Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 6/7/23: Chris Christie Attacks Trump, Mike Pence Launches 2024 Bid, Tucker Returns On Ukraine And UFOs, PGA Merges With Liv Golf, Chris Licht Out At CNN, Wokeness Vs. Anti-Woke, Julian Assange, FBI Election Interference And An Interview With Imran Khan

Episode Date: June 7, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss Chris Christie and Mike Pence launching their 2024 bids, Tucker returning with his new Twitter show on Ukraine and UFOs, PGA Tour merging with LIV Golf, anti-woke vs. wokeness, Julian Assange and the CIA, FBI election interference, and Ryan interviews ousted Pakistani leader Imran Khan. Full Imran Khan Interview: https://theintercept.com/2023/06/05/imran-khan-interview/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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Good. I'm in pajama pants. No, just kidding. But it's great to have you back, Ryan. It was a blast to have Crystal here, but we missed you for sure. Ladies Day seemed like a great show. The pro shows have been fun, but it's good to get back on track here. Today, we've got two new people jumping in to the presidential election. We've got Chris Christie and Mike Pence.

We're going to talk about that. We've got explosive news out of Ukraine. Also, the PGA basically getting taken over by the Saudis. We'll go into the details of this shocking deal that emerged yesterday. Emily, what else we got today? Well, Tucker Carlson is back. So we're going to talk about that as part of the Ukraine block, some interesting stuff going on there. We're also talking about AI, deepfakes, the 2024 election, which does feel like the 2024 election has officially kicked off. And so, of course, so are concerns about generative AI in the election. But Europe is handling them

in a different way than we probably will. So we're going to talk about that. Also, Ryan, you're going to be talking a little bit about Julian Assange. I'm going to be talking a little bit about FBI and the whistleblower trying to break that down. And we have a huge guest, Ryan, because you scored a heck of an interview. Yeah, we're going to have an interview later in the show with Imran Khan, who's the populist former prime minister of Pakistan, who is basically currently surrounded in his home in Lahore. His party has been the target of one of the most incredible kind of crackdowns that you could imagine since he was ousted in April 2022. He's going to talk about what he thinks the U.S. role was in his ouster, what he

thinks the U.S. ought to be doing now, stand up for rule of law and democracy. Stick around for that for sure. But to start, let's play our boy Chris Christie. This is the former New Jersey governor announcing that he's jumping into the 2024 race for the Republican nomination. Let me tell you something, everybody. The grift from this family is breathtaking. It's breathtaking. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Kushner walk out of the White House and months later get $2 billion from the Saudis? $2 billion from the Saudis. You think it's because he's some kind of investing genius?

Or do you think it's because he was sitting next to the President of the United States for four years doing favors for the Saudis? That's your money. That's your money he stole and gave it to his family. You know what that makes us? A banana republic. That's what money he stole and gave it to his family. You know what that makes us? A banana republic. That's what it makes us. So he may get 30% again.

I'm not sure. Maybe he'll get more. Maybe he'll get less. But let me tell you what he'll know in 2024 that he had no idea of in 2016. He's in for a fight to get it. It's like a high school theater teacher. But on the substance, he's not wrong about any of that. And you and I have talked about this, and I know you agree on those points, that the level of grift represented by that $2 billion

payment from the Saudis to the Kushners immediately after leaving the White House is absolutely extraordinary. In the realm of foreign foreign policy corruption, I can't think of anything bigger than that. You know, doesn't mean that smaller levels of corruption from Romania or from Ukrainian gas companies or whatever are less, you know, are not themselves, you know, evidence of corruption. But good Lord, $2 billion to a family that is trying to get back into the White House is just incredible. Yeah, and it's interesting. I know we have a lot of clips, so we have to keep it moving. But just a quick thought is that it's interesting, particularly because no other Republican candidate goes after Trump on that

question of corruption. They watched everyone else basically try it in 2015 and 2016. And so they're hesitant to wade back into those waters. They don't else basically try it in 2015 and 2016. And so they're hesitant to wade back into those waters. They don't want to offend Trump supporters whose votes they need. And they also know it's kind of baked into the Trump cake. But as unserious I think of a candidacy as Chris Christie's is, that's one of the more interesting things. If this is a kamikaze mission for Chris Christie to exact vengeance on Donald Trump and take him down. I mean, the difference between what happened in 2015 and 2016 is that he wasn't president yet. And now this is actually like a grift that happened

as president of the United States who campaigned to drain the swamp. Do I think it's a fatal blow? Not even close. But I do think it's interesting to see Trump actually, to see him actually talk about that. And for people who don't know the backstory, it's not as if Chris Christie has some unique level of purity on this question here. It's that he prosecuted Jared Kushner's father and Jared Kushner paid him back by making sure that Chris Christie's life in the Trump orbit was miserable, blocking him from appointments and otherwise undermining him during the Trump presidency. And so Christie has always had a feud with Jared Kushner. And so that's where this is coming from, not any kind of innate kind of disgust that he might have at how MBS spends his bribe money.

You're right. And it's not like Chris Christie really has a leg to stand on when it comes to that either. So let's roll the next clip from, again, this was Chris Christie's Tuesday night presidential announcement in New Hampshire. Here he is again. Beware of the leader in this country who you have handed leadership to, who has never made a mistake, who has never done anything wrong, who when something goes wrong, it's always someone else's fault. And who has never lost. I've lost. You people did that to me in 2016. That's good, right?

That's kind of funny. He also referred to Trump as a, quote, lonely, self-consumed, self-serving mirror hog. And said, quote, we can't dismiss the question of character anymore, everybody. If we do, we get what we deserve. And an advisor to the campaign told Mike Allen of Axios that Christie's campaign will emphasize authenticity and, quote, be willing to admit mistakes, be accountable and share why he keeps showing up even when it seems hard, obviously, for somebody now running on authenticity against corruption and grift. He might have some Bridgegate explaining to do if anybody really cared about his candidacy. Yes, yes, indeed. But it probably doesn't

get to that point. Trump did not go with the Bridgegate rebuttal. Let's play the response from the frontrunner for the Republican nomination to the entry of Chris Christie into the race. Let's roll that. And it was about our country and its future. And I wondered what our choice was going to be. We're going to be small or are we going to be big? OK. That's the president, the former president of the United States just winning the meme war left and right. A lot of people online did pick up on Christie repeatedly using the word small. It seemed intentional. I thought the entire rollout from Christie was just sort of cringe and more than I expected it to because more than I expected it to be, because he actually when he first became governor of New Jersey, he clearly had some political talent.

And I mean that in the sense of like the political theater. He wasn't bad at it. You know, he would he really was one of the first people to maximize the power of a viral clip. At the time, it was probably like people pinging it around on listservs, but of him just like laying into teachers unions. It was, you know, the political theater part wasn't that bad. This feels like, you know, 80s hair metal band trying to, you know, stay alive and play all the hits for, you know, a big boomer concert crowd, because it just it's like so badly done the you know, when he's getting in people's faces and walking over to just, it's like so badly done. The, you know, when he's getting in people's faces and walking over to them, it felt like, yeah, middle school theater. Yeah. I do think of him during his time as New Jersey governor as sort of like a proto Trump,

like he, he didn't, he didn't necessarily see Trump coming, but he understood that that's where the energy of the Republican party was going. And so he, and he, so he fed them that type of spectacle where he was, you know, attacking, attacking the media and attacking his political enemies without any type of hedging, any efforts to, you know, appear like a, you know, a re a reasonable center who's like going to sit down with the teachers unions and, and going to work something out you know he he famously would just yell at the teachers unions and you know if if he was fortunate enough from his perspective to have a teacher come and confront him he delighted in that and then and he would grab the cameras and he would and he would go after them and the republican base then would would celebrate that but i feel like there's something that Christie can't match when Trump came and kind of topped a proto-Trump. If you're proto-Trump

and you meet Trump himself, it's very difficult for you to kind of up your game to a level that is going to get the same reaction out of the crowd than you can with the headline act. I think that's a really good point. And there's no reason that it'll be different from 2016, I don't think, except for one interesting, perhaps, development, which is that Chris Christie, some indications point to him really being on a kamikaze mission and saying, you know, I know my political future is in the rearview mirror. And what I want to do is take down Donald Trump. As opposed to 2015, 2016, the guy clearly wanted to work in the White House. He wanted to be a cabinet official.

He wanted to be chief of staff. He wanted a major appointment. So he couldn't go full kamikaze and totally run against Trump. In fact, what he did was basically kamikaze the rest of the Republican field and go after Marco Rubio. And this is Chris Christie knowing he really had no chance. I think that Rubio debate moment that people remember was in New Hampshire. And Christie is sort of uniquely suited to the New Hampshire audience, at least in his performance. I don't know if actually policy-wise,

he's probably not the best fit, but he is somebody who's like kind of an unorthodox coastal establishment Republican that also has this brash populist energy, but no populist policies. He's just a weird candidate in 2023. And I don't think any of his kamikaze plans seem to be what actually will go after Trump. But to the point about the Kushners, nobody else is talking about that. So I say bring it on. Oh, for sure. I actually think Christie gets a little bit too much credit for that debate performance because all he did was point out that Marco Rubio had said the same grammatically awkward line three times within a 90 second like window that

i think the entire audience recognized also and and all christy had to do is kind of just point to the guy tripping over his own shoelaces and people like wow what a knockout blow from christy it's like no the guy just the guy just fell over on his face uh agree but if he's going to do a kamikaze mission uh it the question is who's that who does that serve because like you said he Agree. institution or audience that will celebrate a kamikaze mission in the Republican primary. But speaking of kamikaze missions, I think we might have another fighter in the air who is similarly kind of nosediving toward a Trump battleship. And that's Mike Pence, who after breaking with Trump a number of times, we put up, I think, a two here. Pence is filing the paperwork news that I was actually shocked to see, I think was broken by the messenger, which is that new

kind of Hill knockoff news outlet. A couple of days ago, they announced that he'd be jumping into the race within two weeks. He has filed the paperwork to run. What's your read on what kind of moment this is for Mike Pence? Yeah, it's interesting. So it felt to me like this last week, the Joni Ernst roast and ride event out in Iowa was the kind of unofficial kickoff to the 2024 presidential primary season. And it's hard to always know. It's like the quote about

pornography, right? Like, you know it when you see it. That's what it is about. That's what it is with the primary season. And I feel like it's actually like, you know, you hear people, I'm going to announce this. They launched their pack. They filed their paperwork. But with Christie and Pence making their announcements this week, Pence is making his official announcement today. He's already rolled out a video. Uh, he's going to be doing a CNN town hall. It feels like now it's, it's really happening there. You know, Ron DeSantis has been in Iowa, South Carolina, New Hampshire, um, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, the, he's a Hutchinson. I don't know why I felt compelled to mention him there, but it does really seem like it's in full swing now. And with Pence entering this week, it's interesting. In his announcement video, he said,

quote, I'll always be proud of the progress we made together, referring to Trump, for a stronger, more prosperous America. But different times call for different leadership. I have faith God is not done with America yet. So you see how his Trump strategy, his Trump messaging strategy is say, I was proud of the administration. Now we're in a different time, need a different guy. And it's definitely not the Christie strategy. It may or may not be similar to the DeSantis strategy. We still don't really know. That's a little preview of how Mike Pence plans to deal with it. I will say for all of the people just quickly wondering why on earth is Mike Pence getting into the race, two things. Ben Dominich made a really good point, which is that,

you know, take Mike Pence seriously when he says he prayed about it and that his faith is really real. And if he believes that through prayer he came to the decision he should run, then that's probably why he's running. And secondly, I was I was talking on Megan Kelly's show about this, like these candidates are old. Uh, Trump and Biden are old. There is an element of a totally unexpected potential situation that could unfold in a year. And then, uh, things would be, the race would just be blown essentially wide open if something were to happen health-wise. And then you're in the race and you have a real shot at becoming president if everything is suddenly blown open. And there are criminal cases underway that'll matter too. But before we move

on to the next segment, I did want to ask you one question. I noticed that at least one high-profile Republican on Twitter recently was talking about how excited they were about RFK Jr.'s Twitter spaces. And I've seen some other kind of populist right enthusiasm around RFK Jr. So I'm curious, from your perspective, what would happen if he had jumped in the Republican primary instead? Do you think his numbers would be, you know, lesser, equal or greater than in the Democratic primary? I would say lesser. I think the abortion issue would be a real one. I think he would have to talk a whole lot more about like the kind of woke cultural issues that he sort of steered clear and steered clear of because right now he's trying to draw a contrast with Biden. Um, and that's really interesting. I don't know, but I think there's something also very alluring

to a lot of people on the right about the sort of democratic candidate who's running. I mean, that was the whole Trump thing is that he was trying to appeal to these sort of old school Rust Belt, um, Democrats and he pulled a lot of them over. So I think there's something very alluring about that, too. I think that's probably why there are a lot of people on the right that are like, oh, RFK, he's talking about being like a 60s Democrat, a Kennedy Democrat. So that's probably part of it from my perspective. Gotcha. All right. Sounds right to me. The Washington Post is out with new reporting based on the Discord leaks that the Ukrainians had actually been plotting to blow up the Nord Stream pipeline and that the United States learned

about this conspiracy months before the pipeline was actually blown up, this came from a human source, Tucker Carlson came back to Twitter with his show, what's it called, Emily Tucker on Twitter? Twitter on Tucker. Tucker on Twitter. He's back with, it was his first segment that he posted last night, and he dipped into this news. Roll that here. No one who's paid to cover these things seemed to entertain even the possibility it could have been Ukrainians who did it. No chance of that. Ukraine, as you may have

heard, is led by a man called Zelensky. And we can say for a dead certain fact that he was not involved. He couldn't have been. Zelensky is too decent for terrorism. Now you see him on television, it's true you might form a different impression. Sweaty and rat-like, a comedian turned oligarch, a persecutor of Christians, a friend of BlackRock. But don't believe your own eyes. Actually, Mr. Zelensky is a very good man. The best, really. As George W. Bush once noted, he is our generation's Winston Churchill. Of all the people in the world, our shifty, dead-eyed Ukrainian friend in the tracksuit is uniquely incapable of blowing up a dam. A former Air Force officer who worked for years in military intelligence came forward as a whistleblower to reveal that the U.S. government has physical evidence of crashed

non-human made aircraft, as well as the bodies of the pilots who flew those aircraft. The Pentagon has spent decades studying these otherworldly remains in order to build more technologically advanced weapon systems. Okay, that's what the former intel officer revealed, and it was clear he was telling the truth. In other words, UFOs are actually real, and apparently so is extraterrestrial life. Now we know.

In a normal country, this news would qualify as a bombshell, the story of the millennium. But in our country, it doesn't. And I think what's really interesting there is you see him tying this extended argument about the Washington Post Discord leak reporting on Nord Stream. And as Sager points out, we can put up B3 here. Sager points out, you look at that and you see that we were basically, our government knows all of this. Sager says, let's just sink in. The Biden admin had intel that Ukraine had a plot to blow up Nord Stream and still lied slash tried to insinuate that Russia was responsible in real time.

So we've had months of deception basically from our government at this point. And Tucker then ties that, his monologue starts with Ukraine and ends on UFOs. It's about 10 minutes long. It's on Twitter if folks want to check the whole thing out. And he has a line where he says, even a yak herder in Tajikistan knows who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline. And he's drawing contrast between American audiences and everyone else in the world. He's like, the American people might

be the least informed in the world at this point. Because when you look at how our media reacts to just like an incredible revelation about alien life forms in our government, when you look at how our media reacts with a kind of a shrug, as our presidential administration initially was really deceptive. In fact, they actually said it was a crazy conspiracy theory at first in an echo of the lab leak narrative. It was a crazy conspiracy theory that Ukraine may have had anything to do with this. So I thought it was a pretty interesting piece of argumentation from Tucker. I thought the show looked good. What did you think, Ryan? Yeah, so, I mean, let's take the Ukrainian piece first.

This is fascinating reporting coming out of these Discord leaks. And it's interesting that The Washington Post kind of held back the country that initially discovered this intel and then shared it with the United States. The United States then shared it with its German partners and others, because if it's in the discord leaks, presumably you would think that other foreign intelligence operations, including the Russians, already have access to it. So you can kind of withhold the country's name from the public, but I'm not sure what good that's doing from a counterintelligence perspective. But what's interesting is that there are some real specific details that they list about this Ukrainian operation. They say they're going to be kind of six operatives. They're going to rent a yacht, and then they're

going to go out and use submersibles to blow it up. Now, according to the German investigative reporting, it was there were six people who rented a yacht and they dove, which is I don't know if that's what they mean by submersibles. There was there was a reference to helium being used by both because it's such a deep dive that you need helium to maintain clarity and to keep keep you safe at that level of depth. And so the idea, and oh, they also said that they were going to do it around this June operation, where there were a naval operation. That didn't happen. There was some speculation in the article that they learned that their operation had been compromised and had been leaked. And so they postponed it, but it was still done right around a giant naval operation. So basically all of the details that the intelligence community had

before the operation was carried out actually panned out. One point though, I'm curious for your take on this, this would undercut Seymour Hersh's reporting in the sense that he reported that it was this, you know, this crew of Americans out of, you know, working out of the school in the Gulf that carried it out. My guess would be what Hersh learned about was a plan that was trained for, but ultimately not carried out. And instead, this Ukrainian operation was carried out. But I'm curious what you think about the way that this conflicts,

A, with everything the intelligence community has said publicly. They had that leak to the New York Times to try to counter Seymour Hersh. But it also does conflict with Hersh's reporting. That's an interesting point. I hadn't thought about it. And if folks can watch

our whole interview with Seymour Hirsch from shortly after that bombshell was published, not too long ago. But I've always thought with his report that it may be through the telephone chain, official affiliations are getting confused or are getting intentionally obfuscated and hard to totally pin down, which I think gets us to obviously one of the biggest problems with this entire war is that we don't know what our country's involvement in operations like Nord Stream, like anything that's being used inside of Russia, in Moscow, regardless of what our government says, it's hard to trust what our government says. They don't seem to know the extent to which our personnel and our equipment is being used. So, and things that we've sold

Ukraine are being used. So I've always wondered if there was more, if there were just like affiliations that were already loose when you're using maybe mercenaries, and it's unclear where the money, the support, or the go-ahead was given. I don't know. I think maybe that's possibly an explanation. And as for Tucker's show, I think he's right that it's wild that there isn't kind of wall-to-wall coverage of this whistleblower uh intelligence community allegation that the u.s has in its in its possession uh basically alien aircraft like and some of the report some of the reporting you know seems to confirm that like that

that to me is shocking like that is something that I would expect we would be covering wall to wall. On his show itself, just as a person who's involved in progressive media, it's intimidating how dominant the right is getting when it comes to the media ecosystem. How many views does this sucker have by now? Probably 50 million or maybe far more than that this that comes after uh the what is a woman uh documentary got good lord knows how many uh you know viewers on twitter even if you think that their counting is an order of magnitude off you're still talking about millions and millions of people gobbling up this content. And the progressive kind of media ecosystem is just not, even if you include CNN and MSNBC in that, which I wouldn't, but even if you do you feel a burst of energy when it comes to audience that wasn't there before?

Or is this manufactured through the hostile takeover of an algorithm? I think independent media has a burst of energy, not so much conservative media, if that makes sense. Because I just checked, the Tucker video does have, according to Twitter's numbers, 61.7 million views. So that's about 12 hours in about 12 hours. And it may be orders of magnitude off. It may just be when people scroll through a video. Which would still be 6.1 million, right? Right, which is higher than his audience on Fox News. And I think that 10 minute format is smart. It's really targeted. You can write a

really sharp, clever monologue. I thought the writing in the monologue was excellent just from like the art of writing standpoint, sort of very typical Tucker. He's a great writer and he has good writers on his staff. So I think that's where he, I think the format is very, he found a format that's going to work very well for him. But I also think it's true that real leftist media, meaning actual, critical of our foreign policy, critical of the economic consensus leftist media, it's similar to where conservative media has always been. There's not a ton of money and energy behind that in the professional political class. But what's interesting is that the establishment media, the legacy media is so culturally leftist

now, I shouldn't say leftist, so culturally progressive now that it's, it's the, it's created the lane. And when I say culturally, I don't just mean on the sort of woke agenda because yes, they're, they're really far're, uh, really far to the left when it comes to a lot of those things. But, um, also just in like censorship issues, like they're completely pro censorship, the pro like X, Y, and Z. And that creates the lane for a Matt Walsh to come in. That creates the lane for Tucker Carlson to come in. And then those are the same people in legacy media who decry populism. And all they do is empower populists by giving them very real ammunition. not doing your job very well if you aren't wall-to-wall coverage about government's lies on UFO craft and government's lies on, you know, this entire Nord Stream bombing and

for the entire war, really. And Tucker had a really interesting kind of inversion of a Bernie Sanders line at the end of his monologue, which people can find it's around the like nine and a half minute mark or so where he says something like, don't ask why we're all so rich. Go worry about racism, which is essentially out of kind of left wing populism over the last 150 years that the argument is that, you know, race and racism itself was kind of constructed back in the 16th, 17th century in order to allow elites to divide the working class in a way that will allow them to rule over them. He's sort of using it from a slightly different angle. He's arguing that, I guess, there isn't racism.

And so the elites are saying look there is racism so you need to fight about the question of whether there is racism but it's fundamentally the same point that he's making that that uh that has been made for you know hundreds of years by people on the left saying that that that it's a it's a tool that the ruling class uses to kind of divide everyone underneath the ruling class. And was that an iteration, an evolution at all of his politics, that he's edging closer to that? Or do you think that there's been a kind of an element of that from the beginning? The speech he gave at the Heritage Foundation right before, and reportedly this may have had some impact on Rupert Murdoch's thinking. He made a speech at the

Heritage Foundation's 50th anniversary gala the Friday before he got canned on a Monday. And he talked like very honestly about his ideological evolution, going from sort of more libertarian to now more of like populist conservative. And yeah, I think that absolutely represents an evolutionist thinking. And I wish the, again, speaking of how there's like a lane created, I actually really wish that the left talked more like that. And I think the right is needs to internalize and learn the lesson too, about how the ruling class uses those questions to distract because they're, they're actually still, they're using like very real concerns people have about what their children are being taught in school. Um, and, and using it as fodder to just create complete distractions. That doesn't mean that

people on the right or the anti woke left center, whatever, shouldn't talk about that at all. I mean, it doesn't invalidate those concerns. But it is important to recognize that there does need to be a balance because there is a balance for your average voter, your average person who relies on the media, the political class, the political universe to create a safe and prospering society. Well, let's move on to this incredible, basically, takeover of golf by Mohammed bin Salman. Now, it's being reported as a merger between the PGA and Live Golf, which is the Saudi-funded rival that went around and was poaching a whole bunch of uh players in order to create like a rival tour you know massively overpaying them and then uh

you know with the idea that they're going to you know create this competition pga tour was uh responded by saying basically these are terrorists uh you know you've never had to apologize for being part of the pga you're going to have never had to apologize for being part of the PGA. You're going to have to apologize constantly if you're part of the live tour, if you do that you're a complete sellout. And then next thing you know, PGA tour is selling out itself.

If you look at, and Ben Walsh there has some of the details of the contract, the PGA will still technically have the kind of voting majority on the board that governs this, but the Saudis through their sovereign wealth fund will have the exclusive right to invest. In other words, they will own it. They are the owners. And so what does it even mean at that point that PGA players have a voting membership if it's completely funded and owned by the Saudis? This seems like just a complete victory for them as far as I can see. What's your read on it?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, the memes on this were incredible. First of all, who knew that golf Twitter was so funny? Not me. And speaking of which, speaking of Twitter, let's roll the next element. Let's just put C2 up here. This was a pretty interesting take by Senator Mike Lee, where he said the PGA golf tour is buying Saudi backed live golf tour. It looks like a long established dominant incumbent is inquiring a nascent competitor, one that has been challenging its dominant position. So there you see a counter argument from actually an antitrust angle, which is pretty interesting to Matt Fuller.

Then we can put the next element up here as we roll through. A lot of the amusing reactions had this great tweet where he's like doing this transcript of a conversation between Saudi Arabia and the PGA tour. Hey, PGA golfers, we have a bunch of money to offer you for a new league. PGA, you're ruining the game and sports washing your reputation of human rights abuses. Okay, but what if we offered you a lot of money, PGA? Today, we'd like to announce a merger. Yeah, basically. And then there's just an incredible confluence of events here. So we can put the next element up. This is a Wall Street Journal story about Secretary of State Antony Blinken. He goes to Saudi Arabia and reportedly he's going to say that human rights are in, he's going to take up the issue of human rights with the Saudis, which of course

is what the Biden administration wants to posture as we'll see how substantive that ends up being. And then, uh, finally, this is maybe my favorite element of the story. C5, we can put this tweet up. Um, this is a tweet from Timothy Meads of a Donald Trump truth from what? yeah, July 18th, 2022, where he basically predicted this. It's pretty crazy where he said all of those golfers that remain, quote, loyal to the very disloyal PGA and all of its different forms will pay a big price when the inevitable merger with Liv comes and you get nothing but a thank you from PGA officials who are making millions of dollars a year. Ryan, my question to you is, there's nobody who knows corrupt business deals better than Donald Trump.

Is this not him just having the perfect experience to predict the moment? This was crystal clear to him. From his perspective, he probably couldn't see how other people couldn't see where this was going he's like what part of this don't you guys understand like they have an enormous amount of money that they're willing to spend people like money they will eventually take the money and they will own you and i like the way that he well like isn't the right word for it the way that he addresses love right the way that he addresses the players who were trying to take a stand against this is, is just amazing saying like, look, you guys are the fools because

you're eventually going to be in the pay of MBS anyway. And all you're not even, you're all you're going to get is a pat on the head from the PGA, while the PGA is eventually going to sell out, take the money. All these other players that are selling out are going to take the money. And you're still going to end up working for the Saudis, but just at the same pay or maybe even less than you're getting now. And tragic as it is, that turns out to have been basically 100% correct. So we have now Antony Blinken going to Saudi Arabia. And Ryan, you know this particular issue area very well. Of course, the Biden administration wants to posture, and they got their Wall Street Journal headline, assuming this is the one that they wanted. As Blinken visits Saudi Arabia, human rights are back in focus,

subheading Biden officials have pushed the Saudis to lift travel bans on American citizens. So Blinken is prepping to visit Saudi Arabia this week and prepping a human rights message to the Saudis. How confident are you that that actually comes to fruition in a substantive way? Not very, because as you saw, MBS basically jacked up gas prices right ahead of the announcement of the PGA takeover. So it's almost inaccurate to say that the Saudis are buying PGA. We are buying the PGA with the money that we're putting into our gas tanks and then sending over to MBS that he's then using to buy PGA. And he's restricting oil production in order to drive up gas prices to offset the tiny amount that he's going to spend for the PGA. So Blinken is going to have that that he's going to have to negotiate. He's also going to be pushing, he said, for MBS to release a bunch of American residents who are being kept illegally in the country, a lot of them for social media

posts on a social media platform that Saudi Arabia is a significant owner of, Twitter. You constantly see news stories of people being arrested and sentenced to insanely long sentences for something that they said on Twitter. A significant number of those are American residents or American citizens. And so Blinken is going to be taking up their cases. So those are a couple of things he's going to have to push. Meanwhile, they're pushing a cruel and absurd Yemen policy while they're there. And that is probably the real driver of Blinken's visit, which is to try to undermine these talks that are ongoing directly between

Saudi Arabia and the Houthis, because the U.S. says that they want a kind of quote unquote U.N. brokered peace. And by U.N. broker, they mean a huge a huge role for the United States in those talks. The U.S. is deeply concerned about the fact that China was able to and we've talked about this before on the show, that China was able to reach this kind of detente between Iran and Saudi Arabia. And as a result, you wound up with these peace talks progressing. So Blinken is going to try to make sure that those peace talks jump from there over into basically a U.S. brokered situation that would then, of the U.S. hopes, you know, continue to give them access to the Gulf of Aden, which controls something like 40% of the maritime economy, oil and shipping all flows through there and into the Mediterranean. So that's really what's going on.

And so how much of a role are human rights going to play into that? We'll see. And what do you make, lastly, of Mike Lee's antitrust argument in this case? I mean, I guess it's funny. It'd be funny if Lena Kahn, FTC chair, was able to come in and say, you know what? Actually, we're not going to allow this. We want more competition in our golf leagues. I don't see that happening and also it doesn't he had to kind of contort what really happened uh in order to make it fit his uh his kind of joke there because it doesn't actually seem like the incumbent dominant uh player acquired uh an

upstart competitor it seems like the upstart competitor acquired the incumbent right uh but whatever like close enough for the close enough for a joke it, close enough for a joke. It's close enough for a joke. And it also is true that you have these two, whether or not it's an upstart, two hugely groups that have a big swath of the market joining each other up. And people probably know this, but the NFL, Major League Baseball, those types of entities have carve-outs to antitrust policy written into law. Like they are legally allowed to operate illegally. And in order to have that cartel, to have this monopoly on baseball, we as a public are then able to regulate baseball and football and basketball in ways that we otherwise wouldn't have been. We have some breaking news. Chris Licht is out at CNN

following that devastating Tim Alberta profile in The Atlantic. Emily, what is your reaction to this extremely short tenure of the new CNN head? Chris Lick's tenure at CNN was always fascinating because he came from Stephen Colbert, and he was producing the heck out of that Stephen Colbert show to where it was both the least funny show in late night and the most highly rated show in late night for a long period of the Trump administration, a very far cry from the Johnny Carson days. In the same way that CNN during the reign of Jeff Zucker was a very far cry from the version of CNN in the 80s and 90s and the aughts when it thrived as a news network that people saw as truly being kind of down the middle. It was the only place that could really pull off hosting a show like Crossfire. And Chris Licht desperately wanted to restore that, which is funny,

because when you're tapping Chris Licht for this job, he was producing Morning Joe. He was a very successful sort of mastermind of what happened over at Morning Joe in the early days of that show. That's a very niche product. Colbert is a very niche product. And so on one hand, he really knew the market. He knew that because corporate press is dying, that what it needs to do is corner these very particular niches. But in that sort of direction, he never seemed to know then how to implement that. He, in the Tim Alberta profile, is repeatedly shown as straining to get his staff to be on board with his mission of what's derided in the press now, both sides-ism, you know, having Republicans on your air and giving them room, you know, giving them tough interviews, but like actually letting them on air and letting them say things

you may think are horrible about the election, but at least letting them say that so that you can grill them and you can have the contrast. That's what Chris Licht really wanted. So I actually, my contrarian take is I probably would have kept CNN Plus because I think, you know, the future is in that space, definitely not in the sort of airwaves. And I think I never would have sat for that Tim Alberta profile, which was unbelievable. And it seemed like Licht had long been protected by a good relationship with Zaslav. And maybe that has come to an end in the light of the Alberta profile. But just a lot of fascinating, I think, failures of people to reckon with the new media atmosphere in which

audiences desperately want independent news. But that doesn't mean they want people to lie to them and say they have no biases. And that's what CNN wanted to do. It wanted to get people up there with a straight face, like with Caitlin Collins and Donald Trump, and say, I'm just going to be right down the middle here and then be fully from the left. And it seems even in the way that you're describing it, that it was just a fundamental contradiction that that couldn't be worked out because he wants to do two things that are in conflict. One, he wants to bring back CNN, you know, to its glory days when it was trusted by tens of millions of people across the political spectrum. Yet he also understands that that doesn't exist anymore and that the spot for that type of media is a niche market.

And sometimes the smartest people on the planet will get themselves stuck in these fundamental contradictions that can't be worked out and then just frustrate themselves endlessly because their intelligence and their hard work just can't seem to unbundle this contradiction because it just simply can't be unbundled. If I were given Chris Lick's job and said, all right, you need to fix CNN, what I would actually do is I would have gone to Crystal and Sagar and be like like i want to hire you guys and i want to i don't want to produce kind of left right but not crossfire television all day long no centrists we're getting like centrists can come on as guests just because we want to hear what these kind of zoo creatures have to say about their view of of politics but but we're not going to try to pretend like we

have some magical center that we're going to channel and be trusted by everybody. What I'm going to get is some people you like, some people you don't like, and you can hear from all sides and see if that works. I still think there's actually an opening for a mass media that does that. whether it can do that and be trusted on a corporate platform remains to be seen. Although there are so many different platforms now, like you said, it's streaming, it's cable, it's, you know, their clips are on YouTube. We're on YouTube, YouTube's a corporation. So, you know, the jury's out on that, but that's the route I would have gone. Also would not have sat with Tim Alberta for a

15,000 word Atlantic profile and taken him to the gym and whatever else he did. Right. He took him to the gym and said, quote, Zucker can't do this shit when he was lifting. It's just like my favorite thing I've ever seen in a profile that somebody, you know, willingly sat for. And that just brings us to, I think, one of the other fundamental parts of the story, which is no matter how badly you want to kind of restore some of these institutions, they are, we're actually talking about this in the next block too, because it relates back to that fantastic story you wrote last year. When you raise a generation or two of people with this, I don't know, this idea that people need to be protected from bad arguments, like they actually need protection from bad arguments,

you can't trust the public to deal with those bad arguments. Well, that's baked the CNN's cake now. And even as the CEO, Chris Licht could not deal with that. He couldn't actually control employees who said, I don't want to have Republicans on our airwaves. I don't want to air these arguments. I don't want the contrast. Chris Licht was never able to, some of the stuff, the pendulum will just swing back. Well, no, because there are a whole lot of especially younger people who for whom these ideas are really central to their worldview and to their like self-esteem in so many cases, because that's how they measure, you know, whether or not they have the right ideas about the world that you're not just going to come in and have Chris Licht bulldozed this like deeply, this, this deeply seated ideology that so many people have. It just doesn't work that way anymore. Um, and you know, even if you look at something like a top podcast, like the daily, that's not monoculture. Like you can't just be like, you know, walking, maybe if you walk into a whole foods, you'll find else be like hey did you uh hear what was on the daily this morning but and they did i guarantee it yeah but like it's not like that in the rest of the country there really isn't monoculture anymore so it's that that clash between trying to make monoculture with a generation that really isn't capable and also trying to make monoculture when that's not really what, you know, the, it's just really hard to do that.

Cause I agree with you that the audience does want it, but if you're not willing to like really go there, you're not going to be able to do it. Yeah. Rough ride for Chris Licht. He's been put out of his misery. Stick around. We'll be back with more right after this. A Story in the New Yorker by Emma Green profiling the arc of Fair, a group that was started by Barry Weiss and some other sort of dissident people on the right and the center, maybe a few on the center left. The arc of fair became fodder for this fairly interesting New Yorker story. And the story reminded me pretty immediately, actually, of Ryan's story from last summer in The Intercept that was also very, very viral and especially viral in sort of D.C. and Beltway circles about how ideology has paralyzed a lot of nonprofits on the left. The story in The New Yorker was really about how even an anti-woke group, FAIR in the words of some of the people that were really involved,

was supposed to be kind of a counterbalance to the ACLU, like an idea of a group that could really stand up for civil liberties where you see them coming under siege, I would argue, correctly. I would argue that they're correct, that some civil liberties have come under siege, I would argue correctly. I would argue that they're correct, that some civil liberties have come under siege by, I don't want to call it woke ideology, but that sort of far left, I don't even know, Ryan. How do you describe it? What's a better word than woke? I mean, woke kind of gets you there. It does. It's a shortcut. Until people ask you to define it and then you go viral because because it's hard to hard to pin down um but you know that's that's kind of it

um weiss herself wrote an essay uh in was it tablet uh you know that kind of inspired this organization in some ways and the new yorker new york talks about that and even her description of it uh lumps together of you know you know post-modern post-structural uh combined with some uh you know uh identity politics it's like it's it's very hard to kind of boil down into a single word well um you know is probably decent if you can uh take away some of the stigma and pejorative nature of it, because it started out as a moniker that people were adopting on their own. But I think there's a couple interesting layers of this piece that we can disentangle here. On the one hand, you and I were talking about this, some of this is just kind of silly naivete

among some people that just don't seem to understand how non-profits work and we're frustrated at that. And you see that at so many different organizations. That's just, that is what it is. But that is also the responsibility of good managers to work through. Like it, I think too many managers think that everybody is just kind of born knowing how organizations work, how nonprofits work, what nonprofit structures are like, and they're, and they're not, they like people have to learn

through the process of, of doing and through the process of, you know, interactions with management of these types of organizations. And so you can't just throw your hands up and say, kids today, they just don't have any idea what they're doing. It's also your responsibility to make the case for why the structure that you have and the mission that you have is working. So that's one side of it. The other is the kind of interesting, substantive, ideological question at the heart of this piece, which is, as they ask it, can you be moderate and be anti-woke? I'd kind of frame it as, what does this kind of world, which we could broadly call anti-woke

maybe, stand for rather than stand against? And that's the point that one of the co-founders who went on to run the organization was making himself, his name's Bayan Bartning, and he didn't want it to be just anti-this and anti-that. He wanted it to stand for something. The problem is what he decided it stood for was kind of cringe and silly.

Pro-human. He went with pro-human, which I think is not his fault for being unable to accurately message. I think there isn't actually a substantive politics there for him to name because there's so much disagreement within the space that is coalescing and organizing around the idea of anti-woke. It's like if you're an anti-fascist front in Spain, let's say, you encompass everybody from the center right to the far left. And so you're a front that is against a thing. You don't actually stand for, all of you don't stand for the same thing. So trying to, so trying to narrow it down is, is basically impossible because it's going to eliminate some people who don't agree with certain things. And it really seemed to come to a head around gender ideology. What, what was your,

what was your read on that, on that substantive question of, of what kind of tore this group apart? That's clearly where it crumbled. And to your point about anti-pro, I mean, anti is baked into the name. It's called the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism. And the relevance of the story, again, is that I think Barry Weiss admirably had ambitions of this to be something that really counters the ACLU. And it's clearly not headed for that trajectory. It seems to be at this point a shell of its former self and a shell of its ambitions. It had money, we learn in this profile, from Harlan Crowe, which some folks will remember from recent stories about the conservative legal movement and Clarence Thomas. It got like a million dollar donation from one high level donor who started to become disillusioned on the group

herself, particularly around this issue of sex and gender. And that's what's so interesting about this story is that, you know, the intolerance part of FAIR, obviously, I think in this climate, I mean, one of the reasons I don't like to use the word woke is because I think it's almost too narrow, that a lot of this is really broad, these questions about what is a woman? That's so much broader than woke, if you even want to use the Matt Walsh framing. There's so much more going on in that. And I think if you say you're pro-human and you're against intolerance, that's almost just getting to the censorship question. And that gets to the, you know, like Twitter for a while, not letting you weigh in on the issue of, you know, defining or referring to biological women by their biological sex. Twitter says you can't do that. That's an entirely different question,

whether Twitter and the government collude to say you can't do that, then whether you should actually morally refer to a biological woman as a woman, or if you should go along with preferred pronouns, or if you should say that, you know, people actually really can change their biological sex or that biological sex is inconsequential. Like these are completely different questions. And I think part of the problem that the so-called anti-woke movement has is that the censorship question is the gateway for a lot of disillusioned people on the left. And then they have to make, you know, Chris Ruffo for instance, was a part of this group. So you, you have

people coming from the dissident left and re like then they have to make common cause with somebody like Chris Ruffo, who by the way, himself, I would argue was pretty much has been center left at different points in his life. And if you can come together on the censorship question, it doesn't mean that you can come together on all of the other questions. And that is probably one of the biggest problems that the so-called anti-woke movement has. And in general, the sort of like, I actually think those, that common cause is essential in the same way that I think our common cause on, for instance, like Pentagon funding and welfare and all of these other things is essential. But if you can't get past that,

your advocacy group might not work. Yeah. And it suggests to me that kind of gender ideology is becoming on probably both sides, a black hole that has so much centrifugal force that nobody is able to kind of stay out of it and stay out of the question. Because Bartning, he argued internally that some of these questions were not properly addressed by fair advocacy or fair policy. What he would say is, we don't support any censorship like he would say if we you know it might be cruel to misgender somebody but it is not illegal and it should not be uh banned you know so they would they would they would oppose that but when it came to the question of gender affirming care for minors for instance he would argue that's not our business. That's a political question

that ought to be worked out through the political system. And we are here to defend kind of fundamental principles of free expression. We're here to create the playing field on which those decisions can be made fairly by a population that can come together and argue it out. Whereas that major donor, for instance, Rufo and others were saying, absolutely not. You need to take a stand against this care, that this is an issue that requires your intervention. And so they basically went to Barry Weiss and the other co-founder and Bartning,

without their knowing it, had made them board members. There were three board members of this New York nonprofit. And when they discovered that they were on the paperwork as board members, two of the three board members, they were like, oh, well, we didn't really want to be on the board here, but now that we are, we actually have the votes. And they just called him into a meeting and made a motion and booted him out. He then kind of basically countersued, saying, if you're going to do board business, you need 10 days. And then it gets into this 10 days notice and it gets into this extraordinarily boring kind of bureaucratic bickering over, but which underlies a real ideological fight over the direction of the

organization. But I'm curious if you think that that's right, that an organization that wants to be kind of in the middle of the 20th century, where people in remarkable and beautiful ways had had their minds changed about certain extremely important issues. And the ACLU really, for more than 50 years, I think benefited from that version of the country where people had like really come onto the same page about racism and the legal system and sexism, et cetera, et cetera. And I don't think that the people involved in FAIR would say they wanted a center right ACLU. They would say they wanted like a center, like They wanted something that was genuinely neutral. And that ambition of neutrality is not only impossible now, but I don't know that it ever... I mean, it was maybe

possible for a very fleeting moment in oral history in the mid-century to millennial America. And I just don't see that being possible. Here's a quote. People were afraid, this is from The New Yorker, to voice their disagreement because of how they would be portrayed by bartending behind their backs, or they feared being fired, disparaged, or other forms of retaliation. So it's like, on the one hand, this may not be the big, maybe the narrative isn't super neatly wrapped up in the story because this is deeply, I think, intertwined with personnel issues. Like clearly, first of all, nonprofit structure in this country is a Byzantine bureaucratic nightmare that lends itself, I think, towards corruption

and inefficiency. Secondly, maybe this guy was just really wrong for the job. But I also think the narrative questions are fair. That's my perspective. I don't know about you. I think it is fair to pull some stuff away from this because clearly, personnel issues aside, they were all accelerated. The sex question was like gasoline on the fire. There were these, you can see in the story, there were these existing fissures. And then when they were forced to litigate internally whether or not they would take a stance on all of the issues that you raise pertaining to biological sex, it crumbled. They couldn't do it without you being afraid to talk openly. That's just like pretty amazing takeaway.

Yeah, no, I, yeah, I think that's right. I think everybody should read the piece because it's, as you described it, I think that's right. They tried to be the, these are heterodox thinkers. These are anti-tribalism folks. And I think the reason the New Yorker was excited to do this story is because they love the delicious irony of the heterodox folks raising the question of how orthodox they need to be on a variety of different issues. And they quote somebody saying, you know, we tried to fight tribalism and in doing that, we formed our own tribes. And I think it is a reflection of where we are today in our kind of

social construction that everybody is retreating into their different tribes. And if you don't, you kind of just get ripped apart and pieces of you go in every direction. Agree. And just really quickly before we wrap, I would say that's why it's just a breakdown in social trust. Even people who can find common political cause can't organize and trust each other in, I think, a high tech social media panopticon environment in the way that they used to, you know, say even 20 years ago. And secondly, just a quick question before we run.

Did this remind you of your story from last year that saw just like leftist groups being paralyzed by that breakdown in social trust? Yes, yes. You know, you had different kind of tools and weapons that were being used internally by the combatants in the office politics, just because those are tools that are, you know, constructed out of whatever your particular politics are. But the methods and the machinations were all basically the same. So yes, and I think you're seeing some of this on the right as well with a lot of church groups, church organizations kind of in turmoil with everybody accusing each other of being kind of too woke or to have embracing, you know, crypto DEI type tendencies and using, you know, whatever the language is, whatever the ideology is that kind of your organization is organized around,

you then grab the mantle of the purity of that and you beat up your internal enemies. And so I think the left kind of pioneered that over the last 10 years or so. But I think you're going to see it in organizations like FAIR and everywhere else. I mean, you know, right wing organizations a lot better than I do. But have you started noticing that you're seeing people kind of accuse each other of kind of crypto wokeness, that, you know, if when in reality, they're just kind of expressing power struggles for, you know, for dominance of the organization. It's definitely in the churches.

I don't know that I feel like wokeness is a litmus test on the right in general now. So even like kind of like Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, when he gave his preferred pronouns on a zoom call with students, I mean, that was, well, he was just discredited by basically everybody in the right as soon as he did that. So I think it's generally a litmus test, like on the political right, but, uh, in cultural spaces like churches, for instance, um, I think you definitely, definitely, definitely see it. So it's not an issue that is going anywhere at all. We have some news on the case of Julian Assange. So for a while there's been a lawsuit that's been going on that people may or may not be aware of, where a group

of attorneys and journalists are suing the CIA and also suing a former CIA head, Michael Pompeo, for basically illegal surveillance and searches within the Ecuadorian embassy. There's been some incredible new revelations from the Spanish news organization El Pais that they are now including in a new filing opposing basically the CIA's attempt to get this case thrown out of court. And first of all, I wanted to show some of the surveillance footage. You can roll this just kind of in the background. This is the footage that a contractor who was working for the Ecuadorian embassy had access to. And we now know that that contractor had connections to the CIA and that the CIA was able to exploit their relationship with this contractor to constantly surveil not only Assange, but other people who came into the embassy,

one of which was me at one point. I wonder if there's footage of me when I interviewed Assange there, just wandering around that embassy. People can find this on, I think it's on El Pais's, you can find a fuller video on El Pais's YouTube page. And it does give you a real look at the Ecuadorian embassy that he was living in for years. And I was startled when I went there because it's this basically a railway apartment in London that looked to be only two or three bedrooms and maybe one or two bathrooms and that that little living room area that you see uh and he not only was he there for years but so was the ecuadorian embassy staff just just an incredible situation uh that uh and he wasn't able to leave for anything which is because the second

he would have left he would have been picked up so it's which must be you know psychologically torturous to know that if you need medical attention, that that is it for you. You're not going to make it even to the hospital before you're detained. But so the new piece of information that emerged is that the CIA or this contractor was supposed to turn over, you know, all of its data from various kind of electronic equipment. There was a technical problem, so the judge ordered them to try again. And when they did it again, and we can put up this El Pais article, they accidentally shared what, well, they were supposed to do it, but I think that they were trying not to share it, a file that is listed as CIA, like the direct file, it's just named CIA. And so

Richard Roth of the Roth Law Firm, who's representing the plaintiffs, he said in a comment to me, he said, these startling new revelations as reported by El Pais demonstrate that UC Global unlawfully surveilled unknowing Americans when they met with Assange. The initial concealment and then revelation of this new information, if true, is proof that the plaintiff's claims are legitimate. The CIA's motion to dismiss should either be denied or plaintiffs should be allowed to re-plead to bring in these new facts. So literally, they busted this contractor with a file called CIA while they have all sorts of other evidence that the CIA was working. Meanwhile, Emily, what are you taking a look at? What's your point? I'm also talking about things related to the surveillance state today because it's

sort of inescapable. I wanted to do a breakdown on the question of this FBI whistleblower that's being sort of ping pong around in the media. It's really hot in conservative media, but I think a lot of people don't know exactly what to do with it because Democrats and Republicans and the House of Representatives have come away with different ideas after they've viewed this document that's at the center of the whistleblower controversy on the Senate side, too. They've come away with just different ideas of what's actually going on here. So with Republicans led by James Comer actually saying this week that he's Comer is the head of the House Oversight Committee. He said

that they're going to convene contempt of Congress hearings for FBI Director Christopher Raitt later this week over his unwillingness to provide the committee with this document. So the basics here, just to go up to this 30,000 foot level, is that there is a document from an FBI whistleblower that has information that was given by a confidential human source to the FBI. And I'm reading from The Federalist here, a story by Margo Cleveland over at The Federalist. This is a quote from Margo. That forum dated June 30th, 2020. So this is an FD 1023 forum, included detailed information from a confidential human source to the FBI regarding an agreement by now President Biden to deliver preferred foreign policy positions for a $5 million payment. It's an absurd possibility. I mean, it's not an absurd

possibility, but it's an absurd allegation. Not that it's absurd in the realm of being implausible or being anything like that, but it's ripped straight from the pages of a novel or from a movie, basically, that you would have a president of the United States, a former vice president, a longtime senator, just taking money for foreign policy positions. But the reason this is so important, and the reason that Republicans are right to demand this form is because of what we talked about last week, the Durham report. I really see this as a coda to everything in the Durham report where it says, basically, Durham, I think, really in great detail showed that James Comey, Peter Strzok,

everyone who was working on the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into the allegations of Russia collusion applied an incredibly different standard to Donald Trump than they did to Hillary Clinton, meaning they subjected claims about Clinton's alleged corruption to much higher scrutiny than they did claims of Trump's collusion with Russia. So if Hillary Clinton was alleged to have the server and did she know about it? Did she not know about it? How was this involved? They were going to subject any claims about that to a really high level of scrutiny, because

actually, as you see them saying in emails Durham saw, they were like, well, she's probably the next president of the United States. We don't want her to turn on the DOJ or the FBI. And that really informed the way they went about the investigation into her private server. Whereas with Donald Trump, they were, A, as Kevin Clinesmith did, he pleaded guilty to this, fudging information to surveil campaign volunteers, advisors. So it was definitely a double standard. And that's why Republicans, this is Chuck Grassley, Chuck Grassley goes on Fox News last week and says, we aren't interested. This is a really interesting quote. We aren't interested in whether or not the accusations against then Vice President Biden are accurate. Well, that seems so ridiculous.

And the media has run with it and said, what do you mean you're not concerned about whether they're accurate? Bill Hemmer asks, how damning is this document to the sitting U.S. president? Grassley replies, I don't know. He stressed that while, this is from Warren, quote, there's accusations in the FBI report, the Congressional Oversight Committee's concern is whether, quote, the FBI does its job. That's what we want to know, Grassley said. An entirely fair question. This is the bottom line. That is an entirely fair question, given the mountains of evidence in the Durham report, the IG report, that even James Comey himself recently has been saying, you know, it did uncover some

real problems in the FBI. This is critical. After all of that, after years of the Russia collusion investigation, after John Durham pulls out, I think, pretty clear evidence of a double standard, Chuck Grassley is right that this document is relevant, that Christopher Wray should turn it over, whether or not the allegations that a vice president, sitting vice president, took $5 million to change his foreign policy position, Congress needs to perform its job and provide oversight. And the way to do that is to see the document on their own and to gauge the potential accuracy of it and to gauge whether or not the FBI, which had this document and is dated June 30th of 2020, and they have a

confidential human source we know now was seen as, quote, highly credible. That's actually from what we know, that the FBI had a confidential human source they considered highly credible. Total contrast with Igor Danchenko, who they used as their confidential human source in Crossfire Hurricane. Again, I said this last week, my eyes glaze over when you talk about all this stuff. It is intentionally confusing and complicated on the part of the FBI, the surveillance state, because they want your eyes to glaze over. It helps them get away with these things. But this whistleblower document is not nothing. It is not something the media should shrug at because Congress has a very real duty to ensure that the FBI is performing its role equally, that it's upholding the rule of law, and that it is using its vast, far too vast powers in a way that is at the very least

responsible. Durham gave us plenty of reason to doubt that the FBI is doing that, and this document is well within the purview of Congress to take a look at. So with that, Ryan, I want to pivot to you on the question of the accuracy of the document. What Chuck Grassley is saying, I think is important, but then also whether or not the document is accurate is ultimately the key question. It sounds sensational and absurd that Joe Biden as a vice president would be like, yes, the price for my foreign policy position is $5 million. Take that for what you will, highly credible confidential human source. I don't

know exactly what that means in the standards of today's FBI. What do you make of the central claim of the document? We mentioned this at the top of the show, but you landed a really big interview that we're super excited to bring to the CounterPoints and BreakingPoints audience here today. Tell us a little bit about what we can expect to hear from Imran Khan. So extraordinarily important, you know, because the nation of Pakistan, it's a nuclear power with a population of 250 million people. Today, it's facing an existential crisis as the country's military establishment is rapidly consolidating power and cracking down on the most popular political party, which is known as the PTI, headed by former Prime Minister Imran Khan. Now, Khan is an unusual politician. He's going to be our guest in just a moment through a

pre-taped interview. And for decades, Khan was the nation's most famous cricketer before transitioning into the world. There's Khan wrapping a cricket ball or whatever the word is for what he's doing there. Before he transitioned into the world of philanthropy, he's well known in Pakistan for building hospitals, for supporting universities. From there, he moved into politics, founding the PTI and sweeping into power as a populist in 2018. But he had a slim majority and he was ousted in a no confidence vote by April of 2022. Since then, he and his party have been the target of a relentless crackdown by the nation's

military, which has ruled the country directly or indirectly for decades. Now, my earlier attempt, if you remember this, to schedule an interview with him, was foiled when he was arrested on May 9th by the military and held for four days while the country erupted in protests, after which the Supreme Court ruled his detention illegal. Some of the protests turned violent and directly targeted officials, high officials in the military, and the military establishment responded by arresting most of Khan's senior leadership and forcing them to resign from the party under pressure. Thousands of rank and file party workers have also been jailed. Khan meanwhile is holed up in his home in Lahore, sifting through some 150 charges of

corruption and other offenses that have been leveled at him, charges he and his supporters dismissed as politically motivated. Yesterday, there were suggestions that they're even going to charge him perhaps with murder. Yet Khan remains a popular political figure heading into elections that are scheduled, at least for October. We'll see if they actually happen. So in the interview, and actually I can, we can play some of this interview now and then we can come out and talk about it. So here's Imran Khan.

Were you interrogated? Were there any threats, direct or veiled, made about your future role in Pakistani politics? I think they know me, you know, this country knows me for 50 years. I mean, for 20 years, I was the leading sportsman in this country and cricket is the biggest sport and I was captain for 10 years. So I was in the media for a long time. And then I went into philanthropy and built the biggest charitable institution, which are cancer hospitals and the university. So people know me for a long time.

They know that I'm not going to back down. But what they're doing is, you know, I mean, they have clearly stated to me, the establishment, that whatever happens, you're not going to be allowed to get back into power. So what they're doing now is that they are dismantling the party. But dismantling the biggest political party, the only federal party in Pakistan is dismantling our democracy. And actually, that's what's going on. All the democratic institutions, the judiciary, it is, I mean, the judiciary today is totally impotent in stopping this violation of fundamental rights.

The Supreme Court, we went to the Supreme Court. According to the Constitution, the elections in Punjab, the biggest province, which is 60% of Pakistan, was supposed to be held on the 14th of May. The government refused. So, I mean, even the Supreme Court orders are not listened to. The judges give people bail there. The police picks them up on some of the cases. So, this total violation of fundamental rights which is going on, I think this is, it's all an attempt to weaken me and my party

to the point that we will not be able to contest the elections. Because all the opinion polls show that we will win a massive majority in elections. Out of the 37 by-elections, my party has swept 30 of them, despite the establishment helping the government parties. So therefore, they know that in a free and fair election, we will just sweep. Hence, all these efforts are being made to completely dismantle my party and weaken it to the point that it will not be able to contest elections. This is a dark moment for your country, for your party, as you said, for you yourself personally. But I'm curious, what are you looking forward to? In a best case scenario,

what's the path out of this crisis? It's like a crossroads. One road is leading back to the bad old days of military dictatorship, because that means we will regress. The whole movement for democracy, which gradually evolved over a period of time, our media really struggled valiantly for their freedom. And we had one of the freest medias. And then our judiciary was always subservient to the executive. But in 2007 started a movement called the Lawyers Movement.

And for the first time, the judiciary asserted its independence. So the whole pillars of democracy now are being rolled back. The whole evolution, the steady move towards a democratic country is now all at stake. So either we allow this to go where it is going,

towards a military dictatorship. The other is we all know, we all try and all the democratic forces get together and strive for getting back to rule of law, democracy, and free and fair elections. As you confront this potential long-term military dictatorship, how does it make you think back

on your own support of the military in the coup of Pervez Musharraf or having the military's indirect support in your own election? Do you feel like there was a way to accomplish that without the military? Or is Pakistan in a situation that reform is only possible through that institution? Well, you know, just to make a correction, mine is the only party that was never manufactured by the military. People's Party, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto,

he served a dictator for eight years before he formed his party. The other, the second party is PMLN. The head of PMLN was actually nurtured by General Zia's dictatorship. I mean, he was a non-entity, so he was actually a product of his military dictatorship. Mine is the only party for 22 years from scratch I started and actually broke through a two-party system. In the 2018 election, the army didn't oppose me, but they didn't help us in winning the election. The elections weren't rigged because it should be now obvious. Now, despite the army, the establishment standing behind this government,

we've swept 30 out of 37 by-elections, and all opinion polls show that we are way ahead of everyone, almost 60 to 70% rating. And the other thing I want to say is, how is it different? When Ayub Khan, the first military dictator, took over, the majority of the population backed him. Because at that time, we were very insecure, and the army was the bastion of security.

When Zia-ul-Haq deposed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the second military dictator, half the population supported him. Half the vote was for Bhutto, but half the vote went against him. When General Musharraf wound up our democracy in 99, he had 80% rating in Pakistan because he came on an anti-corruption platform.

But this is a unique time in Pakistan. The entire country is standing now for democracy. There are no takers for military dictatorship anymore. So it's a unique situation because our thought process has evolved to the point now where there's a consensus in Pakistan that a bad democracy is better than military dictatorship. It feels like the military may see this crisis and this conflict as existential for them, that given what you've said, that the country, the population has now turned against them. If they lose power, they may be pushed off the stage entirely. And so cornered, that may explain some of the reaction that you're seeing.

So how do you navigate that situation where they currently have you literally and politically surrounded, but if you escape, they face an existential crisis. When I was in three and a half years in power, I mean, I recognized that, you know, you can't wish away the military. You know, you have to work with them because they've been entrenched for 70 years, directly or indirectly, they've ruled this country.

So I worked with the army chief and apart from the fact that he would not he did not understand what rule of law meant or didn't want to understand apart from that we sort of you know we had a working relationship when and why he decided to pull the rug under my feet I still don't know I mean at what point he decided to pull the rug under my feet, I still don't know. I mean, at what point he decided that this is, you know, I was dangerous to the country. Why he decided to change horses, because he backed the current prime minister, who was facing massive corruption cases. And so why he decided to do that, I think my hunch is that he wanted an extension and the current prime minister had promised him that. I guess that's the reason.

But really, he would know why. I don't know why. So my point is, you know, the way Pakistan has been run, a hybrid system, it just cannot be run like this anymore. We are now facing the worst economic crisis in our history. And my point is that, you know,

when I've said I've offered talks to the military, I've said, look, to the army chief, but so far there's no response. My point is that the hybrid system cannot work any longer. Because if a prime minister has the public mandate and the responsibility to deliver, he must have the authority. He can't have a situation where he has the responsibility, but the authority, most of the authority lies with the military establishment. So a new equilibrium has to be made. You have to have some sort of an arrangement where, you know, certain issues just have to be delivered in

Pakistan. Pakistan cannot do without rule of law now, because we cannot get out of this economic mess unless we attract investment. But investment from abroad does not come to a country where people do not have confidence in their justice system and the legal system and the contract enforcement. And therefore, Pakistani go and invest in Dubai and in other countries. But they go and invest in Dubai and in other countries, but they don't invest in this country. We have 10 million Pakistanis. If we could only get

5% of them investing in this country, we wouldn't have any problems. But they do not have faith in our justice system. We are out of the 140 countries in the rule of law index, Pakistan is 129th. So with that sort of, you know, lack of rule of law, I'm afraid the country's survival is at stake.

So hence, a new equilibrium has to be made with the military establishment. Final question. I know you said that you believe that the driver of your ouster was clearly internal and not driven from outside.

But I'm also curious, given that the U.S. expressed its private approval for you to be pushed out of office through a no-confidence vote, I'm wondering what it was that you think drove the United States to that position.

Do you think it had something to do with your willingness to work with the Taliban after the Taliban took over? Do you think it had something to do with the war in Ukraine? Or what is your read of the geopolitics that would have led the United States to go from supportive to willing to see you thrown out? Well, for a start, you know, the war Trump administration acknowledged that I was the one who consistently kept saying there was not going to be a military solution in Afghanistan. It's because I know Afghanistan, I know the history and the province, the Pashtun province. Remember, Afghanistan has 50% Pashtuns, but the Pashtun population is twice as much in Pakistan and my province where I first got into power is the Pashtun province bordering Afghanistan. So I kept saying

there would not be any military solution. Trump administration acknowledged it and they finally when he decided to the withdrawal he understood that it was not going to be a military solution. But I think this was taken wrong by the Biden administration. They somehow thought I was critical of the Americans and I was sort of pro-Taliban. It's total nonsense. It's just simply that anyone who knows the history of Afghanistan just knows that they have a problem with outsiders. So the same happened with the British in the 19th century, the Soviets in the 20th century. Exactly the same was happening with the US.

But it's just that no one knew that. And so I think that was one reason. Secondly, I was anti the war on terror in pakistan because remember pakistan pakistan first of all in the 80s created the mujahideen mujahideen who were conducting a guerrilla warfare against the soviets so it was from pakistani soil and we we told them that doing jihad, jihad means fighting foreign occupation, is your heroes. We encouraged it. Now, come 10 years later, once the Soviets had left, the U.S. lands in Afghanistan. You're told that this was heroism to fight foreign occupation. How are you going to tell them that now that the

Americans are there, it's terrorism? So that's what happened. The moment we joined the US war on terror, they turned against us. 80,000 Pakistanis died. I mean, no ally of US has taken such heavy casualties as Pakistan did. And in the end, we couldn't help the US either. Because we were trying to save ourselves. There were 40 different militant groups at one point working against the government. Islamabad was like under siege. There were suicide attacks everywhere.

We had no investment coming in the country. Well, our economy tanked. So I think my opposition to the war on terror also was perceived as being anti-American, which is not. It's just being nationalistic about your own country. And with Taliban, I mean, when the Taliban took over, frankly, whichever government is in Afghanistan, Pakistan has to have good relationship with them. We have a 2,500- thousand kilometer border with them. We have three million Afghan refugees here. And when the Ghani government, before that, I went to Afghanistan, Kabul to meet him. I invited him to Pakistan. We tried our best to have good relationship with them. So whoever is in power

in Afghanistan, Pakistan has to have good relationship because at one point during the previous government, there were three different terrorist groups using Afghan territory to attack Pakistan. The ISIL, Pakistani Taliban, and the Baloch Liberation Organization. Three different groups were attacking us. So therefore, you need a government in Afghanistan which would be helpful. So it was not pro-Taliban. It's basically pro-Pakistan as anyone who cares about his country would make those decisions. You can listen to the entire interview over at my Intercept podcast, which is called Deconstructed. In that interview, he made claims against former Pakistan ambassador to the United States, Hussein Haqqani, and I reached out to him for comment.

He denied Khan's allegation that he had lobbied the United States against Khan. I also reached out to the State Department for comment, and I will read that here. The State Department says, quote, our message has been clear and consistent on this. We support the peaceful upholding of constitutional democratic principles, including respect for human rights.

We do not support, whether it's in Pakistan or anywhere else around the world, one political party over another. We support broader principles, including the rule of law and equal justice under the law on the war on terror and the Taliban. The United States and Pakistan have a shared interest in ensuring the Taliban live up to the commitments that they have made, that terrorist groups that may be active in Afghanistan are no longer able to threaten regional stability. Emily, Imran Khan, fascinating political figure, and in some ways, kind of,

I would think maybe an ideal populist right candidate that you guys might wish you had somebody like that over here in the United States. Fascinating. And just, I think your interview really brought that side in Imran Khan to the forefront because it's also a personality thing. And the sort of politics that he espouses, then to see that translated through, I think, the political personality, it is a very interesting combination. He's such an important international figure that gets, I think, probably too little attention on the world stage. He's probably one of the more, if you follow foreign policy stuff, I mean, people know his name, but his central importance to world politics right now, I think, is disproportionate to the media's interest in his story. So I thought that was a fantastic

interview. And I'm so glad that you were able to bring it to the audience here. And just a small process note, if folks can imagine how interesting it was for you to negotiate getting an interview with somebody who is in a position like Imran Khan. I mean, you can see it in the internet a little bit. You can see it in just some of your questions. Not an easy interview to land, but also just not an easy interview to make happen when you have so many obstacles, political obstacles to just like using the internet and talking to journalists. Yeah. And I think part of it is that he's so constricted in Pakistan that one of the few avenues for him left is to start doing these kind of international interviews. So I think

our ability to kind of get him had to do with how cornered he is politically back home. So next week, we'll be back in our brand new studio. I was in Boyertown, Pennsylvania for my cousin Lainey Grimm's high school graduation this weekend and met a guy named Justin, who was maybe he's watching now. He's a big CounterPoints fan. I was able to show him pictures of the studio. And he's like, wow, I didn't even have to pay for this. And so everybody's going to get to see the new studio next week. What's your take on what you've seen so far? I think it's amazing. And thank you so much to the viewers who make it possible. It's, you know, I think it's, Sagar always makes a really important point about why we need to take on, not just be

someone broadcasting from their basement with an Xbox headset. I don't mean that to be offensive at all, but we're here in DC and there are people, because of the rise of independent media, who are going to have conversations with the Breaking Points team. And you're going to see some of those big names next week. And the new set design is just a real elevation that I think is going to allow Breaking Points to keep growing and to to draw big names, more viewers. So we're just beyond grateful to all of you and so excited for you to see it. Yeah, and we could keep the bricks around

and still do kind of moonlight with an open mic comedy night or something in Washington, D.C. It'll be like how various museums have different pieces of the Berlin Wall. We'll give different places a slice of the breaking points wall. Wait, these are fake bricks. This is outrageous. We could have just poked holes in it the whole time.

Yes. All right. Well, we'll see you there in studio next week. See you soon. Thanks for watching. I think everything that might have dropped in 95 has been labeled the golden years of hip-hop. It's Black Music Month, and we need to talk. It's tapping in. I'm Nyla Simone, breaking down lyrics, amplifying voices, and digging into the culture that shaped the soundtrack of our lives. Like, that's what's really important, that's what stands out is that our music

changes people's lives for the better. Let's talk about the music that moves us. To hear this and more on how music and culture collide, listen to We Need to Talk from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You experienced dad guilt? I hate it. How hard is it?

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To hear this and more, open your free iHeart app, search Good Moms, Bad Choices, and listen now. I know a lot of cops. They get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. Listen to Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app,

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