The Daily Beast Podcast - No Republicans Fears the Wrath of Kevin McCarthy w/ Andy Levy

Episode Date: July 2, 2021

So House Majority Kevin McCarthy says he’ll strip committee assignments from any Republican who deigns to serve on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Jan. 6 select commission. The New Abnormal co-host Molly Jong-Fast wants to know: Can he actually do that? Not by himself, says NBC News reporter Jonathan Allen. “In order for Kevin McCarthy to make good on this threat, Nancy Pelosi would have to allow a House floor vote on whether to take Liz Cheney off of her committees, as punishment for joining Pelosi’s select committee on Jan. 6.” Also on the show, comedian Andy Levy joins Molly and co-host Jesse Cannon to talk about Meghan McCain’s exit from The View—“a victory for passive-aggressive hairstylists”—and where she’ll go next. Finally on the episode, lawyer Daniel Goldman, who served as general counsel for former President Trump’s impeachment trial, weighs in on the new charges for Trump Organization CFO Allen Weiselberg and what it means for Trump and the rule of law. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Jong-Fast and welcome to The Daily Beast, The New Abnormal. I'm a left-wing pundit and an editor at large at The Daily Beast. We're here to have fun, sharp conversations with some of the smartest people in media, politics, and science that help make what's happening in the country and the world clearer. Our world has been turned up to a down. On the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and figure out how to get ourselves out of it. And I'm producer Jesse Kennan. I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails.

We have such a fun show today. John Allen, who is an NBC political reporter and author of Lucky, joins us to talk about what's going on in politics. And then we'll talk to Daniel Goldman, who is the lawyer who led the first impeachment of President Donald Trump. And he's going to talk to us about the legal jeopardy Trump is in now that Alan Weisselberg has been charged and the Supreme Court's decision on voting rights.

But first, we're joined by comedian Andy Levy again. Hello, Andy Levy. Hello, Molly Junkfest. How are you? Welcome back to the new abnormal. This is becoming a thing. It is a little bit, yeah. Don't tell anyone, though. That's a thing. I won't. We'll keep it our secret. Okay, cool. So I feel like today was a victory for passive-aggressive, hairstyleses, everyone.

Is this about Kevin McCarthy? Yes, it is about Kevin McCarthy. No, it's about, I don't know if you know who her father is, He was a senator. Okay. Liz Cheney? Do you know who I'm talking about Liz Cheney? Yes, it's about Liz Cheney.

No, you monster. We are talking about Megan McCain. She is leaving the view, and all it took was a Mohawk. What was the Mohawk braided into her hair like that? Why wouldn't it be? I don't buy your premise that there's a problem here. I'm just saying she was on the show. show, she had like three weeks of insane hairstyles, and now she's resigning.

You connect the dots. Like you say this is a victory for passive aggressive hairstylists, but I don't know. Maybe it's a loss for someone who just had the ability to just use their creativity to its utmost. Listen, the thing I think about Maggie McCain is you didn't need to like her, right? The idea was she was a conservative firebrand who said crazy stuff a la Laura Ingram, but on a mainstream news network, right? I mean, isn't that sort of, wasn't that sort of the brand she was trying to build?

I want to say it's odd because she used to be a fairly moderate Republican, but. Right. Which is dead. That's just not odd anymore, I guess. I don't know who her constituency is now because she was never pro-Trump. So I can't imagine that like the hardcore pro-Trumpers like her. and she moved away from what was like a sort of vaguely generic moderate Republican to someone who says, you know, crazy stuff on TV.

So who's our constituency now? Is it the crazy Republicans who are not pro-Trump? Because there aren't many of those. The fundamental problem, which is we see the far right media falling into again and again and again, right, which is Fox News's problem. If you want to appeal to Trump voters, you must do certain things. And the main one is have complete alliance to this person who says insane stuff and that you have to then pretend it's true. So like, you know, there's been so much talk about the big lie and how if you're in this right-wing

media, you have to support the big lie and all these senators and congressmen and pretty much every Republican supports a big lie. But this is just one of many big lies throughout the Trump administration, right? I mean, Mexico's going to pay for the wall. And, you know, I mean, this whole exercise is one big lie, right? And Trump, you know, is the healthiest person ever to serve as president despite the fact that nobody, you know, that he's obese. So I just want to make sure I'm correct on this. So you're saying this is all Megan McCain's fault.

Yeah, pretty much. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I have to say, as someone who has really suckled from the teat of nepotism myself, right? and not, unfortunately, not as successfully as Megan McCain because I'm not on television. I have to say that you don't have to always tell people because that's why you're there. You know what I mean? Like, they know.

Now, Molly, is this you sort of maybe offering yourself up as a replacement? Yeah. Yeah. Can we get a hashtag trend? Yeah. Can you imagine it's good to replace your Republican with a liberal. That will just balance stuff out. Hashtag Molly's view.

Hashtag. I'm looking forward to this tomorrow. But yes. So, yes, I'm offering myself up to the view. I'm sure they would love to have me. I have very Republican views about many different things. And if I'm your Republican, you're in a lot of trouble. But yeah.

Can your hair do the vaguely Princess Leia thing? Yes. I have the hair for the crazy hairstyles. And I also think I could pull them off with, like, I would be fine putting crazy shit in my hair and looking ridiculous. Aye, you're halfway there. So I'm going to guide this conversation because, unfortunately, we do have to discuss some other terrible people. But wait, can I just read one just very quickly?

Can I read a quote from Megan on the last step of the view that she did? She said, if five men were doing what we do every day, I believe we would have, we would have a Pulitzer Prize at this point. That's right. A Pulitzer Prize. The famous Pulitzer Prize for daytime television. I think that one deserves a Pulitzer for breaking my... Yeah, that breaks the internet. I'd like to move on to some other terrible people of the news. So Bill Cosby is now set to be free. How are you guys feeling about this? I would say this, which is that everything sucks for women and that it was a fucking day of misogyny.

Now, he didn't get released because the courts found him not going to be. guilty. He got released because there was prosecutorial misconduct. And the courts are set up that way. Of course, the prosecutor was the guy who was Trump's lawyer. Impeachment defense lawyer.

So it is really like everything bad comes from Trump, at least right now. But I would say no, it's fucked up. And it's like heartbreaking. And I actually tweet about this last night, which is that, you know, I have a daughter and I have a mother. I don't know if you know

who she is. Her name is John McCain. And she was a big feminist, and she worked very hard by, you know, as a war prisoner in Vietnam. No, I'm just kidding. She wasn't. She was a feminist, and they worked really hard in her generation, which was this baby boomer generation, to try to get women the right to choose. And they thought they had it settled. And there are a lot of things that are happening now, which are things, things that they thought they had settled in the 70s that are coming back in this Republican Party. And I actually wrote about it today for Vogue, which is that they're really coming after birth control as sort of as a, there's a whole kind of game going in the Republican Party

now that birth control is some kind of, that birth control is some kind of abortion, right, that certain kinds of birth control are abortion, which is preposterous. So, yeah, I think it's a loss for women. You know, every time someone like that, this goes for a, you know, it's saying your experience doesn't matter. First of all, I agree with everything you just said. We all know what Bill Cosby did, and we all know what an insanely horrible person he is. This does not change that at all, even though obviously it meant that he got to go in front of cameras yesterday and say that, you know, he had been vindicated or I don't even remember

whatever language he used that made it sound like the court had ruled him innocent or not guilty, which is obviously a huge crock of shit. But so basically, if I understand this correctly, the prosecutor, the DA at the time, yeah, this idiot Trump lawyer now, and please correct me if I'm wrong here. But my understanding is he basically thought, okay, we don't have,

we're not going to get him in a criminal case because he'll plead the fifth. It'll be a he said and many she's said. If you are being told that no charges will be filed, against you criminally. And then that affects things, you know, that affects things in a civil suit. And then suddenly a prosecutor says, okay, hey, well, that, that thing we said, oh, that's, that's not true. We're going to now charge you criminally. If you forget that it's Bill Cosby involved in this, that's kind of scary. The reality is affluent, famous men tend not to ever get in

trouble for anything they do. I mean, and it's the exception, not the norm, right? Like, Harvey Weinstein is in jail, and I actually can't even believe it because he's like the only one. No, that 100% true. A poor and or non-famous person would never have had this happen to them. That is 100% true. This deal had been made, which wasn't even a deal. It wasn't even like they sat down with Cosby and made a deal. The DA just out of nowhere said, we're not going to charge him criminally.

Yeah. So it's not even like he reached a, it's not even like one of these obnoxious plea deals where it's like, you know, you set someone horrible free to maybe get someone a little more horrible or whatever. Unfortunately, I'm not sure the Pennsylvania Supreme Court made the wrong decision here. I think they ruled sort of the way they had to rule. No, I think they had to. But I think you shouldn't get off on Texan holidays. It was a good day for bad dead people. What?

Because Don Rumsfeld. rummy, as he was called to his friends. 88 years old, died. He's gone. He can't start any more wars. Somebody, there was a tweet. Someone said he's now trying to convince Satan to invade heaven. I thought that.

He signed his own torture memos. I mean, that's something. But something I read yesterday that really stuck with me is that he fired the Pentagon pastry chef because he thought it was a waste of money. So, you know... That is the worst thing I've ever heard. Honestly, like, the one good thing is that they had a pastry shop. Like, that, you make the whole place of pastry.

You know, make the place a pastry store. Like, fuck the Pentagon. Why don't they make the whole Pentagon out of pastry? Seriously, like, pastry never killed any... Well, I mean, relatively speaking. I mean, I was going to swim in a sea of pastry. But I just loved it. Like, this is guys, you know, one of the...

And yeah, I agree. like he gets, you know, we seem to have decided that Iraq was his war and that's probably a little unfair to him because it was a lot of other people's war too. But we're saving our ire for some of the other ones coming down the pike. But, you know, he was definitely one of the architects of that war. But then I see these articles. It's like, but on the other hand, he didn't like waste and he fired the pastry chef. That's like, well, he wrote in the torture memos that he thought they should be able to. torture of Mordaise of the week?

Like, why limit it to four? By not giving them pastries. That's right. Ultimately, this is all about how he never should have fired that pastry chef or also the torture. The thing I got reminded of that had somehow slipped my mind was, if anybody's read Frederick Douglas' horrible account of when he was broken by this slave breaker, the place was called Fort Misery.

Donald Rumsfeld liked torture so much, he bought that place in vacations there. Like, what in the hell? That's not great. That's not right. What the hell type of fucking freak are you that reads this book that is like the worst account of a person being broken? It's like, I wonder if it's available on Zillow.

Oh, so he's out there doing this and I'm the one in therapy? Yeah. Well, he probably was in therapy. What the hell? You know the other thing, though, that, I really think we should hate Donald Rumsfeld for. Popularizer of the standing desk. Really?

Yeah, that he wasn't. In one of the torture memos, he said, I stand for my standing desk. Yeah, I stand for four to five hours a day at my standing desk. Why can't these detainees stand longer? And who had heard of a standing desk before that? So I blame the fact that my employees sometimes ask for these fucking things. I blame it on Donald Rumsfeld

because I have to then accommodate them. I don't think that's Donald Rumsfeld's worst crime. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that all the dead Iraqis worst. Molly, I'm a job creator. I get some privileges in this economy. I get to expend these things. Come on. Don't take this away from me.

Yes. So anyway, Don Rumsfeld is dead, but Henry Hissinger lives on another day. I will say I was pretty happy. to see how much people have come around to this was a bad man. We should shame the fuck out of him. And we should admit that this war was a problem. I know all of us lived through the gaslighting of the Iraq War. It was kind of great to see that everybody unanimously was like,

fuck this person for what they did. Yeah. I mean, I have to say that there was a lot less of the, the body's not even cold yet. Yes. Yeah, it was. Usually get, you know, when people tweet nasty things about a shithead who dies. Yeah, I think that's true.

Which makes me, look, and Molly, you sort of alluded to this, all of this is a warm up to Kissinger. We all know that, right? That's right. Kissinger's the big one. Twitter is going to be lit on that day. I wonder if we need John Pot Horitz to come back so that he can be offended when people say me and things about Kissinger.

Like, I used to, I'll be honest. How dare you? I used to be one of the, and I still. Look, I didn't tweet anything about Rumsfeld yesterday, but whatever. Like, I had nothing to add to the conversation. He sucked and he's dead and whatever. But I used to be one of the people who was like, ah, you know, wait a day or two after someone dies,

which I'm not that person anymore. I've grown. But even then in my head, I was like, except Kissinger, that's the exception. Yeah. I can't even imagine what it's going to be like. Yeah, Limbaugh, too. I mean, you know, when we just got to talk about that, his grave now becomes a gender-neutral bathroom. I was really excited that we were all into that on the first day.

I mean, I think it is interesting. You do see that there are people who really are just, I mean, beyond the pale. Like, you know, Rush Limbaugh, the way he targeted women, the way he, you know, ruined the discourse. I mean, he is a bad fucking dude. Like, there's no world in which you can defend that. And he made millions of dollars. I mean, it's not like he was, you know, some kind of public servant. Yeah, he was not Mother Teresa.

I think it's fair to say. Though Mother Teresa was actually problematic. I know. I know. I forgot we canceled Mother Teresa. You know, everybody. She's sort of on a hiatus. That was such a, you know, you'd always go to the, like, you know, Mother Teresa and Gandhi,

such good people when we were younger. and now, you know, cancel culture comes for everyone, even the states. Right. But at least with those people, they had good qualities. Yes, that's right. Like, Gandhi was thin. Right. No, like Mother Teresa did stuff for poor people.

No. But, but, but Kissinger, like, no. There's no, well, there's no well but for Kissinger. Wait, does Megan McCain end up on the view? I mean, she ends up, I'm sorry. ends up on the real housewives. I was going to say. Yeah, no, she was on the view.

She ends up on the real housewives discuss. Wait, wait, that means that the federalist guy, who's now the Fox News guy, will be one of the real housewives. That is not going to be good. I feel like I could see this happening. You could see it. You could see it like, oh, honey, what are you doing? So he's like, ah, just a little bit of misinformation about the vaccine.

Bravo goes Fox. I could see it. Bravo goes all right. I'm going to go ahead and say that's not happening. I'm going to go out on a limb. Let's talk about the January 6th commission. It's all happening. Nancy Pelosi has appointed Liz Cheney as a member of the commission.

What are you guys feeling here? What's going to happen? How you've seen this shakeout? I know you love Liz Cheney. So let's start. Welcome to the resistance, Liz Cheney. Which one of us are you talking to there? Yeah.

So all the all the. is Cheney fan club here. That's right. It's a yong. You know, is Dick no longer, does he no longer get the angry death tweets? No, I think he still does. I'm going to play, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to play it safe and say, I think he still does. Okay, I think that's a good call. Well, the first thing is I think I need to publicly apologize to Nancy Pelosi because I actually, and I think I said it on an earlier episode of this podcast.

I did not think she would actually do this. Yeah. I agree. You know, I didn't think she had it in her to actually do it. I thought it was going to be one of those things where, you know, she ends up saying, well, we're focused on 2022 now or whatever. Wow, that was a great Nancy Pelosi impression. It was pretty good. Yeah.

Pretty, pretty good. But I have to say, and I also said in this podcast, let's not put Liz Cheney on Mount Rushmore just yet. And obviously I stand by that, but. Listen. I do give her credit. She's been, you know, she's been remarkably consistent on this. and she has not backed down. And that's in, you know, I still don't like her.

And I think this is now maybe it's great that there's one thing we agree on. But in the world we live in, not backing down from actual principles is kind of amazing. It's sad that it's amazing, but it's amazing. Yeah. I think this is she's the only, she and Kinsinger are the only Republicans who really put themselves out there. Yeah. What I love is that Kinsinger is just a, the brand that he says, I don't give a shit.

Yeah. He said, Who gives a shit? Yeah. We really like that he's branding himself as the like, who gives a fuck type of Republican. Yeah. And he's good for him.

I mean, it's great. Yeah. It's good to kick Sand in Kevin McCarthy's face because truly, have we ever seen somebody more incompetent at this job? I feel like he's really done an amazing job coming from behind in the biggest asshole. competition. Yeah. Because like, you know, McConnell was clearly ahead of him for a very long time. Yeah. And there were so many others also. And he was, you know, McCarthy was trailing badly. And I think a lot of people had counted him out, including me, and had sort of, you know, turned off the game.

And then you come back in later, you know, in the second half. And suddenly there's McCarthy. I think maybe even pulling ahead. Yeah, he's a real fucking asshole. Let me tell you. He's a Republican from California. And I'm actually a little surprised because, you know, before everything happened with with the Lich Cheney today, you know, on Thursday, when it first was announced that there was going to be this committee and that there were going to be, you know, five of them were going to be chosen with input from the Republicans or whatever. I assumed McCarthy would appoint people or try to appoint people like Nunes or whatever and just turn this, turn the whole thing into the biggest clown show possible. And I, you know, obviously he's gone the other way and threat. to strip anyone who takes a seat on this from their other committee seats, which I don't even think he can do. Which we're going to learn the nuances of in the interview coming up in just one minute.

Oh, okay. Oh, excellent. Oh, good. Yeah, I would like to see Kinzinger on this committee. I mean, I hope they find a way to put him on it. I'd love to see one or two Democratic, really partisan clowns. Like, I think that could help the brand. Molly is a secret donor to the Alan Grayson come back to Congress fund. All I'm saying is their people are insane.

And they constantly try to do these false equivalents like with Ilhan Omar, right? Who like grew up as an immigrant in an immigrant camp. Right, a refugee. I'm sorry, grew up as a refugee in a refugee camp and who is like this very impressive person whose daughter goes to Barnard. and is very brainy and smart. And they're saying, like, she's just like, you know, in T.G. Yeah. Right.

Because they're both women. Yeah. The literal, like the worst possible fucking analogy in the world. So today, the Trump organization has got its first kind of legal challenges. And the Trump and the CFO of the Trump organization, a man called Alan Weisselberg, who's real fucking sketchy, let me tell you, who's worked for Trump, worked for his dad, has self-surrendered. is being prosecuted on tax charges and a lot of stuff, nothing like super huge. Right. You know, the kind of stuff that happens when you run a cash business that is constantly

equated with the mafia. But my question to you is this. In the media today, I read pieces, pieces or peace today that said that Trump was emboldened by this. Do you think Trump is emboldened by this? I don't think he's not emboldened by this. Interesting. Discuss. There was a quote from

Maggie Hibberman saying that, you know, that if Trump is dealing with the reality of a trial in like 18 months, it's hard to see him how he runs for president. And it's like, really? Really? It's hard to see? After everything he's done, you can't see that. Wasn't Trump University on trial when he was running the first time?

So along those same lines, it's just reached the point where, you know, anything you do can be used by Trump and people like him as just evidence of the conspiracy against them. Right. That is true. That is certainly true. I don't know why this is any different. Assuming nothing changes because he is not personally, you know, part of these indictments. So unless this leads, and as you said, this is all for very, like, unsexy things, which is fine. It's, you know, it's the untouchables. It's the Alcapables. It's the Alcapableness. tax evasion. Right. It's taxes. Yeah.

Unless something comes out as a result of these indictments, unless something is uncovered or, you know, or somebody flips or whatever, and suddenly it gets to Trump personally, I completely understand why he would feel emboldened by this, because it gives him another thing to go out there and yell about the lying media. And that shit gets eaten up by Republicans right now. So why shouldn't he be emboldened by this? as long as it's not going to touch him personally. Right, and I guess that is the question.

Back to this for a second. So this NSA thing, Tucker Carlson says he's being spot on by the NSA. The NSA then, again, not the most believable, you know, why would they tell the truth about anything? But they do put out a tweet saying they're not following Tucker Carlson around, okay, take of that what you will. The one thing that does seem to sort of shore up the possibility that Tucker Carlson is just making this up is that the Fox, network itself has no interest in this story, does not cover it at all, right? Which makes you think that maybe, in fact, they know something we don't.

You will realize now that Kevin McCarthy says it needs to be investigated. Yeah. Is the NSA spying on Tucker? Well, and I thought, Molly, I know that when you saw that yesterday, you tweeted that Tucker Carlson is the leader of the Republican Party, which honestly, in some ways, is at most a slight exaggeration. Right. What he really is the leader of is, remember back in like the 1850s, we had the no-nothing party? And now we just have, now we have the no wrong things party. Like everything they know is wrong. And Tucker is definitely the de facto, if not, they're a leader of that party.

I mean, the guy just now gets his platform every day and gets up every night and says incredibly wrong things, like things that have no basis in reality. And, you know, his viewers nod and eat it up. And Kevin McCarthy nods and eats it up. And it's just, it's absolutely incredible. And I'm still trying to figure out how a fairly standard conservative, which is what Tucker has been throughout most of his. career. And now he's Glenn Beck without the chalkboards. And I just like I can't, I don't know when that, like I get why it happened because it's happened to most of them, if not all of them. But it's just, it's just fucking amazing to look at. But it does come back to what we were talking about before with, I don't know if you know who her father is. She had that same thing, which is there is no place for sane people in the Republican Party, right? There's no place for it, right? Those people are, You know, they're Liz Cheney, they're Adam Kinsinger, they're like five people.

They're Evan McMullen, right? They are on the sidelines. The Republican media, you know, Fox, O-A-N, and Newsmax, there's only room for craye. So that's where we're at. It's also just crazy because you think of how many years we were lectured by conservatives that liberals don't look at reality. Now it's deny slavery, deny January 6th ever happened, deny January 6th ever happened, make things out a whole cloth every fucking day.

Yeah. And call the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff a pig. Yeah, that was amazing, Millie. And we still have a Matt Gates, you know, grilling people in the FBI while being under FBI investigation. It's a wonderful world. Did you know every single week

the new Abnormal does a special bonus episode that's available to Beast Inside Members, which is the Daily Beast membership program? This week we're lucky enough to be joined by David Shore, who's the head of data science at Open Labs. And he's going to talk to us about what he saw in the New York mayoral race and what it makes him think about the Democrats' chances in the midterms.

To hear this along with all of our past bonus episodes, head to New Abnormal, That's New Abnormal.com. John Allen is a political reporter for NBC News, as well as the author of Lucky, how Joe Biden barely won the presidency. So I think we should start by talking about one Kevin McCarthy, the congressional minority leader who threatened today to strip any Republican who deigned to serve on Nancy Pelosi's January 6th as select commission of their committee assignments. John Allen, can he do that? No, not by himself. There is a problem with this threat, which is that the minority

typically is allowed by the majority to pick its committee assignments for its members. However, to add somebody to a committee or to remove somebody from a committee, it requires a full vote of the House, which means that in order for Kevin McCarthy to make good on this threat, Nancy Pelosi would have to allow a House floor vote on whether to take Liz Cheney off of her committees as punishment for joining Pelosi's select committee on January 6th. It seems unlikely that he would do that. It seems very unlikely, and it would be certainly high theater. but I can't see the Democrat, the majority Democrats, voting to punish Liz Cheney for investigating the riot on the Capitol. Seems like they would rather celebrate her for that than punish her for it. I mean, it's amazing. I mean, it's amazing.

There are no words. So here's the question I want the answer to is, did McCarthy do this because he doesn't know the rules? Or did he make this threat because he doesn't care about the rules and he just wants to scare people like Louis Gomer who don't know the rules? Well, and he particularly said this according to the reporting. He said this in a meeting with freshman Republicans. So presumably most of them are not as up on the rules. But they have been in Congress and watched this happen before because the House stripped Marjorie Taylor Green of her committee assignments. And so they were, you know, they should have been able to follow that procedure, which was the Democrats put up a resolution.

resolution, and the Democrats, the majority in the House, outnumbered the Republicans and voted to strip Marjorie Taylor Green of her committee assignments through this formal process against the objections of all of the Republicans who voted in unison to keep her on her committees. So, you know, it shouldn't be shocking to them that this is the process, but I think McCarthy was looking for some way to try to, you know, to scare members away from taking an appointment like this. And Congressman Adam Kinsinger from Illinois was asked about this threat today, and he said, who gives a shit?

Good for him, man. I think Liz Cheney actually accepting an appointment to this committee is a demonstration that she is not someone who gives a flip, yeah. Yeah. There are literally only two Republicans who are willing to really say, fuck you, to McCarthy. everyone else is still kind of on the QT. Do you think that McCarthy's power is diminished, or do you think it's just that it's only two, so they're outliers?

I think this isn't really about Kevin McCarthy and that it's much more about Donald Trump and what he means in primaries. I don't think there's a single Republican who is afraid of the awesome wrath of Kevin McCarthy. I think what they're afraid of is that Donald Trump will, you know, pick them out of the crowd and say that they're the person that Republican voters should turn again. So McCurthy's power is in a way sort of devolved from Trump's power.

He's an intermediary who's trying to balance these wings of his party. And one wing is much larger, if you can imagine, you know, a bird with one airplane-sized wing and one flea-sized wing. The Republicans right now are the Trump airplane-sized wing, and then the flea-sized wing of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger and a couple of others. who, you know, stood up to the Trump faction. Yeah, the commission goes, you have Liz Cheney on it, and then five Democrats. In theory, there would be other Republicans. It's possible that they don't name anybody. It's possible that people refuse assignments, or it's possible that it's, you know, the Jim Jordan defense.

What's the Jim Jordan defense? Well, meaning that you stick Jim Jordan and some of your other, you know, partisan warriors on that committee to try to represent. Yeah, I'm not sure that Gates. would be a candidate for right now. So it doesn't seem like Matt Gates, but so that it could go either way there. I mean, I don't think Gates will end up being on the committee. I mean, I think what you'll end up seeing is a relatively serious investigation that will be sort of permanently discredited by Trump and his backers based on the fact that it is a,

you know, a partisan committee, one that was set up when they couldn't get an independent commission through Congress. So, you know, whatever they come out with, the, you know, the Republican side will say that this is biased and shameful and terrible, no matter how well it's conducted. But people will make their own judgments about that. And so I think, you know, it's incumbent on the Democrats who are conducting this to do it in a serious fashion. So I know, I don't know if you, you saw this investigation in the UK, right, where Greenpeace posed as a headhunter and interviewed two of the biggest Exxon lobbyists. And they complained, I mean, I thought it was like basically an ad for the Biden administration in some ways. Absolutely. Well, they complained bitterly about, you know, Biden's larger infrastructure bill had all this climate stuff in it.

And they complained bitterly about. how this would fuck up Exxon and cost them a billion dollars. And then they talked about all the senators that they have in their pocket like Shelley More Capito and also they talked about how

every week they call the kingmaker Joe Manchin. So I'm curious to know look, we all know this is what happens behind the scenes. But this strikes me as a pretty unusual video.

It is an unusual video. You don't usually get to see that quite like that behind the scenes, right? But I also think that the bottom line result of it is that ExxonMobil is going to make billions of dollars as people go to pump their cars

full of gas. I mean, like, I was trying to think about this earlier and talking through this with someone I know who's in public relations, and we sort of came to the to that conclusion that like it's bad PR for ExxonMobil, but what's the, you know, what votes does it change in Congress? I don't think it changes any votes in Congress. And more to the point, it's not like, I mean, maybe you could see,

you know, some new tax on oil companies added in a pay for reconciliation if that bill gets anywhere. But if you look at the sort of broader debate on transportation and infrastructure right now and the family infrastructure that Biden's trying to do, I mean, it is now in a place where it's fight among Democrats. You know, McConnell has played this really well, getting, you know, because there are two trains, what McConnell's done is allowed Republicans to negotiate on one train. They come to an agreement with the White House. And then on the other train, it's just Democrats negotiating against themselves. And the White House is in the position of the president, you know, I guess he reversed his position or walked back from it, but originally sort of saying the one

thing he couldn't say, which is, I'm not going to do the one without the other. I don't think that was helpful to him, which is why he turned around and reversed it. But ultimately, the Republicans have a position now where they're like, we'll do this thing. And the Democrats are like, well, we need to get to both of these things. And that discussion is entirely among Democrats. And it is getting more and more bitter, not less and less bitter. It seems like Mitch McConnell is really kind of, he's so good at playing it, that he's made this deal moderate Democrats versus more progressive Democrats, as opposed to the fact that there are not, there are not 10 sane Republicans who will pass anything. Right. I mean, the way that I would put it is that all of the Republicans that tentatively agreed to

this deal have a lot of wiggle room to get out of it if they want to. It's what Democrats accuse Republicans are doing, which is, you know, sort of a fake negotiation. that's intended to delay not to actually come to an agreement. And then, you know, they get to announce an agreement. Then, you know, within a few hours, the president has said something that gives them a ton of room if they want to, to turn around and reject the deal that they'd already made. It's like McConnell's already won.

I mean, it's somebody who's looking at a chess board and knows where all the pieces move. And, you know, you would think that the president Biden and Schumer and Pelosi would have as good of a feel for the chess. board, but, you know. But they clearly don't. But it's also worth remembering that the minority leader in the Senate has a lot of influence over what goes and what doesn't. Except when Chuck Schumer was the minority leader in the Senate, that wasn't true. I mean, I think it was a little different. I mean, the things that we remember about the Trump administration were things that they did do in reconciliation, right? So the big tax cut for reconciliation and the judges. And the Arctic drilling.

Yes. Which came in reconciliation. Right. And the judges, right? This report, which are, you know, no longer subject to filibuster. Right. But in terms of like policy things that President Trump would have wanted to do, I mean, there were things he wasn't able, like he would have thrown, you know, untold billions at building a wall if he could have, right? Right. Congress said you can't do that.

And then he reprogram money to start doing it, but it was not done in the way he would have liked. Yeah. And he said last night on Sean Hannity that he thought the wall should have been painted. It should have been painted. I don't know. I mean, I guess, you know. You know, I was told, I seemed to remember being told that Mexico was going to pay for the wall. And the painting.

And the painting, obviously. I mean, look, if you're going to build a big beautiful wall, you might as well cover it in good paint. It just strikes me as extremely odd that Democrats can't kind of get past McConnell on this. So, John Allen, today I was watching a press conference with DeSantis and sitting next to Biden doing a press. conference on this atrocity that happened at Sunnyside, Florida. I'm curious to know there was some reporting that I read this morning that said that Trump wants to do a rally this weekend in Florida and DeSantis has like begged him not to because of this enormous humanitarian catastrophe that has happened in Florida in Miami, which is this building that collapsed and there

are 150 plus people missing. So I'm curious to know this seems like these two men, are heading for a collision course. DeSantis is campaigning for president in 2024. And so is Donald Trump. So, I mean, the short answer is yes, they are on a collision course. This isn't the first time DeSantis has tried to get Trump not to come to Florida. He did that, you know, the Tulsa rally that Trump did in 2020, the sort of, you know, the super spreader event, as it was termed by many.

It was originally Trump and wanted to do an event in Florida to do his first. rally out of COVID or it was in the middle of COVID, but Trump wanted to suggest that COVID was over. He wanted to do that first rally in Florida and DeSantis basically told him don't come. And then also the Republican National Convention was supposed to be in Florida and DeSantis told him don't come. So, yeah, Desanis is, you know, I mean, I think what we've seen from Ron DeSantis is that he has both a feel for, you know, the populist Trump wing of the party and like what those voters want and is also afraid of the political damage Trump can do to him and to the party by being

deeply undisciplined and doing kind of weird things like come to Florida to hold a political rally in the middle of a tragedy. I mean, they need to basically get along, right? I don't know that they need to get along and they could end up running against each other. If Trump turns on DeSantis, then DeSantis is done. right? It's certainly a lot harder for DeSantis if Trump turns on him. But, you know, DeSantis has also done a pretty good job of cutting a political profile for himself. It'd be interesting to see, I think he might withstand Trump's fury better than a lot of other Republicans. And interestingly,

I mean, you know, if you're a governor of a state and the president of the other party comes in, that can go poorly or it can go well. You know, I think that, you know, for DeSantis, you know, tragedy creates some opportunity in terms of just looking like a responsible governing party in the time of crisis. You know, it doesn't appear that he told Biden not to come. Fascinating. And also totally, I mean, we're in weird, weird times. Thank you so much, John Allen, for joining us. Molly Johnfest, I have a great time, every time on the normal, abnormal. Daniel Goldman is the former lead counsel of the House impeachment inquiry into former president Donald J. Trump's first impeachment.

Welcome to the new abnormal Daniel Goldman. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. I'm a big fan of the podcast and honored to finally get to join you. Oh, well, we're so psych. We couldn't have you for a long time because you were. What was your official title in the first impeachment? We sort of made it up because I was the director of investigations for the House Intelligence Committee. I think lead counsel for the impeachment inquiry is where we landed. So you did this first impeachment. You've seen now you've lived through watching the second impeachment and now we're back sort of

litigating the Trump presidency with the January 6th commission. Can you talk to me about, are there ways in which this commission can do things that impeachment wasn't able to? Because it is sort of the same kind of idea of Congress running a narrative. Well, that is true. I mean, Congress is doing an investigation. I think there's a critical difference, and everyone needs to remember this, is the impeachment inquiry was very clearly targeted at Donald Trump's conduct regarding Ukraine. The January 6th Select Committee is really focusing on a fact-finding mission to determine who organized it, what the root causes were, and whether there was. any influence or behind-the-scenes organization or assistance from anyone in the White House, anyone associated with Donald Trump, such as someone like Rudy Giuliani, or any members of Congress. It's less that Donald Trump is the target of this investigation, and far more that it really is,

and it may be, the only sort of definitive investigation about what happened, on January 6th, both in terms of the insurrection, but also in terms of the breach of the capital and the failure to secure the capital and what intelligence failures there were, not dissimilar to 9-11. Do you think that Democrats have, I mean, it feels like there is not a lot of bipartisan interest in knowing the truth? I mean, are you seeing that? Right. I agree with that. And I think, you know, we can. speculate as to why that is. There's a political reason, which is harping on the January 6th

insurrection and Donald Trump's role in fomenting it as well as other conservative Republican congressman like Mo Brooks. That's just not helpful to the Republican Party and whatever narrative that they're messaging they're trying to put forward in order to take back the House in particular in 2022. There also may be personal reasons for that, which is, for one, I assume Republican members of Congress or senators do not want to testify before a select committee. And the second and perhaps more significant is, and we don't know this, there are rumors about it, but maybe some of these members of Congress played a role in organizing and inciting the insurrection. And so they definitely don't want an investigation if that's the case. We don't know that yet.

That's pure speculation. But there's been enough chatter about it that I'm sure that is something that the select committee will look into. It feels to a lot of us on the left that Trump has gotten away with it. We know that Weisselberg surrendered this morning. Do you think Trump world is being held accountable in any way? And do things give you hope here? I think we have to separate the two things. The January 6th is one thing, and certainly Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the election and the insurrection that followed his activities in trying to convince Brad Raffensberger and Georgia to find the votes necessary.

That's subject of another investigation down in Atlanta. The Manhattan DA's investigation has nothing to do with January 6th. This really has to do, in fact, with nothing. related to Donald Trump's presidency. This has to do with the Trump organization, the company that bears his name, and that he ran for decades and still had a vested interest in while he was president. But it's very important to draw that distinction. And as a former prosecutor and as a strong believer in the rule of law, I think it's essential to keep politics and emotion out of whatever comes from the Manhattan DA's office. A prosecution is not a vehicle to, quote, hold someone accountable for

political actions or other criminal conduct if it's separate and apart from what you're investigating. And so I think that we have a tendency and many have a tendency to conflate the two, that we need to hold Donald Trump accountable for four years of hell by by imprisoning him for stuff that's unrelated to that. And I think it's really, really important that for those of us who believe in the rule of law and believe that Donald Trump stomped all over the rule of law for four years, that we cannot now say, oh, well, we're going to do the same thing. If you believe in the rule of law, you've got to believe in it on both sides. Right. But I do think the question of like what is happening, what happened with the way that the Trump, the Trump organization was run? I mean,

you've heard from practically everyone in the world that there was sketchy stuff. I mean, Jennifer Weisselberg has talked about, you know, her husband bringing the cash from the skating rank. I mean, this, it's, I mean, I've never, ever heard of a business run like this before. I mean, I have in like the Sopranos. So it does strike me as this is hard, like, like a partisan witch hunt. Oh, I don't think it is. And certainly it didn't start to be that. I just hear a lot of calls of we need to lock him up. And that rubs me the wrong way. But separate and apart from that, if there is a, there certainly is a legitimate basis to investigate the Trump organization because of all of those little tidbits that you hear about and because, you know, look at what happened with the Trump

foundation. Look at what happened with Trump University. There are so many things. Yeah, I mean, there are so many things that have borne out to be fraudulent in nature that you, as a prosecutor, you know, it's not a big leap to think that, well, if he's going to run his foundation and his university as a fraudulent enterprise, then certainly he would run the Trump organization. And by all accounts, you know, he's not someone who cares about the laws. And he will do whatever it is that's in his best interest. He doesn't care about contracts. He doesn't care about paying his vendors. So someone like that is very prone to cutting corners and perhaps illegally. You can't go after him for things that didn't happen, but you should go after him for things

that did happen. There's another problem here, Molly, which is, you know, the criminal process is not necessarily designed as the ultimate truth-finding. mission. And I say that because, yes, you need to try to get to the truth and you need justice when you do get to the truth. But remember, there are very strict evidentiary rules. There are very specific legal requirements to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt and the elements of a crime. And so when I was a prosecutor, there were a number of times where I knew in my heart, heart that someone committed a crime, but I couldn't prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. And that's where, you know, we need to maintain our core foundations of our democracy and the rule of law, which is to say

we have this system for a reason. And that is to make sure that we don't imprison people who didn't actually commit a crime. And I'm not trying to take Donald Trump side here. I just think that we need to be careful about viewing the Manhattan DA's investigation as the effort to hold Donald Trump accountable for all of the wrongs that he has done. There may be specific crimes he's committed, but there are other ways of holding him accountable for other things that he's done. And I think it's important to kind of keep the long view in mind when you're trying to think about Donald Trump. And that's very hard because he evokes so much of. of an emotional response from so many people.

Yeah, no, I understand that. I'm curious to know what you think about the Supreme Court voting decision that came down today. Well, it's not surprising at all, given what happened in Shelby County eight years ago. So what happened today was that, you know, the three Trumpy Supreme Court justices and the three conservative Supreme Court justices who were already there sided with Georgia's new election. laws and said, and also made it harder now to overturn state election laws, right? I mean, ultimately, yeah, I think it's less in some respects about this specific case and much more about the legal standard that the court now established for going forward to allow the

Voting Rights Act to be a check on discriminatory voting laws. And the real concern is that the language in Justice Alito's opinion recognizes voter fraud as a legitimate concern to enact laws to protect and has some very lenient language about how far states can go that even if there is an incidental, I think, was the word he used, a disparate impact, meaning that the result, that the result, even if not the intent, the results end up harming minority communities more than majority communities that that may be okay if you cannot establish that it was intended to do that. That sets up a very high bar because, you know, in this day and age, people are generally smart enough not to say the quiet part out loud other than perhaps Donald Trump and that, you know, they're not going to go out and say, well, we want to make it impossible for minorities to vote. So that's why we're enacting these laws. Of course, they're not going to say that. And when you see so many Republican legislatures

claim that voter fraud is the basis for all these restrictive laws, when the facts just don't bear that out, voter fraud is not an issue. It's not an issue that has impacted any election as long as anyone can imagine. It may have a couple different individuals here and there, but it's not a widespread problem that needs a large-scale cure, but the Supreme Court has said today that it effectively is. And that's very dangerous, I think, going forward for permissively allowing states to do what they're doing across the country,

which is to significantly suppress the minority vote in an indirect way. Do you see a world in which Democrats have any way back from this, though? Well, I think Merrick Garland anticipated this, and the Department of Justice anticipated this with their lawsuit against Georgia, where they're claiming discriminatory intent. And I think one way of doing it will be to be a little bit more aggressive in arguing discriminatory intent and in using circumstantial evidence to show that there is an intent. circumstantial evidence has been used traditionally to show that there's results-oriented impact, but there's a way, as a prosecutor I would do this all the time,

there's a way of using circumstantial evidence and inferences to show that this was the intended effect, perhaps partly because there was no other alternative effect that could be cited as a reason for doing it. So it's a higher bar. I don't think it's a bar that is impossible to meet. As an example, you know, the laws that restrict people from providing food and water to those waiting in lines forever, there's no legitimate purpose for that other than just to try to suppress the vote. And so the claims may be less about race and more about the right to vote. And that's one way of perhaps attacking it. Thank you so much.

This was really helpful. It's just soul crush. But we live another day. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. What's crazier than QAnon, more outlandish than Pizza Gate, and scarier than a Mexican getaway with Ted Cruz? The answer is what the American right wing has planned next. Be one of the first to listen to Fever Dreams, new podcasts from the Daily Beast, tracking the conspiracy slingers, orange acolytes, and straight-up grifters pushing to retake power.

Every Wednesday hosts Swin Subisang and Will Summer. Checking in on the movement of the radical right. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash podcasts or your favorite podcast player to catch the first episode and get subscribed. That's Fever Dreams, which you can subscribe to wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Jesse Cannon.

Hi, Molly Junkfast. So, what's going on? He's not even president anymore, but he's still, fuck that guy. Oh, man. The former guy. So he's not on Twitter anymore. He's not on Facebook anymore, but he does publish these bizarre statements.

What do you say now? Which then gets sent around. And it's just one line. Four words. Four words that can really fuck everyone up. Who shot Ashley Babbitt? Let me tell you who shot Ashley Babbitt. A police officer who was trying to prevent her from storming the county.

Capitol and killing congressmen and potentially hanging Mike Pence. I can tell you who started this whole incident. Yeah. So in case you're wondering, Donald J. Trump, the 45th president of the United States, pro insurrection, not that we're surprised, but there it is. Whoop. As we say. That was a deep cut.

There was a deep cut. It's one of my favorite songs. Yes. So my fuck that guy Since I didn't go last time I'm coming with a two for oneer It is going to be both of the men Vying to be the Senate candidate

On the Jeep OPE side in Ohio Josh Mandel for running Such a shitty campaign like he does every time Because he's run for the seat a million fucking times Has apparently been sleeping With one of his staffers Who's made the campaign A miserable environment to work in

So his staff quit in mass I know I would have just quit mass if I'd look at his worm-looking face, but that's a different story. I mean, you know. I mean, I knew his campaign would go down in flames in some way because he's the most unlikable little worm, but like this one is really new heights of asshole dish. Well done, sir.

But secondly, coming with the heat and really tearing up the fuck that guy charts these days is one J.D. Vance, author of Shittiest Book of Maga era, he has been discovered by the K-file had all these anti-Trump tweets. Well, that is his best quality. He voted for, he voted for my bestie, Evan McMullen. That's right. He said he voted for Evan McMullen, but now he has aspirations on his hand. He needs to ascend to the Senate.

And, you know, once that happens and you know you're running on the GOP side, you got to suck up to the orange man. Only way to win a Republican primary. Yeah, that in the racism. Well done, Guy. Well done. Yeah, well done. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics and science. We'll help us understand what's happening to our country and the world.

We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you again on the next episode. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Last Last. and our star studded The Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber. Subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline.

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