to pause for a minute and instead talk about, like, because this is a particular annoyance of mind, deregulation, because we did really see this year a couple of things that happened as a sort of crescendo to deregulation. Like I'm not going to speak to causality because who knows, but you know, it's certainly like the trained aroundment in Ohio. And we've had others
since then. And then really this bank run was because these mid sized banks do not have the same kind of stress tests that the larger banks do.
I would not have imagined that, by the way, shame on me, and I covered this industry, and when that stuff happened, I said, you would think that mega regional banks and even smaller regional banks would be susceptible to this idea of stress testing their uninsured deposits. Again, uninsured deposits being an embarrassment of riches. You have some depositors with so much money that they just get complacent and leave several millions of dollars in an account insured for
JO hundred and fifty. Isn't that kind of a deminimous check by the Feds. But I found out that there was lobbying to kind of pull back. There were banks, if you look at them four years ago, they were saying, we can't make capital formation, We can't be the lubricants of the economy if you're breathing down our next every quarter. And they got some modicum of relief, and it became
did anybody officially call that a Minsky moment? Where you know, stability sows the seeds of its own instability, like complacently explain.
The larger Minski for those who are keeping track at home.
As I always understood that times of stability and complacency are going to sow their own crises things that happen. You don't have to have crises being long in the making and the rot being out there that people if interest rates are too low, if the calm is for too long, people are gonna try something like the bear Stearns traders did back in two thousand and seven and two thousand and eight and set fire to the entire system. And it's funny to me that an embarrassment of riches.
The reason that if you told me to start this year, if we're sitting around on New Year's Eve and you're saying, farz Ad, we're gonna have two or three of the biggest bank failures in history, I would have said it would have been, well a commercial property meltdown, because so many of these buildings are distressed and people are not going back to work. I have zero idea that it was because too much money in accounts and then people getting worried that they're not insured enough and hence the
self fulfilling propsy. So why why we're regulators in front of that? And again on the other side, I don't mean to get it inside baseball, is the bankers themselves. We're putting money in at not as you know, treasuries that could be marked down. There should be an ultra liquid short term treasury. So this stuff was like finance one oh one. So who's in control here?
Right? And I think I mean again, it's hard to get One of the things we've seen historically is that regulators have a hard time getting ahead of crisises. But in this case, we've had crisises like this fairly recently, like the you know, during the Obama administration, for example. And you really have to wonder how much of this deregulation, which was.
The central tenant of trump.
Ism, was due to I mean, remember Trump would get up there every day and say and work for every regulation, We're going to deregulate fifty five things.
Right, But you know, in the mid nineties, the Clinton's were deregularly, I mean lar Bob Rubin and others, and that that's so the seeds of subprime. Everybody loves low borrowing costs, low interest rates. That's something that will bring all wings of all parties. That'll bring AOC and MTG together for once. Right, we love we love capital formation. The problem is that the regulation, as I've said before, we all end up picking up the tab, whether it's
bank failures, insurance amounts tacked on increasing inflation. I think that I don't mean to go back to PPP more than I have to, but I think that that is something that we're all paying for through higher inflation. As there was such a double triple injection of money into the economy with fiscal stimulus and monetary stimulus, that it's so much harder to kill that inflation down the road.
Right, But now I want to just sort of pause and back up for a second, because a lot of us, I want to say, like people who worry, not just exclusively Jews, but my husband and I worry a lot enough to power a small country.
We're called the clot up in class.
Well except we can't take arpin. But yes, so I want to talk about this. There was a real serious worry that we were going to step back into the nineteen seventies and stagflation. I would love you to talk our listeners through what is stagflation and why is it not happening now?
Well, I could just sing the song to the sitcom Good Times, and that will remind you perfect not getting ass not getting assle that rare laying offs. I mean, the worst of all possible outcomes is when you have a declining economy and joblessness and high inflation. I mean, you know, Jimmy Carter and his cardigan er, Gerald Ford, let's whip inflation. I don't even remember what the vintage of that was. And the FED is in snake bit
territory because what am I going to do? Do I kill inflation first, or do I prioritize stimulus because they're inversely proportional. If I pomp money into the economy, it's going to add to this double digit inflation, and so it's it's the most intractable problem for the FED. We had a taste of that this time around, I think,
with inflation reaching highs unseen since the early eighties. But at the same time, unemployment was breaking well below four percent, so it wasn't like we were at you know, high single digit unemployment and high single digit inflation.
We did not.
Fall into stagnation because our employment was so good.
I think it feels like that for a lot of people. I think there is some cold comfort for you know, you've discussed in your columns the catch up for wage workers and service workers and people for finally got some vindication that fifteen was the new ten or the new seven to fifty, and increasingly you can't even hire people
for fifteen dollars. But the rest of people out there, they're saying, well, I might not be unemployed, but inflation has eaten so much into my buying power when I travel or take my kids out for panera or something like that, that it feels like I'm in a stagflationary environment. Think how awful it is if you do lose your job. And we did have a ton of tech layoffs last year, but by and large people have been able to readjust and find jobs. So this would have been a lot worse.
This difficulty for the FED. I mean, if you had to pick your battle, but one dragon versus the other, unemployment versus inflation, that.
Would have been scary.
Fortunately, we have not seen that yet in fact, I would say the FED would gladly trade some bit of higher unemployment, even though it won't say it on the record, for inflation to get back down to two percent.
Right and raising the raids again.
This is this dance of raising the rates and trying to keep from tipping into recession.
It's such a delicate, delicate game. I wish, and I know Jerome Powell wishes he had more precise levers to pull, like things that could specifically address housing without killing off small banks or small and medium sized businesses that are credit worthy that can't get loans right now because of the banking swoon itself in the Spring was a form of tightening onto itself. These banks became chastened and at the same time that they saw the FED take up rates.
So it's still an imperfect tool. When the FED takes rates down to zero, you invariably get these crazy asset bubbles that come out of it, which might create their own various Minsky moments. And I look back, Molly on the last twenty five years. We've just had a rolling set of emergency interest rate policies and asset bubbles. And the cosmic question to me is, what is normal. What is the baseline? What is the equilibrium carrying capacity of
the United States economy without extraordinary FED intervention? And that, alongside other trauma, keeps me up at night.
I want to talk for another minute about inflation. One of the things that I think really is a cause of inflation, and we just don't talk about enough. Is this pumping money into the economy, this printing money, this juicing the public markets, which is modern monetary policy, right.
Right, And yeah, there used to be taboos. We used to have something called moral hazard where the FED doesn't want to seem like it's backstopping speculators and investors. But so much of that was shattered after the Wall Street bailouts. In the case of PPP, one of the dangerous precedents
here is that we don't have business interruption insurance. If there's another pandemic that comes across the Atlantic and takes unemployment up to fifteen percent of a week, again, the only option we had was for Congress to step in and effectively nationalize insurance, and that wasn't solved. I mean that was just kicked down the road, and clearly with the effects of inflation, I think it was a a really.
I mean, in the fog of war, you have to make emergency decisions, but we're still paying for it.
I want to talk to you about insurance because you've just hit on one of Jesse and I's favorite anxieties, climate change is here. Insurance companies seem to be the only people who are not in denial. We got gas companies, oil companies. They are not going to meet their climate goals quote unquote meet. I mean, sure, whatever, if you're just gonna lie, let's just lie.
But I want to ask you about insurance companies.
We are seeing in Florida the insurance market just creater. This looks like it could be a huge economic crisis.
Very few people realized there was a smallish hurricane I think in two thousand and five or two thousand and six, was it Wilma that then kind of led to the moment of insurers pulling out, and that may have finally caused the housing crisis ground zero in my hometown, you know, in South Florida in the aughts. But what's happening right now is just orders of magnitude larger than any bubble you ever had. In Miami with millionaires and finance people
and Citadel and tech bros going down there. And you can look at the Wall Street Journal every day and look at a record mansion in Coral Gables or Miami Beach, a demo job or an area of high flood risk, and properties keep going up, and it seems to be like the greater full theory, like I'm just going to build this and flip it to the next guy. Climate
change be damned. We've done several episodes where we talk to developers and real estate people, and I was shocked when I learned that, you know, Argentines and Venezuelans and say Brazilians of money have a certain predilection for new high rises that have elevated garages at the bottom where if something happens, you can you know, the building manager will call you in South America and say, look, I'll just take the car up the garage and then we'll padlock,
you know, all the shutters and the thing, and it's not your problem. What happens street level with flooding is is for for hoyp. Beloy, and the chief motivation there is to just protect your money from South American inflation or creeping expropriation. And you have a lot of people, a lot of consumers like that right now, that are coming into places and just devouring the housing market. And I wonder, at what point what gives if you can't buy homeowners insurance? Can you you know, does the bank
get involved, like you're not credit worthy? We're not going to issue a mortgage if you don't have it. So this this is fascinating to me. But I've been trying to cop off.
And does a government step in.
Well with flood insurance?
It does right, right, So if they're going to if they stepped in with flood insurance, you could see a world where they then step in. I mean, if we're just going to protect wealthy people's investments.
Here's a problem. Like if I take Miami in isolation, it used to be the province of people in Golden Beach and Sunny Aisles and the ones who lived on a one A who could afford you know, federal flood insurance, which is expensive, but it's sold by Uncle Sam. Now you could go well Inland on days when there's no rain and find water gurgling up because of King Tide.
And it's everybody's problem, and small and medium sized businesses at homeowners cannot afford that kind of premium insurance, so at some point it has to force people out of the market. But that has not happened yet.
Oh Jesus, oh so much more to worry about. Thank you for joining. I hope you'll come back.
Thank you, Molly, I Will.
Martin Panjelli is The Guardian's Washington breaking news correspondent.
Welcome too fast Politics, Martin.
Thank you for having me. It's a question.
I'm so happy to have you here. We're actually real friends in real life, but you also cover everything. So besides being real friends in real life, you are also really have your finger on everything that's going on, and there's quite a lot going on. I think we should start with the Leonard Leo for the people who are not just completely read in on Leonard Leo, just give us the top lines.
It's kind of app that I would do that. One of my main job at The Guardian is to cover everything quickly.
Right, good, perfect, let's go kind of help.
So, in terms of covering Lenard Leo quickly, Leonard Leo is the man behind the Federalist Society, the man behind Trump's Supreme Court list, right wing Catholic activist who is phenomenally successful in attracting money to his various courses. He throw a Lebyrinthine process. Earlier this year, it was reported that he had attracted a one point six billion dollar gift for the biggest ever such.
Not from Harlan Crow.
Not from Harlan Crow, but he is connected to Arlin Crow. He does pop up Harlan Crow circles. That was mcguy called State Bar. He pops up everywhere there is a Supreme Court ethics story.
Is a good sign.
Yeah, he pops up every time there's a Supreme Court nomination obviously for all the past three anyway, not including Kathandy Bran Jackson three, Trump one. So he's got his finger a lot of pies. And the thing that caused everyone's attention last week and I ended up writing about, but I very explicitly was right about it, because Politico did the reporting was that the DC Attorney General is looking into Leo's some of Leo's arrangements now in how
the nonprofits speak to each other. And the report was very, very impressive, and the Guardian swooped and the Guardian did its thing, which is this is what's happening. Quickly. Here is the political report. It's an amazing report. I recommend reading it. Nobody's none of the big names have matched it. Yet it goes off into a world of registrations of nonprofits in things like strip malls in Texas, which is phenomenal. I just I was reading it and thinking about better call Saul and giggling.
Let's stop and just pull back for a minute.
Here.
This is like when you have a super pack and the super pac is not allowed to speak to the candidate.
It's these kind of rules, right.
It's that kind of thing. It's that kind of world of what communicates with what, what gives what to what? In this case, there's been the question is it's one arm of the empire feeding money to another arm of the empire, which maybe it shouldn't or maybe it should. I don't, I don't know. I was getting lost in
the thickets of it. I mean, with such a big empire and such such amounts of money switching around, and you know, a democratic is only general in DC who has reason to want to have a look and who has a background in the Justice Department, in tax law. That's where this is started to head.
It definitely seems like and again I'm not a tax lawyer, nor do I play one on television, but it does seem a lot of this staff is taking nonprofit status for things that are clearly political.
Yes, I mean, but that's a nonprofit world, doesn't it. I mean. One of Leo's defenses, which he's given to us, not to me, is reportable to one of my fellow reporters, Chris McGreal was. He basically says, you know, dark money is dark money. It's always been around. I'm batting my side, you bat yours, which is cynical sense, correct, right, I.
Mean, technically this money is supposed to be helping like starving children.
Depends on right.
I mean technically nonprofit money is theoretically you're supposed to go to things that are a political or at least animal shelter, starving children, hospitals, things where there's not a political band. We've gone down rabbit hole where things have gotten further and further away from what they're meant to be.
I suppose it's about advancing causes, and that's how you head down the rabbit hole. I did notice in some reading that I thought made laugh federalist society which she looks a slightly different to appear on propit. But it's the legal Activism does say on its website the Federalist Society does not take political positions. So that chimed with me because I work for The Guardian, So I work for a newspaper that takes political positions, which in America sometimes say they don't.
I want to sort of move on from this and talk about the New York constant clip of legal problems that Donald Trump has. But let's just get us up to speed on where we are with Trump's most recent legal stuff.
From my position sitting as a breaking news guy, his legal stuff is constantly breaking. I'm constantly scrambling to catch up with it. I'm instantly updating my totals of indictments to get it right and sorry, totals of charges and under indictment.
So give us account right now.
Account right now is ninety one.
Ninety one counts, four indictments, one superseding.
Four indictments, one superseding. I listened to your conversation with George Comways and made a mental note not to say four indictments.
Well, I mean there, it's technically either for I mean whatever, at this level, I feel like you can the way.
I've been iumerating it, and again I think this maybe is how breaking news reporters can serve a reader quite quite well, is to keep account of just precisely what is true. So he has four areas of criminal legal jeopardy. He's got deral elections subversion, state election subversion meaning Georgia.
He's got retention of classified information. He's got the hush money payments to Stormy Downers, who I keep referring to as a porn star in copy and keep getting told I can't do that because with the Guardian, she's an adult filmmaker. What I find fascinating, obviously the procession of trials that's coming on those subject to legal ranking about when they will happen. I keep remembering. You also have
to remember and mention the other stuff. So you have to you have to tell the readers that there are various cases going on about his business affairs, and there is the other defamation trial coming in the Eugene Carroll case, in which you can say he's been adjudicated a rapist. It's absolutely staggering, and it doesn't stop getting staggering every
time you do it. I've already done it once this morning for the website before coming on here, you know, enumerating the whole thing, following the whole thing at the Guardian. The heavy repertorial lifting on Trump is done by Hugo Lowell, who I think has been.
On Yes, and he's a close personal friend of mine.
Yes, I wanted to. I wanted to introduce myself by saying I'm not as well informed as Hugo Lowell and not as funny and done.
But that is not true. You are as funny as Ian Done you done? I actually had had dinner with when I was in the UK, and he's very funny. Now I kind of want to talk about UK politics, but I don't think we should. Oh, last week GB News asked me to come on GB News. Is this basically Rupert Murdock trying to get Fox News in the UK?
Is that fair?
It's the Fox News clone.
Right, and it's created almost entirely to try to sell Brexit to the British people.
The only famous anchor.
They have is a man called Nigel Farage, who was most famous for Brexit and before that being a low level mp EP.
Ironically he ran I think it's seven parliamentary campaigns for that winning. I'd have to double check that with that figure famous never winning, but also first fair for winning for getting Brexit. You know. I was also thinking before coming out about how many of my little biases can come out as report it again. I'm so quite a few. I'm allowed to have them. There are no words to describe how I personally never mind in my personal job,
whether that's from regard and so it doesn't matter. There are no words to describe how much I loathe Brexit. That's coming from me who's a privileged guy who moved to New York eleven years ago now lives in DC. You know, left the scene, not part of the argument, but I just.
So I need to now tell this story. I go on gb News when they ask me. My thinking is, as long as I don't promote it, I am on their airwaves, and I am you know, I might.
Be the only sane person they ever see. So I go.
On the other day and usually they put me with like more of a newsy cruise, so you know, we'll have our disagreements, but the questions won't be quite so slanted.
On this time, I.
Was on with like a very opinionated guy who and the package before. You know, they aired a little package before and it was jaw droppingly terrible. It was a package about how immigrants are coming from North Africa and they're making it so that women can't wear bathing suits. I mean, it was like just about the most racist
thing I had ever seen. By the time they got to me, I was so enraged and it was just like the most blatant, disgusting I mean it was like literally being in the opinion section of the New York Post and they started talking about how much the Biden is demented and.
Old and dah dah dah.
And I said, you know, our inflation is three you know, three percent a little more. I mean, you know they're different inflationary statistics, but you know your your inflation rate is many multiples more than ours. I said, like, if he's so demented, why can't you guys have lower inflation? You know, why is our monetary policy kicking your ass?
And he was so furious with May.
And then we went down and I said, you know, is it because you've sanctioned yourselves by leaving Europe? And he just got more mad at me and I just got worse and worse as an interview went on, as.
It were, you're doing the Lord's work. I went on there last summer when Liz Trust was heading for Downing Street. I've told everybody this, obviously proud of myself. I knew Liz Trust growing up. She's my friend Chris's older sister, and knew her and liked her and didn't know her
that particularly while she was old than me. But I saw her here and there, saw her once we grew up, moved to London, saw her a party so on, had entertaining political arguments because she was a conservative and I'm not. And then last summer, I kind of having not said anything in public about about this Trust, she started criticizing the area we come from in Leeds in the north and the school we went to criticizing it in contestable terms and also outright false terms about the seat in
the school. So I had a crack in a Guardian op ed and in the fallout from that, and as she got closer to Downing Street, I went on GP News in a few other places to talk about it. And it was fine for me because they were just asking, they were trying to sort of needle me a bit about calling me a Guardian lefty and stuff, but I am it went okay. I try not to overstate and the thing I told them why people in round Hay
and Leeds were upset with it too much. But I did get a note from Guardian in London saying it or really we don't do GPS. Do Fox News. I can do GP.
I mean I do.
Think like it is one of these questions of what is diminishing returns? Right?
I mean, what is okay and what is not okay?
Yeah, it sounds like you had a bunch stickier, but.
It is like and I'd love to like pull out and just talk about Jessic, my friend Jessica who is the liberal on Fox News, and she really, Jessica Tarloff really does do God's work on there. You've seen many clips of her on The Five, which is a really
highly rated show. Millions of people watching that show, or at least million of people watching that show, and she is actually demnking these claims, which opens the door of the question and again was pee budajiitch too, Like how much should these two media ecosystems interact and what is positive and what is negative.
I think we should interact as much as possible. I do think that. I know there are dangers, I know there are pitfalls, but I really think liberals should talk to conservatives ad vice versa. It just stands to reason to me, you should be able to have a disagreement and stay civil. And even if you don't stay civil, it's good TV, right, I mean, look at that, it's just not talking the other side seems wrong to me.
I blatant self promotional alarm going it is. I've had ten eleven years here, and as a side project, I started writing about rugby ten years ago. I'll keep this brief, but it has actually led me writing about rugby and writing about West Point Rugby at the Academy into a lot of places where Guardian reporters don't always go into
small town America. Trump signed in the Rockery America in western Pennsylvania, say, or in California, in Orange County, where Reagan said good Republicans go to die when they're other places, small town Jersey, lots of places, lots of people who are not the people I would say every day. Is that a phrase I don't like, right?
But it's really it is very important.
And it's funny because it's like, I think about this luck because I have one kid who is involved, at least tandentially in the military, and he tells me what his friends, who a lot of his friends are the kids of the military, And he told me this amazing thing which I think I hadn't seen reported anywhere, which is that these military families, and I assume other people in the military too, are furious with Tommy Tubervel for what he's done, and that politicizing the military is one
of the greatest crimes you can commit against the military, and so to Bervail has really become this huge villain in the world of the military. And when Ron DeSantis said he's supported Tuberville's kind of the way that Tuberville was shutting down the military, it made my kid, whose name I will not mention because he's already going to be screaming at me about this, made him not like DeSantis anymore, because here was a guy who was putting
politics over military. So that was something I would never have known.
Yeah, it's adjacent to something I learned. I think it was Simour hersh who I read at some point said in the discussion. The thing you have to when you're reporting on the US military, you have to understand they don't do irony. They don't do it. It's like they mean it basically. And I learned that going into West Point seven eight years ago, quickly going out and talking to these guys from a team twenty years ago. They don't do irony. They mean it like someone from one
group going to another gap saying the other way. It's it's incumbent on you to understand that. You don't have to accept everything. You don't have to repeat the line. But you're talking to people who believe a thing. So why do they believe that? What does that belief make them do? How can you discuss various things? You know, discussing with these West Point guys discussing the rights and wrongs of the Iraq war is on one level, guys who fought. They're talking to me, a guy literally literal
bearded lefty from with the forum we've got. We're talking because of rugby, but then it goes wider than that. We have We've had some fascinating conversations over the time, and it's just all goes back to the original point here of do you talk to Fox? Do you talk to GP News? Do you talk to I'm not sure about news, Maximo.
Am that's a bridge too far.
But I'm trying to get the pr agent at the moment for the book to get me onto some into some right, into some conservative media. I think I should conservatives read books.
Too, exactly. Thank you so much, Martin. I hope you'll come back.
Absolutely, thank you very much for having me.
He can Molly jung Fast. Rudy Juliati, a guy who would you read nearly every article accounting of him, is drinking and smoking a cigar. I'm going to be shocked to tell you this.
Yes, Jack Smith is investigating some of the things he does while he's very very.
Drug I'm very unsurprised.
Anyone who has seen Rudy's YouTube channel, which you and I both have, unfortunately, can attest to the fact that Rudy does a lot of things under the influence.
And you heard it here ninety nine. But it is our moment of fook.
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to hear the best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again thanks for listening.