Pod Save America - “Crime after crime.”

Episode Date: December 20, 2018

A judge’s shock over Michael Flynn’s crimes destroys right-wing conspiracy theories, Trump is forced to shut down his fraudulent charity, Trump may get his government shutdown after all, and a criminal justice reform bill just may become law. Then CNN’s Van Jones talks to Jon and Dan about what’s in the First Step Act, and how a bipartisan coalition got it done.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. Later in the pod, we'll talk to CNN's Van Jones about the criminal justice reform bill that looks like it's heading to President Trump's desk. Other quick announcements. We're going on tour again. And you can now get tickets for our February swing in New Orleans, Charleston, and Durham at crooked.com slash events. Those are only the February tour dates.

There will be plenty more, plenty of other cities in the months ahead. Good times. Here's my question for you. Sure. Is someone IE love it overlaying our days off with the NBA schedule to make sure that everywhere we go, wherever we are,

there is not an nba game on the night we're there i was like oh we're gonna be in new orleans for a night we'll check out anthony davis now they're on the road it's happened for two years now oh we did not we did not look at the nba schedule basically what i just try to do is make sure that uh the really fun city in each swing is our day off yeah i like i i appreciate that don't get me wrong but i'd like to have a little bit of my cake you needed too here so we do have our day off in new orleans on saturday which is great um also our holiday schedule um you and i have a great mailbag episode that will be out on christmas eve december 24th uh john tommy and i host a special new year's

resolutions episode that'll be out on December 27th. And then we will be back to our regular schedule on Thursday, January 3rd. Finally, over the holidays, catch up on some crooked podcasts. And may I especially recommend The Wilderness, which now you can listen to realizing that it has a pretty happy ending. Or at least a happy 2018. And more importantly, some great lessons for Democrats in 2020 that they listened to in 2018. So check out the wilderness while you're home trying to catch up on podcasts. Okay, to the news in a segment that you have titled, Dan, Crime After Crime.

That is very good. Thank you. On Tuesday, a federal judge delayed sentencing for former trump national security advisor michael flynn who's pleaded guilty to lying to the fbi about his contacts with russia's former ambassador to the united states and has been cooperating with robert muller's investigation so in the days leading up to the hearing the right-wing media had peddled a conspiracy theory that the fbi tricked Flynn into lying to them, and many predicted that Judge Emmett Sullivan would take it easy on Flynn, Fox News' Judge Jeanine praised Sullivan as a, quote, jurist unafraid of the swamp, a judge who has a track record of calling out prosecutorial misconduct, a man who does not

tolerate injustice or abuse of power, and she went on to suggest that he might throw out Flynn's guilty plea altogether. Then we got this tweet from Donald Trump, quote, good luck today in court to General Michael Flynn. Will be interesting to see what he has to say, despite tremendous pressure being put on him about Russian collusion in our great and obviously highly successful political campaign. Dan, do you think our MAGA friends were a bit disappointed by the outcome? Dan, do you think our MAGA friends were a bit disappointed by the outcome? a conspiracy theory in anything. They have somehow taken this set of facts that ran very counter

to the right-wing wish-casting that they had put forward for the last few days and somehow held it up as evidence that they were actually right. So who the fuck knows? I mean, also, it seems like a president under federal investigation using Twitter to send messages

to his former national security advisor on the day he's being sentenced for his crimes might be a bit of an ethical gray area. No, I mean, like we say this all the time, but if Trump emailed the things he tweeted, he would be brought up on obstruction of justice charges tomorrow.

Like if he sent an email to Jeff Sessions, pressuring him to investigate his political opponents, if he sent messages threatening my send an email threatening michael cohen you know all these things because he does them in the in public we don't really as a political legal culture understand how to deal with someone who does their crimes out in the open it was uh and now it just happens so often that we're sort of just like oh yeah okay another crazy tweet but it's like no dude you're you're under investigation yourself what do you it'll be interesting to see what he has to say he sounds like fucking a mob boss you know that's sort of what he is like the

dumbest mob boss yeah the dumbest so let's talk about how this went down because it's a pretty extraordinary story so muller submits a sentencing memo to the judge proposing little to no jail time for Flynn because he was such a good cooperating witness. Then Flynn's lawyers submit a sentencing memo that basically parrots the right-wing conspiracy that the FBI tricked Flynn into lying because, you know, I guess the FBI doesn't have anything better to do than go to the White House and trick the National Security Advisor into committing perjury. They do that all the time. I mean, don't you think, I guess the FBI doesn't have anything better to do than go to the White House and trick the National Security Advisor into committing perjury. They do that all the time. I mean, don't you think, Dan, that this defense strategy was a bit flawed from the start?

Like, you have Mueller saying he's been a great cooperating witness and I wouldn't give him much jail time. So then why do you get a memo from Flynn's people sort of saying, oh, you know, it's not his fault. It was the FBI's fault for tricking him into lying. Well, it's also Jim Comey's fault for deciding to, once again, unburden himself with unhelpful information at the absolute worst time by saying that, by indicating that they are intended to trick Flynn because it was, you know, not trick him, but that it was in a normal, well functioning administration, if you called up and said, the FBI called him and said, I need to speak to the National Security Advisor, they would have come with an attorney, but because the Trump administration were a bunch

of knuckleheads that Flynn just sat down without without the White House counsel and lied repeatedly. But the what I think was going on here, and I can't take credit for this theory, because you've seen it from much of the sort of best legal Mueller Twitter accounts, is that Flynn is trying to do two things at the same time. He is trying to cut the best deal he possibly can with Mueller and stay out of jail for as much as possible, but also continue to raise money for his legal defense fund from Trump's base. And so he's trying to, on one hand, I get the best deal I can from all the other hand, feed into the right wing Fox News conspiracy theories that led to this moment in this odd moment in our politics. Right. So so he tries to do this as defense lawyers try to do this.

And then here's what happens next. Before the hearing starts, the judge orders the government to release the FBI summary of the agent's interview with Flynn, which makes it pretty fucking clear that they weren't trying to trick Flynn and that Flynn knew exactly what the situation was. And that every time Flynn said something that wasn't true, the FBI agents basically gave him the opportunity to correct himself, which he chose not to take. So it's a pretty damning summary of the interview so then when the hearing starts judge sullivan says you know he's concerned about flynn's allegations in his defense memo and then he calmly asks flynn if he wants to reconsider his guilty plea and of course flynn says no and then the judge starts asking flynn's lawyers questions like do you believe the fbi had a legal obligation to warn mr. Flynn that lying to the FBI was a federal crime? Is it your contention that Mr. Flynn was

entrapped by the FBI? And of course, the attorneys say no, because it's a bullshit conspiracy theory. And that's when Sullivan gets pretty pissed and says that he can't hide his disgust for Flynn's actions. Here's the quote. This is a was your reaction to all of this? other charges that Mueller's team had considered because he believed these crimes were so serious. Dan, what was your reaction to all of this? Do you agree or disagree with some of the legal folks who thought that the judge might have gone too far? Well, he definitely got the timeline wrong, as I understand it, by saying that Flynn was acting as an agent, an unregistered agent for the Turkish government while he was now a security advisor. And that, the evidence I believe does not support that. He was actually just acting as an unregistered agent for the Turkish government while he was now a security advisor. And that, the evidence I believe does not support that. He was actually just acting as an unregistered agent for the Turkish government while serving as the chief foreign policy advisor for the Republican nominee for president of the

United States. So, yeah. And it's interesting. Marcy Wheeler had pointed out that she said there was some problem with the verbiage there, right? But what's interesting is that, yes, he absolutely wasn't doing work for the turkish government while he was national security advisor but he became national security advisor without the world knowing that he was an unregistered agent for the fourth for the turkish government because he had never registered ever and never disclosed it ever so that information was out there while he was being hired as national security advisor and he just didn't disclose it but anyway yeah it was uh yeah and i and the tur. And the being an unregistered agent of the Turkish government is a very important backdrop to all of this. As Trump is tweeting about him and Republicans are saying, you know, Eli Lake of Bloomberg is writing why we all owe Michael Flynn an apology, which is right at this time. Based, we believe, on information that Michael Flynn gave the FBI, Michael Flynn's business partner was indicted for serving as an unregistered agent for the Turkish government, involved in discussions around a plot to kidnap a U.S. resident and return them to Turkey because they were a political opponent of Erdogan.

And so, like, there are very serious, there's a very serious backs up here the other important point which marcy wheeler also made is that judge sullivan knows a lot more than we do about what robert muller knows and that's a really important point it says tirade came after being briefed on the unredacted parts of muller's investigation involving flynn and so there are like it is worth being curious even if he got the timeline wrong about what led to the outrage. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's very important. And as Marcy pointed out, um, Sullivan is now the only person not on Mueller's team, which has not leaked, who has read about, who has read the full story of the crimes and wrongdoing that Flynn has committed and, you know, how Trump has connected to them as well. And after having read all those redacted parts, and there was also, by the way, another memo

that the judge got about what Flynn, about Flynn's cooperation that Flynn himself hasn't even read or Flynn's lawyers hasn't read. He was so angry that he came out there and started saying all this stuff. So clearly the judge read something that was something that didn't sit with him well. So Dan, how big of a blow was this to all the Mueller conspiracy theorists and Flynn stans out there? We had Kim Strassel of the Wall Street Journal had praised Sullivan as a judge who was wise to the tricks of prosecutors. As you mentioned, Eli Lake published a column that said the FBI owes Flynn an apology. Neither of them backed down after the hearing.

Neither did any of the other Mueller conspiracy theorists. What's up with these people, Dan? Do they really just not understand this? Are they just willfully obtuse? What's going on? I think that everything that's happening here is like a meta commentary on the right wing media bubble and politics in the era of Trump,. They get access from it. They get retweets. And so there is this incentive structure that has them be full of shit. are also a lot of people who believe it because they are only talking to each other, right? They are reading the same stories. They're watching the same shows on Fox. They are following the

same Twitter accounts and they're living in this unpenetrated bubble where you are forced. There's a psychological exercise at place to try to justify your support of Trump. And like, you know, it's as constantly the sliding scale where originally it was collusion is bullshit. There are no crimes. Then there were crimes, but they weren't collusion related. So this is bullshit. And then it's like, oh, well, there was a lot of potential collusion. So the only way that we're going to have like the most specific like defense lawyer from the wire strategy of we're going to argue that it's all fruit from a poison tree. from the wire strategy of we're going to argue that it's all fruit from a poison tree so that yes we discover these crimes but we never even should have been looking because what led to the

investigation was somehow wrong even though that is complete bullshit and there's this term that exists that was used to describe the media bubble which is called kip kaleism like named after pauline kale who was a new yorker film critic who once exclaimed after nixon won that she how was that possible she had she didn't meet a single person who voted for nixon oh yeah and that is sort of how the republic that is the that the republicans constantly live in a pauline kale style right-wing media bubble where they the actual facts that would contradict their arguments are not put before them. And therefore, they can only continue that even proof of the inaccuracy of their arguments can only be seen as actual proof of the accuracy

of their arguments because to either admit that they are wrong would either cause them to just melt into the ground or you know be evicted from maga island yeah and and you saw this the other day in a poll that showed like an alarming percentage of republicans who believe that the republicans won the midterms. I mean, just because that's what Trump said, that's what the right-wing media said, they're not seeing any soul-searching on Fox. I mean, it is an impenetrable bubble that a lot of these people are living in,

which also says something, by the way, to Democrats, because it's like, you know, is it really worth trying to penetrate this bubble and argue with these people on Twitter or go, as I saw, you know, some Democrats suggest and, like, a Daily Beast story from a couple weeks ago, you know, Democrats should go on Fox more and debate these people. Like, none of that is going to work. I mean, it's, and I'm a believer that, yes, Democratic politicians democratic politicians should like go out into the country talk to uh republican and you know republican leaning voters independent republican

voters and try to bring them over to our side like i think you know we obviously had a lot of success with that in 2018 but as far as the pundits themselves and the republican politicians themselves it is not worth it it's not worth arguing with them. Yeah, I think that the problem we have is that there are a lot of, there's some people at least, it's not a majority of people, it's not a plurality of people,

there are some people who are trapped in the Fox News, Facebook-fueled filter bubble who are reachable. And we have to find ways to to uh get get information into that bubble to at least some set of people doesn't mean we have to try to convince kim stressel that she's not full of shit right we have to uh but there are some people in there and i agree with you that going on fox is basically a massive waste of time. You might as well do a video with the R you know, hosted by the RNC. But like there, there it is met it is a high

priority of my imaginary super PAC to find ways to get to those voters through digital advertising. Yeah, that I completely agree with. So what happens next for Flynn? He chose to delay sentencing, presumably so he could potentially cooperate more either on the larger Russia conspiracy or in the case against his former business partners. But even then, Judge Sullivan said he can't guarantee that Flynn won't get jail time when he finally sentences him, presumably in March. So clearly this is about more than the fact that Flynn lied to the FBI. It's about the content of those lies that make it so serious, that got Judge Sullivan so upset. He lied to the FBI about what he said to the Russian ambassador

after an election where Russia attacked us. He lied about working as an unregistered foreign agent on behalf of the Turkish government while he was Trump's foreign policy advisor during the campaign and also a foreign agent on behalf of the Turkish government. And isn't the broader question, what did Donald Trump know about all of this? And was he also doing the bidding of countries like Russia, either for financial gain or to repay them for helping him win the presidential campaign. Like, isn't that the heart of what's at stake here? Yeah, 100%. Like, Flynn's conduct was absolutely shameful. And there's a lot of smoke around Trump and his associates doing very similar

activity, either for, as you point out, political benefit in the form of the strategic release of hacked DNC and John Podesta emails, or the, as we'll discuss, the building of a massive Trump property in Moscow, or just investments in Jared Kushner's real estate. We just don't know, and we have to get to the bottom of it. And the argument that Flynn's crimes are... I guess this is an important thing that has become crystal clear in the last few weeks, and we've gone through the Flynn process and the Manafort processes. The argument for a long time, believed by a lot of people, was that Manafort was a crook and Flynn was a crook, but their crimes were separate than Trump. Trump just hung out with a lot of crooks, but they were not being crooks on his behalf. And what we have learned is there was a

lot, the dots between what Manafort did and what Flynn did are much more connected to what was going on with Trump, his family, his campaign, his organization than we were led to believe last year or so. And here's one way you really know this is it's at some point in that hearing, Judge Sullivan's asking the prosecutors, the government, you know, isn't doesn't it seem like you could have charged Flynn with more serious crimes? And basically, the prosecutors like say yes. They obviously don't say yes to treason or anything like that. But it's clear that you know he never got charged with not registering as a foreign agent he never got charged for a lot

of other things that clearly uh you know crimes that judge Sullivan has seen that he potentially committed and so if Mueller chose to only charge Flynn with a single count of lying to the FBI, it is very clear that he must have cooperated a lot and given them some substantial information. And it's not just on his business partners either. It has to be Donald Trump or it has to be someone in the Trump orbit, right? Yeah. Someone who is higher up on the food chain than Michael Flynn. Yeah. So also CNN this week obtained a copy of a letter of intent that Donald Trump signed in October 2015 to move forward with talks to build a Trump Tower in Russia, contradicting claims made by Trump TV lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who just days ago said Trump never signed such a document. Do you think this% a big deal because it – like we immediately ignore Trump's lies because he just pretends like he never told them. And he said over and over and over again that he had no business dealings with Russia.

his organization, despite the fact that it's like eight people, or his son, despite the fact that his son wants nothing more than approval from his father, could have engaged down this path without ever involving Trump. And maybe he was too busy spouting racist bromides on the campaign trail to engage in this. But now we've discovered he actually signed the document. So it is like, it is the smoking gun that Trump was lying to everyone, to the voters, you know, maybe possibly someone's a conspiring to defraud the American people as part of the electoral process of actual information about what he was doing as related to Russia. let this slip during his interview last sunday um like if if they were in talks with russia about a financial deal about a deal to build trump tower in moscow through november of 2016 which is possible based on rudy giuliani's comments on sunday that means that any of the foreign policy moves that trump made any of the proposals to you know lift sanctions on russia to have friendlier relations with Russia.

You don't know if he was making those moves because he thought they were the right thing to do or because it would politically or financially benefit him personally. You know, it's also worth mentioning that Trump gave Vladimir Putin two big wins yesterday. The president surprised his entire national security team by announcing via tweet that he'd been with he'd be withdrawing u.s forces from syria immediately declaring wrongly that we've defeated isis in syria um vladimir putin welcomed this move said that trump did the right thing trump's administration also announced on wednesday that even though they were imposing new sanctions on certain russian actors who meddled in the election they were lifting sanctions on two So, isn't the real problem, I was going to ask like were either of these actions because of Russian influence on Trump? We don't know, but isn't the real problem that we aren't totally sure of that question?

And we should be sure when it has to do with the President of the United States? Yes, we are constantly asking we it's actually worth noting we never assume that trump is doing something for the right reasons because he has never done anything for the right reasons we we always wonder whether there's like two paths in the in the horrible choose your own adventure that is the trump era is he doing it to enrich himself or is he doing it to enrich himself? Or is he doing it to out of loyalty to some authoritarian despot somewhere else in the world? Like those, those are the only two options. There's not like a considered view of the policy or a call to

patriotism or something larger than himself. It's is he lining his right pocket right now? Or is he lining his left pocket down the line by kissing up to oligarchs and rich people, rich authoritarians? Yeah, it's well, it's either financial benefit or political benefit because there's a whole slew of things he does because he thinks it's going to keep him in power, too. So it's either like make yourself money, keep yourself in power. Those are basically the two options with most of the things so russia aside what do you think of his decision to withdraw from syria so precipitously it's hard to say like if you're being fair you would say he has talked about this a lot over the months in fact he was a campaign randomly announced it at a rally like a year ago i think yeah and everyone

was just was like ignore it it's just the president spouting off again the other reason is he's he is in he's having a shitty month among so many things, right? The economy has hit a lot of turbulence. The Dow, which has been his measuring stick for the economy from the beginning, is way down in recent months. But basically ever since Paul Ryan's massive tax cut to corporations, every day is another bit of bad Mueller news. The I was like, every day is another bit of bad Mueller news. And he's getting beat about the head by the right over having to theoretically back down from his promise to fund the wall. And so I think maybe in his simplistic mind, it's like, well, here's a promise. I mean, here's a promise I can keep, but it always sort of comes back to just lashing out because of some segment he saw on Fox News at some point. Yeah, look, I think there is a way to have made this decision that whether you agreed with the ultimate decision or not, you could at least say, oh, it was thoughtful. And that process is, I don't know, consulting with anyone in the Defense Department, the State Department, your national security team.

You know, Chris Murphy tweeted this morning, you know, both things can be true. One, the way Trump is pulling out of Syria with no notice and no new plan is dangerous and makes America weaker. Two, the neocons vastly oversold the impact of 2000 troops and pretended it was an actual strategy. But of course, like pulling out so fast without consulting anyone, you know know there's like there's Kurdish fighters that we're fighting alongside who learned that we were withdrawing from Twitter and according to the New York Times they're now considering releasing um 3,200 ISIS prisoners um because the United States is just going to pick up and leave so like you can very easily say yeah this was never an authorized intervention into Syria and U.S. troops weren't going to make a difference in that war anyway.

But you sort of have to show your work. You have to consult with people. You have to, and just doing it via tweet, you have senior administration officials all over the place on background, of course, because all they can do is talk on background, saying that like everyone in the administration on the national security team is pissed with Trump for doing this without warning. Yeah, I mean, it, mean, you're exactly right.

I probably agree this is the right thing to do. He's just doing it in the most ass-backwards way possible. There is a process to run. There is a world in which you work to get your government, the military, your allies around the world on the same page for this announcement. You try to do it in the most orderly way possible. But you're sowing chaos by doing policymaking by tweet. And so you can disagree on the merits of the decision, but it is impossible to agree that this was done with any measure of basic

competence. So just when you thought we were done with all the crimes for the week, we forgot to talk about the Trump Foundation. New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood announced that the Trump Foundation would be dissolving this week. She said the investigation her office is leading has found quote, a shocking pattern of illegality involving the Trump Foundation, including unlawful coordination with the Trump presidential campaign, repeated and willful self-dealing, and much more. Underwood is still seeking more than $2.8 million in restitution. Her lawsuit targets the charity, Trump's three oldest children, and Trump himself. Dan, how important is this one and why? Dan, how important is this one and why?

You know, when I write the outline every week, there is some new episode of Hot Sub Crime Machine, and I always write, how big a deal is this? And the answer is sort of always the same, which is in a normal world to be a gigantic deal and Trump would be run out of office in the next five minutes. But we live in a world where he continues to have immunity by Republican majority in the Senate, at least now. a world where he continues to have immunity by republican majority in the senate at least now but i do think for the public that you know collusion has become sort of this uh just this issue of either you care passionately you believe it's bullshit or you think trump probably did something but you don't care that much as long as he doesn't fuck with the investigation too much that's sort of how you divide republic democrats republicans and independents on this yeah but i do think that there is something a little more tangible about using a charity to line your own pockets that is just seems a little more real than some of this other stuff which is pretty absence i'm smoking gun that says trump and the russians hatched a

plan to steal harry clinton's emails and steal the election a lot of it is esoteric it's circumstantial and it's like a wide-ranging conspiracy that may be hard people to understand but this is a more at least potentially more simple concept if messaged correctly to the right number the right people regular people also donated to this foundation all kinds of people donated to the foundation and then he used the money to pay legal settlements for his for-profit businesses buy portraits of himself and uh boost his presidential campaign by paying for giveaways at his iowa rallies um these are also things that the new york attorney general accused the foundation of doing

so it is a pretty simple picture to draw of donald trump just like raising money for a charity and then using it to just as we've said line his pockets and biles and then and you know settle his fucking legal disputes yeah it's a it's tax fraud yeah he's giving money to get a to his he's taking money out of his right pocket and putting in his left pocket to avoid paying taxes on it then using the money in his left pocket to avoid paying taxes on it than using the money in his left pocket to solve all of his political legal problems that is a that should be much more easy to explain to people than a lot of the other things like the you know the famous was actually not famous because no one remembers it new york times story that accused trump of tax fraud those

are complicated tax avoidance schemes that i think a lot of Americans assume all rich people do. And they're sort of right about that. Trump just goes a lot further and goes from gray area to obviously illegal. But this is a much more, it is easier to understand. And so there is some potential for it to have some political impact that some of the other stuff may not have. Just potential. One might think. Okay, let's talk about the shutdown that I thought we for certain avoided before I drove into the studio today. And now, who knows, we're recording this Thursday, 10 a.m. Pacific time. And I was sort of monitoring Twitter to see what's happening here. So on Wednesday, Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced a deal for a stopgap spending bill that will keep the government open until February 8th.

That bill would not include does not include the five billion dollars that Trump has demanded for his wall. And people thought, OK, that's what's going to happen. You know, everyone just wants to go home. And then it seemed like the White House, you know, was going to going to be like all right we'll live to fight this again in february um but now this morning uh you know we're told that trump is i don't know he's upset he's angry i forget the words they use one of the insiders in the white house he's in a tailspin tailspin there we go trump's in a tailspin because he's so angry that he's not getting his fucking wall. And now he might not sign the bill.

And the House Republicans had a press conference scheduled to talk about how they've avoided the shutdown. They canceled that. And now Paul Ryan is dragging his sad face to the White House along with Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows, the two Freedom Caucus loonies. And now I guess they're talking to Donald Trump, and they're probably all spinning each other up, and who knows what's going to happen now. What do you think is going to happen? No idea. I mean, we do this almost all the time, which is there's about to be a deal. There's a Fox News segment or a drudge headline. Trump sends word through Twitter or some of his minions to a reporter that he's not going to sign the bill uh the people who at least play the role of adults in the republican party call

him and eventually signs the bill so i think what paul ryan says is going to be irrelevant to trump because trump is an american as far as i know and therefore it's ipso facto irrelevant um the what will matter is what mcconnell tells him i think i think mcconnell's gonna tell him like it's this or the shutdown there you're not getting five billion dollars or anything for either a wall or the steel slats that he seems to think is a more favorable rebranding of the wall which is the weirdest thing that's happened in a long time when did that happen i saw him tweet about the steel slats today is that a new thing now he's steel slats are instead of the wall he did it too he did it like i mean time's a flat circle but if sometime this week he sent some tweet basically saying arguing in some way that

democrats think the wall is made of ugly brick these are not his words but like that's sort of the supposition is it's not an ugly brick wall it's actually gonna have beautiful steel slats that you can see through and like the see-through nature of the wall has been this weird hobby horse of trump's for years now and i don't he doesn't really get why he why people oppose oppose the wall and that it's not an aesthetic point of view it's like we just get a pretty he doesn't really get why he, why people oppose, oppose the wall. And then it's not an aesthetic point of view. It's like, we just get a pretty wall.

We'd be for it. And so now like he even said this morning, I think it was like steel slats, Peren's wall, just in case we, you were not following the thread on the rebranding. I mean, it's,

it is really bizarre. And then Sarah Sanders in her statement today, I think announcing this meeting had to use the term steel slats to describe the wall. Everything is so stupid all the time. Yes, that is exactly right. Per usual, in a time of very serious challenges, we are talking about the dumbest aspect of it in the dumbest way possible. I mean, I guess here's what happens. Either Trump caves and signs the stopgap spending, government stays open, and then I guess he fights this again on February 8th,

or Trump says, fuck it, I'm standing firm. I won't sign this. I want my steel slats. And so we have a partial government shutdown. Either way, Congress comes back in january democrats control the house you got to imagine at that point the first thing nancy pelosi does is pass a spending bill it's just a continuing resolution that funds all these agencies at the same level uh that goes to the senate chuck schumer tries to bring it up mitch mcconnell says no i won't bring it up and then isn't it still on republicans and trump to open the government at that point like i don't see how

they win this one i mean no they don't and i think the way this this may end is when mcconnell or someone tells trump that if the government shuts down he can't go to mar-a-lago right he's got like a 16 day or he will or he will do it anyway he doesn't fucking care i'll go to i think if he i think if he does that uh the republicans will just pass the continuing resolution yeah they're like i would you know i worked for obama we had a government shutdown, and we had a very important trip to Asia that was planned. And the Democrats were like, we are with you on this shutdown. We will stand to fight Obamacare. But if you get on that fucking plane, we're opening the government back up. And that was for an actual – he wasn't going on vacation.

That was for an actual diplomatic purpose. So if he wants to go play golf and hang out with the rich billionaires he's letting run the VA, I think you will see a revolt in the ranks, particularly for these members who all lost their jobs, have nowhere to stay because they lived in their offices and just want to begin their lobbying career. So how do you think the Democrats have played this so far uh schumer and pelosi specifically i mean it does seem like they are at least so far standing firm you know at one point mcconnell gave them uh some kind of compromise where he said okay well if you give us just a billion dollars for immigration priorities for trump that can't be used for the wall itself but

could be used for other stuff like maybe we can call it a day. And, you know, I was happy that Schumer and Pelosi said, no, no, you get nothing. Yeah, I think they've done a great job and they know they have leverage and they're using it. And I mean, this is how you do this, right? Was we have power now. We have a say in what happens in Washington, and we need to use that for all we possibly can.

And so good for them. This is a slightly easier fight in the sense that other than the Freedom Caucus types, the overwhelming majority of Republican senators and House members think the wall, concrete, steel slats, brick, is stupid and don't really care about it. So that sort of helped. When Trump is most isolated on this issue, it'll be a different question when we get into battles around attempts to cut

Medicare or more tax cuts or things like that. But on this one, the Democrats, I believe, have a strong hand both in Congress and politically with the public and are playing it very well. And we should give them credit for that. Okay, let's talk about criminal justice reform, which we're going to talk about with Van as well. The Senate on Tuesday passed a criminal justice reform bill

backed by a bipartisan coalition that included everyone from Jared Kushner to the ACLU to the Koch brothers. The First Step Act would relax mandatory minimum sentences, reduce some three-strike laws from life sentence to 25 years, and require inmates to be located within 500 miles of their families. It will also expand early release programs and allow the 2010 law that reduced the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine apply retroactively. It's important to note that this legislation affects the federal prison system, which only includes a fraction of the country's prison population, about 180,000 people out of 2 million incarcerated total. Justice reform

advocates have been careful to note how even if they're happy about it being a good first step, it's very much, as the name suggests, only a first step. Dan, we're going to talk to Van Jones about all this in a bit, but what do you think? Good first step? Yeah, absolutely. Congratulations to everyone involved for making progress on an important issue that has been lingering for way too long. So just a couple of general takeaways on this. It, you're, I mean, we can stop with the puns if you will, but it's a very, it is, it's, it's a very important first step, but it is just a first step. Uh, the vast majority of America's

prison population are at the state level. And so this goes to the importance of similar bipartisan coalitions passing criminal justice reform measures at the state level, as well as electing progressive district attorneys and attorney generals who will have a progressive view of how to deal with crime in this country, as opposed to just locking everyone up for even the smallest offense. I would also say, while we can be glad that Jared Kushner supported this and fought for it, maybe just for a second, take a pause on the messianic profiles of him, because it's like the most classic white savior trope in all of writing, which is if, you know, there are all these people who work like van, for instance, who have been working on this issue for decades to get it done. And then we are required to give credit to the dilettante son of a rich person who happened to go to jail. And it's so I think that that has been frustrating to me in the coverage is he gets credit for it. But the idea that he somehow is single handedly responsible for criminal justice reform is a pretty structurally prejudiced notion that ignores the history of the of the battles on this from a lot of grassroots activists all across this country yes that that is annoying in the coverage and the other thing that's annoying in the coverage is i do think some of the coverage is going a little bit overboard in describing how sweeping this is because yes it's it's a pretty it's a it's it's a step but you know it's a small step

i think vox some of the german lopez at vox called it meaningful tweaks to the criminal justice system um and you know what they estimate vox estimates that six to seven thousand of the 180 000 uh federally incarcerated uh americans um could be released early So even of the federal population, they think it's early release could happen with for six to 7,000. I think the CBO scored something like 50,000 would get out over the however many years. But that's not just early release. That's other other stuff as well. What the bill doesn't do, it doesn't end the war on drugs or mass incarceration, it won't stop law enforcement from locking up nonviolent drug offenders. It doesn't legalize marijuana. And it doesn't even end mandatory minimums or reduce prison sentences across the board. Two

things that a 2015 bill that was also bipartisan called the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act would have done. So it's important to note that had a bunch of Republican support in the Senate as well. Mike Lee, Chuck Grassley, people like that. So this bill is a sort of a bit of a watered down version of that bill. And the reason it is probably is because Donald Trump is in the White House. So as much as Jared Kushner had pull on Donald Trump to finally get this signed, he didn't quite have the pull to put a bipartisan bill on his desk that would have been stronger that had been introduced in uh in the last congress yeah i mean all of that is true i think we should at least be grateful that i remember we had uh former attorney general eric holder on the podcast last year earlier this year and we talked a little bit about criminal justice reform because that was

a big part of what he wanted his legacy to be as Attorney General. And you're in this world where we like you had the you had this comprehensive bill that could have passed, you know, you had efforts around the country around a bipartisan coalition for criminal justice reform, you know, the clue to everyone from Black Lives Matter to the Koch brothers, that Donald Trump wins Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, and it feels like all those laws. So we haven't gotten back to where we were prior to the national tragedy that is Donald Trump's election, but at least we can grasp on to some glimmers of hope that we can continue moving in the right direction on what is an important and hopefully bipartisan issue. important and hopefully bipartisan issue. As our old boss always says, better is good.

And this is better. I think as long as we understand that it's progress, it's small progress, and this isn't something to just celebrate and then say, okay, work is done here. There is a ton more work to do on criminal justice reform. It is work that is unlikely to succeed under this president, even though he's signing this small step. And so, and a lot of that work has to happen on the state level because that's where most people are incarcerated.

And, you know, but it's a good first step and it's good to see that there is a bipartisan coalition that exists in Congress, even in this Congress, to get something done. And hopefully that moves the debate towards bolder proposals for criminal justice reform. But we will talk about all of this with our next guest, CNN's Van Jones, who had a big role to play in this legislation.

And we'll talk to van right after the break on the pod today cnn's van jones who's also part of cut 50 uh you've been working really hard on getting the first step act passed and now it is close to uh to being passed van welcome to the show hey good i'm at the uh visitor center on the capitol and uh uh it's a really really big day it feels like you know the 1959 civil rights act which nobody remembers now but it broke the log jam on you know civil rights votes and uh that made when 64 and 65, the big X came, Congress was ready to move. And after, you know, 40 years of Willie Horton politics, I think we finally, finally are going to be able to do something on criminal justice reform. So Van, what do you feel are the most important parts of the legislation just passed by the

Senate, by the First Step Act? Well, I mean, you know, I think the thing that I'm most excited about is, you know, the Congressional Budget Office scored this daggum thing. And this one bill, if it passes today out of the House and gets signed by the president, will mean a 50,000 person reduction in the federal prison population. You know, obviously this affects only the federal system, which is about 10% of the overall system. But you're talking about going from 180,000 to 130,000 people locked up, a 50,000 person reduction over the next 10 years with one bill. You're also, you know, 100 percent of the people behind bars are going to be able to come home sooner if they stay out of trouble.

About half of the people behind bars will be able to take classes and earn their way home even sooner. 100% of the women behind bars will no longer be shackled when they're pregnant and having babies like we do now. 100% of the juveniles will be kept out of solitary confinement. Also, we're cleaning up the whole crack cocaine, crack versus powder cocaine disparity. As you remember, Obama was able to get it cleaned up a lot of it, but it wasn't retroactive. We couldn't get it done retroactively. We're going to retroactively clean up some of that stuff, some of those racial disparities and a whole bunch of more stuff. But honestly, as good as that is for all the people behind bars, it's also good politics for Democrats.

We had a lot of people saying, you're going to give Trump a victory. How can you work with Trump on this? What we've actually done is we pulled Trump away from his initial lock him up, law and order, Jeff Sessions position, and have him embracing criminal justice reform, which makes it safer for Democrats to keep pushing ahead, because now you have both parties more healthy on the issue. We could have been running, no matter what the Democrats do, our nominee is going to be pro criminal justice. If you left the situation the way that it was a year ago, they would be running into a buzzsaw of Donald Trump's mouth, running that issue down. Willie Horton adds, as far as the eye can see. Instead, there's at least a chance now that

Donald Trump also runs on criminal justice, which means kind of like when McCain and Obama ran, climate change was not an issue. They both agreed. We may have actually de-weaponized this issue for the first time since 1988. If not, at least we have a chance that more Republicans and more Democrats can be smart on this issue going forward. Van, I take it in your initial comments that you're optimistic that this is the beginning of a series of potential legislative actions on criminal justice reform. Where does this go next?

Well, I mean, we've already had like three governors contact the White House and contact us from different states saying, hey, look, they want to do first step acts in their state. So I think you're going to have a lot of copycatting going on at the state level, which will be great in Congress. I think you're going to have a lot of Democrats, especially putting forward a lot of bills. I doubt if in the next Congress we're going to get anything major done because of impeachment talks and the elections. going to get anything major done because of impeachment talks and the elections, but you're going to have a lot of debate, a lot of discussion, and some of those bills will probably get combined into a second step act, which if it doesn't pass in the next Congress, will certainly pass in the next one. Like I said, the first Civil Rights Act, for 100 years, you couldn't vote for civil

rights because you're either going to be called a Negro lover or a communist, and people were just scared of the issue. 59, you had a modest bill. People said it didn't go far enough, but it broke the logjam. And I think that's what you just saw happen in the Senate. We thought if we got 73 votes, we would be jumping up and down. That thing passed 87 to 11. And if Lindsey Graham had been in town, it would have been 88 to 11. It's an unbelievable breakthrough. I mean, we have essentially Dr. King's family and Sean Hannity on the same page of something really extraordinary happened. You cannot tell, if you just look at the quotes,

you can't tell sometimes now if it's a Republican senator talking or Black Lives Matter talking about criminal justice because we've just moved that issue that much. So, Van, obviously, I want to talk about how this bill got passed. Obviously, this version of the bill doesn't go nearly as far as the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act, which was introduced in 2015, which also had strong bipartisan support in the Senate. And, you know, the Brennan Center says would have put a much more significant dent in the federal prison population by limiting the reach of other mandatory minimum provisions. How did you guys decide what to push for, what to include in here? And why is it that, you know, the version of the bill couldn't be quite as strong as the one introduced by Republicans and Democrats a couple years ago? Well, because of Donald Trump and because of,

you know, just the, you know, you're talking about somebody who, when Donald Trump came into office, he was, private prison stocks went through the roof. The assumption was, you know, he was talking about law and order and American carnage, and he put Jeff Sessions in. So it's almost like if you have a guy who gets in a car crash, and the doctors say, this guy is probably, you know probably dead. He's certainly never going to walk again. He's probably going to be a paraplegic. And then two years later,

the guy's running the New York City Marathon. You wouldn't say, well, how come he didn't win the marathon? How come he didn't break the world record? You say, you're not even supposed to be here. You're supposed to be in a hospital bed. Criminal justice was supposed to be dead the day that Donald Trump was elected. The fact that we're passing anything, especially something that's going to reduce the federal prison population by 50,000 people over a 10-year period and help women and help juveniles and all the other stuff, I think is pretty remarkable. It shows something about the power of this idea. It shows something about the power of progressives that have been fighting for this for decades, including myself. It also shows something about what's happening on the Republican side where, you know, they're tired of raising taxes to pay for prisons that don't work. And they've got some Christian evangelicals who are tired of having no redemption,

no second chances. They got some libertarians over there that are tired of the government eating up more rights and liberties. And so this is an idea whose time has come. The fact that we could get a bill this significant, even under Donald Trump, lets us know that going forward, we're going significant, even under Donald Trump, lets us know that going forward, we're going to be able to do much, much more. We had to get through the House with an even smaller bill at first. And people were really upset. ACLU attacked the smaller version of this bill, the NAACP, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, even John Lewis, the Washington Post all said that the first step act that we got through the House was a travesty.

We said, you know, you can't get a camel through a keyhole. You got to get something to get the conversation going. We got 360 votes to 59 in the House in the spring. That started this whole debate in the Senate that resulted in a much stronger bill in the Senate. And then that bill got, again, 87 votes. Now we're back in the House. The House will pass the stronger version. Trump may sign it tonight or tomorrow.

And you're going to have what the New York Times called the biggest breakthrough in criminal justice in a generation because, frankly, formerly incarcerated people, directly impacted families, just refused to give up on this thing and fought and fought and fought. And ironically, one of those impacted family members, Jared Kushner, whose dad went to prison, and he was one of the people who refused to let this thing die, along with Jessica Jackson, Louis Reed, and Topeka Sam from Cut 50, and other people who

went to prison, their family members went to prison, and just refused to let this thing die. So no, we're not, if under Obama, we would have won the marathon and gotten a world record. That ain't possible, but at least we ran the race, and we're proud. Van, you've spent a lot of the last four years being a very passionate voice against Donald Trump dividing Americans along racial lines, and that has your interaction with the Trump administration and what has happened here with the First Step Act changed your opinion of Donald Trump in any way? Not significantly in that, you know, he's still incredibly tough, horrifically tough, unforgivably tough on the immigrant population.

And he's attacking the weakest among the immigrant population, snatching babies from their mothers. He's still very tough on Muslims. He's still very tough on African-Americans, though with African-Americans increasingly, he attacks like football players. He attacks reporters, you know, frankly, the wealthiest and most visible of our community, not the weakest. He's not going after the folks at the street level as much, which makes it more possible for us to move forward criminal justice reform. I think his base demands, I think he has a big part of his base that is white nationalist, is white nativist, is white supremacist. It's not his whole base, but there's a part of his base that does have those politics. And I think that instinctively or sometimes deliberately, he throws red meat to that part

of the base. And that is horrific for a country that is multiracial, multicultural, and democratic. We have to fight that tooth and nail. But this ideology is flexible enough that some of the other parts of that base that have other commitments and concerns, the fiscal hawks, the libertarians, the Christian evangelicals, can prevail on an issue like this. And I think we've got to take those wins where we can get them and also use that win to extend more of a sensibility that we should be working together and not dividing folks. But I think we got an incurably bad case of white nativism in his coalition. And I think the only real solution to that is for him to leave and be replaced by the next version of the Obama coalition. Obviously, the Justice Department under Trump and the bureaucracy that deals with sentencing and prisons has been very tough under Donald Trump. There was a Sessions memo that required, you know, the U.S. attorneys to seek the harshest possible punishment for many

crimes. Are you worried at all that the bureaucracy will sort of drag its feet on some of these reforms, or do you think this sends a message? Very, very much worried. And we've got some oversight provisions and some sunshine provisions in there. There is a new oversight commission, the so-called FERC, that has been established to help with some of this stuff. So there will be, I am 100 percent sure, some foot dragging and other implementation battles, but we're ready for those battles and we're going to keep fighting forward. And Van, what do you see as the next step in this fight on the state level where obviously most incarceration happens on a state level? for everybody. When Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi agree that we need to do something, it's safer for Republicans and Democrats to run on this, to vote on this, and to implement this in the various different places. And so, you know, every state's different. You know, the Cut50 campaign,

cut50.org, by the way, if you want more information, firststepact.org, if you want more information. But the Cut50 campaign's now in all 50 states, our campaign passed 12 bills in eight states this year. In addition to this federal stuff with more to come, you know, anybody wants to get involved. This is going to be a lot. Listen, it took both political parties to get us into this ditch. It's going to take both political parties to get us out. If one political party is for it and the other one's against it, you get a bunch of Willie Horton ads. We don't want that. So people say, how can you work with the Republicans? Well,

shit, how can you not work with the Republicans? Because if you leave them up in the sniper tower, they kill you. So you got to get the Republicans out of the sniper tower, down on the field with the rest of us to solve the problem. We did that. 87 senators voting that we gotta do something. So now it's up to us. It's back to the grassroots, back to the fight, but I think we've got real momentum now. Van, thanks for all your great work on this

and keep up the fight. Let us know if we can do anything and we'll talk to you later. Please come back. Congratulations, Van. Thank you so much. We continue. Bye-bye. Thanks to Van Jones for joining us today. And, you know, we'll have our specials next week and then we'll talk to you next year.

Bye, everyone. Bye. Thank you.