Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 2/3/23 Weekly Roundup: Paul Pelosi Video Released, Bill Maher to CNN, Buzzfeed ChatGPT, Bernie Vs Pharma, Bill Gates on Epstein Ties, How George Santos Emerged

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

In this Weekly Roundup we cover the new footage released from Paul Pelosi's home invasion, Bill Maher's Overtime moving to CNN, Buzzfeed laying off 12% of its workforce and replacing them with CHATGPT, Bernie bringing the hammer down on Pharma, Bill Gates squirming under questions about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, and our new partner Spencer Snyder explores the making of George Santos.Timestamps:Pelosi: (00:00)Maher: (5:30)Buzzfeed: (9:58)Bernie: (13:13)Gates: (22:03)Spencer: (27:58)To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Hey, guys. Ready or not, 2024 is here, and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it means the absolute world to have your support. What are you waiting for? Become a premium subscriber today at breakingpoints.com. Hello, everybody. Coming to you from my home office, we just got a bunch of new details about the Paul Pelosi attack. 911 call, the body cam footage, and surveillance cam footage. So let's

go chronologically. Number one, Fox News has the surveillance video footage of David DePapp, the attacker, actually breaking into the Pelosi home. Let's watch that first. DePapp. And you see him, he put some items down. You see him breaking some glass and the fragments of glass that are that are breaking now. Emily, talk to me about this as evidence in the case. Well, so keep in mind that this suspect is facing federal charges and state at the same time, right? All right. So clearly, what can we take away from that? DePapp was not invited into the home. He broke his way in there.

And there doesn't appear to have been enough of an alarm system in order to trip 911 or a broken glass window or trigger or anything like that to actually bring law enforcement to the scene. From there, where do we pick up? Pelosi has been taken hostage by Mr. David DePapp. And somehow Pelosi is able to call 911. So throughout the course of this 911 call, we're about to listen to a couple of things. Number one, he's clearly in distress. Number two, what's he trying to do? He's trying to finesse the fact that he's literally being held hostage at the same time trying to get 911 to dispatch, to actually send some officers to his house. Scariest moment of the call for me is specifically when they almost try and hang up on him and say, well, call back if

you need us. So take a listen to that in full. Here, just waiting for my wife to come back. He's just waiting for her to come back because he's not going to be here for a day. So I guess we'll have to wait. But I've got a problem. But he thinks everything's good. Okay. Call us back if you change your mind. No, no, no. This gentleman just came into the house. This gentleman says that he thinks everything ought to, you know, he told me to put the

phone down and just do what he said. Okay. Okay. What's the gentleman's name? I don't know. What's his name? My what he said. Okay. Okay, who, what's the gentleman's name? I don't know. What's his name? My name's David. The name is David.

What's that? I'm a friend of theirs. Yeah, I, he says he's a friend, but. But you don't know who he is? No, ma'am. All right, so as you can see, really dicey moment when she almost hangs up on him. And then they start to figure out that something really weird is going on. She keeps saying the San Francisco police. She's like, well, do you know this man, et cetera, eventually then dispatching police over to the house.

All right. So that's when the body cam footage kicks in. You have police officers arriving on the scene. They realize, OK, we're at the right house. They ring and kind of knock on the door. And that's when the door opens and we see a couple of things, everything to look out for. Number one, Pelosi is in a strange mood. He's kind of smiling. He's also holding onto the hammer with David DePapp. My initial estimation is he's just trying to do everything he can to keep DePapp in the situation as least stressful as possible. Keep the guy calm. DePap himself has a really deranged look on his face. And also, you know, Pelosi having one hand on the hammer.

DePap also with his hand on the hammer as well. Really dicey. With the police there, that's what accelerates the situation. Let's take a listen in full. Just a warning for everybody watching this. It's it's it's kind of disturbing, especially on the latter half of the video after he Pelosi actually does get attacked. Let's watch the full thing. Yeah, it was me sitting there. Hi, how you doing? What's going on, man? Everything's good. Hi. Drop the hammer. Um, nope.

Hey. Hey, hey, hey. What is going on right now? I'm not getting an answer on crawlers. Whoa! Oh shit! Come on! I'm getting a cross in the area, but it's not letting me in. I got him, Michael. I'm gonna jump, just to keep my cool, but... all right so what do we take away from that man just uh first of all that horrible sound

pelosi making uh after being attacked no matter what you think about anybody and, you know, things that they have done, old man like that in distress, getting attacked by a deranged individual like this is just horrific, absolutely horrific to see. Two, thank God the police were able to arrive on the scene and, you know, I mean, they immediately kind of sprang into action there to jump the guy off of him. And then honestly, just for Paul Pelosi himself, that took courage in that situation. He kept it diffused as possible, called 911, was able to get the guy over there, and appears to have kept it at least nonviolent before the police officers arrived. So I guess we can take away a couple of things in terms of the rumors around what was weird. Clearly, DePap did break into the residence. Also, in terms of the attack itself, I know some people are focusing in on kind of how weird and almost jovial Paul Pelosi was when answering the door.

But in context, I think with the 911 call, it's clear he's just trying to keep things as calm as possible. Overall, honestly, terrifying situation. And I guess, you know, my personal takeaway from it is always be prepared, man. You never know what's going to go down. And it still took a while for the police to get there. So if somebody breaks into your home, be prepared. Have an alarm system if it's your thing, if that's what you believe in. Have something you can defend yourself with because you're the first line of defense. Breaking news happened right after we wrapped the show.

Major entertainment news whenever it comes to CNN. We brought you before they're exploring hiring a comedian, and it seems they have made their choice. Let's put this up there on the screen. Bill Maher's post-show overtime segment will now be aired on CNN on Friday nights beginning this week. So here is the official announcement. HBO's popular show segment, Overtime,

is coming to CNN Friday nights at 11.30's popular show segment, Overtime, is coming to CNN Friday nights at 11.30 p.m. Eastern Time, starting Friday, February 3rd. It will air during CNN Tonight. Overtime features Marr and his guests continuing the discussion. I believe it's available on YouTube, as I understand it. So not really sure why anyone would tune into it live, but maybe they'll take it off YouTube and make it CNN exclusive, and maybe nobody will watch it. Marr headline, blah, blah, blah. The executive producers of Real Time are Bill Maher, and they lay out all the other people who are involved. So this actually made the most sense. It's what we talked about in our segment about this, which is he's already under the Discovery platform, the umbrella company, because it is owned by Discovery. HBO is a subsidiary of that company,

same as CNN. So if you already have IP, you need to fill in a slot, might as well take some stuff that you already own, have somebody under contract who is a well-known personality, and slot him on to CNN. My initial take is, Bill, I dare you to feature criticism of CNN on CNN. Let's see how independent and how much FBU money you actually have. Well, you know, I was looking, it matters a lot whether or not they pull it from YouTube because there's no chance in hell he's going to get anywhere near the views on CNN that he gets on YouTube right now. I mean, the overtime segments they get like this last time, this last one had Bill Barr, Nancy Mace, and Andrew Sullivan. It's got almost a million views. It's like, yeah, CNN's not going to. And on YouTube, you know, a lot

of those views are going to ultimately be in the demo, whereas on CNN, a lot of those views are not going to be in the demo. So many of these overtime segments, you know, do pretty well on YouTube. And for those of you, I don't know how many of you are like fans of the show or even watch the show, but overtime is like the postgame. So you've already done all the topics, they lay it out, whatever, and they bring out all the guests and they do another little like half an hour after the fact. And it actually, in some ways, it is the most interesting part of the show because people have kind of like got their angst or whatever from doing the show in front of the audience. Like that's over and people are a little more relaxed and candid. But I'm skeptical that CNN is ultimately

gonna be comfortable with this unless it's really sanitized. Because, you know, the rules on HBO are different. First of all, there's cursing. Oh, that's a good point. What about the cursing? Yeah. They're not under FCC,

but I know they have advertisement regulations or whatever. And also, Bill at this point, I mean, politically, he's hard to peg. And he'll say some things that, you know, he's very anti-Trump. So a CNN audience will be very comfortable with that. But there are other areas that he's going to really piss off a CNN audience. So I don't know. I'm skeptical that the juice is going to be worth the squeeze here, ultimately, for CNN. It seems to me like a bit of an odd mix in terms of the choice, other than just the ease of he was already under the umbrella. So I just looked at his show, and one of his guests this week was Francis Haugen. And

it's like the Star Wars meme. I'm like, that's a name I have not heard in a long time. I don't even know. Who is that? That's the Facebook whistleblower lady. You remember? Oh. Yeah.

I was like, why is this lady on your show right now? Like, what are you doing? But like, for example, I mean, Andrew Sullivan is very controversial. But I'm saying that's a very controversial figure for liberals. Right. So again, it's just like, you know, you're really, you're really going to be pushing the boundaries with some of your audience in terms of what they're comfortable with. Now, maybe that's not a bad thing to like push them in some different directions. But, you know, I don't know. We'll see. It seems to me like a strange fit to just sort of shoehorn this existing piece of the Marr show into a CNN time slot. And Alyssa, I'm also going to be very

curious to see what the ratings are because I have a guess that they're not going to be great. It's not a great time slot. Friday night at that time anyway is not a great time slot. Yeah. Good point. Man, weird guess. I'm looking through this. Some of these, I'm like, wow, that's great. Some of these, I'm like, why would you ever book that person? But hey, I'm not the key demo, clearly, at least for these people. Big news in the world of chat GPT and journalism. A lot of people are talking about this. Let's put this up there on the screen.

BuzzFeed announcing that it will increase the use of chat GPT to create listicles and content. After cutting 12% of its workforce, the stock is up a staggering 146%. I think the first case of ChatGPT genuinely replacing a white-collar workforce, it's an interesting one, I think, to say the least. Here's the problem, though. What have we already covered? And I guess with BuzzFeed, the stakes are low. Some bullshit listicle about here's the 12 things or whatever that say which Harry Potter house you're in. I'm Slytherin, by the way. I have a Slytherin scarf.

What does that tell you, though? Which is, when the stakes are low, I think it's fine. Already CNET and, what was it, CNET and Bankrate have had to suspend the use of chat GPT when writing articles because it was getting basic facts wrong. So it's one of those where, and look, maybe it'll get there. I think it's gonna be a titanic and look, maybe it'll get there. I think it's

going to be a titanic and a very difficult struggle to genuinely do. Also because, you know, factual journalism in the way that they're considering it in Silicon Valley, that is already essentially commoditized and is already concentrated to the AP, Reuters, and Bloomberg. You don't need, you know, like none of us us are suffering or mass employment does not exist to say X event happened. That's already outside. What the real business is and being like, what does this mean? Let's string six things together and tell a story. That's what most things in the New York Times are. It's not just news. It's context. That's a lot of what we do over here as well. Can AI replace that? I'm not going to say no. I've been amazed at the technology so far. But also, you have to recognize the limitations. When you play with it, you see the limitations

really, really clearly. There you go. I was looking online. Actually, if you ask it, what is the most cited economic paper in history? I think that's a question. It actually returns to you a paper that does not exist. Oh, wow. By real economists. But economists who did not, you know, maybe they worked together, but they did not write this paper. And then they're claiming that this paper was the most cited economics paper in history. And so there is a whole analysis actually online of the way that the AI would arrive at like inventing this paper. But this is just an example to show you that there are still a lot of failings and a lot of weaknesses in this.

And again, if you ask it to do something for you, that becomes extremely clear extremely quickly. So my guess is BuzzFeed was already planning to cut these jobs with or without chat GPT, to be honest with you. I mean, there are mass media layoffs at a lot of news outlets across the country and, you know, a lot of stock rewards for laying off those workers ultimately. So, you know, we'll see if this works out for their little listicle creation business. But I think it also shows you the level of sort of respect that they have for their audience and commitment they have to the integrity of the listicle creation process, I guess, as well. It's just churn and burn. Yeah, it's just churn and burn. It's very 2012. That's why the company failed. It had nothing to do with the journalists. It's just a crap business model. That's really what it's all about. It's not what people want at all. But, you know, good luck on your views.

I hope it works out, especially when ad rates are down by like 45%. The new chairman of the Senate Health Committee has a message for the pharmaceutical industry that they're probably not going to like. Let's roll that. As the new chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pension Committee, I'm going to do everything I can to protect the needs of a struggling working class in this country. That means we're going to take on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry, which charges the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs at lower-dose prices. We're gonna expand healthcare in this country.

Our eventual goal is healthcare for all through a Medicare for All single-payer program. We're gonna deal with the crisis in childcare in this country, outrageous, that working families have to pay $15,000 a year to get their kids into childcare. We're gonna deal with the issue of student debt. We'll deal with the fact that so many of our teachers

are fleeing the profession at a time when we need the best public school system that we possibly can have. So we've got an enormous amount of work to be done. I look forward to work with you, the American people, and standing up the powerful special interest and start developing policy that works for all, not just the 1%.

Thanks. This is neither here nor there, but did you notice that he's wearing his, I am asking you one more time, jacket in there? Oh, wait, he always wears that in winter. This is his permanent state of existence. It's very, Bernie Sanders has one really nice jacket. Right, right. How good from your perspective is it to say, chairman of the Senate HelpP Committee, Bernie Sanders? I mean, this guy 10 years ago was considered so fringe, right?

Like nobody really took him seriously in Washington, D.C., except for leftists. The progressive movement, obviously, has taken him seriously since then. But I think it's an incredible testament to the work he's done over the last decade that he's now the chairman of the committee. Yeah, and it was a lot of fun saying budget committee chairman while the reconciliation process was the thing that everything was revolving around in the Senate. Having him be the one with the pen on that was, I think, you know, I think meant a significant difference in the Senate and then as a result in the lives of hundreds of millions of people afterwards. So, yes, you know, we can put up this Axios tear sheet here, which has some fun, you know, sad quotes from drug maker lobbyists saying. Axios' sponsors, by the way. Their corporate sponsors definitely include some of the pharma companies.

Yes. Oh, for sure. Basically everything in Washington is funded by drug makers, weapons makers, whatever kind of variety of content creators need protections for whatever rents they're seeking at the time. And oil and gas. Like that's, those are, like, if you flip through, you know, the kind of roll call political on the Hill, that's, those are the full page ads that you're going to see. But yeah, so a bunch of fun quotes from them saying, you know, don't worry, we'll be ready. But we do expect that we're going to take a beating with Axios acknowledging that Republicans, you that Republicans control the House of Representatives so that Sanders won't be able to enact some of his more ambitious schemes. But we should get some good hearings out of it, at least.

One pharma, this is to Axios, one pharmaceutical industry source said, quote, I think that's going to be a real challenge, referring to, quote, I have no doubt there will be tough hearings with people from industry being forced to testify, subpoenaed to testify, et cetera. And then the source goes on to say that's going to be a real challenge. It is going to be a real challenge. the course of this article where this is a consultant for Forma who says, we're seeing companies intensify their proactive education and advocacy efforts while also preparing to deal with fresh attacks from the senator. Axios says the consultant added that there's hope attention can shift to other players in the drug supply chain. Yes. Which, fine. Why not both would be my answer. And that goes back to the story we were talking about last week where big tech is urging Congress not to focus on big tech, but to go after Live Nation and Ticketmaster. Which, yeah, go after Live Nation and Ticketmaster, but it doesn't mean don't go after big tech as well. Yeah, and actually this is another really interesting part of this.

Sanders wrote a Fox News op-ed where he said, quote, greedy farmer rips off Americans. That's the move to put that in Fox News. And I think he's placed op-eds there before. When, by the way, it was a controversy for Democrats to do town halls on Fox News in 2020 or whatever, despite the fact that maybe some of the people who watch Fox News are completely open to different messages on different issues because it has a big audience. Whatever you think of as the average Fox News viewer is certainly like a stereotype that's not representative of the bulk of people that are watching that show because it just gets big audiences, meaning there are a lot of people listening. And if you're watching Tucker Carlson, you've probably seen a lot of overlap between

Tucker and some people on the left. So it's, I think, very shrewd of Bernie to go after, quote, greedy pharma in Fox News. And I'm also curious whether or not he's going to use it as a wedge against Republicans who are now talking about strengthening Medicare. And by strengthening, as we talked about earlier, Medicare, they mean cutting it. And you'll also see, I think it was Jim Jordan or maybe it was Steve Scalise recently saying, look, why are you coming after us for saying that we're going to cut Medicare when the only people who have cut Medicare are these Democrats who cut hundreds of millions of dollars out of Medicare with their reconciliation package? And what they mean by that is they allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices, and that's going to save Medicare money.

And so they're calling that a cut. And so you wind up then kind of jamming Republicans up, it seems like, saying, wait a minute, you don't support allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices that's like when they pull that I think that pulls that pulls higher than the number of people in Santos's district who think you should resign well back in the Tea Party years there was this real effort to color people as either makers or takers and to really shame people Paul Ryan's failed attempt it yeah it's a dichotomy you're either a makers or takers and to really shame people. Paul Ryan's failed attempt at branding something. Yeah, it's a dichotomy. You're either a maker or you're a taker. And

obviously, taker is pejorative and maker is this huge compliment. And you'd see them talk about CEOs. And obviously, this has been true of Republicans for a long time. Takers, right? No, they're makers. They're not takers, of course, even though, of course, their corporate welfare queens are a much bigger threat to the country. But all that is to say, I'm really curious if Republicans can make this logical leap in their head, which is such an easy one to do. They've been really upset with, I think, some of the reprehensible tactics. I'm sure you see it in pharma. We've seen it in the defense industry. We've seen it in the media, corporate media space. We've seen it from just about every major corporation. These awful signals on different issues that I think have really

changed the norms in this country that have been damaging on a variety of issues. Cancel culture is a really good one. So if they're upset about woke CEOs and they think that reflects a lack of character, they think these CEOs are awful, should they not then logically extend that to the character of the CEOs treating other human beings like garbage? If you think they're going to do it on cultural issues, what tells you that these are not greedy pharma executives, that it's not excessive greed beyond what is necessary to power the free market? If you can make that logical leap, you can see how economically they're doing the same BS because they don't care who they hurt in the process.

Except these are their big donors. And they don't know who they hurt in the process. Except these are their big donors. And they don't know who they hurt in the process. Right. These are their donors. The CEOs, the presidents, the CFOs, the executive vice presidents, the lobbyists that work for them. They're all their big donors. And so they might believe that, but they're not going to say it to them. Well, I'm curious to see the rest of the committee from Democrats because, again, Social Security and Medicare, those are, you know, sacrosanct. Democrats are never going to talk about them, you know, post-2011 and whatever Obama was doing during that reelection campaign when he was flirting with austerity.

But Democrats, when you start getting into, like, really chipping away at the power of pharma. And if Bernie Sanders is the chairman of the help committee, he probably is going to push them in some uncomfortable directions too. Looking forward to it. Sounds fun to me. We'll live stream it. We should do that. That would be really fun. We'll have some popcorn. All right. We'll see you then. Bill Gates was put on the spot again over his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein,

which he has been less than forthcoming about over the years. You've got to take a look at this clip. This is Australia's ABC 730 host, Sarah Ferguson, in an interview on Monday, pressing Gates on some questions that he's gotten before. But it's always worth getting his answers to them, given the seriousness of the allegations. Let's roll the clip.

One of the issues that's dogged you is that of your relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Do you regret the relationship that you maintained with him against Melinda's advice and wishes? Oh, I've said that I'm, I mean, this is, you're going way back in time. But yeah, I will say for the, you know, over 100 times, yeah, I shouldn't have had dinners with him. Epstein had a way of sexually compromising people.

Is that what Melinda was warning you about? No. I mean, it's, no, I had dinner with him and that's all. And that you regret the relationship, the acquaintance? That I had dinner with him. And the relationship between the Foundation and Epstein, which was... There never was any relationship of any kind. So that's not true.

And he's really trusting the truth to be able to say there was never any relationship at any time. Flight logs show that he flew to Palm Beach, despite saying at one point he had never been to Palm Beach. His excuse was on Epstein Palm Beach. His excuse was on Epstein's jet. His excuse was that he didn't know it was Jeffrey Epstein's jet. Several meetings at the Manhattan townhouse, the famed, the infamous Manhattan townhouse took place. Bill Gates was there for those. So to say there was no relationship is a complete lie on that question. And you can see him in that interview. I think one of the reasons it's valuable to continue putting him in the spot, especially

in live physical interviews, he's physically squirming. He's trying to make the interviewer uncomfortable for asking the question. He's like, I've done it. I've asked it. I've asked it. But I thought she asked a great question. This was allegedly one of the reasons Melinda Gates divorced him. This played a role, she says, in their divorce.

I don't know how true that is or whether it was just a way to get herself off the hook for having this involvement. But Bill Gates just said people told him that Epstein was rich. Maybe he could get some money for the Gates Foundation out of him. I think what Gates means is that he didn't, no pun intended, consummate the relationship between the foundation and the Gates Foundation. No money changed hands. Right. So because there were meetings and there were discussions and dinners about where Epstein

was saying that he even said at one point that he had potentially trillions of dollars of his clients' money that he could put toward a foundation Gates was running. That was a red flag for some of Gates' staffers who were like, no, you definitely do not have trillions of dollars, like that's completely absurd. His staff also learned that he was a sex criminal. And what distinguishes Bill Gates' relationship for a couple of years with Epstein from some of the other people

is that a lot of them met him before he was arrested for basically statutory rape. Some of them continued hanging out with him. He remained popular in New York after he got out of this Florida prison for doing that very short stint that he did. Gates, however, met him after he got out of prison. Yes. Which somehow is just a level above. That is the key part of the story. I mean, he knew.

And his staff was like, came to him, it seems like, and said, well, you know that this guy went to prison for sex crimes? Yeah. And this is who you're setting us up with to meet about merging our foundations? You really think that that would be a good look for us? And then there's emails where Epstein gets frustrated that Gates is now ghosting him after a couple years of them having met every now and then at the mansion or having dinner.

And so, like Gates said, that money didn't change hands. But it seemed like there had to be some pressure. I liked the way that the presenter, though, was pressing him on what was it that Melinda Gates was so nervous about? Like, why was she warning you against him? I just think that's so key. And I'm really glad she pushed on that question because Bill Gates is not an idiot. Bill Gates had all of this evidence. I mean, Jeffrey Epstein, obviously, you know, the case didn't completely blow up until it got more and more national attention at a later date. But they knew they knew he had served the jail time for, I think it was the charge of soliciting prostitution from a minor. They knew he was a registered sex offender.

They're probably justifying, this is the very best case scenario, they're justifying in their mind, well, hey, if we can help the Gates Foundation and the benefactors of the Gates Foundation by securing this guy's money, he's probably not so great, but maybe we can get the money out of him, it's fine. But Bill Gates should know that Jeffrey Epstein is rumored to have intelligence connections. He should know that Gillian Maxwell comes from a family that's rumored to have intelligence connections. And he should know that either way, an alleged billionaire who is a registered sex offender might be doing something that could harm him, could harm his foundation, could harm his businesses. And so to make multiple trips to fly on the jet,

it does not add up whatsoever. No, not impressive. Super, super worth following up on this. If you're a journalist out there who gets another sit down with Bill Gates, don't let him tell you that it's asked and answered. He's been there, done that. And we'll obviously continue to follow any updates on the saga of Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein as they become available. Hi, my name is Spencer Snyder. I am very excited to be here on Breaking Points

because I wanna talk to you about something that I think is very important. Now, this is George Santos, but I am sure you already know all about this guy. You know that he never worked at Goldman Sachs. You know that he was connected to a Ponzi scheme in Florida. Not only did he claim to go to a college he never attended, he lied about being a star athlete there. I mean, this is like a George Costanza B story. It's all crazy, but as egregious as the lies are, and as interesting as it's going to be to watch the investigations play out, I think there might be a slightly bigger

lesson in all this. Now before we get to the narrative that I think is largely missing, we have to ask, what about our political vetting system is so broken that it failed to weed out such a profound liar? Because it's not like people didn't know he was a liar before the election, and actually quite a few people knew something was up. Look, I sat down and I had lunch with him three years ago for about an hour and a half, and I asked a lot of very detailed and focused questions, and he was evasive and weirdly bragging and egotistical. And right from the start it just sat raw.

Okay so that's Grant Lally. He publishes a small paper called The North Shore Leader on Long Island. So he was talking about getting a bad feeling a few years ago. And we're going to come back to him because he represents kind of a special player in this, but he was not alone. Josh Eisen, a small businessman running for Congress in Westchester, met Santos often on the political club circuit in 2019 and 2020. And remember Santos frequently bragging about his Gonzo fundraising numbers, saying that he was bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars. And then I would look in his filings and see that it was a four figure quarter. Santos is bragging, of course, about funds he was bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then I would look in his filings and see that it was a four-figure quarter. Santos is bragging, of course, about funds he was bringing in for his 2020 campaign against Tom Swazi, and a couple things happened here.

First, some people allowed themselves to assume that because Santos made it out of a campaign against Tom Swazi unscathed for the most part, that's evidence that opposition research didn't turn out much. Except, Swasey didn't do much opposition research, and second, it turned out that Santos was a huge sore loser. Because one of the first things he did was start a fight with the chairman of the Nassau County GOP, accusing him of sabotaging the election, and then despite being on track to lose, he went to the new congressional member orientation in Washington anyway. He refused to leave the orientation once he officially lost, and obviously this all made his own staff start questioning his sanity. So already he had developed

somewhat of a negative reputation. Fast forward to his second attempt at the seat. It's 2021, and an aide of Santos is caught impersonating Kevin McCarthy's chief of staff. McCarthy apparently knew about this. But this doesn't stop him from getting his first major endorsement in August of 2021 for his second campaign, Elise Stefanik. One of her aides even started assisting with Santos' campaign. Multiple Republican operatives in Washington and New York told CNN that they found it implausible that Stefanik had not been aware of Santos' falsehoods given rumors about Santos had been passed around in GOP circles since at least the summer of 2021. So let's put her and her team in the probably heard some rumors category.

Now it's around this time that allegedly the first big bells were rung and ignored. A former advisor to Santos learned about a business he was involved with in Florida, an alleged Ponzi scheme, among other suspicious businesses. So taken with the rumors he was most likely aware of, the advisor said he took the findings to a state party official later that fall and tried to pitch the story to a newspaper, which he said did not pursue it. A newspaper not pursuing something. Let's remember that. Okay, so we're making our way through 2021, and as is common for a campaign to do, they commission a vulnerability report. So a firm, Capital Research Group LLC, put together a report that apparently revealed quite a bit of information. It's not out in the public, but it was bad enough that on December 1st, 2021, people working with

him called a meeting and their message to him was basically, game over, either quietly drop out or wait until all of this information comes out and destroys you, can you guess what happened? Because he came back a few days later and expressed that he wasn't worried. It was going to be fine. And members of his campaign must have been shocked at his inability to understand what was happening. Because these aren't just rumors now, people close to him know things. And according to the people the Times spoke with, most of his team just quit after that. That's not a fun way to enter Christmas.

Going into the new year, 2022, rumors are circulating people are warning other people, but none of this makes it to the press in a meaningful enough way. Dan Constan, a close ally of Speaker Kevin McCarthy who leads the Congressional Leadership Fund, the main House Republican super PAC, also confided in lawmakers, donors, and other associates that he was worried information would come out exposing Mr. Santos as a fraud, according to two people with knowledge of the conversations. That leadership fund did not support Santos' race. But it doesn't sound like Dan Konstan was calling his friends at the Washington Post either, so maybe he was waiting for the Democrats

to do the dirty work, or someone else, or Santos would just implode on his own. Who knows? But in the summer of 2022, the DCCC puts together an 87-page book of opposition research. This should have uncovered everything. The Republicans will confirm all their suspicions without having to throw their own under the bus, and the Democrats will win the seat as was expected. This report was not that. It missed a bunch of stuff. It's written at various places in the DCCC report that more research needs to be done. So take it all together. You have politicians who are suspicious, you have donors who are

skeptical, you have campaign staff who are willing to completely break off from the campaign, and yet, somehow, this didn't really come out until after he won the general election. Now there were other articles that reported on Santos, the Daily Beast did some really good work, but it was really just one paper, the North Shore Leader, that came out before the general to say unequivocally, this guy is a fake. This person, Grant Lally, called it years ago. So the question becomes, why did a small local paper get it and pretty much everyone else missed it? Well, Santos's opponent, Robert Robert Zimmerman told the Times, his campaign tried to prod

reporters at local and national news outlets with leads about Mr. Santos but had little luck. The response we got back, pretty universally, was they just didn't have the personnel, the time, or the money to do it. One person said to me, there are 60-80 crazy people running, we can't investigate them all. Okay, but why? Why aren't there more reporters allocated to second-tier races? Why was most of Santos' staff able to quit without being noticed? The answer to all of this is very simple.

For-profit news sucks. And actually, the massive coverage of George Santos now that all of his secrets are out perfectly explains why there was such scant coverage of him before. He was not a proven news item before. If you are reliant on ad dollars and viewership equals ad dollars, you and your network are deeply concerned with what is captivating and entertaining, and who has proven themselves as more of an entertaining news item than George Santos. Some acknowledge to me and to our team that frankly it's only a news story if he gets

elected. He's an epic fraud and we've all been given permission to hate him. Consider how much money, how many salary dollars have been spent on coverage of Santos recently. Now how much of that, if you click on CNN or MSNBC, how much of it has been completely needless and redundant and you've learned nothing from it? Now that's cable news' thing. Most of the time they just senselessly cover a handful of big ticket items. You can really only rely on them to amplify a story. Maybe.

Now as far as national print goes, the Times obviously did some great work after the fact on this story, but they too have similar ad pressures and they have a profit directive. And on top of that, it's true, they don't have infinite reporters to throw at every single lead. But for what we're talking about, there's a bigger issue. This is a map that shows all the counties in the US and how many newspapers they have. The areas in yellow have one newspaper, and the areas in red have none. And keep in mind this doesn't indicate the budgets of the papers. The reason the North Shore Leader was special in its reporting on Santos is because they're

plugged into the community and the political scene. Of course they beat the national outlets. That's their function. This is why local papers are important. But they do have limited resources. But we're a small weekly newspaper. We have a dozen part-time reporters, some who do investigative work, some are actually high school kids. Part of their staff are high schoolers who probably can't do investigative work past 830 on a school night. Now, you look at these areas in red, they don't even have that. So there's this thing called coverage density, and it's basically the ratio of people in a given area to reporters in that area.

And in the last 20 years, coverage density is way down. On average, for every $100 million spent by state and local governments, $100 million, there's only one reporter scrutinizing it. And there are a few factors you can look to for why. One is that papers have been really hurting by the sharp drop-off in advertising and classifieds. But another is that hedge funds own half the newspapers in this country, the most notorious of which is probably Alden Global Capital. Basically, if they buy your newspaper, it's time to get your resume together, because

they are known for gutting newspapers. In another video on my channel, I touched on a particular story of a paper that had about a dozen people on staff when they were acquired by Alden, their newsroom was destroyed and ended up being cut down to just one reporter who was responsible for covering every aspect of their community. So when a George Santos emerges in one of these red areas, what happens after every politician who encounters him says that they knew something was crooked but ultimately thought someone else would take care of the taxing work of exposing him,

or they go to their local paper and there's only one reporter working there. Well, unfortunately, one possibility is that that crooked person goes to Congress. So for me, that's the big picture takeaway. Because yes, George Santos is a fraud and a liar and everything surrounding his story is crazy and worth examining for sure. However, he will ultimately leave Congress. He might not even make it to the end of this term. But he was allowed to rise because everyone either thought that someone else would take

care of the dirty work, or they went to the press only to learn that there wasn't actually enough press to go around. Eventually there was, but it was too late. He's already in Washington making decisions. So the only thing that's left is whether or not the next George Santos also benefits from a journalistic landscape that doesn't have the time or the resources or the interest, and unfortunately, that's entirely possible. But that will do it for me. I'm Spencer Snyder.

If you found this video interesting, you can check out my YouTube channel, where I talk about the media and politics and other interesting things. Link in the description. Obviously, make sure you are subscribed to Breaking Points. Liking and sharing always helps. Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you in the next one.