Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Counter Points 12/16/22: Trump NFTs, GOP Covid Report, Putin Missiles, Keystone Spill, Jan 6th Warning, Free Press Rights, Celeb NFT Lawsuits, JFK Files

Episode Date: December 16, 2022

Emily and Ryan discuss Trump's NFT Trading Cards, GOP Report on Covid, Putin Missiles, Keystone Spill, Jan 6th Warning, Rights of Free Press, Celebs Sued Over Bored Ape NFT, and updates on the JFK files release.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Hey guys, Ready or Not 2024 is here and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it means the absolute world to have your support. What are you waiting for? Become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Welcome everybody to CounterPoints. I'm Ryan Grimm here with Emily Jashinsky. How you doing? I'm good. I'm ready for today's show. It's a lot of stuff, but it's important stuff.

Yes. And we're going to start out with a joke that we didn't realize was going to be a joke, but it turned into a joke, but it's also quite serious. And this is Donald Trump's major announcement. Right. He teased a major announcement this week and had everybody sort of on edge because the last time he made a major announcement, it was that he was actually running for president of the United States and he got into the field earlier than anybody else except for the incumbent president.

A1 here. Yeah, so put A1 up on the screen. This was it. This was the announcement. If you can't see it, if you're listening, it's Donald Trump in superhero garb with a kind of American flag looking background. It's sort of cartoonish. Ryan, what on earth is he doing? Well, Maggie Haberman made the connection here for everybody. I don't know if you saw this. When he survived COVID, thanks to the remdesivir or whatever it was, he very much, and this would have been based if he had done this,

he wanted to come out of the hospital in his wheelchair and then kind of have a Superman costume on underneath and then stand up and rip off a fake shirt showing that he was Superman, that he had beaten coronavirus. I mean, insensitive in thousands of different ways, representing the hundreds of thousands of people who died by then, but also would have been quite a spectacle. And he was talked out of it. And I think he's been bitter since then.

Here we are. Right. And there's two things. Also, he wanted to do Willy Wonka, which is my favorite reporting from Trump's surviving COVID, was that he wanted to actually pretend that he was sick and then roll in a Willy Wonka-esque way out and pop out and be perfectly healthy and have the Superman shirt underneath. But to your point, Ryan, there's a lot going on here. So big, it is a big announcement. Trump describes NFTs in his Truth Social post as, quote,

very much like baseball cards, which is really interesting, actually. It's not an inaccurate way to describe NFTs altogether. But Melania had previously done an NFT. I think she ended up buying a lot of her own offering. It wasn't super successful. NFTs have had a rough year. Actually, I did not plan this at all. My monologue is on that, just getting into a little bit of the celebrity shilling for NFTs. So it's... Oh, your monologue today is on that. Yeah. I thought somebody turned a monologue of yours into an NFT. Oh, no. Oh, gosh. You're going to go bid on that. Ryan's like, I wouldn't buy it. But Ryan, the interesting thing here is this is not going to his campaign. I was actually, I was waiting to see whether this was a campaign fundraiser,

which there are a lot of interesting questions about crypto and campaigns, but it's actually just a personal money-making venture, yes. He must be finding it hard to figure out ways to enrich himself through his campaign, so he's like, just let's cut the campaign out. Just give me the money directly to me because I am hopefully your favorite president.

So let's actually roll his plea that you part with $99 for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Hello, everyone. This is Donald Trump, hopefully your favorite president of all time, better than Lincoln, better than Washington, with an important announcement to make. I'm doing my first official Donald J. Trump NFT collection right here and right now. They're called Trump Digital Trading Cards. These cards feature some of the really incredible artwork pertaining to my life and my career. It's been very exciting. You can collect your Trump digital cards just like a baseball card, or other collectibles. Here's one of the best parts.

Each card comes with an automatic chance to win amazing prizes, like dinner with me. I don't know if that's an amazing prize, but it's what we have. Or golf with you and a group of your friends at one of my beautiful golf courses, and they are beautiful. I'm also doing Zoom calls, a one-on-one meeting, autographing memorabilia, and so much more. We're doing a lot. My official Trump digital

trading cards are $99, which doesn't sound like very much for what you're getting. Buy one and you will join a very exclusive community. It's my community. And I think it's something you're going to like and you're going to like it a lot. They also make perfect gifts. So you can buy them with your credit card or crypto. All you need is an email address. Go to collecttrumpcards.com. I'm sold. Ryan was giggling for that entire minute.

Did you just get your wallet out? I'm in. I'm in. $99. You're losing money not buying that. Right. Well, OK.'m in. $99. You're losing money not buying that. Right. Well, okay. So maybe later. $99. They are at collecttrumpcards.com. And there's what, 4,500 of them? It's a limited edition collection. I'm sure it's very limited. Yes. Very limited.

Until the second they sell every one of them, then all of a sudden there'll be more. How about that? The best part was the Zoom call. You're going to buy an NFT to get a Zoom call with Donald Trump. Right. And in the past, when he has made these offers, they have never panned out. You know, like somebody will win like the raffle to play golf with Trump or go to this dinner with Trump. And then journalists have found them and be like, hey, did that ever happen? Like, yeah, no. All you need to do is have dinner with one guy to get everybody's money for this raffle, but you won't have dinner with the one guy. So according to, this was in Variety,

this is actually kind of interesting. It says, there's a disclaimer that says basically it's not controlled. They're not being sold. Yeah, here they are. The NFTs are being sold by a company called NFT, I-N-T-L-L-C, which says it is, quote, not owned, managed, or controlled by Donald J. Trump, the Trump Organization, CIC Digital LLC, or any of their respective principles or affiliates. And they're using an underpaid license from CIC Digital LLC. So again, it seemed

like maybe this would be a campaign-related announcement. It was personal. The media wanted this to be a really big story. It is a funny story because, to your point, Donald Trump is in on the joke. You can see it in the video where he's like, well, I don't know if that's that great of a prize, dinner with me. Yeah. Now, I wonder if he's furious right now. And we'll have to wait for Maggie Haberman's reporting on that, too, because he's been just ridiculed across the board, including by even a bunch of his supporters. I saw Lenny Dykstra, the best Lenny Dykstra could do was express some confusion about why this was happening must be distracting people from some other thing. Maybe that's what Trump was up to here.

So Trump does not like to be humiliated. Like his number one insult that everything with Trump is projection. So his number one insult is they're laughing at us. Like the thing that he fears the most is to be laughed at. And so today, yes, he was in on the joke. And so maybe that blunts it a little bit, but he was being laughed at today when he launched this presidential campaign on the advice of the circle of advisors around him. You get out ahead and you look at the polling. You're far ahead of everybody else. You'll leave the sanctimonious in the dust. Instead, the polling is looking terrible for him.

And he then has to presumably, he's contractually obligated to say he's making a major announcement. He probably didn't read the document, like signed it because he's getting a cut of whatever they sell. Now he's like, oh, God, I have to make a major announcement. And he's reading the teleprompter. Well, you know, it's interesting because the announcement of it in and of itself, like really did strike the intrigue and strike intrigue in the media. And of course it would. I mean, he's an announced, he's a former president and announced candidate for president again. And it's kind of like the Trump show happening all over again, where I thought, you know, there was a period of time, especially early in the Biden presidency when Trump wasn't on Twitter, that he didn't necessarily control the news cycles in the same

way that it seems like based on the media reaction to this announcement, he's going to do again, right? Like we were, people were just with, with bated breath waiting for what this announcement would be turned out to be these cards. I don't know that Donald Trump is entirely upset by the reaction because I think he's always been an all-press-is-good-press type of person, which is going back to the way he treated tabloid rumors about his marriages. It was always sort of an all-press-is-good-press mentality. So I don't know that he's particularly upset by it. It is interesting that he tweeted back in 2019,

he's not a big fan of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. That sentiment I think he had repeated a couple of times, of all the times to get into crypto. This is an interesting one. Hilarious time to get into crypto. It is. What timing. But he, I mean, I don't know. I just, I think it was probably a personal venture.

Someone wanted to make it a big thing. He films the video. He has a lot of legal bills, a lot of legal bills. Didn't he raise $250 million? He's He has a lot of legal bills, a lot of legal bills. Didn't he raise $250 million? He's also raising a lot of money. Yeah. That was a complaint Republicans had during the course of the campaign is that he wasn't steering enough of the money that he raised into candidate funds. Right. I mean, yeah, he raised hundreds of millions. And most of that is eligible for

legal funds. Right. He's got really cheap lawyers. So I don't know. I don't know. But again, like it was an interesting glimpse into the another Trump run for the presidency, which would be a third run for the presidency in an do think the Musk-owned Twitter gives a little bit more legs to these stories like this about Trump, Trump-centric news cycles. The media still enjoys Trump-centric news cycles as much as they say they don't. I think that was on full display as people waited for this to pan out. I saw somebody speculating that because Musk has become the main character that has bumped Trump off the main character stage? Do you think there's anything to that?

No. That he feels it? I don't think so. I don't think so. I mean, if anything, I would think DeSantis would be bothering him more than Musk. But I get the theory. The sort of armchair quarterback, armchair psychologist analyses of Trump, for me, have always just been impossible because the guy is a true enigma.

There's just no way to know what's happening with him at any given moment. And I think this is important because, like you said, this is a former president of the United States declared for president. And this is what he's doing today. And this is his major announcement. It would be easy to say, this is just silly, ignore it. But what could be more defining of our era than a day like today? Yeah, I mean, listen, like crypto, I'm getting into this in my monologue, is very easily used to exploit people. And there are a lot of financial ties involved in various crypto schemes. And it's a lot to unpack. I think we might learn more.

It's like Bernie Madoff going out and finding more investors after getting arrested. We might learn more about what's going on behind the scenes with this particular venture. Again, that's one of the things with crypto. It's that there are a lot of people who are making money even when things aren't successful. And hopefully the people that are buying Trump NFTs are able to take kind of risks like that. But he has a big fan base of people who love him and will sacrifice out of their bank accounts to support him. So who knows what will come of this. But like you said, this is sort of a good symbolic rendering of our times. And in other big news today, the House Republicans on the Intelligence Committee came out with their unclassified version of their investigation into the origins of COVID. I spoke actually in the Senate today with Richard Burr, who as a ranking member of the HELP Committee, that's the Health, Education, Labor, Pensions,

so not in his role on the Intelligence Committee, I asked him what the status of their HELP Committee report was. Because if you remember, the HELP Committee's minority report formed kind of the basis of that famous Vanity Fair story that came out maybe six weeks ago. That made it okay to talk about. It's okay. You can talk about it now. It was immediately jumped on to the point where Vanity Fair sent a whole bunch of new reporters, Vanity Fair and ProPublica sent a bunch of new reporters to kind of re-report their story because they had been so roundly criticized. And a couple weeks ago, they published the report on their report,

which found we stand by our reporting. Well, and let's not forget that people were being pilloried as racists, right? Like that was being invoked for people who were flirting, especially in the early days with the idea of Olablique, that this was anti-Asian bias seeping into the public consciousness. And by the way, that was wielded to protect the interests who could be, the people who had things at stake in the question of whether or not it would ultimately be exposed, that there's a likelihood of a lab leak. And this is from the report based on our investigation involving a variety of public and non-public information. We conclude there are indications that SARS-CoV-2 may have been tied to China's biological weapons

research program and spilled over to the human population during a lab-related incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So China's biological weapons research program, again, that has long been a theory. But there were a lot of different reasons. I mean, it was created or it was called the conspiracy theory. People invoked accusations of racism. They brought out all the big guns to shut down these theories early on. And so, Ryan, do you think the fact that this is kind of a partisan, it's a report for minorities, it's a minority report. Do you think that tars the findings or do you think that this is specific and substantive enough that this gives those findings credibility? I think we'll need to wait for the classified version, which is supposed to come out.

They said they're working to declassify it next year, which reminds me that I forgot to mention why I talked to Richard Burr in the Senate. I asked him what the status of their bipartisan investigation was. So the minority report already came out. But in the minority report, they said we're continuing to work with Democrats to produce a final report. He said they're very close to actually finishing that. But then there's still the process of getting it through the declassification process because you have to produce you produce an unclassified version and he said that will probably Trickle into the next Congress. So Burr is unlikely to see that published as part of his Turn as part of his term in the Senate But so the what the Republicans in the House Intelligence Committee have done is they've already gotten their unclassified version out

But they're saying that they want to get their declassified version out, and that requires them to have control of the house, because then they can just gavel it through. And they'll work with the intelligence community to redact things that the intelligence community says, please don't include this. But how much credibility it gets will probably depend on that. On the other hand, a lot of people are just going to ignore this. And, you know, it's, and, you know, it probably got worse with Elon Musk recently saying that, you know, Fauci, he said, you know, Fauci funded gain-of-function research and killed millions of people. Normally when you say that, scientists who believe that that's plausible say Anthony Fauci's, you know, agency funded gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab. And there's a lot of evidence that that research could have led to a spillover.

Whereas Musk just says he killed millions of people. And then because Musk is so increasingly hated on the left, that now I think it might be getting even harder as a progressive to talk about it. Rather, despite the pro-Publica stuff, despite all the work the Intercept did with its FOIAs and other work, that members of Congress on the Democratic side might say there's just no percentage here among my voters here when it's like, well, what ought to matter is what the truth is. This is a pretty good News Nation write-up of takeaways from the report. So they said the House Republicans make a few key points. One, it confirms that China does have a military research

arm that operates a biological weapons program. The report says the intelligence community too also knows China does research on SARS coronaviruses for its biological weapons program. So the program exists and they do research into coronaviruses. Which isn't surprising. And it may have been happening in Wuhan. Right. And which isn't surprising because so do we. Not at all. Yeah. The EcoHealth Alliance, which is Peter Zazak's organization, applied for funding from DARPA, Defense Department.

So everybody, including China, calls it biodefense. Like we don't say, none of us say it's a weapon. We all say we're doing it for defensive purposes. Just studying these things just in case. But it's the military that's doing the studying. So when China accuses us of doing it, they say that we're making bioweapons. When we accuse China, we say they're making bioweapons,

but we both say that we're just only doing it for defense. So relevant... A familiar dynamic, by the way. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so relevant to that, the Intelligence Committee report says that, and you don't have to do a whole lot of reading between the lines here,

but basically what they're saying is that for every conclusion that they reached, that the intelligence community reached in a report that came out, I think it's September 21, they indicated the level of confidence. High confidence, moderate confidence, low confidence, except for one. And the only thing where they didn't indicate what the confidence level was, was whether or not it was part of a bioweapon program. And they said there was, quote, broad agreement. The intelligence community said there was broad agreement that this was not part of a bioweapons program. Clearly what the House Republicans are saying is that we have seen the intelligence report. You did not reveal what the confidence

level was of that claim that you made. Critical. We are going to try to declassify this in the future. You did not respond to us when we pointed out this discrepancy. All of this is in here. And so we're just going to flag the fact that you didn't note what the level is. So they're basically screaming that in the classified version of the report, they found with low confidence that this was not part of a bioweapons program, but they excluded that caveat when they told the public that this was not part of a bioweapons program. Yeah, the report is really critical of the intelligence community, which again, if there's an indication of where the realignment does happen, it's in the flip-flop on intelligence community reports.

I mean, this is very clear and very critical of the intelligence community for not communicating how they got to their conclusion with House Republicans on the committee or with the committee, period. And so it's frustrating because as more time elapses from the start of the pandemic to right now, Anthony Fauci is at the end of the year, he's gone. He's out the door. And I think the more time elapses here, because the harsh spotlight isn't on them to the extent that it would have been if this was playing out with more urgency right away. I mean, we shouldn't have to be this far divorced from the beginning of the pandemic to be having that conversation. Right. And it's not a conspiracy to say that a lot of this research is done in the same labs and sometimes in coordination with military funding,

both whether it's United States or Chinese. In fact, so much so that gain of function for real heads is kind of being pushed aside as the main concern and is being replaced with what they call dual use research of concern, dual use meaning civilian and military. Yeah. So Anthony Fauci can say, well, who knows what gain of function is? He loves to do that. We talked about that in his deposition just last week. So dual use research of concern is actually a kind of broader because it's like, look, this is concerning stuff. So you can't say, well, you know, there was only one logarithmic expansion of the number of people that this is going to kill or how fast it's going to fly around.

And so, therefore, does it qualify as gain of function? Well, it's research of concern. Right. And, therefore, we need strict either prohibitions or guardrails around it. Right. Well, if anything, I'll say it's good timing for Dr. Fauci, who will certainly be out of government before everything is declassified. And he downplays the role he may have had in signing off on the research with American taxpayer money that could have been happening, that we know was happening and was, by most definitions, gain of function happening in Wuhan. But he'll be out the door by the time

anything is declassified in that direction that might show levels of confidence that he made a mistake, which, by the way, it's OK to make a mistake. It's not OK when you're making tons of money from taxpayers and you're not honest about it. But, you know, they can make their arguments for why the gain of function research was doing. Those arguments are wrong. We've talked about that many times. We think they're wrong. But there's just no accountability or honesty about it. And the last thing for people who haven't been following along with this, why it matters that the People's Liberation Army was involved with this lab, which was pretty much already known, is that one of the kind of key roadmaps toward kind of solving this mystery is included in the DARPA application for a grant that EcoHealth Alliance wrote up with, you know, Ralph Baric and some

others based on their work. And the Vanity Fair article talks about this. We've written about this, that it basically is a recipe for how to produce viruses like this one. And the big defense from EcoHealth Alliance and NIH types was that, well, actually, it turns out that was never funded. The Department of Defense didn't end up funding that grant. That's true. But did the lab have its own independent source of funding? And did it use that recipe to do research anyway?

Yeah. And it appeared, and my reporting has always shown that, yes, there was funding outside. So, okay. And that's why this shouldn't be seen as kind of anti-Chinese propaganda because this was a team effort. Yeah. This was the United States and China very much teaming up together to do this. Right. And they completely sort of erased or muddied the waters on that part of the story in the early days of the pandemic. That's actually a pretty central part of the narrative. And when

I say it's okay to make mistakes, I don't mean it's okay to make mistakes that lead to the death of millions and millions and millions of people, disrupt the entire world economy. That's not what I mean. But I do mean that, dude, if you did, if you signed off on this, you signed off on it. That means your name's on it. Even after Obama paused it. Right, exactly, exactly. So anyway, we are paying for all of this and we still have no idea and no access to what the truth is. and that is infuriating. Now, speaking of foreign affairs.

And speaking of millions of people dying. Speaking of tragic foreign affairs, kind of a frightening, some frightening images out of Russia this week. Let's put up C1 and then we'll get to some video if you're watching. So this is a Newsweek headline that says Russia primes nuclear bomb 12 times more powerful than what was dropped in Hiroshima. And indeed, he was sort of Putin, there was footage, all of this stuff kind of flaunting an ICBM this week, which is different, of course, than tactical nukes, which has sort of been the primary focus of a lot of the conversations.

It's just like what the most likely scenario is that tactical nukes start going back and forth, which is not a good scenario. ICBMs, even worse scenario, of course, as the headline indicates. Let's look at C2 here because again, yeah, so Ryan. Scary looking stuff. Scary looking stuff. What is your reaction? What we're seeing if you're listening is some tanks rolling through the snow over in Russia. What do you think, Ryan? What did you think when you saw this? The nuclear, the kind of nuclear saber rattling, which isn't, isn't much fun there. So in Northwest Washington, where I live,

there's this, what everybody says is a reservoir. And it's kind of this iconic mystery in Northwest DC of like, what is behind this block-long sized area of, like behind the barbed wire there. And there have been construction folks out there. Everyone in the neighborhood is like, oh yeah, those are anti-aircraft missiles. Nice. I actually asked some of the workers as I was going past. They're like, he's like, it is a water reservoir. I'm telling you, it's a water reservoir. He was like, what do you think it is? It's not some anti-aircraft missile. He's like, everybody says that. All the neighbors are going by. It's funny you should mention it. But we are here in Washington, D.C., and the ICBMs, I don't know how up-to-date they are.

I'm not sure if they'd be able to actually get all the way over here. Yeah, that's a big question. But really, this is Putin's way of just trying to remind the world that he still has the ability to kind of wipe us all out and that because things are still you know still not going well for him you know we're we're approaching january and his you know his big play was i'm gonna starve europe basically uh energy prices in europe are gonna be through the roof i'm going to knock out all the power in Ukraine and produce suffering of a biblical scale. And food prices are going to be through the roof and there'll be so much pressure on Ukraine to just end this thing that I'll be able to then walk away with a victory. I think the slowing economy, ironically, an economy that I

think that was partly slowed by the war itself has, along with Jay Powell's kind of interest rate moves, has knocked down oil prices to a place where that's not really working out, that Europe part of the strategy is not working out. He's definitely producing biblical levels of suffering for Ukrainians, but it's not something that the world is necessarily concerned about. They're sympathetic, but it's not the kind of thing that's going to change anybody's strategy. That's what's so brutal about being kind of a proxy state, that you're going to suffer, and you're going to suffer endlessly. But I think what it shows is that Putin's plan is really not working, because we're almost in January. That's what I was going to ask you. But I think what it shows is that Putin's plan is really not working because we're almost in January.

That's what I was going to ask you. Is that how you interpret this, as sort of a defensive? It does feel a little bit desperate. It's like, really, you're going to nuke the world now? Come on, no, you're not. So let's put up C3 because that plays into this as well. Yeah, you can see there, this is an exclusive from CNN and it was confirmed by other reporters over the week.

U.S. finalizing plans to send Patriot missile defense system to Ukraine. Now, actually why this segment is so interesting is because we're getting back into the semantic battles about what constitutes a defensive military weapon. I mean, it's straight out of the Cold War again. What's defensive and what's not? Is Putin's ICBM a, and when I said defensive, I meant desperate, like you said. Right, so Patriot missile, what do you make of that move?

Those are pretty, you know, iconically considered to be defensive. They sit outside of cities or wherever else and they became famous uh during the uh during the first gulf war yeah um and and so yeah i i don't think that that escalates things um i think the the the vote this week in the senate uh or the non-vote in the senate where bernie sanders pulled his his his Yemen resolution off the floor at the last minute, had some interesting interplay with Russia and Ukraine that didn't

get discussed much. Because all of this is now becoming interlocked, and nobody wants to talk about it on the Senate floor or talk about it publicly. But Iran is a central figure here. Iran is a backer of the Houthis. And I don't want to say the Houthis don't have their independent agency because they do. Like there have been instances where Iran has wanted them to do X, Y, or Z and they have done different things. Yes. The Houthis are also winning this war. Or you might even say they practically won it.

Like it's over. Like they have swept aside so much of the UAE and Saudi-backed militias. They're on the brink of basically taking over the entire country. And you also have Iran supplying drones and actively supporting Russia, getting closer to Russia. And so I think that one thing that a lot of people don't want to say out loud is that there are concerns, like if the Houthis push that much further to Saudi Arabia and Russia can convince Iran to convince the Houthis to take some Saudi oil fields offline and send oil prices back to $150, $200 a barrel, all of a sudden now the Russian war effort is looking much stronger. It's super interesting because also,

remember, Russia was negotiating the Iran nuclear deal agreements between the Biden administration and Iran. So obviously, this is all intertwined. And a lot of China watchers, by the way, may not have been super happy to see the Patriot missile go over to Ukraine because they're very concerned about the depletion of the United States arsenal if Xi Jinping were to move quickly or faster than people expect on Taiwan. And so this is an incredibly... Doesn't Taiwan have Patriot missiles? I have no idea. Probably. Incredibly tangled web. I mean, you've got to ship them now. That's not like same-day delivery.

Well, that's the difference, right? That's the big difference that people... I'm not saying you should ship them, but yeah. But that's the big difference people say. Listen, Taiwan is an island nation. And it's not like in Europe where we have all of our allies with land borders. It's a completely different type of situation. And so anyway, your point is a really good one that the longer this goes on, I think the more heavily it's weighing in on other conflicts.

And how outrageous is it that we spend $900 billion a year, and this week we're going to pass probably the highest military authorization in American history. It might crack $900 billion. And we're running out of bullets already and missiles. What do you get for $900 billion? We actually just sent newer Patriot missiles to Taiwan. Oh, okay. There you go. This is a December 5th report. So much war, so few weapons. What a shame. I know. And it's like not enough to go around, right? The defense guys are hurting so much right

now. But yeah, the U.S. has proposed selling Taiwan as many as 100 of its most advanced Patriot air defense missiles, along with radar and support equipment in a deal valued at $882 million, according to a State Department memo obtained by Bloomberg. $882 million. And that's in another part of the world. That'd be great for housing prices in Northern Virginia. So when you see, exactly, so when you see people freaking out because the potential Speaker of the House says, maybe not a blank check to Ukraine, which is a consensus position, it should be a consensus position in a normal world, you know why. So speaking of intelligence operations that can't get their act together,

there's new reporting, we put up E11 here new reporting that shows that the Department of Homeland Security had people raising the alarm of heading into the January 6th protests turned riot turns sacking of the Capitol that this that hey guys this is gonna turn bloody now there are I think there are a couple and we could put that tear sheet up here I think there are a couple, and we could put that tear sheet up here. I think there are a couple different ways to look at this. One is that this analyst was dead on and good for them for doing the Googling that led to this. Yeah. Secondly, though, why did they need this analyst to do this? And what is it about the bureaucracy that they couldn't see it?

Everybody knew January 6th was going to get violent. Or that it had serious potential to get violent. It was being organized out in the open on Facebook and Parler and Twitter and all sorts of other forums that are not at all secret or require passwords to get into. Anybody who was remotely paying attention knew that it was going to be a big day. Yeah, and let's not even forget the fact that we now know they had people that were in the inner circles of the Oath Keepers. What's the point of that? Five, they have five sources inside the Proud Boys and like eight inside the Oath Keepers. I don't have the exact numbers off the top of my head, but at the Oath Keepers, we covered the trial last week.

They were super close to Stuart Rhodes. They were like the FBI. The FBI source was like one of the top people in the Oath Keepers. So let's not be ridiculous and say they didn't have any idea what was going to happen, whether or not this person had went on what Yahoo's excellent report describes as a literal fishing expedition, because he was actually looking for fishing holes in D.C. And he actually ended up finding this blueprint of a plot to storm the Capitol. That's from Yahoo. And, quote, execute members of Congress and law enforcement officers to prevent the certification of electoral votes to make Joe Biden the next president. OK, this is insane.

And Yahoo says it turns into a, quote, failed 16 day effort to sound the alarm and push the various parts of the DHS intelligence apparatus into action. The office created in the wake of 9-11 to share intelligence more broadly and prevent another catastrophic attack failed to share its intelligence ahead of the January 6th U.S. Capitol riot. It had the intelligence. DHS has the intelligence. The FBI has the intelligence because they have human sources in the inner circle of the Oath Keepers, by the way, one of which had a heart attack before on the plane on his way to testify in the trial. It's just, it makes me sick to my stomach to think about. I watched the documentary from Nancy Pelosi's daughter that aired on HBO this week, and there's some new footage of,

whatever you think of Nancy Pelosi, there's some new January 6th footage of House leadership. She was with them. Yeah, she's with them. Her camera's rolling the entire time. And you're seeing sort of from the speaker's office, that was a really good vantage point at what was happening outside. It was much better than what I could see on the day. And it was like, when you're looking at that footage, when you're

looking at the buildup to it, all of the clips of the stupid stuff Trump was saying in the months before it happened, it's just remarkable to know that we had sources, intelligence sources in these groups and this DHS intelligence person is screaming and saying, look, we have it right here. We have it right here. And in the lead up to 9-11, so DHS was created out of 9-11 because they had failed to share information and act on tips and information that they had obtained. But one of the problems that they identified was an obvious one, that a bunch of these analysts didn't speak Arabic and didn't also understand the idioms,

didn't know the different forums that they were supposed to be monitoring. This thing was planned on social media in English. You didn't need a whole lot of expertise. That's why this 21-year-old kid was able to... And we knew, by the way, we knew who was doing it. Like, the groups were not a mystery, whereas it's a needle in a haystack with 9-11. A couple of the things that they cite in the Yahoo article are tweets from at real Donald Trump. Yeah.

Like, those are not secret. Those are not secret communiques. And it does show the way that Trump's tweets would then lead to this explosion of organizing activity. December 19th, I think he's like, you know, this thing was rigged. Everybody come to D.C. And then it was the next day that the analyst is looking for the fishing hole and stumbles on, quote, witnessed upwards of 500 pages worth of potential threats to national security, including people urging others and discussing how to smuggle illegal weapons into the nation's capital and avoid detection by law enforcement. The DHS analysts also saw a discussion of references of overthrowing the U.S. government by force, sparking a second

civil war, and veiled credible threats of violence toward other U.S. persons who were perceived as any specifically members of Congress and other federal employees. Yeah, I mean, I saw that stuff. I'm not a DHS analyst. Everybody saw that stuff. Well, again, like they're seeing posts of people saying we're going to bring hooks and ropes for taking down fencing. And again, I'm like pretty much of the opinion that this wasn't a finely tuned plan that was just set into motion. You gives the signal and you know to do A, B, and C. It was just that people were saying, I'm willing to die for this.

That's what some of these DHS people, this is what the DHS person is finding in some of these posts. People saying, I've done my last will and testament. I'm willing to die for this country. We may have to storm the Capitol, et cetera, et cetera. And then when you get there and you can just walk in because the police are like, they did horrible things to get past the police. They shoved them to the ground. But if that was all it took for the mob to overwhelm the police that are

guarding the Capitol of the United States, they've completely spiraled out of control. It is entirely their fault, but there is no excuse for the failure of the law enforcement on that day. And I think the really important context here is this is all coming out as the January 6th committee. Leaks are coming from the January 6th committee saying the report is going to be too focused on Trump and not focused enough on the law enforcement angle that was gathered by the January 6th committee. So the January 6th committee for a while now, months, has had people doing research on the law enforcement failures. And they are upset. They're leaking to the media because they're so upset that those aren't going to be included in the final report that is delivered before the end of the year, around the end of the year when the committee is formally dissolved. So what are Democrats on the J6 committee? What is Liz Cheney on the J6 committee

not wanting to say about the law enforcement failures? Because this is a stunning report. My assumption is always first to look at bureaucratic incompetence. Yes, of course. But if I'm talking to somebody who's skeptical of that and says, A, to your question, why didn't they look into this? Well, they are covering the butts of their kind of like allies in the deep state would be one explanation. But you couple why didn't they look into that with the kind of argument that you hear from the skeptics, which is they were actually okay with this because it presented them with the rationale to then bring the iron fist and crack down

on this thing that was getting out of control. And the level and the depth of the incompetence, I mean, makes it so hard to counter that with, no, it was probably incompetence. You're like, really? It's that bad? They're really that bad? And it's like, well, were you around for 9-11? Like, it's billions of dollars just getting flushed down the toilet every day.

People just push papers around and not actually doing it. Like, they point out that it took a week. So he identifies all, or she, the analyst, identifies all these things. Analyst is not named for safety concerns per the DHS. Right. So they identify all of these things. They're like, named for safety concerns per the DHS. Right, so they identify all of these things. They're like, hey, let's do something about this. Well, we need official Googlers to find this stuff.

There's a whole open source investigative team. Open source means stuff you can find on Google. And so they're putting an urgent request on that. The analyst follows up every single day. It took a week to get that research going because they had just implemented a new system. They're always implementing new systems. And so he or she didn't file their TPS report the right way. And so a week later, finally, then they start their Googling.

And they just still never sent their Google search results onto the Capitol Police. But, you know, come on, Capitol Police. Like, they're around the Capitol every day. The crowds were building throughout the week. It was in your face. You didn't need to, like, even have a parlor account. To know, well, at the very least, to know that this is, like, a recipe for potential disaster.

And so just put a bunch of people around the Capitol and they're not going to get in. I think you're right that there was, and there's been no proof presented in the Oath Keepers plans that they had a methodical plan of breaking into the Capitol. It seemed more, if they did order it, they had the will and it was an opportunistic moment. So there are a bunch of calls between Rhodes and some other deputies, and then right after those calls are made, they search the Capitol. But they only do that in an opportunistic way because they're like, oh, wait, all they have is some bike racks up. Well, yeah, I was going to say, having been there, what clearly was happening is people realized they could get past the police,

and they were shocked to realize they could get into the Capitol. People who were breaking into the Capitol were like, is this really happening? Like, am I really just getting past the police here? And they were beating them and doing abhorrent things to do it. But they were surprised that it was that easy, as easy as it was. And I just, the more that we get these reports out, the more that it's like, first of all, that day could have been, there was a lot of loss of life that stemmed from that day. One person was killed in the riot.

But my God, that day could have been even worse. And all of our money is going to these layers of incompetence, the DHS, the FBI, both of which we know knew they had more information that there should have been a bigger security presence. So just completely disgusting all the way around. Yeah, indeed. Let's move on to, I think we skipped ahead a little bit. We skipped Keystone. Oh, we skipped Keystone. We're going backwards. Yeah, that's right. We're going briefly backwards. But if you're following along on the ESPN screen, which I think was actually an ingenious idea from Crystal, but we skipped from... The best ideas are stolen. So the Keystone XL spill this week, Ryan, this is way more of a subject up your alley than mine.

Tell me why I should be concerned about the oil spill this week. Well, for one, and maybe do we have the first element on this block, like we're seeing, you know, you might not care about the like environmental catastrophe that is being, you know, spooled across an expanding region here. Oil prices are going to go up too. Yeah. As you know, potentially as a result of this or it's putting pressure on oil prices. I think that might be the next element. That's a really good point because this is a particularly leaky pipeline. And right. And so the Keystone, this is the original Keystone pipeline.

They've been trying to build a second Keystone pipeline so they can expand the amount of oil tar sands oil that they're able to pump through. And I think what a lot of people might not appreciate is actually, this is something I learned in covering the Keystone XL one, how energy intensive it is to pump tar sands oil through that. You would think, like, you see a picture of the pipeline. It's running north to south just like a river does. It doesn't take energy to move a river. Oil is liquid. You're like, oh, well, you know, the energy intensivity is in extracting it and then later at the end point refining it.

No. It is extraordinarily energy intensive to pump this oil through the pipeline because it's this disgusting glop. It's not. It's dense. It's so dense. So you have to constantly be pushing it. And because you're using power to push it,

that's going to create vulnerabilities all across the pipeline if something goes wrong and it bursts. This is a 14,000-barrel spill. Yeah, and because you're pushing it, then now you're pushing it out. And so, to me, it makes just one more case that we're about to hit a record when it comes to domestic oil production. I think Trump's – it surged under Obama. It peaked under Trump, came back down recently, but now it's back up. And it might eclipse Trump's record pretty soon, which will be awkward all around because Democrats will not,

a lot of Democrats won't want to celebrate that. A lot of Republicans won't want to acknowledge it. Be weird to see how it plays out if Biden like brags about it at the State of the Union or something. Who cheers for that? It shows like long- term, is this really the system that we want? And so and and secondly, Keystone XL is supposed to go over an aquifer that is that produces fresh water potentially to your parents. Yeah, this is a this is a this is about 200 miles rural Kansas. Again, let's the environmental implications of that, the consequences of that are obvious. So 14,000 barrels, so that's about 600,000 gallons.

This all was transpiring on Wednesday. And if you're watching, you can see that on the screen. Northeastern Kansas this month. Look at that. And so again, when you compare that with the 89 Exxon spill, that would be 260,000 barrels. Deepwater Horizon was 5 million. So this is 14,000, minor.

But Keystone, you would know this better than I do. I was being fastidious when I introduced this segment and said, tell me why I should care about it. I will say that this pipeline is a very big part of the American economy. It's not like just one little pipeline out there. It actually plays a huge role in the American. There's a lot of jobs involved. There's a lot of money involved. There's just a lot going on when it comes to Keystone XL. But the pipeline has had a decent amount of problems over the course of its lifespan. Yeah. And I know you're being facetious, but a lot of people are earnest in this. To them, it's just part of doing business. It's like, hey, this is just how we got to deal

with it. I think it is that. So I don't disagree that it is part of doing it. This is not the system. And it is, which is a good reason to do different kinds of business. Exactly. Right. So this is not the system I think anybody wants long term. The oil and gas industry is going to make as much money as humanly possible as they can from it. They have started investing a little bit in green technologies because even they know that's where the future is. But we have to until we get to that point where we can use renewables and we can use I mean there was the big fission announcement this week. Until we get to a point we're we are stuck with this and so it can't just be that we put up a leaky pipeline and are like it's the cost of doing business if you're gonna have the technology do it in a way that's

respectful and do it in a way that's healthy and is not going to cost after getting I don't know how many subsidies Keystone XL has gotten but to your point it's going to raise prices because it's 14,000 barrels. Right. Right. And then, you know, and then throwing up all sorts of dust in front of people who are like, look, this is dangerous stuff. Maybe we shouldn't, maybe we shouldn't go over the Mississippi here. Maybe it shouldn't go over this aquifer. Like there are, I think, you know, real objections from conservationists, from environmental groups that kind of get dismissed as just strictly hostile to all fossil fuel development. But when the likelihood of a spill is as high as it is over time, to put a pipeline like

this through an aquifer like they're trying to do with Keystone XL, to me, is just kind of antisocial, like socially suicidal, when you know that there's a very good chance that you're going to spoil that. And we need to, by the way, this is another thing, when you're talking about the potential benefits of something like Keystone XL, right now it's a moment where we've shown what we need is some measure of independence. And you can say that's on a spectrum, right? But it should be at a point where you can turn the spigot on in the United States of America at any given moment, and the country is not being absolutely killed by OPEC or absolutely killed by what's happening in Russia and Ukraine. And I think a lot of people on the right, myself included, think there's more room to be producing oil and gas energy in the United States right now. But if this is who's doing it, you have problems because, again, then you're funneling subsidies into companies that are not being the best stewards of them possible. And that

is not overall going to end well. Yeah. And it does point to one upside of renewables, which is that if you have some type of catastrophe with solar panels or a windmill or even a geothermal or a large geothermal plant, it's narrow, small. You might get a fire on somebody's roof and somebody could die. Tragic. But the BP-level oil to shut these off very shortly after a spill. But guess what? It costs money to do that. And it reminds me, was it outside of San Diego a little while ago where like a boat crashed into a pipeline? Boom. Because they didn't have the technology to shut it down, it was just blasted oil into the ocean. Right. Should we do January 6th again since we're now...

Make this one seem... Yeah, we'll just compete to see which one could be darker. There you go. I guess we can jump over it too. Yeah, now we're leapfrogging January 6th again. We're back here, Ryan, to talk about what's on your mind this week, what your counterpoint is for this week. My counterpoint. So I'm going to talk about the Press Act. So in September, the House of Representatives did a few things all at once that were extremely unusual. They passed a piece of legislation unanimously and also stood up for the right of a free press against intrusions by the federal government. Now, normally, if the House passes something unanimously, it's a resolution celebrating Santa Claus or the naming of a post office somewhere. But this bill has actual teeth

and it has real support in the Senate and could genuinely become law if Schumer moves it to the floor in the next couple of weeks or puts it into the omnibus package that's being debated now. So it's called the Press Act and it's sponsored by Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin, and it effectively blocks the federal government from using subpoenas or jail or the threat of jail to coerce reporters to turn over sources, and it blocks tech companies from sharing sensitive information from journalists' phones and other devices with the federal government. It also has one of these clever acronyms, which in this case stands for the Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying Act. So one of the key questions that always confronts any type of shield law that is intended to protect

journalists runs into the question of who counts as a journalist. We certainly do not want the federal government licensing reporters or keeping lists of who's a real journalist and who's not. That's the opposite of a free press. That's a government regulated press. And this bill does a great job of giving an expansive definition, calling a cover journalist, quote, a person who regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, investigates, or publishes news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public. Note that professional is not in there. The second problem that always gets in the way of bills like this is fear-mongering about a terrorist with a ticking time bomb somewhere. It's a scenario that

has basically never occurred in the real world, but Raskin was smart to write an exception directly into the law that deals with that fantastical scenario. So it makes an exception if, quote, disclosure of the protected information is necessary to prevent or to identify any perpetrator of an act of terrorism against the United States, or disclosure of the protected information is necessary to prevent a threat of imminent violence, significant bodily harm, or death, unquote. So the final important question is what information is protected? And the bill offers a sweeping and impressive definition here. They say, quote, the term protected information means any information identifying a source who provided information as part of engaging in journalism

and any records, content of a communication documents or information that a covered journalist obtained or created as part of engaging in journalism. That's pretty good. Previous PressShield laws have included huge gaping loopholes around national security written into law at the behest of the national security establishment, which end up gutting the law. My colleague James Risen, back when he was at the New York Times, was in a long-running legal battle with the Bush administration and then the Obama administration, in which they repeatedly threatened him with jail time for not revealing sources. He refused, and they eventually backed off.

But if this bill were passed into law, prosecutors would not have been able to have come after Risen because there was no imminent threat of anything, just vaguely worded assertions about national security that shouldn't be taken seriously coming from a government that lies regularly about such threats. So the bill put similarly strict obstacles in front of prosecutors who are looking to go straight to Google or Apple. Now, another good element of this law is that it would block the government from secretly colluding with big tech to surveil journalists. Before a tech company could turn anything over, they'd have to let the journalist know about the subpoena and give them a chance to respond in court. The bill also narrows what can be requested by subpoena down to

information needed to confirm what was reported is true. In other words, if a journalist exposes a crime with his or her reporting, that's often not enough for a prosecutor because a news article is technically hearsay. Back when I was at the Washington City paper, for instance, I exposed a slumlord who appeared to be breaking all sorts of laws and DC prosecutors came after him. They subpoenaed me, but through the city paper's lawyer, we refused to testify about any sources involved in reporting. The prosecutors agreed to drop the subpoena if I would testify under oath that the article I wrote was true and accurate. I was more than happy to do that. So if journalism does expose criminal behavior like that, there are circumstances where it's okay to confirm that what you reported is,

in fact, true. Now, this bill limits what can be obtained, quote, to the purpose of verifying published information, unquote. As long as that doesn't compel a journalist to reveal sources, as the rest of the bill says, then that part seems okay. On Wednesday, Democrats tried to move the bill through the Senate by unanimous consent, like had been done in the House, but it was blocked by Republican Senator Tom Cotton, who made this incredible argument on the Senate floor. Senator from Arkansas. Reserving the right to object, and I will, I want to make a few brief remarks here about why I object to the passage of this bill, the so-called Press Act, which would open a floodgate of leaks damaging to law enforcement and our nation's security. The press, unfortunately, has a long and sordid history of publishing sensitive information from inside the government that damages our national security. During the Vietnam War, the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers in an effort to demoralize the American people and turn them against the war

effort. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the press routinely revealed details about America's efforts to hunt down terrorists, details that helped our enemies cover their tracks and evade justice. These leaks were reckless and harmful to our national security. Yet the Press Act would immunize journalists and leakers alike from scrutiny and consequences for their actions. This bill would prohibit the government from compelling any individual who calls himself a journalist from disclosing the source or substance of such damaging leaks. This effectively would grant journalists special legal privileges to disclose sensitive information that no other citizen enjoys. It would treat the press as a special cast of

crusaders for truth who are somehow set apart from their fellow citizens. But that's not how the law historically has treated journalists. Our laws have always made clear that journalists can be held criminally liable for what they publish. So he goes on and on and we'll talk about that in a minute, But the bill still actually has a shot of going through, as it might get included in an end of year omnibus bill that's now being written by both parties. Cotton went on to say that he also objected to the bill because, quote, if recent history has taught us anything, it's that too many journalists these days are little more than left-wing activists who are at best ambivalent about America, unquote. Now, what's interesting about

Tom Cotton is you might remember. So what point are you on today? All right. Well, speaking of Donald Trump and NFTs, actually, Donald Trump has nothing to do with this, but it's all about NFTs. An interesting class action lawsuit was filed on December 8th targeting celebrities who promoted those famous bored ape yacht club NFTs. The suit alleges the existence of a convoluted network of conflicted interests in Hollywood and tech scheming for the sake of self-enrichment. Now, an untangling who invested in what and then who was invested in that is no easy feat, but we needn't even litigate the defendant's legal guilt to peel back the curtain on their moral guilt and to see the

rot in our corporate media as well. The LA Times broke the suit down like this, quote, Yuga Labs, the blockchain startup behind Bored Ape Yacht Club, Hollywood agent Guy Oseary, and Moonpay USA, a company controlled by Oseary, were accused in the proposed class action lawsuit of leveraging their network of A-list musicians, athletes, and celebrities to misleadingly promote and sell Yuga financial products. All right, remember this gloriously awkward segment on The Tonight Show from last January? Last time you were on the show, I asked you to explain NFTs, and you did so in a great way, which is a very hard thing to really explain to a lot of people. But since then, Forbes has named you one of the top 50 most influential people in the NFT space. So congrats on that. You know what you're doing. Thank you. I'm so proud. I love being a part of this community and being a voice and sharing my platform and just

getting the word out there because I think it's just such an incredible thing to be a part of. Yeah, I jumped in. I know. I heard. I'm so happy I taught you what they were. You did. You taught me what's up and then I bought an ape. I got an ape too because I saw you on the show with Beeple and you said you got on Moonpay. So I went and I copied you and did the same thing. You did? Mm-hmm. This is your ape.

Yeah, it's really cool. That's mine. But we debuted. It's really cool. Look at the hat, the shades. And what? How did you? All right, well, it's not illegal or even unethical to make America cringe, but even by today's late-night comedy standards, that segment is painful. Like, the pair is stretching to make their investment seem relevant enough

to warrant the poorly disguised promotion. At the time, NBC defended Fallon by saying, quote, hosts are able to promote outside projects such as books and movies, despite company policy also stating that employees must, quote, disclose and obtain approval for all outside work, financial interests, and other personal activities, relationships that may create or appear to create a conflict. The exposure for Bored Apes functioned clearly as a free commercial for the product, with two fawning celebrity endorsements to boot. Quoting an SEC statement on the problems with celebrities' financial promotions,

the lawsuit brought on behalf of investors in this case says its case against Bored Apes quote, epitomizes these concerns as it involves a vast scheme between a blockchain startup company, a highly connected Hollywood talent agent, and a front operation who all united for the purpose of promoting and selling a suite of digital assets. It's really convoluted, but did you notice Paris Hilton, an NFT influencer who's also a defendant in the class action suit, mentioned Moonpay? She said it in the clip. That is the alleged front operation named in the lawsuit. According to the suit, Hilton and a host of other celebrities who promoted Bored Apes and Moonpay

were actually invested in Moonpay and failed to disclose it. Moonpay has been described as like the PayPal of crypto. It turns out, and stay with me here, that Yuga Labs, the creator of Bored Ape, had been signed to the management company of Hollywood operator Guy Oseary, best known as Madonna's manager, but he's also a super well-connected VC rock star, as Fox Business once described him. Hilton had invested in Oseary's social media company, and Fallon was friendly with him. Oseary was invested in Moonpay. This is all

written and produced to look organic on TV and social media, but of course, it is a high-value promotion for a particular product. Later, Moonpay would announce that talent agency CAA, which represents Fallon and many of the celebrities named in the suit, was an investor. Osiri signed Yuga in October, just two months before the Fallon segment. In November, Fallon announced his purchase of an ape. The lawsuit tracked payments from Moonpay to the wallets of celebrities like Post Malone, alleging the influencers were privately being paid by Yuga

to talk about the apes via Moonpay, given Osiri's connections to both. I do not know if that's true. Quote, these claims are opportunistic and parasitic, Ego Labs told the LA Times, referring to the lawsuit. They continued, we strongly believe that they are without merit and look forward to proving as much. Scooter Braun and Justin Bieber are implicated, as are Gwyneth Paltrow, Madonna, Serena Williams, Diplo, and many others. Josh Kushner is an investor in Moonpay. It is just

a crazy web of wealth and influence intentionally and explicitly leveraged to use celebrities' platforms to boost businesses from which they would all benefit. This is actually fine when it's done honestly so that investors aren't being lured with less than accurate narratives of organic enthusiasm. I actually think a lot of celebrities and wealthy investors have jumped onto the NFT bandwagon specifically because people explain it to them in a way that sounds inspiring, like the next frontier and one that will make the world a better, fairer, more creative place. I'm sure some of them are genuinely excited about NFTs for both the money and the potential revolutionary changes people

tease them with. But that doesn't excuse the misleading theatrics. So yes, obviously Hilton and Fallon used The Tonight Show and NBC let them, and celebrities used their social media in a way that was likely to boost their investments. It's not entirely dissimilar from what people do with their personal books. The Tonight Show segment, though, is also just an unusually clear glimpse at how networks of well-connected, wealthy celebrities and businesses bend the media to their will. BuzzFeed and other outlets did some good coverage of this at the time, but all of the celebrities who spent the last year or two shilling crypto should have been hammered by journalists during every single interview about their involvement in the industry. Any interview they did, period, they should have been hammered on this. Every friendly interview given to Jimmy

Fallon and let's say the FTX front, people like Matt Damon in the last year, should be looked back on skeptically. NFT sales were declining month to month for most of the year. Bored apes are still being sold, but their value took a big hit. This doesn't just happen with faulty products either. We know it happened with sexual abuse before the Me Too movement when Harvey Weinstein leveraged his connections at NBC to shut down Rowan and Farrow's reporting. That's obviously on a much more serious level,

but it happens with celebrities' vapid politics too, which entertainment media claps along with, like trained SEALs, that just allows celebrities to lie and mislead their way into endorsements and into bigger bank accounts. It is just a ridiculous grift, and it's one of the reasons why Hollywood is less entertaining than ever, frankly, because it's basically just a front for investment schemes

that rich celebrities can take risks on more easily. So we've got a little surprise bonus segment that's not down on the ESPN row. That's right. Can we do this now or should we kill the show and then do it right after? What do you guys think? I say we do it live. All right. We're going to do it live.

Control Room has told us we're going to do it live. We've got approval to do it live. And I has told us we're going to do it live. We've got approval to do it live. And I love that we get to do this because it's – I actually love that we get to talk about this with you, Ryan, because you're pretty deep into the weeds on the JFK files. Well, when I was in, I think, fifth grade or something, I did my first ever report on, like, who killed Kennedy. And I remember my teacher being like, you know, after reading your report, maybe it was a conspiracy. What the hell is wrong with this kid? It's such a watershed moment in American history.

And forget, put who did it, the conspiracy, how it happened, put all that aside. The key fact is that every president, including Johnson, after Kennedy, believed that it was at least possible that it was his own government, that it was, say, the CIA that carried this out. So whether or not that actually is true, and it'd be nice to be alive if we ever learn definitively what happened. But whether or not we ever learn, just the fact that every president since then and every government since then has wondered whether it's true. It kind of changes the relationship between the people, the president they elect, and the bureaucracy that grew up after World War II and out of World War II,

the OSS and Alan Dulles specifically growing out of World War II and expanding into the CIA. Well, the first thing Ryan did when these documents were released was actually a keyword search for Alan Dulles. So again, what happened on Thursday is an unsealing by the National Archive of thousands of classified documents that are related to the Kennedy assassination. And we're going to be piecing through these over the course of several days.

I think Crystal is prepping something already for Monday because there's just, again, we said thousands. So you can do your keyword searches. You can see what's in there for Allen Dulles. But whether we learn anything significant from this, and then even if it's not significant, if it reinforces theories, brings forth new theories, that can't be done in a few hours. It's a long process. But Ryan, you do have some initial reactions to what you've been able to sift through. Yeah, and just for people's backgrounds, so about 12,000 documents, I think, were released by the National Archives earlier today. They're withholding an extraordinary number of documents until, I think they're saying June. It will be the next possibility that they'll release more, but they may end up holding them again.

Do we have any elements prepared for this or not? I don't think there's... Yeah, we haven't gotten them quickly enough. So you can go to actually just archives.gov and find them, and you can search around in there. Alan Dulles turned up actually only two things. But the second one was interesting. Let me see if I have it handy.

It was about... It was basically about the Bay of Pigs, where it was a memo. It's just fun to know that Bay of Pigs stuff is in the JFK files. Well, yeah, that was my thought when you were tweeting about the Cuba stuff. I was like, oh, really? It's kind of a goofy memo that he sends out. So here it is. Subject JM8 commendations.

And JM8 is the code word that they used for Bay of Pigs after their original code word got busted. And knowing that this is the Bay of Pigs, it's funny to read it. I know that Project JM8 brought together many excellent, loyal, and devoted employees who believed strongly in the mission and responded by contributing substantially more in spite of disappointments and personal inconveniences than an employee would in a normal assignment. This kind of performance is a real credit to the individual and to our organization. Two, those mentioned on the attached list are credited with this kind of performance over a sustained period of time and with confident display of leadership and knowledge in their field given liberally in the interest of the objective recognition

of this creditable performance should be brought to their attention and a copy of this memoranda memorandum recorded in their personnel files now go do watergate and then yes and then a list of about a dozen people and probably some interesting names but but you'd have to cross reference. The real JFK heads are going to have to cross reference some of these names. William Young and Charles Yasu are both kind of circled here. But I do love the CIA giving themselves an A for effort on the Bay of Pigs. No, it didn't turn out precisely how we wanted it. Wasn't perfect. But no, not everything is perfect. What do you make of the timing here?

You know, they keep punting it. Right. And then they dribble out. So incremental. And, you know, we're 50 years past. And so they're running up against, they're running out of excuses. Yeah. Because most everybody, not everybody is completely dead, but the threat, like the risks to national security are being, are harder and harder to kind of maintain plausibly. So the other one, the other interesting one I found.

So one of Oswald's, some people call him his best friend or whatever, this guy is a fascinating dude, George DeMoren Schilt, who was interviewed by the Warren Commission. He gave the longest interview in the Warren Commission. What we know about him are a bunch of different things. One, that he was a CIA informant. So you're like, wait a minute. Right there. Wait a minute, Oswald's best friend in Dallas was a CIA informant.

We also know that he hadn't seen him since—we're told he hadn't seen Oswald since April of the year that he assassinated him. He assassinated Kennedy in November. He then traveled to Washington and New York and other places, and then he winds up in Haiti, and he's in Haiti at the time of the assassination. So there's an interesting note here from a DOD security, basically. It says, it may or may not be of interest that on 29 April 1963, the Office of Security provided Bill Bean, DOD, a copy of a 1958 summary of the case of George DeMoren Schilt. Gail Allen, then a DOD case officer, had requested an expedited check on DeMoren Schilt, quote, exact reason unknown, unquote. Apparently, Allen's initial request was initiated through Anna Pannor, DOD, on 26 April 1963. So this raises an interesting question of why somebody in DOD, like Washington area,

is all of a sudden in April 1963 as he leaves, you know, investigating DeMora and Scheldt. But this is the level of kind of details that these documents get into 50 years later, because people have pieced together in books and investigations, so many different elements of it, that you're looking for extra things that are going to connect the dots. And so the question would be, okay, so we know that he's a CIA informant. We know that he traveled up north after being with Oswald. We know he was with Oswald down in Dallas. So who did he meet with in New York? What was he doing in D.C.?

Or is this why he was there? So apparently Allen's initial request was an issue. Oh, we say that. DeMoren Schilt was a close associate of Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas. Information is minimal concerning this association, but DeMoren Schilt is mentioned extensively in the Warren Commission hearings, and his testimony and the testimony of his wife encompasses one of the longer testimonies in the hearings. The testimonies reveal that the DeMoren Schilts did not associate with Lee Harvey Oswald after 19 April 1963, when they left Dallas for a trip to New

York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., returning to Dallas for two days near the end of May 1963, and then traveling to Haiti, where they were located at the time of President Kennedy's assassination in November 1963. There was no information in the testimonies as to what the DeMore and Schultz were doing or with whom they had contact during the period 19 April to late May 1963. It is interesting that Allen's interest in de Moorinshield coincided with the trip. So that's from this DOD intel kind of assessment there. So that's the kind of thing that you'll find if you spend your weekend sifting through the new National Archives JFK dump. I think both of us will probably be doing that.

There you go. So you can follow along certainly with Ryan on Twitter. If you find anything good, tag Crystal because she's doing something on it Monday. She would, I'm sure, appreciate the help. That's right. Tag me too because I want to see it. I was going to say. Maybe it will just be like a team effort.

Us in the Breaking Boys community, we're all coming together. It's only 12,000 files. We can get through that. Only 12,000. And Biden ordered the review of them to see what can go out, what's classified that can be declassified of the 16,000. He released those 1,500 last December. So this is just, for JFK folks, this is a big day. And I'll remind him one more time, the greatest failure of Roger Stone's life was not getting his good friend, who was the president of the United States, to release all of the documents. Yeah, that's 100%. Roger Stone had one job. But to the point you started off with, that's what's been remarkable about these files.

It's just that everybody wants, every president who says they're going to do more in that space ends up not. Yes. It's like, you know what, actually. But what are they going to do to Biden? He doesn't have much time left, right? Oh, my God. Right? I mean, he's an old guy. He's older. That's right.

An old guy. That's fine. Actuarially is what I mean. Yes, yes. Yeah, from his purely... So he's got no fear. Yeah, fearless. Except he held a lot of documents back. So he's got no fear. Yeah, no fear. Fearless. Except he held a lot of documents back. So he's got some fear.

There you go. Well, we'll be back here next week for sure. And we know it's getting close to the holidays. So I hope everybody is enjoying their time with friends and family. But like I said, we'll be right back here last week to break down the news because Congress still has lots of work cut out for it. They do. So we'll be here to break it all down.

We have $900 billion to authorize. That's right. Well, on that note, as the $900 billion is being authorized, I hope you guys all have a great weekend and we'll see you back there then. This is an iHeart Podcast.