Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 1/3/23: McCarthy House Speaker Vote, George Santos Lies Investigation, Trump Taxes, Virgin Islands Epstein Lawsuit, CNN Midnight Screw Up, SouthWest Holiday Disaster, Home Depot Blames Socialism

Episode Date: January 3, 2023

Krystal and Saagar discuss the chaos inside the GOP speaker vote surrounding Kevin McCarthy, new congressman George Santos' litany of lies confronted by Tulsi Gabbard, a review of the discourse around Trump's taxes, Virgin Islands suing JPMorgan Chase over ties to Jeffrey Epstein, Southwest's colossal holiday flight disaster, and Home Depot's co-founder blaming Socialism for killing American's motivation to work.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/AUSTIN LIVE SHOW FEB 3RDTickets & Presale Linkhttps://tickets.austintheatre.org/9053/9054To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Okay, in the show today, there's actually a lot happening in Washington today. There's a big battle for Speaker of the House. Kevin McCarthy has the most votes, but he doesn't have enough votes. And it is totally unclear. Like a lot of times in Washington, there's suspense, but it's kind of fake suspense. This time, literally no one knows what is going to happen. So we'll break all of that down for you. We also have some updates on one of those new members of Congress, George Santos. I've been sort of obsessed with the story. This dude lied about literally everything in his life. Now he is under a brand new investigation. So we'll bring you those details. We also have at long last after many years of anticipation and speculation, Trump tax returns. We'll tell you what's in there and the way that the media has spun this,

which is very interesting as well. We've got big Epstein news and we have a major fail from CNN that they started the year with. I've also got a report from the billionaire and boss class. Sager is taking a look at the total debacle from Southwest Airlines and Mayor Pete's failures with regards to that. But before we get to any of that, Sagar, live show. Live show. Go ahead and put it up there on the screen. Austin, Texas, February 3rd. We are coming to the Paramount Theater. The tickets are actually almost sold out, so I highly recommend that you go ahead and grab them. I was just in Austin for New Year's. I took a little drive by the theater.

It's a stunningly beautiful venue. I met some of you beautiful people as well in Austin, Texas. And I can tell you, Crystal, we've got some awesome fans that are on the ground there already. Many of them were mentioning and talking about how excited they were for the live show. So go ahead and join those people, Texas people and others. It's going to be the last one for a little while. And tickets are scarcely available now. Highly recommend that you come. We have a great show planned for you all. But with that, let's get to actually a shocking development in Washington, some genuinely suspenseful and possibly history making news. Yes, indeed. OK, so today there's expected to be a vote on speaker of the House and Kevin McCarthy. Republicans are taking control of the House. Kevin McCarthy has long been seen as the leading candidate, but he needs 218 votes. And since Republicans only took the House by a very slim margin, he can only afford to lose four votes. So remember that four votes, that's the number that he can

lose. Fortunately for him, there are five members of the Republican caucus who are calling themselves never Kevin. They have vowed to never vote for Kevin McCarthy. And so far, they do not seem to be budging. Let's go ahead and put this tear sheet up on the screen from Roll Call that breaks all of this down. So the headline there, it says, Speaker Race Headed Toward Dramatic Floor Election. Here's the lead that they wrote out here.

They said, whether or not Kevin McCarthy becomes speaker under the incoming House Republican majority, the January 3rd floor election to determine who will take the gavel from Pelosi is poised to be the most dramatic in a century. A small faction of never Kevin Republicans is threatening to ensure McCarthy is denied the 218 votes needed to win the speaker's election. But a larger group of Republicans

who have pledged to vote for only Kevin are making clear they will not support any other returning members of Congress for the role. The two positions are seemingly irreconcilable, and members on both sides of the standoff predict the Speaker's election will require multiple ballots for the first time since 1923. So you see the problem here. You've got Kevin McCarthy. He's got a pretty hard group that says they will only vote for him. But meanwhile, you have this other smaller contingent that says they will absolutely never vote for him. There is no one as of this morning who has the 218 votes needed. And so it's very uncertain how this is ultimately all going to unfold. You've actually had, Sagar, a couple of moderate Republicans who have said floated that they

may be willing to work with Democrats to get a kind of consensus candidate to get to that 218 vote threshold. One person who's been floated for that is Fred Upton, who is a moderate Republican. He's actually he's out of the House after the session. Now, there's nothing in the law that says that the speaker of the House has to be a sitting member of Congress. That's just the way it's been traditionally done. So that's one potential alternative out there. It's just a very up in the air right now how it all goes. And the last thing I'll add that I'm interested in your take is McCarthy has been really trying to appease this group of five hard nose.

There's a larger group. There's an additional nine who have sent a letter saying that they're very concerned. There's the whip count this morning suggests that there may be about 18 members of the Republican caucus who are right now no votes. He's made some changes to the rules to try to win over these folks. And so far, it just hasn't worked out. Yeah, it's absolutely fascinating. Let's go and put that one on the screen, the letter of the so-called nine. So what you can see here, we have Representative Scott Perry, Paul Gosar, Andy Ogallis, Anna Paulina, Luna from Florida, Eli Crane, Chip Roy, Dan Bishop, Andy Harris, Andrew Clyde. So the reason why those names are important is they do generally run the gamut. I guess the one thing that unites all of them is being, quote unquote, anti-establishment.

But you can read that in a lot of different ways. That can mean Tea Party Republican. That can also mean somebody who really just wants to make the headlines. The reason why I think that this is the most important is that the lack of certainty opens up all kinds of insane and interesting possibilities. We should remember the last time that the speakership was actually in question was when John Boehner actually resigned the House. Absolutely nobody predicted that it would be Paul Ryan, and it was Paul Ryan. That shows us that out of this could emerge somebody who really many Americans may not have ever heard of. I guess Paul Ryan was a little bit more well-established. The Fred Upton category is very much in there.

I believe it would be one of the first or one of the only times in American history that somebody who's not currently serving in the House of Representatives would be the speaker. We should reiterate that as well. I've heard previously calls from MAGA Republicans to actually make Trump the speaker of the House. That's one way that they wanted to. I mean, I guess it would put him in the official line of succession since he's a pride of its citizen right now. I want to underscore just for everyone that the chaos of the situation, the very fast moving negotiations that are happening mean that Kevin McCarthy very well could be the Speaker of the House. In fact, probably, I don't know, he's got the best shot. I wouldn't say more likely than not, but he's got the best shot of any person who is currently in the government right now.

But as we have all learned through, and we really have to reach back through very long ago in our history, second, third, fourth, fifth, 10th, 12th, and all of those types of ballots, things can go in a crazy and very unexpected direction. It's a really fun for me because this is showing us the crumbling of the party infrastructure at the very top of the Republican party. People should not think that this is only a MAGA, like a MAGA revolt against Kevin McCarthy. This is longstanding, basically party crumbling at the top for the GOP. And personally, I'm enjoying the chaos, Crystal. Yeah, same. I mean, McCarthy was in line for the speakership before, and he kind of blew himself up that time because he admitted that the Benghazi hearings were just an attempt at like political attack on Hillary Clinton. And so that kind of sank his bid last time around. But I think there's a sense from that seems fairly

justifiable to me that the dude doesn't really stand for anything. He's just a climber. You can't really trust him. And so that's why you see a fairly broad ideological array against him. And then you also have the complicating factor of, you know, you have some of the hard MAGA folks in Congress who are against McCarthy. But of course, McCarthy himself was actually endorsed by Trump. So that's led to this whole falling out between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz being on the other side of Marjorie Taylor Greene and MTG really forcefully making the case for McCarthy.

So it has been a very interesting spectacle to watch unfold. And the lines are not entirely clear or consistent in the way that they've been drawn between these two camps. You know, some other names that have been mentioned besides Brett Upton, another person that was mentioned is Steve Scalise as a potential, you know, if McCarthy fails and it looks like there's no way to get him across the finish line, maybe they put Scalise up as a potential consensus pick. But it's incredibly hard to say what happens. The other question is, how hard are these never Kevin votes ultimately? Are they just posturing so that they can get more concessions out of the rulemaking process?

The thing that they really wanted was to make it easier to basically depose the speaker if they were unhappy with them. They've effectively already won that rule change. But then there's questions over whether the rest of the caucus will accept that rule change and vote for it. And the rule change vote happens after the speaker vote. So just a lot of uncertainty in this. There was a good thread

from one of the reporters at Politico's playbook laying out the difficulty of the math problem. And I want to take the time to go through this because I think it's a good explanation of exactly where things stand for McCarthy right now. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. So they say here, news and playbook, McCarthy's math problem is actually worse than it seems. It's not just the five hard no never Kevin earns and nine fence sitters who pan the rule changes as not good enough. One told me some undecideds won't support him even if he gives them everything they ask.

That's a huge problem for McCarthy. Something McCarthy allies have worried about for weeks that some of these members are not really winnable because of the long held animosity they've had for the GOP leader. Key quote, they say, the problem is people don't trust Kevin McCarthy and a number won't vote for him. This undecided lawmaker told me the list of demands that we offered was not for guaranteed support, but rather the kinds of things that might move some of his detractors. So pointing out there in the first part, you know, they offer this list of demands, but they didn't even say, like, if you give me these demands, if you concede, then we're

all going to vote for you. So that puts him in a difficult position. Let's go ahead to the next screen. They say this is why McCarthy dodged questions last night about whether his concession on the motion to vacate got him the votes. That's the motion that would make it easier, basically, to depose the speaker. It didn't. Even if he goes down to a one-person trigger, he may not get there if this well-placed source is right.

Three other signs of problems for McCarthy. One, the undecideds are already preparing to deflect blame to him if he goes down. He'd like it to be our problem. It's his problem. The real question should be, why is he dragging the country and the Congress through this? Two, anti-McCarthy members are already talking to GOP centrists about a unity candidate. You have to be responsible and say, well, if he's not going to get the votes, what alternatives are out there? There's no agreement. Centrists continue to be McCarthy's strongest supporters, but the fact that convos between conservatives

and moderates are happening are notable. Three, a small subset of McCarthy backers are privately wary of this fight. He plans to wage this week to get the gavel with multiple votes distancing from distracting from the GOP takeover. The more ballots he calls up, the more he could lose his own base of support. And the last quote they have here is that we're supposed to be hitting the ground running here, but instead it's just a big belly flop. Believe me, it's not just members of the Freedom Caucus who are aggravated. So, Sagar, one of the key points there is it's not you know, you have these different ideological factions in the Republican Party, but they're not completely at odds. And this is what's really dangerous for McCarthy. If you have the hard right members in conversations with the centrist members who are just interested in sort of getting through this vote and getting someone as a consensus pick in, you know, up to 218 votes to take the speaker's gavel.

Well, that's how you could very clearly end up with something someone other than Kevin McCarthy, because, you know, if you would unite those factions together behind someone, then you end up in a completely different situation. So hard to see how this is all going to go down. But certainly as of this morning, Kevin McCarthy is not really particularly close to having the 218 votes that he would need to actually become speaker. Yeah, I really did not think it would come this close down to the wire. I really believe that some of those concessions from Kevin McCarthy on the rule changes and others, we're really talking about the motion to vacate, the ability to just bring legislation to the floor with just 15 or so members, which itself would be a huge blow to McCarthy and would already stop his speakership or would really humble his speakership. Now, it doesn't even seem like that's enough. I want to just underscore to everybody how

historical this is. If Kevin McCarthy fails on the first ballot, it will be the first time since the Congress of 1923 in exactly 100 years that the majority party has not had a nominee on the very first ballot. Now, what happens here is that right now the math still can't change. We should remember that given absentees, voting present, you don't necessarily need to hit 218. There have actually been a couple of instances, six specifically, where they have had speakers elected with less than 218 votes, which is exactly a majority plus one. There have actually been 14 instances where it took multiple ballots to choose a new speaker. 13 of them were before the Civil War. So this would be

the first time in 100 years that it would take more than one ballot possibly to elect a new speaker. It would be really the first one since the post-Civil war era. And the last time that it took a long time in order to get a speaker crystal was 1855 over the course of two months with 133 ballots to elect a speaker during that Congress. Oh my God, that's insane. I didn't know about that. That's amazing. Well, last thing I'll say here, guys, is CounterPoints is going to be moving to Wednesday. So they're going to have a show for you tomorrow to break all of this down. Ryan knows way more about like congressional procedure and inside baseball stuff than basically anyone. So he'll be able to break all of this down really well.

It'll be great to have Emily's perspective also on these different ideological factions and what they are saying and what they're thinking. She's also very well sourced within the Republican caucus. So definitely check that out to see how this all ultimately unfolds. We will be watching it very closely. All right. So one of these new members who is about to be sworn in on the Republican side is a fellow by the name, at least we think this is his name, of George Santos. I have been sort of obsessed with the story because I just find it fascinating the pathological nature of this man and how he literally lied about seemingly everything in his life. He's lied at different times about his religion, about his race. He claimed he was black on Twitter at one point to deflect criticism that he might be racist. He lied about how his mother died. He lied about his grandparents being Holocaust survivors. He lied about his

education. He lied about his work history, lied about his business history. He would make up random anecdotes, like, for example, that he had employees who were murdered in the Pulse nightclub shooting. So this man, every day there seems to be more about just how much he fabricated about his life and about his resume. Tulsi Gabbard actually had an interview with him. He went on Fox News. I'm sure he probably thought, okay, this is the place where I'm going to get the best, most softball hearing. I don't think he got what he really bargained for. Take a listen to the way that she grilled him. The reality is, is that I remain committed to doing everything I set forward in my campaign. I'm not a fraud. I'm not a fake. I didn't materialize from thin air. If I were one of those in New York's third district right now,

now that the election is over and I'm finding out all of these lies that you've told, not just one little lie or one little embellishment, these are blatant lies. My question is, do you have no shame? Do you have no shame in the people who are now you're asking to trust you to go and be their voice for them, their families and their kids in Washington? Tulsi, I can say the same thing about the Democrats and the party. Look at Joe Biden. Joe Biden has been lying to the American people for 40 years. He's the president of the United States. Democrats resoundingly support him. Do they have no shame? Look, I've made this very clear. This is not about the Democratic Party, though. This is, I think, one of the biggest concerns,

Congressman-elect, is that you don't really seem to be taking this seriously. You've apologized. You said you've made mistakes, but you've outright lied. A lie is not an embellishment on a resume. You said you worked at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, but they've said, we've got no record of this guy working for us. You've said you've gone to and graduated from these universities, but they've said, well, we've got no record of that. These are blatant lies, and it calls into question how your constituents and the American people can believe anything that you may say when you are standing on the floor of the House of Representatives supposedly fighting for them. That's the real issue here. Well, look, I agree with what you're saying, and as I stated and I continue, we can debate my resume and how I worked with firms such as Goldman and Zeddy. Is it debatable or is it just false? Is it debatable or is it just false?

No, it's very debatable. No, it's not false at all. It's debatable. I can sit down and explain to you what you can do in private equity, in capital intro, via servicing limited partners and general partners. And we can have this discussion that's going to go way above the American people's head. But that's not what I campaigned on. I campaigned on delivering results for the American people by lowering inflation.

I can sit down. If you want to have that discussion, I'd be glad to Tulsi to explain that to you and make sure that we settle the score. So, I mean, there's really no defense of just all of the fabrications and some of the things that he said. I mean, he did cop to like resume embellishment. Come on, dude. You literally made up your entire life story that is not resume embellishment and then one of my favorite excuses he gave Sagar is he had claimed that he was a proud Jewish American and it turns out he's not Jewish at all but he claimed he was like oh well I was just saying I was Jew dash ish like I'm down with the Jewish community or something like that. It's so ridiculous. The latest lie that came out is apparently some teenager that he was in a relationship with. He had just made up all kinds of stories to this guy too. He actually told this dude

that he had bought him tickets to Hawaii. It turned out the tickets were fake. I mean, again, clearly this is someone who has some sort of a pathological issue in terms of Lyme. And then the latest development this morning is that it's not just U.S. authorities who are now looking into this guy, but there's an allegation, it appears to be confirmed by the records, that he engaged in check fraud in Brazil, that he went into a clothing store, bought some $700 worth of clothes using a stolen checkbook. And let's go ahead and put this piece up on the screen. So Brazilian authorities say that they are now reviving that fraud case against George Santos. This happened quite a while ago. It was back in 2008. What they say here in the New York Times is that they intend to revive those fraud charges and are seeking his formal response. They

had sort of dropped them before because they just couldn't find him. But now he's turned up. He's been located. So they are going after him again for this. The next piece, let's go and put this next part up on the screen here, is the very latest in terms of updates from this guy, because it's kind of hard to keep track of everything. There's now allegations that he was selling access to his swearing in, which could be an ethics violation in the House. We had Jamie Comer, a key Republican congressman, predicting that the House Ethics Committee will, in fact, look into Santos and his conduct. You've had people digging into his campaign finance reports, and he spent tens of thousands of dollars on air travel, $11,000 to rent a house that he claimed was for staff, but neighbors say they saw Santos himself living there. You also had his

press secretary resign. You have a Democratic congressman introducing what's called the Santos Act to make it actually illegal to lie about your credentials when you are running for office. And you have three new probes, put this last piece up on the screen, including, and this is probably the most significant part, federal prosecutors opening an investigation into him over his campaign spending. Because one of the biggest questions is, this guy went from broke and getting kicked out of his apartments and claiming fairly low level of income to personally contributing $700,000 to his own campaign. His business history has never added up. He's never really been able to explain what he does or where he may have come into so much money. So it sure looks like there could be some campaign finance violations here if you had

wealthy donors who effectively funneled him this cash to put into his campaign, that would be wildly, wildly illegal. And then just last thing, Sagar, the way this ties into the speaker fight today is Santos is a yes for Kevin McCarthy. So McCarthy hasn't wanted to say anything about him because he needs every vote he can get at this point in order to take the speaker's gavel. And with the Republican majority so incredibly slim. Of course, everyone there is very interested in holding on to every vote they possibly can, even if one of those votes is someone who, you know, you barely know that he's telling you the truth about his own name.

Oh, yeah, they need his vote and they need it bad. Look, the Santos thing, that pivot was humiliating whenever he was talking about Joe Biden and the Democrats. It's like you have literally lied about almost every single thing that you have said whenever you ran for public office. And the insane part is that there's really nothing they can do about it. Right now, his sign has actually been held up in the House of Representatives. They've installed the placard outside of his office. He will be the congressman from New York of this district, which is insane when you think about it, especially

just the level of the really just the level of narcissism. But what's also really we're discovering is that it very likely could have been paved with some serious either campaign finance or straight up just illegal activities. The number one question is, where did this man get all of his money? Whose money is it? He apparently has a net worth of several million dollars or at least connections to wealthy donors that are there. And the unraveling of this, I think, will be one of the really just the great stories in modern American politics, because this is just, this is like the fire festival of Congress. There's just, he really reminds me of him. I don't know if you ever watched those interviews with, I forget his name, Billy just got out of prison. I've always been fascinated

with those kind of pathological liar type, the Tinder swindler. I mean, you know what he was pulling on pulling with that guy in terms of one of the guys He was date maybe dating who knows In terms of his own sexual orientation but In terms of whatever he was pulling it is Just a complete pathology Of you know every once in a while these people Do exist and the really crazy part is not that only

They exist but they succeed in our Society so I don't even know what that says about us Yeah and the reason why Sagar is questioning whether even you know The way he portrayed his sexuality is accurate is because he apparently had a seven year secret marriage to a woman. He appears to at least be bi because there are, you know, men who come out or at least one man who's come out now and said he had a romantic relationship with them. I don't I mean,, I just don't know at this point, but the other piece of it that's really fascinating to me is, you know, Santos just told everyone exactly what

they wanted to hear. So he portrayed himself in his congressional campaign as this, you know, trailblazing. He said he is the American dream and, you know, really push forward this identity that would be inspiring to people and maybe win over some liberal voters, because this was a swing district. He was not really actually expected to win in this New York district, mostly Long Island and part of Queens. And so he, I'm sure, told wealthy donors what they wanted to hear. He told the Republican Jewish coalition what they wanted to hear. He told people on Twitter what they wanted to hear. He told people on Twitter

what they wanted to hear or what was convenient for them. And so I also think in a way it's a sort of profound indictment of identity and personality driven politics, because you shouldn't be able to get away with winning congressional office just based on your own personal bio and narrative. It should be about what you're going to do and what you believe in and what you ultimately stand for. And he sort of figured out that, no, the thing that really matters is that I have the right story to tell. And that he probably lied to some donors to get him to funnel in these hundreds of thousands of dollars as well to get him across the finish line. So, you know, I'm fascinated in him and his psychological profile. I personally feel guilty when I even like get something a little bit wrong

on the show or whatever. So to imagine crafting this whole invented life story is just beyond my capability to imagine being able to do that. But then I also think there's like an indictment of our mode of politics here as well, that this dude was able to slip through and win enough votes to become a member of Congress. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that's the main meta story to me. I'm like, the fact is that he fooled everybody and it really just wasn't that hard. He's one of the most transparent frauds, you know, in modern history, especially given the fact that the Democratic Party apparently didn't even do any basic opposition research. And even the Republican Party, I mean, wouldn't you want to run a background check on somebody after they've

secured the primary? It was one of the like a, you know, some sort of drunk private investigator could have easily uncovered this in a matter of hours. And yet, you know, it took all the way until he officially won. And now he's going to be a congressman in the House. And yet, you know, it took all the way until he officially won. And now he's going to be a congressman in the House. I guess, you know, crazier stuff has happened. It's the people's house. Apparently, there were some Republicans who before the election had made some comments like they didn't want to touch this guy with a 10 foot pole, that they were had some real questions about the way he was portraying his business background,

but they just didn't sort of like dig really deeply because again, they didn't really expect him to win. And also, frankly, they don't really care. If he did win, then they get his vote. And that was what they were ultimately most interested in. So they certainly weren't interested in blowing the lid off this guy. And then the Democrats, the DCCC, you'll love this, their briefing book, they did do opposition research on him. And the thing that their briefing book really pointed out and that the Democratic candidate really ran on was some like comment he made about January 6th. So that's what they they leaned into something he said about January 6th.

So they just went with the like January 6th was bad line of attack. Um, and just completely missed the fact that everything about this man was a total and complete lie. And like a simple Google search or a single phone call could have revealed that he was an utter and complete fraud. So just an amazing story. It actually fits well with our next segment here about Trump taxes, about who exactly Donald Trump is, how did he make his money, what exactly do his tax returns show us? There are two kind of attack vectors. One, which I think was totally legitimate, was Trump, by his own admission, gamed the tax code to effectively pay very little in taxes despite having a multi-billion dollar net worth. Two was one which really became the main vector of attack for 2017 onwards, that one of the reasons that Trump was hiding his tax returns was because it showed some purported connection to the Russian

government. So we'll play you the first one, which shows you that Trump very clearly lied to the American people during the presidential debate. And then the second one, which shows you that the media obviously lied. Let's start with the first one. I know that you pay a lot of other taxes, but I'm asking you the specific question. Is it true that you paid $750 in federal income taxes each of those two years? I paid millions of dollars in taxes, millions of dollars of income tax. And let me just tell you, there was a story in one of the papers. I paid $38 million one year. I paid $27 million one year. I went, you'll see it as soon as it's finished. You'll see it. You know, if you want to do, go to the Board of Elections. There's 118 page or so report that says everything I have,

every bank I have, I'm totally under leveraged because the assets are extremely good. And we have a very, we have, I built a great company. Sir, I'm asking you a specific question, which is. But let me tell you. I understand all of that. I understand all of that. No, Mr. President, I'm asking you a question. Will you tell us how much you paid in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017? Millions of dollars. You paid millions of dollars? Millions of dollars. So not $750. Millions of dollars. And you'll get to see it. Well, Crystal, it turns out actually he only paid $750 that year. Just a little bit of a shocker. Also, it turns out actually he only paid seven hundred and fifty dollars that year. Just a little bit of a shocker. Also, it does show us very clearly.

And I want to make this much less about Trump and his lying. This is how the tax code is written for the super rich. That means that you're like average working class person in payroll taxes is paying more than many of the people who are on the Forbes 400 list. Let that sink in. So I think it's a much more of a meta commentary. And it is hilarious because now that we do have his tax returns, we can see clearly that he did lie about that. And actually, the major mega story of the tax returns from Donald Trump is that these people in the real estate business are pulling all kinds of insane shenanigans, which he also enabled for himself in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that enable them to just write off outrageous sums of money. Put 2020 aside because that showed genuine losses

at the Trump organization, which makes sense during hotels. In normal boom years, which by of his own admission, the economy was doing well. He was not paying even close to the amount that the average American citizen pays in income taxes or in taxes in general to the government. It's absolutely disgusting that you can get away with as wealthy of a person as he is paying $750 or paying $0 in certain tax years, or even like less than a million dollars, considering how much he supposedly is earning and how wealthy he supposedly is. You know, it's very hard to tell because there are so many loopholes and so many ways that you

can engineer your income if you're as wealthy as he is to make it appear as if you're taking losses or make it appear as if you're not earning much in a given year. It's very hard to tell ultimately how successful his businesses were during this period, how much he really made, did he really lose money, all of those things. One analyst that I read said that his taxes are extraordinarily complicated. He has this whole complex web of companies and offshore entities and all of these tax planning devices. And this analyst said, it's very hard to tell whether or not he was a poor businessman or whether he's basically like, you know, conning the tax code, because each of these entities would make a very small profit.

And it was sort of precisely calculated so that you would pay the minimal of taxes. So there's certainly some red flags here in terms of potential tax fraud, but nothing that is definitive. And this gets to your other meta point about the tax code and about the problem with the IRS that we've been covering for quite a while. They are much more likely to go after a waitress who is not recording all of her cash tips for audit than someone like Donald Trump, who creates this entire complex web of entities in order to minimize their tax burden, because that requires so much more resources because they have so many well-paid lawyers behind them to fight you tooth and nail. And so ultimately the IRS, which has been stripped of funding time and

time again over the years and is operating at bare bones, instead of going after the wealthy, they go after the lower paid working class person because it's the lowest hanging fruit. And then as you point out to cyber, like just the fact that the tax code even enables this type of behavior is utterly disgusting. And Donald Trump is far from the only plutocrat who engages in these types of very questionable tax planning behaviors. Yes. And that is the point that the Democrats probably should have been talking about for the last five years. Instead, this is what people on MSNBC were hearing during the Trump years about Trump's taxes. This single source close to Deutsche Bank has told me that the Trump, Donald Trump's loan documents there show that he has co-signers. That's how

he was able to obtain those loans and that the co-signers are Russian oligarchs. What? Really? Really? Actually, no. It turns out that's actually not true at all. We have just now gotten all of the Trump tax returns. Now the House Financial Services Committee weighs in means and all those have their information. Actually, you know, somebody said this, Crystal, that this is going to start a precedent where Congress will have access to the tax returns going back all the way for every president. And I was like, great, that's awesome. If the president doesn't want to release it, let Congress release it. I don't care. That should be public record for everybody. In fact, they really should just pass a law that you have to basically disclose, I would say, not even five years, I would say over the last 20 years,

before you become president, specifically to make sure that we don't have to go through all of these shenanigans. And I think really, if we'll put the last part up here on the screen, the meta takeaway is exactly what we have laid out here. Donald Trump engaged in the exact same tax planning as every rich person and mega rich person in America. He has links to several foreign accounts and others, all of which linked to various LLCs designed specifically to lower his taxable donations, including charitable donations and others strategically placed to make sure that the tax burden is as little as humanly possible. And that the real takeaway here should be that the IRS, which right now, you know, has all these, has all of these rules about reporting Venmo transactions over $600 and others that they're continued, you know, really persecution

of poor people and going after them. Meanwhile, you know, the unit which is charged with going after some of the 10 wealthiest Americans has been far less effective and far less active in the last decade. I think that is a genuine crime. And it just shows us that we got to get out of this whole funding the IRS or not and try and focus on boosting the exact entities within the organization and the government, which go after the super rich, who of course are avoiding, you know, beyond the fact that what they legally owe is already very low. They don't even pay that. It's hundreds of millions of dollars of which are going unpaid in taxes. And instead, you know, people's Venmo transactions are the ones that are being looked at. Remember, Sagar, when was it the Pandora papers that were released that revealed all of the tax

cheating behavior of the world's richest? And in the analysis of those papers, they said, basically, there aren't a lot of US persons here because the US tax code is set up such that you can basically hide your assets using all of these tax loopholes and owe zero dollars in taxes. So you don't have to engage in the same like offshoring behavior that the world's other oligarchs engage in to cheat their own country's taxes. So it's an enforcement issue because you do have a lot of wealthy people who are tax cheats and just expect that they can get away with it or let most get a slap on the wrist. And it's also a tax code issue that there are so many loopholes available to them to basically pay zero dollars in taxes. And given the level

of inequality in the country in particular, it's just disgusting that we continue to persist in that regime when we supposedly have a progressive taxation system. In reality, when it comes to the wealthiest of the wealthy, that is just so far from the case. Oh, it's a complete lie, a complete and a total lie. And it fits very well and neatly with our next story, the Jeffrey Epstein saga. So we have some very interesting and new information. I've always thought that this, the Virgin Islands could be one of the areas where their prosecutors and their team very much wanted to try and get to the bottom of this. And a new filing in the U.S. Attorney's Office is devastating for one of the major financial

institutions in the country. Let's put this up there on the screen. Epstein's sex trafficking was aided by J.P. Morgan. This is according to a new lawsuit from the U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General's office that was filed in the Southern District of Manhattan on Tuesday. suspicious activities and actually provided the financier with services reserved for high wealth clients even after a 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution in Palm Beach, Florida. They specifically say that they have information which has revealed that J.P. Morgan knowingly, negligently, and unlawfully provided and pulled the levers through which recruiters and victims were paid and was indispensable to the operation and concealment of the Epstein trafficking enterprise. So why does all of this matter? We should go back and remember a New York financial services

department fine of JP Morgan, of Deutsche Bank, and of other financial institutions, which showed specifically that the banks were involved in a collusion process to go after Epstein's business and specifically facilitated his own transactions from the United Statesicanery that if you you're supposed to call the feds and they engage in regular behavior where they would try and withdraw as much cash as possible without triggering an automatic regulatory informing to federal authorities. This is just the tip of the iceberg. What the U.S. Virgin Islands is doing here is revealing it at the major meta financial institutional level, of which remember, we have no transparency outside of that financial services fine that happened for Deutsche Bank in I think it was in 2021. We have no more clarity because the Glenn Maxwell trial focused on crimes. And I'm not saying these weren't valid, but on things that

happened in so far limited in scope. And so long time ago, the actual architect of all of the power networks, the people like Leon Black, the billionaires, the Wall Street, the financial institutions, all of it remains outside of public record. So this is a very important case that's happening here. Yeah, I mean, the Ghislaine Maxwell trial, I think it's pretty clear, was engineered to protect as many powerful people as possible while still putting her in prison because the public was just not going to accept her ultimately going through, going free. institutions. Keep in mind, like maybe before he was a convicted sex offender, maybe you could sort of turn a blind eye and make up some innocent reason for these strange transactions. But they continued to do business with him and seek out business with him after he's a convicted sex offender. And these are sophisticated institutions. You don't think that they don't know what suspicious financial transactions look like, what they are supposed to report under the law in terms of suspicious financial transactions. So it really is disgusting. All they cared about ultimately was the money.

And then the next twist in this story is this attorney general for the Virgin Islands, who's been seems to be pretty dogged in her pursuit of accountability and exposing the enablers of the Jeffrey Epstein sex crimes ring. She was fired from her job for filing this lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase. ahead and put this piece up on the screen here. She was fired days after suing JP Morgan Chase over the Jeffrey Epstein ties. And it says in the article, I mean, they out and out acknowledged that this was the reason for her dismissal. They didn't even try to make up like, oh no, it had something to do with her other conduct and it really had nothing to do with Epstein.

No, they were like, no, this caught us off guard. And so we relieved her of her duty. So even from the grave, this man is still being protected, but more to the point, all of the powerful people who were caught up in this or who enabled this and chose to look the other way or were active participants, they continue to be protected at the highest levels. Yes.

I want to underscore again that Denise George, the attorney general here who was fired, has been really courageous on this investigation for years now. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. It's a news item from a couple of years ago, but it shows you that in an initial lawsuit that she actually filed, they allege that Epstein was trafficking girls as young as 12 years old to the U. that the Virgin Islands actually just came to with the Epstein estate to claw back, quote, more than $80 million in economic development tax benefits that Epstein and co-defendants had fraudulently obtained from U.S. Virgin Islands and other authorities to actually use to then fund his sex trafficking enterprise. I also want to read a quote from the lawsuit that she filed before she

was fired. These decisions were advocated and approved at the senior levels of JP Morgan, who facilitated and concealed wire and cash transactions that raised suspicious of and weren't packed part of a criminal enterprise whose currency was the sexual servitude of dozens of women and girls in and beyond the U.S. Virgin Islands. This lawsuit is, again, the tip of the iceberg. And if it actually was allowed to proceed, we would have gotten financial statements, subpoenas, possibly a senior J.P. Morgan executives, account managers, some of the other sophisticated financial chicanery that Epstein and all of his coterie were involved in.

I mean, I still have so many questions. If we'll all remember Leon Black, who was the head of the Apollo Group, he was one of the richest men in the United States, one of the most powerful people on Wall Street. And he paid him some $100 million for, quote, tax advice. And the way that he paid him that $100 million was through the Shell Corporation that owned his private jet to Jeffrey. I mean, this and then Bill Gates. I mean, Bill Gates' own divorce, as Melinda Gates has now come out and said, was because

she was understanding the level of his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein, not just some one chance meeting. We're talking about behind closed doors, even allegedly in some cases complaining about his marriage. And he's known to have been involved in affairs also while he was married. So some of the world's richest and most powerful men aren't snared in this. And none of it yet has come to light. And he's been dead. I'll just say dead will say for the circumstances for later for several years now. I mean, it's just completely crazy. This was one of the only chances that we really had.

And now she's been fired. And, you know, I'll let you surmise about why exactly that would happen. Yeah, very well said. OK, now it's finally we couldn't help but cover this. The new year, it was rang in. For some reason, many of the cable news networks believe that people want to watch them while they are ringing in the new year. And I guess if you're at least going to go to the trouble of doing a new year show, should you not then engage in a countdown, you know, and actually with the revelry, the ball drop, or if you don't have the ball drop, some sort of big celebration of the moment. Instead, CNN's Don Lemon actually did not ring in the new year at all. They forgot the countdown, presumably because of the time zone difference, because they

were in New Orleans. They had music that was going on and completely did not acknowledge the change of the new year in any way. Let's take we started. That's how we started. Y'all ready for this countdown? So you missed the countdown. I missed the countdown. And as you said, Crystal, they're not even allowed to drink anymore.

So he can't even blame being wasted he was just straight up bad at his job you know i think we need to end these cable news once we need to have one maybe two i personally i watched the miley and dolly parton show it was in fun i enjoyed it um you know miley and dolly they're entertainers they're exactly the people who i want to ring the new year in uh with why would anyone want to watch CNN's Don Lemon do this? And I guess the only previous time was with Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffin is when they were getting completely wasted on the air. And people were like, OK, well, you know, this is at least kind of amusing and fun. But he wasn't even drunk. He was completely sober and he was completely unable to ring in the new year.

I think it's a metaphor for CNN and for the future of that network, hopefully in this year, or maybe I'm just projecting one of my new year's resolutions onto them. I hope so. I hope so. It's like you had one job, one job to let people know when it is midnight, do a little countdown. That's it. That's the whole reason that people were there and you failed at it. I mean, I would love to fully blame Don Lemon, but I can't because I really think this is more of a, like, you should have a producer telling you we need to throw to the countdown now. And it's possible, listen, having been in the city that it was like loud and you didn't hear whatever, but what an incredible fuck up that you missed the midnight countdown on New

Year's Eve. So perfect way, perfect way for CNN to ultimately ring in the new year. I don't know the Dolly part in my life. Do they do that every year? They do it. It was on Peacock. I'm a huge Dolly fan.

So that I might, I might be willing to watch. You're looking at a cord. Also, I was staying in an Airbnb with my friends. Literally, you know, every classic Airbnb has like Roku TV or whatever. And I was like, oh, Peacock. And then it was, I seen the day before.

It was like Miley and Dolly Parton. I was like, oh, that looks fun. This will be an interesting one. They did a great job. So shout out to Miley and to Dolly Parton for helping me personally ring in the new year. Yeah. So Kyle hadn't watched game of Thrones. So I've been rewatching game of Thrones with him.

So we watched two game of Thrones episodes. The second one got us to 1201. And then I was, I was out. I was actually shocked. I made it. I made it to midnight to be honest with you. So there you go. I was proud of myself for that. Well, that's how the two of us rang in the new year. I can't say I lasted too far long after 12, but that was largely because of activities

that were partook in earlier. Earlier in the- Anyway, it was a fun time. Shout out again to the city of Austin for treating me very, very well. And may we have many more CNN failures to come in 2023. Well, everyone, as you can see, I'm on the road. It's been a nightmare not only for me, but for millions of others with the travel cancellations and the chaos in the skies.

But what did our Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg promise before the holidays? Take a listen. Do you think this issue will be sorted in time for the holidays? I think it's going to get better by the holidays. We're really pressing the airlines to deliver better service. Despite Secretary Buttigieg's promises, that's actually not what happened at all. Instead, there was a complete meltdown in the skies. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. Most of it attributable to Southwest Airlines, which canceled

at one point 50% of all flights globally, 85% of all flights in the United States, stranding millions of passengers at airports, causing chaos, luggage, losing it. People I personally know had to drive hours across the country in order to see their families and loved ones. I personally witnessed this at Austin Airport, even days after when I was in town for New Year's. I saw hundreds of bags that were still stranded at the airport waiting to be picked up by Southwest passengers. None of this should have happened and all of it was completely preventable. The Secretary of Transportation completely failed in readiness conditions for the airlines ahead of the holidays.

There was no audit that was completed of Southwest Airlines. There were no fines and others that were levied. On top of that, Southwest, the company itself, is now the portrait of corporate greed. On December 7th, 2022, put this up there on the screen, they went ahead and issued a dividend to all stockholders and announced that they had no signs of slowdown in travel demand and that they were well prepared for the holiday season. The CEO of Southwest specifically said that on his earnings call with stock investors. And literally only days later during the holidays, they have one of the greatest meltdowns of travel in modern American history.

They used none of the pandemic relief money, which was given to them to not only keep their staff on, but to reinvest in their business. Presumably they have a high enough profit in order to pay about dividend, but they don't have a high enough profit to actually make sure that their staffing system is not antiquated. They didn't pour any of the money into customer service very clearly. They were not covering hotels and others because they claimed that the cancellation was due to weather, even though the weather affected every other airline in the country. And somehow they were the only ones who had a complete and a total meltdown. to all of this as well. It's really middle-class and lower middle-class people who are visiting families and taking advantage of the cheaper and the discount airlines, as well as the free check bag policy, who are the ones who are most affected by this. Business travelers and others with status and others usually fly the big three carriers. So when you consider that it's that group of which

needs air travel every once in a while and really only at the holidays, but saves up over a long period of time. They're the ones who are the completely and totally just destroyed by this. Many of them had to just cancel their flight completely. Many just didn't go. Some had to spend a hundred dollars potentially in savings to rent a car. This caused just havoc and wreaked it across everyone. And I think it's really important for people to understand just how terrible it was for a lot of, I was lucky, you know, none of my flights were canceled, but several hour delays were experienced, not necessarily due to weather, many cases due to, let's just say incompetence on the part of crew planning and many of these other things, but just seeing some of this, you know, firsthand people at hours long lines and having, you know, personal friends and others that were really affected by this. It's not, it's ruining because it takes away a precious time that in many cases,

people save up for the entire year. They plan their vacation time. They plan everything around the ability to make sure they can get to their destination. And Southwest itself actually bills itself as a family-friendly airline with the free check bags, low prices, and all of that. And this is what they give their customers in the middle of the only real time that most Americans need them to actually function. It wasn't the weather. It was their piss-poor planning. It was their piss-poor business, really, because they invested more in their stock price than in their actual

infrastructure. And a lot of people paid the price on this. It's really just not right. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, I have another little dispatch from the billionaire and boss class. It appears they're getting a little upset. They feel like the peasants are getting a little uppity. They're complaining a bit about their rations. They're lo and behold demanding that they actually get paid for the work that they do. Crazy stuff, I know. Let me start with this first piece. This is the billionaire founder of Home Depot. Put this up on the screen. A guy named

Bernie Marcus. And in a new interview, it was with the Financial Times. This is the New York Post write-up of it. He says that socialism killed motivation to work and that nobody gives a damn. Let me give you some of the specifics here. He said, quote, I'm worried about capitalism. Thanks to socialism, nobody works. Nobody gives a damn. Just give it to me. Send me money. I don't want to work.

I'm too lazy. I'm too fat. I'm too stupid. He goes on to list what he claims are some of the obstacles to entrepreneurial success in the US today. They include human resource executives, government bureaucrats, regulators, socialists, Harvard graduates, MBAs, Harvard MBAs,

lawyers, accountants, Joe Biden, the media, and quote, the woke people. So he's claiming that people don't want to work anymore and it's socialism to blame, which is weird because we don't have socialism and communism was crushed and defeated. It's not really an ongoing project really anywhere in the world. You have Joe Biden, who's a total neoliberal centrist who is very pro-capitalism running the country. So hard to see exactly what he is talking about there. But it seems like the billionaire and the boss class

are getting increasingly frustrating because there was this other piece in the Wall Street Journal that certainly caught my attention. Put this up on the screen. They have this headline, your co-workers are less ambitious. Bosses adjust to the new order. The tweet that they sent out with this article had an even more rage-inducing headline, which was, bosses all over the US are asking the same question, where have all the go-getters gone? And there are a lot of sort of delightfully rage-inducing quotes in here of managers who are shocked and dismayed that their workers might actually expect to be fairly compensated for their labor. I love this anecdote in particular from this company, Zed Digital. They talked to one of the managers who said,

since the onset of the pandemic, several employees have asked for more pay when managers ask that they do more work. It was not like that before COVID at all. So imagine the audacity of workers wanting to get paid for the work that they are ultimately doing. Outside of the sort of rage-inducing boss class quotes that are in this piece and the assumption that it's a bad thing for workers to be actually asking to be compensated for their work, there were some really interesting statistics about the way that the pandemic has changed people's relationship to their workplace. Now, this is focused on white-collar workers, but we've, of course, been tracking here the way that blue-collar workers have been standing up for themselves as well. Service workers, you think about the Starbucks workers, the warehouse workers

at Amazon and other places. So this is really kind of a reckoning that's happening at every level of wage-earning society. But they had some statistics here that showed it was not just a phenomenon among millennials and Gen Z. This really crosses generational barriers where people after the pandemic reoriented their life priorities. ambitions have waned over the past three years. You've got 40% who say that work has become less important to them in the past three years. An American Bar Association survey of about 2,000 members said that 44% of young lawyers said they would leave their jobs for a greater ability to work remotely elsewhere. And you ask yourself why you've had this reckoning. I mean, for white collar workers, I are pessimistic about people's ability to achieve the American dream. So there's also a sense of, let's say I get in there and grind. Let's say I get in there and take on the extra hours and work the overtime and ask for the extra shifts, and all of that stuff, I have no confidence that that's going to lead me anywhere. Because increasingly, in our capitalist system, those

paths to solid middle class prosperity have been closed. So to go back to our billionaire friend here at the beginning, who says the problem with workers being lazy and not having that get up and go and just wanting it all handed to them, it's not socialism. It's actually the mode of capitalism that we have that funnels so much wealth to Bernie Marcus and others and forecloses the ability of people lower down the chain to be able to work and rise up the ladder. So a lot of workers, white collar workers included, are saying, screw it. If working hard isn't going to get me anywhere, you know what? I have hobbies and passions and interests that make me who I am, that I can find fulfillment in. And ultimately this path of the grind set and working, working, working, hoping to climb up the ladder, it's uncertain, it's unfulfilling, and I'm ultimately choosing a different path.

So Sagar, I've seen a number of these. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become with us while we're on the road. We'll be back fully in the studio next week. CounterPoints will be in the studio tomorrow. They've got a great show planned for you all that we cover in all the speakership, some of the breaking news, et cetera. We'll have another show for you guys on Thursday, a couple of extra segments as well. And we love you all.

Thanks for bearing with us in the holiday season. God bless you all and happy new year. I think everything that might've dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip-hop it's black music month and we need to talk is tapping in I'm Nyla Simone breaking down lyrics amplifying voices and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives like that's what's really important and that's what stands out is that our music changes people's lives for the better let's talk about the music that moves us. To hear this and more on how music and culture collide,

listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You say you'd never give in to a meltdown. Never let kids' toys take over the house. And never fill your feed with kid photos. You'd never plan your life around their schedule. Never lick your thumb to clean their face. And you'd never let them leave the house looking like less than their best. You say you'd never put a pacifier in your mouth to clean it. Never let them stay up too late.

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