Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Counterpoints #1: Trump Comments, Insider Trading, Twitter Whistleblower, Afghan Funds, & More!

Episode Date: September 16, 2022

Ryan and Emily talk about Trump's indictment comments, congressional stock trades, Twitter whistleblower, Ken Starr, Afghan theft, GOP vs ESG, immigration policy, railway workers, & more!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/Ryan Grim: https://theintercept.com/podcasts/deconstructed/ Emily Jashinsky: https://thefederalist.com/author/emilyjashinsky/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to the inaugural edition of CounterPoints Friday. Ryan, actually, what people didn't get to see, although I did consider taping it, was the amount of effort it took to get an earpiece in your ear. It seems as though Ryan's ears are too smooth to hold the earpiece. Yeah, we'll see if it holds on. We'll see if it holds on. If not, I won't be able to get my talking points from the control room.

That's right. I'll just have to wing it on my own. You need the voice of God in your head to direct you. Well, we're really excited to be here. We were talking to Crystal and Sagar on yesterday's show about what an honor it is to be here because we love and appreciate this audience and what you've helped them build here so much. So it's just very, very exciting to start the show today. How are you feeling, Ryan?

Feeling good. We get to talk about Trump some more. Yes. I think the big guy's still here. He's still around. Wait, the big guy's Biden. He's the former guy. Right. Trump's the former guy. I think big guy's still here. He's still around. Wait, the big guy's Biden. He's the former guy. Right. Trump's the former guy. Okay. Right. Well, I think he might meme nicknames straight. Yeah. Well, I was going to say, I think probably both of them have been

referred to as the big guy at one point or another. But speaking of Donald Trump, he was in conversation with radio host Hugh Hewitt yesterday discussing a potential indictment. We want to play some sound of that because it's actually pretty big news in the context of a lot of different things that are going on. So let's take a listen. You know the old saying, a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich if they want to. I'm just asking if there is such a prosecutor and they indict you, would that deter you from running for president again? I don't think the people of the United States would stand for it. And as you know, if a thing like that happened, I would have no prohibition against running. You know that.

You've already seen it. I do. And that's what I want people to understand. That would not take you out of the arena. It would not. But I think if it happened, I think you'd have problems in this country, the likes of which perhaps we've never seen before. I don't think the people of the United States would stand for it.

What kind of problems, Mr. President? I think they'd have big problems, big problems. I just don't think they'd stand for it. They will not sit still and stand for this ultimate of hoaxes. So, Ryan, he's walking this fine line that Lindsey Graham got in a little trouble for attempting to walk. And I think actually unnecessarily so because what they're saying is essentially what the left is saying, that the tensions, especially on the right, are so high that there's such anger and frustration among the Republican base and especially this Trump slice of the Republican base that an indictment of Donald Trump, I think we all know, could cause riots, I think is what Lindsey Graham said. And Donald Trump is trying to walk the fine line between saying, you know, getting caught in this question of incitement. And I think that's why he stopped

short of saying what those big problems might be, whether or not you... Mostly peaceful big problems. Mostly peaceful. But whether or not you like Donald Trump, I think that's fundamentally the left and the right are saying the same thing in this case, that even though the left wants to pin incitement on the right, it's true. This could be headed in a very, very dangerous direction. You can also talk it in that direction as well. A hundred percent. Imagine if Chuck Schumer went up and said, look, if you don't indict, name an officer and name a killing, whether it's Eric Garner or Michael Brown or George Floyd, if you don't indict and convict these officers, then there will be big problems.

Right. There are going to be big problems. And so you say, well, Senator Schumer, what kind of big problems? Oh, just big problems the likes of which you have never seen. I don't think people on the right at that point would say, hey, it's true. There might be big problems. And Schumer's just a pundit out here stating facts. People would say Schumer is encouraging there to be a reaction. And he's threatening the prosecutor. He's threatening the jury that if you don't do this thing, that there's going to be blood in the streets or things are going to be burned down. Right. And I think we've got a similar thing going on here. And I think it's so fun to watch Hugh Hewitt try to guide interviews. And sometimes he guides them in the place that he wants it to go.

Other times they veer off a little bit. Here, he even narrated what his own vision for the interview was. He said, I wanted people to understand that you're still going to run for president, even if you get indicted. And then Trump goes on in a direction that Hewitt didn't want him to go, and there are going to be big problems. Not only am I going to run, there are going to be big problems the likes of which you've never seen. And you can see him clarifying there. He's like, what do you mean by big problems? He's like, oh, okay. I made news, which he likes. He loves to make news. He's also like, hmm. Well, yeah, I mean, then again, though, whether or not it's a

threat to a prosecutor, I think is a very different question. And I don't think even the hypothetical you just laid out with Chuck Schumer, which is an interesting one, even that I don't think would necessarily amount to a threat so much as it amounts to a diagnosis of the problem, which is very real and obvious. I do think it's a fine line though. But what if you're essential to creating the problem? But how do we find that? How do you disentangle those variables? Somebody goes by a small business. There's been a lot of crime on this block lately. I'm pretty good at solving crimes. Give me $500 a month, and I don't think you're going to have any problems. This is a really nice small business

you've got here. It would be a real shame if something bad happened to it. I certainly don't disagree with that. I do think that when it's public officials talking about, and we don't actually even need to get into that question because there's a lot more going on with this. But I do think it's going to be in the future because we have a, this is also news from this week, the January 6th committee is planning not only to go into September, which they had said earlier, they're also planning to go into October. They said, I think it was- Election Eve. Right, right. They said they- Season finale, election eve. Right, right. They said they sunset on December 31st, so they can. Some people are saying whatever final report they issue wouldn't be until after the election, but we do know that they plan to. In fact, they're talking today about their schedule for the rest of the year. They're meeting today to talk about their schedule for the rest of the year. So this is going to be looming.

Season two, you mean? Season two, right. Which we can't wait for. This is streaming soon. Unfortunately, not bingeable, though, because. I know somebody should put the first season together so you can just binge it. Like the books that they do, the Mueller report with like an intro by just name it. Anyway, this is going to be looming over the rest of the election season on a sort of daily basis. It's part of an election

strategy. There's no question about it because it eats into time that Republicans have to talk about gas prices, inflation, whatever they think is going to be politically expedient for them to talk about. Now, this is a shadow over every Republican candidate every single day as to the extent that you can do the drip drip. And there's plenty actually dripping. You know, you don't have to create a lot of it, although in the January 6th side, they surely are. Trump's Save America PAC, this is from Politico this week, another story. We've got another tear sheet here. Paid $3 million to cover top lawyers' legal work. Ryan, $3 million from the PAC, the legal work covers January 6th work and Mar-a-Lago work. How does this play into everything that is surrounding Trump going into November?

What's shocking in that headline as it relates to Trump is the word paid. Trump does not pay lawyers. He's like the old HuffPost bloggers. He's going to pay you in a platform. And shower you with comments. Yeah, you're going to get comments, and you get the platform here. So if you're a slip-and-fall lawyer from Philadelphia, you do a pro bono case. But the impeachment case, remember that guy who hadn't prepared anything and just gave a completely off-the-cuff stem winder in front of the Senate. It was great advertisement for his slip and fall business back in Philadelphia. So for him to actually have his PAC pay $3 million to a law firm to get real lawyers to do real work

suggests a heightened sense of concern about where this is heading for him, which I think is reflected also in his ramping up the threats or punditry or whatever you want to call it. Because once Lindsey Graham had gotten so much heat for saying, hey, there's going to be riots in the streets of America if this happens, everybody knows that if you go there, that's how it's going to be received. And so he went there deliberately knowing that's how it's going to be received. And so he went there deliberately knowing that's how it's going to be received. So I think those two things together suggest that he's getting kind of concerned about where this is heading. Now, it's not going there anytime soon, it doesn't seem like, because the other news we have is they appointed a New York

judge finally to look over these documents for really utterly absurd reasons. The Justice Department had asked to be able to continue to look at them and examine what was lost. They claim, if you take them at their word, they're claiming, which you're supposed to do when you're hearing out these arguments, they're claiming that there's such sensitive national security information that they had to raid the home of a president in order to retrieve this information, because there could be human intelligence sources at risk. And so now they're not allowed to sift through that. Now, they might be bluffing, and there might not be anybody at risk. That's a massive gamble for a judge to be taking to say, you can't even look at this anymore.

Like, imagine that there is something actually sensitive in there that is time sensitive that they need to deal with. Say, hey, guy in Beijing, like, you might want to get out of there because your name was in here. And we saw in the video that this person we think is an asset was like roaming these hallways. To stop that mid-search, to me, was just wild. And then to have this, what are they, special master going over the documents to determine what's executive privilege is just incoherent. Because that's something that a judge or a Supreme Court has to determine, whether it's executive privilege. Like, is there even executive privilege for somebody who's no longer in the executive if the current executive has like waived executive

privilege, which they obviously have because they are suing or they're prosecuting, they're trying to prosecute this case. And it goes back to this judge, which is just wild. Have you looked into this judge canon? A little bit. I mean, it's pretty, all of this is pretty convoluted. And I think that's why actually Democrats realize that as an election strategy, if you're talking about this from a purely sort of nakedly political standpoint, you can say that's why this is in a way politically expedient, because it's such a vague question day in and day out, because unless you have time to peel back every single layer and to determine what the

credibility of the DOJ and the FBI is at any given stop and the credibility of Trump is at every given stop. We have two basically less than credible actors on every side of this with every step of the way. And so it basically just becomes a dark cloud and it plays into what one person can fundraise off of and what another person can fundraise off of and what another person can fundraise off of. And as a media strategy for Democrats, it's really helpful because to the extent that we can have these headlines about the special master, nobody knows what a special master is. I mean, it's not exactly made up, but like, right. It's like, right. And so it sounds really serious and it is really serious.

But you'd have to really at every given step of the way, you have to be like diving into the minutiae to determine who has the credibility at that particular step, because it's very, very difficult to trust the credibility of either party here. Although on this judge cannon, it gets pretty easy. And her story also shows how much stuff goes on that that the most dogged journalists are going to miss at the time. So she was confirmed, a handful of Democrats voted for her in November of 2020. So like after the election, but before Trump had left office, about six weeks before Democrats took control of Congress, they've since released some of her, you know, the answers that she gave to the Judiciary Committee going through her thing. One of the questions they ask is like, list, so this is a 38-year-old woman, not to be ageist here. Whoa, whoa. They say, list four, So she's had a decent career, like 10 plus years.

She's been in the legal world. They say, list four papers that you've written. Because they like to read the papers and their opponents are going to go through it and find things and challenge them in the hearing. Nothing. I saw these. She had some press releases. It was pretty fun. In which she was mentioned in from her like law firm.

And it was like lists, it says like list speaking gigs, list lectures that you've given. List media appearances. Media appearances. It was her wedding announcement. It was her wedding announcement. It was like list panels you've been on. Like everybody in Washington has been on a panel. She hasn't been on a single panel.

And maybe this is just, you know, populism made beautiful, like just plucking people off the street and throwing them on the bench. But this is also a job that requires, you know, some experience. And they said, why did you join the Federalist Society? The answer, I wish I could quote it. It was just, I'm not a lawyer, but I was like, that doesn't even make any sense. I'm not a lawyer, but it doesn't sound right. This is crazy. You don't seem to have any idea what you're doing.

And so when her first legal opinion came out and you had all these legal experts saying that it was an incoherent draft opinion, it's like, I didn't quite believe it. I thought they were being like partisan hacks or something. Then it's like, oh, no, this is like what they actually mean is that this is a paper that somebody like a 1L would turn in and get it graded by the professor. I mean, like, not for political reasons. This is just wrong and bad. Like, turn this back in. Like, you misunderstand everything. And so, now here we are with like,

a special master determining whether there's executive privilege at play. It's like, that's not how this works, but that's how power works. She's the judge for life, unless somebody figures something out. Is that incitement? It's incitement, I think, to impeachment for like being completely unqualified. Well, we have one more tear sheet here that I think actually gets to your point. And this is about Mark Meadows, the ex-chief of staff in the White House under President Trump, former President Trump, who is now complying with a January 6th subpoena. He had sued in the past not to comply. But Ryan, to your point about bringing this a little bit full circle, you started by saying the reality

of Donald Trump paying the lawyers to the tune of $3 million, which probably doesn't cover all of the work. I don't know. That seems, if anything, low. It's more than he's paid for a long time, I'm sure. So this does, I think, speak to what you're the point that you're making, which is that there seems to be a sense from the outside and from the scraps that we're getting in the media that they're taking this more seriously. It's the that Mark Meadows is complying with the subpoena. That seems to be a sign that things are probably intensifying. Yeah. And I have always felt that if the system wants to try to check future attempted coups, future presidents from going to, okay, hey, you went to every court. You got lost in 30 plus court cases. Fine. You sue all you want. That's our system. You went to the Supreme Court. Supreme Court didn't want to hear it. Fine. Those are the processes we have set up. Once that's over

and you're continuing to try to overturn the results of the election coming up with harebrained schemes, like we're going to get fake electors and we're going to have Mike Pence say that, well, there's these fake electors, so therefore we need to send it back to the states and on and on. Once you go to that place, that to me is attempting to overturn the election. If you want to check that, I think it's not just the president that you have to check. You have to check the chief of staff. Because without chiefs of staff, without these senior figures engaging in these operations, a president is stuck. Like he can rant and rave all he wants. But if all the

people around him are like, the Supreme Court has spoken. And the vice president's not doing your thing. It's over. That's been one of the most interesting, I think, sagas to follow. Well, it was throughout the entire Trump White House, right? And there are a lot of Trump people who are still very frustrated with how difficult it was to get anything done in the administration, especially the kind of hardcore Trump people in the administration, because they felt like they were being blocked every step of the way by establishment Republicans who had infiltrated the administration. Now, Mark Meadows would not be called an establishment Republican. This guy was a lot of resistance within the White House to continuing to push on the election. There was a lot of resistance, I think, probably on the campaign side at some point, too.

But Mark Meadows obviously is an interesting part of that puzzle. I do still think at the end of the day what Donald Trump wanted to do, he fires people to get that stuff done, right? We've seen it. If somebody gets in his way, Rex Tillerson gets in his way. Who was the environmental, the like anti-environmental lawyer that he had running the Department of Justice or something? Right, right. Yeah. So, I mean, I don't know how much of a bulwark, even in this hypothetical, Mark Meadows could have been. Right. What's your sense of what his posture was? Was he trying to slow walk or was he like to the barricades? I don't know. It's hard to say. It's very hard to say. So it's because there's also, there's a, again, that's kind of a difficult question when you're thinking of like, what does one thing constitute?

Like if I'm, are you on the Sidney Powell side or are you and, you know, voting against certifying the electors, which people did in 2016, Democrats had done in 2016, and had predated the wall back in January of 2021 to know where people stood. It's hard to say because those positions are slightly different. You have to tune in for season two of the J6 hearings. That's right. New on the true crime genre. Speaking of true crime. I was going to say, it is produced to look a lot like true crime. And speaking of which, should we move on to insider trading? Let's move on. Yeah. So the New York Times had a big investigation confirming what we've all known for a very long time, which is that members

of Congress have been engaging in insider trading. What the Times adds is a couple of things. One, they add their imprimatur. So now Pelosi's going to get asked about it and she's going to get pressured on it. They also add numbers. So they do a sophisticated database analysis and they come up with saying that roughly, so what, close to over 90 members of Congress had made thousands of trades and at least a third of them were conflicts of interest, like clearly appeared to be conflicts of interest. And they had a lot of exclusions that would have pushed their number up even higher. And what they were trying to say is like, we're doing this in the most conservative possible way, and we're still finding eye-popping amounts of corruption. They carved out Pelosi,

for one, because she doesn't sit on any committees and their entire rubric was around committees. They also carved out the Ways and Means Committee, which is, that's the committee that does not just tax policy, but now tax credits. So it used to be that that was the revenue, the ways and means that you fund a government. Now it's also spending because we do so much spending through tax credits, the child tax credit, energy tax credits, you name it. And so they said, you know what, because these members of Congress have jurisdiction over the entire economy, we could say that every single one of their trades was and is a conflict of interest. That's the point. I know. So they're like, therefore, we're not going to count those. It's like, okay, all right. Maybe we just count all of them.

Yeah. I mean, basically you could count basically every trade. Yeah, of course. Because the obvious answer, they shouldn't be allowed to do this, but they do to this. Now, I mentioned this before, there is a kind of unspoken or unwritten, at least, bargain that's gone on that members of Congress have not gotten a raise for many years because just the politics of voting yourself a pay increase are just going to dominate then the next election. And they already make a lot more than the average. They make $174,000 a year. And so it's very hard to come to somebody who's making the median salary and say that I needed a little bit extra. Because once you're explaining, you're losing. You're

like, I got an apartment in DC. I've got my family back here. I've got extra. AOC made that argument recently. And what was in Sean Duffy? Yeah, Sean Duffy years ago. I sympathized with his point. A hundred percent. I mean, he's got six, seven kids. And AOC is right. You have to maintain two properties in very high rent areas. So it's not the most sympathetic case, but it is somewhat valid.

Right. And so the kind of unwritten bargain was like, all right, we're not going to raise your pay, but look, look how much money you can make on the side. Right. And incentivizes it absolutely. Which is just insane. And there's a couple of things that are like not sympathetic cases, but that do incentivize corruption in Washington, D.C. One is the low amount of money, relatively low amount of money compared to the private sector that Hill staffers make, and the other is Congress. And again, not sympathetic cases. You don't want to go to the mat for that, but I do think higher pay in both those cases would probably disincentivize,

especially on the staffing side, some revolving door activity, because it's so incredibly lucrative to go to the other side and go to the dark side and to do it very quickly. But on the member side, some of them have legitimate needs for more money, but not everybody is maintaining two properties in New York and D.C. Most of them are independently wealthy coming into Congress. So a lot of them do not have any incentive. I mean, when we're looking at some of the names on here and the graphic from the tariff sheet that the New York Times has is great because you see of these 183 current senators or representatives who reported a stock trade or another financial asset

by themselves or an immediate family member, it's perfectly split down red and blue. Perfectly split down Democrats and Republicans on both the House and the Senate side, which is just a beautiful illustration of exactly how this works. It's like the best bipartisan grift in Washington. Ryan, I'm also curious as your take, the ways and means point is a really good one. Some of these numbers, I think, are just unusual whales tracks this like on a more, and Crystal and Sager cover unusual whales a lot, and they should, covers it on a more instantaneous basis. We can sort of see the rolling trades that people like Paul Pelosi are making. It is really difficult to look at the times analysis. It's so general to a certain point that it's like, okay, so they say their wife's doing it and they say that they don't ever talk to their wife about this. Or they say they never talked to their broker about this. Well, did they then talk to

their spouse who then talked to their broker? There's a lot of slippery language. Right. And they get into some trades and they put some of their best ones at the very top where you're like, yeah, you're kind of busted. Like you've got what Tommy Tuberville is, I think their first example, where he's trading cattle futures. And he said- He's on the ag committee. And he told a reporter that, yeah, the ag committee has been talking a lot about cattle. So he also told the Times that his broker makes the trades, that he does not.

Of course the broker makes the trades. Right. But that he has nothing to do with it. Right. Exactly. Yes. And so that's why clearly, clearly the solution to this is no trading while you're in Congress, because there's absolutely no legitimate way to provide oversight and to know whether they're being honest. Also, they filed their disclosures really late. In a lot of cases, they're out of compliance with even the Stock Act. That's 2012, right? That was the 2012 piece of legislation. After a Pelosi and a Boehner scandal. Yeah. Pelosi and Spencer Baucus. Yeah. Yeah. It was, and the Pelosi. Yeah, all of them. Yeah. There's a study also quoted in this Long

Times piece. What is it from? Cornell or one of the, I think it's from one of the Ivies, showing that they didn't outperform. Although it said the stocks didn't outperform. Exactly. And it's like, okay, but how closely did you track that? Because you can track, you don't know how much they bought, but you know what day they bought. Right.

And so you can track it that way. But this is putting more pressure on Pelosi, who has claimed that she's going to do something about this. She was asked about this at a press conference. Let's let's roll that shot here. Yeah, I'm not big on New York Times and their investigations, but if that's what your premise is, the here's the thing. Members have been working on this just because somebody introduces a bill doesn't mean it becomes the law of the land. There's been discussion about it. And just recently, this morning, actually, the committee, we've been going back and forth and they were refining things and talking to members about what they think will work. And we believe we have a product that we can bring to the floor this month. It's exciting.

What about the congressional staff? Well, you know what, when the bill comes out, you'll see what it is, and those are some of the discussions that go back and forth. But I'm pleased with it. It's very strong. But again, just because, what did they say, they have 60, that's not even a quarter of what we need, a third of what we need to pass a bill. The question from the reporter there, if you couldn't hear it, was, will this include

congressional staff, which is a huge sticking point on the Hill, because guess who has a ton of power on Capitol Hill, the people that write the bills, particularly the chiefs of staff. These are people who, I think their max salary is also $174,000, which is a lot of money. It's also, for many of them, a quarter of what they could make next week. And as you get older, as you have more kids, they call it going downtown. There's this phenomenon on the Hill where one kid, they might stay for a little bit. They have their second kid, boom, they're going downtown. Going downtown. So anyway, we'll find out if staff are involved in this because I think that's a really essential point. I think the other answer is you

got to pay the staff a lot more. Probably. We understand this when it comes to the CFPB, the OCC, like a lot of these financial regulators, we pay them these kind of market rates. Some of these regulators are making $300,000, $400,000 a year, which might be actually still less than they'd be making out in the private sector, but it's a lot of money and you can live comfortably on it. And you don't want to get into an arbitrage type place where there's so much financial incentive for you to sell yourself out. And so the public, in a lot of ways, is going to get what it pays for. And if you don't pay your public servants, somebody else is going to pay them. Yes, that's true. Well, and the other way to attack this problem would be to strengthen revolving door laws. And there are obviously some on the books,

but you can, I mean, I do think a salary increases probably, especially because you can actually even go back to like what Newt Gingrich's congressional reforms were in the 90s and say, frankly, Congress is understaffed. And it's allowing lobbyists to do the work. That was the point, to privatize the lawmaking. To let special interests come in and fill in the gaps where there's no staff to do it. Like the way that API wrote Joe Manchin's permitting reform bill. They had the stamp on it. They put it out with the API watermark on it.

They had the watermark on it, yeah. You usually have to go to the metadata to see which lobbyists wrote the legislation. This one, they just put the watermark right on it. I also enjoyed Nancy Pelosi giving her stamp of approval to the bill, saying it's very strong and I'm very pleased with it, as though that would matter to any...

If Nancy Pelosi is happy with a piece of bill, with a piece of legislation on insider trading, I'm going to assume it is terrible. Or she's retiring. Right. She's getting out. Jeff Merkley also said yesterday, Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, that it doesn't look like they're going to vote on this in the Senate because they need, they need 60 votes over the Senate. I think the house will still, obviously we'll still vote on it just because actually they're even more likely to vote on it if the Senate assures them that it's not going to become law.

They're saying that they're going to come back. It's going to be an interesting lame duck because they also said they're not going to vote on codifying marriage equality because they don't yet have the 10 Republicans that they need, but they think that they'll be able to get them after the election

because maybe after the election, because maybe after the election, you get a bunch of the retiring senators. I know Portman's retiring, Blunt's retiring. I don't know if they're on the bill yet or not, but they might want to not be on it for whatever political reasons yet, but after the election, you might be able to get 10, 15. And I think after the election, maybe you can get 10 Republicans to sign on to a ban. But how expansive the ban is, is really important. We're going to have Ro Khanna on the show later. He won't be on during this first hour and a half show that we're putting out because he can't join till later, but we'll post his interview later today. And we'll ask him about this. He's actually mentioned in this New York Times article because his wife is super wealthy. And his wife was trading a bunch of stocks that he had some

jurisdiction over. And we can ask him about that. But it also raises a question. What do you do about spouses? Because that's the Pelosi. Pelosi always says, I don't trade any stocks. Her husband's basically an investor. Right. So what do you do if you're married to an investor? Like, your spouse now has to, like, leave the industry? I'm actually okay with that. Yes.

There are only 435 members of Congress, and it should be a privilege to serve the public. Yes. And that means your entire family has to be along for the ride. But we don't have that sense of civic virtue in this country anymore. Not at all. The idea that a spouse should have to change their job because somebody's serving the public, I think for most people would seem radical. I think they should because it's their civic duty, but I don't see much hope for that. It should be shameful and it should be embarrassing to be in Paul Pelosi's situation,

which is that you are trading on public service, that you are using- Or you seem like it. You say you're not, but you sure seem like it. Absolutely. I mean, the Pelosi's have been- Do you ever talk to your wife about work? They have been doing this for years. I mean, this goes back years and years with the Pelosi's. So I think it's just utter nonsense. And the question of spouses is a good one. The other thing that these studies that claim they'd be better off if they had, based on the evidence, they'd have been better off if they had had their money in index funds. You're not really going to be able to measure the losses they avoid. Right. That's another,

if you're- Well, you sort of can based on the annual rates of return. I guess you can, but I think it's also very difficult to quantify what they're not doing. Yeah. Based on information that they might have had. They certainly feel like they're doing well. Otherwise, they wouldn't be resisting this in the face of so much political pain. I mean, and there are certain trades that are just glaringly obvious. I mean, it's almost, you can just say with like 99% certainty, this is what happened and you avoided,

I mean, the COVID stuff was a good example. Yeah. Right. Right. How Richard Burr stayed out of jail. Like they have him busted, like coming out of that classified briefing. Chris Collins. Chris Collins did go to jail. Yeah. He literally went to jail. Burr comes out, calls his like brother-in-law or whatever, calls his broker, his brother-in-law and him both all dump their stocks after coming out of this meeting. And they seize his phone and they do the whole investigation and they just let it slide. SEC is apparently still investigating him. So we'll see where that goes. But even if when you've got somebody dead to rights and you can't nail them, then you know that it's basically an unenforceable law. So you've just got to go further and just say, look, put your stuff in a blind trust.

Which brings us back to Joe Manchin, who owns a coal company. And he says, well, my coal company is in a blind trust. Don't worry about it. You know what it is. It's a coal company. My coal company is in a blind trust. At least that's what I'm told. Run by his son. Yeah. So we have, we can move on probably to the big tech segment because there was some under-discussed news on this front this week. I wouldn't say it was undercovered because a lot of people,

a lot of the outlets actually picked up on the news because you had a congressional testimony from Twitter's former security head who testified on Tuesday that, quote, there was at least one agent from China's intelligence service on Twitter's payroll. I'm reading from the Associated Press here. The company knowingly allowed India to add agents to the company roster as well. This is coming from, you probably heard the name Mudge, Mudge Zatko. He's a cybersecurity expert. He was blowing the whistle on Twitter in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee this week. Ryan, what did you make of Mudge's testimony?

I think it's, the China question is an interesting one. Do you find this credible? Is probably the most important first question. Yes. And in fact, we know that Saudi Arabia ran one of these operations, paid some engineers. Those engineers were on trial recently. So this is a thing that we know that we know it happens um and and so they they don't they clearly don't care enough to have internal controls set up uh they have obviously way too

much they give way too much access um to way too many people inside there's that you can just find a couple of engineers bribe them and then you can find out who these dissident accounts are, where they are, who they're in communication with. And it can lead to people disappearing and dying as a result of it. And it's dystopian and it's authoritarian. And Twitter has to ask whether or not it cares enough to do this. Or the government, the public, needs to force them to. This was actually one of my main concerns about Elon Musk being able to buy Twitter. All the culture war stuff, to me, is a complete sideshow relative to his dependence on China. He needs China for materials, for investment, for labor. He has factories over there. These are just obvious

points of leverage that the Chinese government has. If they come to him and are like, hey, this person in Taiwan or Hong Kong or San Francisco or New York said this thing and we want access to their DMs, is somebody who has that much leverage over them going to say no? You're asking to put an enormous amount of trust in one person or in the infrastructure that one person oversees. And I think that's what the Twitter story gets to that, that these tech companies or social media tech companies in Silicon Valley expanded really rapidly and their power over our world expanded really rapidly. They quickly became not just silly ways to keep in touch with people from college. They quickly became these vast data sucks and these places where politics happen,

these places where people's personal, professional, and political lives happen. And so when you have this, to me, what it sounds like is Twitter not taking this seriously and not being capable even of taking it seriously because they're totally over, they're totally underwater in terms of like they have not been able to keep up with their own power. And you've seen it before where they say, especially after the 2016 election, where there were Russian bots and everything and people were upset about that. And I mean, I think the Facebook memes were kind of funny and probably not super effective from Russia's end. But you saw Facebook at that point saying, we don't want this power. Take this power from us, Congress. Please help us do this because we are not equipped. But it's like you built this entire platform to monetize having that power. And it's the same thing with Twitter.

And I'm not comfortable, whether it's Elon Musk or Jack Dorsey or whomever, over Twitter because it's one person with a truly, truly unbelievable, unprecedented, too, amount of power over human interaction and world politics. And you just, the way that our system is set up right now, have to trust that they are going to wield it in the public's interest. And I would say that the answer to this, to the extent that there is an answer, is end-to-end encryption. They need, like, you know, so Signal,

if you paid an engineer at Signal, which is a messaging app that everybody should use if they're not, they don't have access to your messages. They can't. You have the most corrupt engineer who's bought off by five different countries. They can't get into my account. They can't get into your account. There may be some way that they can tell that messages are happening.

I don't know quite the details of it. They certainly can't read the contents. I don't know what metadata they would have access to. But at a minimum, I would say that somebody like Twitter needs to have end-to-end encryption on its direct messaging. Instead, our government kind of pushes in the opposite direction. They want back doors into encryption. They oppose encryption because it's in their benefit from a law enforcement perspective and kind of a national security perspective that they want to be able to hoover up all of this information and they want to be able to spy on everybody. So they're not so keen on companies adopting end-to-end encryption.

But I think that if we care about privacy, and particularly care about privacy of dissidents relative to countries that are disappearing and torturing and killing them, that's the only answer. Well, and it is kind of an interesting question as to how they would have power over geopolitics. And you've explained this a little bit, but it's true. It's through DMs. It's through the interactions that people who are engaging in our politics, that our political actors are having with others. It's through what people are doing privately on the platforms, who they're communicating with journalists, who journalists're communicating with journalists, who journalists are communicating with, what they're saying, all of this stuff is accessible. And we're told that there are safeguards that prevent the wrong people from accessing that information. But whenever you have a whistleblower testimony like this come out, it confirms the

obvious suspicions and the serious and very real suspicions. And to your point, you raised, you brought this article to my attention. This is a vice headline. I think we have the tear sheet. Google deep mind researcher co-authors paper saying AI will eliminate humanity. Now, here's the, again, we're talking about this massive corporation. Twitter is much smaller than Google, obviously, and Alphabet. But what's crazy about that is you realize how very, very rapidly these companies are doing exactly what we can see with the benefit of hindsight that they were doing in the early aughts. Right now, we can say the same thing. The power that they have is rapidly increasing. And whether or not you think AI will indeed eliminate humanity, you can see that what they're working on right now and what people are working

on in these spaces are going to dramatically increase the power that these private companies have in some pretty unprecedented ways. AI, unprecedented. There is not a precedent for that in human history over the entire world, essentially. Yeah, and if there's a 5% or 10% chance of that, I think that's something we ought to take extremely seriously. There's no work in Congress on oversight of this at all right now. Right. And you have, yeah, that's right. And we're not talking necessarily about like

armed robots, like massacring the entire world, like over a weekend. Well, you know, it's more likely some type of power plant disruptions, nuclear plant disruptions, like some type of artificial intelligence guided calamity that we don't see coming because we have instructed this AI to have particular goals, which we don't necessarily realize are in conflict with our own goals, but they do realize that as they develop whatever kind of artificial consciousness that you're thinking of, that this is a Google engineer who is laying this out, I think should give people a lot of pause. AI is going to be impossible to kind of,

I think at this point, root out. Nor would we even necessarily want it. So I use Otter to transcribe. Oh, yes. And Otter uses AI. And Otter gets better and better. I do worry about it. That's a great example of something, though, I do worry about.

Because you're transcribing conversations that dip into off-the-record information at times. What's their encryption backup? Exactly. I don't use Otter, by the way. I use a different one. Didn't you just say, I use Otter? It's throwing me off. And so you're not going to rip it out of the system.

But there are, I don't know all the details of this. This is not up to me. This is not up to us to come up with the solutions here. But there are solutions. There are people who are thinking seriously about guardrails that can be put in place now, like off switches and other ways to basically prevent this from spiraling out of control. But nobody cares. Congress is perpetually 10 years behind the curve on digital technology. And so 10 years from now, they'll figure out it's too late in the same way that they figured out, oh, Russia is paying bots to influence votes. You know, after it happened, it's the same thing.

And it's completely – actually, this week, I was down in Miami at the National Conservatism Conference. And part of what I said was that we may need to reinterpret labor laws for the digital age. And again, like conservatives get really uncomfortable with that stuff. But if they believe, for instance, in a weekend, like a five-day work week, if they believe in policies against child labor, it's a matter of like really reinterpreting some of these laws that we've said are reasonable and should govern the workplace for the digital world because, you know, people are now forced to be tethered to their email until midnight, if not later. And it's really, really hard for the laws to keep up with where technology is taking us. So it's the same thing here. We need to be not

just reinterpreting, but figuring out what the reasonable boundaries for policy actions are instead of reflexively letting special interests drive where they would like the boundaries to be because the stuff is changing so quickly. Right. We need to deal with it or the robots are going to kill us all, either on purpose or by accident. Right. They're coming. Moving on from the robots. So Republican operative and Judge Kenneth Starr died this week. And let's talk a little bit about Judge Starr. This is a man who had as much impact on, I think, our politics over the last 50 years or so as perhaps any other in some ways. What's your take on the life of Ken Starr? His death was met with very warm remembrances by a lot of groups in the conservative movement

over the course of the last week. Actually, one thing that stood out to me in that Peter Baker piece in the New York Times, and obviously Peter Baker was, it's very, very familiar with Ken Starr having covered the Clinton, right? Yeah, the entire Clinton saga of the 90s that Ken Starr was front and center for. Peter Baker wrote, he became a Rorschach test for the post-Cold War generation,

a hero to his admirers for taking on, in their view, an indecent president who had despoiled the Oval Office and a villain to his detractors who saw him as a sex-obsessed Inspector Javert driven by partisanship. His investigation tested the boundaries of the Constitution when it prompted the first impeachment of a president in 130 years and scarred both Mr. Clinton's legacy and his own. Now, I went and looked at what the New York Times wrote in 1998 before the Starr report came out. And it's really, really interesting to see not just the arc of Ken Starr's career, but just the arc of his investigations into the Clinton administration. There was actually optimism when Ken Starr was chosen to investigate Whitewater all the way back in 1994 because he had a great reputation in D.C. on a sort of bipartisan basis that simply does not exist in Washington, D.C. anymore.

There are not a lot of Democratic-aligned lawyers and Republican-aligned lawyers who will vouch for each other and who would want people to be overseeing investigations into them. And so the Clintons had an attorney, their White House counsel, Abner Mikva, who had assured them that Ken Starr is basically the best choice that they could have had. When Mikva thought of Starr, words like, quote, ethical, fair, and decent came to mind. And that's according to the Times all the way back in 1998. Now, the Clintons, of course, were not initially so pleased with the work of Ken Starr. Right. And I'll say something nice about him. First, more recently in his life, he was doing some very useful and righteous death penalty work. He was working for people who were either wrongfully

convicted or who deserved some sort of compassion. And I think that flowed from the best of the kind of compassionate Christian kind of movement that you could have. So sideline that. What happened to him? Like what happened to the fair-minded, bipartisanly respected judge who went in to examine Whitewater, which was this—Whitewater, good lord, the most boring thing ever. Really boring. It's accusation that the Clintons basically profited somehow unfairly from some type of deals where they had some insider access. There ended up being no evidence for that. And so they go several years. They find every piece of paperwork.

There had been some missing documents that elevated it to the level of, let's bring in a special prosecutor because they're hiding evidence or something. They found the documents. They're in some box somewhere. They looked at everything. They're like some box somewhere. They looked at everything. They're like, you know what? Actually, this is clean. Like, this is...

Clean-ish. It's complicated, but it's, yeah. There's no crime here. And so they're close to shutting the books on the investigation. He was investigating the death of Vince Foster as well. Investigating the death of Vince Foster, which they concluded was what it seemed like it was.

That it was a suicide. Ken started, right? Right. And so they're shutting the books on this. And then they keep the books open. And, you know, there's, I forget, was it on FX has a drama on this recently? Yeah, it's the Ryan Murphy drama is actually very good. And Brett Kavanaugh is a main character. They always call him Kavanaugh.

Right. Just to make sure that the viewer knows that this is Brett Kavanaugh. Brett Kavanaugh was one of the investigators that worked under Starr. And they're like, Kavanaugh, what do we got? And so then they find the sex stuff. And then they start pressuring women. Well, through the Paula Jones. I mean, that's the interesting thing is it really, Paula Jones is the avenue towards Monica Lewinsky. Right, but what they had heard basically is that there was some funny business going on

and then Linda Tripp gets involved and they go into the Lewinsky stuff. But it did start with learning of Paula Jones. And no, it didn't have anything to do with Whitewater. So it's so kind of wildly outside his mandate. What do you think it was that... And it did seem like he was genuinely offended that this hippie, like this figure of the counterculture,

was out there playing jazz and engaging in all this infidelity. And maybe assault. And they include a rape allegation, a credible rape allegation, in the footnotes of the Star Report. And then it goes from there and it just snowballs. And I remember when the Star Report came out, I was in college. It was a bestseller. God, you're old.

People, yeah. They were, I wasn't following it very closely. It wasn't something that people in college really cared about until the Star Report came out. I was going to say. It seems like it was right for the college demographic. This, it was the racist thing you could possibly imagine a government agency or a government prosecutor producing, like a soft corn narrative that came out in 300 pages and was selling in the college bookstore. What is going on here? Ken Starr, though, expected that to be redacted, right? Like some of the gritty stuff from the, gritty is an understatement.

Who did he expect was going to redact it? The House, I think, released an unredacted version, and it wasn't expected. I don't know what the redactions would have looked like, but I think that was part of the— The whole thing would have— Yeah, it's like the Trump affidavit. And so Ken Starr, this is interesting. By the way, people always reference him representing Big Tobacco. He represented Jeffrey Epstein.

He left Baylor University over allegations that athletes were given basically special treatment in sexual assault investigations. As you mentioned, Ryan, he had been doing good death penalty work and I think respectable death penalty work, very much so. But looking back on Lewinsky, he published a memoir in 2018. And so this was like 20 years later. Did you read that one? I didn't read it. No. I did meet Ken Starr on, I think, one or two occasions, and he was a perfectly pleasant person. But he said, quote, I deeply regret that I took on the Lewinsky phase of the investigation. But at the same time, as I still see it 20 years later, there was no practical alternative to my doing so. He said later on CBS that he regretted the whole thing. They asked him

what parts of it he regretted. He said, I regretted the whole thing, but it had to be done. Now, Monica Lewinsky responded. So Monica Lewinsky responded this week and she put out a tweet that said, as I'm sure many can understand, my thoughts about Ken Starr bring up complicated feelings, but of more importance is that I imagine it's a painful loss for those who love him. I think that Ken Starr was in this position, you mentioned earlier, that he seemed genuinely offended by Bill Clinton's presence in the Oval Office. I think he knew the country, though, would be genuinely offended to know that the president was covering up these relationships, was using public resources to engage in the relationships, and was not being honest about them. And so I think that put him in

an extremely difficult position. There is, and that's what he sounds like he's regretting. He regrets being in that position, but doesn't know what else could have been done. He could have closed the investigation. And then he could do what all honorable people in Washington, D.C. Just go leak it. You don't like what it is.

Go tell David Brock about Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky. And if the press can like suss it out, Isikoff was doing all kinds of, Michael Isikoff was doing lots of reporting on that.

Peter Baker. There's a great story where he, like, Isikoff, like, walks into the Pentagon to find Linda Tripp, goes to her desk, and then she comes out and talks with him. And, like, that's the way that we've done sex scandals, going back to Andrew Jackson. And before that.

Like, that's normal. This thing where you throw people in prison, people forget that. There were Clinton friends who he wanted to testify, who refused to testify, refused to participate in this, whose lives he utterly and completely destroyed, some of whom he actually put in prison for contempt of his subpoena, which is something we should remember now that Steve Bannon is a political prisoner. Ken Starr had political prisoners. He had people who were refusing subpoenas that he locked away. That's not how you have to handle things that you're offended by. You're offended by something? It's a free country have to handle things that you're offended by you're offended by something it's a free country go tell us that you're offended by it to turn it into this a criminal

and impeachment matter I think I thought was uh just way overboard and and and also was really the a lot of people have I think effectively made the argument is a place that kind of broke the system as well that's what I was going to ask you about because it's easy to look back on it in 2022 when things feel so broken. It's another thing when, especially in the conservative movement of the 1990s, there was this idea that the government had careened out of control and needed to be, especially the federal government and Congress in Washington, D.C. It was sort of the swamp, right? It was this earlier version of the swamp narrative that things had to be brought into accountability and into check. And that's where I'm curious from your perspective on how this led to, if you think it did, it sounds like

you think it did, how this led to where we are. What's the sort of, does this open the floodgates is maybe a good way to ask the question. Yeah, I mean, it certainly sharpened a lot of partisan knives. Like it, and I think partisanship is good when it's muscled behind kind of ideological energy. Genuine ideological energy. If it represents a political movement, then good. Get the partisan knives out and fight for your political movement. If it's just two factions knifing each other over power to do nothing but screw over their enemies, then what are we doing?

And so you had this entire generation that then kind of felt like it was in actual war with the other side because personal bankruptcy and prison were becoming things that people in the political culture knew had happened either to them or to people close to them. And that really shaped, I think, the thinking of a lot of people as it then. Now, everything is kind of disrupted and the pattern is disrupted because September 11th, 2001 attacks come just three years after this is all happening. And so it kind of put a lid on things for a while, but I think it then reemerged in this visceral way. I would keep plugging the FX thing because I actually thought it was pretty well done. But what it highlights is how many people, as you say, when you mentioned Kavanaugh, were around for the whitewater investigation for the special

counsel and for the Clintons. I mean, the Clintons are still huge players in our politics themselves. And so we can spend a lot of time talking about Ken Starr. And Bill Clinton is also very interesting because Ken Starr has gotten a lot of flack for representing, rightfully gotten a lot of flack for representing Jeffrey Epstein. And we grilled Alan Dershowitz the other week over sort of similar things. He's rightfully gotten caught up in that. He also defended Donald Trump in impeachment, against impeachment. And in ways where he said, you know, impeachment is, basically he was saying it's a can of worms and it's a deeply unpleasant process for the country and not just

the person implicated. It should be done only with utmost seriousness. Now, it is, to your point, thinking of all of the people who went through that in the 90s, who are now even in bigger positions of power, who have moved through the halls of power in different ways. In DC, you can see how bitterly this would have divided people in ways that there is no recovery from, basically. Right. And what an ironic way for him to end his career, like you said, with the Baylor cover-up of sexual assault. You can't make this stuff up, that this is how that portion of his career ended. So I'm going to go back and read his memoir now. It sounds fascinating.

I bet it's very, very interesting. And, you know, it's been very interesting to see Monica Lewinsky's perspective played out in very high-profile ways in recent years as well, with this totally fresh set of eyes from America in 2022 on what happened. I bet Ken Starr's memoir, though, is probably pretty interesting, too, because it sounds like, I mean, clearly, it doesn't sound like clearly he wasn't happy with the position that he was put in. What he chose to do with that. Ryan has some thoughts on it. Ryan also has some great reporting in The Intercept this week on Afghanistan and on the funds from the Afghan Central Bank.

So let's move on to that. Here's the headline from Ryan at The Intercept. U.S. to release stolen Afghan Central Bank funds to Swiss Bank. It's always a Swiss bank. It's got to be a Swiss bank. Ryan, tell us about this story. They'll hide bank funds to Swiss bank. It's always a Swiss bank. Got to be a Swiss bank. Right. Tell us about this story. Got to hide it in the Swiss bank. Tell us how you went about getting comment from the Taliban.

Oh, yes. So, right. In this story, I've been trying to, I've been reaching out to the Taliban for comment when I write about Afghanistan for a couple of years now. I think, you know, predating when they took over, because it's just what you're supposed to do. And actually it was Anand Gopal who I had on Deconstructed podcast once who wrote the book No Good Men Among the Living, which is maybe the best book I've ever read, but definitely the best book about Afghanistan.

Just an incredible piece of work. I think it's one of the greatest kind of writers slash reporters that's working today. And I asked him, I was like, you got a good contact over there? And he's like, yeah, try a couple of these people. And they eventually got me to a guy who was the Taliban spokesperson. What a job. But his official title is who is the Taliban spokesperson. What a job. But his official title is head of the political office. And yeah, I mean, I assume as you interact with them now, they are a government.

And I asked another Taliban source, I was like, his name's Suhail Shaheen. I was like, is Suhail still spokesperson? They're like, yep. And so I pinged Suhail. Maybe we can put that, we can read their comment up and then we can get into the context of the story. I think that is tear sheet E4. Start with that one. But basically what the Taliban is saying here is that, actually I don't have my glasses on. Can you read that? Yeah. The Afghanistan bank funds belong to

the DAB and should be returned to Afghanistan, said Suhail Shaheen, a spokesperson for the Taliban who serves as head of the political office. In this critical time when 99% of Afghans are living under the poverty line, it is direly needed that the reserves will return to the country. So basically what happened is that during the occupation, the United States set up the DAB, the Afghanistan Bank, which is the central bank modeled on the U.S. Federal Reserve, staffed it with Americans. There's still at least one American, Shami Rabi, who we had on Rising. He lives in Maryland. He's one of five central bankers on the Afghanistan Central Bank. So it built up foreign currency reserves through its monetary policy to the tune of about $9 billion.

$7 billion of those reserves were being held by the New York Federal Reserve during the occupation. About 2 billion were being held by the European unions, whatever their New York Federal Reserve version is over there. When Kabul fell to the Taliban, the US froze the money and also instructed the EU, freeze their $2 billion as well. Also instructed the IMF and World Bank to halt all projects that were ongoing in Afghanistan and all lending. And so what predictably happened was the currency completely collapsed. And you think we

have bad inflation here. The inflation over there went completely insane. Government employees, which makes up a huge portion, teachers and others, were no longer getting paychecks. If you went to the bank, sometimes you'd have to wait days, and you could only get up to a couple hundred dollars at a time. Imports basically ceased because you need the central bank to balance the import-export payments. They don't even have the ability to print their own currency. They had a contract with, it was either a Polish or Romanian currency printing company. And the US stepped in and halted that too. So even though they had already

put in the order for their cash, which is called the Afghani, and they get really upset if you call Afghan people Afghanis. They're like, that's our currency. We're Afghans, not Afghanis. So that's just a little thing for the next Afghan person you meet.

Don't call them an Afghani. It's like being called a dollar. And so the result is this dystopian situation that's almost unique in American history in the sense that everywhere you look, the shops have food. There is enough food in the country. There's a drought. There is a crisis. There would be food in the country. There's a drought. There is a crisis. There would be economic difficulties, obviously, going on without this. But there is enough food for everybody. Yet, you have people starving to death. You have people selling their kidneys. You have

more than a million people have fled to Iran, not for reasons of political persecution. They're getting treated absolutely horribly in Iran. But they're starving to death. And so they're fleeing the country because nobody has access to the money needed to buy the food that is everywhere. It's just such an insane situation. And because here in the United States, everybody just says, well, what are you going to do? Give the Taliban money so they can just spend it on terrorism? It's like, no, we set up a central bank that operates independently, whose job it is to engage in currency auctions, keep the currency stable, and to combat inflation. If we don't like the way that they're doing that, we could instantly freeze the money again. It's not like we're going to dump $7 billion in cash just on the runway and then walk away.

And so what I reported this week is that they've finally come up with this solution. They're going to take $3.5 billion of it, and they're still going to hold that for the small number of 9-11 plaintiff families, which they will probably lose that case, by the way. But for now, they're going to send $3.5 billion to this Swiss bank, Bank of International Settlements. And they're instructing the EU to release their $2 billion. So they'll have $5.5 billion, which they'll be able to use. And they're setting up a trusteeship, which they'll be able to use for monetary policy, which is good, which is the appropriate use of that money. But also, they're instructing it to be used for humanitarian purposes, like paying for electricity and paying for other imports, which sounds good, but is not good. Because it would be as if the Federal Reserve stepped in and just started buying

oil for everybody. Then what happens? Then what happens when the Federal Reserve is back out of money? Well, the Fed is the head of an empire. They can print more money. But imagine you're not the Federal Reserve. You're the Afghanistan Central Bank. If they draw their reserves all the way down, then they're right back in the situation they're in today, unable to stabilize their currency, balance their payments. And so they did set up a process that will allow them to return the money to the Afghan Central Bank. Maybe they're kicking it past the midterms.

They set up three different criteria, which seem easy to meet. But so that's where we are. That's where we are now. One of the things you said really, I was thinking about it last night actually, so it's almost unprecedented in American history. And it's kind of an odd statement on what modern war looks like, because in the past, like for most of human history, the idea of negotiating this way and the idea of these funds being frozen and being, you know, it just, it's very strange the way this war transpired and the way that like the United States was not really fighting for land and the entire mission of the war was strange.

And so then it's like, well, what do you do with the funds? Do you give them to the Taliban, which you initially were fighting, but decided. I get it. It's embarrassing. Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And, you know, the Biden administration doesn't want to be seen saying, Republicans going out and saying the Biden administration, you know, absolutely just funded the Taliban, et cetera, et cetera. But the nuance that you point out, and it looks like they're getting closer to, I wonder what your perspective is on why that was lost for a year, right? Why basically it was just this black and white conversation, because you've been covering this a lot over the course of the last year. And I've been following your reporting.

There was always a middle ground. But even though there was always a middle ground, that seems perfectly reasonable to me and like something that would hardly be enormously controversial because it's not a huge headline, banner, news story anyway. Why was that lost? I think maybe some inertia, some spite, some politics. Embarrassment. Maybe that's the soup that they were dining out on there. And nobody cared. It's just a deep level of cruelty. That's what it seems like to me. Yeah. And it's a callousness. I think it's a crime against humanity that rivals some of the greatest of the 20th century. Like to, just with a press of a button at the New York Federal Reserve, to drive millions of people into starvation. Like the most painful way to die.

And what people, like the kidney example is just kind of the most vivid. But people are selling their children. People are selling their furniture in order to get food. People are then burning the remainder of their furniture to stay warm, all of which are just solutions. And these are people who have money in the bank. Right. They just can't get it because the U.S. pressed a button and shut the economy down. And people might jump into the comments and be like, well, during the potato famine, Ireland was growing enough food to feed everyone in Ireland.

Yes, that's true. And that's why we call it a British genocide. They were exporting that food. It wasn't as if the food was just sitting in front of people. Right. And they were unable to get it. It was like guards were like marshalling it out of the country. The food is there. So answer the devil's advocate question that is probably on a lot of people's minds. What are the risks then of releasing funds to the Taliban? And to your point, just pushing a button, I mean, it sounds like the most reasonable solution is more than just pushing a button. It's pushing a button and finding the right route for it to take to be in better hands. What are the risks?

So the risks would be that the Taliban, let's say, so Shahmeh Rabi, the banker, you know, the central banker that we've interviewed has said, let's just start with, I forget if we're saying 150150 million a month or a week. And then we'll use that for currency auctions, which then stabilizes the currency and projects confidence into the economy, gets cash into the banks, gets cash into the economy. Let's say you do that. The worst case scenario there, Taliban shows up with AK-47s and says, actually, this $150 million is ours. We're seizing it. We're using it for whatever nefarious purposes we, you know, the worst thing that you can imagine the Taliban might use $150 million for. If they did that, the next shipment just gets paused.

But you still had already handed over. $150 million, which, I mean, people would think that that's a lot of money. The Taliban would not do that, though. And the reason they wouldn't do that is because they don't want to oversee an economy where 99% of the people are living under the poverty line, where millions of people, only 30 million people in the country, where millions are fleeing, and where, most importantly, the al-Qaeda branch over there, the ISIS branch over there, gain in power as people become more and more desperate. And as the United States is more easily blamed for their desperation. Right. And then you come in and say, wow, the Taliban were moderate compared to,

you know, the people that have come in and replaced the Taliban because of this. And the other, what I would ask- Seems like we would have figured that one out. Right. And what I would ask people is like, what's your goal here? Other than just spite, other than saying,

I don't want to give the Taliban, central bank, any money. Like, why? Like, what's the goal there? Do you think that if you drive 100% of the population under the poverty line, that then the people will overthrow the Taliban and replace them with a liberal democratic government that is supportive of the United States and supportive of the West? Why would that happen under those circumstances when we couldn't make it stick with 20 years of occupation? If you do foment some type of revolt in Afghanistan, it's just going to be ISIS that steps in and takes whatever modicum of power is left. The vacuum. Right. So I don't quite understand. So yeah, I think the absolute worst case scenario, you send $150 million in there, and before it gets to the banks and before it's able to pay for imports, it's just seized by the Taliban. But why on earth would they do that and then cost themselves the...

Because they could actually make much more money by getting the economy going again and actually having economic activity that you can then tax. The real risk, though, is the Taliban harboring people like al-Qaeda and ISIS. That's why we went to war with them in the first place. They were harboring al-Qaeda. They're noworing people like al-Qaeda and ISIS. That's why we went to war with them in the first place. They were harboring al-Qaeda. They're now at war with al-Qaeda. And they don't have ambitions of attacking the United States yet. Again, you'd think that after 20 years of war in both Afghanistan and Iraq, where we saw similar things play out, where we saw the radicalization happening in the shadow of some similar problems that we would

be, although it sounds like as they're walking towards the solution that you're reporting on, it sounds like there may be some awareness of that. Yeah. And for people who want to read more about it, you can throw up, I think there's a second tear sheet. It's this written by a guy who oversaw the Ecuadorian central bank for the Center for Economic and Policy Research. You can find that piece. Oh, that's actually the details of how they're releasing the money, which came out the day after my report, which was fun. Nice work, Ryan.

There you go. So the other one, the Center for Economic Policy and Research, ran a piece by a guy who ran the Ecuadorian Central Bank, and he wrote about how global politics kept getting Ecuadorian Central Bank, and he wrote about how global politics kept getting Ecuadorian Central Bank money seized all over the country and the way it drove their economy completely wild. And you're right. In these modern times, we fight wars in different ways, and it's with these bankers and these keystrokes. Right. Yeah, which is extremely strange. Ryan, speaking of your reporting, actually, you have more of it, I believe,

to share with us right now. So what have you got today? Oh, that's right. We do. That's what we're doing next. These used to be radars. What are we calling them now? Counterpoints? Old man's putting his glasses on. A counterpoint. All right. So House Republicans plan to launch a variety of investigations into the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and many of its largest member corporations if they retake the majority in November, according to a Republican member of Congress who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity relationship with ESG, which I'll get into in a moment. And what it does is it marries the kind of hostility to the chamber with the party's mission to undermine the growth of the so-called ESG, which stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance Criteria, has enough power to shape company valuations and behavior and has become a major conservative source of consternation, with Republicans arguing that companies who follow it are breaking with their fiduciary duty to maximize profits for investors. They're particularly enraged that ESG has the capacity to harm fossil fuel companies. A House Republican put it to me like this. He said, how is it, again, that you can discourage investment in American energy when you own or when you're controlling board seats of an American energy company, but you're pushing it offshore to a Chinese energy company?

Tell me you didn't violate your fiduciary duty somehow. Then you throw that over into the Judiciary Committee hearings and you say, how do you reconcile this from an antitrust perspective? How can somebody actually be duty of care to the shareholders of one entity when you're duty of care to the Chinese Communist Party's controlled energy company, unquote. So the GOP's war on today's Chamber of commerce, which is a stunning turnaround from just a few years ago, has deep roots actually in the conservative movement dating back to the movement that formed around Barry Goldwater in the 1950s and 1960s. So at the height of the New Deal era after World War II, Democrats and liberal Republicans were united in the belief that

cooperation between big business, big labor, and government was the secret to the era's economic boom. The nation's most famous economist, later President John Kennedy's advisor, John Kenneth Galbraith, dubbed it the affluent society. In a 1958 book that was both a cultural and a political sensation, it sat on top of the bestseller list for six straight months. Now, a raid against this coalition was an aggrieved and well-organized network of small and medium-sized businesses, which felt like they were getting squeezed by the big guys. What was good for General Motors, they said, was not necessarily good for them. That same coalition has organized

behind Donald Trump. Now, Big Labor and the New Deal coalition thought that they were living in a time of peace between capital and labor, but capital always knew that they were engaged in a strategic ceasefire, having been crushed by the depression and unable to compete against the rising strength of the modern government. But there was no real peace, and business launched its counterattack on both labor and government in the 1970s, ushering in the neoliberal era. The chamber, this time allied with small and medium-sized businesses, played a major role in the counterattack, with the heir to the Goldwater movement, Ronald Reagan, enacting a wish list of big business policies and tax cuts. The chamber started drifting back to the center in the early part of the Clinton years,

but was snapped back into place ahead of the Gingrich Revolution in 1994. It was a reliable Republican ally for the next roughly 25 years, up until just the last few. In 2020, the Chamber of Commerce endorsed 23 House Democrats in swing districts, a sharp break from the past practice of endorsing a nearly exclusive slate of Republicans with one or two Democrats thrown on the list for a patina of bipartisan perception. The chamber announced recently, though, that it would be devoting $3 million toward the election of Mr. Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania and funneled it through the Senate Leadership Fund, which was seen as an olive branch extended towards Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who's linked to the Super PAC. They have so far made no similar

contribution to the House Republican Super PAC. The Republican member of Congress said that he didn't begin as an active opponent of the chamber, but also didn't see them as a natural ally either. He told me, quote, frankly, as a business guy, I couldn't join some of the efforts nationally because they were at odds with small companies. They were really pushing for a long time this pro-China trade policy, which was great for General Motors, but it was bad for everyone in the supply chain. And it was really gutting domestic manufacturing. And it was the same thing with NAMM, which is the National Association of Manufacturers.

A lot of their members had had an organization that was working against their interests. And the biggest, biggest members have certainly benefited from a lot of this stuff. And I think that's a big part of why Trump was so well received by this small and medium business community. And so, Emily, what do you think of the claim? What about you? They're not radars anymore, but what are you looking at? Well, this week, migrants were dropped off at the D.C. resident of Vice President Kamala Harris in buses that were sent by Texas Governor Greg Abbott and in Martha's Vineyard on planes that were funded, paid for, organized, funded by Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis. There is no question that migrants bused and flown to the East Coast in recent weeks by

Republican governors are being used as political pawns. The argument is that lenient immigration policies overwhelm border states, so the people who push those lenient immigration policies should experience and share in the difficulties after years and years of ignoring them. Republicans aren't exactly hiding their political motivations here. But it's true that border towns like Del Rio, Eagle Pass, and Brownsville have been experiencing record numbers of attempted crossings this year. Some migrants are making multiple attempts, and that has a little bit to do with the high numbers.

Just yesterday, the Washington Free Beacon reported on internal DHS numbers showing a record 8,000 migrants are entering the country each day. When I went to Northern Mexico back in June to report on the situation, migrants repeatedly told us two things. One, they heard it was a good time to come. Sometimes even specifically, they name-dropped Biden.

And two, that they paid organized crime to enter Mexico and into the United States, to enter the United States as well. Quote, everyone who arrives here has paid. That's what the head of a Catholic shelter in Matamoros told us, recalling how one group of migrants tried to cross without paying, but was literally plucked straight from the river by cartels who rely on the business. Savvy and sincere Democrats who believe America has a moral obligation to asylum seekers would have and should be welcoming the migrants

this summer with open arms. Instead, like our mayor here in Washington, D.C., they declared emergencies and railed against the GOP. They want to have their sanctuary city cake and eat it too, scoring easy points with virtue signals and then crumbling when forced to actually deal with the consequences of their policies. What the media never tells us about immigration is that lenient border enforcement, including sanctuary city policies, are a multi-million dollar gift to cartels and a major draw for desperate people who are forced

to pay the cartels. But desperate is not synonymous with dumb. Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed without evidence that migrants sent to Martha's Vineyard by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis yesterday were, quote, misled. She said the stunt was, quote, cruel. Mayor Bowser and Mayor Adams in New York made similar claims throughout the summer as migrants from Texas and Arizona were bused to their cities. Jessica Valenti tweeted yesterday that DeSantis

had cruelly tricked vulnerable people into making the trip to Massachusetts. The problem with all of these claims, of course, is what migrants themselves have to say. For weeks, interviewers have found the migrants eager to make these trips. Now, CNN heard similar sentiments as did Fox throughout the summer, News Nation as well, and even other outlets. They get safe, free trips, these migrants, due to cities they otherwise would have had to raise money to get to. But they're trying to go to those cities anyway. So with only a day of reporting to go off of, the Martha's Vineyard stunt seems a bit different so far. I said earlier that Karine Jean-Pierre said without evidence that they were misled. The evidence is hard to say exactly what the

migrants were told when getting on the plane. So it's possible that the White House is correct that people were, quote, misled, and it's possible Valenti will be proven correct that people were, quote, tricked. NPR is reporting some migrants were told they were going to Boston. Some said New York, although one migrant also specifically told a local paper that they, quote, wanted to come to the island and are seeking employment. So it is very unclear right now, and the evidence is certainly unclear. But Democrats have said all summer that migrants were being tricked, and that has turned out not to be the case. If anything, it speaks to one of the very flawed premises of liberal immigration policy, which is that migrants

lack agency. They are not helpless. They're extremely savvy, and they know exactly what they're doing. They're smart. They watch the news, and they know exactly what they're doing. They're smart. They watch the news, and they want to be in the United States so badly that they knowingly take perilous trips through Central America and Mexico with the possibility they'll be crammed into shelters, sleeping in the streets, kidnapped by cartels, and struggling to pay lawyers. They know they'll almost certainly get in eventually, but they accept the risks. That's how badly they want to be here.

Once they cross, they seek asylum, how badly they want to be here. Once they cross, they seek asylum, even if they don't have a legitimate claim, which is very often the case for people fleeing for economic reasons. But they go to sanctuary cities and then disappear into the shadows. Without the sanctuary city movement, cartels would undoubtedly have much less money. Fewer migrants would die en route to the United States and small rural border towns would be less overwhelmed. This is the overlooked tragedy of lenient border policies. There's of course an alternative which is to simply let anyone come in but cartels would still run Mexico and still force people to pay just to get to our border plus the national security ramifications would obviously be a huge problem. Or we could listen to what one

pastor running a shelter in Matamoros told us in June. This is what he begs U.S. officials to do. Put out information on social media in, quote, plain Spanish, explaining what American asylum policy is. Tell people they will not get across, then enforce it. We need to reform our asylum policy as well. These are all practical ways to mitigate the immense human suffering at our border. But they don't fall neatly into the category of open borders or totally closed ones, so the political class doesn't talk about them at all. I rarely meet Americans who love America as much as many of the people trying to get into the country at our border. We have a lot of labor needs here. We need to fix our system.

The first step we should take, of course, is to enforce existing policies, though, so people stop making these horrible trips. Now, the migrants in Martha's Vineyard will absolutely be greeted with robust community support. That's been the case so far. But it's support the people in border towns with vastly less wealth and less social capital are ill-equipped to provide. Max Alvarez has to run to his real job at the Real News Network. So check out his reporting there. Check out his reporting on the Breaking Points channel on this. We'll have him back. He'll be back next week as well. Sorry about that. I was too long-winded. Well, both of us. Yeah, we ran up against the time. Well, and, you know, we had originally planned a lot of the show to cover what was the deadline today for the strike negotiations,

which is what Max was going to talk to us about, the railway strike negotiations. But they reached a deal. And so there's a lot of news to follow. I highly recommend you go back and watch everything that Max has been doing and read the Real News Network because there's so much good coverage that actually interviews the people involved and the real workers involved. Because they're what matters now because the deal has to now be ratified by the workers. And the question is, is it enough when it comes to the sick day and the other unpaid sick days? The railroads were throwing money at them, but they're like, that's not what we're asking for.

Obviously, we're going to take the money. But what we want is to be able to live a decent life. And we want to be able to call out if we need to call out without getting fired for that. There are examples of people who couldn't go to funerals and stuff like that. And I saw Crystal and Sagar covering yesterday, Republicans sort of being shocked to learn of the conditions, of the working conditions for some of these railway workers. And it's just an important, like, this is not a crisis averted. It's a crisis momentarily averted. We could still see all of the supply chain backlogs and we could still see people not getting, you know, the working conditions that they need to do their jobs. So there's a lot to follow. But as Ryan said, the ball is now in the workers' court. And Biden has kind of put them in a tough situation by doing a victory lap over this deal because that puts a lot of pressure on them now to ratify it.

Yeah. But, you know, they're going to make the decision that's best for them, and that's what they need to do. It's the point of these negotiations. Ryan, I guess the inaugural edition of CounterPoints, the lesson learned is that we talk too damn much. It's a lot to say. These are not simple questions. Yesterday you said, no, they're not. And yesterday you said something when we were talking to Crystal and Sagar about how when we're going back and forth, it's genuinely like picking each other's brains. What do you actually think about this?

What does the right think about this? What does the left think about this? And that's why it's hard for me sometimes to stop because I have so many different questions. Just so, it's like a train wreck. You just like, you know, can't look away. Yeah. Yes, it's exactly like that.

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But more importantly, it's less about that. It's just more about supporting independent alternative media. You can also find me. I got my own newsletter at Bad News. It's over at Substack. What about you? Where can people find you? Federalist Radio, our daily podcast. So that's where I am. And yeah, it's so much fun. I'm so excited to be doing this every Friday and hope that everybody subscribes and gets those premium subscriptions and stays tuned in. Yep, indeed.

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