Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 8/9/22: FBI's Trump Raid, GOP Reaction, Political Implications, Legal Possibilities, Dark Brandon, Legacy Media, & More!

Episode Date: August 9, 2022

Krystal and Saagar break down the FBI's raid of Trump's Mar-a-Lago compound, the GOP reaction, Dark Brandon memes, Maddow's next steps, 'stop the steal' backfiring, GOP ignoring mainstream media, and the legal implications of the FBI raid!To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/Tickets: https://www.ticketmaster.com/event/0E005CD6DBFF6D47 Bradley P. Moss: https://twitter.com/BradMossEsq https://markzaid.com/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Happy Tuesday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. I don't know. We really had to scrape the bottom of the barrel of figuring out what to talk about today. No, I mean, honestly, guys, we had a whole other show planned for you. And then lo and behold, the FBI raids the former

president's residence in Florida. So rather than get into a big preamble here, let's just jump straight into it. So yesterday evening, we got this news from the former president himself. Let's go ahead and put his statement up on the screen. And I'll read to you a good portion of this. We don't, I think, need to hear the whole thing, but we'll get a little flavor of it. He says, these are dark times for our nation as my beautiful home, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents. Nothing like this ever happened to a president of the United States before, that is true. After working and cooperating with the relevant government agencies,

this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate. It is prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the justice system, and an attack by radical left Democrats who desperately don't want me to run for president in 2024, especially based on recent polls, and who will likewise do anything to stop Republicans and conservatives in the upcoming midterm elections. Such an assault could only take place in broken third world countries. Sadly, America has now become one of those countries corrupt at a level not seen before. They even broke into my safe. What is the difference between this and Watergate where operatives broke into the Democrat National Committee? Here in reverse,

Democrats broke into the home of the 45th president of the United States. So let me just say at the top here that, listen, we still have precious few details about what they were looking for, what exactly this was all about, what this is going to lead to, what sort of information the Justice Department and presumably the federal judge who signed off on this, what they have access to that none of us knows. So we're just going to go through the facts as we know them right now in what is, I mean, he's right that this has never happened before in history. That's the one thing we can say for certain is this is an absolutely extraordinary turn of events. And I do think it's important to have the sort of overall context, which is that the president is subject to investigation on any number of fronts. One over is, you know, there's a D.C. grand jury, two actually D.C. grand juries that are looking into his involvement on January 6th. There's Georgia prosecutors looking into the fake elector scheme there and potentially what Trump's involvement was with that scheme.

There is a New York investigation into his business. And there is also an investigation into his handling of classified materials. And what we have learned, according to reporting through New York Times and other places, is that this FBI search of Mar-a-Lago had to do with that last piece, the handling of classified documents. Let's go ahead and put Maggie Haberman up on the screen here. So she had this, I don't know if it was a scoop, if she was the first to get it, but she was one among several to have this piece of information that the search related to the 15 boxes of material Trump took to Mar-a-Lago last year per three different sources. According to multiple people familiar with the investigation, appeared to be focused on that material that he brought with him to Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence when he left the White House. Those boxes contain many pages of classified documents, according to a person familiar with their contents.

We're going to get into a minute into all of the details of what we know about those documents. And let me just put this last piece up on the screen here from Jonathan Lemire, who kind of has all of the details that we know at this point, that the focus was on mishandled classified government documents, that the raid took hours. Actually, the very first reporter to break this story was just this like random Florida reporter. According to their sources, they said the FBI had been at Mar-a-Lago all day since the morning. And they actually were like, I, to be honest with you, am not a strong enough reporter to chase this down, but I promise it's real. And of course, it did turn out to be real. Trump was not at Mar-a-Lago. He could probably presume that that was intentional. He was in New York at the time. And the Biden White House apparently was not given a heads up. Top aides learned about it on

Twitter and by news accounts, as we all did, the last piece they have there is that potentially why this is happening right now at this time is because we are just about into 90 days before the election. Remember at the beginning of the week, we were talking about 100 days till the election just recently. So typically 90 days out from an election, there's what's called a quiet period where they don't want to have any big actions like this that could impact the politics of the situation. So, Sagar, that's basically what we— Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's anything else to say except it's obviously an extraordinary event. We don't appear to know all that much. Currently, the focus appears to be on mishandled classified government documents. Of course, it's an extraordinary event for the Department of Justice to sign off on a search warrant of the former president of the United States in order

to raid his compound. It's even more extraordinary because a judge apparently reviewed the evidence and found evidence not only that the search warrant would be aided to an investigation, but that they had reasonable suspicion that they would find something that would aid that investigation and push it even further. And of course, as you and I have been discussing, search warrants often turn up other materials or other things that could be in plain view or sight, which could then be used in the investigation. We have had nothing yet from the FBI. And I went back and looked. Christopher Wray, who of course was selected by President Trump after he fired James Comey actually testified before Congress and said that if he were to conduct an investigation into anybody's name that he would do undue, he would take an extraordinary amount of course. Again, I'm just reiterating what he said at the

time was if I were to investigate somebody of political prominence, I would go out of my way and not to besmirch their character, you know, in the public sphere. He was at that time, he was rebuking James Comey, because remember, there was all kinds of crazy stuff that happened in the Comey investigation of Hillary Clinton. Extraordinary amounts of almost public transparency. Comey, of course, giving press conferences, which at the time was extraordinarily out of the norm. He was actually even rebuked by Loretta Lynch for doing so. Everybody hated the way he handled it. Everybody hated the way he handled it. Everybody hated the way he handled it.

It was horrific. And then beyond that, of course, the political influence of Loretta Lynch at the time. So, of course, the Biden White House claims that they did not know about this. Previous reporting does indicate, though, Crystal, that President Biden had been very frustrated and had made it known, not necessarily to Merrick Garland, but to other people around him and his coterie, that he was frustrated that Merrick Garland had not been investigating former President Trump. So that appears to be the case. I mean, as I was telling you this morning, having a lot of flashbacks to Loretta Lynch, the Obama administration, the Department of Justice, the tarmac meetings and more.

So I think everybody should just buckle up and get ready to learn a hell of a lot about the Presidential Records Act, about the constitutional impact. We're going to start that education for you today. Yes, I've spent the last several hours reading about all of this for you. I'm an expert. I mean, there is, look, there's so much to say about this. First of all, I do want to underscore some of the basic points here about what it takes to get this type of warrant to conduct a search of anyone's home. The idea is that you have to prove there is a probable cause of a crime and that it is likely you will turn up evidence of that crime in the search. Obviously, you know, the other option available is a subpoena.

The reason that you do a search instead of or in conjunction with a subpoena, we don't know whether a subpoena was issued or not, is because you fear that those documents or whatever you're looking for might be hidden, might be taken away. So the fact that, you know, you have the Department of Justice and, I mean, it's 100% certain that Merrick Garland signed off on something of this sort of political significance, this would have gone all the way to the top. He signs off on it. Then you have a federal judge saying, yes, I think there's probable cause. And I think that you're likely to turn up evidence in this search. That is incredibly extraordinary. As you're pointing out, and just to underscore again, while the search, based on

what we know, and I do think it's important to put the caveat in there of like reporting changes, and these are very early facts. And the fact that we know it has to do with the record thing classified records issue, could be potentially used in other investigations. this search had to do with classified materials, that does not mean that it won't potentially touch other ongoing investigations that we know are being conducted right now. I think it's also important to note some of the things that have come out in the media recently. There has been significant reporting that there seemed to be an escalation in terms of the sort of heightened scrutiny and direct investigations into Trump. We talked to you before about those D.C. grand juries who were being presented evidence and two of Mike Pence's aides came and testified to them and they were asking very specific questions

about what Trump knew, what those meetings were like, and what his involvement was in the, actually the fake elector scheme seemed to be more of what they were focused on versus his sort of incitement around January 6th. So that's important to keep in mind. Another thing that's important to keep in mind is you'll recall Merrick Garland, Attorney General Merrick Garland, recently gave a fairly rare interview to Lester Holt of NBC News, in which, for the first time, he said very clearly that, you know, he would follow the facts wherever they went and that no person was above the law, seeming to open the door for,

look, we could be potentially, you know, looking at indicting former President Trump. And then the last piece that I'll add to that sort of overall context is, I don't know if you saw this, Sagar, but former Attorney General Eric Holder had been interviewed recently, and he outright predicted that given what we know in the public sphere, and I assume that he's still pretty well connected in the Justice Department and other places, never happened before, the president's home being searched by the FBI. It's pretty hard to imagine at this point that they go to that length and don't ultimately end up with some sort of indictment of the former president. It's hard to read the set of facts otherwise. We will speak, well, also, and this is possibly the case, we're speaking with lawyer Bradley Moss. He's actually a national security lawyer who specializes in classified litigation. So we'll be speaking with him about that.

But actually, I was speaking with him earlier when we were booking him last night. And it's actually even possible that this isn't even about Trump necessarily, but it's also about the people around him. So we'll also get to the political ramifications, which is, I think just at the top, I'll state this. They better have the goods,

because if they don't, they have unleashed holy hell onto American politics. And I guess this is a good transition to the specific facts of what we know about this classified material. So let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. And it stems from a story that broke in February of 2022, earlier this year. The recovery of 15 boxes, the National Archives chartered a plane, flew down to Mar-a-Lago and recovered 15 boxes from Mar-a-Lago. That included, from what we know, letters from Barack Obama, from Kim Jong-un, and it underscored the previous administration's cavalier handling of presidential records. Now, according to what we know about this is that the Presidential Records Act actually requires the president and his aides in order to preserve all possibly both classified, unclassified, historically important information, including also the private communications of the president, memos, and any other contemporary notes that he may have taken for both historical purposes, but also to preserve the record for all time, specifically

for cases like this. What we also know about that is that the inventory list of that has come out and been described as, in the unclassified section, occupying 100 pages. So 100 pages was the inventory list, not necessarily the boxes themselves, Crystal. The other important part is that the classified materials section, currently, if they were to use the same listing standard, and I know this is getting boring, would occupy approximately three pages of the inventory list itself, as in X document, Y document, et cetera. So we don't actually know the amount of materials, but if the classified materials list were to look the same as the unclassified materials list, it would be approximately three pages out of the 100 pages that have already been taken out of Mar-a-Lago. FBI, to prosecutors, and to others that their investigation and that their attempt in order to

get back all classified and unclassified materials from the former president's residence was then unsuccessful. And also prosecutors, let's go to this next part up on the screen, two months ago were already probing these actual classified materials and the handling of it. Now, on this, it is important to also underscore why and how and the actual circumstances through which it would matter. Simply taking classified materials is not necessarily a violation of the Presidential Records Act at a criminal level. What prosecutors would have had to prove, and this article is from May of 2022, what they lay out in actual crime was committed, is they would have to prove that the president or somebody around him knowingly and selectively took classified materials and knowingly did so in violation of the Presidential Records Act. Now, Trump himself did himself no favors. Part of the reason why is that because Trump did not want to admit that he had lost the election. So there was a hurried and frenzied attempt in order to pack, gather these materials. The process that should have been gone

through in order to do so was not done. Now we get to the question of classified material itself, which I'm sure many people are wondering. The president is ultimately the determiner of classification, as in the president of the United States basically can declassify whatever he wants. He could take the most top-secret documents inside of the U.S. military and declassify it tomorrow and simply publish it. That's how it works in our chain of command. Now the question becomes, did he declassify those documents to make them unclassified whenever he took them? Now, here we have a little bit of interesting reporting, which is months ago, Kash Patel, who is an attorney, he's been in and out of the White House. He's very much so involved in not only Stop the Steal information, but others. He actually spoke to Breitbart News.

And in that article, what he describes is that, yes, these classified materials were already declassified, but he admits that the White House Counsel's Office had not updated the classification markings on some of these documents. Here's what he says, quote, Trump declassified whole sets of materials in anticipation of leaving government that he thought the American public should have the right to read for themselves. The White House counsel failed to generate the paperwork to change the classification markings, but that doesn't mean that the information wasn't declassified. I was there with President Trump when he said, we are declassifying this information. He was saying at that time, the story is just another disinformation campaign

designed to break the public trust in the president. That has lived on transparency. So I believe that some of this will come down to a major fight. And this also stems back to May. That's when this story was written. So we're going off what we have so far in the public record, which is that such that there could be so-called violation

of the Presidential Records Act on this classification, that it will come down to a fight of actual classification authority by President Trump, whether the process was followed, whether he knowingly and the Justice Department had to prove that he knowingly circumvented and selectively tried in order to circumvent the Presidential Records Act, which could be why they rate it as safe, right? Because it didn't end up in those boxes. And then it will ultimately, I believe, if all of this stems from, and again, this is only based upon what we know, will come down to this matter of classification authority, whether it was a White House counsel's fault, whether Trump, you know, whether they overlooked it, whether he knowingly circumvented it. And this will be a central part. So as I was saying, just like with the Hillary emails thing, we all learned, you know, who exactly installed the server in Hillary's house,

Huma Abedin's access to the server, whether the server had been pinged, exactly the location the server was located, the exact emails of such. So everybody buckle up because we're all going to become very familiar with classification law, declassification authority, the White House Council's process of declassifying said documents, the Presidential Records Act, the National Archives, what has to be preserved, what doesn't have to be preserved, and what rises to the level of criminality under the Presidential Records Act. So that's where we stand right now. Yes. I mean, potentially, or this is an entree to broader investigations. And again, the reporting we have so far does not rule out

that additionally in this warrant there was, you know, that this touched other investigations, that it wasn't just the Presidential Records Act. So I'm just really reserving judgment in a lot of ways because it's so early. Now, you would think, as you were saying, Sagar, that if they were willing to take this historic, unprecedented action, that they would have the goods, that they would have him dead to rights, that it would be clear as possible. That would be the expectation.

But again, at this point, we just don't know. So, you know, we're going to play some of the reaction on Fox News, which was really, you know, very telling in a lot of ways. You know, they've automatically decided without knowing anything whatsoever that, of course, he did nothing wrong. And, of course, this is abuse of power and all this stuff. An immediate rush to judgment. have the facts at this point to know whether they really had the goods, whether it's really justified to take what is by any account an extraordinary action here. Just to read to you about, you know, specifically on the Presidential Records Act stuff, which doesn't just pertain to classified documents, but of course the classified data, that's the most sensitive, that's the most

potentially problematic area. They talked to an expert in one of these articles who said typically records preservation proceeds by mutual agreement with the occupant of the White House staff and archivists, quote, but if there is willful and unlawful intent to violate the law, then the picture changes with penalties of up to three years in jail for individuals who willfully conceal or destroy public records, quote. You can't prosecute for just tearing willfully conceal or destroy public records. Quote, you can't prosecute for just tearing up papers, he said of Trump. You would have to show him being highly selective and have evidence that he wanted to behave unlawfully. So like a little mistake, the, there was a reporting yesterday. Again, this is again, Maggie Haberman reporting about how he would tear up the documents and flush them down the toilet. And she had pictures yesterday of partially flushed documents in toilets, various toilets around the White House. So just that alone is actually not enough. Yes. You have to have that and you have to have the proof that he knew this was wrong and was intentionally violating the law for this to actually be a criminal act. Bingo. And that's what it will all come down to the circumstances. And look, to prove something like this is

extraordinary. You can't just really rely on witness testimony. You kind of have to either have like a written record, phone call, some sort of other evidence, especially when we're talking about the former president. So I think you're right. We should all just reserve the fact that we actually don't really know all that much about this. One interesting thing is that Trump actually did receive a copy of the warrant whenever, or at least one of his representatives, that would at least lay out some of what they were looking for. Frankly, I think you should publish it. If it's a witch hunt and all of this, we should know. I mean, part of the maddening thing around all of this is that given how high profile and public the former president is, the political ramifications, is we just simply have no clue about what's happening with the investigation. And we're going to get to the calls for the GOP reaction on an investigation

and more. But I think the facts of the matter are just more important than ever when we're discussing because otherwise people can jump to some wild conclusions, which I'm already beginning to see. Let's go ahead and move on to this next part. So some of you might remember, as I immediately did, in terms of the exact law and classification materials as to one very interesting part of that. Now, there was a very viral tweet that went up yesterday. Let's go and put this up there on the screen from Mark Elias. He's a longtime Russiagate connected figure, and he was fanning a lot of resistance hope. Let's put his tweet up there, please. What he points to is that in 18 U.S. Code 2071, in the concealment, removal, or mutilation generally of classified materials,

there is a clause, Part B, that says any person who is convicted of doing so shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States. So, this was taken as fact that this would, if he was convicted, actually bar President Trump from ever holding office again. However, we actually all went through this already during the Hillary episode of her use of a classified materials server in her basement. And what we found, and let's go ahead and throw this up there, is that you cannot actually impose qualifications on holding the presidency by statute, that the Supreme Court has ruled that the qualifications for the presidency of the United States are set only and only in the Constitution, that the search for a one weird trick, as my friend Jason puts it, to banish Trump from politics will simply have to continue. And I

think he's right there. I mean, I guess the only part of the one weird trick would be if he's literally sitting in a federal penitentiary. So I guess you can't run for office then. Although I actually don't even know if that is true. I actually think you can. Didn't Jim Traficant. Oh, my God. What a throwback. I think he ran for Congress from a prison cell, I think. So I don't actually think even that technically bars him. I'm sure it makes a difference. Was I right? Did I get it? He was certified to run for the same seat

and said that his platform to repeal the 16th Amendment of the Constitution, he actually ended up losing that race. Let's see. No, he was released from prison on September 2009. So I think at the time of the election that he was not technically sitting in a federal penitentiary. But he was campaigning while in prison. Right, but he did enter prison in 2002. So, wow, this will be a fun one.

So when he filed for office, he was in prison. Sounds like, anyway. I don't want to speak definitively because I genuinely don't know, but that is a fascinating one I had not even thought about. I think it would be a barrier. I think it would make things very difficult to difficult for office sitting in a federal jail cell. But, you know, I'm not sure that it technically rules you out from office. Again, these are wild times to be contemplating any of this. on the Federal Records Act, the fact remains that the president is under investigation in multiple jurisdictions across the country, any one of which could turn up an indictment. Actually, Eric Holder, who again, you know, I think it's interesting to hear what he thinks

about it, not only because he used to be attorney general, but because he's presumably well-connected in the DOJ and in the legal community, said he actually thinks the most advanced investigation is the one that's going on in Georgia regarding the fake elector scheme, more so than the grand juries that are right here in D.C. Now, I would also expect that we're going to enter a relatively quiet period now that we are into, you know, very close to the midterm elections. So it's probable that we have this, you know, major, major event right now. And then we don't hear much of anything until after the elections are finished and we're, you know, beyond the midterms. But that's just speculation based on historical

precedent and what the Justice Department has done in the past. You know, it is interesting, the parallels with the Hillary thing, and it kind of cuts both ways because, you know, you had certainly at the time Republicans felt that the handling of classified material was very vital, extremely important, worthy of investigation, worthy of potentially hashtag locker upping. Now it's, you know, it's no big deal. And like, this is an overreach. And who really cares about classified information, et cetera, et cetera. I'm not sure I can bear a relitigation of all of that, having lived through some of it and having participated in much of it itself.

But I mean, we all learned, I used to know the details of like, there was like this seaman who had also been convicted. Yes, I was thinking about this this morning too. And he was on, they talked about it on Fox News relentlessly about how it's unfair. They went after him. I remember every detail of the guy, too. And he was on—they talked about it on Fox News relentlessly about how it's unfair. They went after him. They charged him.

They didn't charge Hillary. All of this stuff. I do want to say on the law there and about that one piece about, you know, then you can't hold public office again. I mean, it's possible that this would be subject to litigation. I'm no lawyer, but it seems to me that the reading of the parameters for who can run for president laid out in the Constitution. It seems to me that that reading is probably correct. I also want to say, though, it wasn't just resistance libs that I saw sharing this. I also saw right-wingers sharing this as a way to say, like, oh, do you get, like, this is the game.

This is where they're heading. This is really their goal. So I just think it's important to, you know, to have the information out there about what exactly that statute means and how far reaching it ultimately is. So a lot that we don't know at this point, but the one thing we can say for certain is this, we've never been in this place in history where you have a former president, residents being searched, according to him, safe being searched, served a warrant under investigation in multiple jurisdictions. And I think anyone who is hazarding a guess as to where this is going and how it plays out and how Trump will react is, you know, way out over their skis. And that's probably a good segue into the Fox News reaction because they were very measured and nuanced. No, they immediately were,

you know, went all in on witch hunt, deep state. I think the news broke during while Jesse Waters was hosting. So here is his immediate react. Let's take a listen. We were told that the FBI wasn't going to get involved in any politically charged search warrants, investigations, announcements, indictments before an election. We were told that. I mean, remember what they did with the crooked situation with the server? They made all sorts of announcements then. They investigated the Trump campaign then. You saw what they did in October by covering up the laptop. And now they're going to send agents into Mar-a-Lago before the midterm election. This is not what we were told the FBI was going to do, especially, Dana, on the heels of what we just did at the top of the show.

When we just laid out how, you know, Paul Pelosi, senior, suspiciously involved in insider trading with the with the wife, Nancy. And then she takes her son to this Asian trip, tries to hide it while he's got lithium investments. He's got EV battery investments all over these Asian countries. They're trying to cover it up and nothing gets done with Hunter. They're trying to push that off, make it a little just little tax thing, make that go away. Meanwhile, we have evidence that they were holding 10 for the big guy. Diamonds are being exchanged. There's like 150 flags from Treasury that there were suspicious wire transfers

coming from all these countries, China, Russia, Ukraine, into the Biden family bank accounts that were all co-mingled. And you're sending agents to Mar-a-Lago. Did they get the address wrong, Dana? Some fair points. Pelosi, 105, a diamonds exchange is there. Here's what I will say, again, about the rush to judgment here. If your position is that no president should ever face investigation, that they should just be completely above, which there are some people who hold that view, then you can, you know, then yes, you know how you feel about this, right? You can say, I don't think that this is appropriate to do to any president. But, of course, Jesse doesn't take that tact. It's that, you know, I do think presidents should be prosecuted. I'm just going to already absolve Trump of any sort of culpability and assume the person who should be investigated here is fine.

Yeah, I think the absolution is the problem. Exactly. And that's the thing. I mean, there is no disagreement, I think, on this show, Crystal, that Hunter should be fully investigated, I think, to the full extent of the law based on anything we've seen on the laptop, you know, et cetera. And if he doesn't- Based on any connections, corrupt connections to the way. Exactly. Especially corrupt connections to the White House, foreign wire transfers, and all that. His own personal life and degeneracy aside, like in terms of what actually had an impact. And look, I mean, it would be a problem if there's selective application of

the law. And I'm almost certain that that will probably be the main political controversy going forward. As you said, immediate rushes and denunciations thrown up there. Marjorie Taylor Greene putting a picture of the U.S. flag literally upside down. The Candace Owens reaction, let's go ahead and put that up there as well. The FBI must be legally and formally dissolved. What happened to Trump is positively stunning. A mark of unchecked government power. I will no longer recognize the country I live in. We must all come together to fight this evil. I mean, you and I were talking. I could co-sign that very first sentence about the FBI. This is the part where I'm extraordinarily conflicted because now I say we're about to

get to this, you know, talk about GOP reaction. Everybody's calling for like an investigation, a church committee, a dissolution of the FBI at the top ranks. I'm get to this, you know, talk about GOP reaction. Everybody's calling for like an investigation, a church committee, a dissolution of the FBI at the top ranks. I'm like, well, you know, it wouldn't be such a bad thing. I wouldn't mind actually seeing all of these records just spilled forward. We've talked previously about such all the sketchy things that have gone on in terms of wiretaps class in terms of I mean, think about even the Carter-Page FISA and like the hijinks that that went to. And really, it wasn't even about Carter-Page. That just revealed like how sketchy the FISA process is for thousands, hundreds of thousands of Americans. We had this illusion of some like check and balance.

Exactly. It was just a complete rubber stamp. And we've spoken, I think, about the number of secret FBI informants and all of that. So perhaps if there is one good thing that comes from this, and Republicans do take power in the House of Representatives, that we will get like a wholesale transparency of everything. I mean, really what I learned more about from Russiagate was just how shoddy the top levels of the FBI operate at all times,

not just with the Hillary investigation. I mean, the thing that was funny that I was pointing to is like, you had Marjorie Taylor Greene, Candace Owens, and a lot more besides who were immediately literally writing out defund the FBI. And you're like, you know what you said. Anyway, forget it. Yes, we agree. Yeah, we're like, fine.

Defund the FBI, do it. Go for it. I actually agree. Nice little horseshoe moment there. We're all for it. Apparently, Bannon's reaction to this we have as well. He says, Mr. President, I've said this for months. Ride now and ride been speculating for a while is that part of his motivation, not only for announcing early, but actually for running for president again at all, is to try to avoid some of the legal jeopardy that he is legitimately in. Right. Again, not just on the presidential records thing, but

fake electors in Georgia, the D.C. grand jury, New York also investigation into his business. All of those things seem to be sort of heating up where it seemed very quiet and very slow for a long time. We now have more and more reporting about, OK, there there seems to be, you know, a narrow time frame to reach an end, reach a conclusion and very possible, if not likely, that the president ends up indicted. So he's not just facing problems on this front, but he's facing problems on a number of fronts. So it wouldn't surprise me if... Now, Republicans were reportedly really not happy about the idea that he might launch before the midterms because they

don't want the midterm election to be a referendum on Trump. They want to keep the focus all on Joe Biden and inflation and the problems there. So I've also seen some sort of galaxy brain takes that actually this is all good for Trump. Listen, if there's tremendous overreach here and there's back, like if we go down that path, then maybe. But in general, when the FBI raids your home, your office, your safe, and all the rest, it's, as I think Josh Barrow said this online, it's generally a good rule of thumb. It's not good for you personally or politically. And I think trying to concoct this, like, oh, this is actually all 4-D chess thing is a bit of a stretch.

Yeah, I think you're, I mean, look, there's two ways this goes. And I mean, look, given the handling of Russiagate and all that and the idiocy of the top levels of the DOJ, do we put it past that they dramatically overreached? I don't put that past for a second, which would be the greatest political boon to Donald Trump that has ever existed. I mean, we should always remember, I'll never forget this, January of 2020, I believe I did a monologue, and you and I were discussing that at the height of impeachment, the height was also coinciding with the largest amount of GOP identification that we had seen in modern American history. And the reason why was that the Democrats were making it all about Russiagate, all about Mueller, and all about what was even impeachment one, like Ukrainegate and the perfect phone call, right?

So at that time, people cared so little, and the economy, look, had many structural problems, but let's be honest, it was not bad at the top, at least for the middle class and for the upper class. People were basically saying, listen, the Dems are offering me only one alternative. I'm going to go and identify as GOP. Now, obviously, the coronavirus pandemic and threw everything into a wrench with that. But that is a very prescient lesson, which is that if you overreach to the American public and Russiagate became one of those things, which was a household joke. I mean, outside of MSNBC circles, given ultimately what happened, if that is a repeat of what we see here, which we cannot put that out of the question. I mean, my God, like, I can't even believe that they will have inflicted that on us.

Now, it's also possible that they actually do have him dead to rights this time, that they have learned some of these lessons, and that politically things will go completely the other way and that they will make it so that, you know, he legitimately has been, quote, caught red-handed. But I can't just help but think of the 2016 tweet, which we were laughing about this morning. It's like, how's old Donnie going to wriggle his way out of this one? He wriggles his way out. He wriggles his way out easily. It's like, oh, well. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to have covered all of these various things

and seen the way they play out and not feel that way, right? Not feel like this is another like, oh, the walls are closing in moment when the walls never actually end up closing in. But one thing that's different is not the president anymore. Correct. So he doesn't have that legal shield. Yeah, and another thing that's different is, I mean, we never have had actual federal investigations on multiple fronts. We never have had an FBI raid of his home. So there are reasons to think that maybe there is something, this story will end differently.

I'll also say, I mean, I think there's a couple things here. Him not having his perch on Twitter and not having so much control of the media, I think, hobbles his attempt to really, you know, to really respond in the way that he did when he was president of the United States. And I also think that, you know, the January 6th committee hearings, all my, you know, issues with the focus on them and the things we've said on the show before, which you can go back and re-watch, I think they have been more impactful than I expected. And even not that it has persuaded Republican voters that, oh, January 6th was really bad and Trump is evil and awful and whatever. But remember we played that Fox News montage, which was basically some like pro-DeSantis propaganda of voters in Arizona. But what they were saying was not like, oh, Donald Trump is bad and I can't stand him. They were basically like, listen, I like the guy, but the reality is he's just too divisive

for the country. And I just, you know, it sucks, but I feel like we have to move on. So obviously that was very cherry picked piece of propaganda that Fox News put together. But it did signal to me that there is some sentiment within the GOP base of like, sort of, you know, I wish it was different and I wish that this guy wasn't such a like divisive, polarizing figure, but it is what it is. And so we need to look to somebody else. I could see how this would continue to fuel that sense of like, gosh, I wish it wasn't this way, but we need to move forward. Yeah. I mean, look, again, all possible.

It's actually a good segue. I want to talk about the GOP reaction. So at the immediate level, I think something that this has proven is any idea that Donald Trump was not the undisputed leader of the GOP has really been disproven. Maybe not at the base level, but at the very top in terms of the number of officials who are immediately coming to his defense. So let's go ahead and throw this up there. Kevin McCarthy, the leader of the GOP and probably the next speaker of the House in the election, says this, quote, I've seen enough. The Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization. When Republicans take back the House, we will conduct immediate oversight of this department,

follow the facts, and leave no stone unturned. Attorney General Garland, preserve your documents and clear your calendar. So, making it very, very clear that this is going to be turned into a big thing. Also, many of the traditional Russiagate defenders coming out of the woodwork. So what we're seeing this morning, reporting Representative Jim Banks, he's been taking a dozen Republican study committee committees, these are House of Representative figures, to go have dinner with Trump tonight in Bedminster because he's in New Jersey. So there's going to be some coordination of investigation. Jim Banks, Jim Jordan, many of these other folks made huge

careers, Matt Gates and others on Fox News and elsewhere as defenders of President Trump. They have longstanding ties, you know, head of the Judiciary Committee, immediately the Judiciary Committee. GOP also reacted. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. Here's what they say. Quote, this is what happens in the third world countries, not in the United States. Doesn't the FBI have better things to do than harass the former president? So what you're going to see is that, remember, these people are going to be in control the next time around. And I think that that very much is going to tell us that they are going to launch a full-scale investigation and that we will likely

get a significant amount of information. I mean, this is, as I said, just like the Hillary thing, which is that first it started with the basement, then it started with the ask for classification, then what was actually classified and not, then where was it located, who installed the server, then it came into all of the details of the Department of Justice under Barack Obama, how he handled that investigation, Loretta Lynch meeting with Bill

Clinton on the tarmac and some sort of weird handshake deal, whether there was any impropriety that happened at the time, then all the drama between James Comey and with Loretta Lynch. So the fallout from this, I think the reason we're spending so much time on is just like abortion, it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, this legitimately does change everything. It changes the media landscape. I mean, we were about to do a whole show on the economy about, you know, all these underlying things. And we're like, you know, frankly, we just have to cover this, not only because we know this will be the biggest story across all three networks. We just know it is going to consume Washington and American politics in the same way that Russiagate did, in the same way that others did. And we owe it to people to try and give the best amount of information because I think people really do need to understand.

As I learned at that time, which is the amount of horrific information and speculation that comes out and the level of hysteria that people are reaching on all sides at the height of these things, it's mind-numbing. It actually is what ruined politics for me for a time, in 2016, again in 2019, which is that we wanted to do a show on inflation, and this is ultimately what you end up having to discuss. And look, it's a legitimately gigantic story.

Exactly. There's no denying that it's massively consequential. Reading history, it's impossible to not say so. It is legitimately historic for good or bad, impossible to not say so. It is legitimately, you know, historic for good or bad. Right. However you feel about it, it is a historic moment. I think there's a couple things to say about the Republican response here. First of all, there's a lot of Republican elites who have been wish-casting that, oh, really, the base is moving on from Trump. Right.

And, like, the party is actually moving on from Trump. And you may not see it. And, yeah, he may still be up in the polls. But trust me, like, DeSantis is really the guy. Oh, really? Because the minute that this came down, there was no hesitation. Every media figure, you know, there was all this also Fox, maybe Fox News is moving,

and maybe the Murdochs are moving on from Trump. He hasn't been on in a long time. All that stuff. No, no, no. They were on the talking points immediately, though. This is Banana Republic. This is a witch hunt. Deep State. They were all in immediately.

McCarthy, you know, immediately coming out and saying, hey, if we win the House, this is how we're going to use our time. Not waiting for any, like, facts, the pesky little facts to come out or figure out what's actually going on here. No, immediately we're going to investigate Merrick Garland, preserve your notes or whatever the heck he said, and clear your calendar because we're coming in after you. And I guess that is another piece of this is, like, Republicans are broadcasting to the American public, like, if you hand us power, this is what we're going to spend our time doing as well. They're telling people that, Crystal. They're making that pitch to the base, which is, this is why I actually do think this will energize Republicans for the midterms,

which is beyond more so even than they may have. Just the level of persecution that they're going to feel and that is going to be not whipped up just on, I mean, look, it's legitimate, right? Which is a historic event.

They're going to say that this is one of the only ways that we can defend President Trump. For a Republican base to come out and vote, that's going to be certainly something. At the same time, it will also energize, I think, Democrats, which is that the more this election is about Trump. It makes this election much more about Trump and much less about inflation. Economy. I mean, the Republican winning hand was Biden, Biden, Biden, inflation, inflation, inflation. Don't talk about anything else. That was the winning hand. That hand was already somewhat compromised by the Roe decision, which has forced them into an uncomfortable place and has energized the Democratic base when it was previously demoralized. This now just takes the

whole thing up like a snow globe and shakes it all over again. And, you know, there are, as we're laying out for you, I think there are any number of directions that that could ultimately go. And I think the Republican base was already very highly energized to vote in these midterms. The Democratic base was starting to match them in terms of that level of intensity. Now you throw the very polarizing figure of Trump and how you feel about him and what you think that should be done about his potential alleged crimes that he's committed in the past, and you put him in the middle of the cycle, and that's a whole other wrench entirely that it just is too early to say exactly how that's going to shape the midterms or if it does. I mean,

and then maybe he does announce that he's going to run again and go ahead and launch his campaign before the midterms, which makes this all even more about him and takes the eyeballs off of disappointments in Joe Biden and his stewardship of the economy. There's reporting this morning that Trump is delighted with this, that he thinks this is great, that he continues to believe all publicity is good publicity, that he believes the notion that this will rally the base to him. I don't think he's wrong. Of course, I mean, he also doesn't give a shit about the midterms. He only cares about himself. So it's, you know, to the extent that he's delighted about being

the center of attention again, it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how he thinks this will play into GOP performance in the fall. Look, we have simply no idea. Let's go into the next part here, which is also interesting in terms of the betting markets. Put this up there on the screen. Ron DeSantis, now officially the betting favorite in the 2024 GOP primary. Kyle Kalitsky, go ahead and screenshotting that for us. You know Trump is hating that part. Oh, he's very upset about that. He does not like it, that part. That being said, you know, I think that this is all just captures again the level of hysteria. And I just want to reiterate, which is to me, this actually just showed the level of

grip that Trump still has on the party. I mean, Fox, sure, you know, they may have said a few bad things about him. They may have said, you know, spoken up a little bit on behalf of Peter Meyer. But I mean, when he's under attack, Jesse Waters and the rest of them, they immediately come to defense. I also want to read this tweet that Ron DeSantis sent late last night. Here's what he says, quote, the raid of Mar-a-Lago is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the regime's political opponents. While people like Hunter Biden get treated with kid gloves, now the regime is getting another 87K IRS agents to wield against adversaries. Banana republic. It's interesting he's trying to turn that into a thing about the IRS. By the way, we will be covering that, don't worry everybody, in our next segment because I know there's still

a lot of questions about those agents and the expansion of the IRS. However, why I think that is important is for Ron DeSantis to come out and immediately have to come to the defense of Trump. And I've actually even seen the most hardcore right-wing MAGA people being like, Ron DeSantis needs to mobilize the Federal Florida National Guard and protect Mar-a-Lago and have a standoff with the feds like Huey Long or something like that. But, I mean, it does show you the level, the position that he's going to be put in, which is now he is going to have to be served as chief defender to somebody who he clearly is not getting along with. Trump didn't even endorse him so far. He didn't ask for his endorsement, more importantly. Exactly. So there is a lot of consternation, I think,

amongst those people. I do think there is a level of 5D chess that some GOP elites are trying to play, which is, oh, actually, all of this is good because if we can take Trump out, then we will eventually be able to move on to Ron DeSantis. I mean, there's just no real reading of the law. I mean, I just think the level of chaos that Trump injects into the system, as long as he breathes air, he's the leader of the GOP. I just don't think that they're... And the only person going to take him out is himself to say, you know what, I'm not going to run again. Given his ego, that's just not going to happen. Forget about it. I just don't think that's going to happen. I mean, I could even see a scenario where he's running for president from the jail cell. Oh, 100%.

If it ever gets to that, absolutely. I could imagine that. I really could. And, yeah, I mean, that DeSantis tweet just shows you he immediately bent the knee. I mean, he immediately went all in on the Trump preferred narrative about what this is and what it means. So to imagine this guy trying to take Trump out and levy sufficient criticism and critique of why the party should move on from Trump and why they should go with him instead, I just don't see it. I've never seen it. I still don't see it. I think everything that we've seen in terms of the immediate reaction and, I mean, instantaneous

reaction to this series of events, look, it would have been very easy to say, which actually Chuck Schumer said on Rachel Maddow's show last night, I don't have the facts and I think it's irresponsible. Yeah, he kept no comment. Yeah, he said no comment. I don't know the facts. I think it's irresponsible to issue a judgment given how little we know at this point. Very easy for DeSantis, for anybody on Fox News, for any media figure, any elected official to say the same exact thing. I'm going to wait and see what the facts are because it's irresponsible. But that is not what they did. Instead, they

immediately are all lockstep by his side. Certainly, this continues to sort of like harden his grip on the party and force them to demonstrate their continued loyalty to him. Yeah, so I'm looking here. Mike Pompeo also had reportedly been saying he could run against Trump and beat Trump. Even he also, similarly, last night. Oh, really? Yeah, late last night. Executing a warrant against ex-POTUS is dangerous. The apparent political weaponization of DOJ, FBI is shameful. AG must explain why 250 years of practice was upended with this raid.

I served on the Benghazi committee where we proved Hillary possessed classified information. We didn't raid her home. So, again, that's going to be lockstep. This is somebody who has come out and said, or not come out and said, but reportedly has been exploring his own run. Now we have Ron DeSantis saying that. We have many of the people who are coming out. Pompeo's one who outright said he would run even if Trump was running too.

He didn't outright say it. Apparently he told donors. Tom Cotton, interestingly enough, hasn't tweeted anything just yet. I would expect him to immediately also come out and to go after this. To me, it just proves the level of hold he still has on

the GOP. It just cannot be underestimated. And there's quite a bit of cope here in Washington trying to get away from that base. Yeah, I think that is very true. And in terms of the overall political impact, I think that's about the only thing you could really confidently say at this point until we see how this plays out a little bit more and get a little bit of a temperature read from the public. Right. Okay. Let's move on. Actually, this story also now relates, which is there has been, we had this as part of our original show and we just thought it was so funny that we didn't have to keep it, which is that there has been the emergence, the left has decided that they want to start trying to enter the meme game. And I'm going to be honest, I find some of these memes kind of funny.

So the Biden White House really embracing what has become like an online left phenomenon, which, by the way, Crystal, some of these actually apparently come from Chinese social media. Yeah. I'm not claiming, by the way, this is like a Russian plant or anything. I did find there were a bunch of people on the right who were like, way to echo Chinese propaganda. It's like, calm the F down. Come on. Don't be ridiculous. They're just kind of funny. Let's go ahead and put this up there.

So the White House digital director posting. This was all through yesterday. And this was not in reaction to the Trump raid, to be clear. It was actually in reaction to the passage of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which we talked a lot about yesterday. Biden there with the laser eyes. Funnily enough, in the Bitcoin community, that's what you do whenever you're a Bitcoin believer. Let's go ahead and throw the next one up there from Andrew Bates. This was also really funny. So it's from the Dark Knight Rises, and it says the malarkey will end, the dark Brandon rises. And he's the White House Deputy Press Secretary. Right, he is the

White House Press Secretary. These are both White House officials. And actually they're both from the official White House Twitter account. And it was also doing funny. People were saying, how could he post this image which includes the Reich Eagle? Guys, it's from Batman Begins and the Dark Knight Rises.

Like, come on. Don't be lame. They're just memes. Ben Shapiro also reacting to all of this, put this up there. He says, you can try to dark brand and meme your way out of sub-approval rating, but throwing hundreds of billions at green boondoggles in the middle of inflationary spiral isn't going to turn things around. I don't think I read that fast enough in order to do it in his cadence. However, I just think it's one of those things where, guys, Trump memes are funny. A lot of them are really funny. Some of the ones I remember that people freaked out about,

about him tackling CNN, sorry, it was hilarious. The Dark Brandon ones, the ones we showed you are not as funny. We have some, which we are not allowed to show you for copyright reasons, which literally had me laughing so much, which is they had at the end, it was like Trump, it was Biden at the end, and he was like, They have music that isn't working. And then I even saw Bloomberg reporters being like, why are White House reporters elevating unprofessional memes? It's just like, guys, relax. It's the internet. We all shitpost sometimes.

It's fun. And although it did kind of affirm the Dark Brandon meme whenever the raid actually did end up happening. Yeah, that was your immediate reaction. Yeah, I said, I was like, this is true Dark Brandon behavior. For those who are not as online as I am, I envy you. This all emanates not from Let's Go Brandon. Oh, that's where the Dark Brandon thing comes from. Where the Brandon part comes from. It comes from Dark MAGA, which is during Stop the Steal and much more,

there was this entire thing like patriots in control, as in truly usurping the deep state and the so-called political appointees. Sort of like Q adjacent kind of rhetoric. It was Q adjacent, but it did become kind of a thing online. Its own thing, yeah. And really what it came into the idea was is that there are traitors within the GOP in the deep state against President Trump and that there's real MAGA, so-called dark MAGA. So Dark MAGA, actually, Madison Cawthorn even talked about this once. After he lost. After he lost, he's like, now Dark MAGA will

take control. So anyway, Dark MAGA was born within the MAGA community online. Then it was made fun of online. It was like, is this Dark MAGA? Everyone's making fun of Dark MAGA. Eventually then, of course, Let's Go Brandon becomes a meme against Biden after that viral NASCAR video. And then we are now in the phase where they are embracing the Brandon meme and saying Dark Brandon. So that is the etymology of the Dark Brandon meme. dark brand in aesthetic. Yes. Came from like actual leftists

who were sort of making fun of the idea that Biden Yes, yeah, that's right. That Biden would be this like strong like sort of pseudo-authoritarian figure taking control and rooting out the evildoers in the deep state

and all that sort of stuff. So it started on a sort of mockery and then now liberals and the White House even near a tendon oh my god embracing it now it's cringe it's done i mean that's the thing is by the time like politico playbook wrote this up right by the time it's embraced by the white house press it's done the fun is over like you killed it now right um the other thing that i did think was kind of interesting about this is, you know, Biden and his team famously they had this mantra, the Internet is not real life. And so even though when he as vice president under Obama, he had a whole there there was an Internet culture around who Joe Biden was.

There was a sort of like caricature made of him as like, you know, the kind of like, the car guy out washing his Corvette or whatever in the White House driveway. That was Uncle Joe. Yeah, and the Uncle Joe thing. And that, you know, I mean, that there was kind of a, it wasn't 100% flattering,

but there was a little bit of an interest in sort of like some sort of an edgy factor around him. They completely, you know, they didn't embrace any of that in his White House run and were very much not online. So to see the White House directly embracing this and sort of like feeling themselves after having a couple of legislative wins is interesting. I saw one quote here. I think this was from the Politico write-up, but I can't 100% say for sure. One Democratic digital strategist close to the White House said, quote, being a Joe Biden supporter hasn't been very fun over the past

year, and dark Brandon is fun. It's a sign the vibes are improving. This couldn't have bubbled up unless there are some actual genuine Ws to point to. Which I think is, I think that's true. I think it is, they feel like, okay, we finally got a few victories notched. Those are being wildly oversold by the media and turn out historic, landmark, best weekend ball, that stuff that we covered yesterday. But, you know, no doubt about it, they've actually done a few things things whereas previously they were just completely stuck in the mud. I do actually think this is not a great thing for the Biden White House.

I mean, and there was even speculation about that this morning, which is that they basically, they wanted the whole week to just be about their legislation. That's why Chuck Schumer was on Rachel Maddow last week. He wasn't there to talk about any of these raids. Which is part of why he would just say no comment and let's talk about the inflation. He's like, let's talk about the act.

But listen, guys, it's, you know, as I heard it described as a 100 megaton political event. I think that's true, which is that scrambles everything. Just like Roe versus Wade,

it's like a bomb that gets dropped and now everything, this is going to be the political center of gravity now for the political media, for everybody else, for all time to come.

And so, you know, in a way, I do feel bad for the Biden administration. They just had their win. I mean, they claim they didn't know about it. We'll see if the reporting actually bears that out and the facts. But no question that it does actually obscure some of their wins. One of the things we'll mention, and if we have the time. Part of why I believe they didn't have direct control over it is because they would not have chosen this timing. Well,

not necessarily control, but maybe they got a heads up. I mean, this was always a speculation with Obama that he knew a hell of a lot more about what was going on than ever came out. Anyway, again, I literally have no idea. So we'll see whatever the facts bear out. I mean, Joe Biden barely knows where he is when he wakes up in the morning. Not untrue. Ron Klain knows where he is, right? So we'll see.

I don't know how it plays out. There is one other piece of the show. In addition to our monologues, our monologues also predated the, what did you call it? 100 megaton. The 100 megaton event. Political event, which is there was, for our media block, there was a deep interview with Rachel Maddow, who of course was and still is the megaton or megawatt star at MSNBC, who signed this gigantic new deal to basically not be on TV every night anymore. And this was her first big sit down with a writer for Vanity Fair who, you know, interviewed her, I think, over a number of days about what she thinks about the world and what she wants to do next and all of that. And, you know, I read through the whole thing. It's always just

interesting to get into the mind of someone like this. And she is an unusual figure because, first of all, she also is very not online, which makes her kind of unique among the cable news punditry and host class. She also had some very favorable things to say about Tucker Carlson, which I think shocked a lot of people. But the part we wanted to focus on is that, you know, and this does tie into like Trump and his various scandals and all of that, is she got pressed a bit on her handling of Russiagate and how far she went down the conspiracy rabbit hole. And this was done in a relatively like, you know, kid gloves friendly kind of a way, but still continued to be quite revealing. Let's go ahead and put the first piece up on the screen that we have here. This is what the Vanity Fair article looks like.

It's a picture of Rachel in the woods, splitting wood there. It says, exclusive Rachel Maddow gives her first interview as she steps back from the nightly grind and revs up for her next act. Let's go ahead and put the next piece up. Let's put the third, actually, element that we have up on the screen here. So this is where she was asked to reflect on her coverage of the Steele dossier. And no joke, she used the Dan Rather scandal over the, remember, this is really reaching back in the archives. There were fabricated documents that they ran with, that Dan Rather ran with to, you know, call into question George W. Bush's National Guard service and say that they were basically, you know, it was falsified and that he didn't really serve and all this.

This turned out to, they were unable to authenticate a gigantic scandal. He lost his job. Other people lost his job. There's actually a documentary about the failings there. But let me read to you specifically what she says. She said, trying to turn the Russian scandal into just the Steele dossier or trying to turn the dossier into the Russian scandal is a revisionist history designed to intimidate people and of covering stories like that in the future and to try to obscure the seriousness of what Russia did

and what the Trump campaign's relationship was with what Russia did. The reporter suggested that Maddow's coverage may have given viewers a false sense of hope that Trump was about to be taken down, not unlike how, say, viewers of Newsmax may have been led to believe the 2020 election was about to be overturned. At this point in the conversation, that's when Maddow brings up the Dan Rather thing.

And here's what she says. Do you remember what the Dan Rather scandal was about? There was a document that was involved. He was reporting on, like, how did George W. Bush avoid going to Vietnam? How was his National Guard service arranged? Why did he get this coveted spot in this group that wasn't going to be fighting? The story of George W. Bush getting a sweet gig in the National Guard so he didn't have to go fight in Vietnam was true. Somebody giving Dan Rather a forged document so he had a screwed up

news story about it is fascinating. It's an interesting thing about CBS News, but it doesn't mean that the National Guard thing about George W. Bush was not true. It just, it neutralized it, like it made that go away. And the whole thing became a Dan Rather scandal. That's what's going on with the dossier. So, she struggles to directly defend her reporting and how far out she went, how much she relied on the dossier, which ended up being, you know, completely collapsing and one of the main sources admits to lying and all of these things, she can't really directly defend it.

So she tries to do this roundabout defense of saying, well, focusing on the parts of this that were wrong is just a distraction from the parts that were correct. What I would say is she's actually not wrong that the fact that Dan Rather and CBS News ran with this fake document ended up distracting from what might have been a real story about George W. Bush, took reporters off of the path of digging into that more. But that's exactly part of the problem and why it was so irresponsible and counterproductive for you to go so far out here that, yes, you lose all credibility about any other parts of the story that may have been consequential, that may have been true. When you go beyond where the facts and the evidence lead, and you never apologize and make it right and have accountability,

then, of course, people aren't going to trust you about the rest of the story. That's actually exactly the problem here. Oh yeah, that's correct. Which is that you and Dan also have agency, which is that your screw ups are part of why that political circumstance and, you know, that circumstance happened in the first place. Yeah, she did harm to her own cause. That's the truth. Exactly. And we went ahead and pulled. I think people need to remember how unhinged these people were. Let's take a listen. And that maybe is the most important thing for our purposes as U.S. citizens here, right? We're all trying to figure out what's just happened to our country. You know, what's going on with this incredible national security

scandal that looms over our new presidency? How are we going to get to the bottom of this thing? Right? What's most important to all of us about this is that if this guy did have a key role in looms over our new presidency. How are we going to get to the bottom of this thing? What's most important to all of us about this is that if this guy did have a key role in that scheme, while he is in Moscow, he is out of reach of U.S. investigators. And who are the U.S. investigators? In terms of the investigation into what happened here, something really important happened today that is not heartening at all. We all know the basic history of this dossier, right? Reportedly, it had circulated around Washington. It had circulated among some journalists late last year.

I never saw it before it was published. I had heard rumors about some of the things in it, but I am not one of the people who saw it. And I don't know many people who say they did see it before BuzzFeed published it. But it was apparently out there. In early January, it was reported by CNN that the FBI briefed Donald Trump and briefed President Obama on a list of allegations against Donald Trump and his campaign concerning Russia. That initial report from CNN didn't exactly say what these allegations were, but within 24 hours, BuzzFeed News published the dossier, this whole 35-page dossier. And there was a huge uproar at the time. Everybody, including BuzzFeed, admitted the dossier was all uncorroborated information.

But you know what? It didn't end there. So there you go, Crystal. I mean, basically none of what she floated there to millions of people ended up being true at all. She never coped with that. She never told the truth to her audience. She effectively retired, and now she's doing some podcasts about World War II, which, you know, more power to you, I guess, getting paid $30 million a year to do so. But the Dan Rather thing actually is far more revealing whenever you consider that

it wasn't just one report like Dan Rather. It was two straight years of this shit on TV every single night. And it was the sun and the moon of American politics. You know, everything revolved around it, thanks to them. They wasted so much of our time. Part of why she's getting that $30 million paycheck. Because, I mean, she had the top ratings. People tuned in night after night.

I thought the report, even though it was done gently, raised a very good parallel of like, you know, you did a disservice to your viewers by stringing them along to believe that the walls were closing in and they were going to, you know, do the raid on the White House at the time that, you know, now is had stuck to what we knew and what the facts were, yeah, I think that people would have come away with this more accurate sense of, listen, there wasn't maybe this direct collusion and the pings between the servers and Trump wasn't a Russian asset since 1987. But were they uncomfortably willing to, like, you know, certainly solicit Russia's help if they had the ability to do so? Yeah, and that was a gross thing, and people should have known about that, and it should have been reported out. There's no doubt about it. But because they went so far, then ultimately when you get the Mueller report, and it's not nearly the spy novel level allegations that had been floated night after night, year after year, of course people are going to say, you led us astray.

Because frankly, you really did. Yeah, I think you're right, Crystal. What are you taking a look at? Well... I ran twice, I won twice, and did much better the second time than I did the first, getting millions and millions of more votes than in 2016, and likewise getting more votes than any sitting president in the history of our country by far. And now we may have to do it again.

We may have to do it again. That was, of course, the former president receiving raucous applause at CPAC over the weekend for his false claims that the election was stolen. It is impossible to hear the response to those results and look at the GOP primary results thus far and not conclude that Stop the Steal is the single most animating issue for Republican-based voters. Not that election conspiracy dabblers and outright kooks have won in every single instance in the GOP primaries, but let's be honest, they've had a pretty good track record. In Pennsylvania, gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano worked hand-in-glove with the Trump team to try to overturn Pennsylvania's results and was at the Capitol on January 6th.

In Michigan, the Trump-backed attorney general candidate led a team that illegally breached voting equipment as part of their efforts to overturn the results in that state. In Arizona, election deniers won a clean sweep for Governor Agee and Secretary of State. In fact, the so-called America First Secretary of State candidates have had phenomenal success in GOP primaries really across the country. This group is united in their belief that the 2020 election was stolen, and many have said that they would not have certified the results in their state had they been in power last time around. Their candidates have notched wins in New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Indiana, and Nevada. Sure, GOP candidates are happy to trash Biden, mock Hunter, and rail against inflation while failing to offer a single real solution

to inflation, but no issue has been as much of a litmus test in these primaries as Stop the Steal Republican voters may tell pollsters their top issue is with inflation But they've largely voted with their heart on Trump's election conspiracies And not only is this a fake terrible thing to organize a political party around It might be a bit of a double-edged sword in terms of electoral results for the Republican Party Because it's kind of hard to get motivated to vote when you don't really believe that your vote is going to be counted. Already, Republican attacks on mail-in ballots have been so thorough that their voters are much, much less likely than Democrats to avail themselves of this method of casting their ballot. And that ultimately matters,

because mail-in ballots are a great way for candidates to bank votes so they can more effectively focus their election day turnout operations. Inevitably, of course, also some percentage of voters are going to intend to vote on election day and then they get waylaid because of weather or traffic, a long workday, or any of a thousand different things that can always blow up your bus-laid plans. But there's also a question of whether the new mode in the GOP, where every result they don't like is fake, will lead to some of their voters deciding just not to bother at all. Buried in a Politico article about the Warnock-Walker race down in Georgia was some worries about exactly this issue. One Republican county chair in the state told Politico that,

that's a concern that I have about people not voting because they have the opinion that everything is crooked and Trump really won and that their vote doesn't count and they're just not going to vote at all. And I see that every day. It seems to me he's right to at least be concerned. After all, it was likely stopped the steel claims which allowed Democrats to sweep Georgia's two Senate seats, a feat that basically no one expected them to be able to pull off.

Remember what happened there? Georgia law says that you've got to win a majority of the vote to avoid a runoff, and no Senate candidate pulled that off in the fall. So, Loeffler and Warnock and Ossoff and Perdue, they all went into runoffs. Now, historically, Republicans have nearly always increased their vote share in these Georgia runoffs and prevailed. Without Trump on the ballot to drive Democratic turnout up, and with Republicans facing the dire prospect of being shut out of power completely, sure looked like the GOP was in the poll position to win both of those seats and grab control of the Senate. But then Trump and his cronies went all in on Stop the Steal, claiming all sorts of fantastical schemes

involving a dead Venezuelan dictator and Dominion voting machines. You remember all of that. And then Sidney Powell, his nutty conspiracy lawyer, even went so far as to go to Georgia and tell Republican voters to boycott the election because of her voter fraud claims. I guess some percentage of them must have listened because Democrats were able to win both seats in what had seemed a near impossible task. I can't help but wonder if there will be some continued effect from all of this stuff.

After all, many of these Senate races are expected to be very close. When it comes to election day and you got to deal with all your normal life stuff, plus find time to get to the polls, will some percent on the margins bail, telling themselves, well, why bother? This whole thing's a setup anyway. Right now, in a fairly astonishing turn of events, Nate Silver's 538 model gives Democrats a 60% chance of keeping the Senate. At this point, the trend line is really pretty dramatic. Two months ago, the parties were exactly flipped. Republicans were favored with 60% odds to take the Senate. Two weeks ago, they were exactly even. And now Democrats

have opened up that sizable gap. This midterm does not look the way it did just a couple months ago. In the Senate, Republicans are going to need every advantage they can to overcome the manifestly horrendous slate of candidates that they have decided to line up behind. And I'm just spitballing here, but constantly messaging to their base that elections are all fake anyway is probably not going to help. And of course, Sagar, as we've been discussing, the whole election analysis has been once again... And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, when I think back upon the past Trump era, now that we're in another one,

I pinpoint a few things that really seismically changed for American politics. His very first debate, his win in New Hampshire, and one that many would also point to, but for a very different reason than me. It was the day after Access Hollywood. The entire media was covering it incessantly. The traditional rules were compelling dozens of high-profile Republicans to say he shouldn't drop out of the race, and that he had no shot. All the while, the media was surrounding his residence, waiting for his first public

comments. And then something very interesting happened. He didn't do an interview, he holed up in his residence, and he simply released a video addressing the incident on Twitter. The next time he spoke about it publicly, it was at the second presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, where he brought with him as guests women who had publicly accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault. From that day forward, it was just a different story, and he survived. To this day, I think it's about one of the most significant days

in American politics, because it occurred without any input from whatsoever from the news media. Previously, the news media were the conveners of power, necessary methods of communication to millions of people. Politicians and other people in power had to engage with them in order to get the message out there. But the day that the internet was invented, that value proposition was threatened. And it was really dethroned on that day in 2016, because Trump did not need them to put out his video.

He shot it himself, and he just tweeted it out. The news media played it over and over and over again without even speaking to him once, a decade before that could not have possibly happened. Politicians literally did not have the capability to just easily record a video like that. Even if they did, they would need the media to air it on traditional TV because that's where a lot of people got their information. But the internet changed everything in the interim years, and it opened up all sorts of crazy possibilities. The irony is that once Trump actually did win, though,

he had a symbiotic relationship with the traditional media he hated. He himself loved talking to the mainstream media. He would call them incessantly on background or off the record. Trust me, I saw it firsthand as a White House correspondent. The people who worked for him talked a massive game about how the mainstream media sucked. Off the record, though, and on background, just like their boss, there's nothing those people loved more than speaking to

the New York Times or the Washington Post, leaking this tidbit or that and trying to preserve their image in official Washington. But now that Trump is out, or at least temporarily, the forces he unleashed on that day and the power of the internet's legacy is being felt all across the country. The media is not happy about it at all. Things started about a week ago. There was a Washington Post profile of Ron DeSantis' press secretary, Christina Pouchot. She is famous for brawling on Twitter with any reporter who is writing unfavorably about DeSantis. She is known for publicly posting their email inquiries to show their bias or to fact check them post-publication in real time. Poochaw and her tactics aside, which I do think are very

effective, it ignited a discussion amongst the mainstream media because they realized here, you had the press secretary for possibly the second most prominent Republican in the United States who did not want to engage with the national press, and in fact has found political success by being as antagonistic as possible towards them. Of course, the media spins it as Republicans don't want to answer any hard questions, which look, let's be honest, that is definitely kind of true. But it also says less about Republicans than it does about the media. Here's a truth that we all know. The political media of the United States is by and large an arm of the capital D Democratic Party.

Look at Crystal's monologue from yesterday if you need proof. Combine this with the internet and you have a new world. Republicans have no actual incentive or reason to speak with the mainstream media, who are effectively their political opponents, when they can. They can just talk to the right-wing media, who won't really ask them anything tough. In the age of the internet, the medium is the message. If Trump makes a crazy comment to a right-wing blogger and doesn't speak to the New York Times, if the comment is crazy enough, the New York Times will just cover that comment and cite the interview. He doesn't actually need to speak to them to get the coverage that he

needs. DeSantis is in the same boat. He has no incentive to speak to the New York Times. He can literally just give a speech or release a video and the Times will be forced to cover it. If he wants to elaborate, he's far better off speaking to a friendly news outlet. The Times or the Post or any other major paper is then forced to cover that if they're writing a story about it. The counter to what I'm saying would be, yeah, but then you don't get your side of the story. And while that's kind of true, does it really matter today? As Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel recently reflected onto NPR, he increasingly has found himself barred from events or with GOP officials straight up ignoring him.

He notes, quote, I've started to see more Republican candidates avoiding the press, blocking the press from events, and taking advantage of the fact that there is a conservative media that will ask different questions and has a different audience. He continues, and to be honest, an interview with one of those websites might get more views from the people who vote in a Republican primary than an interview with me. He continues, quote, so I'm obviously not going to say to the world,

stop talking to the media, but he adds, I'm just saying objectively, there is a media infrastructure built up so you don't need to, if you're a Republican candidate, to talk to us. He's right. As he knows, if he needs to cover them, he could just listen to their interviews on a different source. All of this is an outgrowth of the internet. And of course, NPR is trying to spin this as some tragedy that nobody will talk to them anymore, how it shows that Republicans are afraid of democracy and accountability, activists, but the real pros like Weigel really understand the game. Jonathan Swan, who I also deeply respect, similarly noted on Twitter that convening

power for a TV interview, that's just dead. Nobody has the power to compel a politician to do a challenging interview. Continuing what he has tried desperately to get a one-on-interview with Biden and that Biden simply won't do it because he doesn't want to be challenged. He says, quote, there's no convening power on planet Earth that could compel him to do an interview that his advisors deem to be unsafe. Yeah, and that is why Biden does interviews with people like Jimmy Fallon. I mean, why shouldn't he? The entire press will watch it. If there's a good clip, cable news will show it. The internet has decentralized and exposed the press for what they are, mostly agents for that select faction of the Democratic Party. Personally, I have actually no problem with that. What I have

a real problem with is their virtual monopoly up until now on the exchange of information and of the power that they yielded over politicians and our politics. And while that, yes, it remains the case today in American politics, those at the very, very top, like Biden and DeSantis, are realizing they don't need them as much as they used to. And while I think there will be many costs to this, mainly that startup media organizations, just like ours, lack the billions of dollars that traditional media does to subsidize investigative reporting and more, I have far more trust in the emerging model and vision because many of the hardest parts now not only exist, but have higher viewership than traditional media. It's both a

better customer experience and liable to reach more people if you post something on YouTube than if you air it live on cable news. Inevitably, the former will win. It is just a matter of time to figure out how to replicate the only good things the legacy media ever did. In the meantime, you can be sure of this. While the mainstream press retains whatever waning power it does, they will not go willingly into the good night. They will fight, and they will kick, and scream, and demean, and besmirch, and seek to destroy anyone who reveals their true agenda, and the trendsetters that show us how powerless that they are. And it is going to be fun to watch it all play out. So I tried to take more of a meta stance on this, Crystal. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sagar's monologue,

become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Joining us now is Bradley Moss. He's a lawyer over at the Markzade law firm. He's actually specializing in classified materials. Brad, you and I have known each other for a long time, political differences and all that aside. You're a legitimate expert, and you and I were actually talking ahead of the raid, and you were the person who told me that this was likely what it was all about. So let's start at the beginning. You put out a thread a couple of months ago as to how exactly the classification process and all that works, what it would take for the president to break the law in the case in so far and what we know, and all this, could you just lay that out for the audience, given your

experience litigating some of these matters? Sure, absolutely. So when Donald Trump was president, he under Article Two of the Constitution had unlimited unfettered discretion to classify or declassify anything he wanted, He could handle classified information however he wanted. But when Joe Biden took the oath of office at noon on January 20th, 2021, Donald Trump lost any and all authority he had over classified information. So when he left the White House and decamped Mar-a-Lago, we know he took all kinds of documents. He just boxed everything up and shipped itamped to Mar-a-Lago, we know he took all kinds of documents. He just boxed everything up and shipped it down to Mar-a-Lago.

And in those documents or in those boxes, we know there were countless classified, properly marked, still classified documents that got shipped down to Mar-a-Lago and were sitting in a basement there in boxes. This is a problem for a couple reasons. One, the Presidential Records Act says those aren't his documents. Those are historical presidential records. They are the property of the United States, and they're supposed to go to the National Archive first to be sorted, documented, logged, and set aside to ultimately put in the archives, as well as in any library Donald Trump would create. The second problem though, the bigger issue,

and this is why there's a criminal liability, is that there are still properly marked classified documents in there. He's not allowed to carry classified documents anymore. He's not allowed to transport them on the Mayflower shipping trucks. He's not allowed to store them at Mar-a-Lago in the basement.

They have to be put in secure locations. That's been his problem here, is that he was grossly negligent and completely inexcusably unethical in how he handled these documents. We know they found 15 boxes of documents back in February that were shipped to the archives, and just in June, we're here reporting they found more classified documents in Mar-a-Lago. Got it. So I have a lot of questions for you. One of them that came up earlier in Sagar and I's discussion is, is there some sort of formal process that when he was the president that he would have to follow in order to get

those documents declassified? Or can he just like sort of look at a box of 15, you know, 15 boxes ready to ship to Mar-a-Lago and say, these are all now declass 15, you know, 15 boxes ready to ship to Mar-a-Lago and say, these are all now declassified, you know, because I say so. Do they have to have those markings removed? Does there have to be some official process, some official record keeping? Or can he just sort of like blanket declassify things at his whim when he was still president? Yes, very good question. And it's actually something that came up in litigation that we were handling and that some other FOIA litigants were handling during the Trump era. He cannot just spout off verbally a declassification. He can't declassify something in his mind. He can't just tell someone it's declassified. There is a formal process. The documents have to be taken aside. They have to be, there's classification markings at the header and the footer of every single page.

They have to be marked off. There has to be what is called a declassification stamp put on every single page that identifies when it was declassified and who declassified it. All that has to be done to actually turn the documents into a declassified document. However much authority he had to verbally say, I want it declassified, I order it declassified. Until that process was done, documents still have to be treated as classified. And it's not shocking with everything we know with the Trump administration that the details of how this worked is something that completely flew past him. Yeah, we already covered actually Kash Patel, who works for him, already blaming the White House counsel. This happened in May. So Brad, then this relates to then the next question, which I know you've addressed previously on criminality. So what

is the standard through which the DAOJ would be able to bring an indictment, having litigated some of this in court? Like you use the word grossly negligent. James Comey used the word famously with Hillary. She wasn't actually prosecuted. So then what lies is to the level of prosecution for the Department of Justice? Yeah, so there's a couple different provisions that could come into play. Some of them are eight. It's all in the U.S. Code 18 USC 793D as well as 793F. These technically fall under the Espionage Act, but they're really provisions we consider to be what we call Official Secrets Act provisions. Basically, it says someone who originally had lawful authorized access to the classified information either willfully allows it to be communicated or transported to an unsecured personal location, they are grossly negligent in allowing it to be transported to the unsecured

location, or they become aware that it's in an unsecured location and then take no steps to rectify that. There is an intent requirement, of course, this famously came up in the Hillary Clinton saga with the email server. And that would be certainly something that I'm sure the grand jury is investigating with respect to how these records came to Mar-a-Lago. Any prosecution of a former president is going to be politically controversial. The Justice Department isn't going to bring an indictment unless they have what they view as a rock solid case. They're going to want proof that Trump was completely negligent in what he was doing,

that he knew what he was doing, that he didn't care, that he brought the documents there anyways, and that he left them there even when warned that there were documents there and continue to leave them there. They're going to want to have an open and shut case. And I think we're going to be waiting a little bit still to see if there are any indictments that come out of this. Yeah. How often is this crime or similar crimes related to classified documents charged? So generally speaking, most of the time it's not because most of the time you're talking about mid-level bureaucrats people who took you know classified documents home uh there was you know the infamous case of an NSA official who had been secretly storing documents for years usually it's sufficient for the government's

purposes just to revoke the person's security clearance to fire them possibly even seek civil damages but there are select cases where they do choose to bring prosecutions and they generally win when they do so, because there's not a lot of leeway or discretion here. Generally speaking, it's for the more egregious of the cases. There's the infamous ones of the Navy Seaman

who took photos in the nuclear submarine. There's NSA officials who took stuff home. General Petraeus stored, you know, code word classified notebooks in his attic and got, had to plead guilty to a misdemeanor. There are several prosecutions that have happened. It certainly is not out of the question that it could happen here. Right. And so that actually was what I was going to ask about. So I've seen some comparison to the Petraeus case that they believe Sandy Berger and a few other officials have been gone after. Now, whenever they were under, were they actually prosecuted?

Did they reach a plea deal? What was the actual punishment? So Sandy Berger and General Petraeus both pled guilty to misdemeanors in order to avoid more serious felony charges. We don't know how those prosecutions would have gone forward and what would have resulted if the government actually pursued cases. They reached plea deals with both individuals. Both of them got probation, fines. I think Sandy Berger, you know, had his security clearance stripped.

That's, you know, somewhat expected. And it's not to say that with Donald Trump, that he would necessarily even go to prison for this, depending on the full factual circumstances, which we don't know yet. Right. It certainly could be something less. So to that point, I mean, obviously, sort of the thorniest question here is not all crimes are charged, not all crimes are even, you know, thoroughly investigated. As you indicated earlier, the fact that this is the former president of the United States makes this extraordinarily politically sensitive. enough crime for this raid to have occurred and for this level of sort of intrusion investigation to be going on. And, you know, you even had some figures on the Democratic side. Andrew Cuomo was out with a tweet this morning saying the DOJ must immediately explain the reason for its raid,

and it must be more than a search for inconsequential archives or it will be viewed as a political tactic and undermine any future credible investigation and legitimacy of January 6th investigations. What is your view of that sort of line of critique of this action by the FBI and the Department of Justice? Sure. So if this were just about archived records, if this were just about a Presidential Records Act violation and nothing was classified, then I'd be pretty much in agreement with Mr. Cuomo and the others saying this is, you know, overreach because that could be handled through a civil suit. The reason there's a grand jury, the reason that a search warrant had to even be

sought and executed here was because there's classified documents, including, again, this is all based off recordings. We don't know what the FBI truly has. We don't know what was in the search warrant affidavit, even though Mr. Trump made that public. We don't know for certain how high level of classification the documents were. The reporting says it was up to top secret, including some compartmentalized documents that only certain people would even have had access to in the first place. So the sensitivity level of the documents would certainly come into play in terms of how egregious of a violation this is. If this was just archived records that are unclassified, this would require criminal inquiry. The reason it's classified is why it's a problem.

Yeah. And so then, okay, then taking it one further, actually something you and I had talked about, it's possible also that Trump himself is not the target of this investigation. Is that right? It could be the people around him and the materials were simply at Mar-a-Lago. Is that within the realm of possibility? It's absolutely within the realm of possibilities. You know, he is notoriously disconnected from the administrative realities of day-to-day operations. We certainly know he wasn't packing any boxes or anything along those lines. We don't know how much he knew about where the records were stored, who was handling them,

what efforts were being taken to separate classified from unclassified. The only reason that he, I think he might be a target at this point, and this is based off obviously new information we've had since you and I talked, was that they went into the safe. They had to open up a safe in his personal office,

and then they had met with him and his lawyers in just June, just two months ago, and found more classified documents. That gives me additional reason to suspect he might in fact be a target, but I would not be surprised to see someone lower level in his staff be the true target of this. We will just have to wait and see. And remember, grand jury proceedings are secret. What would the FBI have had to prove in order to get a judge to sign off on this warrant? And what sort of information would that warrant contain?

Sure. So the standard is simply that there is probable cause that a crime was committed. You have to identify the specific crime or crime or crimes that you believe were committed, and you have to identify where you are searching and why you are searching there. There would be both the standard template form on the front of it, which is the search warrant itself, and then there would be an affidavit, a sworn affidavit from the relevant FBI official outlining what's already been done in the investigation, what they've already found, why they have reason to believe that there is evidence of a crime that's going to be located in the evidence at Mar-a-Lago and where in Mar-a-Lago they want to search. They have to identify particular locations. They can't just go roaming around the entire facility. They had to have very specific details. And I suspect that if we ever do see the search affidavit, we're going to see a lot of detailed information about exactly why they went to Mar-a-Lago and where they looked in Mar-a-Lago. Yeah, Brad, it's been very

helpful. Really appreciate your analysis here, man. And thank you for taking time this morning. Appreciate it. Have a good one. Absolutely. Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it. I had to scrimp. This is what we live for, folks. It's like, what is it, like 7.30? And we're like, all right, well, we have to change literally the entire show. Cool. It's all good. Off the treadmill.

Yeah, off the treadmill. All become Presidential Records experts. Have to rebook guests, but that's why we do it. And we have the capability, and I really mean this, thanks to all of you. Yeah. Remake the entire show, pay for all the extra time, et cetera. And so I'm so thankful to all of the people who make this happen, all of our premium members and more.

So thank you all very much. If you have the ability, the link is down in the description. Otherwise, we will see you all on Thursday with probably some even more explosive information. Yeah, who knows what will come out between now and then. Stay tuned, as they say. Love you guys. See you soon. This is an iHeart Podcast.