Behind the Bastards - The Mueller Report Episode

Episode Date: April 20, 2019

In this special episode Robert is joined by Miles Gray and Jack O'Brien (The Daily Zeitgeist) to discuss The Mueller Report.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's obstructing my justices? I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards. This is actually a special crossover episode of Behind the Bastards and the Daily Zeitgeist, and I have Jack O'Brien and Miles Gray on with me. Where we calling this? Behind the Zeitgeist? The Daily Bastards? I'm eating right now because we had to rip ourselves away from the microphones just

to come back to other microphones, and we don't even have time to eat because we need to make that tent. I thought it was an entire pie that you're eating because it's in a pie tent, but it's not. We're talking about the Mueller Report today. Yesterday, Thursday, the Mueller Report dropped like a Beyonce album with a lot of lead time and not out of nowhere, and I read all of it over the course of like, I don't know, nine or 10 hours or so, and I took 11,000 words of notes, and now I'm going to read them all to you guys. 11,000 words of notes. That's a lot of its copy pastes. Okay. So what would that be like? A Rihanna album? Who drops their album with lots of lead time? Like actually years of lead time? Right. Dr. Dre. Dr. Dre. Because we still don't have

detox. Right. I have thought that there's a lot of similarities between Dre and Robert Mueller. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. They're both OGs. I guess. That is true. Yeah. Or one's an OG, one's a G-man. Yeah, one's an OG, one's an original G-man. It's not the best in the biz for nothing, folks. Yep. What just general thoughts on Robert Mueller's prose style? Not great. Okay. Could he use an editor? Okay. A lot of buried leads. You know, maybe, you know, copy editing's good, but maybe somebody to kick it up a notch style-wise. Yeah, that presentation of ideas could have been a little more effective. Could have been a little bit more fun. Okay. That was a Sprite, not a beer. Uh-huh. Sure, Miles. Yeah, Miles has a Sprite. Damn this butt.

I have a bunch of throwing bagels. Yeah. Because this is going to be a frustrating conversation. Robert comes armed as per usual. The old throwing bagels. All right. I guess before we get into it, have you guys read much of the report? I've read probably many articles with excerpts that would amount to maybe 15 pages. Okay. My reading is excerpt based at this point. Yeah, I did a lot of that too. I want to start by talking about William Barr, the current attorney general, a little bit before we get into the report itself. We're going to talk about him much in the report because he's not in the report, but I think a little bit of his background is useful for understanding the context of his behavior and his track record of the context

that he gave us. Yeah, I would call him the lies. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. But like, this is like in his playbook. Yeah. You can point to like past home runs he's done like this. Yeah. Yeah. So in 1989, as assistant attorney general, William Barr drew some ire for authoring a legal opinion that stated that the FBI had the right to abduct people in foreign countries without the approval of the governments of those host countries. When this became an issue before Congress, he was asked to hand over a full copy of that memo and he refused and instead offered to summarize its key points. He's got a playbook that hasn't changed in 30 years. According to former DOJ legal advisor, Ryan Goodman Barr, quote, admitted some of the most consequential

and incendiary conclusions from the actual opinion, which forced Congress to issue a subpoena to find that opinion. You may notice as with some words switched around, the same thing that happened with the Mueller report. That's very interesting. So 89. 89. Who were we abducting back then? Noriega. Oh, got it. Got it. I think was a cool dude. Let's not look into that at all. Yeah. I mean, well, it's funny because like before this, right, Bush was trying to figure out how to get Noriega out and first is like, oh, it would be tight if the Panamanians like overthrown, but you know, I don't want to tell them what to do. Right. And basically being like, please do some, please do some, please do something. We'll help you. Maybe we won't. And then they failed.

There was like a failed, cool attempt. And then it got to the point where I'm sure they were just like, all right, how the fuck do we just like send our fucking people into this? Can we just abduct him? William Barr says yes. Yeah. Now in 1990, during Barr's first run as attorney general, the news broke that the Reagan administration had kind of secretly given billions of dollars in loans and military aid to Saddam Hussein. When we went to war with Saddam Hussein, some of Bush's officials doctored documents in order to hide this fact. Six separate congressional investigations were convened to look into the matter. The House Judiciary Committee asked Barr to launch an independent counsel investigation. And he said, no, which is the first time that an attorney

general ever refused such a request. Huh. Yeah. Wow. So already. No, we're not going to be looking at that set new precedents. I mean, that's the one thing he has a good track record of William Barr is the homie. If you get him in, he's going to do like literally whatever you need. You know that episode of Breaking Bad when Jesse's girlfriend ODs on heroin and they call in Mike to clean up the body and everything so that when the cops come, nothing incriminating will be found? William Barr is the that guy of attorney generals. Yeah, he's like Mike. Yeah. Yeah. He's the Mike, but with like less, no, with as much dirty work. Yeah. Yeah. He's good at dirty work. Far less likable. Yeah, less likable. William

Ermentraut. Because we all, we all wound up on Mike's side by the end of Breaking Bad, but, but I'm not on William Barr's side. Yeah. I mean, the other thing though, with the whole 1989 memo was just like the level of how he first said it was like, it only has to do with domestic law. Yeah. It was like, you don't need it, doesn't matter because it's just about domestic law. And to know that when they actually got it, they're like, this has to do with so much more. Yeah. This is, this is all of the crimes that thing can be. The Fourth Amendment, like all these other things. Yeah. Yeah. He left some critical stuff out. And hearing all that, you won't be surprised to hear that Barr's summary

of the Mueller report left out some key facts as well. Not just key facts about the president. For one thing, it omitted a fascinating little crime drama where an Eric Prince and Michael Flynn tried to get their grubby little hands on Hillary Clinton's near mythical 30,000 deleted Clinton emails. This is like one of the most interesting parts of the whole document to me because the report reveals that Trump essentially repeatedly asked Flynn, General Flynn to acquire Hillary Clinton's emails for him. And one of the through lines of the report is that Flynn is literally the only loyal person who was ever in Donald Trump's orbit. And so unlike, unlike everyone else who works for Trump, who is solely interested in themselves, Flynn was like, yeah, I mean,

boss wants these emails, I'm going to try and get these motherfucking emails. He just needed someone to give him orders again. He loves getting orders. Yeah. Yeah. He loves getting orders. So he worked with a lady named Barbara Ladine, who is a former GOP staffer. And she actually managed to get her hands on what she believed was a tranche of Clinton emails. And that's when Michael Flynn teamed up with our old buddy Echo Papa, Eric Prince, and he funded the effort to verify the Clinton emails, which showed that they were in fact bullshit made to trick the GOP. So that's, that's neat. Yeah, fun little, you get a fun little 90 minutes of, you know, cut that into a film. Yeah. So as I said, I read the whole report in one like

blurred frenzied eight hour, nine hour, whatever session, I'm not a lawyer, and I won't pretend to have understood all the different arguments about constitutional law that the report makes that I kind of my eyes glaze over on that. Well, that's why you have me here. That's why I have you here, famous constitutional law scholar, Miles Gray. But it does seem from everything else I read about it that one of the things Mueller makes very clear at the end is that he believes that Trump status as the president does not make him immune to charges of obstruction of justice. Yeah. And he also makes it clear that the crime of conspiracy with the Russian government does not have to have been committed for Trump to a committed obstruction of justice by trying to obstruct the

whole fucking right, which was the sort of logic William Barr was using. Yeah. And like, that's like the most repeat, like the refrain, if this is one 400 page long song, like if this is American pie, the refrain of the song, the bye-bye mess American pie line is Mueller saying, I'm not saying Trump didn't commit crimes. I'm not saying Trump didn't commit crimes, like very, very clearly and repeatedly. Yeah. That's like one of the most commonly repeated things I know, because William Barr, famous truth teller, he said, well, that the whole conspiracy thing wasn't a crime. So like, how can you obstruct something that's not even crimes? It's like, you know, he was mad at fuck or at the news. It is remarkable how much of it is just like,

and this is like Chris Christie repeatedly told Donald Trump, like, that's another thing that's in there is Christie repeatedly saying, just don't do anything. Just don't do anything. You didn't collude with the Russian government. Just don't do anything. And it'll be fine. And Trump being like, well, fuck Chris Christie. What the fuck does that guy know? It's like, really, it's one of the weird things about this document is the people who come across as like, paragons of sanity. And one of them is Chris Christie, which is how you know you're in a low point. So, sorry, I'm just going back to the beginning here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You, I felt like we didn't need to read after. So I read the New York Post cover that said, the Mueller report, Trump clean, no crimes committed,

dem hoax destroyed. And then I read the bar summary. Why would we need to go any deeper than that? I don't know. Well, I don't know, Jack, let's talk about that for, let's say like an hour and a half. Okay, something like that. Deal. All right. Let's get into it. So another big reveal concerning the infamous P tape first revealed to the public through the much in aligned steel dossier. P tape was apparently a major subject of discussion among people close to Trump in the weeks before the election. Two weeks prior to the election, a Russian businessman texted this to Michael Cohen, quote, stop the flow of tapes from Russia, but not sure if there's anything else just so you know, dot, dot, dot. Right. Yeah. Flow. Yeah. The flow of tapes. And this is before the

election. This is two weeks before. This is before any anyone out in the world was talking about tapes. Yeah. Buzzfeed had not dropped. I think John McCain had taken the report had like made a note of the report to the FBI because he'd seen it, but like Buzzfeed hadn't dropped it yet. Okay. Now the special counsel apparently talked to this Russian businessman whose name I just cannot pronounce and I'm not going to try. Yeah, don't want to find it. Russian businessman who explained to Cohen that these tapes were compromising tapes of Trump's Trump rumored to be held by persons associated with the Russian real estate conglomerate crocus group, which had helped host the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Russia. This guy insisted that the tapes were fake when he was

talked to by the special counsel. So he told the Mueller investigation that the P tapes were faked, but Cohen did not know that at the time. Got it. So that that's the most pressing stuff up front. The rest of what we have to talk about is going to be a lot less organized because we're basically just going through my raw notes, some of which will be sensible and some of which may not be since by the end of the read, I was pretty stir crazy and also very, very inebriated. So this will this will get less logical as we go along. All right. Yeah, I'm looking at that doc. We're using wingdings or webdings. Are there other fonts? Oh, wow. Hey, you know what? Just go on ahead, man. So the report starts off with what under normal sane circumstances would be a pretty

damning sentence. The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion. Again, like that's one of the first lines. But compared to based on everything else, it almost doesn't even make an impact. If we were living in a rational universe where the Trump administration was treated like other presidential administrations, the fact that that is the beginning of the report and the president has been saying for years, we don't know if Russia collude. We don't know if it was Russia and just constantly equivocating and, you know, just standing for Russia, basically, that would be a big story. People would be like, huh, so now he knows. Now we know he was wrong and the Mueller report clearly says that they

intervened on his behalf and he's still lying on their behalf. That's just weird. Yeah, the question I had most going through this first part of the report that talks about Russian meddling is just like, this feels like an act of war. Not that I'm in favor of a war with Russia, but this feels like a digital Pearl Harbor. And it's pretty shocking. A lot of this stuff about the Internet Research Agency was out from prior subpoenas and whatnot, but seeing it all put together here is, it's really shocking. The report makes it clear that the Russians definitely wanted Trump to win and that they took substantial effort to ensure that he did. It describes the social media campaign that they ran as having favored Trump and disparaged Hillary Clinton.

However, quote, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities. The report's also careful to note that a statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean that there was no evidence of those facts. So he's saying we didn't find a hard proof that they conspired with the Russian government. However, we did find some evidence that they conspired with the Russian government. Just not enough to make it a chargeable offense. He says that specifically in reference to the collusion. In making the report, Mueller applied the framework of conspiracy law to determine whether, quote,

collective action of multiple individuals constituted a crime rather than collusion. Because as he notes, collusion is not actually a crime with a definition under federal criminal law. It's just a word people have been using. But like in terms of the FBI's job, it's in a relevant term because there's no way legally to determine it. Mueller notes, in connection with that analysis, we addressed the factual question of whether members of the Trump campaign coordinated, a term that appears in the appointment order, which is the order that established the special counsel's investigation, with Russian election interference activities. Now, kind of confusingly, the report notes that

coordination doesn't have a definition under federal criminal law either. But they defined coordination as requiring an agreement, tacit or express, between the campaign and the Russian government. So like that's sort of the framework under which Mueller's trying to analyze. And the goalposts are pretty far out. Yeah. The goalposts are far out and it's surprising how many field goals they still kick. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah, you nailed that. Okay, good job, man. I don't go Red Sox. Yeah, no, nice. Well done. Red Sox are indeed a football team. They are my favorite squadron. And it's how many field goals they kick and make.

Yeah, they have to actually successfully kick the field goals, not just kick them in their landing 30 yards short. Yeah. Anyways, let's talk about this sports analogy a little bit. So under this definition, they did not find coordination between the campaign and the Russian government. In other words, Russia helping the Trump campaign win and the Trump campaign knowingly taking their help, which is documented, did not count as coordination because there was no tacit or express agreement to interfere with the election behind it. Right. It's one of those things where it's like, they're not saying at Putin at Russia.gov or.ru, sorry, I have more respect, with subject headline, hey, when do we want to drop the emails? This is what I'm thinking.

Because yeah, it's really tough when more or less it was just sort of like, hey, I think the Russians are kind of hooking it up. Yeah. And it was more just like, we know that these documents were hacked by someone. We know they're going to be released through WikiLeaks. A lot of people are saying it's Russia. Trump just keeps saying, I don't think it's Russia, but we know the documents are going to release and we're planning weeks ahead of time how we're going to exploit what we know is going to come out in the releases. But because it's not Vladipu picking up the phone and being like, hey, guys, got some documents. There's additional layers of of of of skirmish to it. Now, there are a couple of cases where it is almost that

direct, which we'll get to. So Russia's efforts to influence the election were focused mostly around either the GRU, which is Russian intelligence or the Internet Research Agency, which is essentially a private company that's also part of the Russian intelligence infrastructure. Now, the IRA, which I will be referring to even though it's kind of confusing because it's not the IRA that just killed a lady up in Derry. The IRA started its infiltration of the US by sending agents over in 2014. This is implied to be the beginning of their election infiltration efforts, but the details are all redacted out of harm to ongoing matter. So there's a lot that's redacted in like relation to the IRA. It notes later in the document, quote, IRA employees

traveled to the United States in mid 2014 on an intelligence gathering mission to obtain information and photographs for use in their social media posts. So they were taking pictures of Americans and locations so that they could make more compelling fake people on the Internet to pretend to be American activists. That's interesting. That actually happened. Like, they didn't just use Google image search. They went and took pictures because they knew that it would be possible to trace the images back. Yeah. When I think about what I do online, when I suspect someone is like a fake person, it's like the first thing you do is do a reverse Google image search. So they didn't want that to be possible. Okay. Yeah. Quote,

the IRA's operation also included the purchase of political advertisements on social media and the names of US persons and entities, as well as the staging of political rallies inside the United States to organize those rallies. IRA employees posed as US grassroots entities and persons and made contact with Trump supporters and Trump campaign officials in the United States. The investigation did not identify evidence that any US persons conspired or coordinated with the IRA. So they definitely worked with the IRA and supported their efforts, but they thought they were there. There's no evidence they thought there were anything but US based activists, because there were there were even examples of like Trump retweeting through some social media

site, like one of the IRA's protests that they were like a pro Trump thing that they were gathering. But there's no necessary way that Trump would have known that they weren't just a normal group of his supporters. Yeah, that would have required him to do more, more research into that than anything he's ever done. Yeah, which of course he did. Like, yeah. But I mean, at that point, they're operating in a way that's supposed to come off as sincere as possible. So we get even, like, I don't think we needed any more confirmation that Guccifer 2.0 was the GRU and that the the DNC leaks were part of a Russian government operation. But what? Oh, Miles. Are you serious? Yeah, I'm sorry, man. If you've been I thought he was some hacker dude in his basement. Yeah,

in his mom's basement with his blood type of Mountain Dew, Baja Blast. Yeah. I mean, they the GRU are big fans of Baja Blast. Yeah, of course. That's very well documented. So it notes that WikiLeaks made its first releases in July of 2016, like within days of candidate Trump announcing that he hoped Russia would recover emails described as missing from a private server. So it like, essentially, it states very clearly that the GRU, a lot of their hacking efforts to try to get her emails started within a couple of days of Trump saying, I hope that the Russians get her emails, like he said that and they started cert like spearfishing attempts to break into Clinton email accounts. Oh, that's new. Yeah. Yeah, that is new. They started days after he said

that it was, you know, I didn't take down the exact length of time, but I think it was within like 48 hours. It was very cool. Oh, so it's not like, so yeah, before you could have thought, well, this is probably ongoing. He literally said, Hey, let me get the meme. I hope you should do that. And they started spearfishing. I've always thought people pointing to that part, like him saying that in a speech as like evidence that he was coordinating or trying to coordinate with Russia. I've always taken that as like, yeah, but he was like clearly just doing this Trump thing and up there riffing and shit like that. But it seemed like that's crazy that they were like, yes, yes, sir. Yes, your honor. Yeah, yeah, it was like, yeah, it was it was pretty nuts. Well, I think

yeah, I guess even if there isn't, if you don't think it's they were in direct contact, it was definitely that like, that was information they needed to be like, Oh, okay, this is this will help. Yeah, it's it's worth noting that they had penetrated the DNC in June. So before Trump ever said anything, they had already started getting emails and stuff from the DNC. But they suspect they like specifically started spearfishing, which is essentially when you send out a bunch of emails to like people whose accounts you want to compromise that have things that if they click like it might'll it'll like, Oh, login because your bank account and then it's a website I created. Yeah, so they started targeting Clinton aides and people like associated with Hillary Clinton

on a wider scale immediately after that. So like that's one of the more damning things that's in the whole report. Even though that's obviously not necessarily evidence of coordination, because it's possible. And in fact, probable that what happened is Trump speaking out of his ass because it sounded good and tough. And the Russians being like, Yeah, we can do more of that. Right. Why not? Sure, sure. But is also pretty damning in a normal political environment. Yeah, I mean, care about stuff like that. I mean, it's very easy for him to say that speaking out of his ass because he was just in three meetings where people were like, damn it, it would be really great for our campaign if we had the Clinton emails. And he just goes out there and like says it

out of his ass. And they're like, Oh, we probably shouldn't say that. But he can because he's a fucking clown. And the Russians are like, got it. Yeah, like, yeah, I mean, that's the court. It is effectively coordinating even if it's not like the legal definition of them like getting on the phone or like legally, you know, something that we can prove. Yeah. Well, but he would have to know that the Russians were going to do that. And that was all part like that. It was all coming from there, right? Rather than like sort of subconsciously expressing a desire that they could pick up on. And I guess the reason coordinating is so dangerous is because you're, you know, bringing like one person's illicit like plan to attack the Democrats into like alongside yours.

That's why the like sharing polling information and like strategic information that Manafort did is so, you know, that is so significant because that's what makes it particularly effective is you're, you know, targeting the same areas, the same types of people. And I mean, obviously Trump wanted her email. So it's just, yes, like it doesn't technically rise to the level. But like when you're looking at like what we need to keep a sane electoral process, like not being able to jokingly tell somebody to help your campaign by doing an illegal thing. Yeah. Is probably should be something we take into account. We should make that be illegal in the future because it seems like a gap in our current because 60 years ago, that wouldn't have

really been a thing people could do. And now it is. Yeah. Anyway, Sophie's giving me the two fingers sign, which means screw you to it's time for ads. You guys are better at transitions. Yeah, no, that was amazing. Got a better one. I actually got freaked out when you did that. Oh, good. Are your ads haunted? Yes. Okay. Yes. Oh, by these ghosts. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the gun badass way. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic

science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So one of the things the report makes really clear is what a staggering success the internet research agency's influence

campaign was. Facebook at all were in no way prepared for this and were essentially perfect victims. Quote, Instagram accounts had hundreds, IRA Instagram accounts had hundreds of thousands of US participants. IRA controlled Twitter accounts separately had tens of thousands of followers including multiple US political figures who retweeted IRA created content. In November 2017, a Facebook representative testified that Facebook had identified 470 IRA controlled Facebook accounts that collectively made 80,000 posts between January 2015 and August 2017. Facebook estimated that the IRA reached as many as 126 million persons through its Facebook accounts. In 6th of January 2018, Twitter announced that it had identified 3,814 IRA controlled

Twitter accounts and notified approximately 1.4 million people Twitter believed may have been in contact with an IRA controlled account. So in just keeping all that in mind, the 126 million people who were reached by Facebook like IRA controlled Facebook accounts alone, I want to note that according to Vanity Fair, there's a great Vanity Fair article titled you could fettle the voters who cost Clinton the election in a midsize stadium, noting that the three states that cost Clinton the victory Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania were lost by a margin of 79,000 votes. So when we're talking about whether or not Russian influence peddling could have had a significant impact on the outcome of the election, they reached 126 million people through Facebook.

The election came down to 79,000 votes. Right. And that's where the part where Manafort exchanging information with Konstantin Kalimnik is so damning, too, because they go, oh, no collusion. Well, you have this person. That is the most damning thing in terms of the campaign. He is the manager of the campaign at the time, right? Yeah. Sharing internal polling data and strategy. And also saying these are the battleground states we're really focusing on because we think the Clinton campaign is actually taking some of these states for granted or as the media said, we're just not putting as much investment in those states. And then like, oh, and we've also been like, and from there identifying the Clinton defector demographic of voter who they especially

needed to get to because once you get those people to vote third party or for Trump, great. Yeah. Now you've actually you're whittling down the margins. And again, like you say, when it comes to something as just under 80,000 people. Now, Rebevance, I have a question for you. Why does he why would Mueller, like he acknowledges the thing that we're talking about, right? The Konstantin Kalimnik Manafort like connection. Oh, yeah, he's very explicit about that. So why did that? Because one of the critiques that I've seen the likes of Glenn Greenwald bring is that how like, do you believe that they didn't come up with one single indictment of somebody for Russia, Russian collusion? Why does that not rise to the level of collusion?

Well, or sorry, not a critical criminal term. Sorry. Why does that rise to the level of criminal conspiracy with Russia? Yeah, that's that's that's a great question. I guess some of it is because like, is it it's not illegal to share polling data with somebody like he wasn't Manafort was giving this guy polling data. He was not in return getting a promise. We're going to have this agency that you might not even know exists at this point, attack these battleground states to try to shift voters. Right. There's nothing illegal about a guy giving like information as the campaign had he had control over. He can share that with whoever. Konstantin Kalimnik was not like next door to Vladimir Putin at the time working for him or whatever. So that

maybe did they have a direct connection between them? They did. He him. Kalimnik and Putin had a direct connection. Okay. And the intelligence agencies were enough to be like, we consider this person to be part of the intelligence intelligence apparatus. Part of what Manafort is in jail for is related to this, the acting as an unregistered foreign agent. Now that's not as a result of him sharing data with Kalimnik, but as other results of things he did with Kalimnik, because he was also talking with Kalimnik about essentially establishing a peace plan that would have given Russia backdoor control of Eastern Ukraine. So one of the things Manafort was doing while he was giving this data to Kalimnik was being like, and we'll establish a peace program

that gives Russia a large chunk of Ukraine in exchange for better relations with Russia. Like that was the thing he was working on at this time. And that's a lot legally shadier ground to stand on, but some of that's still ongoing in terms of like the the investigation and whatnot. And one of the things that Manafort that Moller repeatedly notes is that it's hard to say exactly what crimes Manafort did or didn't commit because he lied about everything and deleted all of his text messages, and we didn't get them all. Like that's a repeated comment that Moller makes is that like, there might be more here, but we just don't have all of the information from Manafort because he lies constantly and deleted everything.

Right. Yeah. Based on your reading of the Moller report, would you guess that Moller thinks that Russian intervention swung the election or is he taking that idea seriously enough to say that he definitely thinks it's a possibility? I would say that everything that's in the report says it's definitely a possibility. He does not go as far as saying this swung like that, and that's outside of the scope of his investigation, but he spends probably like a good quarter, maybe 20% if it's lower of the whole report talking about Russian influences, actions to swing the election, going in detail about them, about what Manafort did, about what the internet research agency did, about what WikiLeaks did. He makes a very clear case that WikiLeaks coordinated directly with the

Russian government to release a lot of this stuff. Like he goes into exhaustive detail about like one of the first half of the Moller report, part one, is essentially a detailed outline of Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election. And I don't see how you can walk away from it thinking anything, but that they put a lot of work and money into this. And some of them at least believe there's even a statement from some guy close to Putin saying Putin won after Trump won the election. In the Moller report. In the Moller report. There's a statement. Yeah. So I would say, and I, you know, I can't get inside Bob Moller's head, but he definitely takes the possibility seriously because he spent like a hundred pages talking about it. Right? Yeah. So I do want to

talk a little bit more about the internet research agency. There's another little line a little bit further down that talks about how those four IRA employees snuck into the country. They lied and pretended to be four friends who'd met at a party. I just wanted to visit the US, which I thought was cute. Have you, have you actually seen times when like Russian spies have gone abroad to like do recon and stuff? How obvious they look? Well, some people just want to look at some cathedrals, Miles. Yeah. Remember those guys in England who were like, had the most. The guys who poisoned for the listeners, the guys who poisoned several people in Russia when they were tracked down by members of the site that I write for, Bellingcat, and were found to have been agents of the GRU.

They claimed to be tourists who were just there to look at cathedrals. And they looked like comic book versions of like Russian like goon. Like like the most just like chiseled faces. Their expressions were so like angry. And you couldn't for a second be like, oh, these are cathedral enthusiasts. Like these are these people just with their scowls look like they're up to no good. They were either Russian spies or soccer hooligans and nothing else. Yeah. Yeah. They were not. Oh, Mike. So I can't believe like coming here. They're like, and your purpose for your visit? We are friends who met that party want to look at the United States. What's in your backpack? Camera and sweater. Those look like chair legs. No, is for my

marionette class. I must make here. I must go. Yeah, just like a wild because that was the one thing that really surprised me about the because it was with Sergei Skripal, right? That was those guys. When you saw those photos, like they're not even trying. They're actually not even trying. Yeah, like if I feel like the people at the border could like, I don't know, I guess this gets into profiling. But like, so you guys are clearly Russian spies. I'm like, why is your friend folding up a frying pan with his bare hands behind you as he looks at me like like they like they if there was a shooting and I was near one of those guys, I would dive behind their forehead for cover because it was clearly thick enough to stop bullets. Oh my goodness. It's freaky. Yeah.

You know, and easy could you think like with the way some people finesse things like with the way Kim Jong-un's brother was taken out. Like they had those people. Swarmo women with poison needles. Right. Good plan. Right. Or just like trying to bring in weird people to be like, oh, it's a prank show or whatever. I don't know if they actually still believe that or cover or whatever. But if you just need photos, right, you could easily just send you're like, oh, my cousin studying abroad. Just make sure you get all the pictures off the SD card when you get back. But you know, why am I trying to do their job better? I mean, you know, Miles, when this whole podcasting game falls apart, I do think you have a future as a Russian contracting spy agent. I'm like,

hey, hoots, babe, let's talk. I'm like, you're bubby. You got this thing all the way turned around, man. I'm like, future as a Russian spy, you should see as past. Oh, I had to hire this guy. Yeah, right. Wow. Hey, but it stopped the flow of tapes, didn't it? It did stop the flow of tapes. The fake tapes. Oh, yeah, I'm yeah. Yeah. The flow of tapes of flow. Okay, so not the progressive. She was my improv teacher. Hey, Stephanie Courtney. So there's a there's fun lines in the report that are partially redacted. One that says the focus on the US presidential campaign continued through to set 2016 and redacted 2016 internal redacted reviewing the IRA controlled Facebook group secured borders. The author criticized the lower

number of posts dedicated to criticizing Hillary Clinton and reminded the Facebook specialist, it is imperative to intensify criticizing Hillary Clinton. Just very direct. A lot of it's interesting to me how much information the Mueller report has on what's going on here and a lot of it's redacted. So once we get a full version, I expect we're going to like, there's a lot in here about the journalists who worked with WikiLeaks. And I'm really interested to see some of those conversations when they're inevitably revealed. Right. Because that's one of the things that those are redacted. Yeah, I think I mean, we don't know what's redacted. But it talks about at other points that journalists, American journalists worked with WikiLeaks and were given access to

the leaks ahead of time. WikiLeaks was getting the leaks directly from the GRU. And from, you know, as Guccifer. So like there's, I'm interested in the form those conversations took because I suspect some of those journalists kind of knew what was going on. Right. So who was coordinating with a Facebook expert there? That was a IRA agent, like talking with one of their Facebook experts. One of the IRA's Facebook experts. Yeah, that's an internal conversation where they're talking about, you know, we have to intensify criticizing Hillary Clinton. Isn't that funny when your job is like you get an email from your manager and it's like, Hey, we talked about this, man. Yeah, right. We got to ramp up the Hillary Clinton stuff.

Right. And then your job is to go back and be like, Oh, man, she sucks. I mean, I can't believe she's destroying this country. Yeah, such a bizarre sitcom. Most of the IRA's groups were like pretty, pretty hardline conservative pro-Trump, but they actually kind of spun the gamut. There was everything from B, like their Facebook groups had names like being patriotic, stop all immigrants, secured borders and tea party news, but also had names like Black Matters, Blacktivist and Don't Shoot Us. There was an LGBT United group and then like religious groups like United Muslims of America. All were actually IRA Facebook groups. And Blacktivist was pretty big. Yeah, Blacktivist was very big and they carried out

rallies and stuff. They got sizable numbers of people and they were pushing the anti-Hillary, like Hillary Clinton's racist line to try to get Black voters to stop supporting her. Now, it's noted in here, like there was a lot of shit last year, I think, when it came out that the Internet Research Agency, it's been $100,000 on 3,500 Facebook advertisements. One of the things that's really clear from the Mueller report is that they really didn't need to do that. Most of their engagement seems to have occurred organically without the need to put any money down to amplify things at all. Like that was almost more icing on the cake, like just the way that social media is structured. Right. They didn't need to spend money. Why? Because they were creating

fake news. Fake news. It's easy to, if you just get to write fiction and pretend it's fact, you can create viral, something that's going to go viral, because you just say, the Pope said, fuck Hillary Clinton. People, Catholics are going to want to read about that. Yeah, Hillary Clinton's going to kill your babies. It's controversial. It's something that gets people angry and then like your job's already done for you. You don't need to spend that money. Like they did in some cases, but it doesn't seem like it was even all that necessary. But that is one of the top rebuttals I hear from conservatives or even moderate people who are like, this whole thing's a witch hunt. Yeah. Well, you're telling me $30,000,000 of Facebook money

is what swung this election. It's like, no, it was the constant churn of like fake stories that were wish fulfillment for anybody who like thought about supporting Trump. Yeah. One thing that's really clear is that the IRA was a big push behind Hillary Clinton for prison 2016, that hashtag, like that was one of the Hillary for prison. Yeah, that was one of the big things they pushed. I think it started it, but like they really, oh, got you. They really pushed it. That's one of the things they spent money to push, especially around the RNC and the DNC. So the IRA efforts were too pronged and they created a number of fake persons and groups, obviously to like act as American citizens who are activists, but they also operated a sizable

botnet, which would give these fake people the impression of being real. It notes that numerous high profile US persons, including former ambassador Michael McFall, Roger Stone, Sean Hannity, Michael Flynn Jr. retweeted or responded to tweets posted by IRA controlled accounts. So again, they had a lot of success holding rallies. They would put US media in touch, like they would basically start a rally, get dozens or hundreds of thousands of people to confirm that they were attending. Then they would find an actual American volunteer to act as a coordinator and make an excuse about how they had to be out of the state during the rally. And then they would put media in touch with the person who'd volunteered to be the coordinator to make it seem like it was a

legitimate grassroots effort. The first such rally they executed was actually in November of 2015, and it was a Confederate rally. That was the name of the event. These rallies continued after the 2016 election. There's one example of one of the posters here, which I actually think I saw during the election. It's a minors for Trump ad for a minors for Trump rally. And that was an IRA rally. Wow. I definitely saw that ad. Not children. No, no, no, like coal miners. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's pretty wild. One of their groups was black, or one of their fake people was named Black Fist, which was purportedly an African American, like trying to teach other black people how to protect themselves from law enforcement. They were really focused on BLM, because it was controversial,

because it was something people argued about and fought about on the internet. Right. And I know if they created one incident that involved Black Lives Matter, the right-wing media would do the rest. Yeah. That seems to have been a huge part of their goal. Yeah. So I'm not going to go into detail on every time the Trump campaign promoted IRA-created material, but the report notes that in total, Trump campaign affiliates promoted dozens of tweets, posts, and other political content created by the IRA. So that's cool. And again, not coordination. Not coordination in the legal sense. It's just synergy, man. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's just two people working at parallel purposes. And that's the thing with conspiracy. You need that agreement ahead of

time. Right. So it's defined what it is, rather than being like, yeah, we want the same thing. We'll let this thing happen. Yeah. Now, that's one chunk of Russia's efforts. The other chunk were carried out by the GRU, which is, again, Russian intelligence. And those are the people who did the DNC hacks. They did the spearfishing that got them access to a bunch of Hillary Clinton related emails and stuff. So there were a couple of different GRU departments that did this. One of the things I found interesting is that the GRU carried out a moderately-sized Bitcoin mining operation in order to buy the computer infrastructure they used to hack the DNC. So that's cool. Yeah. Neat. Oh, so they had a bunch of computers running to get as much Bitcoin

to fund their other computer? Yeah. Yeah. Wasn't Bitcoin like a penny stock at that time? Like, wasn't it really low? It was worth more than that. It was in the hundreds, I think, at least. Oh, was it? Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, the spearfishing campaign was incredibly successful in sending the GRU access to John Podesta's emails, as well as tens of thousands of other messages from other campaign staffers. The GRU began planning the releases of this content at least as early as April 19, 2016, which is when one GRU unit registered the domain DCLeaks.com and then anonymized the registrant. They paid for the registration using Bitcoin, but they had mined. So that's cool. Yeah. So we'll get into the rest of this. But first,

you know, what's better than Bitcoin? Product services. Money is better than no, no. Spending. Yeah. Uh-huh. Yes. Where am I? Capitalism. I'm not as good at the answer to that, Miles. I'm not as good at the ad plugs as you guys are. Oh, no. See, this is why I was trusting one of y'all to do the ad plugs. Hey, guys, we're going to take a quick break to tell you about sick old products, bro. Jack, do it like one of our ads real quick. Okay. One of our ads? Yeah. Hey, Miles. Huh? It's me, Jack, from work. Yeah. All right. Go listen to some ads. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated

the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space,

313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when

there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Wow. Great ads. That was sick, man. Great lead into the ads. Let's talk about Roger Stone. So Roger Stone is notable in the Mueller report for his absence, because he's not really in the Mueller report, but he clearly is because there's a bunch of redacted stuff like, oh, y'all are talking about Roger Stone now. One of those places is talking about the communication between the GRU in the persona of Gustafur 2.0 with a Trump campaign member,

well, a former Trump campaign member, who's again clearly Roger Stone. So I'm going to read a selection of that, which is again, in the middle of a bunch of very redacted stuff. In early August 2016, redacted, Twitter's suspension of the Gustafur 2.0 Twitter account. After it was reinstated, GRU officers posing as Gustafur 2.0 wrote redacted via private message, thank you for writing back. Do you find anything interesting in the docs I posted? On August 17, 2016, the GRU added, please tell me if I can help you anyhow. It would be a great pleasure to me. On September 9, 2016, the GRU, again posing as Gustafur 2.0, referred to a stolen Democratic campaign document posted online and asked Roger Stone, probably, what do you think

about the info on the turnout model for the Democrats entire presidential campaign? Roger Stone probably responded pretty standard. The investigation did not identify evidence of other communications between probably Roger Stone and Gustafur 2.0. So there's a lot of talk between Roger and Gustafur. Right. But he's saying the information you got us is pretty standard. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It ain't shit. It ain't shit. But there's still an ongoing investigation there, which that's the stuff they could show you. Yeah. Yeah. That's the stuff that they were able to show you. Now, if there's any chance you still thought Julian Assange was anything but a partisan hack, here's something he wrote to his colleagues in November 2015. That's in the Mueller report.

We believe it would be much better for GOP to win. Dems plus media plus liberals would then form a block to reign in their worst qualities with Hillary in charge. GOP will be pushing for her worst qualities. Dems plus media plus neoliberals will be mute. She's a bright, well-connected sadistic sociopath. Julian Assange. Talking about Hillary Clinton. Talking about Hillary Clinton. Which might be an accurate description of Hillary Clinton. But sadistic seems weird because she's would be more interesting. Yeah. Yeah. That's probably true. I'm going to guess anyone who writes to her level in politics has a little bit of sociopath in them. Right. But I feel like any career politician. Yeah. You got to have a little bit. I just yeah. I wouldn't be shocked if she had

like some small German children tied up in her basement that she just like stuck pins in every once in a while. Pizza gate on us here Jack. Jesus. Saying like I probably not in her basement but maybe like a secret bunker that she walks to in the woods. But yeah. I don't know. Yeah. I don't want to say that. But I can see where I can see where her like dislike for Hillary Clinton. Assange. Yeah. Yeah. Where that can come from. I mean he also hated Obama. Right. He sure did. And but the fact that he's like yeah but we want GOP doesn't really make sense because they seem to violate everything that he. And he was very wrong about their worst excesses being reigned in. Yes. Part of what I find interesting there is like yeah that's not

how that worked out. Yeah. You think he convinced himself of that or was just lying to convince others of that. I think he might have. It's hard to say with Julian Assange. Right. We do know from the document that WikiLeaks and Goose for 2.0 cooperated consistently and effectively to derail the Clinton campaign. They were in constant conversation. WikiLeaks sent them a message on July 6th 2016 through Twitter saying if you have anything Hillary related we would want it in the next twio which is he misspelled to days prefab preferably because the DNC is approaching and she will solidify Bernie supporters behind her after Goose for 2.0 responded OK I see WikiLeaks explained we think Trump has only a 25 percent chance of winning against Hillary so conflict

between Bernie and Hillary is interesting. So again Julian Assange coordinating directly with Russian intelligence to try to drive a wedge between Bernie voters and Hillary Clinton. Hmm. Yeah. Now the Seth Rich stuff is by far the most disgusting thing in here and yet another reason that I am very angry at Julian Assange. The report makes it incredibly clear that after Seth Rich had died when he was receiving documents on the DNC leaks he was lying in public press announcements and essentially saying it might have been Seth Rich. So again this is and again he's getting all of his information after Seth Rich is already dead so he knows it can't be Seth Rich. So on August 9th 2016 the WikiLeaks Twitter account posted announced WikiLeaks has decided

to issue a US $20,000 award for information leading to conviction for the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich. On August 25th Assange was asked in an interview why are you so interested in Seth Rich's killer. He responded we're very interested in anything that might be a threat to alleged WikiLeaks sources. The interview responded to Assange by saying I know you don't want to reveal your source but it certainly sounds like you're suggesting a man who leaked information to Wiki Leaks was then murdered. Assange replied if there's someone who's potentially connected to our publication and that person has been murdered in suspicious circumstances. It doesn't necessarily mean the two are connected but it's a very serious matter. That type of allegation is very

serious and it's taken seriously by us. So just to give everybody context this is referring to right-wing conspiracy theory that this DNC staffer who was murdered in DC during the election they started the conspiracy theory that he was the one who Wiki leaked the documents. Yeah he was the DNC leaker and was murdered by Hillary Clinton. And Assange stoked that conspiracy theory which is number one and fathomably cruel to Seth Rich's family and a point at which he knew it was not Seth Rich. Because he was communicating with these people and getting these documents well after Seth Rich was dead. Very obvious to him where this had all come from. We know that for a point of fact he was lying and stoking a bullshit about the murder of

Seth Rich in order to hurt Hillary Clinton. That seems to have been the primary goal of it. He had to fan the flames even more. Yeah which is the most in a document full of despicable things might be the most despicable thing in the entire Mueller report. Yeah especially like with Gratz Julian what his family's gone through and just becoming this like busy like just taking this person's murder for this political narrative and almost unspeakably evil. Yeah with regards to the Trump campaign's conspiring with coordination with WikiLeaks. So one of the details that we talked about on the Daily Zeitgeist last week or a few days ago was that if the Trump campaign had been coordinating with WikiLeaks and WikiLeaks like or if they have been doing what they did

with WikiLeaks to Guccifer like if they weren't that one step removed then it would have been a criminal conspiracy. Like do you think they were working with WikiLeaks knowing that WikiLeaks was one step removed and that protected them politically and that's why they were going through WikiLeaks as opposed to just going directly to the source. I don't think that they knew I don't think they ever I don't even know if they ever thought about it they just knew that WikiLeaks had this stuff like in you know in defense of the Trump campaign it's entirely possible they just thought WikiLeaks had damning information that they had gotten from one of their usual sources and no idea. Now later on especially in the the after election period it becomes very

clear that it was the Russians and Trump continues to deny that it was the Russians even as his advisors are being like it was definitely the Russians. But they were like it they didn't necessarily like the Trump campaign didn't necessarily know that WikiLeaks was getting all their stuff from the Russian government. WikiLeaks almost certainly knew what was going on. Julian Assange is not a dumb dumb dummy. And just since you bring it up and maybe we'll get to this later but the Trump continuing to deny that it was the hack was Russia does that fall within the scope of Mueller's report? Yeah I mean it's in there. It's in there. He continued to deny like even after it became very clear that there was Russian involvement yeah that that's included

in a couple different points. Yeah from what Hope Hicks told him it was because he just could not stand the idea of people trying to delegitimize the election. His election got it. Because you know because everything about him is fake. Right. So his wealth he can't show you his tax returns because he's not actually wealthy and he doesn't want to get into it because then that will expose him. If he even acknowledged I don't think out of self-preservation he might not even being able to acknowledge that's what it is because it's like I didn't know. Of course I didn't get help from the Russians. I did it myself. Oh I found the quote that I had from after Trump made his open call for the Russian government to hack Hillary Clinton's email. We said Russia you know

please get us her emails. This is what the Mueller report says word for word. Within approximately five hours of Trump's statement GRU officers targeted for the first time Clinton's personal office after candidate Trump's remarks unit 26165 which is the unit of the GRU that was doing this created and sent malicious links targeting 15 email accounts at the domain including an email account belonging to Clinton to Clinton aid. The investigation did not find evidence of earlier GRU attempts to compromise accounts hosted on this domain. Holy shit. Yeah. The Mueller report is incredibly direct about that. Right. Yeah. So that's why it's total bullshit. Yeah. Which is so funny. Yeah. We went from total exoneration to total bullshit. Yeah. Now the contacts with

campaign Trump campaign about WikiLeaks section of the Mueller report is heavily redacted. There's a section in there that's literally in debriefing with office former deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates said that a whole paragraph of redacted from harm to ongoing matter and then Gates recalled candidate Trump being generally frustrated that Clinton emails had not been found. Paul Manafort who would later become campaign chairman an entire paragraph of things is redacted. So. Right. Yeah. There's again they made the Trump campaign very well may have known who was behind the DNC leaks and stuff. There's a lot that's redacted there like who knows what's going on there. Right. I mean with regards to Trump saying he doesn't

know that it's Russia like he's acknowledging that he got help from somebody. Yeah. He doesn't want it to be Russia for some reason. Yeah. And he denied that and he definitely had contact with the people like and colluded with the people who had the Russian hacked documents but it wasn't directly with the Russian government. Yeah. The footnotes about Manafort and the in the footnotes in the in the Mueller report are pretty pretty great. Oh yeah. This version of it appears like versions of this paragraph appear multiple times. Manafort entered into the plea agreement with our office. We determined that he breached the agreement by being untruthful in proffer sessions and before the grand jury. We have generally recounted his version of events in

this report only when his statements are sufficiently corroborated to be trustworthy to identify issues on which Manafort's untruthful responses may themselves be of evidentiary value or to provide Manafort's explanations for certain events even when we were unable to determine whether that explanation was credible. So basically Manafort lied so much that we couldn't include a lot of what he said because like he there's just nothing you can take out of what he. Yeah. He's a pro. He's a pro. You know. He's a great liar. That's amazing when you're so full of shit. Yeah. Someone who's even trying to investigate it. I honestly don't even know. Right. This motherfucker said so much bullshit. The former head of the FBI is like

he's so full of shit. I'm almost impressed that he's still breathing. He did a Yoda voice for an entire session and completely fucked with me. Asshole. You get it. You really get the feeling that Bob Mueller might hate Paul Manafort as much as I do. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah. It's pretty great. Now, much of the stuff that Trump said to Cohen about WikiLeaks is redacted due to ongoing investigations, which is, you know, due to the stuff that Manafort said. Cohen and Trump both seems to have talked at length about their communications with Trump about WikiLeaks, but that shit is all black barred. So here's another heavily redacted paragraph. According to Gates, by the late summer of 2016, the Trump campaign was planning a press strategy, a communications

campaign, and messaging based on the possible release of Clinton emails by WikiLeaks. Three or so sentences of redacted stuff and then in the middle of a sentence. While Trump and Gates were driving to LaGuardia Airport, fully redacted sentence, comma, shortly after the call candidate Trump told Gates that more releases of damaging information would be coming. So again, might be some direct shit. This might be some of that evidence he was said that they had of direct cooperation or it might be like, I don't know. Or yeah, it went through too many channels to get there. It's like, well, he was this person. Too much was deleted, you know. Yeah. But it's not what Michael Cohen, didn't he say? He's like, I'll come to the Hill and I'll tell you everything

that I can tell you that was probably redacted in there. Yeah. Yeah. Mr. Messy. Mr. Messy. Well, I mean, look, maybe he can get a couple years knocked off his sentence. Yeah. Maybe, maybe he can. And maybe his daughter will show up to court with three crutches. There's stuff about the Trump Tower in Moscow. Most of it's not super interesting. It seems like it was pretty haphazardly pursued, although it is interesting how directly the Russians wanted to tie the Trump Tower deal to the election. That part is interesting. Like making the carrot. What's that? That's the carrot on the stick, you mean? Yeah, they seem to have tried to. On November 3rd, 2015, the day after the Trump Organization

transmitted the letter of intent, Felix Seder emailed Cohen, suggesting that the Trump Moscow project could be used to increase candidate Trump's chances at being elected. Writing, buddy, our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin's team to buy in on this. I will manage the process. Michael, Putin gets on stage with Donald for a ribbon cutting for Trump Moscow and Donald owns the Republican nomination and possibly beats Hillary and our boy is in. We will manage this process better than anyone. You and I will get Donald and Vladimir on a stage together very shortly. That the game changer. Later that day, Seder followed up. Donald doesn't stare down. He negotiates and understands the economic issues

and Putin only wanted to deal with a pragmatic leader. A successful businessman is a good candidate for someone who knows how to negotiate. Business, politics, whatever. It is all the same for someone who knows how to deal. So that's really direct offers from Felix Seder. But Cohen does not appear to have said, yes, let's crime in those explicit words. But again, there's like a bunch of offers directly from people connected to Putin to help with the campaign. We can engineer this. Yeah, we can engineer this. Yeah, because I mean, if you invite it, if you make it clear that you don't know that this is wrong, they're just going to keep making offers, keep going. It's just going to be nonstop. It's like having termites and not taking care of it. They're going to keep

feeding on the rot until your house falls down around you and your wife gets mad at you. Yeah. And you're on the toilet, but luckily the house collapsed neatly around you. Yeah. Now in the report. I did have a shower collapse on me once. Really? What? Like the structure? Yeah, the roof of the shower fell on me while I was taking a shower. This is in like a slum I used to live in. I was about to say like knowing you, you're really like, well. It was 200 bucks a long rent, man. I used the word shower very little. It was great that we didn't have a roof in the shower for weeks, which was actually okay, because it's a shower. So when it's raining, it's not the biggest deal in the world.

So it was Bombay, 1962. Yeah, like what? How are you alive? Oh, I'm a Highlander. India just gained independence. All right. So Cohen does not recall Trump talking directly about the potential impact the tower project would have had on the election. So he apparently, he says he didn't bring that to Trump, but Cohen does recall conversations with Trump in which the candidate suggested that his campaign would be, would be, or that the tower would be an infomercial or that, sorry, Cohen recalled conversations with Trump in which Trump suggests that the political campaign would act as an infomercial for his properties, which is some evidence to the idea that Trump never expected to win. Yeah, I fully believe that. Yeah. Who knows,

but that does make me think that might have been part of it. Right. There was repeated talk of Cohen and candidate Trump visiting Russia, but the trip never panned out, possibly due in large part to the campaign. Outside of the tower deal, there were numerous attempts made by Russians to get Trump to attend or speak at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum. He turned them all down due to time constraints. Joseph Mifsud is a Maltese national and a professor at the London Academy of Diplomacy. He has connections to employees of the Internet Research Agency. Mifsud met our old buddy George Papadopoulos in the spring of 2016, after Papadopoulos had become a policy advisor to the Trump campaign. The two discussed Mifsud's European and Russian connections

and had a discussion about Russia. Mifsud offered to introduce Papadopoulos to European leaders and leaders with contact in the Russian government. And essentially, Papadopoulos went on to repeatedly try to set up a meeting between Donald Trump and the Russian government after these meetings with Mifsud. He continuously tried to do that. It seems that for the most part, he was just trying to increase his value to the campaign by brokering a meeting between the two. And there's a lot of that in here where the most direct collusion is individual members of the campaign trying to get Trump in the room with somebody so that they can increase their value to the campaign. Which is, again, the only person associated with Trump during the election

who actually was loyal to him was Michael Flynn. That is made repeatedly clear. Papadopoulos is just trying to get a job after the election. It's pretty fascinating. The most damning evidence of this is Carter Page. He worked for the Trump campaign from January to September of 2016, becoming a foreign policy adviser in March. He had worked in Russia and lived in Russia before and had direct contact with Russian intelligence officers. He continuously attempted to basically push the Russian government line on things like Ukraine in meetings with the Trump campaign and get the Trump team to adopt plans that would be like reducing sanctions and stuff the Russian government would like. Again, not direct collusion other than like you could say Carter Page was

colluding, but like not the campaign itself colluding. This is the guy that Republicans are like. They illegally looked into Carter Page and they had no right to do that. Those FISA warrants, they were unwarranted. He was overtly climbing and working on, clearly working on behalf of Russia and the fact that intelligence looked into him doesn't seem that suspicious. No, it seems like you would be not doing your job if you didn't look into Carter Page. Yeah, but that's what's so mind-blowing about conservatives. They're actually not, they're just ignoring the biggest factual thing to start with is that a foreign government tried to meddle in the way that we elect our president, regardless of what side it is. They completely blow by that to then get it lost in

the weeds of like, oh, Carter Page was really, really unfairly targeted or whatever, rather than saying, oh my God, this is terrible. What? We're not even able to operate on our own as a country to choose our leaders. That's weird. Yeah, right. Okay, so the Trump Tower meeting, the actual meeting itself does seem to have really been a nothing burger. Like the Russians, there was absolutely corrupt intent in the planning of it. Donald Trump wanted to get information on the campaign directly from the Russian government, but none of that was really communicated during the meeting. It was really just an attempt to get them to talk about the Magnitsky Act. Right. And there's a lot of evidence that corroborates that they kind of got tricked into the meeting. Kushner, we actually

know that Kushner sent a message to Manafort during the meeting, calling it a waste of time, and then messaged two of his assistants to try to get them to call in so he had an excuse to leave. Oh, I love that. Power move. Yeah, power move. But again, Donald Trump Jr. might get in criminal trouble for this. This might be one of the things. There are 14 ongoing investigations as a result of the Mueller report. We only know what two of them are. Oh, really? And a lot of the stuff is redacted around the meeting that might be like some of it might be because Donald Trump Jr. is being looked at for it. There's other stuff in the report that makes it seem like Mueller is saying he doesn't think that it's like Donald Trump Jr. was committing a crime, but can't be charged for

it because he didn't really know what he was doing and there was no corrupt intent. Innocent by way of stupidity. By way of stupidity. By just sheer incompetence. Right. Which doesn't sound like my Donald Trump Jr. No. Who's father calls him too dumb to live. And he is. When you see the pictures of him when he's when he's out in the woods hunting. Yeah. I just wished he never left the woods. Right. Yeah. You're like, there goes a dumb guy. And then you read about his actions and you're like, wow. Oh, wow, it's even worse. Like, how did he just not spontaneously catch fire for no reason? How does he not forget to keep breathing? So wait, the 12 investigations. 14. Right, 14. Two that we know about 12 that we don't. Yeah. Quick maths for you. Like who are who

is looking into those investigations? Who's in charge of that? We don't know specifically. Essentially, what the Mueller report says is that while they were doing their investigation, because they were not making prosecutorial judgments here. So this was not about them saying like this document was not about them saying like we found crimes here. But when they found evidence of crimes that were outside of the scope of the investigation or that like they weren't pursuing for whatever, they would refer it to other law enforcement agencies. Right. And that happened 14 times. Okay. So the Mueller investigation is over, but 14 criminal investigations are ongoing elsewhere in the government as a result of

things uncovered in the Mueller investigation. We only know about two of them. Again, that would seem to be a big headline from this report that it kicked off 14 criminal investigations. But you know what, better or not, that way the right doesn't have time to try and figure out how to smear that. And they're like, I think we're fine because William Barr said so. It's honestly like some of this is kind of the opposite of a Nixon where like Nixon is this guy who's orchestrating a vast web of crimes and then a cover up. And Trump may not have committed crimes during the election, but everyone around him did. And then he committed to crimes covering it up. That kind of seems like a lot of what happened here is like everyone

around him was a gross criminal and he was a dumb guy. And then even though he wasn't at risk initially, because like he wasn't initially under any investigation at all. And the only reason he personally became under investigation is because of the obstruction of justice, which is great presidenting. Yeah. Isn't it funny? Like what if because it was around Michael Flynn, you know? And if that was the one guy who had his back, like to think like in this romantic sense, Trump had Flynn's back and then cost us all this other shit to go down. There's a little kernel of sweetness there. Because you do get the feeling that Trump kind of likes Flynn. He's a good guy. He's a good guy. I'm telling you. He's a good guy.

I mean, yeah, I catch him crying in the bathroom. The only human emotion at the center of this campaign is the love between Donald Trump and Michael Flynn. Wow. That's what I really got to think about. Romance novel cover and gone with the Flynn. Yeah. What do you call your listeners? I don't. Your little sons of bitches. Zyte gang and bastard lovers. Somebody please make that art. Yeah. The 40% that he does love. That is good dance. Yeah. Please. Someone make that romance art. Somebody make gone with the Flynn. Because I really, I mean, not that it's totally like that, but if there is a version where Trump kind of gets, there is some murky stuff, but really he just like, he's like, oh, don't do it. He finally, this is his first friend. This is the first person

he's ever done something selfless for. Yeah. Right. He just thinks of all the times Michael Flynn like sincerely laughed at his shitty jokes and remembers everyone's fake laughter. Right. We were going to go fishing in Montana. Well, and he is a general. So that does fall into the category of people Trump is capable of respecting. Yeah. I think that's the only category. That might be the only military general. No, you know what? He really, really fucking likes the attorney generals who committed crimes to protect their presidents. Oh, yeah, that's true. He did that. Big fan of, big fan of, well, I don't know about crimes, big fan of Bobby Kennedy and of Eric Holder. Yeah. Yeah. So that he, that the Malera Port repeats like four or five times that he's like,

where's my Bobby Kennedy? Yeah, exactly. That he says some variation of like, Bobby Kennedy protected his brother, like Eric Holder protected Obama, which also there's a part of it where I wonder if like, he's kind of making like a, like a brother statement too, because he's like, Kennedy hired his brother, Eric or Obama hired Eric Holder. And it's like, what are you, what are you saying? You know, the brothers, are you, are you getting it? Like, right. You should have seen it. I was in Harlem once. They're all brothers. The way he words it makes me think like, there's a little bit of like a little one the way that he calls Tim Cook, Tim Apple. So he's like, brothers, brothers. It's weird. But yeah. So it should come

as no surprise to that other than the heavily redacted Roger Stone, the most directly criminal member of the Trump campaign staff, by far was Paul Manafort. Right. Who cannot avoid committing crimes. Right. Like, I think he would shut down if he had to stop. There's a lot of, yeah, this is, this is where we get to the stuff about Constantine Klimnick, like them sharing polling data and whatnot. At a cigar bar, right? At a, you know, it doesn't say. Or that was another one. I remember Rick Gates and Manafort went met with somebody at a cigar bar. I think Paul Manafort has spent most of his waking hours in cigar bars. Yeah. Yeah. And he's the most carcinogenic thing in the cigar bar. He makes the cigars around him safe. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Like, yeah, he keeps getting

trouble in prison. They're like, are you smoking in me? Right. It's just like coming off his pores. Like, I know I just like this. Yeah. If he stops committing crimes, he would immediately catch cancer for some. He's like the bus from speed, but with. Right. With crimes. Federal law. Yeah. I have to break 60 laws a minute. Something has to be poisonous about me. It's either my actions or the way my cells are dividing. Oh, yeah. So we already got over a lot of the Paul Manafort stuff. There's a great quote in here that I want to read. The office reviewed numerous Manafort email and text communications and asked President Trump about the plan in written questions. The investigation did not uncover evidence of Manafort's passing along

information about Ukrainian peace plans to the candidate. This was the plan to give Russia control of Eastern Ukraine or anyone else in the campaign or administration. The office was, however, not able to gain access to all of Manafort's electronic communications. In some instances, messages were sent using encryption applications. And while Manafort denied that he spoke to members of the Trump campaign or the new administration about the peace plan, he lied to the office and the grand jury about the peace plan and his meetings with Kalimnik and his unreliability on this subject was among the reasons that the district judge found that he had breached his cooperation agreement. So we don't know that Paul Manafort

went to the president and said, we can work with Russia. They'll help us out if we give them Eastern Ukraine. But Moli goes out of his way to say, I can't say that that didn't happen because Paul Manafort lies about literally everything and deleted all of his communications with the campaign. Right. And this goes back to the big question that I've always had that I think is one of the strangest details is that while Russia is intervening on behalf of the Trump campaign, the Republican platform for at the 2016 RNC suddenly adjust to incorporate a very pro-Russian stance. Yeah, but that was something in the report. It changed the language from lethal aid to, I forget exactly what they used, but they like soften the language of the aid we were providing

the Ukrainian government against the Russian-backed separatists. But wasn't there something in the Mueller report that actually said that they couldn't find that strong a connection between the platform change and some kind of direct stimulation prodding from the Russians? It doesn't say that. At least from my recollections, this didn't make it into my notes, but they went into a lot of detail about how that changed and they talk about Manafort's communications with the campaign, but they don't have a smoking gun. That's definitely clear. Oh, I guess the way they summed it up was there are several prominent contacts, but we're innocuous. Yeah. Again, one of those things where a lot of stuff was deleted, we don't

know what was said there. But also, it could have just been that Paul Manafort was pushing a pro-Russian line on Ukraine, so was what's named Carter Page, so were other people in contact with the campaign, and it may have been those people repeatedly stating their opinions that caused some of the softening of the campaign, which isn't illegal. Yeah. No, I mean, it just sounds like they did a good job of having many ways to create pressure around it, to guide people in a certain direction, and they did a lot of good atmospheric pressure creating. So they're saying a lot of people provide like applied pressure and a lot of people were talking about it. They couldn't say that directly, that there was a, they could actually draw a line to that platform change and some kind of

communication with somebody, aside from the fact that many people were kind of... But innocuous is a very strong word, isn't it? Doesn't that mean like not harmful or offensive? So I guess that could just mean legally not something. Yeah, they just said, I couldn't really nail something on, like even though it looks like that on the surface, like, oh, suddenly there aren't like the platforms changing, but they just, there weren't those as strong a connection is. It points to the nature of this, whatever you want to call it, whether or not it's a conspiracy, with Nixon, which is our other political touchstone of this kind of corruption, it was very much emanating from the center, whereas the corruption here was all pushing towards Trump,

who appears to have just been kind of focused on improving his brand and shouting at people, and like, whereas the Russians would, we're reaching it to everyone around him, and a lot of those individual people did stuff that was unethical or straight up criminal as result of the Russians reaching out to them, but it was not a coordinated effort between the campaign in Russia. Interesting. So rather than one gigantic crime, it was a million kind of tiny half crimes that create one big, feeling of a crime, and wouldn't have created a crime in regards to Donald Trump, although again, it's possible that he had some criminal contact with Manafort, like, which again, the document spit, but like, the crime was specifically started in large part

when Trump was like, started obstructing the hell out of some justice, which is why he wasn't under investigation until that point. Right. Because of his love for microphone. Because of his deep and honestly, they're so rough. They're bros to hear that, like, especially when everyone else is such a snake, yeah, that somehow microphone. The one person capable of loyalty. And so shit out of luck to all of us too, like, right, he's fucked. Yeah, he's got no money. Yeah. His like, his son is like, come on, man. Yeah, fucking dad. Like even Donald Trump's like, he's a good man, you know, just really hate to see this happen. One of the great love stories of our time. You do hate Flynn less than everyone else involved in this. And I say that as someone

who deeply dislikes Michael Flynn. Right, right. That's what's so odd about it all too. There's at least a kernel of like redeeming human loyalty in Michael Flynn. Right. He was so direct talking to Russians too. He's like, I'll do it. I'll do it. I'll do the work I gotta do. Yeah. But he was also trying to get rich too. So, can't feel my bit. So he, he also was let off fairly easy for somebody who was like directly undermining. Yeah. Like he's not going to get anything close to the worst penalty that comes out of this. That'll hopefully be Manafort and ought to be Manafort. Right. Yeah. And like the thing is, like Flynn wasn't involved long enough to get at that point. Yeah. Too much climbing done. Because there's mostly all of his interactions

with the ambassadors and like being a Turkish agent and those other things that he's mostly in trouble for. Yeah. And being just a good solid bro. Good solid bro. You know. So it's speaking of people who are caught committing crimes that are evidenced of in the Mueller report. Let's talk about Eric Prince. Hey, my favorite. So Eric Prince testified to Congress that he met with Carol Dimitri of only once during his trip to the Seychelles where they talked about stuff. Yeah. They wanted to do. So he testified that they only met once. The Mueller report reveals that they met on two separate occasions, including one in which he attempted to get the Russian government to change the course of an aircraft carrier and send it away from Libya

so that they wouldn't interfere with things that were going on in Libya, which is again evidence that Paul or that Eric Prince lied to Congress about the extent of his conversations with Carol Dimitri of, which I think is pretty cool. Also that Steve Bannon seems to have been the guy orchestrating the whole meeting and that Bannon seems to have been giving Eric Prince his marching orders. However, Prince deleted all of his text messages. And so we don't know the exact extent of what Bannon was ordering him to do or what they were asking to talk about. So again, probably something shady with Bannon there. Although one part of it is that Bannon was just trying to get Prince something to do and didn't really care about what went on there, which is like, yeah,

you go meet in the Seychelles with this guy. Eric loves just getting on both planes and stuff. Having these James Bond meetings and stuff. Seychelles, that sounds like a James Bond place. Get him out there. Did you see that Mehdi Hassan interview? Oh God. Yeah, that was great. He's so cringy when he's like, so what were you doing in the Seychelles? He's like, ah, just meeting. Meeting? Anyway, he lied to Congress. So that's what you said. That's what you say. That's what you said. But I don't know what it says. He's like, no, I'm reading the court transcript. According to you. No, that's what you said. That's what you said. That's the transcript. Mm-hmm. In what language? All right, never mind. So the report also reveals that Rick Gerson,

a hedge fund manager and friend of Jared Kushner also worked with Carol Dmitriev to put together a plan for better relations between Russia and the US. One of the results of this was the meeting after Trump became president between him and Vladimir Putin. They put together a list of like things to talk about during the meeting that apparently seems to have been used as like the the minutes for that meeting. Most of it's pretty banal stuff, like we're improving relations and like cooperation to fight terrorism and all that sort of stuff, yada, yada, yada. Gerson's interest seems to have disappeared after the financial deal he was working with Dmitriev fell apart, which again goes into the general pattern you see around, like with the people who are around

Trump, which is that everyone in Russia had a very specific set of goals with like in terms of lifting sanctions and in terms of Ukraine that were trying to get people around Trump to push, whereas everyone on the Trump side of things was working on their own personal goals. Like Gerson didn't give a shit about what was discussed in the meeting. He wanted to set the meeting up because it would get him in good with Dmitriev so that they could make like a financial transaction essentially. So everyone on the Trump side of things had their own very like niche personal interests at heart and Russia was pushing a couple of very specific lines. We want sanctions lifted, we want control of Eastern Ukraine. We don't want Hillary Clinton to be president. Russia was very

focused the whole time. Everyone around Trump, except for Michael Flynn, was focused on like their own personal careers. That's how Russia uses people is they find out what your motivation is, what your fears are, and then find ways to make you do what they want. And if you have enough people who are just so self-serving, it's like chumming the waters and there's a hundred sharks tethered to Trump. So naturally that's going to pull all these fucking creatures in one direction. A hundred sharks and one dolphin named Michael Flynn. Just gets eaten alive. He really does. Also one of Kushner's Russian contacts gave him a bag of dirt. I thought that was funny. Like a literal bag of dirt. Like a literal sack of dirt from the

town in Belarus where his family came from. Oh, that's pretty fun. He was like, here's dirt on Clinton. Do you have any emails that Joe just made? I should have brought the emails. I also like this. If the sack of dirt, the guy who just said total scum lord, he's like, do you just put fucking anything? It's like, yeah, it is from your town, man. Yeah, this is from where your family comes from. I want their bif on foot. It's like, is there an old Fanta bottle cap in there? No. So the explanation in the Mueller report for why the June 9th Trump Tower meeting probably wasn't a crime is really interesting to me. Quote, there are reasonable arguments that the offered information would constitute a thing of

value within the meaning of these provisions, which is the provision that determines whether or not the law was broken and setting up this meeting. But the office determined that the government would not be likely to obtain and sustain a conviction for two other reasons. First, the office did not obtain admissible evidence likely to meet the government's burden to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that these individuals acted willfully, i.e., with general knowledge of the illegality of their conduct. And second, the government would likely encounter difficulty in proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the value of the promised information exceeded the threshold of a criminal violation. How do you monetarily attach your value to

Hillary damaging information on Hillary Clinton? That's why we don't know if Donald Trump Jr. and Kushner committed a crime in organizing that meeting. I would say just if someone told me, you know, I have a hard drive full of hacked Hillary Clinton emails, I would imagine that the price tag just to start off, you'd be like 10 grand. 10 grand? At the low end. At the low end. I mean, I know people who do dirt for less, but like I think, all right, well, I guess realistically, I wonder if there is a way you could, it's too abstract to try to assign value to it. And also, you don't, so you're going blind, you don't know what's on the emails, what's in the emails?

Hey, look, bro, I got these emails, man, you want them or not? 10 grand? Yeah, because it could just all be Hillary Clinton talking about her charity efforts. Print this for me. Yeah, yeah. That's what a lot of her emails were. That is what a lot of her emails were. Print this, print this, print this. I don't like to read on my computer screen. Yeah, she's an old lady who doesn't like computers. So the Mueller report states after that paragraph I just read, the special counsel's office decided not to charge Donald Trump Jr. or other campaign officials for the meeting, but then the next three pages are redacted due to an ongoing

investigation, which again, seems to suggest that someone else might charge Trump Jr. for what he was doing in that meeting at some other point because the investigation is still ongoing. The two of like of the 14 allegations of potential crimes that the Mueller investigation headed off handed off to other departments. The only two we know of are Michael Cohen and Greg Craig, who is a former Obama counsel like White House counsel to President Obama, but Craig was not charged for his work during the Obama administration. He was charged for acting as an unregistered agent of the Ukrainian government in the past before he came to work for Obama. So those are the two of the 14 that we know what they are. And this is the end of part one,

because part two of the Mueller report is what comes up next. And so now we're going to talk about destruction. Obstruction. Prove it. But Sophie says it's time for an ad break. Oh my god. So first off, Sophie. Yeah. Oh, whoa. I threw the bagels again. Robert just threw Sophie across the room and into the wall. Holy shit. Stop calling her a bag of bagels. Yeah, that's pretty, pretty hard, pretty harsh. Yeah, man, you're gonna, you're moving product in this episode. I'll tell you what. I am moving product as well as tossing bagels. Buy things. Yep. Here we go, guys. We're gonna take a quick break and we'll be right back. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what?

They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the good badass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast,

or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991. And that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen

to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize

that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We're back. Jack is just trying to take over this podcast. Yeah, where can people find you? Yeah, we're on that later. But first, Robert, what's something from your search history? Good question. What is obstruction of justice? One of the many things Donald Trump and I actually have in common. We have a surprising number of things in common. He and I had the same literary agent at one point. Bird was Trump's literary agent. Yeah, he's thanked in one of his books. Bird and Waxman, the other guy was working with. Well, no, it's just what happens. You work with whoever. He wasn't president yet. You have

to say that. And then Woody Guthrie wrote songs about our relatives. Really? Yeah, he wrote a song about, Woody Guthrie wrote a song about how Donald Trump's dad refused to let black people stay in his buildings. And Woody Guthrie wrote a song about my relative, pretty boy Floyd, for beating a cop to death with a log chain for cursing at his wife. Wow. Yeah. That's pretty cool, man. Pretty boy grabbed a log chain and the deputy grabbed his gun. And in the fight that followed, he laid that deputy down. Wow. So it's a neat song. Doesn't rhyme. Sort of a cross rhyme, but yeah. Hey, look, when you're talking about a guy who beats somebody with a chain, they're rhyming. I like your uncle's story better. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Shouldn't be cursing in front

of pretty boy Floyd's wife. I've always said that. You have. Now, the second part of the Mueller report opens by noting that it is specifically not ruling on whether or not there was obstruction of justice because to do so, among other things, undermine the president's ability to be president. And also in general, because the special counsel can't make rulings on such things, because it would be like a separation of powers thing. One thing I've seen people say is that this is essentially Mueller's argument as to why Congress should impeach. And that's a pretty fair summation of things because Mueller is essentially saying, I can't declare the president guilty of a crime. And there's a number of reasons that are more complicated that I'm just not competent to get

into. But it's not my job. It's not the special counsel's job. It's not the FBI's job. Congress needs to make a decision. And here is my case for why there's a lot of evidence of obstruction of justice. And I do think that is the fairest way to sum up part two. As Mueller saying, here's a bunch of evidence the president obstructed justice. Congress, do your job. Yeah. It's like, I'm handcuffed. So just so you know, but here's this whole instruction manual. Yeah. Yeah. I've seen some articles from more right-wing publications where they're like, Mueller dropped the ball by not saying that Trump didn't obstruct justice. He should have like made a decision one way or the other. He writes about 200 pages of that are basically like, I can't say that he committed

obstruction of justice. But if I could say that, I would. But here's a description of him obstructing justice. Here's 40 pages about how he obstructed justice. Huh? Yeah. All right. It's weird. He won't say murder, but he said, beat a guy to death with a chain. Beat a guy to death with a chain. So, all right. Well, yeah, maybe it's not a murder. I'm going to quote from the Mueller report here. First, a traditional prosecution or delineation decision entails a binary determination to initiate or decline a prosecution, but we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment. The office of legal counsel has issued an opinion finding that the indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting president would impermissibly undermine the

capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions in violation of the constitutional separation of powers. So again, that's Mueller's explanation for why he's not going to say whether or not a crime was committed. But he does go out of his way to say that the president can still be charged with a crime after leaving office and indicted after leaving office. And then he notes this, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Which is the second time in the report that he says, accordingly, well, this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime. It also does not exonerate him. That's repeated

word for word on total exonerations. Yeah. Three different times says this does not exonerate the president. So that's cool. It's like he's trying to tell us something. The evidence we obtained about the president's actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred. The evidence we found of crimes makes it difficult to say that there were no crimes. Yeah. Now, cool. Cool stuff. So, yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, Congress can look into it. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's what's so also frustrating about just how conservative media chooses to just ignore these things. Just for like, just, I think all they can do is point to the fact that Donald Trump isn't in jail. Yeah. And saying like,

well, if he did something wrong, he'd be in jail. Right. So, yeah. Even though there's all this stuff like, no, but you're also ignoring the fact that I'd imagine if Robert Mueller was brought up to the Hill and asked like, if this were a private citizen, does this look like regular, straight up crime to you? Probably like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yes, it's crime. Yeah. The Mueller investigation makes a lot, says a lot about the anger President Trump felt when Jeff Sessions recused himself, talks repeatedly about his multiple, multiple constant attempts to get Jeff Sessions to unrecuse himself. A word I don't know if existed. Unrecuse? It's always in quotation marks. And I'm not, I think he might have coined that term, which it's a word now.

Well, why can't the, why can't my dog undie daddy? Yeah. He's never had a dog. Yeah, I know, but I'm just trying to... He'd be a better man if he had. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now, the President immediately made all of his problems worse by trying to coerce people into saying he wasn't in trouble. I'm going to read this next paragraph, which is about sort of him trying to get Comey to, to go after, or to stop going after Michael Flynn, because there's some, there's some beautiful shade in there. In the following days, the President reached out to the Director of National Intelligence and the leaders of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency to ask them what they could do to publicly dispel the suggestion that the President had

any connection to the Russian election effort, or a Russian election interference effort. The President also twice called Comey directly, notwithstanding guidance from McGahn, his lawyer, to avoid direct contacts with the Department of Justice. It goes out of its way to be like, the President's lawyer said, don't do this, and the President did this. Right. Yeah. There's a lot of fascinating information in here about how Trump manages a team during a crisis. And honestly, this chunk of the report is worth everyone reading in full. I am going to read another quote about a meeting he had with Lewandowski. The President asked about the status of his message for sessions to limit the special counsel investigation to future election interference. Lewandowski told...

What? Yeah. He wanted to limit the Mueller investigation to future Russian interference. Future crime. Yeah, exactly. Wait. I just saw this movie with Van Damme, Time Cop. Yeah. Why can't he Time Cop it to the next election? Yeah. But that doesn't make... I don't think... Was that known that he was trying to get it to be about future? I think this might be one of the new things that we learned in the investigation. What does that even mean? I guess more of an assessment. That he wanted to only investigate if they can do it in the future. Don't talk about what they did in 2016. Just talk about what they might do in 2020. And then ignore that. What a very specific

request to make. For someone who committed no crimes. Yeah. That's one of the things that makes me think he did commit direct crimes. I'm kind of on the fence about whether or not his behavior in 2016, prior to the obstruction of justice, was like direct cooperation because it's kind of hard to say. Right. In the legal sense. Or maybe they don't realize that this is something that was happening way before. Yeah. Like you could have been like, yo, I'm like, about five years, we might want to look at making you president. Yeah. It's entirely possible. I just don't... I just don't know. But it seems like... None of us do, Robert. None of us do. It seems like it. We just don't know. Yeah. So, yeah. This is great. Further attempts to have the

attorney general take control of the investigation. In early summer of 2017, the president called sessions at home to again ask him to reverse his recusal from the Russia investigation. Sessions did not reverse his recusal. In October, 2017, the president met privately with sessions in the Oval Office and asked him to take a look at investigating Clinton. In December, 2017, shortly after Flynn pleaded guilty pursuant to a cooperation agreement, the president met with sessions in the Oval Office and suggested, according to notes taken by a senior advisor, that if sessions unrecused and took back supervision of the Russia investigation, he would be a, quote, hero. The president told sessions, I'm not going to do anything or direct you to do anything,

I just want to be treated fairly. In response, sessions volunteered that he had never seen anything improper on the campaign and told the president there was a whole new leadership team in place. He did not unrecused. So, it's like four times just there. The special counsel notes that it did not make a traditional prosecutorial judgment again about the president's behavior, but states that the evidence they found supports a few general statements about him, most of which boil down to, he may have obstructed justice, but it's hard to say, since the evidence suggests he didn't commit the underlying crime, but actively did act to damage the investigation. So, yeah, that's repeatedly stated. The president ultimately refused to be interviewed

as the result of investigation, but provided some written answers. Mulder gives an explanation as to why he did not choose to subpoena the president to force the investigation. Ultimately, while we believe that we had the authority and legal justification to issue a grand jury subpoena to obtain the president's testimony, we chose not to do so. We made that decision in view of the substantial delay that such an investigative step would likely produce at a late stage in our investigation. We also assessed that based on the significant body of evidence we had already obtained on the president's actions and his public and private statements, describing or explaining those actions, we had sufficient evidence to understand relevant events and to make assessments without

the president's testimony. There's a lot of really heavily redacted paragraphs in this part, the most interesting of which is this one. Within the Trump campaign, this is about the DNC hacks. Aids reacted with enthusiasm to reports of the hacks. Sentence redacted. Discussed with campaign officials that WikiLeaks would release the hacked material. Some witnesses said that Trump himself discussed the possibility of upcoming releases. Michael Cohen then executive vice president of the Trump Organization and Special Counsel to Trump recalled hearing two or three sentences redacted. Cohen recalled that Trump responded, oh good, all right, and sentence redacted. Manafort said that shortly after WikiLeaks,

July 22nd, 2016 release of hacked documents, he spoke to Trump, sentence redacted. Manafort, and these are all redacted due to an ongoing case. Manafort recalled that Trump responded that Manafort should sentence redacted, keep Trump updated. Deputy campaign manager Rick Gates said that Manafort was getting pressure from a couple of words redacted, information on that Manafort instructed Gates, a couple of word redacted status updates on upcoming releases. Around the same time, Gates was with Trump on a trip to an airport, sentence redacted. Shortly after the call ended, Trump told Gates that more releases of damaging information will be coming. Sentence redacted were discussed within the campaign, and the summer of 2016,

the campaign was planning a communication strategy based on the possible release of Clinton emails by WikiLeaks. That sounds like cooperation. So much crime happening, just the number of redactions. Yeah, that's some sketchy shit. That's the sketchiest paragraph in the whole thing, at least to my eyes. We should make a mad libs of the Mueller report. We should make a mad libs of the Mueller report. I'm just going to use the word butt. Yeah, butt, fart, mostly fart. Gates was with Trump on a trip to the airport, fart, fart, fart, fart, fart, fart, fart, fart, and shortly after the call ended, Trump told Gates that more releases of damaging information would be coming.

Fart, fart, fart, fart were discussed. Yeah, that works. No, just make a sentence. So it's the most damning because he speaks knowledgeably about what WikiLeaks is about to do, basically. Yeah, he knows. He's like, oh good, just like we talked about. Yeah, just like we talked about, oh good, this thing that I know is happening. Oh good, so Paul came through on that. Yeah, good man, a fort. So my favorite story, and maybe the whole Mueller report, is the tale of Donald Trump's lunch with Chris Christie after firing Flynn. Now, this is on February 14th, 2017, the day after Flynn resigned. So Trump had lunch at the White House with just Chris Christie, quote,

according to Christie, at one point during the lunch, the president said, now that we fired Flynn, the Russia thing is over. Christie laughed and responded, no way. He said, this Russia thing is far from over, and we'll be here on Valentine's Day, 2018, talking about this. The president said, what do you mean? Flynn met with the Russians. That was the problem. I fired Flynn. It's over. Christie recalled responding that based on his experience, both as a prosecutor and as someone who had been investigated, firing Flynn would not end the investigation. Christie said there was no way to make the investigation shorter, but a lot of ways to make it longer. The president asked Christie what he meant,

and Christie told the president not to talk about the investigation, even if he was frustrated with it at times. Christie told the president that he would never be able to get rid of Flynn, like gum on the bottom of your shoe. Towards the end of the lunch, the president brought up Comey and asked if Christie was still friendly with him. Christie said he was. The president told Christie to call Comey and tell him that the president really likes him. Tell him he's part of the team. At the end of the lunch, the president repeated his request that Christie reach out to Comey. Christie had no intention of complying with the president's request that he contact Comey. He thought that the president's request was nonsensical, and Christie did not want to put

Comey in the position of having to receive such a phone call. This is one of like five times the president tells someone to talk to Comey or someone else to try to get them to do something, and that person just doesn't do it. But it's like, yeah, okay. And just like, again. Like with McGann, when he's like, firemuller, and he's like, I'm packing my shit. Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm gone. Right. Yeah, this is nuts. Like, oh, really? Uh, previous. I'm not doing this crazy shit. I just love that, like Christie specifically tells, tells Mueller, I've been investigated for crime. So I know what to do. And it's nothing. Also, I just love that his also Trump is so confused because he's used to this corporate thing. He's like, what? Michael was stealing? Fire him.

Okay, good. That's, that's dealt with. All done. Yeah. Like, and now it's like, oh, it's not over. What do you mean? Christie's advice is good. Like, you can't, you can't shorten the investigation, but you can make it longer by committing crimes. So don't do that. Right. And then again, who knows without it would have been like, if, you know, if Jared Kushner wasn't in the way of Chris Christie actually joining the White House. It definitely seems like Trump would have handled all of this better if Christie had been closer to it. Or, you know, when you also think about it, he doesn't listen to anyone. So it could have been, it could have been a holographic ghost of his father. Yeah. Christie and McGann might have taken the same lift away from the White House.

Right. You know. So the report heavily corroborates Comey's claims that Trump cleared out the room to speak to just him about letting Flynn go. A decision that could definitely be seen as a serious attempt to influence the investigation. He talks to other people besides Comey that also lists Comey's notes and stuff. It definitely seems like based on everything the, the Mueller investigation dug up Comey's recitation of events while he was head of the FBI is very credible. The Mueller investigation seems to be concluding that like what Trump did was obstruction in this specific instance. Although again, it doesn't call it that because it's not going to make a prosecutorial judgment. Well, the president said he hoped

Comey could let Flynn go rather than affirmatively directing him to do so. The circumstances of the conversation show that the president was asking Comey to close the FBI's investigation into Flynn. And so it began. Pretty clear. Yeah. Trump repeatedly whined about the investigation during intelligence briefings. That comes up that like he'd be talking about like ISIS and something and he'd start whining about the investigation. And the briefers didn't know what to do about it. Like they were like, I'm not going to comment on it. I don't really. Okay. Right. Yeah. You have like someone from like the CIA or something like, what about this Russia bullshit, huh? Yeah. He did repeatedly complain that the Mueller investigation was making his

job as president impossible, but it seems like everyone he worked with besides him was trying to move on and just do their jobs. And he was the one that couldn't get over it, which I find interesting. If he had been able to, most of the bad behavior in this section would not have occurred. Yeah. And at least two occasions, the president began the presidential daily briefings by stating that there was no collusion with Russia and he hoped to press statement to that effect could be issued. Pompeo, head of the CIA, recalled that the president vented about the investigation on multiple occasions, complaining that there was no evidence against him and that nobody would publicly defend him. Yeah. That's, it's, it's pretty wild.

Michael Flynn would have defended me. Yeah. He sure would have, buddy. He sure would have. Trump repeatedly badgered Comey and other department of justice officials to announce that he was not under investigation. They tried to explain to him why this was a bad idea, but he did not listen to them. Trump basically used firing Comey as an excuse to note that on three occasions, the FBI director told him that the president was not under investigations. Like, it seems like his primary reason in firing Comey is that Comey wouldn't state publicly that he had told the president that he wasn't under investigation. Right. And Trump used the firing memo as an excuse to say that. Yeah. It's, it's, it's pretty, pretty wild. The Mueller report

definitely seems to be concluding that the firing of James Comey may have also been an example of obstruction of justice. So that's pretty cool. What version, sorry. What version of the report are you looking at? Do you, do you fucking think we'll believe? No. What version, because we'd know for a fact, Trump is not reading the report. No, good God, no. No, it's a thing. He's probably not reading an entire article about the report. Yeah. There's a chance he might be, might have listened to Barr's entire summary, but like, what, what do you think he knows? Because it does seem like across the days after the day after the report, he started calling some of the details bullshit. Like, I just wonder, we've never had a president who can't or won't

read before. What, how, how is the information coming to him? Like, how is he digesting this? Is it just Fox's? It seems like he mostly gets it from Fox News. Right. That's been true in the past, but this is like such a specific document. And it's so dense that like, I just, I'm curious, like, I mean, I'm sure there'll be another book where someone talks about how they had to like dumb it, like Cliff's notes it, or just highlight. Yeah. I just highlight the good parts. This doesn't talk about how Trump gets his information, but it does talk about how relentlessly when he's interested in something, like he was incapable of not asking everyone around him to try to get Comey to drop the Flynn thing when that was his focus. And then like, when he wanted someone to

say that he wasn't being investigated, he brought that up to every single person he talked to. Right. Because again, he's kind of incapable of listening to people, especially when there's something on his mind like this. Right. I bet there's a lot of conversations happening where he implies that he's read the Mueller report, but everybody knows he hasn't. But he's like, would you think of it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, me too. Oh, yeah, though. Yeah. Remember page 83? I remember that part. That was. Yeah. Right. I mean, total bullshit. So the fact that like the, so the report notes that the firing of James Comey was never like going to close the investigation and could not have, which is a mark in the president's defense.

It seems accurate to say that Trump's intent in firing Comey was to punish him for not openly stating that he Trump was not being investigated more than it was an attempt to disrupt the investigation. That seems to be the conclusion that the Mueller report makes. The analysis of whether or not the president obstructed justice gets really interesting after this point in the report. It notes that his talk to Comey about the loyalty pledge, if you all remember his asking Comey to be loyal, does support the fact that he was trying to put the kibosh on the investigation. But then it basically says that Mueller, yeah, I'm just going to read this quote because it's pretty remarkable. As described in volume one, the evidence uncovered in the investigation did

not establish that the president or those close to him were involved in the charge Russian computer hacking or active measure conspiracies, or that the president otherwise had an unlawful relationship with any Russian official. But the evidence does indicate that a thorough FBI investigation would uncover facts about the campaign and the president personally, that the president could have understood to be crimes or that would give rise to personal and political concerns. So he's saying that like, we didn't find any evidence of a conspiracy with Russia, but the evidence suggests that the reason the president was so worried about the investigation is because he committed a bunch of other crimes that he was worried would be revealed.

That's Comey stating that as directly as he can. Mueller stating that or that's Comey? Yeah, Mueller stating that. Sorry, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just kind of circling back on detail that we talked about earlier, just in terms of like Trump and the people around him having direct Russian ties. Somebody was pointing out, and this is a detail that I hadn't really heard. I think it was Andrew Sullivan was pointing out in the intelligence or the New York magazine thing that in the days immediately after the election,

Putin and a lot of Russian officials were scrambling to try and get access to Trump. So that's kind of the best argument I've seen for why like that, at least the idea that like there was some deep, deeply tied in conspiracy like probably isn't true, like all the. Unless it's simply through people around him. Yeah, right. That seems to be the influence they had. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, because it's hard to be like Trump fully knows the full extent of everything, knows like just enough to know how to move, but not enough to seem completely on the hook for

anything. And I think that some of that might be the Russian government giving him too much credit because knowing what we know now, if I was the Russian government and I was trying to influence him, I would just have, I would just reach out to someone on Fox News and get them to talk about the president should let Russia have Eastern Ukraine. Like that, you don't even, you don't need to talk. He doesn't listen to people who talk to him. Like I'm going to guess that's what Putin learned in their meeting is that like, oh my God, this guy can't fucking pay attention. He can't even hear me. He's just talking about Comey. Who the fuck is James Comey?

I handle that. So would you say that the investigation's not into me? Like, right? Yeah. So it talks about for a while about how he repeatedly tried to file the special counsel McGahn after McGahn refused to talk about how there were conflicts of interest between Robert Mueller and what Trump thought was a conflict of interest is that Mueller had interviewed for the head of the FBI job and not gotten it, which like everyone else was like, that's not a conflict of interest. And he was like, you got to tell people about this conflict of interest. But it wasn't even that, but it's not like it's, it was the golf course thing too. Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, where he was like, Robert Mueller tried to get into one of the golf

courses. Oh, that's not in here. Wait, is that another one of them? Maybe I missed it. Yeah. Look at, but I'm one of the other things that was he was pointing to was like, he's mad that he, uh, he tried to get into like a club and didn't or some of it was something tied to some conflict where it was like, what, you're also putting that layer on top of it. Beautiful. That, that is a very Trump story. Trump March 3rd, but we have conflicts. I have a nasty business transaction with Robert Mueller a number of years ago. I said, why isn't that mentioned? He wants the job as FBI director. I mean, these are things that are out there. They know it. Why isn't that, and I didn't give it to him. Why isn't that mentioned?

Wow. But what about the membership fees for Trump national golf course? I think that's the nasty business transaction that he's talking about. So Bob Mueller couldn't golf at a mediocre golf course. Or it was, it was a dispute over fees or so. Yes. Okay. So it wasn't, so. Okay. Robert Mueller's family was members of the Trump national golf course. He said, we actually, we're not even using this membership anymore. We'd like to cancel it. Can we get some more membership fees back? Right. And they did. Right. Okay. But that was like, pretty damning. Well, this changes everything. Yeah. Let's just throw this, you know what? I'm sorry we wasted everyone's time listening. I believe that a man was shot, who was shot in combat for his country would, would give all

that away because of golf club membership. Golf club membership fees he recouped. Yeah. Okay. And I do think that is more than anything a window into Trump's psyche because that is totally something he would do. Trump would burn this country down if someone to fuck somebody over a $30 refund. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Now you probably have run into some of some quotes from pieces of Trump's reaction when he was first told about the special counsel investigation. The best. I want to read that little bit in full because it's, it's good for the soul and we could all use that at this point. The president learned of the special counsel's appointment from Sessions who was with the president,

Hunt and McGahn during conducting interviews for a new FBI director. Sessions stepped out of the Oval Office to take a call from Rosenstein who told him about the special counsel appointment and Sessions then returned to inform the president of the news. According to notes written by Hunt, when Sessions told the president that a special counsel had been appointed, the president slumped back in his chair and said, Oh my God, this is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I'm fucked. The president became angry and lambasted the attorney general for his decision to not recuse the investigation, stating, How could you let this happen, Jeff? The president said the position of attorney general was his most important appointment and

that Sessions had let him down, contrasting him to Eric Holder and Robert Kennedy. Sessions recalled that the president said to him, You were supposed to protect me or words to that effect. The president returned to the consequences of the appointment and said, Everyone tells me that if you get one of these independent councils that ruins your presidency, it takes years and I won't be able to do anything. This is the worst thing that's ever happened to me. The president told Sessions he should resign as attorney general. Sessions agreed to resubmit his resignation and left the Oval Office. Hicks saw the president shortly after Sessions departed and described the president as being extremely upset by the special counsel's appointment.

Hicks said that she had only seen the president like that one other time when the access Hollywood tape came out during the campaign. So I'm trying to think of the person, oh no it was someone from Gateway Pundit I think, Jim Hoft, who said that that line, the reason why the president acted, responded, I'm fucked it's over is because he knew that the deep state had now initiated a coup against him and that was the reason. Cool. Yeah. Cool. It's just funny to see like the ways the journalists on the right are trying to answer or rationalize things. Oh yeah, it wasn't because he did anything wrong. It's because he knew the deep state was gonna fucking end the whole thing. Yeah. There's also just such child like little child vibes to it. Yeah. This is

the worst thing that's ever happened to me. And there's a lot about this that led to like, you just hear how much, how little trust everyone around the president has for him. So Sessions gave in his resignation papers but Trump ultimately didn't ask him to resign yet, but the president kept his resignation letter and then Reince Priebus was like, Jeff you gotta get that letter back. It's gonna be, the words he used was a shock collar on the Department of Justice's neck. Like you have to take that back. So the president tried to argue that Mueller interviewing for the, yeah. Yeah. So the president tried to argue that Mueller interviewing for the director of the FBI job was a conflict of interest. Steve Bannon told him that

was ridiculous and petty. Like Steve Bannon called it petty. Right. Because at least he's somewhat in touch with the version of reality some people are engaged. You have to be to be a good propagandist. You have to at least know what the world is. You can't just be like, yeah man, I'm telling you cupcakes are making our kids all freaky and shit. Like what the what? It's speaking of cupcakes making our kids all freaky and shit. We have some product ads now. For freak cakes. Freak cakes. They make your kids unhealthy. And think for themselves. Buy them. So if you have much money, are we getting from the freak cakes people? $1,000 trillion? $1,000 trillion. Usually it's the high number first. Your diamond-encrusted grill says freak cakes on

it. Well, let me tell you about freak cakes, Miles. The only cakes that clean your teeth. Now, we're getting a lot of pushback from Big Dental here. Yeah, yeah. Every morning, dentists outside my door, picketing, fighting, firebombing my windows. That's why I've got those diamond grills on the windows. Exactly. So fuck with Big Dentistry and buy some freak cakes. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC.

What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when

a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus, it's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Speaking of us being back, here's more of the Mueller report. Are you guys dead inside yet? Back because Trump got stabbed in the back by the deep state. Yeah, he sure did. Nice. Jack returning. Yes. In this round, I'm going to robot everything you say.

Oh boy. Well, you're going to have to robot everything Mueller says because we got a big mole quote here. Okay, good. I'm ready. So the president repeatedly hammered McGahn, his lawyer, to try to get McGahn to call the Department of Justice and tell Rod Rosenstein that Mueller had to go. This next paragraph paints a very vivid picture of what it's like working for Donald Trump. When the president called McGahn a second time to follow up on the order to call the Department of Justice, McGahn recalled that the president was more direct, saying something like, call Rod. Tell Rod that Mueller has conflicts and can't be the special counsel.

McGahn recalled the president telling him, Mueller has got to go. Call me back when you do it. McGahn understood the president to be saying that the special counsel had to be removed by Rosenstein. To end the conversation with the president, McGahn left the president with the impression that McGahn would call Rosenstein. McGahn recalled that he had already said no to the president's request that he was worn down, so he just wanted to get off the phone. McGahn recalled feeling trapped because he did not plan to follow the president's directive, but did not know what he would say the next time the president called. McGahn decided he had to resign. He called his personal lawyer and then called his chief of

staff and Annie Donaldson to inform her of his decision. He then drove to the office to pack his belongings and submit his resignation letter. Donaldson recalled that McGahn told her the president had called and demanded he contact the Department of Justice and that the president wanted him to do something that McGahn did not want to do. McGahn told Donaldson that the president had called at least twice and asked him one of the calls, have you done it? Just real quick, because I listened to the slow burn about the Clinton-Lewinsky affair and just the Watergate investigation, and the level of intrigue and just Clinton doing bad things is so minimal that, and the Republicans freaked out about that for 10 years in a row, basically.

And still are. And still are freaking out about it. And they have the balls to say that call our interest in this guy who can't stop committing crimes. They have the balls to call that Trump derangement syndrome. I just wanted to put that into perspective. He can't stop committing crimes when his employees who have a vested interest in his political success repeatedly say, please don't do anything. You're not in danger. And then he endangers himself by demanding that they commit crimes, calling them at all hours of the day. Call Rod and say, Mueller has to go, he has conflicts. Those conflicts again? Oh, just like that? Yeah. Yeah, what was the problem? That's not how it works. What do you mean? So McGahn later told Reince Priebus when he was still

trying to resign that the president had asked him to do crazy shit. And seems to have been on the verge of resigning, but eventually did not. And the president eventually dropped the issue, because again, he has the attention span of a 14 year old. As to whether or not this is collusion, well, the president claimed he was just asking McGahn to bring up Mueller's possible conflicts of interest to the Department of Justice. But in the Mueller report notes that some evidence does support this, but quote, substantial evidence, however, supports the conclusion that the president went further and in fact directed McGahn to call Rosenstein to have the special counsel removed, which again, is obstruction of justice. The report notes that the president's conversations with

numerous other people during this period, including Priebus and Chris Christie, showed that he had an intense desire to, in the president's words, knock out Mueller. Kind of fun to think of Mueller typing all that out. Now the evidence shows that the president was not just seeking an examination of whether conflicts of interest existed, but was instead looking to use asserted conflicts as a way to terminate the special counsel. So again, the conclusion by the Mueller report is basically the president committed obstruction of justice, but we can't say that because that's not in the scope of this thing. Here's this outlining the obstruction he committed. Here is a detailed description of him committing obstruction of justice. Also, that's a good snapshot of

what life is like for people who work for Donald Trump. It's also a good testimony to how to deal with a shitty boss. Just say, yeah, sure, boss, and then don't do the terrible idea he's telling you to do. That almost always works. Oh yeah, I do it every day. Fuck you, Miles. Yes, sir. Son of a bitch. I'm going to get right away. Yeah. And speaking of that, Jack, there's another great detail of that later in the report on, again, this is like on December of 2017 after Flynn pleaded guilty of him hammering Jeff Sessions again to unrecuse. According to contemporaneous notes taken by Porter, the president said, I don't know if you could unrecuse yourself, you'd be a hero, not telling you to do anything. Dershowitz says, POTUS can get involved, can

order AG to investigate. I don't want to get involved. I'm not going to get involved. I'm not going to do anything or direct you to do anything. I just want to be treated fairly. Huh. There you go. Yeah. Now, the report does seem to suggest that Trump's constant attempts to get Sessions to unrecuse himself were in fact acts of obstruction. Do they, and they use quotes there too when they say unrecuse in that instance? Let me see here. Yes. Okay. Yeah. So that really is like a shade move. Yeah, that's a shade move. This is not a word. In Trump vocab. Yeah, unrecuse. Unrecuse yourself. You will unrecuse yourself. Yeah. So the report does seem to conclude that Trump's constant attempts to get Sessions to unrecuse were in fact acts of obstruction.

It's just like, I see the quotes every time. They're every time. Every time. And unrecuse himself. He seems very irritated by this point. There is evidence that at least, yeah, he's pissed. One night he says, do fuck this guy. Fuck this guy. He seems to be really frustrated at the president and at Paul Manafort. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I hear he's reading the report for Audible, so we'll be able to hear it in his voice. Oh, that's going to be great. Yeah. Robert Mueller reads the Mueller report. We actually are having him on behind the bastards soon, but we're not, we're not talking about Trump. We're going to, we're going to, we're going to finally talk about how he nailed the NFL. We're going to finally get that Mao episode out. Oh, Bob Mueller seemed

like the guest for that. Yeah. He's actually, if you heard his type five down at the comedy factory, he's really, really solid. I was surprised he was doing so well with the prop bits, but he's actually, yeah, he's a little racy, but, uh, yeah, you know, yeah, really racy. It's like, yeah. Well, because he says racy and then pulls out an inflatable race car. Yeah, it sure does. It's a good joke. It's a good, it's a good game. But then puts an afro on it. Yeah, that's when it gets questionable. Uh-oh. The report does seem to suggest that Trump's constant attempts to get sessions to unrequies himself were in fact acts of obstruction. Quote, there's evidence that at least one purpose of the president's conduct towards sessions was to have sessions assume

control of the Russia investigation and supervise it in a way that would restrict its scope. A reasonable inference from those statements and the president's actions is that the president believed that an unrequiesed attorney general would play a protective role and could shield the president from the ongoing Russia investigation. Um, yeah, uh, it's constantly interesting to me, uh, how little loyalty and like is shown by the people who are close to president Trump. Um, yeah, uh, he asked Rob Porter, the White House staff secretary to deliver the president's demands to Reagan that he did not, McGahn that he denied publicly that president had ever tried to fire Mueller. Um, McGahn dismissed that like the threat that he would be fired if he didn't

deliver this, uh, by saying that it would look bad for the president if he did this and McGahn turned him down again. So again, he keeps ordering McGahn to break the law and McGahn doesn't break the law. And that's part of why the case against him isn't clear, because people didn't listen when he repeatedly, they knew that's full on because these are lawyers. Yeah. McGahn acknowledged that he had not told the president directly that he planned to resign, but said that the story was otherwise accurate. The president asked McGahn, did I say the word fire? McGahn responded, what you said is call Rod Rosenstein, tell Rod that Mueller has conflicts and can't be the special counsel. The president responded, I never said that. The president

said that he merely wanted McGahn to raise the conflicts issue with Rosenstein and leave it to him to decide what to do. McGahn told the president that he did not understand the conversations that way. And instead of her, call Rod, there are conflicts, Mueller has to go. The president asked McGahn whether or not he would do a correction. And McGahn said, no, do a correction. Will you do a correction? I'm sorry, let me do a correction really quickly. And this is all about, by the way, a New York Times report stating that the president had tried to get McGahn to fire Mueller, which Trump claimed publicly was all lies by the bias New York Times. And McGahn himself was like, no, they got it right. No, that's a funny thing,

too, is so many journalists are vindicated to from this report too. And things came out like, oh, this is all unfounded, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. A lot of this stuff is now in here. Yeah, that's why the Glenn Greenwald thing of him being like, ah, see, it was all bullshit is like, wait, did you even read the report? Because like all this stuff you've been like saying was bullshit and overblown has been borne out in this report. No, because Glenn Greenwald was not going to do what I did and spend the entire all of yesterday in a dank room, draining King Scotch and reading the Mueller report, because Glenn Greenwald lives on a mansion above a Brazilian favela filled with dogs and has better things to do than read this report.

Is that where he lives? Yeah. Yeah. He makes like a million dollars a year. Yeah. He lives in Brazil. Yeah. Crushing it. I didn't know that. Yeah. With his beautiful husband. He's one of the best who's like journalists on the planet. Oh, God bless you. God bless him. Yeah. And he lives above the favelas and where like Rio or something. I think it's in Rio. It might be Sao Paulo. I don't know off the top of my head. Yeah, sure. Yeah. But it seems like the sort of thing that he had locked and loaded right before the report even came out. There's no way he read it all. Good God, no. No. In four hours. No, and it would betray everything he's done up until then. It took me eight and I really half asked the reading of this report, guys. Yeah. I know.

It's obvious. So this is all leading up to my very favorite paragraph in the entire Mueller report. And this is as he's talking to McGahn. The president also asked McGahn in a meeting why he had told special counsel's office investigators that the president had told him to have the special counsel removed. McGahn responded that he had to and that his conversations with the president were not protected by attorney-client privilege. The president then asked, what about these notes? Why do you take notes? Lawyers don't take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes. McGahn responded that he keeps notes because he's a real lawyer and explains that notes create a record and are not a bad thing. The president said, I've had a lot of great lawyers like Ray

Cohn. He didn't take notes. Boom. Mob lawyer, Roy Cohn. Famous crime lawyer, Roy Cohn. What are you doing? What are you doing? Notes? Who does that? Why aren't you like Roy Cohn? Because I'm not committing crimes that guarantee you'll be impeached. Like, I'm not going to do that because I'm a real lawyer. Right. Again, McGahn's one of the guys you come across from this being like, well, at least you're competent. Because I'm a real lawyer is such a fucking condescending answer to be giving to the president. I'm sure too, like with Trump, he's like not used to being spoken to like that. And I'm sure Don McGahn is like, fuck you, mode. I don't like shit. Trump probably took all that. He's like, because I'm a real lawyer. Because he's seen what's happened to Flynn. I'm

not going to go to prison for you. Another people probably would never. I hope that Don McGahn was so just shitty. Like, I mean, obviously, fuck him like guiding Brett Kavanaugh through the confirmation shit. And that has been swanson. No, he's a bad person. But like, I just, if it were like a scene in a show of just being like, shut the fuck up, okay? Because I'm a real lawyer, you fuck. Because I'm a lawyer. I'm taking, it's not bad to take notes, Donald. I've never seen that. You've never seen that? The TV show that it would be from, right? Yeah, the TV show that it would be from would not be House of Cards. It would be Veep. Because yeah, you also have to imagine that McGahn was taking notes of that conversation while this was telling him not to

take notes. So Trump was then like, you're doing it again. It's like asking about notes, said creating record, just said, but Roy Cohn didn't do that. Okay, I got what I need. Yeah, Mr. President. I got a lot of tables, man. I got to get out of here. Yeah. Next, we get into a bunch more stuff of the Manafort stuff, which again, it's a lot of obstruction-y stuff there. You can read it. We already talked about a lot of Manafort's crimes, a decent amount of it's still redacted. We get to what's probably Roger Stone next, but again, everything about Stone is redacted right now. So it's a little bit hard to say. There is a partially redacted paragraph talking about the president, Michael Cohen, that makes Donald Trump sound exactly like a mob boss. So I'm going to read

that next. Okay. A few days after the searches, the president called Cohen. According to Cohen, the president said he wanted to check in and asked if Cohen was okay. And the president encouraged Cohen to hang in there and stay strong. Cohen also recalled that following the searches, this is after Cohen's house had been searched. He heard from individuals who were in touch with the president, relate to Cohen, the president's support for him. Cohen recalled that, blank, a friend of the president's reached out to say that he was with the boss, bosses capitalized, and Mar-a-Lago. And the president said, he loves you and not to worry. Cohen recalled that redacted for the Trump organization told him, the boss loves you. And Cohen said that redacted, a friend of the president's

told him, everyone knows the boss has your back. That's a mob ass shit. That is a mob shit, but it's also like very touchy feely, warm, sentimental for Trump and an army general. Yeah. Like that's probably as warm and feely as Michael Cohen has ever been, including like on his wedding night. So yeah. Yeah. The fact that he turned on him after that. The boss loves me. Yeah. And sorry. I take a bullet for him. Well, now I'm going to testify against him. Right. But he has to say it in the third person because saying you would be like too emotional. And he said that the boss loves me. The Mueller report concludes that the president probably knew and directly approved of Michael Cohen lying to Congress. The evidence could support an inference that the president

was aware of these facts at the time of Cohen's false statements to Congress. So again, so the president probably committed a crime and the evidence could probably support that he committed a crime. Yeah. Yeah. That's what Mueller seems to be saying. At the conclusion of the report, it reiterates that it will not make traditional prosecutorial judgments, but does note some conclusions. In this investigation, the evidence does not establish that the president was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference. But the evidence does point to a range of other possible personal motives animating the president's conduct. These include concerns that continued investigation recall in a question the legitimacy of his election and potential

uncertainty about whether certain events such as advance notice of WikiLeaks's release of hacked information or the June 9th, 2016 meeting between senior campaign officials and Russians could be seen as criminal activity by the president, his campaign or his family. Third, many of the president's acts directed at witnesses, including the discouragement of cooperation with the government and suggestions of possible future pardons occurred in public view. While it may be more difficult to establish that public facing acts were motivated by a corrupt intent, the president's power to influence actions, persons and events is enhanced by his unique ability to attract attention through use of mass communications. And no principle of law excludes

public acts from the scope of obstruction statutes. At the likely effect of the acts is to intimidate witnesses or alter their testimony, the justice system's integrity is equally threatened. That seems so damn it. Like such a sane description of what the president was doing that like nobody was using like those sorts of straightforward words to describe what he was doing for so long. Yeah. And he's just like, no, this is how it works. You can't publicly intimidate people. Yeah. Mulder notes that the president's efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined

to carry out orders or a cede to his requests. He kept urging them to do crimes and they were just a little too smart to do it. Right. Yeah. Fuck man. I just, I don't want to go to prison and I don't want you to go to prison. So I guess not. And then he yells at you for an hour and a half. Right. Yeah. So it notes after this that the president is not immune to charges for obstruction of justice just by the nature of being the president. And then, you know, I'm going to read essentially the final word in the report before the appendix, which is one word. Well, final paragraph, which in any sane society would be damning. Because we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment, we did not draw ultimate conclusions about the president's

conduct. The evidence we obtained about the president's actions and intent presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state based on the facts and the applicable legal standard, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him for the third time. Right. That's my fucking notes. Whoa. He's really threw that bagel down. Where are the bagels? Where's my tossing bagels? They're already on the ground. Bring me my tossing

bagels, sir. Thank you, Dave. Fuck you, bagels. Yeah. I'm not surprised by anything in there. You know, we need William Barr to do some explaining. Yeah. We need some Robert Mueller explaining. And I mean, all this really shows is like, this is, I think the beginning of a much longer process. Yeah. I mean, again, again, there's still 14 ongoing criminal investigations. So is there a version of this where they don't say we're going forward with impeachment hearings, but they do continue to like have hearings? Yeah, that's possible. Yeah. I mean, they can investigate all these other things. I think it's a foregone conclusion that Mueller is going to talk to Congress. Okay. Oh, yeah. That's, and Congress has already requested the unredacted

version of the report. So that's probably going to happen. So far, Democratic leadership has been unwilling to, in fact, directly stated, they don't want to pursue impeachment. Right. I saw that. Which like, I will say, based on my nonlawyer knowledge of what I read in the report, definitely seems like there's enough to impeach over. Right. Like to at least do, because obviously impeaching doesn't mean he gets kicked out of the job. It just starts. Right. Impeaching is just a political act. There's definitely more there than there was with Clinton in terms of crime. Right. That was probably committed. But at the state, like people are wondering, like, is it a good political strategy to impeach him? Which like, well, is it a good political strategy to just like, not charge the

president for his multiple crimes? Right. Yeah. Right. I hope that you win the next election. Like Democrats often don't. Right. But there's no version of reality where the Democrats are able to successfully impeach Trump from office given what is currently out there. So they would need- It depends on the votes too. Right. Yeah. The votes for on the Senate would require a bunch of Republicans to vote to impeach Trump. Yes. And that, I mean, that is a good point that like if he gets impeached and then like isn't actually kicked out, he might claim vindication or something. Oh, he definitely would. You could say it'll probably drag on up until the election and would be- Right. And the last time we saw an unsuccessful impeaching of a president, the

president saw a huge boost after. Yeah. Although the president, like his poll numbers flat as a fucking doornail. This president. Yeah. Well, just in the wake of the Mueller report coming out, like it doesn't seem to have had any impact. Still early. Like, even when we're looking at, like, but yeah, but it's been like a week or two since Barr announced no collusion or whatever, and it didn't do anything. Because I think most people, they don't need the report on either side to still believe he's either the best thing to happen or the worst thing to happen. So. So then, I guess when you look at it from there, you're like, well, then if it's not going to move the needle that much, is it the best, is that the best way of- I'm not going to make a judgment on like

whether or not he should be impeached because there's a lot of thinking behind that. I will say, it seems like a horrible dereliction of duty to not hammer every aspect of this, bring Mueller up before Congress, publicize heavily every investigation that is still ongoing. It needs to be kept in the public eye up until the election. The president committed a huge number of crimes, it sounds like. And by having people under oath in a televised test, like if they're testifying and giving testimony, you can hopefully chip away a little bit at the court of public opinion too, if it's non-stop of people being like, yeah, and then he asked me to do this. And I was like, yeah, I can't do that. Yeah. I want to hear Donald McGahn talk about

all of the times Trump tried to get him to commit crimes in front of Congress. I really want that. Because what was the, in the Watergate thing, like one of the first ones was like just like an office assistant who they asked to shred documents. Yeah. And like that whole thing was kind of the first anecdote that people were like, wait, what's going on? Yeah. Because like higher ups are like, I don't know how to use this document shredder. Right. And the idea that Nixon should be impeached was incredibly unpopular at the start of those televised hearings. And it completely flipped by the end of the televised hearings. But I mean, I think people are too aware of this whole process to like have their mind changed that much by a televised thing. But I do think,

you know, as we're, you know, looking at the 2020 election, if there is a televised, you know, hearing where different just incompetence and dishonesty and just being terrible at the job are like kind of coming out and drips and drips. That's not a bad thing for Democrats. And that seems like it would be a smart strategy. Yeah, it does seem like it would be a smart strategy, but we are talking about the Democratic Party here. So I look forward to them doing something that makes everything worse. Yeah. Yeah. That is what I can rely on the Democratic Party for. So I'm excited about Hillary's 2020 run. Nominate Biden with Tim Kaine once again. Oh, man. Biden Kaine ticket, baby. Yeah. Who do we, who do we, who do we toss in that campaign?

Yeah. How do we, how do we get the lefties on board? Oh, let's bring back Tim Kaine. They love Tim Kaine. Right. Oh, geez. Jack's breaking. Our mic just fell off. Probably maybe related to all the bagel tossing I've been doing. No way to know. See, you've angered, you've angered the Lord. You know what, Daniel, when you get done with that, hand me those bagels again. I'm going to give one more good toss and before we, before we, we throw it on. Yeah, you guys any got any, got any plugables to plug? Bagels down there. Thank you, Daniel. Uh, last time I did, I, I did glade plugins. I did Belkin surge protectors for your pluggable item. Um, yeah, no, none here. Daily Zeitgeist. Daily Zeitgeist. Check it out. Oh, they already

know. Week daily, Monday through Friday. Well, not, not everybody in there. Man, if we don't fuck, bruh. Fuck, bruh. It's the sickest secondary podcast in the building, man. Check out the Daily Zeitgeist. If you're looking for a great tube of throw in bagels, I can recommend Cerely deluxe bagels, blueberry, really throw in bagels. I mean, just listen to how good these toss solid bounce off one of the sound boards onto a couch, really good throw in bagels. And they're still intact. Those will be eating those bagels. Well, yeah, it's cause the preservatives baby. I think those bagels became throwing bagels because nobody wanted to eat them. And I did want to throw them. They were therefore donated to the throwing

bagel fund, his throwing bagel basket that we put for Robert every day. So buy some throwing bagels of your own, toss them to relieve your frustration about the Mueller report and the horrible morass of hatred that we are all slouching closer to in 2020. Got to be a fun election. We're all looking forward to it. The best. Hey, Robert, do you have any plugables? No. I think you do. I don't have any other shows that I know of. He only does. I don't even, I don't even do this show. No. Right. All right. And I want to talk about a podcast that I've been listening to lately. Big fan. Slow burn? Yeah. It's called slow burn. No, it's called it could happen here. It is terrifying. It's about the possibility of a second American civil war.

Ties into all this a little bit. Yeah. Ties into all this quite a bit. And those were wishes at the border. Yeah. What you might not know is when we're talking about, you know, a possible impeachment that the right is already saying they will murder us in the streets if people try and remove Trump from office. So just some of them, including several of the people named in the Mueller report. Yeah. So that's worth taking into account. Yeah, it could happen here is mind blowing. Every week it's growing more and more. It's become a phenomenon. Check it out. It could happen here. So make yourself sad and scared with it could happen here and then stockpile food and armaments. Yes. And those buckets from Jim Baker.

From Jim Baker. Yeah. Baker buckets. Actually, buy Indian Army rations. They have a really good shelf life. They're pretty, pretty cheap. And they're probably good flavors. Really good. I mean, yeah, you want a lot of curry in your rations. Like not like a chow mein MRA. MRA you can get out here. No, those are the worst ones. All right. I have a podcast called Behind the Bastards, which this is. Oh, yeah. The podcast is. I'm all out of sorts. You're so good at this. I liked when Jack was plugging your show. It felt like a weird like toast at a fucking wedding. Right. Yeah, like the guy I got a podcast. I want to tell you about it's like Robert's like, Oh, God. Oh, boy. I am hungover from the Mueller report. It's terrible. Also, buy merch for both of our shows

of the public. From T public. It will keep you warm as the country burns down around you. Or we'll keep you cool. Yeah, get a tank top. Maybe get it too hot because it's going to be even warmer soon. Cool as the day is long. Could be insurgent warfare or climate change. I don't know. You might not need sleeves anymore. I'm just saying nothing looks better than a freedom fighter with like those arms buried. Oh, yeah. Big guns. Right to bear arms. You could be like that guy in Libya who stuck a cannon in a shopping cart. Oh, yeah. Technical guy like a 50 cowl or something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I don't know. The podcast is over. Go hug your family, kiss a cat, throw some bagels. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in

the United States told you, Hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Boland. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition treason and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to let's start a coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price to death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app,

Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. to bring him down with the Soviet Union collapsing around him. He orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.