The Daily Beast Podcast - Preet Bharara: It’s ‘Odd’ Garland Hasn’t Grilled Trump & Co.

Episode Date: January 18, 2022

Preet Bharara, former Southern District of New York Attorney General and Justice Is…, is very concerned that Merrick Garland has likely not yet investigated Trump in relation to the Jan. 6 riots. He tells co-host Molly Jong-Fast why on this episode of The New Abnormal. Then, CNBC’s Fast Money panelist Dan Nathan joins to explain what’s happening with inflation in the U.S. and the Biden administration’s potential plan to fix it. But not before co-host Andy Levy and Molly discuss Paul Gosar’s intelligence, or lack thereof, and whether Ron DeSantis is more dangerous than Trump? Or will his boring personality be his 2024 kryptonite? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Zhang Fast, no relationship to Kim Jong-un. I'm a left-wing pundant and a writer at the Atlantic Invo. And I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart, conversations with the wisest and funniest and funniest people in science and media and politics that help make what's happening today clearer. Our world has been turned upside down. And on the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and how we'll hopefully get ourselves out of it. We did it again. We made a great show.

Former U.S. attorney, Prit Barar, who you of course know from his podcast, stay tuned. And as the author of his latest book, Justice Is, is going to explain to us what in the hell is going on with Merrick, Ireland, and all the controversy around his handling of the January 6th prosecutions. Then we're going to have an awesome conversation on the economy with Dan Nathan, who you of course know from CNBC's Fast Money, as well as his podcast, OK computer. But first, let's have some fun. Andy Levy. Molly Jong, Fast.

Lot of fuckery today. Tons of fuckery on this holiday week. The first thing we have to talk about is Dulcantis. Oh, that's a good name. Versus Trump. Yes, Dulcantus. Funny because it's like, I think DeSantis or Dol Santos. as we now call him, is actually more dangerous than Trump?

Because he's seemingly less insane? Yes. You know, he sort of lived in the world in a way that Trump hasn't, right? Because Trump just worked for the family business and then was a reality television host and then went back to the family business. Whereas DeSantis, he is a governor. He's kind of, he's sort of had success in the Republican Party. He looks more like a Mitt Romney.

He has the look. but I think he plays by the Donald Trump rules. I agree with all of that. My only question for you, Molly Jongfest, would be, is that what the Republican Party wants? Because the Republican Party had that choice in 2016 when you had Trump and you had all the guys that DeSantis looks like. And that didn't go too well for those guys. It's interesting right now, though, because DeSantis, I think, has had that thought and has now decided that he is going to obfuscate whether or not he. had a booster in the hopes of being more anti-science than Trump. Let's take a minute here

to think about what more anti-science than Trump would look like. I'm thinking about it. I'm picturing a flat earth. I'm picturing leeches. I mean, imagine a world, because that's what's going on here, right, is that Trump, you know, as he was leaving off. He's sort of weaponized anti-vax. And now we have DeSantis sort of taking the baton. And Trump has pivoted to the pivoted now to say that he's pro boosters. This is what I've read on NBC.com that he was actually doing this because he thinks it will help him in a general. Right.

While agreeing with absolutely everything you said, I think what this comes down to is what the Republican Party wants. And like, is it a question of beliefs or is it a question of style? Because nobody can match Trump's style. And that seems to be what a lot of the vote, you know, his voters have sort of glommed onto. And that's why they voted for him and not for a Ted Cruz or a Marco Rubio. You know, and DeSantis, personality-wise, fits in more with those guys. And he's even like, like, he's a, you know, he's an Ivy Leagueer. He's not Trump.

He's not the bluster guy. He's not going to get up there and talk about shithole countries probably and stuff like that. And, you know, my sort of feeling is that the Republican Party hasn't moved on from that, from Trump's style. And that makes him, I think, still the clear frontrunner for 2024. And I totally agree with you that about what DeSantis is trying to do. I'm just curious. I'm actually sort of curious to see if he can pull it off, you know, in the sense of watching to

you know, let my enemies fight and you can sort of sit back. And even though you know it's going to end with one of them still standing, which sucks, you can still kind of enjoy it in that it's these two assholes going at it and one of them isn't going to survive. Right. I mean, I think that's an important point which you're opening the door to, which is we sometimes, and it's possible we overthink this. Trump is very charismatic.

Yes. I mean, he's an autocrat. He's an idiot. He's a fucking fascist. But he's very charismatic. And some of why us in the mainstream media want to say, like, it's, you know, they're racist, they're insecure, they're this, they're that, they have economic insecurity. But we never sort of take this sort of very superficial, they liked him because he was funny. He appealed to them in a certain way.

Right. Because like if you think about Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton, if you listen to a Bill Clinton speech, you think this guy sounds like fun, you know. And I think that that is something that Del Santis does not have. Well, and I think that that's exactly why Trump, look, he makes up these nicknames and most of them are kind of lame, but they do also get to, if not the actual core of the person, they get to the core of how that person can be perceived. And I think that by starting out with, by calling DeSantis dull, you know, and talking about that, I do think that sort of paves. the way for a future strategy if they end up going head to head or anything like that is to paint him as this sort of really boring guy. You don't want this boring, dull guy who's going to give you these Ivy League speeches. You want me getting up there with the weird hand gestures and, again,

calling things shit whole countries and talking about, you know, real talk as he claims it is, even though it's not. You make a great point here. And I think somebody once said that really that, you know, Trump was never even close to an incompetent fascist. He was never playing 40 chess. But the one political talent that he showed that was new was the Occam's razor of being able to say the most obvious nickname that really sticks to somebody was the true MVP, all-time greatest talent at doing that in politics. Yeah, I mean, it really worked for him. You know, even, what was it, Little Marco? Yes. Right, right. No, no. Lyon Ted is fucking genius. Lion Ted.

Lion Ted was great. But Little Marco makes no, like, what does that even mean? It means nothing. But he kept hammering it and he kept even spelling it with two Ds and saying Little Marco and making it into a joke. But it worked. It fucking worked. Like, no matter how dumb it was and like meaningless it was, it worked with the party's base.

So I really do think that, you know, these little leaks of him calling DeSantis doll is showing us where he's going to go with this. battle, if this battle even ever comes up. Right, but it's also, it's all the Trumpy affiscation, right? Like, we have a guy who he started his administration with this inauguration where it's implied that they may have stole money from the, uh, used it to enrich the, the businesses. He ended with these fake electorates. Now we're seeing that there are seven. They did all these sort of slow moving coup things. And every day we find a new evidence of. another slow-moving coup. I mean, the goal here is he puts in all this little bits of drama

and backbiting in order and little fights in order to distract us from his larger corruption. I mean, like, for example, Trump versus Morning Joe, which is the, which is his newest thing where he's making fun of Morning Joe's ratings in the hopes of distracting from all of his people beating down his door for criminal stuff. Trump did a big speech this week. He had a nice little rally in Arizona. And I, you know, I think the distraction there was he tried to say enough things that people got distracted to not see that Paul Gosar's brain died on stage that night. I'm not going to touch medical diagnoses. I'm not going to touch that. I can't tell you. I can't touch it. I'm just curious how you could tell. It seemed worse than usual. I mean,

like I previously commented on this podcast when he did that interview on Matt Gates's podcast, that there was something really semen off with his health. This seemed like an escalation to me. I will be in this business because I get no repercussions because I don't. Yeah, I'm not touching the medical. Like underage kids and like medical problems, like I don't know. I have no idea. Was underage kids and medical problems the title of the back gates Paul Gossar episode?

But I'm just saying like I don't, it just, I don't know what's wrong with him. But even if he's perfectly healthy, his policies are just appalling and his racism. I mean, he's like, you know, they got rid of Steve King, but somehow this guy's even worse. Yeah. And what was interesting about the speech was that he did, he pushed lies that he had been more hesitant to push before. And he really pushed them this time. Like what? I mean, Arizona is interesting because the people in Arizona are really, like, the right is really wacky over there.

And so you had people calling to lock up Dr. Fauci at the beginning. That wasn't Trump. And then Trump said, you know, did a lot of election lies. I mean, he's always like that. He's always not bound by the truth. So, and it was long and it was boring. And people started leaving after about an hour from the video I saw. Yeah, he was really hammering home.

I mean, I saw him say that the big lie is bullshit was the quote I saw. And he really is hammering the 2020 stuff. And that's going to be interesting if he runs in 2024. It'll be interesting to see if that. And I honestly have no idea if that hurts him or helps him. And I also, I sort of, you know, if I'm going to go down this political analysis thing, I just want to start out by saying that it's obviously bad that he's doing all this. Sometimes, you know, we get accused of looking at the political aspect of something instead of at the thing itself.

and I think, you know, we all clearly agree that the big lie, the election stuff is bad and awful and horrible for this country. That doesn't mean it's not good for Trump. Right. But I'm not, I don't know if it is, you know, I don't know if by 2023 or whenever this election sort of kicks off, if there's not going to be a lot of fatigue on that. And if he's still running around talking about 2020, maybe it hurts him. But I honestly don't know. Like, it's so hard to gauge the Republican base because they'll believe just about anything. And it's really hard to analyze, I think.

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I also think you have a situation where you have a politician who has no respect for any of the norms that we've lived in this country since we became a country. And you have a voting group that will do anything for him. So, you know, it's just a question of how bad it gets. And the Republican Party is just sort of tripping all over itself to be. be as bad as Trump, you know, to be as right-wing, or if not worse than Trump, which is interesting. And we're seeing that everywhere. So a good example, and I want to talk about this, is Yon, Virginia, goes in there in the red vest. I'm a businessman. I'm going to give you

back your schools. I'm going to take it away from the Democrats. I'm going. And I think, and he wouldn't let Trump come up, and he really sort of advertised himself as a moderate. you know, he got, he was put in office this weekend. He has 11, 11 immediate executive actions on his first day in office. Yeah, and a lot of them had to do with, you know, education. Banning things that aren't being taught. And look, the thing about that, you know, and this gets to the critical race theory, the latest Republican bugaboo or one of the latest. And the executive order forbids the teaching of, I'm trying to remember the phrase. it's inherently divisive concepts, including critical race theory. It's like, how do you ban the

teaching of concepts that people disagree on? Like, that isn't the whole point of education that you talk about these things? Leave critical race theory out of it. What kind of education is this? Do those concepts include, like, there are people, you know, there are strict Bible constructionists who believe the earth was created in six days. So is evolution a divisive or divisive? concept, where does this end? It's awful and it's going to have, my point is it's going to have, like, it's going to have unforeseen consequences because of the way it's written that are going to go way beyond even critical race theory. My favorite thing was he had a tweet and he was like, we are not going to teach children how to hate America or hate each other anymore. And I was like,

there are no schools, there are zero schools that teach children to hate America and each other. Like, that's something that just doesn't happen. And, you know, people were like, well, no, it does happen. No, it doesn't happen. That doesn't happen. What's good about all of this ridiculous Republican stuff on education is, like, people are interested in education for the first time ever, right? Like, just, like, you know, I mean, we're having these conversations about, like,

how you educate. I mean, what's bad is that they're just, they've decided that they're just not going to teach anything that makes them uncomfortable, which is, if you're a Republican, everything. Yes, that's 100% true that every social studies program or history program at any school is just rah, rah, rah, and ignores nearly every atrocity America ever did. Like, as a kid who literally went to one of the, what was called the most liberal town in America at the time, when I brought up Howard Zinn in high school, I was like literally nearly almost thrown out. Right. I mean, it's also just, I mean, this is not how it is, but it is, you know,

you have a Republican Party that has, you know, advertise itself on like, fuck your feelings. And now you're not allowed to talk about racism. You're not allowed to talk about vaccines. You're not allowed to talk about science. You're not allowed to talk about, I mean, you guys, they're so sensitive and so worried about teaching and books. I mean, they're banning books now. I mean, think about a world. They're so worried about books that books are going to somehow make their, make their, um,

children learn. I mean, it's, we're getting into real crazy stuff here. Yeah, I mean, to be fair, what they always said

was fuck your feelings. They never said, fuck my feelings. They were accurate about that. I'm curious if you two have any thoughts on this, and if you don't, we can move on. Somebody pointed out that the Republicans

actually won the sex head wars, that liberals just gave up at some point on actually making sex education be a thing that should be taught in all the schools. And Republicans, kids got to basically have a whole different country where they just ignore the idea that a condom exists until a kid gets out of high school. And it seems like this is them learning that lesson that they can do this again. The lesson of going after localities is, I think, you know, something that Republicans have definitely learned.

And we're seeing this with the school boards, with these crazy queue people getting up at all these school board meetings and them being encouraged to run. for school board and stuff like that. And we're seeing it with these book ban laws, you know, which in, I guess in some cases or maybe states, but in a lot of cases seem to be localities, you know, just school districts. And the lesson that the Democrats, I think, need to learn, like, real quick,

is to not overlook these local elections and these local issues because they're concentrating on the big picture of the presidential race or whatever. There's some scary stuff going on with this book banning and stuff you would have liked to think this country had moved past decades ago. And what about secretaries of state? And that too. I mean, it's all sort of a piece. You know, that's on the state level. We've got these efforts by Republicans to get secretaries of state elected in a bunch of states

who will be friendly to their chance. of votes and, you know, can help them win elections that they've lost, basically, is what they're trying to do here. And you can't overlook that stuff. I saw Michael Besloss, the historian, tweeted this out the other day. And he tweeted it with no context, but it's very clear what it was about. He tweeted, it's a quote from, well, it's, I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote or how. But what is extraordinarily important is, is this, who will count the votes and how? And that's a quote from Stalin from 1923. Right, right, right. And it sucks that that quote, that quote from Stalin from 1923 is relevant

to America in, or 1923, I don't know if I said 2023, and 1923 is relevant to America in 2022. But it is, you know, that's the world we're living in now. We have to worry about who gets to vote, yes, and there are obviously concerted efforts on the Republican side to limit who gets to vote. but we also have to worry if votes will be counted correctly. It's something that should be inconceivable and unfortunately is being conceived before our eyes. Yes, it is. And it's really bad. And I think that so the secretaries of state, Democrats need to get on the secretaries of state train before it's too late. Absolutely. And the school boards and the, you know, again, it's got to be all this local stuff that,

you know, not enough people, including that we don't talk about this stuff enough because, you know, We talk about the big issues. We talk about the fights in the Senate. We talk about what's going on in the White House. And meanwhile, there's this like rearguard action being taken by the Republicans all across the country. And it's a concerted effort. You know, and they're all working together. And like Steve Bannon is pushing this stuff.

And it's all being pushed. It's not just, you know, it's not just random grassroots stuff. It's being pushed from higher up. And, yeah, we need to start paying attention to it and hope it's not too late all. To put this into perspective, I do want to say there's this tweet from Amanda Lipman that says, the Republican committee that deals with Secretaries of State races raised 33.3 million in 2021. In the first half of the same year, the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State raised $1 million. Oh boy.

They're not good. I don't think there's always that many winning things Democrats could easily run on. But I hate to say, if you're going to use scare tactics, QAnonon is coming for your school boards. is fucking scary to parents. That's a winning message. And the reality is, it's not a lie. Kewanon's coming for your school boards. And the Secretary of States are the only way you get a Republican nomination in most of these states that are anywhere near purple is saying,

I will overturn the election for Mango Mussolini. Yeah, no, I agree. Absolutely agree. And I think the lesson from Yonkin is that these Republicans are going to come in and they're going to campaign as a Larry Hogan. and then they're going to govern as a Ron DeSantis. They're going to pretend and try to con you into thinking that they're, you know, Mitt Romney's and they're not. So I think ultimately that has to be the message when Democrats get a message going, which they may not. Boy, my, the funny thing is, is all I saw, and I watched a little too much Fox News in the last week,

is every talking point on Fox News was Joe Biden ran as Joe Biden. Biden and the centerist, and now he's governing like Bernie. And you're like, what the fuck? I wish that were true. But that's what's genius about Fox News is that that is what they're doing. And so that is what they're going to accuse Democrats of doing. Right. Which is always, I mean, that's the standard tactic.

Absolutely right of Fox News and the right in general. But it works really well. It does work very. It works incredibly well. You know, Roger Ells was many things, most of them awful. he wasn't stupid. Yeah, it's true. Hey folks, if you haven't heard

every single week we do a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast membership program. Sometimes we interview senators like Corey Booker or the folks who explain what's happening behind the scenes in media like Jim Acosta or Soladadobrian. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes we just have friends around

to analyze what's happening in the news. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a beast inside member where you'll support the beast fearless journalism, as well as getting full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member, head to new abnormal. That's new abnormal.the dailybeast.com. Preet-Barrar is a former U.S. attorney, host of the podcast, stay tuned, and the author of his latest book, Justice is. Welcome back to the new abnormal, Preet. Good to be here. Very excited to have you here. You got me working on a holiday.

Yes, that's right. Don't tell anyone. Yeah, so I want time and a half. I want time and a half. It's good. Let's talk about what's happening with the January 6th. There was an article in the Washington Post this weekend. It seemed to imply that Merrick Garland is not following these leads.

What is your hot take here? I try not to do hot takes. I try to do room temperature takes. Okay, good. I find much better for the long run. Let's begin with the positive. The positive is there are a group of individuals who are part of an organization called the Oathkeepers who have been charged with a very rare federal statute.

It's not often used. And when it has been used in the past, as has famously been discussed recently, it ends in failure often. It's hard to prove. The standards are high. They're first amendment issues. And it's called seditious conspiracy. We'll get to the point you're making in a moment.

But that is a significant charge against a significant group of people. It is not only an important charge in terms of the seriousness of the offense and the amount of time people are facing in prison on each count of that, 20 years, I believe, but it's important symbolically. You know, it sets forth the U.S. government's position that these people were trying to interfere with the execution of a law. And I think it fits, you know, the statute better than some of the prior cases that had been talked about and that failed. Separate question. Well, actually, sticking with that for one moment, sticking with that for just another moment, it's not clear where, those prosecutions will lead further, whether people in high places who are giving comfort and aid and money to these group of folks who've been charged with seditious conspiracy, maybe. So, you know, you could go further up the chain. Some of those people may cooperate.

Remember, many of these people, most of them, had been charged already. The seditious conspiracy charts came later when it looks like one or more of them cooperated and handed over to authorities encrypted app communications, which lay out in very great detail chapter and verse, all the ways in which they were conspiracies. aspiring, planning to use weapons and everything else. So you could have that further up the food chain itself. I don't think it's going to be a straight line from the oathkeepers, you know, to Mark Meadows and to Donald Trump. So that's what you opened with. But it could be a straight line from the oathkeepers to Roger Stone. Yeah, the people at the Willard Hotel. I just, I just don't know. But, you know, my anticipation is we'll see, we'll see other shoes dropping with respect to that. Now, DOJ, what they're doing with respect to very high up folks, including the former president,

including Mark Meadows, including members of his family, and also the people at the Willard, is unclear. And I understand the hope and feeling that everyone has that sometimes these things just remain submerged and secretly lots of investigation is going on. But the people who say it doesn't look like certain witnesses have been approached by the FBI in a DOJ investigation as opposed to a one-sixth Select Committee investigation. Those people appear to be correct. You know, the Department of Justice, the FBI, they are not always, but they're pretty good about keeping things under wraps. The Mueller investigation was largely kept under wraps. Right.

But when you go and you approach and try to interview, as you might expect them to have done, people who are very mouty, like some of the Trump folks, they get up in arms, they send letters, they try to quash, they get very upset, and they blab about it, and none of that blabbing is happening. And then the article you mentioned suggests that they're entities. themselves who are being asked the question and they're saying, no one seems to have come to us to ask us for information. I respect Merrick Garland, the people at the top of the department, not only do I know and respect and have worked with, they're close friends of mine. I have great respect for how they go about doing things. They don't do things casually. They're very

deliberate. They're very smart. They're very respectable. They're very honorable. I am not, I don't know why it would be unless there was some legal conclusion at the outset or some other political consideration, not political consideration, but optics consideration of not wanting to do certain things too quickly or until the Congress does some things, and I would have a quarrel with that approach as well. I don't have an explanation for why certain basic interviews would not have been undertaken. I just don't. Do you have a speculation? Have you talked to smarter people who can explain it? Well, no. And in fact, a lot of people on the internet are saying to me, you are wrong to post that article from the Washington Post. Merritt Garland's office never leaks. You must

trust that he is doing. They don't leave. But they don't understand. It is just not a possibility that they have tried to interview a dozen of the top people at the White House and around the White House like the 1-6 Commission has, and for that to remain secret. It is just not a possible. I'm sorry I'm sorry to the folks on the internet. That is just that that strains credulity. That's not how the world works. That's just not how, you know, no matter how tight-lipped the prosecutors are and the FBI agents are, or a grand jury might be, or a court reporter might be, the people who you might have been speaking to or been expected to have spoken to, they squeal like stuck pigs when people approach them. And those squeals are heard around the world. And so, look, maybe there is some

explanation and reason and logic. Maybe they're collecting, you know, other kinds of information that would not necessarily leak, you know, third-party communications, emails, and other things. But what seems clear to me is that the people around the president, Mark Meadows, and others, members of Congress who may have had something to do with this, and maybe there's a reason you don't want to go after members of Congress because of the speech or debate clause, but lots and lots of folks who the one-six commission, the one-six committee, I should say, believe are important to understanding transparently what happened in the lead-up to one-six and what happened on-one-six. They're relevant to that inquiry. You would imagine that even though the Justice Department is not about compiling reports,

but about doing investigations and bringing prosecutions, even though they have a different mission, that there would be some considerable overlap in the kinds of witnesses that DOJ might want to look at to, by the way, not just prove a crime, but when there's smoke, you investigate. And people are not maybe aware of this principle that grand jury subpoenas fly and can be issued, and investigations undertaken to satisfy oneself that a crime has not been committed.

That happens too. And the threshold for prosecution is high. And maybe there wouldn't be a prosecution at the end of the day. And Merrick Garland said in his speech, you know, at any level, they'll hold people accountable. I get all that. The threshold for investigating when you had such a, you know, bizarre, dangerous, costly, violent event, the threshold for investigating is far lower as it should be. And so I don't know why that hasn't happened.

It's interesting, if you think about it, that it seems like the January 6th committee is doing a lot more investigating than Merrick Garland's DOJ. Yeah, look, I mean, they have a different mission, right? At the end of the day, they don't have to prove anything. They don't have to go before a court. They don't have to beat a motion to dismiss. They don't have to prove elements of a crime. They're trying to write a story with as many facts as they can put together. As I said, DOJ has a different mission, but there should be some overlap.

The other thing I'll say is to people who have been in this area and have not only done criminal prosecutions, but have worked on the Hill and have an understanding of congressional investigations. It is just not the norm that you would go sequentially. In other words, some people are speculating, well, maybe they're waiting for a referral from the 1-6 committee. I don't know why that makes sense because, you know, memories fade, documents disappear. You know, people cover up, people lie, people coach, people rehearse their testimony. And you also have the prospect of having, you know, competing tests. testimony. You know, one person talks to the committee. So, you know, sometimes it's the case, I don't think you could have had this here. Sometimes it is the case that DOJ will say to a committee

of Congress. It doesn't always work. And I haven't done a, you know, a study to see if it ever works. But they will say, look, we're investigating a very serious crime. You will hurt our investigation by creating other testimony that might be at odds, you know, with the testimony that we get because questions are asked differently and recollections can be refreshed differently. And you don't want to have your witnesses blabbing all over the place. You want them to do it in one forum, and later if Congress has some legislative purpose or investigative purpose, it can do so. I'm not saying here that DAJ would ever have succeeded in or would have wanted to say, on a matter of such importance to the country and the country's history, don't do anything until we do it.

I'm not saying that would have happened, but it's odd to have allowed all this testimony to be collected, all these documents to be subpoenaed and compiled, and they don't look. like they've done any of these interviews. And maybe there's some reason that I'm not aware of that I can't think of, and I haven't heard anybody come up with one. What about the excuse like that I've heard a lot from people screaming at me on the internet that they are rolling it up and they're going for the lower level people and then they'll get up to Trump? Yeah, there's some lower level people who breached the doors to the Capitol, but I don't think those people are giving it up in a straight line up to Trump. Yes, I think that's what's happened with respect to

to some of these 725 investigations. I think it's what's happened with the Oathkeeper's case, right, that they built a case going up. You know, I don't know how much coordination there was between lower-level people that we're talking about and high-level people. There's also the matter of the things leading up to the insurrection, you know, the big lie. And the things that Donald Trump did and that Mark Meadows did and that Jeffrey Clark did at DOJ with respect to Georgia and some other elections, that may be a separate conspiracy, but I would think that's something that you would want to investigate. And I don't see evidence that those people have been approached, and it's been a while. You know, it's been a year. Oh, yeah. It's been a long time, yeah. I'm waiting to understand,

look, the department doesn't explain its reasons for doing things. I have a whole chapter in my book called Walking Away and why it's difficult to explain why you do something or not do something, particularly explain an omission. And Jim Comey got in a lot of trouble, as we all know, by having a having a press conference on why Hillary Clinton was not charged. But at some point, I think, you know, given the nature of the event and the consequences of the event, you know, going forward still, you know, some people call it a staging exercise for the next time, that we're going to want to have some kind of explanation, which some people will abide by and some people won't. Some people will accept and some people won't of what was done.

And if it wasn't done, why wasn't it done? And I'm awaiting that myself. So you don't think that the more serious, the indictment is to drop the longer it takes. No, that can definitely be true. I'm making a very limited point. Right. I'm just, no, I know. I'm just, in connection with an investigation of a certain type, to satisfy yourself

that a crime has where has not been committed, at some point you start talking to people. And the kind of people that we're talking that we're referring to here, as I said, they shout and they blab and they mouth off if anyone dares to question them in any way, shape, or form. And I'm inferring that the lack of that squealing means that DOJ has not approached them. Oh. And it's not good. What sound is that? It's not good, sound, Preet.

It's not good. It's not good. I mean, it's... I'm not here to make you happy. That's not my role here. But you did. I'm just so glad to have you here. And just to explain this, because, yeah, it's great.

As I used to say to my staff at the U.S. Attorney's Office, take a portion of the rest of the day off. And have some fun. Thank you so much. Dan Nathan is a contributor to CNBC's Fast Money and host of the podcast OK Computer. Welcome to the new abnormal, Dan Nathan. I love it. You know, I've been obsessing over the name of this podcast since the strokes came out with their latest album to do we out normal.

Yeah, right, right when we launched the same time. It was great. Let me tell you, I was real excited about that. That album, just, you know, was part of my, like, pandemic rotation, though. It was, like, played on a loop in my house, so. Nice. I was excited. I've been listening to your podcast and your podcasts and also your TVs.

I want to talk to you, though, because we spend a lot of time on the podcast. political side talking about there are a lot of kind of economic issues that have come up that are complicated and also I feel like we're not talking about them quite enough and they're setting the stage that Biden is occupying. Yeah, no doubt. And I think a really important differentiation is kind of like what's going on in the economy and what are the things that are political hot issues in a midterm election year like this? What are the markets? how they interpret it. And that's kind of like the job that I do on CBC's Fast Money or on my podcast. I mean, we're really trying to kind of bridge the gap between economy and markets.

And I think what you're making right now, though, is really about inflation. And it seems to be that this is like the thing that's going to drive sentiment towards how this administration is doing. It's no longer about COVID. It really is about prices of goods and services at this point. Yeah. So let's talk about that for a second because I think there's a real common misconception about inflation that the Biden administration can do something about it. And they really, there are a few tools they have, but not as many as we think, right? Yeah. Well, so one of them that pundits say that they kind of fired a blank when they were trying to get the price of gasoline at the pump down, they tapped the strategic petroleum reserve.

That was in November. It just so happened that the price of crude oil fell pretty dramatically, but it also coincided with Amacron in late November. And so you saw that. So what are some of the tools that, you know, there's obviously, you know, legislation, fiscal sort of things. But in a lot of ways, that kind of helps inflation for all intents of purposes. It just kind of primes the pump for the economy. I guess the most important thing that's happened in the last few weeks is that Fed Chair Powell

had been renominated by Biden. And the whole idea there was that he and his board of governors, and the Federal Reserve, they are the ones that have the policy tools to kind of affect money, supply, affect interest rates. And so, but the thing is, they're basically going full on at inflation right now. So they're talking about being more hawkish, meaning like they're going to tighten monetary policy and really kind of battle inflation because I think the deal with the Fed at this moment, at least as Biden's renomination, is that we have to fight this inflation. otherwise we lose the House and Senate.

And I think that's probably right, too, because inflation is, I mean, the only thing that explains Biden's poor polling numbers is the pandemic at inflation. Because otherwise, you know, it just doesn't make any sense. In my mind, it doesn't make any sense. I want to get back into inflation for a minute, though. If you are focused on bringing down inflation, you then inadvertently crash the markets. Yes, that's the point. You run the risk of risk assets like stocks.

being like investors going to look at them a little differently with a higher interest rate environment. So one of the reasons why when the pandemic started, the Fed lowered interest rates basically to zero, right? They didn't want credit to seize up, whether it be corporate or consumers. We know what that felt like during the financial crisis. So they kind of did the right thing. And then they started buying literally $120 billion worth of bonds, U.S. treasuries and mortgage-backed securities. And what did that do? it made every risk asset that wasn't bolted down on the planet just scream, whether it be housing, whether it be art, whether it be NFTs, you know, I mean, the list goes on and on and on and so, you know, one of the big criticisms that you see on both sides of the aisle is that the Federal Reserve monetary policy really does exasperate income inequality. Every time we have one of these sort of fissures, whether it be the financial crisis, whether it be this pandemic, which was clearly a black swan, no one saw this sort of.

sort of thing coming. But the owners of risk assets do very well and the fact lowers interest rates to zero and starts flooding the zone. So what happens if inflation happens. So right now, here's the one thing. I'll tell you there's a silver lining, Holly, in this whole scenario. Oh, I can't wait because that would be great. All right. But what you see headlines about inflation at 40-year highs, right? After this period where we've seen unusual dovish, you know what I mean, like monetary and fiscal policy. And so now you've seen wage inflations. There's been these weird disconnects in the labor market, right? So the great migration. It's causing a shortage of workers and there's basically, you know, there's been wage inflation. So that might stick to some degree. You've also seen

these supply chain disruptions, right? And it's been making it hard to get parts around the world. So that's causing prices to go up. Like I said, before, risk assets are also going up. And so that's the thing right here that might be peaking at 40-year highs. And that's that could be a really good thing. And so by the fall, you might have a scenario where gas at the pump is back below this and inflation is back at 3%. And one of the things that I would just add to this is that prior to the pandemic, the Fed was panicked about disinflationary factors, meaning like the prices of what you remember, like they were like struggling to get wage inflation higher, right? So I think we go back to all that at some point by the end of 2022. And I guess

from political purposes or through the lens of politics, the real question is, is it fast enough before the midterms? Yeah. It's interesting because I don't know if you read there was a piece this morning in the times about how Biden is having the opposite problem of Obama, right? There's not enough supply versus too much supply and not enough consumer interest. Right. And so what are the difference between the financial crisis and now is that in the throes of

that crisis. these consumer balance sheets were just got destroyed, right? Because they, you know, their housing values got destroyed. And in this scenario, consumer balance sheets are a really good shape because for, you know, a year, maybe a year and a half in many instances, people weren't allowed to go to work. They weren't traveling. They weren't spending money on things. And they basically had, there was just tons of fiscal stimulus. So yeah, there's pent up demand. But here's one thing I'll say is that in Q3 of 2021, we had this delta variant. And it really, it really, really clipped GDP. That's gross domestic product. That's basically the sum of, you know,

all economic value created in the quarter. So that was literally trending at six, seven percent at the start of Q3. It came in below three percent. Okay. So Q4, we had Omicrom, which basically is definitely a clip Q4 GDP. And now Amicron has worked its way into Q1 of 2022. And I don't know about you, but New York City is back to being a little bit of a ghost town. If you noticed that over the last few weeks and, you know, right. Yeah. So this thing, is going to be like a rolling sort of recovery. I think we're never going to get that kind of inflection point, I don't think, because we're seeing that decelerating growth. And the biggest risk, I will say, to the Biden administration right now is that if they have basically coerced

the Fed for all intents and purposes to battle inflation and they start tightening monetary policy into a slowing economy, I don't know if you saw overnight, the Chinese just lowered interest rates because their economy is slowing. And then you have something called stagnation, right? And that would be a real disaster for, I think, at least the financial markets. Can you explain what stagflation is? It's something that happened in the 70s. That's right. And so it's basically where you have a scenario where prices are just kind of, they stay high-ish, but in a slowing sort of growth environment, it becomes this really kind of difficult cycle to break in a way. And it goes back to what you were just saying about the supply demand dynamics, which were very different in these two crises. So, you know, there's certain things that, for instance, if wage inflation really stock or de-globalization caused, you know, like the components of a lot of these consumer electronics microchips that are going into everything now. Let's say they cause them to be higher. And it causes, you know, original equipment manufacturers, rates, prices, the end goods. But then you have a situation where growth is flowing. You know, we had these really easy comparisons to last year because in 2020, I mean, growth went negative, right? We have a

that massive recession. And then anything off of those lows is considered massive growth. And now we're decelerating. So the Federal Reserve has a dual mandate. It's stable prices and full employment. Well, they've gotten very nearly back to, I think there's maybe two or three million jobs from before the pandemic that are still not accounted for. But they're almost at full employment, right? Almost at full employment. Yes. And so that could be the thing that keeps wages, higher, corporate profits, lower. And then if you were to see a slowdown in the economy, one of the reasons why if corporations have less profits, then they spend less on R&D and other things that might help grow their business and kind of grow the economy.

So you've given me something new to worry about, which usually I come in and I hope for something to sort of be less worried about. But now I feel like I can worry about both, inflation, stagflation, and also deflation, right? Yeah, I mean, listen to now, I'm one of these people, I've been in financial markets for 25 years, and almost everything that goes parabolic in one way, shape, or form, that means just straight up or anything that crashes and goes straight down, hit me revert. So when I look at that inflation number from last month at 7%, and I see all the headlines, and I see all the people screaming about it, I say to myself that number is going to be cut in half

in like three, four, maybe five months, and we can check back. back on that. I suspect we see, you know, CBI, which is the measure of inflation that a lot of, you know, people in news and stuff, quote, that's going to be low single digits really soon, right? And so if you have that and then you have four-employment, so we could be in a scenario where just, like, people are just yelling and screaming right now and they don't realize that we're going to get this massive being reversion in some of these really scary metrics. Yeah. And I mean, I also think what's important is we came from a time when inflation was actually way too low and people could not make money on their money in the bank, which was actually detrimental

in an other way. Well, that's one of the biggest criticisms of the Fed's, you know, easy monetary policy is that it really hurts savers, right? So it's really pushing. When you have interest rates at zero, you're basically pushing people to put money in things that will, like, earn a yield. And it's one of the reasons why crypto was essentially invented, right? is just kind of resistance, central bank resistance for your money.

So, you know, I think that, you know, we're likely to see interest rates go a little bit higher. They're never going meaningfully higher when I say never. In 2018, in the Q4 of 2018, the stock market sold off nearly 20% in the straight line. I don't know if you remember that. The Fed was raising interest rates. And then we had a gross scare. And what did the Federal Reserve do? They did an about face on raising interest rates.

So what did the stock market do? It took off. And it started this next leg of the bull market, which really, again, crashed once we had this pandemic in early 2020. This is all very interesting. I want you to do like a minute or two on crypto. I mean, there are so people who think crypto is a scam. We happen to have an Ethereum mine.

Is it Ethereum? We have a little Ethereum miner in our bedroom. Do you have one of those? Helium mine. We have a helium mine in our bedroom. I have one of those too, and I'll just tell you this. So what's going on right now, Molly? Our helium, our things are probably talking to each other.

They are part of a distributed Wi-Fi network, right? And we're basically mining it by using some of our excess capacity in, you know, on our Wi-Fi. And it's kind of cool. I mean, listen, there's a lot of really cool things going on. I will tell you that I came into the markets in the late 90s. And I remember just how skeptical everyone was about the Internet and how the Internet. and how the internet was going to change almost every industry. And some of these guys and gals who were out there doing it were labeled to be like, you know,

just like crackpots, right? And so all of that has been accelerated because here we are 20, 25 years later. And we know that the five biggest companies in the world own the internet age. You know, I mean, Apple nearly took $3 trillion in market cap recently. Amazon is, you know, $2 trillion. Microsoft is $2.5 trillion. And so fabulous wealth has been created by some crazy ideas, right? Google is $2 trillion, that sort of thing.

So on crypto, I think that this is a movement, no doubt about it. And that usually falls in the Bitcoin camp. And there's what they call Bitcoin maximalist. Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter and Square, has laid out the gauntlet on that. And he thinks everything else is a bit goofy, Ethereum. So Ethereum is smart contracts. And basically a lot of the things that are getting a lot of headlines now, NFTs, non-fungible tokens, defy centralized finance are built on smart contract blockchains like Ethereum and Solana,

whereas Bitcoin on the flip side of it is really just considered a store of value. I mean, Jack Dorsey is calling it like, you know, the money of the Internet or something like that, the way you would buy gold hoping that it would appreciate or fight inflation. And that's more of the Bitcoin story. But all of the tech innovation in finance, and I guess in broader tech seems to be happening in the crypto space right now, we're going to know soon enough if any of it really sticks. By the way, we're making 99 cents on our mining per day. Yeah. So it's not a huge upside.

And we spend about 30 cents, right, on the electricity of it. Yeah. So what I would say is that this is in such early stages. You know, here is a group of engineers. She came up. They looked at the blockchain. or a blockchain. And they said, we could build something on this that is distributed, that we can incentivize the people who participate in it, you know, by actually doing the mining, who bought

the hardware, right? And so the helium token that you earn, right, is kind of the gas of the whole system. So there's just new, like, thought process is being created right here. And some are going to be trillion-dollar ideas. And many are going to go to zero in the not so distant future. Right. And I think it's important for every, you know, Google, and Microsoft, and there's a Theranos, right? Yes. There you go. Theranos, yes.

We just talked to us for two seconds about Tesla? Yeah. So Tesla went from a company where I think investors couldn't figure out whether it was a tech company that was working on basically autonomous driving or it was a car company that was going to kind of change the electrical grid altogether. And, you know, what's happened right now, at least as far as financial business, markets are concerned, both of those have merged. And there was a lot of people betting against Tesla for a very, very long time. And the stock went to, you know, great heights. It literally just

tick like $1.2 trillion. And just to put that in some context, the company shipped 937,000 cars in 2021. That is low single digits market share of the global auto market, okay? But it had over 80% of the entire market cap of all publicly listed auto company. So it made no sense to many, many people. And it has become a bit of a cult following. And they have their leader. And it's name is Elon Musk. And he didn't give a shit about anything.

And he just does things his own way. So all the power to them, I guess. But it could be Theranos. Because they did have to recall like 400,000 cars. You know, so now I get the segue. I think Elon Musk has very clearly been. fast and loose as far as like the way that they report, you know, some some financial metrics, that sort of thing. I think they've probably really tightened it up over the last few years.

He's had some run-ins with the SEC, but there are enough eyes on this. Like, here's the thing, and I've said this time and time again, there are far better places to commit crimes in the public view. You know what I'm saying? Like if you're like a CEO of a publicly traded company, because there's just so many eyes on you. And I don't think there's any fraud there. I know that some of the shorts in the name have long thought that he just kind of plays fast and loose with the metrics. And he's just kind of goose it around the stock. But it looks like at this point, he's probably taken a little bit of a backseat.

I think the chair of his board, he is no longer the chair of the board. And I think there's a lot of restrictions on what he tweets and how he tweets it to. Well, that's good news. Thank you so much, Dan. I hope you'll come back and explain this stuff to us because, you know, we've had a lot economists on, but ultimately, this is really a different, what you're describing and explaining to us is completely different and really important. Yeah, I would just say the one thing about economists, it's like they're very useful. They kind of, they're important inputs for people like me who are just

trying to make sense of it in a regular way, you know, as a market participant or as somebody who's concerned about inflation. And if you're not staring at your like Bloomberg or fact set screens every day, some of this stuff is really complicated. I've been doing it for 25 years. So what I just tried to do is break it that a little bit in a way that just kind of everyday Joe's can understand it. Yeah, well, we're really appreciated. So thank you, Dan. Thanks, Molly. 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 Daily Beast.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. Andy Levy. Molly Jongfest. Today is Martin Luther King Day. And one of the really fucked up things that happened today is that Republicans use Martin Luther King quotes to cover themselves and to appear not racist. Hi, it looks like you've quoted Martin Luther King Jr. out of context.

Instead of engaging with the complex reality of white supremacy in America, would you like some help with that? No, they would not. They would not. The worst one, I think, and this isn't even Republican, it's just FBI. Yeah. Is Martin Luser King being used by the FBI? Martin Liser King being used by Greg Abbott, Josh Mandel, the GOP, Mitch McConnell, all people who, if Martin Louser King were alive right now, would probably not be fans.

Beyond the fact that they wouldn't be fans, they'd be calling for him to be locked up. Yes. I mean, even like the worst people, I mean, Kim Richards, I mean, every Republican governor has found an MLK quote that they've been able to crop down to make as small as possible. And for that, a hearty fuck you to all the Republicans trying desperately to prove they're not racist by quoting MLK one day a year. And it's almost always the same quote. It's the content of

their character and not the color of their skin. That's their big quote, which they obviously take completely out of context. And as you said, ignore literally every other thing that Dr. King said. It's just the MLK thing is the only thing funnier to me that they do than when they say, well, Lincoln was a Republican. We're the party of Lincoln. Yeah. Poor Lincoln.

Yeah. Almost worse than the play. Andy Levy, who's your fuck that Supreme Court guys? Who's that fuck that guys? Spoilers. Spoilers. Yeah, my fuck those guys is. and Gall is the Supreme Court for ruling that businesses...

Do you even need a reason? I don't, generally. It is a very general thing these days, but I guess the most specific reason now would be saying that the OSHA regulations that allow businesses to do VACs mandates are unconstitutional. The reasoning being that it's not a workplace issue, it's a world issue, which is just, I think, the most specious reasoning I can possibly think of

the workplace is part of the world. And I don't like to the idea that it's sort of this separate thing or it doesn't matter because, oh, well, this is a bigger issue than that. Well, okay, but then let us deal with it on the smaller level as well as the bigger level. But it's just, look, increasingly, we all know, the Supreme Court is just, I don't want to say, of touch, but they're just, look, Mitch McConnell won. You know, Molly, you've said this on this, on this show. Mitch McConnell won and Donald Trump won. And this court for a lot of years now is going to be making decisions like this.

And they're going to be horrible decisions that are going to negatively impact the lives of Americans. But this is what we apparently voted for. Yeah, I think it's worth saying, like, You do not get to be surprised when the Supreme Court does terrible, crazy conservative things. There were three justices who were put on this court just to overturn Roe v. Wade. Right. Donald Trump told us that.

Yeah. And the rest of this is just like collateral victories for them. Yeah. Because you're right. That's the big one for them. And unfortunately, it may be coming. But in the meantime, they're satisfying themselves with forcing businesses to allow unvaccinated people into their offices and fun stuff like that so they can kill us slowly. That's right. Merry Christmas.

They allowed hospitals to make sure that their people are vaccinated when they're around sick people. So I guess that was a victory. Right, which I don't understand because it's not a hospital problem. It's a world problem. The whole thing that then Trump is mad at Kavanaugh for supporting the vaccine mandate in hospitals. I mean, we really are, there's no bottom here. are we're just in a train to fuck away. 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 Laugh, and our star-studied The Day Daily Beast podcast at the DailyBeast.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

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