The Daily Beast Podcast - The Truth about Those ‘Classified’ Biden and Trump Docs

Episode Date: March 19, 2023

The right and the left seemed to have gotten super worked up about the classified documents found in the private homes of both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, but NSA and surveillance writer Kerry Howley, also the author of Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State, saw the findings differently. She joins Andy Levy on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal to talk about what classified docs really mean—the bad and the-not-so-bad but still bad. Plus! She shares with Andy what whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning have in common and shares the story of a whistleblower named “Reality Winner,” a woman not a horse, whose story will infuriate you. And, as always, Danielle Moodie and Andy listen and make fun of clips of “racist” and really dumb Republicans. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. 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 some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. Hello and welcome to another bonus episode of The New Abnormal.

We thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with New York Magazine feature writer Carrie Howley, who's going to talk to us about our new book, bottoms up and the devil laughs, a journey through the deep state. And she'll tell us all about that. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Yes, clips. Jesse Waters, we try to figure out why he's so stupid. I have an idea, a hypothesis.

It might be in the water. Never washed my water bottle. I went almost a year without washing. You're joking. No, I swear to God. Why would I wash it? Is that brave or disgusting? I think it's both.

That's disgusting. I finally found something I could agree with the five about. You think that you think it's the lead in his water? You think it's the fact that like the corrosion on the inside of his water bottle, you think that that's what it is? The crystallus, the crystallus that's forming on the inside, maybe that's the cause.

It's a very chicken and egg thing, though. Does he not wash his water bottle because he's a fucking moron? Or is he a fucking moron because he doesn't wash his water bottle? Oof, hard one. I think that it's much more than there being something in the waters

for another terrible metaphor that this stupidity has existed long before he owned this water bottle. I agree. I agree. But that does it. explain how far the rot is. They're like just weird people who say weird things. You know, there's always someone who will say like, oh, I never wash my bath towel.

I don't need to wash my bath towel. I'm clean when it drives me off. Like, people will say that and think they're actually smart. I'm just going to go out on a limb and say white people say shit like that. I really, I'm going to, I'm going to say it. I mean, look, if you said men, I would be with you. I've never heard a woman say that. No, because women are clean.

I know, I know, no. Look, I'm with you. saying it's insane and I've only heard it for men and I suspect that's probably true with the water bottle thing too I suspect there is no woman out there who would go a year without washing their water bottle but I suspect he is not the only man who does that I hope it's plastic speaking of people with very demented brains Marjorie Taylor green she has an idea of who we should really be at war out there drumming the the you know beating the drum for war every single day in Ukraine when the real drum we should be beating for war is the one against the Mexican

Mexican cartels because that's the one I'm beating. I think that her two brain cells are beating each other. Like, is that, like, I think that that's what it is. It's just like this fight that is happening in this big, empty fucking space. I think it's like a game of asteroids in there. There's like a little ship in the middle and it just shoots brain cells that come its way. To take her seriously, though, for a minute, this new Republican talking point ever since Trump's about going to war with Mexico and the cartels.

It's really, really one of the dumber things they're getting their people on board with. The best way to go to war against the drug cartels is to legalize drugs. Come on. They make their money off of selling illegal drugs. You legalize those drugs, they ain't making their money anymore. But nobody wants to hear that. Let's not have common sense. Also, oh, this wasn't part of her duct tape incident, was it?

No, but while we explain that real fast for people... I mean, Marjorie Taylor Green once again tweeted out, you know, the real security issue is about this bomb that was at the border in an area that is unprotected. And it turns out it was a ball of dirt wrapped in duct tape. But, you know, who cares about the truth or reality on Earth One when you don't live here? So Marjorie Taylor fucking Green, man. I knew right away it wasn't a bomb. It didn't say Acme on it. No.

So there was no way. It was really a bomb. But that is what it looked like. It looked like a cartoon bomb. And, you know, it had, it was a round ball with like a fuse type thing coming out the top. But it turned out, as you said, to be just dirt covered in duct tape. But it was like, that's a cartoon bomb, you idiot. Like, I just unbelievable.

Well, as usual, the stupidity doesn't stop there. So our favorite, John Kennedy of Louisiana, he has a not so better half in the Senate, Bill Cassidy, who also represents the great state of Louisiana, a state I'm very fond of but they do not represent it well and we're going to hear just how bad it gets. Social Security is a Silicon Valley bank of retirement systems. It is going broke. It's just the question of whether we let it bleed to death or whether we do something right now.

We need a credible plan. If a politician tells you that he doesn't want to fix social, that there's no problem, they're either too old or too rich to care. Your benefits are going to be cut by 25% if we do nothing when it goes back. broke in nine years. I have an idea. Uh-huh. The defense budget is $842 billion for 2024.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I don't know. Take a small percentage of that and put it in Georgia security, and that would probably solve all of this. Andy, you want us to be weak? You want us to be unprotected?

Yes. That's clearly what I want. Yes. Yes. Andy, what is wrong with you, you, Kami? We haven't seen that Russia's military defense system that we are really scared of is pretty much filled with graft and bullshit or anything. So we really need to

keep this thing up. $412 billion to develop and procure the F-35 fighter jet. Nope. Nope. An absolute piece of shit. Can we also just discuss though that every time they've decided something's woke now

then it also will go over and they'll be like, ah and we'll blame this for everything too. Like last week it was DEI but now we can compare it to this bank instead because that that bank, all of its fault was from DEI. You mean the bank that they, the bank that they voted to deregulate and allow for it to decrease its level of holdings for security purposes because regulations are just so pesky and hard and onerous? That's the one.

Got it. Just want to make sure. Well, unfortunately, the woke generals were to blame this time because, you know. Okay. Well, the good news is his buddy, partner and Chris. John Kennedy's here to school us, as always, because we know I'm obsessed with him. Now, President Biden chose to bail out three of our banks. It was a bailout.

You can pretty it up any way you want to. And you can put perfume on a pig, but it still smells like a pig. This was a bailout. You know who else you can put perfume on and would still smell like a pig? Could I guess? Yeah, just saying. I love fake homespun stuff like that, though. Like this guy trying his best to pretend he's just a good old boy.

Trying his head at an old Sarah Palinism when she was authentically doing it. I get such a kick out of it. It's just so funny. I mean, he is a good old boy, but, you know. Yeah, I guess. But he's not. Yeah. I feel like you play him to torture me.

Like, I really do. Like, it's like if an alien were to come to Earth and say, what does racism sound like? I would play that man's voice. Like, I would just say, here, listen. I need to defend this. There's a Louis Gobert-sized hole in my heart, and he fills it. Yes, that's very true.

I've lost track of how many times I've tweeted, always read Kerry Howley, but I'm pretty sure it's, just about every time she's written a new long-form feature for New York Magazine or elsewhere. And now she's here to talk about her fantastic new book out Tuesday, bottoms up and the devil laughs, a journey through the deep state. Carrie, it is a true pleasure to have you here. Thank you so much for having me. Absolutely.

So, all right, I want to start with this. The term the deep state has now become sort of associated with Trumpists, Q&ON types, etc. And in fact, a little more than halfway through the book, I think it was, you write that when Trump talked the vast, unaccountable secret state built by his predecessors, he sounded like an intern at the intercept. So I just want to get this out of the way off the top. How do you define the deep state, and I would remind you, you are under oath? So it's important to distinguish between the deep state, as I talk about it, and I think as it's reasonably referred to as the deep state, and something like QAnon or adenochrome or whatever wayfair conspiracy you might be dealing in. There is a vast

unaccountable bureaucracy with its own goals and intentions. And much of the drama in this book takes place there. And interestingly, the fact that this exists is fertile ground for all of those conspiracies that you might say have done damage to our democracy. But they're not one in the same. Yeah, absolutely. And I want to get more into that stuff in a bit. But I want to start with, back in 2017, you wrote a terrific profile of reality winner for New York Magazine and bottoms up, and the devil laughs, obviously feels like an extension of that, or I was thinking maybe a better put, like a more macro version of that. And I'm curious what made you decide that this was the book you wanted to write? I don't know if I would say it was an extension. I would say that once I had entered

that world that I was describing to you, I was intrigued by the fact that there were so many ordinary people existing in this universe. And I also think underlying the book is this anxiety we rarely articulate, but all have, that we're leaving pieces of ourselves all around in the cloud all the time, right? There's pieces of ourselves, Facebook perhaps, or on text, on email. We're kind of dispersed informationally in a way that's new. And all of those pieces can be reassembled in a way that creates a false sense of identity. And this is exactly what happened to Reality Winner. The state reassembled those pieces to paint a really ridiculous. picture of her as a terrorist, like so distant from reality that many people still believe. And we're

all vulnerable to that, you know, to our text being subpoenaed or what have you. And so this book is in a kind of attempt to grapple what it is to live with that kind of vulnerability. You have a line in the book that sort of gets to the scariest potential endgame for what you're describing, I think. And you say that the CIA has often said that it has killed people based on metadata and that that is true and that often it is the wrong people. Right. We know from whistleblowers how tenuous a lot of that data is and how reliance these agencies have become on gathering information that they can't always build into something like

knowledge in just the way that they reassembled reality's identity into something so distant from what it actually was for their own purposes. Yeah. And the book is full of profiles of these whistleblower. lowers, people like Reality Winner, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, others. But early on, you include what I think could be fairly described as an empathetic look at John Walker Lind, who infamously became an American Taliban member and was captured in Afghanistan. Talk to me about why you wanted to include his story among these others. I think I was really interested in his story because it

takes place in his early 20s and his late teens and early 20s, a time when a lot of us are on fire with our ideals in a way that I'm, I mean, I want to be careful not to be dismissive of. I mean, I kind of miss that certainty. But there is a certainty to that period. And he becomes like on fire with the desire to learn Arabic in its purest form and to study Islam and eventually to engage in jihad. But none of this has anything really to do with the United States for him. These are internal conflicts elsewhere. And another part of the story that's so interesting to me is that he was able to do all of this. He was able to go to camps that were partially funded by Osama bin Laden on his way to Afghanistan

in a way that the United States wasn't tracking at all, in a way that wasn't even interesting to agencies here. This is pre-9-11. This is pre-9-11. And, of course, 9-11 occurs while he's in the middle of a conflict. in Afghanistan. And so suddenly the world has changed. The full force of the American security state, as it was then, was about to be a much larger and more powerful, is pointed basically in his direction. And that kind of freedom to wander, to not be tracked, really ended in that moment in a lot of ways for American citizens. No, I thought it was an absolutely fascinating way to begin the book and to sort of

usher us into post-9-11 America with that look of what it was like literally just before 9-11, like early September 2001. And you also, you look at some through lines that were shared by whistleblowers like Snowden Manning winner, Daniel Hale, who gave us the drone papers. For instance, you talk about how they were all intellectuals, but they did not grow up in intellectually sophisticated households. Why did this strike you as important? I think they were all true searchers. and they were kind of left on their own to discern right from wrong and truth from falsity. And that left them in a place that wasn't necessarily partisan, in a place that was just like, I'm interested in what's true.

And maybe when you look from that lens, the American security state is especially scary. And you don't feel a kind of loyalty to the same forces that someone, with a more traditional educational background would. I mean, their youth is also really important, and that's something that has changed because the vision of, like, an NSA whistleblower 20 years ago would have been some 50-year-old white guy who, like, had a grudge. Right. Me.

Right. It would be you. And at this point, it becomes a maybe 28-year-old or 30-year-old analyst to someone who's maybe really good with computers or language who feels that they have a personal relationship perhaps with a journalist and knows that they're just an email away. And in writing about Chelsea Manning, you actually, you call her a harbinger and basically say she was the new template for leakers and you describe her, which is something that also sort of describes Snowden and Reality Winner as ideologically morally serious 20-somethings. Yeah, and that gets back to what we're talking about

with John Walker Lynn, that moment when you have that sense of conviction. And I'm grateful to to many of these whistleblowers for their kind of moral certainty. But that's definitely, like, at the emotional heart of a lot of these stories. Yeah, absolutely. Part of Lynn's story involved a Justice Department lawyer named Jesselan Radick, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, hopefully, who became sort of, like she seemed to me, I sort of in my head described her to myself as an exasperated whistleblower. Tell us about her and the sort of story of her emails. Yeah, so Jessel and Radick is a lawyer closely associated with a lot of the whistleblowers in the book, Daniel Hale, Kiriaku, and first and foremost, John Walker Lind.

She was working in an office that was part of the administration during 9-11, right, when all the John Walker Lind stuff was happening. And it was her job to make sure that the agencies investigating Linde did so ethically. So she was working for like an ethics office. And she found that there were a lot of inconsistencies in the way he was being interrogated, the way this was being reported. And she tried to call attention to this. And she says in response was basically given a bad report, like progress report,

and eventually was forced out of the organization. And she, you know, like a lot of people in this book, like reality, Jesslyn Raddock is someone who had been a true believer, who really believed that if you worked through the right channels, the government would in the end do the right thing. So another interesting thing about reality is that when she initially joined the Air Force, she believed that the military had the capacity to do great humanitarian good. Right. And Jesselin had the same sense about the American bureaucracy, essentially, like going, she was there

to safeguard ethics, right? And so to a person like that, a true believer, when something goes wrong, it's like the whole edifice crumbles. That's what happened with Jesselin. And she eventually becomes out of that really traumatizing experience of both losing her job. And then the government went on to retaliate by trying to prevent her from even working in private practice to become a lawyer who stands up for people who are charged with the Espionage Act and other related charges. And really, all she was trying to do was to. ensure that John Walker Lind got a fair trial. Yes. That story, I think because I didn't know much about it as opposed to the others, that story really stuck with me for some, I think for that reason.

I want to go to something that you sort of touched on at the start when you talked about the classified documents with Trump and Biden, et cetera. You write, the currency of zero America is the secret, but the currency is degraded. First of all, tell us about the term zero America because it was this unexpectedly adorable story. And then explain what you mean about the currency being degraded. So my friend's toddler, when she was a toddler, described shadows as zero things. So the shadow of a hippo would be a zero hippo. And so I describe Shadow America, this underbelly that we were talking about earlier, as Zero America. And so, yeah, this classification issue. And it's been really surprising to me, actually, in the reporting that nobody calls attention to this. But everything is

classified. Like, it is the default for anything the NSA does to be classified. And that includes, or the CIA, that includes maybe you're writing an email to your wife about lunch. Like, if you don't classify it, you're calling attention to it, right? So you just classify it. And so there's mountains and mountains of absolutely meaningless classified data. It doesn't tell you anything. The fact that there were some papers in Biden's garage that were classified just tells you that there are papers in Biden's garage, right? Like, you need to know more of the story. And the same with Trump. I mean, I think the Trump situation is actually interesting in that he wanted those documents because they had that aura of mystery that we give them, right? Like they're like Chinese gems for him, you know? So we invest these objects with the sense of the sacred, but most of them are entirely meaningless and unhelpful. And it's just that we don't have the personnel or the will to declassify. And this isn't a partisan issue at all. Like anybody who studies this or is really associated with this in any way in government knows that this is a problem. It's just like, Like, we have learned how to turn everything into data and haven't kept up with sorting through it.

Yeah, because this is, it seems to me, this is sort of the equivalent of the fact that in general, the NSA and all these organizations sweep up so much data about Americans and people all across the world. There's so much chaff that it makes it really hard for them to find the wheat. Exactly. And it's like easier and easier technologically to soak up more and more and more and more data. and we really haven't figured out how to sort through it. I mean, I think that with AI, like a lot of these, I don't want to say problems will be solved because it's going to create new problems, but like new methods of sorting through the data are being created that are going to carry their own horrors.

But essentially, a lot of what's going on, you know, under the stories in this book are massive amounts of data being soaked up and then reassembled in the sloppiest way possible or never assembled, as you're saying. Right. I don't know how to. There's sort of like a good story. side and a bad side to that, I think. And the good side is, I think, for the average non-shadow American, it means even though the government is collecting all this stuff about them, there's, you know,

probably not that great a chance that the government's ever going to look at it or, you know, use it in any way. That's true. But unless someone feels motivated to go looking. Exactly. Right. Yes. Nobody wants to live under that threat. No, no, no. Absolutely. I'm just saying, yes, and I'm saying this is sort of the good side of a bad thing. But of course, the bad side is, A, they're still collecting the data. And B, it makes it harder for them to find the stuff that, you know, might actually help us and keep us safe. Yes, I think that's true. There's a sentence you wrote early in the book that stuck with me. And I'm going to pay you what in my mind is a compliment. And I'm actually deathly afraid you won't take it in that spirit.

But so the line is the thing on which you will one day focus all of your anxiety is not the thing you know today to fear. And you use it in the book in describing the fact that, as you said earlier, nobody cared about John Walker Lind, basically going over to the Taliban and going to all these training camps and everything because it was pre-9-11. But that line struck me as a much more intellectual version of something from Fight Club. And I just, and I apologize for that because I know to most people, I know it's not a compliment to most people, but I really do mean it that way. And I sort of, now I just, I hear that sentence in Edward Norton's narrator voice from the movie. I mean, I love that. I wish he could do the audio box. I think he should. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. I just, I had to get that out. The vast chunk of the, I would say the final third of the book, maybe, or the final quarter is about reality winners arrest. And. trial and imprisonment. It's unbelievably anger making. I don't know. I talk about that. I guess I don't really have a question here. And I knew the story and I'd read your profile. But as I'm reading it and reading all the details and everything, it's just like on every page, I'm just getting angrier and angrier.

Well, I mean, I'm glad that you brought it. I mean, I think that there's more to the book than anger. There's like clay and humor, but there is something really, really upsetting about this story. And people still don't know it. I mean, I was out with a friend at a bar. a few weeks ago, a good friend, but we never talk about work. And I was telling her, I was like, you know, this reality winner project. And she goes, the horse. And so the first thing you know her reality winner is like, she's not a horse. She is someone who, as I said, joined the Air Force out of humanitarian motives and has always been very quite far left, I think. And she became an NSA linguist. She's brilliant in her capacity for languages, learned Dari Pashto, and then walked into

a job at the NSA because of her security clearance. and later at a related contractor came across a document that indicated Russia may have tried to interfere in the 2016 election and sent that to The Intercept. And the Intercept then bungled that massively. And she ended up in jail for five years. But what's really upsetting, I think what maybe you're referring to is that last part of the book is the absolute decency of Reality Winner's family. She comes from a family that really tries their best to do good and make the world a better

place in a way that's almost cartoonish, like taking in blind cats and like to do like dogs and like helping women in halfway houses who have nowhere else to turn. I mean, people just like with an instinct for social justice. And in reality, that instinct is almost, it's like funny. It's like, it creates conflict because she's constantly needs to help, you know? Like maybe you don't want help, but reality's going to help you, you know? Right. And, you know, she's going to like go to her local senator's office and complain about the keystone pipeline. This person has nothing to do with it. You know, like she's out there trying to make the world a better place. And the way that this family was brutalized by the security state, for the reasons that we talked about in that it was just

like, well, this was a classified document. And we can't say more because this is the national security state. And if we say anything more about this, all of America will be in jeopardy. So really, you should just take a plea bargain and go to jail. had a very deferential judge. She ended up with a really unjust sentence. And I think the story is really deeply misunderstood still because people can't get over, you know, oh, well, this was a classified document, so you did wrong and sharing it. Yeah, absolutely. Was it her mom that was so upset and angry by the way she was treated by the prison staff that she then became a prison guard? Exactly. Her mom. So after being introduced to the security state, they then had to be introduced to the

carceral states. Right. And those very unpleasant encounters, just at the level of like getting to the jail and like, do I have the right number of quarters to, you know, use the vending machine? And all of these little questions were handled in a really cruel way in her experience. And so to be like a beacon of kindness, Billy Winner then went on to get a job in a jail near her home in retirement. It was just unbelievable. It was such a great little story to read, but also so sad. And again, it made me angry why she decided to do that. There's so much more to talk about in this book.

If I had the time, which I unfortunately don't, but there's other fascinating portraits of people that I didn't get to mention. And also just carries writing, which I absolutely adore. And as far as I'm concerned, she is one of the best writers we've got. The book is Bottoms Up and the Devil laughs, a journey through the deep state. It is out Tuesday. Kerry, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much for having me, Andy.

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