Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 2/26/25: House Passes Medicaid Cuts, DOGE Resignations, Trump Gold Cards, Israel Bombs Syria & MORE!

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

Ryan and Emily discuss House passes budget bill with Medicaid cuts, mass DOGE resignations, Trump to sell citizenship for $5 million, Israel Damascus bombing raid, Zelensky folds on Trump mineral demand, Trump lawyer blocks arrest of GOP Congressmen.   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to BreakingPoints.com, become a member today and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media and we hope to see you at BreakingPoints.com. Welcome to CounterPoints. We always say that we have an amazing show today. We really,

really, really have an amazing show. Brian is so excited. It's incredible. Yeah. There's so much going on in the world. Gold cards. Yes. If you have $5 billion, don't blow it because you can buy an American citizenship for it, according to Trump. Coming soon. All right. Coming soon to a location near you. All right.

So we're going to start with news that actually House Republicans passed a budget resolution last night. We're going to walk everyone through exactly how they got there and what it means, what it could mean for Medicaid, what it could mean for all kinds of stuff. So that's going to be up first. Then we have lots of updates from Doge, as is the case every single day. We learn more about what Doge is up to. Sometimes these reports are conflicting, but we are going to get to the bottom of the last 24 hours in Doge world.

Trump also introduced, as we just teased, a quite interesting idea about $5 million gold cards that could replace visas. And Ryan has some reporting to share from Dropsite on the bombing in Syria that just took place over the course of the last 24 hours. Yeah, Israel launched an air assault over Damascus and its surrounding areas, because why not? And you had just on the ground, Petr Zav was on the ground, right? Yeah. We had him on the show last week. He just returned from Syria. We filed a dispatch last night with Ali Yunus. We're also going to talk about Ukraine agreeing that, okay, you know what? After all, we will sign a deal around rare earth minerals and exploitation of our oil and gas in our ports. They removed the, we're going to take $500 billion of it.

So good negotiation from Zelensky. That's a pretty big sticking point, $500 billion sticking point. Yeah, well, it's nothing. Still no security guarantees. We've got Steve Bannon comments about what Trump should do with that minerals deal as well that we'll get to. And meanwhile, prosecutors are being rather shy in how they approach a domestic violence case where a Republican member of Congress was, according to police reports, bruised up his not wife, but girlfriend who lives here in dc and she decided

she is now deciding not to press charges although there's so much evidence that seems like they really should be able to press charges the police were able to see the bruises it's pretty like which is you know that's at least like hey you're coming with us type of evidence. Yep, yep. But, yeah, so we'll go into the sordid details of that story, everything we know about it, because it's kind of an interesting story about Ed Martin, who is in the news, very much so in the news, for saying that he sees himself as the president's attorney, as D.C. Yes, he's the U.S. attorney for D.C.,

and he's about as radical a figure that has probably ever been in a job like that. He's hardcore MAGA. He is hardcore MAGA. He claims he was not in the Capitol, right, on January 6th, but he was there and has made his bones as the defender of the hostages, as Trump calls them, and is now just on a complete rampage, except against a Republican congressman who may have beaten their girlfriends. Yeah, we'll see. We will dive into all of that. And man, do we have a Good Friday show. I'm very sorry. I unfortunately have to miss it because I have to get on a flight, but Ryan booked Rohit Chopra. Yeah, Rohit Chopra, the former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and a former FTC commissioner. He kind of paved the way for the Lena Kahn, Andrew Ferguson, bipartisan anti-monopoly wing to take

power in the FTC. Then he went over to the CFPB. Then he was ousted. He's going to respond to all of the various charges that he's gotten over the last several months. Jamie Dimon called him an arrogant POS, I believe, or arrogant SOB. Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Andreessen. He has all the right enemies, and he has them all very angry. So we're going to ask him why and my questions on, so I'm excited to watch and hear how it goes. Let's start with our A block, which is that the House of Representatives passed a budget resolution last night. This is going to go through the reconciliation process to keep using this ridiculous parliamentary language. We can put the first element up on the screen. This is the vote total. Look at that razor-thin margin. The vote was 217 to 215. The one and only Thomas Massey, American hero, in my opinion, was the only Republican to vote no, not because Thomas Massey had any issue with the proposed tweaks to Medicaid, of course, but because it adds to the debt. And Thomas Massey is a hawk on that and is always ideologically consistent. Now, what's interesting is that

there were three Republicans throughout the day yesterday who said they were absolutely nos. Mike Johnson was able to flip two of them, Warren Davidson. With the help of Trump. With the help of Trump, Warren Davidson and Victoria Sparks. So now this bill heads over to the Senate, where it will have to obviously deal with some of the same concerns about Medicaid. Someone like Susan Collins is not going to be particularly excited to have to vote for what we can get into this in just a moment. What many on the left will say amount to cuts to Medicaid and the right will say is we don't know the particulars of how they'll get to these cuts yet, but basically they'll try to add work requirements and all kinds of different things in all likelihood. Not to be the well actually guy, and we'll roll Massey in one second.

Yeah. It doesn't quite go to the Senate yet. Oh no. You guys want to buckle up for a little parliamentary lesson? Get out your number two pencils because this will be on the test. So the way that this absurd process works is the House floor votes on a budget resolution which sets the outlines for what each committee is supposed to then produce. So it'll say, hey, you, Ways and Means Committee, you do taxes. We want you to cut $4.5 trillion in taxes over the next 10 years. You, Education Committee,

we want you to cut this. You know, over here in the education committee, we want you to cut this. Over here in the health committee, we want you to cut this much Medicaid, et cetera. Like they just give a flat line. They don't tell them how to do it, they say just do it. Then the committees all meet and they pass their individual pieces. Then the budget committee reconciles all of that

into one place. Then they send that back to the House floor. And then they vote yes or no on that. And then they kick it over to the Senate. And so the Senate is undergoing its own process of reconciliation as well. The difference being they are not dealing with that $4.5 trillion in tax cuts. They're trying to only do the spending cuts. And that's why you keep seeing Trump saying that he wants one big, beautiful bill.

And what he means by that is that he wants the tax cuts and the spending cuts all done together. Now, Massey, the reason he's a no on this is that you might have noticed that the numbers, $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and what was it, $1.5 or $2.5? It's all made up. So it doesn't really matter what these numbers are because these are projected out over 10 years and involve these projections that nobody takes seriously. $1.5, yeah. Yeah, $1.5. So even in their rosiest scenario, they're saying that they're going to cut $1.5 trillion in spending.

Don't worry, only bad things, waste, fraud, and abuse. Not the things that you like. And then they're going to do $4.5 trillion in tax cuts. So here's Thomas Massey explaining why he voted no on this. Can you just talk to us? Are you still a no? Is there anything? They convinced me in there. I'm a no. Is there anything? Look, let me, their own numbers, if the Republican plan passes

under the rosiest assumptions, which aren't even true, we're going to add $328 billion to the deficit this year. We're going to add $295 billion to the deficit the year after that, and $242 billion to the deficit after that, and $242 billion dollars to the deficit after that, under the rosiest assumptions. Why would I vote for that? So are you solidly a no? Yeah, they convinced me. I was a lean no until this meeting. Not a no. This no confirmed you were a no. All right, so Emily, what am I missing? That's a very persuasive argument from the right.

Yeah, I mean, the only possible rebuttal to that from the right is that if this is your stance, you literally can't vote for anything. Yeah. Because you will just not get anything done. Which he doesn't. Yeah, right, he doesn't, which is perfectly consistent. So, yeah, I mean, if you won't, I mean, it's obviously a sliding scale of, like, horribles. But basically, if that's your ideological position, you're consistent in it to your point. The counterargument is, come on, bro.

Yeah, the counterargument is really. Come on, we got to do something, bro. Yeah, we got to do something. But that actually is the counterargument. That's literally the counterargument that you'll get from people like Mike Johnson, who used to be sort of Freedom Caucus adjacent, like Massey's Freedom Caucus adjacent. But those guys obviously now face looking at this huge addition, as Massey pointed out. Let's take a look at how Democrats are reacting, particularly to what's been going on Medicaid-wise. This is AOC. Let's roll A3. There's a fundamental math problem here.

There is a constant reiteration of waste, fraud, and abuse. Sure, that's great. What is the identified amount of waste that this committee has identified? Because the order that's been sent down here is find $880 billion. Not there is $880 billion of waste, fraud, and abuse. It's find $880 billion. And so we have not heard a single concrete number of the amount of waste that's been identified. We have not heard a single concrete number on the amount of abuse that's been identified. And there's just kind of this vague magic wand around waste, to my colleague from

California's point. And waste is being used as a very large word here, because what's being suggested is that long-term care is wasteful in America. That children's health insurance is wasteful in America. That poor people seeing the doctor is a waste. That all of these people are disposable. That the elderly are disposable. So I think the problem here is that the numbers don't add up. And anyone who votes on this budget this week is voting to cut Medicaid in America and voting to gut health care for Medicare recipients in America. There's just

no other way around it. And with that, I yield back. So that's obviously a temperature check from the left flank. Let's tune into the center left flank. Here's Hakeem Jeffries. Children will be devastated. Families will be devastated. People with disabilities will be devastated. Seniors will be devastated. Hospitals will be devastated. Nursing homes will be devastated. So let me be clear. House Democrats will not provide a single vote to this reckless Republican budget. Not one. Not one. Not one. They will not get a single Democratic vote. Why? Because we're voting with the American people.

We're voting with the American people. So, Ryan, what's really interesting about that is this Republican resolution, as it heads through the reconciliation process, has a really easy giveaway to Democrats in terms of political unity when it comes to Medicaid. And Republicans are really bad at explaining, quote, waste, fraud, and abuse as not, like pushing back on the allegation that that's a cut as opposed to reform. They're really bad at making that case. Like with Medicaid, the media isn't being super helpful here, but if you dig into what they say they're going to do, it is more like cutting down on, they say it's like waste, fraud, and abuse, but if you look at it and say, okay, so you want to add work requirements and all of that, and we can disagree with it, but the word cuts, they should at least be smart enough to try to find a workaround politically to try and find a workaround to that, but they don't.

Yeah, and I'll give you my theory on why I think they can't do it, and it's because they don't like the program. Yes, fundamentally, yes. program. And in fact, Steve Bannon on his show had to remind his audience and Republican lawmakers with them that there are MAGAs, as he says, there are MAGAs on Medicaid. Implicit in that. He said a lot. And that's right. Implicit in that is it's just not those poor Democrats that you think about, poor black Democrats that you think about. Like in your head, when a Republican is thinking about Medicaid, and a lot of people think about Medicaid, that's what they think about. So he's telling them, okay, if that's what you think about, I understand why you want to cut it, but it's not just them. It's also MAGAs

that are on it. So you start from that premise, that they don't actually like the program, and they don't like the people who are on the program. So the way that they want to cut the program is to reduce the number of people that get the program. And the way they do that is they throw up a bunch of paperwork requirements and also this work requirement, which would say you have to work 20 hours in order to get Medicaid. And if you can't find work, you basically have to come to some community center and sit there on a computer or something and just wasting your time so that they can feel good about making you feel bad about getting the assistance that they're giving you. And so they tried this in Georgia

and they spent like $70 million on this like pilot program and ended up just having 6,500 people in it. So it costs an enormous amount of money to set up these projects and programs to monitor all of these people. And then you don't actually, you're spending enormous amounts of money per individual when it would be so much easier to just say, hey, if you're under this threshold, you get this money. Now, the other way that you could cut spending on this program is to go after the businesses and the scam artists that are ripping it off. And there is an enormous amount of waste in Medicaid and Medicare. It's one of them in the Senate, isn't it? On that front. Yes, one of the guys in the Senate, Rick Scott from Florida, ran the largest Medicare scam in American history. And the way you do a Medicare scam or a Medicaid scam is,

like I heard recently about a Medicaid one in New York where people were saying, like a dentist will do these, others will say, we'll give you a toaster for free if you will come in and sign a piece of paper that says I pulled your tooth or whatever, and then I submit this. You could invest money in inspectors and probably AI at this point, analyzing the different payment schemes and finding this fraud and targeting it and prosecuting it and going after it. I think the reason that Republicans won't do that is it would make the program work better. And as I said in the beginning, they don't like the program. Because what that would do is it would solidify it.

And it would make people feel better about the program. And so they would support it more. But there is indeed, you could, so it's $880 billion that they're trying to cut over 10 years. I think you could actually do that without hurting individual people. But you would have to stand up a serious program of investigation. Hey, guess what? There's like 150,000 federal workers who are well-trained that were just fired. You can go hire them to do that at pennies, just continuing to pay their salaries. Actually, a lot of them are on administrative leave now or unemployment, so we're paying them anyway. We're just paying them not to work. So pay them, put them to work,

go find the fraud. It was much easier to do Medicare and Medicaid fraud before we have the technology that we do now. If you're some South Florida scam operation and you've stolen a bunch of Medicare numbers that you can find online. What they do is they steal these numbers. They pretend that they sold wheelchairs to them. They charge $7,000 for 100,000 wheelchairs. They cash the check, move the money, shut down, and then start up a new thing and do it again. I'm not a technologist, but it's got to be pretty easy to figure out how to make somebody prove that you actually did sell and have something to do with making wheelchairs or selling wheelchairs. Did you do it or not?

I mean, scooters is the big one. It's very sad how, like, these grifts are so convenient for the political establishment. Like, this is also part of the reason. These are donors. are so convenient for the political establishment. Like this is also part of the reason. It's part of the reason Democrats are hesitant to like be super, like to take a scalpel to Medicaid too is that there's all kinds of people who benefit from the system. The people who benefit least

are the people who need it. These are our heralded small business owners. Yes, exactly. The people who obviously need it most. And so as long as you have the inertia where the system feels like it's working well enough and people aren't rioting in the streets, then you end up with just like the worst system ever. Right, because Democrats are unwilling to go after it because then they'll get accused of cutting Medicaid. In fact, in Obamacare, one of the good things that Obamacare

did was cut Medicare Advantage, which is this privatized version of Medicare, which is absolutely rife with scams. And so they went in and said, we're going to pull out some of the BS profit from Medicare Advantage, which is a good thing to do for everybody except the scammers who are making that fake profit. Yep. And they spent the next 10 years with Republicans complaining that they cut Medicare. It's amazing, right? It's like, wait a minute, what? But on the other hand, yeah, so this is the problem. It's like Republicans will say, like to AOC's point where she's saying they don't like,

you know, this is poor people are disposable, elderly people are disposable. The principle of ideological conservative response to that is actually they end up paying more for worse care. That's what the actual conservative argument is. And if you believe that, you also don't have many incentives to come up with a better solution, which is what we've seen for the past 10 plus years of the Republican Party after the repeal and replace era, where there was nothing ever to repeal and replace with because Republicans couldn't agree on anything. There's just no incentives to either go fully—there's no good way to operate a system that aligns with the Republican Party's donor-aligned incentives.

And it's like, sadly, the worst possible—I mean, if you look at studies on happiness, like they've gone into indigenous communities that have barely been touched by technology and found that one of the constants, two things that keep people happy, community, like knowing that you have family around you and friends around you and health. So if you have your, if you feel like you have your health covered, you feel comfortable with that, which most people in this country don't, like one in five people are actually on Medicaid in this country. It's a very, very high number. And I'm sure it's a lot higher in some really deep red states. That's, I mean, that's extremely precarious. It's not comfortable. It's very nerve wracking. And the people who make these policies don't understand that. Yeah. And so if you noticed when you had your number two pencil

out and I was explaining this process, obviously none of this is going to get done by March 14th, which is the deadline for the government shutdown. But that's actually a separate track just to add a layer of complexity to this. So you've probably heard the news talking a lot about, hey, March 14th, if they don't pass budget by March 14th, then the government shuts down. That actually is not related to what happened last night. What happened last night is setting the 10-year projections and the spending and tax policy for 10 years going forward, basically 2026 on. So on a separate track, they're pushing forward

with what they're trying to do with these budget cuts and to actually kind of codify the Doge cuts, which is what I think they should do. You're going to do this. You do it the right way. Do it through Congress. Who knows what they'll be able to cobble together. The Republicans, you tell me, seem to be signaling quietly, OK, we're going to do a CR, which is a continuing resolution. We're going to complain between now and March 14th. We're going to say we're not going to do a CR.

We're going to denigrate the entire idea of doing a CR. And then when we've tried everything else on March 13th at 11.59 p.m., we're going to do a CR, which is a continuing resolution, which continues spending levels at a set level. Basically, I think they'll do it through September 30th. And then Russ Vogt, Elon Musk, and the others are going to take that amount of spending and what they're signaling privately and somewhat publicly is that they see that as a ceiling. So don't worry that it's a big number and you feel like you've been betrayed again. We're not going to spend all that money. We're going to impound a bunch of it. We're going to ask for rescissions from Congress. But the impounded part will then draw lawsuits and it will go to the Supreme Court and they think that that's when they'll get their chance to say that it is actually legal, contrary to the Impoundment Act,

for the president to impound congressional spending. And then that will... Overturn potentially the Impoundment Act. Exactly. Overturn it and then solidify this unitary executive theory that they've been trying to put into practice. So that... And then they go back by September 30th. By then, they hope they'll have passed their reconciliation tax bill. Right? Is that about what they're...

Is that what we can expect, do you think? Yeah, I mean, I think that's probably a pretty good sketch of what will actually end up happening here. You know, also the mentality with the one bill versus two bills, and Mike Johnson won that out, obviously. So far, yeah. Right. So far, right. John Thune wanted to do two bills instead of just one big, beautiful reconciliation bill. Part of the thinking was that you'd be able to put a lot more of the tough stuff in the first bill with the promise of getting the tax cuts or something in the second bill. You would be able, or you could do something the other way around depending on your motivations. But that was a losing argument from Thune. So

we'll see how they can keep these like really narrow majorities in the Senate and the House together to get these votes. It's not going to be easy at all. But once again, Trump is the factor that can get things across the line because, I mean, we've seen this multiple times with nominations in the Senate. He's able to make that math work by threats. One thing that people have talked about is the America PAC that Elon Musk set up that was instrumental in Pennsylvania. That is a sort of Damocles, people have said, hanging over the head of Republicans that's been able to get them in line so far throughout this first month of Donald Trump's presidency, his second presidency.

So we'll see what happens with these votes. But that's very, very powerful going forward. All right. What I like about this show, and I think if you made it through this segment, I think you have a pretty good idea of what's going on here in a pretty weird situation. Should we see if we can keep that up with Doge? I doubt it. Let's take a trip to Doge land. Let's try it out. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no.

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All right, let's start with President Donald Trump, who decided that he was going to clear things up for federal workers, because there's been a very confusing situation where Elon Musk emailed everybody in the government and said, you know, reply to your boss and CCOMB and tell us the five things that you accomplished last week. Very quickly, the FBI, the CIA, you know, DNI, the Pentagon, lots of places that have national security implications were like, maybe it's not such a great idea to put all the information about what you did the last week into a public, you know, basically a publicly available email. I tapped Ryan Grimm's phone. Which will then be uploaded into some deeply insecure AI to have it analyzed.

And Elon Musk's response was, hey, I said don't send classified information. And they're like, okay, thanks. That still doesn't help. We still don't want all of our employees responding and telling Chairman Xi and DeepSeek exactly what they did the last week. So then Elon Musk said, all right, well, screw you. I'm going to ask again next week. And anybody who doesn't do it next week, they're going to be fired, despite what the Secretary of Defense or anybody else might say. So thankfully, there is somebody in charge. Donald Trump decided to clear it up for everybody. Here's the man himself. Can you clarify, hopefully once and for all,

what your expectations are with this email to federal employees? What are you going to use that information for? And do you see it as voluntary, like OPM has said, or mandatory? Well, it's somewhat voluntary, but it's also, if you don't answer, I guess you get fired. What it really is is... What it is is, do people exist?

We have this massive government with millions of people and nobody knows who's working for the government, who's not. So what they're doing is they're sending out a letter to everybody and they're saying, what were the things you did last week? I guess they ask for five. And if people are working, it's easy. I could tell you five things I did last. I could tell you five things I did last week. I could tell you five things I did six weeks ago, right? Well, that's what I call government efficiency right there, right? It's somewhat voluntary, but if you don't do it, you get fired. So it is somewhat voluntary. Okay, so the Secretary of Defense or the Director of National Intelligence tells you, do not do this thing.

The president tells you, it's somewhat voluntary, but if you don't do it, you're fired. I guess. Isn't that what he said? He was like, I guess. So do you do it? I think you do it. It doesn't hurt to do it. Well, except it hurts national security. Well, if you do it, but just be like, hey, to be clear, this is not actually what I did. No, there's no way to know. There's no right answer here. There's no right answer here. I mean, I think you obviously follow the directions of the department head. And some managers have instructed their employees to say, here's the five things you should say. Like, number one, I fulfilled the responsibilities as listed in my job duties. Number two, I coordinated with my manager on my duties and completed those, which is amazing that

you create all of this wasted time for workers and managers to do this in the name of efficiency. There actually have been sort of competing things from Elon Musk, too, who on the one hand is saying that this is just a, quote, pulse check. Like, he's repeatedly said this is just to make sure that you're not dead, right? Like, you're not a fake person. We're cutting down on waste, fraud, and abuse by just getting these responses back. But on the other hand, he's saying, like, and we've seen it from the White House, too, on the messaging, is that, like, we don't think people are doing serious work. So are you supposed to take it as just a pulse check? Or are you supposed to take it as an actual inquiry about the substance of your work?

It's genuinely pretty. There are thousands of people who have faced this conundrum over the course of the past week. Some of them in very important jobs. Others of them probably in less important jobs. if we put B2 up on the screen here, this is a scoop from NBC News, that 21 Doge staffers have resigned over a refusal to, quote, jeopardize American sensitive data, according to a letter that NBC News got. Ryan, did you read this report? It's pretty, it's pretty, I don't know, I think all of this doesn't portend well for the future of Doge, to be honest. So in defense of Doge, these are... Doggy. In defense of Doggy, these are people who were already in the doghouse when the Dog Pound boss

showed up. Because this was the US, what was it called? The Digital Services Office. Yes, yes. Office of Digital Services. And they just repurposed it as doggy. And so these folks are, you know, these are former Google, you know, lots of Silicon Valley tech people who decided they wanted to come work in the government and help the government become more efficient. That's why they went, you know, that's why they took this agency and converted it into Doge. And so these are not diehard Elon Musk fans. Yes. Or these are not MAGA types. So. I mean, it's arguably the deep state that he's targeting. Except, yeah, it's a fairly new deep state. But so to me, it's almost surprising that they lasted this long. So I don't think it's that damaging necessarily to Doggy because I think they can find some pups that'll come in and do their dirty work.

Like there's more than one big balls out in Silicon Valley that they can, you know, there's no shortage of 19-year-olds on 4chan that Musk can, you know, recruit to come and do this work. The response from Elon Musk was, quote, these were Dem political holdovers who refused to return to the office.

They would have been fired had they not resigned. I mean, that's probably true. Katie Miller said, quote, these were full remote workers who hung trans flags from their workplaces. That's the Katie Miller response to this. Again, what grade are we in here? Probably true. Yeah, might be true. So anyway, that's they also named the Doge administrator yesterday. I think it was the Washington Examiner finally got their hands on the name of the person who is the Doge. Like an Obama person. Yes, an Obama person who seemed to have been on vacation, who was formerly part of the USDS. And this is interesting because Elon Musk was seen as the head of Doge.

And then the White House confirmed last week that Elon Musk was not even part of Doge formally, but was employed by the White House and sort of oversaw Doge in his capacity as a White House official, as a special, quote, special government employee. So, anyway, I guess I shouldn't have said that this doesn't portend well for the future of Doge, but it does just, there's an air of chaos around doge that doesn't bother the people involved in it at all I mean, I think a lot of this was always intentionally understandably going to involve chaos Everyone sort of knew that but there's chaos and then there's chaos that's inefficient Ironically and in this case, I do think there's just I mean the the like the email one is a really good example There's chaos to the point of creating inefficiencies to the end of efficiency. Like in the process of creating efficiency, it's just been a very, like it was always going to be messy. But they're creating more work unnecessarily for themselves.

Yeah, it's weird. Like why are they doing this? Why are they doing this weekly email thing? I've seen a lot of people be like, well, there's nothing wrong with a worker telling their boss what they did the last week. It's like, bro, you don you think that managers aren't managing their workers and workers aren't actually doing any work, then you need to come in and tell them to do this. But if you checked in, you'd see, like, this is a bureaucracy. This is a giant bureaucracy.

The one thing that bureaucracies definitely do is this kind of stuff. What did you do? Like, what did you get done last week? Like, who did you check in with? What meetings did you have? It's half the work. It's just having meetings about meetings. Yes, that's half of what a bureaucrat,

and it is the criticism of a bureaucracy. They spend too much time keeping track of that stuff. Right, and so now Musk is going to come in with another TPS report that they have to complete that is supposed to be in the name of efficiency. It's like, so it's so dumb. It raises the question, okay, what are they really doing? What's really going on here? Like, and is it, are they actually trying to create chaos under the old argument that Democrats would always make about Republicans that they don't like government. And so then when they get in power, they make it not work. And then they point to

the fact that it doesn't work under them as reason that you should get rid of the government. Is it really just as simple as that old thing just now dressed up as a sleek cyber truck? As a sleek cyber truck. Wow, that was beautiful. Very poetic. Yeah, that was a very cyber truck. As a sleek cyber truck. Wow, that was beautiful. Very poetic. Yeah, that was a very poetic touch. And you're putting this stuff out for free. Yes.

Well, not if you want it commercial free. If you want it commercial free, go to breakingpoints.com. So Ro Khanna posted a video of a fired VA worker that just in this bigger conversation about inefficiencies, I mean, the email point, I think some of this obviously is intentional. I mean, the Russ vote playbook

was explicitly before the election to cause trauma for bureaucrats. And so, I mean, I think that's obviously the playbook and part of this. But again, there's inefficiencies that are sort of inevitable when you're creating chaos, and then there's inefficiencies that are sort of inevitable when you're creating chaos, and then there's inefficiencies that are hurting your effort to battle inefficiencies. So let's take a look at this video that Ro Khanna posted of some people who have been affected by various cuts. We can roll this. I'm a veteran.

I deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan. Anybody who asked me, you know, I would have told them I was voting for Trump. But at this point, I mean, obviously I never would have expected things to go this far. This was really a job that meant a lot to me. It was a way for me to help veterans that are struggling. I served this country, but now under Trump's executive orders, I'm being discarded like I don't matter. I don't think anybody's opposed to the idea of government efficiency

and really getting rid of wasteful practices, but doing it in such a chaotic manner that leads to people getting fired by the tens of thousands. This was my dream job and it's just being taken away by an administration who doesn't care about science, it doesn't care about people who might be homeless. I literally sank in my chair. I had no idea that without due process that I could just be terminated out of the blue. I was a highly performing individual. I would just ask President Trump and anybody else that might be in charge

to reconsider your decision. The United States of America is not a social media or tech company and it should not be run like one. Mr. President, many of these people voted for you. I don't regret voting for President Trump, but the actual policies being pursued just don't comport at all with the actual rules of the administration. We want them reinstated. It's an absolute travesty that the president the other day said that Elon Musk was a patriot.

When we see how many veterans we have on the line that are being absolutely devastated by this. This has been devastating for our family. We have a mortgage. We have to pay for preschool. Mine happened on February 15th. But the day before, what many reporters are calling the Valentine's Day massacre, my computer went black and I was unable to sign back into my computer. You know, I was the source of our family's health care.

It's put us in a pretty strenuous position right now. People getting fired and then bringing back because they were fired without realizing how crucial their work is, it really leads to mistrust from the general public and steers people away from a career public service. I was anticipating having, you know, 12 weeks of paternity leave through my work with the USDA.

I mean, Ryan, we talked about, for months, before doggie actually went into effect, Doja actually went into effect, that there were going to be all kinds of tear-jerking images of fired federal workers, whether they're on the streets with their ferns and boxes or talking in these videos that Democrats put out that make the process, complicate the politics of the process for Republicans. Now, a Harvard-Harris poll this week found pretty widespread support for Doge, I think, to the— Worst pollster in America. We should underscore complete fraud. Although, to be fair, other—because it's Mark Pence. Yeah. Yeah. To be fair, other polls have found similar results. Yeah. If you ask, should you cut federal spending? And, like, yeah. Well, and the reason I bring that up is because, to the extent Republicans are able to say this is just about waste, fraud and abuse, and they keep saying

waste, fraud and abuse, waste, fraud and abuse, then they can, they can politically sort of win the battle and overcome the obstacles of having all of these tear-jerking stories circulated through media and by Democrats. But, but those stories, the more powerful they are and the more sympathetic they are, they create a much higher hurdle to overcome for Republicans to make the case that this is just about waste, fraud, and abuse. Right. And if they did all this and they made the government more efficient and they cut taxes for people, then you probably would have a decent chunk of the American public would be like, I'm sorry that this had to happen to these hardworking people, but no, we have to live within our means, blah, blah, blah, blah. They're not going to do that. I think they're going to make the government much less efficient and they're going to anger a lot of people in how they do it. And they're going to basically go on

a round of grifting. So one of the workers in there was from the VA. The Doge lead who is handling the VA is Justin Fulcher. So much is going on that this has barely gotten any attention. He's the co-founder of RingMD, which is a telehealth company. I'm trying to think of what would be a more direct conflict of interest than sending a telehealth tech guy into the VA to slash and destroy it. So we're going to make sure all these veterans get much worse care. Oh, and guess what? I have a telehealth company here that is willing to step into the breach. Sorry that we shut down these

different community facilities. I'm sorry we've extended wait times and now you can't get in to see an actual doctor for six months. But guess what? I have a Zoom for you for the low, low price of whatever he charges the VA. Don't you worry about it. We're just going to have the VA write a check directly to us, and we're going to walk away with enormous amounts of money. Yeah, I mean, and some of this has actually been cuts to, there have actually been proposed cuts to telehealth coverage too. Like it's all very across the, it's all over the place, what the actual strategy is. And again, like they would say that's completely necessary. I actually agree to some extent that there are going to be conflicting cuts because they're trying to

do this sweeping, quote, revolution, according to Elon Musk. And there's a lot that can be cut. I saw an interesting post from someone at the Manhattan Institute who said, imagine if Mitch Daniels were in charge of Doge. You had this very,, it's an interesting catch 22 because on the one hand, you don't have the, I guess, cultural capital and just like crazy will to do a lot of the stuff that Elon Musk has. Who's Mitch Daniels? Remember, the governor, the very mild mannered Tea Party era governor of Indiana. Yeah. Who was all about it. Sort of like a Coburn type, a Tom Coburn type. Who was all about it. Someone who would, you know, like the Rand Paul annual Festivus list.

Like this is, you know, the bread and butter of somebody like Mitch Daniels. And it's kind of a fascinating hypothetical to think about. Or just like a, to think about what it would look like without Elon Musk. Like Doge without Elon Musk. Because on the one hand, you don't have the insane energy. But on the other hand, you don't have the insane energy. Could you even have Doge without Elon Musk? I don't know. But without Elon Musk, it probably would be, there would be streamlining, I would imagine. There would be like more consistency.

Yeah, and last point on efficiency, because we're not being very efficient moving through this block. We don't claim to be the department of media efficiency, though. Because of civil service protections, Musk had to go after people who were on probation. It's been widely reported that that means that they were hired within the last one, two, or three years. But it also includes people who were recently promoted

from one level to another. In that brief period during the promotion, you are back on a probationary period, even if you've been there for 15 years. So think about what that means. All of the people that he fired, without checking with their managers about how valuable they were,

without even looking to see whether or not they protected nuclear secrets, were trying to prevent an outbreak of bird flu, any of these things. What they also did systematically is fired everybody who came into the government within the last couple of years, which means somebody over the last couple of years decided that this is a position that they needed filled. These are very hard jobs to get. Like there is a, it's a ridiculous ticket that you have to go through. And that would be a good place to cut, actually. And just, you know, so you can actually hire fast.

It can take like two years to get one of these jobs. It's incredible because they're trying so hard to root out corruption. And I think they've gone too far in the inefficient direction because corruption and efficiency and transparency and inefficiency kind of go together in an uncomfortable way that we don't like to talk about. So new people, but then also people who got promoted. So who did you not fire? Like people who've been in the same job for like 12 years. When some people have been rehired because they've realized there's gaps. We do have to actually do something about bird flu. Right. So again, inefficient, inefficient. Now that to people like my friends on the right would like to be like, okay, so you are now like

this is a just cause and you are now whining about the process. And I actually completely understand that. But I still, my kind of arguments that would be, we don't know how this all plays out. Like there's still a long way to go. Right. They'd say you've got to break some eggs to make an omelet. And I'm like, cool, where's the omelet? Waiting for the omelet. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes.

But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad.

It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st, and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott.

And this is Season 2 of the War on Drugs podcast. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote

drug thing is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Caramouch. What we're doing now isn't working and we need to change things. Stories matter and it brings a face to them.

It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders.

I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. I've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try.

She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145.

Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so let's pivot to this news that Kyle Cheney posted in B4 about judges. Judges, judges, judges, this is the fight for the next couple of weeks. Obviously, a lot of this has gotten tied up in the courts, but it just took an interesting turn. So Kyle Cheney says a federal judge gave the Trump administration about 36 hours to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars for work performed by foreign aid contractors and is demanding details

about potential defiance of his orders. Speaking of defiance of the judge's orders, Elon Musk posted this yesterday. This is from, this is B5. If any judge anywhere can block every presidential order everywhere, we do not have democracy. We have tyranny of the judiciary. Now, Elon Musk also, I want to point out, weighed in on something that Nayib Kele posted, where he said, if you don't impeach the corrupt judges, you cannot fix the country. They will form a cartel, a judicial dictatorship, and block all

reforms protecting the systemic corruption that put them in their seats. And Musk essentially posted an agreement with that point from Bukele. Did you see Musk post on this, Ryan? No. He reposted the Bukele thing in agreement. And that, to me, is offensive, to be honest. Because Bukele is making a very direct comparison between the judicial system in the United States and the judicial system in El Salvador. That's insane. That is pretty insane. I don't think our system is perfect, and I do think there's some serious questions about separation of powers, but that's insane.

That is insane. Now, of course, it is true that throughout our 200 plus years of being a republic, not a democracy, as the right loves to tell the left all the time. Actually, it's not a democracy right uh there has been a push and pull a tug of war between the executive of the legislative and the judicial branch uh and you would see people like me who are angry about supreme court decisions or fdr for instance in the 1930s who angry about FD Supreme Court decisions hemming in the will of the people during the new New Deal He threatened to expand the size of the court Through through a legislative action right and as a result the Supreme Court back down and started allowing

New Deal policies to go through hey like so this is this is kind of how it goes these are different power centers These are the checks and balances that are built right into the system. For Elon Musk to be surprised that a check exists in a system, I was going to say, suggest that he didn't, you know, go through elementary school in the United States, but he did not go through elementary school in the United States. So he should go back and check out some of these, like, how a bill becomes a law and the checks and balances and like all the things. They're on the citizenship test, though. So here's what he posted. He should have actually seen it then unless he sent some gamer in to take a citizenship test for him. So Bukele posted checks and balances don't truly exist unless the judicial branch can

also be checked and balanced. He could have stopped right there. Checks and balances don't truly exist. But he said checks and balances don't truly exist unless the judicial branch can also be checked and balanced. He could have stopped right there. Checks and balances don't truly exist without El Salvador. But he said checks and balances don't truly exist unless the judicial branch can also be checked and balanced. And Elon Musk responded, the only way to restore rule of the people in America is to impeach judges. No one is above the law, including judges. That is what it took to fix El Salvador. Same applies to America. And it is true that you have to be able to check the judiciary. 100% it's true that you have to be able to check to judiciary. Now, Elon Musk going full Bukele here, and the Trump administration, I mean, there are reasons to have strategically close relationships, as Marco Rubio does with Bukele. But applying

Bukeleism to domestic politics is different than cozying up to Bukele on foreign policy, even if we disagree with that relationship. Applying Bukeleism to domestic politics is like, we just have a completely different country, completely different system. And you can understand why people would say, well, maybe that's a slippery slope to just completely politicizing the judiciary branch. And I agree the judiciary branch has problems with being already overly political, but it's not El Salvador. It's a very surprising thing for him to suggest because you need two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate to impeach a judge, and clearly Republicans don't have two-thirds vote, so why float something you know can't happen?

To shift the Overton window. Yeah, and so he knows that, I mean, I don't know if he knows this or not, like in the first couple years of our republic, and people can look up the exact judge on this, there was a judge who was ruling against the Federalists, if I'm remembering the details right, and the Federalists were mad about that, and they tried to impeach him based on his decisions. They didn't say he was corrupt. Alcee Hastings, late Democratic Congress, and I think he's late, was impeached as a federal judge, but for corruption. And then he was elected to Congress. It was kind of funny. He's like, wait, didn't you get impeached and thrown out of office? And then you won a congressional seat? Whatever. Okay. But that was for corruption.

The founders, basically, in that first or second term or whatever it was of Congress, rejected that resoundingly. And a lot of the Federalists or whoever it was that would have benefited politically from getting rid of that judge said, no, on principle, we do not want to set a precedent that a judge should be removed because we don't agree with their decision. Yeah. Well, I'm not panicked. I'm personally not panicked yet about this question because I think this is an intentional effort on behalf of the Trump administration to force judicial decisions about executive power. And they've been very clear about this. Russ has been very clear about this. They think executive power is atrophied, and they want to force the question into the courts to get definitive answers on things like the Impoundment

Act, potentially to overturn acts of Congress that they think have unduly sapped power from the presidency. And some of that I actually disagree with. I think that creates a too powerful executive. But on the other hand, I do think it's a serious problem that you have. And we've talked about this before. Sometimes at the EPA, it doesn't happen as often to the left as it does to the right. But you have some bureaucrat who came through the revolving door and is making decisions that the president wouldn't be happy about to benefit the industry, to benefit oil and gas industry that they came from. So there is a serious, there's absolutely a serious question about how these executive

branch agencies should be tethered politically to the goals of the president. On the other hand, there are things like the FTC, for example, or there are places where you have to have some level of distance. And the judiciary is kind of the intermediary there. So some of this is just going to get kicked into the courts, and it's going to feel kind of nerve wracking as it's happening, because you don't know exactly how Trump and Musk will wield those powers. It's hard to trust how Musk in particular will suggest people in doggy doge wield those powers. But on the other hand, there are some serious things that do need to be resolved. And having, I guess, more direction one way or the other won't be the end of the world.

In fact, it could actually be a good thing in some places of the government. And interestingly, we're seeing multiple power centers within the executive. So the judge that we just mentioned told the executive that they have to restart a lot of this foreign aid funding or face contempt charges. But we've also learned, I think it was in the Wall Street Journal, that Rubio and Trump approved spending around feeding the hungry and AIDS funding. As he said he would. He said, if you really are just doing poverty reduction stuff that isn't part of a deep state cabal, then I am going to give you a waiver and we're going to move that money out. So they approved a bunch of that stuff. And then Doge people came into the back end, and this is what people have been panicked about with the Doge, unchecked people, and blocked it again.

Authorized by the Secretary of State. Right. Money authorized by the Secretary of State to go back out. Appropriated by Congress. Authorized by the Secretary of State. Who was nominated and appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. And then Big Balls comes in. I don't want to slander Big Balls if he didn't have anything to do with this. Some Doge person goes in and just clicks a button and blocks it.

And so the judge is saying, no, you've got to get this money moving. So who's in contempt at that point? Rubio's like, look, I'm trying to spend this money. Now, he's not trying to spend all of it. There's a bunch that Rubio doesn't want to spend that the judge is saying you have to spend. USAID. And that's going to be very interesting. But what do you do if the kids are like, no, I'm not going to do it? No, really.

Let's, before we leave this block, kick it over to Representative Nicole Malliot-Hawkus of New York who weighed in on Doge with some criticism. Facing tough re-election, right? Yeah. She's one of the few Republicans, this is a chief target of Democrats. Yeah, she's in New York's 11th district, which is actually kind of one of the interesting places. I mean, she won pretty handily last time, but she's one of those places in New York where you can kind of find MAGA world

and interesting places. That was a surprise, I think, a lot of people in like DC, Beltway Media. So let's turn it over to Representative Malia Takis. When I see what happened last week with the 9-11 healthcare program, that employees were fired and that grants were removed from the program, That disturbs me. And it just shows that they're acting too rash and that they need to slow it down a little bit. And obviously, you're going to start seeing more and more of this sort of dissent from Doge. And Elon Musk and Trump may or may not understand that some people obviously have to stake out positions that

put them at odds with Doge or at least publicly stake out positions, even if their votes end up in Congress looking different. And even if their sort of criticism doesn't have a ton of teeth because they're a single representative in a swing district. So some of that, you'll start to see more and more cracks in the foundation as we have over the course of the last week. People like, you know, expectedly Lisa Murkowski coming out against Doge. It doesn't mean that the Republican Party as a whole is having problems with Doge. That said, this stuff does make it harder for, she's responding to political pressures that Doge will have to answer to, not just in swing districts, but all over the country. The debate over how AstroTurfed or not AstroTurfed, for example, what Rich McCormick got in a deep red district in Georgia, as we talked about last Friday with Crystal Ryan, that whether or not it's part of

like it was organized by Indivisible or some left-leaning group isn't really the point. The point is that that means they're able to suddenly organize a bunch of people to get people out to town halls because there is actually some like legitimate frustration in even red parts of the country. Yeah. And so she represents Staten Island and then Republican-leaning portions of like outer Brooklyn. Mm-hmm. Interesting areas. To quote Steve Bannon, a lot of MAGA on Medicaid. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun?

Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that Taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multibillion-dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission.

This is Absolute Season 1. Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st, and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th.

Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives.

This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug thing is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill.

NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Caramouch. What we're doing now isn't working, and we need to change things. Stories matter, and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real.

Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone,

I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there.

Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for.

If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's move on to Donald Trump's suggestion that they up the price for American citizenship because you actually already can buy American citizenship, but sort of through a process of like you have to like invest like a certain amount of money or in a property or something, and then that moves you up in the line. So this is not actually a kind of brand new idea from Trump, but like Trump likes to do, he's really saying the quiet part out loud and just outlining it and putting a price tag on it.

Completely. So this new Trump idea for gold cards. We're going to be doing something else that's going to be very, very good. We're going to be selling a gold card. You have a green card. This is a gold card. You have a green card. This is a gold card. We're going to be putting a price on that card of about $5 million,

and that's going to give you green card privileges plus. It's going to be a route to citizenship, and wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card. They'll be wealthy, and they'll be successful, and they'll be spending a lot of money and paying a lot of taxes and employing a lot of people. And we think it's going to be extremely successful and never been done before or anything like this. But it's something that we're going to be putting out over the next,

would you say two weeks out? Do you want to say a couple of words about it? Sure. Wait a minute. Do you have to invest a certain amount of money in this country in order to qualify for that gold card? Yeah, exactly. So the EB-5 program was really you lend some money, but it was full of nonsense, make-believe, and fraud, and it was a way to get a green card that was low-priced. So the president said rather than having this sort of ridiculous EB-5 program, we're

going to end the EB-5 program. We're going to replace it with the Trump gold card, which is really a green card gold. So they'll be able to pay $5 million to the U.S. government. They'll have to go through vetting, of course. We're going to make sure they're wonderful world-class global citizens. They can come to America. The president can give them a green card and they can invest in America and we can use that money to reduce our deficit. Why do we give out lotteries of green cards? Why do we give out EB-5 for green cards? Brian Zane, that's Howard Lutnick, by the way. If you were listening to this and you couldn't see the video, that was the dulcet tones of Howard Lutnick explaining this here.

Former, he was the head of, what's the private equity company that was at the top of the world? Cancer Fitzgerald, right? Top of the world trade center. Yeah. Yeah. A very interesting guy himself and his story of 9-11 is, go find it if you can. He would not be alive today if he hadn't taken his kid to kindergarten that morning. He's the Commerce Secretary now. Yeah, and he was on his way to work.

And I think they lost more than 600 people at Cantor Fitzgerald. So separate from that, so the EB-5 program, they're kind of right that it's ripe for abuse. Basically, you have to tell the government, you have to convince the government that the amount of money that you're investing is going to create a certain amount of jobs. And the threshold for it is different. How do you define it? How do you prove it? How do you actually make sure that somebody's actually doing it or not? Yeah. It's all difficult. It's all, you know, subject to different judgment calls.

And so Trump's like, look, let's make it simpler. Write a check, $5 million, pay to the order of U.S. Treasury. Yep. I guess they'll run a background check on your oligarch status. He said, you know, are you going to let Russian oligarchs in? And he said, hey, some Russian oligarchs are good people. I've met them. So I guess they'll have the FBI do a little background check, maybe, or maybe not. I mean, who knows? And then you're in. And I know if you're like from the U.S. perspective, like I can see lots of arguments around fairness and on and on.

But from a just national kind of interest perspective, this seems like a smart move for the United States. Oh, yeah. Like this is honestly a way like more transparent and transactional, like nakedly transactional way to improve an already transactional program. And I think you might have a decent number of rich people who would take it up for their kids. Yeah, probably. Like if you can cut a check for $5 million for no reason to the U.S., then you probably

are already a global citizen because you can buy citizenship in Cyprus or whatever, like less than that, and that gets you then citizenship in the EU. And if you have citizenship in the EU, you have reciprocal travel privileges to the United States. So the only reason you might need this extra gold card would be, yeah, for your kids. So you give them a trust fund and you give them then citizenship that passes down. Because

if your parents are an American citizen, I presume, now should we make them buy a gold card for every one of their kids and cousins and everything? Cousins, definitely. But kids, do the kids automatically get a gold card out of this? That's a great question. They weren't born here. That's a great question. But this is galaxy brain Trumpism, right? This is an idea that is so completely bizarre in Washington because it says we are just going to be transactional instead of we are going to mask our transactional process in the language of neoliberalism. He's like, not $5 million. Now, if you want it to be really neoliberal, the way that it should work is that you should be able to sell. We're not going to print citizenships.

Can't just create an asset bubble of citizenships. We have a flat number of citizenships out there. And if a rich person wants to buy it, they have to buy it from an American citizen. Bid. So if you want to sell your American citizenship to an oligarch for $5 million, you can do that. I bet you'd have a lot of people be like, now you have to figure out, like, okay, now I am a countryless citizen of nowhere. So, hey, Mexico, can I, like, come down and I have $5 million, but I have nowhere that I can live. Just live in international waters. It would be funny if you sold your citizenship and then at the ceremony ICE arrests you and puts you in detention.

That would be hilarious. But that's the thing. So our visa program is obviously, it's very complicated, but there are all different ways that elite companies are already gaming the system and rich people are already gaming the system. So Trump is like, if we're going to do it, just streamline the process and be honest about it and stop allowing these companies to poke different holes based on their privileges and their lobbying carve-outs and all of that. So honestly, if we're going to have this system, whatever, $5 million gold cards, might as well. But we don't like people that become poor after they're rich. So shouldn't we charge them like a million a year? Keep it going. Keep it going. And if you can't pay your million a year, then we're stripping that gold card from you.

It's more of a subscription than a one-time. Like, into the gig economy. It's like a country club. Like, it's a big upfront fee. But it's not like you pay your upfront fee to the club. I mean, you wouldn't do that for Mar-a-Lago. And so if it's not good enough for Mar-a-Lago, Don, then it's not good enough for the United States of America.

So country club membership here, big upfront fee, and then an annual membership on top of that. But see, the problem with that is you get to the renters versus owners dilemma, which is serious. You don't want to have it in your country. No, these are renters. These people are renters. It's safe to be xenophobic now. Trump won. Vibe shift.

That's right. Well, ideally, you want people to invest in the long-term health of the United States. It just went up to two. You're doing the wall? The wall just got ten feet higher. It's two now.

Well, we'll see how this goes. This is like one of those Trump ideas that he says and then you don't know if it will actually happen. But now in his second term, everything he says seems to actually be happening. So be on the lookout for the gold card. Maybe you could do it Willy Wonka style. I think you would need legislation because EB-5 is legislatively constructed. Yes, we've said that many times in the last month.

But do your legislation. This is the thing. People are like, oh, stop saying you need Congress to do all this stuff. It's like, guys, you control both houses of Congress. You have Congress. Just do it. They're lazy. Just do it. Well, some of this is intentionally testing executive power. Some of this, they actually want it to be. They want to prove that it should be the executive's authority to do X, Y, and Z. But some of it, they're not trying to make a point, so they might as well just fold it into the reconciliation stuff.

Put the CFPB gutting in the CR. Oh, 100%. Parliamentarian, they're just fine with that. We'll see. All right, let's move on to the awful reporting that you guys have up at Dropside. It's not awful reporting. It's reporting on something awful, I should be clear about, out of Damascus. Ryan, what can you tell us? You can put up this D1 here. So Tuesday evening, Israel launched airstrikes around Damascus. After a day earlier, Netanyahu came out and claimed that, you can put up D2 here, here's a drop site piece by Murtaza Hussein and Ali Yunus.

I can put a link down there and people can go read it. So yesterday, or Monday, Netanyahu said, southern, and so did defense minister Israel Katz, who confirmed that Israel was the one that carried out these airstrikes as a security zone, quote unquote security zone. So this is a de facto annexation of Syrian territory way north of the Golan Heights, effectively saying anything south of Damascus is a no-go zone for the Syrian government. This is a heavily Druze community. The Druze are a significant element of Israeli kind of pluralistic propaganda, where they will point to the Druze and say, look, you call us an ethno-state, but here are the Druze who are living here in Israel and they have equal rights. And you'll have a lot of Druze who will say, we don't actually have equal rights. You don't treat us as equal citizens. But we do get

treated better than Palestinians. And then there's a whole hierarchy. There's the Palestinian who's a citizen of Israel. Then there's the Palestinian who lives in different areas of the West Bank. Palestinians then further who live in different areas of the West Bank, and then all the way at the bottom, Palestinians who live in Gaza and have effectively zero rights, including the right to life. And so the Syrian government has truly bent over backwards to convey to Israel and to the United States, to Europe and everybody else that they want no peace of this axis of resistance. That Assad was a member of this axis of resistance, one of dubious reliability, but a member nonetheless.

They overthrew Assad and they have said that they do not want any of this smoke and that you can't handle any of it. They're completely destroyed. And immediately upon taking power, Israel bombed all of their military bases, destroyed all their planes, all their anti-aircraft. Like they completely wiped out any capacity for this new state to actually defend itself. They are an offshoot of Al-Qaeda, which people love to point out has bombed everyone you can think of, gone after everybody you can think of except Israel. So there's never been this like Al-Qaeda Israel hostility. All of this was done in the vain hope of appeasing Israel, that Israel would say, finally, we've gotten rid of the Assad family, which has been our enemy and has refused to reach

full agreement with us, even though they did reach various different deals that are in place. And so finally, we can now have a neighbor that we can coexist with. There was hope that Israel would see it that way. Israel does not see it that way. Israel sees it as an opportunity to expand the land that it controls, continuing with this very confusing thing where on the one hand, Israel has a right to exist. On the other hand, refusing to ever define where the borders of Israel end. Because if it has a right to exist, but it doesn't ever define where its borders are, then does it have a right to exist in southern Syria? And is southern Syria now Israel?

Southern Lebanon now Israel? Southern Lebanon now Israel? Meanwhile, there's a mass invasion of the West Bank underway, which we can talk about in a second. So this is putting pressure on the Syrian government. We can put up C3. So these are protesters marching through Damascus. They are chanting in Arabic, but the translation is, O beloved Jolani, Bam Tel Aviv. This is indicative of the public pressure that

the head of Syria is under from the Syrian public to stop just rolling over for Israel, but it's not really up to him. And you can read the piece by Murtaza Ali. They don't have the capacity to do anything against, you know, they're still fighting, you know, with some, you know, gangster elements of the Assad regime that are still around as basically, you know, meth traffickers, Captagon traffickers. So the idea that they're gonna take on Israel with any seriousness is a fantasy. The real concern that Israel has, and this is talked about in the story as well, is that Turkey is the backer of this new Syrian government and Israel is worried that Turkey is going to use the foothold in Syria to begin flexing muscles. Which is plausible.

Yeah, it is plausible. And to re-become the great power in the region. They've indicated that. And also, this period from 1917 with the fall of the Ottoman Empire until today is the anomaly in world history. For more than 2,000 years, you had two empires that controlled the entire Middle East, the Byzantine Empire and then the Ottoman Empire, like just two. That's an enormous amount of stability going back to BC. And so you can imagine like, so nationalism was kind of forced on this region after World War I in a fake way where there weren't really- Random borders.

There weren't random borders and fake made up nationalities with people deliberately pitted against each other so that the West could keep them poor and struggling and extract their resources. If we actually cared about reducing the amount of conflict in the region, you'd probably go back to everybody unified under some type of government. This was the dream that kicked around as the kind of pan-Arab socialist movement, which said we're not Iraqis and Iranians and Turks and Syrians. We're all Arabs and Persians and we're all in this area together. Now Turkey has a different idea in the back of Erdogan's mind

where he's going to say, well, how about we just bring back the Ottoman Empire? And then Israel's like, well, wait a minute. Where do we fit into that? Sets off some red flags. Yeah, hold on a second. Because this whole area over here of Palestine, when it was in the Ottoman Empire, was not an independent country called Israel. And what do we know about both Hegseth and Rubio? What can we assume or how can we assume

they'll handle Israel's move here? For support, essentially. You know, Rubio is an interesting case because he is completely hemmed in and has basically no authority left and doesn't even seem... like I was for a minute complaining that the state department wasn't having daily briefings. I'm like, why would I want to go to a state department daily briefing as if they have anything to share with us,

which would imply that they know what's going on. They have no idea. They're learning from us what's going on. Rubio. Because Trump calls the shots in a way that Biden didn't. The Trump presidency calls the shots of foreign affairs in a way that Biden really let Blinken call the shots. Very different. Rubio, this is my forecast, got played in the most hysterical fashion. Trump plucked him out of the Senate so he could make his daughter a senator from Florida. And the second that she is a senator from Florida, not the second, but give it 45 days, Rubio will be fired as Secretary of State. So he will have lost the Senate seat. I don't know.

Trump seems very happy with Rubio so far because, I mean. As long as Rubio keeps kissing his butt. But Rubio also like plays the role. Like Trump, we know that Trump sees these literally as casting decisions and Rubio has really leaned into the... If he keeps playing his role, then he can stay in that role.

So I think the U.S. is just going to be as they have been for, you know, ever, just let Israel, you know, Israel said it would withdraw

from southern Lebanon as part of the ceasefire deal that we negotiated. The time for that expired and they said they're not really going to do that. And they then, you know, go invade and bomb Syria. And right now they are launching, they've sent tanks and a major military incursion into Jenin, into Karim, really trying to wrestle full control of the West Bank, displacing tens of thousands of people, seizing homes, seizing entire villages and cities,

and in the direction of a complete annexation of the West Bank. So they're going for it. CPAC passed a resolution last week about annexation of the Judean Samaria. They're for it? Yeah. So we'll see. Is it CPAC to weigh in on another country, like just getting to annex territory. I mean, I just say that because it's an interesting indication of where the people who are pressuring the Trump administration are right now.

Like they didn't even really have to do like they have to talk about that. But it's a priority. So look, Israel has unlimited weapons from the United States, and it has the military capacity to throw people out of their homes and seize more land. It's 2025, and they're going to do that. So I guess I hope that they're proud of themselves. Well, Trump obviously is not the ideologue that Mike Huckabee, his ambassador to Israel, is. And the people who Huckabee represents ideologically, which is a big chunk of professional Republican politics. But Trump has, you know, did the ceasefire, for example, as Biden was leaving office, helped the ceasefire, sent Steve Witkoff to aid Blinken in the ceasefire, for example, as Biden was leaving office, helped the ceasefire, sent Steve Whitcough to aid Blinken in the ceasefire agreement to the chagrin of the Huckabees of the world. So it's not as though they're fully in control. Trump will push back

when he thinks it's detrimental to his goal of looking like the peacemaker in chief, as we hear the White House repeatedly refer to him to. But not always. So that'll be an interesting one to watch for sure. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no.

Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad.

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In a big way. In a very big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug thing is.

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subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her.

And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother.

She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I asked some people close to Trump this exact question. Like, what is Trump going to do about these efforts by Netanyahu to continue to expand territory and also to,

looks like he's trying to blow up the ceasefire in Gaza. And they said, look, Wyckoff is very committed to making sure the ceasefire holds and that phase two is completed, but Trump is not focused on it. Trump is focused on Ukraine and getting a deal there. Interesting.

That's where his attention is. So let's talk about the progress toward that. We can put this next element up on the screen for the New York Times. U.S. and Ukraine agree to minerals deal, officials say. And so to back up here, the Treasury Secretary went to Ukraine, offered this deal. Like, hey, look, we will actually not, they're not going to promise that we're going to do anything, but we will, you know, invest in some kind of resource extraction. And in exchange for that, you give us $500 billion worth of rare earth minerals, plus

basically control over oil and gas in your ports. And Zelensky then leaked that to the lawmakers who came to visit, slammed it in the press, said he wasn't going to do it. Trump responded by calling him a tin pot dictator and then saying that it was actually Ukraine that provoked the war and now siding in the UN with Russia against a resolution that condemned Russia for the invasion, right? Basically adopting the argument that it was Ukraine's provocations, which were real. It's not Ukraine's provocations. That's actually kind of...

So they're mostly U.S. provocations and NATO provocations. There were Ukraine provocations, of course, like the Maidan coup in 2014, the far right seizing power there, banning the Russian language in the east. So then you get this civil war over in the east. You get Zelensky elected on a promise that he's going to reach a peace deal, Donetsk and the rest of the eastern Ukraine. He comes under enormous pressure from the ultra-right. And instead of that, he kind of ramps up the war in the east. And then Russia sends its

actual troops instead of just its proxies into Ukraine. And so you can see how there's responsibility on both sides. But Trump very clearly angered by this rejection. It's like, actually, this is all Ukraine that started this war anyway. And so now Ukraine has come back and said, okay, we'll agree to the deal, but we're not doing this $500 billion thing. They said they'll create a pot where 50% of the revenues from the extracting of the rare earth minerals, will go into a fund that will be used to redevelop Ukraine. But then we get all the rare earths. So that's the deal. What do you think?

Well, I think it's actually pretty significant as a, if it holds, which it may or may not, because there's so much, there's still a lot of moving parts. But if it holds, I think it's a pretty significant notch in the Trump foreign policy wins column, just because there was mass hysteria. First, it was kicked off with the J.D. Vance speech in Munich. But then Trump's various provocations towards Zelensky over the course of the last week,

which he said even, like, I had Victor Davis Hanson on my show yesterday, and he was saying, or today, and he was he was saying you know some of the stuff is actually crazy like some of what Trump is saying is it's wrong and it's counterintuitive to what he's actually said himself about Putin starting the war like it did invade which is why it's very obviously hardball it's very obviously part of his whole argument is that Putin would have done it if Trump was there. Exactly. Implicit in that is that Putin did it.

Right. Yeah, exactly. So that's where some of this hysteria, I feel like, from the media and European leaders has not been— it lacks all of this context about how Donald Trump negotiates, which is that even some people in America First MAGA world were concerned that he was talking so tough about Putin after he won the election. And they were like, oh, great, Trump's been overcome by the neocons. And we should know by now that this is literally just how Donald Trump negotiates. Over and over again, he does the same thing. His position on Ukraine is actually one of the most interesting, which is that he would say

all kinds of nice things about Vladimir Putin in 2016, 2017, 2018, whatever. And then he was the one who was arming Ukraine more than Obama. And so it's clearly what he does publicly, what he says in his conversations with other world leaders is always like you can't connect it to the policy decisions that he's making or may make because he's just trying to flatter people or he's trying to piss people off to bring them to the table. And in this case, it seems to have actually worked. It seems as though Zelensky and people who are pro-Ukraine who are saying Donald Trump is so awful have actually come to the table to have him say the United States is backsliding into authoritarianism by siding with Putin,

it's like, okay, you just cut a deal with it. Obviously, his leverage, his attempt to create leverage here was successful. So all of that is to say the last couple of weeks of coverage of Donald Trump's negotiations in Ukraine, I think, got the situation woefully wrong. And this is just proof that he was negotiating. But I think it was clear all along that he was negotiating. Well, so let's hear from Trump himself, who is asked, you know, what does Ukraine get out of this? Let's roll this. What does Ukraine get in terms of $350 billion and lots of equipment, military equipment, and the right to fight on, and originally the right to fight.

Look, Ukraine, I will say, they're very brave and they're good soldiers, but without the United States and its money and its military equipment, this war would have been over in a very short period of time. Meanwhile, related to this, by the way, did you see the news that Congo, which is facing this massive insurgency,

Rwanda backed this insurgency, reached out to the U.S. and said, you like rare earths? We have tons. We'll give them to you if you will sanction Rwanda for supporting the M23 insurgents here? Like taking us from the global police to the global mercenaries. Mercenaries, yes.

And by the way, a fairly brilliant approach to negotiating with Donald Trump. Like that's, we were just talking about the gold cards. Yeah, it's just like, it's transactional, naked, mercenary. In this sense, literally mercenary, but it's transactional, naked, mercenary, in this sense, literally mercenary, but you know, he's sort of like figuratively mercenary in many other senses. So Trump is not the only one capable of doing successful Trump negotiations. So we'll see how that goes. And so Steve Bannon was asked about Trump's minerals deal by our old friend Michael Tracy at CPAC. Let's roll Bannon.

My advice is walk the fuck away. I want to walk away so hard, I'm even prepared to say, okay, maybe we don't even investigate, which I think we have to. But we have to walk away. I don't want their minerals, okay? There's enough minerals in the rest of the world. What's the reasoning behind this proposal, then? I think President Trump

looks at Iraq and looks at other places in Afghanistan and I think as a deal guy he's sitting there going, look, remember in Iraq and Afghanistan they didn't take the oil. The net present, or they didn't take the minerals in Afghanistan. The net present value of our expedition was $9 trillion. Think

of what this country would be like that if the last 20 years we spent $9 trillion in rebuilding America, the factories would have, what would Detroit be like? What would St. Louis be like? What would Baltimore be like? What would the great cities of the East be like? What would Detroit be like? If we spent $9 trillion on American citizens on the soil of the United States of America, this would be a paradise. We didn't. We pissed it away and let people steal it. And so many people dead and countries ruined and cultures ruined and the Christians eviscerated for $9 trillion.

I think it says in President Trump, he says, look, if these guys did it, what we should do is at least get something for it. I mean, that's the way he exchanged for a security guarantee, though, which could necessitate or require some kind of U.S. military action. In fact, speaking of World War II, it reminds me of the British arguably very foolishly extending Poland a so-called security guarantee that they didn't have the ability to even uphold. And then World War II gets declared once Hitler goes into Poland. Now, that's a very extreme scenario. But a security guarantee, I mean, those don't have a great record throughout history.

No, very few people understand that. The reason that World War II, which had been building in the same kind of way this is, triggered in September 1939 is because the Germans knew it, and the Germans also knew that the French and the British couldn't stand up to it. And that would give them every pretext to roll across Western Europe. Just two bros talking about World War II on the floor of CPAC. I saw Tracy walking in the CPAC. I was interviewing someone outside of CPAC. I saw Tracy walk in. I was like, oh, boy.

You've got to get some videos. Here it goes. And so this was obviously Bannon. This was taped with Bannon. I want to say this was Friday, Thursday or Friday. So way before the news came out just in the last 12 or so hours that Trump had successfully negotiated this deal. So it would be interesting to see what Bannon says now that Zelensky is giving apparently the mineral rights to the US. Well, you know, to say that it's successfully negotiated, it's like, we'll see.

We'll see. But obviously he got him to agree. It's still paper getting passed back and forth. But even like in, yes, but even in practice. And do they even have what they're saying they have is an open question. And to Bannon's point, there's minerals everywhere. In Russia even. As Putin, well, and in contested regions as well.

As Putin talked about the Donbass recently. And your point about the Congo is a good one. But no, I mean, even in theory, getting Zelensky, I shouldn't even say in theory, but like in practice, getting Zelensky to say, sure, after all the hemming and hawing of the last week, looks like a big MAGA victory. And so does Steve Bannon say, great, like this was well done by Trump? Or does he say, I don't want the minerals? I think it's actually pretty interesting because it's a contrast with the USAID drawdown. And your point about U.S. becoming the policeman of the world versus the mercenary of the world is a really interesting one because some people in the USAID debate, like you actually sort of saw this play out when Benz went, Mike

Benz went on a Tucker Carlson show. And Benz was saying he was worried that a lot of MAGA world doesn't want to be precise and sort of take a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer to a lot of USAID in realizing that some of this is beneficial, like the empire is beneficial. And Tucker Carlson's just sort of like, I don't know, I'm kind of done with all of it. And that's a pretty interesting tension that we see play out here. If you want the U.S. to stop, quote, economically colonizing the world, this mineral deal feels like an extension of economic colonization. It sort of feels like Burisma, as a matter of fact, except it's just more nakedly transactional than Burisma, USAID, and all of that. So I think that's one of the trend lines actually to watch

over the next couple of years is how MAGA handles the question of economic colonization and empire. Right, and maybe they'll just eventually work their way right back to creating a new USAID soft power instrument. Right. But just different. Yeah. And also one last point on that classic Steve Bannon riff. Yeah. Like he's on Afghanistan. Like I think like he's just nailing every piece of it.

And then he throws in, and all these Christians got killed it's like where'd that come from like I thought the whole idea of Christianity was that we're all created by the Creator or what and like all equal in his eyes so why does he have to emphasize that it's Christian there were Christians that were killed to like try to land the idea that people getting killed in war is a bad thing doesn't it also suck that when a Muslim gets killed yeah of course right I mean it's just a like I always seen that from Bannon just like I agree agree agree and then whoop and yes I don't like when Christians get killed either, but I also don't like when atheists or Hindus or Jews or Muslims or anybody gets killed.

No, there's a charitable reading of that, though, which is he's trying to appeal to conservatives who do see these regions as categorically radical Islam. He's appealing to the baser instincts. I don't think it has to necessarily be xenophobic. I think there is an instinct, especially after 9-11, for people to say everyone there is like radical.

I guess a reverse version that the left would do is to say, hey, look, these Medicaid cuts are going to hurt poor white people. No, no, they're going to hurt poor white people trying to appeal to a MAGA person. Absolutely, yeah. Rather than making a more universal argument. Right, right, but I think the left also does it in its own way.

Because when they're appealing to the left, yeah. Yeah, but I don't think it necessarily has to be xenophobic so much as it's just, it could be. But I also think it could be like there are a lot of people who don't, I actually think a lot of people, like for example, in the West Bank, genuinely don't understand how significant those ancient Christian communities are. So, yeah. I mean, where's Jesus from? It's a good point. So let's, let's move on to the scandal of a Republican congressman getting,

getting out of a domestic violence charge. It's an awful story. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple.

Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multibillion-dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st, and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott. And this is Season 2 of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way.

Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug thing is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill.

NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working, and we need to change things. Stories matter, and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real.

Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there.

Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into,

call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We have an update in the unfolding saga of Republican Congressman Corey Mills, who is facing assault allegations, serious assault allegations. And this is a really complicated story. It brings in the interim D.C. Attorney General, Acting Attorney General Ed Martin, who's a pretty interesting character from MAGA World. So I'm going to—bear with me as we go through the details, because we don't want to get

anything wrong on this. We want everybody to have the specifics of this story, because it's a big one and it's an interesting one. I'm reading from a report in The Independent, which I think actually aggregated a lot of the different parts of these allegations. So right now, the police department has said this is an active criminal investigation and there's no further information on the case to provide at this time.

But last Wednesday, she, Corey Mills' mistress, he is married, this is a woman that is not his wife, 27-year-old woman, called the police to his apartment in Washington, D.C., told a 911 operator that she had been assaulted by Corey Mills. Mills, quote, vehemently denies any wrongdoing whatsoever and is confident any investigation will clear this matter quickly. That's according to his office in a statement to the Associated Press. Now, Mills told Politico, both myself and the other individuals said what they had claimed took place and never took place, and that's been reported multiple times. Now, the Independent says a police report that it was provided with describes the initial 911 call as alleging a

simple assault with hands or feet involving the mistress, whose name is Sarah Raviani. She's the head of a group called Iranians for Trump as the victim in this case. Now, a previous police report that NBC Washington got said that Mills, who she's apparently been with for over a year, grabbed her, shoved her, and pushed her out of the door, which left her with bruises. And then she let the police listen in on a phone call between her and Corey Mills, wherein he allegedly told her to, quote, lie about the origin of the bruises when police, according to the report, encountered her. She was physically shaking and scared. Now,

the independent says these are, quote, circumstances that would typically prompt an immediate arrest of an alleged assailant. The independent goes on to say Raviani then recanted her claims, including about the origin of the bruises, when officers said Mills would be placed under arrest. So, when she was told that Corey Mills, Congressman Corey Mills, would be arrested, she recanted his claims. People who have covered and worked with victims of domestic violence know that that's a familiar pattern of people who are victims of domestic violence. Unfortunately, it's incredibly traumatic as an emotional process to go through that can increase the pressures. And, you know, it's enormously difficult to judge people in those situations who are legitimate victims of domestic violence.

But obviously then recanting the claims takes away some credibility from the claims. Now, Mills has not been arrested. And this is interesting. Officers, as the independent says, quote, initially classified the call as a family disturbance, though after commanders reviewed investigative materials, it was reclassified as a domestic violent assault investigation. But Raviani now says that there was no physical altercation at all. She was drinking and sleep deprived. And that explains why she made the allegations. She says the bruises came during a recent trip to Dubai and were not from Corey Mills. Now, Ed Martin, who is the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia,

so here in D.C., is really hardcore MAGA ideologue. Trump appointed him last month. He has, the Florida Democratic Party, we'll add this from the Independent, has accused Martin of quote, running cover-ups for Republicans. But he is not, obviously, not bringing, he's not arresting mills. So far he has, yeah, he has paused the, the, the DC asked, DC, which is not charged, right. DC, which is not a state asked Martin to sign off on an arrest warrant for Mills and the Mills office, uh, not Mills office, Martin's office refused to do so and said they want further investigation here. What's, what's so it's not unprecedented, but it's unusual. They have him on witness tampering and obstruction of justice, dead to rights,

because the police officers were there with Mills on the phone, with Mills telling his girlfriend, Raviani, to, quote, lie about the origin of her bruises. Yeah. That's witness tampering and obstruction of justice. Like, just, even if you don't have anything else, if you're told to lie, and also, obviously...

And then you lie. Then you change your story. Then, obviously, if he is telling her to lie about the origins, that is also a confession of where they actually came from. And also, it doesn't make any sense. According to the police report, which was altered twice, the bruises to the officers appeared to be fresh. Everybody in a jury would know what a fresh bruise looks like. And you would know what a bruise that you got in Dubai the day before looks like. And so then when she comes back and says, actually, it came from somewhere else,

not what I originally said, after she told, she showed, she let the officers listen to the claim. But what did they hear? That's the thing. Like, we don't even know. Right. I mean, they should tell a grand jury. Right. Get an arrest warrant.

Right. But Martin is going to block that. Martin is the guy who, yesterday or the day before, tweeted, I am the president, we are the president's legal team. And we look forward to defending the president at all costs. What? No. That's not what you are. Well, it's sort of true in a technical sense. If you look at what the role is, in a technical sense, if you are in that position, it is your job to defend the executive branch and the constitution. The people versus, yeah. Right. Yeah. So there's

like a technical world in which that's right. The spirit of it though, looks like from what he said, it looks like, what's the best way to put it? Like special privileges to the president. And then also to his wife-beating fellow party members. Because the key, as we talked about in the A block, they passed this budget by the skin of their teeth. If one vote had gone in the opposite direction. So does he now bring charges after the budget resolution vote is over? But they're going to need him again over and over. But they could replace him pretty easily takes it takes a while

And so then you're down a vote. Mm-hmm for that strip for that stretch of time. Yeah, so I would imagine they're gonna just prop him up Just because they they want his vote just like they did with Santa George Santos, even though they didn't want him there. He said, look, I'll vote. You have a tiny majority. I'll vote your way. Just keep me out of prison as long as you can. Well, actually, they regret now. I mean, I think if you talk to most MAGA Hill Republicans, they will say they actually regret getting rid of Santos when they did. They could have actually used him longer. They got Swozy in there. Yeah, but also they feel like they could have used him longer on votes and it would have been more beneficial. So this time, yeah, but let they feel like they could have used him longer on votes and it would have been more beneficial.

So this time, yeah, but let's see if there's any equitable justice at all or if you're in D.C. and you're a Republican, laws don't apply to you. And what did Trump say? If you're saving the country, you violate no law. Yeah, he who saves the country. People assume that just applied to Trump. Why would Trump not apply that same rationale to anybody who's going to vote with Trump to, quote unquote, save the country? Corey Mills is going to vote with Trump. Corey Mills can violate no law. That's actually a really good callback, an important callback if that's the mentality that's spreading in MAGA world. And there's, again, they will, the charitable interpretation of it is you violate no law if you are acting in the spirit of the Constitution and

you're, you eventually, it's upheld, right, in the court of law or whatever, but that's definitely not, that's definitely not the, I would say, best interpretation, or that's definitely not, you can't just default to that charitable interpretation in the case of Musk in particular, reposting that gleefully. So especially, we were talking about Bukele early in the show and all of that stuff. So anyway, the last thing I want to say is it's rather interesting that she is the head of a group called the Iranians for Trump that may or may not have anything to do with this. But it does add an element of potential foreign questions that are raised, espionage questions that can potentially be raised. But it also at this point just looks like there's clearly enough evidence.

If they have a police report where police are listening, the police are involved in a call, so they should have a record of a call. They have testimony of the officers who were listening to a call in which he instructed her to lie, meaning those bruises were not from Dubai. And then her story changes after the call. There seems to be plenty of evidence in that case to actually bring charges. Now, maybe Ed Martin and the police department know something that we don't. That seems unlikely at this point. It is always a possibility. Maybe they, you know, know something that we don't. But at the same time, what we're seeing also does look like a fairly tragic, conventional domestic abuse situation where you have a woman who is pressured and bullied out of,

holding to allegations that end up with her significant other being arrested. So it's not atypical of how people who are experiencing that kind of trauma handle the situation. It just appears on his face to be a really, really sad story. And one with political implications. Yeah. And also,

somebody who runs Iranians for Trump. Yes. Which is interesting in itself. It's a very interesting group. Washington is, yeah. Yeah, Washington is filled with interesting people. It sure is. It sure is.

Ryan, I'm really looking forward to the Friday edition of the show. I'm sad that I can't stick around for it. But this is a huge interview. I mean, Wall Street should be eager to tune in to CounterPoint's Friday this week. If you're a banker, plunk down your premium sub

so you can watch this one early. Curious what his – so we had Doha Mekion last week. People should go watch that edition of the Wednesday show. But I'm curious what he makes of – what he thinks Andrew Ferguson will continue to do in his role at the FTC because he should have some good insight into – The neo-Brandeisians, so the sort of progressive legal world and the MAGA legal world, the like new, I don't know, the conservatives. Yeah, Bannon called himself a neo-Brandeisian. Yeah, the conservatives. They mingle. They know each other.

So that's an interesting, I wonder what he thinks about that. Yeah, this is the guy that Jamie Dimon called an arrogant SOB and Mark Zuckerberg said is just out to destroy America. So we will see how he responds to that because I know you're going to ask him. Yep. All right. Stick around. We'll see you on Friday. The OGs of uncensored motherhood are back and badder than ever. I'm Erica. And I'm Mila. And we're the hosts of the Good Moms Bad Choices podcast,

brought to you by the Black Effect Podcast Network every Wednesday. Yeah, we're moms. But not your mommy. Historically, men talk too much. And women have quietly listened. And all that stops here. If you like witty women, then this is your tribe. Listen to the Good Moms, Bad Choices podcast every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network,

the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you go to find your podcast. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband.

The murderer is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We asked parents who adopted teens to share their journey. We just kind of knew from the beginning that we were family. They showcased a sense of love that I never had before. I mean, he's not only my parent, he's like my best friend. At the end of the day, it's all been worth it. I wouldn't change

a thing about our lives. Learn about adopting a teen from foster care. Visit AdoptUSKids.org to learn more. Brought to you by AdoptUSKids, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Ad Council. This is an iHeart Podcast.