Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 8/16/23: Trump Promises 'Irrefutable Report' On GA Indictment, Christie Passes DeSantis Poll, McCarthy Scrambles On Gov Shutdown, Narco Assassins In Ecuador, Blind Side Movie Lies?, Hillary Clinton On MSNBC, Pakistan Confirms Leaks

Episode Date: August 16, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss Trump's response to the GA indictments, who is Prosecutor Fani Willis?, Chris Christie surpasses DeSantis in new NH poll, McCarthy scrambles to avoid a Gov shutdown, Narco Assassinations spiral in Ecuador, the hollywood movie Blind Side allegedly misrepresented Michale Oher's relationship with his adopted parents, Hillary Clinton emerges on MSNBC for an indictment victory lap, and the Pakistan PM confirms the authenticity of the bombshell cable leaks.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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 back to CounterPoint. Happy Wednesday. I'm Emily Drushinsky, joined by my co-host, Ryan Grimm, who is still remote for the time being.

Ryan, how are you? I'm doing good. I'll be back pretty soon. Looking forward to seeing you and everybody in the studio, but also been nice to be away, gotta say. Oh, yeah, I can't imagine. It's a good time to be away from the swamp, that's for sure. Speaking of all of the craziness in the swamp, we're going to be tackling all kinds of good stuff today. That would be starting with Georgia, the fallout from the latest Trump indictment. We have a lot to break down in terms of how Trump has responded, how his fellow Republican candidates have responded. We're going to talk about Chris Christie in a recent

poll in New Hampshire taking the edge over Ron DeSantis. He's actually leading Ron DeSantis. We're going to talk about that in one poll. The likelihood of a government shutdown increases by the day. We'll probably see some real threats of that going into the fall. Kevin McCarthy has new things to talk about on that. We're going to talk about the cycle of tragedy in Ecuador, which is an important place to look at U.S. policy. It's an important place to look at what's happening in South America, Central America in general. And we're going to be breaking down a little bit of both of our takes on what's happening with the blindside controversy and Michael Orr and the family who famously took him in, whether or not there's

truth to their story. We're going to get into all of it. I'm going to be talking about Hillary Clinton weighing in on the Trump indictment in a very giggly interview with Rachel Maddow. Ryan, you're going to be talking about Pakistan again. Yeah, we've got to follow up on that. Shortly after we broke the news on the show here last week, the State Department was pressed on this secret cable that demonstrated that the U.S. had, in fact, pushed Imran Khan out of power in Pakistan. In a recent interview, the outgoing prime minister has now authenticated the document because there were some people who would take a kind of three-step approach. They'd say,

this document is inauthentic. This document was leaked by Imran Khan, and it's a treasonous act. It was not leaked by Imran Khan. And also, it's a nothing burger. So all three kind of self-contradictory claims would be made at once, and it seems like now they're finally giving up on the inauthentic claim. And we'll talk about the completely bizarre State Department response as well. But speaking of jailing political opponents, we've got number four for a good old former President Donald Trump. We've got RICO charges. What do you make of the case that's being laid out?

Yeah, the RICO charges is specifically something I wanted to ask you about because you've covered cases like this for a while. And Fannie Willis is a big fan of RICO, has used it in the past. And before we even get into that, I think it's worth mentioning Donald Trump himself says, we can put A1 up on the screen here. He posted a Truth Social yesterday morning, so Tuesday morning, saying that a large, complex, detailed, but irrefutable report on the presidential election fraud, which took place in Georgia, is almost complete and will be presented by me at a major news conference at 11 a.m. on Monday of next week in Bedminster, New Jersey. Based on the results

of this conclusive report, all charges should be dropped against me and others. There will be a complete exoneration. So Donald Trump is having a press conference where he is going to be, according to this true social post, putting on display, demonstrating and showing evidence for what he says is an irrefutable case that there was fraud in Georgia and all of the charges against him should be dropped. Now let's put a two up on the screen. There have been some interesting reactions from Donald Trump's fellow candidates. Vivek Ramaswamy said, he called this another disastrous Trump indictment.

And he also said, as someone who's running for president against Trump, I'd volunteer to write the amicus brief to the court myself. Prosecutors should not be deciding U.S. presidential elections. And if they're so overzealous that they commit constitutional violations, then the cases should be thrown out and they should be held accountable. Ron DeSantis said he's going to end the weaponization of federal agencies like the DOJ and FBI. I think it's an example of this criminalization of politics. I don't think this is something that's good for the country. And then you have your Asa Hutchinson's and Will Hurd who said things that this is like Donald Trump demonstrating he's unfit for office, basically what you could expect from

those two. I think it's another great example of how Ramaswamy has a better calm strategy as somebody running in the Trump lane, the Trump adjacent lane, than Ron DeSantis, who's supposed to be running in the Trump adjacent or the Trump adjacent lane than Ron DeSantis, who's supposed to be running in the Trump adjacent lane, the Trump but not Trump lane. Once again, I think Ramaswamy had a better messaging strategy there than DeSantis himself did. But as for the case itself, Ryan, as I read through the 98-page indictment from Fannie Willis, had a pretty similar reaction to when I read through Jack Smith's indictment, which is that it's very dangerous to say you know that people were, and this word comes up over and over again in both indictments, knowingly spreading false

information. So this is, I think, the predicate of both cases. And in Jack Smith's case and a couple of times in Willis's case, she does show that there were people who knew they were spreading false information in certain particular instances. She also, and Jack Smith also, accuses people like Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani of knowingly spreading disinformation, information they were aware was false, in times where I don't think they've proved, and I doubt they have the evidence to prove that those people knew it was false. Now, I think it was grossly unethical because I imagine a lot of times they did realize some of this information was at best

very, very iffy. But to charge people for that without evidence, I think is a pretty terrifying precedent. There are cases where they're citing evidence in both of these indictments. And I want to be clear about that. I also think that as a predicate for, you know, going after a political opponent, which is something that we've generally steered away from in this country, people weren't happy when Ford pardoned Nixon. And, you know, we can go back and think about that. We can think about what Comey did with Hillary Clinton. But we've typically sort of steered away from that in the United States. So if you're going to do it, I think it sets a precedent that scares me a little bit to say, oh, well, of course they knew it was false

without any evidence. And in order to charge them with the conspiracy and in order to charge them with the statutes that Fannie Willis is listing, you do need to prove that they knew it was false. So maybe she can do that they knew it was false. So maybe she can do that. I'm pretty skeptical. What did you make of it, Ryan? I mean, if all that they were doing was spreading false information, I would 100% agree with you and say that we cannot go down the road of criminalizing lies. Now, you have a First Amendment right as a politician to lie. All politicians lie. Now, you don't have the right to do it on YouTube, apparently. You know, they'll take you down for that.

But broadly speaking, under the constitutional umbrella, politicians have the constitutional right to lie their pants off, and they have availed themselves of that right for 200-plus years, and they will continue to do it for as long as this republic exists. But if the lies are linked up with action, and that action is itself illegal, then it does matter. And to me, the most blatant kind of illegal acts that are very hard to explain away, and hey, innocent until proven guilty, these 19 guys and women can go before the jury and try to explain away what they did. But to me, the hacking, trying to bust into the Georgia voter database, which they sort of seem to imply they had some access to legitimately, but it wasn't really legitimate.

Like this was not kind of public access that they were exploiting here. And also the go and find me 11,000 votes, and then also creating fake electors. If you run a fake ID business, if you falsify mortgage documents, if you engage in that type of fraud, those are crimes. And so if they can prove that, I do think then it does have to follow that. It doesn't actually necessarily have to follow that they knew 100% that the election was stolen. You know, and what I mean is this, like, let's pretend that we can get inside of Donald Trump's mind. And he really did 100% believe that he beat Joe Biden in Georgia. He also knows that you have a variety of legal paths that you're able to take in the United States that allow you to challenge what you consider to be an unfair or a rigged election.

And that's mostly going through the courts. They went through the courts, they failed. They knew that that was the outcome. So even if at the end of all that, they still believe that they were wronged, it kind of doesn't matter what you believe. Like if you believe that you were unfairly convicted of burglary, it doesn't give you the right to break out of prison, even if you authentically believed and were even innocent. And so we have rules, you know, because this is not Vietnam, as they say. And they didn't follow the rules. They went outside of it and used all of these extrajudicial, extralegal processes to try to overturn the election. So I think in some ways, you don't even necessarily need to prove that they knew they were lying, although a ton of them knew, like a whole bunch of them knew.

But what they absolutely knew is that the election had been certified and he lost by 11,000 votes. They knew that. Raffensperger told him that. The news reported it. Everybody knew that. He disagreed with it. Right.

But whether or not that was an authentic disagreement or not, in some ways is besides the points. That's what I find frustrating, though, is that jump from, it's likely that, you know, if Raffensperger is telling Donald Trump, you don't have the votes, it's a pretty good piece of evidence that, frankly, you don't have the votes. This is a Republican talking to a Republican, and in all likelihood, you don't have the votes. And that goes to Rusty Bowers as well from Arizona, who was telling Donald Trump similar things. But Jack Smith and Fannie Willis say, well, because Brad Raffensperger and Rusty Bowers

had told Donald Trump and his legal team what they thought about the vote totals, he knew. And then everything he said differently from that was knowingly spreading false information because somebody had told them that. But the fact is, and as these indictments show, he has legal experts telling him different things. And to your point, Ryan, it's like, well, what do we know about what Donald Trump actually believed? And that's where legally it gets in a different territory.

For me, it just becomes, it becomes really difficult to, it becomes very difficult. The legal precedent for me becomes very difficult. Yeah, and if we can put up this next Axios element, we're looking at a wild 2024 because you have all of these different court cases starting to line up with Iowa, New Hampshire, Super Tuesday, the Republican National Convention. And you're going to have them kind of weaving in and out of the political cycle in a way that's going to kind of never take this off the kind of news map for more than, say, a week. You're always going to have some type of motion or decision coming down in one of these different

cases. And so, Emily, on the one hand, I feel like this helps Trump in the sense that it rallies Republicans around him. I also feel like it doesn't necessarily help him with a general electorate, where he continues to erode support. So I'm wondering what your sense is of the politics. We've never come close to having a presidential election unfold in anything remotely like this. No. And again, to the last point that we were debating a little bit, it's part of what makes me wish that this were happening at the ballot box. And I come from the perspective that I wish we locked every politician up who did something bad.

But the fact of the matter is we don't. And so when you have the public watching something like this play out, I think it creates a lot more rancor. We're going to be talking about this in the Hillary Clinton block coming up in a little bit. And we can probably go back and forth on it more then. But when you look at this calendar and you look at what's happened since the first indictment came down in April, Donald Trump's numbers and the gap between him and any other candidate has gone up. So it helps Trump in the primary, might not help

him in the general. But the reason it helps him in the primary is that I think it's for the same reason it helps whatever candidate, likely Joe Biden, is matched up with Donald Trump. This is the type of thing that energizes both bases. And then you have this middle of the country that's just like, well, what the hell am I supposed to do with this? I think Donald Trump is nuts. And I think he has done all kinds of issues of his own, whether that's cognitive problems, whether that's Hunter Biden problems, whether that's the economy, frankly. And so I just, I mean, it makes me, it pains me for the country thinking of looking at that Axios chart, looking at the calendar going forward, which if you're listening to

this, if you find that Axios timeline, it might be worth looking up because it's incredible to look at how many court dates and how on earth even one person could balance a presidential campaign with these four indictments in all of these different jurisdictions over the next year or so. It is going to be – buckle up because we're in for a pretty wild ride. Plus a golf schedule that he's got to work in there too. But the irony here, and I'm curious for your take on this, if he had done what every other president, you know, ever throughout American history had done, which is to concede to the person who won, to say, you know what?

Sleepy Joe got the best of me. I'll be back in four years. I feel like he would be the odds-on favorite, not just to win the Republican nomination, that was his undertaking, but to win the White House again. I feel like he'd be, that Democrats would be running scared that Biden would be, you know, at least several points behind him. Instead, the guy's looking at various prison terms, and it's also hurting him with the general electorate. Where do you think he would be if he would have just said,

you know what, he got me? No, I agree with that. I agree with that two things. One, I agree if he had done that with the presidential election, he would be in a much more strong political position. And if he had taken COVID more seriously all the way through,

I think he would be in a stronger political position. And that's not to say, I'm not trying to get into lockdowns or masking or anything, but just it devolved into something. Because in some sense, he was being attacked as being X, Y, and Z. And he lashed out and responded in ways that I think made it more difficult for the country to approach the serious crisis that was killing lots and lots of people. And so the problem is you just can't

separate that from the things that make Trump politically successful. You know, the things that make him successful are also his downfall. It's like a Greek tragedy that plays out every single day on True Social now. And so you can't really have, I just didn't see how you can have the one part of Trump without the other part of Trump, which is where, again, like a problem with both of these indictments, Smith and Willis, legally, and I think just as like a strategy as well, is that it's saying that Donald Trump was acting, I think they're taking him as a rational actor who, you know, when the Secretary of State, who's a Republican, tells you something, you are like, oh, that is a very good piece of evidence that I lost the election. Whereas with Donald Trump, you see over and over again, and people

I've talked to say if he believes anything, it's that he won that presidential election because he had Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and their people chirping in his ear saying stuff. And that's who he chose to believe. He's a Twitter boomer. He was a Twitter boomer. And that's who he chose to believe. He's like a, you know, he's a Twitter boomer. He was a Twitter boomer. And so the other thing I wanted to say, Ryan, is I agree with you completely on that Sidney Powell part about the Georgia voting machine. That is, that's in the Fannie Willis indictment. And that is extremely dicey material. That looks like it could be a real problem for her. Whether they got access to just like a password and it gave them access to the voting thing, that might be the case,

but they knew that they weren't supposed to have it. It sounds to me from the evidence, and we'll see what evidence is presented in court, but it sure looked like they knew they weren't supposed to be entering the voter database from the back end there. And so I think that is a pretty serious part of the indictment too. Yeah, I mean, it's not technically, I guess, classified information, but it's the same thing. One of the things that they're charging Julian Assange for is for helping Chelsea Manning kind of cover her tracks when she was looking through Pentagon files to WikiLeaks. And so, you know, for everybody who talks about two different tiers of justice, we have to remember that, too. That anybody who tries to kind of penetrate an election system without legal access to it is committing a crime.

Like, that's pretty straightforward. Yeah, we can't have people—there's a great episode of Reno 911 where they try to go in and change votes on a referendum for police pay. There's a reason we have like- You can't have that. You can't have that. Don't have a country here. Right. But just briefly, I want to dive into Fannie Willis, because she's obviously front and center, as people have said, with one of the most serious cases, probably the single

most serious case against Donald Trump, because it does not involve a presidential pardon. It's a series of state charges, and it can't be waved away by a Republican president or a kind-hearted Democratic president. There's nothing that a president can do to save Donald Trump from these charges, and obviously they're serious in nature. So Fannie Willis is, if we put the next element up on the screen, A4. The right is exploring Fannie Willis's, if we put the next element up on the screen, A4, she has been, the right is exploring Fannie Willis's history as, you know, it's sort of natural in a situation like this. But one thing that's come up, you see, this is from Newsmax. They say she's an activist Democrat and her father was a member of the Black Panthers, which they described there, as you'll enjoy in parentheses, Marxist-Leninist Black Power Group.

No, no lies detected. There you go. And so Fannie Willis has sort of come under the microscope, and The Telegraph did a pretty interesting deep dive on her. And I found interesting one quote they have here from a Georgia State University law professor who said, she's really a tough on crime liberal, which is kind of a rare bird these days, but I think that's her brand. The Telegraph also notes by her own admission, Ms. Willis is a fan of Rico. She's previously used Georgia's expansive racketeering charges to prosecute cheating teachers. That's a case that actually got some national headlines at the time.

She won 11 convictions in national media attention in relation to the public school test score scandal as the Telegraph notes there. I think she also had RICO charges against Young Thug and she won. She pursued those charges and I think she won in court. Now, Devin Franklin, an attorney for the Southern Center for Human Rights who spent 12 years in the Fulton County Public Defender's Office said that using these laws drives, quote, a narrative of violence in Atlanta that's not true, that's not necessarily reflected in the data, and has a tendency to sensationalize the cases. She's spent actually most of her career as an assistant DA down in Fulton County. That's, as people know, outside of Atlanta. It's the most populous county in Georgia, so obviously a hugely important political center of the state. She beat a primary fight against her mentor, Paul Howard, who had

been Georgia's first black district attorney. And so she comes, takes out her mentor, and she says she was, she actually said her father was a former Black Panther. That comes from her. That's not like some weird digging. But the, I think that that's when you have Newsmax calling her an activist Democrat and then the Telegraph saying she's actually a tough on crime liberal prosecutor. Those are obviously in tension right now. If you're an activist Democrat prosecutor, a lot of people think of you along the lines of like a Chesa Boudin or Gascon. But that doesn't seem to be the case with Fannie Willis, who is like, hey, Rico, let's let's just have a Rico party. These things seem to be intention.

So the picture of Fannie Willis, to me at least, as somebody who's not, you know, in Georgia following politics for the last couple of decades, that's sort of a muddied picture. They're using activist in a very liberal sense there, because if she were an activist, kind of straight up partisan Democrat, she wouldn't have gone after the teachers union like she did. That was a really brutal case. Came after several schools that she accused of basically rigging their test scores. I think they were cutting into the packets. It was a mess and a really sad case,

and it really shined a light on how far adrift a lot of public schools had gone in Fulton County. And if she were just a straight-up kind of partisan Democrat, she would never have taken on that kind of case. And she certainly wouldn't have done it with the zealousness to bring in Rico, which then allows, to the point of some of her critics, allows you to criminalize some things because they're part of the criminal conspiracy that otherwise wouldn't be criminal acts on their own. And so, but, you know, she's good at what she does she does. She's got the record to show it. And good for her dad. The Black Panther Party for self-defense went in some crazy directions

towards the very end. But throughout much of its history was a real force for good and empowerment, and particularly kind of stitching together civil society elements in the Black community in the late 60s and early 70s. So yes, but you come after the foreign president, you're going to certainly get the spotlight from not just outlets like Newsmax, but everybody. So, you know, I understand where that's coming from. Yeah, absolutely. Although I think any efforts to sort of turn her into one of the like a Chesapeake Dean, that's probably not going to be successful. And Ryan, just before we move to the next topic, I just wanted to mention again

that she has a critic in that Telegraph article, which is a really good deep dive actually, saying that she has a tendency to sensationalize cases. And that is definitely, if you want to spend 98 pages going through the indictment, I definitely felt like that was a word that would accurately characterize the indictment itself. But I wanted to ask you, Ryan, about RICO just sort of in general, as someone who's covered RICO for a while, what it means that she's invoking it here, given the history of RICO and mob stuff, etc., etc. Plenty of people have already pointed out the irony that Rudy Giuliani is getting slapped with

RICO because he very much rose to prominence using RICO cases against, in particular, the mob in New York. And, you know, if you're going to have a government, you're going to have a democratic republic where, you know, power is vested in the people that are elected by the populace, then you can't have mafias. You can't have criminal conspiracies kind of running around outside the law and getting around the law by saying that, okay, well, you don't have criminal conspiracies kind of running around outside the law and getting around the law by saying that, okay, well, you don't have anything on us. You know, yes, it is clear that we are running drugs, running illegal casinos, you know, running sex trafficking and human trafficking operations, trying to overthrow an election,

you know, but you actually haven't, you don't have anything specific on us that can pin a serious crime on us. And so you end up just slapping a whole bunch of misdemeanors together, even though you can prove that it was all collectively oriented toward this grand kind of collective conspiracy. So to the extent that you can bring those laws to bear

on entities that are trying to become private governments, that's the interesting kind of link between a private gang of people that is trying to, you know, overturn an election and a private gang of people that doesn't bother with elections and just kind of takes over a community by force. That's basically the same thing. And that's what a democratic society can have. Like we have established ways that you are able to get into government and we don't have mafias. Like, I mean, we do, but we shouldn't.

And so, you know, RICO is aimed at making sure that the people have control over their own sovereignty. So to me, you know, they can absolutely be abused in a lot of different ways, and we need to be on guard for that. But in general, it's a necessary part of the people exercising their own sovereignty. That's why Ryan voted for Giuliani

in the Republican primary in 2008. America's mayor. All right, well, let's move on to Chris Christie in a new Emerson poll out of New Hampshire, taking the edge over Ron DeSantis. Check this story out. We can put the first element up on the screen. I'm reading from The Hill here.

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has surpassed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in the critical early presidential primary state of New Hampshire. According to an Emerson College survey released Tuesday, Christie leapfrogged DeSantis for second place in the Granite State, garnering 9% support. DeSantis' support, on the other hand, fell to 8% from 17% in March. So check that out. That is a nine-point decline for DeSantis. Christie's one point lead over DeSantis. But this is actually a good point. And I'm glad that he'll put this because you don't always see this in news coverage. That is within the polls, plus or minus 3.4 percent margin of error, well

within the margin of error there, which is pretty important. What is still outside of the margin for error from the margin of error is that big decline for DeSantis. You cannot math away that giant decline in the same poll of New Hampshire voters from 17 to 9. That's really, really brutal. Now, according to that poll, Trump still dominates the GOP primary field, as the Hill puts it, with 49% support. You then have Tim Scott at 6%, Doug Burgum and Nikki Haley at 4%, Ramaswamy and Perry Johnson at 3% and 2% respectively, and then Mike Pence and Will Hurd, each at 1% support. Now we have also 13% of voters saying they are undecided, which is a good chunk, but not enough to make up that massive margin between Trump and everyone else. What did you make of that, Ryan? Well, I heard you mentioning Will Hurd

earlier in the program. I was like, wait, Will Hurd's running for president? He has not landed with much of a splash so far. But yeah, just incredible. The spin you're seeing from the DeSantis camp is that they really feel like they have a clean shot at Iowa. And if they can propel themselves out of Iowa with a victory, then that can reshape their momentum, which is true. If you could do that, it does do that. But he's got such a hill to climb and he's facing such significant headwinds. What are they basing this claim on besides just kind of hope that Iowa could have, you know, is a better place for them than basically everywhere else where he's getting biffed. It's a place where you can, yeah, I mean, I think their theory is that it's a place where you can pour resources into. And if you do the ground game right, then it's the momentum that will

translate to the other states and sort of trickle down campaigning. And the example is that they go off of their consultant is Jeff Rowe, who did this with Ted Cruz in Iowa back in 2016. Cruz wins Iowa, comes out of that with a lot of momentum. And I just, again, look at that and shake my head. And like from maybe it's easier to see the forest from the trees when you're not like when you're a journalist and you're looking at this from the outside. But Ted Cruz lost. I can't agree. I'm glad Ted Cruz had a lot of momentum.

And Ted Cruz barely beat Beto O'Rourke with the same consultant in Texas. And so I just don't, it doesn't inspire. If I were a DeSantis donor, it wouldn't inspire a lot of confidence that that was the strategy, especially since it's still, when you're looking overall at voters, it's such a huge margin. I would understand that if it was a much slimmer margin, but given that it's such a huge margin, I find that completely not persuasive. Let's show Chris Christie. He's got to be feeling good right now. Because again, when you're looking at Chris Christie and when he entered the race It was sort of like okay great like Chris Christie's not gonna win. Well if he's taking 9% support

Away from all of the other candidates. I mean, maybe that's why you have Mike Pence in New Hampshire at 1% because you have Chris Christie taking 9% of the vote and when you have everyone else Sharing, you know Trump's at 49% and his next opponent is 40 points behind at 9%. When you have somebody like Christie eating into the vote, then that's a big, I mean, that's a big chunk that would be spread out from other candidates. It's certainly not enough to make anything up, but when you're trying to get financial support, when you're trying to get momentum, media attention, et cetera, et cetera, Christie's taking some of that up.

So let's see how Christie was talking to a voter in Iowa just this week. I didn't do everything that in my mind and my heart I wanted to do because I was making a political calculation when you were just suggesting, well, if these people are so entrenched with him and they're going to go to hell and back with him and you maybe need them to vote for you at some point, maybe you should just back off a little bit. Let me tell you, I tried it. It doesn't work. And when he says the stuff he said about me yesterday,

I'm not going to bother you for a minute. I don't care. Okay, Ryan, that's a good flavor of how Christie is approaching the Trump issue with voters. Is that how he's getting the 9%? I guess it's just such an interesting way to speak. I tried it and it didn't work. He's not saying it was wrong. I went against my moral principles and I realized that what I was doing was compromised. And so, damn it, I'm just going to speak truth and let the chips fall their word. He's just laying it out in a purely pragmatic way.

He's like, I was a piece of garbage. I tried appeasing him because I thought it would benefit me politically, and it didn't. It hurt me. And so I'm going to now take a different approach to try to benefit myself politically. That's such a fascinating attempt to speak truth because I do believe him. I actually think he is telling the truth, but it's not a very kind of attractive or appealing truth about what it says about what's underneath there. Because what he's saying, not even implicitly but explicitly, is that if appeasing Trump had benefited him politically, in other words, if he hadn't prosecuted Jared Kushner's father

and created a lifelong enemy in Jared Kushner, then he would continue to violate his principles and appease Trump as long as it benefited Christie politically. And so I get it. That's true. That's how he feels. But I don't quite get it. I mean, I guess it sounds, the way he says it, it sounds like he's being honest with people. But what he's saying to people is that I tried lying to you and it didn't work for me. So now I'm going to try something different and we'll see if that works. Right. Yeah, that's exactly what he's doing. No,

that's a great way to put it. He's like, I was lying to you then, but believe me, I wouldn't do that now. I've learned that that's bad. Because it didn't work. Right. Right. But if it worked, I would do it. Like, that's the other thing he's saying. Yeah.

Right. Yeah, that's exactly what he's saying. And again, I think because I was actually thinking about this this morning. I was like, Christie's a really shrewd politician. Like, what he did in New Jersey, he, like, on a political level, he had some strategic innovations and successes that I think are worth noting just from a political point of view. That doesn't, of course, translate into like being a moral stalwart, but he at least like kind of understands the game. And I wonder if he

sees Donald Trump being one of the few people in American politics who has sort of leveled with voters, at least purportedly, or is ostensibly leveled with voters and said, listen, I know the system because I've been a part of the system. Let me tell you, it's bad. I wonder if Christie sees that from Trump, sees that it's been successful with voters and thinks that he can do it. I still don't think Chris Christie thinks he's going to win the Republican primary. I think he's having a lot of fun sort of blowing it up, blowing up Donald Trump.

I think it feels like cathartic for him to be out there just trashing Trump with people who might otherwise support him. And I think it's kind of fun for him, too, to muck it up for Ron DeSantis and everyone else, which, by the way, could be that could be something that actually just ends up handing the nomination to Donald Trump. And I don't know that Chris Christie genuinely cares that it goes to Donald Trump, because if this is Chris Christie's pitch to voters, if anything, it's interesting that he's at nine and Mike Pence in this poll is at like, what, 1%? Because Mike Pence has the strongest argument that he stood up to Donald Trump on a moral level on January 6th. I mean, that is like Mike Pence's bread and butter that he stood up to Donald Trump on a moral level on January 6th. That is like Mike Pence's bread and butter that he's leaned into.

That's his pitch, is that like, listen, at a certain point I had to say no. So that Chris Christie is more successfully making that pitch in New Hampshire, not entirely surprising because he's not an evangelical conservative and he's more of like a Northeastern, you know, sort of maverick Republican than Mike Pence's. But it's still pretty interesting that like that's Pence's thing. And Christie is getting into that lane. Yeah. You make an interesting point that, you know, Trump has been successful by being kind of a flagrant and craven and completely open narcissist. That the politics of just pure self-interest and expressing your pure self-interest has an authenticity to it that resonated with people. Whether that's just Trump or whether that can be kind of broadened out to

other people like Christie is an interesting question. So maybe Christie is seeing that, that like, look, Trump was just completely open about his cravenness and people liked it. People felt like it was raw, that he's just being straight with them. And so maybe Christie's trying to follow in that path. Before we run, I want to put B3 up on the screen. I think this is one of the more interesting takeaways from that Emerson poll. You see the most important issue that New Hampshire voters say is on their mind is the economy. So 32% said economy, jobs, inflation, and taxes. 21% in a very similar vein said housing affordability. 12% said threats to democracy. Then you get to healthcare, abortion, access, education,

immigration, crime, something else. Each between eight and 5%. But if you're looking at the two biggest ones, so more than 50% of voters in New Hampshire say that their top issue is the economy or housing. And I think of those in the, pretty much in the same vein, because obviously one affects the other. That, I don't know what answer Republicans have. I never hear Republicans talking about the issue of housing affordability, ever. I mean, that is just not something. There are two things that voters care about a lot that Republicans never talk about, and it's housing and health care. It's not just that they don't seem to have policy answers, that they aren't even talking about it. And I think Democrats

have their own issues that they don't talk about as well policy answer, is that they aren't even talking about it. And, you know, I think Democrats have their own issues that they don't talk about as well. But for Republicans, looking at that, looking at how important housing is, they need it. If they want to have success in a general election, not just a primary, they need an answer to that. Yeah, right.

Democrats at least occasionally talk about it. They had a gigantic housing affordability piece of Build Back Better, which was in the range of several hundred billion dollars, which would have been, you know, genuinely important on a policy level. It immediately got dropped when Manchin said he's only doing, you know, X on the bottom line. So at least they talk about it. But you're right. It is to have one in five New Hampshire voters saying that that's their top issue. And to basically have no national conversation about any type of kind of federal legislation or federal approach to it is rather striking because housing is becoming the real

kind of dividing question between the haves and the have-nots. And it is becoming the real kind of dividing question between the haves and the have-nots. And it is becoming the thing that is just, you know, making people feel so bleak about their future. Because even as, you know, consumer prices start to level out, you know, if you're still paying jacked up rents from the last couple of years, you know, that means you're still falling behind relative to a couple of years ago, even as your wages are going up. So, yeah, huge, huge problem for both parties. But you're right. Republicans are just completely nowhere on that on that question. And it's interesting that it's in New Hampshire. You know, it's not a state you typically associate with kind of out of control rent. Yeah, that's

a really good point. All those Massachusetts people, I guess, flooding in there, probably driving up, and New Yorkers and others just kind of probably driving up home prices. It's not like they're building a lot. And I'll just also mention before we wrap that last week we were talking about credit card delinquencies starting to spike. You're seeing the same thing with auto loan delinquencies.

You're not seeing the same thing with mortgage delinquencies, but the economy is on shaky ground right now, And that's actually a good transition into our next topic, which is that Kevin McCarthy this week on a conference call with Republicans said actually that he might go with a short-term solution of funding the government in the fall. So meaning he would be potentially supportive of a continuing resolution in September that kind of kicks the can into December when it comes to funding the government. All this is to say that the threat of a government shutdown is very real going into the fall. So real that Republicans are obviously already starting to talk like this. So let's run a clip here from

Jeff Jackson, Democrat from North Carolina, who Ryan and I once misidentified as a Republican for like an entire segment. I think our brains were broken that day. But let's roll Jeff Jackson, Democrat from North Carolina, weighing in on the potentiality of a shutdown here. This man just came up to me at the airport and goes, hey, are you Jack Jefferson? I said, that's pretty close. Sure. He said, I got a question for you. Do you think we're going to have a government shutdown this year? And I said, probably. Yes. He asked why, and here's what I told him. The budget for the federal government runs out on the last day of September. Passing a new budget is actually passing 12 separate bills, and in the House, we've passed one. The other 11 bills haven't

even come to a vote, but that's not because of Republicans versus Democrats. It's because there's an internal fight within the majority party about spending, but also whether to add a bunch of cultural issues like new restrictions on abortion, which is the official story. But here's what's really happening. This isn't about the budget. In the House, you've got a group of folks in the right flank who want to shut down the government. So they're asking for things they know everyone else in their party will say no to. Okay, so I think that's half right. I think he's right about the internal dynamics.

But I also, when you talk to people on the Hill in the sort of Freedom Caucus arena, it's not that they want to shut down the government. They just love the idea of shutting down the government. Republicans know politically they always get blamed for that. It is rarely good, even if you're in a red district, it's rarely good for you to shut down the government. That said, they're also facing an immense amount of pressure from their base. And they look at, again, this is their perspective, what's happening in the country and say, we need to use our power. If we have a majority in the House and we don't push as hard as we possibly can by driving, taking a really hard line on defunding X, Y and Z, defunding DEI, CRT, whatever it is, then we're not using our power at all. If we're not negotiating for the sake of just going along to get along, then we're not going to get any wins.

And we saw them find success with this in the speaker battle. They squeezed a whole lot of wins out of Kevin McCarthy. They felt like they were sort of stabbed in the back a little bit by McCarthy in the bill that was passed in the spring, that they felt, you know, the funding bill from the spring, they felt not great about what happened with that. They thought that they could have kept pushing. But even then, they still got some successes. They still squeezed some wins out of McCarthy and Republican leadership in that case. Axios had the story from the Republican conference call. We can put C2 up on the screen about what McCarthy said himself. He's saying that, according to Axios, he wouldn't

do a CR past early December. So that is according to four sources on the call. So that CR would, if you have the government deadline as September 30th for funding, he wouldn't pass a continuing resolution that would fund it after early December. So that's kicking the can for like a few months. Ralph Norman, Republican from North Carolina, said, right now, I would say no about the CR. He would say he is absolutely willing to force a government shutdown. And then Bob Good of Virginia said, if we have a temporary shutdown of the government, what's the risk or concern about that happening? We shouldn't implement bad policy to avoid that. And that's what Jeff Jackson is talking about, Ryan, right, is that attitude of saying like, well, hey, cost benefit here.

We can push far enough that it won't hurt us, basically. Government shutdowns are sort of becoming an anger release valve for factions within the government. You know, they're elected. They have, you know, significant bases of power, but they don't have a majority. They don't have, you know, the Freedom Caucus obviously doesn't even remotely have a majority in the House of Representatives. Democrats control the House. Democrats control the White House. But they have angry constituents who, you know, want them to post some Ws.

And so the only thing that's kind of left, well, only two things that are left are some wins around the rules package. Set that aside. You know, they got some of those. They caused like a four-day fight. But then after that, you can default on the government debt or you can shut the government down. You can't really default on the government debt, as we learned in the last fight, because nobody has the stomach for it. Because the big money people and the small folks, your car dealers, everybody in the district is calling you. And like, look, do not default on the government. Like, do not seize up the global financial system. Like,

it's not worth it. For what? And so they caved on that. And I thought that they would fight a little bit longer, frankly, than they did on that. But it became so clear that the risk was so great, and the chance of them winning whatever they hoped they that. But it became so clear that the risk was so great and the chance of them winning whatever they hoped they were going to win was so little that they kind of, you know, folded and moved on. And Biden kind of did outmaneuver them. And so now that leaves them with a government shutdown. And so to me, it's almost as if they have to shut the government down just to save face. And I think McCarthy has to punt to December because right now it's just too embarrassing. Like they said, we're going to pass all 12 of

our appropriations bills. And as Jackson said, they've only done one so far. And so when you, when the government is shutting down because you haven't done your homework or what it looks like you haven't done your homework, then it's even more humiliating for you because then it's political and ideological and also a competence problem. Because then all Democrats have to say, it's even more humiliating for you because then it's political and ideological and also a competence problem. Because then all Democrats have to say is like, you didn't even pass anything yet. So at least pushing to December theoretically gives them the possibility to actually get these appropriations bills together.

Whether they can do that or not is not obvious. Like this is harder stuff than you would think. Ironically, it shouldn't be hard because it's not going to become law. Like they're just writing bills that are messaging documents. Like there's no world in which Joe Biden is signing off on whatever, just straight up whatever House Republicans come up with. There's no world in which it gets through the Senate. Right. So it really doesn't matter

to anybody's actual daily lives what's in the bill, yet it's still very hard to get 218 votes on 12 different appropriations bills. So I think they're hoping we can punt this till December, and then we'll have our work done. Then we'll have a shutdown. Freedom Caucus can do what Jackson was saying. They can get a lot of interviews. They can show that they did everything they could. But at some point, they're going to have to bow to the reality that they don't control the House, even if they kind of control the fate of the Speaker. And they don't control the Senate. They don't control the White House. And so that's where I think we'll get, who knows, a couple of weeks of a

shutdown, maybe longer. What's, what's your guess as to how this unfolds? Well, that's the thing, right? So finding agreement for these things, for these appropriations bills. So I think they have like 11 appropriation bills. They passed one of a dozen of them and they're in session. They come back September 12th. So it's recess month. And that's why here in D.C. things are pretty dead and always are in August. They're in session 12 days. That's like one appropriations bill a day. It's not impossible. But if you don't agree on which ones to pass, that means you have to do a lot of negotiating between now and then and in those just 12 days that you're in session. So it makes sense from McCarthy's perspective to do a short term like stopgap measure for the next couple of months, figure out what they're going to agree on or disagree on when it comes to funding. Everyone sort of find their place, which buttons that

they're actually going to push in this theater. Because again, Republicans know they don't control the Senate or the White House. But to your point, Ryan, the question is whether they control the speaker. And they have shown that it's not so much they control the speaker, and it's not that the speaker controls them. It's that they've actually had this relationship where it's a push and pull. That can explode in either of their faces, more in McCarthy's face, at any given moment, which is why he's negotiated with them, I think so. He understands how fragile the relationship is and that can blow up at any moment. So it does make sense to sort of find consensus on the appropriation bills and then get to long-term government funding. We have a couple more reactions

from the Hill. We can put C3 up on the screen. This is Tony Gonzalez with his read of the situation. I just got off a member call. It's clear President Biden and Speaker McCarthy want a government shutdown. So that's what Congress will do after we return in September. This is a member of Congress saying, quote, plan accordingly, because he expects, frankly, the government to shut down based on all of these conversations, internal conversations that have been happening that both Biden and McCarthy see a shutdown as something that is in some sense politically helpful. I don't think that's the case with Kevin McCarthy. I do think it's the case with President Biden. Democrats, again, know that if the government shuts down, they have one huge advantage, and that is the media, which will generally take their side. And sometimes that's fair. Sometimes Republicans do want a government

shutdown, and it makes sense for the media to blame Republicans because Republicans are saying, yes, blame us. But in some cases, that's not exactly how it works out. We can put C4 up on the screen. This is more from the Senate side. This is Schumer in a press call said he spoke with McCarthy at the end of July on need for CR. Quote, I thought it was a good thing that he recognized that we need a CR. I'm supportive of that. And then Schumer says, I was glad that Speaker McCarthy had mentioned publicly the need for CR. If we do this in a bipartisan way, I'm confident we can avoid a government shutdown if the House Republicans and the Freedom Caucus insists on doing this partisan so extreme and gets no Democratic votes. They're heading us towards a shutdown. That's from reporter Mika Solner. So Ryan, what do you make of Schumer's comments there?

Right. And the problem, Schumer, you know, wants to make sure that Republicans get the blame for any shutdown. So he's going to say, look, yeah, whatever you guys, if you guys can figure something out, we're here. We're here for you. We'll do a CR. And I think we spend a lot of time, you know, talking about the Freedom Caucus.

But just as important are the quote-unquote moderate members of the Republican conference, which are... Tuesday group. Yeah, like Gonzales and people who won districts that Biden either carried or that Biden was very close to. Those are districts that are becoming even tougher for Republicans because of the activism around codifying Roe v. Wade. So you're going to have a huge turnout

in those swing districts. And so if the Freedom Caucus gets everything it wants in these appropriations bills, which again will not become law, they're just kind of messaging documents, Democrats then have the ability to pick through this entire budget that Republicans just approved and find

things that are unpopular in it and hammer away at these vulnerable Republicans in these swing districts. And so for those Republicans who are facing serious reelections, they're like, why are you making us do this? Why are you making us take a difficult vote on, you know, much, let's say, much tougher abortion restrictions or whatever it is that's not, that's going to hurt us back in our district, and that isn't actually going to become law. And it's just going to, like, be a step towards a government shutdown. Like, what is the political upside for me here? And it makes them furious that they have to deal with this. And you're going to start to see people like Gonzalez kind of speaking out as we get closer to this.

Again, firing back at the Freedom Caucus and the Freedom Caucus firing back at them, calling them rhinos or whatever drama we're going to see unfold. But that, I think, is a scenario that Schumer's happy to see unfold. And all the while, he'll be saying, look, here we are. We're ready to do a CR. We don't want a government shutdown. But it's up to you guys. Yeah. No, I agree.

I think it's a pretty early but predictable kind of preview of the messaging strategy, which is very similar to what we've seen from both sides going back to like 2014, maybe even earlier than that. Let's move on to Ecuador. Very serious, tragic news out of Ecuador in roughly a month. There have been three political assassinations. We talked a little bit about the assassination of a major presidential candidate last week. But again, another political leader was assassinated in Ecuador on Monday. That would be Pedro Briones. They have presidential elections happening this Sunday.

So a special presidential election is happening this Sunday. Pedro Briones is a member of the party of former President Rafael Correa. And the frontrunner in this special presidential election is Luisa Gonzalez from the same party. So that's violence across the spectrum in Ecuador. And one thing I want to mention before we get into that, a lot of times when you see the former prime minister of Japan was assassinated tragically last summer, Shinzo Abe, a lot of times when we talk about political assassinations, it's not connected to wider trends of violence throughout the country. In Ecuador, it absolutely is. This is from the Associated Press.

The country's national police tallied 3,568 violent deaths in the first six months of this year, far more than the 2,042 reported during the same period in 2022. It's a huge increase. That year ended with 4,600 violent deaths, which was the country's highest in history and doubled the total in 2021. Ryan, one other thing I want to mention is that a lot of, especially people, my fellow conservatives in the United States, Ecuadorians are rushing the southern border at the US in huge numbers, ostensibly record numbers, flooding upwards for some good reasons. A lot of the messaging you hear from conservatives often is, well, fix your own country first, then come up here. Our country is directly tied to the

violence happening in Ecuador right now that is pushing people up to our border. And that's because a lot of the violence, the political violence in Ecuador is connected to Sinaloa, is connected to Jalisco. And these cartels are ballooning as a result of U.S. policy, whether it's U.S. drug policy, whether it's US drug policy, whether it's US border policy. Our policies are responsible in a big part for the explosion in Jalisco and Sinaloa, which are now destabilizing countries like Ecuador, which borders Colombia. Vice reports some 45% of Colombian cocaine is going through Ecuador now.

Ecuador has been, and there's a great vice report That has, you know, Ecuador has been, and this is, there's a great vice report in April that I mentioned. It has been a, obviously, it borders Colombia. So cocaine has gone through Ecuador for a long time. But they say if it was once a highway, it's now a super highway. That's the quote from the vice report that I thought put it really well. What do you make of this, Ryan? You know, I think you're saying it well. We don't know exactly who was involved yet with all of these assassinations, but it does appear that they're kind of narco-trafficker related, that there's some type of kind of cartel situation. The presidential candidate was very much known as one of these kind of anti-corruption fighters who was going to go after the cartels. He was

assassinated even though he had a, in public after a. He was assassinated even though he had a, you know, in public after a rally in Quito, even though he had a security detail kind of all completely surrounding him, they assassinated him anyway. And so you're right that the size of these cartels and their access to weapons and their ability to kind of dominate violence is producing a lot of this violence and instability that is then making economic development impossible and then is producing these massive kind of outflows of migration.

It's not as if the Ecuadorians desperately want to live in the United States. The vast majority of them would prefer to live in Ecuador. But the narco situation is making it untenable for so many of them. And our war on drugs, like you said, is the driving cause of that. And to put this in context, we can put the next element up. In a couple of days, I believe it's on the 20th, there will be a presidential election in Guatemala as well. This one's wild, and not just because the lefty candidate is named Bernie. It's Bernardo Alfaro, who is actually the grandson of Guatemala's first democratically elected president from the 40s. He was not even invited to participate in the presidential debates because he was considered such an also-ran candidate. Yet he finished

second in the first round of voting, which puts him into the runoff against a right-wing former first lady who's publicly saying that if she's elected, she's doing a Bukele-style El Salvador crackdown. She said, you know, her quote is something like, you know, human rights are for victims, not for, you know, not for people that are victimizing them. And so she's really, you know, really threatening this massive crackdown. Bernie, though, is, if the polls are to be believed, up two to one against him. And so this is a kind of social Democrat, left wing, anti-corruption, populist candidate who's dominating the kind of tough on crime, I'm going to be a Bukele style. But now he's, of course, saying he's also going to be tough on crime, but interestingly, he's not saying I'm going after the little guys. He's saying, I'm going to break up

the pharmaceutical companies. I'm going to break up the monopolies that control the telecommunications. I'm going to make sure that the prisons become places that are actually safe once again, because that's a problem in Ecuador as well as Guatemala, that the criminal justice system can't really function because even if you're able to arrest, prosecute, and imprison gang leaders, once you put them in prison, the gangs completely run the prison and they become just kind of recreation areas that are just controlled by those cartels or by the gangs. Which is a huge problem in Ecuador. Right, exactly. So then you have riots and you have the trafficking operations just continue to function just out of the prison.

So that's not a way to run any type of civil society. You're just, at that point, you've basically ceded, you know, government power over to private actors. And so, you know, he's saying that he's going to crack down in that sense, but he's not going to do a Bukele style thing where he just pretends that human rights don't exist anymore. And you have, you know, they tried, the prosecutors tried to throw him off the ballot and it had to go all the way to Guatemala's high court to say, no, no, no, the guy's in the runoff. Like you have to let him in. You haven't heard much at all from the United States on this question of Guatemala. They vaguely said, you know, we support, you know, there ought to be

democracy and everybody should follow the rules. But if Democrats, Republicans, the United States are serious about root causes, that's the thing they love to talk about, root causes, then a guy who has a mandate from the people on a social democratic platform saying that he's going to redevelop the economy of Guatemala and take on the private gangsters, ought to have the support of all good people who are making these kind of root cause arguments, if they actually mean them. But that also means allowing Guatemala to have some sovereignty, rather than having it continue to be a vassal state of the United States. So both of these elections are going to be interesting. But to your point, as these countries continue to be unstable,

the situation at the border is going to continue to be a crisis for whatever administration is in power, no matter what we do at that border. Yeah, this is what drives me crazy. I understand tackling the root causes. I think that's probably the most important thing to do. And drug policy plays a role in that. But so too does our border policy. And that's because you and I disagree on this, Ryan, and that's fine. But what the establishment Democratic Party does and the establishment Republican Party does is keep things sort of muddled to virtue signal and import cheap labor that they benefit from. And so, you know, you go

in one direction or the other. I think there's a, obviously as a conservative, I think there's a pretty strong argument that, you know, we need a clear asylum policy that is not being, you know, overwhelmed by what they're doing with CBP1 at the border and what they're doing with just basically kicking trial dates a couple of years down the road, letting people in and then disappearing into sanctuary cities. At the same time, even from the left perspective, if it was just let's basically open up the border, that does starve cartels of their ability to smuggle human beings and you would need cooperation from Mexico and other places. But basically what I'm saying is that you can go in either direction. You can

have a much more open border or a much more closed border, but what we have right now is an establishment that wants to, you know, say they have both depending on what their audience is and it has completely destabilized not just our country but it is having a massive effect on these countries that are just south of us, smaller, already less stable for a lot of different reasons, some of which directly go back to us as well. And so our border policy, it's not just our drug policy, it's also our border policy, whether you go in one direction or the other, is having an utterly destabilizing effect on these countries. And in the same way that the Biden administration tried to hold Haiti hostage, Haitian democracy,

as they like to talk about hostage, to their border policy, which we saw and we've covered here, these policies are allowing cartels to grow into multibillion dollar, multinational corporations, essentially, that have also government power and that they've been ceded like land and territory. And that is not just going to affect Central America, South America. It's going to start affecting the entire world. It's already having acute effects, obviously, in these regions. But it's spiraling in a really bad direction in ways that we don't seem prepared at all to deal with. And I think you're not going to solve any of these problems unless you do something about the cocaine trade. And what I mean by that is you would really need some type of NAFTA and

SAFTA to bring together South America, Central America, North America, and come up with a way to just straight up legalize and regulate the cocaine trade. Like we have tried this war on drugs where we're just funneling money through these different corrupt systems and it doesn't do anything about the flow of cocaine and it just props up these vicious cartels. You're still, even if you did that, you'd still have problems with the cartels. You'd have human trafficking, you'd have whatever, Bitcoin. They're going to find ways to operate criminally. But if you take out some of the biggest revenue drivers for them,

then what they end up doing is marginal rather than completely dominating entire economies. And I don't know exactly what that regulatory regime would look like, but if we don't do something like that, we're just going to have endless cycles of violence. And also, from a cocaine user perspective at this point, you're getting a lot of fentanyl getting mixed in with different drug products and people dying who are out at a club thinking they're doing a little bump of cocaine, instead it's laced with fentanyl,

and they're overdosing and dying. That's not an end result that anybody wants either. So it's not like anybody is really talking seriously about that, but if we actually want to deal seriously with the issue, I think that really has to be part of the solution. All right. Well, revelations from Michael Orr of Blindside and then NFL fame have really rocked the country. They're pretty brutal towards the family that famously, as was documented in The Blind Side, played by Sandra Bullock and Tim McGraw, took him in. Allegations, actually, though, that the

conservatorship, which was rather than an adoption, so there's some questions here about whether the conservatorship that Michael Orr was kind of pushed into, allegedly, by the family, as opposed to an adoption, was in and of itself a questionable move. He always thought that he was adopted. It turns out, according to allegations he has made in a new lawsuit, that may not be the case. Let's actually start with this. You can put the tear sheet up on the screen. This is a New York Times coverage. He says that, and this is the headline in the New York Times, that he was, quote, conned with a promise of adoption. It now appears that it was a conservatorship, and he's making allegations that the family set up this conservatorship basically to profit off of him in ways that he would not profit himself.

That's the allegation that Michael Orr has made. Extremely sad, obviously, situation as the family relationship is devolving in public view. Let's actually play, though, this clip of Michael Orr talking about the situation himself. This is E2. You just said you feel like you've been mislabeled sometimes, misunderstood. And I think, at least from what I've read in the book, a lot of that stems from how you were portrayed in the movie, The Blind Side, and that people might have the wrong idea of your personality, number one, that you were this kind of shy wallflower, that you were timid and you had to be kind of like drawn out of your shell, when in reality, you were a workaholic, you were hyper-organized, and you were like,

damn it, I'm making something of myself no matter what it takes after a rough background. Is that the big one that you feel you were mislabeled as? I think it took away the hard work and the dedication that I created from a child and going to school in the third grade, getting myself up. First one in the locker room, last one out. And I think the biggest for me is, you know, being portrayed, not being able to read or write. Second grade, I was doing plays in front of the school. And I think that's one of the, when you go into a locker room

and your teammates don't think you can learn a playbook, you know, that weighs heavy. I can imagine absolutely does. And he says that extends to all of his opportunities professionally. Basically, if you're known from the blind side, and the blind side purports to be, and maybe the blind side actually had some legal language that it was like roughly based on a true story. But either way, if that's what rockets you to fame, obviously he was very talented in his own right. But that movie is an Oscar-winning film, was beloved, controversial, but beloved by a lot of the country. You can imagine how that would affect everything.

And the reason this is coming to light now, Michael Orr said he was focused on football basically until about 2016 and wasn't focused on the details. And after he sort of shifted his focus from football, he was able to dive into the details and start unraveling some of what he thought was an adoption and seeing where some of the money went. So he filed a petition to end the conservatorship on Monday

and Orr learned that the conservatorship didn't have the power, as NBC says, to make him a legal member of their family back in February. So this is all happening now because he's just starting to, in his reasoning, kind of put the pieces together. This is from the petition. It says, the lie of Michael's adoption is one upon which co-conservators Leanne Toey and Sean Toey, I'd never learned how to pronounce that name, have enriched themselves at the expense of their ward, the undersigned Michael Orr. I think it's

Toey? Ryan, this is obviously a very, very sad situation. The Toey family denies the allegations. They say, we love Michael at 16 or 17. We'll love him at 37. We'll love him at 67. Both the son and the parents have said that. There was an excerpt from the mom's memoir that came out talking about if there's a misconception about Michael, it's that he's actually very smart. So I don't know how deliberate any of this was on their part. That will be litigated in court. I genuinely don't know. It could have been really malicious. It could not have been.

What's your sense of this, Ryan, as somebody who, you said when we took a break earlier, not a fan of the film. Oh, the film's just brutal to me. The white savior stuff is just, without, like, not even any attempts to kind of cut it for public consumption, just straight, you know, white savior dope, just injected right into the veins of the American

public. That part of it, to me, was just, like, just too much. Like, it felt like this is impossible. Like, there has to be a little bit more agency on the part of Orr. And you hear Orr there saying, look, when I was in third grade, I was getting myself up, getting to school, workaholic. He later in that interview says, I was already an All-American before I moved in to their home. And so the one thing The New York Times reported is that there's some discrepancy over the question of how much money the kids got. The parents are saying the kids got very little. The kids saying they got a little bit more than that. But broadly speaking, there was a deal that was struck, the film deal, where the blood

children did get cut in on the revenues of the movie, and or did not. Or who was the, you know, unit of star of the film, did not get cut in while his, you know, quote unquote siblings did. And I think everybody across the spectrum could agree that that's weird. Now, the dad says that the conservatorship

was set up in a way that would enable him to go to college, and there are some rules about income in college, et cetera. But the movie didn't come out until he's already in the NFL. So that wouldn't have implicated that question. So some of this does need to be litigated, but some of it also does seem clear. He should have been cut in on the movie and the book, if there was any kind of book, they're probably not book proceeds. I'm not sure. Uh, but film proceeds, absolutely. If the kid, if, if the kids that he's living with are getting cut in because of his story, like it's, it's not a, it's not a movie because of them. That's not, you know, I'm sure they're fine kids or whatever, but that's not,

that's not who they, who we all flock to the theaters to see. It was his story. So he should have been cut in on that. But he also has a book coming out. So this is drawing attention to that. And I'm actually looking forward to reading his book. He's led a fascinating life. And not just an offensive lineman, like a Pro Bowler, won a Super Bowl with the Ravens,

like one of the best offensive linemen in the league while he was playing and had a very long and successful career. Yeah, and like many people in the NFL, came from a genuinely difficult background. And it is true, watching the movie, the kind of, as you say, and this was the controversy surrounding it for a long time, the white savior narrative is really glaring. And it's definitely a movie from another time. The movie would not be made in the same way today. It would not be received in the same way today. There's no question about it. And sort of diving down into the particulars legally, I mean, I think it's really sad that that has to play out publicly.

But at the same time, if this was malicious, and to your point, it is really weird. I actually think the conservatorship is extremely weird to begin with. He was 17 years old, I think, when this deal was struck. And rather than adopting a 17-year- old, I can understand the legal argument for going with a conservatorship. A lot of people are familiar with conservatorships because of what happened with Britney Spears, what played out with Britney Spears over the last 10 plus years. But it does seem odd that they had a conservatorship over Michael Orr and continue to.

He is now filing a petition to end the conservatorship. The whole thing, I mean that in and of itself I find very strange and it seems like it's possible the conservatorship You know, maybe there were there were legal justifications their attorney who I believe is a family friend told them at the time You know, you've got to do this for college reasons, etc, etc Maybe that's the case or maybe there were other motivations involved and there were reasons why they didn't want to formally adopt him into their family but to your point there are some things that are just on the surface weird. And, you know,

at least from the sort of court of public opinion, I do feel like the ball is now in the two weeks court to prove that they had, you know, no ill intentions because these two things in and of themselves, like you said, with the movie deal, that stuff is just patently bizarre on its face. And the sort of shift culturally, I think, puts them in their legacy, like actually in big trouble going forward. I think the mom is doing motivational speeches. Leanne, I think, is her name. She does motivational speeches. I think they are still profiting off of the blindside narrative in some pretty big ways. And if they're doing that and there's way more to the story than we realize, then they deserve justice. They deserve to be held accountable

for what they did. So in some sense, it's sad this is playing out publicly because it does seem like there was a lot of love between these folks. But on the other hand, if the public's being taken for a ride, good, let's have it play out publicly so there can be some justice served. Yeah, and I want to see, compare Orr's book to Michael Lewis's book, which I read back when it came out, 2005 or 2006. And I'm curious if it was heavily sourced just to the twoies, or if he had, you know, if he accurately got or his perspective in there, you know, Lewis is the best, you know, nonfiction kind of storyteller that we've had over the last 30 years or so.

He just, you know, pumps out classic after classic. So I will be interested to see, you know, how, how well it holds up and whether or not he just kind of embedded himself with, with the parents, or quote-unquote parents, rather than Orr. So we'll see. That's something that I don't know yet, but I'll be curious about. I'm also curious to read his Sam Bankman Freed book.

He's got that one coming out. So I guess he's got his hands full, although his subject is now indisposed, having gone back to jail. So maybe he can focus on just writing it at this point. Yeah, no, I mean, I think this actually could legitimately reflect in ways that are maybe not so beneficial for Michael Lewis going forward. People may reevaluate his work,

depending on how Orr's story compares with Michael Lewis story and how well Michael Lewis is able to defend his work I don't know uh but if that's the case this is not great and it's it's not you you can really see from Orr's perspective how of course this would follow him throughout his career the way he was depicted in the movie um is he was he was treated as an idiot basically in the movie. And so you can understand how frustrating it would have been from his perspective to have that follow him throughout his career. That is just, his frustrations are very easy to empathize with.

Right, right. That was a poignant moment to hear. So you're looking around a room and you're wondering if your teammates think that you don't know how to learn a playbook, which is awfully important for an offensive lineman. Everything falls apart. And it's not like he doesn't know what he's doing. It's not like he needed the movie to be successful. This is the point that you made earlier. It's not like, well, you know, it's just the price you pay for making it. No, I mean, like he,

of course it made him more famous than he otherwise would have been. But his success in football is not due to the book and the movie. He stands on his own merits. So it's, yeah, the frustrations are very, very easy to empathize with. So I see, and I'm excited, at the bar here, it says we got some Hillary content coming up. What's your point today? Yes, Can't Stop, won't stop. I want to start by playing some clips of Hillary Clinton on Rachel Maddow's show. Just as luck would have it, she was on Maddow's show to discuss an Atlantic op-ed she wrote recently called The Weaponization of Loneliness on Monday night as the indictment, Fannie Willis's indictment against Donald Trump was dropped. That was late at night, actually. It started coming out like 8, 9 p.m., something like that. But let's start with this first clip. It's a

little bit shorter, but it's just you can see Hillary and Rachel Maddow having a little bit of a good time as the indictment is announced. Fancy meeting you. Oh, I can't believe this. Yeah, this is not the circumstances in which I expected to be talking to you. Nor me, Rachel. It's always good to talk to you. But honestly, I didn't think that it would be under these circumstances. Yet another set of indictments. Kayleigh McEnany on Fox News reacted to the clip just by being like, what are you, you know, you're laughing at this. It's not good for the country. And obviously, Kayleigh McEnany was attached to the Trump administration so it's especially not funny if you're Kayleigh McEnany.

But at the same time, she does have a point about how funny all of this is and whether or not it's a good look for Hillary Clinton, somebody who actually avoided an indictment because James Comey said no reasonable prosecutor would bring this case against her, which was very debatable at the time. She's somebody who sort of skirted that and lost to Donald Trump, then perpetrated this fiction of Russian collusion in ways that were not tethered to a small but real problem of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Ha ha, this is so funny. Let me laugh in this nice MSNBC studio. It might not be the best look, but

that aside, let's dive into the substance here and let's watch more of the conversation between Matt Owen Clinton from Monday night. If bad actors tell us falsely that every election is stolen and that the only way an election is trustworthy is if they come out on top of it, then something it tells you something not just about that person or that moment. It maybe wounds us as a democracy and in a way that is hard to repair. What do you think about how we get better after the wounds that have been inflicted on us through this process? Well, I think, you know, the truth matters. I think having these cases be brought and be brought in such professional manners, we'll see how they unfold. Obviously,

the trials, if there are trials, are going to be critically important. But the article you mentioned that I published about the weaponization of loneliness really does, in my view, point to the larger cultural concerns, because the lack of trust, the divisiveness, the undermining of faith in ourselves, in each other, respect for our institutions, the rule of law, all of that has been deliberately inculcated within our body politic. You know, there were trends before. I mean, we have seen how people have become more isolated, less community-oriented, less civically-minded. Then we see how social media and technology

has certainly accelerated a lot of those trends. Okay, so Hillary Clinton is low-hanging fruit. I get that. I think it's still relevant to break down a lot of what she said there, because she's representative of a class of elites who is now basically just unhappy with the world that they created. That's the big takeaway, I think, from everything Hillary Clinton just said there.

She said, Rachel Maddow said, the only way, if we're in a situation where the only way people can feel comfortable with the elections, you know, an election is stolen if they lose it. The fact that Rachel Maddow said that to Hillary Clinton earnestly in a way that wasn't pointing the finger at Hillary Clinton, I think is remarkable. There's a huge difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in that Hillary Clinton did concede that she lost the election to Donald Trump the next day. She spent years after that casting doubt, though, on the outcome of the election, saying that Russia

stole the election. Her campaign was a huge part of planting the seeds of doubt about Trump's legitimacy as president of the United States, and she continued to perpetuate the fiction of this grand, vast conspiracy, to borrow a phrase, about Donald Trump being an asset of Vladimir Putin in some very specific and very false ways. So just to start, Hillary Clinton, again, we see her being somebody that is creating a world she doesn't want to take accountability for having created. She creates this world that she's then unhappy with. I don't think she recognizes how detrimental, I shouldn't say I don't think, I know she doesn't recognize, she never could recognize how detrimental the crisis of confidence in institutions, how much her fiction, the fiction that she was in a large part responsible for about

Russia collusion, how much that played into the loss of trust in institutions. By the way, it's always worth mentioning that even the birther conspiracy, which was famously perpetuated by Donald Trump, came from the Clinton campaign all the way back in 2008. I believe that was a Sidney Blumenthal special. But nevertheless, Hillary Clinton has been sowing the seeds of doubt, of distrust in our institutions for a very long time. And again, this is where the elites who are passing down the United States of 2023 to their children and their grandchildren, look around and are suddenly really unhappy with the world that they've created. Although, of course, they're unwilling to take accountability for having created it.

They'll take accountability for creating other things, but they won't take accountability for creating this world that they're deeply unhappy with now. I actually want to say, I'm glad that Hillary Clinton's op-ed, The Weaponization of Loneliness, that she echoed a little bit from in this Maddow interview, genuinely I'm glad that she's pointing some figures at civic breakdown and at technology, at loneliness, at isolation. I am genuinely very glad to hear that because I think there are a whole lot of people who sit in those MSNBC studios, cable news studios, and don't recognize exactly how much that's crept into the everyday lives of your average American. Half of the battle is admitting you have a problem.

In all seriousness, I think it's fantastic that somebody like Hillary Clinton has come to the realization that there are serious trends. When this was being written about by Robert Putnam in 1980, where was Hillary Clinton when bullying alone came out, when what's the matter with Kansas came out, when coming apart came out, all of these essential pieces of scholarship that were showing very real problems existed? What happened from the Clinton administration in the 90s? Well, we saw a lot of policy decisions that exacerbated the problems of civic breakdown

in certain pockets of the country, of loneliness in certain pockets of the country. Let's just name two, NAFTA and WTO. Great for some parts of the country, very, very destabilizing for other parts of the country. Let's look at all of the tech mergers that happened during the Obama administration that Hillary Clinton was a part of. Let's talk about Section 230, which was passed by none other than Bill Clinton himself, passed into law by none other than Bill Clinton himself, that allowed tech companies. And you know, there was a

piece of legislation at the time that we didn't really know where the internet was going. So it's somewhat understandable in the same way that you can look back and say, I get why there was so much excitement among elites for NAFTA and WTO. I understand. But the practical consequences have been way more serious and way more destabilizing than anybody from that sort of political establishment recognized that would be. And yet they still, they don't want to take accountability for it and they still blame everybody else.

That's what Hillary Clinton is doing here, pointing her fingers at everybody else instead of looking around and saying, oh, maybe the regime that I led and championed for so long had something to do with this. It's also remarkable to hear her talk about the rule of law, which as I mentioned earlier, I mean, she really just said there, rule of law. We've talked on the show over the last couple of weeks. I think pretty much everybody here at Breaking Points would be super happy if they locked up every politician who did something bad. That's not what happens. So to hear Hillary Clinton, a supporter of Joe

Biden, who's overseeing or who is the father of Hunter Biden, I should say, there are very serious implications about lack of rule of law when it comes to Hunter Biden, very serious implications about lack of rule of law when it comes to Hunter Biden, very serious implications about lack of rule of law when it comes to Hillary Clinton herself, when it comes to Bill Clinton. So to hear her sort of wax sanctimonious about rule of law is another example that, again, she's looking around and saying, you know, rule of law, Donald Trump felt so comfortable flouting rule of law in all of these different cases. And Republicans are now so comfortable with Donald Trump flouting the rule of law in all of these different cases, and Republicans are now so comfortable with Donald Trump flouting the rule of law in all of these different cases. That is so disturbing. It is, but the only reason people are doing that is because rule of law,

it's sort of a fight fire with fire. That's a lot of things, and I'm not saying that's right. A lot of people on the conservative side think that's right now. I don't really agree with that over in particular cases. But to see her just being like, oh my gosh, the mysterious rule of law, the breakdown in rule of law, it's just really, really too cute by half to hear that specifically from Hillary Clinton. And it's also remarkable to hear her talk about public trust for all of the reasons that we've already mentioned. So again, especially from Rachel Maddow, the journalist in this situation, to be tossing a question to Hillary Clinton about how disturbing it is that people think, you know, it's only, it's just, an election is not stolen if I win, but if I lose, then it is stolen. To hear that particularly tossed to Hillary Clinton,

to hear that from a network that has platformed Stacey Abrams however many times without ever asking her the question like, hey, maybe do you think walking around saying that you're the legitimate governor of Georgia might be sowing some seeds of distrust in ways that are very unhealthy? It's just, again, it's the world they created that they are unhappy with. So that's one. And two is that they're just unwilling to admit that it's the world that they created. They're unwilling to even see, recognize, understand that it's the world they created. And it's not just from the sort of abstract questions about how Hillary Clinton talked about Russia in the media. It also goes down to policy decisions that she supported.

Guess who was a major donor to the Clinton Foundation? The Sackler family. Some of this stuff, tech, a donor to Hillary Clinton. Some of this stuff is concrete policy decisions that she supported, NAFTA, WTO, 230, tech mergers under Obama. I get that she wasn't in control of tech mergers, but what was she talking about when it came to all of these different decisions? Where did she disagree? I mean, this is a woman who campaigned for president in 2007, 2008, campaigned for president in 2015 and 2016, and was on the wrong side of a lot of these issues. So in addition to just sort of the bigger questions about how Hillary Clinton has discussed these issues in public in ways that are severely detrimental to public trust. The issues where she has been untruthful, where she has outright lied

over and over again, that has contributed to a lack of public trust. The ways in which she has been treated by, let's say, when it comes to cases of the rule of law, her husband has been treated, the administration, the Obama administration she served under has been treated. These are all really serious, and they have all contributed over time to places in the country that are super supportive of Donald Trump, maybe because they bore the brunt of WTO and NAFTA

in ways that other parts of the country didn't. Hillary Clinton famously on stage in India bragged about how she won in 2016 states with the highest GDP, as though all those places that are unproductive, that is just, who would want to win those states anyway? Who would want to be popular in those states anyway? That's for people like Donald Trump. So it just comes back to this lack of accountability, Ryan. And I find that really grating. All right, Ryan, I think you have an update for us on your fantastic reporting in Pakistan

about the Imran Khan situation continuing to unfold over there. Tell us more. Three different interesting updates here. One, we'll talk about the State Department response. We're gonna talk about the response in Pakistan. But more immediately, we have breaking news just out of Pakistan right now. The Pakistani government has charged Imran Khan, former prime minister, with losing a top secret Pakistani cable. He had previously said that he had lost this cable that proved a connection between

United States pressure and his ouster. They've now filed charges against him with the strong implication being that Imran Khan was our source. He lost the document, now we have it. Now, the problem with that logic is many fold, and we can go through it here. One, my colleague, Murtaza Hussain, nor myself, traveled to Pakistan. We did not go to Pakistan, so we did not get a physical copy. We obviously got a digital copy. So the question of whether or not he lost it is absurd. It's inconsistent, makes no sense. So we also were very clear in the story that our source was inside the Pakistani military. The source was not Imran Khan.

It was not anybody in his circle. It was not any civilian functionary. We were very clear about that. And the fact that he lost the document doesn't have any connection to whether or not somebody else could digitally leak a copy. What's interesting, though, is that there was a kind of a three-step move that the State Department and also the kind of Pakistani elite were doing about this cable. So first they would say it's inauthentic.

This is, you know, how do we even know that this is real? Then they would say this must have come from Imran Khan and it's high treason. And then they would say this is a nothing burger. And if you think about it, like all three of those things can't be true together. Two of the three can't be together. One of the three can't be true together. It either is authentic and it is either a treasonous act or it's a nothing burger. It can't be all of those three different things. Finally, it seems like they're moving away from questioning the authenticity of it. And we can put up this first element here.

The outgoing Pakistani Prime Minister, Shabazz Sharif, who has had access to the document so would know what it says, said this in an interview with The Guardian. He said, Khan said he had the cipher, but he had lost it. Now it has been published on a website. And so that is confirmation that the document is authentic. Now, within about an hour or two after our show posted last week, breaking the news of this cable and simultaneously published at The Intercept, there was a State Department briefing.

I want to play a couple of clips from that briefing to show kind of how they responded. People asked, why wasn't it in the show? Why did it come out just a little bit after? Because we were giving the State Department time to respond. What Matt Miller says from the podium here is very similar to what he said in the written statement that we included in the article, but it's interesting to watch him say it. So here's the State Department getting pressed on that cable last week. The Cypher cable, supposedly,

that's been reported. I know you've had some on-record comments on this, but I wanted to ask you about the veracity of the comments. It's obviously a Pakistani document. Does the United States generally think that what was reported there, what was that? So a few things. One, yes, it's a report reported to be a Pakistani document. I can't speak to whether it is an actual Pakistani document or not. I just simply don't know. With respect to the comments that were reported, I'm not going to speak to private diplomatic exchanges other than to say that even if those comments were accurate as reported, they in no way show the United States

taking a position on who the leader of Pakistan ought to be. If you remember the comments that the State Department made privately to the Pakistani ambassador, they said, if the no confidence vote against Imran Khan succeeds, all will be forgiven. They all will be forgiven was the way that the United States was upset that he had visited Russia on the way that the United States was upset that he had

visited Russia on the day of the invasion, that he had taken what they called a quote, aggressively neutral stance on the Russia-Ukraine war. So somehow the State Department is insisting here that by saying that if you take a particular action, which is throw the prime minister out through a no confidence vote, all will be forgiven, that that is somehow not stating a preference about what will happen. I suppose you could argue that, hey, they're just stating facts here, like the same way that, let's say, an armed robber might approach somebody and say, if you don't give me your wallet, I will pull the trigger. Now, I don't have a preference over whether or not one thing or the other happens,

but I'm just telling you what the situation is. And then if he turns over his wallet, you say, well, look, that was an independent decision that that person made to hand his wallet over. The press corps did not completely accept that answer. Push to hand his wallet over. The press corps did not completely accept that answer. Push back a little bit. Here's the next moment from that interview. We expressed concern privately to the government of Pakistan as we expressed concern publicly

about the visit of then Prime Minister Khan to Moscow on the very day of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. We made that concern quite clear. But as the former Pakistani ambassador to the United States himself has stated, the allegations that the United States has interfered in internal decisions about the leadership of Pakistan are false. As we've stated, they're false. They've always been false and they remain false. Okay, so now Miller here is making a very specific claim and he made the claim to us in a comment also, but we did not include it because we thought it was too much of a false claim to just allow it to be said publicly. But since he's saying it from the podium, let's address it here. He's saying that the ambassador himself has said that there was actually no interference. In fact, in the document, in his own assessment, he says that

Don spoke out of turn here and that Pakistan ought to complain officially to the United States about the behavior. What I think is going on, and I asked for a clarification from the State Department on this a week ago, and I re-upped that request today. I think they have the wrong Khan here. So we put up this next element. A man named Azam Khan, who was the principal secretary to Imran Khan, was arrested and held for 30 days in detention by the Pakistani government. After that 30 days of detention, he put out a statement saying that Khan really trumped up the allegations that were in this cable and that actually they don't show that there's any U.S. conspiracy. That is consistent with what Miller is saying. He's the principal secretary. That is a different official. Asad Majid Khan was the ambassador,

not Azam Khan. So I have asked the State Department, did you confuse your cons here? I understand we're now talking three different cons. But if you're going to make a claim that definitive that the ambassador has said that there was no interference, you've got to make sure that you have the right con. I'll report back if I hear this, but there is no public record that we can find of Assad Khan going back on his initial assessment that is included in the cable that we published. And then you have a follow-up from the AP reporter who's in the gallery here saying, look, okay, you're saying that you're not expressing any preference, but you can imagine why people receiving that message might think that you are. So let's roll the full rest of this clip. If you take all of the comments in context that were reported in that purported cable,

I think what they show is the United States government expressing concern about the policy choices that the prime minister was taking. It is not in any way the United States government expressing a preference on who the leadership of Pakistan ought to be. Well, Matt, just – you can go. I think what I'm hearing is that essentially the substance of this report and the purported Pakistani cable back to Islamabad is accurate. But you're saying that it – but it is not the U.S. saying that Prime Minister Khan, then Prime Minister Khan, has to – should leave office. Is that correct? Close-ish.

I cannot speak to the veracity. Close-ish. Then I'll explain what I mean by close-ish. I understand that's a diplomatic term of office. I'll explain what I mean by that, which is I cannot speak to the veracity of this document. What I can say – let me just finish. What I can say – let's even just – even if those comments were all 100 percent accurate as reported, which I do not know them to be, they do not in any way show a representative of the State Department taking a position on who the leadership – they're commenting on – Okay. MR PRICE, you can understand, though, perhaps – perhaps you can understand why other countries might think when the U.S. weighs in, even in a way like this, that it

is taking a position on it. I mean, I can think – name like five or ten leaders who the United States has sought to oust, including some that it has been successful in ousting, although not only after military invasions. So it's not an unprecedented thing for a country to think that the U.S. is trying to pressure it into or trying to make its views known about who it thinks should be the leader of a country, right? I will say that I can understand how those comments, number one, could be taken out of context, and number two, how people might desire for them to be taken out of context and might try to use them to advance an agenda that is not represented by the comments of

themselves. And do you think that's what's happening here? I think a number of people have taken them out of context and used them for political purposes. I won't speak to intentions, but I think that's what's happened. And just so viewers understand the comments that he's talking about, specifically, Donald Liu, the State Department official, said to the Pakistan ambassador, quote, I think if the no confidence vote against the prime minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Russia visit is being looked at as a decision

by the prime minister. Otherwise, I think it will be tough going ahead. So Emily, you and I were talking last week before we had gotten the State Department response, which is why we hadn't posted the video yet. And we were kind of guessing, how is the State Department going to handle this? Because they clearly are now caught doing the thing that they have said for more than a year that they did not do. And it turns out, no, that they can just continue to say that they didn't. It's hard to be stunned at my age in this field, but that to me was a rather stunning set of sentences for a public official to put together. Good on Matt Lee, by the way. Ryan, this reporting has been so important and just amazing to see the State Department

dance around it. I know you'll continue to keep us updated on that, even all the way from Europe, as we continue this month and beyond. So that does it for us today. It was a big show because there's just, it's, we're four indictments in that Axios chart we showed earlier in the show. Every time in DC, political reporters sort of brace themselves and, you know, it's bittersweet, it's exciting,

and it's also going to be a ton of work when you're covering a presidential election cycle. But this time it's a presidential election cycle with four indictments that will be weaving in and out of each other. So there's a lot, especially when Congress comes back after Labor Day, it is just going to be peddled to the metal. There's so much news to cover and we'll be back here every Wednesday, breaking it all down for you. Never, never a dull moment. Never a dull moment. Make sure to subscribe to watch the full CounterPoint show from beginning to end. That's available to premium subscribers. Make sure to follow us, subscribe on podcast platforms, subscribe on YouTube.

We appreciate it so much. We appreciate you watching us week after week. We're almost at a year of CounterPoints. We'll be excited to celebrate that in September. Thanks, everyone, for tuning in. We appreciate it so much. See you later. 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.

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So we'll find out soon. This author writes, my father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. He's trying to give it to his irresponsible son, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up.

They could lose their family and millions of dollars? Yep. Find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.