Pod Save America - “Fair Fight 2020!”

Episode Date: September 16, 2019

An attack on Saudi Arabia leads to Trump saber-rattling on Iran, new allegations surface against Brett Kavanaugh, the United Nations convenes a Climate Action Summit next week, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren avoid direct confrontation, and Crooked Media partners with Stacey Abrams to fund Fair Fight 2020. Then Politico’s Natasha Bertrand talks to Tommy about the news that the President may have used government resources to prop up his struggling hotels. Learn more about our partnership with Fair Fight 2020 & donate: votesaveamerica.com/fairfight

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. Later in the pod, Tommy's conversation with Politico's Natasha Bertrand, who's been breaking news about Trump using the government to keep his hotels afloat. We have a ton of news to cover first, from a new allegation of sexual assault against Brett Kavanaugh, to the politics of the climate crisis,

and the latest 2020 primary news in the wake of last week's big debate in Houston. Before that, a few housekeeping notes. Lovett, I believe you put on a show at a quaint venue in Manhattan on Friday evening. Radio City Music Hall. It's out now. That's the one. That was very fun. That's the one. Stacey Abrams, Desus and Miro, Alyssa Mastromonica, Wyatt Senac, Dulce Sloan, a special appearance by Michael Barbaro. Damn right. Mikey Barbs. by michael barbaro damn right mikey barbs one of the coolest experiences i've ever had and you can have it too the big announcement from friday's love it or leave it uh is our partnership with fair fight

2020 which is the organization that stacy abrams recently started to fight voter suppression in 20 different battleground states she needs to raise five5 million by November 5th, and we have promised to help her raise at least a million. So we're going to be bugging the shit out of all of you to help. All of you. But first, let's just talk about why this issue is so urgent and why we thought it was so important to help out. Tommy, you want to take it? Yeah, I mean, I think people should understand that Stacey Abrams would be the governor of Georgia if not for voter suppression. She said something, you love it, that really stuck with me, which is that the insidious part of voter

suppression is that people try to make it feel like this is user error and that voters are failing to live up to their responsibilities and not doing things right when it's actually a determined, deliberate effort to use techniques that get spread around the country to strike people from the voter rolls or make it harder to vote and otherwise keep mostly Democrats, mostly people of color from voting. So Stacey Abrams doesn't take any bullshit. So she has launched this effort to actively combat voter suppression efforts going into 2020. And it is so, so important. Yeah, I think, you know, a lot of people know about what happened with Stacey Abrams' election in Georgia. I think fewer people probably know that those exact efforts are happening in states

all across the country as we speak, states that we need to win in 2020. You know, ever since the Supreme Court sort of nullified a key part of the Voting Rights Act, states can change their voting laws without getting preclearance from the federal government and make it harder for people to vote. And I think the biggest missing piece in the Democratic Party's strategy right now is that too few people have been focused on that. And so thank God Stacey Abrams is going to be focused on that. Yeah. So what is her group going to do? She can set up state-based organizations that can staff a hotline to troubleshoot any issue a voter might face before the election or at the polls. They can flag voting irregularities that could have been caused by

suppression. They can challenge voter suppression laws and tactics in court, and they can work with the campaign staffs themselves to ensure that voters get to their polling locations. So while we all sit around and watch debates that make us depressed, infuriated, maybe inspired from time to time. Maybe richer if we sign up for a lotto, you know? There you go. Right, right, right. I got there. Where's he going to? Yeah, I got there too.

We can donate to Stacey Abrams Fair Fight 2020 effort now to ensure that the Democrat, whoever it is, has a better chance of winning in 2020. It's so important. we do about it we're just fucked but when you have teams on the ground and stacy harris knows this when you have and she's gonna have like teams of full-time people who are hired from the community that they're trying to protect the right to vote in um when you have when you have people on the ground sort of watching these tactics when you have hotlines to help people voting like they're making it harder for people to vote but that doesn't mean it has to be impossible for people to vote right like voter protection teams work we know they work they're a proven method and the only thing we need to do now is uh help stacy aprams fund them uh and she needs to raise a lot of money by november 5th and but if every single person listening to this right

now only donated ten dollars we would get there ten $10. $10? Nothing. And it's votesaveamerica.com slash fair fight. This is so important. We are spending a lot of time on this in the next month to help Stacey Abrams raise this money in November and we would love you all to help because it's probably maybe the single most important thing you can do between now and

2020. Certainly between now and we have a nominee. Yeah, just remember that Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, these are places that were decided by tens of thousands of votes, and they are actively right now trying to suppress hundreds of thousands of votes in those states. This could determine the outcome of the 2020 election. And one of the lessons of 2016 is if you start paying attention to this a few weeks, a few months before the election, it's too late. Stacey's paying attention now to prevent these losses now. Yeah, we need the teams in place early next year, which is why the money has to be raised by November, because you do it the couple weeks

before the election, you're fucked. Also, if Stacey Abrams told me she was setting up a food truck, I'd want to fund that. I want to be a part of anything she's doing. So thank God it's actually something pertinent to winning elections. I bet it'd be an improvement on the food trucks that come to Cricket Media HQ on Tuesdays. This lobster tastes like it's right out of the ocean in this role. I'm talking about Stacey's. Votesaveamerica.com slash Fair Fight. Go there right now and please donate whatever you can.

All right. We have a lot of news to cover today. Stacey Abrams was a lobster food truck. It was like a lobster roll truck. That's the truck that she was running. Oh, was running? that's keep going so we have a lot of news to cover today um but i do want to start briefly by asking you tommy what the hell is going on in the middle east after a series of strikes on saudi arabian oil facilities over the weekend the trump administration is now making the case that iran is responsible

and the president has been hinting at military action. In a Sunday night tweet, he said, quote, Saudi Arabia oil supply was attacked. There is reason to believe that we know the culprit are locked and loaded, depending on verification, but are waiting to hear from the kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack and under what terms we would proceed. Tommy, why does the president want us to go to war on behalf of Saudi Arabia? That's a really good question. So as you said over the weekend, there are these two major Saudi oil installations that got hit. Maybe there were a drone attack. Maybe it was a combination of drones and cruise missiles. I don't think we necessarily

know yet. There's a rebel group in Yemen called the Houthi rebels who've taken credit for the attack. The Trump administration says it's Iran. Um, they've leaked out to the wall street journal that they have some sort of evidence that they want to provide to the Saudis that say that Iran was responsible. We haven't seen anything publicly yet. Um, so we don't really know what happened. There's some people suspect that maybe this weaponry was too sophisticated to have been used by the Houthis or that the point of impact makes it look like it came south from Iraq and Iran, not north from where Yemen is. Either way, this is really worrisome to me. I think it's more worrisome than the drone incident. You know, a normal administration would maybe go to the UN General Assembly and try to create some sort of international effort to

reestablish a deterrent on the Iranians. But, you know, Pompeo and Trump just sort of international effort to reestablish a deterrent on the Iranians. But, you know, Pompeo and Trump just sort of leapt to locked and loaded or some sort of military response. And who knows what will happen if that if that goes down? Yeah, I mean, that's what I was wondering. Like, even, you know, we don't we don't know what the intelligence is going to show yet. But if it showed it was Iran was responsible, I wouldn't imagine that in a normal administration, the next move would be to go attack Iran right away, would it? Or? I mean, I don't think so. I hope not. I mean, the Saudis spent 70, nearly $70 billion on military equipment in 2018. So I would suspect that they have the means to deal with this on their own. But I don't know. I mean, look, if this happened during the Obama administration,

I think there would probably be voices in the situation room telling him that he needed to respond military to Iran to ensure that they don't do this again. It's assuming that Iran actually is responsible for these strikes. But, you know, right now we're in this weird place where Trump is trying to meet with the president of Iran, but the world is actually divided against our policy because we pulled out of the Iran deal. So it's not clear what's going to happen. And it's just creating massive instability and, I think, fear among people. So we're just waiting to take some marching orders

from the guy who had a journalist murdered over in Saudi Arabia, is that what you said? Yeah, our good friends the Saudis. Very sweet. Okay. Well, we will keep you all updated on the developments there. Another big story over the weekend. Two New York Times reporters, Robin Pogerman and Kate Kelly,

published a piece based on their new book about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in which they share new evidence that corroborates claims made by Deborah Ramirez, a former Yale classmate of Kavanaugh's, who told The New Yorker last year that Kavanaugh thrust his penis into her face at a party when they were in school together. The Times also reported that a different classmate of Kavanaugh's, Max Steyer, told senators and the FBI last year of a separate incident where he says he saw, quote, Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party where friends pushed his penis into the hands of a female student, though the reporters say that the female student has no recollection of the incident. We also learned that Ramirez and her legal team last year, quote,

gave the FBI a list of at least 25 individuals who may have had corroborating evidence, but the Bureau and its supplemental background investigation interviewed none of them, though we learned many of these potential witnesses tried in vain to reach the FBI on their own. So before we get to the substance of this awful and fairly predictable development, I want to start by talking about how the Times handled this story, which was unorthodox, to put it most generously. Lovett, you were tweeting about this over the weekend. What was your take on this? Yeah, so you have to go back to when New Yorker,

Jane Mara and Ronan Farrow published a piece with the Deborah Ramirez account. It was immediately attacked from the right for some of the caveats that were in the piece. And then the Times ran something really peculiar at the time, which is they said they could not corroborate her story and that they tried to. Very rarely does a newspaper publish a story saying they don't have the story. And that was immediately weaponized by the right at the time. It was an incredibly influential story from the times that undermined the credibility of not just the New Yorker, but Deborah Ramirez and some of the other investigations of Kavanaugh at the time. The Times, Dean Becke had to put out a statement sort of adjusting what the Times meant. The Times published a story the next day pointing out that they didn't have an interview with her and that they did not actually dispute her account. now a year later brett calvin is on the court uh the new york times publishes this excerpt of a book by these two reporters who did an incredible amount of investigative work to uncover what

happened uh with deborah ramirez and with some of these other incidents at yale they now are actually uh saying the opposite of what the times had once said saying that they did end up corroborating with this and they obviously point out all this other information, including another incident. But what was so strange is they publish it as a book excerpt in basically the opinion section of the Sunday Times under a headline that basically says, boy, it's hard to fit in at Yale. Just bizarre. And an even worse tweet. Yeah, well, the tweet was insane and incredibly bad judgment. But the fact that they would bury this incredibly important piece of news inside of an opinion piece has sort of been just another chapter in the strange behavior the Times has had towards some of this Kavanaugh reporting.

some of this Kavanaugh reporting. Well, and also then the New York Times had to update the opinion piece, I believed, to reflect the fact that in the book, it says the female student involved in this subsequent incident declined to be interviewed. Friends said she didn't recall the incident in general,

which that doesn't mean it didn't happen. But how do you leave that out of this initial account and have to update it with this big correction that's now getting screenshotted and shared by every conservative online. Yeah, you sort of wonder if that's another problem with treating this as an excerpt from a book in the analysis section as opposed to, and look, these two reporters are Times

reporters. It's not like they did a book review and they broke news in the book review. You know, like they're Times reporters. They could have very easily, I would imagine imagine had a straight news story from this in addition to sort of a longer piece in the analysis section which is it was news which is what the times did around some of the weinstein reporting that the times did um but you know it's funny that to me the the the way the way in which the times has failed to account for its change on the deborah murrah story is more important to me than where this ultimately ended.

Because the truth is, the Times is taking shit today for how they ran this, and fair enough, deserve. But the truth is, in a Twitter environment, the news was found. The news has become the news. The fact that it was in a different section of the paper, I think, is ultimately not as important. Other media outlets wrote it up as news. Of course. And made it the proper headline. So it worked out for them. into the paper and into their social media platforms. That's just a problem. I mean, the tweet about Kavanaugh was just so beyond the pale and the headline that

this story ran under, I think was just really unfair to the journalism. And, uh, that's it. Yeah. The tweet, the tweet that they,

they tweeted the story out the New York times opinion, uh, uh, account. And it said, having a penis thrust in your face at a drunken dorm party may seem like harmless fun but when brett kavanaugh added it to her deborah ramirez says it confirmed she didn't belong at yale in the first place just like holy shit literally couldn't believe that was true

couldn't i thought it was it's also just sort of it speaks to something so um there there really was such misogyny rooted in the tweet that like that when a penis is brought too close to you uh you better switch colleges you know it's like that the it's the penis's school it was and you need to go elsewhere the whole thing was fucking awful now we should say like two hours two hours and then the times deleted it and then they had a tweet sort of saying it was said he's saying it was poorly phrased which then they also had to delete because it was much more than fucking poorly phrased and then they finally issued a full apology for it said it was bad judgment they were looking into who did it all that kind of stuff get a public editor guys like accountability is good for every institution

clearly the times is suffering from not explaining incidents like this clearly and having readers feel like there's accountability again i'm not in the cancel your time subscription group. I will read the paper till the day I die. But this is bad. And it's hurting the very fantastic reporters and reporting that's done by the Times. That's the issue. Yeah. And actually, you know, it's worth pointing out that, you know, the Times issues aside, one of the problems with that tweet is it feeds into a kind of mentality which has been

kind of half of the pushback of this, of these Kavanaugh stories. You know, they've sort of tried to have it both ways, which is, you know, we've seen conservatives tweet various versions of this, defend it in some way, which is these are drunken, minor incidents that everybody goes through on the one hand, and then also this never happened on the other. They're trying to have it both ways, but don't feed into that, don't feed into that, into that interpretation that this was just sort of drunken fooling around, not worthy of investigative attention. Yeah. It also speaks to the fact that in conservative circles, they think that Kavanaugh's confirmation on the closest party line vote,

I think, ever for a Supreme Court judge suddenly means he is absolved in some way, when the reality is the fbi investigation into these incidents was fixed it was a sham the new yorker just confirmed that senator chris coons a democrat personally alerted the fbi director of an additional eyewitness alleging kavanaugh exposed himself to a second woman at yale but the fbi never interviewed the witness max steyer who was the source in the new york times the second incident. How is that possible? I mean, this tells us that the FBI investigation was a sham and that Kavanaugh very likely perjured himself during his testimony, which we already knew.

I mean, you know, news organizations have pointed out all the ways that Brett Kavanaugh lied during his testimony, false statements, misstate, whatever you want to say uh didn't tell the truth and this is just more evidence of that remember he said during the hearing oh this would have been the talk of the campus if this happened well it turns out it was because there's now corroborating witnesses and a separate incident with a witness it's Brett Kavanaugh did not say in his testimony I am so sorry for the mistakes I made when I was young. These were inappropriate incidents in which I was foolish and immature and drunk and treated women poorly.

It's one of my great regrets. I'm so sorry, but I do not believe it should be disqualifying. I've grown as a person. I'm a different kind of man now. They dismiss them. Just lied through it. They dismiss them completely. And I think, you know, there is been a kind of internalized,

I think they've successfully, on the right, even serious or semi-serious, what's left of serious on the right, these commentators have convinced themselves of Kavanaugh's having been railroaded so thoroughly that they now dismiss everything and they can't see the complete picture. They can't see how obvious it is that you attack any one of these stories. You try to find an out out of any one of these stories. You're telling me you're looking at the complete record and you're not seeing a man who behaved drunkenly and inappropriately towards women during his time in college and perhaps

after. You're actually going to look at all of this and dismiss it completely. That takes an incredible amount of mental gymnastics. He behaved inappropriately at the hearing itself. When asked by Amy Klobuchar if he'd ever gotten blacked out drunk, he decided to berate her and ask her if she drank beer when she has spoken movingly and openly about her family's history with alcoholism and how hard it was on her. I mean, the guy was, he's terrible. So the real question is what happens next?

Of course, Trump immediately took to Twitter sunday to defend kavanaugh saying he should quote start suing people for libel or the justice department should come to no conflict of interest there yeah unbelievable let's do that uh other republicans like mitch mcconnell and ted cruz also responded by defending kavanaugh and attacking the media and most of the democratic presidential candidates explicitly called for his impeachment with bernie sanderslobuchar and Joe Biden calling for further investigations. So what can Democrats actually do about this? They could impeach him. I mean, the Supreme Court justice can be impeached. It's you know, I think it's a multilayered question about a strategy here.

If we should impeach a Supreme Court justice before the President of the United States. Yeah, and also we run into, of course, the same problem we have with the President. And look, even if, you know, the difficult thing here is, say we keep a Democratic House and we have a Democratic President, and the first order of business is, all right, let's look into these additional Brett Kavanaugh allegations and let's begin impeachment proceedings. You do that in the House. You have a Democratic president, but you go to the Senate and we have the same problem. You don't get 67 votes because we couldn't get any Republicans to vote against him when it wasn't that many votes.

So, you know, there's a real problem here. But, of course, it does open up the possibility that you say when you get to that point, But of course, it does open up the possibility that you say when you get to that point, all right, either Brett Kavanaugh resigns because of all these additional allegations in these investigations that we've done or with our majority in the Senate and our majority in the House and our Democratic president, we'll just add two seats to the Supreme Court. Or some of the other proposals to rotate justices. Rotate justices. I will say there's also another aspect of this that I think Trump immediately went to because of his, you know, self-preserving id. Trump looks at the Supreme Court and he sees only either a tool that will help him, whether it's take money to build a wall or protect him from investigations or what have you. That stories about Kavanaugh are going to make him reluctant to side too thoroughly with Trump because he needs to look like an even handed person, not a right wing partisan who is protected by the Republicans. It was such a dumb, it was an uncharacteristically politically dumb thought thing from Donald Trump. Yes, but it's usually he has a when I say uncharacteristically, I mean, usually has some sort of a sense of how like raw politics works.

But like the idea that Brett Kavanaugh could convince Democrats that now he's good because he lobbed a few good decisions. And after he's done that is not really getting what's going on. Yeah, I think that's right. But at the same time, he looks, Trump looks at this and says, all right, Kavanaugh's not going anywhere. He's not getting 67 votes in the Senate. So what is the bad that can come for Trump out of these kinds of stories? And it's Kavanaugh being a little bit reluctant to be a straight right wing judge vote. And that's the only upshot that Trump could see from this. So it's worth keeping that in mind.

All right, let's move on. In one week, the United Nations will be convening its Climate Action Summit, and we here at Crooked Media have signed on to an effort, along with more than 170 other media outlets, to cover the climate crisis in the lead-up to the event as part of the Covering Climate Now initiative, which was launched by the Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation. At the climate summit on September 23rd, governments will submit plans to meet the Paris Agreement pledge of keeping global temperature increases well below two degrees Celsius. Although, you know, Donald Trump is trying to pull us out of the Paris

Agreement, though it will not take effect until after the 2020 election, very notably. So I guess my first question is, why does it take an initiative like Covering Climate Now to get us all talking about the climate crisis? Why do we start every Democratic debate with a 30-minute discussion on the intricacies of Medicare for All versus the public option, and then we end up with one question somewhere, if we're lucky, about climate change? And then we end up with one question somewhere, if we're lucky, about climate change. I mean, look, we've talked about this before. Climate change, you couldn't design a tougher problem in a lab. If you tried, the effects are diffuse. The actual impact of climate change is revealing itself slowly over time.

No one terrible storm, no one terrible fire can be explicitly connected to climate change. And yet the cost of climate change are evident over time. The efforts to deal with climate change require collective action on a mammoth and global scale. And all of this creates a sense of fatalism that makes people unattracted to the conversation. Yeah. We're also asking people to do something that could be difficult in the short term for an enormous benefit in the long term. And we as human beings aren't necessarily great at that in general. There's also decades of anti-climate change science that has been funded

by the Koch brothers and fossil fuel industries, which has led to skepticism about the existence of climate change, which has been adopted by the cult of Donald Trump and the Republican Party for many, many years. That's made it a difficult conversation. You know, in sort of doing some research for this segment, one of the best things I saw, though, was that one out of four American teenagers have engaged in activism around climate. That's a remarkable number. Yeah. 25% of any demographic doing something, walking out of something, attending a rally, writing to a public official to express your views on climate change. That's exactly the kind of activism we need to drive this issue to the fore

and to get people to actually care and to get our government to do something. I do think that the good news here is that the politics of climate change have begun to change themselves fairly drastically over the last several years. Now, the bad news is the reason that i think that they've changed is because we are starting to really see and experience um all over the place these extreme weather events droughts floods uh fires record heat waves all the same like it's just happening all over the place now and you start you know there was a there's a good piece we were reading in preparation for this uh in time magazine about how the politics of climate change has affected the race in Iowa. Because there's so many farmers there who are like, there's been floods that have cost me, you know, a lot of money.

And then there was drought that cost me a lot of money. And so now all these farmers who are in the middle of the country who we wouldn't think be big climate change people are now climate change people. So there was a CBS News poll recently that said a majority of Americans believe that climate change is a serious problem, and more than 25% would consider it to be a crisis. 56% of those polled said that we need to address climate change right now, and 7 in 10 think human activity contributes a lot or some. So, you know, the politics are changing, and, you know, we saw this in our change poll of Wisconsin. We've seen it in polling across a whole bunch of different states and around the country in the Democratic primary.

Climate is now after health care in many of these polls, the second most important issue to Democratic voters. And yet, while everyone came out with their climate plans, it still seems like we haven't had a couple new cycles on Democratic candidates talking about climates except once they roll out their plans, you know. Yeah, it's interesting. There's a connection, I think, between the way in which health care and immigration have dominated the debates and climate and the economy have been given second billing. And they're connected in that I think one of the good shifts we've seen, in part because of the Green New Deal, when the Green New Deal came out, the Republicans immediately latched onto that one set of talking points ways you'll be helped, as ways there'll be jobs and new technologies, I think we're on solid ground. The right understands that they are more successful talking about climate change when they're talking about things that people want to take away from you, whether it's cows or airplanes or cars or what have you. And so I think. Or the frame that Tommy was talking about, which I think is the real problem, that climate change is all about sacrificing something in your life now for benefits that you may never see. And if it's framed that way, we will not succeed, I don't think. Yeah. And so I do think. Look, I'm not talking about the science.

I'm talking about the politics. I'm not talking about the science. I'm talking about the politics. You know, I think one of the most important stats we've seen is that 70, I think it's more recent study found that more than 70% of global emissions since I think 1988 have come from, I think, 100 companies. And I think when we resort this whole issue, when we reframe it less as a collective action conservation problem and more as a corporate malfeasance, technology and investment problem. I think we're on much firmer ground. I also think like, I'm glad we did these climate

change forums. I think they were valuable. But I do think a debate would have actually been better because conflict gets news coverage. And there was no sense of a contrast between what's in one plan versus another. I do think that for too long, the conversation around climate change was like, the polar bears are going to drown and things that fell very far off. The IPCC report that said, we're basically in huge trouble if we don't drastically fix the problem

or reduce emissions by 2030, that changed the context. But I also think people need to understand that climate change is not binary. We don't fix it or not. We can make things better or we can make things worse based on our actions. And I hope that understanding will reduce some of the fatalism you hear that's like, well, if the US doesn't do anything, the Chinese are just going

to continue to use coal fired plants and put all the smog into the air and we're screwed no matter what. So what's the point? Actually, that's not the case. We can make things better. And I do think, and the reason that I've always thought that the Green New Deal is actually smarter politics than some of the more moderate proposals that don't include proposals to sort of, you know, sustain economic justice. I think the Green New Deal is smarter politics because we need to talk about it as within this crisis, there is great opportunity to create an economy that is fair and just and produces all kinds of well, good paying jobs. And people can get training for all these new jobs and they can be guaranteed that, you know, they have a federal job guarantee in there and they can make sure that they have benefits. And people on the front lines of communities who are getting devastated by climate change can be helped now, not 10 years from now,

but right now. I think we need to talk about this as, look, we have a dirty energy economy here in the United States and around the world. And in the transition to the cleaner energy economy, to a renewable energy economy that we have to make if we want to survive, there is plenty of opportunity to have an economy that is more fair and more just and still productive and growing all around the world. This can be a win-win, and it doesn't just have to be make all these sacrifices now, and hopefully things in the future will be better. Well, that's why I think when Warren in the climate change town hall was asked, I don't

know, was asked about straws and what have you. She said this is what they want to talk about. They want you to think they're coming for your hamburgers. They're coming for your plastic straws. Because that feels like the kind of old confiscatory, conservative, your personal sacrifice version of the debate when the Green New Deal makes this about infrastructure and opportunity and jobs and all the other good things people inherently understand comes from new technology, renewable energy and what have you. All right, let's talk about the primary. Last week's debate was the first where Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren were on stage at the same time. But aside from an initial exchange on health care, the two front runners didn't draw too many contrasts with one another.

And a few pieces over the weekend tried to dig into why and what might happen next. The New York Times noted that Biden delivered a veiled swipe at Warren at a fundraiser the day after the debate, saying the country needs not just plans, but quote, someone who can execute a plan. And Politico reported that some of Biden's allies in Warren's home state of Massachusetts are going after the senator on electability, with one state rep saying, the grave concern of many of us Democrats in Massachusetts is that in many of the counties where Senator Warren underperforms, they are demographically and culturally similar to voters in key swing states. As for Warren, the Times notes that her goals in the near term are to consolidate her backing from liberals and expand her appeal to lower income voters and minorities. Attacking Mr. Biden might not serve

either goal. Let's start with Biden here. What do we think about his strategy of largely avoiding direct conflict? And what do we think of the argument he's making about Warren through the veiled swipes and through his supporters and allies? I think the we don't just need plans, we need people who can implement them. While true is probably not going to be the most effective attack. I do think that trying to go after Warren on electability grounds is probably their best bet judging on my conversation with people in Iowa, where it's literally the only thing they think about. Now it's, we've talked about this before. It's an unfair comparison. It's an ill-defined

term. We don't really know what it means i think looking at data from a massachusetts senate race where elizabeth warren didn't run a single tv ad is probably imperfect at best but if you can sow that seed of doubt in a potential or current warren supporter it might be effective what do you think i think going look when when you said like oh we need someone who's gonna get something done immediately what i thought of was the consumer financial protection i thought the same thing elizabeth it's a weird one to go after her on it's something so frustrating about the kind of what the the the the access to these debates have been on health care this one is very similar in that okay elizabeth warren doesn't know how to get things done she created the consumer financial protection bureau she's

one of the most influential policymakers of the last half century on democrat on the democratic side like okay, let's debate it on those terms. But then it's similar to the health care debate in that Biden attacks Medicare for all, not, I think, with what is, I think, the ultimate motivation for some of the supporters of a public option, which is this is the thing we can get done. Single payer might be a better outcome in the long run, but it's politically unfeasible. I think that that is the undergirding argument for a lot of the public option defense. But he doesn't make it on those on that frame. He makes it on a pure policy frame that actually his plan is fundamentally

better, not just more politically feasible. And I think you see the same thing. Electability is ultimately the the the redoubt for Biden and Biden supporters. And they are trying to find a less political and a more inspiring way to have this conversation. You know, maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. But that was what I was thinking. Yeah, I think Warren has understood so far that the best way to prove electability is to win. Right. It's show not tell. And yet I also think at some point I imagine she will turn to an argument about not necessarily why she is the most electable but why she can win you know what are the qualities that she brings to a race with donald trump that would make her a candidate who is able to beat him and i think

because of what you said tommy this is the it's on the minds of everyone you talk to in iowa it's on the minds of the electorate we know from poll after poll after poll, we can all yell about it all we want on Twitter about electability. And yet that's what Democratic voters are thinking about. And they're very scared that Donald Trump's going to win again. And so if you want to be the nominee, at some point, you have to make an argument about why you can win. Maybe it's your issues that you're talking about. Maybe it's the contrast that you have with Trump. You know, Bernie Sanders has actually been making an argument for his policies and himself and his electability vis-a-vis Donald Trump from the beginning.

Sometimes the Sanders campaign throws out a lot of polls, which I think are sort of useless to do that. But there's a lot of times where Bernie is contrasting like his background with Donald Trump's background, you know, in a speech and his policies with Donald Trump's policies. And he's sort of trying to get you to imagine him and Donald Trump on stage together. And I think I imagine that at some point Elizabeth Warren will pivot to an argument similar to that. Yeah, I mean, there's I guess there's two levels. is the kind of public-facing, less intellectual, less data-driven argument, basically saying,

see me on the stage with Trump, see me battling Trump. It makes sense. Here's how I'll do it. But I do think one piece of this is the fact that consistently, when you look at head-to-head polls in states like Wisconsin, often those polls show Warren defeating Trump, Kamala Harris defeating Trump, Joe Biden defeating Trump. But consistently, Joe Biden has a bigger edge in those polls. And I think when you get the kind of conversation around Biden never totally gets past that. And so I'd be interested in a Warren campaign argument about why I shouldn't care about that distinction. Now, maybe it's because she believes she'll do better over time, or maybe she believes that those numbers about Biden in Wisconsin are actually soft and concealing some

of his weaknesses. But I just haven't seen that argument fully spelled out. Meanwhile, she's in a great position. I mean, she's got she doesn't have to lay a glove on Biden. She knows that if she attacks him, her unfavorables will go up. And you don't want to do that this early. But she's got she doesn't have to lay a glove on Biden. She knows that if she attacks him, her unfavorables will go up and you don't want to do that this early. But she's got a whole bunch of people just laying broadsides on the guy at every single debate. So if I'm Elizabeth Warren, I'm wondering how I got so lucky to be positioned as I am right now. I was going to say I was going to ask you what you thought about her strategy of largely avoiding attacking him. And I do think it's quite smart. I think his strategy of not directly,

I mean, he's doing it through veiled swipes and his allies and stuff like that. But look, there is a reason that Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren at the top of the field right now, and even to an extent, Bernie Sanders are not all going after each other. Sanders is a little more directly confronting Biden. But there's a reason that Warren and Biden aren't doing it is because they are both very well liked in the electorate. Right. Like these differences are magnified on cable and Twitter and everywhere in the media. But if you look at favorability ratings for Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, they are both very, very high. Same thing with with Bernie Sanders, too, within the Democratic primary.

And a lot of people know them. Their name ID is at the top of the field as well. And so and when you look at second choice for Biden or you look at second choice for Warren, you look at second choice for Sanders, there's a lot of mixing there of supporters that are going to each other. So you don't want to be the one who's attacking another candidate who is people have a lot of affection for, whether you're Elizabeth Warren or Joe Biden. You know, I don't think Warren needs to beat biden right now i think she needs to be the sole alternative to biden in the minds of most voters especially progressives and she will be well positioned now if this whole conversation is stressing you out vote save america.com slash fair fight donate build out

the election infrastructure we need to win in 2020 no matter who wins the primary yeah and i also i do think that warren's task now is to really make inroads with um voters of color and uh non-college educated voters as well because she's not broken into either of those groups the latest cnn poll here's the white vote in the latest cnn poll warren 23 biden 21 Sanders 15. Here's the non-white vote in the latest CNN poll, Biden 28, Sanders 19, Warren 12. And that Biden number has hung on despite many months of a lot of criticisms thrown at Joe Biden about all kinds of issues. How much do you think there's a connection between the electability conversation, which has generally been about how Biden has this advantage and these kinds of polls that show a strong support

outside of the kind of liberal white college educated voters that have been more favorable towards Bernie and Warren. That there are a lot of people out there that are looking at this election and just view Trump as such a tremendous threat that they're just going to go with the safest choice. And I guess what I'm getting at is how much of Elizabeth Warren's problem, outside of what her current base of support is, is tied back to that electability problem. I think it, I mean, we don't know how much of a problem it is right now, but I think that is

going to be her biggest challenge. I think if we were in 2008 right now, and it was the end of George Bush's second term, and he was a horrible president, everyone's looking to see who the next president is. And this was instead of Obama and Hillary, Biden and Warren. I think Warren would have been close to overtaking Joe Biden right now because the risk tolerance in 08 on trying something new and different and big structural change was higher than it is now because Donald Trump is sitting there as president. And I think the Warren campaign and all these other campaigns, whether it's Kamala Harris, Beto O'Rourke, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, they have to reckon with the fact that the risk tolerance among the Democratic electorate or

people who have voted Democrat in the past is much lower than it has been for a while because of who is in the oval office it's interesting i do think that's part of what you're seeing there's a different but connected calculation from pete as he shifts to a kind of more center left moderate alternative very quickly might i add he's we're pretty fast into that way but but it's now, it's also, I think, there's still this question is not just will Warren defeat the, not whether there will be a left alternative to Biden, but will there be a center left alternative to Biden? And there are still a few candidates just right below the top three saying, I want to be the Biden alternative for those looking for the safe option.

the Biden alternative for those looking for the safe option. I think the challenge there is, if you're a voter who wants a safer option, who wants someone that you feel, oh, I'm pretty positive this person could be Donald Trump, do you see that in a Pete Buttigieg, a Kamala Harris, a Beto O'Rourke, a Cory Booker? Even a Bernie Sanders. Even a Bernie Sanders. And I don't know, a better O'Rourke a Cory Booker even a Bernie Sanders even a Bernie Sanders and I don't know that might be a harder case to make than just a case for yourself and your candidacy in general not a case that like I'm going to swerve to be the moderate alternative to Joe Biden like I just don't know that that calculation with Biden's name recognition and the space he occupies right now is and sort of like waiting for him to collapse is the, is a, is a calculation that you should make, especially if, look, if you are a, I think if you're Amy

Klobuchar, of course, that's a good calculation because that's what you are. That's what you believe. You know, that's who you are. That's who you've always been. Pete Buttigieg, I don't know that that's who he's always been. Yeah. I think of it, I'm actually paying attention to it less as what it means for Pete Buttigieg than what it means for Joe Biden, and that there are a number of Democratic candidates who believe Joe Biden's support is softer than it looks, or at least are betting that if it is, they want to be there. Yeah, that's right. All right. When we come back, Tommy's interview with Politico's Natasha Bertrand. Okay, I am joined by Natasha Bertrand, Politico's national security correspondent and a contributor for NBC News and MSNBC. She recently broke the story about Air Force stays at Trump's Turnberry Resort earlier this month.

Natasha, thanks for doing the show. Thanks for having me. So you were the first to report on these Air Force crews staying at Trump's fancy Turnberry Golf Resort in Scotland. Why are these stays so atypical in your view? Yeah, so we got a tip from someone who was essentially in their mind kind of acting like a whistleblower here saying that, you know, they had never experienced this particular flight that they took over in March from the US to the Middle East, that they had never experienced a stopover in Scotland, and that the stopover that they had at the airport nearby Trump's resort was in and of itself unusual for that particular trip. And then, of course, the stay at Trump Turnberry Resort was extremely bizarre for

them as well, because it would be outside of their per diem rates in terms of the food and, you know, even the cost of the stay that the Air Force now disputes that. So one of the big questions, I think, that stems from this is whether it's obviously So one of the big questions I think that stems from this is whether it's obviously a violation of the domestic emoluments clause, which prevents the president from accepting any federal money outside of his salary. And that is what the House Oversight Committee has been investigating for the last several months. They wrote a letter to the Pentagon in June asking whether this was an isolated incident, whether there were more occasions of the U.S. Air Force lodging at Trump's Turnberry Resort en route

to the Middle East. And they never got a reply. And they gave the Pentagon a deadline last week of last Friday. We don't know whether they've heard back. But since we reported on that one trip in March, we've gotten additional information and learned that it's been actually about 40 times that the Air Force has done this. Wow. So another key part of this story is that the Air Force crews were refueling planes at Prestwick Airport. That's a nearby airport to Turnberry, I believe. The Prestwick Airport actually received its first Air Force contract in 2015, which is obviously during the Obama administration. But it does seem odd. Like, I don't pretend to understand how the Department of Defense procures things like fuel

and whatever else. But do you have any sense of why the Air Force would want to refuel at that airport versus other options, presumably where you might be able to have discounted fuel? Yeah, it's a great question. And this is one of the reasons why the person who reached out to us was so concerned about this, because usually they refuel at U.S. military bases, right? And Germany or Spain or Italy, wherever has the space for them, essentially. What the Air Force has been telling us is that in an effort to kind of consolidate their operations in Europe and kind of, you know, work down their stops at military bases and, you know, as they're kind of, you know, decreasing general activity over there, they've forged these partnerships with commercial airports in order to just for convenience sake,

have a place to refuel on these missions. What we don't know is whether these commercial contracts are happening elsewhere, why Prestwick in particular was selected when there's a military base right nearby in England that isn't necessarily very crowded and that the Air Force has used, that has continued to use even with this contract with Prestwick. And, you know, how much more expensive it is actually for them to be refueling there because it costs a lot more for them to do that rather than refuel and have technical maintenance provided to the planes at a U.S. military base.

And, of course, the significance of Prestwick is that it was on the verge of bankruptcy until the Scottish government bought it for a pound back in 2013. And it is the closest airport to Trump's resort. So if that airport fails, then Trump's resort could really suffer. So there's a symbiotic relationship there that is also kind of raising eyebrows among critics. Yeah. I mean, this whole thing is so confusing, because I believe Turnberry was in pretty dire financial straits at one point as well. I don't know how well it's doing now, because obviously, the President of the United States refuses to provide any financial information. But so it seems bizarrely coincidental that suddenly you would see Air Force crews staying at Trump's resort, you'd see the Air Force sending people to

this random airport in Scotland, which doesn't really seem like it's on the way to wherever these folks are going. But it also happened. I mean, the refueling happened in 2015. So I'm just, I've been really been struggling with how to understand this. And I don't know if you have any tips for people who haven't followed it as closely as you. Yeah, I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that this contract was signed under the Obama administration in terms of the Air Force and the refueling at this particular airport. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the Air Force had to stay at Trump's resort, right? There are a lot of hotels in between Prestwick Airport and, you know, Trump Turnberry, where the Air

Force could have been lodging their crews once Trump took office, and it became a conflict of interest, a clear, you know, potential boon for the president and for the struggling resort that Obama wasn't, it didn't matter for Obama, because he doesn't own Turnberry. So I think the conflict here, and which is what the Air Force is actually reviewing, they launched an internal review last week, and what the House Oversight Committee has been investigating is whether this is a violation of the Constitution. And short of that, whether it's just an ethical lapse, whether the perception that the U.S. military is enriching the president and providing a lifeline to this struggling resort is something

that they can justify to the American taxpayers who are ultimately footing this bill. Yeah. So you mentioned that the Air Force did a probe of this issue. I think they found that Cruz stated Turnberry up to 40 times. The Oversight Committee is now investigating Turnberry. Do you know how long those investigations will take and what kind of public disclosure there will be based on their findings? We have no idea. I mean, we know that the Air Force is still in the middle of their review. And so they're not giving us a breakdown, for example, of how many times the Air Force has stayed at Turnberry since Trump took office. And they haven't given us a breakdown exactly of the costs and how much taxpayers are actually paying for this and what hotels were unavailable or really the justification for them essentially being Turnberry's biggest customer at this point.

The Oversight Committee has been investigating, but they asked the Pentagon for documents by Friday, as I mentioned earlier, but they haven't, to our knowledge, gotten anything back. So it could be right now it's an independent investigation into U.S. military expenditures at and around Trump's property in Scotland and other properties. But it could be wrapped into the overall corruption investigation that the House is doing. And if we see that, of course, then it's going to drag on for a while as this becomes more involved in the overall impeachment proceedings. Yeah, the on again, off again, impeachment proceedings that we're maybe doing, maybe not, depends on who you ask on what day. Yeah, right. So we're seeing what we saw today from Nadler is that the House Judiciary Chairman

is that he believes that Trump should be impeached. And he says that we are in the middle of an impeachment investigation. But, you know, depending on which Democrat you ask, you'll get a thousand different answers. Yeah, that's always a winning strategy to message it. So another interesting thing that happened over the weekend was Congressman Adam Schiff has subpoenaed the acting director of national intelligence, claiming that he is unlawfully withholding a whistleblower complaint from the committee, maybe at the behest of the president, maybe the pest of someone in the White House. Schiff says that because the DNI is citing executive privilege around this document,

around this whistleblower, it means it has to involve some top White House officials. I know that this matter is just completely shrouded in classification and secrecy, but do you have any sense of what's going on or how this might play out? Yeah, this was a real shock for us on Friday night to receive this kind of scathing statement from Schiff, who's the chairman of the Intel Committee, giving us just enough detail to be really concerned about a potential cover-up here that could involve the president and a whistleblower in the intelligence community who went to the inspector general of the CIA evidently to lodge some kind of complaint based on what he'd seen or she.

But not enough for us to actually know what the alleged indiscretion was, Not enough for us to actually know what the indiscretion, alleged indiscretion was, whether or not, you know, the president has actually been involved in discussions to keep it from the House Intel Committee. But, you know, this was really bizarre, honestly, for Schiff to put out this kind of statement. We rarely see him making this kind of, you know, subpoena and statement so strongly and so publicly, and especially when the details on the public end are so scarce. So this really felt to us like it was a last resort, like he was making this public because the negotiations between the Intel Committee and the acting Director of National Intelligence had just fallen apart. Even though the Inspector General within the CIA had gone directly to the Intel committee and said, look, just have to give you a heads up. We have this whistleblower. I

can't give you the full details of their complaint. You're going to have to go through the DNI. So really what we're hoping to see in the next coming days is just more details of what this complaint actually was, evidence that Schiff might have to suggest that this cover up that he's alleging came from the White House. And, you know, what involvement the Justice Department has had in this, because according to Schiff's complaint, the director, acting director of national intelligence, actually took this complaint from the whistleblower to the Justice Department, which is unusual because that would be then outside of the boundaries of the intelligence community. So the whole thing is very odd. And Schiff has been out on TV over the last few days discussing it, but again, really not providing any kind of, you know, minute details. Yeah, it's hard to stress how weird it would be, I think, for a CIA inspector general to take a matter to the Department of Justice.

Normally, they would be hellbent on resolving these kinds of things internally, if at all possible. Right. It's very weird. And that's one of the biggest complaints, obviously, that we've seen from the Durham investigation, which is the Justice Department essentially going in and trying to interview CIA officers about the conclusions that they drew in 2016 during the Russia probe, just that kind of mixing of the DOJ and the intel community is seen as a big no-no because on the one hand, you're dealing with prosecutors who deal in criminal activity. On the other hand, you're dealing with intel officers who deal in human intelligence. And so they always fear that, you know, the DOJ and the administration is going to politicize their intelligence. So it's very messy, and we still don't have really any answers. Yeah, it's one of those stories. It's like this could be like earth shattering, massive revelations. It might not. And there's just no way for us to tell. And that feels like the infuriating part for the course during the Trump era. Although I guess ultimately,

reporters have managed to figure out every detail of every scandal. So hope springs eternal. The other big news over the weekend, obviously, was this attack on the Saudi oil infrastructure. The Trump administration is pointing the finger at Iran. The Houthi rebels have come out and taken responsibility. I guess I naively had hoped that John Bolton leaving this administration might cool tensions with Iran. There was reporting about potential talk of Trump maybe meeting with the president of Iran, President Rouhani at the UN General Assembly. Obviously, the Iranians have a lot to say about how relations with the US go. But just stepping back a little bit, I mean, do you have a sense of who is calling the shots when it comes to foreign policy?

Is Pompeo in charge of everything now? I mean, I think that Pompeo is just a reactive figure, to be honest. I mean, he doesn't even really seem to know what the president's impulses are going to be one day to the next. And I think we saw that with the disagreement over whether or not the president actually said that he would meet with Iran without preconditions. You know, he had said that in interviews previously, and then he sent out Pompeo to tell reporters that just last week or the week before. And now he's completely undermined that and said that he actually never said that. So Pompeo then is, of course, left looking kind of like an idiot, like he doesn't

really know what's going on. So I think, you know, I think Pompeo is definitely the person that Trump trusts most in his foreign policy orbit. And I'm sure that he takes advice from Pompeo the most. And that's actually part of the tension that led Bolton to resign is that Pompeo and Bolton were constantly clashing. But, you know, ultimately, Trump is his own foreign policy advisor, right? And, you know, I think that's why we're seeing so much kind of schizophrenic behavior when it comes to creating a cohesive, coherent approach to dealing with these crises. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I remember well when the, you know, sort of ongoing complaint about the Obama national security team was that it was small and insular and, you know, cabinet secretaries are being cut out. And I just, you know, it definitely feels like there's a tiny

cabal of individuals who are making all these decisions. And, you know, normal players like the Defense Department don't seem to even be relevant in some of these debates. Right. And, you know, I think part of the irony of this Saudi-Iranian conflict now and with the president trying to say that, trying to pin all the blame on Iran is that, you know, all of a sudden now he kind of he appears to trust his intel community, right? I mean, it's completely selective when he decides that he wants to do certain things to put pressure on the person or adversary that he doesn't like at this moment, and other times when he feels like the intel community is acting against his own personal interests. I do think, though, that ultimately what Trump wants, and I was speaking to a national security official, senior national

security official who actually left the administration very recently, it was not John Bolton, but who really emphasized to me that Trump is obsessed with nuclear weapons, absolutely obsessed. And he sees everything through that lens. And, you know, for better or for worse, his main focus and his, you know, and when it comes to foreign policy, anyway, is trying to prevent anyone from using a nuclear bomb. And that is why he's met with Kim Jong Un in North Korea, why he's made such a big show of trying to become friends with everyone. And that is ultimately why he has been starting to kind of back down in recent weeks on, you know, holding this really hard line with Iran.

And that's ultimately what led John Bolton to resign in fury as well, is that he wanted to ease sanctions on Iran. And Bolton was extremely against that. He wanted to meet without preconditions. And Bolton, again, was very against that. I think now though with what we're seeing with Iran and this remains to be seen because the satellite images that the administration released of the attacks are not totally consistent with an attack directly from Iran. They're not all pointing in that direction but we'll see whether or not they can produce more solid evidence of that. But you know he now I think is using that as a way just like he But, you know, he now, I think, is using that as a way, just like he did by, you know, tweeting out that classified image, that satellite image of the Iran's, you know,

missile launch. He sees it as a way to kind of taunt them and threaten them and thinks that he can back them into a corner now and that he has leverage. But ultimately, I don't think, you know, as his own foreign policy advisor, and as an America first type of guy, and as someone who is constantly threatening war and has in the past on Twitter and never actually followed through on it, I don't think that we're going to see any kind of serious military action. Oh, man, I'd forgotten about the tweet of the classified image of the Iranian, you know, space station, quote, unquote, site, that the best thing I've ever heard about Donald Trump's focus on foreign policy is that he wants to prevent the use of nuclear weapons. If only that were to be translated into negotiations with the Russians who actually

have nuclear weapons and not the Iranians who don't about limiting their deployment, that would be a wonderful thing. But here we are. Last question for you. So now we have like, Here we are. Last question for you. So now we have like acting DNI. We have an acting Homeland Security Secretary. We have an acting chief of staff. We have some guy I've never heard of who's the national security advisor. Is there any sense of when Trump might step up and replace John Bolton? I mean, that's the easiest one for him to do. He doesn't actually have to get Senate confirmed. He could just name somebody tomorrow. Right. And he's actually been he's narrowed his search in recent days, you know, to people like Ricky Waddell, who is a former deputy national security adviser, and Robert O'Brien, who's the current presidential envoy for hostage affairs. And these are both kind of, you know, you could say of O'Brien, at least, that he's kind of an establishment figure. He kind of worked in the Bush administration, et cetera. But he could also go with, you know, a totally rogue choice like Rick Grinnell, who's the ambassador to Germany at this point and who he had lunch with the other day. And Grinnell is kind of very eager for any administration position that he can get at this moment.

He's been angling for every type of national security intel position for years now. And then there's also Keith Kellogg, who's on his radar, who's a national security advisor for Mike Pence. So there's no real timeline here. But like you said, there's no need for Senate confirmation. So he could do it really any day and probably by Twitter. Great. Natasha, thank you so much for doing the show. Thank you for your great reporting on Turnberry and everything else. Everybody should follow you on

Twitter. Where can they find you? At Natasha Bertrand. That's easy enough. Thank you again for doing the show. Talk to you soon.

Thanks, Tommy. Thanks to Natasha Bertrand for joining us today. Everyone go to votesaveamerica.com slash fair fight. Right now.

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