The Dispatch Podcast - The Durham Split Screen

Episode Date: May 19, 2023

The Durham report points to serious problems in the FBI's investigation of Trump, but finds no criminal wrongdoing and recommends no systemic changes. Sarah, who worked in the White House during the Muller investigation, gives an insider's perspective, as Steve and Mike try to make sense of the fallout. Also: -Biden and McCarthy inch towards a debt ceiling compromise -Congress mulls AI regulations… But is the future already sealed? Show Notes: -Listen: Steve and Sarah interview Sen. Bill Cassidy on Entitlement Reform -Watch: "Bill on the Hill" Cassidy -Gov. Chris Sununu on The Dispatch Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Save when you fuel up for your next road trip. Get up to 7 cents per liter in value every time you fill up at Petro Canada. That's 3 cents per liter in instant savings plus 20% more points when you link an eligible RBC card to your Petro points. Find out more at RBC.com slash Petro dash Canada. Conditions apply. During the Volvo Fall Experience event, discover exceptional offers and thoughtful design that leaves plenty of room for autumn adventures.

And see for yourself how Volvo's legendary safety brings peace of mind to every crisp morning commute. This September, Lisa 2026 X-E-90 plugin hybrid from $599 biweekly at 3.99% during the Volvo Fall Experience event. Condition supply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com. Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host Sarah Isger joined by Steve Hayes and Mike Warren. Oh, the lineup we have. We'll talk about the Durham report, the debt ceiling negotiations, and AI. good, bad, big, small, all the things in between with a little, not worth your time,

Granite State Special at the end. Let's dive right in. So the Durham report, and it's worth a little disclaimer here that I worked at the Department of Justice during the entirety of the Mueller investigation. We've now had three reports related, at least in part, into the 2016 campaigns, an election, and the investigations end of that. So you have the Mueller report itself.

The first part of the Mueller report found no evidence to bring criminal charges for any American citizen colluding, quote, unquote, with Russia or a foreign government to interfere with the election. However, they did bring charges against Russian intelligence officers for hacking the DNC servers,

things related to that. No evidence of changing votes or hacking voting machines, things like that. The second part of the Mueller report, of course, was obstruction. Not relevant to our discussion today, though worth a read, folks. The second report was from

The DOJ Inspector General, Michael Horowitz, this was on whether Department of Justice rules, laws, regulations were followed during the investigation. And of course, the investigation predates Mueller. So Mueller comes in as special counsel in May of 2017, but the investigation, as we now know, was opened in July of 2016. So the IG report goes all the way back to 2016 and found, that no rules or regulations or laws had been broken during the course of the investigation

with one exception that there was a lawyer who fabricated an email in order to get a surveillance warrant renewal. Now we get to the Durham report. Bill Barr appointed Durham to review the investigation not just to see if any rules or regulations were broken, but the prudentialness of the whole thing did was the spirit followed what could have been done better that turned into a criminal investigation in 2020 it's basically been four years of durham looking into this and we got a 300 page report i'm very curious when we've seen i mean just meltdowns

on the right about the need to prosecute folks about this being a huge scandal of epic proportions And on the left, absolutely nothing to see here. This was a huge waste of money. Durham is a partisan hack, and he still couldn't find anything. Steve, where do you think the truth lies? Somewhere in between. It won't surprise you. Our friend Heath Mayo had a, I thought, a useful breakdown

of sort of the Mueller report and the Durham report. And Sarah, I'm just be warned, I would like to turn this all back on you because I'm most interested in. in your views on this, having seen it sort of from the inside and now from the out. But Heath Mayo made the point that as you think about this, sort of all of this from beginning to end from 2016 to the filing of the Durham report in its release, the best way to think about it is the Mueller report was a look at the substance and the Durham report was best viewed as a look at the process. how did the process go. And I think there are, you know, there are some sort of big takeaways.

What remains true is there's, I think, virtually no serious question that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election would like to have been more successful in its attempts to interfere in the 2016 election, that its attempts to interfere in the 2016 election were at least welcomed by the Trump campaign and Donald Trump himself personally and publicly on multiple occasions. And one of the big questions was what role, if any, did the Clinton campaign play in sort of goosing that along, both in public perception and in reality.

I think the Durham report, just skipping ahead a little bit, was pretty tough on the FBI and the DOJ, 306 pages. At several times throughout the report, Durham makes clear that he thinks the FBI, I sort of had built-in biases in favor of sort of assumptions about what was happening in the Trump campaign and the no good that Trump and Trump world might have been up to and didn't test those assumptions adequately.

You false the specific FBI agents for going along for the ride confirmation bias, shortcuts throughout the investigative process. And I think it was tough. I think it was a tough report on the FBI. Appropriately so. In some ways, it echoed the findings of Michael Horowitz, who was the Inspector General, who had looked at this before

and had some, I thought, quite stinging critiques of the FBI. All that said, it is not the full exoneration that we were promised. by Trump world for so long. And it is, it is, you know, certainly if you look at some of the commentary on Fox, it is not the cause for celebration that we're seeing in some quarters. And what's been interesting is to watch sort of the different responses at different times from places on the right.

There was not long ago a prevailing thought that because, John Durham was not likely to aggressively prosecute the quote-unquote deep state that he was running protection for the establishment. There was a headline in the Federalist back in September. Durham's protect the establishment tactic is ruining the country. And now you have, of course, many places, many, many pieces at the Federalist celebrating what Durham has found, even if they, even if he's not led any prosecutions.

My big picture takeaway is we should be disturbed at what Durham found, at what the IG found before him, about the process. It's not acceptable for there to be shortcuts. You know, we say in our launch manifesto at the dispatch that we want to test our own assumptions, we do this, we try to do this on a regular basis. It's even more important, I would argue, that the FBI test its assumptions. and take nothing for granted. And it's very clear that they didn't do that.

So I think it's an indictment of the FBI, an indictment to a certain extent of the DOJ more broadly, but it's not the exoneration that Trump critics or Trump supporters claim this. Mike, Durham brought three cases. One was against that lawyer with the fabricated email, that lawyer got probation. Two of the other cases were very high profile,

both resulted in pretty embarrassing acquittals. And I say embarrassing because, frankly, the Department of Justice doesn't lose cases at trial. All they do is win, win, win, as they say. Lost both of them, you know, not even long jury deliberations. And so one of the things that stood out to me

was what Durham said he found, sure, but then the actual recommendations. So I think Steve did a nice summary. He said he found confirmation bias, people saying things that obviously were wildly inappropriate but sort of a mix of they assumed Clinton would win

maybe they wanted Clinton to win I think that those are two different but kind of buckets to get you to the same place in terms of that confirmation bias and decisions being made in the room that's all pretty bad like Steve said but then on the like okay now what

no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by anyone else Clinton the Clinton campaign McCain, McCabe, Steele, Comey, whoever your boogeyman was, no evidence of criminal wrongdoing or sufficient to bring a case. Two, and this is the part that was almost more damning to me. He recommended no changes to DOJ regulations. Basically, he says, this is a leadership problem.

It's a people problem. If you don't have good people in place, it's not going to matter what the regulations are. But I guess for me, that tells me the problem can't be all that severe, if that makes sense. Now, I say that, like, one thing he did recommend was having someone assigned, basically, to politically sensitive cases to sort of raise their hand and say, yeah, but should we? I'm just not sure why that would only apply to politically sensitive cases. If we think the Department of Justice has a confirmation bias when it comes to pursuing investigations against American citizens,

I'm not sure it matters whether they're politically sensitive. Maybe we should always have someone in the room saying, hey, is this a good idea? But regardless, I mean, the overall takeaway was no criminal wrongdoing and no changes to DOJ regulations. The rest of it, to me, I think Steve was right. It's bad for the integrity and trust in the institution. But there wasn't a lot of there-there-there, actionable there there.

Yeah, this is my ongoing issue with taking the Durham investigation, the Durham report seriously beyond what it actually says, what the actual words say, because there is this very, there's a constant tendency, I would say on the right and the left, it's more pronounced these days on the right, a desire to criminalize everything.

Everything you don't like about politics, everything you don't like about the way things happen, you got to lock them up, right? Like that was the phrase in 2016, you got to lock them up. And Durham, their guy, Trump's guy, essentially, who is going to find the people to lock up, recommends no locking up, says there's no evidence to do so. So it is, I think, I think it is a repudiation of that impulse. Whether anybody's going to learn the lesson, I don't think they will.

I mean, we could just see the reactions to this. The flip side of this, of course, is that everything that we were talking about, talking about at the beginning of this saga with the Mueller investigation. I mean, you could see a similar impulse on the left and with the mainstream media with regard to Donald Trump's relationship or lack thereof or feelings toward Russia and Vladimir Putin's regime there. You know, I've been constantly thinking about something that my friend Andy Ferguson always said about the first, the Clinton administration,

Bill Clinton's administration. You know, it was, it was, why wasn't it enough that, you know, the, you know, the Rose Law firm, the Whitewater deals, there was essentially this like criminal, like mildly criminal enterprise, a scammy, scummy kind of enterprise going on in Arkansas that the Clintons were lying about it Like all of the facts that were, that had evidence behind them were bad enough.

They didn't have to have killed Vince Foster. That's kind of how I felt about all of what was going on with Donald Trump and Russia. Like the actual facts that were, that were not ginned up by, you know, by people who were, you know, had been, you know, CIA, previous CIA assets who were, you know, drawing up this dossier. I'm talking about information that was reported on by reporters, like, for instance, the Trump Tower meeting that Donald Jr. made back in August or when was that August or July 2016, that he lied about. So he had a meeting with a Russian oligarch, I guess, to look for some kind of, he was promised, some kind of dirt on Clinton. And then when he was asked about it, you know, a year later, he lied about it. I mean, that's a fact that even Donald Trump has admitted.

to. Isn't that enough? Isn't the way that, the sort of cavalier way that Donald Trump sort of revealed classified information in the Oval Office to Lavrov and Kislyak in a way that sort of shocked everybody even in the White House that he did this and said this, isn't enough that he's just cavalier about it, that he admires Vladimir Putin for being strong? All of this can be true without there being some sort of criminal, you know, collusion, some conspiracy between Donald Trump and Russia. I mean, in a way, like, it was, they were too simpatico for there was, for there to be a, for colluding to be necessary.

So I look at it, it's the same kind of impulse, which is we've got to just throw all these people in jail, throw the book at them, when the truth is, is that it, the point that you raised, Sarah, about what Durham said. It's about leadership. It's about who's in charge and are the people in charge being responsible or irresponsible? From 2016 to now, the people who are in charge, whether it's the sort of leaders in the right-wing media, leaders in the mainstream media, folks at the FBI, certainly the Trump administration, were they being responsible? The answer is, like, on the whole, no, they weren't being responsible. That's, The problem, you can't legislate that.

You can't throw people in jail for that. You just, you need a better class of leaders. I, you know, that's the long and short of it. Can I follow up on that, Sarah, with questions for you. I have about 50 questions, but I'll try to limit it. Yeah. So I think Mike is right. And picking up on the point that he made about your observation, Sarah, that, you know,

the Durham didn't make any for systemic recommendations here. He didn't say these are the five things we have to. do to prevent a recurrence of this problem in the future. And it all depends on leaders. I mean, isn't it in effect saying like our leaders are so flawed, this is not fixable? And if that's the case, that's awfully depressing, number one. And number two, what do you make of the fact that some of the characters in this story have gone on to quite prominent public places talking about this stuff?

And I think people who can be shown to have behaved very badly in this. Peter Struck, Lisa Page, Andy McCabe, and others, some of whom were caught in pretty clear lies, others of whom, you know, we saw through their private writings and texts, were very clearly biased. What does it say that they're helping shape our public discussion about this? Yeah, so I think there's another side to this that I wanted to explore as well, which is the first two years of Donald Trump's presidency

were ruined by an investigation that kept this cloud over him that he had worked with a foreign adversary to steal an American election. And it wasn't true. That's a big deal to even have that as an allegation against you. And I really do mean,

it took away the first two years of his presidency and when you talk to Trump voters or potential Trump voters in 2024, they'll tell you. Like, he's owed two years back. And they're not wrong in that sense. I absolutely think that, as you said, there were bad actors on the Trump side,

on the Trump campaign side. They just were buffoony actors, bad actors, shady actors, all of that. This is a weird way to phrase it. They were allowed to be. Do you know who's not allowed to be shady, buffoony actors? the FBI leadership running the investigation

and then for them to go on to get lucrative cable news contracts building up that investigation even more in the run-up to the Mueller report that then wasn't there and then after that to keep saying like well I mean the Mueller report didn't find it

but like I know it was there is outrageous to me and let me give you an example that came out this week and it's a totally different example but it almost bothers me more. So the U.S. attorney in Massachusetts is resigning this week after an IG investigation found, among other things, right?

That she had violated the Hatch Act by attending a fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee that Jill Biden had been at. All right. Look, we all know those rules really, really well, so I'm confused how you could accidentally stumble into a fundraiser with Jill Biden. But okay, that's, yeah. But here's the kicker.

It turns out she had been the Suffolk County District Attorney and she really cared about who replaced her. Her sort of temporary replacement she didn't like. She wanted this other guy to win. She was part of sort of a team of hyper-progressive district attorneys who had this vision for how district attorney's offices should work. So she leaked a confidential Department of Justice investigation to a reporter to hurt the candidate that she didn't like, help the candidate that she did like. When they started saying, how did a reporter get this information?

She was like, we need to find the guy who did this. Please search. And of course, then they find out. Was she wearing a hot dog costume, by the way? Yes, exactly. She was the hot dog. meme, and then they find out it was her. I don't know what the hot dog meme thing is, by the way.

Of course you don't. Don't worry about it, Steve. Yeah, but neither to 90% of our listeners guys throwing around memes like you're 18 or something. I could take three minutes to explain the sketch from the sketch comedy, but I'm going to spare the listeners. The point is, you're looking around saying we need to find the guy who did this and everyone knows it's you. That's right. Exactly.

And you're a hot dog. And you're a hot dog. So she lied to investigators about not knowing who the leak was. She herself leaked confidential DOJ investigation information to a reporter for political reasons to influence an election. And the Department of Justice has said they're going to decline to prosecute. This was already referred by the IG and declined by the department and she put out a statement saying that basically while she did nothing criminal she's not saying these were appropriate communications and to me that sounds so much like the russia stuff in a lot of ways nothing criminal here happened i mean we're not saying it was appropriate though yeah but it's kind of a big deal and for the left to pretend like there's

no big deal going on. Nothing wrong happened. You opened an investigation into a presidential candidate based on a conversation at a bar with George Papadopoulos, you know, raw intelligence, uncorroborated. Every time they found exculpatory evidence, they were like, yeah, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen. Every time they found inculpatory evidence, they were like, aha, we knew it happen. There just wasn't an even-handedness to it because, again, I think in part they wanted Hillary Clinton to win, but maybe even worse. Again, I'll give you that, fine, and that's really bad. But what if it was just that they thought Hillary Clinton would win and this was going to be their boss and they wanted to sort of make things easy, smooth for Hillary Clinton, their future boss? In some ways,

it's worse in terms of long-term Department of Justice interests so look again it's very easy

for me to tell the right stop with the locker up nonsense no criminal laws were broken here

Durham spent four years trying to find criminal laws that were broken he brought two pointless

cases frankly that you know he got bench slapped for so and we don't throw

people in jail because you don't like them you think they're bad people you got to have actual crimes

and you're like, well, it was treasonous. That's not what that word means. But for the left to say that there's no problem here, Durham found nothing, and we should all just go about our day and the Russia investigation was great. I can't imagine the fury

that would be raining down from their side if the shoes were on the other feet. And the fact that there's still these massive problems going on. This is a U.S. attorney that I'm talking about from this week. This isn't some low-level, you know, AUSA, baby prosecutor buried in the bowels of the antitrust division at three con for those five people who know any of that is. This is a Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney who gets to make these big, big calls, who is so

flagrantly breaking the rules in order to influence. politics. Woof, I say, woof. I mean, I think this is, this is, you know, not to get off on a much broader tangent than we need to. And this is, of course, a recurring theme on, on this podcast. But this is the reason that our institutions are failing, right? I mean, to a certain extent, it's not surprising when you have political hacks acting like political hacks. That's what they do. That's what you expect. Even, even, I would say, you know, in the case of Trump world, where it's sort of so egregious and so beyond the bounds of what we would expect of normal political behavior. I mean, Don Jr. saying if it's what you say it is, I like it, you know, getting dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Russia.

I mean, it's like, that's insane, or Donald Trump's public statement at the convention, at the Republican convention, where he said, please go hack these Democrats, and then later claimed, unpersuasively in my mind, that he was just kidding. Of course, that's what you wanted. You wanted a hack and leak. That was the whole point. So, you know, the Trump world, in this sense, went way beyond what we think of and sort of the norms of politics. But generally, you expect political hacks to be political hacks.

Carter Page doesn't have a six-digit, you know, contract with cable news where he sits on there every day in his righteousness talking about how right he was and how bad these people are. Right. Right. And the people that we're talking about in government, I mean, the example that you gave from this week, her name is Rachel Rollins, is that the right name? Or Peter Struck, or Lisa Page, or Annie McCabe, or Jim Comey, there's a certain expectation that I think we ought to have for these people that they won't behave in this manner. And I would say the same is true for the newsme. I mean, Sarah, to your point, there's a news analysis, you know, Washington Post and New York Times won Pulitzer Prizes in part for their reporting on this. And the Pulitzer Committee apparently has gone back and looked at this and said,

look, there's nothing wrong. We're not taking these prizes back. And I'm not necessarily arguing that they ought to in this case. But New York Times ran an analysis, a news analysis, which is technically different from a straight reported piece. It's not quite an op-ed, but it's a news analysis from Charlie Savage, who covers this stuff regularly. And the headline was, after years of political hype, the Durham inquiry failed to deliver. Look, you can tell from what I said at the outset that to a certain extent, I agree with that.

I agree with that view. But the subhead, the deeper argument was a dysfunctional investigation led by a Trump-era special counsel illustrates a dilemma about prosecutorial independence and accountability and politically sensitive matters. And then goes on to basically say this was this massive waste of time and it was a big nothing burger. And I'm using that piece as sort of a stand-in

for the reaction from the political class and in particular the left. Look, we should be troubled by the stuff that Durham said. I mean, there's a quote that's traveling around conservative social media about how there was basically no basis for none of the things in the steel dossier were able to be confirmed at all. But we should, that should bother us. That should bother us on sort of a fundamental level.

However egregiously, we think Trump world behave. And it bothers me that it doesn't bother more of us. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance indeed matters.

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it builds trust. Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's E-T-H-O-S dot com slash dispatch. Application times may vary, rates may vary. Can I say as a refugee from the mainstream media who was there? I was at CNN for some of the Mueller investigation, really the rollout of it. I hate to keep hitting this theme, but I do feel like this is from the mainstream media

perspective of failure of leadership as well, and a really big one, which was the editors the executive producers, the folks in charge of these papers, the folks in charge of these cable news organizations, who took what I think was, in terms of news reporting, you know, solid and based on fact, news about what was happening, what information was being gathered, what new evidence that had been independently confirmed.

and and dramatized it in a way because so much, and I think this is led a lot by cable news, which really thrives on narratives and stories, a story from, I don't mean like an individual news story, but a sort of story arc. You know, this is the beginning of the end of Donald Trump, you know, was a news story arc that you were tuning in like it was a soap opera every day to find out.

out what development was next. When actually, of course, reality and facts were are complicated and complex. You don't, things don't always follow in a straight line. That's not how the people in charge treated this.

They were, yes, they were biased against Donald Trump, toward the more liberal viewpoint, but they're really biased towards sensation, toward narrative in a way that actually does a disservice. And the way I think the leadership, say, of the Department of Justice or in the FBI, does a disservice to the actual people doing the real work trying, you know,

they're the ones who do the grunt work for lack of a better term. And it's up to leadership to decide what to do with it and decide whether to cut bait, decide whether to pull the plug, decide whether to make those decisions. And I just think in the media, people were trying their best. some were very liberally biased and anti-Trump biased but it was up to leaders to say I don't think we have it and it was too difficult

because it was so good for New York Times subscriptions and so good for ratings on CNN and MSNBC to keep the story going Can I share a little behind the scenes vignette? Please. Because part of this was frustrating

of course when you're sitting at the Department of Justice watching them say like Donald Trump's going to get arrested any day now and you're like, this is going the other way, guys. What's happening here? Why are these two, you know, the narrative diverging so far from the reality on the ground? So at one point, I went out and met with the heads

of the various cable news organizations. And look, I couldn't tell them exactly everything we know now. But what I could say is, look, when it comes to Department of Justice investigations we don't talk about ongoing pieces behind the scenes but when you see what we've done publicly I think that's always something

you can be piecing together and this was after the 12 GRU Russian intelligence officers had been indicted in that indictment had said there is no evidence that any American was involved but um ching like that line was there and nobody seemed to be running with that

and questioning their own narratives of like how are they going to put that in an indictment this month and then six months from now say that like absolutely they were involved like that doesn't make a lot of sense so I was trying to sort of spoon feed this okay obviously it made no difference I mean we all know how that all went it made no difference so much so in fact that when the Mueller report did come out

they covered it so little that when I tell people that the Mueller report found no evidence to sustain any criminal charges against anyone, any American citizen, but anyone related to the Trump campaign who worked with the Russians. They're like, that's not what it said. Yeah, no, that's literally what it said.

So I had this meeting with the networks. Before the Mueller report came out, the decision of one of the networks was to, in fact, leak a story about me that I had offered to sell secrets from the Mueller investigation. to get a job at this liberal cable news network, which would be really weird since the secrets I knew

about the Mueller investigation were the opposite of what they actually wanted. They didn't know that because the Mueller report hadn't come out yet. But it was this, I mean, it was horrible, you know, totally trashed my reputation that, you know, here I was trying to sell stuff. It was outrageous. And like, that was the reaction to basically information

that didn't fit with that narratives. How does a story like that come about? Do you know? You mean how did it end up in a headline about me? Yeah. A network executive called Vanity Fair and was an anonymous source. Wow.

Incredible. And that story is still out there, right? Like that didn't get taken down. Even after the Mueller report, which again sort of makes the whole story not make sense. How could I sell a secret about nothing? So I do think there were insidious actors on the media side who wanted this for reasons aside from money.

Then there were the people who wanted it for ratings reasons. The less moon viz, this might be bad for the country, but it's good for CBS type analysis. Then there were the individual bad actors who, again, have been highlighted by name in the Durham report, in the IG report, who have been fired from the Department of Justice, who have cable news contracts as experts on the FBI,

the Russian investigation, the very things that they were fired for. And then it's like no lessons were learned, and the coverage of the Durham report is pretty egregious in some circles. You know, it's hard. It's hard as a reporter as you're chasing this story and you're in the middle of it. And on the one hand, you know, everything you observe, as we've mentioned,

you know, the Trump campaign, people close to Donald Trump, Donald Trump himself, were very much inviting this. I mean, this was public. This was, you know, well before Donald Trump's appearance in hell-seeking next to Vladimir Putin, where he basically said I trust Vladimir Putin as much as I trust the U.S. intel community. I think that was kind of the nadir of Trump embracing Putin and Russia. But this had been happening for a while.

you're watching this as a reporter, it's fair to say, to ask yourself, what's going on behind the scenes? If this is what they're doing in public, what are they doing behind the scenes? What are they doing when I can't see them? And then if you have sources, whether they're, you know, in the intel community or law enforcement who are telling you, hey, what you're seeing in public is also going on behind the scenes. And it's way worse than you can imagine. That's a problem. And, you know, you have from people who are working on the investigation, that feels rather authoritative. I'm not defending journalists in this necessarily,

but you know, you can see why they would say, okay, this is the direction I'm going. And then you had Adam Schiff, who I think was an especially bad actor in all of this, who repeatedly said, I can't talk about it in public, but, you know, I'm high up on the intelligence, committee, and I've seen this stuff. So in March of 2017, in an MSNBC appearance, he said that

I can't go into particulars, but there's more than circumstantial evidence now. CNN in December of 2017, he said that this collusion was an established fact. The Russians offered help, the campaign accepted help. The Russians gave help, and the president made full use of that help. sort of, you know, open and shut. That appears not to have been true. I mean, the things that he claimed to have known and seen simply didn't exist. And one would think if they did that Adam Schiff himself

might at some point reasonably soon offer them up for us. And, you know, when you've got people in positions of authority like that, we're saying things that are just not true, that's a hard thing for journalists to cover. Now, I mean, there are all sorts of different approaches to doing this. And I think it's really important, again, to test your own assumptions, test your own assumptions, test your own assumptions. Yes.

But when they find out that that guy was lying, what did they do? Nothing. Right, right. I agree. It's one thing when a person in a position of authority who's actually able to see the intelligence that you're not able to see is telling you what he's seeing. I don't think you have much choice but to report that.

But when it turns out that that person was lying, For your own sake, for the credibility of your own organization, what you have to do at that point is say, dear God, this person should never be listened to again. They should never be a source again. Here's why we trusted them. Here's why we won't. Yada yada.

And that never happens. That Adam Schiff is still invited on every show to say about intelligence that he's seen that other people haven't seen. Still. And he's running for Senate. If you look at the things that he's doing to promote his Senate bid in California, he's running on exactly the negative partisanship that he engaged in here,

the kind of, I'm taking on the right, I'm taking on MAGA, I'm taking on Donald Trump in a way that I think probably benefits him with that hardcore base. All right, let's spend just a couple minutes on debt-sealing negotiations. Mike, can you get us up to speed? You know, last time we checked in on this other soap opera, Kevin McCarthy's saying red line on spending, Codz, Joe Biden's saying, I'm not going to negotiate.

That is not where Joe Biden is anymore. No, I think Joe Biden, the president realized that he had to deal with McCarthy. That McCarthy's point, which was correct, which is that they were the only folks who have, meaning the House, the House Republicans, the only people to have passed some solution to raising the debt limit. Was it the solution that Joe Biden won at first, but it's the only one on the top? table at this point. So there has been more talks, more negotiations. The point where they are at now is essentially McCarthy is saying, we've got to have work requirements for these safety net programs, you know, Medicaid and others. Biden is coming to the table on that a little

bit, says, well, let's talk about it. Let's have some kind of work requirements. You know, that's not where the House Democratic caucus is, but they're in the minority. They're in the House. It kind of don't matter at this point. Obviously, Biden would like to have, and McCarthy would like to have some Democrats, some House Democrats, on the final bill to raise the debt limit. So we'll see if Biden sort of uses the bully pulpit to encourage Democrats. But there is a sense, I think, growing that Democrats.

feel like Republicans have kind of won this one and they're looking for anything, any sort of, you know, rock in a storm that they can hold on to to kind of save face a little bit here, try to just pull back. Because otherwise, I think they're looking into the abyss of not raising the debt limit in a way that would reflect poorly on them. I don't think they counted on that. I think they thought that this would be another example of Republicans playing

you know, playing chicken and when things go bad or when things get to the point of getting bad that Republicans would blink because the American people will not see their side of it, that they will think they're being too extreme.

I think they're coming into the reality that actually they have to deal with Republicans. I always look at people like Mitt Romney, you know, like a middle of the road, you know, center-right, you know, not playing sort of mega-Republican games kind of member of Congress. He's basically had this position the whole time, which is you've got to have spending cuts, you've got to have some of these work where you've got to work with the Republicans because they're the ones in the majority in the House. it seems like Democrats are finally getting to that point. Biden certainly seems to understand it, but there's going to be, I think, a lot of pain on the Democratic side

for a bit as they come to realize that they've been rolled a little bit. Steve, I'm not the first person to wonder this, but given the problems that Kevin McCarthy has had with his own caucus, why isn't the Biden administration calling his bluff and saying like, sure, yeah, okay, fine, work requirements, you get that. now let's see you pass the debt limit. Oh, you still can't? All right, now we're doing it my way.

That's a very good question. I mean, I think the point that Mike makes is a very important one. You had sort of extraordinary unity on the Republican side that very few people predicted, including many of the Republicans who are unified. You know, you had from the early stages of this as the Republicans cobbled together this bill, Senate Republicans, including moderates,

saying that they were sticking with Kevin McCarthy. You know, they would say this isn't our fight. Kevin McCarthy's leading these negotiations. They have the majority in the House, but we're with them. And you had some of the people who Democrats were looking to split off, like Don Bacon, a voice of the leading moderates in the House, who also, you know, he sort of had it both ways he would say, well, you know, we're, we know it's important not to default. But look, I'm with Kevin McCarthy. And you had this kind of remarkable

Republican unity. It was a risk, I think, that Kevin McCarthy took. And I think tactically, it's been brilliant. It's really worked out for him. This is, I think this is a significant success for Kevin McCarthy. Now, on substance, I certainly wish they would be focused on the things that would alter the trajectory of our long-term debt like entitlements. And there's this consensus between leaders of both parties that those things are untouchable. Even if you took the steps that House Republicans included in their legislation, that's not altering a long-term trajectory of our debt. And at some point, we're going to have to deal with entitlements as we talked about with Senator Cassidy.

But there was another factor here. I mean, I think the Biden White House misplayed its hand very badly. And I don't quite understand what the president was doing. He was demagoguing this and insisting that there would be no negotiations, literally while the negotiations were taking place. Now, they will say, look, we were negotiating over long-term budget issues, not over default. That's just not true. It's a semantic game that they're playing. Nobody buys it because this is the deadline and we're up against it. So Joe Biden is sending out tweets from his

Twitter account saying Republicans have given us a binary choice. Either we go all in on cutting all of these things and cutting veterans benefits and everything in their legislation or we default. That was never the choice. It was just dishonest for him to say it, honestly. So I think he badly misplayed his hand. There's one other factor that I think ends up being a huge deal in this, and it's bad. It's bad for Republicans, bad for Democrats. It's bad for our politics.

And that is Donald Trump began making noises that he favored default, that he wanted House Republicans to take the country to default, to fail to raise the debt limit. There's been speculation about this for a long time. There's been some reporting that Donald Trump thinks it would benefit him if there's this massive economic upheaval because they failed to raise the debt limit that it would benefit him heading into 2024.

It's awfully cynical, but it's not at all hard to believe that that's how he would think. And you started to hear elected Republicans, including members of Congress, including people who are going to be voting on the package, articulate this in public, in public. Ken Bach, representative from Colorado, sort of Tea Party representative, Freedom Caucus or Freedom Caucus adjacent, very conservative. I usually think of him, I mean, he's willing to be very aggressive, but he's sort of

makes sensible principled arguments as often as not. Even when I don't agree with him, I know where he's coming from on this. And he started talking openly in an interview just over the couple days about default wouldn't be that big a deal, it could happen, who knows what would happen in the next couple days. We could reach something once it happens. You increasingly were hearing from Republicans articulating those views. And I think there came a point where everybody recognizes that that would be bad, said, all right, we got to get something done. And that includes Joe Biden. Mike, has the chance of default gone up or down? in the last two weeks.

I think it's gone down for exactly what Steve just outlined. I mean, I think there is a, this is always the way that these, kind of this debt limit brinksmanship goes, which is people start suggesting kind of crazy stuff. And everybody who's, you know, whose butts are on the line with it kind of come to the table. And they put aside whatever, you know, pet issue they were trying to get or, you know, sort of tactical effort they were trying to, you know, pull over on their, on their opponents.

And they get it done. And it's ugly and it freaks, markets out, and everybody kind of loses their minds, and then it gets done. It's not a way to govern because it really is like on a knife's edge here. and yes, that's what always happens. At the same time, there's a non-zero and maybe a pretty big chance that somebody throws a wrench in all this, and we do default.

I just think we're closer now because I think the Democrats realized this is not something that will necessarily go our way. I think Biden thinks he is Barack Obama. And he's not Barack Obama. I mean, Barack Obama had, when he's negotiating with the House Republicans during his term, he had this sort of, I mean, he had the poll numbers, but he also had this sort of ineffable ability to kind of weather the storm,

to make it look like Republicans were being extremist and outrageous. And a lot of times it's because they were. and Biden doesn't have that kind of magic touch, and he thinks he does, and he's realizing now, maybe I don't. Steve, anything you disagree with that? Default chances have gone down in the last two weeks. Yeah, no, significantly. I mean, they're openly talking about the fact that they're talking,

and you've had Kevin McCarthy and Joe Biden both signal that they've made significant progress. So I think having gotten to that point, part of the risk was, I think the biggest risk, was everybody's going to sort of dig in. And, you know, Biden had to take this position earlier that there would absolutely be no negotiations. They're negotiating.

I think we're likely to end up, you know, everybody's going to be frustrated, people are going to be unhappy, but we're likely to end up in a place where there's a deal. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building,

a site for your business, your writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one. Use one of their award-winning templates or try the new Blueprint AI, which tailors a site for you based on your goals and style. It's quick, intuitive, and requires zero coding experience. You can also tap into built-in analytics and see who's engaging with your site and email campaigns to stay connected with subscribers or clients. And Squarespace goes beyond design. You can offer services, book appointments, and receive payments directly through your site.

It's a single hub for managing your work and reaching your audience without having to piece together a bunch of different tools. All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. all right last topic let's talk about artificial intelligence steve you've had some feelings in our slack channel and i'm going to paraphrase here but not by much there is no amount of coverage of the ai revolution that could be too much it will be bigger than the biggest version in your head yeah i think that's right um but i was you know i was probably a little late to appreciating

just how revolutionary this is going to be sort of for every aspect of our lives. But as I've talked to people who are a lot smarter than I am about this, you engage in these conversations or you read something or you listen to a podcast. And I always kind of go in expecting to have my mind blown because of one, you know, it'll blow up an assumption that I've held or it'll challenge something that I've long believed. and then you go in and it blows up like eight different things. So just in having conversations about this, I think we're looking at something that will dramatically transform our politics

and in particular the way that we consume information. If we look at our politics today and we see this polarization and we see the challenges and problems that we have, and I believe many of them are a result of the dramatic changes that we've seen with the democratization of information and the proliferation of sources of information, I think we're about to see that go into hyperspeed with the proliferation of AI.

And we're just now gaining the point where I think people are understanding that. There was a hearing on Capitol Hill featuring Sam Altman, who is the CEO of OpenAI, taking some questions from senators. Some of them sort of interesting. some of them sort of not.

Look, you know what? I thought it was a big win because at least there was no, so the internet is a series of interconnected tubes, Guam not tipping over. I mean, frankly, with a topic like this, I was expecting at least one really viral stupid take.

I was disappointed. Somebody bringing up that Steven Spielberg movie about the little boy who's the robot or something. Yeah, none of that. That was good. I don't know that movie. Is that like the hot dog mean?

No. It's literally called AI. Yeah. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I should watch that. Maybe my mind will be blown with a Spielberg movie, too.

It might not take much to blow my mind. Let's be honest. Haley Joel Osmond at his cutest, robotic cutest. I had a conversation with someone back in the early fall who's working on this stuff. And we had sort of a long conversation about its effects on politics. And, of course, if you've paid even casual attention to the discussions of AI and what's happening and what will happen to our politics, you've read about deep fakes and you've read about fake audio, you've listened to people talking about the use of chat GPT, other AI to help with grassroots activities, to help reshape lobbying, what have you. this person was working on AI that he thought could be could make at least in his telling of the story a positive contribution to our politics and I said okay you know explain this to me look as people are as politicians are campaigning less and less in person as we're seeing images shaped more and more by perceived reality less than reality won't it be the case that people who are running campaigns or participating in campaigns or

running for office themselves, want tools that allow them to make themselves present better to the electorate. And so this person, one of the hypotheticals was, you know, somebody who gives a speech that includes lots of ums and oz, um, or who isn't camera friendly, uh, to use the euphemism. Wouldn't we want to allow campaigns to use technology to make somebody like that more camera friendly to put out a speech through the campaign zone distribution channels that will present the very best face of the candidate. So it might be an AI version of a speech on policy issues, would allow this person to give more speeches on a wider variety of policy issues, better informing the electorate. So we went back and forth on this for a long time and I left

unpersuaded. But it was part of the sort of AI politics, the discussion that I hadn't spent a lot of time on. And I think we'll all be spending a lot of time on questions like that in the near future. Mike, can you think of an example of any technology that we as a species were ever able to put on hold? I guess what I find sort of silly about this debate is it seems like it's framed in, should we continue

proliferating AI or should we put the brakes on it? What? When have breaks ever worked on anything? And I'm thinking here of nuclear weapons or industrialization or lots of things through history where some people were like, I'm not

sure this is going to be great for our species. And people are like, ooh, you might be right. And it didn't matter. It was coming anyway because individual incentives are different than collective incentives. And so to me, the should we keep pushing, should we put the brakes on debate is totally beside the point. And instead, it should be far more around what Steve's talking about, sort of the ethics of what's coming,

maybe universal basic income if we're talking about large swaths of populations, not only being unemployed from their current jobs, but they're just not being jobs, really, for people, many, many people anymore. How you think about that? Well, how do you structure a society that is quickly transforming? Those seem like the more interesting conversations to me at this point. I agree. In fact, I think that is, with every major technological innovation, it's been, what does this mean for the relationship between, you know, individuals and their labor and, you know, productivity and all these things? Those to me are the sort of more primal

and important questions with AI. Obviously, in a way, I find the sort of debate about, oh, look at this. They've created a script for a TV show just from AI or the video that, you know, they always have this kind of uncanny element to it. Maybe that gets sort of innovated out eventually. But it makes me feel like that's not really where the regulation is going to be, where the emphasis is going to be, where the sort of disruption of like daily life is going to be.

It's going to be in the sort of menial jobs, menial work that helps a lot of people just kind of get, you know, put food on the table and get through, get through life. That's going to be the disruption. I will say there's this moment, it would be interesting to go back and study the way that, for instance, the developers of railroads or the developers of any of these other sort of big major technological changes, what they did in terms of their conversations with the government, obviously the government was not very big when railroads were out. But there were important conversations, cases before the Supreme Court involving this as just sort of a way to examine what is happening on Capitol Hill this week and we'll be happening in conversations with regulators. What will, you know, in the next several years, what will, you know, members of Congress or presidential candidates be talking about in terms of the issues.

I'm concerned a little bit that you have people, developers of AI, already saying you need to regulate us. I mean, that throws up a huge red flag right there. I mean, maybe AI would benefit from some healthy competition in a marketplace rather than a couple of the early adopters or a couple of the early innovators getting regulatory protection and then putting those people in charge of where AI goes, that's a place where

government can really do a lot of damage. They're not going to stop this, but they could really kind of put the squeeze on anybody who might try to innovate in a positive way or in a market-oriented way. And that's the next step that I'm concerned about. I'm so glad you said that about any industry

where the biggest adopters are asking Congress for regulation should always concern you. Red flag. Because we're so anti-regulatory or you don't want the government, you know, putting in rules. No, quite the opposite. They're asking for regulation because they want the protection because they can afford regulation to comply with it. And they know that up-and-coming competitors simply cannot break into the market if there's too many barriers to entry.

And not only am I asking you to regulate me, Congress, let me write the regulations for you as often how these things go. But there's a, you're right. So just to be clear, I am. am very anti-regulatory. I mean, that would be my main reason. But all of the things that you say are true as well. I mean, we've seen this in the past. I mean, it's, you know, there are a couple reasons that major companies or innovators would want more government regulation. One, they think it's inevitable. And they want to get it in shape it as best they can to limit the amount of damage that the government can do to these industries,

to these growing industries for reasons that undoubtedly have to do with the growth of their own company and profitability, but also might have some broader kind of altruistic motives as well. Then there's the pure rent seeking, we want to keep people out of our business and we want to write these regulations. But a real problem, and this has been true, I think, of the sort of the first wave of this tech revolution

with the internet is technology is moving so fast that the government sort of can't keep up. And what you have then is you have regulators and would-be regulators, imposing regulations or coming up with rules and laws that they don't even understand. They don't understand the impact of what they're doing. And, you know, in talking to leaders in Silicon Valley and folks in venture capital who are driving some of this change, you know, they'll talk to you about their meetings on Capitol Hill in the city.

Like, even, you know, the tech legislative assistant for a senator just is not equipped to have the conversation because they don't know what's going on. You know, these are 27-year-old people who, on the one hand, might be closer to the change because it's happening so rapidly, but don't have the depth and experience to truly understand it. I had another point, and I have no idea what it was, but it was going to be a great one. We're going to generate that through AI, your other point. We'll fill it up. And we can just kind of. All right. We're going to wrap it there on Steve for getting his point because I think that's a fun place to end it.

and end with a little not worth your time because, Mike, the New Hampshire Democratic primary has become a bit of a hot mess, shall we say? So the DNC moved New Hampshire out of its first-in-the-nation primary status, but New Hampshire law says that it will be first-in-the-nation. What does that mean? It means New Hampshire can hold its primary, but that the DNC doesn't have to award it any delegates. So far, so good. But all of a sudden, There's some panic within Democrats that Joe Biden won't be on the ballot and will lose the New Hampshire Democratic primary that won't have any delegates. I don't really get this.

Worth our time? I mean, it's worth your time if you want to kind of pop some popcorn and watch the drama within the Democratic Party. This is all downstream. It's downstream of a lot of things. But it's downstream from the disaster of the Iowa caucuses in 2020, which are hard to remember because it was sort of the last moment in the before time before the pandemic.

But it was a complete disaster for Democrats. There was no clarity on who won because all kinds of problems in Iowa, in terms of getting votes, getting things cast correctly, people accusing other campaigns of, you know, Sutterfuge and all these things. So you combine the kind of sense that the Democratic Party needed to take a little more control of the nominating process, always a bad sign.

These parties don't know what they're doing. With this idea that the current primary calendar does not properly reflect the Democratic coalition. And what that really means is it's too white, it's too old, and the Democratic Coalition is more multicultural, it is younger. And so what are all of these Democrats doing, wasting their time in Iowa, which is so white, and New Hampshire, which is so white, and why aren't we sort of rejiggering this calendar? That's where all this drama is coming from, because, of course, people in New Hampshire hold on very strongly. to this idea that they're the first in the nation. But like, so what?

Marion Williamson wins the New Hampshire primary and gets no delegates. Why should, why is that worth my time? Because it's exciting and fun and it distracts from all of the crap on the Republican side. So you might as well, I mean, look, there will be no action on the Democratic side.

Joe Biden will be the nominee unless, unless he, you know, I don't know, God forbid, drops dead or something. So just enjoy it because it's a little bit of drama. It's a little bit of fun. Why not? Can we have fun in this world, Sarah? Steve?

And enjoy the Democrats going after each other. Steve, can't we have fun? Speaking of fun, I'm going to ignore all the talk about the Democrats. Other than to note that Kristen Noon, when he was on this very podcast, a couple months ago, predicted this kind of chaos. Yes, we can have fun. And continuing the tradition of talking about things before they're fully baked and before we probably probably ought to. We're looking at having a dispatch event in New Hampshire in August.

Will delegates be awarded? I mean, maybe. Sarah, Sarah delegates. If we have New Hampshire people who would be interested in helping us put this on, we're having sort of early conversations about what it would look like, maybe try to do it around one of the debates, although the first two debates are in Milwaukee and California. not in New Hampshire. But looking to do something up there.

If anybody's interested in helping us host the event in New Hampshire, add some ill-defined date in August, maybe September, or sponsor the event, please reach out to us at members at the dispatch.com. New Hampshire is wonderful. I was up there two weekends ago for a high school bass fishing tournament. Beautiful spot and look forward to going back. That's as much thought as I have about this Democrat issue. All right.

So New Hampshire, worth your time. The New Hampshire Democratic Party contest? Maybe not. Fair. Except if you're Mike Warren, in which case, that's where his fun comes from. Exactly. We need dorks on staff. You got one.

And with that, thank you for joining us. Thank you, Stephen, Mike. And don't forget, if you want to comment on this podcast, become a member of the dispatch. Hop in the comments section. The water is warm. Otherwise, give us a rating wherever you're hearing this podcast because it helps other people find it.

We'll talk to you next week. I think I like didn't get a junior high experience or something.