Morning Joe - U.S., Iran vie for control of Strait of Hormuz

Episode Date: July 14, 2026

July 14, 2026: 8am — U.S., Iran vie for control of Strait of Hormuz To listen to this show and other MS podcasts without ads, sign up for MS NOW Premium on Apple Podcasts. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

With us this morning, the President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haas, he's author of the Substack Home and Away, opinion writer at the New York Times, Marra Gay, MS now contributor Mike Barnacle, and Politics Bureau Chief and Senior columnists at Politico, Jonathan Martin. Good morning to you all, Joe. Yeah, you know, before I talk about what I'm looking at, I want to talk about what happened in Maine. Jay Martin will remember that when people like me, started running. Jaymart, you remember Ruby Ridge, Waco, everywhere I went. You know, I had wanted to talk about, well, the flat tax is more. They wanted to talk about Ruby Ridge.

They wanted to talk about, they wanted to talk about the ATF killing families that had guns. They wanted to talk. And suddenly you started seeing all the don't tread on me signs all over everything. You know, now, of course, you see the don't tread on me signs on Maserati's outside of country clubs from people who are so aggrieved from the government because they have a billion dollars and somebody may be trying to raise their tax rate from, you know, 36% to 38.5%. But here, don't try to me, it was like, don't gun us down and, you know, family's going to. And that's exactly what's happening here. They're gunning Americans down in the streets.

They're killing citizens in the streets. They're killing immigrants in the streets of America. And here in Maine, hey, Susan Collins, wondering what? you're going to say about this one since she funded it. I mean, people are getting gone down for driving in their cars. It happened in Texas. What are what Ken Paxson saying about that? Happening in Texas. It's just wildly out of control. You have a, the state, the centralized state, sending out people that don't have any qualifications to be carrying a firearm and using it the way they are.

And they're gunning down. They keep killing people in these streets of America, J. Mark. The street, don't tread on me. Don't tread on me. Are you kidding me? If you support this administration, take that sign down. Because that's exactly what federal agents are doing. They're shooting people in the streets of America.

And they're doing it not necessarily, their own volition, even though there obviously has to be accountability for the individual actions. The overall motivation is driven by a top-down demand from senior figures in the administration who have this as their life's work. It is the overriding focus. So there's downward pressure on these agencies, which then flows to the actual officials and the troops themselves, officers, I should say, in the streets to get more numbers. I thought when things get so bad because they were killing so many people in the streets of America that they actually, the White House said, okay, Republicans, stop talking about mass deportation

and maybe we're just going to back off. And Stephen Miller, why didn't you go sit in the corner? Well, I think he's out of that corner. Why are they doing this? Why are they still pushing this self-defeating policy that kills Americans, that kills people in the streets of America? No, I think it's a shrewd observation that the two killings in January and Minneapolis obviously effectively ended the career of the head of the Border Patrol, and then soon

after ended the career of the head of DHS. Christie Noem, but it didn't end the career of Stephen Miller. And that's the key point here, because obviously he's driving this more than anybody else, and Trump's not going to touch him. So, yeah, maybe for a couple of months, Stephen Miller had to lay low. But now, obviously, he's trying to get his numbers back, and this is happening again. And so it's only going to stop if Donald Trump sees the bad press and tries to step in again. But that's the only way you can get action is if Trump doesn't like the coverage.

And so here we go again. It's the same pattern. But to your point, the politics of this are so brutally awful for the Republican Party because they've given away their best issue. which was immigration. It was the best issue they had last year, and certainly in 2024. And now the issue has been flipped. And now it's an issue they're playing defense on. It's a place like Texas, for example, Joe. You have the Voting Rights Act being repealed by the Supreme Court. Then you have, in the streets of Houston, the killing of this migrant, you can't think of a better way to motivate Democratic voters, independent voters in Texas than those kinds of steps.

So here's the story we're talking about. This is now the second time in less than a week. An ice agent shot and killed someone who was not the intended target of an arrest warrant. Yesterday's deadly shooting happened in Biddeford, Maine. It's a town about 20 miles south of Portland. Immigrant rights groups say, The victim is 26-year-old Juan Sebastian Guerrero from Columbia. The organization say he had been issued a Social Security number and was authorized to work in the United States.

Guerrero was shot just after 7 o'clock yesterday morning. while driving a white car. A witness told the Associated Press and other outlets, he looked out his third floor window after hearing a pop, pop, pop, pop sound and saw a small car turned 90 degrees to the curb with an SUV behind it. He said the driver was wounded

and the car started to move down the street until the SUV hit it, describing the driver as having a bloody face, adding he clearly heard the victim say, I tried to stop. Nearly 12 hours after the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security released a statement saying ICE agents were surveilling an address for a person with a final order of removal from the United States.

When ICE tried to stop a vehicle driven by someone coming from that address, the vehicle attempted to flee the scene and fearing for public safety, DHS, wrote an officer discharged his weapon. All right. Let's stop right there, Will. They're not even lying anymore about somebody trying to weaponize. They used to lie about that. And so then all the all the, all the, pro-maga media outlets and so they were using they were using a weapon. Yeah, never saw the videos, but they just started lying, you know, just like Christyone would always start your life first. Now the lie, I mean, they've even taken that lie out of it.

They don't say, oh, we had to shoot and kill him because we feared for public safety. Like what? What was the guy driving? Like a little white facade? Like feared public safety? Wait, what's wrong? They're just gunning people down. What's wrong with these people?

We've been saying this now for months and months and months. If you talk to the NYPD, you don't shoot into a car. You don't unless you're being engaged in a firefight. If the guy or the person, the woman flees the scene, you get the tag number, you call ahead and someone pulls the person over up ahead the street. You don't shoot into a car. There was a little more victim blaming there. Again, they got the wrong person as they did in Houston last week. and, just to put a point on it, no body cam.

No body cam in Houston. And why isn't that? Wasn't that a requirement? By Christy Noem all those months ago, after what happened with Renee Good and Alex Pretty when they were shot in Minneapolis, that part of this $20 billion push into DHS would include now body camps. No body cams. So they're violating every good policy of policing that we've seen.

Marr, we want to wait and hear the particulars of this, but Senator Angus King, of Maine, who's going to be on the show later, his office reported out that it had talked to Mark Wayne Mullen, the head of DHS, and confirmed that this man who was killed yesterday was not the target of the investigation. They shot into a car at the wrong guy. Well, there's no excuse for this, no matter who he was. People should not be gunned down in the street, in the streets of America or anywhere else. We are waiting for details, but the witness accounts suggest that there were children on the scene.

So I'm having trouble, as you said, Joe, understanding how gunshots are going to improve public safety at 8 in the morning in a coastal town in Maine. As someone who is authorized to work here is driving to work potentially with his child in the back seat is what it looks like. We don't know for sure. And I just want to say, too, the anger that Americans feel was, I think we saw some of it, just a taste of it, when protesters came to Susan Collins. office yesterday, demanding that. Why didn't she vote to fund this? They give ICE one money than ever before? Right.

I think that's right. She voted. Wouldn't she be the one that would require body cams being worn for the billions of dollars that she's handed over to these agents who are going around shooting people in their cars, killing Americans in Minneapolis? Right. And I just want to say, you know, I don't live in Maine. I'm not an immigrant, but I'm a proud American.

and this administration has made every single American complicit in these deaths. This is happening with our taxpayer dollars that could be going to schools to health care. Because of what Susan Maine and Republicans are doing. And they sat back and let this happen. But the other thing here is the hardliners in this administration, they don't care about the politics because many of them are white supremacists. And they don't care. They're cruel.

and this is what they want. This is the same administration that removed protections for Haitians, for Syrians. At the same time, it's allowing more Afrikaners only, white South Africans only in. So this is all one of a piece. And when we ask ourselves, why is this administration doing something that is so obviously bad politics in addition to cruel and un-American? I think we need to really look carefully at all the anti-democratic behavior from this white, house because this is not a popular policy. So why would someone pursue a popular policy in the turn year? It's extraordinarily unpopular. And they've driven away any advantage they had from Hispanics two years ago. And Mike, again, going back to Willie's point about NYPD, they don't just shoot into

any major cities. You're not shooting in a vehicle. Shoot it. Not shooting in a vehicle. There's another element here, Joe, that's really critical. And this is not for the first time this has happened in a city or a town in the United States of America, where ill-trained or untrained federal officials shoot and kill someone. In this case, they shot a resident of Maine. And the idea that the federal police, the ICE people, are there to take over that investigation is beyond outrageous. The Maine state police, I'm sure, has a very good homicide unit. They should be the ones covering this. They should be the ones. They should have encircled that area. right there, frozen it for evidence. It's a shooting scene, and no ICE agent should be allowed

to interfere in that investigation. It's not for the first time that this has happened, that ice comes in and says, yeah, we shot and killed the guy, but it's our case. Now, get away. No. And we're going to talk much more about this deadly shooting in Maine when independent senator Angus King joins us live in just a moment. That conversation straight ahead on Morning Joe. We're going to keep the straight, and we'll probably run it. We'll become the guardian of the strait. Maybe you'll call it the guardian angel of the straight. And we should be reimbursed for that. We guarded it for nothing. And now we're going to guard it. We're going to get paid for guarding it, a lot of money. But we just want to be reimbursed for doing all of this, for putting our people

in danger. But we're really not putting people. We're really saving people. The United States carried out a third consecutive night of strikes on targets across Iran as the fight over the Strait of Hormuz intensifies. The latest round of attacks came, just hours after President Trump said he would reinstate the naval blockade of ships traveling to and from Iranian ports in the key waterway. As we said, the president also suggested the United States will become, quote, the guardian of the strait for a fee equal to 20 percent of the value of a ship's cargo. This despite his administration previously insisting there should be no fees in the waterway upending centuries of U.S. support for global freedom of navigation. All of this,

sending global oil prices surging today to a one month high. Iran, meanwhile, hitting back with attacks targeting U.S. military sites in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan, as well as two UAE flag tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, killing one crew member. The UAE now is threatening to retaliate, again, raising the possibility of return to a wider war. President Trump was asked yesterday if this is simply the new status quo. Mr. President, you noted the United States is bombing Iran again. I mean, you've been bombing Iran for months now. Is this just the new normal for the American people? Well, you know, we're in Vietnam for 19 years. We're here for four months. So I think we've done a lot. We've knocked out their Navy in a period of one month. We knocked out their Air Force. Air Force is non-existent. We knocked out most of their missiles, most of their drones. We knocked out their drone manufacturing capability about 92 percent. Their missile capability, their missile capabilities. for manufacturing. We knocked out 89%. And they have a little capability, but they don't have any capability for us. This is almost a military skirmish. Now, with all of that being said, you have to

get people that want to make something. We had to deal with them two days ago. And then they said, oh, we can't make that deal. We have to negotiate it further. And this is what they've done for 47 years. the differences nobody negotiated like I do. And this should have been done by Bush and Obama and Biden and people before them. Playing the hits there, Richard. So not a little skirmish to our Gulf allies who are being attacked right now by Iran, not a little skirmish to people paying for gas here. Oil price is not going to go back up with the street in contention.

But what do you make of this 20% proposed 20% levy on any cargo coming through the Strait of Hormuz? what does that do? And is it possible to actually enforce? It's not possible to enforce. Totally legitimizes what Iran wants to do, which we oppose. It reinforces a flawed MOU, which gives them the right to do it after 60 days. It raises fundamental questions about our motors. You can disagree with everything the administration's done about this war, but at least they were foreign policy motors, now to make it look like somehow it's a scheme to collect. One last thing, you can't keep the straight open by threats. No one's going to give insurance. What are we going to do? Have the entire U.S. Navy in the strait convoying individual tankers?

The ships aren't safe. You can't do it. It just is not a workable thing. At some point, we need to reach some accommodation with the straits. And I think after four months, we ought to have learned we can't bomb Iran into capitulation. So again, I listen to all this, I watch all this, and I just do not see the logic of what we're doing. Morning Joe's coming right back. Coming up, a conversation with Oscar-winning actress Mary Steenberg. She's here in studio with a look at her new movie, The Dink, co-starring Ben Stiller. Morning Joe. It's back in a moment.

Aesthetic perfection. She needs our protection. An epidemic is sweeping across our once-grade nation. And its name is... Pickleball. Maybe you could... I don't know, hooked me up with something for the pains. Take it easy to this, okay?

Come on, come on. You wrote a prescription? for pickleball? You didn't actually bring it to the pharmacy, did you? Oh, of course not. I'm not an idiot. I know pickleball is sort of dorky, but it's the fastest road back to tennis for you. Prescribed in pickleball. That's a look at the new comedy out this month called The Dink. It stars Jake Johnson as former tennis prodigy, Dusty Boyd, who finds himself stuck between two worlds when his doctor, you saw there played by Ben Stiller, prescribes him a surprising rehab exercise, pickleball. Dusty then has to find a way to defend the sport after his father

challenges him to a head-to-head match for control of the courts. And joining us now, Dusty's new pickleball partner and star the film, Mary Steenberg. And Mary, we're always so happy to see you. It's really nice to be here. Especially around a movie about pickleball, which, I mean, just like, start there. That's already good. I know. There's some haters out there, but there's a whole lot of lovers. Oh, my, everybody's playing pickleball. Yeah, it's really, you know, I, I am in love with it. I have the best time.

I have a little crew. It took me while to find my friends to play with, but it's just, we just laugh so hard, and it's really good for me. I like it. Speaking of laughing so hard, we saw some of the cast here, incredible cast. And I imagine when you were pitched this idea, we're going to shoot in L.A. and you're going to play pickleball with hilarious people all day. That's a pretty easy, yes?

I was supposed to do another film, and I was signed. We were closing the deal that day, and they go, well, there is one more offer for you. And I said, what is it? And they said, it shoots in L.A., check. It's a comedy check. Jake Johnson, Ben Stiller, double check. And it's about pickleball. And I said, I'll do it.

And they said, well, you've got to read the script. And I said, no, that's the one I'm doing. That's how Olivier used to silly. Yeah, yeah. Very Olivier in my choice. Exactly. Let's take a look at Mary in this film. This is a clip from the movie where Mary teaches her new pickleball partner,

the secret strategy to beating grunters. I can't with these two. I honestly can't do another second. Listen, what? Okay, they're grunters. You think? I've played people like this before. And the only way to be.

Beat them is to out, grunt them. Or we could beat them by being better players, which we are. No, that'll never work. We have to do it my way. Grunt with me, Dusty. And the more erotic, the better. You can strategize all you want, but it's not going to help. Yeah, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Let's just play. Okay, all right.

Okay. Let's play. Whatever it takes, right? Shut up! Oh, God. And you were saying so much of this film, another reason you loved it so much, was you got to just improv and play through those scenes. I mean, Sean Clements wrote a great comedy,

and then we would play. Like, it was a scene like that, Jake, and I had to come up with sexual sounds. It's sad how quickly we ran out of good ones. It's incredible. It really is. It really is. Willie and I were talking before. And, you know, it's interesting you said comedy, check.

We were talking before it came on about how it's crazy that, and you never know what people are aware of what they're not aware, but stepbrothers. And your role in it is in all of our children, all of our kids, Instagram feeds. Like, they know it. And it's, it is always amazing what lives and what lives on. And, and that's a great example. Another comedy like this, that, again, there are going to be a lot of people that are going to go see this because you're in their feet every day on stepbrothers.

Isn't it crazy how that was? Which came out so long ago, but every day of my life, people, usually kids come up to me about stepbrothers. It's the gift that keeps on giving. It really is. In that movie, you had such a, there was, what was so funny, a patience about you with those two morons, you know, who are in your house. If your husband is yelling at you, well, I know, I was the worst enabling parents.

But Richard Jenkins and I, on the first day, watched those two geniuses being hilarious. And we looked at each other going, what are we doing here? And the next day I said, Richard, I figured it out overnight. We are responsible for holding down some sort of reality that these, these, These guys live at home with their parents. That's our only job. We just have to do that. And we ended up having the best time on that movie.

It was just, but there is a scene in the movie where I'm driving Will in the car. We never completed the scene. Not one take. Couldn't do it. Couldn't do it. One of us would go either Will or myself. And it's never been completed. It's in the movie, but it's like the truncated little bit they could put together.

So what is it about comedy that is applied there, but applies here too, that you love doing so much? Because obviously, it's won a lot of awards. You're an acclaimed actor. But again, you're drawn also to comedy. Well, I love laughter. I'm married of one of the funniest people I've ever met, Ted Danson. But I think I love it because it's harder. I love it because it's more, it's more deliast.

more intricate. There's no way you can learn in acting school how to be funny. It just doesn't work that way. It's something deep in your soul. And it just interests me. I mean, I love drama too, but I love doing a movie like this. And the audience can't lie. Either laugh or you don't. Right. Exactly. Exactly. You also love music. And you came to it. it late. I was really... Very late. Really surprised you, you know, and listening and it's just great stuff. Do you... I've stuck

with it. You still stuck with it? You're still writing? I don't... People think that I'm trying to be a singer. I'm not. I love writing music for great singers. Right. And I write mostly with people from Nashville, Tennessee,

that scene down there. We write everything, not just country, but we write everything. Does that help you in your acting or in your roles? Do you ever see that sometimes it adds a little finesse to one part of something or another? They're so tied because they're both storytelling. And, you know, a song is just like a movie but condensed and sometimes rhyming. It feels the same way.

Somebody should be able to see the story at the end of the song. Yeah. That's fantastic. movie is a blast. It's called The Dink. It premieres July 24th on Apple TV Academy Award winning actress Mary Steenbergin. We're always so happy when you're here. Congratulations on the movie. Thank you. And I watch you every day. Thank you. Say hi to Ted for us. Oh, I will. Please say how. Come it up. We will explain why President Trump will deliver a primetime address to the nation later this week. Morning Joe's coming right back. President Trump promoted on social media yesterday. He'll give a

primetime address to the nation this Thursday at 9 p.m. Eastern time. MS. Now has learned the speech will focus on newly declassified intelligence. The White House claims reveal plans by foreign nation to interfere in the 2020 election. That's according to two White House officials speaking on the condition of anonymity. One of those officials said the president will be joined at the address by the CIA director, the acting director of national intelligence, the FBI director, and the Secretary of Homeland Security. We will again note, as we have for many years now, there has been no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, a primetime address to the nation about an election he lost six years. And this is what I love about this. And I think Nicole

brought this point up yesterday. The 2016 election was okay, right? Who ran that election? The Obama administration? Barack Hussein Obama ran the 2020. 2016 election. It was clean. The 2024 election was run by sleepy Joe Biden. And it was clean. Who ran the 2020 election? I'd say, this is a crazy thing when they'll be going, oh, the FBI, they infiltrated January 6th, the deep state. It was his FBI. It was his deep state. It was his deep state. It was his election officials. Like, he ran the 2020 So he's going to come on and say, I was so stupid that I let foreign countries infiltrate our election in 2020 in a way that Barack Hussein Obama did not in 2016 in a way that sleepy

Joe Biden did not in 2020. Again, the insanity of it all. But I guess, I guess he wants to turn the camera on himself and say, I was so incompetent that I couldn't even run an election. feels like an own goal. Also at a time when a president, any other president at this moment might talk about the war in Iran. Right. What are we doing there? How's it going? What's the end game? Or affordability, things that are impacting people's lives. Certainly not an election. He lost six years ago. And court after court, including Trump appointed judges, said as much that he lost.

Let's bring an independent senator, Angus King of Maine. He's a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Senator, thanks for being with us. I want to talk to you about the shooting, ICE involved shooting yesterday in Maine. But just briefly, you are on the U.S. Intel Committee. Can you shed any light into what the president may be talking about later this week? Have you learned any new information about the 2020 election that might be relevant here? Nothing whatsoever. I've never heard anything about foreign interference in the 2020 election. Now, I could go on for a half hour about Russian interference in the 2016 election, but nothing about 2020. I have no idea what they're going to say tomorrow night. And I have to tell you,

one of the frustrating things is for a member of the Intelligence Committee, we have to hold what we hear in confidence. And when we hear the White House say things that we know are inconsistent with the intelligence that we've been given on the committee, we can't say anything. And I just have to share that. That's a continuing frustration with this administration. Wait, wait. So you're telling me if they lie to the American people, you can't correct them. Well, I would never say that, Joe. No, that's right. I'm saying if they lie to the American people about matters of intel that you know the real story on,

you can't correct them because you would be revealing classified information. So they just go around lying all they want. Exactly. It's very frustrating. When I hear things being said by the administration, by the Secretary of Defense or by the president that I know is inconsistent with the intelligence that we've seen, but I can't say that because I respect the confidentiality. reality of classified information.

And is the director of the CIA really going to stand there on national television and let the president lie about the 2020 election? We will see. As we've been discussing, Senator, all morning growing calls in your state for justice and transparency after an ICE agent fatally shot a man in Maine yesterday, marking the second deadly ice involved shooting in the United States in less than a week. Immigrant rights groups identify the victim as 26-year-old Juan Sebastian Guerrero of Columbia. The organizations say he'd been issued a Social Security number and was authorized to work in the United States legally. Initially, federal officials said Guerrero was the subject of an arrest warrant.

But later, Senator, you confirmed that Homeland Security Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen told me the victim was not to the person ICE agents were looking for and that the agents were not wearing body cameras. So for people just waking up to this story, Senator, can you kind of walk us through what you know at this hour? Well, number one is a real tragedy. This was a young man who was married, had a three-year-old daughter, was working, and wasn't the target of the investigation. They were going after the wrong person. And we don't have much in the way of facts, except that this fellow was killed driving a car. And there's a lot of law about law enforcement officers shooting into cars. You're not supposed to shoot into a car unless there's imminent threat to yourself or to others.

And it was really interesting. DHS issued a statement last night, and they said that the officer perceived that there was a danger to public safety. He didn't say, they didn't say he felt endangered himself. It was a very sort of lawyerly worded statement that didn't really defend what happened. What happens now is we've got to have a straightforward, transparent, and honest investigation that involves state officials. the people of Maine are not going to buy an investigation that's strictly run by the FBI or DHS. I'm sorry, but they just don't have the credibility. The other piece of this, and the larger question is, why were they there in the first place? And we can talk about that. You go ahead.

No, I was just going to say, here we have an image. Once again, it appears to be an ICE agent shooting into a side window of a moving car going at a slow rate of speed when, as you said, statement suggests that agents themselves were in no danger. They were talking about danger to the public. There's no danger to the public here. And they're gunning down people. It appears at point blank range, just like they did in Minneapolis to Renegas. Is there nothing Republicans will do to step in and stop this? They're the ones that funded it. They're the ones that are allowing this to continue. What needs to be done? So people, will stop getting gunned down in the streets of America by the federal government.

How about this? Here's a really simple idea. Apply to ICE the same standards that are applied to police forces all over the country, whether it's Miami or New York or San Diego or Denver. Make them follow the same protocols. Number one, let's get these body cameras on. It's ridiculous with all the money they have. They have all the money in the world under the appropriations that they've had. By the way, my Republican colleagues have now funded ICE to the end of Donald Trump's term. They've literally given up the power of the purse over ice. And so things like body cameras, identifications, no masks, those are simple things that apply everywhere else in the country to police forces. That's number one. Number two, let's be

sure that an investigation of this is real and that it's credible and that involves not just the federal authorities. And that's why I'm glad so far, our state attorney general, our state police, have been engaged in this investigation, and that's what we have to continue. But the bigger point is, why were they there in the first place? They arrested, we had a big surge in Maine. It didn't get the publicity of Minnesota, but we had a big surge in Maine in the winter. They arrested over 200 people. 19 of them had criminal records.

So this whole idea of this is the worst of the worst, and they're going after the criminals and getting criminals off our streets, that's a phony. That's a fraud. And what's really going on is these folks have been given a quota by the White House, which is the worst thing you could do with law enforcement to arrest. It was 3,500 a day. Now I hear it's 2,000 a day. But when you do that, give that kind of quota to law enforcement.

You're almost certain to get bad results. So they shouldn't have even been Biddeford in the first place. Biddeford is a wonderful town. It's up and coming. It's a very dynamic town with, interestingly, a lot of immigrant routes going back. a hundred years. So they shouldn't have been there at all and there appears to be very little, if any, justification for this. I'm going to wait for the facts, but thus far, it stinks. We will join you in waiting for the facts. Not only is it not the worst to the worst,

in the recent cases, it's been the wrong person. And in this case, someone who is working here legally. Independent Senator Angus Maine, Angus King of Maine. Thank you so much, Senator for your time this morning. We always appreciate it. talk to you soon. That does it for us this morning. Money, power, politics with Stephanie Ruhl is up next after a break.