Pod Save America - “Fox’s $787 Million Lie.”

Episode Date: April 20, 2023

Fox’s lies cost them more than three-quarters of a billion dollars, House Republicans settle on a wildly unpopular debt ceiling ransom, and Ron DeSantis lets a wave of home state endorsements slip through his pudding fingers. Then later, Strict Scrutiny’s Leah Litman stops by break down the legal implications of the Dominion settlement and the fight to keep abortion medication legal.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's show, Fox Lies costs the network three quarters of a billion dollars. House Republicans settle on a wildly unpopular debt ceiling ransom. Ron DeSantis lets a wave of home state endorsements slip through his pudding fingers. And later, strict scrutiny's Leah Lippman stops by to break down the legal implications of the Dominion settlement and talk about new Supreme Court developments in the fight to keep abortion medication legal. But first, we are extremely excited to release the trailer for Pod Save the UK, hosted by comedian Nish Kumar and journalist Coco Khan. This hilarious and brilliant podcast will be your go-to source for all the political developments across the pond. And the first episode will be out just in time for the coronation of King Charles. Perfect. We're producing this with our friends at Reduce Listening. They are such pros. They are so smart. Lovett and Tommy and I recorded an episode with Nish and coco last week could not stop laughing the whole time

i think love it made a lot of you know 1776 jokes there's some real you know it's everything you'd expect but the good thing is they are brilliant they are funny and uh we are very very excited about the podcast um can't wait for you to hear the show listen to the trailer now wherever you get your podcasts and don't forget to subscribe. Also, if you're looking for a binge-worthy podcast and still haven't checked out Stiff'd, now is the time. This is the eight-part series from Crooked Media

and iHeartRadio about the rise and fall of Viva, the erotic magazine for women that rocked the publishing world in 1973. With a team of feminist writers and editors behind it, Viva had everything from full frontal nudity. How many times can I say full frontal nudity in the housekeeping for Pod Save America? That's the test. That's the test.

At least twice a week is basically where we are. At least twice a week. With Porn King. I see now I've lost my place. I'm just, that's too much full frontal nudity. With Porn King publisher Bob Guccione at the helm. Were they always destined for failure? Find out now by listening to the first half of Stiffed,

available for free on your favorite podcast platform. Don't miss out on this podcast. All right, let's get to the news. The media trial of the century ended before it began this week as Fox News paid Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million in a last-minute settlement that denies libs like us the satisfaction of six weeks in court where Rupert Murdoch, Tucker Carlson, Maria Bartiromo, and other Fox bozos would finally be exposed as lying grifters who treat their

viewers like morons. But alas, Dominion gets the largest media settlement in history, worth 10 times the value of their company, and we get nothing. No squirming under oath, no admissions of guilt, no on-air apologies. Just a statement from Fox that says they, quote, acknowledge the court's rulings, finding certain claims about Dominion to be false. Dan, why did Dominion and its lawyers rob us of this joy? Do they hate content? It's our fault for getting our hopes up, as we do all the time. We never learn our lesson.

We get excited and we just have them crushed. That is what happened here. I mean, look, it was probably naive on our part to choose as our fighter in the battle for democracy a voting software company owned by a private equity firm represented by major trial lawyers to be the ones who are going to fight for this in some sort of Aaron Sorkin-esque battle for the truth. I mean, of course they settled. Why wouldn't they settle? Fox had every incentive to settle. Dominion, as you said, it was a company that was worth $80 million a few years ago. A private equity firm has majority

stake in the company. It's being represented by lawyers who get a cut of the settlement. Why would they not take the largest settlement in media defamation history right there without having to go through any risk of losing that at trial? Yeah. I mean, I also let myself get too hopeful about this one because way back when, when it started, I was like, of course they're going to end up settling. Why would Fox go to trial? And then, you know, there's a lot of reporting like Dominion doesn't want to settle. Dominion doesn't want to settle. But like, look, even if one of their goals, one of their big goals, Dominions was to, you know, prevent Fox News from doing more damage and help save democracy. Like their primary goal is to make money.

They are a business. And even though they had a very high chance of winning, it wasn't certain. It wasn't certain at all that they would get that much money, the amount of money they did and like you suggested it probably would have taken years to go through the appeals process to get all this money or less or an apology from from them based on like just all the different they could have gone it probably would have ended up at the supreme court and who knows what they would have done so you know they took they took the money which is again it's a business what are you gonna do And let's just, before we get all depressed about this, because of this suit, we got to learn a lot of really fun, really important and quite

embarrassing information about Fox and its personalities. Yes. They cannot take that. We had that content. They cannot take it away from us. Yeah. I mean, look, has Fox's ratings suffered at all? No. But, you know, there's been a couple polls. There was a poll from last month. It found that, like,

20% of Fox viewers trust the network less because of the revelations over the last several months. That is a very small percentage, but it's something. Do you think this settlement will impact Fox's business,

and will it at all impact fox's behavior it's gonna be tough for their business they're gonna have to make some real cuts the five is gonna become the four oh my god i'm so sorry i was testing out you testing out your white house correspondence material here look i, you know, you got Lovett's basically professional comedian. Tommy's out here just bringing songs and AI stuff. I'm just trying to bring something to the table here. It can't just all be data for progress cross tabs I got. Do you have a eulogy for this trial that you can read like Tommy did for Mike Pompeo's campaign?

Because it's going viral. Oh, I know. I helped. I participated in its virality. I retweeted it repeatedly because it was good stuff. All right. This hurts their business for sure, but they're going to get to write some of this off in their taxes. Their insurance may cover some of it.

The Fox Corporation carries around about $4 billion in cash at any one time. They make over a billion dollars a year in net revenue. So they can afford this, but it's bad. Much like the conversation about Donald Trump getting indicted, no one's ever a winner when they're paying $800 million to someone else. In terms of their behavior, hard to say. They do not want this to happen again. They're going to

be more careful. They're certainly going to stop texting about all of their crimes. I imagine that will be the case. Yeah, maybe get some burner phones, you know? I don't know. Maybe do your crimes in person. Don't take notes on a criminal conspiracy. That is the rule. And I

think about it. Put yourself in this position. They're not going to become fair and balanced. They're not going to, you know, they're not going to get rid of the conspiracy theorists, blowhards in primetime and the media. And they're not going to the propagandists are not going to become mediocre journalists in the daytime. Like it's going to say basically the same. But imagine a situation where Donald Trump, we are in October and November of 2024. And Donald Trump is pushing more in October and November of 2024, and Donald Trump is pushing more conspiracy theories about the election. Fox is going to be this much more careful about that

because this costs them almost a billion dollars. They're facing another, they're facing more lawsuits. The price tag of the lies around the election is going to be quite high for them, and there may be just a wee bit of hesitancy before they do it again. Yeah, I mean, I think that there'll be hesitancy around potentially defaming a big corporation that could sue them, you know. And so if Trump is pushing a big lie again, as opposed to targeting Dominion voting systems or Smartmatic or any of the other voting systems, they could just, you know, they could have pushed the big lie without specifically targeting Dominion. Right. They could have just said plenty of questions. You know, they could have aired the conspiracy theories and they could have like there's a whole I mean, Donald Trump does this all the time.

You know, when he's like, oh, I would. Who knows? A lot of people are saying that there's some there's some stuffed ballots somewhere and I don't know. A lot of people are saying that there's some stuffed ballots somewhere and I don't know. And they're going to do all that. And they're just going to be a little bit more careful about how they lie because they don't want to actually defame specific corporations. Or specific people. Because let's not forget, a few years ago, they had to settle a case with the family of Seth Rich, the murdered DNC staffer who they slandered and claimed that he was murdered because he leaked documents to WikiLeaks, which was obviously completely not true. Let me just put it this way. The legal risk

of being in the lying business has gone up. And because of this settlement, there are going to be more lawyers and more potential plaintiffs looking to bring suits. And so it's very possible that if Fox continues its business as it has been doing, it's going to get more expensive to do so. possible that if Fox continues its business as it has been doing, it's going to get more expensive to do so. And that is not cost-free. They are in a dying business. Every day, more people come to court. Literally. Yeah, literally. I mean, their audience, yes, demographically, but they make their money from carriage fees based on the number of people who have cable. The number of people who have cable is going down every day. And so they are already managing a very profitable, but a decline nonetheless. And that's going to get more expensive as more lawsuits come. Because you know, there are a whole bunch of people who just

watch the Dominion lawyers get quite rich and they're going to, lawyers going to be out looking for plaintiffs to do the same thing. This is what happened to Big Tobacco. Yes. And look, we're going to talk about Smartmatic in a minute, which is another defamation lawsuit that Fox faces. There are also potentially going to be shareholder lawsuits. And what happens with shareholder lawsuits is oftentimes the Fox shareholders who might sue the company for this might demand some kind of management change. You know, and so you might get there's been some reporting that Fox clearly doesn't want to admit that they're going to get rid of people because of this lawsuit. But you could start seeing a few heads roll, like not not any of the big stars, like maybe a Sid, a Jerry, maybe even a Tom.

I mean, they already essentially fired Lou Dobbs for his role in spreading the Smartmatic conspiracy theories. They've already, in one way, admitted some culpability there and will probably be looking to settle that lawsuit as well. I do wonder about other MAGA media outlets like OAN, Newsmax, told the exact same lies about Dominion, don't have as much money as Fox. Could they get sued? Yeah, absolutely they could get sued. People were maybe less likely to sue them because their pockets are less deep. It's only worth the time and energy for the attorneys if the potential payout is sufficient to cover the costs of the case. And that may not be the case with these middling third tier propaganda networks like OAN

and Newsmax. What I was hoping for more than anything was an outcome that required primetime Fox hosts to deliver on-air apologies. I wanted like five minutes of groveling at the top of every hour, you know, right before they go back to yelling about trans kids and immigrants, that first five minutes, prime time, just making an apology. That's clearly a fantasy that will not be coming true. Do you think that would have had any effect whatsoever beyond our own enjoyment? I don't want to diminish our own enjoyment as a value here. I feel like we've heard that a lot, not just you and I, but everyone listening here, we deserve that. No, I don't think it would have made a bit of difference because we all have these fantasies that Fox has this cult-like power over its viewers.

And it may be the reverse is true because they did tell the truth once, and it was in 2020, after the election, when they said that Joe Biden won Arizona and it was a legitimate win. And did a whole bunch of Fox News viewers come around to the idea that Joe Biden was a legitimate president? No, they didn't change their mind. They changed the channel to Newsmax or OAN to go find someone who would tell them what they want to believe. And I think we underestimate the power of motivated reasoning and why people believe some of the things they believe. And in some ways, Fox is just reflecting back what its viewers want them to say. And so would it have been fun? Yes. Would any amount of embarrassment for Tucker Carlson be a net benefit for society? Yes. Would it have changed the calculus or reverse the radicalization of Republican voters? I don't think

so. Yeah, I keep going back and forth on this one because, you know, one thing we do know is that more than anything else, Fox really didn't want their audience exposed to the truth. I mean, that's why they settled. That's why they refused to apologize. Like they clearly were afraid of what would happen if those audiences were exposed to the truth. But as you point out, they're probably not afraid of that because they think that the audience's minds would change. They thought that the audiences would just leave them for somewhere else. That's the fear.

That's probably why they didn't want all the hosts on the stand and they didn't want to do the on-air apologies. Not because they think they're going to create a bunch of libs, but because those people are just going to go to Newsmax or OAN or somewhere else. Yeah. So, yeah. I think liberals sometimes have this fantasy that if just Michael Bloomberg or someone bought Fox News and shut it down, that the world would be saved and that all these people would turn off Hannity and put on PBS NewsHour. And that's not how it's going to work, right? It's just they're going to go find another source of confirmation bias in their cable news

programming. Have you seen this study by David Brookman and Joshua Kala? And it was they did one last year in 2022, where they paid Fox viewers to watch CNN shortly before the 2020 election. And they found large effects on attitudes and policy preferences about COVID-19, about evaluations of Trump. And then I guess they just did one recently. And they found that one in seven Americans consume over eight hours of partisan media per month, which is like a lot more than I would have expected. And most partisan media voters they found are not aligned strong partisans

and do not have especially strong prior attitudes and that they also rarely consume cross-cutting partisan content or meaningful quantities of national broadcast media. I bring this up because I do wonder if there's more give there with these audiences than we assume. Like sometimes we assume that everyone who watches Fox, their mind is made up forever. They're going to only go further right if they leave Fox to OAN or Newsmax. But I wonder if we are estimating some people who are more casual Fox viewers, who aren't as strong partisans. What do you make of that? I have read the summary of the study. I haven't read the whole thing, obviously, for a lot of reasons.

It's 60 pages. But I have – and there's some interesting points in there that are worth flagging. One is we always say Fox's audience is small, right? They're getting at most four and a half million viewers at a time. And that is a fraction of it. That's not a number that is electorally significant in a national, you know, in terms of the overall national electorate. But if you, but their point is, is that you have to look at the overall audience, not how many people are watching it at any given time, how many people, different people watch it over a period of days. And then that number is actually quite large. Now, some questions I have with that study is, is that as I understood the summary, CNN is included in the partisan

audience. And I'd like to understand, and I understand that the reason for that is that Republicans have been told that CNN is a partisan audience. We can have a lot of debate about what life was like at CNN under Jeff Zucker, under new leadership, et cetera. But I think that there's a real, that isn't even apples to oranges that's like apples to i don't know lug nuts or something like it's just they're just very different things that are hard to compare the one thing i think we also sort of underestimate with fox is the osmotic effect of it because it is on it's not just that people tune in at home like if you go to rural america it's on if when you're getting your oil changed in the waiting room. It's on the

doctor's office. It's on everywhere. And it's also just the people who watch it are then talking about what they see on there. I have seen other studies that are older than this one that raise some real questions about the number of persuadable voters who were there. There's a difference between persuadable voters and not strongly aligned partisans. Like there are people who identify as – who identify as – and this may be adjusted in the other 59 pages of the study that I did not read. But there are – but you can be – you can call yourself a Democrat or an independent and vote with Republicans 100% of the time. And so you have to look not at their party registration or their self-identified party identification, but their actual voting habits and their beliefs to know if there are actually – if there are as many movable voters there as we think.

And one thing we do know both from research and anecdotal data is that like Fox does radicalize people. I mean I don't know if you saw that horrific shooting of Ralph Yarl, the black teenager in Missouri. And they did an interview with the grandson of the 84-year-old guy who shot him. And the grandson's like, yeah, I mean, I actually wasn't really surprised because over the last several years, my grandfather's always been conservative. But he's gone down the Fox, OAN rabbit hole. He's become angrier, listening to the NRA stand your ground stuff. He has been going down that rabbit hole and getting more radicalized over the years. So we know it happens. We know that they have the power to do that. If you have powerful media entities who see it as their business model

and their political incentive to scare the living shit out of a certain set of people about other sets of people, and you live in a society that has easy access to weapons, you're going to end up with things like this happening all the time. So Fox still faces a $2.7 billion lawsuit from Smartmatic, another voting technology company, whose lawyer released a statement right after the settlement that promised the company will expose more of Fox's misconduct and, quote, hold them accountable for undermining democracy. You getting your hopes up again? Is it Smartmatic, the new media trial of the century that's going to finally take down Fox and save democracy? I think that statement, if you were to, like, hold it up to a mirror or play it backwards on a record player,

would say, please call me about settlement terms. Both Fox's response and Smartmatic's is to posture. Fox is like, see, we're not scared of this. Dominion validates us, so we're not going to settle. And Smartmatic is saying, we're going to make this as painful for you as Dominion did. So it'll be interesting to see how this one plays out taking place in New York instead of Delaware, because Delaware has a very specific corporate court system there. New York will be taking place in the regular court system there. That's potentially a very bad jury pool for Fox. But also, Sparomatic is a much smaller business

than Dominion. So their legitimate claims of amount of damages, if they were to go to court, are potentially smaller than Dominion's. Yeah. But again, we should not be expecting Smartmatic, this company, to save democracy. Adam Serwer wrote a great piece in The Atlantic about why this was never going to save democracy. And it ended, I just want to read the paragraph at the end, no lawsuit, no investigation, no state intervention can prevent people from believing falsehoods they want to be true. The only real solution is to prevent those operating under such delusions or the politicians beholden to them from wielding power. And that is not the work of corporations like Dominion. That is not the work of the courts that unfortunately is the work of politics and in democracy it is work that never ends whether it's bob muller trump

indictments we can't none of this shit's gonna save us we shouldn't expect the new york times to save us the mainstream media like we have to do the hard work of persuading people you know and i do think just to end this media conversation you have written about this in all of your books, that the real solution is to build progressive media. And this is why we started Crooked, right? Because instead of just spending all our time trying to take Fox down, you know, like we have to go out there and actually persuade people. And we are competing with the right-wing media ecosystem to make sure that more people aren't radicalized by those media outlets. And simply trying to shut them down is not going to work. We actually have to do the hard work of persuading people ourselves.

The urgency of building up progressive media, I think, was brought even more to the forefront today with the news that BuzzFeed News was shutting down, which just shows that the media economics and the changes in people's information consumption habits mean that the days in which a objective, non-ideological, traditional press could serve as a bulwark against disinformation like what comes from Fox are over. And you're going to have to beat it by competing with it as opposed to hoping someone's going to do it for you. All right. Let's talk about the debt ceiling since House Republicans finally revealed their ransom demands. They will blow up the economy unless Joe Biden agrees to repeal most of the Inflation Reduction Act, cancel student debt relief and cut everything from education and child care to veterans benefits and health care.

President said no deal during a speech at a union hall in Maryland on Wednesday. Folks, here's what's really dangerous. The mega-republican congressmen are threatening to default on the national debt. The debt that took 230 years to accumulate overall. Overall. Unless we do what they say. They say they're going to default unless I agree to all these wacko notions they have. Wacko notions. There's so much awful shit in this plan. It's hard to know what to focus on. Does Kevin McCarthy really think that making it easier for rich people to

cheat on their taxes and jacking up the cost of prescription drugs is a political winner? What's going on here? Kevin McCarthy is not trying to remain speaker of the House. He's trying to remain leader of the Republican caucus. None of this is big picture politics. It's not about trying to persuade voters. It is about continuing to stitch together the 218 votes he needs to remain speaker. And that is forcing his hand to do something the public has no appetite for. His voters have no appetite for. In the long history of dumb, dangerous shit Republicans have done, this is near the top of the list because at least in previous debt ceiling battles in the Obama era, the congressional leaders were responding to a fervor in the base, like a real reaction to government, particularly

in the wake of the bank bailouts and the Recovery Act and the Affordable Care Act that there was this, like that spending, and I use that in the most generic air quotes sense possible, but government really was a driving motivating force. The Republican voters do not give a shit about that. Nate Cohen has this amazing stat that he wrote a few months ago about how in all they did open-ended questions to ask people what they cared about in the New York Times, Siena College polls. And I think it was two people out of 1,500 respondents mentioned government spending as a top concern. It's not about that. And so this is about keeping his caucus, not his voters, but his caucus aligned with him. I mean, the White House has been, I think, doing a great job over the last 24, 48

hours on this, really letting people know what this would mean, because the dance that the Republicans have been trying to do is, oh, we just want to cut spending. We want to, you know, get our deficit in order. And people are notionally supportive of that. But when you dig into what these cuts would mean, education, veterans health care, cancer research, food safety, law enforcement, the repeal of the clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act could put 100,000 clean energy jobs at risk, most of them in red states. Red states and, you know, increase energy bills, take away food assistance for older people. And then, of course, you know, the IRS thing, which is just I've always thought is the most ridiculous hobby horse of the Republican side. It's like it's literally more IRS enforcement to stop rich people from cheating on their taxes. Also, we're going through tax season right now. People have been like because there's more IRS agents,

people found it easier to do taxes. It's been like a better process for people. You repeal this, it's going to increase the deficit and let more rich people cheat on their taxes. This is what they're going to the match for. I just, it's wild to me. It's wild.

You think this passes the House? Probably. I mean, I guess they can only lose four. There's two goobers who said, no, I'm never raising the debt ceiling ever. I guess like George Santos says he's a no right now, but that he could be open to coming around to yes. From his, you got to trust what he says. Yeah, you got to trust what he says. Yeah, you got to trust what he says. But then they like they've interviewed some House Freedom Caucus. Yeah.

Who's plus some of the more establishment Republicans and they all seem supportive, which makes me think. Yeah. I mean, like, well, this exact 320 page bill pass. I have no idea. But in general, we know that Kevin McCarthy will do anything. He'll cross any line. He'll take on any policy, no matter how politically toxic, to get the votes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, et cetera.

And also just historically, the rest of the caucus, even the ones who are in the Biden states, tend to vote with the leadership, particularly this early in the fight. They also don't want to hobble Kevin McCarthy right away. And so you can see that if they're going to break, they will break at the end, not the beginning of the fight. If it does pass the House, do you think Biden and the Senate Democrats should still hold the line on no negotiations over the debt ceiling? Because obviously there's going to be incredible pressure, not just from Republicans, but from the media is going to say, OK, now, you know, we're getting

close to the close to the debt ceiling. Why isn't Biden negotiating? And we're already getting that from Joe Manchin. You know, the president should sit down. He should negotiate. So should they hold the line? And how hard is that going to be? I think they should hold the line for as long as possible and put as much pressure on the Republicans to do their job. Now, everyone needs to be looking for a way out of the situation that ends in something other than default. And it's very possible Biden's-

Good plan. Good plan. Biden's hand will be forced by some i can already see imagine like joe manchin and kirsten cinnamon mitt romney are all of a sudden having lunch and now there's a there's a gang of some kind getting together trying to come up with some sort of plan and like those things may happen but biden should not should do what he continued doing what he's been doing put as much hold his ground he substantively correct. He is politically correct. Force their hand.

Certainly, you don't do anything until the Republicans – let's see if they can actually pass this thing. But do not – the problem here is to begin negotiations is to accept the faulty premise of the argument that the debt ceiling is something you should negotiate on. So I think Biden should continue to hold the ground. I don't know if you've heard, but the bipartisanipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus is trying to save the day here. They are proposing a plan that would lift the debt ceiling in exchange for an independent commission. We love an independent commission that would come up with a plan to reduce the debt and deficit and that that plan would just be guaranteed a vote in Congress, nothing more. Do you think this is a feasible solution? Do you see any other way out? Are we

just fucked? What's going on? Likely fucked. I mean, I am deeply, deeply worried about this because previous debt ceiling battles have come, have ended because the Republicans were responsive to the massive amounts of political pressure being put on them. That is not the game McCarthy is playing. He is only responsive to his caucus. And that is very different. And his caucus is – this is one of the dangerous consequences of gerrymandering is that the vast majority of these Republicans have much greater fear of a primary than a general election. So from their political point of view, put aside the idea that they might care about the country or the economy, from their own personal point of view,

voting to lift the debt ceiling is more dangerous than crashing the economy. And that's a bad place to be. If the end result was a fake commission, they got one vote in Congress and the economy stayed on track. Great job, Josh Gottheimer. I'm for it. Like, who cares? As long as there's no teeth, right? Well, that's why I'm, I mean, I, I keep looking at the plan because I was like, what's the, what's the catch here, you know, and it seems like a great outcome if we could get there. And I'm wondering if I'm the Biden White House, how long until I try to endorse that plan? Probably right at the end. Yeah. But if there's if look, if there's a bunch of Republicans in the House who are in the problem solvers caucus who will actually get behind that plan. behind that plan. Now, McCarthy still might decide not to bring it to a vote. A discharge petition at that point towards the end will probably take too long. So I don't know how that works.

I mean, just to put some perspective here, we are in the third week of April right now, and Goldman Sachs estimated that the middle of June is when extraordinary measures will run out. So there's also, I think, several congressional recesses in the middle of that. So there is some work to do. The danger of the problem solvers caucus solution is that it's coming out too soon. These are the kinds of things you want to come out in the last minute when everyone's desperately looking for a face saving exit. But now that it's out here now,

everyone's going to say no to it and then they can't back off. So then we will need another different, hopefully toothless escape hatch at the end. A toothless escape hatch. That's what we're looking for. All right. If the Dominion settlement and the debt ceiling shenanigans have you down, one thing that's sure to bring a smile to your face is the continued trials and tribulations of little Ronnie Puddingfingers. Tiny D had a big day planned on Capitol Hill this week where he spoke to dozens of Republican House members hoping to win some support for his not yet announced but already failing presidential campaign.

Instead, he picked up one endorsement, one House endorsement. The person was his former secretary of state in Florida, now a House Republican from Florida. And he lost, at this count, it's Thursday morning, who knows, by the time you hear this, could be more, lost seven House members to Trump from the Florida delegation, including one Yahoo who literally walked out of a meeting with DeSantis and announced that he's endorsing Trump. I saw this morning he lost another one. This guy currently represents the district that DeSantis used to represent in Congress. Lost that guy, too. Why is DeSantis getting his ass handed to him by a twice impeached criminal defendant who lost the last three elections for the Republican Party? Well, I'd like to read you a quote from someone in DeSantis's orbit to I think it was Politico this morning.

I love the orbit quotes. Yes. He doesn't like talking to people and it's showing. Seems like a- Tough line of work. It seems like you might've picked the wrong business, right? I mean, it is still early and there is still going to be a place for one person not named Trump to make a real go at this because Trump is incredibly vulnerable. And everyone has assumed that that was going to be Ron DeSantis. But the first few months of this

campaign have offered some real, I would say, warning signs that he doesn't have what it takes to play that role. And that's worrisome if you don't want Trump to be the nominee because the rest of these people running definitely don't have it. So absent a better candidate, like there was a, was it Playbook today that said somewhere, somewhere I read this story that was like, DeSantis' stumbles give an opening to Christie.

I was like, really? Does it? So I don't know. When you say, when you talk about DeSantis' stumbles, are you talking about his press conference where he continued his attack on Disney by threatening Disney World? Can we play a clip of that? Now people are like, well, what should we do with this land? You know, maybe have another, maybe create a state park.

Maybe try to do more amusement parks. Someone even said, like, maybe you need another state prison. Who knows? Do you think that threatening to put a state prison or a competitive amusement park next to your state's biggest employer is a smart move?

I actually, after listening to that clip, take back what I said about that quote from the person in the orbit, which is, if my voice sounded like that, I wouldn't like talking to people either. It's pretty grating. Every time is the first time. No matter how many times you hear it, you are shocked to hear it again. Honestly, I don't know what he's doing. He is reeking of desperation.

The way he handled the Disney thing suggests he doesn't really understand what his rise was in the first place. He didn't even have a plan going into it. He just held an angry press conference where he was pretending to be angry, but not really. Without any real solutions, it seemed real. The idea was that he was Trump without the chaos, that he was a smarter, more effective version of Trump. And it turns out that he is none of those thus far in this campaign. I was going to say, not smarter, not more effective. We got to have one more clip because this is my favorite. So because the woke represents a war on truth, we have no other recourse but to wage a war on woke. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the legislature.

We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die. I mean, that's his 2004 convention speech right there. Remember during the 08 Republican primary when Joe Biden, now president of the United States, had that quip about Rudy Giuliani that everything he said was a noun of urban 9-11? Yeah. That's like DeSantis in woke.

He's just fucking woke mad libs. Like I said, he has a very simplistic understanding of his own political strengths and his own political rise. And it is not just saying woke over and over again. And he has diverted from that. And I – obviously, we're not making predictions. I know nothing. But if it were to come out in the next two weeks that he was deciding against running, I would not be surprised. Yeah.

Look, I also think – I probably come down on the side that it's too early because, you know, I'm a huge Ron DeSantis fan. Yeah, you have been pushing him. Yeah, but pushing him. No, I still think it's a little early just because, you know, there's like a million lifetimes and a million, a billion news cycles between now and Iowa. between now and Iowa. This is also like we are focusing on the national media narrative. We don't know what's going on in Iowa. We do know that evangelicals in Iowa aren't thrilled about Donald Trump. Donald Trump didn't win the Iowa caucus last time. You could imagine a path for DeSantis where he wins over evangelicals plus the college educated set in iowa that's enough to propel him to the to win the iowa caucuses new hampshire is a much better state for desantis because college heavily college educated there he does better with college educated republicans

and then it sets him up better for south carolina so you could imagine this but like i don't know all the stuff he's trying to do go harder at at Disney, the endorsements, or he can't talk to people, he's trying to mingle more. To me, like, the only thing that matters is how he handles Donald Trump, because Donald Trump is just the elephant in the room. He's the only thing in the Republican Party, right? He's the biggest thing in the Republican Party. And the idea that DeSantis is not going to take him on, not going to make his electability argument about Donald Trump in an explicit way. It's all these like oblique comments about electability or Trump's indictment, or he's trying to be subtle here and there. And like, again, I get that DeSantis can't

piss off a lot of these voters who love Donald Trump, but I don't even think he's trying to make a case against Trump right now. Well, he's not in the race yet. So I think- Which is also a weird choice. That is likely to turn out to, if he loses, which just seems like the most likely scenario at this point, it was probably always the most likely scenario.

Trump is the front runner. But his decision to delay his announcement until after his momentum had passed. Seems like a fatal, and a big, a fatal error. I mean, just take Obama, for instance, right? Which you and I obviously are intimately familiar with, but he announced his exploratory committee essentially 17 days after he made his final decision. I mean, I had been on the, I, my, he hired me for that campaign and I was one of the earlier groups of people hired, unlike you who are coming from a Senate office, 10 days before that announcement. Because he knew and we as a team knew that we had momentum.

There were donors who wanted to be for Obama. There were tens of thousands of people all over the country who wanted to go work for Obama, who wanted to volunteer for him. And we had to give them a place to go. DeSantis had that in November. He has a lot less of that now. And that might be a mistake. And could he change it? Maybe. But it is very hard to get the stink of being a loser off of you, especially if your argument is that you're a winner. And Trump is very effective. Donald Trump seems to have done a pretty good job of that. Well, Donald Trump has won, right? And he – it's he Donald Trump has a lot of skills as a.

Understander of a manipulator of Republican political sentiment and Republican media that Ron DeSantis currently does not. Yeah. All right. When we come back, Dan talks to strict scrutiny's Leah Lippman about the latest Supreme Court developments and the Dominion settlement. Yesterday, Supreme Court once again did something confusing, chaotic, and potentially evil. Here to tell us more about the case is our resident legal expert and co-host of Strict Scrutiny, Leah Lippman. Leah, welcome back to the pod. Thanks for having me. Okay, so help us understand what's happening here. So yesterday, your favorite, Justice Samuel Alito, issued an extension of a previous stay he had issued extending the stay on the court-ordered ban on the abortion drug Mifepristone until

1159 on Friday. Which should help us understand this, but just let's begin with where is that case right now in terms of how it's progressing and access to the drug in this country? So right now, because of all of the stays slash extended stays, Mifepristone remains legal and can be prescribed and distributed according to, you know, the Biden administration's current guidelines. But that could all end depending what the Supreme Court does, you know, after its next deadline, which is Friday at midnight. So basically what happened is, you know, the district judge said Mifepristone is an unauthorized drug, you

know, no one can distribute it. And then the Court of Appeals said, well, maybe it's not technically an unauthorized drug, but they can't distribute it in the way they currently have been. And basically, you need to relabel all the drugs. So no one's going to be able to access this drug for like at least several months while the FDA figures it out. And now the Supreme Court is figuring out what they are going to do. So it's kind of technically in the Supreme Court while there is still litigation ongoing in the Court of Appeals. Is an extension like this unusual? This seems like it should be a pretty easy decision for the court, since everything you guys have said on strict scrutiny, everything I've read is that the legal reasoning behind the original ruling was something my daughter would call cuckoo bananas. Like, what is happening here?

ruling was something my daughter would call cuckoo bananas. Like, what is happening here? Yeah, so it's unusual to have to extend an administrative stay that had an initial deadline. That's partially because most of the justices don't place time limits on their administrative stays. So that itself is unusual. But this particular case, you know, it should take two seconds to realize this is all cuckoo bananas or just like straight up bananas, you know, whatever you want to call it and say, of course, you know, this lower court ruling should be stayed in its entirety. But, you know, what is happening is, you know, these justices don't much care for the law when it gets in the way of, you know, forcing women to undergo childbirth when they don't want to. And so I think, you know, you probably

have some of the justices thinking, you know, can I put lipstick on this pig to make it a little bit more palatable while still restricting access to medication abortion? And there's probably some negotiations going on with justices wanting to get more justices on board, you know, in either direction. And so they couldn't work it out before Wednesday. And it's just, it's so ridiculous and laughable that it is taking them more than two seconds to just say, this entire thing made us all dumber while we had to engage with it just for a little. What are the court's options here? And how could this potentially play out? So there are a bunch of different options. You know, one thing that they could do is just stay the district court's ruling in its entirety.

That would prevent the district court's, you know, various restrictions on Mifepristone, including the Court of Appeals, you know, take on the restrictions from going into effect at any point in the litigation before the litigation ultimately reaches the Supreme Court, which usually takes several years. And so that's one option. Another option is they say, well, we'll stay this, but we're going to put this case on our calendar in order for us to hear oral arguments and decide what to do. Another option is they, you know, don't stay the Court of Appeals or District Court ruling, and they add the case to their calendar. So they reserve the possibility that they might actually put it on pause, but they let it go into effect in the interim. And then another option is, you know, they let either the

District Court or the Court of Appeals ruling into effect, and they just don't really do anything other than that. And, you know, those are just some of the options, but there's a lot of wiggle room as far as whether they let either of the rulings go into effect, as well as whether they add this case to their calendar, and therefore preserve the possibility that they would change, you know, their initial action sometime in the next few months. If they were to allow it to go, take that last option, you said, allow it to go into place and not add it to the calendar, are we at a point of no recourse then? No, we are at a point of no recourse, at least until the case finishes up in the district

court and court of appeals. But that, again, usually takes years. And so in that event, we would be kind of at a point of no recourse in the sense that there would be a bunch of additional restrictions on mifepristone that would suddenly go into effect. It would be much more limited access for the drug, which there's a possibility it couldn't be marketed at all for some period of time. And that would all be playing out while the case kind of finishes its way through the courts.

Do you have any, I guess I will ask you, but do you have a sense, a prediction of where you think this is going based on your close watching of the court over the years? You know, I have extremely lowest of low opinions of this court. And I honestly still think the most likely option is they stay the lower court's ruling in its entirety while maybe adding the case to their argument calendar or not. But, you know, I have, however, a pretty low degree of confidence in that prediction, even though I think it's the most likely outcome. And the reason you think it's the most likely outcome is that because generally the court will try to avoid chaos while waiting for a decision, because it does create tremendous

chaos in the marketplace and people's health care decisions, et cetera. Is that right? So it's a combination of reasons. You know, one is I think there are some number of justices who don't like the extent of chaos that either the district court or court of appeals ruling would, you know, inflict on the country. I think it's also that the underlying legal claims are so appallingly bad that, you know, you can just poke holes in them and make fun of them, you know, for endless time periods on end. And then there's also some sense that I think some of the justices who care about

preserving their own authority have a sense that, you know, people are really reacting to the Dobbs ruling and the consequences that that has had on people's lives. You know, you see the results in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, you saw the results in the midterms. And so I think there is some hesitation about basically going, you know, full speed ahead on judges effectively ordering nationwide abortion bans out of some concern that maybe that will finally be the thing that pisses people off enough to do something about the federal courts. And that might cause, you know, Brett Kavanaugh, the chief justice, to say, like, whoa, we need to slow this train down. the chief justice to say, like, whoa, we need to slow this train down. Pivoting to the settlement reach earlier this week in the Fox Dominion case. Last time you and I spoke on the show, I feel guilty about this, but I asked you to pretend to be Donald Trump's lawyer. I will not ask you to be the Murdoch's lawyer this time around out of guilt. But are you surprised that

settlement reach? What's your reaction to how that case played itself out? I'm not that surprised that it settled. I mean, most cases settle. On some level, it was a little surprising that it settled this late in the game just because a bunch of really negative information had already come out at this point. And so it's not like settling avoided all of the embarrassing emails and text messages coming out in which it was clear that Fox executives knew that these were lies. On the other hand, it did avoid probably pretty embarrassing cross-examinations where you confront, say, you know, the Murdochs with these emails and texts and ask them why they allowed this to go on,

as well as what was likely to be, you know, a pretty grueling trial. And, you know, you also avoid the possibility of punitive damages. So it's not that surprising. You know, and I think on the other side, you know, Dominion, their interest was always kind of recovering the harm done to them. And that is a harm that can be quantified in money. And so the incentives on kind of both sides are really to settle. So it wasn't that surprising, a little bit surprising that there was that amount of brinksmanship and delay that, you know, led to the settlement happening really last minute. Will this settlement, do you think, have any impact on how Fox operates as a media entity? I mean, initial signs point to no, right? Like, they're not really covering this, you know, their initial kind of statement about the settlement is, this confirms our highest standards of journalistic integrity. So it's not like they really took the path of, oh, now we need to tell the truth. So, you know, it's a little bit unclear.

I mean, on some level, obviously, this has to affect their financial calculus about what the most rational business model is for them. You know, they obviously concluded that it was in their interest to have a business model, you know, basically facilitating these lies and that would keep their viewership. On the other hand, they now have some costs, right, that they have to incur when they engage

in these kinds of lies that they think will secure and preserve their viewers. So it's a little bit difficult to know. I mean, maybe they try to lie better and a little bit less recently going forward. But at least initially, it doesn't seem like this is going to cause any sort of major changes. Do you think they'll stop texting each other to just admit they're meeting the actual malice threshold set by the Supreme Court? There will be company-wide emails on how to use Signal and deleting messages. But yeah, fewer emails, less text messages and the like. Do you think the attorneys will be more empowered to at least raise some concerns to the Tucker Carlsons of the world?

You know, again, maybe, but only in the sense that Fox will have to decide how much they're willing to pay in order to keep their viewers and grow their audience. So this is really just assessing them a financial penalty for lying. And if this is their business model, then they will just decide how much are the lies worth. And this could get more expensive, correct? Because they are also facing another lawsuit. This one brought $2.7 billion from Smartmatic, another voting company. And I believe there's a handful of shareholder lawsuits as well who are suing the company because the company has lost value because of this irresponsible behavior on that part. Is that correct? Yes, that's right.

Although I also saw that they have concluded that they can basically write off the settlement for tax purposes. So it's not like they are just going to have to pay this all out from their net profits. You know, we've had a number of, they're all, I mean, you can speak to this better than I can, but they're not all of the sort of the same ilk legally, but there has been a number of cases over the recent years that have gone at media entities or media personalities who are spreading conspiracy theories. Fox itself had to settle a case with Seth Rich's family a few years ago, the DNC staffer,

who they falsely accused of leaking documents to WikiLeaks. The Alex Jones has over a billion dollars in damages he has to pay. Is this specific to what's happening here? Or do you see any sort of change in the legal environment or the legal risk profile for media entities and personalities who push these lies or push disinformation as part of their business plan? Again, I don't really see any of these cases as really altering the legal standard, just because it was clear what these companies were doing were lies. And any person with any remote connection to reality would understand that they were lies. So they were knowingly lying,

or at least acting with reckless disregard for the truth. I think to the extent there are changes, there are likely to be changes that kind of cut in the opposite direction as far as the political ideological valence of the entities being sued and who is doing the suing, which is, you know, you might have, let's say, more conservative leaning plaintiffs, you know, attacking news organizations for criticizing or making statements about conservative Republican leaning figures. And in those lawsuits seeking to change the legal standard that's represented by New York Times versus Sullivan that requires plaintiffs to show that these companies were acting with actual malice, that is like intentionally lying or they knew that

they were lying. And so it's possible that we will see some additional movement on that front with these plaintiffs trying to encourage more judges to speak out against New York Times versus Sullivan and make it easier to criticize or make it easier to sue entities that are criticizing public officials. You know, and Clarence Thomas has already signaled he wants to revisit that standard. You know, with the additional negative media coverage of him, you know, he might be additionally motivated to revisit New York Times versus Sullivan. to revisit New York Times versus Sullivan. I was going to say, but it seems like he, I mean, he would probably recuse himself from that case because we know that Clarence Thomas holds his independence in highest regard. It would never rule in a case in which he could possibly have a stake in it. Is that right?

Just like Fox has the highest standards of journalistic integrity, Clarence Thomas has the highest standards of ethical integrity, and he definitely would not participate in any case in which he or his wife have any potential interest. Leah Lippman, thank you so much for joining us. And once again, helping to explain all the crazy and bad things happening in the Supreme Court. Thanks for having me. All right, before we go, like many media organizations, we had all kinds of plans for the trial of the century that never actually happened. And we had Max Fisher. He was going to follow the trial and contribute. And we had all these plans.

And, of course, it all fell apart. all these plans and of course it all fell apart one of the funniest plans we had which wasn't really a plan our our fearless senior producer andy gardner bernstein who's here with me now hi andy hey john andy took it upon herself um to um to make some puppets. Yeah, I made sock puppets. To make sock puppets of Fox personalities because, of course, we weren't going to be able to see the trial. There's no cameras in the courtroom. Yeah, and they weren't going to let us,

they weren't letting any reporters use the audio from the trial. Correct. So what we were going to do is use Andy's puppets to say the text and testimony. Yeah, so we could read back the testimony and reenact Tucker on the stand or whoever. So I figured we kind of have to show you all the puppets. I realize this is an audio format, but this is another plug to subscribe to

the Pod Save America YouTube channel. Yeah, go to the YouTube. Go to the YouTube right now and you can see the puppets. Andy, show us what you made here. Okay, so I made three puppets. And the first one I made, I'm going to put this on my little stand for those of you watching on the YouTube. This is a picture of Tucker. And I was thinking,

how to make a Tucker Carlson sock puppet. And you have to always go with their most obvious feature, right? So here we go. I don't know if the camera can get it. Look at that. So Tucker's feature to me was his eyebrows. So we got it right there. And then he always wears, you know, the gingham shirt. And luckily my kids had graph paper from math. So I use that for, this is a craft podcast now. And my husband let me use the end of his tie to make a tiny tie for Tucker. Look, if you want to do a DIY Tucker Carlson sock puppet, you're going to want to take inspiration from Andy's.

Yeah. So anyway, everyone just has to imagine what it would have been like to have him falling apart on the stand. Had you thought through the voice part? Were you going to do the voice? No, no, no, no. Is there someone who can do great replacement theory through that sock puppet? I think Olivia was practicing her Murdoch accent. Yeah, she was working on her accent. No, no, no, no. Is there someone who can do great replacement theory through that sock puppet? I think Olivia was practicing her Murdoch accent. Yeah, she was working on her accent.

We had big plans, guys. We have such great comedic friends here at Crooked that we're going to try, but sadly, the settlement. Can we see the other two too? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So the next one I did was Rupert Murdoch. Wow. And

as I'm sure you can imagine, his greatest you know physical attribute are the glasses. And so. And the wrinkles. So I made this little guy. I don't know if you can see him quite right, but we used cotton for his hair and we used a pipe cleaner to make his glasses.

This is just an incredible amount of effort. Thank you so much. Also. When I'm not like deep into Politico, I'm doing this with my kids. Real self-starter vibes, too. It's not even like we... No one asked me to do this. No one asked me to do this.

You should just send a picture to the Slack. Here's some puppets. I was like, look what I'm doing. I got the glue gun out. I think this is your best one. This is my masterpiece. Worked up to this one. This is Maria Bartiromo.

Initially, I thought Maria's big quality physical attribute that I needed to go with was her hair. But as I looked at this picture longer, I realized it's the smoky eye. She's got a great smoky eye. So this is Maria. Look at that sweater, too. Yeah, this was an American Girl sweater that I just took from an old box from back in the day when my kids liked American Girl dolls. And, yeah, we even used some fake eyelashes to get this one going. This is amazing. I mean, I do hope that the Smartmatic trial does not settle because we may still be able to use these.

Oh, I hope so. Can I ask you a couple questions? Sure. Did you have prior to this an abiding interest in puppetry? Well, I love the Muppets. Who doesn't? Yeah. I mean, The Great Muppet Caper is one of the best movies of all time, in my opinion.

So I do love puppets, but I'd actually like really, I like crafting and like my kids do a lot of crafting. So like this, we had most of this stuff already on hand, but I had never actually like sat down and made a sock puppet. Oh, so these are your first sock puppets. Yeah, I mean, and they're not great. I mean, they are. Don't sell yourself short. Don't sell yourself short. Don't sell yourself short. Can you swear to me under oath that you do not have a John, John, and Tommy set of sock puppets at home?

I know. I made it. I was saying the other day. No, I do not. I do not. Do you have any sort of like John, John, and Tommy dolls? Like a Lovett voodoo doll. Yeah, voodoo dolls.

Is there a Mueller sock puppet from 2017? Oh, if only, if only. Andy, thank you for those sock puppets. You're so welcome. Thank you to sock puppet Rupert Murdoch, sock puppet Maria Bartiromo, and sock puppet Tucker Carlson for joining us. Thank you to Leah Littman from strict scrutiny. Everyone have a fantastic weekend. Andy,

enjoy the sock puppets. I will. And, and we'll see y'all next week. Bye everyone. Pod save America is a crooked media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our senior producer is Andy Gardner Bernstein.

Our producers are Haley muse and Olivia Martinez. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis sound engineered the show. Thanks to Hallie Kiefer, Ari Schwartz, Sandy Gerard, Andy Taft, and Justine Howe for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Milo Kim, and Amelia Montu. Our episodes are uploaded as videos at youtube.com slash pod save America.