Pod Save America - Can the Big Beautiful Bill Be Stopped?

Episode Date: July 1, 2025

Senate Republicans jam through a final vote on the so-called "Big, Beautiful Bill." Senator Chris Murphy steps away from the Senate floor to join Tommy and Lovett to talk about Republican Senator Tom Thillis's unexpected opposition to the bill, the Medicaid cuts that sparked it, and what the bill's passage would mean for Americans' wallets (you guessed it: more money for the rich, less for the poor). Then, Tommy and Lovett discuss Trump's trip to "Alligator Alcatraz," a new migrant detention facility in the middle of the Everglades, the Supreme Court's 6-3 decision ending the practice of nationwide injunctions, and the White House doubling down on their claim that airstrikes "totally obliterated" Iran's nuclear program, despite mounting evidence to the contrary.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast. 

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And Jon Favreau is out this week. He's tweeting a lot. I actually like, there was a part of it, hey man, you're out, it's okay. Slack too. Let the man have a vacation. Yeah, he doesn't, I think this, I think he's in it. I don't think he feels like he can let go. It'll be, he'll deprogram.

It takes a minute. But Lovett and I are here. We're gonna cover the fate of President Trump's entire second term legislative agenda. That's right. No pressure, sir. Senator Chris Murphy will be joining us in just a minute. Talk about the latest with the so-called

big, beautiful bill. It's devastating impact, the Republican holdouts, and what might happen when this piece of shit goes back over to the House for final passage. If it does, if it does. Right now as we're recording this, we're recording this Monday, the bill's up for votes. It could pass by the time you've heard this.

It could have been pulled by the time you've heard this. We don't know, but either way, whether it gets stopped in the Senate or it hopefully can be stopped in the House, it's still about the dynamic between the ways in which it's gotten much worse in the Senate. Much worse. But at the same time becoming more antagonistic

to the sort of deficit hawks that were part of the problem of passing in the House. So whatever happens overnight, it still faces trouble, but it's shocking how bad the bill actually is. Shockingly bad. Yeah. Shockingly bad. It got so much worse on the Senate side.

You will please listen to Senator Murphy. We're gonna lead with that interview because it's so important that people understand the stakes of this bill passing. Levine and I are also going to talk about the latest intelligence about Iran's nuclear program and that it wasn't totally obliterated as Trump promised us. What a surprise that he overstated it. Then we'll talk about some new immigration news swirling out there.

So we got it all for you. But first, joining us now to talk about the Voterama on Trump's so-called big beautiful bill is Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy. Senator, good to see you. Hey guys. So Senator, you tweeted that 17 million people will lose their health care because of the Medicaid cuts in this bill. How will that happen? And can you also explain the impact on the cost of health care premiums for people who get insurance through the Affordable Care Act? Yes, so 17 million people lose their health care both through Medicaid and through people that were on the Affordable Care Act that no longer will be on the Affordable Care Act. I mean that is a cataclysm. You know that's the equivalent population I think

of like 12 US states and that will ultimately impact everybody, whether you have health care or not. So how does that happen? First, in a whole bunch of different ways, the bill just slims down the amount of money that goes to states for Medicaid. So states will have only a couple choices. They'll either have to cut the amount of money they send to providers or, more likely, they will just throw people off of Medicaid. Second, it sets up a whole bunch of bullshit work

requirements. It's basically just a ton of paperwork to discourage people from signing up for Medicaid. So it says you have to prove that you're working, but it does it in a way that we know most people won't be able to comply with. And so a lot of people that are working but can't prove it through all this paperwork

will end up losing Medicaid. And then it just reduces the subsidies that we have always used to help people buy Obamacare plans. And so that means that an additional 5 million people will now find it unaffordable to get the Affordable Care Act. So it's 70 million people lose their health care, but by withdrawing all of that money, $900 billion from the Medicaid system,

it just makes a lot of hospitals, drug treatment centers that were operating on really slim margins unable to continue to operate. So you'll see sort of mass closures in the country, likely of treatment centers, of rural hospitals, and that will mean that a whole bunch of people who have insurance will all of a sudden not be able to find anywhere to go get care.

So it's just a, it's an absolute moral abomination. It is gonna ruin our healthcare system for a lot of people. Thousands of people will likely die. Many of them will be really vulnerable folks, people with serious disabilities that can only get insurance through Medicaid. And it's kind of implausible that a president is out there saying that they're not cutting Medicaid and they are about to ruin the lives of, you know, about 12 million people on Medicaid today.

So when this bill came out of the House, it was terrible. And the assumption was it's going to come over to the Senate, it's going to be moderated by the adults in the room in the Senate. And then the plan was to send it back to the House to jam the right wingers with something they would have to vote for. But it feels like the opposite has happened, that somehow in the Senate, the bill has become more radical, more dangerous, more extreme. It's baffling. And I think we all like to pretend we're pretty kind of,

you know, sophisticated people. It's surprising how much worse it's gotten. Can you explain the dynamic? Like, how did we get to this point? Because all of the moderates with any kind of guts or power in the United States Senate are gone. There is no meaningful, moderate block inside the Republican Party any longer. And what's happened is over the last 10 years, all of the new Republican senators are straight out of the MAGA wing, right? They were nominated, endorsed by Donald Trump. And so they hold all of the power, which means the bill gets worse when it gets to the Senate not better. And it doesn't just get worse on the health care title. It got a ton worse on the energy title.

So already the House had stripped out all of the renewable energy tax credits, but that wasn't good enough for Senate Republicans. They wanted to actually apply a new tax on renewable energy. They just wanted to totally bury the renewable energy industry. So we never, ever build another solar farm or wind turbine in the country. So the bill's gotten worse on healthcare.

More people are gonna lose their health insurance because of the Senate product. And the renewable energy industry could ultimately be destroyed. Now there's a chance that we might be able to sort of roll that back with an amendment later tonight But right now the bill is even worse than the House bill for renewables Yeah, I mean just just to add to that

I mean There's also a new tax break for the coal industry, right? And and so what we're hearing is, you know, this isn't just like a green energy problem This is something that this provision this new excise tax that will kill the renewable energy industry will take massive amounts of power offline at a time when we've got data centers and AI companies coming up that are going to need more and more power. What do you think the impact would be on just sort of like your average consumer? So the estimates are that there's going to be probably a 5% to 20% increase in energy

prices because what this bill does is cancel renewable projects that are already in motion, that are literally being developed right now. You've got to be online next year, I think, in order to qualify for the tax credits. There's lots of programs that are being built today. When all of that capacity is erased, then the energy distribution companies are going to have to raise rates because they were planning on that supply being part of the grid.

So 5% to 20% rate increases, but also probably brownouts because we just won't have enough energy in order to supply, especially the hotter parts of the country. So brownouts in Texas, brownouts in the southwest, you know, we're just gonna lack for electricity. But I think like the most important thing to talk about here is like why is this happening? Because it just doesn't make any sense to raise energy prices and to have people go without electricity during the summer. Remember, Donald Trump brought the oil and gas and coal executives down to Mar-a-Lago at the end of the campaign and he just kind of deal with them. It's been widely reported.

They promised him a billion dollars in campaign contributions, and he promised them whatever they wanted. And so they're calling in that shit. They're saying, yeah, it's not good enough to just erase the renewable energy tax credits. We want to kill the industry and give us some extra help as well.

So that's what you're seeing, the payoff on the corrupt deal that was done at Mar-a-Lago between the energy industry and Donald Trump. So there's a very small set of people that benefit from this bill. Coal industry is one of them. Trump himself needs a political win. People in the very highest tax bracket, billionaires,

some of the richest people in our country. But you have the building trade saying it'll cost 1.75 million jobs. You have people like Elon Musk pointing out there's a gift to China. You have Rand Paul, the Freedom Caucus, Musk as well, other deficit hawks saying it's the biggest increase to the debt. In history, Tom Tillis, your colleague, went to the floor to say that they're gonna be punished for lying to the American people. Josh Hawley explained why he should be against it, because it does exactly what he said he wouldn't do, which is cut Medicaid. Who behind the scenes is for this? Who's justifying this?

This feels like zombie legislation, right? Like, there's nobody out there advocating or explaining why this is actually a good thing on its own terms. Yeah, except everybody that is at Mar-a-Lago, right? I mean, like, and that's kind of the only thing that matters, right? That Donald Trump's world is Mar-a-Lago. The only human beings that matter are the folks who pay dues and pat him on the back at his club.

And this benefits everybody at Mar-a-Lago. The CEOs at Mar-a-Lago get a big corporate tax cut. The billionaires at Mar-a-Lago get, you know, an average $270,000 tax cut. And so Donald Trump's constituency, the ones that lobby him every day, do very, very well here. And in part because of our closed media environment today, where his base is only hearing from Fox News, they don't know that much about the Medicaid cuts.

Because on Fox News, Donald Trump and Mike Johnson continue to say there are no Medicaid cuts in this bill, two plus two equals seven. And unfortunately for a sizable portion of the country, that's what they believe, that this bill actually strengthens Medicaid. Unfortunately, they will find out pretty quickly when they lose their healthcare or their hospital closes what the truth is. Are you worried at all that the way they've done these cuts, I mean, this is what Tillis was talking about, that some of them, like the way the reimbursement changes are kind of pushed off to 2026, so they've sort of hidden it before the midterms? Yeah, I think there's some truth to that in terms of when the political impact will be.

But I mean, the jury is kind of in on what people think about this bill. It's true that maybe only half of the country knows about it because they're rushing it through. But when you learn about the bill, you hate it. And so if we do our job and stay really focused on explaining this bill between now and 2026, even if all the impacts haven't gone into effect, I think it'll have an impact. The story is so simple. You are throwing 17 million people off their health care in order to afford a quarter million dollar tax cut for the richest Americans. How long did that

take me to say? Fifteen seconds? That's a story that I think could be impactful for the midterms. Yeah, I think the polling on the bill ranges from like 19 points underwater to 29 points underwater. So I feel like that's bad. Yeah, it's not great. So speaking of, look, we can campaign if they pass it. What is the hope?

Like, what is the best thing to be saying today to try to stop this? Do you have any hope for your colleagues, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Tom Tillis is a no, Rand Paul could be a no, there's a few others on the table. What are you hearing? What are your hopes?

You know, listen, I am not hopeless. I mean, in part because, you know, had we done an interview at this time in the Affordable Care Act repeal debate in 2017, we would have been pretty pessimistic. There were lots of people at that moment, 10 hours before final passage in the Senate, that said, of course, Republicans are going to pass it. You know, this is their number one campaign and political priority, repealing the Affordable

Care Act. And then there was a surprise. And there still are surprises left in politics, especially when the American people mobilize. And that's what they're doing right now. These offices, Susan Collins' office, Lisa Murkowski's office are being flooded with phone calls. Tomorrow there'll be hundreds of people

at their district offices. So yes, I think there is still a chance that they vote no. That might not kill the bill permanently, but it would at least force them back to the drawing board and give us some more time to continue to explain to the American public what's in here. So the prescription is pretty simple. Just keep calling, keep showing up.

This bill might not pass tonight. You might still have tomorrow to make those phone calls and show up to those offices. And who knows, like in 2017, we might actually beat this thing. Senator, I think we're used to Republicans and Trump lying about how much their plans cost, but what's happening with this bill is kind of hard to wrap your head around. I was wondering if you could help explain the way they are scoring this bill and what kind of precedent that might set for a future democratic or any other Congress? Well, one interesting thing to say is that

they have now twice changed the rules of the Senate in order to get their agenda passed. They did it once a few weeks ago in order to try to cancel a California state environmental regulation that normally we can't do in the Senate. And they're doing it right now to hide the cost of this bill, changing the rules of the Senate. That has

implications because, you know, if there was any question that Democrats were going to get rid of the filibuster to pass really popular things, if we get control, now there's no excuse not to do that because the Senate Republicans are changing the rules on a pretty regular basis. But what they're specifically doing is they are trying to hide the deficit cost of this bill. This bill will create four trillion dollars worth of new debt for this country. But they are doing a scoring gimmick to pretend that that number is zero. But in fact, we know it's not zero, even though they will have a piece of paper that says this bill creates no

deficits, because also in the bill is an increase in the debt ceiling of $5 trillion. And we will immediately start to have to borrow additional money. We will actually borrow $4 trillion of new debt as part of this bill. So yes, they will have a piece of paper that says this bill creates no debt, but we will borrow $4 trillion in new money. So it'll be pretty quickly apparent that the piece of paper they have means nothing. But it does help them to see voters on Fox News because they'll wave that piece of paper on Fox News and tell folks that there's no debt increase while they're literally going out to the bond market and borrowing $4 trillion of additional debt.

You know, when Tom, when your colleague Senator Tillis spoke about the bill. A lot of the clips are around the fact that the Republicans will pay because it's a lie, that this is going to throw 600 and some-odd thousand people off of Medicaid in the state. But he talked about the lack of interest or awareness about the details about what the bill actually does. He talked about governing and that this is not a Congress that's interested in governing. You're right, they'll have a number that they can say on Fox News. But Susan Collins knows that's not real. Lisa Murkowski knows that that's not real.

Mitch McConnell knows that that's not real. What is it like behind the scenes talking to them? Rand Paul certainly knows it's not real. He genuinely cares about deficits. I don't understand how they're defending this or if they're even bothering to defend this when there aren't any cameras and if there's hope there in getting them and what you're saying when you talk to these people. Yeah.

I mean, this is a 900 page bill that got introduced late on Saturday. Not a single one of them has read it. We are just discovering as we speak new things that are in the bill. I just read a provision that creates a 100 million dollar fund to go find inefficiencies in the federal government. I'm not sure why you need a hundred million dollars to go find inefficiencies, but it looks to me just like a kind of nice sludge fund for the OMB director. Yeah, I mean, this isn't a governing party any longer. This is a cult. And a cult does whatever the leader says without question. That is kind of the definition of a cult,

that you are sort of no longer interested in getting involved in the Rationale of your organization's operations. You just want to stay in favor of the cult leader. So there is no Intellectual curiosity left over in this party. Maybe with the exception of Tom Tillis and Rand Paul They all just take orders from Donald Trump and Donald Trump has given the orders past this bill because it's good for my friends at Mar-a-Lago. I wish there was a more complicated answer than that, but that's just kind of how the Republican Party operates today.

Yeah, but that's not Murkowski, right? That's not, I mean, that's a lot of them, but that's not those people, right? Like those people seem like you should be, we should be trying to get them. Like a big part of the bill that was meant to help Alaska just taken out by not those people, right? Like I like those people seem like you should be, we should be trying to get them like they like a big part of the bill that was meant to help Alaska just taken out by the parliamentarian, right? Like this bill just got a lot worse for her state. Like it seems like these people should be people we can get. Yeah, but you're like,

that's the list, right? Like you might, like you might've just, you know, like read the beginning at the end of the list. So that's why I'm not, you know, fatalist right now. That's why, like, we are literally working, as we speak, on the Senate floor, trying to figure out new ways to convince Senator Murkowski and Senator Collins to vote against this, because if they vote against this, and Tillis and Paul stay noes, then this bill fails.

So there's still a path, but they're behind closed doors, also, as we speak, trying to find ways to potentially get enough money to Alaska and Maine so that those two senators just look the other way. We'll see who wins in the end, rational thought, which I do think both of those senators still have the capacity to engage in, or the power of the cult.

So, you know, folks are, you know, we're targeting Alaska and Maine. Rand Paul has always been his own man on kind of spending and deficit and debt questions, right? Tom Tillis had to resign to find enough courage to vote against his bill, but, you know, we're grateful to him. I saw though, this thing will have to go back

over to the House side where it will be voted on again. I saw that Elon Musk just tweeted, every member of Congress who campaigned on reducing government spending and then immediately voted for the biggest debt increase in history should hang their head in shame and they will lose their primary next year if it's the last thing I do on this earth.

I know the primary fear among Republicans is of getting primaried by a Donald Trump endorsed candidate, but that's interesting. That's a new wrinkle, right? Yeah, I don't know. Is it? I mean, come on, but that's interesting. That's a new wrinkle, right? Yeah, I don't know. Is it? I mean. Come on, give us something.

I mean, I don't know. I mean, didn't we just have that battle between Donald Trump and Elon Musk? I know. Elon Musk lost, and it's like whatever his ketamine high says next week will cause him to forget what he said this week. Yeah, but listen, there's still a problem in the House. And the problem

in the House is that there is a more sizable group of moderates there that do care about two things, the size of the Medicaid cuts and this issue over state and local deductibility. And the deal they cut in the House on state and local tax deductibility got a lot worse in the Senate and the Medicaid cuts got a lot bigger. So you are going to have a group of semi-moderate, if you can call them that, House Republicans that are going to have a big problem with what comes back. And Rand Paul, by sort of holding the line on the deficit, definitely made it a little bit harder for people who follow him and think like him in the House to swallow when this thing comes back. So no, this is not done.

I mean, the House may have to amend it again. They may have to send it back to the Senate again. And again, every day that this thing hangs out on the clothesline, it stinks more and more. It gives us more of an opportunity to go out and explain to the American public why they should vote out of office, anybody that votes for it.

So any delay in this thing passing makes it a little bit less likely that it'll ever get to the president's desk. It has a branding question because since it's come over to the Senate and since they've now put on the table really like dismantling a big part of Medicaid, it's really gotten much, much worse since it's come to the Senate. Are we doing enough to convey the scale of what it's trying to do on healthcare? Like we're referring to it as massive Medicaid cuts, which is certainly true.

I think that undersells the effect it'll have on everybody with insurance if rural hospitals don't have the resources to function, if this causes a whole bunch of providers to have to lay people off. Is there a way we should be talking about this that that conveys it more as a kind of a like Trump, a version of Trump care that this is a fundamental reform of the health care system that they will own all of it, all the consequences over the next couple of years? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, it's a it's a tax on health care, right? This is the Trump tax on health care. Everybody, you are either going to lose your health care,

or you're going to pay a whole lot more for it. There are only two outcomes here, right? And so I think we do need to do a better job of explaining that because I think it is still true that 75% of the country is not on Medicaid. 25% is. So that 75% probably says to themselves, well, this is a Medicaid bill. I don't love that you're kicking people off of Medicaid. I still like that program, but this doesn't probably impact me. So I think we need to do a more consistent job of not just talking about

the 17 million people who are going to lose coverage, but everybody else who's going to see, you know, probably a double-digit increase in their premiums. If you are a 60-year-old couple in Connecticut and you make $80,000 a year, you are probably on the exchange, and that couple will see a $26,000 annual increase in their premiums, or 100% increase in their out-of-pocket expenses. We have not really told that story, right, because we've been so focused on the people who are losing coverage, but you just shook your head in disbelief that that's actually a part of this bill, and it is. So that's a story that we have to tell.

And by the way, we're not going to stop telling the story. If this bill does pass, we are going to explain the impact on people who even retain their health care throughout the rest of the year and throughout all of next year. The storytelling doesn't stop. Yeah. One quick Iran question for you, Senator. Um, folks, I'm sure we're watching the, uh, the U S strike on Iran's nuclear

facilities, Trump said the program was totally obliterated. You got a briefing last week where you said, uh, we have not obliterated Iran's nuclear program. The president was deliberately misleading. They still have significant capability and equipment. I know you can't talk about anything classified and you would never disclose anything from that briefing, but can you just sort of help us understand Iran's nuclear capability as you know it after the Israeli and US military campaign? Yeah, and a lot has been publicly reported so I certainly can talk about that.

There's no doubt we set back their nuclear program because they just don't have working research sites. But there has been publicly available satellite imagery that shows that the Iranians are actively excavating, digging out, and recovering material from both of those sites and the public reporting has been pretty clear that Iran still has centrifuges, Iran still has enriched uranium up to the 60% level, and Iran still has scientists that know what to do with the centrifuges and with the enriched material. So if you have those three things, centrifuges, 60% enriched uranium, and scientists who know how to build what are called the cascades, the connected centrifuges that allow

you to move 60% enriched uranium to 90% enriched uranium, then you are definitely only months away from being able to rebuild that program. You have not obliterated that program. And so that's just the truth and it is dangerously misleading for the president or Republicans to use terms like obliteration. What is more dangerous is that we were at the table negotiating a deal. And the only way to get Iran permanently off a path to a nuclear weapon once they have all of that equipment and once they have all of that knowledge and once they have all that knowledge is a diplomatic agreement. And we were literally at the table with them. We interrupted those negotiations

and there's no guarantee that we will ever get back because we have scrambled Iranian politics to the point where they might not now be able to make those concessions that they could have made before the United States and Israel struck them. So we have made the Iranian threat in the medium and long term worse, even though in the short run, in the next three or four months, we did destroy their capacity. And so that's the story that we have to tell. And though I can't disclose anything I've heard behind closed doors, the public reporting has been very clear. We didn't get everything. And if we didn't get everything and we don't have a negotiating table, that's not good for the United States. And frankly, that's not good for Israel. I believe the Israelis killed the

political leader overseeing the negotiations. So correct. Sort of tough way to not coincidentally. Yeah. Well, I don't know, Senator Murphy, keep talking like this. You're not going to get a statue in the $40 million Garden of Heroes, which is also included in the bill. Included in the bill, a new Garden of Maga Heroes, $40 million, we're gonna kick kids off of their nutrition benefits, but we're gonna get a statue of Andrew Tate.

Jesus Christ, this is bleak. What a time to be alive. Senator, thank you so much. Thank you, Senator. We appreciate it. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but two quick things before we do that. If this reconciliation bill passes, the Senate

is going back to the house and you can make a big difference there. Go to vote, save America.com to find out how to take action. Also love it. Lowly seeking asylum north of the border. Oh yeah, that's right. We're going to Just For Laughs in Montreal.

Just For Laughs is back and Love to Leave is going. We'll be there on July 24th. You can get those tickets at crooked.com slash events. We're gonna have an amazing lineup of guests that I'll tell you about later because I'm going on vacation. Okay, great. Grab tickets now at crooked.com slash events. Pot Save America is brought to you by Helix. I love Helix mattresses. I have a Dawn Lux. That's the mattress I have from them. Really comfortable.

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crooked for 27% off-site wide. Make sure yousleep.com slash crooked for 27% off site wide. Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you helixsleep.com slash crooked. So love it. As we just heard from Senator Chris Murphy, despite Trump's claims to the contrary, there is growing evidence that the U S strikes over a week ago did not in fact completely and totally obliterate Iran's nuclear program. So Rafael Grossi, the head of the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, told CBS

News that Iran could begin producing enriched uranium in quote, a matter of months. The Washington Post also reported that the United States has intercepted private communications between senior Iranian officials, which revealed that the attacks were not as destructive as the Iranians thought they would be. White House press secretary, Caroline Levitt, called the post reporting shameful and said, the notion that unnamed Iranian officials know what happened under hundreds of feet of rubble is nonsense.

I love that her position is that President Trump has perfect visibility into that pile of rubble, but the Iranians who live there do not. Right, like, I feel like if anybody knows, maybe nobody knows, but how do we know? Yeah, it wouldn't be us. Presumably the way we would find out without being there was from what they were saying.

We're spying on them. Right. That's why we're spying on them. Yeah, although it also kind of like, they're sort of standing around a microphone as being like, ham it up, say how bad it was. I mean, like they all know they're being fucking bugged. That's 100% a possibility.

But as always, Trump and by extension his administration have responded not by admitting error, but by doubling down, including threatening journalists and Democrats. Trump talked about all of this in an interview with Fox News' Maria Bartiromo that aired on Sunday. Here's a clip.

We call it the 12 day war. That was an intensive war. You tweeted the Democrats leaked an intelligence. They should be prosecuted. Who specifically? Do I get people to believe it? No, who did it? Will you be able to find out? You can find out. You tweeted the Democrats leaked an intelligence. They should be prosecuted who specifically doing I'm gonna be able to find out and find out if they want or they could find out easily You know you go up and tell the reporter national security who gave it you have to do that And I suspect we'll be doing things like that enrichment doesn't mean like air conditioning

And it doesn't mean to jack up your car. Enrichment is a bad word. I love when he explains. Enrichment doesn't mean the dumbest possible explanation in this context. It means something bad. Yeah, I also hadn't realized he was trying to brand it as the 12-day war. We're branding it. You don't like it?

Because he wants it to be a big part of history, so he felt like six days war, now there's 12 days war. Not working for you? No. If you were a reporter, how nervous would you be about those threats? I mean, it's serious. I think it's really scary.

Yeah. And it depends on what they do, but I was remembering you had Judith Miller went to jail for 85 days because she refused to reveal her source until Scooter Libby came forward. Matthew Cooper, journalist at Time, almost went to jail, but then Karl Rove came forward and said he was the source.

At that time, that was a serious prosecutor named Patrick Fitzgerald who was appointed by James Comey, who was appointed by James Ashcroft, who had recused himself because he was too connected. I mean, this is how far we've fallen. James Ashcroft recused himself because he was too connected to Karl Rove and the Bush White House.

They were trying to show restraint, show that they had integrity, Ashcroft recused himself because he was too connected to Karl Rove and the Bush White House. They were trying to show restraint, show that they had integrity, that they were beyond reproach. And even then, they went after journalists in a way that was, I think, deeply, deeply wrong. They threw Judith Miller, who has a lot of problems with the reporting, but they threw Judith Miller in jail, even though she said she wouldn't speak, for 85 days until Scooter Libby agreed.

And they can claim it was an intimidation, but of course it was. He wouldn't have come forward if she hadn't been thrown in jail. Look, people were critical of Eric Holder when they went after James Rosen. So in the Obama administration, people who leaked classified information were prosecuted. And those prosecutions included the subpoenaing of records

from members of the media, including like metadata, I think from James Rosen, who was a Fox News reporter who got a leak about North Korea from someone at the State Department. But Obama, I think, was very clear that he did not support charging journalists. And that even extended to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, because the concern was if you charge Julian Assange and you set

a precedent, that could then be applied to the mainstream media. Now Obama didn't create a precedent, but Trump later prosecuted Assange in 2019 with like 17 counts of espionage. But then in 2024 seemed to suggest that he'd consider pardoning Assange. So like who knows where he is on this. The point is that, so when the Obama DOJ was going after a leak, they called Rosen, a co-conspirator, just to get at his information. The DOJ also gathered the information from AP reporters to get at a different leak around a Yemen plot that the CIA had foiled. And then ultimately Holder basically said,

we will never put a journalist in jail. That was a good thing. But all of that is a way to say Eric Holder, Patrick Fitzgerald, James Comey, these people have been replaced by Cash Patel, Pam Bondi, people with zero integrity. So you had a time when journalists were getting locked up for an investigation into something that they could look a lot like this, under people that, as much as I dislike them,

had more sc-poles than fucking these yahoos will ever have. So it is a genuinely scary prospect if they actually start looking into it. Yeah, I would be quite nervous, to be honest. I did notice that Trump just dropped his lawsuit against Ann Seltzer, the long-time Iowa bolster who released the poll. He dropped it, it's out.

On November 2nd, yeah. Good for him, good for him. Remember her poll had Kamala winning 47, 43. Uh, that insults her poll ended up being off by 16 points and then Trump wanted to sue her. I think that claiming election interference and they just dropped it today out of nowhere. Yeah. It's frivolous and ridiculous.

So I wonder why, why on that one case they decided maybe they're just, I don't understand. There's no meat on that bone. Like I understand why he's going after parents. I understand why a frivolous law lawsuit against CBS has a place's going after parents. I understand why a frivolous lawsuit against CBS has a place to go for him. A frivolous lawsuit against ABC has a place to go for him. There's wins that he can get.

What are you trying to eke out from the Des Moines register? What are you trying to get out of Ann Salter? It's stupid. Made no sense. In a true social post on Saturday, Trump appeared to leverage military support for Israel, which Republicans and some Democrats always say is sacred in order to pressure Israel to quit its, quote,

witch hunt into Netanyahu's corruption scandals. That's Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. He is currently standing trial for charges of bribery, fraud, breach of trust, and these three separate cases that are kind of folded together. Not long after Trump's post, Israeli courts canceled this week's hearings in the case. They did so at Netanyahu's request,

but the details explaining why are classified. On Saturday night, Trump posted about the Gaza hostage deal or trying to get a Gaza hostage deal as well. Love it, the kind of like 4D chess explanation for Trump suddenly posting on Truth Social that Netanyahu's corruption trial should go away as he thinks alleviating the political pressure of jail time could give Bibi the political space he needs

to cut a ceasefire deal and not worry about his government collapsing. Do you buy that, or is he just sympathetic, you know, sympathy for all the corrupt dictators out there? Uh, no, I do not buy that. In fact, so the good rule of thumb, the stupidest explanation is usually the correct one. Uh, an official told Axios, the president read in an article that Bibi had to be in court on Monday

and thought it's crazy. He identified with what Bibi is going through and decided to write something about it. It seems to be, I mean, look, they could all be full of shit, who knows, some of this could, maybe there's a phone call where sort of Bibi insourced Trump with the stories of how hard it is for him to both face this trial and get this deal done.

We have no idea, but basically someone close to Trump is saying he read an article, thought it was stupid, identified with it, did the post. So that to me feels, unless proven otherwise, that to me is the most plausible explanation. I love identified with it. The things, some of the things that Netanyahu was on trial for are just like so venal.

I mean, so there's, they virtually were numbering the cases. Like case 1000 said that Netanyahu was on trial for are just like so venal. I mean, so there's, they virtually were numbering the cases. Like case 1000 said that Netanyahu and his wife accepted like a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of gifts like cigars, jewelry, and champagne in exchange for political favors. There's another case, case 2000, that Netanyahu is accused of trying to harm, like he was talking to some publisher of her newspaper and told

that publisher that he would harm his rival newspaper in exchange for good coverage. There's another case, case 4000, where Netanyahu allegedly provided regulatory help to a telecom company in exchange for favorable coverage for him and his family by the owner of that telecom company's news website. So it's just like, there's just so much crap that this guy is accused of. He's just such a corrupt piece of shit. Yeah, it's like, it's so, maybe it's just like,

it's so obvious, it isn't worth saying, but you know, Benjamin Netanyahu, he does not disentangle his personal interests with the interests of his country. Donald Trump does the same. And by the way, the leadership of Iran does the same thing. They are not doing what is in the interest of the Iranian people when they pursue this program.

So it's just a group of fucking egomaniacs battling it out. And the stakes are life and death. And a lot of people die and a lot of people suffer because these three people are in charge and that's, whatever comes of this, the fact that these countries are led by two of the most corrupt leaders in any democratic or, you know,

democratish country on earth and they're sort of negotiating across from despots in Iran puts everyone in those two countries, in all of our countries, everywhere at risk because we live in fucking hell. There's also a very weird political story about some State Department political appointee proposing that they use taxpayer money

to help Marine Le Pen appeal her conviction for embezzling funds. For those who don't know, Marine Le Pen is this far-right French politician. Her national rally party, some of the founders of it were literally Nazis, like former Waffen SS members or Vichy French people. It's just very weird things happening in our government right now. Yeah, that's a small example, but it's a big deal that JD Vance goes to Germany and excoriates them for not welcoming like what came after Nazis, the sort of the neo-Nazi representative

back to the fold meets with them, right? Like these people do not see themselves as leaders of all of us, as leaders of nations. They are leaders of a right-wing movement. And the people that believe in that movement, no law can hold them for the rest of us. We don't matter. This podcast is sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform designed to elevate your online presence and drive your success.

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Head to squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash crooked to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's squarespace.com slash crooked. All right, let's talk about some immigration news. So as usual, there's a lot happening here. As you're listening to this, President Trump is headed to the so-called Alligator Alcatraz, this new migrant detention facility being built in the middle of the Everglades, just

to be as cruel as humanly possible to the people who may be imprisoned there. We also have a story about Kristi Noem padding her income as governor of South Dakota by pocketing some of the donation money she solicited for a nonprofit dedicated to advancing her career and raising her profile. But the biggest news is that on Friday, the Supreme Court ruled in the case on Trump's birthright citizenship order, which really became a case about whether federal judges can order nationwide injunctions. The justices ruled six to three that judges cannot put nationwide holds on laws and actions they think are unconstitutional.

Love it. I know you talked to our buddies over at Strict Scrutiny about this last week. What does this mean for this sort of underlying question about Trump's EO ending birthright citizenship? So in terms of how the court will rule, they did not rule on the substance of the birthright citizenship case. But in practice, this ruling is incredibly dangerous, not just on this, but on a host of other issues,

because basically what it is saying is, if let's say the Trump administration picks somebody up and says they're not a citizen because of birthrights, they don't have birthright citizenship, begins deportation proceedings, they sue, they get it stopped by a judge. They can pick up another person who has the exact same profile, exact same set of facts,

and it can't be stopped because every person, I guess, needs to go out and get a lawyer to sue if they are being mistreated by the Trump administration, if the Trump administration is brazenly violating the Constitution. Now, Kavanaugh says, well, actually there is a mechanism because you can do class actions. And so immediately the legal organization fighting and birthright citizenship had that in the can. They started the proceedings to create a class,

and that might be able to mitigate it in some cases. But then you have Alito coming back and saying, no, don't get too fancy with these class actions, we're watching that too, you can't use class action lawsuits to achieve the same end, which is nationwide injunctions. The bottom line is, we have no idea what the impact of this will be, it will cause a bunch of chaos.

Now, on birthright citizenship and a host of other issues, injunctions on brazenly unconstitutional orders was one of the key ways we were able to slow the Trump administration or stop the Trump administration in its tracks. But it's worth putting together what's happening with the big, beautiful bill and what happened at the court because Donald Trump loves complaining about woke liberal judges. Stephen Miller loves complaining about woke liberal judges. But when Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem

went down to go meet with the field directors at the Department of Homeland Security at ICE, he was saying how they needed to do more, they needed to arrest more. And what they were hearing back from the actual people on the ground implementing this policy is that the resource limited, that they don't have the resources to do all this,

that some of the agents don't feel it's their responsibility, the other feels strapped. The big beautiful bill, along with cutting taxes for rich people, along with doing healthcare cuts, along with raising electricity costs, has a big chunk of money to unleash ICE, to fund detention centers, to fund mass deportations. And so the combination of the court saying that the only court that can adjudicate the constitutionality of what Donald Trump is doing is the Supreme Court. And the fact that they're about to be, if this bill passes, get a bunch of resources means there will be very, very little that people can do in the short term to fight back, that it will unleash what the Trump

administration wants to do on mass deportation. So it's extremely dangerous. It'll be dangerous on immigration and a host of other, a whole set of other issues. What if the administration starts coming after Miffl-Prestone, if the administration starts coming after gay and trans people, if the administration starts coming after all kinds of rules around healthcare access and religious objections, whatever it may be,

there is gonna be a ton of rules that the Trump administration puts in place and we have very few ways to stop it nationally until it reaches the Supreme Court. Yeah, and just on the deportations, I mean, there's this long, I think it was the New York Times piece about how the State Department is spending most of its time

just pushing countries to take deportees. Usually it's places like Libya or South Sudan, like places that are as scary and as dangerous as possible because they think that will somehow serve as a deterrent. And on the injunction piece, Jonathan Van Last at the Bulwark had a smart piece on this ruling last week, I believe, and the likelihood that this could lead to patchwork rulings

and kind of de facto different federal law in different places because there's different interpretations of the constitution in different places. So you could basically have red state laws and blue state laws. And that means suddenly it's really, really important where you live because your rights and freedoms as guaranteed by the constitution could be determined

by the shittiest judge close to you. Yes, it's one of those things where it's hard to talk about because it is really just very bad news. And I was talking about this with Leah Littman and with Melissa Murray, who hosts Strict, and first of all, they pointed out that pressure, that drawing attention to what the judiciary does has an impact. They see it, they feel it, they respond to it. But the other part of it is, I'm not a fan of like,

you wanna heighten the contradiction, right? You wanna like kind of, like accelerationist, like let's have people experience how bad Trump can really be. I don't believe in that because I think for the same reason, I think we need to stop this bill. We should try to stop bad things and try to do good things and figure out the politics after.

But Trump has been protected, you know They blame the woke judges But Trump is protected when his worst and most unpopular policies are stopped by judges, right? This whole thing about calling Trump, you know taco all these people Democrats being like Trump's chickening out Chickening out when Trump doesn't do stuff people love it, right? And they think oh, you know Donald Trump He sounds crazy, but he always chickens out, he always moderates, things never as bad as these liberals say it's gonna be. Well, the liberal judges are no longer

gonna stand in Trump's way. He's gonna do what he wants to do. The only people that'll be able to stop him at a national level is the Supreme Court. And that means we are gonna live with the consequences of what Donald Trump actually wants to do. And I think we will start to see more blowback because of it. I don't want to live in that world, but it's the world we're going to live in.

No, I feel I have similar feelings on Iran. Obviously, I don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. I don't want the United States to get sucked into some extended awful regime change war in the Middle East. But there is this feeling right now, I think, that bombing Iran was cost-free, that is based on the kind of compressed day-to-day, hour-to-hour news cycle and the way we judge events, that I think is completely underappreciated, or at least not calculating, the odds increasing that they will eventually get a nuclear weapon, or that they will respond to the United States or Israel with some sort of terrorist attack, whether it's directly or through proxies, or that there could be some awful like second or third order consequences to what happened, like more nuclear proliferation everywhere. So I totally, it's a huge challenge.

And, but it's also what happens the next time the US is negotiating with a country and they don't trust us because when Donald Trump said you have two weeks, he was already planning to bomb someone. Like what we're talking about today, whether it's on all of these issues, they put the huge Medicaid cuts two years out, right? They have these things sunset so they can claim it's cheaper,

but they plan to extend them forever. They give money to coal companies now and cancel clean energy projects in the future. Everything about Trump, and there's a point Ezra Klein makes this often, which is that Trump borrows in the future. Everything about Trump, and this is a point Ezra Klein makes this often, which is that Trump borrows from the future. When he spends our credibility, they're literally borrowing trillions of dollars to pay for tax cuts for the rich.

They're going to fuck up clean energy for the next generation with this bill. Why? To what? To get a quick hit for some coal companies, for some billionaires right now, to give himself a quick political win before the July 4th holiday. Same thing with Iran, right? Like, oh, you know, a 48-hour story about how he feels tough

because he saw Bibi was getting good press and now he wants to bomb Iran. Who's gonna wanna trust us? Who's gonna trust our word going forward? Like, Donald Trump borrows against the future and we will pay in the long run whether whether we admit or not So with these nationwide injunctions off the table for now a bunch of Trump policies are likely going to go into effect right away One of those is from Friday Trump is going to end temporary protected status or TPS for immigrants from Haiti

This was a big campaign promise It was centered infamously on his lie that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. In the announcement, the Department of Homeland Security said, quote, the environmental situation in Haiti has improved enough that it is safe for Haitian citizens to return home. I cannot overstate how much that is a lie. This might be news to anyone who's actually been keeping track of what's happening there. According to an AP tally last year, more than 5,600 people were killed in gang violence. And from January to March this year, another 1,600 have died.

Love it. The idea of deporting someone back to Haiti right now is so unimaginably cruel. It's kind of like hard to wrap your head around it. I guess this is all just part of the Stephen Miller deterrence. I'm sure there's just a big bunch of racism in there too. Well it's not even deterrent, these people are here legally. They're following the rules. Like this is an attack on legal immigrants. And look, they have a, I think they have,

I think it's in part, it's largely racist, right? They don't seem to have a problem with immigrants from certain countries, but a huge problem with immigrants from others. But they have an ideological problem with temporary protective status, because they don't ideological problem with temporary protective status because they don't view it as temporary, right? People are granted this status and it's from countries that are in turmoil.

That turmoil does not go away in a matter of months or if not years. And so people end up having a status that allows them to stay in the country for a long time. If you want to reform that system, propose some laws. You want to reform that system over the time. But they don't. They're not disciplined, they have no long-term plan, they're not governing.

They just, they want to exact a pain. And so they're going to punish these people who basically did what we told them to do. They applied, they had temporary protection status, they came, they built life, they support local economies, their kids go to school here, their kids are sometimes, are born here, they become citizens. And so they're going to punish these people

because they don't believe in this program. And it will start here, but it won't end here, because they're going to go after all kinds of other legal immigrants. So in Haiti, though, like, let's just, I want to double-stamp this. Like, in Haiti, we were talking about levels of violence that you rarely see outside of active war zones.

Like, gangs, armed groups, they control 85% of the capital city, Port-au-Prince. Last year there were bloody massacres where like 130, 250 people were butchered with machetes in these like, you know, pogroms. A million people have been displaced, like the government services have just completely collapsed. Like there's no security and we're just, we're going to start deporting people on September

2nd, back to that. Like similar situation in Venezuela, where 350,000 people are losing TPS. Venezuela, it went from being the richest country in South America in the 70s and 80s to the poorest or one of the poorest. Obviously most of the blame lies with Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro, the current president.

But the United States is sanctioning the shit out of that country. We are crushing their economy. We have been for years under a bipartisan group of presidents. And as you said, like the Biden administration created a process to allow Venezuelan migrants to come to the US legally. They followed the rules and now that's being ripped away

from them and these people are just gonna be sent home or anywhere or to Libya? Like we don't know. Yeah. There was a time too when conservatives viewed people that fled left-wing governments were politically valuable, right? That they were people you welcomed because they were refugees from a system you despised. You didn't hold them responsible for the sins of governments

you didn't agree with. But their first order is getting rid of immigrants, legal immigrants, undocumented immigrants. That is their goal. That is their agenda. The rest is immaterial to them. This is an ad by BetterHelp. Work can be stressful. Life can be stressful. You can use this summer to focus on your wellness with small steps to manage your workday challenges. Workplace stress is now one of the top causes of declining mental health, with 61% of the global workforce experiencing higher than normal levels of stress. To battle stress, most of us can't wave goodbye to work, but we can start small with a focus

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Another move that's even weirder scarier It's getting less attention is there's this internal DOJ memo Issued by the assistant attorney general in charge of the Civil Division. This is from early June it was reported out by the New Republic and it says, it kind of lays out what the division's top enforcement priorities should be. One of the items on the list is prioritizing denaturalization, then listed out 10 categories of naturalized citizens who should be targeted for losing their status, including people they deemed

to be national security threats, or who committed fraud or have gang ties, and people who lie during the naturalization process as determined by the officials at this deeply partisan and politicized Trump agency. This is incredibly ominous given that we've already seen this administration throw people in jail for attending a pro-Palestine protest, for signing an op-ed in support of Palestinian rights. If suddenly like we're just gonna denaturalize someone for vague quote unquote natural security concerns?

So Andy Ogles, who's a Republican Congress person, he posts that Zoran Mamdani, who just won the primary in New York, if he didn't disclose his advocacy for something on a citizenship forbs, he lied when he became a US citizen. If he admitted that, he faces deportation. If what happens now is any person who is a citizen of the United States, a naturalized

citizen of the United States, if they upset the regime, if they say something that a guy like Andy Ogles doesn't like, if they take a politically unpopular position, if what happens then is a group of political hacks in the Trump administration, then start going and pulling forms and looking for any inconsistency. What that says is, if you say something we don't like, your citizenship is in doubt. And if your citizenship is in doubt, your rights as an American. That's it. If your citizenship is fungible, your rights are fungible.

It is so dangerous. And so obviously their next move, once they move on from grabbing people like, like Mahmoud Khalil off the streets or others off the streets. Columbia Street is a leader of pro-Palestinian protests. And like, this is the slippery slope. This is the dangerous path, right? Because suddenly American citizens will not feel safe

to speak their mind if they weren't born here. Because like any of us, if you go, this is why, like, you know, an audit sucks even if you follow the rules. You go into anybody's file, you go through everybody's file, you're gonna find a mistake, you're gonna find something, you can find something and trump it up. That's what makes it so dangerous. Yeah, I mean, in this, the allegations against Zora Mamdani are based on rap lyrics he wrote in 2017. Like, what are we talking about? And Caroline Levitt got asked about this today at the White House press briefing. She said, surely if they are true,

it's something that should be investigated. So they're not walking away from this, they're leaning in. Well, the thing about that too is what she said in that press briefing is, that's not something he said, it's not something Donald Trump has said. But because these people have no kind of, they're not, they don't have a kind of respect for American values. They don't really understand

what makes America a great place. They don't understand freedom and what it's worth. She can't do what an honorable, patriotic person would do is say, we respect the rights of citizens in the country and we don't target people for their beliefs. And he may, we may not like this guy, but that doesn't mean we're gonna suddenly start questioning whether or not they're Americans, right? They don't have that capacity.

And we're so far gone from it, we're used to it now, but it's ridiculous. Yeah. And then there's, look, for those who think we might be inflating this, I mean, there's a lower burden of proof for a denaturalization than for a criminal case. There's no statute of limitations, so they can do this at any time. From 1907 to 1967, 22,000 Americans were denaturalized. So this was like the Red Scare era. Now that dropped way down from the 90s through 2017,

but they could certainly ramp this right back up. Yeah, I mean, look, people talk about like green card marriages, right, like almost as a joke. It's not a joke when all of a sudden there is a partisan, politicized effort to throw people out of this country. Yeah. All right. Finally, we wanted to give you guys an update on the case of Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, who

has opted to remain in federal custody as his human smuggling case proceeds rather than risk being potentially deported again, which is what the Department of Homeland Security seems primed to do. On Sunday, the Washington Post reported that the star witness against Abrego Garcia is a three-time felon who has been released from prison early to a halfway house in exchange for cooperating. That witness has had multiple run-ins with the police

for public intoxication, transporting undocumented migrants, drunkenly firing a handgun out of a car window in a residential neighborhood, and a few other things. Love it, it basically just seems like the Trump administration is letting handgun out of a car window in a residential neighborhood and a few other things. Love it, it basically just seems like the Trump administration is letting an actually dangerous repeat offender free in order to continue their prosecution of someone

that they fucked up, they wrongly sent to El Salvador, but now they've deemed a political enemy who is kind of like the keystone holding together the argument for their entire policy of sending Venezuelans mostly to El Salvador. Yeah, look, they said that they were going to get criminals off the street, so they're putting a criminal on the street in order to pursue this, what is clearly a political prosecution. Whatever evidence they ultimately put forward is a political prosecution.

And we know that because it didn't exist until it was on his way back to the US to right the previous wrong of their deportation. But this is what we're seeing across the board. They claimed that they were going to be going after criminals in our country instead because of these kind of ad hoc, chaotic roundups, they are grabbing people who are not criminals at a far higher rate than they were before. They claim that they want to go after the deficit,

so they're gonna pass a bill that dramatically increases the debt. Like they're just, they're just, they are, they are lying and they are failing on their own terms. But it's just like a small example of how much of this is just rhetoric for the Fox News audience while in practice they are rounding up people who are just trying to go to work.

They are not focusing on criminals. What you're about to talk about next makes that even more clear. Yeah, I mean, it's just remarkable how often their policies are not just cruel, but also self-defeating. So, you know, the Times is a big piece today about Trump's, the deal he cut with El Salvador

with Naïve Bukele that allowed the United States to send people like Gilmour Obregó-Garcia and a couple hundred other Venezuelan men to this nightmare, a secote prison in El Salvador. As part of that deal, there was some funding that went to Bukele's government, like $5 million or something, kind of de minimis. But as part of the deal, the US also

agreed to drop charges against an MS-13 gang leader named Vampiro, who was being prosecuted in New York on charges of terrorism, murder, and corruption. This guy was accused of overseeing killings in at least three countries. But because we cut this deal with Bukele, he was sent back to El Salvador. Now, Bukele's government says,

oh, they'll prosecute him there, but it seems very likely that the real reason that Bukele wanted this guy, Vampiro, sent back to El Salvador, along with several others, that he's seeking the release of is because they are gang leaders who could provide or have provided the US government evidence about Bukele cutting deals with gangs for political reasons. Basically the gangs agreed to hide the bodies of the people they were murdering and to help round up support for Bukele around elections in exchange for special favors

when they were in prison or whatever. And so Trump's policy here, it's not tough on crime. It is actually undermining a major prosecution of some of the most senior MS-13 officials that we've ever arrested. Yeah, and look, this is why you don't grab people and throw them into a gulag without any form of due process or ability to question their accusers, because you don't have all the facts and governments are flawed.

People make mistakes or people are corrupt. Right now, people are being grabbed on the street in Los Angeles and they're being held. They're not able to contact their lawyers. Often they're not, they don Los Angeles and they're being held. They're not able to contact their lawyers. They're not often they're not they don't know where they're being held. They don't know where they're being taken to. They're being grabbed off the street by people who are not identifying themselves, who are covering their faces. It's not often not clear what law enforcement agency they're even from or if they're just being working for that law enforcement agency. And it look it is dangerous and wrong when it happens in a country like El Salvador, but

it's not supposed to happen here because that's why we set up a constitution that has habeas corpus. That's why we have all of these protections. That's why we require law enforcement to show their badge and to declare themselves, not just because it is important in that case. It is so that other people know that if someone tries to grab them off the street and they're not wearing a uniform, you can't later be what? Held in contempt, accused of a crime

for obstructing law enforcement because somebody wearing a mask tried to grab you off the street. I know, yeah. Did you see this video that was going around over the weekend of this? Mom in Pasadena who was arrested by a bunch of ICE agents, like only two of the three had a badge,

none wore uniform, and they arrested this woman, and they picked up the wrong person. They arrested the wrong person. Like they had, they ended up having to call 911 on ICE because it just looked like an abduction. Yeah, they are abductions. They are abductions, that's what's happening. These are, these are abductions.

It's lawless, it's chaotic, it's dangerous. These are abductions. People are being abducted off the street in America by people wearing masks, taken to places God knows where, often unable to be found by their families or their lawyers. It's happening. It's dangerous. And when you look at what's coming next, when you look at them talking about doing denaturalization

proceedings, suddenly that's open to citizens, citizens who weren't born here who they claim may have lied on a form 30 years ago, an inconsistency. That is what's gonna happen. That is the danger of what happens when right now, they don't have the money. Wait till they have the resources. Yeah, the way too many. Yeah, in practice, you know,

dangerous people are getting put back on the street and, you know, innocent communities full of people, mostly Latino people in here in Los Angeles, are terrorized and scared to leave the house. And it is just truly awful. Well, it's also, there's a limited amount of resources. This push by Stephen Miller and Trump and Nome to go after as many people as possible,

it means those are people driving around, grabbing people who are just trying to go to work. They're not focused on finding the criminals that are still out, right, that have been released. They're not trying to find the people that they claim that they were gonna target, right? Like there are people walking the streets who, Joe Biden and all of us would have thought,

oh, that's a person that needs to be found and deported, that found and arrested. Those are people that are on the streets because that is not how you get the numbers, right? This is a numbers game. Hey, Tommy, Murphy said this, that so Iran still has centrifuges, it still has uranium enriched to 60%

and it still has nuclear scientists. We were trying to concentrate when, like on a hard project, but your dog was barking. Sure. And it's like hard to really focus. Yeah. How do you do nuclear scientists stuff in Iran? But your dog was barking. Sure. And it's like hard to really focus. Yeah. How do you do nuclear scientist stuff in Iran?

When you're getting bombed? I just don't know. I just think it's hard to concentrate. That's a scary job. Talk to me about the Venn diagram overlap between people smart enough to be a nuclear scientist and dumb enough to be a nuclear scientist in Iran. Yeah, you've got to wonder a little coercion here, because they've been, their vehicles have been exploding for a very long time.

This has been a long effort. It's a tough job. The Iranian. It's a tough job. Yeah. I'm glad we could end that on an even lighter note. I don't understand. Like if somebody, if I lived in Iran and someone said, hey, what do you know about adepts?

Fucking nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nothing. Nothing. I want to start an app. OK, that's it for us from today. Is that allowed?

I don't even know. I don't know. That's it for this show. Dan will be back on Thursday with guest host Jen Psaki. That's exciting. Thanks for listening. Talk to you soon. Uranium, never heard of it.

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