After Party with Emily Jashinsky - 2025 “After Party” Year in Review: A Look Back at Some of Our Top Interviews and Favorite Moments

Episode Date: December 30, 2025

On this special episode, Emily Jashinsky takes you behind the scenes of some of our most memorable interviews and how they came to be. After Party launched on June 23, the day after the U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and our very first guest was Tucker Carlson.  Emily also shares moments from a Megyn Kelly discussion on Pam Bondi and Epstein, Matt Taibbi breaking news on Brennan and Comey, Mike Benz’s take on the Biden DOJ’s efforts to destroy the GOP, and the Adam Carolla comments about Ellen DeGeneres that went viral. Emily wraps up the show with a message of thanks to all our viewers and listeners. See you all soon! Masa Chips: Ready to give MASA or Vandy a try? Get 25% off your first order by going to http://masachips.com/AFTERPARTY and using code AFTERPARTY Cowboy Colostrum: Get 25% Off Cowboy Colostrum with code AFTERPARTY at https://www.cowboycolostrum.com/AFTERPARTY  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to a special, what do we call this time of year, the time between Christmas and New Year's, a special liminal episode of After Party. It's great to be with all of you, and I hope you're having a very, very special time with your family and your friends. Now, first, if you haven't subscribed yet, give me a little Christmas gift. Wish me a Happy New Year. Throw a subscription, R-A-Way. It means a lot of you subscribe on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Helps us a ton on a podcast feed. You're going to get episodes of Happy Hour every Friday.

That's where I talk to you through the questions that you send in to Emily at Devil Make Care Media.com. We appreciate it so much when you send those questions in because it gives me fodder for great discussion on Happy Hour, which drops every Friday around 5 p.m. just in time for you to have a drink. Okay. Today's show, we are going through,

a best of, because you may or may not remember this. After party started on June 23rd, what was happening in mid to late June? Nothing much, nothing much, just the 12-day war in Iran. So you may remember at that time, there was deep, deep, a very deep divide among those of us on the right about the decision, the Trump administration's decision, obviously, bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. And this was before the ceasefire in Gaza as well. So there was deep ongoing disagreement over the further prosecution of that war,

the US's support for Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government. So just luck of the timing. And I'm actually not making this up because as we go through this best of, I'm going to give you a little bit of behind the scene stuff too. I mean, we've just aired, I think our 50th episode of After Party, it's crazy.

We started like at the perfect time and truly behind the scenes before we, I think before we even knew what was going to be in the news cycle. In fact, I know before we even knew what was going to be in the news cycle, we said, let's try Tucker Carlson for the first guest. That man is constantly making news, constantly making news. He's a very compelling guest on any show and he is fascinating. to listen to. Now, Tucker happened to be on the episode, the Monday, we started on Monday, June 23rd. That was the Monday after, if I remember it correctly,

Trump made his decision to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. And everyone, when it was announced that it was Tucker Carlson, my friends were like, how did you pull this off? I was like, it was booked a week or two ago. So it was perfect, perfect timing. And I think that episode live, I mean, the amount of concurrence we had watching it was probably competitive with cable channels because it was Tucker Carlson, not cable news channels probably, but cable channels in general, because here you had Tucker Carlson weighing in live on these questions. And he was tossing barbs back and forth with Mark Levine and others.

And so everyone was like on tenterhooks waiting to see what Tucker Carlson, who I asked him in that interview if he had, it was conversations with the president, with the administration. And I think that's a big part of why people were waiting sort of with bated breath to hear from Tucker because it's not just that he's an interesting commentator in his own right. He's completely influential with MAGA and he's influential with the president himself. So to hear from the horse's mouth, so to speak, about some of those discussions behind closed doors, about his assessment of the GOP and the White House's decisions just in the last 70s. 72 hours at that point. I mean, it was electric. It was electric. And before we went to air, Tucker was advertising ALP to all of us, which you don't use rectally like Zinn. Alp is not applied rectally, but not enjoyed rectally like Zen, but he was just jolly as can be while pitching ALP to us. And I have, yeah, it's a, it was, it was very, very funny. And then

And he just was all business in a second. So we were very lucky to have that as our first interview and appreciate Tucker for doing it. A couple weeks later, we had the great Megan Kelly, the one and only Megan Kelly. This is an MK media show after all. The MK stands for Megan Kelly, as you know. So Megan was reacting to Pam Bondi's weird comments about Jeffrey Epstein. This was in early July. It was right after the 4th of July, July 7th, and to have Megan at that time, who, you know, Megan has since said she thinks that Pam Bondi overall is doing a good job.

And right now, clearly, unless something's changed between the time I taped this and when it airs, has been, continue to have, you know, normal skepticism of power, but confidence in Dan Bonino and Cash Patel overall. But this Epstein story was popping and it was bizarre and having Megan again with her lawyerly instincts to kind of parse the language and try to make sense of what was happening. I found that personally really helpful. I imagine a lot of you found that helpful from Megan as well. A couple of days later we had Matt Taibi join to talk about those FBI investigations into John Brennan and James Comey. and then also react to the way the media was spinning it as Trump, like, frothing at the mouth out for blood with absolutely no justification whatsoever. It's all retribution. So Taibi has covered

that story very, very closely and skeptically. Speaking of Epstein, by the way, Taibi over at Rackett is doing some very uncomfortable journalism when it comes to the Epstein story. If you haven't seen that lately. But this is why we appreciate Matt Taibi because he doesn't care what people are going to say, he cares about the truth. He cares much more about the truth than he cares about what people are going to say. So I'm expecting that some of what Matt is continuing to write about, Epstein, I'll probably have some disagreements with. But I just, can you possibly find someone that is more committed to the truth

over convenience, comfort, popularity? No. I mean, Matt Taibi is a special kind of journalist. used to be a much more common kind of journalist. But we're very lucky to have Matt Tybee. We've been very lucky to have him on our show, especially when it comes to these very weedy, naughty questions about these Russia collusion investigations.

There have been multiple investigations into the investigations. And in order to really, I think, explain it, you have to be able to get deep into the weeds. I think that was intentional. I think it's always intentional coming out of the FBI and the CIA. and the NSA and DNI, all those fun three-letter agencies. These things are convoluted intentionally

because it makes it impossible for journalists to follow, but then even more importantly, it makes it impossible for the public to follow because when you start talking about Russia collusion, sometimes if you're not careful, you sound like you're wearing a tin foil hat and smoking a crack pipe outside the 7-Eleven. So Taibi is thankfully not one of those people

because he knows the story in and out, like the back of his hand, and is able to, was able immediately to smell the rat in the mainstream media's coverage of this, quote unquote, mainstream media's coverage of this, and step back, give the big picture assessment of what's really happening. And by the way, it's especially helpful from Taibi, because let's not pretend that there aren't some real tinfoil hat, people hitting the crack pipe, or partisans who are milking this as partisans do for every last drop of political advantage that they can. And so to cut through all of that noise,

you can't find anyone better than Matt Taibi. So as more of this information was being disclosed, he came by and I think broke down information that's helpful to just remind ourselves of, especially as the year comes to close. We're heading into a midterm cycle. So much has happened in the first year of the second Trump administration

that even just going through these clips now, I'm reminded of how helpful it is to look back, take stock before another extremely busy year, extremely busy year. And it's going to be even busier, I promise, because there's also a midterm election cycle layer, a multi-billion dollar midterm election cycle layered on top of all of this. Trump is a huge question mark on Trump's political future. What does he do after he's president, after this term? What does that mean for the current secretary of state, the current vice president, maybe the current secretary of transportation, all kinds of secretary of the

interior. There are all kinds of people in this administration right now who could end up being in a race in 2028, which again, guess when that happens? 27. That is a year from right now. A year from right now, we will be talking about freaking Iowa and New Hampshire. Yeah. So good to go back a little bit. Pause, take stock of this last busy year, prep for the busy year ahead. Rumors abound that there are Republicans looking for the exit in the House of Representatives. There's a lot, as I'm typing this, there's a whole lot of consternation on Capitol Hill, frustration with the House Speaker Mike Johnson in particular. There could be a ton of retirements, could potentially be looking at a midterm bloodbath for Republicans or a surprising staving off of a, quote,

midterm bloodbath for Republicans that tells us a little bit about where the party goes in the future. We'll see. We'll see. I mean, Donald Trump is promising more of an economic turnaround in the year to come. This is a long windup to the Matt Taibi clip, but I just say that because he's so detail-oriented and in the weeds of the story that just thinking about his journalism, his reporting on this, helps me take stock of what happened in year one of Trump to point. Oh, we had Mike Benz on pretty recently. You may remember this. It was before Thanksgiving. And we started to see these Arctic Frost revelations, which I continue to believe are the most undercovered story of the entire year. I mean, historic proportion, because this is state surveillance of historic proportion, weaponized, partisan state surveillance of historic proportion of a vast scope Sort of like the story Taiy was talking about going back to Brennan and Comey. And the corporate press has barely touched it except to, like, debunk it. I mean, this one is truly bizarre.

And that's why Benz has an audience, by the way, is that they're looking around and thinking, wait, am I reading this correctly? where the Senate, the senator's phone was surveilled and all of these people, all of these people at these conservative non-profits were being surveilled and nobody knew about it because a judge said it was okay to keep it secret. Am I looking at this Excel spreadsheet of like hundreds of names? Is that right? And you guys aren't talking about it at all, at all? So having bends on as those Arctic Frost revelations were coming out. That was incredible. So he's another person who gets really into the muck, into the weeds, and helps make the bigger picture a bit clearer

on stories where the bigger picture is very, very hard to discern. Also because you're not getting corporate press coverage of it. And I think that in and of itself biases people against a story. Like when you're only seeing it in conservative media, sometimes people, normalies assume that it must just be a silly red meat conservative media story. But, you know, the Arctic Frost is something that the left of the 1970s, if the shoe was on the other foot, would be obsessed with, and rightfully so. And it's incredible, incredible how nobody talks about it at all among journalists right now. Like one of the subpoenas was for conversation, no more than one of the subpoenas was for conversations that conservatives were having with journalists

their communications with journalists journalists should be apoplectic about that level of state surveillance and barely a peep if anything i mean i honestly it's been so little i think that really biases people against these stories like taking them seriously and that's i hope that's fading away but it is actually insane. And finally, we're going to play this clip that went unexpectedly viral, I have to say. So one of our first shows, we had the great, the legendary, the man, the myth, the legend, Adam Carolla on. And he started going off on Ellen. I don't even remember how he started talking about Ellen, but we were talking about Ellen.

And he spilled the tea on what it was like going on Ellen back in the day. that went mega viral. It was one of our first shows. And I was watching those numbers, I was like, damn, I had this, like, foggy sense that it might get picked up by, like, TMZ or something when he said it. I was like, ooh, that's dishy.

And it was out of, if I remember correctly, it was, like, kind of random that we got into, like, dishy gossip about Ellen. But it's, of course, not gossip when it's about a very powerful person because that's why the story is compelling. It's that you have someone who, you know, Ellen has been torn to shreds in the press in recent years, but that was after decades of being

lauded by the press. And, you know, she's still somebody who tries to wield some influence. And so it's not gossip at all to say, here's how this powerful, influential person treats people behind closed doors. And here's what the massive corporation that supported her put up with, knowingly behind closed doors for a long time. So it was, yeah, I definitely want to get Adam back on the show when you can do it because he has so many insights through his years in Hollywood. And he's not afraid to talk about them at all, not afraid to talk about them at all. We also got him talking about Kimmel a bit, his friend Kimmel.

He was pretty respectful of Kimmel. I think they're still friends. I think he talked about how they were still friends. So if you want to go back and watch that interview, if you missed it, I thought it was really interesting. I'm going to start with a question that everyone, I'm sure, has on their mind right now. Now, Donald Trump posted on True Social at 6.02 p.m. that about two hours from actually right now, so around midnight, East Coast time, Israel and Iran will enter a, quote, complete and total ceasefire. Now, Tucker, you recently predicted, and people are of course

recirculating this now, quote, the first week of a war with Iran could easily kill thousands of Americans. It could also collapse our economy as surging oil prices trigger unmanageable inflation, consider the effects of $30 gasoline, but the second week of the war could be even worse, end quote. Now, Ted Cruz is already taking a victory lap. He says, quote, it turns out that Tucker was wrong. I just want to get your thoughts on this, Tucker. Did Trump prove you and all of us who doubted the wisdom of this strike wrong tonight? Well, you could ask Trump. I mean, was this fraught with existential peril? Of course. I'm so grateful that he brought it in for a landing. I mean, I think we should be grateful to him.

I think we should be grateful to God. I think we should understand how close we came. But I also think we should step back and ponder what we've learned. And what we've learned is who cares about the fortunes of the United States and who doesn't. And Ted Cruz doesn't, obviously, the people who acknowledged no risk at all because they were so focused on helping another country like Ted Cruz or like the many people who revealed themselves in the last two weeks, Mark Levin, chief among them, like those people should not have any access to power at all. Those people rolled the dice with your life and with

the lives of your children. It's disgusting. And so, I mean, just ask yourself, is Mark Levin concerned at all about the United States, like, at all? And the answer is no. Mark Levin is a repulsive ghoul whose entire sex life consists of watching other people get blown up. He was upset that there was a ceasefire and said so. How could you be upset with a ceasefire? How could you be upset that people are no longer dying. By the way, I think the ceasefire is real. We have no idea where anything goes in life. That's up to God. But as of right now, it's absolutely real, and we should be thankful for it. And so if your first instinct is this is bad, then you've just told us who you are. And look, that's between Mark Levine and God. And I think it's going to be a tough conversation.

But for our purposes, you know, Mark Levine should not have access to power. I mean, he almost pushed the president of the United States into a path that would have destroyed the presidency. in the united states and a lot of other countries too so like a victory lap really no he was thwarted john pahars was thwarted all the people who are thrilled by the direction this was going bill you know bill crystal you know people who are avowed enemies of donald trump and are not at all interested in the united states like they were stopped before getting what they wanted which was regime changed in military occupation of iran so like you know they can spend that they're professional liars so of course they're lying but the facts tell a very different story they didn't

get what they wanted and and thank god they didn't so why do you think the mark levin's of the world didn't get what they wanted in this case at least as of right now because the president just yesterday because Trump doesn't want nuclear war i mean as he said a million times like he doesn't want Iran to have the bomb because he doesn't want more bombs because he's afraid of nuclear war because he understands what it is i've talked to him about this on and off camera many many times. And he has unique among world leaders like an instinctive aversion to killing millions of people in seconds. And so he's worried about nuclear wars. The reason Tulsi Gabbard supported him is the reason they hate Tulsi Gabbard now because she raises the actual, the very real

specter of mass annihilation. And people like Mark Levin just don't care. They're nihilists, but they're hardly conservative. There's a thing conservative about rolling the dice on your country starting a voluntary war. It's like freaking insane. And so, you know, kudos, gratitude and more to Donald Trump for stopping that. But it's not because he was following the advice of Mark Levin or Ted Cruz. I mean, these people are buffoons

who again, revealed their priorities. And those priorities have nothing to do with the United States. They were absolutely willing to destroy the United States, and including Donald Trump, for an objective that had nothing to do with the United States. And I think every honest person, knows that. I mean, that's what we just learned. Like, under stress, you reveal who you really are. You show your real priorities, and they did. And, like, again, that's between

them and God. But I think going forward, people like that cannot be allowed to steal the mantle of America first when America's interests are not first on their list of concerns. Like, not even close. So I think you're the first person to ever use the words Mark Levin and Sex Life in the same sentence. But I'm not being mean, I don't, look, it's clear that there are certain people for whatever reason. It's connected to age. That's obvious. All the people who are most excited about killing seem to be old.

I don't know. Any 35-year-olds were really excited when people die when their videos of dead people on the internet. They don't get off on that. They're like, you know, they, because they are living their lives. They are in the truest sense pro-life. But there is something about some older people. And I've always had great admiration and respect for older people. I was raised that way.

I revered my father, for example, who lived to 84. But there is a category of older people that would include Rupert Murdoch. It would include Lindsay Graham, would turn 70 next month. It would definitely include Mark Levin, for whom, like, killing obviously provides some sort of deep emotional charge. And I don't mean to be glib and say it's sexual. I'm not like the Freudian here. But, I mean, clearly you watch Mark Levine talk about killing people, and it's really dark. And it's certainly not something that any.

Christian can be comfortable with, because Christians are not for killing people, just period. Just remind you, and I know that there are a lot of evangelicals who are like very excited to kill people. You know, check yourself for a second. Is Jesus' message we need to drop more bombs on people? Is that what you, is that what you're arguing? I mean, I'm sorry to bring it to that, but, but I feel that I can say that as a deeply imperfect, flawed, ignorant Christian who's trying to understand the message of the religion, but I'm pretty certain it's not let's drop more bombs on people. And to see pastors saying that, you know, the neocons, many of whom are Jewish, get all the attack, all the hate, or whatever, but it's, boy, it's not just them. There are a lot of evangelical

ministers who are worse than Mark Levin, in my opinion. So I just want to say that because it's true. Yeah. And I think they should measure what they're saying against the gospel. And it's like, is their alignment there? There's not. There's no alignment there. What Mark Levin is already talking about, Iran needing to be pushed to sign a document of unconditional surrender. And I wanted to ask you about our friend Dave Smith's reaction to today's news as it was unfolding. He said, quote, even if the strikes, quote, did destroy a lot of equipment, the Iranians can rebuild and the regime will remain in power, now more incentivized than ever to get nuclear weapons. So two-part question for you here, Tucker. First, do you agree with

Dave? I think I agree with Dave. And second point is, if that is true, then is Mark Levin not pushing us into a much more dangerous situation and will that have sway with the president. That's been the goal from the beginning. And all this stuff about Iran can't have nukes. I mean, Donald Trump believed that for sure. He's been saying it for a decade. But I don't think a lot of the people who were pushing Donald Trump to further engage in a war with Iran were concerned about that all. What they want is regime change. They said it, by the way. They're saying it now. I mean, let's take them with their word. They want regime change. What does that mean? You know, you don't change.

a regime by bombing it. There's no track record of success there. You change the regime by killing the people who run it. And in the end, it's only kind of possible to steer that country in the direction you want by occupying it with people, which is to say troops. So they're arguing for a ground war with a country of 90 million people. And I know it's not interesting the population of Iran to Ted Cruz because the details don't matter because he doesn't care about the United States, obviously. But if you do care about the United States, you have to ask like, okay regime change what does that mean exactly what does that mean for us how do we do that like how do you affect that and and the answer is by destroying your own country so like let's start with

no we're not doing that let's do everything we can short of that to get you know the result that we want but levin again doesn't care about the united states and they're all wearing the trump skin suit right now because they think it suits their purposes these are people who hated trump they're anti-trump they're never trump and that would include a lot of people on fox news who I worked with for 15 years. I know what their political views are. They're my colleagues. They hate Trump.

They hate him personally. They hate his agenda. They hate his economic views. And they really hate his foreign policy views, which in private they describe as insane and isolationist, he's a Nazi, and all this stuff. I mean, they really have contempt for him. They kept him off the air at Fox News

while I was there against my protests. So that's all true. And it's very frustrating as a literal person who cares about what's true to see people jumping up Mark Levin or Laura Lumer, that's world's creepiest human. I don't even know where she came from or who she is exactly, but she's running around. I'm Donald Trump's, you know, defend her. It's bizarre.

Champion. And I'm the arbiter of what it means to be for America, someone who, again, has no interest in the United States, demonstrated no interest. So I think it's just important. It's not a matter of score settling. And I don't care what Mark Levine does in his private life. i don't care what his opinions are and laura luma i'm not even really sure who she is however if people like that are able to take over a political movement whose stated goal is to serve

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that really jumped out to me, actually, because it maybe gives her a little wiggle room between saying that she had a client list and then saying there's no incriminating client list. So I wanted to ask you if maybe that's what's going on here before we get into some of these other details. I don't know what's going on with her. I believe Dan Bongino is not lying to me. I really do. When Dan Bonino puts his name on something, I don't know Cash as well, but I don't Dan. I know him well. We've worked together many, many years. He's not, he didn't just turn around and start lying. That's not who he is. He's an honest guy. And he takes this role very seriously. And I trust him. And I trust him not to actively mislead me or you. However, Pam Bondi has definitely made multiple inconsistent statements,

and I'm sorry, but she does not deserve the benefit of my good opinion, and I'm not prepared to give it to her. She's, yes, on camera saying that clip that Peter Ducey was referencing where John Roberts asked her, do you have a client list? Like, are you going to release a client list? And she said, yes, he said client list. And she said, yes, it's on my desk right now. So it was not as amorphous as Caroline, to her credit, she's trying to cover for the administration, which is her job, but they put her in a very difficult position.

It's not amorphous. It's very clear. She said yes. And here's what happened. What happened was Pam Bondi said that. And then a week later, she said she was going to be releasing some very interesting documents the next day when on just, Water Show, like six days after that first hit, he said, hey, what client list is coming out?

And she was like, it's going to be getting very interesting and some interesting Epstein documents are coming out tomorrow. And that is when the influencers, right-wing influencers who had been very good to Trump, who amidst all the deranged media out there, were able to see through the bullshit and reported honestly and helped him a lot and did not deserve the humiliation that you. But she heaped upon them. It was not through their own doing. She invited them there. I mean, who wouldn't go, right?

It's Pam Bondi. Do you want to come meet with the head of the FBI and the vice president for an exclusive Epstein leak? Yeah. Yes. Most people in media would say yes to that. So they went and in the classic line from Animal House, you fucked up. You trusted us.

That's what happened. They fucked up because they trusted her. And they were humiliated because she gave them all these binders that read Epstein files, you volume one and there was nothing new in there nothing there was no scoop why would she do that and it led to behind the scenes like all the white house staffers like the top people in the white house for trump distancing themselves from pam bondi immediately like we don't know why she did that and then it came out that they were urging her not to do it but i don't know what she was up to she wanted to have some moment where she looked like she was the one and then she was in trouble and she knew it so she

said all right that's just the first tranche i'm really pissed off the FBI is the one who screwed me. They said everything who's in there. Okay, like you need to know. You need to know that no lawyer just sloppily calls all these PR people in and says, here are the files without knowing what's in there. But she wants us to believe she did. Okay, so she either was clueless or she intentionally embarrassed them. I don't know which is better. And then she said, more is coming. More is coming. And we waited and waited and waited. Those people did not get an exclusive to redeem them. And instead, she got caught on camera by James O'Keefe saying, there are thousands and thousands of videos, like showing child pornography. And it was like,

wait, what? Child pornography, no one's been talking about that. I mean, we know he had like a predilection for very young girls, generally, you know, 17, but the ones looked more like 14, but we hadn't heard like eight. So, you know, what exactly does she mean by child pornography. We don't know. When she found out from James O'Keefe, he was about to drop that on her the next day. She ran to the microphones and on her own was like, I've got all these videos. So it was very clear to me she was trying to make it look like I didn't say anything out of turn to the James O'Keefe operative. I'll say this right on camera. It was just very obvious what she was doing. But it was still a loop because it was like, what about, we're talking about client lists.

We're talking about people who Jeffrey Epstein may have blackmailed. How have we taken a loop now over to weird, you know, inappropriate, disgusting pornography. Okay, so to me that already seemed odd and like a slip, but it seemed like perhaps this is where she's going to plant her flag now, like this is the extra stuff because either there is extra stuff that she decided she can't show us or there isn't and there never was. And she was lying when she was like, it's on my desk and trying to hype the story. Overhype, hype, whatever your word is.

So that's March. She's now switched to like this thing with O'Keefe and on camera about the child pornography, sexual assault material. And the next thing, so we're waiting at April and May and June. And now here comes July. And we get the drop to Axios, a left-leaning publication. Right. The opposite of the influencers.

Yeah, exactly. They're never going to kick the same tires that right-wing influencers, who are the ones who care about the Epstein story, would kick, which they're not dumb. They know that. So they do this late holiday weekend drop through. Axios, which is just going to, you know, lick, you know, their boots saying, thanks so much for this exclusive, which we know is going to get us millions of clicks. And now nobody's talking about it. So we, and in the memo, it's, we've gone from, I have it,

the client list. Yes, the client list. It's on my desk to, no, no client list. And no names. And by the way, at the same time all this was happening, Alina Haba, who is Trump's personal lawyer and at the time in February, counselor to the president, and would become part of the DOJ team working for Bondi within three weeks of these comments on Pierce Morgan went on camera to say these are some very bad people we've got names we've got client lists and the only reason you don't know about it is because there wasn't transparency that's what Bondi had said too that this administration before us wasn't transparent and Alina Haba said I'm not going to get ahead of letting them have their day in court you know I'm going to let the guilt or innocence

come out in court. But yeah, like people will be held accountable under Cash and Pam Bondi. Okay, so that was all the messaging prior to Sunday night. So my main position here, Emily, is people are right to be skeptical. They have every right to distrust now the messaging because of the way this was handled. But I do see a distinction personally and professionally between what Pam Bondi has said and done and what Cash Patel and Dan Bungino have said and done. while people want to bring up what Cash and Dan said, while they were podcasters and out of the administration, I'm sorry, but it doesn't really reflect anything about what they knew or should know as FBI director and deputy director. Bondi, for what it's worth, and it's very worth mentioning

this, by the way. And Julie K. Brown pointed this out actually back in February when all of this was happening, was the Florida Attorney General during these, like, critical Epstein years. Julie K. Brown said she was Florida's AG 2011 to 2019, a period of time, when Epstein's plane records became public, victims lawsuits were filed and a lot of new evidence against Epstein surfaced. So questions should be asked about why she didn't take up the case

or launch a probe when she was AG in Florida. And Megan, just to, I think, ask about everything you laid out, it sounds like you don't see a sort of plausible explanation that will satisfy the public for how Bondi has conducted herself since late February. She either knows or she either,

there's no good explanation. Why did she say it's all? Why was she leading the media along? The thing that I don't understand, if you want to put total faith in the memo that they leaked to Axios, there's no there. And, you know, you may or may not know about me, Emily, but I am like the least conspiratorial person you'll ever meet. I believe in, like, almost all of the government lies. I do. Like, I do.

So. Oh, that's right. You've got 10 boosters. You're right. No, I did get a booster. One booster, two COVID shots on a booster. driving it to the drink. I know, me too.

And now I have an autoimmune issue. Great. That's right. That's what the tequila is for. I think it is actually a medicinal. We'll have to ask Bobby about that. Right. Okay, so, but anyway, it's not like, whatever.

I mean, I believe COVID started in the lab and all that. I'm not a complete loon. But I'm just saying I'm not somebody who thinks we didn't have the moon landing or all that stuff. So my point is simply on Epstein all along. I've been like, he might have killed himself. I don't. He might have. You know, he's facing a lifetime in jail. He's a miserable guy. I don't know if there's going to be client lists or not. I'm not sure. You know, so my simply point, my point in raising this is for me to be looking at her saying, I don't believe

you is telling. It's telling even in my own heart because I am trying to go down the non-conspiratorial route to say, okay, there are no client lists. It was just Jeffrey Epstein and his own perversions. I'm just going to forget all the stuff about the plains and the islands and all that. Okay, I'm just going to say, I know Galane Maxwell was convicted of trafficking girls to Jeffrey. That is true. There was no evidence in that trial. She was trafficking them to, you know, all the other names that we've heard and or any others that we haven't. So, okay, I'm going down the lane with you.

What then makes Pam Bondi come out and do all those things like, I got juicy stuff is basically, what she was saying and get the influencers there to try to look like it's, shit's going down. You know, like you're gonna get the truth from us. And then like doubling and tripling down. And then why did she switch it to child pornography, which I do believe there is. I believe the FBI does have that of Jeffrey Epstein.

But to me, I guess that was probably her out because now she's starting to realize either she is caught that she doesn't have the other stuff or someone has slapped her hand to say, you can't release that. and so now she's got a pivot to something entirely, it's not off topic, but it's not what was being promised. Client lists and blackmail material were what we thought. I mean, Jeffrey Epstein's sick, disgusting, felonious enjoyment of child sexual assault material is disgusting and

horrific, but it's a pivot away from where we were going on the story and what she was promising. So I don't know. I wish I had all the answers. All I know is it doesn't. make sense and as my mentor judge judy says if it doesn't make sense it isn't true pretty big news on one of your like signature beats and that's fbi director cash patel has opened criminal investigations into john brennan and james combe for as you write quote offenses related to the trump russia scandal colloquially known as russia gate the opening of criminal probes into the two of the most powerful enforcement chiefs of the trump era marks the first steps towards consequences for the elaborate and historically unprecedented intelligence fraud that for years consumed American

politics. And this follows the ICA scandal of the week before. We're going to get in all of this because, Matt, you make it very intelligible to people who don't follow it as closely as you do. But let's just start with these investigations against Brennan and Comey. Seems like a pretty significant escalation. Tell us what's going on. So I was able to confirm this morning that they've, opened up criminal investigations at the FBI pertaining to Brennan Encombe, and that those were as a result of a criminal referral

from the CIA director John Ratcliffe, who as you know last week also released an eight-page report on irregularities with the process of creating the intelligence community assessment of 2017. But it's a significant stuff. step forward for anybody who's followed this incredibly annoying story for the last nine years because you know this is now the boomerang coming all the way back you know once upon a time everybody was waiting for indictments against Donald Trump or people in the

Trump family and now it looks like there you know there's a realistic chance that that there may be cases that end up in court against figures like James Comey and John Brennan and that's good news. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the question now is actually what some of these, what some of the investigations could turn up. And I think we have this video of, because you sent out a separate note today to racket subscribers, people should subscribe to racket, racket. News. That was a clip of Cash Patel on Joe Rogan. The FBI is like transferring buildings at the moment and it's all like very bizarre. But this is Cash Patel maybe previewing something when he was talking to Joe Rogan recently and we can go ahead and roll this clip and get your reaction map we just think about

this me at the director of the FBI the former russia gate guy when i first got to the bureau found a room that combe and others hid from the world in the hoover building full of documents and computer hard drives that no one had ever seen or heard of locked the key and hit access and just said no one's ever going to find this place what yeah so my guys are going through that right now what's in there a lot of stuff that this is amazing clip for a rogue is just in the background being like what no he's like um brad pit in true romance in that scene it's great i love that you had that right at the top of your mind you're like oh yeah it's brad pit That was an interesting thing and everybody is sort of passing that around the internet.

But then as I was calling around this morning, somebody close to the one of the investigations told me like, yeah, he was actually, that was actually a slip or he did actually refer to this investigation when he was talking to Joe. So that is a true thing. It's not something that people are just saying on the internet and it's also interesting because it brings in, there are really two parallel tracks to this investigation. I think that's one of the things that's confusing people.

There was a huge investigation that was run out of the House Intelligence Committee for years. It began with, oddly enough, Cash Patel, working for Devon Noons. But all that stuff was housed over at Langley for years. It's been locked up there since 2018 and people haven't been able to get it.

at it. Trump tried to try to declassify it. So that pile is now meeting this other new pile that the Justice Department just found, they say, in the old Hoover building by chance, just because they happen to be moving out of the Hoover building. It's so random. It's like the perfect ending to this idiotic story. I mean, it really is the only way that you ever end up getting certain classified information is that they just accidentally leave it in a room when they're moving the Uber building, because it's the greatest combination of incompetence and secrecy, and that's really the story of the FBI. Oh, totally, yeah.

No, it couldn't, there couldn't be a better resolution to this whole thing. If there's actually damning evidence on any of those documents or hard drives that, that Cash is referring to, I mean, that would be hilariously funny and kind of the perfect resolution to this whole thing. But we don't really know what's on there. We do have a pretty decent idea of what's on the other stuff. And that's probably going to be the predicate for, you know, these perjury-slash-conspiracy investigations that they're pursuing. Yeah, that's one of the things I thought you did a really good job of running down.

And that's one of the questions I have for you right now is what it's hard for me to believe that they open these investigations. Cash Patel opens these investigations and they don't end up in charges against Brennan. and Comey, particularly for perjury over whether or not the steel dossier was involved in this ICA that became big news last week because the CIA under director John Ratcliffe, who is very well-regarded in the MAGA world and is close to Donald Trump, frankly, released a, and Matt, what was the document formally? It was like a memo. Yeah, it was called, it had some bizarre name like tradecraft shortcomings of something, something, something. It was a very forgettable title. But, you know, it got kind of lukewarm reviews among hardcore Russiagate followers and even among people who had conducted the original House Intelligence Committee investigation. You saw Rick Crawford from the Intel Committee talking about how the CIA was attempting to whitewash everything that happened.

He sent a letter, angry letter to Trump about that. But I think that was actually just a misunderstanding. It appears, from what I hear today, it appears that Ratcliffe wrote that very short eight-page thing in a way that was specifically crafted to give, in a narrow way. to give cash a way to open up some perjury investigations and then everything else can come in afterwards. But that document is not the be-all, end-all of everything that they found. It's just it's designed for utilitarian purpose. So that's a really important point because the big picture zooming out of all of this is whether or not they said the steel dossier was sort of immaterial

to opening up the Trump-Russia investigation when they did. And they were passing along what's called an ICA internally. And so there's a big fight over basically whether or not they used this opposition research to target a political opponent. A political opponent. And then the sitting president of the United States, that's one of the most undemocratic schemes that we've seen happening. And the Peter Strick text message about an insurance policy basically tells you all you need to know about their mentality here. But I want to put two headlines up on the screen. This is F2. This is the Politico headline about the Ratcliffe memo. Which said, CIA review of 2016 Russian election probe finds no major flaws, which Matt, you wrote about also, apparently I hadn't seen this, but Kendallanian, also known informally as Fusion Ken, because of his obvious connections to Fusion GPS, which was peddling all this opposition research.

He went on MSNBC and said the Ratcliffe report didn't show any, so Brennan had done any wrongdoing, let alone a crime. And you kind of fisked this. Let's put the racket headline. This is F3 up on the screen. But at the same time, there's something interesting about Politico reporting that essentially this was a letdown, that there wasn't much in it,

that it almost like didn't accuse anybody of wrongdoing, because that's kind of what the people you were talking about said. Your reporting suggests that actually it was maybe the first step into investigating perjury regarded to the Steele dossier. Is that correct? Yeah, I think that's right. But by itself, the Ratcliffe report is still pretty bad, and it also moves the ball forward

significantly. There were some things. I mean, I spent a month on this question last year in February, working with Michael Schellenberger on the question of what was in that House Intelligence Committee report. And it was very similar to the WMD story. Essentially, Brennan, Comey, and the NSA, when they were putting together the intelligence community assessment that came out in the first week of 2017, you have to remember that Russiagate at that point had stalled out.

All the various investigations had finished. There had been a story in Mother Jones. It was David Corn. By David Corn suggesting that the Russians had blackmail material on Donald Trump, and that didn't go anywhere. So there was nothing left. The Russia gate was about to be kind of a non-story. And then they dropped, you know, Barack Obama commissioned this report.

And the only way that they could say in the report that Russia specifically interfered to help Donald Trump was if they brought in material from the steel dossier because they didn't have a source on this. So that's how this whole thing was put together. that's what's in the Ratcliffe report is essentially like a documentary confirmation that John Brennan overrode his internal controls. They told him that they shouldn't use this stuff, that it didn't meet even minimal standards of anything. And, you know, he said, no, and there's a written thing by him saying, no, I think it warrants, you know, in consideration. And that's,

the reason that's relevant is because he's on the record saying, otherwise in testimony. So there's your case right there if you want to make a perjury case. Yeah, there's such a circling back to that video of Cash Patel and Rogan. You also made a good point about this. And I'm curious to hear more of what you think because you know the internal machinations of the media really well and how government tries to spin reporters and the position that it puts reporters in when they're giving newsworthy information, even if it's also clearly trying to get ahead of something or to disrupt a bad news cycle. And so the obvious connection that a lot of people have made is this is happening amidst the fallout over

Jeffrey Epstein basically, the DOJ basically closing the case on the Jeffrey Epstein investigation saying there's no more disclosures coming from us, nothing to see here, no incriminating client list, no credible evidence of a blackmail operation. It's all very ridiculous. But then we hear that from the FBI, they're opening this long-awaited investigation into two of the major villains of the Trump era, John Brennan and James Comey. So your point, and flesh this out for us a little bit, is that clearly this was already percolating, according to your sources, when Cash Patel went on Joe Rogan's throw. So maybe is it possible that the story that I think was originally given to Fox News, the exclusive on this, was Epstein related, but the actual investigation, or the actual investigations themselves maybe weren't? Yeah, what I was told is that the investigation has been going on for months.

I don't know the actual what the deal is with how the Fox story came out, but I do know that there were rumors flying all over the conservative media world this weekend that something about Russiagate much bigger than the Ratcliffe report was about to come out. So, yeah, it's possible that's politically related that maybe the timing on the, you know, the announcement of an investigation that could be related to the Epstein fallout. But there's no question they were working on. this and that they have been working on this. I mean, this is the reason that Cash Patel was named FBI director.

I mean, this is the case that put him in that office. And it would be an enormous shock if they weren't working on this from day one, frankly. When Arctic Frost revelations broke wide open from Senator Grassley's whistleblower documents, I think people had a hard time wrapping their head around exactly what the government appears to have had done in that case. And we keep getting more information. It seems like every single week now, there's a New York Times report suggesting subpoenas are landing in the lapse of people who were, this is F-Zero folks, that people who were potentially implicated in the original Russian collusion hoax, collusion hoax, some of which continue to be involved in shadow operations

down the line. So, Mike, we're a couple of weeks now post-grassly whistleblower revelation. As we are approaching maybe a 30,000-foot view, how are you making sense of what we've learned just in the last couple of weeks as somebody who's been very much in the weeds of this for a long time? Well, there's nothing surprising in it. It's simply validation of what I think folks felt but didn't have the documents to prove, which was that there was a full-scale effort by the Biden Justice Department to completely destroy any aspect of the Republican Party that had some perceived allegiance or support network access around President Trump and his movement. This Arctic Frost investigation, you know, the Arctic Frost is essentially an orange tree

that can grow in Florida. And it's, you know, it's kind of like an orange man bad. It's just like they named Operation Crossfire Hurricane after the, jumping jack flash lyrics from the rolling stone song but then also the spy movie the whoopey goldberg british spy movie and of course it was created by a british spy christopher steel and his british spy network with richard dear love they did the same thing with arctic frost to root out all the different uh roots and branches of the trump tree and so what they did is they spied on they got subpoenas and uh basically got the phone communications texts, basically everything you can dig up emails on 430 major GOP figures, not just in the media

and in civil society, but also, and in the Trump inner circle, but also in Congress. I think Ted Cruz said 20% of Senate Republicans ended up having their phones secretly subpoenaed by the Biden, FBI, and Justice Department, and then Judge Bozberg, who is this very infamous chief justice, basically, in the D.C. court system, he then compelled AT&T and Verizon to not tell the senators

that the FBI was spying on their phones. And, I mean, I pointed this out, but this is a criminal violation. There's, the Senate Oversight Committee has to be able to conduct oversight of the FBI. When they're being spied on by the FBI, they can't conduct oversight of what the FBI is doing. And it looks like this was basically a conspiracy with Jack Smith and Judge Bozberg. I think that, frankly, Judge Bozberg should not just be impeached. She should be

indicted on those grounds. And what's important to understand is that this Arctic Frost investigation was launched a full year after the alleged event of trying to overturn the election results with alternate electors, a plot whose very idea was started by Democrats when they used the alternate electors attempt in 2016 to try to get, to try to negate Trump's victory, citing Russian interference. And then in 2020, with the Transition Integrity Project kerfuffle, they literally war-gamed how to get alternate electors to vote on January 6, 2021 for Joe Biden, even in the event of a clear Trump win. This is in their own manual, which was war-gamed by no less than John Podesta himself, the campaign manager for Hillary Clinton, and who would go on to be

the White House climate czar in charge of a $375 billion slush fund for his cronies. And that was organized by not just the Democrats, but the never Trump wing of the Republican Party. Participating in that war game for alternate electors in case Trump had a clear victory on election night in 2020 was Michael Steele, the former head of the DNC, Donna Brazil, the former head of the DNC. I was going to say Michael Steele was sort of the RNC. R&C, that's why I meant. Even better, even better. But you had both former heads of the party. Michael Steele, whose group was knocked out by Trump when Trump,

defeated not just the Clinton dynasty, but the Bushes in 2016. So even if this thing, Arctic Frost was a crime, the FBI should have been going after the highest-level Democrats. They should have been going after the highest level of the White House at the time, as John Podesta was the head of the climate, basically slush fund of the White House. But what this was is they didn't target any of the Republicans who were perceived to be never Trump. What they wanted to do, this was, they waited a full year to launch this investigation because it wasn't clear whether Trump was going to run again. But once it became clear that he

was going to run again, they needed a broad sweeping apparatus to spy on the campaign and in order to put pressure on every node in the, in the MAGA affinity network, in order to politically neutralize them. Right. So what struck me going through the whistleblower documents is actually how similar this looks to one of the operations, the CIA via groups like USAID, runs in other countries to interfere in civil society. And that sounds extreme and crazy to people. But when you're looking at the nonprofit organizations on the right that get swept up into the surveillance network, which is vast and clearly very strategic, if you know the conservative movement and you're rifling through these whistleblower documents, you know they. It's a who's who. Exactly.

Exactly. Exactly. And so I think that's kind of interesting, Mike. And I know that you've looked at this in many other cases and many other countries you've particularly been deep in Eastern Europe lately I've seen. So is that the sense that you got as well that basically it's almost a plug and play domestically? Oh, it's exactly a plug and play. Jack Smith himself was a plug in play. Jack Smith was a prosecutor at the Hague and was involved in these USAID rule of law programs in Kosovo. See, we have this, it is not illegal for the FBI, I'm sorry, for the CIA and USAID and the U.S. State Department to put pressure on foreign judiciaries, to rule a certain way, to deem something constitutional or unconstitutional in that country, to prosecute or not prosecute someone. That is standard fair, standard courts. We have whole programs that the American Bar Association gets tens of millions of dollars to administer abroad. and the American Bar Association has a spin-out group called the World Justice Project. They're both funded tens of millions of dollars by USAID to go out and influence prosecutors, influence judges, influence ministries of justice in foreign countries,

to go after the political opponents of the State Department in those countries. This is what you have, and I can go through a million examples of this, but one of perhaps the most famous is the Victor Shokin case in Ukraine. This was the prosecutor in Ukraine. who was investigating Burisma, Joe Biden's son, Vice President Joe Biden's son at the time, and Joe Biden, as Vice President, flew to Ukraine, met with the Ukrainian government,

and threatened a billion-dollar U.S.Aid loan guarantee, which was conditioned on implementing certain governance and rule of law reforms, that they would not get that billion dollars in USAID bribe money unless they fired Victor Shokin. the prosecutor. And then Joe Biden famously told the Council on Foreign Relations, son of a bee, and that's exactly what they did.

He got rid of him the next day. At CFR, he's saying that, by the way, which is delightful. Yes, right, right, yes. Couldn't have picked a better venue. But it's the same thing everywhere. I mean, the National Down for Democracy, which is a straight-up CIA cut out. It was conceived by the CIA Director William Casey in 1982.

The legislation was written by the CIA Director William Casey, these right-hand man, Walter Raymond, who had spent 30 years in the CIA operations and propaganda and disinformation division within the CIA, helped draft the 1983 legislation that signed the NED into law. The head, the two founding co-heads of the National Down for Democracy told the New York Times and the Washington Post in the early 1980s that they exist to subsidize the groups that the CIA wants to, but doesn't want to get in trouble for funding. Right.

They bragged about it to David Ignatius. Yes, exactly. Right. Right. And the CIA gets a copy of every single National Endowment for Democracy Grant to this day. And this is a straight up CIA cut out. And one of the things that I published last year was the National Endowment for Democracy's in-house journal called the Journal of Democracy, which we fund as taxpayers, because this is funded by the U.S. government, by the State Department. It's an arm of the State Department that masquerades as an NGO.

And it's basically this, the State Department giving a grant to the NGO so that the NGO can do what the CIA wants. So because the CIA is just the covert action side of the overt diplomacy state department. So this is just funny how this all works. But what they wrote to the prime minister of Poland, Donald Tusk, was a command the month after he took office. This is December 2023 for him to arrest everybody in the. PIS party in Poland, the Law and Justice Party, which was the right-wing pro-Trump party that had been in power for eight years, a comprehensive plan of everybody from the party to arrest, senior party leadership, the judges who ruled in his favor, the heads of the civil society

institutions in Poland, in order to achieve a state of democratic stability and ensure that populism does not return in the next election. It was that explicit. And I mean, this is a CIA manual to the Ministry of Justice of a foreign country about who they need to arrest. And they even went through this list of names and talked about how easy it would be to actually secure a conviction in the various cases

and basically proposed that in the cases where it would be difficult to get a conviction, they should still bring the case anyway and try to be creative about getting people to squeal. I mean, this is, and this is the network that Jack Smith slithers out of, you know, like a sort of frozen

snake that just gets unfrozen out of the box to do this same thing to the who is the president of the United States and then running for president and now president again. I mean, frankly, this is a criminal conspiracy. Yeah. And so right now it's looking like according to New York Times report I just referenced, these are subpoenas for James Clapper, Peter Strach, Lisa Page, so some very familiar characters, but also today, big news, pardons were issued in the case of the alternate electors that Mike just mentioned. And if you're looking through the Arctic Frost whistleblower documents, you can match a whole lot of them up to what was going on, what was being investigated and surveilled. So Mike, is the Trump administration, I mean,

you were talking about this before Trump was reelected, but is the Trump administration now, people are very anxious. They don't know exactly what to think of what's happened from Trump 2.0's FBI and CIA and State Department. Do you think that this is, is a pretty sincere, robust effort right now that is humming the way it needs to be to solve some of these really foundational problems, the roots, you know, really start digging up the roots of these problems. I don't know that it's humming the way that it needs to be. I think that, you know, there's been a good effort to try to expunge the Justice Department of the worst apples. At the same time, I don't know that there has been an equivalent hiring spree in order to on board the

necessary manpower because these are these cases are very fact intensive there's a lot of due diligence that needs to be done there's a lot of strategizing about all you know all the different you know because you need to be ready for basically pro bono infinity mega lawyers on the other side to find every technicality you know every jurisdictional or venue loophole to move things you know in their favor every every way they can rig it is kind of what the Trump administration is up against because the legal profession as a whole leans enormously pro pro blob pro foreign policy establishment and you know as i was discussing these u.s a rule of law programs which are prolific basically in every country on earth are a way to get promoted up the judiciary

as i've you know covered even norm isan the chief hatchet man for uh you know for all anti-trump lawfare and has been since day one when Trump got into office in January 2017, you know, was flying over to Europe or flew out Chief Justice John Roberts on two occasions to have week-long joint study, you know, study sessions on U.S. EU law. I mean, just at the highest levels of this thing, you see this relationship. I mean, right now on the board of the World Justice Project, the U.S. aid funded. programs to influence foreign judiciaries for former Supreme Court justices are on the board of directors for that. I mean, this is a network. How do you end up on the short list to become a

Supreme Court justice or to become a high-level appellate judge in the United States? You move up through these networks. You get credentialed through them. You get the whisper networks and the donor networks and the political networks say, okay, this is a good, solid guy. And so that is what you're up, against in the United States judiciary. I mean, the fact is the American Bar Association led the crusade to indict Trump. And they have a legal monopoly on the ability to credential law schools.

I went to law school. That law school had to be credentialed by the American Bar. Every single one in the country does. And this is the group partisanly crusading to indict for the first time in U.S. history, the U.S. president. everyone knows what this is about, how the bread is buttered, how the rank partisan hackery of it,

but the whole system has to be restructured, and I don't think that there is a concerted effort to think about this holistically. I think people are kind of running around putting out fires one at a time, and we'll wait to see what the status of these subpoenas are. I should say that I definitely commend the just, Department for taking action on the crimes of James Comey and Letitia James, you know, no small amount of irony that James Comey, who set up Mike Flynn on these perjury charges, the napkin with Comey's, you know, crony's handwriting was, what are we doing here?

Is our, is the goal to get Flynn to lie or to get him fired? Is our goal to entree? Is our goal to entrap him for some BS perjury charge, or is it to run a covert political black ops operation to get the national security advisor fired? I mean, it was that naked. And James Comey even then bragged and laughed in an interview that he would never have even attempted that if Hillary Clinton had won the election, because she would not be so green as to allow James Comey's FBI cronies to even attempt such an entrapment operation. But the fact that they have moved forward on that and they've moved forward in the Letitia James,

one does give me some hope that justice and accountability will finally arrive at the feet of John Brennan. It's incredible because even just thinking of that, call me quote, which is, I mean, I've even forgotten about it until just now. That's a real deep cut, Mike, and deep cuts are your specialties. But call me to say that about Hillary Clinton,

Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, His brother, Tony Podesta, was running this absurd Yanukovych op with Paul Manafort for the European Center for a modern Ukraine, which was a bullshit NGO. They set up to mask that they didn't want to register for Farah when they were operating on behalf of the Party of Regions in Ukraine. So this idea that Michael Flynn needed to be surveilled because he was on a call with Sergei Lavrov. And you would leave Hillary Clinton alone. It's all so rich because you can play six degrees of Kevin Bacon with every single one of these MFers. Recently, I learned about colostrum. It is the very first milk known as liquid gold.

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their chocolate, Madagascar, vanilla, or strawberry into your coffee or smoothie. I like to put the strawberry into a cup of milk. Very good. For a limited time, our listeners get up to 25% off their entire order. Just head to cowboy colostrum.com slash afterparty and use code after party at checkout. That's 25% off when you use code after party at cowboy colostrum.com slash after party. After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them our show sent you. Let's go ahead roll this clip of Ellen DeGeneres from last week, S7, talking about what she perceives as a grave injustice occurring under our noses here in the United States.

Our people in America and Republicans who are quite like to undo the right for gay people to get married. I mean, that's back on the table as a debate, I think, isn't it? Absolutely. The Baptist Church in America is trying to reverse gay marriage. They're trying to, at the very least, stop it from happening in the future and possibly reverse it. And Portia and I are already looking into it. And if they do that, we're going to get married here. Honest to God didn't realize. They love their pause lines. They love it. How is, I thought they

were married years ago. She says she's also, this is F3. She says she moved to the UK because of Trump, which reminds me of exactly what you were just saying, Adam, that something about Trump himself seems to have triggered the unraveling of very talented people. Do you, you you consider Ellen to be one such case? Well, Ellen has always been a mean person, and it's not, you know, she had her dust up with the press and these stories probably three years, two or three years ago, but I did her show, and I mean, look, I'll tell you truthfully sort of how it works when you do every show. Every show has its own kind of personality, the show itself, not the on-air show, but the behind-the-scenes.

They all take on sort of the personality of their leader. And it's sort of like when you go into a business and people are always all friendly or they're going to a business and everyone's sort of dushy, you know, and you're going like, what's going? Why is everyone so mean and crappy in this business? You know, it's the owner is that way, you know? And so when you would go do Letterman, I'll start here. When you do Leno, Leno was fun and breezy and easy and people were nice and they were kind of laid back and they weren't looking over their shoulder at all. And it was very kind of laid back.

And Kimmel's show is laid back and nice and people are nice. And Letterman show people are scared or they were scared. They were scared when I did. Two times I did. They're scared because Dave would scare them. And Ellen's show people were scared, real scared. And I knew they were scared because it's like I was just sitting in my dressing room and they're like segment producer came in and he went,

all right, so we went over all the stuff we're going to talk about, you know, Christmas vacation or whatever it was. And I go, yeah, yeah. And he goes, you're not going to talk about me. meat or beef or anything like that, right? And I go, no, I'm not. I'm just going to talk about the stuff we talked about going on vacation or Christmas or the kids or, you know, their anecdotes, you know.

Okay, all right, okay, all right. And he, like, came back like 20 minutes later right before I went out. And it's like, okay, but don't talk about beef or meat or any. And I was like, you got two warnings? Yeah, yeah. And I was like, oh, this guy scared to death. this guy's scared and then and then later on I talked to someone who signed an NDA so I won't say his name but he wrote for Ellen and I just went how's Ellen and he said worst person uh worst person

and then we went not worst person I've worked for worst person I've ever met and by the way I knew the guy did Rosie when Rosie was the Judy Chub Club the worst and the meanest So, I don't know, some kind of, she's got some sort of mean off between Rosie and her prime and Ellen in her prime, you know, the Clash of the Titans. Men's mud wrestling. She's, I like that, but. So she's not a nice person at all, which now everyone knows what I knew 15 years ago or whenever I learned it, but now that's. seems to be common knowledge, which I was, I was trying to explain everyone how mean she was. Not because she was mean to me, because everyone was scared of her, which means she's mean.

She's not going to be mean to me. I'm a guest on the show, right? So I wouldn't know it for my exchanges. I would know it with how her staff was cowering. So also, they make so much out of this. Like they're going to try to do, it's like they're not going to do anything. Obviously, it's a form of narcissism where I'm going to have to come here and do that. And she crosses her legs like Barack Obama, which is bad.

So specific. It's such a specific. Well, the more progressive you are, the deeper your cross. Okay. And if you watch Barack Obama, this is like a full, deep, deep cross because he has to him and Justin Trudeau and Gavin Newsom have to do like super deep crosses to signal to their constituency where they're at. You learn the further left you go.

That's a sort of that's passed down a politician position. Trump puts his souls of his feet together, spreads his knees as wide as he can, and then makes a diamond around his nut sack so everyone can, like an offering, you know, it's like accentuate. Like, hey, over here, right down. Here we are. Can't get my knees closer than 26 inches together. Nobody will ever do it like him.

No, we'll ever do it like him. It's just been an incredible six months. I can't believe it. More than 50 shows, all of these guests making news. You know, we've had a lot of these interviews that we do get picked up by other news outlets, which is always really gratifying as an interviewer because it means that you ask questions that people care about. And you were able to get answers that people cared about. With Adam Carolla, I was not even trying.

My memory is that he just went and started dishing. on outland so i can't take credit for that uh but you know it's if you're watching after party you're watching a newsmaking show even though we're live at 10 p.m we're like cross-listed with comedy podcasts uh we have like we're we're irreverent uh we do things differently than a lot of other news shows and it's been really gratifying heartening to see the response that we've gotten in the first six months we're over 100 000 subscribers we want that to be over a million subscribers and we don't to wait that long to do it. So tell all of your friends. I have to say just the reaction in public has been, you know, I mentioned this sometimes, but like I used to do a fair bit of Fox News

probably a few times a week at my peak. And, you know, what new media, the influence that new media is gaining so quickly, I mean, just going on Megan's show, you know, once a week, it's like people will stop you at airports and now what's really cool is people stop and say they watch after party that blows my mind blows my mind so thank you thank you for your support thanks to our great team here at after party and mk media for all of their hard work there is a team behind the show that busts its ass so we are very very grateful uh for all of them for each other and all of you who've tuned in and made this part of your regular rotation. We all appreciate it more than you know.

I appreciate it more than you know. It's just been very cool. And I'm always around at Emily at Devil Make Care Media. I truly try to respond to everyone. I read everyone's emails. And if you ever have suggestions, whatever, feel free to send them in there. If they're for a happy hour episode, just put that in the subject line. It's no problem if you forget.

But stay in touch with me. and thank you for being along for the ride and being a part of our after-party community, our after-party audience. It's been incredible. And here's to another year of after-party's success, of entertaining and informing all of you, and more importantly, to a wonderful New Year's Eve and New Year's Day celebrating with friends and family. Thanks, everyone. God bless.