The Dispatch Podcast - Washington Is A Mess

Episode Date: July 28, 2023

Steve is back to monitor the Dispod as the Sarah, Mike, and David discuss Hunter Biden plea deals and GOP primary wackiness, but the conversation eventually derails into UFO territory. Tune in to hear the four discuss: -The wackiness of the GOP primary field -Ron DeSantis going bonkers with RFK Jr. potential appointments -UFO marketing campaign for skeptics Show Notes: -Check out Mike and Sarah's Collision newsletter for The Dispatch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Conditions apply, 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, Mike Warren, and drum roll. David French is back to join us this week because we have some things to talk about. So we have the Hunter Biden plea deal hearing that was supposed to be not particularly newsworthy and turned out to be a hot mess train crash. So we'll talk about that. We obviously have to talk about the Ron DeSantis GOP field heading into 2024 and maybe some UFOs,

which is a new addition to this podcast, but nevertheless was really dominating some of the news yesterday. And everyone wants to know, what does David French think? Are the little green men popping up tomorrow? The answer is yes. They're coming. All right, let's dive in. I'll do a little table setting on the Hunter Biden thing, just to back everyone up for a second.

So Hunter Biden was charged by the Department of Justice with two misdemeanor tax evasion charges, which he had agreed to plead guilty to, in exchange for probation. He was also charged with a felony gun possession because at the time he purchased the gun, he was a user of illegal substances. For that, he had agreed to a pretrial diversion program,

which would mean that if he completed basically two years of probation in advance, that it's wiped clean. It's as if the charges didn't happen. You don't have a felony on your record. and that's important to a lot of people because if you're a felon, you can't serve on a jury,

you can't own a gun, there's all sorts of rights that you lose. And so to not be a convicted felon is generally speaking a good thing. There was a lot of hand-wringing on the right over whether this was a sweetheart deal. And David, you and I talked about this a little and I'll just give sort of my rough overview,

which is it depends how you look at it. most people are never charged with tax evasion for doing what Hunter Biden did. And definitely most people who are drug users aren't charged with a legal possession of a gun. But so in that sense, he's actually treated less favorably. But if you are charged with tax evasion or a legal possession of a gun, yeah, no, most people charge with a legal possession of a gun don't get pretrial diversion from the feds. Like, why are you even doing this? The whole point of the resources that the department,

Department of Justice puts into getting illegal guns off the street, frankly, is to throw the book at them, get the guns, and, yeah, give people felony records so that they can't own a gun again. If you couldn't own it legally the first time, why are we giving you sort of second chances to legally continue to own a gun? So, again, sort of depends on how you approach the question of whether it was a, quote, sweetheart deal. But regardless, we enter this week's hearing. you know David you and I weren't even really going to pay attention to it it was going to be a very routine the judge reads the relevant portions of the deal you know do you understand this are you being advised by counsel um you know are you mentally competent to enter into this plea

deal yes yes yes your honor bye bye the end that is not what happened at this summary, at the end of the day, Hunter Biden pleaded not guilty to the charges, meaning we're nowhere, we're not moving yet. Now, a lot of people are like, aha, it's going to trial. No, it's not. They're just going to take 30 days and they're going to talk about the plea deal and try to get on the same page. And I expect we'll end up exactly where we were this week, but just next month. However, there's there, we learned some interesting things. We had not seen the plea deal before. Now we have. And the plea deal on the tax evasion charges basically was interacting with the pretrial diversion deal. Now, again, we don't need to get too far into the weeds here,

but when you enter into a plea deal, the court is enforcing that because you are pleading guilty to a crime. That's how the court's involved. You basically just skip the trial. But in pre-trial Diversion, that's actually usually just a deal between the government and the defendant. You don't really need a judge to be involved in that. But here, the pretrial diversion agreement between the government and the defendant referenced and incorporated the plea deal. And it said that they agreed not to charge him for any facts referenced in the plea deal. And the plea deal, of course, walked through all sorts of facts.

um, facts about foreign government, business, things like that. So the judge first said, so do you understand, uh, that the government is not going to charge you with anything related to this? And he's like, yeah. And the government's like, wait, no. And they're like, okay, why don't you guys go discuss this? So they did. And they came back. She's like, great. Okay, let's try this again. So if the government tried to charge you with, for instance, failing to register as a foreign agent, you, you, would think this covers that deal? Yes, they can't charge me with that. Government. Wait, no. Now, eventually they came back and had worked that out. The Biden team said that they now understood

it the way the government understood it. But at that point, I think they'd really lost the judge's trust that there was a mutual meeting of the minds, what the judge's role was going to be in enforcing this down the road. So nevertheless, she continued this for 30 days and wants both sides to write her long homework assignments on their understandings of the judge's role. David, I'm coming to you. Is there anything I missed that was legally relevant to you?

No. I think that, you know, the reader's digest version would be to say this plea deal, which seemed to be, at least the way it had been publicly portrayed as a plea deal relating to the tax and gun charges, was actually through the back door,

apparently a plea deal for, related to prosecution under FARA or the Foreign Agent Registration Act. In other words, it would cover some of this foreign activity as well. So how broad was this thing was the real question? And Sarah, it was really remarkable. We were actually recording our podcast when the first reports that the plea deal was coming apart started to filter across Twitter. And then it was, no, the plea deal is back together again. And then it was no, it's actually been blown apart. And it really, really was over the breadth, the issue. What was the deal actually? And the judge, to the judge's credit, was saying, look, let's get it all out there. What is this thing really? And when it turned out to be, oh, wait, is this broader than tax and gun charges? Is when everything started to fall apart? So I think the judge, the judge did her job here. I mean, the judge did her job here, which was to fully tease it all out, bring it all out in the open

and see what we were actually dealing with. And, you know, look, at the end of the day, Sarah, I think of all of the people involved in this, Hunter Biden is in the worst position because he did have a deal that the previous deal it was exactly, I had the exact thoughts you had, whether this met the qualification of sweetheart depended on the lens you're viewing it in.

do people normally get prosecuted for this? No. So in that sense, not sweetheart. If you're prosecuted, is this the deal you get? No, in that sense, sweetheart. So how are you squinting at this was a big issue? But when you add in the Fara stuff, the sweetness of it, you could almost smell the sugar. Can you smell sugar? You could almost smell the sugar. But David, there's two possibilities here. And the possibilities are what's being bandied about, you know, online and among sort of

the pundit class. Either the Department of Justice was sort of trying to conspire to hide this very large immunity agreement that they were giving Hunter Biden under the guise of not giving him an immunity agreement. Or...

Hunter Biden. Well, or DOJ was dumb. And they did not realize what the Hunter Biden team had snuffed. into the pretrial diversion agreement. And there's a timing issue here in that my understanding is the pretrial diversion agreement

was agreed to first. And I do come back to that old. I'm going to get the saying a little bit wrong, but never assume malice where incompetence will explain it. I'm inclined to think that this was not some grand conspiracy

here where DOJ and the Biden team were on the same page and we're trying to pull a fast one by everyone else, including the judge. my reason for that is that it would be one thing to go in and assume the judge wasn't going to ask you the question and then when she does ask you the question

y'all aren't on the same page to answer it. Then you get to have a private meeting off the record and get your story straight and they came back and still didn't have their story straight which to me now we're in more of the incompetence territory. Yeah, I mean a point in your favor on so a point against that would be really Sarah on the Hunter Biden deal

they're going to be that bad That would be, you know, one rebuttal to you. But on the other hand, if you're talking about accounts from the courtroom, from the courtroom and says that they're stating on the record that the other investigations were ongoing and he was susceptible to prosecution. And then Hunter's lawyers are like, whoa, what are you talking about? So why are you telling the judge on the record that Hunter is still susceptible to prosecution? if the deal is clearly on its face renders him not susceptible to prosecution. Let me give you my explanation for why, even though it's the Hunter Biden thing.

In fact, it's why I am now more convinced of it, because the Department of Justice didn't want the political fallout from having to deal with this case themselves. So they basically cut off the U.S. Attorney's Office in Delaware and let them float as a little island on their own to do this prosecution. normally if you had a deal of this sort of public scrutiny magnitude complication, it would run up through sort of senior staff at the Department of Justice, main justice, the criminal division.

You'd have a lot of really smart, experienced lawyers reading this plea deal. It seems quite possible to me that DOJ, main justice, as we call it, was like, no, no, please don't tell us anything about this. Don't include us. We don't want to know. Yeah. I mean, it's possible, but it's possible. Can I ask a clarifying question?

Yeah, for sure. Isn't it also the case that if there was this sweetheart deal that was sort of snuck in there, the ultimate reason that this wouldn't have been a conspiracy is because we were going to find that eventually. Right? I mean, this wasn't going to remain a secret forever, right? We were going to see if he was not going to be, if they were not going to be able to pursue these additional charges. We would see him not prosecuted, but we wouldn't necessarily have known why. So it would have been possible for that part of the deal to remain secret forever?

Yeah. Oh. Okay. Well, then I think there's, then I think, then let me assume the position of Republicans who are very skeptical about this. So I want to move to the Republicans who are very skeptical about this because the complaints are contradictory at times, Steve. And I want you to unwrap them for us. Okay. Initially, they're mad that Hunter Biden gets this sweetheart plea deal, the initial plea deal

at all, right? The pretrial diversion on the gun charges, the misdemeanor tax evasion. All right. Then... Which doesn't, just to be clear, doesn't include potentially this other FARA sort of immunity. That's right. I mean, what happens in the immediate aftermath of that, by the way, is that Hunter Biden's lawyers come out and say, this ends the investigations into Hunter Biden, and the U.S.

Attorney's Office says, no, it doesn't. Right away, yes. right away. So, I mean, literally for a month, we've known that there was something off in what the agreement was. I remember it was hard for us to report on it at the time because you had these statements, this clarifying statements that said the investigations are ongoing. And then you had other people who were parted to the agreement and were saying, no, the investigations are not ongoing. For a little background, Declan Garvey, who edits our morning dispatch, came to me with this question. And I was like, yeah, Declan, you found the problem.

And he's like, so what's the answer? And I was like, no, Declan, there is no answer. The guy who would know is the one running the investigation, the U.S. attorney, who says that it's ongoing. But the people who actually agreed to the agreement are the one saying that it's over. So I don't know, man. Okay. So after that, when then the U.S. attorney said the investigation was ongoing,

interestingly enough, there were Republicans who were upset about that. On the one hand, they wanted Hunter Biden charged with his sort of foreign business dealings, a foreign agent registration problem, stuff like that. But they didn't believe that the Department of Justice would bring those charges. And by saying the investigation was ongoing, they thought the Department of Justice was protecting Hunter Biden from having to testify before Congress. Okay.

So now fast forward then to this week's hearing, and you end up in a little bit of the same place. They're like, oh my God, see, there was this secret conspiracy blanket immunity agreement. How dare DOJ do this to protect Hunter Biden? but also, why wasn't there a blanket immunity agreement so that he could testify before Republicans in Congress? And if you're having trouble following that, you're following it just fine. Yeah, I think the easiest way to understand that is that Republicans want the issue. So if you start there, and they want to be at the center of it, right?

They want to be, they want to be leading these investigations. They want to be asking these questions. I think to a certain extent, I mean, you know, this is, there are different groups of Republicans who are looking at this indifference. ways. But if you're looking at, for the most political Republicans, the people who have been repeatedly putting out information that either turns out later to be untrue or wildly exaggerated or, you know, a part of the truth that doesn't tell the whole story, those Republicans want the issue. They want to keep talking about this. This is their, you know, this is their main argument, they want to be able to make those kinds of wild accusations, and having spun up,

you know, some conspiracies that I think are crazy and outlandish, they want to continue to pursue those, right? If you've publicly put forward crazy conspiracies, you don't necessarily want the information that knocks those down, that puts those to bed. Having said that, there are some real questions here. I mean, some of this stuff really smells. I don't know if it smells like sugar, but it really smells. It's, if you, if you look at the behavior, take a big picture back and pull back the camera even further than just the charges that were being discussed in this deal, we know that Hunter Biden was engaged in tremendously shady behavior. This is corruption. And Republicans are right to say that it's corruption.

Just the stuff that we know that even Biden defenders will admit to is awful. It's shady. He repeatedly and aggressively used his father's position to try to make money, to try to make a bunch of money. There are other claims, there are other reports, the reported business and about the money that Hunter Biden is now making from his art. I would put art in scare quotes, but I guess we can all have different definitions of what art is. This is gross. It's really gross.

And Republicans are right to ask these questions. Steve, can I just ask you a side question? So when I left the Department of Justice, I was not allowed to do any work with or talking to the Department of Justice for two years. standard for anyone leaving government. Why don't we have a rule about people's people elected or executive branch officials or their families getting money from foreign governments for some amount of cooling off period

during, certainly while they're in office, JFC, but after leaving office as well like we do for any lobbying, any work with the agency that you left? Yeah, or forever. I mean, look at the kinds of reporting that we've seen on. Jared Kushner's sweetheart business deals and what's happened in the aftermath of the Trump administration. I mean, I think this is true for everybody. And it's one of the areas where if we had some clarity on the legal situation, everybody could agree to it, at least in theory. I think right now, you have Republicans who want this issue. They want to keep making the case.

They want to be the stars of the Hunter Biden investigation. Mike, I want to talk a little bit more about the politics of this, sort of the electoral politics of this because, you know, a lot of focus on the electoral impact of legal deals has been on the Trump side. But here we have Hunter Biden potentially, like this dragging out longer than you'd think. And just to clarify a little here, because I can, I can see David judging me with his law eyes, right? The argument is that if the investigation is ongoing, that Hunter Biden won't testify in front of Congress because he'll simply invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. So if there was some sort of immunity deal, he could not invoke

his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Now, fun fact, you can't just sort of not show up because you're afraid of self-incriminating. You would have to sit there for each question. So if they could ask questions specifically enough, I think those congressional Republicans are right. But first, first, instance, this deal could never cover a state prosecution. So Hunter Biden can always say, well, you can't ask me about my drug use because a state could prosecute me for that. So I'm invoking my Fifth Amendment right. So it's not quite as like if the investigation is ongoing, he can't testify. He can. You can ask him all sorts of things that don't have criminal liability.

Or that if the investigation were over and he had huge blanket immunity from the feds, that somehow he'd have to spill his guts to Congress. Also not true. But what do you think of the sort of electoral side of this? Look, I mean, it's Republicans, Steve is right. Republicans want to own this issue. They want to be on TV. They would love to be seen, you know, jabbing their fingers toward Hunter Biden sitting at a, sitting at a table and have him say, I plead the fifth or or whatever. But they could do that right now.

They could. But it's so much more fun to have it lose. you know and say and say look at our hands are tied we can't do that i mean there there is such sort of it is playing out like so much bad acting frankly on both sides has been that has been going on for the past six years um which is and i was thinking about this as as as i'm contemplating everything that happened yesterday with the hunter biden a plea deal going awry which is you have Republicans who rightly smells something, right? Something doesn't smell right. Something doesn't seem right. And yet they can't help themselves to sort of go to the most extreme or to the most

conspiratorial explanation. I mean, it is a lot like what Republicans were doing during the Clinton years when it was so much more fun to talk about Vince Foster than to talk to talk about sort of the actual like low level like skeviness going on with the clintons so so you have some of that and then you have you have it's democrats but it's what it really is is institutions uh in this case uh sort of the justice department i mean my perception of this and i think the perception that a lot of voters might take is that the justice department is sort of trying to that they have a politically explosive case They have something that it goes awry and it blows up in their face.

And so they're trying to sort of overmanage it and get a little too cute by half and try to figure out a way to massage it in a way that, you know, takes the political edge off. And what they end up doing is looking like fools, looking incompetent and looking to Republicans like it's a conspiracy. And so everybody is sort of repeating this. I mean, you could say that they repeated this, this was the case with the Russia investigation. You could say it was the case with COVID even, where sort of institutions overcorrect because they want to manage the message. And Republicans take their healthy bit of skepticism and go to the extreme.

So what does this end up looking like politically, like electorally? I guess like the last several. election cycles where, like, Republicans are, like, fired up and angry and all kinds of populist rage about institutions protecting their political enemies. And Democrats are sort of have some self-righteousness about, you know, they're on, they're, they're the ones fighting against and holding the line against these conspiratorial Republicans. The bases come out and, you know, I guess independence sort of just kind of wait to see who seems less crazy. That seems to be what's going on here, like big picture-wise.

I don't know how it shakes out, you know, in the little bit. I think that's right. You know, I think if you look at the way that Fox has covered this, they start with this assumption that Hunter Biden is guilty of all of these things that we know and a lot of things that we don't know and that the Justice Department is in cahoots and we're working to protect him. And I think, you know, let's assume for the sake of argument, Sarah, that you write and that this is much more attributable to incompetence than malice or corruption, it still can feed perceptions

of corruption, right? I mean, it still doesn't. It still doesn't look good. This really doesn't look good. Yeah. And I leave open the possibility that we could learn more that makes this feel more like corruption than incompetence. I'm open to that possibility.

But if you look at the Republican electorate, you have sort of the Fox crowd, the base of the Republican Party who says, look, this is gross. This has been happening for a long time. He's being protected. Look at all the things that are happening in plain sight. And the guys, you know, getting these slaps on the wrist. I think beyond that, there's also this sense. This is probably where, you know, squishier Republicans, independence, and some

Democrats end up. Look, this is bad. This, this is corrupt, but this is sort of how Washington operates. And this is, you know, this is unfortunate. In its own way, that sort of feeds Trump's narrative about the swap as well. I don't think it ultimately, you know, helps him that much or helps Republicans that much. But it does feed this broader sense that Washington is a mess. 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

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E-T-H-O-S dot com slash dispatch. Application times may vary, rates may vary. All right, I want to move on to 2024. Ron DeSantis this week gave an interesting interview where he was asked whether he would consider picking Robert Kennedy Jr. as his running mate. Robert Kennedy Jr. is running in the Democratic primary against Joe Biden. Ron DeSantis answered, no, because even though I'm, you know, down with him on the medical stuff, you know, there's like 70% of issues

we probably don't agree on and you don't pick a vice president who you disagree on with that much. Better to sick him on the FDA or something like that. So not totally clear, but it seemed to be heavily implied, Mike, that Ron DeSantis was saying that he would consider appointing RFK Jr to head the FDA, few interesting things there. One, as competitor, fellow candidate Mike Pence pointed out, why in the world would you pick that guy to run the FDA if you're a conservative Republican who has all these other issues that you might care about, like let's say, MIFA Preston, an abortion-inducing drug that you're not going to agree on with RFK Jr.

but even setting aside the Mike Pence point, the DeSantis team has tried to walk a line when it comes to vaccines. They're pro-vaccine, but vaccines skeptical. This seemed to like just jump on, like dive from the diving board into the water with the RFK Jr. vaccine side of things, which feels very online to me

and not actually particularly representative of where most people are in the country, when it comes to the COVID vaccine at this point. Yeah, I mean, it's a great example of the DeSantis team, and DeSantis himself apparently being not just very online, but sort of captured by what used to be kind of kids are like talk radio world. This was an interview with Clay Travis, who is the founder of Al Kick the Covered.

And my neighbor. And David's neighbor, apparently. this is I mean this is like what what you know what used to be called like boo bait for baba like this is the sort of thing where you Daniel Patrick Mornahan used that term which is great it is designed to be sort of entertaining and in sort of outlandish and what a sort of what a presidential candidate whose plan is to win the nomination and the general election does with that question is say the first part, right? Say, you know, I like his skepticism of vaccines. I guess he feels like he has to say that. I don't personally share that skepticism,

but maybe that's what DeSantis has to say. And then pivot to talk about what he would really like to talk about, which is we really need to change this, that, or the other in FDA, CDC, HHS. Leave RFK Jr. behind because while RFK Jr. is, you know, winning the hearts and and minds of the Clay Travis's of the world. You're right, Sarah. It doesn't really speak to the actual larger, not just the general election population, but even the Republican voting block

that DeSantis, you know, theoretically should be going for, which is like the not very online, the not listening to talk radio every single day, but who still vote Republican and who still vote in Republican primaries. And instead, he sort of, he gives, it's weird for a guy who's so sort of savvy about I'm not giving in to the mainstream media's questions on this, that or the other. When it comes to sort of right wing talk radio online media, which is media, which is in some ways mainstream media for the right, he sort of plays the game in a way that doesn't strike me as very savvy or very away. of his own position right now within the primary, which is he's the only guy left at the moment

to really have that non-Trump position. And yet he sort of can't help himself. He can't help himself. In many ways, it's the same group of people who gave him all of the praise and attention while he was, you know, when he was governor during COVID. But in the end, they were always going to go to Papa Trump. David, this venue. yet feels more like a metaphor for some of the problems the DeSantis campaign is having right

now. They've sort of announced another reset. So the initial reset was we're going to engage with the mainstream media. We're going to do more interviews. You're going to see Ron DeSantis everywhere from now on. He starts with a CNN interview with Jake Tapper. Okay. But they were very clear that it was only a messaging reset or really even a medium reset, not a messaging reset. A comms reset, right? Yeah. But now we're in like, reset number two, which is a staffing reset. He's let go about a third of his staff. And some of those are the very online people, you know, who are sort of catering Twitter, et cetera, social media with like weird, very, very niche online stuff. What say you about second reset? It's feeling

like a lot of resets to me. You know, when I was watching that vignette, It was like you had the DeSantis campaign in a nutshell right there, which really was, you're looking at it. It was sort of like an equivalent of the Kamala Harris campaign from 2020, where you would watch them do something and be like, what? Yes. You would see things from Kamala Harris and you would think the only way this makes sense is if you really are immersed in Twitter. If you're really immersed in Twitter, you can absolutely see why she. she did these things. And that's the same thing with DeSantis.

I mean, it's interesting. Rich Lowry has a piece out today where he's talking about some of DeSantis's problems. And he's saying, well, you know, DeSantis isn't super online because he's not, doesn't really have a presence on some of these other social media platforms where a lot of Republicans are. And that's correct. I mean, it really is when we say too online, we really are talking about a quite specific Twitter subculture.

And what he reminds me of, have you all heard the phrase or the, the, the, the, acronym Netter, N-E-T-T-R. It's a very online thing, which now is telling me I'm too online myself. I could have told you that before. Okay, should I stop talking? But anyway, what it means is no enemies to the right. Oh, and so he... I have heard that.

Yeah, so he's sort of, it's become an acronym, N-E-T-R, Netter. So it's the kind of thing where he's like, no candidates to the right. the right. So his position is that he is staking out the populist reactionary version of the Ted Cruz 2016 campaign, which the Ted Cruz campaign is

Trump's not the real conservative. I'm the real conservative. DeSantis is like Trump's not the real conspiracy theorist. I'm the real conspiracy or Trump's not the real anti-vaxxer. I'm the real anti-vaxer. A lot of it is

just the constant churning. of right-wing Twitter talking points and issues and outrages. And you can really see this in that he actually governs Florida increasingly along these lines as well. When he starts openly speculating, for example, that Florida might look into a shareholder derivative lawsuit over dot dot dot bud light. Then you're thinking, please close the app or have the people around you close the app because this is just at some point getting beyond parody. And I think that's where we are.

He's completely convinced himself that the only avenue to attacking Trump is getting to Trump's right on a lot of these niche issues. And then once he's there, you can't dislodge him when the reality is he's completely sort of misjudged the core of why people are with Trump, which is only partly because of the, well, he fights more effectively than anybody else. Or he's the fighter, he's the fighter, he's the fighter. There is an entire social component to it. There's an entire cultural component to this Trump support

that he's just completely missing. And he's running the Ted Cruz playbook, except not as the True Tea Party conservative, but he's running the Ted Cruz playbook as I'm Trumpier than Trump and how do you define that through these really niche online wars that I'm going to attach legislation to, or I'm even going to wrap, not both arms, but one arm around RFK Jr. about

and he's just not getting why he's floundering, but at the same time I feel like he's a little bit trapped because he's created this sort of troll army or he's attracted this kind of troll army to him, and they have zero patience, zero for any softening, for any weakening, for any moderation, And so I think he's kind of trapped by his own constituency in some ways. David, you described him as floundering, and I just now want to spend 20 minutes talking about

whether he's floundering or foundering. Oh. This is one of my big things. I knew Steve would be into this. But you know what? We're not going to do that. We'll let people in the comments section discuss their preferred term. They do have different meetings, but often interchangeable in the context that you're using them.

Steve, let's talk about some of the other candidates, though. We now have the governor of North Dakota making the debate stage, which is surprising to me. I'll admit it. I did not think that this whole give us a dollar and we'll send you a $20, you know, Apple gift card or whatever was going to be effective. He has a name, Sarah. It's Doug Bergam. Thank you. I always remember it.

I always want to call him Norman Borlaug, to be honest. That's how well his name idea is going. is that someone who does this for a living can't quite be sure that they've got it right. All right, so he makes the debate stage, Steve, and I don't know his name, so I'm assuming most people don't either. You have Tim Scott certainly getting some good coverage

about how Republican donors especially are giving him another look. You have Nikki Haley pulling ahead in a few polls. And then, of course, I think we'd be remiss if we didn't at this point start mentioning Vivek Ramoswamy as someone who is showing strength in polls beyond expectations, at least. Yeah, I think the Republican field is a mess.

All of those things that you said are true. None of them seem to be mattering at this point. The only person who's shown, I would argue, real upward movement in polls pretty consistently, lately is Ramoswamy, who is basically, I mean, he's not basically. He is saying, I will be Trumpier than Trump. I will go further.

We had a dispatch politics report on this last week based on discussion with him who's told our reporters and others. Trump didn't go far enough. I will go further than Trump on these America First issues. He's the one who's doing better. Which for a lot of people makes sense, right? They like the policies and they think Trump's a flawed vehicle for them. I think that's right. And Ramoswamy, even though I think if you look at his message, consistently it's a pretty dark message has the ability to be somewhat optimistic about this.

He takes the Trump message, takes it further and somehow recast it as slightly more optimistic. So you can see where that might appeal to people. But if you look, let's just take a step back, look at the Republican primary process from the beginning to where we are today. All of those people that you mentioned, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Doug Bergam, other, Ron DeSantis, certainly I thought at this point that there would be a significant challenge to Donald Trump, that somebody would have run a campaign that would allow him or her to be a direct competitor to Donald Trump. That has not happened. I mean, Trump is dominated. he's two, three, four times the next closest Republican in virtually all of the polling. And one candidate who's showed somewhat consistent upward movement is the guy who says

he's going to be trumpier than Trump. So it may be the case that Tim Scott has a moment. I sort of always thought Tim Scott would have a moment. He's a tremendously appealing person, tremendously appealing character. I think he has, you know, he is somebody who's put his optimism forward. He's campaigning on optimism. But he hasn't separated himself from the field. He hasn't become the alternative to Trump, in part because he's afraid of criticizing Trump.

He doesn't want to criticize Trump. Nikki Haley will eventually tiptoe out and offer something that, you know, if you squint hard enough from a long enough distance, can feel a little bit like it might be getting towards Trump criticism. Republicans are not running against Donald Trump. They don't want to. not really taking him on. He's had moments. You've had Ron DeSantis. Mike Pence has probably been the most forward leading in some regard. But in terms of creating distinctions, they've just failed. And this is, I think, in some ways, Ron DeSantis' biggest failing and where he's been, you know, a real flop of a candidate. You can imagine the campaign that Ron DeSantis could have run.

He had momentum. He had money. He had money. he was billed from the outset as the alternative to Trump. He was billed as the guy who could be Trumpy on some policies, but not the kind of crazy, give us the kind of crazy conspiracy stuff that Trump has given us and not be the online freak that Donald Trump has been for eight years. And instead, DeSantis leans into the stuff about Trump that people don't like, broadly speaking, but might win him a Republican, might win him some votes among the basiest base of Republicans. In almost, you know, his own record as governor has become almost an afterthought.

It's like he'll say things like, yeah, I'd consider RFK as FDA or CDC head. And oh, by the way, I was a pretty good governor. How do you not lead with the effectiveness as a governor? the RFK comments for me are as close to disqualifying as anything. RFK is a guy who's been a left-wing freak on vaccines for decades, decades. And not only did DeSantis say that he might consider him to run the FDA to use him to stick him on the FDA and the CDC, before he did that, he said there are issues where we don't agree. But man, he's right on the medical stuff. That's bonkers. Like, that's insane.

And by the way, medical stuff wasn't limited to the COVID vaccine. No. I mean, the stuff that RFK Jr. says about all vaccines, vaccines causal link to autism, you know, cell phones and brain cancer. Like, he has lots of thoughts about medicine. It's so bonkers. I think people don't really appreciate how crazy he is. Like, and how crazy he's been. for as long as he spent. But here's a point, final point. This is where I'll end. Ron DeSantis has given Clay Travis interviews before, right?

Clay Travis has a popular nationally syndicated talk radio. Now she's taking his outkick stuff to Fox. And he's popular with the super online right. It's not surprising that if you go on and you talk to people like that, or like we've said before, Ron DeSantis, giving one of his first hangout interviews to Benny Johnson, also an extremely on-line conspiracy right winger. Of course, Clay Travis is going to push him in that direction. Clay Travis is the one who said we'd have a couple hundred deaths from COVID.

He wants to be vindicated. He wants to go back and revisit the things that he said and have somebody tell him he's right. So they've moved, he was wrong about COVID. He was wrong as he could possibly be about actual COVID. And it's a faxed. So then they shift to the COVID backs. And they're looking for things that are not provably false so that they can float more conspiracy theories. It's a choice to go and visit those people. It's a choice to spend time with those people. Of course, you're going to be driven there. Now, a good candidate and somebody who actually believes things and has principles

would say, oh, my RFK Jr., are you crazy? Have you not paid attention to what he said over the past 30 years? Of course, I wouldn't consider him for anything. But that's not right of the same case. 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, David, will you set us up on aliens, please? What happened this week? Well, there was a hearing. Speaking of conspiracy, this is a great transition. Man, we hate conspiracy theories. Now let's do a serious segment on UFOs and aliens. We hate conspiracy theories. Unless they're true.

You can tell who wanted to do this segment and who didn't want to do this segment. Yeah. There was hearing U.S. House of Representatives over the unidentified aerial phenomenon, phenomenon, UAPs, which I'm still not used to UAPs over UFOs. Is it because phenomenon starts with a P but sounds like an F and it's just throwing you off? No, I just grew up with the UFO thing. like it's it well well it's so funny because the new york times news coverage of this basically uses ufo and says uapes as the federal government calls which i really appreciate actually

it's like we all know what's ufos no but it's this is part of the marketing campaign for crazy people who believe in this stuff to rename it right i mean this is like let's make it more acceptable now we have uapps instead of ufos well it's the rebranding to try to reach skeptics like you, Steve. What do we have to do? So there was a hearing in the House Representatives. Various witnesses were brought in of various degrees of credibility, in my view, who were talking about encounters with UAPs. Now, I put this in a couple of, let's put this in three buckets as a shout out to Sarah and advisory opinions. So bucket number one will talk about pilot slash airplane encounters, which are the most interesting to me.

So these are when you have F-18 pilots or airline pilots who have encountered things in the air that have been recorded, in other words, it's not just their eyeball testimony, they have been recorded on video cameras, on the various sensors that American aircraft have and have behaved in utterly inexplicable ways. And this is something that is not new. The Times, in fact, covered this back 2017-2018 with some testimony, for example, from F-18 pilots. That is really, really compelling.

Then you have this other kind of testimony, which is, hey, I'm from the deep state, and I've got stuff to share with you. Okay. That's sort of the second bucket. It's not as incredible as the bucket three, which is I'm not from the government, but I've got insights into the government

that I'm here to share with you, which is really not so much the focus of the hearing. But it was more buckets one and two. Okay, but where does the transcript, there's the part where a congresswoman asks, did you recover anything from the crash site? And he says, yes. And she says, was it human?

And he says, no, it was non-human biologics. Now, I just want to, like, can I just tell you my own thoughts on some of this? which is, I think everyone was like, ah, non-human biologics, now we're in Independence Day territory. Couldn't non-human biologics literally be anything else? Like, bacteria? Yeah, yeah.

Or octopus? Like, I have a whole theory that if there's, I think numerically, the likelihood of there being life on some other planet is incredibly high. But then you have to ask yourself, what is that life most likely like? We are sort of an evolutionary dead end. Look, our birth rates are going down,

There's all sorts of reasons your birth rate isn't going down. Mike's doing his part. I'll grant you. He's a little bit above replacement value in his household. But that, you know, they're actually far more likely to just be a bunch of amoebas running around. Or maybe octopus. They're very smart, but solo creatures. They can't really take over much because they refuse to work together and don't live very long.

And then there's, of course, the study that says that things keep evolving into crabs. and so that crabs are actually maybe the most evolutionarily advanced because five different times things have evolved separately into crabs. Can I just pause right here? A hermit crab and a king crab, no, no, you cannot. Stay out of this. This is so great. Look, we don't need you here.

This is like, this is like talking about being, being in our own world. Do you, Sarah, do you realize you just introduced that by saying, and then of course there's the study about how everything evolves into crafts. Like, this is common knowledge and every single person, you know, like, I don't even know what the equivalent would be. I don't know what the equivalent would be, you know. Of course there's the study that everything evolves into craft. Of course. You know, he's just talking about this yesterday with my friends at the bar.

We have had extended conversations about the crab people, Steve. This is, this is, this is new, this is not new stuff. All right. So anyway, the non-biologics. What bucket is that going into, David? That is going into bucket maximum skepticism because anything that depends on large numbers of people across multiple American generations of government employment, maintaining absolute total radio silence

about the biggest story and the history of the world, color me skeptical. If it is, I'm an F-18 pilot and I'm coming out immediately to say, my censors picked up something that I can't explain, that is much more how government works compared to, oh, we have 17,000 people since 1951

who've been sworn to absolute secrecy and kept that secret. But see, David, here's the problem. If you're telling me that my belief in aliens needs to be in bucket one, then I'm out because bucket one is the most explainable bucket. That there's basically, you know, basically, you know, laser weapon technology being tested that these guys haven't seen, aren't privy to, whatever it may be.

So like, yeah, all sorts of, there are so many explanations for why an F-18 pilot and especially a commercial pilot's going to see something in the air that they can't explain. that has absolutely nothing, like the opposite of aliens to do with. Yeah, I don't think that anyone would say much to my profound disappointment that we have established the existence of aliens. I'm saying of all of the buckets, what is most interesting to me is not the, I'm coming forward

the first member of the deep state ever to blow the lid off of the vast labyrinthine deception operation that is encompassed. 40, 50, 60, 80 years of American history involving hundreds, if not thousands of federal employees and not a PEPA of it has emerged until now versus in the way things we've seen things actually work in real time, which is with the lag of a year or two or three or maybe even immediately people see something really unexplained and say, I saw something really unexplained and then come forward. That's so much more interesting to me. And you know, we did have this UAP report that came out, and I wrote a Sunday newsletter about

it, like, what are the religious implications? And I think I said, when the aliens arrive, not if. But, you know, there were elements of the report that were basically like, we can't at this moment explain what the censors recorded, which is not the same thing as saying, and therefore aliens. It's just saying, we cannot, with our present technology, explain what we recorded. And that, to me, is very interesting. Let's look at that. I'm fascinated by that. Mike? Is there a question? Look at resignation on Sarah's face. Look, you're the person who says, we're all going to be crabs. Give me this. Like, give me some intrigue about aliens. There's a great Kurt Vonnegut book called Galapagos that I just

I'm going to throw out there that I highly recommend. It's a short read. It's fictional. And let's just say we don't all evolve into crabs, but it's not that far off. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. If we're going to talk about alien science fiction, I would much prefer a world or a universe that looks like what C.S. Lewis describes in his space trilogy, which is like basically,

you know, like every place. planet has like aliens that are some, uh, you know, manifestation of angels. I don't know. I mean, like, I just find it all so, uh, I guess I'm just a skeptic. Like I do you, here are the two questions. Okay. All right. That's my question. Do you think that there are life on other planets? I think it's possible. Yes. Okay. Two, do you believe that any species able to know and harness the science to jump galaxies will exterminate itself before it has the chance to do so. I have not given that question thought. I just, I do not think that there is, the likelihood is not zero, but is near zero, that there is another form of life that has evolved to, to where

we are. Yeah, but near zero times billions upon trillions upon quadrillions of stars that are out there. Not to mention the planets that are around there, like, near zero is a lot of intelligent life out there then. Yeah, I suppose. That's how the math works. Yeah, I know that's how the math works. I just give me some evidence. Give me some real evidence, not some sort of evidence that is being filtered through,

you know, a guy who's calling himself a whistleblower and interpreting, you know, information that's been filtered through thousands of different. I mean, like, it just... All right. When the aliens come, you guys aren't in fact. I'm excited to the tea party. Yeah, no, okay, fine. Can I, can I just interject right here?

Wait, no, Steve needs to answer the two questions. Steve has had his say. So the, I've got more say. I've got more say. I need to put, I need to make sure that you guys, the people understand that you guys fit squarely into the RFK Jr. category of, of alien. See, this, we don't need this.

I just said there were amoebas on other planets. I think I'm actually like on the side of science here. What does the crab study say? Studies. Crab studies. But let's be fair here because producer Adam sent me a note saying we need to do, we do need to give some background to the whistleblower. So this guy, David Grush, so this is not like some guy who was on a history channel

documentary about mermaids and has branched out into UFOs. This guy is a Air Force officer. He was part of the National Reconnaissance Office representative or he was the National Reconnaissance Office representative to the unidentified Air Force representative to the unidentified aerial phenomena task force. So he actually was a person who was involved in the, his role, one of his roles within the government was looking at the UAP phenomenon. And so this is why a lot of people have paid a heck of a lot more attention to his public claims because he actually had a role. In other words, he's the kind of person that I, I would say, hey, if all of this was real,

this is exactly the kind of person we would have heard from in 1958 or whenever. But David, in order to prosecute him for perjuring himself by giving false testimony under oath, you'd have to prove that he knew his testimony was false. Like, he's not getting charged with perjury. No, no, I know, I know. We can't prove that there aren't aliens. And we certainly can't prove he knows there aren't aliens. Of course.

That's why he's in bucket two for me and he's not in bucket one, which is with sensors, with gun camera footage that you can. can see, you can see it, the gun camera footage. We are showing you unidentified aerial phenomenon that we cannot explain. That to me is a lot more interesting than bucket number two. This guy, and certainly more interesting than bucket number three, which is History Channel Mermaid Territory. All right, Steve. I mostly did this segment just so we could prove that we could do it with you on here. I'm glad you did it. You were gone. We had that off the rails. I have a story.

I mean, this is not new. Certainly, you've had people thinking about UFOs, wondering about UFOs, and asking the U.S. government questions about its UFO program for a long time. In 2000, three days after George W. Bush picked Dick Cheney to be his running mate, they were doing an event in Springdale, Arkansas. And this UFO enthusiast named Charles Huffer came up to Bush. said, half the country thinks UFOs are real. Would you finally tell us what the hell is going on? And Bush, as you can imagine, wanted to have some fun with this guy. So he's standing next to

Cheney and sort of motions in Cheney's direction and says, this man knows. He was Secretary of Defense. So it's sort of a put on. Bush is standing next to Cheney a few minutes later and Huffer comes around again, and Bush gestures to Cheney and says that Cheney now has a new assignment if they're elected, and Bush says it'll be the first thing he will do. He'll get right on it. So this is all like a big joke, right? But in the UFO community, they take Bush literally, and they think that now Cheney has been given the assignment to go and look at this thing.

And in the UFO community, they began calling this Bush's promise. to go and really get to the bottom of what was happening in UFOs and UFOologists. So Cheney is, they win the election, Chies in office, and he does an interview on the Diane Ream show in Washington in the spring of 2011. And they get a call. It's a call-in show. They get a call. And this guy called Shannon says, and I'm reading his quote here,

Since the statement made by George Bush last July, there's a vicious rumors circulating in the UFO community that you've been read into the UFO program. So my question to you is, in any of your government jobs, have you ever been briefed on the subject of UFOs? And if you have, when was it, and what were you told? And Cheney, Cheney has a pretty good sense of humor about such matters, responds to the guy. well, if I had been briefed on it, I'm sure it was classified. And I can't talk about it, which of course, leads to this explosion of new stories. Oh, Cheney knows, but he's, this is, this goes on and on and on. Cheney later denied that he had been part of those briefings.

But look, that's like going to be literally true because at that point, they like absolutely, there are people who are getting briefed on, hey, our F-18 pilots saw this. We think it is probably the Chinese testing some new technology, but we don't know what it is yet, so we're trying to figure that out. Technically, then, you've been briefed

on an unidentified aerial phenomena, and it was classified. And look, you know, in that exchange, Dick Cheney didn't do anything to say that they don't exist, right? So all I know is that I think advisory opinions

will be vindicated here eventually, and that is, when the aliens arrive, they will be crab people. Can you explain to people what advisory opinions is? When the aliens arrive, they will be crab people, and that will square the circle. I think that's right. So I'll just leave you. Kurt Fonda gets Galapagos. It's a great book.

I highly recommend it. I think it actually, honestly, I could have just done a reading from it for the last 20 minutes, and we would have been better off. I'll let y'all decide whether we did it not worth your time today. listeners and um i think we just did it i'm leaving it to them to decide steve leaving it to them maybe we skipped it maybe we didn't we do something important to talk about at the end um if we don't do a formal not worth your time we're at the end to be clear correct um and and unfortunately the thing that we have to talk about is big and exciting um and new and we've probably lost

everybody listening uh through that last statement But I want to talk to you guys about Sarah, then all the network combined. I want to talk specifically to Sarah and Mike about this announcement that we are making this week about a new project that you all are helming. And allow me to introduce it a little bit because I can be excited and enthusiastic and brag about both of you in ways that you can't, even if you're being your most immodent. So we are launching a new newsletter and a new project. It's called The Collision, and it will cover, teamed up by Mike and on a team featuring Mike and Sarah, this collision between law and politics that we're seeing in the 2024 presidential election, which we think is truly unprecedented. Unprecedented has been thrown a lot around a lot over the past eight years and a lot of the things it's been used to describe have not in fact been unprecedented. This is unprecedented. We have a leading Republican candidate, former president, under indictment

in real legal jeopardy in a couple of different ways. And in order to understand what's happening in the presidential race and to understand in our politics, not just at the presidential level, but as it relates to political parties, as it relates to other Republican candidates, I think it's going to be absolutely crucial that we understand what's going on in the legal with us as we talk about these things. So Sarah and Mike have come together to work on this new project called The Collision. And maybe Sarah, I'll start with you. Can you give people a sense of how you're thinking about it and what you want to do with it? First of all, Mike and I have known each other for a long time now. This is really a coming together reunion situation for us. So

that part I think we're just kind of pumped about because that'll be fun. We were on opposite sides of the mic, if you will, for the last 10, 15 years, however long it's been. But that part's fun. But I think we see each other's skill sets as highly simpatico, right? Like, Mike does all of this great reporting. He's a political veteran when it comes to all of these races. and I'll bring the legal side and the operative side and we're going to really focus on

how the legal stuff going on, legal stuff is the technical term, how the legal stuff is going to fit into this political race heading into 2024, because there's no way that it doesn't. And yet you sort of need some expertise to navigate your way around all of this stuff And our hope is that we'll be able to combine the political expertise with the legal expertise,

explain the law side, and that will help you understand the political side. Yeah, and I would just say as we were talking about this, as we were kicking this around a little bit, it occurred to me that we have in both of you, like, we are truly uniquely positioned. I mean, Sarah, you have worked at the highest levels of the Department of Justice. You understand how these investigations work, both in terms of sort of technically how they unfold, what we can expect, what goes into an indictment, what a target letter means, all of these things that for non-lawyers feel like legal jargon and, you know, and things that we don't understand right away. And you've also worked at sort of the highest levels of presidential campaigns.

So you've seen how the campaign dynamics, the internal dynamics, how you think about messaging this. And Mike, Sarah, as you pointed out, you've been working. covering these things and Republican politics specifically for more than a decade on Capitol Hill out covering the campaigns, traveling around with them, covered the Trump White House back at the weekly standard. And we think this is just where we really are uniquely positioned to cover this in a way that you can't, you're not going to be able to get elsewhere. I mean, we talk about this internally. And, you know, there are some areas where we're not going to be able to compete with the New York Times, right? I mean, the dispatch has 30 staffers,

the New York Times sometimes has 20 people working on an individual story in-depth investigation. But in something like this, we have, in both of you, I think, depth of experience and understanding that will allow us to really provide editorial and editorial product that other people can't. And Mike, I guess I'd ask you what you're looking forward to, what do you think this will look like? How do you think this will unfold? Well, I am a reporter, and so I expect, and I think we're already seeing that in the first edition of this newsletter, which is part of the product, some reporting on this collision, this intersection between politics and the law. And sometimes that, you know, means talking with operatives, talking with campaigns, talking with people who are, whose job it is or whose expertise is to navigate these moments and kind of pushing them on pushing these sources I have, the Republican Party and then the Democratic Party, to kind of address or think through. the unprecedented nature of this.

So, for instance, I talked with a few Democratic operatives this week about, you know, kind of pose this hypothetical. We've got a likelihood that Donald Trump is going to be on trial starting in May of 2024, right in the middle of a presidential election year, right as the primaries are wrapping up, if he wins the nomination, he's going to be on the road to, to the convention, to accepting the nomination there, the general election will essentially have started around this same time. So I asked all these Democrats, what does that look like? How do you think through that? I mean, I like to think that, you know, I've seen enough these

campaigns to kind of know how campaign operatives, how candidates sort of react to events. And now we've got this sort of heightened, extraordinary moment. So it won't simply be a moment where a news event happens and a presidential candidate takes advantage of it. Now the news moment will be the presidential candidate himself, Donald Trump. I can foresee daily rallies outside of the courthouse in Florida, for instance. What does that look like? How do you counter-program that if you're a Democrat?

what do you do to take advantage of that if you're the Donald Trump campaign? I mean, just these are questions I want to be asking, I want to be learning, I want to break news on. And so I think this is something that where we can really add value to that. And then you add into the mix, Sarah's own expertise, you know, there are going to be questions for campaigns that campaign reporters and other outlets aren't going to think to ask, that we will because we also have this knowledge of the ins and outs of how trials work or how a DOJ investigation works. And in the same way that very, very talented justice reporters

don't always consider the politics of things. So I think we really come together with sort of a unique mix here, and we can sort of punch above our weight in that sense. And if that sounds like something you'd like, you'd like to get into your inbox, go to the dispatch.com, check out the newsletter list. It's called The Collision. You can also look at all the other newsletters. Maybe you're missing out on, but I mean, really, the collision. It's called The Collision, The Dispatch.com. You can sign up there. With that, thank you for joining us on this very special and very weird edition of The Dispatch podcast. We'll see in the comments section.

We'll see whether we're all crabs, we're all heading to crabs, or floundering or foundering wins out in the comments. Thanks. Thank you.