Welcome everybody to this warning. Addition, we're thrilled to be able to bring you jud Legum. Jud is an extraordinary journalist, one of the leaders of this new era of independent journalism, of people that can't be bought off, can't be made to bend the knee, can't be made to capitulate, and fundamentally are on your side if you're an ordinary person
out there trying to understand what's going on. I have a political perspective that one of the issues of our time that must be dealt with very squarely is the accumulation of power, government power, police power, tech company power, pharmaceutical company power, the power of monopolists, the power of conglomerate that have stifled competition, that have become intrusive of privacy,
have become arrogant, have become officious. Extraordinary moment that marks the end of an era, the beginning of a new one. At Trump's inaugural where he is sitting there seating the American oligarchs for the world to see, even in front of his cabinet. The indiscriminate, thoughtless damage done to public institutions without debate by the world's richest man, Elon musk the disintegration of that relationship. Jud Legum covers all of it and goes in depth, substantively reports facts that are
necessary for citizens to have. In a free society, where there's no accountability, there can't be any oversight of government. And in this country, government is of the people, by the people, for the people, by design, and so we see a lot of testing, a lot of probing, a lot of assertion, and a lot of crumbling of institutions. And with jud Legum you have somebody who can help explain it. If you do not subscribe to popular information,
I really urge you to do so. This is something that I read very very very early in my reading cycle of the day. It's something that I put in the first rank of credibility. I know when jud Legum says that this is the story of what has happened here. If this is asserted in a jud Legum story as
a fact, it's a fact. And so we have spaces in this country where you can be informed, where you can find out what's happening, but it's on you to go find it, and so to be better informed, I really urge you to go to popular information and arm
yourself with information and popular information. I imagine jud had a very specific meaning when you when you named it, Can you take us inside that how it came to be and as you were sitting there in that moment that hey, I'm gonna I'm gonna do this, how this gets started and how the name come to be.
Well, you know, there's a there's a a famous quote that a democracy, you know, without popular information or the means for acquiring it, is a prologue to a farce or a tragedy. H And that was by James Badison, and the idea being that democracy itself, the whole premise of it is focused on people having an accurate understanding of the world so they can make decisions the whole massive people.
Uh.
And I think that that's something that's really under attack.
Obviously.
You have an administration now that is basing a lot of its efforts on inculcating people with ideas that that are are grounded in reality.
So that's you know, that's really what what I'm trying to do.
Uh, you know, and I'm not going to get to everything I do four for newsletters a week, but trying to pick out the things that are the most important or that not necessarily even the most important, but the things that I feel like are not getting adequate coverage elsewhere where I can provide some added value and bringing
that to as many people as possible. So it's not designed, I think when I was conceiving of the name, it's there's a lot of political newsletters that are really geared towards sort of an insidery audience, people who are working in politics, the lobbyists, the staffers, all of those folks, and obviously you know there's nothing that they're free to read this newsletter as well.
But my goal really is to have.
Is to have this appeal to a broad audience, because that's where I think is really the important work to be done, and really underserved group of people.
So you have this incredible body of work, and it's so in depth. Can you just take us inside. How you approach the week, how do you settle on this is what I'm going to cover this week? How much time goes into each story? How many stories are you developing at any one time, and what's the total footprint of popular information? I mean, your output to me is something that, Wow, he must have a giant newsroom behind
him and I suspect the actuality. You don't, but I just you're very prolific, and you talk about necessary stories across this broad front and I find them just universally interesting, but they take us inside that story reselection process that hey, I'm gonna like, this is something I got to get on and I'm gonna go deep on this and then not not the not the names of course of sources, but how do you how do you get into some of this stuff as deeply as you do while publishing
as frequently as you do.
Well thanks for that question, Steve. I think the way that it really works is that I'm working usually on at least two tracks, most of the time three or four, so I try.
I usually always have a few stories, and these are stories that I can be working on for for weeks, for months.
You know, I'm working on a story. I'll just kind of give a little teaser forks.
I think I'm finally gonna be ready to put it out next week on a member of Congress who just resigned, and I had some video of him appearing side by side with a lobbyist and sort of trying to understand what it was he was doing and what the implications of all that were and contacting people. And I've been working on that for a few weeks now, you know, making sure that I understood the got the story right.
At the same time, I published four times a week at six thirty in the morning Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and so I'm always I always hit that that those times, and so as I'm working on those stories, I'm slotting them into some of those these longer term, you know stories, and some of them are these ones where I get a tip or a piece of information through people that I know, and but I also put my signal number out there or my signal username now out there so that people.
Can contact me. That was what was going on.
Of course, a lot in the beginning of this administration, so many people in the federal government just desperate to tell people what's going on?
Is that chilled? Has that changed?
It has?
And I think the reason why is I had a lot of people in different agencies, you know, and I produced a lot of reporting on the Social Security a lot on omp different places where I had people who were on the inside, and anytime something that they thought was significant happit, they were reaching out to me. Most of those people have now left. The people that I was talking to, at least most of them have now left, And I think the ones that are.
Still there, there's been a real.
Crackdown and people are much more hesitant to talk. And I think my guess is that there's a lot more surveillance going on. There's a lot more aggressive rooting out of anyone who was trying to get information out there. It still occurs, but it's nowhere ne the level that it was. I think also part of it is sort of this natural kind of I think the things that
were happening initially were such a shock. Maybe people aren't even reaching out as much because what's going on doesn't even shock them as much anymore.
But but yeah.
I have that and then and then you know, so so some of these stories are are are days or weeks, you know, and some of them are from tips. Some of them are you know, research projects that I'm looking at data or you know, there's filings coming out I'm understanding, Like when the you know, the end of this month, we've got a big filings, we'll understand and they'll finally be disclosed. Who's contributed to all of the super PACs, the main Senate super packs, the House super PACs. That'll
be pretty interesting to see what happens. But then other times I don't have one of those ladies, so I'm gonna go and find something that I can turn around in six or seven hours.
I do have two full time staff people.
Who helped me out, so we can get you know, between the three of us, we can get pretty in depth in you know, six or seven hours, and and and try to find something something new, talk to some folks, look at some primary source information, and we'll get something out the next day. So so that's that's the that's those are sort of the two ways in which it occurs,
and they're all kind of all going on at once. Uh, And it can be a bit of a challenge, but it's something I really enjoyed doing, so it's I don't I don't consider it a burden. It's just that's kind of you know, my my way of life. And then you get something out and you're thinking about the next idea.
How do you know when something's hit? What? What what do you what do you measure success as right? You know, at some level you've made the commitment to report it you've done it with integrity, You've put it out there, so there's pride in the work. But how do you know when this is a piece of information that's really landed with the with the public. And how often are you seeing your original reporting then picked up in other
places and carried forward? And is their crossover of popular information reporting into that corporate media space where they're sourcing popular information right as the credible, independent investigative news agency who has brought to light something that was not in the public sphere prior.
Yeah, that certainly does happen, and we try to put all the information into each newsletter so that people can feel confident of that. So when we're gonna if we are going to report on a me that was produced by the Social Security Agency, you know, a big one that we put out was one where they were describing the impacts of scaling back and really eliminating phone service for a huge swath of beneficiaries, and it was really
described as potentially catastrophic. This was in an internal memo that was widely picked up by a lot of media outlets. I think that ultimately what I'm looking for is impact.
You know, I don't think this is just a.
Process where you're just you know, entertaining people or tried to, you know, just find something that people enjoy reading. I hope people do enjoy reading it. I hope people feel like they're getting something out of it. But at the end of the day, I want the work to have an impact on the world. So a story that we worked on earlier this year regarding the big fight about the Supreme Court race in North Carolina, which was the very last race of twenty twenty four to be decided.
The Republican candidate was trying to.
Throw out tens of thousands of ballots and actually convinced the same Supreme Court of North Carolina that he was ready for to throw out a bunch of ballots on the grounds that they had never lived in North Carolina. We actually found and even with a local partner that we teamed up with, talked to many of these folks and found that they had in fact lived in North Carolina,
some of them had never lived anywhere else. And it was just, you know, as often these things are, a data air that was then cited in both state and federal court and ultimately in the decisions that you know, settled that election. So that's not going to happen all the time. But for me, that says, Okay, we dug into it. We worked hard on this story, we got out and substantiated the facts, and now it's had an impact. Other things are going to have an impact over time.
You know, I think that that's it's not going to be you put the story out, it appears in this lawsuit, and then the lawsuit goes one way. It's going to be something that occurs over months and years and hopefully you help shape people's understanding of an important issue.
How do you approach this ice issue. I'll give you a political analysis of this, which is that this perversely named propagandist propaganda like named bill the big beautiful Bill, so big, so incomprehensible, and there's so many things in it that will harm p bull do real damage. We
could talk about it for many, many hours. There's one big thing that didn't get through the bill, which as a political learning is important, and that was the public land sell off that Mike Lee tried to orchestrate, which was an act of profound you know, Taylor Sheridan could write thirty thirty series about the corruption in that public
land spin off. But what the what the bill will be Berkeley, is that this created a national secret police force that, if it was a military, would be the fifteenth ranked military force in the world is which is a very potent military And they got it through without a lot of debate. And now all of a sudden, and it struck me that there was an ICE official, a sector chief, leaning against a armored vehicle and he said, he doesn't work for Karen Bass, and the federal government
will do whatever it wants in Los Angeles. And you know, I wish somebody to ask him a follow up question because I wonder who it is that he believes that he works for. Right if it would have been Tom Homan or Christy nom or Donald Trump, I suspect his answer would not have been, what I work for the people, And of course he does. He works for us. So you look at this guy, the sector chief, and he's got his long rifle, he's got a ar it's got a ammunition kit, you know, on the on the back
of it. You know, the whole the whole militarized picture. And it makes you think, well, you know, who's the enemy here. And so I'm fifty four and I've worked in a White House, I've worked in the Congress, I've worked for the governor of California. I've worked at politics all around the world at every level, and there's never been an official with the title sector chief that's mattered
in the a life of an American citizen. I wonder, all of a sudden, how many powerful sector chiefs who command armies we're going to have in the United States posing on armored vehicles, announcing that the official who got millions of votes in the second largest city in the country and the fourth largest in North America doesn't matter, and their officiousness and their arrogant So I think that that story right in the in the change to society, it will break and the chaos it's in an unleash.
How how do you intend to cover this? Right do you have? Do you think is ice penetratable? Right? The National Guard soldiers that are that are cooped up in this coast playing performance, Like, how do you conceptualize the the coverage of a story that at some level, if we were sitting around talking about this five years ago, six years ago, seven years ago, this would be a crazy conversation.
Yeah, I mean, I think that looking at the bill, the bill that passed, it did not pass because the components of it were popular, or that the whole thing put together was popular. It passed because they had the power to pass it, and that's what they did. And so I think that what happens next is going to depend on people's understanding of how this plays out, how it impacts society. I agree that this ICE issue, and really the unfathomable amount of money that was given to
IC not just oh well, let's double their assets. So this is twelve thirteen times. You know, they're what they had to work with before in a lot of these categories.
So how do we.
Allow people to begin to understand how these resources are being used. I don't think people want a secret police that's roaming the country snatching up their neighbors. You know, the reason why Trump was successful kind of demagoguing on this is because he painted the idea that he was going to be rounding up these horrible criminals. I think they've already run out of folks to target. They're ripping people out of these muties who've been there for decades.
No criminal history.
So for me, I'm thinking about, well, how can I get into the source actually looking at this today. One of the things I want to do, and I think I'm going to have I think it's going to be not too long, but probably a couple of months before this happen, is every contract that ICE is going to sign to spend this money, because they're not actually going
to be able to spend it internally themselves. They're going to have to just outsource a lot of this because they don't have the capacity to spend this much money. Is public information that's listed on the government contracting database, and so that's I think a pressure point because there's going to be a lot of people, I think quite quick. I mean there's a lot of people already who are
very upset. You know, Joe Rogan is very upset because he didn't think there was any possibility to predict this. But many people are very upset.
And and.
I think that allowing people to understand, well, what corporations are going to be complicit in this, who are going to be grabbing for this, you know, a piece of this, these billions of dollars, that's something where I think I'm going to add value because I don't think a lot of other folks are going to be looking at that closely.
It is the private prison industry and area that is of interest specifically to you or that you think about as as top of mind as you follow the money on this. Yeah.
In fact, we just did a story last week. This was while all this other stuff was happening, you know, the bill was passing all of that, there was a very quiet story that the f CC had reversed a rule it was put in place last year that would prevent companies from charging incarcerated people these outrageous fees for phone calls, you know, something like twelve dollars for a fifteen minute phone call and a lot of these facilities and there's really no reason. And so the question is, well,
why are they doing this? Because the companies that sell these telecommunication service of prisons, it's not really at and T, it's relatively small companies. They don't really even get a lot of money to candidate, So why are they doing this?
Looking into it, the reason why these fees are so high is because the people who operate the prisons, including Geogroup, cour Civic, the big private companies, they get a kickback, sometimes as much as fifty percent of all of the revenue that these companies bring in and they get it sent back to them as part of the contracts they sign. So we now have that industry, which as you know, is one of the top industries as far as you know, donating money to the Trump super packs, donating money to
the inauguration. Just really one of the industries that's gone all that really went all in on Trump. And now you have the FCC for really no reason. Actually the chairman of the FCC, Brendan Carr, who's very conservative, voted for this rule last year because no one's really for this, even if you you know, I don't think anyone is pro criminal, but nobody thinks they should have to pay fifteen dollars to talk to their daughter or their mother for a few minutes when they have the opportunity to.
Voted for it.
Now it's been a sudden reversal, and I think it's that influence of the private prison industry, and so yes, I think they're highly influential. I think there's very little accountability for how they operate, and it's something that I'm going to have a, you know, a very close eye on. I think they're probably going to be one of the primary beneficiaries of all of this, all this money.
When when you think about I had, I had this. I had an experience that was among the most astonishing of my life in this conversation, but it was at Auschwitz. And you know, the first time I went to Auschwitz, it was it was part of the US delegation for the sixtieth anniversary of the of the liberation and Eli Bezel was on that trip and I spent a fair amount of time with him, which was which was an
extraordinary experience. And then I went back last last March and I went on a tour with the head guide. His name is Paul Powell, and he was a journalist who left a radio news job to become teacher educator guide there and he took Elon Musk around and I asked him, I said, well, he didn't make an impression at all, and he said, I'm afraid not. And that was early in the day out on this tour. And so, you know, hat a couple of takeaways from the from
the experience. But you know, one of them is is that as you comprehend the place, it was that even the people like el like Elise who survived Auschwitz really didn't fully experience Auschwitz, in that the only people who did were the ones who walked down the steps into the showers, into the gas sin, into the ovens. Right, and there was no surviving that, right. Nobody came back
from that, nobody, nobody survived that. And so we're in this corner of the camp and he tells me this story about what he describes as the Polish Clint Eastwood who escapes from Auschwitz. They kill a couple of SS guards and we're sitting off in this corner and he says, you know, people will say to me things like, well, is it true that even the birds don't fly over Auschwitz?
And he and he and he points out a stork that is taking off from one of the ponds where the SS dumped the ashes of the of the murder Jews, and he says, look, there's a stork taking off. And he points to a building and he says, do you know what type of building that is? And I said, that's a water treatment facility and he says that's correct, and he goes, did you know that Auschwitz opened up late?
And I said I didn't know that. And he said they couldn't get the permits for the water treatment, for the waste sewage plan, and for the fire codes and the barracks, and he goes, yeah, he goes the SS was not omnipodent in Germany. It was an agency of the government. It was powerful, it was corrupt. But the Germans were a highly organized bureaucratic society needed the stamp.
And when the SS announced that the plan was to dump the waste of the one hundred thousand prisoners in the prison designed in the woods to hold one hundred thousand people, the German bureaucrat didn't say, why are we building a prison for one hundred thousand people in the woods here in Poland? Where are you dumping the waste for the one hundred thousand people when they sat in the river and there were Germans down river? He said nine.
And so the killing gets off to a late start. Now, Schwitz and these buildings are built to last, and we're sitting there and he pulls out of his pocket a piece of the paper and he goes, hey, he goes, this is the permit, and he goes, that's the stamp that opened Auschwitz. And so it didn't It didn't open with a bullet to the head. It opened with a stamp from a water bureaucrat and as this concentration camp, and it is a concentration camp. And I'll debate anyone
till the end times right about that. And the definition of what a concentration camp is in Florida is that in the debate we had as a society in the aftermath of World War II, where people look back and say, what did we know about the Holocaust and the camps and what could have been done? Could it have been bombed the rail lines? And of course the leaders of the Allied countries fundamentally said, well, in order to bring the killing to an end, the abuses to an end,
we win the war. So anything that diverts us from winning the war prolongs the suffering of the Jews and the camp. And once you're in that position, there's an elemental pragmatism that gets involved. But at the beginning, right now, as the camp is coming to be, as it's coming to be formed, and they have a budget of forty five billion dollars to construct these camps, and put that in perspective, the top line NFL stadiums, the one in Vegas and the one in La the Sofi Stadium, where
when you walk into it you say, holy shit. Those two stadiums cost two billion dollars each. So I don't know what forty five billion dollars worth of these detention camps,
concentration camps look like across the United States. And I just like, how do you think about that as an issue in covering that as a as a society issue, Because at some level to me, even talking about this in those terms like as I feel totally confident at an honesty level, at an integrity level, right at at a truthfulness level about we have to talk about this. But at the same time, I'm like, am I crazy?
And the truth is I'm not crazy? So like, how how do we talk about the coverage of this Budge day burgeoning forty five billion dollars of concentration camp building out across the country.
Yeah, I mean, I think I don't think you're crazy bringing that up. And I think one of the things that people forget is that we really the the fundamental legal principle that we're now you know, the Trump administration is now fighting against by setting up you know, these concentration camps, These the tension facilities. You know, we've seen one get created in Florida that I think is probably the you know, maybe maybe it's the blueprint for for
the others. UH is that there was a concern that the United States did not do enough to take in Jews that were threatened in Germany and elsewhere and provide them with asylum, provide them with refuge.
And that's why we passed a law in the.
United States where we do not simply turn away anyone who shows up in the country without you know, all of their paperwork. We have a process in which they are able to make a case that they would be subject to persecution if they were to return home, and if they can prove that they can stay here. You know, that's something we decided after we saw what happened in World War Two and decided that we were not going to do so little again as far as taking people in.
So now we have completely.
Abandoned that and we're going really back into the opposite into the opposite way. So I think understanding the legal history and really the fundamental principles that are behind our immigration laws is important. That's not to say that we you know that twenty twenty five is the same as nineteen sixty five or nineteen forty five, and that we shouldn't make adjustments. But there was a time when Democrats and Republicans understood that these were human beings that deserve
compassion and that shouldn't be demaized, you know. So hopefully we can find a way back to this. I think what we're in, what we're what we're dealing with right now, is an experiment to see how far this can be pushed. And that's it's it's it's quite distressing.
It's quite distressing.
But what keeps me going and wanting to understand as much as I can about it and then share that with the people, you know, who read my newsletter and and get the information I put out elsewhere, is that I've also seen how these things can shift rapidly back and forth, and sometimes you sometimes it takes unfortunately a severe overreach in order to provoke that kind of shift
backwards too. So I think that's what's you know, that's what's confronting us here is are we going to go deeper and deeper and deeper into the into the darkness here as we you know, round up, folks, or are is there going to be a reality check.
You know, there's a there's a reason that the manager of the Yankees gets more media coverage than the Triple A team, and Columbus that gets more coverage than the Double A manager, the single A manager. So when you when you think about people in the in the government and in the in the hierarchy, we cover the people at the top of the chain, the people that have sentate confirmed jobs, the secretaries of defense and State and
so on and so forth. But the commandant, right the warden of this camp in Florida, is that an individual who's worthy of tough and unrelenting media scrutiny along with say, for example, the sector chief in Los Angeles who's leaned against the armored vehicle saying we're not we're not leaving as the city is held under a siege by its federal government. Is that I think? I think so. Is that somebody that is that should be covered relentlessly?
I think so. And I think that.
You know, there's there's a real effort to try to intimidate people against that kind of coverage. Say that you know, this is the media trying to docs you know this person or you know trying to subject them to harm. You know, I'm not going to print, you know, their home address or something like that. I'm not going to talk about you know, I'm not going to you know, hand out their phone number so people can call them.
But I think letting people understand who they are, what their background is, how are they acting.
These are people.
All of these positions are positions where someone's supposed to be acting in the public trust. They're supposed to be acting in accordance with their local laws, the state laws, federal laws, the Constitution. So all of that is fair game because ultimately, you know, it's not going to be Donald Trump that is rounding all the people up. He's not going to be the one doing it. So if you limit your coverage just to the very top, you're
going to miss a lot of the story. I think that it's also it also just is such a limiting lens to look at it, because if you only and this is I try to think about this, you know, as I'm thinking about, how do you plan out your week if if every story I'm writing is just Donald Trump said this and that's not true. You know, I could just write that story every day, But I don't think people would, and sometimes you need to write that story because it's an important story to write that particular day.
But I don't think that's gonna get people anywhere that they aren't where they aren't already. People need to understand the full spectrum of how of how all of this works, and and that's what I think creates a greater level of understanding and a greater level of accountability because there right now, it's probably it's probably past date to hold Trump accountable for anything, but there's a lot of other people who's gonna need to work by his side who
still can be held accountable. And I think that's that's a really important piece of business.
One of the things that I find most curious about all of this, and I've had this conversation privately, but also on the warning, is the degree to which you look at the arrogance of the people involved in this, and there's no semblance of restraint or notion of well, we may be voted out and hold before congressional committees two years from now. It's as if they are deluded into believing that Trump's deaf teflon right covers all of them. And I know it is their arrogance in the moment, right,
And that's the craziness. And it's not the fact that right, they know something that I don't know, right, and right they've got in the plan that it's all over and that it's entirely the arrogance. But do you ever, do you ever sit there in scratch your head when you look at the performances of some of the spokespeople, the disrespect, the factlessness, the just the lying, the yelling, the you know,
the the preening, the performance of a Carolyn Levitt. I mean, you know, I know my audience is skewing my age and up right, you know, I know, but I hope we have some young people on here, and you know they're just not old enough to remember Bagdad Bob Right, who was Saddam hussein spokesperson, right and was a caricature right of dishonesty right literally at the airport saying the Americans will never take the airport as the tanks are rolling behind him. I mean, she, Carolyn Levitt, is that
level of disingenuousness and totally crazy. And you know, and and and you know, fairness to Bagdad Bob Right, Saddam Husain is going to shoot him probably right if he didn't say like what he needed to say, right, And you know Trump's not going to shoot Carolyn Levitt, I
don't think. But what I mean, well, do you ever scratch your head and think about these people like it seems like they haven't imagined that they're about to be voted out of here, right, you know, at least in the Congress in two years like that there's no possibility of it? Or is that just me?
Yeah? I mean I think for I think it's for It definitely takes a certain kind of person to be willing to do that, that's for sure. I think somebody like Gerrold Levitt, Like, when I think about it, I think she'll probably get us softly at lead somewhere. I could see her getting set up, you know, on a nice show on Newsmax or something like that, and it'll probably be fine. She may not ever have to confront,
you know, what she's been involved with. The Thing that I just can't quite understand are these institutions and and people who are definitely going to be around at a time where you know, you'd have to think there's at least a fair possibility that it's going to be a
much different, uh political environment. You know, you look at the Washington Post, which you know has has really taken decades of of work, you know, establishing itself as you know, one of the premier journalistic outlets, and kind of flushed a lot of it, you know, down the drain in in a few months here in an effort to appease Trump. I saw that, you know, just before we're getting on here,
I saw that there. You know, they sign out a letter to all their staff talking about how you know, this is a new era they're they're going to read. They've revamped their opinion page, the opinion page that you know endorsed Pambondi for Attorney General, and you know, is doing everything they can to kind of cozy up to Trump.
And if you're not, you know, if you're if you don't, if you're.
Not on board with all of this, you know, we're we're happy to accept your your resignation, and we'll give you some you know, uh severts, a severts package.
They are going to.
Be around when they're going to have to have credibility with a variety of audiences.
Trump is not.
Gonna you think, do you think that they have credibility as an institution.
Not anymore, not anymore.
I mean, I think they've I think that they're they're certainly journalists there that I respect to continue to do great work kind of in spite of it, you know, so nothing to do with the institution anymore. But I think the readers, they've lost hundreds of thousands of readers. They're they're searching for a reader that doesn't really exist. But it's clear that the priory is to create good feelings within one person, which is Donald Trump, and that
has worked. You know, Donald Trump has praised Jeff Bezos and what Jeff Bezos has done at the Post publicly. Jeff Bezos said that's what he was going to do, you know, that's what he set out to do once Trump got elected. And it's working. But my, my, my, The thing that I don't understand is that's going to work for a few years and then we're going to at some point move on to something else where we at least we might and where is that going to going to leave him? And And that's really what I
don't understand. These are these are supposed to be some of the most sophisticated UH people in the world, these kind of you know, capitalists, savants or whatever you want to whatever you want to call them. It seems like if I can think of it, that they probably can also think of this, but for some reason they.
Do not here or they or they're not thinking about it.
Well, right from a from the Bezos perspective, right, you know, you have to let's unpack this. So Jeff Bezos says, well, this is what the consumer demands, this is what the audience needs to have in the way of news, and all of the changes to the editorial pages right reflect this sensibility. And this is a guy who just threw the wedding that he threw, right, So Jeff Bezos throws that wedding, and he thinks that the people of the
world care about this, as opposed to being appalled by it. Right, So he lives in a total bubble of surreality and delusion. But you know, he's certainly not alone. I mean, I don't necessarily think he's any more delusional than David zaslov for example, Right, at some level, right, David Zasloff is even more offensive given that right, it's a failing public company and he's managed to right figure out how to rig a theft of fifty two million dollars of compensation
right from the shareholders. But it's just also corrupt, and you know, and I wanted to ask you about that, which is what motivates you to kind of chase down the corruption in an era that is just so unfathomably
corrupt and so fast. I mean, when I was in the White House, I had a sci security clearance, and I had I had a political job, you know, and I dealt with the press, and so I was terrified at all times of breaking the Hatch Act, violating the Hatch Act, which was a real thing if you worked in the Bush or the Obama administrations, until Kelly Ann disregarded it, and terrified of making a mistake with the
piece of classified information. And the truth is right, you see these classified briefings and write what was in the briefing was on the front page of the New York Times. Some reporter asked you a question about a story on the front page of the New York Times after you saw the classified briefing in the morning. Right, You're in
a difficult position. So I never talked about any of that, right, just never wanted to talk about any of that, any of that stuff, but the corruption, the liing that this honesty, like what keeps you motivated to keep chasing it as opposed to feeling defeated and drowned by it because the waters are rising everywhere with it. Right, it's so much worse and it was last year, which was worse than it was the year before, which was worse than it was the year before. In this titanic tidal wave of
epic corruption. Yeah, it's it is stunning.
I mean, I think just the not not that Trump is using the presidency to you know, profit before himself. I mean that I think everyone expected, but just the brazenness that's going on. I think I stay motivated because I'm trying to look at the long term view of this. One of the things that is demotivating is you are not going to shame this group of people into changing what they're doing.
They're going to keep doing it.
So you got to have to put that that because that's usually one of the one of the nice things about exposing something that's corrupt is that you know, if you expose it, well then they might stop.
That's not going to happen.
But I do find that to be a thread in the coverage though of him, then it holds out a possibility that it could stop, and may stop. He may do the right thing today, because I see, I think that's endemic to like ninety percent of the media coverage. And I don't mean to interrupt you.
Yeah, No, I mean I think I do think that there's I do think that there's a normality about the coverage that doesn't reflect the abnormality of the behavior.
So I think that that is said, Yes, I agree with that.
And your your point is like, it's they're they're the good Fellow's crew, and the good Fellow's crew is gonna steal shit, right, yeah, and so Donald Trump isn't going to stop doing what he's doing, and so so go ahead.
I didn't mean yeah, but I was gonna say that.
I think what they are the goal of this is just to push ahead and push ahead in two exhaust people bull into kind of throwing up their hands, and to a certain extent it's worky. But I want to try to be a counterbalance of that. So we spent a long time and written several articles about, you know, about Jerry Kushner and this investment fund that he set up, which is mostly money from Saudi Arabia and other countries,
and how he's now funneled that. Now, Jerry Kusher has never been in private equity, has never done anything about this. In fact, his primary experience was nearly bankrupting his family business, which he inherited and got bailed out of that, so no one would ever give him money. And in fact, the independent board in Saudi Arabia that decided that decides to do this said, this is a ridiculous thing where it gets it at only the crowd prints, you know,
overruled them. But then you have him now funneling the money. He's now acting as a funnel and they're building you know, new Trump towers in the Middle East and in Europe. And so the money is going directly from Saudi Arabia into Jared Kushner's you know, Affinity Partners. He takes his management fee and all of the other cuts, and he's then giving it to essentially his father, the Laudadeld Trump and the rest of the Trump sons.
It's gotten very little coverage.
I think is probably the most brazenly corrupt scheme in presidential history, just just taking money from before envelopment and just pouring it right, just giving these millions of dollars right to the president. I think it's but I think it's I'm not going to get defeated by that. We're just going to keep beating the drum and try to make sure that there's at least someone watching this occur.
So when let me just set to this story on the facts and correct me if my memory faults here and I get a detail of this wrong. But some six months after leaving the Trump White House, where Jared Kushner was initially denied a security clearance, was granted one by presidential intervention, and, according to multiple news reports, was the primary consumer of the nation's most closely guarded secrets. Was insatiable with his desire to have access to compartmentalized information.
Jared Kushner, six months after leaving, takes in two billion dollars of direct investment to an investment fund, despite having no experience investing anything anywhere at any time ever. Takes the money against the recommendation of the Saudi professional advisors who advised the sovereign Wealth Fund. The Crown Prince directly intervenes, gives Jared the money and I said at the time, this isn't a this isn't a conflict of interest story. This is an espionage story. That is like, we have
a country where why is oldra James in prison? Right? Why is the you know, I was thinking of the FBI agent, Robert, you know with these guys, these were small timers, right in terms of the money that was taken. It's it's astonishing amounts of money. And I couldn't agree with you more on the fact that it's probably the most brazen act of corruption in the entire history of the country. That's right, Robert Hinson, thank you postcards from home. It's like the third time today I've had a memory
failure on someone someone's name. So I don't I don't know what's going on, but Robert Hanson, But it's a it's a it's astonishing right to behold the corruption? What why do you think that there isn't more coverage of it on on the television shows? Is it a resource issue? Is it that our voters excuse me, that our audience doesn't care to complex a story? Right, there's easier stories to tell, right, What why why isn't there more coverage of this?
I I don't think it's too complex, and I don't think that people think there's a lack of interest. I do think it's an issue where members of the media have decided that because Trump's core voter base does not care, that this is not worthy of continual coverage. There was a much more complicated story, which I think was a legitimate story, which was when Hillary Clinton was running for
office in twenty sixteen. There was concern that foreign governments who donated to the Clinton Foundation, not her, but the Clinton Foundation, would then get some kind of special access as a result because they donated to the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Foundations and using that money to buy anti malarial drugs or whatever they're doing. I think that's a legitimate thing to talk about. You know that that could be a conflict. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.
I did an analysis between January first, twenty fifteen, an election day, so that basically the whole campaign in twenty sixteen, The New York Times wrote seventy nine stories about this issue. That's one story a week for twenty two months about the possibility that this for now, they were going to stop taking for money if she were to have won. So This is about prior money being given out, not
while she was president. Now we have money that's being dulled out while he's president that is not going to a charity, but is directly benefiting a company that is owned and controlled by Donald Trump. And it has gotten a couple of stories, but you don't see this kind of continual coverage that can drive it into the consciousness.
Of the American voter.
I bet very few people are even aware that this has occurred because it got Why why why won't they cover it?
Why do you thing? I think?
I do think it's an idea that.
His that his voters don't don't care that somehow it's when it's your voters that are I actually don't I mean, I'm speculating.
I don't know.
I think it deserves more coverage. But of course there's ways to continue this because he's now using this money, he's developing, you know, an island in Albania. And every time he's doing this, it's creating conflicts because now Trump and Kushner's profits are contingent on good relationships with those local governments because they need to get all the permits and everything else that they're doing. This is occurring simultaneously.
While Trump is renegotiating teriff rates with every country on Earth, so will the country is that Trump needs to maintain good relationships are to complete these projects, get better teriff freights. That's certainly something I'm keeping my eye on with this, and I think that to the extent, I don't think it's true that people do not care about these issues.
Now.
Do Trump's corps voters, the twenty five or thirty percent of Americans who are gonna go out and vote for Trump no matter what happens, did they care? Probably not, because they don't. They don't seem to change their view on this. But I do think there are people who care, and there are people who would want to see other folks take a stand on this if it could be
raised now hopefully. I mean, one thing that could happen that could change, you know, things change if the Democrats, you know, regain let's say the House, you know, one of the chambers. Something like that they could have here is they could have a hearing on this. They could have they could subpoena people, they could get more information
out there. And that's something that I see as Okay, well, we have to start setting the predicate for this and start laying out the facts so that at least when we get to the point in which that might be a possibility, maybe those members of Congress can understand what's at stake and what's going well.
I send your stuff around to no small number of members of Congress, and you know, we talk about it, right, you know, on text, and it makes an impact and they see it even though right the opposition such as it is and the Congress isn't hitting like I would like to see it see it hit. And there's a bunch of different reasons for that. But let me just say, as we come up on the hour, my admiration for you is immense. You are a person of integrity. Uh.
You truly are the best of what journalism is. And what journalism is is a public service that is essential in a free society to give the public the information they need to have to hold the government of the people, by the people, for the people accountable because some of the people are bad. And that's the way, that's the
way it's always been right. And power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely as the as the saying goes, and so one of the things when you when you consider the collapse and I and I consider it a collapse of corporate media, the integrity of so many institutions that that we counted on. If you took a glass and you and you threw it against the wall and it fracts and all those chards fell into the soil, that's
how you have to think about that moment. But because this is the United States, that soil is hospitable because of the First Amendment to an independent journalism and at the foremost front of that the tip of the sphere, the best of the best and really getting into complex issues, covering them with a great deal of integrity, and putting it out there, not looking for outreage, not looking to antagonize into insight, but to inform, to arm and formed
citizen is a dangerous citizen to the authority of any oppressive, tyrannical force. And that is essential in this moment. And so for the two five hundred people on this evening, Wednesday evening who've taken time out of your out of your night, thank you for joining. Really urge all of you and follow me. Please subscribe to Judd Legum and support that work. He can't do it simply by force of his personality and indefatigability. He needs your support, and
I hope you'll consider giving it to him. Jud I'm gonna leave the final word with you tonight to say good night to everybody, but thank you so much for joining and for the conversation, and keep up the great
job you're doing. You really are a great patriot, and the work that journalists do, like yourself is the work of patriots at a time when this country is in a great crisis because of all the lying, because of all the power grabbing, because of all the corruption, and because of all of the people who have lost faith. Been a really powerful idea. So thank you so much for being here with all of us tonight. Well, thanks
so much for having me, h Steven. I think in the I've really enjoyed this conversation.
I think, you know, it's very clear why you've collected such a large and passionate following on this platform. You bring such a rich political and historical perspective to all of these issues, which I think is so important because we get wrapped up in each moment, you know, every year, it's like the moments and the news cycle we used to talk about news cycles as if it was a day or an hour, and it's just the unit of
time keeps getting shorter and shorter. So I think it's really important to broaden your aperture out to understand the scope of things, and I think you really help people do that. Thanks for having me for hosting b and thanks everyone for tuning in and listening.
Thank you, jud Keep up to Fight. I'm Steve Schmidt. This is the warning. I invite you to join this community where I promise to be honest, blunt and direct about what is happening in this country. America is in crisis. Follow and subscribe to this channel and on substack. Thank you