Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/20/23: Is Trump's Arrest Imminent?/MAGA Rages At Desantis/Credit Suisse Rescued/ Putin Tours Ukraine Warzone/Iraq 20 year Anniversary/Anti-Lab Leak Propaganda/Jon Stewart KO's Larry Summers

Episode Date: March 20, 2023

Krystal and Saagar discuss Trump's claims that he will be arrested on Tuesday, Lawyer Bradley Moss (@BradMossEsq) joins to give his legal opinion on Trump's legal scenario, MAGA demands Desantis block arrest of Trump, Pence is frozen on Trump criticism, Credit Suisse rescued on brink, Biden Sec confirms small banks won't receive same treatment, Putin tours Ukraine Warzone, US infuriated by China's Ukraine Peace Deal, the 20 year anniversary of Iraq, Saagar looks into the insane Anti Lab Leak propaganda, and Krystal looks into Jon Stewart's interview with Larry Summers on Socialism for the Rich.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.

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We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Good morning, everybody. Happy Monday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. Lots of big things that are breaking this morning and this week.

Trump claiming he will be indicted on Tuesday. We don't actually know if that's going to happen, but we will see. And we will talk all about that and the particular case and charges that may be brought here. We also have a lawyer on to help us understand the legal intricacies of this one because there's actually a lot of moving parts here. We also have some political fallout already. Ron DeSantis putting a tough bind on this one in particular because as Florida governor, he would have to be involved in extraditing Trump. So awkward for him. And he hasn't said anything about it yet. We also have some updates in terms of the market credit suites being acquired by UBS over the weekend. Will that calm fears? And also some really outrageous things that were said by Janet Yellen about exactly who

is being backstopped here in terms of the banking sector. Also huge news internationally this morning as Putin and Xi are set to meet. This comes amid a report that the U.S. is opposed to any potential Chinese-brokered ceasefire in this conflict. Kind of an outrageous stance there. And we're also looking back at 20 years later after the launch of the Iraq war. And we're going to look at, you know, we looked at, we look at a lot of villains from the Iraq war debacle. We're actually going to look at some of the courageous heroes, do a little bit of a different take on that. But before we get to any of that, thank you guys to all of you for the huge response to now having Spotify video. It is really exciting. And as a reminder, it's available for premium subscribers.

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your email anymore. Just auto updates on the Breaking Points premium feed. Again, we will send everybody a handy dandy little email again to people for both how the existing premiums can do it and for the new ones who want to take advantage. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. And I know that people are really enjoying breakingpoints.com to become a premium subscriber so that you can take advantage of all of these things. There you go. All right. So Donald Trump, is he going to get arrested or not? Kind of dropped a bomb on the people over the weekend. But it does really what we need to do is take a step back. We need to look at the initial claim that Trump has made. And then let's also look at what are these charges?

Because it has been now so long, I unfortunately am intimately familiar with this case from the time that I covered the White House, the ins and the outs of the details of Stormy Daniels, of the payment that was made to silence her, and then the potential crime, the original investigations, and now the new one, which appears to be facing some legal jeopardy for the former president. But first and foremost, let's put this up there on the screen. So Trump sent out an all caps statement, quote, our nation is now third world and dying. The American dream is dead. The radical left anarchists have stolen our presidential election. And with it, the heart of our country. American patriots are being arrested and held in captivity like animals, while criminals and leftist thugs are allowed to roam the streets. Okay, so that's the intro. Then, page two. Now illegal leaks from a corrupt and highly political Manhattan District Attorney's Office, which has allowed new records to be set in violent crime and whose leader is funded by George Soros indicate with no crime being able

to be proven and based on an old and fully debunked by numerous other prosecutors fairy tale the far and away leading Republican candidate and former president of the United States of America will be arrested on Tuesday of next week protests take our nation back so obviously the major headline is what he expects to be arrested on Tuesday in connection to this case by Alvin Bragg from the district attorney's office in the state of New York, considering the payment to Stormy Daniels, of which we have known that this investigation has been taking place for a while. Yeah. So let's all travel back in time and let's try and forget that Michael Avenatti ever existed and say, who is Stormy Daniels? Stormy Daniels was a porn star throughout the 1990s. She had a dalliance with

Trump, of which both have effectively admitted to, in Lake Tahoe. You can go and read some of the details for that if you would like elsewhere. I'm not going to get into what actually happened that day. Anyway, suffice it to say that they were likely or allegedly intimate on this day. I believe it was in 2000 between the two. And since then, Stormy Daniels, especially after President Trump announced his candidacy, wanted to come forward along with Karen McDougal and others who had had brief affairs with him in order to basically embarrass him during the campaign. And he's trying to either get money for it from tabloids like National Geographic or from Trump himself.

National Enquirer. Sorry, yeah. National Geographic. Can you imagine? Can you imagine? Well, there's certainly some nature going on in there. All right. Step back. National Enquirer.

You can tell which one of those I actually read. All right. So National Enquirer, there was an entire case around the way that that case was handled, about the payment, about the intimate relations between the National Enquirer and the safe of all their secret stories that they had and the payoffs that they would- Catch and kill, we all learned about. Yes, it was a, anyway, interesting in its own right

that we all learned a lot about in 2018. The crux of it comes down to this. Stormy Daniels was paid $130,000. This money was paid by President Trump's personal attorney, Michael Cohen, who has since served some time in jail and turned against the former president and actually turned witness against him in this case. In it, he admitted to paying her $130,000. Now, where is the violation here? Well, there were multiple avenues of inquiry on this. Number one, was this

a campaign finance violation? Because it was done in connection with the 2016 campaign. This was alleged at the time. The FEC actually looked into it. This was the initial thought about the way that federal prosecutors would go after Trump while he was president. Ultimately, the federal investigation, the FEC investigation, went nowhere. Now, the New York authorities are looking at this payment in which Michael Cohen was reimbursed this $130,000 by the Trump organization itself. Right. That reimbursement and then the subsequent cover-up or possible misrecording or possible recording it not in the way legally that they should have is at the crux of what we are looking at here.

The $130,000 hush money payment from 2016. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen for the New York Times. It's actually a decent explainer inside the payoff to the porn star that could lead to Trump's indictment. The crux of the case is going to focus on Article 175 of the New York Penal Law of falsifying business records. A conviction of a felony version of bookkeeping fraud carries a sentence of up to four years. To prove that Mr. Trump committed that offense, prosecutors would seemingly need evidence showing he knowingly caused subordinates to make a false entry into his company's records, quote, with the will intent to defraud for the action to be a felony rather

than a misdemeanor. Prosecutors need to show that Mr. Trump falsified the business records with the intention of committing, aiding, or concealing a second crime, as in that they would have to prove that the first payment, the initial cover-up was a crime, and that the knowledge of what they were doing was intentionally trying to cover up a crime to meet the felony statute. That is basically where we are at with the theory of the case. However, the prosecutor faces a wide array of challenges in this. Number one, it requires a very unique interpretation of this Article 175 law, which is not yet brought before New York state law. A judge could toss it out on that regard. Second of all, the intentionality in being able to prove, we've talked a lot here

in the past about defamation cases, Crystal. Part of the reason why they're so hard to prove is because you need to prove not only was somebody defaming someone, but that they were knowingly doing so at the time that they knew what they were saying was not true and that you have to have evidence to show that they knew exactly what they were saying was not true. So everything that I've read about this, and we're going to have a lawyer in to break down, you know, exactly what the charges are and what the precedent is and all of those things. But this is a novel application of the law. You have two pieces here.

Number one, you have basically business fraud because this payment was recorded as a quote-unquote legal expense to Michael Cohen when, of course, that wasn't really what it was. And then to make it a felony, it was in service of covering up a campaign finance violation. This is the idea, the theory, the legal theory here. And obviously, a campaign finance law there, first of all, you have to disclose what money, what benefit you're getting to your campaign. And second of all, there are limits on how much you can receive and who you can receive it from. You can't get it directly from a business as one example. So the idea here is that the $130,000 hush money payment was really to benefit his campaign.

Now, one thing that I will say, there's a lot of people who are saying, and this is kind of legally shaky ground and a weaker case than some of the other things that are out there. For example, the Georgia grand jury, for example, the Merrick Garland special prosecutor led investigation by Jack Smith, looking at incitement and more specifically on fake elector schemes, et cetera, with regard to January 6th. And I think frankly, also from a political perspective, those are the things that people are more focused on at this point in time versus this old hush money allegation from years ago that we all had to like dig deep into the trenches of our memory to recall all the details of. However, I do think it's worth pointing out. Michael Cohen did spend time in prison for this exact payment. under now he ended up pleading guilty and it was to charges of lying to Congress and to campaign

finance violations with regard to this hush money payment to Stormy Daniels. So it's not like it's crazy to imagine that, you know, this payment was, of course, in service of his campaign. And he did plead guilty to those charges and spend time in prison. And, you know, I'm not one to give Michael Cohen like a ton of credit, but he did make a reasonable point, which is all the people are freaking out, this is political, et cetera, et cetera. He's like, where were you all

when I was being prosecuted for the same shit? Nobody raised a single voice of protest from the right about him being found guilty of the same thing. Right. Part of the problem, though, is that one of the charges

that brought Michael Cohen down was actually perjury. So he actually lied under oath. So that was part of the issue, right? Is that that actually was about the subsequent cover of the crime and not the initial payment itself. This is going to focus- Well, it was both. Right. It was lying to Congress and it was the campaign finance violation. Right. And that's actually part of the problem though, is that that was a federal charge,

the campaign finance charge. That is not the charge actually being brought here. Or what would be brought here if an indictment were to come? it would be a bookkeeping case. And actually, there is some discussion about which supersedes which and the fact that the feds decided not specifically to prosecute Trump for this payment on a campaign finance violation in conjunction with the FEC, that this is in a different almost legal entity entirely. Politically, I don't disagree. Actually, that's a very reasonable case. But that is actually why the divergence of this and where the grounds on which he actually might be prosecuted and indicted and then ultimately convicted. If so, what that would come down to? Is it going to come down to the actual facts of the case itself? Or is this

going to be political? And the other thing I think that I should note also is about the statute of limitations, because the statute of limitations in this case may also end up becoming something because bookkeeping fraud has a two year statute of limitations in the state of New York and a five-year one as a felony, both of which normally would have expired for payments made to Mr. Cohen in 2017. But New York law extends the limits to cover periods when a defendant was continuously out of state as he was while he was living in the White House or while he was at his home in Florida. In addition, during the pandemic, New York statute of limitations was extended by more than a year. So with those dual extensions, we are at the expiry limit, which is exactly why they're making the determination specifically on this case at this time. I mean, politically, let's zoom out too, because let's also be real. Like nothing

ever is actually done in terms of the law. Like clearly there's political motivation on all this. Many of these people actually ran on convicting Trump, both from Letitia James to Mr. Bragg. Bragg definitely did. Exactly. He literally ran. He's like, I'm going to put, you know, New York state law even was changed in order to help them. What was it? Released his tax returns. I think that's one of the only reasons we even have his tax returns. Anyway, these are all ridiculous fights from 2018 or so that have since passed. But within the memory bank and also within the current political calculus, of which we will talk quite a bit about in the fallout section, I kind of agree with you, Crystal, which is that at the end of the day,

if this is the first one that you're going to bring, it really does seem to me one of those where on the merits, this does not seem like a very difficult case for Trump actually to beat on the merits in court, especially on bookkeeping. Also with the novel interpretation of the law, the fact that nobody's ever been prosecuted like this, you can make a pretty clear case also in the media around, you know, of course diehard Democrats are going to be behind it, but diehard Republicans too, you know,

this isn't like a smoking gun dead to rights case in any interpretation, I think, of which we will also get into with Bradley Moss. Yeah. I mean, the politics of it, the legal piece is less clear to me just because I'm not lawyers. The politics part is more clear to me, which is I think it's a tremendous gift to Trump that this is the first prosecution, because I think it is the weakest of the cases. I think it's a case that people care the least about. It matters the least. And so, I mean, listen, when I look at it, I'm sort of of two minds. On the one hand, novel application of the law, et cetera.

On the other hand, like if you or I did some like rigged hush money payment in service of a campaign, we would get popped for it. So, you know, I'm sort of of two minds there. But in terms of the politics of it is, I think, pretty clear. And we'll get into this more. But you already see Republicans swimming to his defense. I think it also will take if there are indictments in some of the other cases, which seems fairly likely. You know, there's no time like the first time. Yep. The first time packs the greatest punch.

And this happens to be the case that he has the most to work with in terms of spinning a public narrative, which you already see him aggressively doing. And so I think it can also take some of the sting out of later charges that might be filed in some of the more clear cut and frankly, more serious cases that that he may be implicated in. So, you know, that's kind of how I see this. I think it's very fortunate for him. I don't think it will certainly hurt him at all in the Republican primary. I think it may well help him in the Republican primary. And I don't know that it has an impact really on him, even for a general election. The other piece here is, you know, he

says because of leaks, we know I'm going to be indicted on Tuesday. Obviously, I'm paraphrasing what he said in his own very Trump like way with a lot of misspellings, etc. We don't actually know that he is going to be indicted on Tuesday. In fact, it doesn't really look like he is going to be indicted on Tuesday. There's new reporting that there are some other witness they want to testify in front of the grand jury, which may push the timeline out a bit. I think he's referring to there was a report, I believe, with NBC News saying he could be indicted as soon as as early as this week. That doesn't mean a guarantee that it's going to be this week. It just means this is kind of coming to a close and it's going to happen soon. His own aide said that it's not like he had been given a heads up. Hey, this is coming Tuesday.

So it's not at all clear that this is happening Tuesday. And if anything, I would say it's probably not happening tomorrow. It's probably, you know, maybe a week away, maybe a little more than that. Who knows? In old Trumpian parlance, we'll see what happens. We've got a great guest standing by, Bradley Moss. Let's get to it. Joining us now is national security lawyer Brad Moss. Welcome back to the show, Brad. Appreciate it. Absolutely. How are you guys doing?

We're great. So Brad, give us your breakdown of you've been following these cases in and out for a number of years. That's how we got to know each other. Your initial read of the potential Alvin Bragg indictment of former president Trump. Sure. So I'm a little surprised this one's coming first. I was almost convinced the Fulton County one was going to be happening weeks ago. Fannie Wells has clearly got some stuff that she's working through, and that's fine.

But for the New York case, you know, look, we all remember this story. It came out a bunch of years ago. It was this whole thing about how he paid off Stormy Daniels in the final days of the 2016 campaign, covered it up through payments through the lawyer, and then later on his lawyer went to jail over it. It's a very interesting case because there's going to be some untested elements to it. There's going to be the issue of statute

limitations. Normally we'd be long past that, but New York has a particular provision that allows the government to toll or extend the statute when someone has relocated continuously outside the state. Donald Trump did that. He lived in D.C. and then he moved to Florida. There's going to be issues of venue. He's going to say everybody in Manhattan hates me. You know, he's going to say I can't get a fair trial here. Yeah, that'll be a nice argument. But if it didn't work, the January Sixers on, you know, in D.C., I don't really think it's going to work for a lifelong New Yorker getting tried in Manhattan. You know, and then there's the last part is he's going to claim that this is being overcharged. This should just be a misdemeanor of anything on falsification of business records that the state, you know, campaign finance issues never been tested.

And that's true. It's never been tested. But every crime that's been prosecuted under a particular statute at one time or another had never been tested. This will be the first if this is in fact what happens. Let me push you on that part a little bit. David French, certainly just now a New York Times columnist, certainly no fan of the former president. He's out with a piece that questions exactly that aspect here. In his tweet about his new op-ed, he writes, untested legal theories should not be used to prosecute anyone, including, and perhaps especially, former presidents. I added that perhaps especially for those who are just listening. What do you think of that particular argument, Brad?

Like I said, one, there's always going to be a first for every case, a first for every type of criminal prosecution that's happened. Originally, there was always a first time for all of them. But here's the part that I really dislike about some of those comments, and I've seen the ones from David French and others. They keep referring to Donald Trump like he's special because he's a former president. He's not a president anymore. He's a simple private citizen. He is not special.

He's no different than you or me or anyone else who's an ordinary private citizen at the moment. If he becomes president, he has all kinds of protections then. But until that time, he's just now ordinary average American citizen subject to criminal laws like everybody else. So, Brad, one discussion here is about that you alluded to is that when you're a private citizen versus president, some of the treatment does actually change. So some reporting has indicated one of the reasons that Trump does want to be president again, for a variety of reasons, is actually he would receive legal protection. Can you go into some of the analysis on that? I know that you covered it quite a bit at the time. What legal protection does a current president

actually have while he is in office, especially as it would relate to such crimes like this, and perhaps even the Fulton County one? Sure. So it's nothing written in law. It's nothing written regulation. It's a Department of Justice policy that the Justice Department, at least, would not indict a sitting president, not because they couldn't, but because of the constitutional ramifications, the disruption it would have to the chief executive's abilities to perform his duties. They said we won't do it. That dates back to Nixon. That guidance was updated during Clinton's time, and it's never been changed. That's one of the reasons Mueller didn't do anything with respect to the obstruction angles that he thought he could have pursued, because he felt he did not

have the authority to bring an indictment of a sitting president. It was up to anybody. It was potentially up to the attorney general or Congress to impeach. So if Trump gets reelected, he'll have protection from whatever's going on with the special counsel probe, any other federal investigations. But it's completely unclear what that would mean for Fulton County and what that would mean for Manhattan, because either obviously neither of them report to the Justice Department. Those are local state entities. And there's no theory. There's no precedent. There's no case law to look back at to say, here's how it would work.

We don't know because former presidents generally don't get prosecuted because they don't do this. Yeah, got it. Let me let me ask you about another piece that people have been questioning. Some analogies have been made to the John Edwards prosecution. There was kind of a similar dynamic. He had a mistress. I believe it was campaign funds that were used in a sort of similar cover-up type of a fashion. Let's put this up on the screen. This was an analysis from Jonathan Turley that was written in The Hill.

He says, it is extremely difficult to show that paying money to cover up an embarrassing affair was done for election purposes, as opposed to an array of obvious other reasons, from protecting a celebrity's reputation to preserving a marriage. That was demonstrated by the failed federal prosecution of former presidential candidate John Edwards on a much stronger charge of using campaign funds to cover up an affair. So basically what he's saying here is, you know, they would have to show in order for this to be a felony is my understanding. You can correct me if I'm wrong. I'm not a lawyer far from it. But for this to be a felony charge, they have to basically show that the business fraud was in service of covering up this campaign finance violation. And to show that you have to prove that this one hundred thirty thousand dollars was really about the campaign and not about, you know, protecting his reputation or preserving his marriage or whatever else they're going to argue in court.

Sure. And that's a fair comparison for Turley and others to make. And I'm sure that's something that's going to be brought up in pretrial motions by the Trump legal team, you know, saying that this is, you know, there's no basis for this. It's not, you know, relevant as a matter of law. But here's things to remember. One, that was a federal case dealing with federal campaign finance laws. This is going to be a state case based off New York state law. So they're not directly comparable. Two, with Edwards, it was a mistrial. They could have retried it. They had reasons not to do so, and understandably, they did not. But they could have retried that case. Three, that was use of campaign funds in the Edwards case. This is use of private funds in the days before the election through a third party. It's unclear, and I'll give this, Alvin Bragg's got his work cut out for him

if he brings this indictment, but it's unclear if the Edwards case would really have played out differently if it had based on New York state law. We just know. Right. That's a great point. And then finally, really about the talk of state versus federal. Initially, federal prosecutors, while Trump was president from the FEC and others, decided to go after Michael Cohen on this, but decided ultimately not to go after Trump. Will that factor in any way into the state case? And is that an argument that the Trump lawyers can make? It's certainly something they can raise in the context of, you know, selective prosecution and things along those lines for a pretrial motion. But here's also to remember, when the case against Michael Cohen was originally brought,

Donald Trump was president. The Southern District of New York could not bring a case against Donald Trump. They had no authority to do so under that existing DOJ guidance. The only thing that could have happened is they could have theoretically brought a case once Trump left office in 2021. We don't know for certain why they didn't do it. Maybe they thought the case was weak. Maybe they were worried about any number of factors. Maybe they thought January 6th was just going to take them down.

Who knows? That's not dispositive. One more last question for you, Bradley. Sorry. What do you make of I mean, it's no surprise that Trump would argue this is politically motivated. But, you know, what is your read of his claim that Bragg basically ran in order to try to bring these indictments and that, you know, this prosecution wouldn't happen if it was a Democrat who was facing similar charges. Yeah, this is a tried and true method for him. He tried this in the Letitia James case that's still ongoing against his corporation. He tried that in that civil litigation saying she ran for the purpose of taking down Trump. The judge rejected the argument. And here's the best part for people like Alvin Bragg. They have a Supreme Court precedent they can point to in the context of no matter what I said on the campaign trail, it doesn't

matter if I can point once I'm in office to a legitimate independent reason for having pursued this. It's a case involving Donald Trump and the original Muslim travel ban. That was how the government managed to get the third version of that travel ban through the Supreme Court was by saying, we don't care what Trump said on the trail. All that mattered to us was what we did once he was in office and how we based it in facts once he was in office. And the Supreme Court went along with that. Gotcha. So from a political talking point, it may have some legs, but from a legal standpoint, perhaps not. Yeah, I don't think so now. Got it. Well, Brad, that's why we appreciate it. I know you've got your view,

but you are fair in your judgment. You always have been, and we'll continue to have you back on the show. Yeah, we appreciate it. Appreciate it, man. Anytime. Okay, now that we've gone into the details of said case, we've talked with Brad a little bit

about the actual legal mechanisms, both federal and state, the way that this could all go down. Let's get to the politics of which we alluded to a little bit in our previous A Block. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. A major fight is now currently brewing on if New York state prosecutors do issue an indictment towards Trump is what will Ron DeSantis do? Will he honor the extradition request of the state of New York? Will Trump willingly turn himself over in New York City? And will DeSantis come forward

and denounce the political prosecution of Donald Trump? So here's what we have here. Send the Florida National Guard to Mar-a-Lago. MAGA is demanding that DeSantis defy any Trump arrest by force. You have Jason Miller asking why potential presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has yet to weigh in on the claim on Truth Social that he's being arrested. But many more are saying, what exactly is he going to do? He says here, MAGA figure Mike Cernovich, who's really come out, and he's actually been more of a pro-DeSantis type person, but says, quote, that DeSantis needs to come out and say, I will not extradite a presidential candidate to a Soros DA who allows violent criminals to roam free until there has been a proper legal review conducted under Florida law.

If lawful, then extradition may occur, but not one day sooner. And yet he really hasn't come out and said anything. It spawned a tremendous push, Crystal, by MAGA forces, both online and probably privately as well. This is confirming some reporting from inside the Trump apparatus that politically they see this as a massive gift to them. And what have you and I said from day one? You're like an indictment only helps him in any primary. I'm not talking about the general. At this point, I have I will not even try to speculate on where exactly that will get to purely within the Republican base.

The persecution, however, you may think is justified or not, the prosecution of former president is going to lead to a rallying of exactly like we saw after the Mar-a-Lago raid. And the fact that DeSantis has already waited so long to say anything, I actually think makes him look weak. So at this point, he needs to keep his mouth shut forever because if he comes out now and does try and condemn it in some mealy-mouthed way,

the way he has previously in the past, I think he will look even weaker. He's made his choice. You made your choice now, Ron. Meatball. Now you got to stick to it. Yeah. Putting Ron as the new moniker based on the report that he's putting with this. Yes. This is quite a pickle that he's in because not only I mean, even if he wasn't the governor of the state that technically has to extradite Trump for this indictment. Just being a presidential contender, like they're all under a lot of pressure to say something or not say something or whatever.

A couple of them have come out really forcefully. Others of them are just keeping quiet. Nikki Haley among them. So even if it was just that landscape, it would be difficult. But it is, I mean, I can't help but laugh at what a bind he's in because he actually has to be involved in the mechanics of extra Trump from his day. So even if he says nothing like they're not going to forgive him for being involved in this. And in their words, you know, collaborating with this radical leftist George Soros funded, whatever, whatever, whatever. So, yeah, this is this is a tough one for him.

This is a real pickle for him in terms of how he handles it. Oh yeah. I mean, look, politically, I think it's a nightmare for Ron DeSantis. But as you said, even if he wasn't the governor who had to decide on whether to honor the extradition request or not, he still is in the same political bind of do I condemn or do I not condemn? And when you don't, of course, you are going to follow yourself in the crosshairs. Already, one of the candidates, Vivek Ramaswamy, is calling out Ron DeSantis for not saying anything. In addition to Nikki Haley, he made a video that he put out on Twitter, which is now being praised by the Trump campaign. To be clear, let's take a listen to some of what he said.

Today's announcement I worry about for the same reason that I differentiate myself from Trump, is that I think this takes us a step closer to a national divorce. I think that when you politicize the justice system itself to prosecute a political opponent of the party in power, the lead political opponent of the party in power, that is not one small step, but a giant leap towards a national divorce if they follow through it, too. And so it's in some ways the same reason that I'm drawn into this race as a candidate running against Trump. That also draws me to be a hardliner against the possibility that Trump be indicted on ministerial and politicized grounds. There you go. I don't really know why he's speaking into his phone. I'm presuming microphone.

It's a little odd, but on the substance itself, calling out DeSantis on this is very smart politically. B, you know, let's presume at the fact that, you know, yes, technically, Ramaswamy is running against Trump, but I think he's currently at 1% of the polls. If you're angling for some sort of cabinet position or for some sort of inroads, you could guarantee you that Donald Trump has seen that video and has been showing it to all of his friends. Look, this guy's running against me and even he's defending me. You know, it's like, it's one of those where currying favor with the former president, the current candidate, bringing praise from the Trump campaign, drawing a contrast with Nikki Haley and with DeSantis. DeSantis himself, I mean, the fact that he has stayed silent now, he came out immediately after the Mar-a-Lago raid and said

something. So did Glenn Youngkin. So did so many of these others. That Haley and that DeSantis here are not weighing in and are not condemning, it just shows you too how out of, because look, with the Republican base itself, even the ones who want to move on from Trump, they still think about him fondly. They still like Trump.

They're just like, okay, I like the guy, but maybe not, we need some new blood. The fact is, is like, you have got to be on the side, and this is the tricky part. We can't really run against that person. You kind of have to run beyond that person. But in a zero-sum situation like this, what do you do? He's made his choice now at this point. I really do believe that. It's been two days since he's come out, hasn't said anything. I'm sorry. At this point, if you do come out and try and condemn it, I just think he's going to look weaker. I mean, for Vivek, this makes all the sense in the world because it's unlikely that he'll be the Republican nominee.

But this, you know, it's good brand building for him, potentially angling for a cabinet position, et cetera. But his video also shows how there are no good answers for Republican contenders against Trump in terms of this indictment or any of the other ones. Because if you say nothing, you're going to get hit. And certainly if you're the governor who's charged with extraditing him, that's a very difficult position to be in. So, you know, not defending him, you're going to take a hit. But if you come out and you defend him and you basically bend the knee, you're also giving him power. So it's like either way you lose and he's strengthened. So it's not like there are any good choices on the board game for any of these candidates to make. You know, I think Ramaswamy there makes the best one in terms of how he is situated.

Is that going to help him win a Republican primary? No. I mean, none of this is helpful for the other candidates in the field in terms of winning a Republican primary, which is something that we've been saying all along because we saw it all play out with the Mar-a-Lago raid, where they were effectively forced to bend the knee, defer to him, adopt his narrative. And then the whole political scene and the whole Republican primary scene, once again, is about Donald Trump versus anything else that they may want to be talking about. I think Nikki Haley is making a poor decision here, too, by staying quiet. I don't really understand that calculation because probably even though neither move is a good move, the best thing you can do is at least say something tepidly like critical of it and try to move forward with your campaign. But, yeah, it's it only helps Trump this whole especially this particular prosecutor like the January 6th stuff would be harder for Mike Pence to navigate. Much harder. I agree. And I think some of the other candidates, too, would have a harder time navigating that one. This one, from their perspective, when you have even voices like

David French saying, you know, there's some problems with this prosecution, this one is kind of a slam duck in terms of how the base is going to perceive it. That's really well said. And already that's all beginning to happen. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. So there have been multitude signs of which we have already showed you where DeSantis is showing signs of slipping in the polls. So you can see here in a graphic compiled by Nate than 10 points. At the same time, if you look at the multi-candidate polling averages where you include others, DeSantis was roughly 10 points behind Trump. But now the gap between them has widened significantly. And again, this is why, and we can accept that polling is off in many cases, but the tracking in the average within them is still useful to look at. So if it is wrong, at the very least, then it's wrong consistently. And in that consistent wrongness,

DeSantis is dropping. So you can presume that that is going to have some effect that we can see in some of these polls. And then by and large, too, with Republican primary polls, they weren't perfect throughout 2016, but they weren't even close to as wrong as the general election. The pollsters actually seemed to be better off than normal, and they never underestimated any of Trump's strength in any of those primaries, if we'll remember. Yeah, that's true. They had him way ahead in New Hampshire. He won New Hampshire. Had him way ahead in Nevada and South Carolina.

Ended up winning both of those races. Super Tuesday as well. They always did have John Kasich in very much striking distance of Trump in Ohio. Same thing for Ted Cruz in Texas. So they were pretty much correct throughout 2016. The last time we had a multi-candidate field, going to generally presume that if you were right last time that you could use a relatively same methodology around. I mean, the thing with these polls is in the Republican primary, they have been wildly divergent. Some of them have showed DeSantis a little up or close.

Some of them have shown like a total Trump blowout. The state polls have looked different than the national polls. So there has been a lot of variability between them. What Nate looks at here is he said, OK, of all the pollsters who had previously polled in this race, how have their numbers shifted? And there were about 12 polls that had been done previously where they were doing, you know, a new a new round, a new updated version of them. And in every single one of those 12 polls, Trump was taking a larger lead. So rather than looking at the absolute number, OK, is he up by five? Is he up by 10? Is he up by 15?

What he looked at is, OK, if you polled previously, we're assuming you're using basically the same methodology. What are you finding in the field? And every single one of them found that Trump was taking a larger lead and that DeSantis had kind of fallen off. And so I think it really demonstrates the perils of the strategy that he's engaged in. You know, for a while, I think it made sense for him to do his thing in Florida and be above the fray and not get into it. But now that Trump has fully joined the fight and this shows with the indictment situation as well, the more that you're staying quiet reads as weakness and the more that Trump is able to completely define you, define what you're about, define the narrative of this primary, define the issues that he wants people to focus on and things

that he wants people to care about. And so, you know, it's still, I guess, sort of early in the game. But at some point, DeSantis is going to have to truly join this fight. And that is perilous as well. That's a perilous situation as well. Absolutely. All right. Let's go to Mike Pence been continuing himself out in the sphere. So this is the perfect also illustration of the where you're really stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, you don't necessarily want to support Trump. You clearly are willing to rhetorically hit him a little bit. But on the other, you still are mealy mouth in attacking him. You appear weak. And

there's two clips here that we're going to show you kind of put together, which kind of encapsulate all of his problems. Let's get to it. I mean, he's effectively justifying or excusing the actions of people who were, were calling for you to be hate. There was no excuse for the violence that took place at the Capitol on January 6th. And I'll never diminish it as long as I live. But look, the president's wrong. He was wrong that day. And I had actually hoped that he would come around in time, John, that he would see that the cadre of legal advisors that he surrounded himself with had led him astray.

But he hasn't done so. And I think it's one of the reasons why the country just wants a fresh start. If that standard bearer is the former president, if he is the nominee, would you support him? Well, I think we'll have better choices. And I really trust Republican voters to sort it out. We still won't say it. It's like, well, I think we'll have better choices. But I trust Republican voters to sort it out. We still won't say it. It's like, well, I think we'll have better choices, but I trust Republican voters to sort it out. Basically giving himself an in of, yeah, well, okay, I might still support him. These people, they don't have a real critique. And to the extent that they do,

as we've always tried to point out, their critique is not politically popular. Their critique of Trump outside of January 6th is, well, he doesn't want to fully privatize Social Security and he doesn't want to institute a national abortion ban. It's like, OK. And then, you know, increasingly what we have seen with them is that they both have to walk the line of that the base and most Republicans feel that Trump is being politically persecuted, but then also trying to make the case against him while going after the liberal establishment. The whole point of being a Republican today, really, I really think, is just whoever can piss off the liberal establishment more. Trump is the king of that. To the extent that DeSantis is number two, it's because he is not the second in the country who is also good at that. He's the prince of it, if you will. But being prince doesn't make you the king. Doesn't make you the king. Yeah.

Yeah. And in terms of this potential indictment coming from the Manhattan D.A., Pence has already come out and said it is politically charged and, quote, not what the American people want to see. So he is backing Trump on those particular charges. As I said before, I think if it was some of the January 6th charges, this would be more challenging for him to navigate. And I don't know exactly what he would say there. But, you know, he's trying to have it both ways. He's trying to go to the gridiron dinner and like signal to them like, ah, this was bad. January 6th was bad, but he's trying not to piss off the Republican base. And I think ultimately that gets you like the 8% of the polls that Mike Pence is at right now. Yeah. Well, this is everything. And at the same time, you know, Speaker McCarthy, let's go and put this up there on the screen. You can see here he's coming out and fully condemning the prosecution on Trump. And same thing. Here we go again. An outrageous abuse of power by a radical DA who lets violent criminals walk as he pursues political vengeance against

Trump. I am directing relevant committees to immediately investigate if federal funds are being used to subvert our democracy by interfering in elections with politically motivated prosecutions. And so what can we take away from this? Which is that the people who have real ties into the electoral system, the path to political victory is clear. That's what McCarthy has always basically made that basic political calculus as humiliating as it has been to him personally. And for everybody else who wants to walk some sort of different line, I just don't believe that a different line exists, Crystal. If you are an aspiring Republican politician today, you have to be full-throated against this. There is simply no other way to have any political opportunity. Yeah. And it's just so clear how Trump still

dominates Republican politics, how he's still the leader of the party, how there is still such a compelling bond between him and a large portion of the Republican base. I mean, if you think you're going to be able to grab the narrative for your benefit in this Republican primary, well, this is the first of many legal dramas that are about to play out. We're going to see this cycle continue and continue and continue. So I just think it's a, you know, really emblematic of some of the dynamics that we've been talking about where, yeah, they may be happy to run against him, even offer some sort of like passive aggressive, tepid, like mild critique of Trump. But when it actually comes to taking this guy head on, when it actually comes to making a case that's going to be compelling to a Republican base about why they should, why they should drop the Donald and go with you. I just don't see it yet. Yep. Just don't see

it yet. It's been a present reality now for basically some time. OK, let's go on to the banks. All right. So let's get to what is happening in the markets this morning. As we reported last week, there was a lot of turmoil because there were signs that Credit Suisse, which is a gigantic bank, was on the edge. They had put out a statement saying they were having some issues. They went to their biggest funder, which was like the Bank of Saudi Arabia or something like that. And they were like, now we're good. We're not giving you any money. The market freaked out.

Their stock was plummeting. It was causing all sorts of turmoil in terms of other banks around the world, including some of the ones based here. So the Swiss government, and this we reported last week, came in and said, all right, we're going to provide liquidity. We're basically here to backstop you. And over the weekend, they were able to force through a deal for another gigantic bank, UBS, to buy Credit Suisse. Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. From Bloomberg, the headline is they're going to buy Credit Suisse in a $3.3 billion deal to try to end this crisis. The government is going to backstop some of the losses. So the Swiss taxpayer will be on the hook for some of this. UBS was not willing to do the deal without some provisions of that sort. And they say authorities pushed for a deal amid worsening confidence crisis. So, you know, right now,

while we're recording this, it's 840 a.m. So it's still very early to see whether this is sort of like stemmed some of the chaos in the markets. There's some indications that ultimately it has. But, you know, there's also a question, Sagar, of whether this banking issue was like totally separate from what happened here or if they were somewhat related. I'm not sure if we have the answer to that, really. But in one way, they might be linked, which is the type of depositors that Credit Suisse relies on are similarly, you know, really large and, you know, very large deposits, potentially more flighty, just like Silicon Valley Bank. So in that way, they might be sort of related. And potentially, they had some of the similar interest

rate risk that stressed their balance sheet in the same way as Silicon Valley Bank. Yeah, it's very odd because the purchase price seems low for the amount of assets that are under management. But that may give us an insight into actually how badly run Credit Suisse clearly was. This was one, you know, this is a, it's difficult also to describe it because we've had such a crazy couple of weeks now with the Silicon Valley bank crisis. But this is one of the biggest reorganizations of the global financial system since 2008 from the FDIC insurance basically being moved to unlimited to the Silicon Valley bank savior, then the signature

bank shut down, and same with the subsequent guarantee, and now possible contagion that we are seeing in the Credit Suisse situation. So the fact, too, that you had the Swiss government that stepped in and basically ordered UBS, the UBS to come in and to buy it, and also to give them a credit line that other banks that were organized to make sure and keep it afloat shows you that too big to fail still not only reigns, but is now basically law of the global financial system, which is nuts. That's what we were supposed to prevent. And UBS with this acquisition is going to be an absolute behemoth. I mean, an absolute giant now with this acquisition. After the deal, Credit Suisse stock cratered 60 percent.

So that's kind of where we are. You can see the different approach that regulators took. I mean, in terms of Credit Suisse, they tried to do a bailout just for this one bank with the idea being, OK, this isn't about anybody else. This is just like sort of unique to Credit Suisse, which we talked about last week. They've had all sorts of scandals and issues anyway. So I think that makes sense. In this context, you know, our regulators, and I'll get to this in a minute, they really bought into this idea that this could be this widespread crisis. And so they needed to provide liquidity across the entire sector and give, you know, what amounts to a public bailout of all, especially mid-sized banks

across the country, banks of a similar size to Silicon Valley Bank. So very different regulatory approaches here, but ultimately, you know, in both cases, taxpayers on the hook for some portion of it. Let's go and put this next piece up on the screen because this was really interesting. Okay, so part of the Fed response, as we covered last week, one part was backstopping the depositors. And we'll get to more on that in a moment. The other part was opening up some new lending facility and allowing banks to use collateral that has seen its value collapse to use it at the original value. So just pretend that those losses didn't actually happen. And you had a huge number of banks that took advantage of some of these crisis programs.

So when I first read that, the headline here from CNBC is banks take advantage of Fed crisis lending programs. When I first read this, I thought, oh, I guess there really was a huge problem. And these banks were, you know, flocking to the discount window into this new lending facilities to make sure they have sufficient liquidity. The numbers here are quite astonishing. Borrowing totaled nearly $153 billion at the Fed discount window. I believe that was a record over that period of time and a huge spike in terms of, you know, what had been going on there previously. But when you dig into the numbers, it tells a little bit of a different story. Let's put this tweet thread up on the screen. So the TLDR here is that almost all of the money that was borrowed from the Fed here

went to just three banks. So most of it was out West. You can see in the first chart, the overwhelming preponderance of the borrowing from the Fed came from the San Francisco region and then a smaller portion from New York. And basically that's it. None of the other regions saw any borrowing really whatsoever. And this is from a guy, his name is Nick Timirows, maybe? Let's go with that. Timirows, we'll just go with that. Wallirows? We'll just go with that. Wall Street Journal. I want to give him credit. He's with the Wall Street Journal, and this was really helpful. So if you look into this, he says, assuming most of the $55 billion in New York, which was the totality of the New York lending, is for Signature Bank, which we

know just failed, that would mean the balance of funds for FDIC Bridge Banks accounts for $88 billion for Silicon Valley Bank in San Francisco. Further, First Republic, which continues to be under pressure, said they borrowed up to $109 billion from the discount window. That suggests as much as $197 billion of the $233 billion in San Francisco went to two institutions. It also suggests there may not have been large demands from many banks across the other 10 Fed districts in the Midwest and Eastern U.S. So again, the overwhelming preponderance of this money, the bulk of this money went to just three banks, which in my opinion kind of undermines the view that this was like a widespread, immediate crisis where there were a whole bunch of banks, hundreds of banks some people had posited across the country that really needed to shore up their

balance sheets. That's what Nick's point was. He said, if you look at this, it's very clear who needed money and who didn't. The contagion piece, I mean, look, we will never know at the end of the day, right? Maybe it would look crazier today than it would have at that time. But clearly, after and the pretext through which it was done and then the extraordinary action was the idea that this was going to backstop the entire banking system. And in reality, that's simply not the case here in the U.S. That's just not what the Fed discount window borrowing shows us. It looks like you have troubled financial institutions, both of which who idiotically managed their bank balance sheets on top of

flighty customers in the tech industry, which is specifically the most hard hit by increasing rates. And those two have basically coupled with, let's be honest, outrageous calls online for immediate bailouts unless you're going to have total collapse is what pressured Washington into doing this. When, you know, it's not, look, and I think people may are misunderstanding. Nobody here ever said, I don't, Chris, I'm sure you didn't as well. I was like, I have never said that I don't sympathize with people who had deposits in the bank. Like I very much am looking at small businesses and others saying, yeah, that sounds like an outrageous situation, terrible.

The fact that you wouldn't be able to make payroll. I'm not saying even necessarily the normal FDIC process would have been enough because then many of these places would have gone under. All we are saying is an extraordinary precedent has now been set, one which strikes at the bedrock of the way that we think about private banks. So if we are going to strike at that bedrock, then we should also strike at the extraordinary bonuses, profits, and multi-millions of dollars in bonuses, tax benefits, and others that these people get. That's it. That really has been the position from day one. Everybody likes the bedrock. Nobody likes whenever you want to reform how these people actually make a ton of money based on all of our assets together.

I mean, it's just – It's just become incredibly clear that all the profits, when times are good, the bank managers, shareholders, they are all raking in the cash. And when times are bad, guess who's on the hook? Especially when you're talking about, I mean, Silicon Valley Bank. We put some of the charts up on the screen last week. This was a weird bank, very unique, very unusual in the percent of deposits that it had that were uninsured, like 98%. That is not normal, okay? That is really, really strange and unusual, that they were all concentrated in this one little

cliquish club group, predominantly in the tech sector in Silicon Valley, hence the name. There were a lot of things. And then, of course, their decision to they were warned by regulators. They're warned by also their own employees that were like this risk management looks really bad. We have tons of interest rate risk here because of how our balance sheet is overwhelmingly held in these, youterm treasuries that are losing value by the day, they were warned about that and they thought that they could basically ride it out. So this was a whole strange confluence of unusual circumstances that would not be reflected in many, if any, other banks nationwide. You have Signature, which they were taking huge hit because they had really courted a lot of people who were involved in crypto. And when

crypto lost its ass, then guess what? Signature was in a really bad place too. And this other bank, First Republic, that still continues to struggle and is losing value. Stock market is, you know, stock value is falling and still struggling, et cetera. And they're the ones who are like borrowing like crazy at the Fed discount window. They also had a similar tech heavy, wealthy tech heavy clientele and a vast amount of uninsured deposits.

So these are really unique, unusual circumstances. So it does not surprise me at all to look at the Fed lending and find out that, oh, it's basically these three banks and that's it. Now, there are also questions because it's very clear that there was a lot of market like investor freak out last week in terms of the stock market, which may continue into today. We'll find out there's a real case to be made that because the Fed took such overwhelming industry wide action. I mean, these investors, they are also herd creatures that they took that as a signal.

It's like, oh, my goodness, there must be this massive issue across the economy. And they freaked out in terms of the markets. But all of the, you know, capital flight and all of these other things that were posited and that potentially there were hundreds of other banks on the brink of failure. Listen, maybe, but we have not seen evidence that that is the case. And we have seen some evidence in the other direction that this was a very specific, unique set of circumstances that only really applied to a handful of banks in the country. I think that's really well said. OK, so at the same time, let's talk a little bit about the depositors. The other part of the government response was to say,

hey, if you're an uninsured depositor at Signature Bank, you're good. We're going to cover 100. FDIC is going to cover 100% of it. Hey, if you're an uninsured depositor at Silicon Valley Bank, your cash is also safe. The FDIC, backed by the U.S. taxpayer, is going to cover 100% of it. Hey, if you're an uninsured depositor at Silicon Valley Bank, your cash is also safe. The FDIC, backed by the U.S. taxpayer, is going to cover 100% of it. You're good. Now, this opened up a lot of questions about, OK, so are you de facto guaranteeing 100% of uninsured depositors across the industry from small banks to medium-sized banks to the largest banks? Is that basically what you're saying?

And Jeff Stein asked them this question right away. They wouldn't really give an answer. So Senator James Langford asked Janet Yellen, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, this exact same question. And the response is pretty stunning. Take a listen. Will the deposits in every community bank in Oklahoma, regardless of their size, be fully insured now? Are they fully recovered? Every bank, every community bank in Oklahoma, regardless of the size of the deposit,

will they get the same treatment that SVBP just got or Signature Bank just got? A bank only gets that treatment if a majority of the FDIC board, a super majority, a super majority of the Fed board and I in consultation with the president determine that the failure to protect uninsured depositors would create systemic risk. All right. So let me interpret that for you. She says banks only get that treatment if the FDIC board and myself determine that the failure to protect those depositors would create systemic risk. That means basically screw you to small banks. Yes. OK. One of the problems that was posited here in very aggressive terms of why you had to backstop all the depositors at SVB and everywhere else was basically and this was a reasonable case to make. OK, if you're a depositor

and you have all of this money uninsured in SVB and you're looking around at, you know, a shaky banking financial system, what are you going to do? You're going to pull your cash. You're going to put it in the largest banks because you know they're too big to fail and you know you'll be on more solid ground there. So they're saying there's going to be this huge capital flight of depositors from the midsize banks into the large banks. Well, why doesn't that same reasoning apply then to small banks? Because now you have basically they've said, OK, well, the mid-range of banks, I guess they're too big to fail as well. So we're going to backstop all of their depositors.

So if you have a large deposit at a small bank, then why wouldn't you be thinking the exact same thing of I got to pull my cash and I got to move it up the food chain to one of these institutions that is going to be backstopped by the Fed. Now, I don't know because I don't have, you know, those numbers aren't publicly available, whether that is actually happening or not. And there's some reason to believe that it may not be because bank deposits are really sticky. It's a pain in the ass to move your money. You got all your auto pays set up. So people tend to just be like, yeah, we'll figure it out. It'll probably be OK. And by the way, the overwhelming majority of people, the mean bank account is only fifty three hundred dollars anyway. So they would be covered by the FDIC insurance. But this is a real screw you to small banks.

This is saying we are going to give you special treatment if you are a certain size. We're going to give your depositors special treatment if you are of a certain size. And the small banks are incredibly angry about all of this. Well, as they should be, because really, as you interpreted it, what she is saying is that the feds are now going to pick winners and losers in the banking system. The too big to fail banks, as they define it, not Congress, are the ones that now have unlimited deposit insurance. Credit union, like he's saying, of Tulsa, you're screwed. Sorry, you're not systemically risked. And here's the other one. Who are the people most likely

to use those small credit unions? Those are locals, small business owners. Actual small businesses. Farmers, like real small. I'm talking like, yeah, like you said, like a hardware store that's barely floating on a 2% profit margin. That doesn't have like a wealthy VC that could float them a bridge loan if they get into a cash crunch. They have five guys who work there. So they have five guys who work there. They're trying to make ends meet every once in a while.

They have to go through their banking system and relationship is purely built on a guy that they know there at the bank. If that bank goes down, that actually is devastating for the community. But it's not, quote, systemically risk for the entire global financial system. Ergo, it doesn't now qualify. So it's just simply not fair. This is giving the big guys the greatest gift they could ever have, which is the government saying our bank can literally never fail when all of the smaller banks, what's their incentive now? Sell. You should just sell to First Republic or any of these people. Sell to PNC. Sell to JPMorgan Chase and have even more of a roll-up in the financial. So that's exactly what you want to avoid.

Credit unions in this way are, you know, they specifically avoid much of the risk. I mean, that's why they don't fail as much. And now they're effectively being penalized for it by regulators. It's not right. Yeah, I 100% agree with all of that. It really is not right. There's another piece of this that has. Well, before we get to this, one thing that really grossed me out, Sagar, is I saw Silicon Valley Bank. They were actually like recruiting depositors based on the fact that the FDIC is backstopping all of their deposits.

They were putting out, you know, missives that were saying, oh, you're there's no bank in the country that's safer than us at this point, right? Because we got the federal government guarantee like, you know, these other people, you're mid range. You might be betting on, OK, are they going to decide we're systemically important or not? But we know 100 percent that Janet Yellen and co have said that we are. So your deposits are absolutely safe in this bank. There is no safer bank in the entire country, which again demonstrates what incredible gift the public driven by the government has given those banks in particular, but any bank that is their size or larger in general. There's another piece here, which, last week we talked about how the Fed was just asleep at the switch. Like these were obvious problems. There were tons of short sellers who saw that this was an issue for Silicon Valley Bank. It was not complex in order to

understand. And yet they didn't intervene. They didn't do anything before the, you know, the S hit the fan, so to speak. So let's put this up on the screen. New York Times is reporting that actually the Fed did spot some problems at Silicon Valley Bank ahead of time. Now, I read this. Let me give you the details, then I'll tell you how I interpreted this. They say Silicon Valley Bank's risky practices were on the Fed's radar for more than a year, an awareness that proved insufficient to stop the bank's demise. The Fed repeatedly warned the bank that it had problems, according to a person familiar with the matter. In 2021, a Fed review of the growing bank found serious weaknesses in how it was handling key risks. Supervisors at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which the CEO of this bank sat on that board, put that aside, issued six citations. known as matters requiring attention and matters requiring immediate attention, flagged that the

firm was doing a bad job of ensuring that it would have enough easy-to-tap cash on hand in the event of troubles, but the bank did not fix its vulnerabilities, et cetera, et cetera. So I read this in two ways. First of all, I feel like it's an attempt at Fed ass covering because they have come into a lot of scrutiny and a lot of criticism for their, you know, complete failure to see this coming and be able to deal with it before it became a complete crisis. But it also, in some ways, is even more embarrassing because it's like you knew there were issues. You issued your little like, well, we're sending you a warning, but you didn't actually do anything. And I think this speaks to a larger problem within Fed and other banking supervision and

regulation, which is effectively since the Greenspan era and in the era of market fundamentalism, neoliberalism, whatever you want to call it, there was really this shift in philosophy where regulators were going to see their role as making sure the private sector had sufficient transparency and information for them to hold the banks accountable and do the due diligence that in previous eras, and like the New Deal era, that the regulatory bodies did themselves. Well, for one thing, shareholders have a different set of incentives than the public does. That's one thing. They're more risk tolerant than the public is ultimately. But number two, the market is also not perfect, it turns out, and they can miss a lot of things as well. So the Fed taking that hands-off, laid-back approach,

sent them their little notices, but didn't actually intervene or do anything to stem the crisis before it became one. Yeah. And the fascinating thing is, let's put this up there on the screen. I really enjoyed reading this, is that the crisis sparks a new battle between small and large banks. The Independent Community Bankers Association of America, which represents the nation's smallest banks, is now coming to Congress to make the case that they should not have to pay for the rescue of bank depositors and that the largest lenders instead deserve stricter oversight from regulators. The group entered in early Monday saying that Silicon Valley Bank and the nation's largest

banks are not community banks, specifically pushing back against the idea that they are the ones who will now have to pay the way that they would pay, as I've laid out before, is that the FDIC almost certainly, with this new guarantee, is going to raise the amount that all banks are going to have to pay into the FDIC system. Something I'm totally fine with if you're JPMorgan Chase. But again, the likelihood is you almost certainly and I, the actual customers of said banks, will be the ones who bear the brunt. But these independent community banks are like, we don't want to pass these fees onto our customers because we're charging them on a fair system. We're not doing anything risky. Why should we have to pay for this? Pretty fair point, if you ask me.

And instead, as Yellen laid out, I'm in the business of saving the big ones. The little guys and all that, you basically have no defense here. Yeah. You have no insurance. That's right. So the little guys are going to help subsidize FDIC insurance to cover 100% of the deposits at mid-range and higher banks. They're like, how is this fair? This is insane, especially after Yellen came out and said directly like, no, little guys, no, you're not part of this deal. Don't even think that you are.

So, yeah, I can see why. And I think justifiably so. They are absolutely outraged by the state of affairs. And they should be. And so it'll be a brewing fight. And, look, if Congress really did its job, we would have real hearings on this. We would have a real investigation. We'd have a full report that was delivered to us. New regulations. I just don't see any real path to that.

So I really do feel for the little guys because their prices or their customer fees and FDIC fees, regulatory scrutiny, all that is going to go way up. And they didn't do anything. They did nothing to deserve it. Warren and Katie Porter are sort of leading the charge to try to pass, you know, to re-regulate because part of this story is obviously some of the rollback and regulation. And so that would be important. But I have to say there's a whole philosophical shift that has to happen in terms of regulators who are not only way too cozy with industry, but have this, you know, odious philosophy that says basically like, we don't, we're not really the regulators. It's actually the private, you know, the, the shareholders who need to hold these banks

to account. So there's a whole philosophical shift that needs to happen as well. All right. There's a lot of news with regard to Ukraine. Let's start with this piece. Go ahead and put this up on the screen. So what you're looking at here is Vladimir Putin driving a car around the occupied city of Mariupol. That, of course, Ukrainian city, they, you know, was really devastated by the Russian attack. My understanding here is there's some little banter between him and whoever his henchman is about, like, you know, what's being reconstructed and how's the Russian attack. My understanding here is there's some little banter between him and whoever his henchman is about like, you know, what's being reconstructed

and how's the airport doing. He's just like us. Chris Lee can drive a car. He's even driving a Toyota. I mean, some of this is actually kind of hilarious to see because it's obviously very clearly staged.

Oh, yeah. He like goes to somebody's apartment in the middle of the night. Yeah, this is like at 3 a.m. Yeah. And it's like, oh, it's just a surprise visit. They have a whole buffet spread laid out for him. Probably like caviar the night. Yeah, this is like at 3 a.m. Yeah. And it's like, oh, it's just a surprise visit. They have a whole buffet spread

laid out for him. Probably like caviar and champagne. Yeah. So I got our friend Yegor to take a look at these and tell me what they were saying and talking about whatever. And there was actually

one of the videos in the background. You could faintly hear someone in the original post of the video say, this is all fake. When they first post it. And then they edited that out ultimately. But anyway, he's trying to display as it's kind of a show of force, especially after let's put this next piece up on the screen. The international criminal court

has issued an arrest warrant for Putin. Now the ICC is kind of toothless in part because we don't participate. So obviously none of our war criminals have been held to account by the ICC. No one expects Putin is actually going to be arrested and held accountable for alleged war crimes. But, you know, this is kind of a symbolic show. And one other thing just to keep in mind about the ICC, which has made it, you know, lose a lot of credibility. They have only ever tried Africans at this court. So any other war crimes or atrocities around the world have not been subject to ICC prosecution. So a symbolic move here. I saw a lot of Atlantic Council neolibs be like, this is a strong move by the international community. And I'm just like, look,

international law is fake. The only law that can be enforced between states is violence. I don't wish that to be the case, but it is simply the truth. It's like whenever we have the World Trade Organization and then the great powers sign up and not a single one of them actually abides by the WTO. And then the smaller nations try to and they get screwed. And then they end up being just pawns of greater powers. Empire will always exist. It will simply exist in different forms. I'm sorry to say it. With the ICC, as you say, there's a reason that we don't support it or

sign up to it because we don't want our soldiers, our generals, our presidents, and our leaders to ever be subject to the same thing. Well, right. But actually, well, there've been past cases, right, where the ICC will look at generals and African and, you know, the U.S. military and others like, no, the ultimate decider of whether the U.S. military and others. Like, no, the ultimate decider of whether the U.S. military did right or wrong will be the president of the United States and the universal, what is it, the UCMJ? I forget exactly what it stands for,

but the Court of Military Justice instead of any ICC. There's another reason why we don't abide by, for example, like the international law of the sea, because we're like, yeah, in de facto, we agree, but in time of war, like, we'll see, you know, maybe. And look, all countries- I wish we lived in a world where leaders could consistently be held to account around the world for the atrocities and crimes that they commit.

Sadly, we do not live in that world. And we probably never will. I'm sorry. The entire Wilsonian idea of all of this, I'm not saying in cooperation, all that is not good. It certainly is in some cases. But as this shows, what is this? And actually, all that's really happened is that it's worsening tension, if possible, between Washington and

Moscow. Because now, what is Russia's message to its people and for the people who are supporting the war? This is a global NATO, US-led plot against us, to constrain us, to prosecute us, to isolate us. So was an ICC warrant based on that? Nobody here is defending the actions of the Russian military in Ukraine, but we're just simply pointing out that politically, since this isn't going to happen, what is the actual utility of this? Joe Biden came out and said, quote, I think it's justified saying that the US has not even signed up for the ICC, but it makes a very strong point saying that Putin has clearly committed war crimes. You know, it's interesting too that this just passed with any real consternation where the original declaration of Putin as a war criminal, even many people in Washington saw that as a point of no return

because it's like, okay, now what are you going to do about it? How are we going to negotiate with this person? Remember this, too, which is the way that we've boxed ourselves in, basically post-Rwanda and all of that, is anytime we see anything, you know, with Rwanda and Kosovo, like, we are going to go in, and if we have the ability to try and stop it. It's like, well, then the follow-on question is like, so does that mean that we can ever have proper relations with the Putin government ever again? That doesn't sound like a very good starting point for any sort of negotiations. Now, you know, wouldn't say that it's not like we haven't called people war criminals in the past and then restored full relations whenever they happen to be useful, let's say,

in a fight against communism. So it's not like the precedent there doesn't exist. But given like the neoliberal brain of here in Washington and specifically, we can't underestimate the view in Moscow of this as a point of no return of Moscow's relations with the international community. It sets a bad precedent, I think. Yeah. And we're going to talk in a minute about the 20 year anniversary of the Iraq war invasion, something that Putin has invoked in terms of our own lawless behavior in justifying his own illegal invasion, Not that those things make any sense, but you know, he can also, you can also look very clearly at all of the war criminals

here that were involved in the Iraq war and the horrors that that unfolded on the Iraqi people and ultimately on the entire region in some ways in the world, they're all like wealthier than ever. They were certainly never held to account. So you can imagine him using similar rhetoric around, you know, exactly how consistent we are in our calling out of war crimes and atrocities. Yeah, I've told that story before, but, you know, apparently George W. Bush would lecture Putin on democracy and Putin would just look at him. He speaks perfect English. He'd be like, we do not want the same democracy as you have given Iraq. And everyone in the room was like, fair, fair point there. Well, this is also really relevant.

Go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen. So we reported that, you know, China has been making some overtures. Obviously, they've been talking to Putin basically the whole time. And in fact, she is in Moscow to meet for three days with Putin and with other Russian leaders. So incredibly significant moment. But they've been making overtures not just to Putin, but also to Zelensky. And Zelensky has been sort of open to that. He says he'll call him.

Yeah, he says he'll talk to him. They're supposed to talk potentially next week. China also put out a kind of rough outline of what they thought a peace deal might look like, which Zelensky was also kind of open to. Well, now we have this report from the Wall Street Journal that the U.S. is trying to head off any potential proposals from Beijing for a ceasefire in Ukraine ahead of this Russia-China summit. They say suspending fighting now would help solidify Russia's hold on Ukrainian territory. John Kirby said a ceasefire now is, again, effectively the ratification of Russian conquest. He said it would recognize Russia's territorial gains and occupation of

Ukrainian territory while giving Moscow a chance to entrench its positions and refresh its troops as Ukraine prepares for an anticipated spring offensive. Let me give you a little bit more of the details from this piece and then we can react and I have a lot to say about this. As Russia and China lay out the agenda for the Putin-Xi meeting, Mr. Kirby said the U.S. wants to draw attention to any Chinese proposal for a ceasefire that would be one-sided and reflect only the Russian perspective. He said he couldn't speak for Zelensky and whether he would accept that Chinese-backed proposal, but, quote, we certainly don't support calls for a ceasefire that would be called for by the PRC in a meeting in Moscow. They go on to say Mr. Zelensky has

taken a different approach with Beijing so far, commending the 12-point Chinese position paper on Ukraine. Mr. Zelensky, however, stressed the Chinese paper's emphasis on territorial integrity, and his foreign minister said he also discussed the significance of the principle of territorial integrity in a phone call. So let me break this down for you. Ukraine, at least publicly, has been sort of open to these overtures. And remember how the U.S. Biden's line is always nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine, except when it comes to China actually trying to do something useful here and potentially broker a ceasefire.

Oh no, we can't have that. Suddenly, the U.S. feels emboldened to assert their opinion that they want hostilities to continue lest we be embarrassed by the Chinese playing a significant role here as potential peacemakers.

If the Chinese do, we should be embarrassed. That's why the framing of our entire segment the last time we talked about this, it is a humiliation. It's an international humiliation. It also is the worst nightmare of the Nixonian strategy and the Kissingerian strategy of the 1970s, where we recognized, and look, the opening of China was a disaster for many reasons in the way that it was executed. But strategically, it was a very smart idea. The idea was China is a

behemoth. It will grow. Inevitably, it will become one of the largest powers in East Asia. A linking up between our adversary at the time, the Soviet Union, and China would be a geopolitical disaster for the United States. We should do everything in our power to exploit the rift between Moscow and to Beijing to draw relations between those two and to deny this power apparatus. That was the Kissingerian and Nixonian strategy. And it was fundamentally correct. Now, again, we executed it in a very wrong way in terms of total neoliberalization, in terms of trade, et cetera. There was a way, absolutely, I think, to go back in time and to do it differently. Now, we have actually forced

the two powers together, where they are now on the part where defining territorial integrity through invasion is a benefit to both of them. China's case in the want to take over Taiwan, Putin's case in order to rescue former territory that was from the Soviet Union. And with these two powers, by driving them together, they are more powerful today, individually and then together, than almost in the times of the Soviet Union and with China, together I mean, just because of the sheer amount of China's size. So then when we look at this and to be humiliated on the international stage and furthermore, to look at this

and take a maximalist position on the peace deal, it's a big mistake. Following in the footsteps, or following and supporting the Ukrainians in this endeavor is the way that we should be. Really, if it was a nothing without Ukraine, nothing for Ukraine without Ukraine strategy, we'd be like, look, if Mr. Zelensky wants to entertain that opportunity, we are happy to back him up at the negotiating table. That's it. Just say that. He is the chief of Ukraine.

And also, by the way, because Zelensky, remember this, anytime anyone in the West says something like this, like Elon, he attacks them as Putin's pawns and all this. You know why he's not saying that about China? Because he knows China is on the precipice of giving Russia lethal and heavy weapons. And if he were to just reject it outright, Beijing could say, we tried, but Zelensky says he's not interested.

Putin, here's all the weapons that you could ever want or ever need and use in the Ukraine conflict. That is why he can see the grand picture for his own country. He needs to shore up support in the West for as much as humanly possible. And by the way, the way he's prosecuting the right war, the war right now is ridiculous. If there were any actual military strategists who weren't wholly co-opted by Ukraine, they would look at his expenditure of ammunition in places like Bakhba and say, you're an idiot. What are you doing? You have no industrial base. You're running out of ammo. You've got six-month runway, and America's probably not going to give you any more. What are you actually going about? If you look at it almost like a

balance sheet in the way that he is prosecuting the war and then what the potential insertion of Chinese weapons would do to the Russian military cause, it would be a full-fledged disaster. And maybe he can see that because if I can see it sitting here, he has access to the real information. He probably just assumes that we will keep giving him everything he wants since that's been the tradition since the war started. At least from the hundred. Yeah. I mean, and that's another part that drives me nuts. Maybe this is something we could talk about as well tomorrow, but you know, his ammunition stock, that's another part that drives me nuts. Maybe this is something we could talk about as well tomorrow. But, you know, his ammunition stock, he's acting like one of the great powers in the middle of World War I.

The difference is those great powers were actual great powers and had an industrial base to make more shells. He can do nothing. Not only had an existing industrial base, but actually, you know, spun up massive additional capacity. Population, base. Which, you know, since we're their primary backer, like we're not spinning massive additional capacity. Population, base. Which, since we're their primary backer, we're not spinning up additional capacity. So even our capacity is limited in terms of what we even could send them. But to go back to this report about China, I mean, there are a few things here, and I was talking to our friend Bronco about some of this and some of the lessons to take away from it. I mean, number one, the attitude towards the Chinese overtures here from the U.S. government and their aligned media has been very dismissive. Like, this isn't serious. It's not going to happen.

Well, if it's not serious and it's not going to happen, why do you feel the need to come in over the top and say, absolutely no ceasefire, We're opposed to it. That's number one. Number two, it really exposes. And to me, this is the key point. How much of a lie this idea of like, oh, we're just backing Ukraine and doing what they want. We are so involved. I mean, we are proxy combatants. And so it has always been the case. It's just they're actually showing it now when Zelensky has shown some public signs of wanting to actually entertain these overtures. And we are very much opposed to it because we basically don't want to be humiliated and may think that we have something to gain from this war indefinitely continuing at great expense to Ukrainian civilians and the Ukrainian economy and the world economy as well. So those pieces, I think, are really clear here. It's just like this whole farce of, oh, nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine has always been a lie.

And then the other piece, zooming out from this particular conflict, China obviously just played dealmaker in the Middle East as well. Trita Parsi has been warning about since we get ourselves embroiled as combatants, co-combatants effectively in these various conflicts in the Middle East, of course, he's referring to Yemen. It makes it so, of course, no one is going to listen to us as a peacemaker and a dealmaker.

Now, China has sort of like tacitly backed her, but they haven't shipped those heavy weapons yet. You know, they've talked about the limit backed her, but they haven't shipped those heavy weapons yet. You know, they've talked about the limitless relationship, but they haven't gone all in. And they've said some things that have been critical of Russia as well. So they've maintained more credibility on the international stage in this conflict as a potential dealmaker, which I think is also why the U.S. finds themselves in a really bad position here. Yeah. All of that, well said. It's one of those where, look, geo, is this even a word? Geostrategically, probably not. That's

like a Bushism. But let's zoom out. I think it would be a disaster for American power and for American hegemony for something like this to happen. The Iraq-Saudi thing or Iran-Saudi thing, that's one thing. This is the most important thing going on in the globe. And if it were to come to a close with the U.S. not literally at the center of the brokering process, that basically returns us to full-blown multipolarity, which is a very unstable system. It would be, ironically, we're thinking of the Russia conflict in Ukraine through a U.S. hegemony lens. This is all just euro supremacy whereby disregarding the nation, the relations with the global south, with India and with China, with Japan and South Korea, all of whom see the conflict very differently than the way that we do. So it's an ideological blind spot, which would be a huge blow, I think, to American power. And it would be an absolute humiliation of Joe Biden. Yeah.

If something like this. I mean, I don't really care about American power. And it would be an absolute humiliation of Joe Biden if something like this were to happen. I mean, I don't really care about American power. I just want the war to end because it's been devastating for them and it's been pretty devastating for the world as well. I care about the American way of life, Crystal,

all of which is backed up by American power. I mean, we would be fine in a multipolar world. I think there's a lot of alarmism If everyone wants to pay $15 a gallon for gas and to never buy anything

ever again for a cheap way, which is literally, look, I'm not saying oil and gas. Biden's green, just greenlit the Willow which is literally, look, I'm not saying defend it. Oil and gas. Biden's green, just greenlit the Willow Project. Don't worry, we're going to be fine. That ain't going to make up any,

the loss of international control of the seas. Different debate for another day. All right, let's talk about imperialism with regard to the Iraq war. There've been a lot of retrospectives as yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the Iraq war invasion. And by the way, I'm moderating a panel this week on Wednesday in partnership with the Quincy

Institute. Go ahead and put this up on the screen, guys. It's called Bad News, How the Media Marched Us Into War in Iraq and Beyond. Some great panelists there. Hope you all will join us. There's a, you can join in person or online and we'll put the link in the description so you can check that out if that is interesting to you. But you know, there's been a lot of retrospectives, Sagar, about how, you know, sort of the worst villains of leading us up to that war and understandably so. But you had a great idea, which is why don't we take a look at some of the people who were actually correct and quite courageous in their dissent? Because it's easy to forget how hard it was to be a dissenter at that point. I mean, there was, you know, just post 9-11. If you questioned the president and the direction

he was taking in the country, you were considered un-American, unpatriotic. You were just absolutely smeared. The media from liberal to conservative media, all marching effectively in lockstep with a very few exceptions. It was very difficult to be a dissenter at this time. So we wanted to take a look at a few of the people who, you know, took brave stands in that era. Started with a couple of politicians here, Bernie Sanders in particular, and Barbara Lee. Let's take a look at that. The fact of the matter is that our allies now in that region, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, those countries say, don't do it. It would cause chaos in the region.

The truth of the matter is, in my view, the happiest guy in the world would be Osama bin Laden if the United States waged a unilateral invasion of Iraq, because he would have more recruits for terrorism against this country that he could have used. September 11th changed the world. Our deepest fears now haunt us. Yet I am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of international terrorism against the United States. This is a very complex and complicated matter. Now, this resolution will pass, although we all know that the president can wage a war even without it. However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint. Our country is in a state of mourning. Some of us must say, let of restraint. Our country is in a state of mourning.

Some of us must say, let's step back for a moment, let's just pause just for a minute and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control. I don't oppose war in all circumstances. And when I look out over this crowd today, I know there is no shortage of patriots or patriotism. What I do oppose is a dumb war. Us rushing headlong into a war unilaterally was a mistake and may still be a mistake. If it has happened, then at that point what the debate's really going to be about is what's

our long-term commitment there? How much is it going to cost? What does it mean for us to rebuild Iraq? How do we stabilize and make sure that this country doesn't splinter into factions between the Shias and the Kurds and the Sunnis? And that's, of course, Barack Obama there at the end, a reminder that this war not only was a disaster, but completely reshaped politics. That clip, that 2002 speech, which someone almost didn't record, it was a happenstance, it was on video, that won him the presidency of 2008. And look, I have quibbles with many of those people and policy and all that. That was a heroic stance to take in 2002. And unfortunately, not enough people did it. Not enough people stood up to President Bush,

to the unilateral monoculture that we were living in at the time, the O'Reillys and 2002. And unfortunately, not enough people did it. Not enough people stood up to President Bush, to the unilateral monoculture that we were living in at the time, the O'Reillys and Fox and leading us to that war in Iraq. But it wasn't just them. MSNBC joined with them, CNN as well. The entire establishment was fully bought into this war. It became in vogue years later to turn against it. But for those who stood up at the time, they were on an island and many of them suffered tremendous consequence. I actually remember Tucker Carlson talking about this, about how he initially was supportive of the war in Iraq and received a lot of pressure from the Bush White House to do so and actually turned against it within about six months to a year of the war and was frozen out completely

by the Republican establishment at the time for daring to come out and speak. We shouldn't forget, it was really Donald Trump in 2016 who broke the Iraq ceiling on the debate stage when he challenged President Jeb Bush and said, and Jeb Bush was like, my brother kept us safe. And Trump was like, no, he didn't. The Iraq war was the greatest disaster of all time. And that was it. That finally made it OK for Republicans to admit it. It took,

what was it, 14 years? Yeah. To get to that point? I mean, you could make a case that not only was Barack Obama president because of the Iraq war, but Donald Trump as well. So the extent that this reshaped politics, I mean, cannot possibly be overstated. And to your point, Sagar, about MSNBC, which was kind of a different outlet at that point in the early days of MSNBC, they were just trying to be like another CNN and they hadn't landed on what would ultimately, you know, Keith Olbermann then shows up and he's doing, you know, countdown and that's tremendously popular and is liberal. And then they're sort of like, oh, this is the business model we want to lean into. This was before those days. And Phil Donahue was one of the few voices that was critical of the Iraq war. And we also have so we have him and he ended up losing his job for a memo was uncovered after the fact that explicitly stated that they wanted his show was the top rated show on the network. And they fired him because they wanted to get a pro-war voice in there. They didn't want to be, you know, seen as traitors or un-American or whatever. So he gets fired over his criticism here. And we also have Michael Moore, who gave quite a stunning Oscar acceptance speech where

he's basically like played off the stage as well to give you a sense of how fraught this was at the time. Take a listen. At that time, half the political voice in this nation was silence, really. And I believe most people at that time opposed this war. Most people did. They said, what are we—why? How come over there? And yet every metropolitan, every major metropolitan newspaper in this country supported the invasion of Iraq. Think about that for a minute.

Every major metropolitan. This is what you can do with the politics of fear. The Bush took this whole nation and the whole media establishment by the ear and let it right into the sword. Amazing. In the land of free speech, free press. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons, whether it's the fictition of duct tape or the fictitious of orange alerts. We are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush. Shame on you. And anytime you've got the Pope and the 66 against you, your time is up. For all the talk of Hollywood being liberal and all that, at the time when it was in vogue,

they were booing him while he was there on the stage. And then Phil Donahue, he literally lost his job. You know, we were doing some reading. He was replaced by a show called literally Countdown Iraq, hosted by Lester Holt, who is now on the nightly news. Amazing that that is supposedly a trusted figure. And Donahue, I mean, you know, this was a real career blow to him at the time. There were no internet shows that he was able to go out and start for himself. If you were taken off the cable, you were dead for a long time. And really the vindication of their views. That's why I thought it was important to pay homage to these people. It's never popular in the moment to speak out against that. The only thing I do think he's wrong about is,

unfortunately, I think the majority of people did believe in the Iraq war. You could blame the media. You could blame Bush. And ultimately, Bush is the one most responsible for pushing the propaganda. But the president had an extraordinary amount of trust by the American people at that time to, quote, keep us safe. He blew it in Afghanistan, spent all of his political capital on Iraq. And it really wasn't until 05, when the deaths started really going up amongst American soldiers and security situation became a total disaster. Did the American people really turn against it? Yeah. Well, I mean, I was doing some reading in preparation for moderating this panel and

refreshing my memory about some of the dynamics and some of the villains and all of that. And I found there was a fairness and accuracy in reporting analysis of two weeks of coverage in the lead up to the war. They found 222 of the 297 current and retired officials that networks overwhelmingly relied on as guests were associated with governments that were backing the war. Four out of the 297 were critical. Four.

Wow. So yeah, of course, the American people, all they heard were voices of, we have to do this. And they were convinced, nearly two-thirds of the public thought Saddam Hussein had played a role in the September 11th attacks. 90% believed he had WMD. So the propaganda was so thick and coming at you from effectively every single corner of the media virtually without feel. I mean, there are like a handful of reporters who were critical and skeptical of the case that was being made by the Bush administration for. Yeah. When you have that sort of force coming from the media at the American public. Yeah. You're going to end up with a majority of people saying, oh, we have to I guess we have to do that. Literally everyone I hear says we have to do this.

The other part, too, is why the reason we play the lawmakers first is if anyone had the power to stop this war, it was Congress. Congress had the ability to question what was actually going on to subpoena more. They had the ability to have the intelligence assessments, question those intelligence assessments with the CIA, with George Tenet, call them into back rooms, actually exert some pressure, deliver a real report to them as to whether they were going to vote for that authorization of military use of force against Iraq or not. They abdicated that responsibility harder, even more so, I would say, than the media. The media, they did not have access to that information. Congress actually did. They bought the Bush administration hook, line, and sinker. And look, it was a disaster. It was a disaster for all time. And thousands of American soldiers are dead. Nobody knows how many Iraqis are dead. It literally could be in the millions,

not to mention the destruction of Syria, the rise of ISIS, the fact that we took our eye off the ball. It took us 10 years and how many billions of dollars to eventually kill bin Laden, which is what we wanted to do there in the first place. And then 20 years in Afghanistan, the entire thing was, it's such a nightmare. I don't think I would be in politics if it wasn't for the Iraq war. I probably would have fulfilled my parents' dreams and become an engineer. But I just remember, I was looking at this and I was like, man, this is so wrong. And, you know, just over the years getting to know people who were maimed and killed in Iraq. And it's just, man, 20 years later, I can't even believe it.

For what? For what? All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, believe me when I say this. I really would rather not talk about Lab League ever again. I wish that we could just come to the obvious consensus. It's the absolute most likely scenario for the origin of COVID. With banned gain-of-function research, that alone would be a modest and reasonable victory.

Prosecuting Fauci would be a tremendous plus, but given how the powerful get protected in this country, we all know that's just never going to happen, especially under this administration. But the media simply will not let it die. Ever since the Energy Department and the FBI made it public that they believe COVID leaked from the lab, they have gone into literal overdrive to try and push the bunk natural origin hypothesis, joined in part by the World Health Organization and by the CCP. The scientists also who helped cover up the lab leak hypothesis in the first place. And it's all started this weekend with a new seemingly stunning story in the Atlantic. The strongest evidence yet.

An animal started the pandemic. Wow, I'm listening. Okay, a new analysis from China appears to link the pandemic's origin to raccoon dogs. Raccoon dogs? What? First it was bat soup, then pangolins, now it's raccoon dogs? Okay, let's keep reading. Well, according to a new analysis,

some data from Chinese CDC mysteriously was made public just a few weeks ago for only a few hours. This data included swabs of animals from the Wuhan wet market in late 2019. The data was then analyzed by three scientists who say that the samples collected in late 2019 show the presence of SARS-CoV-2 virus in a raccoon dog sample.

There's just one big problem, though. The lead scientist on the paper is Christian Anderson, one of the scientists who first observed to Fauci that the virus was not consistent with evolutionary theory and then acted as his apparatchik to cover up any discussion of COVID being man-made. He since then has attempted to leverage this position to silence lab leak evidence and is a major proponent and history with gain-of-function research. Next, the actual sample itself. Like I said, it was collected in late 2019. But the timeline here is actually everything. Nobody has disputed that COVID-19 may not have been present in the Wuhan wet market. The question is, how did it get there? Via animals or by people who were infected at the lab and by those who they then infected, including some animals?

The reason late 2019 really doesn't matter is because we have reams of open source data to show us that COVID was already widespread throughout the city of Wuhan at the time that that sample was collected. As I've already previously laid out, geospatial analysis from Harvard and Boston University has found parking lot volume of all hospitals in Wuhan had the highest daily volume of cars in the parking lot in September and October 2019, long before the CCC first reported any cases of COVID, along with a massive spike in search terms

in the city of Wuhan for the Chinese version of Google for terms of cough and diarrhea. Not only that, foreign athletes at the 2019 World Military Games held in Wuhan in October 2019 reported COVID-like symptoms. Athletes remember that Wuhan looked pretty weird at the time. One says that he got his temperature taken to the airport. They also describe in October the city of 15 million looked like it was on lockdown. A Canadian athlete described this quote, I got very sick 12 days after we arrived. Fever, chills, vomiting, insomnia. On our flight home, 60 Canadian athletes on the flight were put in isolation at the back of the plane for the 12-hour flight. We were sick with symptoms ranging from cough to diarrhea and in

between. Later analysis by Italy, Brazil, Sweden, and France confirms they had patients within their borders who had COVID antibodies from before November 2019. In other words, by the time this raccoon dog sample was taken, COVID had leaked from the lab two months earlier, almost certainly in September 2019. Wuhan was likely already fully infected. Was literally any of this noted by the Atlantic? No, they in fact used the late 2019 date as gospel because that's when China says that they had the pandemic started,

not when the actual pandemic had already begun. So we have scientists with a motive. We have a timeline that makes no sense. What about the data itself? That too is a real mystery. So Chinese data with animal swabs that supposedly show a wet market of origin just miraculously appear in an open-source database three years later

and then mysteriously taken down after that. Why? You think the Chinese just suddenly dropped their OPSEC? Or maybe they can see people like us talk about this and people like you who don't believe them. And they use their scientific allies to push this. Worse, the new raccoon dog theory is all the rage over at the World Health Organization. The WHO is buying this crap, hook, line, and sinker.

They are now calling on China to release the data that they just clearly released to try and show a raccoon dog origin of COVID. Now, if they do, it'll just confirm their previous findings. Let me repeat, this is a psyop. There is only one set of data that needs to be released, the log of samples at the Wuhan lab

that was taken down mysteriously in September, 2019, when COVID likely leaked from there in the first place. A record of employees and their causes of death, illness records. We already know multiple researchers at the Wuhan lab were deathly ill in November, 2019. Release that data. When and how many of your employees were hospitalized

with COVID-like symptoms in 2019, the entire year. That's the data that we need and we need to get our hands on. You see any of the WHO and the US government or the media asking for any of that? No, of course they don't. This is the whole ballgame. And really, it would be the only smoking gun proof we would ever get to confirm a lab leak. But at this point, ask yourself, what other theory makes sense? Chinese people were eating raw dog meat at the Wuhan wet market with a side of bat soup? We just happen to find out about that right now? Or it came from the unsafe bio lab a few miles away? It's comical at this point to consider the natural origin hypothesis when we have so much data, so many points that point right to the lab.

It won't stop the media from trying, apparently, or the WHO, or those who don't already want to believe, of course, already uncritically passing along this report. It's the latest psyop. And next, they're going to come up with a different animal to blame. So first it was the bat. Now it's a raccoon dog. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sager's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Jon Stewart just absolutely took Larry Summers to the woodshed over his terrible, terrible ideology, and it is glorious to behold. Now, it is hard to imagine a greater economic villain in modern American history than Larry

Summers. He's like the final boss of neoliberalism. Basically, at the scene of every great recent economic crime, you can find Larry Summers. Start with NAFTA, which decimated American manufacturing, permanent normal trade relations with China, which did even more to decimate American manufacturing, pushing shock doctrine on the former Soviet Union, helping to cause the financial crash, and then helping to craft the bank bailouts after the housing crash. Over the last 30 years, if there's a working person who is getting screwed, Larry Summers was probably involved in some way or another. So you might think after this disastrous track record of having been

remarkably consistently wrong in the most devastating ways that people would maybe not put too much stock in what this guy has to say about current conditions. But boy, oh boy, would you be wrong because being disastrously wrong in service of an elite-friendly message is actually going to bolster your credentials in Washington. As a result, Larry has emerged as one of the leading advocates

of the Fed crushing workers in service of fighting inflation while corporations use the excuse of inflation to price gouge to their heart's content. And it is this morally reprehensible position that Stewart nails him on. Just take a listen. What basically happened to us as we had massive stimulus and an economy that could only produce so much, we had huge levels of demand. And those huge levels of demand kept pushing up prices and pushing up wages. But ultimately, it was you put too much water in the bathtub, the bathtub overflows. You put too much demand into the economy and you get high and rising prices. But the San Francisco Fed says that is demand is maybe 30 to 35 percent of the inflation.

Wages are really around 20% of the inflation. There's a huge corporate profit aspect to it. There's a huge supply chain aspect to it. But our method for controlling it seems really much more focused on wages and employment. There's certain sicknesses you can have where there's a drug and it has side effects. And everybody hates the side effects. And no doctor wants their patient to suffer the side effects. But if you don't address the sickness,

you're going to have a bigger problem down the road. But the stock market assets have gone up 150%. CEO pay has gone up 1,500%. Workers' wages haven't gone up at all. I think you're misdiagnosing the sickness. Take your medicine, people. Now, sometimes John will play a rube in these interviews and do a kind of like,

I'm just a regular guy asking questions shtick. But here he really drops the act and he comes with the receipts, even as Summers condescends to him with his BS analogies about the bathtub and about taking our medicine. Take a look at this chart from the Economic Policy Institute, which breaks down the factors that have, in fact, contributed to inflation. As John correctly notes, while unemployment is low, most of the workforce has actually seen a pay cut due to inflation. Here you can see that in past inflationary periods, wages were in fact the largest driving force of those price increases. That's the light blue bars that you see in this chart. That is not even close to the case right now.

Corporate profits, i.e. price gouging, accounts for about 54% of price rises. Non-labor inputs, i.e. supply chain issues, account for about 38%. Labor costs, a mere 8%. So all this crap about workers having it too good is garbage. Yet the primary mechanism we're using to fight inflation is a tool that is only able to impact that roughly 8% of the issue, which comes from labor costs. And actually, it could make the supply chain issues get worse. So it is no wonder that thus far, crushing labor alone has not checked inflation, since wages only account for a tiny fraction of what is actually going on here. Another great part of this interview, Larry Summers asserts that this corporate profiteering isn't really price gouging. It's just the free market working its magic. John checkmates him on this one, too.

Take a listen. The tools that we have, though, are basically saying to somebody, everyone's paying more for gas and groceries, and that's really hard. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to throw 10 million of them out of work so that we all don't have to share that burden. Why aren't we attacking corporate profit in any way? Because that's been estimated to be 30% of inflation. Isn't the show going to be on Apple TV? Correct. And I think Apple TV is worth about five times as much as Exxon. I think Apple's price since the stimulus began, Apple's value has gone up by about $1.2 trillion. That's $4,000 for every American,

just an increase in the value of Apple. You just made my point for me. Do you feel that Apple is somehow gouging or doing something wrong? Yes, of course. And Exxon is, and Mobil is. Let's talk about Apple. Do you think Apple should just sell phones for less and not have enough phones? What would you have Apple do?

You're saying to me, John, market forces are market forces. And if demand goes up, are you suggesting, young man, that Apple should charge less than they could charge? Let me flip that on you. When there's a tightness in the labor market, what you're saying is the workers shouldn't do the same. That the workers just following the same capitalistic principles that allow Apple to charge more for their phones shouldn't charge more because wage inflation is driving inflation. That's not at all what I'm saying, John. That's exactly what you're saying. Now, the reason that moment is so perfect, among others, is because John exposes how one-sided Larry's economic worldview is.

When it comes to corporations using the excuse of inflation to price gouge, he's all for it. In fact, he's shocked at the idea anyone would oppose such a thing. But when it comes to some small slice of the workforce getting a higher wage because of a tight labor market, well, this must be stopped and we must use the blunt force instrument of the Fed to make sure it happens. Now, we can see this contradiction in Larry's current stance on the Silicon Valley bailout as well. He's all free market, rah, rah, when it means record-breaking profits. But literally within an hour of SVB's collapse, he was out calling for a very non-free market bailout to protect the well-heeled VCs and their portfolio companies. He even went so far as to say, now's not the time for discussions of moral hazard.

No, of course not. Even though the government response is now greenlit reckless behavior from the entire banking sector with a promise that the U.S. taxpayer will backstop the risk and clean it up, no, now's not the time to talk about that moral hazard. I'm shocked to learn he had quite a different view when it came to helping students deal with their crushing debt burden. Larry Summers is the living, breathing embodiment of socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor. Right now, at this very moment, he is both, at this time, in favor of Fed loosening to help bankers and wealthy depositors and Fed tightening to hurt working people. Does it get any clearer than that? He is also the living, breathing embodiment of how

the people with the most catastrophic records get treated as the most serious people in Washington. Yesterday, as we noted in the show, was 20 years since the Iraq war invasion. Just take a look at where all the Iraq war fraudsters are now. Doing better than ever. As long as your disasters and lies are in service of the regime, you will be celebrated. You'll be showered with power and with riches. Kudos to Jon Stewart for at least giving us the satisfaction of watching this man squirm. Because trust me, Larry Summers is not finished trying to ruin your life. And like so many before him, Larry Summers dramatically- And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue,

become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, guys, thank you so much for watching today. As we said at the top of the show, if you want to have the Spotify video, go to BreakingPoints.com and become a premium subscriber. There you go. That's all you need to know. We'll see you tomorrow. DNA test proves he is not the father.

Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily, it's your not the father week on the'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily, it's your not the father week on the OK Storytime podcast. So we'll find out soon. This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. He's trying to give it to his irresponsible son. But I have DNA proof that could get the money back.

Hold up. They could lose their family and millions of dollars. Yep. Find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades-long success. You can listen to all

episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and

relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.