Reply All - #131 Surefire Investigations

Episode Date: November 15, 2018

This week, the return of YYN: from a deranged mascot to the top of the FBI Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm PJ Vote. And I'm Alex Goldman. Welcome once again to Yes Yes No, the segment on the show where our boss, who, when we started this show, seemed very old to me, but now seems very much within reasonable. With an reasonable age difference to me. This season of Reply All, like the theme is just aging anxiety. It's really uncomfortable. You guys are getting so old.

So our boss, Alex Bloomberg, comes to us to stuff from the internet that he doesn't understand, and we do our best to explain it to him. Hi, Alex. Hello, Alex Goldman. Hi, how are you? I'm good. You guys sound like you're about to do a Pledge drive. Hey, PJ. What have you got?

All right, so I have a tweet. It's from somebody named Maya Kossoff. And Maya's tweet says, I just left a hipster coffee shop in Philadelphia. All the young libs there were sipping disposable cups full of septa sewer sledge and murmuring among themselves how gritty is actually the fanatic son. and there's 1,163 likes

and a bunch of retweets and I really don't know Do none of the words I mean the words makes It's one of those classic Yes Yes No tweets Where the words, I know every word Except for SEPTA

I guess I know even know what SEPTA is It's a train line right Yeah I know what SEPTA is I know what all the words are But I just don't The way they're arranged makes no sense to me PJ vote, do you understand this tweet? Mostly.

All right. Alex Bloomberg, do you understand this tweet? No. Alex Goldman, do you understand this tweet? I'm going to go, I would say I'm about 90%, 95%. Okay, we're at that famous segment. 95% mostly no. Can I just say something unusual that I'm excited about about this?

Yes. The part that I feel most qualified to explain is all sort of, sports stuff. Yeah, this is a this is like a backdoor sports, sports, sports, man, I hope you're ready.

Oh my God, really. Also, it's actually like, we've not on like four episodes or something just about Philadelphia sports. I know, it's all Philly sports. This is more Philly sports.

Oh, that's, oh, so the fanatic in this tweet then, fanatics, the fanatic is spelled P-H-A-N-A-T-I-I-C and that must refer to the Philly fanatic,

which is the Philadelphia Phillies mascot. Yes, a big green Muppet-looking guy who's really zany and lots of fun. All right. If you're a young PJ vote

who is being taken to all these Phillies games by his dad, the love of sports didn't really stick, but the Fanatic was just pretty awesome. He's just a very weird,

goofy mascot. Even if the game was a little slow, he's out there. He's one of the best mascots. It was him and the San Diego chicken were the best ones.

Do you know, okay, so wait, so you know the Fanatic, do you know Gritty? I don't know Gritty. So, at the end of September, the Philadelphia Flyers, the hockey team,

unveiled their new mascot. Okay. His name is Gritty. He's fantastic. I'm going to just show you his entrance to the first, to the first Flyers game of the season. Okay. Okay, here we go.

Oh, my God. Wow. Wow. So there is a massive, fuzzy, orange monster in a hockey jersey that is Gritty. He is descending from the ceiling on a wire. waving and tumbling and spinning all around. And he hits the ice. Not gracefully, I might add.

Just kind of wobbly. And then he disconnects himself and just starts wiggling around. Like his eyes are like... They never stop wobbling. Because most, yeah, I realize most mascots don't have like the googly eyes. Because it would be disturbing. You can buy at a craft store, you know, and you put on like a sock puppet. And like, that he has like gigantic version of the...

googly eyes that you put on sockpuppets and it's really disconcerting because his eyes are just like constantly rotating in different directions right it makes him look incredibly scarily deranged yes he looks like crazy he looks like he could hurt you yes and might want to hurt you yes yeah he also looks kind of like a mascot that somebody made in prison out of parts of other mascots he's got but but like but somebody with a prison artisan with great talent yes yes yes because it's like really it's a really fully it's a fully cohesive sort of mask it's really great Anyway. So gritty, I mean, PJ, you can speak to the spirit of Philadelphia more than I can.

Yeah, just like Philadelphia and Philadelphia sports fans are just like sort of like teetering on the edge of violence at all times. It's like kind of scary but also like very lovable and great. Like when I was a kid and my dad would take me like Eagles games or basically it was the camera was just being scared the whole time. Like it would just be like guys spilling beer all the time like fist fights constantly. And it just didn't feel like there was a class of person including like 11 year old boy who was definitely safe from getting just like. knocked out for no reason. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, like, the reason Gritty is great is because he, like, they somehow managed to communicate all that in mascot. Yes, he is the, he is the mascot epitimate, like sort of incarnation of all that, uh, angry, Philly sports energy.

Honestly, the first thing I thought was like, okay, the summer between my freshman and sophomore year at college, I got a job working, uh, working construction, uh, where we would frame houses and it was me and these three dudes who were like sort of like framed houses for a living and every day we would show up at the job site and they would like six in the morning they would like smoke a gigantic joint and then they would proceed to smoke joints all day long and then they'd be up on top of like houses just like walking along like they just would get completely wasted all day but somehow it didn't affect them and the first day I showed up and I was just like out of college at Oberlin and like I show up and they hand me the joint and then I didn't know what to do so I took a hit

And then I was like, I was too stoned to do anything for the whole day. And so then I couldn't smoke any more pot that whole summer. But there was four of us that worked on this construction crew. It was me and this guy Pat and this guy, Arnie. And then there was this guy, Ricky. And Ricky had this big, big huge red hair and this crazy huge red beard. And, like, he was sort of a wild man. And they would always tease him.

And they would always talk about he never brushed his teeth. And, like, it was just like, that is gritty. Exactly. I took one look at Gritty and the very first thing that popped into my mind was this image from like over 30 years ago of Ricky on that construction crew in Cincinnati, Ohio. So when Gritty first came out, people were just like, what the hell is this? This thing is hideous. It's ridiculous. Look what Philadelphia's done again.

Right. So the first Flyers game of the season rolls around and Gritty steps onto the ice and from like moment one, it is just a debacle. Like they give him a t-shirt cannon and he like nails a guy in the back with a t-shirt. They don't give gritty skates and he's just like immediately falling all over the place. He's falling down. Here, there's actually a picture of him just like laying on the ice after having fallen. And there's like there's a person in the foreground with their hands on their head like just looking upset. Oh, yeah, people like have their hands on their head and somebody's like, what the hell?

There's another guy with his arms spread out wide. Like what the fuck, Grady? It looks like a catastrophe has just happened. Like Gritty has fallen and gotten a concussion. And Gritty's just laying with his legs splayed out, staring off into space. Like he might have knocked himself out. Like he might have knocked himself out. Or he just fell down and decided it wasn't worth it.

Yeah. Or he just fell down and decided that was it. And so people saw this picture and like people were responding to it being like, I love this, I love this so much. Oh, like it touched something in them. Right. All of a sudden he seemed like instead of like, it just somehow this unlocked his humanity. Even the guy who tweeted the original, like, viral photo of Gritty laying on the ice was like totally on board with Gritty. He tweeted something like, I'm in tears.

That was amazing. I am in. I am so in. So basically that we can't prove it, but that might have been the moment that public sentiment turned in favor of Gritty. Right. Wow. Okay. But people responding to that just saying like Gritty is the relatable hero that we all need.

Suddenly people were all in on this guy. Gritty is an every man. Gritty is this person who is totally representative, not just of the Philly spirit, but of like everyone. And it was just this goofy joke. Everyone was enjoying it. And then this website, this sort of like socialist, anti-capitalist website called Jacobin takes the joke one step further by tweeting gritty is a worker. Oh. Guy.

So how of a sudden Gritty becomes political? That's right. So people loved to this idea and just like ran with it. And so now the joke has evolved to being that gritty is like a hero for the left, a defender of the proletariat. And within like a week, Donald Trump comes to Philly and protesters mount up just like with full gritty representation of their anti-Trumpness. What do you mean full gritty representation of their anti-Trumpness? Signs that say like, say like there's only room for one orange asshole in this town. There is a video of people marching down the street, and I'll just play it for you.

Okay. Gritty is true. Wow. People are like... The left has really claimed Gritty. Yeah. Wow. There's a petition to replace a mural of the former mayor, Frank Rizzo, with a mural of Gritty.

Okay. And then it gets to this point where like four or five days after the Trump rally, the Wall Street Journal of all places publishes this piece called Antifa Appropriates a creepy mascot. Keep your Marxist hands off of Gritty. He belongs to Philly. And it says stuff like, The same leftists who want statues of Thomas Jefferson removed are now petitioning for Gritty to replace Mayor Frank Rizzo on a downtown mural. Like, they're taking this deadly seriously.

Wow. Okay. And then a month after Gritty's introduced, like in the end of October, the Philadelphia City Council puts together a resolution welcoming Gritty to the city. Whoa. And there's a lot to it. It's very long. But it's one of the – it says like a resolution welcoming Gritty. Whereas blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's written in like the style of a standard political resolution. But the details in it are so wonderful.

It says like whereas Gritty has been described as an acid trip of a mascot, a shaggy orange wukiesque grotesquery, a non-binary leftist icon, an orange menace, a raging id in an anti-hero. It has been argued that he, quote, conveys the absurdity and struggle of modern life under capitalism

and that he represents joyful comic respite. Wait, this is Philadelphia City Council? Yes. That's funny. And he represents a source of joyful comic respite in a time of societal upheaval. This is just, I'm cherry picking from a very long document. And then it says resolved

that the city council, that the council of the city of Philadelphia welcomes Gritty, the new mascot of the Philadelphia Flyers, and honors the spirit and passion that Gritty has brought to the city of Philadelphia and to the entire country both on and off the ice. It's just amazing that they're being like, like, we welcome this big monstrosity. Like, of course, he's the mascot.

Right. But they're like, we welcome him and the internet is right. Like, he voted for Bernie or whatever. Wow. Yeah. That's amazing. So I feel like... Wait, that's literally one phrase of this.

Like, you know who Gritty is. I know who good he is. Oh, wait, so there's more. Right. So the last thing that is very important to this and is itself an Odyssey is the phrase, I just left a hipster coffee shop. Oh, yeah. I didn't know that there was a backstory to that. I didn't even know enough to be, to not know that I didn't know what that sent. I thought that was the one, I thought that was the one sentence in here that I, that I, that I, or the one phrase in here that I. Surely this book is not a trapdoor to another secret passage, right? So what don't I understand about hipster coffee shop in Philadelphia? Well. To explain the hips or coffee shop thing, I have to explain an entirely different but related phenomenon. Okay. Which is the Trump responder. Are you familiar with Trump responders, Alex? No.

A Trump responder is a person who essentially responds to every Trump tweet in order to raise their own profile. Not just response to every Trump tweet. They try to be first. They try to make it so that when you open up Donald Trump's latest like provocation, right below it, you see the same one. to six people every time. People on the left, he'll say something incendiary, and they'll be like, you, sir, are not going to be laughing so hard

when Mueller puts you in jail. And then the people on the right are like, you should lock all immigrants up. You're doing a great job. Right. But it's always the same people. It's always the same people. And neither is a person on the left

being like, have you no decency. And also, everyone else who's, like, offended by my t-shirt or my stupid book. Or a person on the right who's like, have you all no decency buy my stupid t-shirt or my stupid book. Got it. And it's always like the most like, like just...

They're problematic people. Well, and not just the people are problematic. The merch is problematic. It's always on like Zazzle. And it's always like... Wait, with Zazzle. Zazzle, it's like, it's a website where you can print whatever you want on a t-shirt and sell it.

And so it's like, it's like lots of people making junkie t-shirts, lots of copyright infringement. And then like, I don't know, like stuff you buy at a boardwalk. Like, don't date my daughter. I have a shotgun. Or like, it's a blue. Bloomberg thing, you wouldn't understand. Okay, so wait, who are the Trump responders? So there's a couple of big ones.

There are these two guys, the Krasenstein brothers. Oh, they're the worst. Ed and Brian Krasenstein, who... They're just like these bloggers. Each of them have, I think, half a million Twitter followers. They run this website called Hill Reporter, which is supposed to sound like a newspaper, but it's just their website. Like, the best way to explain them is that Twitter will not verify them because they're not

legitimate. And so one of the brothers got an emoji of a blue diamond and put it next to his name so that people would think that he was verified on Twitter. Okay. They kickstarted a children's book called, oh, God. I want to get the exact name because it's wonderful. Because it's just saying the phrase bums me out so bad. How the people trumped Ronald Plump.

And it is a children's book about people fighting back against Donald Trump and his evil hairpiece, which is also a squirrel named Weave Bannon. Oh, my God. But before they were part of the hashtag resistance. the Krasenstein's have like kind of a checkered past. Like people looked into them and it turns out that a couple years ago, they were rated by the FBI for allegedly running a bunch of Ponzi scheme websites. But the reason that I explain the idea of Trump responders to you is because this hipster coffee shop thing has to do with a gentleman by the name of Jacob Wohl. Jacob Woll is.

I've heard that name. Is a Trump responder. He's a Trump supporting Trump responder. All I know about Jacob Wohl is he's always saying the most incendiary stuff, and he's like 19. He's 20. He's 20. He represents himself as a very wealthy man. And he's one of the youngest people to be permanently barred from futures trading or something.

So, so, so Jacob Wohl. So Krasenstein's are liberal Trump responders. And Wall is a conservative Trump responder. And so like, here's an archetypal Jacob Wall tweet. He's responding to Donald Trump saying, many gang members and some very bad people are mixed into the caravan heading to our southern border. Please go back.

You will not be admitted into the United States unless you go through the legal process. This is invasion of our country and our military is waiting for you. Jacob Wall responds, gang members and low-skilled illiterate workers. That's the Democratic Party's base. Right.

So Jacob Wall, prior to becoming the online Jacob Wall that we all know and love? Loathe? He owned this hedge fund, and in 2016, he was investigated after investors complained that he had misrepresented himself by saying that he had 10 years of experience, despite only being 18 years old. Okay. He was investigated again after telling his investors that his company managed $10 million worth of assets when in reality they were managing like half a million dollars worth of assets. And then when people got suspicious and wanted their money back, he gave them about half of their money back.

Not great. And another thing he would allegedly do is hire models to accompany him to conferences because he thought that it would like help him woo investors. So Jacob Wall would have remained a Trump replyer, probably could have parlayed this into like spots on Fox News, whatever. Zazzle Empire. Yeah, Zazzle Empire. Right. But my man, he flew very close to the sun. Oh.

So this is what I think I don't know. What happened? You don't know what happened? Really? I don't know anything that takes me from Jacob Wall to hipster coffee shop in Philadelphia. Well, there's a long bridge between those two things. Okay. We're on a yes yes now.

We're on it. Coming up after the break, things get much worse for Jacob Wall. Welcome back to the show. So in mid-October, two things started happening. One was that Jacob Wall was tweeting all this stuff about how he's got huge news about Robert Mueller, and reliable sources are telling him that something really bad's going to happen. Like, here's one of his tweets.

He says, quote, spoke to a prominent DC insider today, told me there are several women prepared to make credible allegations against dirty cop, Robert Mueller. So he was implying that he had. He was implying this. And at the same time... They had compromise on Robert Mueller. And at the same time, reporters were tweeting, like, hi, I just got an email from someone that said that they got an email from someone else offering them money in return for

claiming that they were sexually assaulted by Robert Mueller. I did see some of this. So, um, so he posts a thing saying I have, stay tuned. I've got a bombshell. Right. And then. And then there's a woman emailing all these reporters saying, hey, some guy just offered me thousands of dollars to make accusations against Robert Mueller.

Exactly. Wow. And then there was a different woman, a law school professor named Jennifer Taub, and she says she got this very concerning email offering her money if she talked to this guy about her experiences with Mueller, who, according to Taub, she's never even met. So her correspondence gets forwarded to the FBI. And at the same time, like, Jacob Wall is just barreling forward. And on October 30th, Jacob Wall tweets several media sources tell me that a scandalous story about Mueller's breaking tomorrow. Should be interesting. Stay tuned.

And then an article comes out alleging that Mueller sexually assaulted someone written by none other than Jacob Wall. An article where? In a very fringy outlet called Gateway Pundit, which is like basically a cousin of Info Wars. And the article outlines an accusation from a woman who says that she was sexually assaulted by Robert Mueller in New York on or about August 2, 2010. And Jacob Wohl backs this up with images of leaked documents from a private intelligence firm called surefire intelligence. So people immediately start digging into the allegations. And the first thing that people find is that there's an article in the Washington Post from 2010 that says that Robert Mueller was actually in Washington, D.C. on August 2nd, not New York, because he was serving jury duty.

What a shoddy, whatever. It's not just like, it's not just that this is. like awful in a bunch of different ways, but it's also like it's the worldview of a person who like, for instance, like when there are multiple credible accusations against, somebody thinks that this is what the other side is doing. Do you know what I mean? Like it's such a, ugh, anyway. Okay. Tell me more about how it didn't work. So the next thing people do is they're like, okay, so we've never heard of this surefire intelligence. What is surefire intelligence? Name sounds credible. So people start doing what you or I would do if we were investigating

this. They're just like, I'm going to like look for all evidence. of this place existing online. They go to the website. This place. Sure Fire Intelligence. Yeah. So they go to the website. They start looking on LinkedIn.

And the first indication that something's off is they go to LinkedIn. They find a couple of employees who work there. Let me show you one. His name is Simon Frick. So the picture of Simon Frick looks a lot like a 1940s film star. Does it look like a 1940 film star? Does it look like Christoph Waltz?

Oh, it's Christoph Waltz just in black and white. The guy from Inglary's bastards. Just pick a random image of someone who's not an actor. They did. They picked. a minister from Michigan. They also got Bar Raphaelie, the Israeli model. No, get people who you can't reverse Google image surgery. More to the point. Why use a picture at all? Who puts a picture on their LinkedIn? Most people. Yeah. I have one. That's a good point.

Your sense of what is normal in the world is so funny. And so people are asking Jacob Wohl, like, hey, are you behind this? Like, you have been claiming for weeks that this is going to happen. you posted the article. Are you sure of fire intelligence? And he was like, no, not at all. Of course not. And then people look up the Who is record and the website is registered to Jacob Wall.

People call the, what? There could be, that could be a different, Jacob Wall. People call the phone number on the website and it's his mom's cell phone. That could be his father then, who set it up. He's so bad at this. And Jane... Which makes me almost feel like maybe he's like a liberal operator.

You think it's a false flag operation? They got you, man. That's amazing. And Jane Mayer... His mom's cell phone. Jane Mayer from the New Yorker posts a picture from the LinkedIn of the managing partner at Surefire Intelligence, Matthew Cohen. And it's a darkened picture of like a silhouette of someone with a contrast turned way down.

And she cranked the contrast way up. And look who it is. I can't see. Is it Jacob Wall? It's Jacob Wall. What is he even doing? Wow. So literally you just went into like Photoshop or whatever.

Yeah, just turn the contrast. It's like when kids put their hands over their eyes and think you can't find them. Like it's so nuts. Wow. All right. So. Okay. So some people look at this evidence, they think, maybe Jacob Wall's involved.

How does he respond when people start saying like, hey buddy? He's like, he's like, I haven't even come forward with all my evidence. and there's an mainstream media smear to try and ruin me. What happens is pretty much immediately, I think it was the same day, Gateway Pundit pulls the article down. Okay. And then within a day,

suspended Jacob Wall from Gateway Pundit. It's like getting kicked out of being kicked out. Like, it's a really, that's really, it's like being too nuts for Info Wars. Like, it's really something. But guys, it's not over. Okay. So it gets kicked off of Game.

Somehow we need to get to a con. coffee shop. I just know that. He gets kicked out of, uh, kicked off a gateway pundit. And then on November 1st, he and this guy named Jack Berkman, who's another right wing conspiracy guy, they hold a press conference in a holiday inn in the D.C. area. Okay. And the whole reason that they're doing this is because they're like, okay, we're just going to like clear the air. We're going to set the record straight on like what's going on. Hold on. Let me just find it. there has developed in the last week, as I'm sure all of you have noticed, a rather tragic and sad backstory that somehow I or Jacob or others paid or attended to pay some woman for coming forward. None of this is true. So this press conference is about as professional and slick as you'd imagine it to be. It's like in a tiny weird beige room, sparsely attended, mostly by people who are there to straight up laugh at these kinds. guys. And it is like a circus from the very beginning. Jack Berkman somehow manages to have his zipper

undone for the entire press conference. They really leave no detail. Seriously, is this like false flag? You think it's false flag? It's looking more and more. You think it's all like funded by like Avanotti or whatever. Wow. And they reveal the name of the accuser, which they'd been withholding. They say her name is Caroline Cass, that she's a fashion designer. Caroline Cass actually was supposed to show up at the conference, but according to Jacob Wohl, she was too busy being a real person, arrived in D.C., immediately got scared, got on another plane and left. Did anyone confirm that she existed? There is a woman by the name of Caroline Cass.

As to date, I'm not sure if it has been confirmed that this woman, who is a fashion designer, as they described her, is in any way associated with them. They just know that there's a woman who's a fashion designer with the name Caroline Cass, who exists. So reporters start asking questions, and someone immediately asked, like, Jacob, you're 20 years old. Like, what kind of investigative experience do you have? What qualifications do you have to be running an intelligence agent, an intelligence operation? And Berkman responds. No one should engage in age discrimination. We're going to say that just because the person is planning means there are, James a lot smarter than I am, and I'm 52 and went to law school with Georgetown. So let me tell you that.

I think Jacob is a child prodigy that has. as he clipped Mozart. It was like such weird stuff. Like, one of the things that people have been doing to Jacob Wals since this happened is they've been quoting the drill tweet at him, the drill I'm not owned tweet. Yeah. So there's a very famous tweet by weird Twitter comedian drill,

which is, it says, I'm not owned, I'm not owned. I continue to insist as I slowly shrink and transform into a corn cob. Right. Sometimes people will say that someone's getting corncobbed, which is just like they're losing and refusing to admit that they're losing. And they just like kind of keep making it worse for themselves? So when he was, when he quickly got exposed, Jacob Wolle continued to tweet defiantly. And people started sending him this tweet, started sending in pictures of corncobs, photoshopped his face onto a corn cob.

Right. And for some reason, he brings this up at the conference. I just had a picture of me wearing a corn, some kind of porn costume. Another thing about Jacob is that he's 20, but he says he has a Harvard law degree, like an honorary Harvard law degree. And so someone asks him about that. When did you give us honorary Harvard law degree? It's a figure of speech. That's wonderful.

Wow. And then the reporter follows up about like his qualifications. Okay. So you're 20 years old. What is your investigative? What is your background as a professional investigation? Like I said, I've done a handful. of matters. I've done a handful of matters like this over the years. My, you know, my,

uh, mission here is not to establish a narrative. It's not to follow an agenda. It's to bring forth, it's a, it's, hang on, hang on. It's, excuse me, it's to bring forth the facts and let the facts speak for themselves. And that's what we've done here. So the, the, the press conference ends with someone saying, someone in the back shouting to Jack Berkman. Are you guys prepared to go to federal prison? to which Jack Berkman's replies, no, no, we're not. And so what happens?

So the thing is that, like, it does seem like he could actually be in real trouble. And, like, most people, there are a lot of times when people will say something in Send Airy Online and try and back it up, and when they realize they've been caught out in, like, a spectacular way,

delete everything and hunker down in the hopes that they just get left alone. Which you can kind of do online. And Jacob Wall has tweeted through it. He is absolutely defiant, right? Mm-hmm. And so that brings us to hipster coffee shops. Oh, interesting.

I'd forgotten about those. Right, hipster coffee shop, which is the first phrase in the tweet that brought us here together today. Many years ago. I just left a hipster coffee shop in Philadelphia. So I've got a tweet here from the July 16th of 2018. It is a Jacob Bull tweet, and it says, I just left a hipser coffee shop. It was packed with liberals whispering amongst each other about what a commendable job.

President Trump did with Vladimir Putin this morning in Helsinki. America is proud. If they're all whispering about it, why are they still whispering about it? So. So he's imagining like it's like some like, like, $10 espresso place and they're like, you know, I really hate to admit it, but President Trump's very good.

Some enterprising genius on Twitter decided to plug the phrase coffee shop into Jacob Wolle's tweets. Yeah. I was in a hipster coffee shop, parentheses, safe space here in L.A., and the libs were whispering to each other about how Donald Trump is doing great for the economy.

I hope nobody in Philadelphia finds out of this conversation for always having. Got them a raise at work and will definitely be reelected in 2020. Even coffee shop hipster liberals are marveling at President Trump's success with North Korea. I was sitting in a hister coffee shop in downtown L.A. this morning and couldn't help it over here. Six college-age women seated at a table who were clamoring with excitement and joy over the confirmation of Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Less than a week later, this one's pretty rough, just to prepare you. I was in an inner-city coffee shop just now and couldn't help but notice several groups of smart young black men who,

were remarking with amazement at the Trump-Kaignee meeting, incredibly inspired to vote for Trump in 2020. Oh, my God. I was in a hipster coffee shop in downtown LA. There was a group of young Democrats murmuring to each other that they know the suspicious packages were an inside job to make Republicans look bad. I just left a hipster coffee shop in the Fairfax District here in Los Angeles. I will tell you one thing. Jewish support for President Trump is higher than ever. He's on like a unity mission of coffee shops or.

around the world. So like a friendship tour. People would just figure out like, oh, Jacob Wall's here. We better murmuried that quietly. Yes. So after this came out, a lot of the responses to him were about how he was in a how they were in a hifster coffee shop and he was going to go to jail, et cetera, et cetera. I was in a hipster coffee shop.

I heard all the liberals talking about how you're going to prison. Jacob Wall has tweeted so hard through this. Like he has leaned into his persona. What else is he going to do at this point? You can't go on Oprah. So there's an interesting coda to the story. So his press conference was on November. His press conference, when was his press conference?

His press conference was on November 1st. Okay. It did not go as well as I think he had hoped it would. On November 6th, a website called Above the Law, which is like a law blog, there is an article. This is a real site. This is a real saying. Above the law wrote an article called SureFi Intelligence. Surefire Intelligence offers an explanation that won't do it any favors with the feds.

And basically what happened is the author whose name is Joe Patrice. Joe Patrice of Surefire Intelligence. No, Joe Patrice of Above the Law. Yeah. Right, right, right. Received an email from someone at Surefire Intelligence. Wake up Jall? It goes by the name.

It's an amazing name. It goes by the name Donald Trehorn. Isn't that the fake name in the Big Lobowski? That's Jackie Treehorn, but that's exactly what the author says. In an email sent to me yesterday, Surefire Intelligence Managing Partner, Donald Treehorn, who's almost certainly Jacob Wall choosing an alias because he assumes no one's ever watched Big Lobowski.

Explained that they meant for their email to Professor Taub to leak. And what this means is that he was admitting to writing one of the emails to one of these women who said they were offered money. He denied the rest. And he said what he wanted to do was catch the media with their pants down when they credulously reported something false that he was planting without fact-checking it at all. Which is absolutely not what happened. This is an excerpt from the email that Joe Patrice got. Our objective was to expose the media for the hacks they are. They ran with our made-up story with reckless a without doing any background or source checking.

We sold the story up the chain of small blogs to news blogs, then to media people. Essentially, we played all of you. And it was so easy. We look forward to many more operations that will expose so-called journalists for what they truly are. A fakers. It's easy to make fun of them, but I was in this hipster coffee shop. Wow. It's just like the worst ass covering.

It feels like the kind of thing where, like, He's just like, who are you lying for at this point? And because none of that is, like, they didn't run with, nobody ran with the story, right? No, no mainstream outlet ran with this story. Wow. Yeah. So is he going to go to jail? Uh, I don't know, but Joe Patrice, the above the law guy says that legally Jacob Wall could go to jail.

Like, he says, like, he basically says, like, you can't witness tamper, you can't obstruct justice, you can't make false statements, and then defend yourself by just saying, like, it's all a big joke. All right. There was a tweet once. There was a tweet at the beginning of this journey. Right. So I think I understand everything now. Lay it on us. Once again, Maya Kossoff has this tweet.

I just left the hipster coffee shop in Philadelphia. All the young libs there were sipping disposable mugs full of septa sewer sludge and murmuring among themselves about how Gritty is actually the fanatic son. I'll explain the last part of it and then I'll get back to the first sentence. Okay. The last part of it is Gritty is the new. Philadelphia Flyers mascot and Grady has been claimed by the left wing and by Philadelphia

in general. And so they're talking about how Gritty is awesome and he is the fanatic's son, which is and the fanatic is another, Gritty is a mascot for the Philadelphia Flyers. The fanatic is the mascot for the Philadelphia. Phillies, the baseball team. The Flyers are the hockey team. And so they're talking about how Gritty is the son and symbolic lineage to the Philly Fanatic, another beloved Philadelphia sports mascot. Right. Okay. And they're drinking septa sewer sludge.

Septa is the municipal transit system of Philadelphia. Wait. Wait, why? Did we skip that part? Why are they drinking septa sewer sludge? I think all she's doing is like, because she's pretending to be like a conservative, she's just pretending that hipsters in Philly drink like subway juice, basically. Got it.

Okay. So, all right. And so then I just left a hipster coffee shop. It turns out is a rifted. reference to a deep, long backstory, starring a Trump first responder named Jacob Wall. Jacob Wall is like a conservative first responder who is prone to say in tweets, I just left a hipster coffee shop and heard whatever it is I want to hear. And he got into a crazy amount of trouble by claiming that he had evidence that Robert Mueller committed sexual assault. And then

very, very clumsily planting that evidence in a very easy to discern way. And so he was ridiculed on social media by having the I just left a hipster coffee shop phrase thrown back at him

over and over again. I feel like we're yes, yes, yes. I'm wondering what we learned today. You mean in like a sitcom ending way? Yeah. I think if anyone's going to be able to close off. I learned that I have spent my whole life wanting a family,

but I found out that my family is right here with me all along. Not bad. It's kind of sweet. Do we all have to do it or are we good on that? No, I think we're fine. Can I do one more thing before we go? Sure. I just literally want to play us out on the greatest song in the world,

which is the theme song for Action News, Philadelphia. That's all I want. Oh, my God, it's so good. You guys didn't grow up with this in your hearts, but you could have. Okay. And this has been another edition of Billy Sports. This is good. Yes, yes, no.

Brought to you by our host, Alex Bloomberg. And. PJ Boat. And... I don't want to do this. This is a jambo. Move closer to your world, my friend. Take a little bit of time.

Your world, my friend, and use the time. That's all it takes to bring your world together. Reply All is hosted by PJ Vote and me, Alex Goldman. We're produced by Shruthy Pinnaminani, Fia Bannon, Damiano Marquetti, Anna Foley, and Jessica Young. Show is edited by Tim Howard. We were mixed by Rick Kwan. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris.

Our intern is Heather Schurring. Our theme song is by The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Special thanks. this week to Will Summer from The Daily Beast. Matt Lieber is getting a phone call and having it not turn out to be spam. You can listen to our show on Spotify, iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you soon.