Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime – Episode #493: Adam Schiff, Bob Costas, John Avlon, Zerlina Maxwell, Grover Norquist

Episode Date: April 27, 2019

Bill Maher and his guests answer viewer questions after the show. (Originally aired 4/26/19) See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series, Real Time with Bill Maugh. Okay, we're back. All right, Congressman, how do you propose to deal with the White House's refusal to let its aides testify before Congress? Oh yeah, that's the latest obstruction. Well, we're going to have to force the issue. We're going to have to litigate it in court. And we're going to have to look at other options as well. And that may mean devices we've used in the past where we cut off funding for certain offices within certain agencies.

if they don't cooperate. So we'll look at whatever tools that we have because at the end of the day, if this president can succeed in stonewalling the Congress, it means that our power of oversight is effectively nullified. And that will obviously have serious repercussions

when you have someone who lacks character in the Oval Office, but it will also have repercussions for any president who follows. And so there's a lot at stake in this fight. It's not just over whether a certain witness testifies. It's over whether we, have a system of checks and balances that still works.

Okay. Grover, by the way, you go on Fox News. Grover just told me he went up at the comedy store last night. The comedy store. That takes balls because that's not a conservative audience.

Did you standoff? It's a fun, yeah. Did they laugh? Yeah, we did well. You count how many just... What's we? Who's we? The soft puppet?

The club. We had... It was a... about 12 people performing. It was a conservative slate? No, no, no. Everybody else was talking about sex. I tried to do some just regular...

I didn't go blue. Everybody else went deep blue. You'd have been happy. Was it mostly about taxes? No, it wasn't about taxes at all. Oh. Yeah, I was like, what are you doing jokes? I'm so curious.

There's no jokes about taxes, per se. We were making fun of the French. With a puppy. Making fun of the French. Well, we can all get in on that. Sure. Do you think Stephen Moore, also a frequent guest on our show, should be on the Fed board?

Now, Stephen is an economist like Dr. Pepper's a doctor, but, you know. Okay. Yeah, no, I think Steve should, and I think it will be on the Fed board. Really? Besides the fact that he agrees, he's totally on your page with taxes. He's the, you know. He's fine on taxes, but he's also, look, he's also for, commodity-back currency.

But does he know how... A country's central bank is sort of key to keeping our shit together and not having the... What is it, unfucked? Unfuck America. I feel this is a good way.

When you undermine the institutions that are supposed to keep a president accountable, the independent institutions, law enforcement, the Fed, balance of powers, journalists, Trump goes after these intentionally and constantly,

and the appointment of Moore is just an effort to do that. You put a crony on the board of the Fed. It's his old play. many stooges. Come on. This is a stooge. You may disagree with Moore's policy of sort of harder. I don't know what his thought about. Let's just talk about it.

You really think he has the qualifications? Yeah. Look, he's a serious guy. He's a serious student of economics. The tax plan that he put together turned the economy from one that wasn't growing very rapidly to growing at 3%. Today, we just found out in the last quarter, the economy grew

at 3.2%. This is rather significant growth. But it has nothing to do with whether Steve Moore should be on the Fed, which is Something that he is attacked constantly throughout his career. Steve helped write the tax bill that did that, which is more than other people have done. This has nothing to do with whether or not the qualifications for sitting on the Fed. However, it might be relevant that he made several comments over the years. Ridiculously misogynistic, sexist comments, shouldn't be female sportscasters unless they look like so-and-so,

or unless they dress like something. You took it personally. Yeah, I did. As a matter of fact, these would have been retrograde positions in case. Smith's time, let alone more recently. Going all back like that. But he also said that women shouldn't be at men's basketball games because it's so annoying to see women.

Isn't there a place that men can go? This is not for you to do with interest rates. No. That I don't think he should be upset. So is there anything you can do about this, Stephen Moore on the Fed bench? Well, you know, I share the view. He doesn't belong there. He's not qualified to be there.

You can't stop it. And you're going to cite the text giveaway bill as a credential. that's all the more reason not to have them in that position. Okay. Bob Costas, what's your reaction to the right-wing's embrace of Putin, considering you are criticized by people like Rush Limbaugh for being too favorable towards him in 2014? I remember that. Well, let's start out with the false premise to begin with.

Right. What I said about Putin, among many things said about Putin in the course of hosting the Olympics from Sochi, was that Forbes, not Mother Jones or the nation, Forbes, had named him for 2013 the most influential world leader dropping Obama to two. Now, naturally, the right-wing crowd took that out of context. I became a straw man.

That became a talking point. They ignored the fact that prior to that and after it, I noted he has the mentality of the former KGB agent that he was, that he's an international thug, that journalists and dissidents are suppressed or worse in Russia.

They have anti-gay laws. They sponsor repressive regimes, Syria. It didn't make any difference that I said all those things because that wasn't useful to their business model. However, you look at the way Trump has cozyed up to Putin and all those curious moments where he could have made clear that he was an American first and did not, okay? But to that crowd, it's all a matter of, you know, that's their tribe. And they cheat at the Olympics. Oh, they absolutely cheated the Olympics. They cheated right under the IOC's nose at the Sochi Olympics. There should be no Russian meddling. Meddling, get it?

That's good. Okay. Ouch. John Avalon, do you have any thoughts on why Bill Barr would jeopardize his legacy to appease Trump? Look, it is crystal clear that he misled the American people intentionally by putting forward the most positive spin possible on the report and closing the door on obstruction, you know, at least unless Congress picks it up. I think because there's an Overton window with Trump, right?

He didn't nominate Chris Kobach for AG, so all of a sudden, Bill Barr is comparatively respected. If you look at his record in the George H.W. Bush administration, this is a play he's done before. He's done these memos that sort of summarize he says what an underlying opinion says. And then after it's subpoenaed two, three years later, you find out actually it's a very different deal. He's clearly making good on his 19-page memo that he wrote for the president about Mueller. I don't. I think he will go down in history. This will be a real mark not only against him in the administration. but this was a total distortion, an attempt to frame the debate in a way that's favorable to the president, and it did not represent the contents of the Mueller report.

You may not be unhappy they didn't go far enough, but there's a lot there. There are 12 open cases, and I think there's a lot more investigations that you're going to be done in the House about follow the money and other things. I don't care. It felt good to rip Mueller a new asshole. There you go, sir. The other thing that is so galling about Barr is, of course, Mueller wrote his own summary. If he wanted to give a preview and not wait until the whole report was out. Part of the plan. Mother had a summary, but the whole communication strategy was get Barr out there to misrepresent the report.

Why did Barr want the job? I marvel at this with so many people who are willing to completely debase themselves for a seat at Donald Trump's table. Yeah. You know, I'll tell you. I'm so disloyal to others. When Rudy Giuliani first went on the talk show's circuit is. a surrogate of Trump, I wrote a tweet, and unlike the president, I have my staff review it to see if it's insane.

And my draft said, you know, whatever happened to America's mayor, why are so many people willing to completely debase themselves receded Donald Trump's table? And two of my staff said, you can't possibly send that out. You can't possibly send that out. They were both New Yorkers, and I said, why? And they said, because he completely debased himself long before now.

I used to work for Rudy Giuliani when he was mayor, and I was proud to do it. But I do think this is a different chapter. I do think folks have a tendency to show a lot of loyalty and filty to somebody who does not show loyalty in return. And just back on the bar thing, the most egregious thing was he repeated six times in the presser of the day and in the memo the exonerating, you know, the non-exonerating language, right? The other half of the sentence said that the Trump campaign expected to benefit from Russian efforts to influence the election. That's as crystal clears again. That effort's ongoing today and Donald Trump is still in denial. It's completely insane.

All right. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, audience. We'll see you next week. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch them anytime on HBO on demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com.