Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 2/9/23: Ukraine Fighter Jets, Bombshell Nordstream Pipeline, Twitter Hearings, Microsoft Vs Google AI, Zoom Layoffs, Trump Makes Groomer Allegations, Big Pharma, Biden Economy, IRS Tips, FBI Agent Provocateur

Episode Date: February 9, 2023

Krystal and Saagar discuss Zelensky demanding Fighter Jets in his UK visit, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist says that the US blew up the Nordstream pipeline, Twitter hearings reveal bipartisan censorship of posts, Microsoft attempts to challenge Google's ChatGPT with it's own AI, the video chat company Zoom lays off thousands of workers, Trump brands Desantis a Groomer forcing him to respond, a Dem Rep defends Big Pharma, Krystal looks into the reality of the Biden economy, Saagar looks into the IRS cracking down on service worker tips, and Trevor Aaronson (https://twitter.com/trevoraaronson) joins us to talk about his new piece in The Intercept surrounding how the FBI paid a violent felon to infiltrate Denver's Radical Justice movement.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. 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. Good morning, everybody. Happy Thursday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. Lots of interesting stuff to talk about this morning. So first of all, a blockbuster report. Now, this is being disputed, but we'll get into all of it about who actually blew up the Nord Stream pipeline and how precisely they did it. You definitely want to hear the details there. We also have the highlights and lowlights from the Twitter hearings yesterday from both sides. New AI wars reaching new heights, I guess. You've got Microsoft and Google kind of going at it. Very interesting in terms of the future and big implications here for, I think, the news media and what it's going to mean for online news in particular. We have Donald Trump accusing Ron DeSantis of being a groomer.

DeSantis now firing back as the Republican primary continues to heat up. And quite an extraordinary reaction to the Biden State of the Union coming from a former Democratic member of Congress. We will play that for you, too. Also excited to welcome to the show Trevor Aronson. He has a new podcast out, blockbuster reporting about how the FBI infiltrated Black Lives Matter protests in Denver in particular. And the allegation here is that they basically tried to make this thing more violent in an attempt to entrap people, sort of echoes of COINTELPRO here. So Trevor's going to come on. He's going to tell us all about his reporting.

But first, we wanted to start with some big news with regards to the Ukraine war. Yeah, that's right. So President Zelensky leaving Ukraine and traveling to the United Kingdom this morning. He's actually in France. So yesterday in the UK, he made an impassioned speech at Westminster for fighter pilots and sorry, for fighter jets to be delivered to Ukraine from the UK. And they are open to that possibility. Here's what he had to say. I will explain. It's the helmet of a real Ukrainian pilot. He's one of our kings. And the writing on the helmet reads, we have freedom, give us wings to protect it. So that was President Zelensky at Westminster. It was a big speech in the UK. He was greeted on the tarmac by Rishi Sunak.

And according to the UK press and some leaks out of the UK government, they are highly considering actually turning over F-16s. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. So what we do know is that the prime minister said that Ukrainian pilots as a, quote, first step will begin their months-long training on NATO standard aircraft. Now, they're going to be trained. That doesn't necessarily mean that the jets are going yet. However, they said that all options were on the table. The defense secretary has now been tasked with investigating which jets that the UK might be able to supply to Ukraine. So the prime minister just said it would be a, quote, long-term option.

So this of course has been probably behind the tanks, which they just got, British Challenger tanks, Leopard tanks from the US, from Germany and from elsewhere. This has probably been the top ask of the Zelensky government outside of a no-fly zone. It was totally off the table for basically the entire year. But as I often say on a long enough timeline, they do appear to get whatever they want.

The other question, too, is about how the rest of the NATO countries will react. So France, of course, has its own jets. The U.S. has jets. President Biden shot down that report about the Pentagon saying that they were warming to providing jets to Ukraine. He said point blank, no, we're not going to send F-16s. However, some of the wording here of what we're looking at is NATO standard aircraft, F-16 not being specifically named, so another aircraft could be sending there. But of course, it would be an extraordinary move. It would be effectively

the most escalatory piece of weaponry that we could provide the Ukrainians literally outside of a direct no-fly zone and intervention into the conflict crystal. Yeah, and it's worth keeping in mind with regards to how we ended up agreeing to sending tanks, that there was resistance, especially actually coming from the Pentagon, right up until the moment when they decided they ultimately came and said, all right, fine, we're going to send the tanks. And part of how that all happened is there was a lot of pressure coming from Germany because Germany was under pressure to send tanks and they didn't want to be out there alone. So effectively, they sort of pressured the US and ultimately, because we seem to always do this, we caved and said, all right, fine, we will send the tanks. So are you going to have a similar dynamic here where the UK is on board with sending fighter jets, but wants us to

go along with them? You know, the UK, whether it is under new prime minister Rishi Sunak or previous prime minister, this was now two prime ministers ago, Boris Johnson, they have been among the most bellicose, the most hawkish, the most pro-escalation. Famously, Boris Johnson, you know, flew to Kiev early on in the conflict and delivered the message probably on behalf of the U.S. that even though peace talks were sort of moving forward and they were coming close to potentially some sort of deal, that the U.S. and the U.K. did not want a deal at that time. So they have been our close partners in terms of a strategy that has just consistently led to escalation after escalation after escalation. I think it is always important to go back to the way this was sold to the American people at the beginning and what we were told were going to be the parameters of our support. we can for Ukraine to defend themselves. And offensive capabilities, tanks, and especially longer range missiles,

and doubly especially fighter jets, totally off the table. Joe Biden says, no, we're not going to do it. He's said that before about many other things that we ultimately ended up shipping. So I wouldn't take that. I would take that with a lot of grains of salt. We'll see.

You know, Boris Johnson, Prime Minister Johnson, a former Prime Minister Johnson, was actually here in the United States just last week campaigning to send F-16s to the Ukrainians. He's been calling for more fighter jets that go over there. I'm of a couple of minds of this. Of course, I do want the Europeans to take the vast majority of the aid. So it's one of those things where I'm like, hey, you want to send it? Then all right, that's on you. But don't get us into your mess. But in a lot of ways, it also doesn't work like that, right?

Because we're all NATO allies and if somebody attacks Britain, well, we're all in it no matter what. So I don't really know how exactly we should look at this. The real question is always going to come down to Washington. What does Washington think? What are they going to do? Are they going to join the UK?

I mean, it's almost never happened that, you know, outside of DC, that another country is willing to give something even more offensive to the Ukrainians without the US joining in part. So we'll see if Biden can keep the pressure against that inside of the Pentagon. Personally, I'm a bit skeptical of all of that. Well, and Russia, rightly, I think, at this point, sees this as a proxy war with the U.S. specifically and NATO more broadly. Are they going to make a crucial distinction between whether it's the Brits or us that send the fighter jets? I highly doubt it. Right. So Christopher Caldwell had actually a great op-ed in The New York Times.

Go ahead and put this up there on the screen. I thought we'd read some of it to all of you because he did a very good job of articulating it. So Russia and Ukraine have incentives to negotiate. The U.S. has other plans. That's the headline. So what he reads here is that the United States' recent promise to ship M1 Abram tanks to Ukraine was swift response to a serious problem. The problem is that Ukraine is losing the war, not as far as we can tell because its soldiers are fighting poorly or its people have lost heart, but because war has settled into a World War I-style battle of attrition, complete with carefully dug trenches and relatively stable

fronts. Such wars tend to be won, as World War I was, by the side with the demographic and industrial resources to hold out the longest. Russia has three times Ukraine's population, an intact economy, superior military technology. At the same time, Russia has its own problems. Until recently, a shortage of soldiers, vulnerability of arms depots to missile strikes slowed its westward progress. Both sides thus have an incentive to come to the negotiating table. The Biden administration has other plans. It is betting that by providing tanks, it can improve Ukraine's chances of winning the war. In a sense, the idea is to fast forward history from World War I battles of position to World War II battles of movement. It's a plausible strategy. 80 years ago, the tanks of Hitler and Stalin

revolutionized warfare not far from the territory that is being fought today. But the Biden strategy has a bad name, escalation. Beyond a certain point, the United States is no longer, quote, helping or, quote, advising or, quote, supplying the Ukrainians the way that it did, say, the Afghan Mujahideen. It is, quote, replacing Ukraine as Russia's main battlefield adversary. It is hard to say when that point will be reached or whether it has been already. With whom is Russia at war, Ukraine or the United States? Russia started the war between Russia and Ukraine. Who started the war between Russia and the United States? This sudden policy lurch has the look of an accident. And he talks about the way that the tanks were ultimately shipped because of the Germans and what they were asking of us.

But ultimately, what he comes down to and what he points is that where that line is as to when we are replacing Ukrainian forces as opposed to supporting Ukrainian forces, well, it's a complicated question. It's one of those, like the famous quote about pornography from the Supreme Court. It's like, I know it when you see it. To me, tanks and jets look very close to the replacement line. I probably could have made a good case basically all the way back to the beginning. But the point that he's making is that, look, I mean, Ukraine is a polity that does not exist without the West, period. They'll literally fold tomorrow. So they have no industrial base. They have no economy. Their entire population is already

weaponized towards total warfare. And that's just simply not going to cut it in an actual conflict. Now, with the help of their allies, they're able to hold on. The question, though, and you use the word defense. I already know the Ukraine stans will say, well, they're defending their territory. They were invaded. And I'm like, yeah, absolutely. And again, I've said this, I would do the exact same thing if I were them. The question to us though, is like, well, where's our line? Are we willing to war, go to war and let Ukrainian jets bomb Crimea? I mean, or sorry, US provided jets to bomb Crimea. That's a whole other ball game in terms of the way that they consider it. You know, or sorry, US provided jets to bomb Crimea. That's a whole other ballgame in terms of the way that they consider it. You know, bombing Eastern Ukraine is a whole other scenario.

And the Ukrainians, by the way, you know, all the polling coming out of Ukraine in the at least Western part of Ukraine, the people who massively support the Zelensky government, 91% of them want to retake Crimea. They look at it as a total non-negotiable thing that we would tell them not to do it. Listen, you can do what you want. What you do with our weapons, though, we're going to have some say in that. And I think we probably should. There's a couple of really key points that he makes here. As you, Leon Sager, targeting Crimea is a different thing, a different beast. And what he says in this piece is President Biden's own advisors are divided on how aggressively to pursue the war. Some even proposed to chase

Russia out of Crimea. That would promise a new kind of mission for NATO, the conquest, annexation and garrisoning of a population that doesn't want it. So with regards to Crimea, I think he lays that out extremely well. The other piece here is that, you know, he reminds that we have to keep in mind not just what's good for us or good for Ukraine in the short term, but how are you going to bring this thing to a close? And when or if is Russia likely to fold? Like you have to get into their shoes and how they're looking at this as well. And he warns we should not forget that whatever values each side might bring to it, this war is not at heart a clash of values. It is a classic interstate war over territory and power occurring at a border between empires.

In this confrontation, Mr. Putin and his Russia have fewer good options for backing down than American policymakers seem to realize. And more incentives to follow the U.S. all the way up the ladder of escalation. That is a dire warning right there, because what does the ladder of escalation look like when you're talking about two nuclear armed superpowers? I don't think that is a place that any of us want to go and that our policymakers should be ultimately pushing us. So I think he lays out the stakes here quite well and has some clear thinking about what we're doing, how we have just sort of climbed this ladder of escalation with very little debate, with very little thinking,

and where this could ultimately all lead. Yeah. Well, I think we'll all find out. And look, things on the ground are actually shifting quickly. Let's put this up there on the screen. Right now, it looks like a offensive sometime in this month of February is going to be mounted by the Russians somewhere in eastern Ukraine. A lot of intelligence coming out, spy satellites and others indicating that there's a lot of railway activity and a lot of troops that are being brought to the front line. And so this will also be a critical test of Ukrainian forces after they had their significant victory in the spring offensive and to see how they've held up through the winter. There's been relentless amounts of shelling, missile attacks all across the city.

Their resolve doesn't seem to be folding. But look, you think Zelensky leaves Ukraine begging for weapons, you know, just because it's out of the goodness of his heart or because things are going well. No, he's doing it because he desperately, obviously, looks like he needs it in order to get the job done the way that he sees it. That's part of why he came to Washington. That's part of why he's in Paris today. And it's part of why he was in the UK.

And he's probably going to go to Berlin next. And that's not a surprise to anybody. All right, let's go to the next one here. Quite a bit of discussion. We're going to lay it all out for you. Seymour Hersh, the famous Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who uncovered the My Lai Massacre, has put out a new report on his substack. He says, quote, how America took out the Nord Stream pipeline.

His subhead is the New York Times called it a mystery, but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret until now. So it's worth noting a couple of things. Number one is that Hirsch is basing all of this on an anonymous source, but I'll read to you exactly what he says. The US Navy's Diving and Salvage Center is found at an obscure location down in a country lane in rural Panama City, a now booming resort in the southwestern panhandle of Florida. The complex is nondescript as its location. The center has been training highly

skilled deepwater divers for decades who were once assigned to the American military units worldwide, capable of technical diving to do the good, using C4 explosives to clear harbors and beaches of debris and unexploded ordnance, as well as the bad, like blowing up foreign oil rigs, fouling intake valves for undersea power plants, destroying locks. The Panama City Center, which boasts the second largest indoor pool in America, was a perfect place to recruit the best and most taciturn graduates of the diving school, who successfully last summer, when they were authorized to do a 260-feet operation under the surface of the Baltic Sea. So here is his specific allegation. Last June, Navy divers operating the cover of a widely publicized midsummer NATO exercise known as

BaltOps-22 planted remotely triggered explosives that three months later destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning. I will note that he is single sourcing this. He says it's somebody who, since been interviewed, he says it's somebody who would certainly be in the know. Two of the pipelines, which were collectively known as Nord Stream 1, providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian gas, a second pair of pipelines called Nord Stream 2, but were not yet operational. Now with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war since 1945, President Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions. So this was denied by the White House. They say, quote, this is false and

complete fiction. This claim is completely and utterly false. So the rest of the report goes more into the strategic position of the North Stream Pipeline itself. But the core allegation is that U.S. Navy divers acting under the authorization of the president were sent in June of 2022 to plant explosives that were triggered months later on the pipeline. And of course, you know, this is an explosive allegation because look, Seymour Hersh, you cannot deny it, uncovered one of the biggest scandals of the entire Vietnam War and is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. And anything that the man has to say, I think that we have to take very seriously. Yeah. And I think zooming

out from this report, which has a lot of specificity, I really encourage you to read it in depth about the considerations, about the motive here, the fact that, you know, the U.S. has long sort of hated these pipelines. They talk about, you know, the political fears with regards to the pipelines are real. Putin would now have an additional and much-needed major source of income. Germany and the rest of Western Europe would become addicted to low-cost natural gas supplied by Russia while diminishing European reliance on America. Then once the war starts, as Sager laid out, they're thinking, all right, this is a way for Putin to sort of weaponize his control over energy with regards to Germany specifically and Europe

more broadly. So the motive makes some sense, makes a lot more sense than the motive of Russia to blow up their own infrastructure and source of revenue ever did. So that's number one. And like I said, there's a lot of details here that are worth taking a look at, including the fact that, you know, these divers planted the explosives in advance, even talks about the operation that they used as cover, which countries sort of collaborated and knew about it, who knew what, when, who was involved in the deliberations, et cetera, when and how they decided ultimately to detonate. But, you know, this is this fits with what the U.S. motive could be. And it also fits with the fact that we have now, after the fact, had multiple reports. Let's put this latest one

up on the screen that, oh, in all the investigations of who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, now you've got a German top official saying, oh, lo and behold, we didn't find any evidence of Russian sabotage. And this is not the first investigation that came to this conclusion. Now, what they say is, oh, I guess it's just going to be a mystery. We'll never know who did it. Well, there's only a few culprits who really would be capable of this sort of very intricate, elaborate mission. And, you know, the U.S., U.K., Russia, there aren't a whole lot of others that could have probably pulled this off by themselves. Yeah. My only personal thing with this is I honestly I've always thought, at least in the last couple of weeks especially since that came out

I was like what if it was Ukraine what if we're the ones who gave them the capability A. they have a clear motive to do so B. they blew up

the Crimean bridge they literally assassinated somebody in Russia I mean it's not outside of their playbook it's just that they

didn't have the capability so I was like well but then it's one of those where like did we give them the capability maybe we trained them at this facility even okay let's say it was ukraine yeah who was giving them of course the know-how the tools the weapons that every the targeting

all of that would have to come from us or potentially the uk and i mean us and the uk and this whole conflict have been fairly inseparable. So listen, it's a single anonymous source. So you should keep that in mind as you read this. I will just say that, you know, I'm not opining on knowing for sure what happened here, but the motive for the U.S. makes a hell of a lot more sense than the motive from Russia ever did. So there's a lot of this that, you know, kind of fits and lines up and could potentially make a lot of sense in explaining what the hell exactly happened here. Again, the White House denies it. Everybody involved denied it or wouldn't comment or whatever. But the U.S. motive, like the NATO motive, has always made a lot more sense than

the Russia did it motive. Well, it's one of those where like somebody had to do it. Right. And it's not that hard to figure out that there's only like four or five countries that actually could. So it's like, well, then which one he did? And well, current relief forensic evidence says that it wasn't the Russians, or at least there's no evidence pointing to that. Now, to be clear, they haven't released evidence about ruling out other culprits either. They're just like, no, no, no, it doesn't look like it was Russia. It's like, well, okay then.

So we have some questions. At the time of the attack, a lot of people were passing around this clip of President Biden talking about the Nord Stream pipeline. Let's take a listen. If Russia invades, that means tanks or troops

crossing the border of Ukraine again, then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it. We will bring an end to it. One way or the other. So look, you know, a lot of people were talking about that at the time. I tried my best here to just be like, we're never going to know. The thing that was always the sketchiest to me, if people will remember, is that Polish MEP, who was Anne Applebaum's husband, literally one of the chief Russia hawks here in Washington, who writes for The Atlantic, being like, thank you, America. Thank you, President Biden, tweeting a screenshot of the explosion of the pipeline. He later deleted it several days later with no explanation. And once again, let's just reiterate the White House,

let's put this up there on the screen, says that this is utterly false and a complete fiction. That's Adrian Watson, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council and spokespeople for the CIA and State Department both said the exact same thing. So remember right now as to who actually has all of the evidence, it's Sweden and Denmark. Sweden in particular had some of the forensics that they have in their laboratories. We should also recall that it was deliberately called an act of sabotage by almost everybody that was involved. And that's what the current evidence, according to the Swedes and to the Danes, that's what it all points to. The only question is who

undertook that sabotage. We'll have a link to that report in the description if people want to go and read it for themselves. Two final things to say. Number one, the Kremlin is responding this morning. They are saying that the world should know the truth about who sabotaged the Nord Stream gas pipelines and that those responsible should be punished. And this is directly, you know, in relationship to this report from Cy Hirsch. And the other thing, just in terms of the stakes here, blowing up these pipelines is an act of war. I mean, directly blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines is an act of war. So if it is true that the U.S. was behind this attack, behind this sabotage, that is truly an extraordinary and

very dangerous act, ultimately. So that's why we focused on this. That's why we went in great depth when it originally happened and why we'll continue to pay attention to how this all develops. Yeah, absolutely. And you got to wait for evidence, though. That's the one thing is, you know, everybody, people were very quick on the draw to assign blame. But as we said at the time, let's wait. And the longer we waited, a lot of the cynics actually were vindicated. So if you just waited, you wouldn't have actually looked like you were jumping to conclusions based on preconceived notions. Especially because now a lot of the people who immediately were like, yeah, it was Russia.

Now they look like idiots. True. Anyway, it always does a favor. That is true, especially when multiple investigations have said we haven't found, it was Russia. Now they look like idiots. So anyway, it always does a favor. That is true. Especially when multiple investigations have said we haven't found any evidence of Russia. And if it wasn't Russia, then it was somebody in the NATO alliance, which is just basically de facto us. You and I both know if they found a single nail with a single acrylic letter on it at the bottom of the ocean. They would have been like, it was Putin. All right. So if they had even one scrap that they could put out there, listen, we invaded Iraq on,

you know, some bullshit yellow cake. So if they even had that, they would go with it. I'm honestly shocked that they didn't just fabricate some evidence, to be honest with you. It may still come. You never know. We'll see. All right. So big Twitter hearings in the House yesterday. This is kind of the GOP now that they're in control. It's their first big foray into their investigations into, quote unquote, the weaponization of government. You had a number of former high level Twitter executives there. You know, basically the long and short of it, we'll play you some clips from all of this and you can see what you think about it. Long and short of it is, of course, Republicans focused in particular on the censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop story, I think with some justification. And focusing on some other areas of concern where this or that person was censored.

Marjorie Taylor Greene asking questions about her own deplatforming from Twitter. Democrats were focused a lot on, number one, saying like, oh, this is all a giant waste of time. And number two, that they actually didn't do enough to censor extreme content, especially leading up to January 6th. So that was kind of the overall, that was like the part, what the partisan sides were jockeying about. We had Yoel Roth, who, of course, you guys probably know, former high-level Twitter executive. He had penned a piece for the New York Times and became very known throughout his role in the Twitter files, his appearances in the Twitter files, talking about how the Hunter Biden laptop story was censored initially because it bore the hallmarks of Russian misinformation. Let's take a listen to what he had to say. In 2020, Twitter noticed activity related to the laptop that, at first glance,

bore a lot of similarities to the 2016 Russian hack and leak operation targeting the DNC, and we had to decide what to do. And in that moment, with limited information, Twitter made a mistake. Under the distribution of hacked material policy, the company decided to prevent links to the New York Post stories about the laptop from being shared across the service. Within just mere minutes or hours after the New York Post published its story on the Hunter Biden laptop, at 8.51 a.m., you sent a message to a team, part of your team, I assume, and you said, it isn't clearly violative of our hacked materials policy, referring to this story. So bottom line, their story is the government didn't actually

talk to us about this specific thing. However, they seem to have taken, remember that letter that was published and signed by all the generals and whatever saying this bears the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. They apparently took that very seriously. Number one. Number two, the idea that hacked materials shouldn't be distributed or that there was some grave error in the way that they handled the WikiLeaks information, I just think this is total nonsense. I mean, journalists get information from a variety of sources, oftentimes very sketchy, sometimes hacked materials, all the time. That material, even if this was a Russian hack and dump operation, it still shouldn't be banned. So that's another piece. And then finally, Sagar, you know, it seems

like what happened here potentially is the same thing that happened with Facebook, where you had all these meetings with the FBI and they're saying, oh, something might come. We're worried something's going to come. Something's going to come. Something's going to come. And then when this story drops and you have official Washington come in and say all the hallmarks of Russian misinformation, they were primed to act even without needing the government to tell them specifically to act on this particular piece of information. Oh, absolutely. I mean, the FBI fingerprints on this are everywhere. And I believe, you know, we have this next one here, which shows Jim Jordan actually talking to Jim Baker, who was literally worked for Jim Comey, was actually got in trouble at the FBI for mishandling Russiagate specifically, then hired by Twitter, which it's like, how can you just continue to fail upward? Like, imagine getting fired from your job for doing a bad job and then getting paid millions of dollars more to go work

at one of the biggest tech companies in the world. It's insane. And of course, you know, he also denies any FBI fingerprints on all of this, but he literally was the FBI general counsel. Let's take a listen to what he said. Mr. Baker, you said you didn't talk with the FBI that day. Did you talk to the FBI about the Hunter Biden laptop story prior to then or after that day? I'm trying to make sure I can answer this question consistent with the restrictions that I talked about in my opening statement. Simple question, you talked to the FBI about the Hunter Biden story? I do to the best of my recollection I did not talk to the FBI about the Hunter Biden story before that day. You talked talk to him after?

You said your response is real specific to the chairman. You said, I did not talk to the FBI about the Hunter Biden laptop story that day. I assume that day is October 14th. I want to know if you talked to him on the 13th or before, or if you talked to him on the 15th and after. I don't recall speaking to the FBI sitting here today. I don't recall speaking to the FBI at all about the Hunter Biden matter. Well, then why'd you answer it the way you did?

I beg your pardon? I yield back. I don't recall. The classic. He doesn't recall. He doesn't recall anything. Great way to avoid a purge.

I don't know. Some other information comes out later. I don't know. Yeah, it's possible. I just happen to work for them. I just happen to be good friends with all the people

who signed this BS letter which says it has all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. I also happen to work for them. I just happen to be good friends with all the people who signed this BS letter, which says it has all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. I also happen to just get fired from the FBI for, you know, lying to an inspector general and for being all over Russiagate. Hey, you know, whatever. I don't recall. That's why I'm sitting before you people today. I mean, it's so, like, it's so mucky and disgusting.

And, look, I wish we could move past this. But it does matter. I mean, you can't have these former cops, top law enforcement officials, then going to go work in the private sector, taking their cues in order to censor a legitimate story. We always go back to this. Look, the day that the story broke, we were like, yeah, maybe we'll cover it tomorrow. It was one of those things where it's like, and again, all the Biden corruption stuff actually hadn't come out. A lot of it was more just like the original photos. Photos, a picture, whatever.

Exactly. That's the first initial impression that we had. And we're like, eh, we'll cover it tomorrow. We were literally on the air. By the end of the day, you can't click a link on it on Twitter. And now we have to talk, not even just have to talk about it. That's a way bigger story. And really, I think, was across the Rubicon moment for a lot of people, just extraordinary lengths that they would go to. And listen,

what we're about to show you shows exactly why you cannot let governments have this type of power. Right. You can't, because it just goes down a very dangerous road. I saw AOC and I saw Jamie Raskin both talking about, like, there are so many other things we could be doing with our time. We could be focused on health care, jobs, et cetera, et cetera, and agree. Like, I definitely want the government to focus on those issues as well. But I don't think you can hand wave away how important, you know, core speech rights are, how important, like, the core infrastructure of our democracy ultimately is. And so even if you believe, as I do, that Republicans have basically partisan motives here, the idea of

a few billionaires in cahoots with government in a secret collaboration controlling the platforms that millions and millions of Americans use to communicate, especially about political topics, it's an important issue. So to just hand wave it away and say, ah, there's so much more important stuff we could talk about, I just don't agree with that perspective whatsoever. Now, to the point of the partisan nature of this inquiry, little language warning here,

but also part of what came out is, listen, it's not just the Democrats out there working the refs in terms of Twitter and these other platforms. Republicans and specifically Donald Trump were asking for certain content to be censored as well. Let's take a listen to that. Earlier, you testified about a 2019 tweet that was about President Trump. And I think it was from Ms. Teigen. What was the tweet about?

Would you like me to give the direct quote? Yeah. Please excuse my language. This is a direct quote, but Chrissy Teigen referred to Donald Trump as a pussy ass bitch. Okay. Free speech. And what happened after Ms. Teigen posted her tweet? What did the White House do? What did the Trump White House do? From my understanding, the White House reached out to ask that this tweet be removed. It was my team's job. This fell underneath the policy for abusive behaviors. And we evaluated underneath our insults policy.

At that time, up to three insults were allowed. And so it was our job to determine how many insults were included within that phrase. The Trump White House reached out, not an agency, but the White House reached out and requested that you remove the tweet? From my understanding, yes. In any case, apparently, according to this testimony, Donald Trump specifically asked for this Chrissy Teigen tweet to be taken down and censored based on their hate speech policies. There's also been reporting from Rolling Stone that they had an entire database of Republican requests. Now, some of those were requests of like, hey, this tweet shouldn't have been taken down, put it back up. Others of them were things like this of, you know, hey, take this one down. It

violates the hate speech policy, et cetera. But whether it was, you know, a request to bring something back or take it off, all of this also shows that Republicans were happy to use the sort of elite access that they had to Twitter to work the rest as well. I also just hate the way, it's so bureaucratic. They're like, well, we have an insult policy. You're allowed to have three insults. Why? Why are we only allowed to have three insults? It's very arbitrary. All right, sorry. It's America. You know, some people are annoying and they're allowed to say whatever they want. I just don't, all of the bureaucracy that they invented,

and it was all fake. You know, they're like, our hacked materials policy. It's BS. You literally make this stuff up on the spot. You know what's easier?

A free speech policy because then you actually don't have to invent any of this other nonsense in order to take stuff down. If it's illegal, okay, take it down. Everything else,

leave it up. There it is. It's just not difficult to actually figure out the solution to this. It really does drive me crazy when I listen to these people talk. Yeah, I mean, you've just—and part of the problem—

listen, I don't want to make it like these decisions would always be clear-cut. I think it's challenging. I think under even the best of intentions, you are going to have borderline cases. You're going to have issues where, eh, does it fall on the side of free speech? Is it too far? Is this dox? I mean, these are not simple questions to answer here. But the total lack of transparency, the fact that this is all happening in a black box, the fact that you have powerful government elites and agencies like the FBI collaborating to work the refs to get their interpretation of

the rules imposed on all of this. And again, all happening in secret, that is a major, major problem for our democracy when these tools are so core to speech at this point. So she saw Cori Bush, Congresswoman, make a good point about how, you know, in her view, there should be some sort of public ownership so that you have some sort of democratic accountability. In my opinion, that's the only direction to actually solve these problems. The other direction to go in would be to break up some of these platforms so that they have less individual power. But I think the bottom line, whatever you think the right solution is here, the bottom

line is having this kind of power consolidated in the hands of a few totally unaccountable people and it all happening in secret is a disaster for absolutely everybody. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, let's move on. Speaking of technology and what some of the possible potential disasters are, potential disasters, all of that, big war breaking out right now between Microsoft and Google with Bing and the incorporation of AI, specifically ChatGPT, which Microsoft has invested some $10 billion into the open AI platform. The CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, just gave an interview specifically about how they plan to take on Google. Here's what he had to say. I mean, look, I have the greatest of admirations for Google and what

they've done. And they're an unbelievable company with great talent. And I have a lot of respect for Sundar and his team. So therefore, I just want us to innovate. So there's always, I mean, we compete today. Today was a day where we brought some more competition to search. We've been at it. Believe me, I've been at it for 20 years and I've been waiting for it. But look, at the end of the day, let's not, you know, they are the 800-pound gorilla on this, which is what they are. And I hope that with our innovation, they will definitely want to come out and show that they can dance. And I want people to know that we made them dance. And I think that'll be a great day.

I want people to know that we made them dance. We made them dance. Guess what? They are dancing. I can tell you that. Let's put this up there on the screen. Google is now unveiling its new AI-powered search and map features after all of the Microsoft announcements about how they're going to use OpenAI and incorporate

it into the Microsoft Team Suite, into Microsoft Office. Now it's all about the war for search. So I tried this morning. I actually downloaded the Bing app and tried some of the new Bing AI stuff. It hasn't been rolled out yet to the general public, but I was looking at some tech journalists that they gave some of the AI capabilities to. I got to be honest, it looks cool. Like you can, you know, it's just like chat GPT. You can literally go into Bing and be like, write me a, what is the best way to brew French press coffee or something like that. Instead of a link to some recipe.com, it gives you, it's like, well, you know, here's the best thing to do. I was like, wow, that's kind of cool. Who is, you know, so-and-so help me get from point A to point B with,

you know, saving the most amount of gas and it spits it all out for you. I mean, it could be a game changer. It really could. Like this could resusc Bing, big league. I really think so. I think so, too. Reportedly, I mean, it's funny that Google just jumped down literally the next day. We're like, ah, we're doing it, too. We got the same thing. But, I mean, reportedly, their technology is not as far along. I've tried it. It's just not as good.

It's not as good as what OpenAI was able to create with ChatGPT. So Microsoft, for once, got a big leg up, I think, in terms of Google. I think it's hard to wrap your head around how transformative this could potentially be. I mean, when you think about it, as you described it, like, oh, is that really a big deal that when I asked for like, oh, what's the best pizza place in DC, instead of getting a list of links with articles or different restaurants, I mean, oftentimes, if you're searching on Google, what you're going to get is a lot of paid advertisements for pizza in DC. Instead of getting that, you're going to get an actual like written paragraph that has

internalized all of this information to give you an actual more human response. Like that's cool. But the other piece of this is when you think about, I was thinking a lot about the news industry, because obviously that's what I'm most familiar with. You know, if you are going to them and you're saying like, tell me about Zelensky's trip to the UK, you're not going to then have to go and click through an article on the Daily Beast, NPR, CNN, wherever. They're going to have an article sort of taking all of that information together and present it to you. Well, what does that mean? That means, why are you going to pay for a paywall for any of these news organizations? You're not clicking through to their website, so you're not seeing whatever ads have been paid to be placed on these websites. So this could really upend the business model for news. It could really undermine the

business model for online news in particular. And I think what's very likely to happen is, look, the New York Times, the Washington Post, like the big boys, the AP, the Reuters, they're going to be fine because they do that original report. They're so large. They have so many resources behind them. But I suspect this is going to kill a lot of news outlets ultimately. I mean, you already start to see the beginnings of that buzzfeed laid off, what, 12% of their workforce or whatever. They're already leaning on ChatGPT to write the articles. But it's not just that. It's not just that some of the just, you know, sort of baseline blocking and tackling of regurgitating articles based on what's already been produced by other journalists, is going to be now automated. It's also the fact that if you are searching for news, many fewer people are going to actually click through the articles.

They're going to rely on what Bing and ChatGPT ultimately tells them is going on. So this could be revolutionary. It could be a massive disruption in terms of journalism and news media. Oh, absolutely. And already, you know, you're seeing the business incentives, the Alphabet stock, the parent company of Google, dropped by 7% on the news of this. And Microsoft already, you know,

where I think the biggest innovation is going to come is going to be in the team suite. Like what I was looking at in terms of how, I don't use Microsoft Teams, but I know a lot of you office workers do. And for the chat function and all that stuff, they're going to do AI-generated chats where if you ask something, AI will draft an email for you. They'll draft a response for you. You can imagine already, I mean, for a customer service perspective, we already have to do

customer service here. It's a pain in the ass sometimes. And just figuring out somebody's exact issue, you have AI generated. Somebody's like, I don't know how to connect to the podcast player and immediately just replies with a spit out function form. You can imagine a lot of people, including us, would absolutely pay for something like that. If you think about so much of what that would mean at the big, big companies, places like Salesforce and others, who the entire jobs is literally just data organization deploying for business purposes. The ability to have search function, it would eliminate so much data entry. I mean, the sky is the limit here, I think, for that.

And education and business is where I think this is going to have the biggest impact. But culturally, you are right. I mean, for the news business, this is bad. Yeah. This is real bad. The other thing that I'm really just starting to wrap my head around is, you know, it seems like, okay, it's AI. It's just, like, gobbling up all of this information and producing for you, like, what it has internalized based on what's out there. But there are also human beings, programmers and executives behind the scenes who are making certain rules about how this operates, what type of information it puts out, what type of information it takes in. And all of those things

will ultimately shape, you know, when you ask it, for example, what happened with the Nord Stream pipeline? Who sabotaged it? Well, what kind of a response are you going to get if the bulk of the reporting initially was it was Russia, it was Russia, it was Russia, we're sure it was Russia, Russia had the way, here's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has a long story about how they think it was actually the U.S. What is the definitive response that's ultimately going to be put out there? So that's another piece of this that I think we're only starting to really dig into and think about is none of this stuff is just neutral. It all is driven by decisions that are being made by human beings behind the scenes. And so just like when we were talking about Twitter and algorithm and banning and how censorship, all those things work on those platforms, having a level of transparency around the way that chat GPT is developed around the parameters that exist for what sorts of results it produces is going to be equally important. And I think also you can see the way that this can lead to further industry consolidation, both in the news industry, also in the tech industry. I mean, if you've got Microsoft and Google that are miles ahead of everybody else in terms of their technology, what do you think that that's ultimately going to mean for literally any other player in the space? It's a big question. Nobody knows. There's

already a lot of controversy online around chat GPT and trying to ask it, you know, questions and go against social orthodoxy. And it's like, I don't know. I'm staying away from that one. Yeah. It's not great. That's probably the best. That might be the best direction to go in rather than, you know, opining. I don't know. Yeah. All right. Let's go to the next one on Zoom and big layoffs continuing in the tech industry. eBay, latest company. Let's put this up there one on Zoom and big layoffs continuing in the tech industry. eBay, latest company, let's put this up there on the screen. They're laying off 500 workers for 4% in total of its overall workforce. So why does that matter?

Well, that, of course, shows e-commerce, and it's just another example of major tech companies that are having to lay off some workers. He said that the company had to do layoffs after examining the macroeconomic environment over the past several months. And he said that the cuts will strengthen eBay's ability to deliver better experiences for its customers. And they're just going to try and focus on the areas where they make the most impact. Not the only one. The biggest probably is the next one here. Let's put it up there on the screen. Zoom. Now, Zoom is announcing layoffs and that its CEO is going to cut 98% of his pay, including some 1,300 employees or about 15%

of its overall workforce. That isn't just US, that's global in terms of all the people who will be laid off. But, I mean, that is just insane. And, you know, look, by the way, his salary was $300,000. So, you know, 98% cut goes down to six. But in terms of stock and all that, he's doing just fine. For the people who are at the company and they're losing their wages and their jobs, it's really not. And in a lot of ways, I mean, Zoom and Peloton were like the quintessential pandemic stocks. They were like, this is it. It's going to blow the door

off. Work has changed forever. And it's like, yeah, actually, it turns out a lot of people really like hybrid work. Sure, Zoom usage is up, but is it going to take over the world in the way that people thought? Like, no, absolutely not. It was one of those completely narrative- driven things. And so they expanded big time. They had all this stock, they had all this cash infusion. And unfortunately, you know, now they're going to have to lay off a lot of people. But overall, you were just looking at the cost of cheap money, of like a lot of excitement and all that was happening in 2020. And when the damn bursts in the Federal Reserve raised rates, a lot of people

got laid off in the process. Yeah, I mean, and you had a huge, huge stock market, you know, spikes that were driving these massive valuations that led to a lot of companies, a lot of tech companies in particular that were like the pandemic stocks. A lot of them adding thousands of workers and getting a bit out over their skis. Now they all, well, Apollo, we're sorry we expanded too fast, but I'm sure that's cold comfort of the workers that are losing their livelihood right now. I think there's a few things to say about this. I thought Derek Thompson, when we had him on, he sort of dug into what's going on with the tech session. Part of it is just like what we said. These were pandemic stocks that when people were at home, they're ordering this and that online and they're doing all their meetings on Zoom and whatever, these things blew up big and they're watching Netflix.

And now that we're getting back to a more sort of normal time, there has been a natural recession in terms of what's going on with these tech companies. That's part of it. Part of it, he thinks it could be a kind of groupthink where you see other companies doing it. And by the way, you see them being rewarded with their stock price bumping up when they lay off workers, which is kind of gross, but that's the way our economy works. And so that creates an incentive to follow along and say, you know what, I'm also going to cut 5% of my workforce and try to get that stock bump, which inwards to executive benefits and shareholder benefits as well. So that could

also be part of what's going on here. But it is part of, in my monologue today, I'm talking about some of the weirdness in the economy. And this is one of the stories that is part of that weirdness, because at the same time, as we're seeing these hundreds and hundreds of thousands of tech workers being laid off, we're also seeing lowest unemployment since 1969. Isn't that what it's? Yes. So it's a strange story. And of course, the tech growth of the tech sector has been what has undergirded the rise of an upper middle class. So much of our economy and our culture is geared towards that upper middle class. And now that you see, you know, recession in this one particular sector, that is undoubtedly going to have some, you know, sort of trickle, I don't want to use the term

trickle down, but it's going to have cascading ramifications, let's say that. And at the same time, what's growing is actually jobs at the bottom end of the spectrum, service sector jobs, and then also more sort of middle skill nursing and healthcare jobs as well. So it's a strange time where the upper middle class has kind of taken a haircut. Actually, the very wealthy have taken a huge haircut because of how much they're invested in the stock market. And the people in the bottom quintile, because the labor market is so tight, have at least gotten a little bit of a pay raise. Now, is that enough to make up for four years of getting screwed over? Not even close, but it is a little bit of a rebalancing that's happening right now, is I guess how I would put it. No question. It's a really weird situation. I'm looking forward to your monologue on it.

Yeah. I'm going to figure it all out for you guys. Don't worry. All right. So let's talk about our former president here and what he's up to. We referenced this on our State of the Union live stream. By the way, thanks to all of you guys for joining us. We had a lot of fun that night. Great insights from our friends at CounterPoints and Kyle Marshall as well. Okay, so let's go ahead and put this up on the screen from Trump. He is going after DeSantis, alleging that he was grooming high school girls. He reposted a photo that purported to show DeSantis while he was, I think, a 23-year-old teacher drinking and partying with his high school students. This is something that's been passed around previously, but Trump added his own flair to it. He reposted the photograph, and he said, or is it here?

The photo that the post originally said, here is Ron Deimonious grooming high school girls with alcohol as a teacher. And he said, that's not Ron, is it? He would never do such a thing. So that was the Trump side of the equation. Many have pointed out that with all of the photos of Trump with Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein, maybe this isn't like clean blow to land on Ron DeSanctimonious here, but Trump has never been one to worry about whether he's going to be called a hypocrite. So he's going all in. No, certainly not. This is the thing with Trump. No matter what, you can try and stay out of the gutter. You can try and stay out of the muck. He will bring you down with him. And I thought that

was really evident in the DeSantis response to all of this. Just he addressed it yesterday. Let's take a listen. Former President Trump yesterday made a series of posts on True Social directed at you somewhere insinuating that you- So here's what I'd say about all that. I get you guys want the controversy. How would your proposed legislation against defamation address those posts that could be considered damage? Well, if you think when we did the defamation panel yesterday, I made the point, look, I have a platform. It's different for me because I can fight back and people just know I face defamatory stuff every single day I've been governor. That's just the nature of it. But I have a platform to fight back.

A lot of these other people that are more little, they don't necessarily have a platform to fight back. And so in terms of our reforms, I really want to empower them more so than people that occupy high positions like me. It just goes with the territory. You've got to have a thick skin. It's also just practically speaking, I would not take time out of being governor to be fighting lawsuits. It's just not practical in terms of what we're doing. But I'd also just say this. I spend my time delivering results for the people of Florida and fighting against Joe Biden. That's how I spend my time. Not a bad response. He tries to take the high road. I just don't think it's possible, especially if he's ever going to run for president. I mean, it's possible. We could see it. We have

some polling data that kind of is all over the place and indicates some things. And otherwise, of course, he's a strong and a beloved figure. But so is Trump. And Trump just has a unique ability also to just get under someone's skin. The reason also why he's doing this is he's warning DeSantis. He's like, this is what you're in for. He's like, this is a tiny little taste of what's going to happen if you run against me.

I mean, I actually thought DeSantis' response was probably the right note to strike. You can't say nothing because then you just look like you're

getting owned. Yeah, you look weak. You look weak. Yes. Right. But you also, I mean, in my opinion,

if he had really gotten into the mud and talked about Epstein or whatever and like taking some direct shots, I think that's also not going to work out well for you because there's no one better at this thing than Donald Trump. I don't spend my time, you know, trashing other Republicans or smearing other Republicans, however you put it. I think that's probably the best he could do right now. But I also, it is not clear to me that Ron DeSantis is ready for this. And I was thinking back to the glorious 2016 Republican primary debates. And, I mean, you know, Jeb Bush, all of them, Marco Rubio, all of them trying to figure out how to handle Trump. And they just failed so badly. Jeb getting up there and being like, you need to apologize to my wife. And Trump's, of course, like, no, not going to do it. Marco Rubio trying to like get

in there for making comments about like, oh, your dick is small or what. I mean, none of this worked out for them whatsoever. And so it's a very difficult thing when you're head to head with him, face to face with him on a debate stage. And by the way, all of these other also rants, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, whatever. Chris Sununu is thinking of running now. None of these people have a prayer of facing this guy down on a debate stage and like making this work for them. So, so anyway, this is big time warning shots from Trump at DeSantis in terms of, hey buddy, you ready for this? Because this is what is coming at you and so much worse. There was other weirdness though from Trump. No one saw this coming on the night of Biden's

State of the Union. Go ahead and put this up on the screen. He was posting on Truth Social these like sort of nice comments about Biden. He says, look, he worked hard tonight. It's not a natural thing for him. It never was and never will be. But you've got to give him credit for trying. I disagree with him on most of his policies, but he put into words what he felt and he ended up the evening far stronger than he began. Give him credit for that. Many things weren't mentioned that should have been, but that's for another time. I've done a little clip. Perhaps you'd like to watch it. Good night, everybody. And God bless America. And that wasn't all. He also posted Biden's doing better now. Far fewer stumbles. And his wife, Jill, is looking lovely tonight and beautiful purple dress, clapping and applauding with great enthusiasm.

I don't know. Kyle and I were debating whether this is somehow strategic or whether this is just Trump, you know, opining off the cuff as he does and not like really thinking that hard about it. He also put in a video that was much harder hitting and, you know, aggressive and negative on the Biden speech. So there were sort of two sides to the coin there. But I don't know. What did you think about this saga? I just think Trump likes to be a color commentator and you know His most natural role is like a critic You know whenever I used to interview him I used to think about that I bake, you know He's not just the president like he's Donald J

You know He's Trump and Trump to me is a cultural figure much more than he ever was a political figure part of why he ever even Became president like he loves to be the cultural commentary. Yeah, my personal favorite was he's like, J.D. Vance looking great tonight. You know, I was like, what? What are you doing? He's like sitting there watching TV, just live-tweeting it.

But, you know, I mean, that's who the man is. This is a very clear view into it. Yeah, so Kyle's theory was that he's doing like a little bit of a face turn because he realizes that he has to appear somewhat less crazy so that Republicans will think he's like electable. But personally, I don't think there's those levels of chess going on. I think he's just saying what he felt in the moment. Exactly. Yeah. And not putting all that much thought into it.

So anyway, in terms of the state of the overall race, here's just some of the numbers that are coming out. Again, I cannot possibly overstate how all over the place the polls are of the Republican primary right now. Some of them have Trump up by 30 points. Some of them have DeSantis up by close to that. And, you know, the state polls tend to show a win for DeSantis. Some of them show DeSantis doing well if it's just a head to head, but then losing if it's a wider field. They are all over the map. In any case, here's the latest one. This is from Morning Console. Let's put this up on the screen. They're doing their primary tracker as they did last time around. This one has a wide field they tested. Trump comes in at 49%. DeSantis, 31%.

Next down the list is Mike Pence, 7%. Nikki Haley, 3%. Liz Cheney, 2%. Ted Cruz, 2%. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So basically, the only real players are Trump and DeSantis. Mike Pence getting his 7% to 10%. That actually seems pretty consistent from poll to poll. Yeah, it does. But the margin between Trump and DeSantis and who is on top, I just don't know what to make of it because the polls, one day I'll see one that has DeSantis way up, next day Trump way up, and there'll be supposedly similar samples from similarly sort of placed pollsters. And I literally don't know what to make of it. Yeah. I mean, there was another one that came out late last night that we weren't able to cut, which showed DeSantis 45-41 actually

beating Trump, but only in a head-to-head match. And so if Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, and others all ran, then it actually showed that Trump would win. Shocker. That's exactly what we've been talking about. And by the way, that is almost certainly going to happen because Nikki Haley is basically a leak to the entire press corps that she's going to announce in like six days for president. Yeah, she's announcing next week, right?

Yeah, exactly. So it's over. Like, it's going to happen. Some of the anti-Trump vote then is going to get bled off. And guess what's going to happen? Trump is going to win. So that scenario just looks overwhelmingly more likely. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire appears like he is also moving towards a run, which, I mean, you might be like, who and what and why do I care? I mean, the reason it's significant is because New Hampshire obviously is a key early primary state. And so if you're and I also think it's a state where DeSantis does appear

to be polling well in terms of these early polls. So if Sununu is able to like rob DeSantis of that potential win, it could end up being significant. So that's another one that I'm sort of taking a look at. And there's also reporting this morning, which we've kind of, you know, already touched on here as well, that there is a bit of a freak out among the Republican donor set in particular and like official Republican establishment types. And they're trying to figure out, they believe that Trump is very beatable, that Biden would have a good shot at beating him and would struggle with other candidates. By the way, the White House thinks the same thing. They think Trump is the easiest path for them ultimately to win, reelect. I don't know. I mean, that's probably right. But I also always caution against

underestimating Donald Trump. But there are efforts behind the scenes from Koch Network, Americans for Prosperity, Chamber of Commerce, like all these, Club for Growth. That's the other big one to try to come up with some strategy to perhaps unite behind one candidate, most likely Ron DeSantis, to try to take out Trump. But, you know, these other candidates are obviously not following the game plan if the game plan is to consolidate against one person because they're already building their own networks and planning their own campaigns and unlikely to be swayed by that. Absolutely. All right. Last thing here for you. We took note of quite a remarkable bit of commentary following Joe Biden's State of the Union speech.

This was over on Fox News. Harold Ford Jr. I don't know if you guys remember this guy. He was a Democratic congressman. He's always sort of like positioned himself as a moderate slash corporatist kind of guy. Here's what he had to say in critique of Joe Biden's speech. Harold, you know, we talked about polls right before the midterms, and they didn't turn out how Republicans thought they were going to, with Democrats outperforming where they were. And that has emboldened this president and this White House. Look, we talk about his energy, and Larry touched on it. He's 80 years old.

It took him 30 minutes to get out that chamber. I mean, he even stayed another 30 minutes, said they not gaveled the thing down. Two, I agree with you, Larry. I don't like when American presidents pit U.S. companies against people. I know what the president's trying to get out that chamber. I mean, he even stayed another 30 minutes and they not gavel the thing down. Two, I agree with you, Larry. I don't like when American presidents pit U.S. companies against people. I know what the president's trying to get at, but we need a fair tax system. But pharma was good to us during COVID. Big oil is important to us as we now find ourselves in a war in Ukraine. So I think that us versus them thing is not necessarily a thing to do, but we need a fair tax code. Even you and I started talking about how we could agree on the Medicaid expansion by making work requirements.

Those are the things we need. I agree with you. Yeah, he agrees. You know, we all got to just get together and we should stop pitting companies against people and big pharma. They were good to us. Big oil. They were good to us too. Oh my God. I don't even know. Like, that is probably, what, the most perfect distillation of corporatism? Yes. That's it, right? That's it. That was a former, he used to be a real Morning Joe regular. This guy's literally a Democratic congressman.

He still makes the rounds there. Or was. It's like, what are you doing? And, yeah, it's insanity that anybody would think that way. It's also a perfect example, by the way, of Larry Kudlow. He was picked by Trump. Why? Because he supposedly looks good

and does well on television. I don't really know where anyone got that idea, but that's what they believe. That's it. Big Pharma was good to us during the pandemic. How can you possibly believe that? And Pfizer, let's keep in mind, Pfizer, very good to us,

set to increase the price of the vaccine by 400% people. So the idea that these companies are like, oh, they're just out there for the good of their— Okay, they made so much money off of the backs of U.S. taxpayers based on, by the way, research that was originally funded. The technology originally funded this research came from U.S. taxpayers. So, I mean, it's just, it's just a blatant display of corporatism. It reminded me, Sagar, of our favorite Stephanie Ruhle moment, where it's like, of all the things that you could criticize Biden for in this speech, this is what you're upset about? Like, that's the best part of the speech, that he's going after these people who have been screwing over the American public, who've been price gouging them, jacking up their prices and pretending like, oh, it's just inflation while their profit margins go through the roof. That's he needs to lean into that more.

And so it reminds me of Stephanie Ruhle when he said something about, you know, Main Street and Wall Street and whatever. And she went on her whole like, I don't live on Park Avenue, but I live pretty close. And, you know, I got there because I worked my butt off, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So they take umbrage at like actually the better things that Biden does and completely ignore the failings. It's an amazing moment. It's one of those where I'm never going to get, I can't imagine going on national television and then being like, you know what, I got to stick up for big pharma. Yeah, well, it'd be worth taking a look at. I guess I imagine going on national television and then being like, you know what? I got to stick up for Big Pharma. Yeah, well, it'd be worth taking a look at. Help me tax, I guess.

I was going to say it'd be worth taking a look at, like, who's he lobbying for these days? What kind of boards is he sitting on? There might be some financial disclosures that may need to be made there as well. These people are so shameless. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the worst of times.

One of the strangest features of the very strange time that we are living in is the bizarre mixed bag which is our current economy. Is it terrible? Is it phenomenal? It kind of depends on what metric you're looking at, who you ask, and what factors weigh most heavily for you in your analysis. So I wanted to spend some time today digging into the confusion and exposing the reality, a reality that most Americans are experiencing as deeply painful, even as the White House does a victory lap. So we've got split screens of record-breaking job numbers and catastrophic layoffs. Joe Biden, as he laid out in a State of the Union address Tuesday night, plans to run on a strong economy bolstered by new manufacturing jobs from the Inflation Reduction Act, while Republicans plan to run against him on how the economy is actually terrible and people

are struggling with high inflation. So what the hell is actually going on? Well, first we've got to set some standards here of what it would mean to have a quote unquote good economy. I certainly don't judge it by the stock market or corporate profits, but I also don't judge it by the unemployment rate alone. After all, if we've got a lot of jobs, but they're all crappy jobs, I would not call that a strong economy. What I care about is how your average working class citizen is doing, how stretched

and how stressed they are, how easily they can afford the basics of a stable existence, food, shelter, healthcare. And when I look at the data there, it is a pretty ugly picture across the board. First of all, we should listen to what Americans themselves are saying about their own economic situation. And by large numbers, they say it absolutely sucks. 41% of respondents in a Washington Post-ABC News poll say they are worse off since Biden took office. Only 16% say they're actually better off. Those are the worst readings on that metric in the history of that poll dating back 37 years. Record-breaking. Voters also give Biden poor marks for his handling of the economy.

He only has a 37% approval rating there. It makes sense, then, that voters by a wide margin say their top priority right now is strengthening the economy. 75% of all voters' name suggest this as a top priority for the president and Congress. The next highest priority at 60% is ways to reduce health care costs, another economic issue. But maybe these voters are all just listening to Fox News, buying into their gloom and their economic doom. Well, here are some hard numbers that make a case for much more than an economic mass delusion. First of all, 64% of all Americans say they are living paycheck to paycheck. That is an increase of 9.3 million

Americans who are living hand to mouth as compared to 2021, and it is also one of the highest levels ever recorded. That squeeze is showing up in consumer spending numbers. Americans just don't have the cash to make the purchases that they were making just a year ago. Here's the Wall Street Journal with some details. Quote, Retail purchases have fallen in three of the past four months. Spending on services, including rent, haircuts, and the bulk of bills was flat in December after adjusting for inflation, the worst monthly reading in nearly a year. Sales of existing homes in the U.S. fell last year to their lowest level since 2014

as mortgage rates rose. The auto industry posted its worst sales year in more than a decade. The share of monthly income that Americans set aside for savings was 3.4% in December. That's down from 7.5% just a year earlier and from a record high back in April of 2020. So consumers have cut back, but even with those cutbacks, credit card debt is skyrocketing. It also actually hit a new record. This is particularly painful right now since the Fed's interest rate hikes have led to a spike in credit card interest rates. These numbers all together, they tell a really grim tale of how the American consumer is doing. They are being forced

to spend down their meager savings and take on a debt load that has just been made much more expensive thanks to high interest rates. In fact, credit card balances have jumped 15% year over year. That's the largest increase in more than 20 years. Now, the key problem here causing all of these issues is a really simple one. Wages are too low and costs are too high. And actually, as much as this economic moment does feel really weird, this is not a new problem at all. As with so many current problems, the pandemic revealed and accelerated a lot of trends which already existed. Over the past 40 years, as union power has declined, wages have stagnated and workers' share of the pie has

decreased. Corporations, they were able to rake in record profits and give the people who actually work to generate those profits the short end of the stick. Now, you can see in this chart how workers produce more and more, but their hourly compensation barely budged. Wages were flat, but costs certainly don't stop going up, especially costs of education, costs of health care, cost of housing. I know we like to pretend that inflation just started in the past couple of years, but in reality, when it comes to the basic building blocks of a stable middle class life, inflation has been ripping American families to shreds for decades now. And now, as inflation soared also in goods across the board and pandemic

era relief programs all expired, this dire situation has left Americans desperate and left them really cash-strapped. There's actually some conflicting data about whether or not wages have kept up with inflation in the post-pandemic era. The answer may look different depending on where you are on the income ladder. But what's not in doubt is that there are no more checks coming, no more expanded child tax credit, no more pandemic loans to help people deal with what has actually been a 40-year disaster in the making. So the economic crisis today, in reality, it's the same crisis that has been building and building and building my entire life. It's a crisis of jobs that don't pay people enough to be able to live, an economy that often turns on a lot

of low-paid, precarious service sector or gig work employment, but doesn't allow you to escape the cycle of scraping by paycheck to paycheck. High inflation and dramatic cuts to social spending have just brought all of this pain to the surface. So who are you going to believe, Joe Biden or your lying bank account? And Zagar, the backdrop, of course, for all of this. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, when the Biden administration signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which significantly increased funding for the IRS, they made a promise. Taxes would not go up on people making below $400,000 a year or more. The increased funding

for agents would be solely dedicated to going after wealthy tax cheats, who by some estimation have skipped out on hundreds of billions of dollars in unpaid taxes they legally owe over the last few decades. It is something Biden has stuck to and touted, including in his State of the Union address. Here was his promise again. Let me be crystal clear. I said at the very beginning, under my plans, as long as I'm president, nobody earning less than $400,000 will pay an additional penny in taxes. Nobody, not one penny. However, as critics of the IRS like myself noted at that time, while I believe strongly that enforcement against the rich should take place, many of us noted that the actual behavior of the

IRS does not give them the benefit of the doubt. And sure enough many of us noted that the actual behavior of the IRS does not give them the benefit of the doubt. And sure enough, literally the day of the State of the Union, the IRS, flush with more cash than it has had nearly a decade, put out new guidance to show us exactly who they will be going after. The new notice reads, quote, IRS introduces new service industry TIP reporting program. Oh, tell me more. IRS is establishing a new program called the Service Industry Tip Compliance Agreement, which will, quote, take advantage of advancements in point of sale, time, attendance systems, and electronic payment settlement methods to improve tip reporting compliance. The notice will literally involve monitoring employers and their point of

sale systems in the service industry to record the exact amount of tips given by customers. The program is effectively blackmail. The IRS tells employers the program is totally voluntary. And by signing up, though, for their dystopian surveillance, you get liability from audit. Great for the business owners, but for the servers, what this effectively means is the IRS is coming for your two or three dollar tips on a cup of coffee and make sure every cent is paid by you is accounted for. Now look, is it the law that you should report that? It is. I would never encourage you to break the law.

I would only say, when it's legal to pay somebody two bucks an hour, they happen to get some tip income, you hang onto that instead of forking it over to Uncle Sam when you're trying to make ends meet, I'm not going to cry about it. Neither should the goddamn government. Unfortunately, this latest action vindicates all past IRS behavior, enforcing the law most stringently against the poor while the rich get a free ride. Latest data out of the IRS from 2021 tells us that the IRS is 5.5 times more likely to audit a low-income earner claiming earned income tax credit than literally anyone

else. Imagine that. Somebody making effectively a poverty line who is literally working and has kids who might have mistakenly filled out a form is the one who deserves audits, not the uber-rich? In fact, in the 2021 report I mentioned, they outlined the odds of what it is like to be a millionaire in this country and get audited. Quote, the odds of millionaires receiving some attention by the IRS is 2.8%. You dig deeper, the odds of millionaires received a regular audit by a revenue agent, 1.1%. Less than the audit rate of the targeted lowest income wage earners whose audit rate was 1.27. The richer you are, the less likely you are to get audited. Why? Because it takes effort. Rich people can fight back. Past IRS data also vindicates this.

2020 data told us that the IRS is three times more likely to audit someone making less than $20,000 a year than someone in the top 1% of American income. Imagine that, $20,000. That's poor for a household income. Consider the immense stress of an audit when people are buying yachts with money that they owe to the government. This highlights the role of surveillance tech in our lives. Venmo, PayPal, point of sale, it's great. But the downside is it's tracking everything that we're doing. Right now, the Biden administration is still on the books. Full-scale financial spying is going to affect in 2023. The rule entails Venmo, PayPal, and other companies issuing users 1099k tax forms if they exceed $600 in payments over the course of a year. It's a previous change from before when people were only given such forms if they exceed

$20,000 in 200 transactions. The clear motive for lowering the threshold from $20,000 to $600,000, they want to capture every single cent of the gig economy that might be taking place. Again, legally, you are supposed to do that. But are we really going to cry about the crumbs here in relative terms to the feds when they mean the world to the service sector workers, you certainly won't be saying that. This is the biggest problem inherent to the buildup of the IRS. There is no mandate in any of this legislation that actually restricts them from cracking down on the poor. Until they can prove that or are legally mandated to do so, they're going to do what they do best, going after poor people and the most vulnerable amongst us, because that's what's easy.

Screwed up. Man, I hate this. Yeah, I mean, did you see? And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. So joining us now, we have Trevor Aronson. Welcome. Hi, thanks for having me. Yeah, of course. So in addition to the podcast, you wrote down a lot of your reporting and a fantastic piece for The Intercept. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. The headline here is The Snitch in the Silver Hearse. The FBI paid a violent felon to infiltrate Denver's racial justice movement. And this dude, one of his calling cards was he drove this quite notable silver hearse around in Denver and at protests, etc. So he became well known quite quickly, kind of out of nowhere within Denver.

Before you get into the story, what sort of tipped you off to this dude? What sort of, you know, got your interest as a journalist and led you to follow down this path and pull this thread? Yeah, so for the last 10, 15 years, I've been reporting on the FBI's counterterrorism program and its use of informants and sting operations to find would-be terrorists and really kind of highlighting this question of whether the FBI is finding real terrorists or creating them through these sophisticated stings where they provide everything that they need, including the weapons and the money and all of the planning. And so during the summer of 2020, it was a long suspicion of mine that the FBI may use these types of tactics against demonstrators, particularly given the climate that the summer of 2020 was

happening in. There was a drumbeat for this idea that Antifa and BLM were anti-government extremists or potentially violent. The FBI had previously designated Black political activists as so-called Black identity extremists. And so there seemed to be a predisposition within the FBI to view these demonstrations not as First Amendment protect activity, but potentially as something, potentially something violent. And the question for me was whether they would use these tactics and powers that had been deployed in the war on terror against these activists. And my suspicion was that they would. And so I'd spent a good amount of time trying to find an example of that and find a recording

on that. And, you know, at first wound up empty and then eventually came across this case through a source that revealed recordings and about 300 pages of internal documents that showed that the FBI did precisely that, using an undercover informant to infiltrate groups in Denver and then try to set them up in violent crimes. Yeah, I mean, this reads like a straight-up entrapment scenario. We're talking about giving out guns, urging activists to become more violent, go on the offensive against the police, all while getting straight up paid by the FBI. Go into some of the details on this story. Sure. So Mickey Windecker was this guy with a long, long history of deception and violence. Among his convictions were for

sexual assault. He had sex with a 14-year-old when he was 20 and ended up leading that down to misdemeanor sexual assault. He spent two years in prison for stuffing a gun in someone's face and was convicted for felony menacing. While he was in prison in the early 2000s, he was approached for a murder for hire. And instead of doing that, ends up becoming an informant. And as far as we know, that's the beginning of his career as a police cooperator. And then, you know, fast forward 20 years, in the summer of 2020, he goes to local police working with the FBI through the Joint Terrorism Task Force and says, hey, I know about these protesters who are saying incendiary things. And do you want to hire me as an informant to look into this?

And I think it's important to keep in mind that what Mickey reported to the FBI was nothing more than First Amendment protected activities. These were things that protesters had said, very incendiary things and certainly questionable, but nonetheless protected by free speech rights. And yet the FBI then opened this investigation using him as a paid informant. And then what he did was kind of insert himself as a leader. And not only did he insert himself as a leader, but he took out tactics from the COINTELPRO playbook of the 1960s. He would accuse the real leaders of the Denver movement of being police cooperators, of being

FBI informants, essentially marginalizing them as a result. And in that leadership vacuum kind of rose up in prominence among the activists. And then once he was in a leadership role, he was encouraging violence. He was in apartments filled with guns. His hearse had guns in the back, and he was encouraging protesters to get more and more violent. And by the end of August 2020, a number of the protests in Denver had turned extremely violent with basically full-on assaults against police buildings. Police officers were injured. Protesters were injured. Mickey's fingerprints were all over those and encouraging the violence.

And so he was doing that more broadly in the Denver activist community, turning these protests that were otherwise peaceful into something much more violent. And at the same time was trying to entrap protesters into into plots. You know, the most significant that he tried was to rope two protesters into a supposed plot to assassinate Colorado's attorney general. Phil Weiser ultimately was unsuccessful, but, you know, tried to get protesters to move more and more toward those kinds of violent plots. That is so nuts. Yeah. And when you talk about First Amendment protected speech from these protesters that he was reporting

to the FBI, it was things that, you know, we've all probably heard at least on television or if you've been to any protest, we're going to burn it down. Things of that nature were what they were saying to him. Talk to me, Trevor, about how he sort of picked out the leaders he was going to target, what kind of tactics he used, and what kind of direction he attempted to push them in. So one of the things that Mickey did that was quite helpful to his ability to infiltrate the Denver activist groups was that, you know, when you look at Mickey, there's this initial feeling that you have, like, how did this guy infiltrate these groups, right? He dresses like a biker. He's got military style uniform and he's old, right? He's pushing 50 years old in the group of protesters who were in their teens and 20-somethings. So he was by himself quite suspicious. And what he did that was quite effective was that he allied himself

very quickly with activists, with the Young Democratic Socialists of America, or YDSA, very young activists, arguably very naive activists. And those activists became his allies. And so what ended up happening was that the protesters who were rightfully suspicious of this old guy dressed like a biker's with the YDSA kids, so he must be okay. And that allowed him to essentially rise up in the movement and become someone that people started to trust. At the same time, what he would do anytime someone became suspicious of him, you know, the most notable example of this is a man named Trey Quinn, who was one of the leaders of the demonstrations in Denver. Trey very quickly suspected that this Mickey guy was an informant. He didn't have proof. And he ended up doing a test

where he went to Mickey and he said, speaking wholly in hypotheticals, you know, what if we went and burned down a neighborhood? And Mickey's like, oh, yeah, I can get that done. I know a guy, we can do that. And to Trey, that meant this guy was clearly an agent provocateur. And so what Trey then does is pack away from him. Mickey at that point realizes that Trey's kind of on to him. And so what Mickey does is then accuse Trey of being an FBI informant himself to all of the other activist community. And that allows Mickey to kind of create a vacuum that he then fills. And once he's in that leadership position, he's pushing more and more people toward violence and getting people to go out and, you know, attack police buildings, getting people out to talk about violent plots. And all of this is then being reported back to the FBI. It's important to understand, too, according to these FBI reports, Mickey wasn't just investigating possible crimes.

He was basically collecting intelligence on all of the demonstrators. And so much of the information that's in the FBI files is related to information about activists, activists who are not charged with crimes, activists who are not suspected of crimes, but were simply going out, you know, performing their First Amendment protected activities. And they were then getting FBI files back in the Denver office. Again, this is very reminiscent of what we saw during the COINTELPRO days. This is also directly contrary to what the FBI has stated publicly to Congress. Christopher Wray, the FBI director, has spoken before Congress a number of times and said, we don't investigate ideology. We don't investigate speech. And that's exactly what happened in the Denver case. And I think it's reasonable to assume that it may have happened in other cities as well in the summer of 2020. Oh, I mean, there's no question about it.

My last question for you is, are there any people who were charged based on this information? And are we going to have a Gretchen Whitmer situation where those people potentially are going to get off? Because clearly, I mean, in a lot of ways, he entrapped many people who were in the commission of some of these crimes. So the assassination plot that they attempted to construct against Colorado's attorney general was very similar to the type of tactic you saw in the Gretchen Whitmer case. Ultimately, that was unsuccessful. The two people who were part of the supposed plot backed out. But one of those people, I mean, one of those activists, a man named Zebedias Hall,

did end up purchasing a gun for Mickey and ultimately was charged with purchasing a gun for a felon. The irony being, of course, that Mickey was a felon, but he was also an FBI informant. And so he purchases a gun using FBI money to give the gun to the FBI informant, who then gives it to the FBI, right? Totally victimless crime. And so Zeb, you know, in the show, in Alphabet Boys, we describe how Zeb, you know, admits what he did, admits that he was wrong. He shouldn't have done it. But the important part to understand is that one of the reasons that Mickey was able to get activists to do things that they might not have otherwise done is that part of his identity was

this looming sense of violence. You know, he described how he had fought with the Peshmerga in Iraq, fought against ISIS. He had pictures of his phone, on his phone of dead ISIS fighters. Some of them, in some of them, he's standing over the dead bodies. And so there was always this sense that the activists had that Mickey was dangerous and that he could physically harm them. And so a number of activists, including Zeb, described that once they got close to Mickey, they felt they couldn't back away from him for fear that he would physically harm them. And they felt compelled to do the things that he had asked them to do, which again, I think is part of the more insidious tactic that the FBI used in this regard, that they inserted Mickey knowing that he was a person who would be quite intimidating.

And then once people got close to him, they felt they couldn't back away. And that's how he was able to entice people into further and further crimes. It is insane. I mean, there would have been no crime of purchasing a gun for a felon if you didn't have the FBI encouraging, setting up, paying for, and intimidating this person ultimately into committing this crime. So far from disrupting crime, they're actually creating and encouraging it. Not to mention that under under with Mickey's encouragement, the Denver protests turn

far more violent. My last question for you, Trevor, is what was the fallout in the activist community? Because obviously part of the goal of COINTELPRO was to disrupt these groups and pit them against each other. Were they successful ultimately in doing that in Denver? Yeah, so if one of the FBI's goals was to undermine the movement and undermine these groups, they were successful. You know, starting in late September, there was an abrupt stop to these demonstrations in Denver. A lot of these groups splintered. A number of groups that were allied together ended up splitting apart and a lot of that was due to the confusion and distrust that was sown as a result of mickey's activity you know many people in denver suspected that there were fbi infiltrators in their groups they started to trust each other less and as a

result started to organize with each other less and ultimately that undermined the movement you know that's exactly what the church committee found in 1975 that in cointelpro, the FBI deployed this tactic to devastating effect in order to undermine black political movements throughout the country. And we saw that it happened exactly in Denver, that because of Mickey's infiltration, not only did these protests turn violent, not only were people attempted to be set up in crimes, but the overall movement ended up being harmed as a result of the distrust that was engendered due to his activities. Yeah, absolutely. Unbelievable. Great work tracking all of this down. I know you spent, I can't even imagine how many hours you spent digging into this. I've listened to the first episodes of the podcast that are out.

They're both fantastic. Guys, check it out. It's called Alphabet Boys. And Trevor, thank you so much for joining us today. We're super grateful. That's right. We're going to have a link to that podcast right in the description. So go ahead and subscribe. Thanks, Trevor. It's been much for joining us today. We're super grateful. That's right. We're going to have a link to that podcast right in the description. So go ahead and subscribe.

Thanks, Trevor. It's been an eventful week here. Had the State of the Union. Got called anti-Semites. It's okay. A very, very warm welcome to many of the new JRE listeners who have joined us since then. We really appreciate so many of you taking advantage of the discount. We just had a meeting yesterday with the new set team.

Things are exciting, people. It's exciting. Lots of ideas that are bubbling up here, and I think people are really going to enjoy the look of the show. We are doing our absolute best to bring you the best quality product for your hard-earned money, and we never, ever take advantage of it. So thank you all so much for that. We'll have great content for you over the weekend.

We'll see you next week. Love you guys. See you next week. Love you guys. See you next week. This is an iHeart Podcast.