Bulwark Takes - Morning Shots Live: Army Secretary Resigns After Warning Trump About Hegseth

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

Andrew Egger has uncovered one of the strangest congressional candidate stories you’ll hear all year: a woman facing federal fraud charges in Illinois appears to have resurfaced as a different candidate in Florida and denied being the same person.Plus, Dan Driscoll’s stunning resignation exposes the deepening chaos at the Pentagon, Bill Kristol explains why Pete Hegseth may be harder for Trump to get rid of than you think, and the Supreme Court clears the way for Trump’s White House ballroom.Read more from Andrew's piece: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/we-found-her-the-most-absurd-general-election-candidate-te-brown-illinois-florida-congress-fraud-primary-election-putin-whale-orca-polar-bear-russia-ukraineMake today a good day, and get yourself some Soul gummies. Right now, Soul is offering our audience 30% off your entire order! Go to https://GetSoul.com and use the code BULWARKTAKES for 30% off.

All right. Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stein. I'm joined by Bill Crystal. I am sitting in for Andrew Eggier on this A Morning Shots Live. Andrew's going to join us when he gets his wits about him, but Andrew, folks need to know this. We're going to pull the curtain back before we get into the real stuff. Andrew wrote a real banger of a morning shots this morning. Okay. People should go check out the piece. It's about this congressional, it's hard to even do it justice, but it's about this congressional candidate in Florida. There she is, Tay Brown. She won her primary, so she's, the actual general election candidate in Florida's 24th district, a very Democratic district. She's not going to win.

But what's crazy about her is that we dug into it. She actually has already run for office earlier this cycle, not in Florida, but in Illinois. Okay. So she ran earlier the cycle in Illinois, lost. She's under felony indictment for wire fraud, I believe, having to do with PPP loans. So she decamped from Illinois, went to Florida, ran. ran again for office, won the primary this time, likely is going to have to face trial shortly after the election.

And here's where it gets crazy, Bill. Andrew calls her up, as a good reporter does for this piece, gets her on the phone and says, hi, I want to talk to you about why you ran for office in this trial that you're facing and the indictment. And what does she do? She says, that's not me. Those are two different people. It's the same person, folks.

That's why Andrew's a little busy this morning. Yeah, he was busy updating the piece to the last minute, which was the campaign manager, I guess, called hours after the deadline to say, oh, no, we want to clarify a few things, but they didn't really clarify a few things. Anyway, you should read Andrew's piece, and he'll come on, hopefully if he resolves this minor tech issue that he encountered, and he can discuss it in the second half of our morning shots on a podcast. A tech issue and a gestational issue, I think he's vomiting from the nerves of having to publish this piece. Let's not bring that, let's not bring that,

hurting back too much, Sam. You know what I mean? I've always been a little bit of a believer in the black box theory of running a media company. You don't want people to know. You don't want them to see too much about what's going on behind the scenes. Well, that's why the bulwark is a success. That's probably true.

All right, let's get into the real news. Look, there's a lot to talk about. I actually want to talk about something else, but we're going to start with Dan Driscoll. Dan Driscoll, Army Secretary resigns. I guess this was sort of, oh, hey, there he is. The man is. That's not true. People are in the hands.

Okay. Look, get your get. No, no, no, no. We don't need to get you. You were doing great. Let's get to Dan. I'm doing great.

I have nothing left to talk about about my piece later. You guys already already already popped all like this stuff. But I appreciate it because thanks for covered for me. But yeah. I'm going to stick around for a little bit. Then I'm going to go do my business. But Dan Driscoll Bill. Like obviously this has been in the ether for a while.

It looks like the reasons he retired was. essentially, Hexseth just messing around way too much in the rank and file. Driscoll didn't like it. Driscoll was fighting it. A lot of this anti-woke stuff, which was really just Hexeth trying to fire, generals he disagreed with. And finally, Driscoll says enough, and he goes to Trump. The Atlantic in this story recounts that he goes to Trump with his resignation letter

and talked to him about the things that he thinks are going poorly at DOD. What did you, I mean, obviously it's a bit frightening to see all the civilian leaders gone and Senate-confirmed position is gone, and just utter chaos at the Pentagon, which I can't either recall seeing before. But what did you make of sort of operationally what this means? Yeah, we've never seen this degree of chaos and disarray. And it's dangerous, but since the Pentagon,

kind of an important place, you know? So Driscoll is a very good friend of Vance. They were Yale law school together. And it was imposed on HECF in the beginning. And I think HECSeth always thought, probably correctly, that Driscoll was an obvious candidate to succeed him. If you're secretary, I think Asper had been secretary of the army, became Secretary of Defense, so it's not like no one's ever thought of that promotion.

And so he didn't like Juskal from the beginning. But then they tried to make it work and all this, and there were some tensions. But HECF has just got after, obviously, all the services, but really, especially the Army, especially with the firing of the very well-respected Army Chiefs of Staff, Randy George, during the war. And Jusk, I think probably took this as a bit of an occasion to leave anyway. Maybe he was going to think about it and to do so. But again, we now have no Army Secretary and no Army Chief of Staff, you know, civilian, or we have an acting, obviously, in both cases. But not people who are confirmed by the Senate for those jobs.

But it's very interesting to me, just as a matter of like inside Washington baseball. So Juskal could have just left. He decided to, however, leave now. He could have waited a couple of month or two, it sounds like, after the election, for example. He decided to leave now, and he decided to basically tell the Atlantic or have someone tell the Atlantic, obviously, that he had two things, that he had real problems with the firing of Randy George. I think we knew that already. Juskal had gone to his Georgia's retirement ceremony, I think,

and I think it went recently to another retirement ceremony of someone else that was forced out by HECSeth. So he wasn't being shy about signaling his displeasure with the way Haxeth was treating the military, which is really both outrageous and sort of scary in terms of firing all the generals, as you alluded to, Sam. But Jiscoll also let it be known that he, had got to Trump to explain what HECSeth was doing was wrong,

which I think is very important, don't you, Sam, and you've been around Washington. I mean, that puts Trump on the spot. Trump can't say. I didn't really realize. I have confidence to my secretaries. I don't mic-managed these departments. He personally met.

That's kind of rare, honestly. Army secretary is not the high up enough to meet necessarily personally with the president a lot. He meets personally with Trump. I assume he requested that meeting. Obviously requested that meeting. Maybe Vance interview. to get him the meeting. And so now Trump's on the spot. Trump has signed off on what Hexeth has done,

even more than a president would normally sign off on a sect death. Yeah, that stood out to me. There's two layers of it. One is that he could have submitted a letter explaining why he was resigning to Trump, but he chose to go there and talk about it in person. So that's one element, but then the meta element that you allude to, which is leaking, or at least having people leak, or maybe he didn't even leak, but people who knew about it felt the need to say, hey, Trump knows about this. he went right to Trump. Why do you need to put that detail out there, precisely for the reason you allude to,

which is that it's, hey, Donald Trump knows about the problems with Pete Hagseth. Donald Trump can't feign ignorance about the fact that people in the Pentagon think Pete Hegseth is running the place into the ground. And this puts a little bit of pressure on Trump. I don't think Trump, Bill, you don't think Trump does anything. I guess this is a good question for Andrew, too. There is a case to be made that, like, Trump, obviously should act on Hegsteth, but like even that Hexeth is probably the most problematic

cabinet member for Trump. And it's very bizarre to me that Trump just doesn't see it or chooses not to see it because he's willing to throw other people over the side. But why not Hegset, Andrew? I do think Hegset has a little bit more, thanks for covering again for him, by the way, at the top, Sam. I do think that Hegsteth has a little bit more baked in buoyancy than a lot of the people that Trump throws in. There are a lot of these guys who end up in Trump's orbit who he knows that they serve all of their credibility with the MAGA base and with Republicans in general comes through Donald Trump, right? Pete Heggseth is a little bit different because he has the preexisting Fox News brand. He speaks the language of the MAGA warrior. He has a giant online

following of his own. He has people invested in his political project for the military. It would be a little bit politically precarious for Trump to throw him overboard, like, in a hostile way. Maybe he could try to quietly get Hegset to submit his own resignation, but Hegsef has his own presidential ambitions in the future, as we've all been talking about for all this time. I think that he doesn't want to have to, you know, get off the Trump train early until he would choose to do so. So I do think there are certain senses in which Trump is more stuck with Heg Seth than he might be with other people now.

That doesn't mean he wouldn't ultimately try, you know, Trump has never backed away from these sorts of fights. Obviously, Elon Musk is a guy who had even more credibility and Trump was willing to cut him loose and throw him overboard. But I think that might drive some of Trump's hesitation versus just some random faceless figure that Magist would have. Bill, but also let me just go ahead. Let me just put it to you.

After the Renee Good, Alex Prady, fiasco, and all the stuff with ICE, Trump cut bait. He did. Okay. Trump has, you know, didn't stick up for Matt Gates when he didn't need to. Bondi after the Epstein fiasco, he said, fine, push them. So, Nome's gone, Bondi's gone. There's cases where Trump's willing to say. say, all right, I don't want, I'm going to put all the blame on that person.

And we won't switch the approach, but we're going to switch the personnel. Hagseth has overseen the biggest military disaster in decades. And it's on Trump and it's going to hurt them in the election. So is it just get through the midterms and we'll deal with this? Like, what is the deal? I think two things. I mean, yeah, I think that latter one problem. It's hard.

I mean, it's hard to switch sects. Obviously, the middle of a war, usually wait until there's a moment. I remember in 2006, I was a huge critic of Rumsfeld, a McCain guy, was pro-war, pro the Iraq war, pro the surge. But Rumsfeld had done it obviously totally mismanaged it and was incredibly stubborn. And I remember having a conversation privately with a very senior person in the Bush administration. He said, could he get rid of what? What is going on? So we can't make the change to the left of the election. We cannot change secretaries of defense when we're under assault from Congress and so forth.

And I do, there's a little bit of that more conventional. You sort of can't, you have to wait until November. I think it's a little weird. because you maybe, but the other thing is he would have to replace him. And there is a war going on. And there would, they'd be, I guess, the deputy secretary would become acting secretary of defense. He's a business guy, Feinberg. He doesn't, you know, is even less than X-F.

Well, that's not fair, but it would be a little weird to make him sec-deaf, I think. So I think there are reasons why someone might be saying to Trump, you got to wait until November. But I also very much agree with Andrew. I think we underestimate these other, he got rid of Bondi, but replaced him with her with Blanche. You got rid of, obviously, of Nome, replaced her with Mullen, who were, you. arguably slightly more competent, slightly less insanely controversial, people who are willing to execute the mass deportation policy, willing to execute the prosecution of political opponents. I mean, the defense thing, what Hex-F is doing is so extreme, as the way I would put it, is so radical, that it would be hard to get someone else to go, who wants to have any future, anywhere in the national security world, to go in and continue firing generals so he can politicize the military, go in doing the woke insanity stuff in terms of, you know, the kind of stuff that Hexsett just does every day. the chest pounding. I mean, it is, in a weird way, because he's more radical than, more outrageous

than, less qualified probably than the previous people he's fired in a funny way. He has more, it's a little harder for Trump to get rid of him maybe at this point. And Trump wants to use the military, obviously, in various ways over the next two years. And is he confident if you replace his ex-exempt misused the military, could he still get away with using the military? Having said all that, maybe there's a Mark Wayne Mullen type replacement, right? someone from Congress who's equally, but, you know, honestly, if you're even a very strong Trump loyalist who's on the armed services community, I'm just thinking out loud here, you don't, I don't know, do you really want to go in and do what HexS is doing? You have to be willing to burn

a lot of bridges to do what HexS doing. Why do you have to do what Hexas doing? So you think this is Trump's directive and not Hegsafe, just because Hex has written about woke generals prior to. I think some of both, and Hex has been obsessed with this in a while, but Trump wants a military that will do what he says on key moments, whether it's blowing up, he doesn't want people to be objecting to it. Maybe it's against the loss of war to be blowing up these boats. He doesn't want a military that's saying,

why exactly is the National Guard still deployed in D.C. till the end of the Trump administration. You know, there are obvious election issues. There are obvious laws of war issues where Trump does want to no questioning. And, and, heck, Seth, you know, weirdly has not a pretty good job. Because he's intimidated a lot of people and fired people,

there hasn't been that much of a rebellion from within the military. I wonder, this is a huge question. I don't know. We have to see, this is right. I'll bracket that. That post piece from a couple days ago was a fairly significant. Well, so I let's talk about that for a minute, and then we'll get to Andrew's important,

really fantastic piece. But yeah, so, I mean, there hasn't, I agree with that. There's leaking now, which is pretty astonishing. There still isn't the literal kind of rebellion that we have had in U.S. history where, you know, four-star generals resign with statements about why they're resigning and going public and so forth. And we haven't quite gotten to that yet. I mean, yeah, but Dan Drisk, we also haven't had Army secretaries go to the Oval Office.

Right, so I think we're maybe one step. This is something to really watch over the next two of us. I think you're right to say this, Sam. I mean, it's really an important. But this leak to the post that had both the three combatant commanders and the chief of naval operations not concurring in Trump's, what in the Secretary of Defense's desire to keep troops, the same level of troops, basically, especially the Navy in the Gulf. I mean, if I, in the committed to the Iran war, was interesting. It's not, Mark Hartling has an excellent piece about this, which really explains what these documents are like and non-concurrents doesn't mean they're not going to go along. It means they think it's unwise and too risky.

But the most striking thing for me on that was the chief of naval operations, the head of the Navy, Caudill, is not concurring. Cottle is a Hague-Seth Trump pick. He was literally put in there. Yeah. There's a very good New York Times article about this a month ago, right? He sucked up to Hague Seth to get this job when Hague Seth fired his predecessor. who had the unfortunate, from HECS's point of view, fact of being a female,

though very well qualified, I would say, person to be chief of Naval Operations. And so he fired Admiral Franketti, I think her name is Franchetti, put in Caudill. If Caudill is not concurring, Caudill is not, you know, the equivalent of like Mark Millie or someone who's from the previous regime.

You know, Caudill is a guy who was a dubious appointment. I think a lot of my friends who know the military said because he was catering to Hague Seth and to Trump. So I think that maybe fits into your point, actually, that maybe the depth of discontent and the rebellion within the military is greater than one can see right now. Yeah, let me, I'm going to head out and hand the reins to Edgar in a second, but a couple points in that before I go. Actually, a couple of random points here. One, Driscoll's also not a, you know, establishment pick. He's advanced guy, as you note.

And so, like, for him to speak up, clearly there's real tensions there. to Heggseth, not covering himself in glory during any of this. I don't know if you guys saw this. As the walls are falling in and as the Iran war is not going well and all this shit, he takes to Twitter to mock Canadian cadets. Did you see this? No. Put up a mocking post about these two Canadian cadets.

These are kids and he like went to Twitter to mock them with an unfattering photo. I mean, the guy is like a child. It's ridiculous. All right. Non-related to Hegsteth before I go. I've noticed in the comments a couple people were talking about, well, you know, the algorithm is not rewarding the bulwark and it's disappearing from the feed. And I'm looking into that. You know, I don't really have much power to figure out what the hell's going on with the algorithm.

But I'm on Google. I'm looking into it. But there is one way to just sort of get around the algorithm. And that's just to subscribe. You can subscribe to our feed. Just subscribe hit that button. You can pay for a YouTube subscription to support this work. You get commercial free stuff and all that great stuff from a paid YouTube description.

So go and do it. We're trying to catch up with the other bastards, the conspiracists out there on the right who have a lot of big YouTube following. So go do that. Finally, I just had to notice this. Last point. Amber Hale, 9-813, who commented around 1020. I won't lie, Sam is a beloved bulwurkean, but he is my least beloved in Amber.

You and a lot of other people, Amber. That's Andrew's mom's pen name. What do they call that online? The burner account? Yeah, her burner account. Amber, I'm going to devote my life to winning you back. And I know I'm not beloved. And in your opinion is held by a lot of people out there.

But I'm going to work my best. All right, Andrew. Guys, go read Andrews piece. He's going to talk about it. It's so delicious. It's fantastic. Take care, guys. I'll be in touch.

Hi, I'm Andrew Eger. Amber's second least favorite bulwark personality. Hey, hey, everybody. Yeah, it's been a crazy morning. We're going to talk about it a little bit more in a little bit. We have a couple more things to talk about first. I have one last thing that I wanted to do on this Driscoll story, just because you guys were talking about, like,

is there some guy down in Congress who Trump could, in theory, pull out and plug in to finish Hegsef's program if the seat under Hegsef got too hot? And I just wanted to pull this one little chunk out. The Army has been without a top commander since George is firing. Hegseth is expected to nominate General Christopher Lanieve to lead the army, but Capitol Hill is already signaling that Leneve would struggle to be confirmed because of many lawmakers' antipathy to Hegseth. Quote, we are not going to reward Hegseth for what he did to the Army.

One congressional staffer told us. So look, these MAGA Republicans out there, you can say a lot of terrible things about them. It's almost all fair. All these guys in Congress who haven't stood up to this stuff. But they have had an up close and personal seat to see, to watch in real time, as Hegset does all this stuff to the Army, to the armed forces in general, they care about this stuff a lot.

It's a big part of why a lot of them are in politics to begin with. The idea that there are like a bunch of these guys who are both like actually quite qualified and who would be willing to continue this program, I'm not sure that's true. And I think that that might, if Trump knows that's true, it might actually in a perverse way protect Heg Seth in this job. I don't know what you make of that bill, but that's just a thought that I had reading the piece. No, that's a very good point. I mean, I was thinking about people in Tom Cotton, Brian Mass.

there are people who've been in Congress now about a decade and a pretty one of the Senate, one in the House, they were pretty senior in armed services and wouldn't be crazy appointments and probably would get some of that deference from colleagues that Mark Wayne Mullen got when he was appointed nominated for DHS, for example. But I think you're right.

Trump can't be confident that they would behave the way HECS has. Yeah, okay. Well, is there anything else on that story or should we turn real quick to the ballroom? We can do the ballroom quickly, then we need to get to your huge story. I don't want to take too much time away

I know, yeah. We barely mentioned the ballroom today because I was working on this other thing all day yesterday. Trump's going to probably get his ballroom, it turns out. It's not a completely a done deal yet, but the Supreme Court yesterday threw out the stay that was currently in place on the ballroom. It was a 5-4 decision with the Chief Justice with the minority, which it almost never happens in this Congress, that it's all of the conservatives on one side other than Roberts and Roberts with the liberals in a 5-4 dissent. They basically said that the historical preservationists who had brought the suit had no standing to sue. They did not weigh in on the merits of whether the president is legally allowed to just knock down the east wing and throw up a ballroom there instead. It seems pretty obviously contravened by federal law, which is another way of saying it is illegal for him to do that.

But the Supreme Court said we can't weigh in on this. The important primary thing for us to consider is that this particular lawsuit can't exist because these preservationists lack standing. Bill, anything on this before we move on? Yeah, the fact that Chief Justice Roberts wrote the opinion in the dissent, which he assigns the opinions and he could have assigned it to Justice Kagan or something like that. He wanted to be front and center and he says it's likely that Trump, what Trump has done is illegal. I think he uses that term, something like very close to that, right?

Likely unlawful. unlikely unawful. That's pretty striking. And I think, you know, he has taken advantage, if I could put it that way, of some of the jurisdictional issues, the standing type issues in the past to help the court duck dealing with the merits. And basically, most of those cases, almost all probably, let Trump get away with certain things, at least for a while, right? This was a stay against Trump going forward. So I think that Roberts did this is pretty significant. We don't, and now it doesn't change the fact that he's going to chuck ahead and try to build as much of the ballroom as possible. Trump will. But I, yeah, I was striking. I think you're right to call out the fact that Roberts,

not just joining the three liberals, but writing for the minority is pretty striking. Yeah, yeah. It's just, he's such an institutionalist, right? And like it has seemed like he has been pushing, or at least like trying to finesse a lot of these things so that there just aren't that many, five, four decisions. He ends up with six threes in various cases. He's almost always with the majority whenever it's a six three. It's not always all the conservatives against all the liberals either. You can end up with these weird six three splits where, you know, you've got Roberts and Elena Kagan and, you know, just a sort of institutionalist coalition making these cases. But I guess in this, in this instance, he felt pretty strongly that this thing should

be illegal and that the standing issue was not where this should have been decided. But that's where you get the other five conservative justice is coming in. It is possible someone else will sue and we will see some kind of new lawsuit come up. But this seemed like the one. I mean, I think that these standing things tend to get hashed out pretty early. You go and you find a bunch of plaintiff, possible plaintiffs, and you're like, who actually has the best case that they can, they are harmed by this, that they can bring this case. Some of these cases are just hard to bring, too, because the president just does something and it's obviously bad, but it's hard to find the sort of justissible, you know, plaintiff. Which is why we have a Congress, which passes the laws in the first place and appropriates the money. Now, interesting, if the Democrats take Congress, this puts it right in their court they've got to, I assume,

they will go ahead and try to prohibit the use of funds for the ballroom. That's something that was discussed. Remember, early this year, the ballroom thing caused such a ruckus that the Republicans wouldn't appropriate a billion dollars for the ballroom, right? And now Trump's found some other pot of money. Anyway, it's a very easy thing for the Democrats to at least do. They might be able to pass it through both houses, depending on what happens in the Senate, obviously in November.

And then Trump would veto it. I don't know, in a weird way, this makes the political salience for the ballroom. And the ballroom is kind of a symbol for the other issues of Trump spending a lot of time and money on his decorating process of projects in Washington instead of worrying about the public out there, the citizens out there. It might help the Democrats make this more of an issue. Yeah, yeah. Well, we'll see.

We're obviously going to keep covering it. Let's throw it to a quick ad, and then we'll come back on the other side. I can yap about this crazy story from this morning. This message is brought to by Seoul. So if you've been listening to this show for a while, you're going to know how much I love Seoul's out-of-office THC gummies and their sparkling beverages. The sparkling beverages have been absolutely critical this very hot summer. They're fantastic.

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his fantastic piece this morning, which also got the great advantage of giving me a day off. And since Kathy Young also had a very interesting piece about Putin, which people should also read. But first of all, I just want to note here for the record that Amber is back in the comments and saying, I love you, Sam. So I don't know if that's now, I don't know if she's being, I don't want to question her sincerity. Maybe she just has had a, you know, moment where she realized that she spoke too early or fast earlier. Maybe she's just trying to, you know, patch up things with Sam. Sam so sensitive, it turns out.

Who knew? Did we know who was that thinskins, Andrew? I don't know. We're going to have to implement a new, a new element in morning shots. It's the Amber Tracker. We're going to get her power rankings of the different bullworkers every given day. You know, who's up, who's down, who's made her happy, who's made her mad. Don't give people ideas. That'll be a huge Reddit group now.

Probably already is for all I know. Okay, talk about your excellent piece here in this morning's board. Okay. Well, Sam's still a little of my thunder off the top, is fine. That's fine. It was a good teaser. This is a very strange story. And I should start by underselling it a little bit. This is not a person who's going to be in Congress. Her name is T. Brown. She is running right now in Florida's 24th congressional district, which is a very blue district. It's currently Frederica Wilson's district. She's retiring, so she won't be there at the end of the

year. But this is something like D plus 20. So she's the Republican. Sam said she won the primary. That's not quite true. There was no primary. She ran unopposed. She ran unopposed. So she, the primary was canceled and they waved her through to the general. She was the only person running on the Republican ticket. Come to find out that T. Brown of Florida bears a really striking resemblance to Tidora Brown, Tidora M. Brown, who was formerly running for House in Illinois. Illinois's 11th congressional district, Chicago suburbs district. The interesting thing about Tudora Brown is that this candidate was,

widely known to also be under indictment for felony wire fraud. She and her ex-husband prosecutors allege beginning in 2023 had embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars in pandemic money and COVID PPP funds and that they had invented businesses and invented employees and set up fake bank accounts and fake checks and all sorts of fake things to get this federal money. They had essentially just spent it on themselves. This is a known fact about her when she's running in Illinois. but then she loses the Illinois primary.

Suddenly, T. Brown, very similar-looking person, same name, also from the same part of Illinois, surfaces in this Florida race and is waived through to the general election. And no one seems to know that she's the same person. And in the meantime, she has dropped the notion that she's a person who's under felony indictment. So I called her yesterday. I got her on the phone. And I started asking her questions. And I just started off by saying, are you the same person who was running?

in the 11th district in Illinois. And she immediately just flatly denied it. Straight up denied it, repeatedly denied that she is this person. She became extremely suspicious. The second I started asking her about this, she asked me if I was the police. She then put me on speakerphone and started patching another campaign people. Then she started saying that she had a really busy day

and that she had an exclusive NBC news interview that she had to get ready for. So she was going to have to call me back and she'd call me back this morning. She never did call me back this morning. Her campaign manager about five, minutes before we were going to publish the piece this morning, finally did call me back. I had sent over a detailed list of questions last night. She finally did call me back. Unlike T. Brown herself, this campaign manager very belatedly did acknowledge that this is the

same person who was formerly running in Illinois. This campaign manager then claimed to me that these charges were dropped. This criminal case into her was dropped. Everything that I can see online, these court records are publicly available. You can see them on PACER, is that that's not. true. This is an ongoing matter. It's set to go to trial in a number of weeks. There have been a number of motions from both sides, basically haggling out what that's going to look like. They have agreed on pretrial proceedings starting on November 20th and an actual criminal trial to begin on these wire charges, wire fraud charges in early December. But the only comment I can get from the campaign is first, I'm not that person from the candidate. And second, actually these charges have been dropped and she's counter suing. from the campaign manager this morning. So it's a very strange, very surreal thing. There's a long paper trail, even if she had not admitted to me that this was true. There's a long paper trail

that makes it very obvious, even if you, I mean, you can see in the picture it's the same lady twice, but there's a long paper trail connecting these two things. She was going through yesterday for a short period of time and seemingly attempting to cover that trail. I had emailed her basically saying, well, you know, you say you're not this person, but here are these campaign materials for you now, point back to this Instagram account that involves your businesses from yesterday. After I email over for this comment, she changes her Instagram bio to take out some of these details, as you can see up there, take out some of these details about these companies that linked her back to her when she was running for Congress in Illinois. So the whole thing is very shambolic. The whole thing is

extremely strange and surreal. Again, I don't really get what the point of it is because she's not going to win. She's not raising any money. She loaned herself $300,000. She loaned her own campaign, $300,000. not sure where that money is coming from either. The federal government is going to have a big claim on a lot of money of hers if she's found guilty of these wire fraud charges. But she loaned her own campaign $300,000 to get going. Filing shows she's only raised about $7,000 organically since then. Presumably she's had to spend through some of the $300K.

So the whole story is very weird, very strange. And I don't know much to say about it other than that. I don't know if you, is there anything else you wanted me to, to hit up on this, Bill? No, no, that's a really excellent summary of how crazy it all this. I suppose she might just love the celebrity and figure that can sort of be translated in this current world we live in, and certainly in a MAGA world, to some success, some financial reward, you know, a George Santos type thing, even if she's guilty and even

if she's not going to win, obviously, and even if she is going to go to trial and maybe Trump will partner, she's a MAGA type. And I must be on their mind a little bit. She's pardoned other people, including, I think you make this point in passing in the in morning shots, right, the former governor of Illinois, who also was convicted of crime. So he's, if you're in Illinois, the idea of a pardon occurs to you.

I also wonder what about the money. I mean, this is what do I know? I don't know anything to make this clear. But I mean, if maybe she thinks, honestly, or maybe one would think in those circumstances, I'll put it where this way, that if you give $300,000 to your campaign, it sort of can't be clawed back quite the way it can be.

If it's sitting in a personal account of yours, but you still, the way the campaign rules work, sometimes you can still, use that money after the election for other expenses that are allegedly vaguely election, you know, related, don't we know candidates have paid for their rent and bills and so forth from campaign. Who knows whether someone told her that's a kind of clever way to not let the government just get that money back if it's been illegally obtained.

So who knows? I mean, it seems it's pretty, it is, Mago World has produced a lot of craziness. I mean, can we really, a lot of congressional candidates you can't quite believe one or two of them for that one like George Santos, you know, but this is kind of another level. She shares, there's one interesting piece of connective tissue with the George Santos story, which I didn't get in the piece because I was not really able to like hammer it down exactly, but part of the reason I was initially able to connect that these two candidates were the same is that they had the same initial treasurer when they filed, this woman, DeTanya Ratcliffe is her name,

who was the treasurer listed on the original FEC forms for both T. Brown in Florida and Tidora M. Brown in Illinois. But De Tanya Ratcliffe is not her campaign treasurer anymore. Her treasurer now is this guy Thomas Datweiler, who is a pretty well-known compliance treasurer for a bunch of different candidates, but his name actually came up in the George Santos story because he was the guy who was written about a lot as sort of the shadow treasurer behind a lot of the weird campaign finance stuff with Santos. And I did not get into that in the piece. And I don't even have it at the front of my mind to talk fluently about it now. But because you mentioned Santos, there is that interesting connection there too. Let me drill down on one other thing you said, which is the whole pardon angle, the possible pardon angle, because I kind of didn't talk about that

a minute ago and you're right to bring it up. I think that is the most obvious gloss of what this woman was up to when she was running in Illinois. At that time, She is leaning very hard into a pretty standard MAGA-type playbook, which is that she is, she's a black woman. She's in her campaign material. She's talking about how she is a former lifelong Democrat who, quote, was waking up to what the Democratic Party was doing to her community and her country. And here's a quote that she gave to a local paper at that time. Again, this is when it is known that she is facing these felony charges. It's not like the situation now in Florida where she has just kind of hoped no one will notice this.

So this is in Illinois. Quote, they came after me because I'm a Republican and I'm an American black woman. If I was guilty, why would I run for Congress? Why would I put myself in the limelight? It just doesn't make any sense. So there are echoes of what we've seen a lot of these guys do, this attempt to say, you know, this is weaponized justice against me because I'm a Republican, because I'm the kind of Republican they're afraid of, an American black woman, she says there.

And you could see a situation where a candidate is trying to take that case. face forward all the way to the big guy, you know, this guy who has this soft spot for white collar criminals of various kinds, who you never know. I mean, as Hail Mary strategies go, it's not the worst Hail Mary strategy anybody's ever thought of. I don't know how that, how that narrative explains what's happening now, because again, she vanishes, she reemerges in Florida. And when I called her yesterday, her first blush response was to deny everything, deny that she's this same person and facing these charges. So plainly, it's not just that. that she wants to be known as this wrongfully accused Republican who needs to be on Trump's

pardon radar, unless I don't know. It's parts of it at a certain level just boggle my mind because it doesn't seem like sane behavior. But, but I guess, you know, this woman, this campaign manager has promised to send along certain exonerating documents once she's finished with her drive at noon today. And, and I guess we'll have to see whether we will need an update in morning shots tomorrow. My impression on the phone was that she was just kind of trying to get me to spike the story. And I'd been lied to a lot by this campaign already, so we didn't honor that request to not publish. But you never know. We'll let you know tomorrow what we get over the transom. We will. We'll save some space there and warning shots for, you know, if something notable comes to

you there, but I agree, I wouldn't hold my breath. And I do think we'll, I'm not sure what I'll write about tomorrow. But I think the Heggsat stuff remains just such a big story. I mean, Sam was right to stress that if one of these things happened, okay, you didn't get along with the Army Secretary. Or there's a leak of a document with, you know, senior generals not being very worried about how risky it is to continue devoting the number of the resources we are to Iran. Or some of the other leaks we've seen in terms of the munitions and stuff. You do put it all together. And then the quote was it from the Hill about, you know, we're not confirming probably excess likely nominee to replace the previous Army. for staff and this nominee is a guy who had been excess military aids would be another case of

hexeth putting someone into an extremely senior position obviously one of the chiefs uh you know who's kind of his guy and the end his hill republicans even balking at that you put all that together you have a really really unusual's really unusual i mean blanche is unusual and boulin's unusual and dhs is horrible and justice is horrible i don't want to rank the how horrible they are but excess degree of of of unusualness, but I would say extremism in a certain way in terms of being willing to challenge the way the department works and challenge in the way the laws have worked, you know, are supposed to be the way it's supposed to be working, you know. I make one last point on the military, I think if I could just because I think it's this country, the American founders were very suspicious of a standing army that all Republicans with a small hour were back then because standing armies were ways in which kings started wars abroad and also enforced. their their kingdom at home. So that's why, for example,

the Constitution says you have to reappropriate Congress has to appropriate funds every two years for the military. There's no, you can't have an ongoing, you know, and five-year appropriation or an entitlement for the military. And there are there many, many expressions of the fear and wariness about a standing army. And we didn't have much of a standing army, except for the Civil War, obviously,

for the first century and a half of this country. Famously, as we got in getting ready for World War II, we had a tiny little army and thank god George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower and others were able to build it up unbelievably quickly but it was a huge task to do that after World War two the new world we're living in Cold War so the Union the experience of World War one or two we decided correctly I think we have to have a stranded army in quite a large one as it happened and so we spent decades working very hard as we the country but really civilian leadership military leadership Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, each of you had their own slight takes on this, but

actually worked together to have, how do you make a standing military safe for democracy? And how do you make it work well and professional? And how do you make it not politicized, but also responsive? I mean, huge amounts of very serious thought from went into this. And I think it's a pretty good success story. I mean, we've had, what, 80 years since World War II and as large military. And we've had clashes. We had Truman Firehammer Carthur. We had Vietnam, we had Vietnam. Thompson realtor Lamee quitting and running as George Wallace's vice president. We sort of forgotten that, but that was, you know,

sort of a civil military relations issue. But basically, nothing really threatened the civilian control of the military on the one hand and military professionalism on the other, I'd say, you know. And the degree to which therefore Hegsteth is really could be undermining or trying to undermine, I think it's fair to say something that's been a real achievement over eight decades and in a way over two and a half,

centuries in the sense that, you know, of having a military that works well in a Democratic Republic, small D, small R is the radicalism of what heck that's doing in that respect is maybe beyond a little bit even the bad things that are happening in other departments where things are being done, things that shouldn't be done are being done. But this is a pretty fundamental thing. So just that's my thought on the military situation. Yeah. Yeah. In terms of the permanent damage, I mean, I think you'd have to at least say the big two are what Robert F. Kennedy has been doing to the public health apparatus and then this. And I guess maybe ICE and DHS would be the third in terms of even if you yank these guys out, just putting these sort of systemic forces back together is not an easy task. It's not an overnight job.

And it will take a lot of blood, sweat, and tears just to get it to where it has been. And then hopefully we can. Can I just make one kind of meta point about how strange it is to cover. I mean, we write this daily newsletter, right? And it's news of the day stuff where we're trying to keep our eye on all the major stuff that's going on in the Trump administration. I pull out of that for like two days to put my head down and nail down this much smaller scale crazy story we were talking about a minute ago.

And like I pop back up. We published it this morning. We publish it late because like I said, their campaign manager gets me on the phone just as we're trying to publish and everything. And I'm popping back up and it's like, oh, the Army Secretary met with who and did what and what's happening at the Pentagon. I mean, like, you can't take your eye off the ball, at least if you're us. If you're out there, if you're one of you guys, I recommend taking your eye up the ball periodically for your mental health. Because it's insane.

But just like you can't stop, you can't stop looking at these guys for five seconds or you come back into some completely new insane story that, I don't know, it's weird. But that's why they have two of us, right? That's why they keep us both around. Good point. It's well said, Andrew. That was a good pitch for the need for both of us to keep our drives. Exactly. Exactly. Are you listening, Sarah Longwell? Okay. Actually, speaking of Sarah Longwell, I was going to just wrap up the show, but since I happened to bring her up, you were mentioning, she's got a book coming out. Obviously, it's a good book. My understanding is it's a good book, although I have not yet had a chance to peruse it. Many people around here have. You were mentioning that you have something to say about this book.

How to Eat an Elephant? It's out next week. You can pre-order it today from the publisher. or from obviously whoever you wish to free order it from barns and noble amazon st martin's press is the publisher if you like going right to their website sarah's beginning a book tour really thursday night actually a big event here in dc i'm going to do an event with her a week from thursday in cambridge massachusetts where i mean they've sold out a big auditorium so i think this book will sell well as it should it's sarah's thoughts how to eat an elephant how to fix their how to save their how to defeat the current republican party had to defeat maga a lot of it based on her work with focus groups, which obviously people at the bulwark are people you all are familiar with.

If you've seen the focus group podcast and heard Sarah talk about it or the rest of us talk about what she's learned from that and her own experience is just being in ever Trump Republican from the beginning. There are a couple of stories in there about me and how we all got, we met in 2017 or met once again with a wedding a few years before, it turned out. And how we got the bulwark going, actually, and got the other enterprises we've been involved in the Never Trump stuff and the Republican voters against Trump stuff going. And so yeah, it's a very entertaining read.

First person, a lot of, you know, Sarah's own experiences and kind of autobiography in there. But a very shrewd, needless to say, with Sarah, and it's intelligent and shrewd thoughts about how to how to win this fight against MAGA and against Trump and against authoritarianism. So people should get the book and order it today or buy it in a bookstore. People still go to bookstores? I do. I don't know. Your generation, not so much.

I don't know. You've been in one or two. You've been in one or two in your time, right? So go to a bookstore and get it next week. But how to eat an elephant by Sarah Longwell? Yeah, yeah. All right, I think we can leave it there. I don't know, man.

A lot of crazy stuff going on in the world. I'm still just coming down from this crazy story. So thanks for putting up with me. Thanks for putting up with me being late and everything. Thanks to you all out there for watching. Thanks for reading. We hope you will go check out the newsletter, especially today, because, again, it's just really fun.

over at the bulwark.com, the Morningshots newsletter that Bill and I write. Subscribe to the YouTube channel if you are not yet subscribed or on Substac, if that's where you're watching this. Thanks, Bill. Thanks to you all out there, and we will see you next time.