The Bulwark Podcast - Brian Tyler Cohen and Carol Leonnig: Go Inside the Bubble

Episode Date: August 14, 2024

The anti-MAGA world should keep going on right-wing media platforms, and maybe embarrass their hosts in the process—like Buttigieg on Fox, and Tim on Tomi Lahren's show. Plus, the direct line between Secret Service failures in Butler, PA and the Dallas book depository. And will the FBI ever be able to confirm if Trump took a $10 million bribe from Egypt? Brian Tyler Cohen and Carol Leonnig join Tim Miller. show notes: Brian's new book, "Shameless: Republicans' Deliberate Dysfunction and the Battle to Preserve Democracy" Carol's reporting on the $10 mil cash withdrawal from Egypt Carol's book on the Secret Service, "Zero Fail" 8 Times Tim SCHOOLED Right-Wing Tomi Lahren on Her Own Show! Will Selber's piece on the Walz 'stolen valor' claims John Kerry campaign vets on how to respond to the Walz swiftboating Will Selber and Ben Parker video on the Walz 'stolen valor' claims

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Hey, y'all. Remember, it's Wednesday. So I'm also going to be over on the Next Level feed. Sam Sines sitting in for Sarah today. anxious angry enraged rants about former arizona governor republican doug ducey and former north carolina senator republican richard burr cowardly endorsing trump well that's going to be your place for that today uh because i've got some thoughts about those assholes in addition if you like hearing me you know spar with maga world. I went on to Tommy Loren's podcast over on Outkick yesterday.

It didn't go so great for Tommy, I don't think. We'll put in the show notes the full episode, but I thought some of you might enjoy just this part at the very end, which, you know, anytime I get the chance to defend the honor of RuPaul and talk about how much she loves this country, I just feel like I have to do it.

So let's take a listen. Will there be tampons available for men there? I hope so. Yeah, I mean, look, hey, sometimes I can use a little tampon. They're going to dab myself down a little bit. I would love to see it. Tommy, I think you should keep talking about tampons and about the drag queens in the opening ceremony of the Olympics

because that's totally not weird. They might be running away from Hollywood, but they're not running away from drag. We know because Kamala Harris has done several interviews on RuPaul's Drag Race, which, so I take that back. God bless America. Nobody loves America more than RuPaul. She loves her freedom of speech and freedom of expression. I think she actually does some fracking herself.

God bless it. I appreciate that, Tommy. Hope you enjoyed that. You can check out the rest of it in the show notes. We've got a great show today. Doubleheader, my friend Brian Tyler Cohen, who is a progressive YouTuber, looks like it's up from his bootstraps guy. Amazing guy. Has a new

book out. Then Carol Lennig, who knows more about the Secret Service than anybody, in addition to this bombshell story about potential Trump and Egypt corruption. So it's an awesome doubleheader. Reminder, if you want to come see us in Dallas, September 5th, it's coming up. We've sold a bunch of tickets already, but there's still some available. Go to thebullwark.com slash events. We'll see y'all in Dallas. Everything's bigger in Texas. Up next, Brian Tower Cohen and Carol Lennig.

Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. I'm pumped to be here with the first-timer, Brian Tyler Cohen. He's a progressive YouTuber. He's the author of the brand-new book, Shameless, Republicans' Deliberate Dysfunction and the Battle to Preserve Democracy. What's going on, my brother? Tim, really happy to be here. Our series, obviously, Inside the Right, has been really fun for me,

so excited to let you get in the driver's seat here. Yeah, man, we're taking turns here. I get to turn the tables on you. For folks who don't know Brian, if you just consume traditional, boring, Axios and politico media, for starters, you might see things like the politico story on Monday talking about how Kamala Harris's campaign is in the tank because of the stock market, which has recovered all of its stock market losses since Monday. So, you know, sometimes the legacy media doesn't treat you that well. But you might not know Brian, but many more people know Brian than know the people writing that Politico story.

Dude, your success in alternative media is just unbelievable. And I just, I admire kind of the up from the bootstraps element to it. And so kind of before we get into the news of the day and the book, I just kind of hoped you might give people a little bit of your origin story. Yeah. So actually, I got interested in politics politics, I guess around 2018, 2017, 2018 to start working in it. I moved to LA to act basically. And I worked at my first job. How'd that turn out? It's great. I'm a huge star. What's your IMDB look like? Yeah, not great. But while I was in LA, I started writing articles to submit voluntarily for HuffPost. And I was just really passionate about that.

And also being in the entertainment industry where you have to wait for everybody to give you permission to do everything and you have to wait for 10 different people to say yes before you can take one step forward. Getting into the political media space where I would be able to work for myself and kind of create content for myself was really freeing. And so there came a point where I started creating content while I was, you know, working in LA and, and I realized that, you know, that my audience was growing pretty quickly. And so eventually just stopped, stopped the whole acting thing and, and went full time for politics.

Good thing you were blogging for HuffPost and not working at a hipster restaurant like these other failed actors. Oh, yeah. The lore was strong. The magnetic force when you're in LA to start waiting tables and being a bartender was strong. But avoided that and just kept my head down. Started making content on Facebook.

That was the main frontier in political media back then in 2018. And putting some of my content on YouTube as well, but just doing it consistently, keeping my head down, let's do the news. As you mentioned, we've been doing this inside the right series where you ask me about what the hell's going on in the brains of people on the right. And so it's your turn to have to answer that question. Nikki Haley was on with Brett Baer last night. And I want to play a 17 second clip that honestly, you could do an entire political science and psychology seminar on just this 17 seconds from Nikki Haley. Let's listen. I want this campaign to win. But the campaign is not going to win talking about crowd sizes. It's not going to win talking about what race Kamala Harris is. It's not going to win talking about whether she's dumb. It's not you can't win on those

things. The American people are smart. Treat them like they're smart. Are you smart? I guess. Is Nikki Haley smart? I guess is my question for you, Brian. What's happening there? She says these things about Donald Trump for Donald Trump, as if she doesn't know who he is. I mean, the reason that she was against Donald Trump for so long during the primary process is precisely because she knows that Donald Trump only does that. So to then turn around and pretend that he should be deferring to policy as if he would ever defer to policy kind of undermines Nikki Haley's whole knowledge of who the guy is and why she was running against him in the first place. There's this cognitive dissonance here with her where she knows Donald Trump and yet has this weird expectation

of him to be somebody who he's not. I'm not really sure what she's trying to do in the Republican Party at this point. I mean, she's effectively a persona non grata. It's not like there's a base within the GOP for her, but I guess she's trying to preserve some really, really narrow lane for some untold point in the future when the spell of MAGA breaks and somehow 80% of the Republican base isn't exactly who they are today. I think she's trying to convince people that she's smart, I think is what's happening. And that like, if they if they'd only listen to her, then things would be going better and as a result they should turn their lonely eyes to her next time like i think that's what the game is here why she's playing pundit

because it's like yeah you just notice she goes through this ticks of things she's been doing this for years and all these guys do this but like this tick of things like you shouldn't call kamala harris dumb you shouldn't insult her race you shouldn't complain about crowd size and rather than saying like these things are bad like on the merits like we shouldn't like we fox viewers like those of us here should not condone this this is bad what we should expect more of our president it's like there are these other people out there that don't condone it like if it worked it would be fine right if it worked okay it's not that she doesn't agree with it. Like if it worked, it would be fine, right? If it worked, okay. It's not that she doesn't agree with it. It's that she recognizes that it might not be a viable political strategy. It's a bizarre thing that Nikki Haley, well, good news is I don't think

Donald Trump's going to be listening to her. Another big kind of news item yesterday is Tim Walsh gave his first solo speech outing that I thought was interesting on a couple of levels. He went to speak to AFSCME, a union where he talked a lot about economic populist issues and contrasted with the Trump vance team and how they're kind of phony on that front. And he also pushed back on the stolen valor attacks. Your book talks a lot about how to kind of combat the right wing, you know, misinformation and lies and attacks. And so I'm interested to hear what you think about how Tim Walz did in dealing with the stolen valor attacks. Let's take a listen. Then in 2005, I felt the call of duty again,

this time being serviced to my country in the halls of Congress. My students inspired me to run for that office. And I was proud to make it to Washington. I was a member of the Veterans Affairs Committee and a champion of our men and women in uniform. I'm going to say it again as clearly as I can. I am damn proud of my service to this country. And I firmly believe you should never denigrate another person's service record. Anyone brave enough to put on that uniform for our great country, including my opponent, I just have a few simple words. Thank you for your service and sacrifice.

What'd you think? You can't get much better than that. I do talk in the book how Republicans rely on their historical branding. And one of the pieces of branding that they've leaned on for so long is that they're the party of the military. But so much of what we've heard from people on the left, whether it's Tim Walz here, whether it's Pete Buttigieg, whether it's Lucas Kuntz, who's being attacked for being a Democrat as well. Everybody says the exact same thing, which is that the last thing that an actual good standing member of the military, somebody that has respect for the military would do is to denigrate somebody for their own service. And so I think this is just one instance where J.D. Vance thinks that he,

that just by virtue of being a Republican, that he is entitled to like ownership over that label of being pro-military, but everything he does actually undermines our trust in who he is and his ability to actually persuade us of that. And so I think that's his failing there and good on these Democrats, whether it's Pete, whether it's Tim, whether it's Lucas to push back on these guys by calling them out. And I think they're doing it really effectively and kind of disabusing Americans of this idea that Republicans somehow have ownership over the military stuff, which is to say nothing of the other labels that they benefit from. Yeah, I do think that that aura is definitely is what kind of gives, you know, Republicans a

feeling that they can make these attacks without, you know, without feeling like there's going to be a boomerang effect on them. A couple interesting items in the bulwark this morning i just want to point out to people that will sellber who served served his fucking ass off by the way we appreciate you will sell but wrote kind of six things to know about the stolen dollar claims it's interesting to see will as a veteran going to break this down in a very sober way if you're interested in that we'll put it in the show notes the other thing that we had this morning is we interviewed a couple of John Kerry vets who were campaign strategists

that dealt with the swift voting attacks that came from Chris LaCivita, who's Trump's top advisor back then in 2004. I was interested in kind of reading through their advice. The one element of what they suggested that was not included in that wall's response was punching Trump over bone spurs, over how these vets are suckers and losers. I don't know, maybe that's not the

venue for it right there, but you got to feel like that is like the offensive play here, right? Well, there is some like cognitive dissonance here and going back to, you know, we spoke about Nikki Haley. There is some cognitive dissonance here where they will, you know, bolster these attacks that are being posed by J.D. Vance against Tim Walz, but at the same time not recognizing or not accepting the fact that the guy at the top of the ticket, the standard bearer in the Republican Party, to your exact point, yeah, avoided military service by going to some random podiatrist somewhere and getting a note that says that he has a non-existent disease. They will always create a permission structure for themselves to, you know, get away with the exact thing that they're guilty of doing. Some of our more progressive listeners maybe haven't been thrilled with my lukewarm Walls

vibes. So, what's your opinion, Ben, about the addition of Tim Walls to the ticket? Do you feel like he's added a lot? What have you thought about his performance? I do. I mean, look, I think the optics, first of all, of him serving as a compliment to Kamala Harris's San Francisco liberal. She's a black woman. Tim Walz is a white guy. He grew up as a farmer, Midwestern who may not feel inclined to support Kamala Harris just by virtue of her policies, or even what she looks like. And as I said, commentary on the state of this country, that that's all it takes for some people, but that's all it takes for some people. And I think a lot of, you know, what I try to do is, if I can bring one or two more people into the process by virtue of what I say, then I think it's worth it. And so I think having someone like Tim Walz, who even if he brings a small amount of people into the political process over to the Democratic camp by virtue of who he is, then it's worth it. So I think that has been one tack. The other is

that he's been really effective in a different way from Kamala Harris. I think she's doing the tough prosecutor versus felon thing. She's kind of meeting Trump at his level and proving his weakness by virtue of her strength. But Tim Walz brings something different where he has that very relatable folksy like coach attitude. And I think for different folks, that's going to be more persuasive if you're not into the into the like matching Donald Trump's tough guy vibe you know what I'm saying I think he does offer a good compliment to Kamala Harris it was funny watching him yesterday if you watch the whole speech he's still bad on the teleprompter but kind of in a

cute way like he would just lose his spot at the teleprompter for like eight seconds trying to figure out where he was and then he goes back to talking like a normal person in some ways that's charming he'll get he'll get better on it but it just shows his authenticity kind of he doesn't trying to figure out where he was. And then he goes back to talking like a normal person. In some ways, that's charming. He'll get better on it, but it just shows his authenticity kind of. He doesn't even need it. He's great off teleprompter. I remember watching him,

I think it was in Philadelphia for the first time, and I'm squinting at the screen. And I rely on teleprompter for my regular YouTube videos on a daily basis. That is a crutch for me. I mean, my videos are a thousand words, so I need prompter anyway. But I've tried to get really good at making sure you can't tell that I'm reading prompter. But I was staring at

Tim Wallace and I'm like, I just don't think this guy is on prompter. I can't figure it out, but I can't, I'm not seeing him do the things that people who are on prompter do. The switching from left to right and looking at the panels and to his credit, if he can do this extemporaneously, then more power to you. He was looking left to right yesterday, I'll tell you. And you just gave away a secret. Now our listeners know that you're on the prompter. That's right. New poll out today from Cook Political and Global Strategy Group.

Legitimate polling outfits. Harris plus three in Michigan, plus three in Wisconsin, plus two in Arizona, plus one in Pennsylvania, plus one in North Carolina, which Nate Silver was flagging as maybe a sneaky comeback state for her. Tied in Georgia, down three in Nevada. Where are you on? Is there irrational exuberance at this point? Are you worried a little bit about folks getting too high on their own supply? Oh, I wouldn't be a Democrat if I wasn't worried about everything. That's our entrance fee into the Democratic Party. You know, knock on wood, I feel really good about the state of the race. I feel even better about the fact that the momentum is clearly only going in one direction. Even beyond that, I feel better about the fact that

with every passing day, people who wouldn't have otherwise been in the political process are getting involved. We're seeing more endorsements from people who clearly are aligned with the Democratic agenda because they're endorsing now, but weren't endorsing expressly because Joe Biden was the nominee. So Kamala Harris is bringing something to these people like, you know, Megan Thee Stallion and Katy Perry and Beyonce and Charlie XCX. And that brings people into the political process who wouldn't have otherwise voted. And that's only going to continue to grow in strength as we see more and more people come out and hopefully see this long-anticipated Taylor Swift endorsement as well.

It's going to have a big impact. And we're seeing that further in the extent to which Kamala Harris's campaign is actually using the money that she's raising to open field offices, which will then help them in terms of bringing more people in while Trump continues to hawk know, hawk his shoes

and his NFTs and his trading cards and his Bibles and whatever else he's selling. And as far as I can tell, he hasn't opened up more than just a small handful of field offices, even in these swing states. And so I don't know what he's doing with the money. I am seeing Alina Haba with some really nice handbags. But other than that, I'm not sure really where the money is going. He's been promising the most beautiful ads ever. They are running a lot of ads in Pennsylvania, Georgia. That's the one thing that keeps me up at night when I look at those polls is that all he's got to do is win Pennsylvania and Georgia.

Only down one in that one tied in Georgia. So anyway, I think they're going to spend a lot of money there. But that's about it right now. All right, let's talk about the book. The subhead here is the Republicans deliberate destruction. Talk about like what you see there and kind of in the book, how you tried to frame that up, you know, look going from, you know, historically up to now. Yeah, I think Republicans have a vested interest as the party of small government and going in there and purposefully breaking things so that they can point

to the thing that they just broke as evidence that the government doesn't work. And then, of course, they'll turn around and say, so go ahead and elect the people who think that government should be shrunk down to nothing. And they present themselves as the saviors, again, to come in and fix the thing that is only broken because of them. The antidote to that, however, is that we just look at what Democrats did with their first two years in office with effectively the same house margin as Republicans would have in the cycle before. And, you know, when Republicans were in control, they passed a tax cut for millionaires and billionaires and installed three judges who would eventually

overturn the right to safe and legal abortions in this country. Democrats with the same majority passed the American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, the PACT Act, the infrastructure law, the gun safety law, codified marriage equality into federal law, reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act, added 16 million jobs and brought the unemployment rate down to 4%. So that is the antidote to Republican dysfunction. That is a proof point that when you have people in government who want government to work, then it can work. And so that's what Republicans don't want you to see, basically. But that doesn't mean that they won't continue to go in there and break this stuff on purpose because they think that it can redound to their political benefit. What about the messaging side

of this? And I think you spend a lot of time in this world thinking about it, thinking about how to offset it with a progressive or pro-democracy, however you want to put it, like media ecosystem, the combats, what's happening on the right. Like, what do you see that they are doing on the right when you're kind of really analyzing this from the book that is effective? I think that they've been, they've been especially effective, just honestly, by virtue of, of how the thought leaders on the right have embraced alternative media and conferred a degree of legitimacy onto these people who deserve no legitimacy. I mean, just straight disinformation figures, people, just peddlers, basically.

But because the right has seen that mainstream media wasn't going to be an effective partner for them and that they need some type of messaging apparatus, they immediately laid hands on all of these outlets on the right to a degree that Democrats were never willing or able to do on the left. And so we still kind of rely on mainstream media. I think most politicians on the left rely on mainstream media as kind of our messaging apparatus. I talk in the book about how Dan Pfeiffer actually says that it feels so bizarre for Democrats to spend all of this time crafting our message, the perfect message, saying exactly what we want to say, using the words we want to use, and then handing that perfectly crafted message over to legacy media to deliver it to people. And that's the wrong way to go about doing this because mainstream media is not on the Democrats'

side. They are not our messaging apparatus. But for so long, they've been viewed that way because Republicans have Fox News and Newsmax and OAN who are avowed Republican propagandists. And so we just assume that the equivalent to that is going to be what we have on ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN. But that's not the case. Can I tell you what my friends on the right would say to push back to that they would say, well, sure, like the mainstream media might not be Fox equivalent, right? Like ABC might not be the equivalent of Fox, but they are biased towards the left. And it was hard for, you know, good faith conservatives get a fair shake there. And

you know, they do put their thumb on the scale. And so Fox was like a reaction to their failures. Yeah, I think to a degree, I mean, I can understand where they're coming from. But the good comes with the bad. And also, you see the extent to which those same networks for as left leaning as the journalists and the reporters might be, there's also the extent to which they will bend over backwards to do both sides journalism. And so, for example, knowing in the lead up to the 2016 election, knowing that Hillary's emails was just basically being peddled on the right, that if they didn't cover it, they would be called the liberal media. And so they covered it ad nauseum. And we had something like 69 cover stories on the New

York Times about Hillary's emails. And yet, when the same thing happened with Ivanka Trump during the Trump administration, came and went like a farting hurricane. And so, there is that asymmetry at play here. And so, I understand that the journalists and the reporters may be left wing, and I certainly believe that they are. But there is a gaming of the refs that we've seen the right take advantage of with regards to the mainstream media. All right. So, we are where we are. You talked in the book to Pete about why he goes into Fox. I played in the intro here, my little dabble, hanging out with our friend Tommy yesterday.

I think that it's very important to go inside the bubble. What did you learn talking to Pete and others about that? What do you think Dems should do? You know, there's some people on the left that say, ignore them, don't platform them. You know, there's some say Dems should go in there more. Should Dems be going on to these right wing platforms? And if so, how should they be conducting themselves?

I completely changed my opinion on this because at first I was like, don't platform them. Don't legitimize these outlets. But I think we're fooling ourselves if we're going to try to claim that Fox News is not legitimate or is not viewed as legitimate or is not a widely watched news network or that we give them some huge benefit by platforming them. Fox News is watched by millions and millions of people. That ship has already sailed. So at this point, I think our option is to either cede that ground to Republicans or if we have effective messengers like Pete, like Gavin Newsom during his debate

with Ron DeSantis and Sean Hannity, send them into that area. I mean, what you did with Tommy Lahren is a perfect example of that. It is kind of like embarrassing them on their terrain. And it kind of helps to pop the bubble and not give them full, unfettered, complete control of these platforms where people don't see us. Because the only thing worse than going on and where we think that we're giving them some degree of legitimacy is giving them full control over those platforms, full access to their audience with zero pushback whatsoever. All right, last one. I got to ask you a hard one. I wonder if you think about this at all. Because I totally agree with your criticism of the right media. And there's so much more there in the book that people should go and check out. It is corrupting. It is propaganda. They do advance fake narratives that give Republican politicians car punch to act like assholes.

Do you worry that like creating a backlash, creating a separate ecosystem on the left to combat that ends up becoming corrupting in the same way. I think that the onus is on us not to create an equivalent of, you know, Alex Jones's show. Well, I think we can create a higher bar for you than that. All right. You can, I mean, not just create an equivalent of Alex Jones. How about not create an equivalent of Hannity or something like that? I think the onus is on us not to do that. Look, creating an independent media infrastructure is not to say that we want to create the Fox News of the left.

And I think the onus is on us to make sure that we don't create that, that we don't just become Blue MAGA, that we don't just basically become a cult of personality for those on the left. I think that's just going to be up to us, you know, those of us who are independent media figures on the left in the pro-democracy ecosystem to say that, like, to be discerning and to guide the conversation where we think it would be more appropriate to go. But there are going to be people who are going to do that, for sure. I have no doubt about that. It's just going to be about making sure that we can have some integrity in what we do and some authenticity, by the way, in doing so.

There wasn't a lot of authenticity on Tommy's show yesterday. It didn't seem like tomorrow. No, of course not. But look, I can see why she would benefit from this idea that to basically participate in the cult of personality that is Trump and do this cognitive dissonance where she can both claim to be some champion for police rights while at the same time doing apologia for the guy who incited an insurrection against those very police. But, you know, I think what we have to do on the left is just have enough voices that are discerning enough, that have enough integrity that you can both advocate for democratic values or pro-democracy values, depending on where you are on the spectrum, while also, you know, not displaying the same cognitive dissonance that Tommy Lahren displays on her show that leads her to get embarrassed by you. That's a bar I think you can step over.

Brian Tower Cohen, thank you for having me on your YouTube. I'm really impressed with what you've launched over there. The book, again, is Shameless Republicans' Deliberate Dysfunction and the Battle to preserve democracy. Thanks again to failed actor, my friend, Brian Tower Cohen. Up next, Carol we're back. I'm delighted to be here with, I think, my favorite Deadline White House partner, maybe. The person that I most want to listen to and shut up and stop talking when she comes on, it's Carol Dlenik, National investigative reporter at the Washington Post. She focuses on the White House and government accountability. She's also won four Pulitzer Prizes, no big deal. And her books include Zero

Fail, The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service. That seems like a pretty relevant subject matter expertise this summer, Carol. It was pretty relevant. I will never forget, Tim, by the way, I'm blushing. I like to shut up and listen to you. So this will be a difficult program for us. I will never forget, I'd finished editing a story, a kind of a marathon story that's now been published, but we were in the middle of a pretty hairy story. And I had gone to take a nap because we had worked so late into the night and early in the morning. And my editor woke me up essentially with a call, you know, Trump's been shot. We're going to need you to call all your sources, which is what I did for the next 48 hours without sleep. It was really a, just a stunning, stunning failure, which was sort of obvious from the get-go, like a billboard in front of your

face. How could they not secure a huge roof 150 yards away from Donald Trump's stage? So for those of us who haven't been following it closely, and I've followed it like Twitter and cable news amount, I did not watch like the hearings, etc. And it's just such a gargantuan fuck up. And you had written a book, obviously, about some of the problems with the Secret Service, like how much of this was foreseeable, systemic, and how much it was just a total brain fart on one afternoon. You know, I really like your choice of the word systemic. We don't know how many brain farts, so to speak, were involved in this cascade of failures. But we know that the preparation for this event is emblematic of a series of chronic failures.

Every time there's a massive security gaffe by the Secret Service, I wrote about a string of them in 2013, 2014, 2015. Every single time there is that kind of huge breach, it's because the Secret Service is spread too thin and it's trying to do more with less. And it's been doing that since 9-11. And I was kind of gobsmacked that this assassination attempt unfolded the way it did because it revealed a failure of Secret Service 101 since 1963 when John F. Kennedy was shot and killed from the sixth floor of a library book depository where Leah R. V. Oswald was standing with a long gun. Secret Service agents always prepare in outdoor events, in particular for line of sight.

And here was such a stunning line of sight, Tim, that was so clear that a commander that horrible weekend when we were just calling every person we could, a commander in Pennsylvania who had been involved in several preparation meetings for other events like this with the Secret Service said to me, you know, Miss Lenig, you know, I know your work. And I think you and I both know your grandma could have shot Donald Trump from this location. And that kind of put everything in perspective. If my grandma could

shoot somebody from there, then why wasn't it secured? Okay, so we go back. There are these failures in 2013, 14, 15, enough for you to write a book about this. What has been then the holdup in the intervening decade? This seems like this should be a bipartisan funding priority. Is it just bureaucratic rot? Is it Tea Party? Republicans don't want to fund this? What is it? Gosh, I'm so glad you asked it that way. I mean, how can it be 10 years after a series of stories I wrote won the Pulitzer for revealing,

humiliating security failures, a disabled vet able to get past 100 Secret Service officers and agents at the White House and inside the building. A man who had a mesionic complex able four days until a White House butler discovered it. plus recommendations to streamline the Secret Services mission, give it more resources. Ten years after a House oversight panel conducted a year-long investigation, made some of the same findings about systemic, I'm using your words, systemic chronic weaknesses and vulnerabilities in the agency. Why didn't any president since or Congress since implement all of those? Well, let's ask Donald Trump. He was the president after these reports came in. He didn't drastically increase the Secret Services budget. He didn't approve several of the

steps that were recommended. Congress was all for cutting back spending generally in non-defense areas and didn't protect the Secret Service in terms of its funding. Let's ask President Biden. He was aware of some security failures on Donald Trump's watch and also did not make this a priority, nor did the Congress that he worked alongside. So you've asked just the right question, and now they should be answering it. Richie Torres is talking now about how, you know, maybe another thing that could be done is take off a Secret Services plate. I guess over the years, they've gained some other responsibilities. I don't even know this. They're looking at financial crimes and instead refocusing the entire effort on protection of presidential and other assets. Was that part of being spread too thin that

they were starting to do other stuff? Well, part of their mission all along and how they were founded really in 1865 was to investigate counterfeit funds, which were then as much as two thirds of the paper currency in trade in the United States during the Civil War. So that was how they were founded, not to protect presidents. But it's true that financial crimes have become a larger and cybersecurity threats have become a larger and larger portion of their work. And on top of that, Tim, they're being asked to protect nearly double the number of people that the Secret Service has normally protected prior to 9-11. After 9-11, all of a sudden, Secret Service details were assigned to cover Vice President Cheney's grandchildren and sons-in-law and the extremely large and expansive

Bush family and their children and grandchildren. And the same has been true when Donald Trump was president. Huge number of family members that were getting protection that hadn't been prior and additional senior government officials that hadn't gotten protection before, largely because of amped up threats against the executive. When the president is being threatened online, you'll often find that his chief of staff, his national security advisor, and deputy White House chief of staff even, are starting to get protection because, well, it's warranted. Unfortunately, the Secret Service has never gotten the manpower, human power, training, resources to add all of that to its mission. I was starting to think about which Bush family members I wanted to cut as we start to do this budget, but I don't want to stick in my craw is i don't feel like that there has been great transparency either from the secret service or the fbi about all of this and there was the

hearing that i referenced but like like why you know have we not had the type of briefings in the fallout from that attempted assassination and killing really of the people in the in the fallout from that attempted assassination and killing, really, of the people in the audience that you have for other similar situations? People who try to assassinate presidents and prominent government officials, in this case, a former president, the Secret Service has done an intense study of people who try to knock off our presidents. And what they found was that they're often not politically motivated. They're often essentially very mentally strained and challenged, and they are looking for attention and validation and affirmation like they haven't had in their lives. You'll remember John Hinckley was trying to impress Jodie Foster, an actress who was very popular at the time. Arthur Bremmer, who tried to kill Nixon and then ended up shooting George Wallace and paralyzing

him for life, was also just a bullied kid who'd never had any success in his life and had struggled with girlfriends and wanted to get attention. Part of the reason that I tell you this little boring story about assassins and would-be assassins is the FBI is frustrated. They don't have an Arthur Bremmer diary. They don't have John Hinckley's writings of why he tried to kill Ronald Reagan. They don't know why crooks tried to kill Trump yet. And I think that that is a source of great frustration to them. So on transparency, it's going to be a little while before they're talking very much about this. The Secret Service acting director, he doesn't want to step in the manure pile that the previous director, Kimberly Cheadle, did. You know, she had to resign essentially after several significant missteps in the optics of how she handled this. inside the agency. There was no question about that. But her defenders eventually ended up

concluding that the way she had said things involved serious inaccuracies. A colleague of mine and I broke the story that she had said very affirmatively that the Trump detail had never been denied any requests for additional assets on campaign events or other security events where they were concerned about his safety. And we were able to establish that that was patently false and that they'd been denied numerous times. It was just such an obvious error that she could have avoided. And the acting director is not going to step into that. Just disastrous. All right. I could do a whole hour on this, but people just need to read your work on all the Secret Service backstories in the Washington Post, because we have to talk about the Egypt story that you also were working on,

which we have discussed on this podcast. But since you were the one that broke it, I've got a few follow ups for you. The short of this, people don't remember is that essentially, Donald Trump's campaign had been asking him for $10 million to put into ads. His advisors had late in the 2016 campaign. He kept saying no. He met with a CC leader of Egypt on the sidelines of a UN conference. And then five weeks later, he decided to put in 10 million into the campaign staff. Nobody really knew why. It was later discovered that at an Egyptian bank, 10 million in US currency was taken out and put into bags. And then the story kind of goes dry. So maybe add on anything I missed there on the summary for people.

This was a really hard story to wrap our arms around and confirm. It was a really hard story to do for the same reason it made the Department of Justice and FBI jaws kind of slack open when they were alerted by the CIA in late 2016, early 2017 about intelligence from an informant. This, of course, was classified at the time. The informant basically had high-level intelligence and information that Sisi was seeking to get this $10 million illegally to Donald Trump. And what stunned the FBI and the DOJ is that they could see corroboration for that informants information in other intelligence that had been gathered by the US government.

In other words, other people, I need to be careful how I say this, but other people were aware of Sisi's efforts and were trying to accomplish his instructions. And then the piece de resistance, Mueller, who takes over this investigation in the middle of 2017 at the instruction of the deputy attorney general, because it certainly involves the possibility of a sitting president taking money from a foreign government

and being compromised by the government of Egypt, Mueller fights to get bank records for a spy account, essentially. The Egyptian government has a very powerful spy agency. And the spy agency was alleged to be basically the tool to get the money to Trump. So Mueller fights to get those bank records. And as he is closing up shop, he finally wins in a sealed case that goes all the way to the Supreme Court. Nobody ever knows anything about it at the time anyway, gets the records that show a $10 million cash withdrawal from this spy account. And it's all in US dollars, $100 bills, not something there were a lot of in the Egyptian banking system. But here they were able to get

200 pounds worth in a duffel bag. Finding those records made the FBI and the prosecutors who then proceed with the case after Mueller closes shop, just sort of gobsmacked. Like, okay, we've got intelligence that an informant said Sisi wanted to do this. We've got corroborating intelligence that shows people trying to follow through on Sisi's instructions, the president of Egypt's instructions. And now we have a document showing that five days before Donald Trump became president, Cici's spy agency whisked $10 million in U.S. cash out of its bank accounts. The fury inside the department was they could not get the U.S. attorney and ultimately the Attorney General, Bill Barr, to sign off on subpoenas to figure out, did that cash ever

land in Donald Trump's bank accounts? So Barr, so he kills the case just by essentially not approving efforts to, you know, to subpoena for more information. Is that the gist of it? You know, he doesn't kill it with, you know, a bazooka. What Bill Barr does when he hears about this is he is briefed by the U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia, who's riding herd on this case now, has sort of caught that ball from Mueller as he's walking out the door. And the U.S. attorney, Jesse Liu, is telling the attorney general, this is what's going on with the sitting president. And this is what my prosecutors and FBI agents want to do. Barr has reservations. He has doubts and he shares those

with her and also instructs her to go to the CIA, make sure that there's a predicate for investigating this in the first place. Look at the underlying intelligence, he tells her. I've got my doubts. I've got some concerns about whether or not this case is warranted or if it's a phishing expedition. He does one more other thing, which is he goes to, in a private meeting with the FBI director, Chris Wray, expresses grave reservations about this case and says he's worried that agents who rolled off the Mueller probe are hell-bent

on getting Donald Trump's bank records, and he's got suspicions about them and their motives. And he tells Ray he wants him to impose, quote-unquote, some adult supervision on this case. Prosecutors and agents involved in this confide to their colleagues and to their friends, close, close allies, that this set a chilling effect. Essentially, Jesse Liu, who had been interested in this subpoena for Trump's bank records to trace the money, did it ever get back to Trump? Did they have a sitting president who was now a national security threat and had taken a bribe? That was the question. They saw her as interested in this until she talked to Barr,

and then she was a no. Later, Barr installs two other acting U.S. attorneys after he forces Liu out of the office. And they both stall the case indefinitely and then shutter it permanently. So what now? I mean, you've written the story. Could other people investigate it? Or is a closed, as a closed case, a closed case, like, where does it go from here? It could have been reopened under Merrick Garland. And for some reason, it wasn't. It had another year on the clock. There are people who've reached out to us, sources who say they believe that while the statute of limitations technically expired at the beginning of 2022, January 2022, five years for bribery, five years for illegal campaign contributions. They believe that there's the possibility of a

10-year statute of limitations, depending on the facts that could be gathered in this case. Because a lot of facts were not ever gathered because prosecutors and FBI agents were blocked from doing that. It's unclear what the facts will show. What about Congress? Could Congress subpoena? Right? There's a statute of limitations. There's not a problem there. Congress could. Senate, controlled by Democrats, could. The House, not controlled by Democrats, probably is not too eager to figure out what happened with Donald Trump's bank accounts and whether or not he took money from Egypt. Fascinating. And for those who don't remember, it was always noteworthy. It always piqued my interest that Trump called Sisi my favorite dictator. Trump has a lot of

dictators he likes. So that's interesting he called Sisi his favorite one. Carol Lennig, you're a national treasure. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, for all your reporting on both of these stories. Come back soon. And I'll see you with Nicole in the next couple days, I'm sure. That's great. Thanks, Tim. Thanks so much to Brian Tyler Cohen and to Carol Lennig. How great is she? Tomorrow's podcast. Well, we're going to do a little apology tour and have another double header with a friend of the pod. So we'll see y'all then it'll be a good one peace I was clean with Petra

I was young and an actress when you knelt by my mattress and asked for my hand I was sad you asked it as I laid in a black dress with my

father in a casket I had no plans And I left the footprints The mud stained on the carpet In a heart like my heart did when you left town But I must admit it, that I would marry you in an instant Damn your wife, I'd be your mistress just to have you around But I was late for this, late for that, late for the love of my life.

And when I die alone, when I die alone, die I'll be on time. The Bullwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.