The Daily Beast Podcast - UNLOCKED: Trump DHS Official: Of Course There Are Racists in the Administration

Episode Date: September 9, 2020

As you’ve probably heard, we also run bonus episodes every Sunday that are only for Beast Inside members. As a small token of our gratitude, we’re sharing one of those bonus episodes in full with you here. If you want more bonus episodes like this, with more of the spicy interviews and blunt banter you know and love, consider joining Beast Inside. Doing so supports us, The New Abnormal, and the rest of fearless journalism from The Daily Beast. Head over to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com to become a member now – or after you listen to this amazing interview with Elizabeth Neumann.  Even a former member of Trump’s Department of Homeland Security thinks he is bat-shit, and surrounded by actual racists. It would be funny if some of the stories that former DHS official Elizabeth Neumann told Rick Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast on this episode on The New Abnormal weren’t so terrifying. She admits that she did “hold her nose” and vote for him in 2016 and really believed he would rise to the occasion. But that dream died super quick—by the end of summer 2017 to be exact: “It was clear he didn’t have a strong enough character to put aside some of his bad habits,” she said. There was one moment, though, that changed it all. Or, as Molly put it, “made you realize we’re not in Kansas anymore.” “He was having some sort of school yard bully fight with a man who is trying to launch a nuclear weapon,” she explained. “It was a huge wake up call for the department.” Neumann also spoke to the influence Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller had on immigration and when she, a pro-lifer, realized the president “wasn’t a true Christian.” And then she makes two scary admissions, which says a lot because they are all pretty scary, tbh. The first is that Nuemann can say with certainty that many of those in Trump’s orbit are racist. In fact, she had a moment while working in the department in which she thought, “Oh my God, some of these people are racist.” The second, and related to the first, is the role that Trump has had on domestic terrorism and white supremacy in the United States: “The president not speaking out against white supremacy and against QAnon is extremely dangerous. He is creating that fear that creates vulnerability in people to be recruited and radicalized by groups that have an intention of violence.” Plus! Will more former administration officials come out? Neumann shares her thoughts. Want more? Become a Beast Inside member to enjoy a limited-run series of bonus interviews from The New Abnormal. Guests include Cory Booker, Jim Acosta, and more. Head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com to join now. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, we just wanted to say a quick thank you for listening to The New Abnormal. As you've probably heard, we also run bonus episodes every Sunday that are only for Beast Inside members. As a small token of our gratitude, we're sharing one of those bonus episodes in full with you here. If you want more bonus episodes like this with more of whatever it is that Rick and I do, that you know and love, consider joining Beast Inside. doing so supports us the new abnormal and the rest of the fearless journalism from The Daily Beast. Head over to new abnormal.com to become a member now or after you listened to this amazing interview with Elizabeth Newman. Why don't you just tell us how you got to the Trump administration? I was living in Dallas at the time with my family and was in the consulting world of helping comfort.

and government with security issues. And when he won, of course, we were all a little surprised. And I was asked initially if I wanted to come in that first week after he won. And I talked it over very briefly with my husband, but we were both in agreement. This is not the administration to come and work for. We're fine where we are. And then Secretary Kelly was nominated in December for the Department of Homeland Security to be the secretary. And I didn't know him very well, but I started to pay attention because it is my field.

Homeland Security is my field. And I was very impressed with him. And I had a conversation with somebody and they asked again, do you want to come in? And I still said, no, it's just not the right time. My grandmother had passed away that Christmas and it just wasn't the right time. My kids were very young. And then three days before the inauguration, around that time, Secretary Kelly had his confirmation hearing and I watched it. I was very moved by him. And I was very excited for the department and for the Homeland Security field because I felt like they were going to have a leader. that would bring a lot of prominence and clout to the Homeland Security Department, which for those maybe that don't live in the Beltway, like you're the new kid on the block, you're only 18 years old, and you're competing against agencies and departments that have been around for 200 years and have huge budgets and huge lobbies and culture that make them very strong, right? So if you're graduating college student and you get the offer to go to the State Department or go to the Department of Homeland Security, you're going to choose to go to the Department of State.

So it was really exciting for the Department of Homeland Security to see such a great leader come in and take the reins. And so that was really exciting. And I was talking to somebody on the transition team that had been supporting him and saying, what a great job preparing him. He did a really good job. I'm really excited for the department. And this person was utterly exhausted and was expressing doubt whether they were going to be able to to function appropriately because the transition had been so chaotic. And all of the people that had been

lined up to move into the department after inauguration day, what you call it the landing team, there was a lot of backfiting and infighting and there was nobody you could trust and very few people with actual executive branch experience. And when I heard that story and then they asked again, will you come in? It kind of broke me and I entered the security field after 9-11. I have a strong core of patriotism in me. And it really changed my heart. It started a process of multiple weeks of conversation with my husband. He was not excited about the idea of moving back to Washington, D.C., and we eventually agreed to do it. And that's how I came in. So I started at the end of February of 2017. Well, so let's get right to it, Elizabeth, because obviously all the good

intentions on your part, and even on Kelly's part, ran up against the reality of who Donald Trump is. and suddenly you started to realize that they weren't taking the real threats seriously, and they were creating threats out of whole cloth, but they were ignoring some of the things that actually threaten our country. Can you talk a little bit about that? When did you start thinking you weren't in Kansas anymore? I mean, I knew when I decided to come in, this was going to be a very, very different experience than the George W. Bush administration where I had initially served, and then I had served as a contractor in government during the Obama administration. So I had seen a

a different crew, if you will, as well. So I knew it was going to be hard. I knew that from the description of the transition experience that we had a lot of inexperienced people and we had a lot of people that quite frankly were kind of toxic in their approach. I had reluctantly voted for Trump and part of my rationale at the time was some policy priorities that align with my faith, being pro-life and support for Israel and just general conservative things that though he was not a conservative and it was clear from his actions he wasn't a true Christian. I was really hoping that maybe he will get into the office and rise to the occasion and help out the conservative cause. And so it was a lesser of two evils decision that I held my nose and voted for him.

So when we came in, you're looking for those signs of he's rising to the occasion. That mantle of leadership has fallen on him. He sees how serious this job is and he's going to change his behavior. Even if it's not in public, he'll do it behind closed doors. And you hoped that you could help that process by educating the people around him. Because with every new administration, you have people that have never been in government before. We noticed this in particular with the Obama administration. You had a lot of people from Chicago come in, and they had to learn how to function in the federal government.

That's very normal in any administration. So you had a bunch of people from New York who had been in business and never experienced government before. So you're doing basic things like, okay, if you want to make a policy decision, you need to run it through a process. You don't just walk it into the Oval Office, get his thumbs up, and then declare it done. If you want to negotiate with Congress, you kind of have to listen to multiple perspectives. you don't make a promise and then, you know, kind of back out of it the next day, like they're not going to trust you, right? You're hoping that they will learn, that they will understand how to use these government norms and processes. And maybe even, I will admit, there was a part of us,

I remember having conversations, maybe disruptions good. Maybe disruption in government will force government to try new things, try, be more innovative, be more like business, right? You were hopeful, we were hopeful that some good could come out of this. I will say that by the summer of 2017, the weight of what we were seeing was really weighing heavy on many of us. It was becoming clear he was not adapting to the role. It was becoming clear he was not of strong enough character to put aside some of his bad habits and actually do the job well. Can you give us a specific there? Was there a moment where you were like, holy shit?

It was more at the time, that 2017 period, I was the deputy chief of staff for Kelly. So what I was seeing was his, he's going to meetings. He's explaining things. And then his face when he would come back was quite scary. I mean, this is a four-star general that has experienced. a lot of tough stuff, including the loss of his son. Like, this man is weathered and experienced and has seen hardship. And he was scared for our country.

I think that's what shook me is if he's this concerned about a man that can't seem to do his job well and is rash in his decisions and refusing to learn how to be disciplined in this role, I think that was part of the shift for us. And now I am thinking of a specific North Korea starts launching missiles in August. And we all kind of were taken it back by it. But if you recall, part of what was going on was the president was agging on North Korea. He was kind of... A little rocket man.

Yes, that's right. It was rocket man. He called him Rocket Man. And he was like having some sort of schoolyard bully fight with a man that is trying to build a nuclear weapon and egging him on, edging him on, whatever that word is. And then meanwhile, the huge wake-up call for the department, because most of the department's work in the last 18 years has been focused on terrorism. And we had to start working on, okay, if we go into a hot war with North Korea, what does that mean for the Department of Homeland

Security and all of the cascading effects? What if we have a hurricane, a massive hurricane, and we can't rely on the National Guard because the National Guard has been deployed in support of this war. We're so young, we haven't worked through those contingency planning scenarios. And so it caused us to ramp up and do a whole lot of action. But the core of it was, stop egging him on. We don't need him to build the missiles any faster. And you just were concerned that he couldn't seem to understand the gravity of his words in a scenario like that. I want to ask you a little bit about,

the influence of people like Stephen Miller and Mrs. Seb Gorka and other people at DHS. And like, was there, there seemed to be something that alerted you or the troubled you with the emergence of, you know, you were worried about sort of the global white supremacist violence rising up across the spectrum. And was that sort of tamped down where they, they were much more concerned about the, like the imaginary caravans than things like the Christchurch shooting and things like that. Yeah, there definitely was an inequity of focus on and a mischaracterization of threat that continues today. So it's not to say that there aren't bad people that try to cross their southern border. There are. It's not to say that there isn't very, very dangerous transnational

criminal organizations that do horrific things to people that are making their way to the order. There are. The Obama administration acknowledged that they were actively working a series of plans to try to address the root causes behind migrant flows into the push and the pull factors that cause somebody to migrate to the United States. So this clearly is a complex problem that we need to be addressing. And I think strong security at the border is helpful, but it became very clear that that was such a campaign touch point, a rallying cry for the president's base, that they started over-emphasizing key pieces of it. And it was kind of also some of their downfall because they over-emphasizes key pieces of their

agenda and over-exaggerated the threat in order to justify their hyperbolic language about the need for a wall or the need to have stricter immigration measures, it actually created the inability for them to make changes with Congress, right? Like the Democrats dug in because of that hyperbolic. language. If you had recognized when you come into office, if I want to get this done, I'm going to have to make some compromises. And I'm not going to get 100 percent, but I probably, there was a deal on the table at one point that would have gotten 80, 85 percent of what the president campaigned on and what he wanted. And Stephen Miller blew it up because he wanted, he wanted the full 100 percent. And it boggles my

mind that, you know, if you're on the side of these types of policies, you think Stephen Miller is brilliant, right? So it's a separate conversation for another day. But if you are actually the brilliant businessman that you are, you find a way to take the deal and you don't let the 30-year-old mess it up for his own agenda. I mean, he had, Stephen has his own agenda. What do you think his agenda is? That's a tough one. It rhymes with schmacism. I initially did, I was probably naive. I initially thought that there were probably people that, were exploiting during the 2016 campaign, exploiting rhetoric to kind of do that dog whistle effect to stir up that part of the right wing that is extremist and their viewpoints

and borderline racist, but definitely nationalist and maybe even white nationalist, right? I was kind of thinking, I don't know that they realize that they're doing this intentionally, but maybe a few of them do. Steve Bannon sticks out in my mind as probably knowing what he was doing. Oh, trust me, Steve Bannon knew exactly what he was doing. Did you work with Steve Bannon?

Not directly, no. I'm just giving you my impression in 2016. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that's very helpful. Sure, sure, sure. That was kind of, I was like, you know, he probably is doing this intentionally. By the time I would say it was like fall of 2017, I had enough anecdotes, and nothing firsthand, but I had enough anecdotes to realize, oh, my goodness, some of these people actually are racist.

And I don't have evidence of the president himself. being wittingly racist. And I use the term, oh, okay, I would love to hear it. He's not very witting as a rule. But I, no, but I know what you mean. I think he's from an older generation, and he never can admit that he makes a mistake.

So when he says something he shouldn't say, he can't find a way to apologize for it. So I think that's one part of his character flaw, you know, huge character flaw is a lack of humility. And then the other side is he has these advisors telling him this is a way that you gin up your base. And so I think he pragmatically thinks that this language helps him. So I don't know that he actually understands when he gets confronted. When you say this, it's actually racist. I don't think he necessarily connects those dots. But he absolutely should be

held accountable for the fact that his actions and his rhetoric are racist, right? So it's a slight distinction. And the slight distinction, because I just haven't heard firsthand enough evidence that, no, this is actually embedded in his heart. He actually hates anybody of a different race. But there are people on his staff that I absolutely think have that as their agenda. So talk to us about what you saw Kelly go through while working for Trump. Yeah, you know, I think the world of John Kelly, I know when he moved into the chief of staff role, he had that famous press conference where, you know, probably, I mean, he is not a polished politician, right? So he was put in a role that, you know, at times he perhaps wasn't the best person to be speaking or wasn't prepared to be addressing some of the politics of the day.

But I think he is genuinely loves his country and did the best he could to lead the department when he was at DHS and to, you know, I watched him wrestle with the decision to go and become chief of staff. I did not want him to leave. I thought he was doing so many great things for the department. and he was protecting us. He could stand up to the president and to people like Stephen who were trying to reach in and direct the operations of the department. He could say no and he could push back. And I knew that when he left, though others would continue to push back, they just wouldn't have the gravitas that a four-star general of his tachar does. Can you explain what that means to push back? Well, so I think in 2017, it was, again, it was more of the,

they just don't know what they're asking. So it usually is more of an education process of, okay, tell me what your objective is. Let me help you find the right path to that objective as opposed to just launching, right? So the classic example is the travel ban that was issued that first week that they were in office. And nobody had seen it. It was written by, as far as I can piece together to Stephen and another staffer at DHS that kind of were in cahoots and left everybody else out of the the loop and neither one of them had what I would consider executive branch policymaking experience. And so they really did not understand, maybe I'm giving them a pass, but I don't think they understood that you can't just say do this and then the entirety of the system can can do it, right? Like there

are legal questions, operational questions. And of course, we saw the chaos that first weekend when a travel ban was issued. And thankfully, the court suspended it and we were able to, you know, correct it in the future. But that's a great example. If they had started with, back to your question, if they had started with our objective is this, then experts that know the screening and vetting laws and the immigration laws and the operational processes by which we execute against those laws, that's the key missing piece that most of those guys didn't have. We could have designed a system for them that would achieve their objective, but would have been constituted. would not have been based around race, but based around security, real security vulnerabilities.

And we eventually got there, but we got there like three years later. And with a ton of skepticism, and quite frankly, most likely we'll get overturned because it is seen as an inherently racist effort. And that's, in my view, a bit of a lost opportunity because there were security benefits to what we eventually designed. There are good things to it. And it's a good tool that could be if used appropriately. It's a good tool if used appropriately would not be seen as racist and would make the United States more safe. But I don't know that anybody's going to even let you have that conversation because it's so associated as the Muslim ban. You know, based on the president's own rhetoric, right?

Like they continually wound themselves in not being able to execute their policy, which is why when I've been speaking out this week, I'm trying to appeal to those who feel like they need to vote for policy only, that the truth of the matter is, if you don't have character and you don't have competence, you can't implement your policy well. You're not going to be successful. So even, you know, many of us, including myself, do not agree with most of his policies. But for those of you out there that think he, you like what he says he's going to do, he is incapable of doing most of it. He is undisciplined. He lacks character. Nobody trusts him. So he can't actually. And the people that he's surrounding himself with. The ones that are left have, I mean, it is scary how little experience some of the people on his team have. And I am fearful of the next four years, not so much because we don't know him. We clearly know him and what he's not capable of doing. But he will not have the Kellys and the Tillerson's and the Mattis's around to say, Mr. President, when we have the bad day, don't push the button yet. We need to do this first and we need to call this ally and we need to consider this consequence. you were quickly losing those people with experience and wisdom to be able to counsel him on the bad day.

And so you're going to be left with people that lack any wisdom. And that's going to get the United States into trouble. More trouble. Correct. Way more trouble. So, Elizabeth, I think the most forward-facing thing about DHS and a lot of the things that we've seen the last couple of years, it has become sort of the sort of the border policy in particular and the wall. and the Muslim ban.

I mean, of all the threats that we faced, what are the things they ignored while focusing on the things that sort of stroked their amygdala, like, you know, MS-13 caravans and ISIS and America? What were the things they were ignoring while those things were looming?

The growing risk of cybersecurity threats, huge, huge issue for the country. And we, thankfully, there are a lot of people paying attention to it. And as I take these things off, like Russia and election interference, the rise of global white supremacy and anti-government sentiment and extremism, what the rest of the world calls right-wing extremism. We in the United States try to void that term so that we don't offend half of the country, but the reality is most of

that extremist violence that actually leads to the killing of people, not just violence against property, but the actual deaths of Americans. It does come from the right-wing part of the political spectrum. All of those are grave threats, not just 10 years from now, but today. And they were growing and increasingly complex and requires significant coordination across the government. If you have a problem that stays within the bounds of a department or agency, like this is just the Department of Defense's job, it's a lot easier. The DOD can just do the job and you don't really, I mean, you might check in with the president, but you don't really need presidential leadership on those. types of issues. Anytime you start getting into the realm where multiple agencies have equities,

multiple agencies have differences of opinion on how to go after the threat, it's new. It might be inherently political because, for a variety of reasons, you need leadership and you need a steer because what your career civil servants who are patriots are going to do is try to protect their country as best as they know how, but they are not going to go do something new and different against the grain of whatever norm has been in existence for 50 years. So when you're talking about something like domestic terrorism, it has been the practice of the U.S. government to default to First Amendment rights. You really have to cross a strong criminal threshold for the FBI to go and investigate you.

It's very different than how we treat international terrorism. If there's somebody inside our country that has aligned themselves with ISIS, because ISIS is a designated foreign terrorist organization. The FBI has the ability to do things, to investigate, to survey in a way that they can't for somebody that has aligned themselves with the Boogaloo movement. So that distinction alone, which is largely legal, but somewhat also tied to just practices that the FBI put in place after Hoover and some of his abuses, those are the things that if we had leadership at the White House, it would have been great to really.

really start to untangle and figure out what can we adjust so we can use all of these great tools that we built to combat ISIS, to combat al-Qaeda. What can we use domestically to combat this growing, increasingly globalized, but domestically based white supremacist movement? And within the bounds of the Constitution, nobody's talking or wants to abuse First Amendment rights or Fourth Amendment rights. And that is complex. That takes leadership and deep thought. That is not something that this administration has been able to do because it's constantly in chaos. And because they wanted to just focus on something simple like build a wall, it's a construction project, that's what he understands. You are left with basically officials at my level. And I certainly had multiple secretaries that were

very concerned with all of those threats that I mentioned with Russia, with cybersecurity, with domestic terrorism. And they did everything they could to coordinate with their colleagues. I coordinated with my colleagues. I was under tremendous pressure to deal with these emerging threats, but we could only go so far in the environment and kind of out on her own. So the good news is for the American people, there are dedicated public servants that are doing their darnness to protect us from these emerging threats. The bad news is, and part of the reason I feel compelled to speak out, is they cannot do everything if they don't have the president paying attention to these issues. And we are running out of time on these issues.

We are losing the fight in many of these spaces because he has been distracted and focused on other things. I'm wondering if anyone at DHS was studying that sort of the parallels between that, because I'm just an amateur anthropologist, but I'm starting to see that there's the same kind of like apocalyptic rhetoric and telling these young men that their lives are meaningless. They're the ones who are going to strike a decisive blow against whether it's the Jews or the deeps. state or the Muslims or the Mexicans or whatever. I wonder if there's anyone who's looked into the parallels of that methodology of radicalization. You're very insightful, Rick. So the answer is yes. And the answer is your spot on that the way, and I actually talk about this in a number of speeches

and hearings that occurred over the last two years. We absolutely believe that the white supremacist anti-government movement borrowed from ISIS's playbook. And are using many of the same recruitment techniques and approaches to radicalize individuals inside the United States and incite them to carry out attack. The one difference so far is that the vast majority, I should say, the primary difference between, say, ISIS and these other groups is that these other groups are actually very sophisticated in understanding the protections that they have under the First Amendment. So they make a point to not be too organized. They make a point to fly under the radar in such a way and anonymize themselves so that they can't be targeted by the FBI. Because the FBI can go

after them under certain statutes like RICO. And certainly if you've crossed a criminal threshold and you're planning an actual attack, the FBI will go after you. But they make a point to fly under that radar. So the one distinction is the disorganization, the intentional disorganization as compared to ISIS. But all of the other aspects of what made ISIS grow so quickly and radicalized people all over the world to carry out attacks and cause terror without some massively orchestrated months-long pre-planned attack like Al-Qaeda's style was. Absolutely the right-wing extremists are capitalizing on that and leveraging it and continues to morph to this day, which is why groups like QAnon, even though on its face, they sound ridiculous. And they, you know, it is

when we first started popping up on our radar, you really, it's like, how are you supposed to brief your leadership about, well, sir. Cannibal pedophiles! They accuse the deep state of drinking blood and worshiping Satan and a massive pedophiles scheme, and you're like, I'm not making it up, sir. So it is the challenge with the Q&on type of ideology, which again is hard to pinpoint because it changes daily, is that there's this sense that you and you alone are standing up against the evil of the world. And if you don't speak out, if you don't do something and carry out

a way to protect these poor children or to push back against the government, then you're the last person standing. You and alone are going to save the, they've civilization. That type of rhetoric, that type of ideology, we do see historically associated with people carrying out attacks. And we've had five instances so far of criminal acts. Several of them have been prosecuted under terrorism charges. Thankfully, only one person, if my stats are right, I think only one person has been killed so far. That's still sad, but not nearly as bad as it could be. But that's why extremist ideology, it needs to be taken seriously and as soon as possible countered so that other vulnerable individuals that might stumble upon it aren't preyed upon because they are extremely

sophisticated in how they recruit. It is fascinating to talk to people that have extracted themselves from white supremacist movements and hear how they were recruited. And it usually starts with very conservative talking points. And it's fear-based. Our world is changing. Your children are going to grow up differently than you. And it's strangely and sadly, very normal type of talking points that you hear in the Republican Party. And that's why the president not speaking out against white supremacy and against Q&N is extremely dangerous because he is sowing those seeds. He is creating that fear that creates vulnerability in people to be recruited and radicalized by these groups that have an intention of violence. Well, there's one person around that circle

that knows exactly what he's doing in this, and that's Steve Bannon. When the secret history of all this is written, they will run this back and they will find that anything that was on that front from DHS that Steve Bannon would put the kibosh on because he is a master of this sort of radicalization strategy. And I think we're going to see in the end of the day some very dark shit coming out about some of the senior people that were involved in this. Isn't it hugely ironic that if what you're saying is true and I'd be fascinated to learn more, but if what you're saying is true, isn't it fascinating, that they are arguing that it's the deep state that is causing all of our problems, and it's, in fact, him in the darkness

orchestrating all of this radicalization that's leading to all of the unrest and the, quite frankly, most of the deaths that have been deemed terroristic in nature for the last five years have all come from the white supremacy movement, not from radical Islamist overseas. So he's, in fact, the deeper of the deep state causing all of these problems. Well, yeah, of course. And look, in Germany and in the late 1930s, Julius Stryker, who wrote and was the editor of Der Sten, wrote about this gigantic plague of terrifying Jews who were murdering people and raping women and polluting the bloodline and reducing the sanctity of the German Volk and all these things.

And it's Steve Bannon, 2.0, 1.0 rather. And it is the same exact strategy. And millions of young German men from lower socioeconomic groups were radicalized by Dershtermer. And Breitbart with a German accent. Wow. Anyway. Did you work with Mrs. Gorka? I did, and I will say that she's very different than her husband. I really enjoyed working with Katie.

I think she's kind of been on the receiving end of some unfair characterizations, probably because of her husband. And what I'll say is that she has told me that she personally learned a lot in her experience working at DHS, and she came into the role in 2017 with a certain viewpoint. And she's very well studied and very, you know, academic and how she views these things. And she had a certain perspective. And over time, by talking, by talking to the staff that were doing the programmatic prevention work, she learned and changed and evolved her perspective. And she was one of the core thought leaders that led us to what we revealed in the RAND study. And this was February 2019. And that was kind of the foundational work that we used to launch the Office of Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention and build the prevention

framework that we released in September of 2019. Congress, we were able through Secretary Nielsen and Secretary McAleon's leadership to get funded for that effort in FY20. So that means this year we have the, the team has money. They're hiring regional prevention coordinators. There's a grant that the money is about to go out the door to be awarded to grantees to start doing prevention work. And then we were able to successfully build into the president's budget in FY21 grant additional funding like a 1,200% increase, which is unheard of in government, 1,200% increase in prevention funding. Here's the catch. If you were to go and look that up in the president's budget, FY21. This was released in February of this year. So what's interesting is that the language that

they use, they talk about it in terms of countering violence, which is what we called it. We intentionally talk about preventing targeted violence because some violence doesn't have an ideological motive. Las Vegas example, the Las Vegas shooting, they never found a motive. But I tell you that the American people think that was terrorism, as they should, but statutorily it's not terrorism. So we broadened our aperture and said, we're countering all violence, terrorism and targeted violence. Well, the White House lashed onto that. They're like, yes, what we need to prevent is targeted violence. So we're not going to talk about domestic terrorism or white supremacy that led to El Paso,

but we'll absolutely support what you were doing to prevent targeted violence. So if you go and look at that budget fact sheet about funding prevention, they use the language of we're preventing violence. I'm fine with that as long as we got the money and we can move forward with our prevention programming, which is what we were able to do. But it is just another example of they will not call out the threat the way it is. So you had to trick them into supporting something. Oh, I didn't have to trick them.

They fully understood. But I was told very clearly what you're doing is right. We need you to keep moving forward. We just have like these are White House officials talking to me. Just we need to call it targeted violence when we're here at the White House. You're like, okay, if that's what I need to do to get to do the right thing for America. Got to get to the X. I will do it.

Do you think there are more people from the administration who are going to come forward? You know, I got to ask this question by Nicole Wallace on MSNBC. it kind of took me by surprise I thought we were talking about something else. But it's an important question and I think the American people need to understand. There are a number of people that are serving as political appointees to the best of their ability and they wake up every day and it's a miserable experience for them. It is exhausting to work in this administration, but they love their country and they're doing the best they can to keep things together. And they are hoping that the American people do the right thing and do not let him win again so that they can have rest and go

home and hang out with their families. But if they leave, important things won't get done or important activities will be stopped and they are there to try to hold things together while we can. Okay. So that was one of our favorite bonus episodes so far. Yours too? Perhaps. Go join Beast Inside at new abnormal.com. To get these every week, thanks again for your support from everyone at the new abnormal and The Daily Beast. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, 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. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash membership slash podcast and sign up. Today.