The Young Turks - Donny Defiant

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

Trump plots revenge against Biden in an unhinged post-arrest speech. Matt Gaetz slams his House GOP colleagues who "prostitute" themselves to lobbyists after being "yelled" at for derailing the House. Sanders vows to oppose Biden nominees until more action is taken to cut drug prices. In ""climate-wrecking"" reversal, Shell ditches plans for oil production cut and hikes dividend. Hosts: John Iadarola, Jordan Uhl Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to The Young Turks, the online news show. Make sure to follow and rate our show with not one, not two, not three, not four, but five stars. You're awesome. Thank you. Welcome one at all to the Young Turks. I'm John Ida Rola. That right there, Jordan Yule. Jordan, how's it going? How are you? I'm good. I'm good. In case anyone doesn't know, by the way, of course, Jordan Yule hosts Game Busters every Friday.

Am I right in my belief that it's not happening this weekend? Or this week, I should say. It's happening as far as I know. I thought in my docket. Are you canceling it? I'm not, I don't think I have that authority unless maybe I try. No. So what's going on then on the Game Busters that totally is happening this Friday?

We'll probably end up playing jackbox because that's what the audience always wants to play. So if you wanna play jackbox games with us, join us on Friday night over on Twitch, 8.30 p.m. Eastern time. Sounds good, thank you. Very excited to be doing the show with you, Jordan. In fact, we have a couple of stories that were selected specifically to tantalize your interests. I think that you're gonna like some of these surveillance related stories that we have. Bernie Sanders trying to fight back against price gouging and the pharmaceutical industry. That's gonna be a lot of fun.

And we are going to be closing things off by checking in on a little pledge that was made by an oil company to drastically cut their investment and production of oil and gas. They've got a lot of good press a couple of years ago about that. Let's see how they're actually doing and how it's likely to go going forward. But before we get into all of that stuff, we're going to check in on a little story that hasn't really been picked up much by the national media. Jordan, you might not be familiar with this. But we found out that a former president of the United States was actually arraigned, was arrested earlier this week. And I think we should talk a little bit about that, starting with this. Hillary Clinton broke the law and she didn't get indicted.

Joe Biden broke the law and in many other ways we're finding out. And so far has not gotten indicted. I did everything right and they indicted me. I mean, how do you not trust a guy like that? a guy who speaks to his supporters on the day that he was arrested, like, like that. How do you not trust a guy like that, Jordan? It was really the perfect defense by Donald Trump, who at that point had gone to a Cuban restaurant and then he eventually flies back to his golf club to be surrounded by high-price

donors to what about, about Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, as if whether they had committed crimes has anything to do with whether he committed crimes and whether there should be consequences for that. And the way that he delivered the what aboutism was also just, it was just so perfect for 2023 America. He just says they committed crimes. And we're finding out about many more. No specifics, no details, no evidence or anything passing for it. But it's enough, thanks to the cult of personality that he's built up on the right to get all of his followers to be sure that he's completely innocent. What do you think? I know that you were a big fan of that video, by the way.

Video's hysterical. That's Trump in his element. The delivery, our colleague here, Brooke Marks pointed out, it sounds a lot like the slug from Monsters Inc. It's just, I couldn't get over how animated it was. He's got this raspy voice. I did everything right and they indicted me. I must have watched it about 20 times.

Yeah, I can't stop. He's deflecting from the point. Oh, it's incredible. It's amazing. So I'm really glad you included it for everyone's benefit. He's ultimately here trying to deflect from the fact that he's the first former president to be indicted of a felony. This is a very serious potential crime. He's trying to point fingers at other people, notably often excluding Pence who also had classified documents at his home.

The thing was, you know, Pence, Biden, I'm sure Obama has some documents somewhere. So cooperated. If his justification is, hey, this is a messy process transitioning out of the White House, and they just happened to be here, we would have given them back. Well, he should have done that when the archives asked for them. He shouldn't have been waiving nuclear secrets or documents pertaining to a potential attack on Iran in front of people at Mar-a-Lago. It was very clear he knew he had them, and he was proud of them and wanted to show just how important he was for having them. I mean, these are totally distinguishable scenarios from the other former presidents or former vice. vice presidents who also had access or in their possession classified documents. He knows the walls are closing in. And I'm not a big like, oh, they're finally, finally got them this time because people who are in power in this country get away with a lot of stuff. Very rarely do we see powerful people ever face punishment or prosecution for what they did. He's just in jeopardy and that could upend his 2024 run. That's why he's desperate. I don't want to get people's hopes up and say he's for sure going to

prison, but it is pretty ridiculous that we have people many in the past couple years who worked in the government who had taken documents home, maybe accidentally, and were punished in way harsher ways than potentially Trump could face. Yeah, I'm basically dwelling in that sort of similar, I guess, middle ground in terms of expectations. I can think of multiple ways in which Donald Trump could not end up going to jail. But I do want to be clear about my expectations anyway, of all of those different ways that he doesn't go to jail, none of them appear to be, oh, it turns out he was innocent. Turns out he didn't really do it or no, that's not, like theoretically the judge that he appointed could get him off or he could become president

and pardon himself or become president and fire all of the investigators. Joe Biden could pardon him. There's a lot of insane ways that he could not end up in prison. But just on the merits, seems unlikely to be it. By the way, before we move into one of the specific defenses, he's trying to give himself, I want to throw out to you into the audience. On Monday on the damage report, Francesca Fiorentini said that the reason that she doesn't have much hope is that across the world in quote unquote democracies, there have been a number of major scandals around, you know, former heads of state. And she said that she could not think of one instance in which they had legitimately ended up in prison.

Now, trying to come up with an example. Even Berlusconi was on house arrest. He's now passed earlier this week. So if anyone can think of an example of that, send it a message and we'll read it during the social break. For now, though, let's turn now to one of the preemptive defenses. I'm not referring to it was planted or whatever. No, this is seemingly more substantive.

Donald Trump, in his initial defense after the arrest, made multiple obviously false claims about the Presidential Records Act. Take a look at that. As president, the law that applies to this case is not the Espionage Act, but very simply the Presidential Records Act, which is not even mentioned in this ridiculous 44-page indictment. Under the Presidential Records Act, which is civil, not criminal, I had every right to have these documents. Judge Amy Berman-Jackson's decision. States under the statutory scheme established by the Presidential Records Act, the decision to segregate personal materials from presidential records is made by the president during

the president's term and in the president's sole discretion. You're surprised to hear that, aren't you? No, they're first of all, no, they're not surprised to hear that because, you you've been saying stuff like that constantly, all of your allies have been saying stuff like that. They've been saying stuff like that so that they don't have to say anything about the actual charges against you. They don't want to come anywhere near that. So they're saying vague stuff about the Presidential Records Act. Well, let's push past vague stuff. Let's get specific about the Presidential Records Act, which he is claiming there is his ultimate defense

against all of this. Although, and there's a couple different things he said there that we're going to return to. One that I want to start off with is this guy says, forget the espionage act. It's all about the Presidential Records Act, which proves that I'm innocent. But then he also mentions, by the way, it's civil, not criminal, seeming to be a bit defensive even there where, okay, maybe it doesn't save me, but even then, it's just going to be like the E. Gene Carroll thing, right? I'm just going to owe money. I'm certainly not going to be going to jail. Well, let's talk about what it actually says, what it actually does. The Presidential Records Act says that all presidential records

belong to the federal government the moment the president leaves office. By having official records at Maralago after his presidency, Trump was in clear contravention of that law. Let's zoom in on a specific sentence inside of the Presidential Records Act. Upon the conclusion of a president's term of office, or if a president serves consecutive terms upon the conclusion of the last term, the archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody control and preservation of and access to the presidential records of that president. And our producer points out, he quoted an actual sentence from the Presidential Records Act

inside of that speech right there, but he left off an important point. He said that the separation of the official and the personal records is up to the sole discretion of the president, but he left off during the president's term. Like, nobody thinks that you can just decide years later as the FBI is banging down your door that then you get to separate it. More importantly, it's a meaningless defense. The presidential records that are talked about in the presidential record act are personal records. They're notes and letters and things like that.

They're not official documentation from the national security apparatus. Nobody thinks that that's what the act is actually regulating. Anyway, we're throwing a lot of stuff out there. Jordan, what do you think? Yeah, again, he's trying to distract and mislead people, in part because he knows his audience is just to eat it up. But it's ultimately very confusing, even for people who pay attention to this stuff. And what he's trying to do is just muddy the waters. So that leaves people with a sense of uncertainty. They don't know where they fall on it. Oh, maybe he actually can have it. Why can't

he have it? But again, to go back to what we talked about earlier, these are nuclear documents. These are documents pertaining to a potential attack on Iran. That's not stuff that just should be laying around anyone's house. Those are really sensitive things with national security and foreign policy complications. The funniest defense that I saw about this was, I think, on Fox, it was Washington Examiner, conservative columnist, and Byron York, and he's talking about how this is really okay, ultimately just because Trump likes souvenirs and collecting memorabilia and trying to conflate this with a letter that he received from Kim Jong Il.

And he just, he tried to conflate the two, again, disregarding the fact these are very sensitive documents and that Trump even admitted we have records showing that he admitted he shouldn't have had them. And they were classified. And he didn't declassify them. And it was potentially a problem for him. That's in the record. And he just kept them. So this whole thing is just a distraction act. And it's really sad to see that his audience and his supporters are just going to lap it up. Yeah. Yeah, there's a couple things that I wish could be true so that I could modify the experience that we're all having as we navigate this issue. The first would be, I don't actually hope this, but I kind of right now hope someday I want to support a politician that turns out to be a massive criminal and a massive liar and a grifter and a con man so that I could experience what that's like as I try to navigate, wait, am I still going to have loyalty to this person who deserves absolutely none of it? Many right wiggers seem to have no problem with that whatsoever. Thankfully, with the politicians that I've supported particularly

for president, I haven't had to deal with that much yet. But it seems like an interesting thing viewed from the outside. Also, wouldn't it be great, Jordan, if, because the airwaves are filled. They have been now, they have been four months with people debating the different aspects of this, the merits, the defenses and all that. Wouldn't it be amazing if right wingers had to grapple with literally any of the facts of the story that Donald Trump would have to. Like when they say, well, it was just memorabilia. It was just nothing or whatever. We already know he took a whole bunch of stuff. That's true. Some of it might even classify as memorabilia. It doesn't mean he gets to have it, but maybe it's just memorabilia. Maybe it's,

as Ben Shapiro says, he just likes to have stuff or whatever, as if that's a defense, as if he would apply that to a petty criminal who's stealing candy from a store. Then he's subpoenaed and he begins a multi-phase scheme to hang on to his favorite stuff. The stuff that is not letters from foreign leaders, it's war plans, it's nuclear program materials, those sorts of things. When he's having the documents moved, when he's implying to his lawyer that they should just get rid of them or say that they don't have them, none of that is consistent with it's just memorabilia. The fact that he's taking certain documents to Bedminster and then showing them off to people. When they are highly classified, highly sensitive documents, the idea that it's just like a particularly good menu,

from a state ball that he went to is utter nonsense. And what the reason that you mentioned it, I'm sure the reason I mentioned that the tape and all that, the conversations with Evan Corcoran is none of this was accidental. None of this was just die biffed it. This was so intentional and thought out, not well thought out, he made tons of mistakes why he allowed himself to be recorded, I'll never know. But this was clearly a conscious series of decisions and none of his right wing defenders have had to grapple with literally any. They don't they don't acknowledge any of these facts that we're talking about. Totally, they don't have to because they live in this world where facts don't matter. But juxtapose

how they're reacting to Trump and justifying it, making excuses for it with how they treated people in the past, how they talked about people like Edward Snowden or Reality Winner, who leaked documents in the national interest, in the public's interest. People, as we'll get to later in the show, especially in the case of Snowden, had a right to know that don't, like they wanted to claim. Those documents did not imperil us as a nation, did not jeopardize our national security, and didn't strain relations with foreign countries. These are, this was information that they leaked in good faith because they wanted to blow the whistle on something. And they were deemed a traitor, they were, you know, hit with ridiculous charges. They're still going after

Stone, obviously, and reality winner served her time. But they threw the book at these people. And Trump, I mean, this is like under Section 702, what they're going after him for. I mean, it's the same law that he signed. He wanted to make an example of people who mishandle classified documents. This is the world that he wanted. He's getting what he wanted. And now they can't, they can't acknowledge that hard truth. Yeah, normalized presidents going to jail for laws that they signed. I just want to see more of that going forward. But anyway, we're going to jump into a few of the other talking points that you might hear as we cruise through this legal process. Donald Trump loves to talk about some sort of supposed ongoing negotiation

that he and I guess all former presidents are supposed to have with the National Archives, where you just take whatever you want, you go about your business and six months later or two years later, you're still just sending like DMs back and forth about whether you're gonna comply with what they want. Of course, there's nothing to this. That's not actually how it works literally at all. But I want to give credit to Donald Trump for in his attempt to roll out this defense, making it as comical and buffoonish as possible. Take a look at this. Can be seen in the picture where someone not me, I wonder who it might have been, dumped one of the very neatly arranged boxes all over the floor. They were full of newspapers, press clippings,

thousands of pictures, thousands and thousands of White House pictures. clothing, memorabilia, and much, much more. I hadn't had a chance to go through all the boxes. It's a long, tedious job, takes a long time, which I was prepared to do, but I have a very busy life. I've had a very busy life. They make it more busy because you're always fighting. Okay, so again, no, you're not in an ongoing negotiation.

No, you're not supposed to take this stuff, and then if you get around to unpacking your bags someday, someday you hand over the attack plans against Iran. That's not how that works. Also, like, there's a lot to fact check in that. I want to do one of the pettier fact checks. If you have time to crash countless weddings and eat people's chocolate cake, you got time to go through your presidential records.

I know that nobody likes to unpack. I've come back from trips and left my bag for like six weeks or whatever. But like, you know that you are being hounded for this stuff. You've received subpoenas. Nobody subpoenaed me to unpack my bathing suits. If they had, I probably would have done it sooner. It's just so comical and it's frustrating, Jordan, as you alluded to earlier, to know that they're gonna eat up every bit of that. Because fundamentally, it's not even that they find him to be persuasive or find his arguments to be convincing.

It's that they do not care if he broke the law and they never will. Yeah, and that's that's frustrating illustration of the state of American politics. It's ultimately, you know, the word cult is always thrown around, but I don't know, who cares? Like, who cares what they are exactly? It's just frustrating to see that no matter what happens, no matter what they do, the level of corruptions that they reach, it doesn't matter. Because they're still going to back them because that those people, the people in their party are not on the other side. Their politics are just, how can we humiliate, destroy, harass, target. people who are our political opponents. And that's their world. That's how they identify with the

political party. That's what gets them fired up. And here, this is like totally bogus. And if this were a normal circumstance, you would see this after other administrations or potentially every administration. They're all pretty busy people. He's not unique in being busy because he was the president. He's out there golfing. He can skip like one golf game. And, and, and do this, but he didn't want to, he wanted to hold on to it, he acknowledged it, that's in the record. And now they're trying to use this as an excuse. And again, the base is just going to eat it up because they don't care. They want to live in a world where they can just think whatever they want and show unilateral support to this guy.

Yeah, yeah, and honestly, it's, it is that they don't care if we broke their law, which, you know, I know a lot of people watching this right now probably have been paying attention to the news for some time. But I never tried to disregard the fact that some Some people might be just starting up. I started listening to the young Turks a couple years into college. I hadn't really been that focused on politics up until then. There's a lot that you have to like learn as you start to be acclimated to American politics. But one of the things that I guess gradually you start to understand that I think the media and maybe schooling, I don't know, does a lot to try to get you to believe that is not true.

Is that like conservatives and liberals or the left and the right or whatever, Democrats are Republicans, they disagree on policies and they have some different values, but the values will be identified as like your pro life or your pro choice or whatever. But everything else fundamentally, we're Americans and we all agree. No, we don't agree on any of that base level stuff. Do you believe that hypocrisy is a bad thing? Is not a thing that everybody believes. We pretend. It's nice to believe that everyone is against hypocrisy or everybody cares that their side follows the same rules as the other side that doesn't believe that the ends justify the means or that power is the only thing that should fundamentally matter at the end of the day.

Those are not universal values. There are so many non-universal values that we are propagandized to. And I think it holds us back in terms of our ability to discuss politics. In any event, I want to get to a little bit more of Donald Trump. Let's take a look at this next video. Now that the seal so important is broken, the seal is broken. broken. By what they've done, they should never have done this. This was an unwritten rule. You just don't, unless it's really bad. But you just don't. But the seal is now broken.

Okay, so I don't know what the seal is supposed to be. The fact that it's Donald Trump and that his speeches are written by some of the worst ghouls in America, I'm going to assume it's deeply conspiratorial, vaguely, heretically Christian is what I'm going to guess, probably both at the same time, something to do with lizards and or demons. I don't know, but whatever the seal is, it means that he is supposed to be able to do whatever he wants. What I find amazing about that, that speech happened before Tucker Carlson's show. And Tucker Carlson made this point that Donald Trump did something that you're not supposed to do. He questioned the war and that was the day they decided to jail him.

Forget about the fact that he massively increased the military budget. Forget about the fact that he massively ramped up bombings across the Middle East and all that. He wasn't against wars. He supported the war in Yemen. The guy delivering that message, Chunker Carlson, was also a massive advocate for the war in Iraq. All of its nonsense. But in that message that Trump said, he implied that there is something that you're not supposed to question and it's elite unaccountability. Trump is telling his base, which has been trained to be populist and

deeply suspicious of power that you're never supposed to do this. There's not supposed to be any consequences and the Biden administration broke that. Because they pretended that the law is supposed to apply to everyone. It's amazing that he can deliver that in public and he just couches it in a bit of like vaguely apocalyptic language and they eat it up. Any final thoughts Jordan? I don't know what the seal is broken means. I like I've seen other people in the chat.

acknowledge we have a different reference point for that phrase. It has nothing to do with presidential records. But maybe it is, maybe you're right. Maybe it is some dominionist, you know, end of days, religious term. Who knows? It certainly would work well with his base. Tucker running to Trump's defense is so funny because it shows how pathetic and desperate he is in this moment now that Fox is coming after him for doing a Twitter show. And also juxtapose with, you know, Tucker potentially or trying to be seen as some anti-elite talking head, like the rare anti-elite talking head on the right. No, at the end of the day, he was always Trump's lap dog. He was always defending everything he did. And he was so close to

the administration, the Trump team brought Tucker's son on for an internship. They're very, very close. And he's never been anti-elite, despite what he wants to frame himself publicly as. Yeah, 100%. I mean, the fact that some people have knowingly or unknowingly bought into the idea that Tucker Carlson is an actual critic of any of this is so absurd. All of his defense of Trump, at the end of the day is the defense of a former president, a billionaire, the current head of the Republican Party, anti-elite. Definitely. He wants to maintain the Republican status quo of Donald Trump being in charge, anti-elite. Has Tucker Carlson ever advocated for any sort of significant cut to the military budget? Why are people pretending that he's anti-war, anti-any, it doesn't make any sense to me. It's absolutely absurd.

It makes about as much sense as Donald Trump's legal defenses when it comes to the classified documents. With that said, we do need to take the first break of our show. You mentioned Section 702. We're actually going to be talking about that on the other side of the break. We're talking about the surveillance state and how it might maybe be amended a little bit after this. Welcome back to the show, everyone. John Erola, Jordan Yule is here as well. Anna and Jenk are elsewhere. I honestly don't know where. I don't know, but they're not here right now, but they will be back. They say, they say. They ran out to get cigarettes, but they'll be back. Right? They'll be back. Anyway, I also want to

give credit, by the way, during the break, we give credit to Edwin for coming up with a former head of state who had been locked up, former head, former president of Peru. John also brought up, Lula to Silva, but that to me doesn't count. Like, plenty of autocrats lock up people. I mean like a legitimate crime that leads to legitimate sentence. But anyway, let's see if there any others. Anyway, with that said, let's talk a little bit more about the law. I've been dying to talk about the law all day. Can we talk about the law? Let's do it. At the end of the year, a surveillance program that was pitched, intended, I suppose, to help security officials counter foreign threats is set to expire. And there's this big debate about whether it should,

whether it should be continued, whether it should be amended. So the Biden administration, as well as a number of different intel agencies that rely on this are pleading with Congress to extend the statute, but there are some Republicans and some Democrats. This is a bipartisan effort, if, although not necessarily for the same reason that they're against it, are arguing against it. So what we're talking about here is section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. So that permits warrantless surveillance against foreign targets, but occasionally, in the words of the Washington Post, they're saying occasionally, collects communications with Americans, which go into a database. The law allows investigators to search that database by using US phone

numbers, email addresses, and other identifiers. So the concern among some lawmakers is whether it should be amended to require a warrant to access information about Americans. Now, you might be a little bit confused here, since the program was pitched, supposedly designed to allow for surveillance of people outside of the United States, why wouldn't it be baked in there, there would be additional safeguards against accessing the information of Americans, well, that's a good question. I think that goes to the motivation of the people that set it up. In any event, as of right now, the FBI can search the database when they have evidence of crimes or for foreign intelligence purposes, but it's documented that the process has been repeatedly

abused, and we want to stress repeatedly. A court order that was unsealed last month showed that the FBI had improperly searched the database for Americans' information more than 278,000 times over several years, including, interestingly, for details of people arrested during U.S. protests against police violence. And obviously, if you're doing some sort of foreign spying investigation, you're going to want to search for people who are locked up for, like, throwing a rock at a George Floyd protest. I'm sure that's what their motivation was. Now, they insist that since those early years up until like two years ago, they've made some major changes and you don't have to worry about the abuse anymore. They say that procedural changes at the FBI

from 2021 to 2022 have cut the number of searches of U.S. individuals by 94%. Okay, so that's great. And admittedly, I am not a mathematician, but that still leaves 6%. And so over the same sort of period of time that we previously talked about, that would still leave 16,680 illegitimate searches of Americans' information. I do not feel all that placated by this information. Jordan, I know that this is something that you have certainly spent a great deal of time thinking and talking about. What do you think about the debate that they're having right now? Well, you have to also consider the report in Wired just a couple days ago about how the federal government is buying tons of data on Americans. Now, it's not just what they're collecting,

it's also what they're buying in this data marketplace. That's extremely murky. You know, the third party doctrine creates a really complicated legal framework for this. Because sure, the government can't just spy on you directly. I mean, they probably are, but let's just legally they're not supposed to be. But let's say you give your information to Facebook, you give your information to Etsy, you give your information to all of these other companies and apps all across the internet, you lose your expectation of privacy when you're dealing with that company. And a lot of those companies also aggregate all that data and sell it. There's been a lot of reporting and really great books on this going back a decade plus now. And again,

this is something that Edward Snowden was warning about, this mass clandestine catch-all surveillance. You have to remember, when asked about this, the former DNI, James Clapper, in the Senate said that the government was not wittingly collecting all of this information on Americans. With every story like this, it becomes clearer and clear that he lied in the Senate and essentially committed perjury. They'll never hold him to that. But they are lying about what they're doing. So you have to compare these stories and juxtapose them and look at them together. Because not just are they illegally collecting people's data, doing all of these searches when they really shouldn't even even been collected in the first place, they're also going

out independently in buying mass troves of data on Americans. And you have to ask, why are they doing this? What could be done with that in a future administration, a future government? If someone takes over who's way more vindictive and way more authoritarian than Trump, look, we all want to tell you what a threat he is, but there could be worse people than him. In that scenario, do you want all of your data in that person's hands, I would say you don't. And the defense always is, or kind of the lackadaisical approach is, well, I've got nothing to hide. What's it matter? Plenty of people have nothing to hide. That still doesn't give the government the right to violate your constitutional rights to privacy. It's just a basic constitutional principle,

and that should be applied in a digital age. But unfortunately, because our decision makers and our leaders and our legislators lag behind technological advancements, it never will catch up. Yeah, 100%. By the way, the prospect of somebody, like, notably worse, that is a scary thing. They could be out there, you're right. It's hard for me to imagine, but they could be out there working their way up through reality TV like Trump did. I don't know who. I'm going to guess the property brothers. There's something about them that I just don't trust. There is a hurdle constitutionally to two men holding one office, but they're clever. They're clever. Anyway, look, this seems like having a warrant to access Americans information in a database that is

not supposed to be about collecting or accessing Americans' information, I would classify as the privacy-based legal bare minimum. The fact that that is controversial, I find to be scary. There are many on the side of the Biden administration that are arguing that this is absolutely critical that it needs to not only be renewed, but it does not need to be hamstrung in literally any way. Here is George Barnes, deputy director of the NSA, talking during a Senate judiciary hearing. When the intelligence community compels the assistance of electronic communication service providers under 702 authority, we quickly get access to reliable, detailed information that addresses key national security information. information gaps affecting the safety and security of our nation. The importance of this authority to our mission cannot be overstated. We have spoken publicly many times about how 702 has supported our counterterrorism mission,

from preventing an attack on New York City subway in 2009, to supporting the operation that took down Amin Zawahiri just last year. But 702 has likewise become indispensable across NSA's other vital mission areas. So look, some of that might even be true, but it will always be trotted out to get Americans to comply with less of an expectation of privacy. I know Anna, I believe last week on the Young Turks was going over polling about people's expectation of privacy when it comes to government surveillance, which is just fundamentally changed.

I mean, Jordan, I know you're a good chunk younger than me, but when I think back to like when I started to get into politics, it was, it was during, you know, the, you know, the the run up to the war in Iraq, it was the Patriot Act and all that. That does, that seems like a world to go, I think generationally in terms of the expectation of privacy, I feel like the state making a case like you saw in that video, they must feel like it is way easier to convince people to live under these conditions at this point. Yeah, I mean, the way people use the internet and the way people communicate has changed drastically. It's almost all digital now. You know, so few people, especially our age,

even have landlines so they only communicate on their cell phones or online and you know I mean nobody writes letters so it's just it's you know you've become so conditioned to it's kind of like the frog and the boiling pot you've just gotten so conditioned to only doing digital communication and interaction with the understanding that some company or some entity out there is collecting everything and it's just maybe too abstract that you don't really take time. Most people don't take time to think about what's being done with my data. Where's it going?

We all feel weirded out when we say something or search something. And then later on, we get an ad for it. The weirdest is when you verbally talk about it and get an ad for it. That's uncomfortable, right? Well, do you want the government collecting everything that you say, you say in front of your smart home device? And then that company bundles everything and sells that metadata to a government that can then just apply multiple layers based on what they've collected

already and what they've bought. And it's pretty easy after a couple layers of metadata to identify somebody. Do you want that archive in the possession of a government? I would argue, no. I would argue that you don't even want that in a private company. I would hope many people agree with me, but because I think so many people have been conditioned to just accept these terms, that everything is being collected and ultimately sold, that they just don't care. Yeah, look, I will end with this. Some cause for optimism, perhaps. There are obviously people who agree with you. And like I implied in the intro to this, it's sort of a weird collection sometimes. You have, you know, the normal sort of privacy, advocacy groups that you might

expect, some progressives. But then you also have some Republicans. Like there, there have always been a few libertarians who might be uncomfortable about this. But then there's also the Republicans who've spent the last like seven years having to imply that the FBI and the NSA are all trying to get Trump or whatever. So now they just kind of have to be a bet against those groups even though they would have been like banging the war drums for the Patriot Act the most back in the day. So you know strange bedfellows but maybe they'll at least get some of these amendments through. Anyway, with that said, why don't we jump into one more topic, the hour is rapidly racing by whenever we're ready, we can jump into the beginning of the C block.

I just walked out of a conference meeting with my colleagues on the way to the war room, and they were yelling at me saying, oh, well, you're just doing this for hours. outrage and fundraising. And I'm sitting there thinking to myself, you all go and prostitute yourself to lobbyists for money. And you want to criticize me because hundreds of thousands of Americans all over this country, give me $10, $15,25 at macgates.com. Like, shame on you. You come to this place and go and shine the shoes of the special interest and then you go do their bidding with your vote card. I love throwing out a shame on you after he just shamelessly plugged his website to get more donations. He goes into that saying, I already get tons of donations, but Matt Gates.com. Anyway, Matt Gates has kind of a point there, certainly the vast majority

of politicians on both the Democratic as well as the Republican side, are 100% there for the bidding of their donors. And Matt Gates can sort of lord it over all of them, or most of them, I should say, because he doesn't take corporate PAC money. I don't know how accurate his 10, 20 bucks at a time sort of pitch for his funding is, but he at least has that. And there are not a lot of Republicans. There aren't even that many Democrats necessarily that can say that. But I do want to jump ahead just a little bit to demonstrate the continued influence of industry, even in areas where you might think the news cycle, the focus of the American people would make change a little bit easier to get unsullied by corporate hands. So you might remember we've had a series of horrendous,

destructive train derailments in the past few months here in the US. It has made clear that increased regulation in terms of safety systems, breaks, all of that, particularly when they're carrying hazardous chemicals, is necessary. And so there's been legislation that's sort of into working its way through to accomplish a little bit of that. And that has not been safe from industry hands and industry concerns. Republican Senator J.D. Vance just openly admitted that he has modified the bill, Not for the interests of constituents or the interests of safety. It's not based on testimony from safety experts, just because the industry didn't like it.

So let me give an example of that. One of the new regulations in the bill was to upgrade tank cars that carry flammable chemicals so that they're less vulnerable to leaks and punctures if a train derails. For some reason in America, there's people that think that that might be good right about now after we had a toxic cloud, hundreds of feet tall spewing chemicals over an entire area of America. So that was in there. But it didn't last, unfortunately. In a previous version of the bill, the old tank cars were set to be phased out by 2025 to be replaced by ones that would comply with this regulation. But on May 10th, Vance and Senator Maria Cantwell amended the bill

to push back the adoption of safer tank cars until 2027 or 28. So to be clear, a Republican and a Democrat working together to eke out a few more years where the railroad companies can make a bit more money. And if that means that maybe they dump hundreds of thousands of gallons of the most toxic substances on the face of the earth in your community, and then it gets set on fire, well, I guess that's a you problem. It's certainly not a problem for that company. And you can go, Jordan, I'm sure you can come up with a lot of examples like this. We see it basically every day in the rare opportunities when the legislature actually chooses to do something. it is going to be affected by industry.

Absolutely. And in both of these cases, these are examples of right wing populists talking out of both sides of their mouths and illustrating ultimately how hollow they are. First, Matt Gates. He wants to talk about how he doesn't take corporate PAC money. Sure, that's true, but he still takes Republican PAC money, the House leadership fund, he still takes money from them, which takes money from takes money from corporations, special interests, and billionaires. He also takes individual donations, the max contribution from billionaires, CEOs, and people

representing special interest groups. It's not that he's just totally sworn off of corporate money. There are many progressives who will return those donations if somehow a, you know, a seedy business interest or lobbyist or whatever donates to them individually. They will return that money. But not Matt Gates. He wants you to think that he's for the people because he's not taking money directly from the PACs. Well, they just take an extra step and ultimately get there. And then their CEOs will just donate directly to him. You know, he admitted his strategy. He's doing it for attention to raise money. And that's why he does this kind of stuff that's why he says these outlandish things and that's ultimately why

as a hollow right wing populist he attacks marginalized groups because that riles people up who then ultimately donate but really he's still doing the bidding of these corporate interests because he's taking their money you know on on on jd vance it's the same thing he wants to be a populist he tried to differentiate himself from the rest of the republican caucus in the aftermath of east palestine but here you could see how money influences his decisions and you can see see that they have the money and the resources to update these things now, just like the breaks and just like they had the resources to give all of these people who work for these rail lines paid sick leave. They ultimately can do that. They're making record profits. And they don't

want to because they want to make more and more money as long as they possibly can. And they know that any infrastructure or capital investment would potentially affect their bottom line. No, they want to do stock buybacks. They want to increase their dividends. They want to make more and more money because that's ultimately the role of capitalism in the society. It's this unsustainable dream where these companies make infinite amounts of money and continue making more than the prior year. It's ridiculous, but this is the consequence. Ultimately unsustainable. For a bit sustainable, let's demonstrate very briefly how it's sustainable. As I said, Vance was very open about this process. He says the bill is changing. a lot from what I introduced just a few short months ago, we've made a number of concessions to the rail industry, a number of concessions to various interest groups, which is why we have so much bipartisan support in this body. Yeah, you found some other Democrats that also bow down to industry. Great, wonderful. But also, we have a lot of support from industry.

Let me ask, this is a rhetorical question, because he's probably not watching, I would guess. Should it have a lot of support from industry? It's to regulate the industry in the wake of multiple horrendous disasters. How on board do we want them to be? They didn't willingly do this. They had opportunities. We could have avoided all of this trouble if they had acted differently. Remember, I didn't cause the derailment, you didn't cause the derailment, they caused the derailment. Why are they getting to dictate the regulations after their tragedy? And in terms of the sustainability, he's got a lot of support from the industry. And it's not just verbal, it's not just rhetorical. If you take a look at this, this is the top

money receivers from the chemical and related manufacturing industry. And what do you know, J.D. Vance is on that list. To be fair, Tim Ryan also is topping that list, but in his defense, I guess, J.D. Vance has been in office less time, so I guess he sold out faster, but it's not good either way. And as of right now, that bill, what's left of it, is gonna go to the Senate. It's gonna require 60 votes, obviously, because all legislation does. John Thune, by the way, who is the party's whip, is a former rail lobbyist who has opposed to the legislation. So that's great. You know, he's a rail lobbyist, like so many Americans are. It's representative democracy, everyone. Okay,

with that said, we're going to take the second break of our hour, but stick around. We've got a lot more to talk about. Welcome back one and all to what remains of the first hour of The Young Turks with me, Johnny Rola and Jordan Yule, Jordan, as always, thank you for being here and tolerating references to Marvel and the social breaks. With that said, let's move on to a little bit more news with the time we have remaining. While the eyes of the country are probably understandably focused on the former president once again being arrested. There is a lot else that needs to be addressed. And thankfully, we do have people like Senator Bernie Sanders who are doing their best

to address it. Here I am talking about absolutely out of control costs of a variety of different necessary medications. And Bernie is getting pretty aggressive when it comes to his efforts to put pressure on the Biden administration to finally do something about it. And it comes in a variety of forms, both rhetorically like with this tweet that he sent out yesterday saying, now is the time for the Biden administration to take executive action to substantially lower the price of prescription drugs and to take on the corporate greed of the pharmaceutical industry. That's good. He should continue to put people's focus on that. It's a reminder of how different this country would be had we gone with Bernie in 2020 or

even better 2016. But he's doing more than just talking about it. He's saying also, I will oppose all nominations until we have a very clear strategy on the part of the government as to how we're going to lower the outrageously high cost of prescription drugs. This is not just like an empty threat. He's the chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. He controls when his panel reviews nominees for positions in the Department of Health and Human Services. So if he wants to shut those down for a little bit, for a long while, he has the power in theory to do that. Now, he says about this plan, my goal is to change government in general policy in terms of the pharmaceutical industry

and demand that the cost of prescription drugs in this country are significantly lowered. Politicians for years have talked about the high cost of prescription drugs. Relatively little has been done, and it's time that we act decisively. Well, the White House put out a statement about this plan, but I don't necessarily draw a lot of hope from it, in terms of their willingness immediately to comply with what Bernie Sanders has to say. They said that they share his concern on drug pricing, oh, I'm sure, I'm sure, which is why Biden signed in a law. law, the Inflation Reduction Act, the most consequential law addressing the high cost of prescription drugs. Which would be a good point if it solved the problem. If suddenly people

were not scripping and saving to get life saving medication or just having whole classes of medication being effectively financially barred to them. Medications that are available and affordable in other parts of the world, but in the number one country in the world are a pipe dream. Gordon, what do you think? Yeah, it's, Bernie's going to be painted as a villain for doing something that if successful, would drastically improve the lives of millions of people in this country. And the cost of drugs here are astronomical compared to other developed countries. And, you know, he, he's doing something and employing a strategy that is for sure going to make him the villain

among the democratic establishment. So they're going to say, hey, he's blocking these nominations. we finally can do these nominations now that Feinstein's back and he's going to block them. So what? I mean, nothing's going to happen as a result of, nothing meaningful is going to happen as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act. But we should not do this because you want to appoint people to positions who are ultimately not going to do anything meaningful there either. No, this is an opportunity to do something about a very real issue that both parties allegedly care about. Do it, solve it right here. Here's your opportunity.

Let's do something about it, you know, use the bully pulpit, go around the country and talk about this issue. Everybody cares about it. Almost everybody is affected by it and use that leverage, use this moment right now to do this. But they're not going to because they want to just make everyone think that this one piece of signature legislation that they passed is the B-O-end all and it's not. It's really just gaslighting people. Yeah, 100%. Like Joe Biden is going, if he is the nominee or whatever, and it looks like he will be, he is going to face a difficult path to re-election, which is just let's stop for a second to admit how embarrassing that is. He's going to be running against the guy who has been, he was just found civilly guilty of sexual assault. He has to pay millions of dollars. He's on the line

potentially for the hush money payments for the classified documents that he stole, probably for Fulton, Fulton County as well, probably for January 6 as well. And he's like, Biden's narrowly losing. It's absurd. So one would think a politician would want to do something that is incredibly popular. And it is difficult to come up with something that would be less immediately popular to more people, particularly older people who voted higher rates than drastically cutting the cost of their medication. I just don't understand politicians sometimes. I mean, I do. They don't want to do it, not because they question whether it would help them electorally, but because they actually put the interest of the donors even over the continuation

of their own political futures. It's absolutely insane, but it's why so little is done. We had, you know, Obamacare a decade and a half ago, and then we had, in the IRA, you had a small handful of medications that had small cuts to them. And that's it. We've been, it's been, what was, was sicko came out like 20 years ago at this point? Like, it is amazing how little has been done in this area and you have people like Bernie Sanders who in theory were they not constantly undermined by their own side attacked by the media buried when they run for president could be setting the agenda on stuff like this instead it's wall-to-wall like bud light is gay or whatever like this is the actual thing that is ruining people's lives not that Target is selling

rainbow t-shirts that's not actually stopping you from getting the cancer medication that you need super fast because I think we're ending on this. A trio of Johnson Johnson's HIV treatments cost from $25,000 to $56,000 annually in the U.S. In other countries, it's 4 to 10. I mean, like you can go medication by medication on this. There's two medications used to treat cancer. They each cost $424,000 in the U.S. It's like 30 to 4, 30% less in Germany.

one of them is half expensive in Japan. It's the same thing. Did you know that your cancer can't tell the difference actually? Your pocketbook can, okay, based on where you buy it. But it is amazing that so little is done and so few politicians even try to make it an issue, even try to run in it. Any final thoughts, Jordan, before we end? Also in other countries, they have universal health care. They have a government that covers their health care bills here. So not only are the costs cheaper, these people aren't going to go into bankruptcy if they don't, you know, don't have insurance. They have it through the government. That's what their tax dollars pay for. Here, if you don't have insurance, you're screwed. How are you going to

just, what are you going to do? Scrounge up $400,000 for your cancer medication? No, you'll just die. And that's the system they want us to live in. Look at Jordan acting as if GoFundMe doesn't exist. It is the perfect solution to all of the structural inequities that we have in our society, obviously. Anyway, Jordan, it's always a pleasure to have you on the show. Everyone definitely check out Game Busters on Friday, which he assures me is happening. And he has also promised that they'll be doing murder trivia. Thank you, Jordan. It's not happening.

I learned this hour that it's not because of there's a special on Friday night. Oh, the Juneteen special. Okay, we'll promo that on the other side of the spring. See, I knew that it wasn't happening. You made me look like a fool. But anyway, thank you, Jordan. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Thank you. Have a good one.

Okay, we're going to take a break. We're going to be back for the second hour. Brett Ehrlich is going to be here in studio. It's going to be wild. We'll see in a few. Thanks for listening to the full episode of the Young Turks. Support our work. Listen ad free.

Access members, only bonus content, and more. by subscribing to Apple Podcasts at apple.co slash t-y-t. I'm your host, Shank Huger, and I'll see you soon.