Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 5/10/23: Trump GUILTY And NOT Guilty In E Jean Caroll Trial, Santos Arrested By Feds, Biden Threatens Debt Ceiling, Ukraine Counter Offensive, Trump V DeSantis, CIA Biden 2020, Ro Khanna on SCOTUS Corruption, David Miranda Remembrance

Episode Date: May 10, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss Donald Trump being found liable by a New York federal jury for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll in a Manhattan department store in the 1990's, George Santos is charged and arrested by the Feds for Fraud, Biden threatens to ignore the Debt Ceiling, Ukraine worries their counter offensive might not move the needle, DeSantis takes an important step in moving towards announcing a campaign for president, Liz Cheney launches attack ad in New Hampshire against Trump, the CIA caught aiding the Biden 2020 election, and Congressman Ro Khanna joins the show to talk about Clarence Thomas and SCOTUS corruption. We also take a short moment to celebrate the life of David Miranda, a Leftist in Brazil with a long career of political activism and husband to Glenn Greenwald.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. 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. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? and subscribe today. 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. 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 Boy Sober, the movement that exploded in 2024.

You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, Boy Sober 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. Hey guys, Ready or Not 2024 is here and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the

show. Good morning, everybody. That's a joke at Sagar's expense because he scared the hell out of me yesterday with his good morning. Happy Wednesday. How was it yesterday with Sagar? It was great. It was great. And you're going to be back with Sagar tomorrow. So he said he was going to play the lefty yesterday? He tried. How'd that go? He did his best.

He's got the populist mojo if he just skips over a bunch of that other stuff. Well, yeah, if you should go back and watch his monologue from yesterday. Okay. Was it a lefty one? What are you talking about? No, it was the opposite. Ah, come on. It was on guns.

You'll love it. False advertising. Right. So we're back to normal here. Yes, I'll be on with Saga tomorrow because Crystal is still on her honeymoon. She'll be back next week. So what do we got today? So we're going to talk about the, obviously the Eden Carroll verdict. We got George Santos, so the sealed indictment. And so we're going to play kind of George Santos bingo,

trying to guess which of the like 36 different frauds he's committed in the last couple of weeks that the feds are going to indict him for. We're going to talk about the upcoming Ukrainian offensive. You've got Ukrainian officials worried that they may have overhyped what they're going to be able to accomplish. What are you looking at? Yeah, we also have the debt ceiling negotiations. Big news in all of that yesterday. As we were prepping the show, it just kept coming yesterday afternoon. We're talking about new developments and Ron DeSantis' potential bid for the presidency. I'm going to talk about a story that broke last night. Again, as we were preparing the show,

more revelations about the CIA's involvement in the Hunter Biden laptop story. And then Congressman Ro Khanna is here in studio. We're excited to talk to him about the Supreme Court. So E.G. and Carol Victorious, if we can put this tear sheet up, Victorious in her defamation suit against President Trump. The jury found that Trump was liable for sexual assault as well as defamation, adding together $5 million in penalties tacked on to him. Trump then responded by immediately defaming her again. If we can put up his response to it. What do you say here? I have absolutely no idea who this woman is. This verdict is a disgrace, a continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time. And so what Trump was hit for when it came to defamation

was a number of things. One saying, basically calling her ugly and calling her a liar. And here he is again, kind of calling her a liar. So it would be interesting if E. Jean Carroll goes back to Reid Hoffman, who funded this first lawsuit and says, you know what? He's still defaming me. Reid Hoffman's not out of money. In fact, Reid Hoffman's lawyer has probably got a little payout here. I mean, $5 million, a $5 million victory is pretty impressive in a case like this. And again, it's civil. So sexual abuse is defined in New York State as, quote, subjecting a person to sexual contact without consent.

Carroll did not win on the question of rape. Rape is defined, this is from New York State Law, a sexual intercourse without consent, which involves any penetration of the penis in the vaginal opening. That would have been much given the allegations about a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room, I believe in the 1990s would have been really difficult to prove. That said, sexual abuse is, again, this is not a criminal case, so Donald Trump does not face jail time. That said, he does, he is now, he has now lost on the question specifically of sexual abuse. Right.

And yeah, this was, she, her accusation, she sues him for saying he kind of pushed her against the wall, shoved her against the wall, and raped her in that dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman in Manhattan in the mid-1990s. And not to get too graphic, but in Jean Carroll's testimony, she talked about not being completely 100% certain about everything that was going on while the assault was happening. Right. And so I think that that's why the jury was like, well, we can't say with certainty precisely what happened in that dressing room, but we can say that there was a sexual assault. Right. And what the jury said with that $5 million verdict is that they felt that was a very serious assault. Because sometimes a jury will say, you know what, we do believe that the thing you say happened and the damages we're going to give you are $1. Like that's something that juries do sometimes.

Say, yes, it happened, but it wasn't that big of a deal. This time the jury said, no, it happened and it was devastating and you're going to pay $5 million for this. Yeah, and again, if it was a criminal trial, you would have a different standard for evidence. But in a civil trial, this is the judge had actually said to the jury before sending them back to deliberate, quote, use the preponderance of the evidence standard, which is more likely true than not true. So again, it's different than the criminal standard. If you're wondering why this trial was sort of low key, it wasn't a huge fixture of media obsession over the last six months or however long it's been going on. But it is partially

because of that standard. And I do want to say a little bit that the E. Jean Carroll episode is a strange one all around. You mentioned Reid Hoffman. She, in her deposition, said she didn't think about suing Trump until George Conway approached her. And I think it was actually at a party at Molly Jung Fast's house in Manhattan. One thing that makes me uncomfortable about the E. Jean Carroll case, people might remember that uncomfortable, to use the word again, interview she had, I think it was with Anderson Cooper. Shortly after she made these allegations, she says, it was an episode, or this was the New York Times, it was an episode, it was an action, it was a fight. It was not a crime. It was, I had a struggle with a guy.

I have not been raped. Something has not been done to me. I fought. That's the thing. She said something similar on MSNBC. I would find it disrespectful to the women who are down on the border who are being raped around the clock down there without any protection. Very true.

It would just be really disrespectful. She also said, mine was three minutes. I'm a mature woman. I can handle it. I can keep going. You know, my mine was three minutes. I'm a mature woman. I can handle it. I can keep going. You know, my life has gone on. I'm a happy woman. The reason I use the word uncomfortable is that we do see sometimes in high profile media

cases like this, partisan and especially men use women for political purposes and drag them through, I think, like really, or convince them to be dragged through, fund the dragging through of just awful, awful media circuses. That's not to say if E. Jean Carroll wanted to try this, she absolutely, absolutely should. Powerful men, Donald Trump, by all means, keep that, hold them to account for their actions. The allegations against Donald Trump here are not outside the scope of what seems plausible to me at all. That said, I don't, I have not enjoyed the media cheerleading for the sort of painful, I think, process that Injean Carroll has had to go through. Whether the allegations are true or not, she has seemed unwell at different

points in this entire episode. And it's just always gross, I think, to see these wealthy kind of political operatives swoop in and bankroll some of this stuff because I just doubt their motives. You know, her motives aside, I doubt their motives. And what's also true is that life doesn't all often imitate the kind of black and white understanding that we have of how these cases are supposed to unfold. And so what, you know, there may be something what you're saying, but at the same time, having covered a bunch of these different cases, what you often do see is people trying to minimize or rationalize what happened happened to them and so when you see you know E. Jean Carroll's a feminist who was felt that giving over the power of the

word rape to him was then giving up some of her own power and some of her own dignity a lot a lot of people don't want to acknowledge what happened to them because if they believe that, you know, if they believe that if they can push it out of their mind and reject the fact that the experience happened, that somehow it didn't happen and that you can process it better that way. And certainly, as she's saying, a three-minute experience relative to what was going on at the border at the time is a different thing. And she's trying to grapple with her own privilege at the same time recognizing that something horrific did happen to her, as she alleged to the jury. And as

importantly, I think the jury believed. And the identities of the jury are fascinating. And not just the identities, but like the backgrounds. We have that element. Yeah, yeah. Throw this one up here. I mean, the most interesting one, of course, being a Bronx security guard who gets all his news from Tim Pool. Yes. So if you're able to convince that guy that Trump was guilty of sexual assault and defamation here. Right. Yeah, they put,

they made a good case. Probably, probably did a good job. Yes. And you go through the rest, you could see a couple, a 20 something retail worker. All right. That person was probably not that difficult to, to convince of this. If you, if you're like, you know, thinking about your guess of the caricature of their politics. But a ton of the other ones are typical the kinds of people that Trump would be able to generally win over and might even vote for him. You could have several. There was apparently one MAGA person on the jury. You could have several other people who end up voting for him and also find him guilty of this sexual assault.

Absolutely. Yeah, it's like, I mean, almost half of Alabama voters voted for Roy Moore in 2018 or 2017, 2018. And if you talked to people down there at the time, they would say, listen, we're not saying that this is untrue, although some people certainly did. They're saying we're voting a single issue on abortion. And if you made that choice in 2016, obviously Roe v. Wade was just overturned based on a court that Donald Trump appointed three justices to. So that's where the logic comes from. And it's easily where the logic could come from. Again, I think what you said about E. Jean Carroll is really well said.

And I think obviously the jury was willing to have that conversation too to the point where, as we just showed on even have, you know, kind of a Tim Pool guy coming down on the side. Interesting week for Tim Pool. That's for sure. Yes, that's for sure. Well, speaking of people having interesting weeks. Yes, and speaking of criminal frauds, George Santos is going to be what, is going to be facing arraignment this week. He's been indicted. That's what it looks like. They filed criminal charges against George Santos, obviously, New York representative, just yesterday. Ryan, you mentioned earlier, we can play George Santos bingo here because the allegations against him are so various. Right. So it's very hard to predict exactly what these charges are. What's your best thought?

I mean, the easiest ones would be filing false paperwork in order to run for Congress. There's that you can you can creatively produce a crime out of that without much difficulty because you are lying to the public and you're doing so on paperwork that you're attesting is accurate. Now, it doesn't mean you can't make a mistake here and there about the tenure you spent somewhere, but he just completely fabricated his entire background, start to finish. So there's that. There's also campaign finance stuff. It does appear that he was using donor money to finance his lifestyle. There are basically two things that you can get busted for in the campaign finance world left. There are no laws. And we can talk about Ron DeSantis just moving $80 million out of his state account into a federal super PAC and be like, this is gonna be fine,

nobody prosecutes anything, which he's right. The only things they do prosecute are straw donations, which is when, and SBF appears to have done that, Sean Mack, who we may, you know, is getting charged with, or has been accused of doing that. Dinesh D'Souza. Dinesh D'Souza, basically you get your son or your daughter to max out to a candidate,

and then you reimburse them. Can't do that. They do prosecute it. The other thing is if you steal campaign funds and you use the campaign funds for personal use. There's plenty of evidence that he was living in a place that was rented by the campaign. And then the other question is, where'd all this money come from? The $3 million. Where did this money come from? That's what he says. He counted $3 million in income for one year, right? There's that. And nobody really knows where that money came from. Where'd that money come from? And, you know, Victor Vexelberg's name gets thrown around here through this Entreata guy who's like. Like a Dr. Seuss thing. Yes. Oh, yes. There's, yeah, there's all sorts of weird kind of Russian connections that might surface that could be fascinating.

Doesn't mean Russian government, but just could mean like corrupt Russian folks in the New York area, which think, has always been somewhat frustrating because the lack of media coverage of his candidacy is why the people in his district right now have an absolute joke of a representative. They're not seriously represented in Congress because nobody is going to take the one person who is meant to, quote, represent their interests seriously. He has zero credibility. And, you know, a lot of that came in the shadow of the local media totally drying up. We talked about this in the fall, that when you just have fewer watchdogs on the ground in these given areas, one local media outlet did some really good due diligence on George Santos, but it wasn't really picked up by anyone else. There weren't a lot of other people on the case.

And so now you have a situation where, actually, interestingly enough, the CNN, because CNN broke this story last night, they say the charges don't affect Santas' status as a member of Congress. So nothing in the Constitution says that you're barred if you are under criminal indictment or a conviction for serving. Obviously, we've seen that in different cases. Now, the 14th Amendment has prohibitions, as CNN says, for certain treasonous conduct committed after a member has taken the oath of office. But if he's convicted of a crime, he can get—of two or more years in prison, he is instructed under the House rules to just sit out of floor votes and committee votes.

Especially if you're in jail. If you're behind bars. That would make it tough. They got rid of remote voting. They got rid of proxy voting. There's you're in jail. If you're behind bars. That would make it tough. They got rid of remote voting. They got rid of proxy voting. There's nothing he can do. But that is an interesting kind of part of all this is that he actually can still be in Congress, even if this ends up, I mean, obviously, as a short term, and I would doubt that this all gets litigated by the time he's up for reelection, but he could technically still be in Congress. Right. And so right now it's 222, 213. Is that right? The House Republican majority.

So if he is convicted, what they often do with corrupt officials is part of a plea bargain involves you resigning from office. So that was one reason that it was smart personally of him not to resign early on because you want to be able to save that card. You'll often see that in like with Philadelphia politicians or other ones who have been like busted for some type of corruption. Not in Philly. New Jersey, often you see this, that in exchange for a lighter sentence, you say I'm forfeiting my political career basically. And so you could see that. Tom Swozy has expressed some interest, the former member of Congress in that area, in running. You can imagine in a special election,

the kind of voters there trying to vote away some of the shame and putting Tom Swozy back in. They were not head over heels for it, but he served there for a very long time as a popular mayor. And he was who he said he was. That's a big start. So there's that. That brings you down to what, 221 to 214. And so then McCarthy only has three votes that he can lose on big issues like debt ceiling. And Santos has held on. I mean, he just won't resign. He doesn't, I mean, he was giving reporters what Chick-fil-A in the hallway of the Capitol. He's got the charm of a con artist. Yeah. The Anna Delvey thing going for him. Yeah. People, I think there's some people who are like,

this is such an amazing story. We want to see, like, we want to see. Yes. That's the problem with the con artist charm is that once you realize it's a con, you can't unsee it. Right. It just gets too cheesy after a certain point, like him giving out Chick-fil-A in the Capitol. But, yeah, if folks are expecting perhaps a resignation after this news, I mean, I'm not going to rule anything out. All I would say is that he has refused to do anything else so far other than stand his ground and be kind of coy about what actually happened. And vote however McCarthy wants him to vote. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I don't know if he still thinks he has a future

or a chance or whatever, but George Santos is not the member we need, but the member perhaps we deserve. Indeed. Yeah. And like any con artist, you just live a day at a time. Yeah. He's not a long-term thinker. And when they asked him, how did you think that you would get away with this in 2020? He said, well, I got away with it last time. So again, checks out. All right. Now back over to the House of Representatives. We're talking right now about the debt ceiling negotiations, which had quite a moment yesterday with Kevin McCarthy, obviously Speaker of the House, meeting with President Biden for the first time since February, face to face. We have a video

of Kevin McCarthy, if we go ahead and put B2 up on the screen, talking to reporters after his meeting with President Biden. Unfortunately, the president has waited 97 days without ever meeting. Every day I asked, could we meet? And he said, no. The House has raised the debt ceiling in a responsible manner. Curve our spending at the same time, bring us economic growth. And I asked the president this simple question. Does he not believe there's any place we could find savings? All right, Mitch McConnell, if we put the next element up on the screen, said, quote, the United States is not going to default. It never has. It never will. However, elections have consequences. We now have a divided government. Well, that's for sure.

We can then go ahead and put another Jake Sherman tweet up on the screen, the next element here. He says, McCarthy says the big four will meet with President Biden Friday. The staff is going to continue to meet in the interim, so that means Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Joe Biden will be meeting on Friday to hash some of this out. Now, Ryan, I think the most important development as context for this in the last week is that 43, Mike Lee organized a letter where he gets 43 Republican senators to back the House bill, which says raising the debt ceiling $4.8 trillion. They will raise the debt ceiling $1.5 trillion as a condition if Democrats agree to $4.8 trillion in cuts. And some of that is right at the Biden agenda. It's student loan

repayment. Some of it is green energy credits, that kind of stuff. Sort of ticky tacky to get to that big number there. But the Republican senators got completely behind that, 43 of them, and saying, you know, this is a reasonable place to start negotiation from. Joe Biden has continued to say, no, we are not negotiating, period. We've seen Karine Jean-Pierre talk about how this is essentially Republicans holding hostage the full faith and credit of the United States and the economy in order to get some spending cuts passed. So now that they have, I mean, how many days left in the congressional schedule do they have? They're going to have to cancel the recess. I mean, they have to move quickly. Yeah.

Yeah. Before the June 1. That's what, because June 1 is the deadline for these negotiations because Janet Yellen has said that's when. Ish. It's the deadline, ish. Which is the problem because they don't actually precisely know exactly when they're going to go to their bank account and find that they have insufficient funds. Although putting June 1 as the deadline out there is sort of speaking it into existence in some sense too. But that's, yeah, to your point. It's Janet Yellen's estimate of when things need to be settled by. Yeah. And if people remember, our friend of the show, Rachel Bovard, occasional co-host of the previous show and this one, she's over in the Senate now, kind of setting strategy and organizing kind of for the right flank in the Senate. I suspect that she had a lot to do with that 40-plus person letter, which once you get over 40, that's real. Because now if they hold the line, you don't have 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. Chuck Schumer said yesterday afternoon there would be a bipartisan lifting of the debt limit. Kevin McCarthy, if you want to put up B1, said

he's not going to do kind of a short-term thing. Now, everything that these people say at this point can mostly be discarded because who knows? We'll see. If he has to do a short-term thing, maybe he ends up doing a short-term thing. This is all for positioning. But speaking of positioning, to me, the biggest news that came out of the post-meeting kind of back and forth was President Biden for the first time, really kind of leaning into the 14th Amendment option. Oh, that's right. Which is the one that says the full faith and credit of the United States shall not be challenged.

That's written into the 14th Amendment, this post-Civil War language that was directed at kind of post-Confederates who they were worried would come and take power and then basically refuse to pay the war debts as a way to kind of undermine the reconstruction and kind of the kind of push toward bringing the Union back together after the Civil War. And so you also have in the Constitution that Congress has the power to authorize bonds and debt. So you have two conflicting pieces within the Constitution. And so when you have a contradiction in there, you do have to have it worked out politically. And so you have people that are the normie mainstream Dems like Lawrence Tribe, who used to be against the 14th Amendment idea coming out now with a column saying, here's why I now support it. That his argument basically is that the debt ceiling,

the arbitrary limit is giving Congress power that the Constitution never intended in order to kind of put a gun to the head of the president to then not enact other laws that have duly been written into law. So you have all of this spending from the Bush, Obama, and Trump era, and the bills are now coming due. So that spending was lawfully enacted. He's saying that it actually isn't constitutionally legit to say, well, actually, because of this decedent, you can't spend some of these things. No, that was already authorized. It was already appropriated. It's the president's job to figure out how to meet those obligations. Yeah, it's an interesting argument. And to your point about it being floated again by the Biden administration in the aftermath of the meeting yesterday,

it reminds me of Dan Pfeiffer. He wrote for The New York Times, obviously a former Obama official, saying he doesn't think Biden should be negotiating with Kevin McCarthy at all because of the lessons from the Obama-Bainer negotiations of the Tea Party years, which got the United States. I mean, that was what our first credit downgrade was. It was the 2011 one or the 2013 one after they were at loggerheads for a really long time. And everyone in DC was really convinced that something was going to work out because it kind of always does, right? We always have this expectation, like it's fine. Something always works out. And then it didn't. It just didn't because in that case, you had the Tea Party movement with a whole lot of energy that had absolutely no political incentive or ideological motive to cooperate with Barack Obama. And so it

was, it blew up in everyone's face, basically. Republicans, Pfeiffer's very correct to say, got their asses kicked and were blamed completely by the media and by voters. And that's why he's saying, why would Joe Biden negotiate with them now? He's the one that has the upper hand because we know there's no way the media is going to take the side of whether or not you think Republicans are right or wrong in an obstructionism of the debt ceiling raise. The media is going to take the Biden administration's side, period. The public is already disinclined to like obstructionism, whether you're Republican or Democrat or independent. People don't like to see generally that things are just not working and that Republicans are

kind of gumming up the machinery. That doesn't play as well as like actually just doing things, getting things done from a purely sort of public relations standpoint. So they have the upper hand and Fiverr's like, well, then what are you doing? You don't need to do anything because if this blows up in Republican spaces, they're going to come groveling back anyway. Right. So just to issue the debt or, and to McConnell's point that elections have consequences, we have divided government. As Democrats have been responding, well, the 2018 elections should have had consequences too. We had divided government in 2019 and 2020. Somehow we didn't manage to default.

We were able to just raise the debt ceiling then, so we can raise the debt ceiling this time. Biden even mentioned the coin, the platinum coin. He said that his staff had not been studying it, but just bringing it up and entering it into the conversation, I think changes the calculus a little bit. If they do mint a platinum coin, by the way, so what you do, you basically, you mint a platinum coin, you say this thing is worth a trillion dollars, you deposit it with the New York Fed, and now boom, you have a trillion dollars in your account, and then you can use that to pay bills while you sort it out. You don't spend all trillion of it, but it's sitting there. Also, you'd have to put dark Brandon on the platinum coin.

On the coin. Right? You'd have no choice. The lasers coming out of the eyes. Oh, I love it. That's absolutely what it would have to be. And so, we'll see. Yeah. Nope. We will see. That's the sticking point with Kevin McCarthy saying in the meeting, basically, or after the meeting, does the president believe there's absolutely no spending that can be cut? Biden responded to that. He said, look, we saved $160 billion out of Medicare. You guys didn't seem to like that. We proposed ways that

by taxing a bunch of the richest corporations and millionaires and billionaires, we could save hundreds of billions or more. How about that? That's where you're getting, it feels like 2011 again, right? Like, is there nowhere we can agree to cuts? Well, of course, there's somewhere we all, we all believe there's something that can be cut in the government. But this process right now, it just, it's too toxic to believe that they're going to, on Friday, say, well, yeah, we can cut this, this, and this, and it'll be a win for everybody. Kevin McCarthy's obviously on the tightrope of not being able to lose either the Freedom Caucus or the more centrist members of his own party. So it's just insane,

and the economy's on the line. So we'll obviously continue to follow this story as closely as possible from our vantage point here in Washington, D.C. On that note, let's talk about developments in Ukraine. The counteroffensive, the much-anticipated counteroffensive is now having some cold water tossed on it. In a Washington Post interview, you can, yeah, we put that right up on the screen there. Here's the headline. Senior Ukrainian officials fear counterattack may not live up to hype. This is a quote. The expectation from our counteroffensive campaign is overestimated in the world, Ukrainian Defense Minister Alexei Reznikov said in an interview this past week, most people are waiting for something huge, he added, which he fears may lead to emotional disappointment. yet begun, although we've been hearing about it for a really long time. That is a comment to the Washington Post. That's not flippant. That's an interview that the generally stage-managed

Ukrainian government gave to one of the biggest newspapers in the world. What did you make of that? It's more stage management. It's the same thing that you see when you go into a debate where you have two candidates about to square off and each side's telling the other, well, our guy didn't sleep well. English is not his first language. Yes. You know, he's not the brightest bulb. You know, if he can string together a couple sentences, that ought to be a win.

Everybody trying to set expectations as low as possible. And I think Ukraine is suffering from the fact that they exceeded expectations so wildly with the last surprise offensive that caught Russia off guard, steamrolled through town after town. But in those situations, the Russians were not dug in and were less fortified and just simply fled. And it was a masterstroke of military organizing. Following that, Russia has launched its kind of full-scale conscription and has something like three to 500,000 troops, has deep trenches dug, has military hardware solidifying areas, and there's much more mud than was expected. And so these are all the things that the Ukrainian officials are saying, that those are the reasons

why people should not expect that they're going to be able to romp like they did last time. So, you know, setting expectations low, it just makes sense. And as Zelensky said in this interview and has said before, the Ukrainians need victories in order to convince the West to continue financing their operations. Speaking of which, just now, just yesterday, the U.S. announced a $1.2 billion aid package to Ukraine. You can see that up on the screen from CNN. That is to bolster its air defenses and sustain its artillery and ammunition needs for that counteroffensive. 155-millimeter artillery rounds, additional air defense systems and munitions, drone ammunition. That's all included in this package. So that brings the total to $37.6 billion

in just military aid to Ukraine since the beginning of the Biden administration. And that includes $36.9 billion since the beginning of the war in February 2022. So basically $37.9 billion, basically $37 billion since the beginning of the war, obviously a huge number. And for the counteroffensive, a piece of momentum to be sure. And I think, Ryan, you make such a good point that a lot of this has to do with convincing the West to give more money anyway. So they get the more money for the counteroffensive, which probably feels to a lot of Americans like a merry-go-round, you know, every time you pass this, like, oh like more money to keep going. But that is part of all of this. We should also mention a couple of other things. First, that the British are hoping to supply some longer range. Yeah, this is the next

element, longer range missiles to Ukraine. And then the last thing I think is worth mentioning is that Vladimir Putin yesterday, folks probably saw some of the headlines from their Victory Day parade. Putin said once again, he made the argument that the West is driving a, quote, real war against Russia. Here's the quote, today's civilization is once again at a decisive turning point. Putin said, obviously, they were celebrating the defeat of the Nazis after World War II. He says, quote, a real war has been unleashed against our motherland. Obviously, this is coming before a potential counteroffensive. What did you make of these developments with the the air supply? And then Putin at the victory day saying, continuing to pin it on the West, not surprising at all, but pointed.

The long-range missiles are similar to aircraft in the way that this is something that Zelensky and the Ukrainian government has been pushing for from the very beginning. And that the U.S. has been resisting, saying that long-range missiles capable of going over 120 kilometers could then be used to strike inside of Russia, which would then lead to greater escalation. And so, therefore, the U.S. has resisted. Involvement from China, potentially involvement from China. Right, because if you have that sort of escalation that then brings in Chinese weapons, then you're unable to keep up at some point, especially given the vicinity. So now the British are saying that they might be willing to supply these. Oh, as that article and others have pointed out, if the United States objectives strenuously,

the British are not going to do it kind of around our back or against our wishes. Zelensky has made the argument that there are so many troop formations and other organizational apparatuses going on on the Russian side just out of their range because the Russians know that they have a very limited, the HIMARS I think have a range of about 47 kilometers. Some other missiles have ranges up to something like 120, and so they're just out of reach. And so that is a strong argument for these. So is the argument that, well, we don't want to escalate this any further.

Because at some point, if the sides are dug in, what the logical next step is, okay, well, let's sort this out. Like how are we going to end this conflict? And, you know, nobody on the Ukrainian side wants to allow a, you know, a single piece of territory that was lost, including Crimea and including kind of the, you know, Russian separatist backed areas that were already held before February of 2022. But at some point, that becomes untenable. And then the question becomes, what is Russia willing to give back in exchange for, you know, some sanctions getting lifted and some other, you know, some other concessions? It's profoundly depressing, actually, to mention these places that had really already been under

the control of Russian separatists or Crimea actually since roughly 2014 because I think it bodes very poorly for the future of this war in that we've talked about this many times, Sager and Kristol have talked about this many times, that there are people in the West for whom they are either ideologically or committed to this for corrupt reasons, this idea that everything is appeasement, everything short of, you know, saving all of Ukrainian territory and agreeing that all of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, is returned to Ukraine, which I think, Brian, we would agree is probably like the ideal if we could just wave a magic wand and wish for something. Maybe that's where we would land. I

don't know. But the idea that anything short of that is appeasement will drive an incredibly long, drawn-out conflict. And I keep coming back to what you said a couple weeks ago, Ryan, about if there is a will to sit down and say we can, and we've heard this from Naftali Bennett, we've heard it from other people that there were conversations about this about a year ago, that there has been openings for some sort of concessions to be made that Ukraine would be willing to talk about that have been scuttled by folks in the West. Why can't we do it before people have to die in a counteroffensive? Why can't we do it before additional death and die in a counteroffensive? Why can't we do it before additional death and destruction in a counteroffensive? Well, I think it's, you know,

the answer to that is we are still so heavily driven by people who say we cannot, you know, give an inch, an inch, lest the world, you know, once again fall to Hitler, essentially, is the argument that they're making. It's no doubt playing Putin. Putin is bad. But it is untenable, to use your word. So speaking of warmongers, Liz Cheney is jumping into the 2024 election. That was a smooth transition. As Ron DeSantis is preparing to launch his own presidential bid, he moved about $86 million. So basically he did this quasi-legal move where he's been raising tens of millions of dollars into his Florida state election campaign.

Florida allows you to do whatever you want, basically. Unlimited corporate contributions, et cetera, which is against federal law. And so in the past, you have not been able to move that state money into your own federal PAC. You just can't do that. Byron Donaldson kind of found a workaround. He said, well, what if I do it into a super PAC? Went to the FEC. The FEC is deadlocked because they don't have enough officials to actually do anything to do their job. And it's like, oh, you guys didn't say it was wrong. So therefore, we're going to keep doing it. And so now DeSantis is doing it on a much grander scale. He put this first one up moving about $86 million. First, he had to step off of his committee. Then

the committee has his instructions of what they're going to do. It'd be funny if they gave it to a Trump super PAC. Technically, these decisions have to be made independently of DeSantis, or they are illegal. So it'd be just hilarious if they gave it to a Biden super PAC or something. Or a Trump super PAC. Look, it's independent. What are you upset about? You saying that you were controlling this money? Because if so, that's super illegal and you wouldn't have been involved in anything like that, would you? So this sets him up

to have a well-financed run. He met with Steve Schwartzman this week. Did you see the billionaire private equity dude who came out of the meeting and said he's not sold yet? He's waiting to see. And I think that's going to be a – I'm curious if you're taking this. This is going to be a big problem for DeSantis. Billionaires? Yes. I just think he doesn't sell in the rooms that he needs to. Like people have said like his problem is a likability question.

Yeah. That people get in the room with him, like, is he putting with his fingers? You know what, I'm not sure I'm going to do the $10 million yet. So, you know, whereas somebody like a Bill Clinton, and this is an apolitical argument. It doesn't matter what your politics are. Or even an Obama or even a Trump, like, who have a kind of charisma when they get into a room. Like when Bill Clinton, what everybody says about Bill Clinton, he'd come into a room, just absolutely light that room up. Just dominate. And everybody's attention is on him. Bill Clinton gets in a room with Steve Schwartzman. He's walking away with tens of millions of dollars of Steve Schwartzman's money.

Ron DeSantis gets in a room with Steve Schwartzman. Schwartzman's like, hmm, not so sure about this. And, you know, it doesn't bother me at all that Ron DeSantis is not well liked among billionaires and can't, you know, quite get them to fork their money over by charming them and lying to them because, or maybe not lying to them, promising them all kinds of things and being very serious about those promises. So it shouldn't be a political handicap that he's not well liked among the billionaire class, which I think is probably true. I mean, we saw Maggie Haberman reporting just last month that one billionaire was kind of icked out by the quote book bans and was rolling back potentially support for Ron DeSantis, which is just classic because from my perspective and like a broader realignment

perspective, it is just a perfect example of these kind of cultural tensions between elite coastal folks and what the rest of the country actually wants and needs. But all of that is to say, so I wish this wasn't a political handicap. And if somebody like made me, in this bizarre hypothetical, was like, you have to choose between Joe Biden and Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis. And, you know, someone was like, you have to do it. I guess I would probably choose DeSantis. I don't like politicians in general, but if someone was telling me I had to pick, I would probably go with him. So I don't, partially because of this, because I don't think he's like completely this, like your typical, like smooth talking politician.

I think he like tries to just, he's kind of a strange guy. He's a little bit of a weird guy, which is kind of, you know, like that's, it's, your politicians should be weird. You know, if they're too normal, they're, they're doing some, some bad stuff. It doesn't mean the weird ones aren't going to do bad stuff, too. But it's a really, it's a big sign if Bill Clinton is walking around the room and everyone's throwing billions at him. So it doesn't necessarily bother me. He is going to Wisconsin, or I'm sorry, he went to Wisconsin last week. He talked to the Marathon County Republican Party out in central Wisconsin.

He's going to Iowa this weekend. Like you said, he's been chatting with people like big donors. He's trying to say, according to, I think this is, yeah, according to Politico, he's saying that he can win Georgia and Arizona. He's talking to people in Iowa, big evangelical leader. So his announcement, I think at this point is absolutely imminent, which is again, interesting given that he's held out so long and there have been so many developments in Trump's own saga. So E. Jean Carroll news yesterday, he was indicted a month ago. It just keeps, the hits just keep coming and that gives Trump, you know, dominance over the news cycle. And for Ron DeSantis to stick his neck out and get into the primary, it's obviously a

decision that affects his viability as a political candidate long, long, long, long into the future, because Donald Trump can wipe you out like that, given his popularity with some like 30% of Republican voters that are hardcore. And so the path to 270 electoral college votes, if you assume, just for the sake of argument that Biden or whoever the Democrats throw up is going to win Michigan and Pennsylvania, like let's assume that and assume the Republicans going to walk away with Ohio, the Republicans then have to sweep, and this goes to the point that you are making, they have to sweep Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona. If Democrats win a single one of those three, then they win. And so DeSantis is making the argument that he's the, that Georgia and Arizona,

he's keyed in there. And I think if he's arguing that he can win in Iowa, he's obviously going to make the, Wisconsin, they like me up there too. What's your sense in those three states in particular, who would have a better shot, Trump or DeSantis, of winning those? Or do neither of them really have, because that's why you have Democrats so confident that they've got a guy who has like a 4% approval rating and that they're still confident they're going to win. Because they look at those three states and like, we think we can hold Georgia, Wisconsin and Arizona. In a general? Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I think that's a super interesting question because we talked about this in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election last month. The numbers in what's called the wow counties where I grew up actually were a little bit like that's a really conservative voting block. It always has been. But the numbers for the conservative justice candidate were fine. Like he won all the counties, but like it was lower than what you'd expect the percentage to be. And so I think it is true that super kind of MAGA-y stuff has eaten away at enthusiasm in the suburbs and in a state like

Georgia outside Atlanta, that's really important. In a state like Wisconsin outside Milwaukee, that's really important. So I think there's a good argument to be made that DeSantis can appeal to the kind of rural Wisconsin and Georgia voters that Trump appealed to, that he can cling, that he can hang on to that because he kind of gets the whole Trump thing in a way other people don't, gets the cultural stuff in a way other people don't, while also putting up better numbers in the suburbs and not allowing Democrats to kind of eat away at them there. So I think there's an argument to be made that it evens out. In the primary, that's where it's really difficult, because if you have DeSantis and all of these other people, and then Donald Trump, in a place like these rural areas where Trump has very, very high Republican support. Even if Trump isn't at 50% Republican support, it's not just Trump versus

DeSantis. It's Trump versus DeSantis, Nikki Haley, et cetera, et cetera. And that splits the vote in a million different ways. And Trump still emerges victorious. So it just, the path to even get to the general, I think is hard to see. So what about this Steve Cortez character? So put this next element up. So this is a former Trump advisor who flipped and is now working on this flush super PAC that DeSantis. Maybe, wouldn't it be hilarious if this is Trump's play and he actually hasn't flipped and he's going to take this $86 million and he's going to move it. This is how Trump's going to keep that money, which would be totally legal.

To reiterate, DeSantis is not allowed to have control over this money, even though he raised it. Right. Because if he does, it's illegal coordination. Define control. Well, right, let him fight for it. That'd be so funny if Steve Cortez is actually still a Trump guy and he played DeSantis.

You should do like campaign strategy actually. You should like advise people on how to exploit these loopholes. Yeah. So Cortez, if you're watching this, just do it for the jokes. Just because it would be so funny. He's like the stripper coming out of a birthday cake. Yeah. just because it would be so funny. He's like the stripper coming out of a birthday cake. So how influential an operative is he?

And is this a win for DeSantis or is this just one more kind of Trump guy that is reading the writing on the wall? I think it's probably the latter. I don't know much about Steve Cortez. I don't have a good sense for, I mean, I don't know. I don't have a good sense for how powerful he might be in the conservative movement, but I do think it's an indication at the very least to your point that a lot of kind of movement conservative people are in the DeSantis, are on the DeSantis team in the DeSantis versus Trump fight. And I've written about this at the

Federalist before that that is actually quite a handicap for Ron DeSantis. And I think Ron DeSantis has started to recognize this and people around him have started to recognize this because if you are very online, if you're on Twitter, the DeSantis versus Trump influencer beefs have gotten insane. Like they're just nauseating and weird at this point. And so to have a bunch of like conservative media pundits on the DeSantis team and not the Trump team, I think just continues to make Donald Trump's point that there are forces in Washington,

the Washington establishment that are aligned against him and are aligning against him, which by the way, is true because if you talk to people who were Trump supporters publicly behind closed doors, they would concede all of the different problems with him. So given the choice in Ron DeSantis, who many people on the right think is all of the good about Trump without the baggage, you know, a lot of voters like what's considered baggage here in Washington, D.C. The baggage, that's the fun stuff. The fun stuff. And it's the fun stuff, but it's also like in some cases, not every case, we obviously talked about E.G. and Carol today. It's not the fun stuff. Not the fun stuff. But in some cases, it's also the important stuff and the good stuff, like him being like, what are we doing with NATO? What are we doing? And the way that that's completely dramatically shifted the way

Republicans think about NATO and think about foreign policy. So if that's considered baggage, then, you know, that's a pretty open question for Republicans how to handle it. And so Liz Cheney did jump into New Hampshire with this, with an ad coming after Trump. Let's roll this real quick. Donald Trump is the only president in American history who has refused to guarantee the peaceful transfer of power. He lost the election and he knew it. He betrayed millions of Americans by telling them the election was stolen. He ignored the rulings of dozens of courts. Rather than accept his defeat,

he mobilized a mob to come to Washington and march on the Capitol. Then he watched on television while the mob attacked law enforcement, invaded the Capitol, and hunted the vice president. He refused for three hours to tell the mob attacked law enforcement, invaded the Capitol, and hunted the Vice President. He refused for three hours to tell the mob to leave. There has never been a greater dereliction of duty by any president.

Trump was warned repeatedly that his plans for January 6th were illegal. He didn't care, and today he celebrates those who attacked our Capitol. Donald Trump has proven he is unfit for office. Donald Trump is a risk America can never take again. The great task is responsible for the content of this advertising. Are there Republicans left in New Hampshire, for instance, that are going to be moved by Liz Cheney? Or has she been so thoroughly kind of stomped out of the party that this only helps him? What's your sense?

It's a good question because this is set to air actually tonight when Trump is doing a town hall with Caitlin Collins of CNN. And I'm kind of confused. I mean, I feel like she probably does have money to throw around. I'm sure she has some benevolent backers and has plenty of her own money that running an ad like this during a CNN town hall, a one-off. She has war profiteering money from Halliburton. She inherited a ton of Halliburton wealth. Yeah, she's good to go. She is good to go. I don't know. I mean, I think with Liz Cheney, the January 6th stuff is, I mean, maybe she wants to remind people that she's out there. She litigated the January 6th case in the public

and she could be an option and she's just kind of feeling that out. I have no, I mean, if you didn't have a lot of money, I don't know why you would do this because it just seems like the most obvious way for Liz Cheney to pitch herself. Everyone already knows her from January 6th. Everyone has seen this January 6th footage over and over and over again, and everybody knows what she thinks about it. So to just purely remind people without trying to say anything new about yourself and just casting this as like, here's the unique thing that my unique criticism of Donald Trump from the vantage point of my January 6th committee perch, it's a weird move, I think. And I don't know who the audience really is for it. I know who she thinks the audience is, but I don't know that it exists. Certainly

the CNN audience. And no, her ad's not wrong. Like he did all that stuff. It's like, and it is, it is stark in some ways to be reminded of it, to be like, oh wow. So yeah, this guy did actually do all of the things that this ad is saying, and he's still kind of the front runner to run again and here's cnn yeah talking to him you know yucking it up with him so that's yeah so that's kind of but i just don't know what it does for her you know what i mean it's it's got uh it's got her coming up at the end of a segment on counterpoints so i mean that's something. I feel indicted. Congratulations to her. But I get a leftist group, like a liberal dark money group running an ad like this during a CNN town hall,

sort of the jarring contrast between what Donald Trump is saying and joking around with on the stage and then the reality of January 6th. To pitch yourself as a candidate that way is just a strange, I think it's a weird move, but I guess at this point it's really all she has. Anyway, what are you looking at? All right, so I said this earlier, as we were preparing the show yesterday, Newsbroke, actually in The Federalist, my boss Sean Davis, our CEO, had a really interesting story that some

other outlets added additional details to as the night wore on about the CIA. The CIA, this is in Sean's writing, both solicited signatures for and eventually approved the infamous 2020 letter claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop story was a Russian disinformation plot. All right, to be clear, this is from a document that Senate Republicans, it's going to be released by the Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Obviously, that's a Kevin McCarthy creation that's come from, Jim Jordan is heading that up. But let's be very clear about what this shows. I know that it gets tired and it gets exhausting, exasperating to litigate the stupid Hunter Biden laptop letter again and again and again.

But what we have here is very clear evidence of the CIA interfering in an American election. Boom, period, full stop. That's honestly all we need to say about this topic. I'll continue to flesh it out with details, but that's why I think Sean's reporting is really worth talking about. In the same way, by the way, that the left really hammered these issues during the church committee years. You can even go back, a lot of people don't know that Barry Goldwater's campaign was spied on, that Lyndon Johnson directed, I believe it was the CIA to spy on Barry Goldwater's campaign, not the FBI, but the CIA to spy on Barry Goldwater's campaign. The left has covered these issues really well for a very long time, but I think it's extremely important that we recognize,

I get it, I get all the Trump stuff, but it's still very important to recognize that this is unelected bureaucrats wielding enormous power and abusing it for the sake of partisan politics. And, you know, as we get through this a little bit, you can see more clearly how it's definitely an abuse despite what they say. You have multiple former U.S. intelligence officials, according to the report that's going to be testimony in a report that's going to be released today, but that Sean obviously reported it on yesterday. They testified under oath about the CIA's involvement in the distribution of the letter. Quote, one signer of the statement, former CIA analyst David Karians, disclosed to the committees that a CIA employee affiliated with the agency's pre-publication classification review board informed him of the existence of the statement and asked if he would sign it. The committees have requested additional material from the CIA, which has ignored the request to date. Okay, so let's just take that. This is an email

that you can read about it in Sean's report and obviously in the report that comes out today that shows there is somebody acting on behalf of the CIA. They'll say that's not the case. Of course, that'll be their defense of themselves, but somebody who is with the Pre-Publication Classification Review Board. That is a board. These stupid acronyms are intentional to get us all mixed up and not be able to follow the plot, but that's a board that basically reviews things that former CIA folks put out into the universe. And they were reviewing the letter. Former CIA director Mike Morrell, we now know, is directed by Antony Blinken to put together this letter in his own

words as a sort of something that would be helpful to President Biden in the 2020 election, because obviously the New York Post story contained all kinds of things from Hunter Biden's laptop, not just the salacious things, not just the photographs, but a lot of evidence that the Biden family and the president himself, that implicates the president himself in influence peddling on a fairly grand scale. And with some hostile foreign countries, China included, this is happening within a month of the election. And the CIA knows that that laptop, they know, they know that that laptop is not all Russian disinformation. I believe the FBI had had the laptop since like 2019. So keep all of that in mind when you recognize they're mobilizing this letter. New emails show that who else but James Clapper is also involved in massaging the language

of the letter. So the language is a bunch of former CIA people. But I think what's so important about this report is that you have someone, one of those former CIA guys who signs the letter, saying that somebody actively with the CIA asked for his signature. Boom. That even according to Morrell's testimony in the report is, quote, inappropriate. Here's what Morrell said. It's inappropriate for a currently serving staff officer or contractor to be involved in the political process. Here's

what another former CIA guy said. If it's true, it would concern me for sure, but I just have a hard time believing that it occurred. If it did, that's incredibly unprofessional. Their theory and their defense is going to be that someone or a couple of people went rogue. They should have sent this from their personal account. They should have, you know, separated business and personal when they were looking at this review of the letter. They should have just kept it to that and then emailed somebody from their personal or called someone from their personal and said, hey, you should maybe sign this letter or something like that. Or that if you're former, if you're current CIA, you shouldn't have been involved at all. It was just a silly slip up and a mistake. But there is no mistake about this. This is the CIA, according to the email, actively,

actively asking someone to sign a partisan, a letter that is being organized for a partisan election purpose. Boom, period, full stop. Again, that's really all we need to know about this. I'm excited to continue learning more. But I just wanted to highlight this for everyone because, you know, as somebody who grew up in that kind of post 9-11 era, generally on the right, I was not, the skepticism of what's now called the deep state or like the CIA, the FBI, the intelligence apparatus was not high on my list of ideological priorities. And I was, not to make excuses for myself, but like a teenager. So I was kind of young and just

following, you know, generally along with conservative priorities. That's wrong. I mean, this should have always been a priority. I mentioned Barry Goldwater. That should have been a priority for decades of the conservative movement, because if you're concerned about the power of an expansive government, you need look no further than the expansive intelligence apparatus for how much that can be abused. Rand Paul, Ron Paul have been good on these issues for a really, really long time. And I think Trump gives a lot of people on the left an excuse to ignore and wish away the amplification and the ratcheting up of these abuses of power. They're not, this is not just what it used to be. It's getting worse and worse. And they're

starting to justify this stuff openly and get away with it because folks in the media don't give a damn. So that's why I thought this story was worth highlighting. Ryan, you've covered this stuff for a really long time. There were some reports in the New York Post and other places from what's going to be released today, yesterday. What did you make of some of these revelations? Where do you think they're going to go from here? I think the CIA ought to stay out of American elections. How about that? I think the CIA ought to stay out of elections in general. All elections. They're very good at this. Yes. And it is a coming home to roost type of thing. Like if you have an intelligence apparatus that is going to be monkeying around in the internal affairs of governments all over the world, then certainly they're going to feel like they can

monkey around with this one. But I think that there needs to be a civic sense among CIA officials that they are out of politics. I think we've got to get these spies and these spy agencies just completely out of our politics. Obviously, they can live in Virginia. You can vote for House of Delegates, vote for Virginia State Senate, you can vote for president. If they live in D.C., they cannot vote for House or Senate because they live in D.C. and we don't have House members or senators. But otherwise, they should not be organizing on behalf of one candidate or another. And if the CIA believes that there is Russian disinformation, then the CIA should say so. Like just publicly come out behind the mics with press conference and give your evidence for why that is and say it. Like if that, say it with your chest.

And in fact, the intelligence communities tried to do that. I think in 2016, if I remember correctly, McConnell basically blocked them from doing that. So then after that, they played all these games, these kind of behind the scenes games instead. But I think they should've just come out. Like say, look, McConnell doesn't agree with this. Like, and then the public can decide it. Is that the role we want the CIA

playing here? But to do this secretly, behind the scenes, organize it as a former, you know, intelligence officials letter and, you know, you know, so, yeah, stay out. Yeah, I mean, and this is a point you make a lot, that it's like when you are, you have this muscle memory of doing this, wherever you're doing it around the world, you're going to use it in the United States eventually. It's just you can't help yourself. You know how to do it.

You think, you know, something needs to be done. It's inevitably going to bleed into your domestic operations, which, you know, the CIA to be done, it's inevitably going to bleed into your domestic operations, which, you know, the CIA is really not supposed to have anyway. And in this case, it looks like taxpayer resources being used for the Democratic Party as like an in-kind contribution. You know, they're laundering their reputations, but they're also using taxpayer money for election purposes. So I doubt anything will, you know, any accountability will come to it, but it would be from, I think this is something that everyone can agree on, whether you're leftist or on the right from a populist perspective, it'd be great if there

was some accountability, but it's like trying to turn the Titanic around at this point. And maybe we'll continue to hear more from RFK Jr. about his plans for the CIA when he's on the campaign trail. There you go. That'll be interesting to see how they handle him. Yeah, it sure will. Stick around. We're going to have Representative Ro Khanna of California joining us. Now that the press is looking into Supreme Court corruption, the hits keep coming. The Senate is demanding a list from Harlan Crowe of gifts that he has given to Supreme Court justices, specifically Clarence Thomas. But hey, might as well ask what else he's given to

whoever else. So joining us now to talk about this constitutional crisis that we're entering into is California Representative Ro Khanna. Congressman Khanna, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me on. And so my sense of this is that there was a social contract that existed for maybe half a century where the public just basically let the Supreme Court do whatever it was doing behind the black robes and behind the kind of mystique of the legitimacy of the court. And something has broken. And that now that people are starting to look, they're a little disturbed by what they're finding. What are you hearing from your colleagues on Capitol Hill about how they're thinking through this controversy around the court? Well, one, there's a shock that Supreme Court justices

are allowed to do this. I mean, most colleagues on the Hill, whatever you think of them, you go out for lunch and you end up picking up the tab usually because you don't want to fill out all the paperwork of someone paying for the lunch. And it's mind boggling to me that you don't have similar regulations for Supreme Court justices. You have them for the executive branch as well. And I think this is just blown open, the fact that the Supreme Court justices have not had many standards. Now, my guess is, even though the Supreme Court has had some absolutely awful decisions, it hasn't just been a beacon for sort of democracy and liberalism, that probably maybe I'm thinking in the past people weren't as venal and you didn't have the kind of egregiousness.

Now you've got this egregious case. And I think it's really called into question why we don't have standards. You know, it's been interesting from the perspective of someone on the right to watch a lot of these reports start snowballing. It does. I mean, whether or not it's coordinated, it feels coordinated. And that's not to say it's not fair. It's not to say that there aren't some attacks that, not attacks, but there aren't some criticisms or revelations. For instance, I would think about the private flight logs with Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crowe that stand out to me as something that obviously should have been disclosed and rules

should be tightened so that we know what's happening. But it seems to be, you know, it was left to like the Daily Wire to report that Sonia Sotomayor, for instance, was hearing a case about Penguin Random House, while obviously being in contract with Penguin Random House. Do you have concerns, Congressman, about how this has been sort of piled on conservative justices by the American media? And then it seems that it's not as balanced when it comes to the media's concerns about justices on the left that may be running afoul of similar rules, but it just sort of tanks the credibility of conservative justices without also saying, well, hey, this is probably a broader problem. There are two reasons that the Supreme Court has a crisis of confidence. One has to do with the fact

that they're just out of touch with the facts of modern life, that you have people appointed 20, 30 years ago who are taking away women's rights to an abortion pill, who are taking away voting rights. And there is real anger in the country, and I would say not just among the left, but many Americans, to say, what is the Supreme Court doing? And that's why I proposed term limits. There's a separate issue about conflicts of interest and people getting gifts and presiding on cases where they may have financial interest. Sometimes those two things can get conflated. I agree with you that they should be separate. We should make sure that the ethics conduct has separate reform. At the

same time, I believe we need term limits. And I believe that the real crisis of this court is that they're taking away basic liberties and rights. And that is only apart from even their financial conflicts. And some of this apart from even their financial conflicts. And some of this to me feels like a symptom of our second Gilded Age, because if you go back and you think about the last Gilded Age and you read some of the Supreme Court corruption that was going on then, just gab smocking, incredible stuff. Supreme Court justices literally on the payroll of railroads writing into laws that benefited the railroads and busting the railroad unions. And so it feels like we're entering kind of a second territory like that. And the way that that original corruption was eventually broken was political.

You had FDR come in and give them a political check, say, you know, we're going to expand the court if you keep, you know, this combination of corruption and moving against the will of the voters. And boom, that got, that snapped them back into place and he didn't have to do the court packing scheme. Is there the political will on the Democratic side to actually check them? Because when voters see somebody like Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin say, well, this is up to the Chief Justice and we hope that he handles this, I think there's a lack of confidence that there is that will to check them in the way that they need to be checked to get them back on track. Yeah, I don't think it's up to the Chief Justice. I think Congress should pass a law

for an ethics code of conduct. It's not a violation of separation of powers. If it's a violation of separation of powers, how can we pass laws requiring the president or the vice president to have financial disclosures? How can we pass laws about conflicts for the executive branch? Of course, we can pass laws on the Supreme Court. And the real thing we need is term limits, 18 years, and then you're out. The Constitution says you have to be a judge for life, not that you have to be on the Supreme Court for life. But Ryan, I know you're a student of history.

I guess part of what happened, it seems to me, is that there was, after FDR, this move towards meritocracy, this idea that now people are going to go and take tests and get into schools based on their own merit. And, you know, a lot of these justices have gone to Ivy League schools. I went to an Ivy League school, and then somehow this is going to make the process cleaner. And what we're now realizing is sort of a deeper point about the underbelly of meritocracy, that it did not root out the corruption. It may have made it much less

blatant, but there's still a lot of conflicts of interest and people with capital still have extraordinary influence in our democracy. Yeah, and that's one of the difficult parts of this is even if there were stringent disclosures implemented, and then I want to ask you about that in a second, billionaires are still going to have plenty of access to the people in the highest echelons of power. And that isn't to say we should just throw up our hands, of course. It's just a note that even if I'm looking at some of the things short of, as you say, congressman term limits, which I would oppose, but like even if you look at that stuff, it's like, gosh, there's just so so much access no matter what and that gets to Ryan's point about the second gilded age but what likelihood do you think there is of like actual real ethical reform being passed and implemented in the supreme court because there obviously is a need for it when you look at you know some of the the different things that we've learned in the last several weeks, how likely do you think that is to happen?

I believe we need to, to your first question, we need to make this not just ideological, and we need to make it broader, that there have to be some common sense reforms. You know, the way to get Congress to act is to say it's unfair that Supreme Court justices aren't getting treated like members of Congress, or why can't they be subject to some of the same restrictions? If you make it about the conservative judges, obviously Republicans get defensive. But here's where I will make a partisan point. I think many Republicans are just fine with the court because they've gotten what they wanted. They got the Roe versus Wade overturn. The court is by and large functioning on their ideological agenda. And so they're reluctant to

do things to change the status quo that is working for them. And that's why I think it's going to be hard to get something passed with Republicans controlling the House of Representatives. And just to quickly add a point to that, it's funny because if maybe this push had happened when Elena Kagan didn't recuse herself from the Obamacare case, Republicans might have thought differently about it. But because in this case, Republicans feel like they have control over and are happy with where the Supreme Court is, there's probably less political will. But 18 years seems good. Do 18 years as a Supreme Court, and then you can go be a circuit court judge. That seems fair.

Congressman, I also wanted to ask you about a letter that was led by Representative Veronica Escobar that was calling out the kind of broken policy around sanctions as it relates to both Venezuela and Cuba and connecting it to the migration crisis. But there was this famous viral clip that during the State of the Union, where you had President Biden going, coming up to Menendez and you kind of, you can hear him saying, Bob, Bob, Bob, we need to talk about Cuba. And you see Bob Menendez's face kind of fall. He's like, he's like, I do not want to talk about Cuba to the president because I think Senator Menendez, the judiciary chair, quite fine with the sanctions regime and the kind of embargo that we've got currently.

But now that we're almost six months on from that, are you getting any sense that the administration is kind of rethinking its policy towards Cuba and Venezuela as we're seeing a flood of migrants come as a direct result of our own policies toward those countries. Well, I appreciate Veronica Escobar's leadership on this, and I had joined the letter, and she obviously represents El Paso, so she's feeling the brunt of the challenge with migrants coming across. There are many parts to solving this, but one of the things that will make it better

is if we don't have draconian sanctions that are creating economic conditions and hardships that are leading to people leaving. I mean, the Republicans often say, well, it's not just all people coming for asylum from political persecution. They're coming because of economic deep deprivation. Well, one of the reasons that there's deep economic

deprivation is because overly punitive sanctions that haven't worked. Maduro is terrible, terrible human rights violations, terrible civil rights violations. But our policy during the Trump administration and then others where we said, well, we'll figure out a way to topple him, get someone else installed. None of that worked. And now we've got these crippling sanctions that aren't doing much to weaken him, haven't led to any of the regime change, because we usually aren't good at that, but are leading to more as well as coming to our border. And I guess just common sense should mean we don't want to be aggravating the flow of refugees into this country, especially economic refugees. Even if we're turning them away, it's putting so much stress on our border patrol. And again, quickly on that point, if you

are coming from Cuba or Venezuela, you actually have almost certainly, whoever you are, a legitimate case for political asylum, not even just economic asylum. According to us, if we're sanctioned here. But not, you know, not for the Biden administration shift on Cuba, which I think is incredibly unfortunate. And I do think the sanctions point is entirely fair. And also, so yesterday, President Biden said that he was contemplating using the 14th Amendment to get out of this debt ceiling crisis. Would you support that approach? And how much support do you think there would be in the Democratic caucus for a 14th Amendment and run around this? I do support it.

I mean, basically, Congress has already authorized the payments. And we've told the executive branch they need to pay this. And now we're telling them don't pay it. I mean, we're contradicting ourselves and the president has a 14th amendment obligation to pay the debts that Congress has said he needs to pay. I can understand the hesitation because I actually think if it goes to the courts,

they'll be resolved in the president's favor. Once and for all, we would end this sort of gamesmanship of the debt ceiling. But I do think that it may temporarily spook the markets at a time that the economy is already fragile. So obviously it's not an ideal situation. And while I support it, I also understand why the president

was desperately trying to avoid that situation so that we're not adding more uncertainty toward the economy. Well, hey, the Fed's trying to undermine the economy anyway, so he can help him out there. Congressman Conner, thanks so much for joining us. Really appreciate it. Appreciate it. Always a pleasure. orphan in Yaca Rizin, which is a favela in Rio de Janeiro. But a beautiful and compassionate neighbor took him in, despite four children of her own and deep poverty, became his mom, gave him a chance for a life. That gave David the chance to live his full potential in a society that often suffocates it. He was key to the Snowden story, became the first gay man elected to Rio City Council, then federal Congress at 32. He inspired so many

with his biography, passion, and force of life. Glenn went on, because of how David grew up, there were always many assumptions made by those who didn't know him. Anyone who did will tell you there was nobody with a stronger will or life force. He was proud that he was named by time to be our next generation's leaders. But by far, David's biggest dream, what gave him the greatest pride and purpose, was being a father. He was the most dedicated and loving parent. He taught me how to be a father. And our truly exceptional boys, with their own difficult start to life, is his greatest legacy. When David arrived at the hospital last August 6th, I was told there was little chance he'd

survived the week. I heard the same three times since. He refused in classic David style. The last four months gave our family the most beautiful moments together. Glenn goes on, David was singular, the strongest, most passionate, most compassionate man I've known. Nobody had a bad word for him. I can't describe the loss and pain. I'll do my best to honor his legacy, our children, and our NGOs. And I know so many will celebrate him and his impact. Now, David's passing has produced an outpouring of emotion in both Brazil and the United States, including from President Lula da Silva, who was freed from prison primarily as a result of reporting done by Glenn in the Intercept Brazil, which Glenn founded.

Lula called David, quote, a young man with an extraordinary trajectory who left too soon, which is a sentiment that is at once profoundly true, yet difficult to fully comprehend. There was no limit to what David's life could have brought, not just to him, but to the people of Brazil who may have lost a future president with his passing yesterday. What made David so unusual was the combination of his passion, his commitment to his democratic socialist politics, and his kindness, his magnanimity, and his ability to leave even his fiercest opponents with little choice but to like him personally. Most people who have the first of those two things, they don't have the third. And when Glenn wrote that, quote, nobody had a bad

word for him, he really meant that. And it's a testament to the love they shared that the two of them found each other, such a perfect compliment. What also separated David was his unusual courage, which he showed throughout his life. Edward Snowden, learning of David's passing, said, of everyone who had a hand in the 2013 revelations of global mass surveillance, my dear friend David Miranda was perhaps the most righteous and pure. I will never forget that when the UK broke its own laws to detain David as a terrorist for daring to aid in active journalism and threatened to throw him in a dungeon for the rest of his life, he never faltered. Instead, he dared them to do it. It was that courage that set him free, that courage that moved the story forward. That will forever serve as the example of a man at his best. I will miss you, David.

Stay free. Snowden here is referring to David's 2013 detention by UK authorities, who did indeed threaten to lock him away for life, a threat David stared down in a way few of us might have been able to do. As Snowden said, it was the realization of the authorities that they had no chance to break his will that set him free. Now, three years later in 2016, he ran with Mario Franco, who also grew up in the city's favelas, for Rio City Council. Both were elected, becoming not just the first gay and lesbian city council members, but genuine radicals and threats to the status quo. In 2018, after leaving an event with Glenn and David, Marielle and her driver were

gunned down by an assassin on a motorcycle. The murder was credibly linked to the Bolsonaro family. Glenn and David continued crusading for justice for Marielle, and instead of shrinking from public life in the face of rising death threats, they pushed forward. Later that year, David ran for Congress while Glenn pushed ahead with an investigation into the networks around Bolsonaro. Now, the way elections work in Brazil, candidates run as a slate and depending on how high up you are on the slate, you win a seat if your party does well enough. David fell one slot short of making it into Congress. But then something remarkable happened. The only openly gay member of Congress at the time was facing a wave of credible death threats, and he fled the country seeking exile rather than what he understood to be

certain assassination. That meant that his seat opened up, and it was David's if he wanted it. He never flinched, stepping forward, knowing that every step could be his last. In Congress, he continued to pursue the assassins of Mario Franco. Last summer, he was hospitalized for a GI infection, and it quickly spread to his bloodstream and major organs, producing sepsis, which is often fatal within hours. Yet David battled it for nine months, making remarkable progress at times, coupled with gut-punching setbacks, which devastatingly included this final one. Now, Glenn doesn't often wax philosophical in public. That's just not his style. But a few times over the last nine months, he wrote essays about this experience and how it had reshaped the

way he thought about life and its meaning. Now, Heidegger's book Being in Time, which helped to define continental existentialism, took its title from the notion that life, or what he called being, got its meaning from time, or more to the point, the lack of time that we get. We all know that rationally, but it's so easy to forget. In March, Glenn wrote, every day since 2005 that David and I woke up and went to sleep and shared and built our lives and In March, Glenn wrote, contract that entitled us to assume this belonged to us and could not be taken away. And because we assumed it, we took it for granted. And because we took it for granted, we often ceased valuing it the way it deserved to be valued. What remains most astounding to me is that after all these years, these decades of running and chasing and striving and reaching and grabbing and struggling and pursuing, everything that I actually need for core happiness, fulfillment, and gratitude are things I already have and have had for a long time.

He goes on, and the lack of permanence of those things that provide us the greatest happiness does not make them less valuable. That is what makes them valuable. Their impermanence is the reason to grab them, hold them, appreciate them, and honor them every day that we have them and are thus able to do that. Glenn said that he had found solace and energy in a search for gratitude, and all of us should be grateful to have been privileged enough to share the world with a force as great as David, painfully short as that time was. And all of us here on the Breaking Points channel are sending our love to his family as they grieve his loss. And thinking back over David's life, that moment in 2018 after their good friend was assassinated, and he, instead of backing away from politics, he pushes ahead and then winds up, remember when he ran

for Congress, he wound up one, in this remarkable situation, one seat short. And then to get the opportunity to go to Congress only because the only other openly gay person decides that it's a death sentence. And he just, he said, I don't care. I'm doing it. Not afraid. You're not going to scare me. And takes his seat in Congress. And as Lula said, his trajectory, you know, knew no limits. Like he was an extraordinarily popular, you know, force in Brazilian politics. You know, that was exactly the point that stood out to me, the courage, because how often in the United States do we, you know, sometimes acknowledge really difficult stuff? And there are real risks, of course, to journalism and activism and politics

in the United States. But to have your friend gunned down and then to have a seat open up because someone is being pushed out of the country by credible death threats for being gay. And then to say, I'm going into it. I'm taking that seat. I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing and I'm going to do it, you know, even, even harder and better and with more strength, that's a testament to incredible authenticity and courage and is just what a lesson. And I think your remembrance is absolutely beautiful. It's so jarring when somebody who is such a force, and I didn't know David, but to your point, amazing when somebody passes and there's not a bad word to be said about them. It's just jarring when somebody who does have so much vitality and strength is stopped short.

That's one of the strangest things that happens in life. And today would have been his 39th birthday. And from all of us here, we're wishing as much love and comfort to his family as possible. Thank you all, as always, for joining us. And we'll be back next week with more CounterPoints. See you then. 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. We'll see you next time. Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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.