Pod Save America - “Maddow!”

Episode Date: October 10, 2019

Rachel Maddow joins as guest co-host to talk about the White House announcement that they intend to obstruct the impeachment inquiry, Trump’s decision to abandon our Kurdish allies, and Facebook’s refusal to pull down false ads about Joe Biden. Then we talk to Rachel about her new book, Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. Oh, me next. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Jon Lovett. Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. Oh, me next. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Jon Lovett.

On today's pod, we are thrilled to finally have in studio the host of the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC and the author of the new book, Blowout, which we're going to talk about a little later. Rachel Maddow is here. Hi, you guys. So exciting. It's very exciting to be here. I can't believe this is real and it's really happening. Neither can we. This is the kind of set you imagine in your mind when you're

dreaming some sort of dystopian future in which you find yourself with people you recognize talking. I mean, this is real. What's wrong with our studio? Nothing's wrong. It's perfect. What's dystopian about it? It's a dystopian future I imagine for myself in which I'm sitting here talking with three smart guys who I admire and then

I completely lose the power of speech and make a complete idiot out of myself. You don't have that dream? That's not possible. It's not possible. That's not possible, although I guess we'll find out. We do have a lot of impeachment and 2020 news to cover tonight, but a few housekeeping notes. Tommy, tell us about this week's Pod Save the World.

Oh, yeah, that show. Yeah, we talked about President Trump leaving our Kurdish allies, hung out to dry in Syria and things have only gotten worse since then so we try to understand what our guys were doing there, what the U.S. mission was

and what's likely to happen. And then we also talked about the NBA's fight with China and what it could mean for the broader business community as authoritarian countries try to tell us what free speech means.

Check it out. Cool future. Also a little plug for the 2019 elections that are coming up in a month. Democrats have a chance to make big gains in Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia, where we need to flip just four seats to win the legislature

and the chance to draw fair congressional districts in 2021. Head to votesaveamerica.com where you can donate to our Fuck Gerrymandering Fund and find volunteer opportunities in these states, some right from the comfort of your home. So check them out. All right, let's get to the news. On Tuesday evening, White House counsel Pat Cipollone announced in an eight-page screed that President Trump is directing his administration to obstruct Congress's impeachment inquiry. They will refuse to comply with any and all subpoenas for testimony

and documents, which is against the law. There were a few pretty angry responses from members of Congress with regard to this kind of obstruction, and I do think we have a few clips. Article 3 of impeachment against Richard Nixon, the article was based on the idea that Richard Nixon, as president, failed to comply with subpoenas of Congress. Congress was going through its oversight function to provide oversight of the president. When asked for information, Richard Nixon chose not to comply, and the Congress back in that time said, you're taking impeachment away from us. You're becoming the judge and jury.

It is not your job to tell us what we need. It is your job to comply with the things we need to provide oversight over you. The day Richard Nixon failed to answer that subpoena is the day that he was subject to impeachment because he took the power from Congress over the impeachment process away from Congress, and he became the judge and jury. And I think we have one more. What a principled leader. So eloquently stated.

Wow, he's really good. Lindsey Graham. The notion that you can withhold information and documents from Congress no matter whether you're the party in power or not in power is wrong. Respect for the rule of law must mean something irrespective of the vicissitudes of political cycles. That's a big word. Do you guys remember when I was coming to sit down here for the first time,

I said, I don't know, like, if you have interference issues, is it okay if I have my phone with me? Because I have a couple of things. The reason I wanted to have my phone with me is because I saved that clip. Oh, really? Because I wanted to bring it to you as a present. I could play it off my phone into my microphone. You know what's funny?

We don't always have clips like that at the beginning, but I saw those two this morning. I was like, these are very Matto-esque type clips. I think we're going to use those to start. Thank you, gentlemen. Yes, thank you. Had to step up our game. So obviously that was Trump's good pal Lindsey Graham and his brand new lawyer, Trey Gowdy. Rachel, what do you make of the White House's rationale for this decision to obstruct, which is basically that the impeachment inquiry is illegitimate and unconstitutional because House Democrats haven't taken a formal vote to launch

the inquiry. And, you know, there's a whole bunch of complaints about they haven't provided the president enough due process. Well, it's interesting to me as a matter of political strategy, because they're saying this impeachment doesn't exist. This impeachment is unconstitutional, which is amazing because impeachment's literally in the Constitution. Article 1, I think. Yeah, it's right there. Weirdly, it's the same word even after all this time. So it's obviously an out there argument. But to specifically say this impeachment isn't real unless you do X. And then X is a totally doable thing. I mean, like Nancy Pelosi could hold a vote in the House and all the Democrats could vote unanimously for impeachment. Right. And plus Justin Amash, right, or whoever. And even, you know, even if they needed

a few Democrats to vote no or vote absent or be washing their hair that day or something, they could still afford to do it because they have plenty of Democrats on the record in favor of impeachment. So I don't think Pelosi should do it because I don't think she should let Trump dictate what she does. But if that's the threshold, that's the only thing that would make this a real impeachment, okay, they could have that tomorrow. It seems like an odd thing for them to set as the predicate. Super odd. I mean, do we think that it's interesting that your explanation is that Pelosi shouldn't let Trump dictate what she does? I think it's a good point. I wonder if they should do it just to call their bluff. Like, or I guess I'm wondering that. I'm also wondering why Pelosi

is not hasn't done it so far. To me, it might be because there's a couple members still on the fence. What do you think about it? It's interesting. I because there's a couple members still on the fence. What do you think about it? It's interesting. I think there's two things. One, with every passing day, impeachment votes get easier for Democrats and harder for Republicans. And I don't think that's lost on anyone making this argument. The second piece of this is you're starting to see rumblings of demands that Republicans uh subpoena power as part of this and and i'm sorry i'm sorry but uh until you have proven yourselves responsible enough for subpoena power because last time you had it it didn't go so well last time last time you promised you would not eat that ice cream sandwich until after dinner and it was gone so you, you know, it's funny. We'll talk about it as well.

But, you know, Lindsey Graham suggesting Rudy come to the Senate, the Republic, Trump calling for this vote in the House. I find myself thinking, I don't see what the problem is, but I'm not evil. So I'm not able to totally wrap my head around all the possibilities. Yeah. I also think that Nancy Pelosi has a really good read on how to play Trump. Yes. I mean, I don't think she does everything right. And I don't think that she's, you know, like a master of the house in a way that is too hard for us to understand. But I do often feel like she knows how to get his goat. Yeah. And she knows what not to rise to. And so her not wanting to take this vote is obviously within her power. I mean, the House gets to decide its own rules. And if their rules are it's an impeachment,

when we say it's an impeachment and it's not dependent on whether we take a whole vote, then that's within her power. But I guess that's why, to me, the more interesting thing is not what Pelosi is doing, but why this crazy letter from Pat Cipollone set that as such an important threshold as if that is something that could never happen. Yeah, I mean, I read this this letter as just a flailing political statement. And I don't think that the White House counsel's office touches thing. I think dime store Peggy Noonan, Stephen Miller probably wrote this crazy bullshit because that that's what they do with that guy on the facts. because that's what they do with that guy. On the facts, like, first of all, Marco Rubio's former counsel, that, you know, paragon of virtue, said the letter was a direct assault on the very legitimacy of Congress's oversight power. So that's what Republicans think about

this letter. But regarding their specific concerns, like, one, I believe the vote during Nixon's impeachment came months and months from now, right? So like the argument that this needs to happen first before they're gathering the facts. I mean, what the House is doing is preparing an indictment, and then the trial will be in the Senate. The idea that they need to vote immediately is ridiculous. And also, this subpoena-ish power issue is a bit of a red herring, because my understanding is that in previous instances, yes, you can give the minority party subpoena power, but the full committee then votes on it. So the majority has a de facto veto on minority party subpoenas anyway. So it's like, sure.

Like you were saying earlier, set up these very easy to meet standards for the Democrats that we can either match or not. But I do think you're right that ultimately Pelosi should dictate this based on her own political instincts and not based on whatever Trump is doing. She's the highest authority that gets to decide what happens here, no matter what the White House counsel does. So the White House sort of gave up the game on this because they held a briefing with reporters after this letter came out. And one reporter's like, okay, well, what would it take for the White House to change its mind and actually cooperate? And the senior administration official said, a full halt to all subpoenas, requests for testimony, for documents, everything else.

So it's like basically they're saying their condition for cooperating in an impeachment inquiry is to end the impeachment inquiry. That makes sense. It makes total sense. So I guess, why do we think that Trump chose this strategy of obstructing Congress? Like what is the political strategy behind the White House's decision to say we are going to war? We're going to pretend this is unconstitutional and we're just going to fight everything.

Strategy. Fucking guilty. We read the transcript. He did it. There might well be video of him shooting someone for all we know. There will be video of him shooting someone for all we know. I think it doesn't have to be more complicated than what we know plus what we don't is far worse than what we know plus blocking the investigation. Yeah.

Right. They think that going down for obstruction is, well, then it's just another process crime. We can get past that. And what they're most afraid of is the truth coming out. Well, but the process crime here, however, that gets adjudicated, even if they left all the obstruction out. The crime of contacting another government and asking for help against a political opponent, done and dusted. You know, they're not going to get out. That's already done, already confessed to. They gave us the evidence. It's done. President Trump then did it again on TV in case we missed it the first time. So that part, the idea that they're trying to constrain this so that he only gets done for obstruction and not for some other thing,

or that they're trying to fight that one article of impeachment because that one worries them more than the other one. That's a sure bet. I mean, dude, it's a sure bet. I don't I don't think there is any strategy here. I think this is whack-a-mole. I think this is like, ah, stop, ah, stop, ah. We were talking while watching a program we love called The Rachel Maddow Show for this very recording. And we were noting that, okay, now this story breaks, that it looks like Tillerson may have been asked by Trump to call DOJ to intercede in a specific investigation,

an investigation he personally cares virtually nothing about, maybe. All of it boiling down to if this is what he's doing on a semi-regular basis, think about all the calls, all the interventions, all the illegal ruminating and questions and wondering if he could get away with things that could pile up if the dam were to ever truly burst. I was saying because of the story, like, whether Trump did this at Rudy's behest or he did it for Erdogan, right? Like, what does Trump give a shit about this guy for? Yeah. Right. Like Trump only gives a shit about himself. Right. He does

everything out of his own personal self-interest. So if he's that worried about getting off some guy who was laundering money with the Iranians, what else is he doing? For stuff that actually means something to him, imagine the kind of stuff that he has been pulling. Hey, Rex, right now you're known as the Secretary of State who got fired while on the toilet. Why don't you go out being known as the only guy who left this white house and told the truth well this is an interesting part of this because that's my speech part of my favor i'm sorry i just have to say i am sick of this shaming of rex tillerson for the crime of doing what we all do it's not his fault john kelly called him while he was on the John. All right. That's not why is Rex. Why is that embarrassing? Every single person in this room poops. Look, sorry, Rachel. Two bold stands in this section of the conversation. I'm going to not come down between you on this one

just because it may implicate me in future crimes. I just I think one of the things that's really interesting about this Rex Tillerson story coming out right now is that it happened in 2017. Yeah. And it happened to Rex in front of three other people. And then it happened to John Kelly. Like he was in like Tillerson took this to John Kelly, according to Bloomberg News, and said, hey, the president just asked me to do something illegal. And the illegal thing he asked me to do, which is a crime, in case you don't know what illegal means. I'm not going to do that crime. Okay, John. And so that's a couple of years ago

now. It's just come out. Why has that come out now? Presumably because in the impeachment inquiry, we're starting to shake loose information about the president's behavior. That Friday night, late night Washington Post story with all of those quotes about the president on the phone with foreign leaders, including him telling Theresa May that Russia wasn't behind the Skripals attempted assassination. Crazy. Completely crazy. All of this crazy stuff. Why is that coming out now? It's coming out now because witnesses are coming forward. Transcripts are being released. Depositions are being taken. The president's behavior is being described. And it is shaking either the conscience or the self-preservation instincts of people who know stuff. Well, this is why I think

this thing could be bigger than I even imagined, right? Because I thought, you know, if we ever do get around to impeaching him, the Republicans and the Senate are going to protect him no matter what, or it's going to happen before the year is over. And then by, you know, June of 2020, we're all going to have forgotten about the impeachment thing, right? But if it was just Ukraine and they rushed a really quick vote on it, and that was that, that'd be one thing. And they tried to obstruct everything else.

But hearing about this Bloomberg story about Tillerson and all the other stuff that's coming out, if this plays out so that all of these people keep coming forward and there are new stories and new developments over and over again for the next couple months, I think it really could build to something very, very bad. Why do we know? I would say I would call it good.

We just found out about the fact that they move, we just found out from the whistleblower, that they move the records of his problematic foreign leader calls into the standalone covert action server. And then immediately we started getting all this information about what's on all those calls. Like, I would like to visit that vault. It's not great when you fire someone like Rex Tillerson and you humiliate him, or Rick Perry just happens to leave the administration after we all just read a transcript where the president commits a crime by trading foreign assistance for dirt on his political rival. And then Trump immediately blames Rick Perry. Like these are not people who are going to go to the mattresses for

you and not tell their stories if they're called in an impeachment inquiry. Rachel, are you surprised? I'm surprised. We talked a lot about what impeachment might unlock. That was our kind of argument, right? If we do this, if we pursue this impeachment, it'll give more power to Congress and we'll be able to get more out of the administration. But I did not believe it would be this transformative. Have you been surprised by just how much has shaken loose in just roughly, what, two and a half, three weeks? Yes. The pace of it is remarkable. And because we're getting all this information about stuff that happened previously, it does sort of make you feel like it was like swelling and ready to burst. And then

somebody finally took the first pinprick there and it's all starting to come. And so I don't know, again, like I don't know how many stories there are like this with Rex Tillerson, but I do know that Rex Tillerson in December told Bob Schieffer that it was multiple times that the president had asked him to do something illegal. I don't know if this is one of those, if there's others. I don't know how much Rex Tillerson is talking. I don't know how much Brooke Perry's going to talk once he leaves. I don't know how much jeopardy other former Trump administration officials, including cabinet officials, feel like they might be in from this process. I mean, see, I think that's why I think the Pompeo thing and the Barr thing are both really interesting. Because one thing to talk about their bad acts and to see them defending the president, I mean, to see Pompeo talking about

the Kurds like they don't deserve our alliance anymore. I mean, it just it's it's incredible. But do they fear for themselves in terms of potential prosecution or impeachment or some other sort of, you know, shaming or consequence that might motivate their own behavior other than just needing to be able to look at themselves in the mirror. And that's an empirical question that I don't, I mean, I don't know what the Democrats are going to do on cabinet officials. It's interesting with Pompeo specifically, forget, you know, the high threshold of worrying about his, you know, criminal liability. He seemed to be always someone like a Nikki Haley who believed he could escape with his credibility intact.

And it seems as though he's I don't know if he's let go of that dream or if he is unaware that that dream is slowly slipping through his fingers. Pompeo. Pompeo thinks he's going to be president. Yeah. And I guess that's why he wants to he wants to keep the Trump base on his side. To quote George H.W. Bush, Pompeo was the benefit T of the soft bigotry of low expectations, right? Like he was the only person who could speak in complete sentences on a Sunday show and was not seen as like a crazy ideologue like John Bolton. But then Pompeo's problem now is when you learn that Gordon Sondland is the one negotiating with Ukraine and you dig into that for 30 seconds and you realize that he only got that job, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, because he cut a million dollar check to Donald Trump's inauguration using four anonymous LLCs. You start to wonder. And then you do some Googling and you realize that Ukraine is not in the EU.

So why is this fucking guy banging around negotiating like military aid to them? Right. So like Pompeo's got to worry about the incompetence of the layer right below him. I also think the Democrats should rope in Bill Barr into these impeachment proceedings and possibly impeach him as well, because what Bill Barr is doing, flying around the world, meeting with all kinds of foreign officials to basically prove a bunch of right wing conspiracy theories by also investigating our own intelligence agencies, our own law enforcement, just so he can basically backtrack to try to prove this conspiracy theory or multiple conspiracy theories is crazy. And people should I just feel like we need the truth about that. You know, like people should know what the attorney general should do. But that's an independent investigation. John Durham is a respected prosecutor who would never allow for any political pressure. Well, I also worry about criminal referrals coming from that too.

Like it's, you know, we can say that he's running around doing his like Carmen Sandiego investigation there. He's going all around the world. But, you know, when they come out with's running around doing his like Carmen Sandiego investigation there. He's going all around the world. But, you know, when they come out with criminal referrals at the end, in the middle of an election, it's going to be very ugly. Using the Justice Department for stuff like that is the end. That's right. And we're getting there. I'm sorry, we already know that when the whistleblower's complaint ends up at DOJ, they're like, oh, we're good.

Stuff it in a bag. like oh we're good stuff in a bag no we're good uh did anyone watch the 51 minute glenn beck video that trump's campaign manager tweeted out that sort of gets at the root of what they think the conspiracy is the one that says like a dnc consultant is the one who basically hatched the whole russia conspiracy yeah i had a lot of free time on saturday it is glenn glenn be. Glenn Beck looks like a coked up Colonel Sanders, and he needs not one but two gigantic chalkboards to walk you through this. And he's like grabbing photos of faces and bringing them from one chalkboard to another and slapping them down.

It's kind of worth five minutes of your time. I love Glenn Beck. I have always loved Glenn Beck. It's theater. I didn't loved Glenn Beck. It's theater. I didn't know he's back into the game. Yeah, I was just, the thing that I mesmerized by here is like,

I could get 51 minutes of Glenn Beck. 51 minutes. Well, the thing to know about Glenn is when he was trying to be the principal conservative, he had to fire like a fifth of his staff at the Blaze. So now it's MAGA.

So, but is the idea, either Mr. Beck or the implication of, was it Parscale who tweeted it? And do we think what Barr and Durham is doing is not just trying to rope Ukraine into some sort of blame for 2016 election interference. Specifically, aren't they trying to make it so that Russia didn't do it? Yeah. So that the Kremlin didn't run an op on our 2016 election. The IRA, the Internet Research Agency, that didn't happen.

The DNC hack was not them, and they were blamed by somebody with a grudge against them. No, they were framed by the barely stable country they invaded, Ukraine. Right. That's the belief that they were- And a DNC staffer. Yeah. One person. That Hillary Clinton's campaign and the DNC were somehow working with Ukraine during the 2016 election to first screw over Manafort, who, of course, is a criminal.

They said they set him up and then installed him. Right. Yeah, exactly. So they exposed Paul Manafort's crimes, which I guess is a problem. Which they created. Which they created, yeah. And I don't know where it actually goes from there. What it goes to is that they stole their own documents and used them to sabotage Hillary Clinton's nominating convention and her campaign in order to make Russia look bad so that Trump would be elected and Russia would look bad. Right, exactly. That's the outcome.

Trump winning just ruins all these conspiracy theories. Like all these people had all this stuff they were trying to take down trump but they all decided to be very quiet until the day we only knew about the one investigation and it was the one unto hillary clinton they are very very the deep state is phenomenally bad at uh making hillary clinton president as evidenced theyced by our nightmare. Our current timeline. But is this part of the thesis that Hillary was orchestrating a campaign that would result on purpose in her losing? Because that is the real knife in the back to the... That is, some of the conspiracies are that.

The more, the lower level conspiracies are just you know, yeah, Russia meddled in the election and maybe the Trump campaign encouraged it and welcomed it, but the Democrats were working with Ukraine too. There was a little meddling there. It's back to the like, yeah, you know we're corrupt, but you're corrupt too. And that's what they're really,

that's all they need. Which is like trademark Putin, right? Exactly. Like the world is corrupt. We're not corrupt. That's absolutely right. So Lindsey Graham said he wants Rudy to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee and that he plans to ask his Republican Senate colleagues to sign a letter stating that they don't believe the transcript of the phone call constitutes an impeachable offense. What is Lindsey Graham up to here? I mean, first of all, I don't think he's getting a ton of signatures on that letter because there's a surprising number of Republican senators who are saying nothing right now, which is probably a bad sign for Donald Trump, or at least not a great sign. But the Rudy thing makes

me think they are gearing up to try to put on a show that is very loud and confusing. And they're trying to drag everyone into process arguments just to, you know. Here's my question. Is there something I don't understand about Rudy Giuliani and Lindsey Graham that anyone could come to the conclusion that an open hearing with Rudy Giuliani in which Democrats will have time to ask him questions will red come to the conclusion that an open hearing with Rudy Giuliani, in which Democrats will have time to ask him questions, will redound to the benefit of anyone associated or affiliated with Rudy Giuliani. Am I missing something? Am I crazy? I would have said that about the Corey Lewandowski hearing, you know, and then, you know, somehow that went off the rails.

But even that, even that, you know, yeah, it was a, it was a, it was a big mess. But first of all, I would say this, I think Corey Lewandowski is still a better witness than Rudy Giuliani. And there were still 30 tough minutes with the staff attorney, which Corey that would reveal the inner workings of Rudy Giuliani's mind. You've met Senate Democrats, right? Yeah. I mean, Kamala Harris would crush it. We got some great ones, but we got some not so great ones. Well, that's Congress. Listen, you go to impeachment with the Congress you have. Listen, you go to impeachment with the Congress you have.

I mean, I think that clearly they are trying to put on a show, a Rudy Giuliani show. I mean, there's a reason Giuliani goes on TV all the time. It's not because he's great on TV. It's because Rudy Giuliani on TV is a spectacle that makes it seem like something crazy is happening and I can't possibly understand this anymore. Look at that guy. I mean, that chaos itself is enough, just that kinetic nonsense. But in terms of asking Republican senators to agree in writing and pledge the way they will vote- Before the trial. Before the trial. I mean, that's a, I mean, it's, for one thing, the problem with Lindsey Graham

doing that is it gives Republican senators their – it gives away their best way to avoid commenting on this, right? I think we've had one or two senators already say, listen, if this comes to the Senate, I will effectively be a juror in this case. And so I don't want to say anything that might prejudge the evidence. Mike Enzi just said that. They can all say that unless Lindsey Graham tells them all to sign a pledge saying, I quit, no matter what it is. I like Marco Rubio's like, are we signing it, guys? No, we're not. I wouldn't sign it.

Obviously, I'm a juror. I know, I know. I'm not going to sign, but we're not. Okay. Is Rubio's line still that he doesn't think the president really asked a foreign country for help with Biden. He thinks it's a joke. He thinks it's a joke. Certainly the China piece, he said he thought it was.

So what CNN reported that actually one of the things in the vault is that Trump didn't just do this on the South Lawn. He did it in private in a conversation with President Xi. Yeah. Doesn't that take away that it was a joke? No, not even that report. The next day, Trump tweeted, I asked China to investigate not because of politics, but because of corruption. So he's like, hey, Marco, in case you were mistaken, I was not kidding.

I feel as though none of you are familiar enough with the avant-garde stylings of Andy Kaufman. This is a long term kind of piece. Oh, it's a bit. Oh. I didn't know that. Just knowing. Okay. All right. What are the Democrats' options now that the White House is all in on obstructing everything in Congress? What are the legal options? And then what is a good political strategy? Can they make the impeachment hearings successful with the Trump administration completely obstructing Congress? What are their options?

One option they have is that they could just impeach him. Just call it a day. Just call it a day. I mean, yes, the obstruction stuff should arguably be an article of impeachment. It sounds like they're building quite a case there. They're also about to get all of the, or a bunch of the stuff that was collected during the Mueller investigation that goes toward obstruction. You know, things like asking Comey to interfere with the Justice Department on the Flynn investigation. So that could all be added there. But even if they don't want to touch the obstruction stuff, they could impeach him right away just on the asking for

foreign interference stuff, the substantive matter that sparked the proceedings in the first place. They can just do that whenever they want. Yeah, they can go to court, right? But that's going to take a long time. Go to court to try to compel the subpoenas? Yeah, to compel the subpoenas. I mean, obviously this would probably end up at the Supreme Court if the White House fought this,

if the White House is going to say we're not going to cooperate with anything. And then I guess they could sue to enforce the subpoenas. Yeah, I mean, the sort of frustrating thing here is, you know, one of the arguments we always heard from people who are pro-impeachment way earlier than now was that impeachment would make winning these court battles easier, faster, would then force them to come forward. And, like, I think it was probably always the case that that was not true, especially when Trump is guilty.

We've read the thing. We know he's guilty. He's going to fight this thing and make it about process the entire way. So I think that Schiff is just going to proceed with what he has at a normal pace. Yeah, it was interesting. I saw Schiff did an interview with Greg Sargent the other day, yesterday, I think. And he said that he believes, he's like, look, if the courts know there's going to be a trial in the Senate, I cannot imagine a court in this land that won't give us the evidence

we need to conduct this trial, whether it's from Mueller or whether it's from anywhere else. So Schiff seems to think that not only will he get the evidence, but he'll get it in a timely fashion for a Senate impeachment trial. Well, Beryl Howell is forcing that to happen right away with the Mueller stuff now. Right. Right. I mean, it's moving. The Constitution says the House shall have the sole power of impeachment and the Senate shall have the sole power to try all impeachments. It couldn't be more clear that it's a congressional prerogative and that they need to supply this evidence. If your argument is we refuse to give you the information you need to hold impeachment proceedings. I mean,

it just, what's the purpose of having impeachment to begin with? I feel like the thing that I'm, that I feel like is potentially on the horizon that I'm really worried about, and I don't know what to, how to think about it, is like reading that transcript from the Beryl Howell hearing this week. And you know, the one where she says, wow, you really are arguing something quite extreme here. I mean, there are- You think Watergate was argued wrongly?

You're arguing to me that Watergate was wrongly decided that the material collected in that grand jury investigation shouldn't have been given to the house for the purposes of their impeachment. Like really? Eight to zero case, right? Yes.

And so to see Howell arguing that and then the brave Justice Department lawyers saying, yes, your honor, I don't think it's that extreme. Like, it's just very awkward. But it made me start thinking about the prospect that the Justice Department under William Barr, as some of these things do go through court, and there's a bunch of things that are already in court. The Justice Department has been representing the president essentially as his personal lawyer through all of these things. They're taking a side on everything. They're losing all of these cases. And they'll all take a while, but they'll all eventually resolve. And they'll resolve with court orders. And under Bill Barr, do we believe that the Justice Department might not comply with court orders? I mean, that's an actual constitutional crisis. It's a unless it's a is that true?

It's a constitutional it's a constitutional crisis if we fail to remove Donald Trump. Right. I mean, these are the reason I think you pursue every legal remedy. You're saying that that constitutional crisis should resolve in favor of impeaching the person that's precipitated the constitutional. Right. That that that, you know, it's a constitutional crisis. The constitutional crisis to me doesn't exist when Donald Trump flouts a subpoena. The constitutional crisis exists when Republicans in the Senate refuse to obey their sort of constitutional responsibilities for the sake of party and fail to punish the president for his obvious crimes. That is the crisis. That's not, I mean, the definition of a constitution, I mean, a constitutional crisis would be the courts ruling against Trump and him ignoring the congressional subpoena. Impeachment is a political decision. I get what you're saying, but it's not the word as defined. This is semantics. Semantics matter. I mean, a constitutional crisis is a crisis the constitution cannot resolve to me. And to me, a constitutional crisis that it will be

unresolved if the president is a criminal and it is obvious and he is flouting both the judiciary and the Congress and the Congress won't act because they put party over their prerogatives as representatives of the legislative branch. That, to me, is the ultimate crisis. I think it's very, very bad. It is a crisis if the president refuses to obey court orders. But to me, that is the moment we will have been, that is the Rubicon to me. I think I'm with Tommy on this in that I think that when you have elected officials behaving badly and refusing to acknowledge their responsibilities as patriots and citizens, that's bad, but you solve that by voting them out. And so you still have one other option

to play. If the Justice Department itself, which is in charge of enforcing the law and prosecuting crimes, refuses to acknowledge the authority of the United States court system, I honestly don't know what to do. I mean, Congress could impeach Bill Barr there. Congress could impeach the president for overseeing an administration that is behaving this way. And it's really bad if the Republicans decide that's not worth impeaching them on. But there's no fix. There's no way to make the, I mean, the courts don't have an army, right? The courts don't have any way to get their way other than by having their authority respected. This is like the Andrew Johnson impeachment. Yeah. I mean, look,

I think we're arguing over the semantics of the phrase constitutional crisis. I agree that it is a terrible, terrible, dangerous thing. We're fucked either way. Yeah, completely fucked. It's not a lot to look forward to. I just think that to me the assumption is we knew from the get-go that the courts would not have troops. That is their weakness. That is why Congress has the power of impeachment to enforce what happens in the court. I mean, I just think it's baked into the system that we might have an administration that fails to honor what the courts do and may even fail to honor what the Congress does. And that's why we have this impeachment power to exist for this very moment.

I just think that the thing that I worry about the most is the Justice Department. The Justice Department bringing political prosecutions against the president's enemies in order to score political points for the president or to clear his enemies off the board. I worry about the Justice Department kiboshing not only other forms of investigating the president or potential crimes by the president and other people in the administration, but submarining them so that nobody ever finds out about them. I mean, it is really lucky, basically, that we found out about the whistleblowers' complaint about the Ukraine call. It's only because of the inspector general of the intelligence community appointed by Trump, who decided that he was going to do the right thing here, despite the fact that he had been completely outmaneuvered. He just bluntly threw himself on it and said, no, I'm bringing this

to Congress. And I mean, that's the normal thing somebody should do. It counts as heroism in this moment. But had he not done that, we never would have known about the complaint. The whistleblower would have been in severe danger. It is a shocking realization the degree to which we have needed heroic acts to find out. I was going to say, my surprise is to the point about the Justice Department is that there haven't been more whistleblowers or people coming forth who are career people at the Justice Department. Because they have had a rough run between Jeff Sessions and now Bill Barr. And that is my worry too, because so far we've seen Bill Barr, you know, abuse all kinds of power to protect Donald Trump, but we haven't seen as much of the prosecuting his enemies and going after his

enemies. The one who's doing that is Mike Pompeo with reopening the email investigation at the State Department. And that is something that I almost feel like, oh, I want to put that in its own folder and carry that. But that's a really big deal that they're doing that. And the way they are pursuing it, as best as I understand, is that they're basically blackballing all senior State Department officials who had any communications with Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of state by saying, oh, listen, we've retroactively classified your emails from that time as now looking to us like they're classified. And therefore, you've got a security ding against you and your record and you can never be employed in the State Department ever again, no matter who's president. It is disgraceful. Like they're retroactively classifying a bunch of emails that maybe could have been classified at the confidential level as a way to punish these people. Meanwhile, our U.S. ambassador to the European Union and our

special representative for Ukraine and the ambassador are texting about fucking Trump's phone calls with foreign leaders, military aid to Ukraine, things the Russians would desperately want to know that should have been classified, that at a minimum, that business should be conducted on State Department equipment so that there is oversight, so that you can FOIA it. You mean not on WhatsApp? Right, not on iMessage, which is like... It was on WhatsApp! Well, at least that's encrypted, but whatever.

You're talking about not capturing them, though, for the records. The hypocrisy is stunning. Deleting it all. Yeah. All right, one other piece of news we should mention is Turkey's invasion of northeastern Syria, which began today after Donald Trump made the decision on Sunday to abandon our Kurdish allies in the region and gave President Erdogan of Turkey the green light. Tommy, I know you guys talked about all this on Pod Save the World, but can you tell us why

Trump's decision was so reckless here? I mean, basically what he did is he told President Erdogan that he has the green light to conduct a military operation into northern Syria. And the problem with that is Trump has tried to frame this as, oh, we're handing over the fight against ISIS to the Turks. They own it now. They'll manage it for us. Everything will be fine. When in reality, what Erdogan wants to do is roll in there and clear the Syrian Democratic Forces out of the area. The Syrian Democratic Forces are the folks who have been on the ground doing the really brutal combat against ISIS this whole time. They're the ones who cleared the way, got us to Raqqa, were fighting house to house. They lost, I think, 11,000 guys in this fight. Actually,

men and women. There are men and women out on the front lines fighting every single day. I think like six Americans were killed during this time. So they've like shouldered the brunt of this. But Erdogan views the Kurds who are part of the SDF as related to the PKK, which is a group within Turkey that's been fighting for an autonomous Kurdistan for a long time. He views them as a terrorist group. So he wants to kill these Kurdish fighters who have been our closest allies, who we've been working hand in glove with over several years to take out ISIS. And so the reports as we were walking in here to record is that the Turks are bombing towns where there are Christians and Kurds and others living and are going to start killing these guys. And like, at best, this is going to be ethnic cleansing, where they push them into a small part of northern Syria. At worst, it could be a massacre. Why do we think that

Trump did this? I mean, there's something clearly that every time Trump talks to Erdogan, whatever Erdogan asks Trump for, he gets instantly with Trump not consulting on anybody, consulting with anybody. Obviously, the U.S. military would be rabidly against this. I think most other people working in national security, even Trump folks working in national security, would be against this. I've never heard anybody argue for this. We should pull out and let Erdogan do what he wants to our allies. So either what did what did Erdogan have to say to Trump to get him to agree to this? What does Trump see as being in this for him? I mean, as Wendy Sherman was arguing tonight on my show, to the extent that Trump wants to be able to say for political purposes,

I'm getting all our boys home. That's not even what this is. So why say yes to this? I cannot fathom an explanation. To your point, right? He's trying to say, oh, I'm bringing these 150 guys home who were there maybe in the way of Erdogan's operation. They're not going anywhere. They're driving to a different location in Syria, so they're not in the line of fire. They're not coming home. I mean, I don't have an answer. Turkey is a NATO ally.

It's the only NATO ally he's nice to, is the one run by this, like, Islamist authoritarian leader. Maybe they get along. I don't get it. It was interesting. I saw, I think, Newsweek had the NSC official say that Trump got rolled on the phone call, which is, you know, it's sort of a simple explanation and not as nefarious, but one that sort of fits Donald Trump.

He gets on a call with a world leader about something else, and all of a sudden he asks him for something, and he's like, yeah, sure, that's fine, great, let's make a deal. I get to bring my troops home? Yeah, great, that's good politically for me. We should bring troops home. At least I can say that. Yeah, you can see him, right, Erdogan's a prickly asshole, and I'm sure he got on there and lectured him for 40 minutes and said, we will take the fight to ISIS, we will take this fight over ourselves,

you send your guys home, we got this covered. You don't have to spend money. And he's like, sure. But that makes even that makes sense to me as a rational course of events. If the end result is that Trump actually is bringing everybody, all U.S. forces home from Syria, and he's not. And the argument that he's having to make now, including on Twitter, is about how the U.S. forces are out of the way and the Kurds didn't help us at Normandy in World War II, and so they're not that good. What are you talking about? What are you talking about?

It's disgraceful. I mean, I just, I don't, I feel like this is something where the thing we understand about the president is that he does stuff that's good for him. Yeah. There's no way in which this looks good for him. And therefore, I believe there's something else going on here that he's been leveraged into, either by Erdogan or by some other force at work that we're not seeing directly. Well, we know he has business interests.

Well, that's what I was going to say. I mean, this is the great struggle for understanding a congenital liar with multiple different vectors of corruption and influence on on him at all times we don't know if it is his financial interest we don't know if it's simply him misunderstanding his own interest yeah uh being rolled in a call uh we don't know if there's not some other uh other other form of influence or interest that we don't yet know about we just we go into this, the only thing we know for sure is that his explanations will not be true. It's so funny, like, because he's the president of the United States, we are forced to like,

take his statements at face value and evaluate them and try to figure out what he's thinking. A month ago, this dude was drawing with a Sharpie on a fucking weather map to tell us that a hurricane was going someplace we all knew. And right, So it's like, we're already in La La Land with him. The thing that's crazy is there is a massive Republican backlash to this decision. He's getting criticized in ways he's never, ever criticized. And it's not just that this, he's not stopping the Turks from taking this military operation. He apparently invited Erdogan to the White House on November 13th. So like, the fuck you is going to get rubbed in the faces of the Lindsey Grahams of the world

all over again with a state visit, not a state visit, but a head of state visit to the White House. Well, this is what happens with him all the time though, right? Like once he makes the decision and then he gets criticized for it, now he's set. He's backed into a corner and now he's going to go down. But not on this. He's walked this back like three times. But he's, but talking about the Normandy thing today and all that, like he's going to keep fighting for his explanation. He just tweeted like, you know, he tweeted his video of him talking about it tonight.

He said, this is a different take for me. Like, like he's just a pundit talking about it. What else you got? Look, I have a different take on this one. I have a different take on this. I gave a green light to, uh. They are, they are walking it back. I mean, remember the last time he talked to Erdogan

was when he announced that all U.S. troops are coming out of... That's how we lost Mattis and how we lost Brett McGurk, who was the envoy to the fight against ISIS. And the... I mean, he did change that. Like, there's still U.S. troops in Syria.

I mean, part of, I think, what we have to think about tonight is that what the Turks are doing right now with the cooperation of the Russians is potentially starting an ethnic genocide campaign in that part of the country where there are a lot of people, not just who aren't only important to us because they were our allies and have been for five years against ISIS. That should be important to us even if we freaking hate them. Right. And the small number of U.S. troops who are there right now are themselves in a new kind of danger that they've never been in before in terms of not having the support of the U.S.

government. And also they're at grave risk from our former allies who they've been working alongside for five years having real reason to turn on them if they decide to think about it that way. And so to have U.S. forces there, deeply sympathetic with the Kurds while the Kurds are being attacked and potentially massacred. Them being under rules of engagement that are not supposed to have them fighting in a frontline way, having them newly in danger, having no sense about what's going to happen next. I mean, just the perspective of American soldiers in Syria right now is almost unfathomably

dark. Yeah. And I don't, I mean, I am conscious of the fact that Russia has wanted U.S. troops out of Syria because it sees Syria as its playground from the very beginning. Turkey and Russia are on different sides of the Syrian civil war, right? They have different interests there. But when Erdogan starts this thing today, he puts out this statement saying, I want to thank Russia for its constructive attitude in this matter. And they're working together on this. Russia for its constructive attitude in this matter. And they're working together on this.

That is, that's just, it's bad. It's really bad. Yeah, we really are confronted right now. It's, you know, you, it does become something you're anesthetized to a little bit, but that just put the, you know, there's incredible corruption, there's criminality, but the fundamental unfitness of the man, the kind of brokenness of his ability to reason and process and make decisions in a rational and cogent and thoughtful way with discipline. The absence of that ability is in and of itself a reason he should no longer be president. His behavior itself is an impeachable offense. Well, he pissed off a lot of his jurors with the turkey move as well. Yeah, which might end up mattering. Well, he's going to try to move it to a different venue. I was going to say, yeah. We've convened end up mattering. Well, he's going to try to move it to a different venue.

I was going to say... We've convened a jury in St. Petersburg. Lindsey Graham's 18 holes away from never knowing who the Kurds were. Yeah, that's sad. Alright, let's talk about 2020. We learned today that Facebook has denied Joe Biden's request to remove a false Trump ad from its platform that other media outlets like CNN have already refused to run.

Facebook's response to the Biden campaign follows its very recent policy change, which allows politicians to run ads that have been already debunked by independent, nonpartisan fact checkers, a decision that was also heavily criticized by Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday. Warren also noted that the decision came shortly after Mark Zuckerberg met with Donald Trump and called Warren's campaign an existential threat to Facebook. Just last week, the Trump campaign spent $700,000 in a week on Facebook ads. Fire out spending anyone else on Facebook. So Facebook says that their decision is grounded in their fundamental belief in free expression, respect for the democratic process, and the belief that in mature democracies with the

free press, political speech is already arguably the most scrutinized speech there is. Oh, yeah. What do we think about that reasoning from Facebook? I don't think it's good. I don't think it's very smart. You know, you shouldn't propagate misinformation and put lies in front of millions of people to make money. Billions. I mean, I guess they would say, look, and we should say it's not just Facebook that's done this.

The ad is on YouTube. It's on Twitter. Fox ran it as well. It's had 5 million views on Facebook already. Yeah. So it's out there. Yeah. And, you know, and Twitter and YouTube are basically saying the same thing.

I guess from their perspective, their argument would be, how are we, how do we fact check this, right? Like, so, you know, we've had, you know, the Washington Post, right? Glenn Klessler at the Washington Post, the fact checker there. He's given Obama four Pinocchios on stuff and we've freaked out about it, right? And we said, that's totally wrong. This is correct. He's, you know, imagine if we had an ad like that, that we put a lot of money behind and we thought it was right. We thought the fact check was wrong.

And then Facebook took them all down. So I guess how do these platforms actually conduct fact checking in a fair way that makes them? Same way every major network does it. Like figure out a process and stick to it. Like CNN rejected the ad. CNN clearly did it. Surely they could find the resources to figure this out. And by the way,

like they are just so constipated on all things politics, right? Like they get beat up by the right and then they get beat up by the left and they're terrified of being called partisan. So at the end, what gets sacrificed is accuracy. So my advice to them would be

stop running political ads. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. It's a drop in the bucket. That's exactly it. It's a drop in the bucket. You don't want the headache? Fuck it, get rid of them. That stop running political ads. It's a drop in the bucket. It's a drop in the bucket. You don't want the headache. Fuck it. Get rid of them. That's exactly it. And I mean, I have this fantasy that there was that, that Facebook would recognize that it is powerless before its own failure, that it can't fix this problem. And no matter, even if they did want to try to fix it,

they can't get there. They can't think themselves or engineer themselves out of this. And so we'll have a moratorium on all political advertising for a month before the election. Right. Even just that. But they should just get rid of it entirely. And like seeing Nick Clegg, a former deputy prime minister of the UK, waving the white flag on like their ability to adjudicate facts and politics is so depressing. I was like, Nick Clegg, isn't that the name of the former, I didn't know it was the same guy.

Now he works for Facebook? Wait, wait, wait. This is new to me. Nick Clegg works for Facebook? I learned this today too. That's who's arguing that we need to run fake, disproven disinformation? That Nick Clegg. Because of America, because free speech, because we love democracy.

And so therefore, we need to take money to run this poison that we know is false. It's baffling. I just don't know that they have really learned any lesson. I know they've invested a lot of time and resources and people at what happened in 2016 and their role in 2016. But for Mark Zuckerberg to meet with Donald Trump, change this policy to make an exception for political ads on fact-checking, and then, even though it was leaked audio, talk in his company meeting about, and I know it was Elizabeth Warren's policy, is an existential threat to the company, and I'm going to go to the mat. I know it was Elizabeth Warren's policy is an existential threat to the company.

And I'm going to go to the mat. Like, doesn't he have doesn't he have a responsibility to be a neutral arbiter at the very least in 2020? Or at least a fake neutral arbiter. Like, don't you aren't you worried about what you look like right now? Right. That's what I don't understand. Like what Zuckerberg's doing there. I got to say, like, if I ran Facebook and one candidate had said, I'm going to break up Facebook, I would probably view that as an existential change to the company, right? Or a risk to the company. And I think that he was sort of being honest about what any CEO in that situation would believe.

Now, whether it's smart to say in a meeting with 10 people or an all-hands that's going to get recorded, that's another matter. While also making radical decisions about how you're going to handle political speech affecting that politician. Right. Well, that's the separate. It's not just any company, right? If he's CEO of some company that Warren says, I'm going to tax a lot or regulate or whatever, that's one thing. But he also has a role. I don't think he has fully, partly he hasn't recognized this because he doesn't think Facebook is a media company. He thinks it's a technology company, right? Like everyone at Facebook is supposed to say we're not a media company, no matter what you ask them. They are a media company, right? And they won't

recognize that. So I don't think he fully recognizes his very important role and his company's important role in the 2020 election, no matter what. This is the story for me. That's why you can't be saying things like that about people's platforms, no matter what. This is the story for me. That's why you can't be saying things like that about people's platform. This is Facebook. This is what they do. Sorry, it's not our policy. It's not our policy. We'll eventually apologize for it and change our policy and recognize that we're wrong, but we're not there yet. There's sort of just this pattern with Facebook again and again and again. They've pursued bigness at all costs without regard for safety. And the bigness itself becomes an excuse.

The scale of Facebook itself becomes an excuse for their inability to solve the problems that they created by achieving such scale. I don't, you know, look, don't run political ads, run political ads. To me, before you even get to them being forced to not have them at all, how about you accept that there are gray areas,

there's also black and white. You may get them wrong sometimes and face a little blowback, but that doesn't justify allowing your platform to be a vehicle for misinformation and lies and deception that already once changed an American election a few years ago. Do we know what proportion of their ad revenue is political ads? Or do we have a guesstimate? of their ad revenue is political ads? Or do we have a guesstimate? I don't.

I don't off the top of my head, but I would suspect it is like a percent of a percent. Yeah. That would be my guess. And so, I don't know. I mean, I don't know how these things get fixed. I mean, Trump is spending a lot. Yeah.

I mean, he is their biggest of all the political candidates. But given the market capitalization of Facebook, even if he's going to spend a billion dollars on ads, which he's not going to do if they were all on Facebook, I'm not sure that would make... Yeah, Facebook made $40 billion in 2017. Yeah. So definitely not that much. So literally, if Trump was going to spend a billion dollars on Facebook ads, it would be a little bit of a rounding error for them. I mean, I don't know that much about this part of the world, and I don't know that much about the advertising to-ing and fro-ing. I do know that this is not a swap meet in which people are

sending this information back and forth amongst themselves with no interface from Facebook. When people want to buy these ads, they send money to Facebook, and Facebook says, thank you. We're going to cash your check. We're going to take that money and thereby allow you to put this thing on our platform. And when they take that gatekeeper role for the purposes of taking money, they then put themselves in the position where they have to have some sort of opinion about what they're doing. You just can't. I don't know. There's just been – it is – responsibility has never been something Facebook has been particularly interested in. At no point in its evolution as a company has it ever been willing to accept the responsibility that it has earned by becoming such an ever-present part of our lives.

It's just, we're not a media company. We're a platform. Okay. Okay. But look what your platform's doing. Ads don't really matter that much, except for the companies that buy ads on our platform. Yeah. It's like, We believe that advertising works

because it's our entire business model. Political advertising doesn't really have that much of an effect. It's the greatest advertising tool in the history of mankind. Their revenue for the 12 months ending in June 30th, 2019 was $62 billion. I think they always move a little slow. They always move with half measures. If I had an inkling of a sense that the ethnic cleansing was happening in Burma because of my platform, I would have cut off access to the platform in the country. You know what I mean? It's like, go big guys, do something important and maybe you'll get criticized, but at least you'll have addressed the problem. Rachel, before we go, I do want to talk about your new book. You're very kind.

It's called Blowout, Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth. It's a very happy topic. It's about how Russia's reliance on the oil and gas industry is critical to explaining why they interfered in the 2016 election. I know you said that you did not start thinking that you would write this kind of book. So how did you start and then how did you end up where you ended up? I started because I am proudly and unapologetically totally obsessed with Russia. And I get it. Bring on the hate. I got it. Bring it. I love it. You make me bigger and stronger.

You brought a lot of red string with you today. You call me Carrie. We've spent like a year and a half on it too. Yeah. We're in it. The part of it that I felt like I was really stuck on is that I didn't understand why it made sense for Russia to attack us in that way. Not only to try to influence our election, but to use those weird MacGyver-y

tactics, right? Like it's the oligarch guy who's got a St. Petersburg thing with people who make fake social media. We're going to use that. And then competing military intelligence hacker groups going for the DNC and then inventing Guccifer 2.0 to post all this stuff in Comic Sant? Like, what is this? This is a strange tactic. Why would a country use this as its tactics? I was interested in that. And why would they take such a risk? I mean, if they believed, like everybody else believed, that Hillary Clinton was likely to win the election, I know that they wanted to weaken her ability to govern. They wanted to undermine her as a president. Those last minute text exchange or Twitter exchanges between Julian Assange and

Don Jr., he was trying to make sure that they would contest the election results and not concede once Hillary won. They wanted to foment as much chaos as they could and upset around. But if they thought Hillary was going to win, Hillary was already a Russia hawk. So imagine what Hillary would have, could have done to them getting into office, knowing that Russia just interfered in our election to try to stop that from happening. You'd think that they might be, like that's a big risk that they were taking against really, really bad odds. And so why was it worth it for them to do that? And I came to realize that both of those things came from the same place, which is desperation. And John McCain

has made this argument. President Obama made this argument. Vice President Biden all made this argument that the best way to understand Russia was through their weakness. And in particular, their economic weakness. But I didn't really get how economically weak they were until I realized that their economy is a pogo stick. It's only got one thing in it, which is oil and gas, which it turns out is a terrible thing to build your economy on. It gives you a bad government. It ruins all other efforts to build a diversified economy around it. And in Russia's case, their oil and gas sector has been so looted by Putin to do the kind of things that he wants to do with it, to use

it as a weapon, essentially, because he doesn't have any other forms of power to project, that they suck even at pumping their own oil and gas. And so they really need Western oil majors to come help them. And they can't get that as long as they're sanctioned because of their bad behavior. Are you a big resource curse adherent? Yeah. Can you tell us what that is? The resource curse is an academic idea that's been around forever, which is basically that if you have resources in your country that are to be extracted and sold as an international commodity, that seems awesome because you're going to get revenue for that. But it has a knock-on effect. There's this paradoxical effect where it tends

to shrink your economy overall, give you bad governance, and result in increased poverty and worse quality of life for everybody in your country. And that's because whatever this remunerative extractive industry that comes in, they tend to capture the elites and the government officials who can make it happen. Those people get corrupted and co-opted by that industry. They get all the money and all they would do for the rest of their lives is make sure that they and their offspring stay in power forever to stay clamped on this financial asset. How deep are the connections between Russian oil and gas interests and the Trump administration? I know you... Well, I mean, Russian... This is why I'm obsessed with Rex

Tillerson. Right. So, I mean, here's the timeline, right? Russia is born living on a sea of oil and gas. They've got tons of oil and gas. Their easy oil and gas kind of starts to run out and they start to need to be able to tap modern technology to get at their reserves. They have nothing else in their economy. They need to keep pumping oil and gas. They start making moon eyes at their resources that are in the Arctic, in the Russian Arctic, in the Kerasi. They have no way to pump it themselves. They do a half trillion dollar deal with Exxon. And Rex Tillerson is willing to do it. All these other Western majors have gone in and tried to do deals with Russia, and they've just gotten chewed up and spit out, including like Western oil execs like getting poisoned in Moscow.

And, you know, good oil companies in Russia get seized and their owners get put in jail. And it's a disaster. But Rex figures it out and is willing to do it. He gets a medal, a fricking medal from Putin, right? And then they're about to start drilling in the Arctic and Putin can't control himself, can't keep it in his pants and he has to go invade Ukraine. And the US institutes sanctions and they're actively drilling in the Kerasi when the sanctions kick in in 2014. And Exxon is like, give us just a few more days. We just needed one. I know we've been sanctioned and we're supposed to stop doing this, but we're really worried about the seabirds. We need to make sure we environmentally clean up our area.

All because they're trying to spud that well. They're trying to get to the oil. And ultimately, like on the last day, the Obama administration will allow them to be there. They do hit oil. And then they have to shut it down. And when Rosneft goes back to it themselves with Exxon not able to get there, they're so freaking incompetent. They can't drill the oil out of that well themselves. They need Exxon to do it. And they can't get Exxon to do it because of U.S. foreign policy. Exxon to do it because of U.S. foreign policy. And then Russia throws this curveball into the middle of our election in 2015 and 2016, and they help install Donald Trump as president.

And Donald Trump, when looking around for somebody to put in charge of U.S. foreign policy, has never met Rex Tillerson. That does not particularly like him when he meets him. And Rex Tillerson shows up having never ever worked anywhere in his life other than at ExxonMobil, shows up for a meeting, he doesn't know what it's about, has never met Trump before, walks out as Secretary of State. It's like, okay, so that can't really have happened, did it? And then he sets about dismantling the State Department. And the Trump administration sets about doing everything they can to try to relieve those sanctions on Russia. What's happening with that oil right now?

Sitting there. They can't do anything about it. I mean, the Russian oil and gas industry is terrible. I mean, natural gas is an even bigger deal for them than oil. The Gazprom, when Alexei Miller took over Gazprom, when Putin installed him, that company was worth like $360 billion because they've got a ton of natural gas. Under his leadership, under Alexei Miller, it's now gone down to being like $60 billion. They've lost more than $300 billion in value, but Alexei Miller is still in charge because he's doing what he needs to do, which is that enriching Putin and everybody who Putin needs enriched with that stuff. They don't even try to make themselves into good companies. He did, however, make himself a palace, which is called Millerhof. Miller is so not a Russian name that he's created

Millerhof, which is a palace for himself. He's still going to be in charge of Gazprom forever. Their companies just suck. Sounds like a palace for himself. He's still going to be in charge of Gazprom forever. Their companies just suck. Sounds like a Milwaukee beer house. So in a world that is moving away from fossil fuels because of climate change, what did you find out about, like, what's the long game here for Russia if they're still trying to squeeze everything they can

out of their oil and gas industry? If I could ask Putin one question, like, if I could ever get a Putin interview, I'm not waiting on it. If I could, Putin one question, like if I could ever get a Putin interview, I'm not waiting on it. If I could, that'd be the question that I'm asking. Like, what's going to be Russia's number one export in 25 years? Because you don't have anything. Talk about desperation. Yes. And so as the world turns away from oil and gas, because we have to, part of the reason I wanted to write the book is that I feel like we ought to get our heads around not just what the environmental consequences of that will be, and not just thinking about it in terms of the political consequences of jobs in America moving

from one sector to another and retraining and all that stuff. Think about it in terms of the international geopolitical influence, because the oil and gas industry is propping up a whole bunch of really terrible governments all around the world. And if they lose their market share and their power, then countries are going to change. Systems of government are going to change. I think the boundaries of countries will change. And countries that have built themselves on a single entity in their economy, that is oil and gas, will find themselves absolutely off the cliff. Can we ask one question about another project you did, which was Bagman, one of my favorite podcasts.

We love, we're Bagman. Bagman, man. It is one of the best podcasts ever made. Everyone should check it out if you haven't listened to it. It's about our former upstanding, virtuous vice president, Spiro Agnew, wonderful human being. With like, you described it as Watergate adjacent, right?

Now that we're in this impeachment proceeding, what did you learn about impeachment from doing that story and about, I don't know, you talked earlier about how if not for this brave whistleblower or a brave IG kind of doing their job, we would be in a very different place. You had some characters in the podcast who are very similar. Yeah. I mean, I feel like Spiro Agnew's ghost is here to help us at this time. For a price. Which you need to pay in a manila envelope in his office in the White House. There's a couple of things. I mean, one, in a very literal sense, I learned how fuzzy the Justice Department policies are on criminally indicting a vice president. Interesting.

To the extent that President Trump is trying to make sure that we don't have President Pence and is trying to make sure that Mike Pence is implicated here. I mean, his lawyers really- Throwing him at anchor. Were arguing in the Mazar's case that just went against him in federal court in New York. They explicitly brought up out of nowhere, by the way, this immunity argument we're making,

we're explicit about the fact that the vice president doesn't get this immunity. The judge was like, why are you saying this? That has been, we will know Donald Trump believes he's in real trouble when he throws his arms around Mike Pence and just jumps in the ocean. So some of that is and actually there were some dynamics like that between Nixon and Agnew back in 73 and 74 or 73 when Agnew at one point begged to be impeached because he thought that he would survive impeachment. And this would this would bring Republican partisans to his cause and it would excite the base. This kind of argument you hear from Republicans now. And he thought that if he was being impeached, that might persuade the Justice Department to drop their indictment of him.

And Nixon was very much against that because he thought if Agnew got impeached, he wasn't sure that he would survive. if Agnew got impeached, he wasn't sure that he would survive. And Agnew being removed from office, Nixon thought was actually bad for him because Democrats hated Agnew more than they hated Nixon. And so they would worry if they took Nixon out first that they'd end up with the president Agnew, and that's terrible. He also didn't want to get the wheels of impeachment going because he thought once they took out Agnew, well, they'd be ready to go. And they'd take out Agnew too. Yeah, it's like a little warm-up, a little stretch. So that dynamic between presidents and vice presidents is, I think, really important. But the big lesson of Bagman is that the Justice Department has to be good and it has to have

people in it who are upstanding and who are patriots and who don't do partisan things for bad reasons. And Elliot Richardson is a fricking hero. And we can't count on there being heroes, although sometimes you find them in unexpected places. Bill Barr is no Elliot Richardson. But to the extent that the Agnew story told us anything, it was that the Constitution doesn't crumble in the face of bad men doing bad things. The Constitution only crumbles when we can't fix that.

And that's the question that we're facing right now. We're going to have to end there because we've had all these really depressing stories, and that was so hopeful there at the end. So I think that's just the place to leave it. Buy the book. Download the podcast. Everyone go buy Blowout, please. Thank you very, very much.

Rachel, thank you so much for doing this. This is really fun. I love you guys. Thanks for having me. I'll come back any time you want. Buy the book. Download the podcast. Everyone go buy Blowout. Thank you very, very much. Rachel, thank you so much for doing this. This is really fun. I love you guys. Thanks for having me. I'll come back anytime you want me. Yes, great.

Anytime you want me. We got Rachel. Bye, everyone. Bye. Pod Save America is a product of Crooked Media. The senior producer is Michael Martinez.

Our assistant producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Carolyn Reston, Tanya Sominator, and Katie Long for Thank you.