Pod Save America - Department of War (Crimes)

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

The House and Senate Armed Services Committees launch an investigation into Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth after a report that he ordered a second strike on a boat in the Caribbean while survivors were clinging to the wreckage. Was his order a war crime? Jon, Lovett, and Tommy discuss and then jump into the rest of the news, including the White House's reaction to the shooting of two National Guard members in D.C., Trump's pardon of a former Hondoran president convicted of helping drug traffickers bring hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States, and a special election in Tennessee where the Democrat has a fighting chance to flip a Trump +22 district. Then, Rob Sand, Democratic candidate for governor of Iowa, joins to talk about his race—and how Iowa farmers are reacting to the Trump trade war. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Today's presenting sponsor is SimplySafe Home Security. We can't calm the news cycle, but we can't help you feel more calm and secure when you're at home. SimplySafe is for people who want real proactive protection because the goal is to stop crimes before they start. Traditional systems wait. SimpliSafe works outside with a double layer of defense. If someone's lurking, AI-powered cameras catch it, and live agents start talking right then. You're on camera? You think that's the voice?

If they don't leave, police can be on the way. Early action is greater than after the fact. There are no long-term contracts or hidden fees. You can cancel any time. It's named Best Home Security Systems by U. U.S. News and World Report for five years running. 60-day money-back guarantee, so you can try it and see the difference for yourself. John, I know you set up a Simply Safe.

What kind of voice did you select for the AI-powered cameras? Is it RFC Jr.? Yeah, I wanted to sound like somebody throwing a bag of loose screws into jet engine. Oh, I love you, I love you, I love you. What are we talking about? SimplySafe. Yeah. I set one up and it's great.

Works really well. Easy to set up out of the box. Customize it. The customer support, completely reliable. The app, I really liked it. It gave you peace of mind.

You should get one. This month only take 50% off any new system. This is one of the best prices you will ever see for SimplySafe. Don't miss it. Hit Simplysafe.com slash crooked. Again, that's Simplysave.com slash cricket and lock in your discount. There's no safe like SimplySafe. Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Faber.

I'm John Lovett. On today's show, we'll talk about whether Pete Hegsef may have ordered the military to commit war crimes in the Caribbean as part of a crusade against drug trafficking so important to Donald Trump that he's about to pardon a Honduran president who's serving 45 years in federal prison for drug trafficking charges. We also have a few other crazy Trump corruption stories to cover

and then you'll hear Tommy's interview with our friend Rob Sand, the Democratic candidate for governor of Iowa who stopped by the studio to talk about his approach to flipping the state and whether farmers' anger at the Trump trade war could be a factor in the race. But let's start with the followout from the horrific shooting in D.C. right before Thanksgiving. For anyone who missed the details of this story, a 29-year-old Afghan National who came to the U.S. when the Taliban took over in 2021 ambushed two West Virginia

National Guard members who'd been deployed to D.C. by Donald Trump. One of those soldiers, 20-year-old specialist Sarah Bextram, died a day later. The other 24-year-old staff sergeant Andrew Wolfe is in critical condition. The shooter, who's in custody, had apparently worked with the U.S. government to fight the Taliban for 10 years as part of a CIA-backed militia known as zero unit. So he'd been extensively vetted multiple times by the government before he got here, and his application for asylum was approved by the Trump administration this year. Of course, none of those specifics matter to the White House. They've responded by using the shooting as a pretext to do what Stephen Miller has already been doing or planning to do,

which is keep people out of America who are from what Trump calls, quote, third world countries. Specifically, the president said in a post, quote, I will permanently pause migration from all third world countries, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions, and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States or is incapable of loving our country, denaturalized migrants who undermine domestic tranquility and deport any foreign national who is a public charge,

security risk, or non-compatible with Western civilization, Only reverse migration can fully cure this situation. So far, the actual policy announcements have been that the government is no longer granting asylum to anyone from Afghanistan. They're no longer granting even temporary protections for any Afghans evacuated in 2021. And they're reviewing all green cards issued to anyone from a list of 19 countries that includes places like Cuba, Haiti, Iran, Sudan, Yemen, and Venezuela. What do you guys make of the White House response to a shooting that pretty clearly had nothing to do? do with the vetting process, the asylum system, or the guy's nationality? Yeah, I mean, I think it's what you said earlier. It's a pretext to do as Stephen Miller's always wanted to do, which is not just

block quote unquote illegal immigration, but also stop, if not reverse legal immigration. And in the case of Afghanistan, this is quite literally collective punishment. One individual did something horrible. He's obviously mentally disturbed. So the White House is punishing everyone from a country we occupied for 20 years, including people who fought the Taliban for the United States. That is a crazy reaction, I would argue. And it's also, I think, just worth unpacking how racist this is. Like, I think now the only refugees allowed in the U.S. are white South Africans. Am I wrong about that? Yeah, yeah. And they're also, even like white immigrants from Europe, they want to make sure that they don't have leftist views. Yeah, we don't like Ukrainians anymore. It's no actual refugees. Nobody from, say, Sudan, where there's a civil war or Haiti where there's war zone-like levels of

violence are allowed to the U.S. And so I guess anyone with a green card from a country Trump doesn't like now goes back to this. kind of legal purgatory, you know, where the administrative purgatory, where they don't know if they're going to be allowed to stay. Also, just like broader context, the U.S. is using sanctions to crush a lot of the countries you just mentioned. Like, I'm not a big fan of the Venezuelan leadership. We'll talk about that later or the Iranian regime, but U.S. sanctions are crushing those economies. They're making it impossible for people to live there. Same as true in Cuba. I guess it could be worse. You could be one of the hundreds of Venezuelan men who came to the United States legally sought asylum and then were sent to a torture prison in El Salvador. But,

like, even the language he uses third world countries. Like, the man's brain froze in the 1980s. That was like a Cold War era description of countries that were not aligned with the U.S. or the Soviet Union. And he's just using it in, like, the most racist way he can think of. Yeah, I mean, third world is pretty tame for him. Yeah. Shithole countries was also in his vernacular. So Sean Van Diver, who runs Afghan Evac, which advocates for the people that were our allies and who, if they are sent back to Afghanistan, could be killed because they were our allies. He said they are using a single violent individual as cover for a policy. They have long planned turning their own intelligence failures into an excuse to punish an entire community

and the veterans who served alongside them, which I think captures it. You know, stepping back, there were, it does sound as though once this person was vetted in the United States, he slowly unravels. And if you took a, like Donald Trump, when a person who was not born in the United States commits a crime, it becomes a story about immigration to them and a justification for whatever crackdown there in the midst of pursuing anyway. But if you take that out for a second and you read about this person, it reads like a lot of stories of people that have been in conflict and slowly unravel.

cannot assimilate, cannot, like, enter civilian life. In this case, it's somebody who had to also come from Afghanistan. You know, there are, we've seen mass shootings and acts of random violence committed by all kinds of people, citizens, non-citizens, veterans, non-veterans, right? Like, it is only when these crimes are committed by people. Trump wants to target anyway, that it becomes a story of immigration

rather than the many failures along the way that allow a person like this, Even as people in the community, like we're worried that he might commit suicide, we're worried about him, reported it apparently to a federal agency, was still in a position to go on this cross-country journey and murder people with a weapon. Yeah, I mean, this guy was five years old on 9-11 and also then ends up working with a CIA-backed, basically death squad who, you know, human rights organizations were concerned. turned about during the time in Afghanistan, too, even though they were fighting the Taliban. So clearly this guy got really fucked up and more like many people, like many U.S. soldiers get fucked up and weren't people all over the world, you know? But it has just nothing to do with the vetting process for immigrants.

And again, the Trump administration just will not explain the fact that they're the ones who granted the asylum application in spring of this year. So what the fuck are you talking about? It's also, look, vetting, it's only so much you can do. You can't predict the future with vetting. You know, we talk about it like it's this, like, perfect process that always, you know, finds the bad. I think, no, like, people have mental breaks. Things happen.

Like, you vetting is highly imperfect. Like, something can always go wrong. That is just part of the process. And, like, I'm not excusing this individual being here. What he did was evil and a tragedy and it shouldn't have happened. But, like, if we're going to point at factors that led to this outcome, it's, could you could include the asylum decision that you mentioned. You can include sending this National Guard unit to Washington. in D.C. to patrol when they didn't need to be. There's like a lot of like things along the way

that led to this horrible outcome. And as you mentioned, like none of it was because of a vetting failure as far as we can tell. Well, I have no doubt that the White House thinks like this is good politics for them. In the most basic level, if you don't follow all the details of the story and you're like, oh, there was an Afghan national who came to this country and then shot at and killed at least one National Guard member. Like, okay, well, we got to pause migration from there. And then you see like DHS tweets out Remigration Now. You know, you look up

Remigration. Wikipedia, it says, Remigration is a European far-right concept of ethnic cleansing via the mass deportation of non-white minority populations. This is like, this is what the Department of Homeland Security

is tweeting. And then Stephen Miller also gives it away where he tweets, At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions and terrors of their broken homelands. This is the president's topic

advisor saying that not only migrants from Afghanistan, but they're descendants. Now we're talking about children of people who come from countries that are war-torn. Stephen Miller wants to not only not come to this country, but kick them out of this country, which is what you get from the Nick Fuentes and those kind of people, right, white nationalists. And it's like, I do not think that part is good politics for them. No, yeah, also in Trump's own statement, like he says denaturalized migrants. It's actually a contradiction. Migrants are citizens. So what you're really saying is I don't...

You're denaturalized citizens. The people you're calling, you're saying you're going to denaturalize or people who are citizens. You're saying you don't recognize their citizenship. He's also talking... What Miller's talking about there is ending birthright citizenship

by so by saying once we've decided this whole group of people that came legally and are here legally and who had children here, once we declare that they are not able to stay, we will be able to denaturalize their children as well. And also, look,

this is like heinous and racist. It's also just fundamentally just like not true about America, right? Like not true of something we were all raised to believe is what is great about the country that people come from all over the world and they bring what makes their culture special while becoming part of our society, something that used to be at least something people paid lip service to. Stephen Miller is part of the Jewish diaspora. The kind of sort of anti-immigrant conspiracies about bringing their corruption from abroad is exactly what. why Jews were kept out of the country at moments when they were desperate to be let in,

even as I am sure he is one of those people that talks about how well Jews did once they got to America. And so it's just, it's obviously heinous, but it's all just wrong. It's not true. Well, also, the Miller thing, when you read Trump's statement,

it's clearly a statement that is, if not written by Miller. I know, you can see my one and twos. Mine is the third world thing. Trump likes to say third world. Miller says like failed states, but the rest of it is very, very Stephen Miller, including, you know, Trump starts that post, the official United States

foreign population stands at 53 million people, in parentheses, he writes, census, most of which are on welfare from failed nations or from prisons, mental institution, gangs, or cartels. The 53 million number is the number of foreign-born Americans, right? Half of that number, 53 million, are citizens. So now we're just talking about, now Trump and Miller are attacking people who who were citizens of this country. Millions and millions were citizens of this country who just happened to have been born somewhere else and then acquired citizenship in this country.

It's literally blood and soil nationalism. Yes. And that's what it is. Look, maybe the politics will change because of this shooting. But, you know, Pew pulled this, the Pew Research Center, pulled some of these policies back in June.

And they were surprisingly popular. The Trump administration's policies were surprisingly unpopular, I should say. 60% of Americans disapprove of the suspension of most asylum applications, only 39% approved, and then 59% disapproved of ending temporary protected status for immigrants who came to the U.S. escaping war or other disasters at home. Obviously, someone from Afghanistan would be under the numbers we're talking about here.

So, I don't know, we'll find out maybe people are very angry about the shooting. Maybe there is this change in sentiment that decides, okay, maybe we should crack down. But I don't know. I think it's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. That's like, I'm sorry, like a 10 million American citizens. citizens who are Mexican are less deserving to be here because of a shooting on the national mall, the people that live in the household with those citizens who were born here.

Like, it's just the idea that, like, now that we live in the reality of what Trump's crackdown has actually meant, we've seen a swing of people that may have been open to Trump swing back. We live in the reality of a Trump immigration policy now. So it's not, I don't think it's as easy as it was for him before to kind of make these broad sweeping claims and hope people don't take it too seriously. Yeah, when they are smarter and careful in how they talk about this, they frame it in terms of either national security, right, protecting people from immigrants who come here and commit crimes or immigrants who come here and, you know, cut the line and are getting all these federal benefits when Americans aren't, like, that is the, if they're looking at the polls, that's what they usually say. But Miller and increasingly Trump and J.D. Vance and some others in the administration, they just drop the mask sometimes and just start saying, oh, no, no, it's it's anyone. who is foreign born, who is here, is suspicious. And doesn't matter if you're not a threat. Doesn't matter

if you've never been on public benefits. You are a threat because you are not, you are not American for, you know, 15 generations. And like, I mean, a few years ago, it was, like, overwhelmingly popular to welcome Afghan citizens who supported the U.S. and the war to the United States. It was polling. 81% said the U.S. should help Afghan allies enter the U.S. only 19% were opposed. Again, this was a couple of years ago, but I agree with what you're saying. I think, like, it was easier for Trump to demagogue these issues when Joe Biden was in charge and the numbers have sort of swung back against him since he's taken office and people have seen the reality of a Trump immigration policy.

This podcast is supported by the Obama Foundation. The Obama Foundation is helping lift up emerging leaders with the tools, training, and support they need to meet this moment in history. At a time when democracy feels under pressure, the Obama Foundation is investing in the next generation of leaders. These young change makers... They blow with us, so they might as well get the next one. Yeah. Yeah, the millennials were done. These young changemakers are stepping up in communities around the world, turning ideas into action and challenges into solutions. The Obama Foundation believes that leadership is not about one person. It's about building movements, fostering collaboration, and creating lasting impact. Through programs, mentorship,

and community engagement, the Foundation equips young leaders with the skills and tools they need to tackle today's toughest challenges from civic engagement to education, social justice, and climate action. Hope isn't passive. It's hard work. And the Obama Foundation is giving emerging leaders the resources they need to turn hope into meaningful change, because when we empower people to lead, we unlock the future. And you can help. Donate today by visiting Obama.org That's Obama.org slash youth. So in the aftermath of the shooting, the guard troops who were deployed in D.C. got a visit from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on Saturday. Just a day after he made headlines in the Washington Post for allegedly ordering the U.S. military to commit what pretty clearly seems like a war crime in the Caribbean.

The Post talked to seven people with knowledge of the very first attack on a boat. The Trump administration claims was trafficking drugs back in September. They've obviously attacked many more since then. The sources say that Hegeseth ordered SEAL Team 6 to, quote, kill everybody on board, a directive that led the special operations commander to order a second strike on the boat when he saw that two survivors were clinging to the wreckage. The House and Senate Armed Services Committees, controlled, of course, by Republicans, announced jointly that they'll be investigating vigorously.

One of the members of the House Committee, retiring Republican Don Bacon, who's a former general, said that if the report were true, it would be, quote, a violation of the law of war. When people want to surrender, you don't kill them. Republican Congressman Mike Turner, a former armed services chairman, said it would be, quote, very serious, and I agree that it would be an illegal act. Trump got asked about this on Air Force One on Sunday, and he gave only qualified support to Heggseth. Let's listen. You talked a little bit about this case in the Congress, the secretary, the facts do you being said.

I don't know anything about it. He said he did no. say that that I believe it. And Pete said he didn't done on them. He didn't even though what people were talking about it. So we'll look into it. But no, I wouldn't have wanted the second strike. Caroline Levitt confirmed the second strike during the White House press briefing on Monday, but denied that Hegsseth gave the order to quote, kill everybody and argued that murdering

defenseless survivors floating in the water was legal because it was conducted in, quote, self-defense. Yeah, sure. How can any of this be legal? It's not. It's a war crime. And it's on video. That's why they can't really lie about it. I mean, this is all taped. So again, if this report is accurate, it's a war crime under international law, and it's almost certainly against the Department of Defense's rules. Basically, if you bomb a target and they're survivors who are still shooting at you, you can bomb them again. But if you

bomb a target and the people are incapacitated or defenseless or trying to surrender, you can't just hit them again. That is a war crime. And the self-defense argument, like, that's obviously absurd. It's like two dudes clinging to burning wreckage in the middle of the Caribbean. Like, they're shooting at a U.S. military aircraft or a drone. They said they might be able to phone, call their other traffickers and tell them. Well, the initial explanation was- And do what? Launch a satellite? What is you talking about? Guys, guys, guys, we're going to need, I think, like a B-2 maybe. Yeah, we're going to need a lot of hardware. And like, this is also the second explanation. Initially, they said the boat was a navigation hazard for other boats in the

region. That's why they had to blow it up and sink it again. So it's also, also important for context, this was the first one of these strikes. And since then, they've changed the policy around survivors. So they know they fucked up. Yep. And the boat might have been carrying cocaine, but it was almost certainly carrying innocent people, too, because there were 11 people on that boat. If you were trafficking drugs, you're not carrying 11 people, right? There's probably You need room for the drugs. You need room for the drugs, but they're also probably human trafficking and smuggling of individuals and drugs.

So, look, I think that all of these strikes are illegal and amount to extrajudicial murder because what we should be doing is picking these people up with the Coast Guard and arresting them. But I do think, like, this strike in particular is going to lead to prosecutions someday, and I hope it's Pete X-F. Yeah, unless Trump. Of course you have this, like, who cares? Like, this is a fucking war crime and should be prosecuted. Yes, of course.

does a war crime should be prosecuted. I think one of the reasons we're in such a dangerous moment is because hanging over all of this is the fact that Trump will, of course, before this gets anywhere, try to get out of it by parting him. That will still leave Congress being able to investigate. I just like the law, even the debate about even the idea that there's a press secretary saying that this is in any way legal. Like the shipwreck thing, like it's the example. It's not just that we're not a lot of murder people who have been shipwrecked. We're supposed to rescue them. We're supposed to go out and pick them up. And the, and it's not just like, it is like military. It is law. Like if you go read about whatever the, the, the law of name, the commander's

handbook. But it also talks about why it's not just law illegal, but it's wrong. And it's in the, in this naval handbooks for the Marines, for the Navy, principles of humanity defined as the principle that forbids the infliction of suffering, injury or destruction, unnecessary to accomplish legitimate military purposes, which includes protecting enemy wounded, sick, and shipwrecked. Incidents that must be reported included deliberate attacks upon shipwrecked survivors. And the reason they say this is from the DOD, persons who have been incapacitated by shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and humane to make them an object of attack.

It is just wrong. You don't think Pete Higgseth has consumed that manual on day one and just just sort of hasn't memorized that? Well, they all, I mean, like, the truth is he has. He was a commander in a rock of Afghanistan. He should actually know better, and so ignorance isn't an excuse here. Also, I wonder about the guy who, the special operations guy, Bradley, who ordered it. Got fucking promoted.

Yeah, but who now, you know, Levitt kind of, you can see them maybe throwing him under the bus, where they're like, Heggseth didn't say kill everybody. And he's the one who. She keeps saying the admiral, the admiral, they're definitely pointing the finger down the chain of command. But now the admiral, knowing that he needs a pardon or will want a pardon, has every, incentive to lie and say I was the one who ordered it knowing that your point about the pardons love it I was thinking about this over the weekend like there is a fucking really dark scenario where Donald Trump leaves office knock on wood and as he leaves office does like a blanket pardon for everyone who worked in the administration for the last four years yeah you can see that like every

member of the federal government which is a real yeah the this also goes back to why it was so right and necessary that they filmed that video about the need to disobey unlawful orders. Unbelievable timing on this story with that, too. Well, but like, yeah, but the details of this first strike have been out there. We've known there was a double tap on it. It just came out that Heggseth was like, kill them all in this meeting or whatever. That was the new detail. There was a, just security had a good write up of the legality of all this.

And actually one of the sort of fucked up parts of all of it is we're not war with anybody. So it actually, like, what laws apply here. But I thought this was an interesting example, which is that they pointed to, which is a U-boat, sank a Greek ship that had British troops on it. And then the commander of that U-boat ordered his seamen to fire machine guns and throw grenades at the people in the water. And that became a famous trial after the war. And obviously one of the reasons we are a party to the Geneva Conventions with not just forbid this,

but requires us to rescue people, is because. of what was happening, what Germans were doing to British and American troops. I thought this captured something about the kind of argument that you've heard from the heggsess of the world and the Trump administration and why it's just so wrong. And this is what the ruling said in that case. It's obvious that no sailor or soldier

can carry with him a library of international law or have immediate access to a professor in that subject who can tell him whether or not a particular command is a lawful one. If this were a case which involved the careful consideration of questions of international law as to whether or not the command to fire at helpless survivors struggling in the one water was lawful, you might well think it would not be fair to hold any of the subordinate accused in this

case responsible. But is it not fairly obvious to you that in fact the carrying out of the command involved the killing of these helpless survivors, it was not a lawful command and that it must have been obvious to the most rudimentary intelligence that this was not a lawful command. I just like shooting people floating in the water, it's the hypothetical that they race. Like that's like that is why we have these rules. And that was from a like a, you know, an international case. But that that is what we're talking about. We're talking about killing. people clinging to fucking wreckage. It's clear when they made the, when the Democrats made the video, and they had been saying

in that New York Times story about the video, that people in the military had raised concerns to them that there were unlawful orders potentially being given. The head of Southcom resigned over this policy. The good thing here is that the announcement of the investigation in Congress was not just a thing, like Roger Wicker, who's the Republican, the Senate Republican on this for Mississippi, be, he just did an interview right before he recorded. And he said, we're certainly going to have available to us all of the video and all of the audio. So they will get that. And he was asked if it could be a war crime. And he said, we're going to find out what the true facts are. So

they are clearly going to run this down. Pete Higgs-F, his response, one of his responses, was posting a parody book cover from the Franklin the Turtle Kids series. And this book cover was called a Franklin Target's narco-terrorist that shows the turtle blowing up a boat. So that's how, that's what Pete Higgsat's doing about this. And Sean Parnell, the spokesman over the Pentagon, tweeted a couple days ago, we told the Washington Post that this entire narrative was false yesterday. These people just fabricate anonymously sour stories out of whole cloth. Fake news is the enemy of the people.

A couple days later, they're confirming it. Also, in the original denial, they said denied the narrative, right? They were very strange choice of words. And now they're copying. to it, but then trying to suggest that Heggseth gave a broad order, and then in the execution of the order, there was the second strike. So they're pushing it on to the, uh, to the admiral. But then this idea of like, what is the order to kill every, like, the order is like, go kill everybody. I mean, I hope it's not. Who knows what's actually said or what was written down? We don't have enough

information yet. But, but all of this is just like, he's just so not, he's just so not a serious person who should be in a role like this. Like the idea that you want the secretary of, of defense posting like trolling posts about extraditional killing showing that he takes absolutely no responsibility does not treat it seriously forget like i'm sorry but like not just before what the law or congress but what about the fucking almighty god like it's disgusting and you think like somebody with that many fucking tattoos about jesus on his chest might think about it a little bit i mean i realize the uh the polling has been depressingly supportive of these boat strikes i do want to I wonder if the details of this incident as they get out there and more people hear this story might change some minds.

I mean, there was that CBS poll where people were like, okay, but I do want evidence that the boats are carrying drugs before there's any kind of strikes on them. I think people are supportive of the stated goal, which is stopping drug trafficking, but that is obviously not what's happening in practice. Like, again, fentanyl is not coming to the U.S. from Venezuela. Fentinol is produced in Mexico with chemicals from China. some relatively small like 10% of cocaine goes through Venezuela but blowing up 20 boats like off the coast of Trinidad or in the Pacific like that's not going to put a dent in the cocaine consumption in the United States a lot of that cocaine could have been going to Europe so I like I do think that people are going to hear this and be like we're just like murking fishermen

there's also the stories of like these Colombian fishermen who there's a guy who went out and his five kids are now looking for him those stories are just. starting to be reported. So I do think, like, the reality of it is starting to come through. Hopefully people are paying attention. And again, even if you're someone who's like, well, you know, it's a bunch of people in boats in the Caribbean and they're drug traffickers and I don't know if I care about this. Like, just think about what it means for the U.S. government to say, hey, you know what? We can murder people in the water and who are just on boats. And when you call us on it and ask us if it's legal, our explanation is going to be it's legal because we say it is.

and then the Secretary of Fence is just going to post memes joking about it and saying there's more killings to come and that's it. I mean, if they can do that to boats off the coast of Venezuela, imagine what they could do to Americans, other international travelers, people anywhere around the world. I mean, like, what the fuck? It is. The claim of self-defense, just you're blowing up people from above who are floating in the water.

Like, I don't, like, who finds that belief? Who is that for? Who is, who is finding that believable? Yeah. I wonder if, if, even Trump, like, with some daylight between him and Hegeseth. Now, I could imagine him changing his tomb, probably by the time he listened to this and getting back on board here. But you can tell that even Trump's like, I don't know if, not that he has some kind of like

moral revelation, but I do think maybe he. You know, he knows that's bad to have everyone know that you committed a war crime. Yeah, yeah, one would hope. One thing that may get Americans upset is Trump launching a full-scale war against Venezuela, which he seems to be inching closer towards. On Saturday, Trump posted, quote, to all airlines, pilots, drug dealers, and human traffickers, please consider the airspace above and surrounding Venezuela to be closed in its entirety.

When a reporter asked Trump whether that meant a strike was imminent, he said, quote, don't read anything into it. But DOD has now moved an aircraft carrier to the region, bringing the total number of Marines and Navy personnel to 12,000. Trump and Marco Rubio also reportedly spoke with Maduro by phone last week, which Trump acknowledged after saying he couldn't talk about it. And some outlets are reporting that it was an ultimatum call, though Trump is refusing to say what was discussed. Tommy, is this happening? We're going to war with Venezuela? What's the latest with you?

I don't know. I mean, they're having it on a little bit. I think Trump's dream situation is to use the threat. of military pressure to force Maduro to leave power voluntarily in some sort of negotiated deal. He is smart enough to know that regime change words are bad politics, but Trump also wants the oil. He hates Maduro. He wants the political benefit of pleasing a bunch of like hardline Latin America activists in Miami. So they're running this big pressure play. I think Marco Rubio would be thrilled by an invasion, like would love nothing more than the U.S. Marines to go

to Venezuela and topple Maduro. He also comes from like these very right-wing Miami political circles and he thinks that toppling Maduro is the way you get to the Cuban government and then topple them. So it's a little domino theory coming back like Kissinger. They're also all hearing from these like the Venezuelan activists and right-wingers who, you know, there's this thing in Politico a couple of days ago about how if this happens, Republicans will win Florida in perpetuity. It's like most gross, bloodless reporting.

So got only, guys, just it's still. just you're cool you go you're already doing that it's like yeah no there could be no other uh secondary or tertiary consequences from a regime change war politico i'm sure it'll just be as simple as right wing venezuelans in miami any of you people alive in 2003 yeah it's crazy so like the god knows what medora was thinking he does not strike me as a guy who's gonna like give up power willingly and move to tehran or moscow or something um he probably thinks he can wait Trump out. He probably thinks I can bribe this guy with oil contracts or maybe buy some Melania coin or whatever. But like it hasn't happened yet. So we're still in this

wait and sea mode. And then of course if he, you know, if Trump does cut a deal with them, then Trump will, you know, say, that's another war that I ended. Another war I ended. Another victory, a victory parade for all the troops coming home from the Caribbean. Exactly. Without firing a shot, no, he's not going to have peace. He'll have won the war. Yeah, right. He'll won the war. So Trump's justification that he's murdering people on boats and threatening war in Venezuela because of drug trafficking became even harder to believe when he announced on Friday that he plans to pardon Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former right-wing leader of Honduras, who was investigated by Trump's own first-term Department of Justice before they passed the baton to the Biden DOJ, which prosecuted him. Hernandez was recently sentenced to 45 years in federal prison for conspiring with South American cartels to facilitate the trafficking of 500 kilos of cocaine into the U.S. Witnesses at his trial testified that Hernandez took millions in bribes, including from El Chapo, and protected traffickers who admitted to dozens of murders. But despite the fact that Trump's own DOJ conducted most of the investigation, the president said on Sunday, quote, they said it was a Biden they.

They said it. We don't know who they are. Yeah, they is his friends. So they said it was a Biden administration setup, and I looked at the facts, and I agreed with them, before going on to say that just because there's drug trafficking in a given country, it doesn't mean you should take action against that country's president. You think Maduro was surprised to hear that comment? I mean, just before we get to the specifics, it drives me crazy when he gets asked about the pardons. He's like, I don't know. He always pleads ignorance.

I'm sorry, shouldn't you know a little something about the individual you just pardons her? They were telling me. Anyway, the juxtaposition of this in Venezuela is, it's like head spinning. Trump doesn't like Maduro, so he labels him a cartel leader, puts a bounty on his head, threatens to evade his country, and kills low-level fishermen off the coast. Juan Orlando Hernandez gets a pardon because he's a right-winger. He's friends with Roger Stone, or he can afford to pay Roger Stone, which I think is far more likely. And he is friends with all these crypto creeps who like Hernandez because he was behind this very bizarre libertarian project called what the hell is Prospera. Thank you that all these guys loved. And it just all of it confirms

this widely held belief in Latin America that the United States is full of shit. We do not care about the rule of law. We don't care about justice. We don't care about stopping drug smuggling. It's all politics and money and defending your friends and killing your enemies. And that is an especially big deal and bad precedent to set in Latin America right now because a lot of folks there feel like the ultimate way they can stop corruption and organized crime is through the extradition of these individuals to the U.S. for prosecution, through the U.S. justice system. And Trump just unraveled all of that. And this comes not that long after Trump made this dirty deal with Naia Buckele down in El Salvador to send back to El Salvador like real deal MS-13 leaders

who allegedly had cut deals with Buckele in his administration. And so what is so shocking about this is it would be so easy to just do nothing. All you had to do was not pardon the guy. You know, it feels very simple. But this is just so lawless. Like this almost feels like this could be this in the boat bombings could be presidency defining in some way because Trump will say they're all corrupt. Everybody does it. But like this is, this is stunning stuff. 500 kilos of cocaine.

Yeah. The, the, in this, Trump said to the times that his many friends asked him to pardon Hernandez, they gave him 45 years because he was the president of the country. You could do this to any president. I know. There's a little bit of like, well, but to Tommy's point, it's the. you know, right wing leaders, uh, can do no wrong. And left wing leaders will never be safe. And that to me is what you take, take away from this. If you're on Trump's side, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're a phone call away. Your friends can call. Uh, you know,

there was this, all these, uh, people with ties to Trump had invested in this, uh, lawless town where they were going to, just, because this is a wild story. It's not. So it's from a New York Times piece in, in 2024 about this, uh, they describe it as, uh, As a private for-profit city with its own government that courts foreign investors through low taxes and light regulation, Peter Thiel and Mark Andreson are investors. And as critics have described it as a neo-colonial state within a state or an example of a corporate monarchy where yacht-owning CEOs exploit land and labor in a poor country. And so people of Honduras got really upset about this. There was a whole protest movement against these zones. Prosper is one of the zones that they basically were selling off the land in Honduras to these companies.

Castro, who was the president that just that it's just leaving office, right? Or is the president now? Was against it. Hernandez was for it. And now Trump has endorsed the guy in the Honduran elections from Hernandez's party. And so when Trump says, like, my friends,

you can tell that they were like, well, we have this good thing going in Honduras and now there's all this trouble there. And we want to make sure that this city is prosperous again. They're like the lefties here. They're nuts. You know, they're nuts. It's just like the whole,

this whole their whole foreign policy it's like it's not fucking isolationism it's imperialism it's like and especially with south america and central america like he just wants these client states where he installed these like fucking tin pot right wing dictators who are going to cut deals with trump make them rich help us friends out and it's mercantilism it's just it's a for profit it's for profit farm policy and the the the idea of a of a uh an independent corporate for profit lawless state within a state it's like design your own crypto regulations it's it's it's It's like the opening crawl for like a dystopian. It's like at the beginning of Elysian or Elysian, like one of those movies.

Like like in the future, you will live in one of a dozen corporo anarchist crypto states. I can't overstate how much this doesn't make sense to because Trump announced this pardon in an endorsement of the current right wing candidate in the race. Hernandez is fucking detested in Honduras. If IRS 4 and you were, I was suddenly linked to this man serving like 45. years in prison in my endorsement announcement. I'm like, what are you doing? Why are you interfering in the election, which happened on Sunday? And also, like, Hernandez is accused of killing a witness in prison.

This is like a very bad guy. It wasn't just drugs. He also stole the 2017 election. Trump basically told the OAS to bury their investigation into it at the time. But like, like, all of this is just crazy politics. And like, the only explanation is that Roger Stone got a bunch of money and whispered in his year and facilitated this I would love this I can't wait for

more reporting to come out about why this actually happened. The way in which it feels like he's just rolling calls about various that he really does I think when he says like I don't know anything about it true of the crypto pardon from a couple weeks ago I don't think that's true but there is a way in which he seems like a passenger on these

like pardons that like he knows that his sons and others are kind of doing out there doing deals and getting things done and kind of sign he seems like he's like putting the like final mob boss approval on some of this stuff. I think it's performative. Like the CZ pardon, like he knows what Binance is. He knows how much money that Binance just put in his pocket through facilitating this

purchase of the USDC, the stable coin through the amorty. I think it takes a five-minute meeting with Donald Trump and the Oval where you're like, got a couple of pardons for you. This guy, friend of ours, made us a ton of money, good out, you know, like just really quick. I don't know how in the weeds he's getting. I'm sure he is aware of who these people are. He knows that they're good for him. I'm saying that the details, the way these things are getting to his desk is a process he is not completely a part of.

This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. The holidays are time of traditions. Some people have many in their family and some have none or are just beginning their own. Now is the time to reflect on what they mean to you or to rewrite those traditions and make your own. incorporating therapy into your new or existing traditions can help ensure you take time for yourself during what can be a very joyful but sometimes hectic and lonely time of year. BetterHelp therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the U.S. BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences and their 12 plus years of experience and industry leading match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time. If you aren't happy with your match, switch to a different therapist at any time.

from our tailored wrecks. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is one of the world's largest online therapy platforms, having served over 5 million people globally, and it works with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. This December started a new tradition by taking care of you. Our listeners get 10% off at BetterHelp.com slash PSA. That's BetterHELP.com slash PSA. Speaking of pardons, we got a whole corrupt date today.

Trump also granted clemency last week to David Gentile, a private equity executive, who was convicted for a billion-dollar investment scheme that victimized more than 10,000 people, many of whom made statements to the court, like the person who wrote, quote, I lost my whole life savings. I am living check-to-check. Gentile walked out of prison last week, just days into his seven-year sentence. Giving us Gentiles a bad name, you know? Honestly, I think he speaks for the group. unbelievable the story on this one too there's no connections yet to Trump it's baffling

we'll find out there'll be another week for sure for sure I mean this is like the the fact that Trump just has a crypto wallet you can throw money we just have no idea what's going on behind the scenes

of some of these some of these parties we just really don't know this wasn't even crypto this guys were like traditional securities fraud OG Ponzi scheme

no no I understand that what I'm saying is you know you put a call in like how do I make how do I make this how do I solve my problem here. Ten thousand investors were defrauded. That must have taken a lot of time. That's a lot of that's a lot of fraud. He was he was asked about it or some of the administration they were just like,

oh, it's another, it was another Biden DOJ weaponization move. That's just fair. Tish James has a civil case against this guy. Maybe that's how it got to Trump because he's like, oh, the enemy of my enemy and my friend. Who knows? Someone probably paid him. The, like, the dark part of all of this is Like prosecuting a Honduran corrupt drug trafficking president going after a massive billion dollar fraud scheme, it is years of people's lives that they did not making a lot of money, that they did for the right reasons. They did sometimes at like personal risk and the victims and the victims. But like these are just investigations that are wiped away. And if you're inside of the Department of Justice and you're involved in one of these long, you're deciding, right? like you can only have so much time in your day. You can devote your lives of your time in the public sector to these, one of these cases. And then it is blown up by a corrupt president for no reason other than somebody got in his ear at the right time. Well, and I just, I can't help but think of all of the people who've been swept up in the ice raids, including American citizens, including people who are legally taken from their families, never know if they're going to come home, have not done a thing. We're seeing all this, you know, the judge in Chicago, um, uh, uh, or, uh,

was just, you know, released a ruling on, on all the, the raids that went on there. And you have all these examples of Department of Homeland Security saying, well, this protester was coming at me. And then they have the body cam footage. And you can see that the protester was doing nothing. And it's just like lie after lie after lie. And these people were tear gassed, pepperballs, taken, and they're just lying about it. And so, like, that's the kind of justice that comes for most people in the country. And these fucking people who are connected to, you know, Mark Andreson or Peter Thiel or God knows whoever else in the Trump orbit who are rich enough or connected enough, they just fucking get pardons.

There's just, there's a lot of people like in the Southern District of New York prosecutor's office are just like, you know what? I don't like Trump, but like head down. I'm doing my job. This doesn't touch me. All of a sudden Hernandez gets pardoned. They must be apoplectic. Hopefully those people start speaking out. Like you're seeing Republicans speak out.

There was like a former head of the DEA I saw on Twitter. commenting on this. Like, there's a lot of people that are like, not Democrats that are really upset about the Hernandez pardon. Yeah, and I do think that is like a little bit of a,

like there is a sort of a natural break, not to what they can do. They can do it's, it's sort of like the, like the Trump project can be unraveling as they're doing more and more damage, but like, you know,

leaks out of the Cash Patel, FBI. Like that, like, these are serious people who are not Trump loyalists. They're not Democrats, but they're not Trumpists. And the idea that they're just going to sit, Like they're going to, first of all, follow these guys into the breach on behalf of Donald Trump.

I mean, look what's going to happen. If you don't follow, if you refuse to follow an illegal order, you quit, you walk away. Like, you may face political consequences. You may be attacked that fuck people call bomb threats into your house at this point. But if you do what they say, and it is illegal, suddenly you are beholden to Trump. Like, you are the mobster that took the bribe. And I do hope in moments like this, you see that side by side, these pardons, the throwing somebody under the bus after giving an order that seems illegal.

the people wake up to the fact that they have to decide what is best for themselves in a world that is with Trump and then without. We got another one. Wall Street Journal had quite a story on Friday about Jared Kushner and Steve Wiccoff and pals who were basing their negotiations with Russia on maximizing profits for American businesses trying to bring the Russian economy back into the fold and so that U.S. companies and Russian companies can sort of go after deals together. Yeah, that'll work. Let's just be clear what's happening here. Trump's golf buddy turned diplomat Steve Wyckoff and his corrupt fail son, son-in-law, Jared Kushner, are sitting in Miami with this guy named Kirill Demetriev, the head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund, and they are sketching out how to carve up Ukraine. That's what's happening. And it doesn't matter if you, like, support funding for Ukraine or oppose it.

Like, that is a terrible process that is destined to be corrupted. And it didn't happen by accident. Vladimir Putin is very smart. He knows Trump. He knows he's a mark. He knows he's a quote-unquote business guy. So we send his business buddies to make contacts with Wittkoff and Kushner and to say, oh, yeah, let's explore the Arctic. Let's do a joint manned mission to Mars.

Let's build oil and gas pipelines. And then you pull Jared aside and you say, you know, and tell me more about this investment fund you started, Jared. It sounds really interesting. We'd love to park a couple billion from our sovereign wealth fund with a sharp young man like you. And like meanwhile, even before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. Russia, Russia, relationship was not big. It wasn't like U.S. China. It wasn't the U.S. EU. It was like tens of billions of dollars. It was like comparable to the U.S. and South Africa's trade relationship. It was like they gave us oil and gas and petroleum products and metal and fertilizer

and shit. We send them like machinery, you know, like caterpillar stuff. Like this idea that there is some deep economic relationship to be had with one of the most corrupt countries on the fucking planet is crazy. Yeah. And they're also talking about the like how to kind of carve up the $300 billion in frozen assets that are in Europe. All of this does seem to in some way flow from the fact that Trump still has an 80s brain and thinks of it as the USSR and not as like a failing petro state with an economy that's roughly the size of Italy's, right? Like this is about, you know, it's a lot of land.

It looks big on the map. But you're talking about it still thinks there's a Leningrad. Yeah, for sure. For sure. I can't be. They move Leningrad on my map. but uh yeah the and the like there was a camera where where i saw this but like how many times has steve wickoff been to to russia like eight times many times and he says it goes in for like

three hour meetings with putin with a russian translator and takes his own notes and just gets worked yeah i was going to say you're not getting one over on steve wickoff yeah by the way you know you can't con an honest man like get one over on steve wickoff he walks away rich what is it he doesn't you know it's like get one over on him he's so he can be bought and and and steve wickoff's son is like co-running the trump family crypto business well there was a story that like you know we saw the story about them putting the putting the the uaa put it putting uh whatever it was two billion dollars ua in ua and two billion dollars into the into the world world liberty financial but then there was new reporting like a month or so after that about how that was tied to

whitcoff that's that's zach wickoff and and trump junior and then steve wickcombe is then part of getting the invidia chips over to the ua a few months after a few weeks after that is a trade steve whitkoff uh and david sacks right yeah india chips who was also the subject of a big piece in the new york times on sunday uh the headline was silicon valley's man in the white house is benefiting himself and his friends so look i didn't think i thought this story was did not have too much detail that was explosive but boy did it set off uh all the tech pros rushing to Sacks defense. Sacks himself posted this like long letter that his lawyer wrote or defamation and

and then everyone in the, you're Sam Altman's, your Mark Benioffs, they're all being like, David Sacks is the most wonderful person we've ever worked with and is going to save the world with his, you know, for how much he knows about artificial intelligence. It was just a lot to me. I'm like, it's just a fucking story. I can sack up. Yeah. Well, sad sacks somewhere.

Sad sack. Yeah. Yeah. There's something about the like over. reaction to a story like this. It's like the idea of just being questioned at all seems anathimate of them. Like the idea that you could just face any kind of feedback. Even feedback you might disagree with, right? They may just have a different take on it. Like doesn't make it defamation. You just, you see it a different way. They're more critical of you. And the whole like

whatever the like I actually felt the same way in reading the piece. Like I don't know what exactly has been exposed by this. I feel like there's a kind of like whatever. There's like a swirling controversy, but you don't really land anything. It's a lot of like fuels claims of type stuff. And I like didn't really feel like I landed on any sort of thing specific. But like that gets at the problem, right, where you're so sensitive to this kind of criticism, which means like you can't step back and like be objective about it. And whatever your specific business ties, you're in a role where you're not supposed to be advocating for your own personal financial interest or the interest or the interest of your friends or an industry you care about and believe in. It's supposed

to advocating for the country. And I'm sure the reason he went around asking people or hoping people would come to his defenses because he thinks he's doing that, right? I'm sure he feels like he's doing that. But like people are complicated and incentives are hard to fully understand. And that's why conflicts of interest matter. And like if you can't handle even though like a flick at exposing some of those questions, like that is really damning. Yeah, I think the central, the conflict in the story is that this is a guy who's not fully divested and he is benefiting from policies he is making and the people around him, all of his closest friends are benefiting financially too. And the response to that very obvious fact was all the people who are financially benefiting from the policies David Sacks

is putting in place tweeting about how great he was. Like, oh, Sam Altman, you like that David Sacks is like steering hundreds of billions of dollars to open AI? What a surprise. I'm glad you think he's nice. Everyone thinks he's famously a fucking asshole, actually, but I'm glad you're happy. Well, they're also, the challenges, conflicts aside, their theory of artificial intelligences is just fucking go hard and we don't care what the consequences are. No lessons learned from social media and what happened in the 2000s and 2010s and that there are going to be no regulations and anytime someone has a complaint or concern about artificial intelligence and where it's headed, all we have to say is, well, we're in a race against China and if China gets there first, then, you know, everything's fucked. But we're going to sell China. all the most advanced Nvidia chips because Jensen Wang argues

that that's the way you defeat China in the AI wars. It's not about him getting really rich. Jensen Wang's the CEO of Vidiya. It's not about invidia being worth $5 trillion and keeping that stock price up. It's about beating the Chinese by giving them our best chips. Or having our chips everywhere around the world,

right? And otherwise, that that would just drive more sales to Huawei if China doesn't have the chips themselves, which is also an argument I don't quite understand. Well, like, in fairness to David Sachs, on the list of, like, ways in which the, like, the private and public have been merged, right? And interests are hard to, like, disentangle. He's not, like, top 10 on the list of corrupt. No, that's why he was last in our roundup here.

Right. But the, like, you know, there's the whole line, like, you can't convince somebody of something their livelihood depends on not believing. And these are all people that have a financial, deep financial interest in the success of this technology. And the fact that this technology is not a world historic evil. Right. And so you can't convince them otherwise. They're going to pursue their interest, even if they genuinely believe it's in the interest of the country. One paragraph that stuck out to me in the story at the All In podcast's annual conference in Los Angeles. It generated this year roughly $21 million in ticket sales. That's up from $15 million last year based on its $7,500 ticket price. In June, the podcast introduced a $1,200 all-in branded tequila. What the fuck are we doing? What the fuck are we doing?

Go get our merch guy. What the hell? Selling fucking. God, Dave, you have any sweatshirts we have to move to meet one bottle of fucking white label tequila? $2,500 tickets. Cricket con next year. What are we doing? I'm just kidding.

Our merch team is fantastic. The whole story is so ridiculous. And basically their response to a lot of the specific allegations of companies that David Tacks owns a piece of and could profit is like 20 mil it's nothing for us we're billionaires I know I know I know And then there was also it's also not clear right about like What he owns versus what the company he continues to own owns right? That seems to be a green area

I'm not sure Yeah I get plenty of problems with those guys and this is the least of it This is the least of that I do think they're absolutely like in 10 years 20 years We could look back at the failure to regulate artificial intelligence as like the biggest Trump failing and I do think David's X is doing that and I just want to say and that is a that is like all conflicts aside like whether he had him or not it's the it's the policy that really fucking worries me and i just want to be clear that if we do live in that future where people like john and tommy say we made a mistake and not regulating i because of how powerful it's gone i want you to know that i did everything i could to bring about your eyes and i was one of the good ones

i was on your side what's the thing called roco's basilis something about which we cannot speak oh boy i know i know the reaction to this is going to be Tucker carlson interviewed sam altman and basically just tried to ask him like basic moral questions about how he thinks about running the company and he couldn't answer any of them and then he spent 10 minutes accusing of a murder but you know what you've talked about that interview so many times and so I listened to the whole thing and I was like Tommy was not exaggerating at all it's a remarkable interview and it's terrifying in that and the Sam Altman part is terrifying Sam Alman always feels like it's like he's like I can't believe I can't believe they're making me do this yeah because I because there's so many it's always feels like there's somebody

there's some monkey he's also learned he's learned a little bit of bit from the Zuckerberg era, too, where instead of just denying everything, he's like, and I can see why that would be a problem. I can see why that could be a concern. But you know what? We need to do it anyway. Yeah. Mark Zucker. Yeah, it is. It's like, I have no choice. We have no choice but to go towards the future. Mark Zuckerberg got years and years of PR advice. It was like show contrition, grovel a little bit. And then five years ago, he's like, you know what? Just grapple with dudes. Do some kickboxing. And never talk to Kara Swisher again. Yeah. Why don't you know. Hey, we have an idea, Mark. Never talk to

Carras Swisher again. Yeah, take over a city, build a compound deep underground. Yeah. It'll be fine. Hey, you know Aloha means hello and goodbye. That's what his press person said the last time he left. One last thing before we get to Tommy's conversation with Rob Sand. Today as you're

listening to this is Election Day in Tennessee 7, the special election where Afton Bain is running to flip a key congressional seat. This is a Trump 22 district. Trump won this by 22 points. But Afton is only a few points behind the Republican. And Republicans are spending a lot of money on this. They're a little nervous. Trump did one of his patented teller rallies on Monday.

Patented. And of course, the closer, Mike Johnson, was stumping around the district as well. How are you guys feeling about this one? I think it's a great sign. They're sending Mike Johnson, you know, beloved figure Mike Johnson among the, among the low, propensity voters of Tennessee. Should we do an A and a B version? We always knew she was going to win B. It was really tough. It was always really going to be hard.

Yeah, for sure. The margin really matters. Dan's conversation with Amy Walter about this was really smart and thoughtful. Everyone should listen to that Sunday conversation. Go ahead. Well, I was just said there's very limited polling here. There was some polling in mid-October from Afton Bain's campaign that had her down eight, I think. And then Emerson released a poll like a week or so ago that just had it at 49-47.

Surprise. Yeah, right. Yeah, so she's only down two. So who knows? It's parts in Nashville, but then it's a lot of the suburbs outside Nashville that are wealthier and I don't know. I mean, again, low turnout special elections that are just in a random Tuesday. You never fucking know what's going to happen.

So who knows? How do you pull a Nashville special on December 2nd and figure out the likely voter universe for that? It feels very hard. We can barely pull a presidential election at this point. Yeah, I do want to tell listeners, one, listen to that the dance conversation with Amy Alters. It was really smart and thoughtful.

And two, check out the Rob Sand interview because I do think Iowa has been a tough state for Democrats in recent years. It was a huge swing from 2012 Obama to Trump, I think, 16 points. But we've got some big statewide races this year. We've got a great governor's race. Rob's going to be the Democratic candidate. There's an open Democratic primary for an open Senate seat. And then the House races there are always really tightly contested. Three out of the four districts, I think, very competitive.

Yeah. And we've really overperformed in some recent special elections in Iowa. us. So it's the kind of place where, like, if you invest a limited amount of money early, it could make a big difference in terms of our ability to, I don't know, have any power in this country. Yeah. And Rob's a fantastic candidate. And Rob's a great candidate, great guy. And if you know anyone in Tennessee 7, which includes the parts of Nashville, reach out, make sure they have a plan to vote today. Or if you're in Tennessee 7, who knows? Hopefully we have some listeners there. Polls open between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. Central in different parts of the districts. And they close

at 7 p.m. Central. So get out there and vote. Quick reminder, before we go to break, this holiday season, consider giving the gift of content. That's right. Hey, hey, now again with feeling. I like when housekeeping copy kills your soul job.

Friend of the pod subscriptions make a great easy present. Your loved one will get access to all the good stuff. Exclusive content like Polarcoaster with Dan Pfeiffer and terminally online, ad-free episodes of all their favorite crooked shows. Oh, I guess your loved one. And the warm yule-tide glow that comes with supporting independent progressive media.

Damn right. Gift a friend of the pod subscription. Grab one for yourself or learn more at cricket.com slash friends. When we come back, Rob Sand. Pod Save America is brought you by Cook Unity. Talk about a comfort food or a meal you're known for making for the holidays. None. There's nothing I'm known to make.

You know what I'm making this year, John? I'll tell you. I'm going to make a corn pie. There's a recipe for a Mexican corn pie that I'm really excited to make. I'm going to make a crust. Like corn bread? No, it's a corn pie. It's almost like, what's a kind of jelly pie?

Like a pecan pie. You know, a pecan pie? Yeah, I do like that. So it's like that style of pie. But with corn, it's an alote pie. Okay. Very excited about it. There you go.

That's what John's known for. The holidays are here, which means it's time for comfort, joy, and really good food. Impress your relatives. Even the judgy ones with gourmet holiday meals from Cook Unity, let their chefs take healthy meal prep off your plate with festive yet nutritious dishes. Festive holiday favorites are available for a limited time and only in select Cook Unity markets, like old-fashioned glazed holiday ham, ultimate holiday turkey dinner, maple-wipped sweet potatoes, and their candied yam cake.

I've tried some of their holiday specials, I think, last year. I really like that glazed holiday ham. Very good. Ham. With Cook Unities, there's no cook. shopping or thinking about how to get the nutrition and comfort meals you need every week. Meals are delivered, fully cooked. Just heat up in as little as five minutes.

Enjoy culinary masterpieces for way less than restaurants or takeout and climbing grocery store prices. Choose from a rotating seasonal menu of over 300 meals or let Cook Unity's platform provide personalized recommendations like apple pie bread pudding, rack of lamb with red wine sauce, roasted turkey sausage dinner, pumpkin spice cake jar, and much more. Menus are updated weekly and new chefs are always joining the team so meals will never be boring or repetitive. Just had Cook Unity last night.

Had myself some steak with some Chim Churry sauce and some green beans and also some mushrooms. Wow. I know. It's great. And tonight, who knows? Who knows what I'll have? I believe there's a surf and turf bowl.

Mexican bowl that's pretty good that I'm going to have. Anyway. You get some of the surf. You get some of the turf. It's great. Taste comforting, craftsmanship, and every bite from the award-winning chefs behind Cook Unity. Go to cookunity.com slash cricket or enter code crooked before checkout to get 50% off your first order. That's 50% off your first order by using code crooked or going to cookunity.com slash crooked. Joining me in studio today is the only Democrat currently holding statewide office in Iowa

and a 26 gubernator, gubernator, Rob, great to see it. Yeah, you too, Tommy. We're in the same room physically. We can put to rest. We are not the same notion that we are the same person. I do, Like, we, I talked to you a few months back. I demanded that I get to be governor for a day. I know you've been thinking about it. Yeah. Get back to me on the constitutional elements, but. I think what we need is if we can get a commitment out of you to be my body double

on the trail for a few days so I can be in two places at once, we can probably make that work. I'm there. I will be on the next flight to Des Moines. Perfect. All right. So there's some really big races in Iowa this year. There's a bunch of contested house races. There's a big Senate race.

Democrats are holding a primary to see. who's going to take on Joni Ernst, you're running for governor. I am biased towards being more hopeful about Iowa because of my experience there. But you are, again, the only statewide elected Democrat. Listeners might know that at the presidential level, Iowa swung about 16 points to the right from 2012 to 2016. Right. So to everyone listening, all the doubters, all the haters, why should Democrats bet on Iowa this cycle? I think there's a pretty simple piece of this.

But honestly, the bottom line is there are many data points. There's all kinds of reasons to support the fact that this is a state that is ready for change. Here's a question for you because I think the bottom line for this for a lot of people is we think oftentimes we're forced and pushed to think in terms of Democrats versus Republicans. There are many people in the state of Iowa and nationally, but I think particularly. in the state of Iowa, that actually look at politics and they're like Democrats, Republicans, whatever. And instead, they're all the same. Yeah, they're all the same. They're asking like, who's real? Who is willing to go against their party's orthodoxy? Who is willing to challenge the status quo? And those are people who supported Barack Obama twice and then also supported Donald Trump

three times. The Democratic nominee for president and all three of those election cycles against Donald Trump was someone who was not an outsider. The consummate insiders versus people an outsider message. All three times. Clinton, Biden, Harris. This is a state that has an idea for something bigger. And they want someone that they feel as a genuine leader on things. And when you look around, yes, we've seen those swings at the presidential level, but look deeper.

We have had for three cycles in a row, one of the closest congressional races. the closest congressional race in a country. Yeah. Last cycle for a pickup, the cycle before that for a defense for an incumbent Democrat. The cycle before that, closest congressional race in American history, six votes. Wow. I'm the only statewide elected Democrat, but that's because there were two other people that lost by one point. One in 2022.

If they had won, our state level offices would be three Democrats and three Republicans. And the national media could be saying like, oh, wow, Iowa is still so purple. Liberal Iowa, right. Yeah, right. Right down the middle. They vote for both parties. And because it's a one point difference, nobody talks about that. Right. That's a good point. I want to talk about Howard County. Yes. Small white rural county. It's right on the Minnesota border. Next door from my home county. Swung 41 points from Obama to Donald Trump. You grew up just east of Howard County and to Cora. I'm sure you've been to Howard County many, many times for like basketball games. Yeah. Cross country meets. What was it about Trump's message in these small, rural towns that made him so successful. I mean, 41 points. Yeah, I think, I think one of the reasons that, you know, it was, but that 41 point swing wouldn't be possible unless also Barack Obama did really well. That's a good point. Right. Right. And so the success of both of their messages

was the idea that politics isn't serving ordinary people. And that's true. It's true. And there a lot of voters are looking at that and they're saying, I want someone who's going to tell me the truth. I'm more focused on hearing that and be authentically who they are, right? And both those guys, Obama and Trump, they are who they are, right? There's no, no confusion about who they are. Right. And so I think when you look at Howard County, and this is a great example of this. So I did 100 public town halls this year.

Why did you do 100 town halls with 99 counties? That's going to confuse the shit out of everybody. Lee County down in southeast Iowa has two county seats. Okay. And so I do 100. What happened there? Is like a Vichy county seat? What are they doing? There was this dispute right after Iowa became a state. Okay. And two years afterward, the state law was like, you will have two county seats. Quit fighting. You can both be a county seat. You know, just like the mom and dad being like, look, you each get half. You each get a toy. Right. Yes. There you go. So I do 100 because a lot of elected officials in Iowa do 99 and I'm competitive. Sure. So that way I'm the hardest working elected official in the state of Iowa, right? But I also, like, I think this is the heart of democracy. Like, you shouldn't want to be in politics unless you are literally willing to go talk to anyone. Yeah. So every year, a state auditor,

I've done 100. We did 100 this year. And I go back to your point about Howard County, um, spent the night in, in Cresco, the county seat, woke up that morning, uh, went on a run and was getting breakfast, uh, at a diner, uh, with my mom, because she's over, right, next door from home. And there's a guy in there who's, uh, an older gentleman. And as we're on the way out. I say, hey, you know, Rob Sand doing a town hall. Come on over. Like, you're welcome there. I want you to be there. We announced all 100 the same day, by the way, like in June. And so no matter where you were in Iowa, like we were like a rock band going out on tour, like we are coming. Get ready. Like it or not. We want you to show up. I'm going to be there. Yeah. It's not like,

poof. He was here. When? Right. Right. How? We want people to show up. So I invite this guy. And he comes. And the reporter for the Des Moines Register, Brian Fantas deals on the road with us. And it turns out that she talked to him afterwards. And to this point of like sort of not really a Democrat or Republican, this guy didn't want to share what his political views was, were. But he said, something to the effect of, I'm glad I had a chance to actually hear from Sand and who I vote for might come down to who's actually here for me to. see, which will not sound strange to someone who went on Brock. The most Iowa thing I've ever heard.

Right, right. And so we're literally, and Tommy, when we do these, so we did this 100 times across the state, we start out by acknowledging the obvious. Our political system is broken. It works better to reelect the people who are in power than to solve the problems of the people it's supposed to serve. And I don't think that either party fundamentally is doing a good enough job of solving our problems to have special legal privileges over our choices on the ballot.

But if we're going to change our political system, we have to change our political culture. We have to work together. And so if you're a Republican here today, I want to applaud you. Raise your hand. We clap for all the Republicans who are present. If you're an independent here today, I want to applaud you. We applaud the independents. We clap for the Democrats.

And then I say, I want to take one minute to prove to all the people who want us to hate each other that we can work together. Let's sing the first verse of America, The Beautiful. Okay. And we do it. How's your voice? I do not lead. Okay. On purpose.

I, this is not a comment on my singing. You don't have a tuning for it. This is not a comment on my singing. Okay. The point is to have everyone do it. Yeah. Right? So my microphone is at my waist.

I'm just another person. And I say, someone else kick us off. And we're in small town Iowa. Usually everybody turns around and is like, maud. You know, like they all know who sings. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. But we have this moment where we've already acknowledged that we are, that we disagree.

We have already acknowledged that we are on opposite sides of this chasm, and yet we are taking a moment to acknowledge those differences and say, let's do something together. By the time you get past that, usually there's someone in the room, you can tell just like hat felt a thing, right? And people are just ready to have a different conversation than you can have before. And to me, that is what we need right now. And I think a lot to the lot of people that are coming out for these events, 100 of them. We had over 10,000 people attend, averaged 30% not Democrats. The year before the election and 30% of the people in the room are independence and Republicans.

Interesting. And again, like the, you know, here's the message, right? Not blue or redder, but truer and better. Like, our political system is broken. Two choices is not realistic. It functions better to control us than it does to get our problems resolved. And people, I think they are ready for that message. They recognize it as being true.

and I think they see it as a route forward from where we are. Yeah, no, look, I've been hearing that I would recommend to anyone running to run against the system right now. I was talking about the head of swing left the other day. So the number one thing they are hearing on the doors is not cost of living. It's anger at the establishment, the system, and all the ways it's broken. But I do think that you're talking to you is so interesting to me because, you know, we talk to a lot of Democrats here who are taking a more aggressive approach in the Trump era, right? Like, there was this big New York Times story the other day about a group of senators who call themselves fight club. They are frustrated with Chuck Schumer and how he's running things.

Now, look, I know, like, fight versus don't fight Trump is, like, kind of stupid and reductive. But if you were governor, you might have to figure out how to deal with, say, a National Guard deployment or really aggressive ice raids in your communities. Or God knows what else by then. How are you thinking about, you know, like those confrontations, potentially? I think the same way I've kind of thought about everything. I mean, my background is not partisan warrior, state auditor for two terms. Like, this is where the money went. Is there a Republican calculator?

Yeah, right. Yeah, that's better. You know, the line that we like is money isn't blue or red at screen, right? And we like to talk a lot about the old, in God we trust, all others we audit, right? But it's not a partisan. thing you're just you're really thinking about like what's the truth yeah prior to that i spent seven years as the chief public corruption prosecutor right uh everybody quick buy my book i uncovered the largest lottery rigging scheme i'm gonna ask you about that in a bit yeah okay all right all right

we won't get too far into it i should say though also my i want my finance people to be happy rob sand dot com everybody please chip in donate volunteer yeah but but here's the answer right like my what i have spent my career doing has been on focusing on figuring out what the truth is and doing the right thing. It hasn't been about like, oh, this person is good or bad because they're wearing this or that color hat. Whether it's a Democratic or Republican president, I am going to do what I think is the right thing to do to protect public safety in Iowa and also to follow the Constitution. That's the bottom line to me. An interesting story about this, we got a public records request in the auditor's office and asked for all allegations of wrongdoing by Republican Governor

Kim Reynolds. Hmm. Right? It's pretty sweeping. Pretty sweeping. Came from the DNC. Under Iowa law, it seemed pretty clear to us that we can't just go hand out allegations. We think they're confidential under Iowa law.

Don't think it's a complicated question. So we sent them, no, we can't give that to you. They sent the same records request a second time. Just unedited? Just the same thing? Yeah. Yeah. Like, I think, like, to me, it's like, they're wondering, did you miss the letterhead?

We're the DNC. Right, right. I gave him the same answer. Like, I'm not here to do what you want. I'm here to do the right thing. I'm not going to go along with anything that any president says just because they are the president. They are people. They are fallible.

And I don't think that, you know, look, I think that right now we should be focused on making sure that our economy is working. We should be focused on making sure that people who are in this country are not a threat to public safety. But if they're not a threat to public safety, if they're doing a job and they're paying their taxes and they don't have a criminal rights. record. Yes, I think it makes sense that if they came here illegal, there would be some level of consequence for that. But if they're a part of our communities, you can have a consequence without being evicted from our community. Right. Yeah. Another area where I would imagine you diverge from some in the Democratic Party is on the question of redistricting. Gavin Newsom is leading this, just led this major fight to redistrict California. It was in response to Trump demanding that

Texas basically rig their maps halfway through the decade to get five more seats. Like my views on this are like I hate gerrymandering because I think it kind of gets us to where we are today, where you have a vast majority of districts where the elected members on both sides are more worried about a primary than a general election. So they just, there's less incentive to be reasonable. But I also think we can't kind of sit idly when Republicans are trying to rig the 2026 midterms. but I get the sense that you are, you are not the biggest fan of partisan redistricting. Is that fair?

You know, Iowa was the first state to prevent this problem. We put the country's first independent redistricting commission into place. And so in Iowa, like, you don't have gerrymandering. You can't do it. The Iowa standard is still the best standard. In fact, when this came up in Wisconsin a few years ago, some folks up there that knew me said, like, hey, you know, the speaker up here, the Republican. is trying to say, oh, we're going to do the Iowa model.

Is this really the Iowa model? I was like, no. And I got a former Republican Iowa GOP chair to write a letter with me to basically like the state of Wisconsin being like, we see what you're trying to do here. This is what we do in Iowa. This is why it's different. And this is why you can't say that's the Iowa model to try to protect truly the idea of independence and that brand of Iowa being like nonpartisan.

To me, this whole redistricting gerrymandering battle. is again, is exactly what I'm talking about when I go to the idea that these two private clubs shouldn't have special legal privileges over our access and our choices on the ballot, right? This is what we get to. We have people who are being paid with tax dollars putting hours and hours and hours into efforts to solidify one private club's control over the lawmaking capacity of different states. now I appreciate the responsiveness to it but the answer to me isn't just like oh an eye for an eye the answer is we need to break down this entire system so that we have a system based on serving

people rather than a system based on serving politicians yeah look I'm there if we could do a national sort of independent redistricting process I'm all for it it's just a long way from here to there. Right. So I interviewed you around your announcement. You know, we talked about the sort of budding Trump trade war. They kicked off in earnest. You know, Trump slapped tariffs on most of the world, including the Chinese. A lot of the world kind of ducked and covered. The Chinese punched back really hard, including by basically boycotting the purchase of U.S. soybeans. Last month, Trump claimed that he'd cut a deal with the Chinese and that they would resume soybean purchases from the U.S. Iowa is, you know, top two biggest soybean producing states in the country. I think

it's you in Illinois, right? Number one. You got to beat Illinois? Come on. You got to talk to chat GPT. She told me. I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure I'm right. How has the kind of like last few months of this trade war impacted Iowa farmers, the Iowa economy? And is China living up to the terms of the deal Trump announced? Well, I mean, that's exactly. Your phrasing of that was precise, right? that's the terms of the deal that the Trump administration announced China has never affirmed yes we're going they have never said

we are going to buy 12 million metric tons they have bought 300,000 allegedly they're going to buy 12 million by the end of the calendar year. It feels tough to do those numbers are very different yeah numbers are very very different right and I think there's a reason that China hasn't said you know oh we're going to do this

and this is just to me this is this is exactly one of those things that I think is the line that you can see between people who are trying to serve a party master and people who are trying to serve the public, right? You got four members of Congress, two U.S. senators in the state of Iowa. All four members of Congress are just whatever the president says, I'm with him, ushering in a new golden age. Okay, you got it.

Meanwhile, farmers in the state of Iowa, right, have no markets to sell their crops to internationally. We're bailing out Argentinian farmers and Argentinian cattlemen beef growers. Well, people in Iowa are sitting there with no market. And all of these Republican elected officials who know how this system works, who are well informed on this, who see how bad this is for Iowa, won't say it. The only one that's even coming close is Chuck Grassley. I think his attitude on this is Yolo, and he's mostly lived, so he's going for it, right? He's getting the end of that for a little work.

Yeah, right, right. Yeah. And so, you know, he's at least saying, yeah, he's at least saying, you know, I don't think tariffs are going to work. If they do, I'll be the first one to say, hallelujah. I'm with him on that. But this is bad for the state of Iowa. And I think most people in the state of Iowa, they want someone who will work with any president to do good and work with no president to do something bad. They will try to avoid bad things happening.

These folks are just saying, yes, boss, whatever you want. Right. What do these farmers do? Look, what do you do with a metric ton of a million metric tons of soybeans? It's a great question because right now you're also having to make decisions about what you're going to plant next year. Where are you going from here? If this Chinese market has gone away for good. Yeah. And this chaos makes their life incredibly difficult because I think most farmers and most people, right?

Most people want to know what the rules of the road are and make their own decisions and sink or swim according to their own merit and according to their own decision making. Yep. You know, I thought, I thought we were going to zig, we zagged. But at least you knew, you know, there was that fork in the road and you were going to do one or the other. Right. This kind of chaos just makes decision making for anyone in agriculture right now incredibly complicated and difficult, particularly because a lot of these people, they don't get to know if the tariffs are about to change in two days. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure somebody knows when the tariffs are about to change in two days. Yeah, somebody knows. Exactly. It's less of a bet. somebody named Donald Trump Jr. knows, and they can go on polymarket or the stock exchange or whatever. Another Iowa specific question for you. So Iowa has the second highest cancer rate in the nation, and it's got one of the only rising cancer rates in the country. That includes a lot of people, young people, who are getting cancer in their 30s. I know that some experts point to alcohol consumption, high levels of radon, potentially as being the cause radon, for those who don't know, is just a naturally occurring radioactive gas. Other suspects, can, Chemicals used in agriculture could be the culprit. And this is not just an Iowa problem.

There's sort of like a Midwestern belt of states that are dealing with this. What do you think is happening? And what is like the governor of Iowa's responsibility or options to address the challenge? Yeah. So the bottom line answer is it's certainly all of the above are a part of this. And I think the responsibility of the governor is to figure out what are our biggest causes and what can we do, what are the best and fastest and easiest ways to lower those incidents of cancer. And you're right.

We are number two overall and the only one with an increasing rate. And this is something that, again, 100 public town halls. And I would get to this point in my stump where I would say we are 49th for economic growth. We are 48th for personal income growth. But what are we number one in for growing? And people would shout back at me, cancer. Oh, you just really hit people's imagination. And it hits people's lives close to home.

And I always think about my friend Abby, who she's from Forest City. We met through my cousin a long time ago. And she was a childhood cancer survivor. And then she, her cancer came back when we were maybe around 30 or something. And her attitude about it was so classically, Iowan and also miraculous. she had to have her entire leg amputated at one point. And so for Halloween, she went as a shark attack victim. Oh, my gosh.

Yeah. The next year, she was a carrot. And she was also a pediatric nurse and just, you know, like taking care of kids and doing her best to balance everything that she was going through with trying to be employed and help kids at the same time. And then she passed away. But people who know her and people whose lives are touched by stories like that across the state of Iowa, and you hear that we are number one for that, it's alarming. And I met a couple in Al-McKee County. So we talked about Howard.

Next over to the east is Winnihishik, My County. And next over to the east is Al-Makee. And I met a couple in Lansing at my town hall. A young couple, I think, probably younger than us, whose kids. has cancer now. And they said, we're working with people in the legislature to try to get some funding for research for pediatric cancers in the state of Iowa. I do think that's an obligation for the state government in Iowa. We should be funding research into why is this happening in Iowa. We absolutely should. Last year, the legislature and governor agreed to put a million dollars into it.

That doesn't seem like much. That's not going to get you much. No. What this couple taught me is that in Nebraska, they have done $23 million of research into pediatric cancer over the last few years. And as a proud Iowan, I demand that we beat Nebraska. I know you do. Yeah. Like, we should be... It's gotten easier recently. Yes, it has.

Yes, it has. Scott Frost era was not good for anybody over there. Well, it was good for Hawkeyes. Yeah, it was good for any of Hawkeyes. But the table steak should be $25 million because we want to beat Nebraska. We're also sitting on a five or six, depending on how you want to count. count it, a billion dollar surplus. So, like, we have money there. What are we doing? Yeah, seems like there's no better way to spend it than this kind of research. You've got a great

hospital, the University of Iowa. I mean, we do. I want to make you name. I don't want you to rank your hospitals, but you got a bunch of good ones. I know that's hard. The other thing of this that I think is, is we so often miss is this is good for everybody, right? Because you can be the person, you know, my faith drives so much of what I believe and so much of what I choose. And to me, you can look at kids and you could say, we should heal the sick. We should want to help these people not be sick. You can also be the single most cold-hearted person in the state of Iowa and reach the same conclusion on a different route. Well, I guess if we prevent cancer that costs fewer tax dollars than treating it later on, so fine. We should all be able to agree to this. It's a simple

thing that we can be doing, and right now the folks that are there aren't doing enough. What are they busy doing? Like I said, 48th in economic growth, number one for cancer growth. But let's figure out how to gut the state auditor's office ability to find the tax dollars that we misspent. That's their priority. I always go back to the story in the New Testament of Jesus flipping tables because he saw people in a position of trust and power at the temple who were abusing that trust and power. That to me is exactly where we are in the state of Iowa right now. And we did, as we're going around and we're doing 100 town halls. You're hearing people left, right, and center who are just fed up. They've had enough. They understand that at this point, it's just insiders serving

insiders in special interest groups. They're not focused on Iowans and they're ready for change. When you say Jesus flipping tables, I think of like a Buffalo Bills tailgate. That's more I guess more like splitting tables jumping off. I want to see, I really want to see Josh Allen get a Super Bowl right. I like Josh Allen. I'm glad the Patriots are good. All right. So, Your work, you prosecuted this hot lotto fraud case. It's one of like the craziest public corruption stories in Iowa. For listeners who don't know, can you just tell us what happened and why you have beef with hot lottery winners, which is how I understand it. I won't dive in on the bait on that one.

There's a, there's a, so yeah, great, amazing book that I wrote. Everyone should buy it. It's so good. it did it did actually win an award from the Washington independent review of books oh which because it has the word independent in it makes it makes an auditor be like okay that's nice yeah yeah absolutely they said they called it a favorite read of the year when it came out okay it's called the winning the winning ticket I had nothing to do with a documentary called jackpot which you can stream for free at lotodoc dot com okay but that tells you the same story in 45 minutes if you're not the book reading time okay um less detail bottom line For 10 years, there was this guy working for the multi-state lottery association in Urbondale, Iowa that serves like 38 state and provincial lotteries in the United States and Canada. And he was, I don't want to spoil it. He was making it a little bit more predictable than it's supposed to be. Fast forward to this part if you want to buy the book.

Yeah. You can tell us what happened. It's okay. All right. All right. Inside job. Like, it was his job to literally write the computer program that was supposed to pick random numbers. And he made him enough less than random that he could buy a bunch of tickets and kind of know what was going to win.

Dude, the craziest part about this is, so he's a Texas, small town Texas boy. And no one noticed he was like driving a Ferrari all of a sudden. He had a really big house. People were like, did you have an uncle? Did he pass away? Was he rich? Right, right. How are you doing this?

People sort of had questions, but, you know, like, yeah. The craziest part about this, beyond the fact. that he's rigging lottery jackpots around america he's a small town texas boy his brother is a justice of the peace down there his brother is a bigfoot hunter and like the saskwatch tasquatch okay yeah and uh that seems like a tough gig it it it's it was a side gig you're not getting a lot of targets right you're not putting a lot of arrows on no on beef no he he he that's why he was a justice of the peace for his day job right but he would help he would help the guy in Des Moines in Urbondale

buy these rigged jackpots and then he would use his friends occasionally from the Bigfoot hunting community to help claim the jackpot tickets. Okay. Yeah. I'm now imagining dudes in like Bigfoot outfits. Like you've seen Harry and the Andersons?

Yeah, of course I have. Or that movie from your kids. Like him going to cash a ticket? Yes. That's crazy. How did you guys suss this out? Long, long story. story. We actually went to trial only knowing about the one Iowa ticket. And I remember this very

clearly. We did jury selection day one when we were starting to bring in evidence. There was a national news story being like, ah, the defense has got a pretty powerful argument for reasonable doubt here. I don't know how you can convict this guy because you don't have the like the, you don't have the file. The computer that had been used for the Iowa jackpot draw had been wiped to Department of defense standards. Like there was no direct evidence at the time of like, oh, here's the file that he wrote. This is how he rigged it. So as a circumstantial case, we won. As we're waiting for sentencing as after the guilty verdict, I get this phone call at my desk. And I recognize the area code is like the area that he's from in Texas. So I answer the phone. And this guy's like,

can I talk to Rob Sand? I'm like, yeah, that's me. Do y'all know that Eddie's brother won the lottery? Maybe about 10 years ago or so, somewhere out west. Maybe call. Colorado. I was like, no, thank you. That is very helpful. Yeah, that is very helpful. We had been sort of waiting for a tip like that. We knew it was there, but one of the interesting tactical decisions for the mastermind's legal defense was they chose to demand speedy trial. So we didn't have time to do this huge nationwide investigation. Right, right. We had to like indict and get ready for trial. And we didn't, we were like, we bet there's something else out there, but right now we got to shoot the alligator closest to the boat.

Yeah. Right? Let's get this guy convicted of this case here in Iowa. See what happens after that. I'm imagining you in voir dire being like, I've got to strike that hairy guy. He's got some bigfoot DNA. He's not going to like these people. He's not going to like this.

All right. Last question. I mean, even if you win, the Republicans will probably have pretty strong majority of the legislature, right? How do you think you can work with them to get stuff done? You know, has our like zero-sum blood? Bloodsport, D.C. politics infected Iowa fully yet? Are you guys still able to talk? So I'll say this. Number one, we are strong believers that we can win this race, right? The only poll that we have seen has us up by two. We keep having people come out of the Republican Party power structure, elected officials and recent party chairs, like county party chairs, publicly endorsing me even if they've never spoken to me in their life. That's nice.

Yeah. When I tell you that Iowans are ready for change, I think we're talking about this earlier, four of the top nine special election over performances in America this year are the only four that we have had for special elections in Iowa. So we're right up at the top there. We can win this race. What's going to happen when we win? I think there's a lot of people in the legislature that want to do good. And I think they belong to both parties. And I will be happy to work with anybody. And this is, This to me is, again, like this, this sort of is, I think, rooted in my faith. I love finding places of agreement and a sense of community where you expect to find none. One of the legislators that voted against the bill that got the auditor's office that made it so they could hide misspent money from us is a legislator who literally was at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2020, to stop this deal. Oh. Yeah. But she was someone that I called. to tell her, hey, there's this bill coming. It's bad. It corrupts our government. It is an

example of the swamp. And she read the bill. She asked me some very intelligent questions about it. And she said, okay, I'm going to vote against it. That's great. People surprise you, right? Margie Taylor Green. Look what she's doing. There you go. There you go. And so I just like, we can judge people's actions. We don't have to judge people. The best part of this story was when that legislator, Luena Stoltenberg, came back to me maybe the day or two before the vote. And she goes, hey, I just want to let you know a lot of other people have approached me about this bill and they've told me some things about it, made some arguments that I think makes sense. And I'm really struggling and praying a lot about what the right thing to do is for how I vote

on this bill. And I'm telling you this now because I want you to know that I'm struggling so that if I vote for it, you don't think that it was because I lied to you. don't you want to be represented by people with that level of integrity? Yeah. Yeah. It's a very decent response. Yes. And so like you can be someone who literally is there to stop the steal and yet also is calling me to put yourself out there and say like, I'm not sure what the right thing to do is.

I'm just working really hard at this. And we're reengaged with her. I said, thank you. Tell me what their questions are. I don't care who it was. You got it from. Just tell me the question. I'll give you my answer.

And we did that and she did end up voting against it. I'm telling this story to illustrate the point, right, that you made. People will surprise you if you let them. The more we are focused on putting each other into a box and saying, no, you're over there and I'm over here and we're going to have to fight the worse we are doing for all the people that are struggling around this state with higher prices, right, with cancer, we're not solving problems if we're not willing to work together. But when we engage in good faith, when I look at someone like her and I assume, hey, they might be willing to do all kinds of things if we at least have a conversation and focus on getting to something good, a whole new world opens up in terms of what's possible to accomplish. From January 6th to voting to voting with you, I like it. Maybe you take them hunting. Are you a big, are you bow hunting guy?

Dude, I got to show you the buck that I shot this year. I can't kill a deer. They're too big. I'm a fishing guy. I like fishing. I've shot birds before. Clay pigeons. That's a good time.

I agree. I agree. Maybe we do a little. That's our common ground. You now have made me think of the buck that I shot this fall. I have to talk to you about this. A lot of points. Big, big, big looking guy.

209 inch white tail. If I like, can I like. Yeah, we can, you know. Can you zoom in? We can put it in post and make our audience vomit. This thing, you know, we'll do a clean picture. A 209 inch buck is like a once in a lifetime if you're having a lucky lifetime. Okay.

I've been a bow hunter my entire life. This was in the city limits in Des Moines. What? Like downtown? I've been doing the urban bow hunting program. Oh, that's a big deer. Yeah. That's a lot of, how many points on that thing?

14. I knew that. But 209 inches. So, again, like, that's just like, that's off the charts. What's a normal sized buck? So a Pope and Young buck, which is big enough for the Pope and Young record books, typically would be 125 inches and up. Okay.

I have taken like eight of those, I want to say, as a hunter. A boon and crockett buck, which is like a booner is a big deal. 170 inches. I'm like speaking a new language here. Yes. Hey, you never know what you're going to learn. I'm learning a lot. Actually, my wife's father is bow hunts and does all this stuff too.

Oh, all right. So they have these measurements, Pope and Young and Boone and Crocket for pretty much every kind of animal. But, you know, whiteto is what we got in Iowa. 125 inches and then 170 inches for that higher line and shooting a booner like 170 or up is a pretty big deal like 209 is just like that's a gooner that's that's monster it's a gooner yeah forget booner yes i don't know man i'm i'm just like i really like fishing you ever get out there let's go fishing yes yeah yeah little streams a little fly rod uh northeast iowa decora some of the best trout fishing in the midwest it is northeast iowa is absolutely beautiful yeah um everyone should go visit

also you should visit rob sand.com figure out to get involved with the campaign maybe donate, maybe volunteer, maybe knocks the doors Yes It's great to see you. Thank you for talking about all this And welcome to LA Thanks man

Hope the weather is nice but not too nice Because I know you're more of a You want that I would gloom Cool weather Yeah yeah It'll be a fun trip That's our show for today Thanks to Rob San for coming by

Dan and I will be back with a new show on Friday Talk to everybody then. If you want to listen to Pod Save America ad-free and get access to exclusive podcasts, go to cricket.com slash friends to subscribe on Supercast, Substack, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts. Also, please consider leaving us a review that helps boost this episode and everything we do here at Cricket. Pod Save America is a Cricket Media production. Our producers are David Toledo, Emma Ilik Frank, and Saul Rubin. Our associate producer is Farah Safari. Austin Fisher is our senior producer.

Reed Cherlin is our executive editor. Adrian Hill is our head of news and politics. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer with audio support from Kyle Seiglin and Charlotte Landis. Matt DeGroote is our head of production. Naomi Sengel is our executive assistant. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Haley Jones, Ben Heffcote, Mia Kelman, Carol Pelaviv, David Tolls, and Ryan Young.

Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.