The Young Turks - Mueller Hearing BREAKDOWN

Episode Date: July 24, 2019

Mueller’s hearing has finally played out. John Iadarola and Ana Kasparian, hosts of The Young Turks, break it down. 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. Hey, guys, you've heard of the Young Turks podcast because you're listening to it right now. But make sure that you subscribe and give it a five star rating if you like it. Thank you for listening. Welcome to the Young Turks, Anna Kasparian, and Johnny Ty. John was on KTLA this morning, a local television station, to do some analysis on the

Mueller testimony, which we will also do today, unfortunately. Oh, it's going to be fun. It's definitely not going to be fun. Game changer. But we're not going to do what everyone else in the media is done today, which is focus on that and that alone. There are so many stories we're going to get to. In fact, the second hour has a story about school lunches that made my head explode as I was working

on it this morning. Are they not doing pizza on Fridays anymore? Remember pizza Fridays? Oh, the good old days. I miss school lunch. Me too. Let's just talk about that. I wish we could.

But we are going to talk about or break down some of the highlights, if you can call it highlights, from the Mueller report. And then later on, we will also talk about just like the political ramifications of his testimony. So we'll do that. And then John, why don't you tell people about damage report? I think you should do a quick plug of your show before we get started. Well, if you started watching damage report today, then you're gonna be disappointed tomorrow because I wasn't on today. But I hear that Brooke and Jared did a great job.

But normally it's an hour long show, it's earlier in the day. So we sort of get like a first take at the news. And one of the things that we like to do is we have this network of guests that join us pretty frequently, both other progressive commentators and activists will join us to break down the news of the day, people like Jordan Yule and Emma Vigland and other people like that. We also have a great group of different reporters and investigative reporters like Ken Klippenstein, writers and authors, educators, activists and organizers, politicians.

I mean, recently we had on both a journalist from Khartoum to break down what was going on Sudan, but also a fundraiser here in the United States who's raising money for people there. As an idea of our approach, we want to bring in people who have an expertise on these topics to fill us in on what's going on. Yeah, you have great interviews on that show, so definitely check them out. And, you know, Brooke is great on the show, so is J.R. You have a good mix of panelists. Brett on Fridays, too.

Oh, that's right. And Brett does a show on Fridays. That's unacceptable, Brett. You need to only focus on the main show, okay? No, too late. Okay. All right, so let's get right to it. Let's break down Mueller's testimony. Did your investigation find that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from one of the candidates winning? Yes. And which candidate would that be? Well, it would be Trump. There is a little highlight from the Mueller testimony today right before the House Judiciary Committee. Now, we will share our analysis on that in just a minute.

But I think it's important to show the distinction between the line of questioning we saw from Democrats versus Republicans. That clip that you just saw there was Representative Zoe Lothgren, a senior Democrat within the committee, who wanted to really hone in on the fact that the Russians certainly did have a preference when it came to the election, and they certainly did reach out to members of the campaign. However, based on the Mueller report, obviously he claimed that there wasn't enough evidence to charge him with conspiracy. Now, one important piece of information before we move on to the rest of the videos, Mueller was told that he is not able to press charges against the president, right?

That is not his job. His job was to do this investigation, that is his prosecutorial duty in this case. But through this investigation, he is supposed to hand over the evidence to members of Congress, and then they make a decision as to what they do with the evidence that he's provided. It did not exonerate Donald Trump when it came to the issue of obstruction of justice. In fact, according to the report, there were at least 10 instances that could be considered obstruction of justice. So that's something that everyone should know as we move forward because right now, today, Donald

Trump is running around, doing a victory lap, and pretending as though he's been completely exonerated by this report, and that is not the case. Everything that you just said is not what I read on Twitter, and so I reject it out of hand. Well, I mean, we gotta believe what Twitter says, right? Yeah, very important that he kept referring to the OLC, Office of Legal Counsel, which if you're from outside of the U.S. or you haven't been through polyside classes is more important than the Constitution. OLC has been around for several thousand years, a mystical organization that we must bow down

to. Never question, certainly never change. If they had a memo at some point half a century ago, case closed, that should be the end of it. Right, so obviously John's being sarcastic for anyone who might not pick up on that sarcasm, But nonetheless, I do want to move on to the first video. This is Representative Ted Lou from California, and I think he did an excellent job in his line of questioning that can't be said of every Democrat, but I want to give you a sense

of how good he was in just revealing what the Mueller report actually said. Quote, Sessions was being instructed to tell the special counsel to end the existing investigation into the president and his campaign, unquote. That's in the report, correct? Correct. That would be evidence of an obstructive act because it would naturally obstruct their investigation, correct? Correct. And you wrote, quote, by the time of the President's initial one-on-one meeting with Lewandowski on June 19, 2017, the existence of a grand jury investigation supervised by the special counsel was public knowledge.

That's in the report, correct? Correct. That would constitute evidence of a nexus to an official investigation. of a nexus to an official proceeding because a grand jury investigation is an official proceeding, correct? Well, yes. Evan, do you see where there's the intent section on that page? I do see that. You wrote, quote, substantial evidence indicates that the president's effort to have sessions limit the scope of the special counsel's investigation to future election interference was intended to prevent further investigative scrutiny of the president's and his campaign's conduct, unquote.

That's in the report, correct? That is in the report. I believe a reasonable person looking at these facts could conclude that all three elements of the crime of obstruction justice have been met. And I'd like to ask you, the reason again that you did not indict Donald Trump is because of OLC opinion stating that you cannot indict a sitting president, correct? That is correct. So Ted Liu came prepared, and we can't show.

show you all of, you know, what happened today because we would literally be here. I mean, I don't know, is it still happening? That was like five or six hours. It was five or six hours. But I felt like throughout this entire testimony, there was evidence, at least it seemed to me that there was evidence that Democrats didn't get together and have like a real strategy. And if they did, that strategy fell short. Ted Liu came prepared.

I think that he was concise. He had the specific excerpts from the actual report that he could refer to. To be fair, other Democrats did as well, but he knew exactly what he was doing, he knew exactly how to do so in a very concise way, and it perfectly demonstrated how the Mueller report did not in any way exonerate Donald Trump of obstruction, and he gave specific examples. Why? Yeah, yeah, if there was a strategy, I don't think it was very well thought out necessarily. He did a good job.

I mean, I think most of the Democrats, when they were planning what they were going to say, that was what they were going to do. Exactly. They were going to sketch it out, and what they were going to do was they were going to demonstrate that Trump had done all of these things to break the law, and that's bad, and Republicans would change their mind because they live in Fantasia, and that's a thing that could happen. It's not a thing that could happen. And the frustrating thing there is, although we do have to acknowledge that that last little

quote there, Mueller did to some extent walk back what he said there, just to be fair, but everybody- Can you elaborate on that a little more? So the last question was the reason you didn't indict was because of the OLC memo and he said yes, which he sort of muddled later on saying we didn't make a decision to indict or not. The question that he was asked and his answer made it seem as if that was the only reason there wasn't an indictment. That was the reason there wasn't a choice about an indictment, which is not the same thing, to be fair.

But everybody went into this, at least the Democrats, thinking we're gonna get something big And the thing is, what are you expecting to get? You just saw something that's not big and not new and not exciting and nobody cares, a perfectly laid out example of how the president obstructed justice. But we already knew that, and nobody cares about obstruction of justice anymore. Nobody cares if the president broke the law anymore. And so what were you really hoping to get out of this? We already know everything we need to know.

I 100% agree with that analysis. I think that this was an attempt at political theater. And keep in mind that the main reason why Nancy Pelosi does not want to open an impeachment inquiry is because she thinks that it will hurt Democrats politically. Now there's, look, the political aspect of this is what Democratic leadership is hyper-focused on. And so do you think that this type of political theater is any different? Because what did Trump do right after this?

What did he do as it was happening? He did a victory lap and he can do the victory lap because most people, eight. don't care about what's happening during this testimony. People have already chosen which camp they're on. There's the camp that wants to completely reject any and all evidence and assume that Donald Trump has been completely exonerated. And there's the camp that sees the clear instances of obstruction of justice. And they're wondering, why aren't they opening up an impeachment inquiry against the president? So I don't understand the political calculation here. I don't think it's working. I think this attempt at political feeder was a complete and utter disaster.

But before we get to more of that analysis, I do want to juxtapose Ted Liu's line of questioning with Louis Gohmert's line of questioning. If somebody knows they did not conspire with anybody from Russia to affect the election. And they see the big justice department with people that hate that person coming after and then a special counsel appointed who hires a dozen or more people that hate that person and he knows he's innocent. He's not corruptly acting

in order to see that justice is done. What he's doing is not obstructing justice. He is pursuing justice. And the fact that you ran it out two years means you perpetuated injustice. I take it. I take your question. The witness has expired.

The witness may answer the question. I take your question. So, John, is there any logic behind what Louis Gohmert said there? Maybe I'm too biased against Representative Gohmert. Maybe that was intelligent and I'm completely unaware. It wasn't intelligent, but it's the best that you can expect from an ear with a human growing on it. So it does make logic if your starting point is Donald Trump cannot do any wrong. wrong.

So he knows he's innocent, because of course he's innocent, that is our starting point. And so anything he does in pursuit of proving his innocence, he can do whatever he wants because at the end of the day he's innocent. We would never approach any other case or investigation in that fashion. He certainly would not, if it was, we were investigating President Clinton or whatever. He would not say, oh, so Bill Clinton was, he was harassing witnesses behind the scenes, he was trying to hamper the investigation, cut its funding. He probably just knew he was innocent.

much of what you heard is on its face, not even, not a double standard, because they don't want a double, like they, they don't assume that the possibility of hypocrisy, like there was that, there was the guy who was going through the political donations of some of the lawyers on the Mueller team and saying, how is it? That some of them have supported Democrats, as if, what are you going to do? Find people who've worked their entire lives in D.C. in the Department of Justice and have no political opinions. And so, and they, all of them, every single person that you saw there are now saying, William Barr needs to go after the people that started this.

They have to hunt them down and investigate them. And so I await those same Republicans grilling every member of his team, every attorney to make sure that they've never registered for a party, that they've never made a political donation, because they've now set up a standard that you can't have any partisans working on these investigations. Do you think that he's gonna do that? Of course not. Of course not. This is ridiculous.

Yeah, and look, I wanna look at the bigger picture for a second, because I don't think that that conversation is really happening right now, and it's important to have that conversation. Everything that's happening and everything that the GOP is fighting aggressively for is increasing the power and the authority of the executive branch, right? This is essentially what they want William Barr to do in investigating the investigators is essentially a way of intimidating anyone from ever wanting to open an investigation into possible criminal behavior by the commander in chief, that is not something that's indicative or representative of a so-called democracy. If you have that much power as the president of the United States and anyone who even

dares to question you or investigate you is going to be investigated themselves, I mean, we're now, well, we've been in incredibly dangerous waters, and it's so short-sighted because while they consolidate power in the executive branch, and the GOP is doing that, imagine if a Democratic president tried to pull these stunts. Now, Democrats are, well, let's just keep it real, they're not as obsessed with power and authoritarianism as the Republicans are. So I don't, I don't see them, you know, doing what Republicans are doing right now. I can certainly break the law, though.

They can certainly break the law. But just can you imagine if the table's returned, right? Because if you're a Republican right now and you're okay with what's going on, are you going to be okay with what's going on if you have, I don't know, President Hillary Clinton, any other Democratic president. But they don't have to be because it doesn't matter what they say now. It's not. We always expect, aha, it's gonna come back to bite you someday, but it's not.

It's got no teeth and nobody will remember it. It doesn't matter, and you can play it right in front of them, and it won't change anything. All right, so I want to go to another Republican lawmaker, Representative Ken Buck, and just, yes, we want to pay attention to the substance, but I think the optics matter more. That's what Americans pay close attention to, so just take a look at his demeanor and the way he asks his questions. The OLC opinion, Office of Legal Counsel, indicates that we cannot indict a sitting president. So one of the tools that a prosecutor would use is not there. Okay, but let me just stop. You made the decision on the Russian interference.

You couldn't have indicted the president on that, and you made the decision on that. But when it came to obstruction, you threw a bunch of stuff up against the wall to see what would stick. And that is fundamentally unfair. I would not agree to that characterization at all. But the, could you charge the president with a crime after he left office? Yes. You believe that he committed, you could charge the president of United States with obstruction of justice after he left office. Yes.

So that last part is the substance that we should be paying attention to. But you got to also keep in mind that you'll have two different people watch that clip and come up with two completely different conclusions. Because the outrage that you see from Representative Buck is what's going to speak to Republican voters. For us, we listen to that last part and we think, yeah, if this guy was not the president, he would be indicted. Yeah. He is a criminal. Okay, he has obstructed justice. There are specific examples in the Mueller report detailing how the president tried to obstruct justice, including attempting to fire a Mueller himself.

And then, of course, White House counsel Don McGahn was like, yo, bro, don't do that, it's a bad idea. I'm gonna quit if you do that, and Trump decided not to. Yeah, yeah, and I know some people watch that, and I hate to be the person who kills hope or whatever, but the idea that, okay, you know, as bad as everything is, when he gets out of office, we're gonna pursue him, nobody's gonna pursue him, we're gonna protest Kavanaugh after he got on the Supreme Court, did that actually happen? Remember Obama of war crimes that were committed in Iraq? We're looking forward, we're not looking backward, nothing's gonna happen to him, he's gonna

live for another two years and he's going to keel over in the middle of the night. That's what's going to happen. And that moment, which was one of the strongest moments, I guess, in terms of Mueller laying out, here's a thing that could happen. One of the things that's so frustrating about having a government that's stuffed full of rabid conspiracy theorists is that they're dumb conspiracy theories. And there's two on display today. There's the fact that the FBI was trying to stop Trump from becoming president, the lover's texts and all that. And then there's Mueller's just doing a coup or whatever. And in both cases, then why is he president? Why didn't they do anything before the election? Why didn't they reveal they were investigating him? They didn't. They revealed

some stuff about Clinton a week before the election, but they were really mum. I guess that they just set their watches wrong for revealing the big plot to stop him before he came president. And now, if the whole thing was a big witch hunt, a two year plot to get him out of office, Somebody should have reminded Mueller of that when he finished the report and deferred to the OLC memo, which he definitely did not have to do. He could have said anything, anything in the thing today was like, well, come on, obviously he committed crimes. He could have laid out a clear path to impeachment.

He chose not to. He wouldn't even defend himself, let alone attack Trump. And that guy who's like, just trying not to offend anyone is the mastermind of a deep state coup to take out Donald Trump. That's what was being screamed at Mueller all day long in both of the. those hearings. It's madness. It's absolute madness.

We gotta take a break. When we come back, we're going to talk about the political ramifications of this, how this entire testimony looked to the outside to other political analysts. And I also want to take some time to talk about how incredibly stupid it is that members of the Democratic Party put all their eggs in this basket and are now deciding that they're not going to actually do anything with the evidence provided from this 22. month investigation. We need to talk about a relatively new show called

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And that's true whether you're in Jedi training or you're uprooting and exposing all the propaganda and disinformation you've been fed over the course of your lifetime. So search for UNFDR in your podcast app today and get ready to get informed, angered, and entertained all at the same time. We'll be right back. Hey guys, welcome back to TYT, Anna and John with you. I want to make a few announcements before we get to the second portion of our Mueller testimony

coverage. Now, there's some exciting stuff happening next week. The Democratic debate will be taking place, and TYT will be offering you guys some special coverage. We will be doing coverage both for everyone for free, but we'll also have some special coverage for our members as well, please become a member that helps to keep us afloat, especially these days with YouTube demonetizing everything. So our members really do help to keep this show alive and go to t.t.com join to become

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Also, on Thursday, which is not today, I thought today was Thursday. On Thursday of this week, TYT will have our shindig in the post game. Our activist-level members get to ask us questions about our predictions regarding the debates next week, and I'm really looking forward to it. Go to t.com slash live, everyone can watch it. However, only our activist level members will be able to ask us questions. Again, this will take place on Thursday, obviously after the main show. This is super exciting news.

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Well, if we're not supposed to, anyway. What kind of a spoiler is that? It was great. Well, now I'm not going to watch it. You already spoiled it. I know, I know. I hear it was funny. What's the point of hearing a joke now?

So Ida's comedy special on Netflix will be airing August 13th. Make sure you guys check it out. Mark your calendars. The name of the special is Tiffany Haddish presents, They Ready. And I say it like that because that's how she said it. Yeah, and it was really funny. There were a lot of good comedians. It was excellent.

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and we're going to give you one month of free membership as an added bonus. What? And one more announcement. So we have a new partner slash sponsor. It's the weekly, which is a weekly show affiliated with the New York Times. What they do is a deep dive into stories that I think are fascinating. And you can check them out both on Hulu or on FX. They air new episodes on FX every Sunday at 10 p.m.

I really like their podcast as well, The Daily. And The Daily is not sponsoring us, but I just want to give them props as well. Look, there's a lot of great- They're busy. They got to do something every day, you know? They have a lot of good reporting at the Times. I mean, we've been critical of them when it's necessary and we continue to be critical. Including recently. Including yesterday.

But in terms of their straight news reporting, there's fantastic work coming from the New York And I do want you guys to check it out. Yeah. All right, with that said, let's move on to part two of this Mueller testimony. Robert Mueller testified before the House Judiciary Committee. And during his testimony and during the line of questioning that we heard from both Democrats and Republicans, I asked myself, how is this going to play out for the public? What are the optics?

Is this going to help in any way, shape, or form? And I was not happy with it, and I wasn't the only one. In fact, let's go to Chris Wallace. Here's his brief analysis of today's events. I think this has been a disaster for the Democrats, and I think it's been a disaster for the reputation of Robert Mueller. He has seemed very uncertain with his brief. He doesn't seem to know what things that are in the report, attacked a number of times,

and you would think that almost anybody else would have defended his own integrity and the integrity of the investigation. and over Mueller just sit silent and allows the attacks from the Republicans to sweep over him and says nothing. The strongest, Martha, by far was John Ratcliffe, a Republican congressman on the committee, who basically said, your big grand conclusion when it comes to obstruction is you can't exonerate him, when did that become a legal principle that a prosecutor can't exonerate anybody? You're innocent until proven guilty. So you either prove him guilty or you're shot.

up. And you're making a point about, I didn't exonerated. He said the president is not above the law, but he's not below the law either. That was dumb. So, no, was it dumb though? Yeah, both of the last two things were dumb. Oh, yeah, the last part. The legal principle thing and then the below the law thing, whatever that was, both were done. I didn't even pay attention to the above the law, below the law part. But I think that there were points made by Chris Wallace that were actually accurate. I do think that today's testimony was a disaster for Democrats. I think that they attempted to use this as political theater and failed to do so. There were certain moments where Democrats proved to be strong, like Representative Ted Lou from California. He came prepared.

He provided specific instances of obstruction of justice coming from the report. But I also think that Chris Wallace is correct in that you had one Republican after the other punching Robert Mueller in the face, and he didn't defend himself. They made him out to be this biased political operative who was out to get Donald Trump. Now we know that that's not true. We know that's not the case. This was a 22 month investigation that did not exonerate Donald Trump, especially when it came to obstruction of justice. And I, he didn't want to be there. It was clear he didn't want to be there. He wanted the report to speak for itself. All the evidence and all of his findings were in the report. And the whole point here is, all right, I did the

investigation. That was my task. I'm not allowed to indict the president. But, but, But this evidence can be given to lawmakers and they can make a decision about what to do with it. And the decision that Nancy Pelosi, as the Democratic Speaker of the House, has made is, I don't want to do an impeachment inquiry because it's not politically popular. It's going to hurt us strategically as the 2020 election approaches. Yeah. Yeah.

And again, that goes to, I mean, his unwillingness to counter some of the ridiculous claims that were put to him, the Republicans were sort of tripping over each other to dredge up ridiculous stuff from, you know, 4chan and Breitbart and just throw conspiracy theories at him. And he wasn't interested in saying, you know, I don't believe that's an accurate characterization of what actually happened. He would say that very rarely, often he would just either sit there or he'd say, I can't speak to that. But sometimes you need to speak to something when someone is attempting to deceive the public.

And he didn't want to do that, which again makes him, according to the report. Republicans, the head of a coup who's incredibly apathetic about it actually succeeding. So not only does it hurt his own reputation, but the way that it appears to a lot of people, myself included, is that he's just complicit in everything that's going on. Why are you not, in the very least, defending yourself against these mischaracterizations coming from GOP lawmakers? Why? Why wouldn't you do, at least do that?

And so, and I think that there was actually a great question asked in that last clip. And in the last segment that we did on this, why follow this OLC memo? Why? Why? Because it's written down. In ink? Who cares? I don't know.

Them, apparently, very serious, responsible people. Imagine a world where the tables are turned and you have a Democrat sitting in office who had clearly obstructed justice. Protected, OLC? Yeah, you think the Republicans are gonna be like, shield, like Captain America, can't get to him. This is a memo from the OLC. We're gonna follow through with the memo. We're just gonna drop it.

We're gonna leave it alone. We're gonna do a 22-month investigation, spend millions of dollars on it. And then that's it. No, Republicans wouldn't do that. They wouldn't do that. They wouldn't do that. They would do multiple investigations. I mean, it's incredible to me that everyone's a loser in this story.

Everyone. Robert Mueller, conspiracy theorist Republicans, incredibly pathetic and weak Democrats. What was this? People have been trying to undermine the investigation for literally years. Everybody. Yeah, the whole country's full of losers actually at this point. It's like one of those Vox articles.

327 million losers and zero winners from this presidency. That's really what's going on. And as you point out, Mueller should care. Like he understands that precedents are being set right now. And he just, he's like, I should have stopped Starbucks. I should have gotten some coffee because I got nothing right now. Now, it matters. At the end, he worked up a little bit of energy where he said that he really hopes that the

foreign intervention or election hasn't been normalized, but he fears that it has been. As if he's not instrumental in sort of, at least to some extent, deciding if that happens or not. Trump continuing as president ensures that foreign intervention will happen in this next election. He knows that, but he doesn't want to get involved, he just doesn't care. And by the way, I sort of love that, like we're focused on obstruction because it's really clear and everything. And the stuff about whether there's a criminal conspiracy, he says there's not enough evidence

to indict, although acknowledging that the massive obstruction, of course, modifies that. But we never know, and maybe there wasn't any. But there definitely was intervention. That stuff was rock solid in there. And everybody's just like, whatever. I mean, there'd been people denying for two years that anything actually happened. And now it comes out in the actual report, not speculation, not some random article or something like that.

Yeah, we already knew that. Okay, so I wanted to- It didn't feel like we already knew that for two years. We need to talk about Pelosi a little longer. And establishment Democrats who have decided, or who had decided, to put all their eggs in this basket, in this Mueller investigation basket. They're like, you know what, we're not, we're not going to focus too much on the hush money payments, we're not going to focus on how Trump has used his charitable foundation

to enrich himself. We're not going to focus on all the financial conflicts of interest. You know, all the other things, insurance fraud, tax fraud, inflating his assets to save on taxes, deflating his assets in order to do fraud and obtain loans that he shouldn't have obtained. I mean, we're gonna ignore all of that, and we're gonna focus on this investigation. Okay, cool, so the investigation happens, 22 months, and you have the evidence indicating that Trump attempted to obstruct justice at least 10 times.

So why isn't Nancy Pelosi opening an impeachment inquiry? I don't understand. And her whole political calculation as this democratic genius, as the establishment makes her out to be, is well, look, if we attempt to impeach, he would be exonerated by the Senate, which of course is dominated by Republicans. Okay, fair enough. But what was today about? Because today didn't help.

So, to the average American, today was no different than attempting to impeach Donald Trump, right? And so think about that for a second, right? So it's not labeled as impeachment, but what is the thought process of the average American? Get yourself out of this like every day we're constantly focusing on the media and what's happening in politics. Get yourself out of that bubble and think of yourself as someone who has a completely different job who does not have the time or the resources to be hyper focused on the news

and what's happening in politics. What is the takeaway from this testimony? In terms of that? Yeah. Nothing. Democrats are going after Trump, it looks like it's been unfair, it looks like it's politically slanted, and it looks like Trump's innocent, I mean. Well, he keeps saying it.

He keeps saying he's exonerated. And Mueller's not really saying anything. Exactly. Yeah. So like your political calculation sucks. Yeah. And it's pathetic and it's sad that this has been the only focus for 22 months and And all the eggs were put in this basket and this basket was broken from the get-go.

It had a giant hole in the bottom. The eggs are gone, they're broken. Okay? We don't have any eggs. Yeah, this was a very, this is a sad day in a string of sad days for anybody who wants the president to be constrained by checks and balances or something like the law. I mean, there's so many people who deserve to be put on the list of the people who have ensured that future presidents, whether it's a second term of Donald Trump or

Or some Democrat or Ted Cruz or God knows who will be free to break the law however they want. There won't be a special counsel because the very concept of one has been so tainted now. If there is one, they can just fire him, they can meddle with the witnesses, they can refuse to be interviewed, they can refuse to give over documents. There will be either no investigation or certainly no justice for any criminality by the president. And a lot of people responsible for that. Nancy Pelosi has signed her name and big bold letters to that.

I would say the people that set up this horrible set of interviews, everyone who has undermining this special investigation the entire time, they have ensured that in the future the president will feel incredibly emboldened to break the law. And that is a sad day for people who don't want a king in this country. Well, don't worry, if it's a Democrat sitting in office, he will not be able to get away with breaking any laws or any type of criminal activity because Democrats actually do have standards, right? They actually do critique one another, they actually do hold one another accountable. And Republicans are ruthless. They're ruthless. Even when they're perceived

wrongdoing has absolutely no substance behind it. So this is where we're at as a country, and it makes me embarrassed to see the type of weak people represent our party. It's sad. The silver lining is that the whole country is just gonna burn up in a couple decades anyway. So we don't have to deal with it for much longer. Okay, we got to move on. Let's do the next story. We must also be vigilant against bigoted or dangerous ideologies masquerading as policy. And that includes BDS.

That's Nancy Pelosi at the annual APAC conference. And I show you that clip because that type of thought process was certainly something you should consider when you hear about the vote that happened in the House just yesterday. The House voted to approve a non-binding resolution that opposes the boycott movement against the right-wing government of Israel. So this is known as the BDS movement. Introduced by a bipartisan group of members, the resolution supports a two-state solution, argues the global boycott, divestment and sanctions, sometimes short-handed as BDS movement, is an effort to delegitimize Israel and urges Israelis and Palestinians to return to direct negotiations

as the only way to achieve an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Now, similar legislation was voted on in the Senate, and it was actually more extreme than what we saw in the House, because this House resolution is non-binding, whereas in the Senate, they actually want to stop people from exercising their First Amendment rights and being part of this protest. Now, the bill in the House, though, passed overwhelmingly 398 to 17, and a number of of progressives voted in favor of it. And I want to call them out, okay? So you have Representative Rokana, devastating. One of my favorite congressmen. One of my favorite congressmen, but he needs

to be called out on this. Ayanna Presley voted in favor of this. She's great too. Tulsi Gabbard voted in favor of this, although I'm not surprised and I'm not going to pretend like I'm surprised. It's unfortunate. And this is a terrible vote because, first of all, it's a non-binding resolution. So we have a lot of problems in this country right now. Now, taking time to get together and it's basically a way of condemning people for exercising their political speech and their political, you know, activity, right? So this is, look, the BDS movement I know is a controversial issue. And we're gonna talk about that specific movement in just a second.

But I wanna talk about the bigger picture and what something like this means. Having members of Congress, having representatives who are supposed to protect our democracy, condemn people for being part of a political movement that is nonviolent, that is, it is based on a moral standard in their minds, right? To have the House and the Senate condemn them for that, I think is, it's dangerous and pathetic. I feel like in a way this bill is like the perfect distillation of what our government is. Like it just, it feels like, yeah, of course, of course, it's, it's typical.

critical. It sets a standard on this one movement that we would never set on others. It's completely removed from our view on any boycott investment or sanctions in literally any other context. We sanction tons of countries. We boycott shoes, we boycott everything. But this particular case, it's just not allowed. And we know that historically, the same sort of movement has been used in very important context. And it really fast, it's another one of the examples of something I was talking about last week on the show where it's like, it's It's pretending that I just don't like this thing. I wanna go back to a neutral standpoint, but it's not.

It's saying we want direct negotiations between a group with almost no power and a group with a massive amount of power. It's like if somebody has a gun being held of their head and they start to scream for help and you're like, no, don't scream for help, negotiate directly with the guy with the gun. Well, that's not fair, that's asymmetric. And they understand that when they pass a bill like that. Yeah, 100%, which is why it's devastating to see someone like Rocana and also I Presley sign on to this type of resolution. So I want to give you some more details because

there were a few people, 17, who voted against this resolution. The vote again showcased the split in the Democratic Party, according to the New York Post, with Acacio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Talib, as well as progressive caucus co-chairs Mark Pocan and Pramila Jayapal casting no votes. And as I mentioned, you have Presley voting in favor of it. It also recognizes the right of an American citizen to protest or criticize policies of the United States or foreign governments. In a very particular way, perhaps. Right.

But not in every way. Yeah, this is, I think, so short-sighted. And the way that I see this is, it's a form of intimidation, right? Because people who are part of this movement, whether you agree with it or not, have been smeared as anti-Semitic. They are not anti-Semitic. And I wanted to really understand where that comes from, right? Like, where does the accusation of anti-Semitism come from?

Because this whole thing is, hey, we want the right wing government of Israel to treat Palestinians better, to give them the same rights as Israeli citizens, right? That's the whole point. And until they do that, we refuse to invest in Israeli companies or buy Israeli products. I mean, that's your money, you can't be forced to buy things or invest in things. And it's their, you know, their moral objective. That is what's pushing them to do this. So I looked into this a little further to kind of figure out where those anti-Semitism

accusations come from. And the point that's been brought up is, well, the Nazis boycotted Jewish businesses. Yeah, they also exterminate, like they killed, they killed people. Like they didn't even allow them to have businesses, they murdered them in millions of people were murdered, right? This is a nonviolent movement and it has nothing to do with. treating Israelis poorly or pushing to treat them poorly. It's all about equal treatment of Palestinians within that region of the world.

Yeah, it's a movement that has a very specific and at least hypothetically not very complicated end state. Right. Which is, you can go, there's three points that they want. If the right wing government of Israel were to accede on those three points, then the boycotts would end. The people of both Israel and Palestine would be far better off. and they wouldn't have the BDS movement at all. But that's difficult to argue against. It's easier to pin it to these historical examples that are absolutely horrendous.

This is a political speech issue. I'm glad that this is non-binding, but the vote shouldn't have happened in the first place. And look, I think that it's fair to have critique of the movement itself, right? So how is this going to negatively impact, you know, innocent citizens of Israel, right? If you're divesting from businesses there, is it going to hurt them with jobs? and things like that. You want to have those types of critiques. Awesome.

Those are valid conversations to have. But outright smearing people as anti-Semitic because they have moral objections to how Palestinians are treated is, in my opinion, ridiculous. And you're about to see a little bit of that in this next clip. So this is Representative Brad Schneider, and he is arguing, well, he tries to make a distinction here. And I want you to pay close attention to it. Take a look.

So I'm not going to subscribe it necessary to the supporters, but the movement itself, its intent, its goals are anti-Semitic and intent, the expression of BDS, what we see on college campuses, the intent to create harassment, hostile environments for supporters of Israel on college campuses, to make it difficult for companies that are doing business with Israel in the United States and around the world. That is, by its very nature, anti-Semitic. The movement itself has anti-Semitic means, uses anti-Semitic. means. That's why it's important tonight that we're going to have more than 75% of the House co-sponsoring a resolution condemning the global BDS movement. So he would not say that individuals who are part of this movement are anti-Semitic, but he believes that the movement is anti-Semitic. And when he was pushed on that distinction, he didn't really have an answer for it. Because he knows that the people were part of this movement are not anti-Semitic, right? But it's easy to just cast this entire movement as a anti-Semitic without specifically naming why, for instance, and who in that movement you

consider to be anti-Semitic. It's just, I just don't get it, I don't know. We have no direct control over the government policy of any foreign government, but we do have preferences, and if we feel like the cost, the human cost to the continuation of those policies is unacceptable, which many, many people do here in the U.S., in Israel and many other countries, we're allowed to try to put pressure on them. And because we can't vote, we have no political power whatsoever in that country or any other, this is the sort of power that hypothetically we have.

There is nothing inherently wrong in exercising that power, whether it's over the right wing government of Israel, the government of Russia or Madagascar or France or God knows where. There's things about Trudeau I don't like. Am I not supposed to try to pursue those ends? I'm not Canadian, it's not up to me, but I do have preferences and I can support people in that country that want to see change. I think it's important to have these political debates, right? And when you stop the debates from happening by intimidating people and smearing them and

just calling them names, well, then you allow bad actors to continue to be bad actors. And we're supposed to celebrate freedom of speech here. And look, I'm not talking about people who argue in bad faith. There is a lot of that in the political world these days. But I think that if you want to come to a solution on this very real problem, you need to Be supportive and you should applaud political discussion and debate, robust debate. All right. With that said, we got to go to break.

But when we come back, we have a little bit of good news and then more bad news. Come right back. At TYT, we frequently talk about all the ways that big tech companies are taking control of our online lives, constantly monitoring us and storing and selling our data. But that doesn't mean we have to let them. It's possible to stay anonymous online and hide your data from the prying eyes of big tech. And one of the best ways is with ExpressVPN. ExpressVPN hides your IP address, making your active ID more difficult to trace and sell the advertisers.

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All right, I got the live reads done so now I can focus on your tweets. Brianna writes in from the member's comments and says, finally have a night off so I can watch live. And what a day for news? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it is. You know what?

Sort of. There are a lot of stories today that I don't love them because they're not good, it's not good news, but they're important to talk about. So you're right. There is a lot to talk about today. A lot of good stories. Bernie is my leader says, now we're living in a bubble. I took my phone to my dog park or to the dog park to listen and people who aren't political

were actually hearing the facts for the first time. It made a difference to the uninformed. You know what, thanks for letting me know about that because maybe I'm a little too pessimistic and maybe I should give people more credit, you know? I just, I always think, it's not that I don't believe Americans can understand what's going I just hate the fact that everything is spun in the media, and it's so easy to be misinformed because there's so much misinformation out there. And I hate that considering how complicated things are and how much stress we have in our everyday

life, how difficult it already is to understand what's going on, that there are so many people so eager to manipulate them. Yeah, exactly. Eclectic Michelania says Anna and John are definitely my favorite host duo for the main show. Wow. Damn. Sorry, Jank. They really do so well together, both in terms of commentary and humor.

We do. We have really good chemistry. By the way, I saw, I think it was JR retweeted. Someone pointed out that there's a set of like five people on Twitter that get read a lot. I saw that too, yeah. What's that about? So it seems rigged. Okay, so we don't choose just to let you guys know the tweets that make it on this document.

I'm not trying to throw anyone under the bus, but I just did, sorry. I actually don't know who does choose the tweets. We choose from among those. I also don't know. All right, I'm getting off of it. Getting off of it. Okay. All right.

But Melissa Mentrice says on TYT live, strolling across the Walmart parking lot in my kick-ass TYT tank top, when suddenly I hear, woo, TYT, shout out to you, my dear TYT stranger. Oh, that's so sweet. That's awesome. Okay, great. So let's do a little bit of good news because luckily there is a tiny little sliver of good news today. The Senate has voted in favor of the 9-11 victims fund, and it will now be permanent. So the first responders who heroically went in to help with relief efforts and to help save

individuals who were victimized by that tragic event will have funding to get health care that they need, to get services that they need. And this is great news because remember, Senator Mitch McConnell didn't even want to bring this up for a vote until John Stewart shamed him into doing. Now, there were only two individuals who voted against this, Randfall, Senator Rand Paul and Mike Lee. But before we get to them, I do want to show you a short clip of Chuck Schumer prior to the vote happening.

I can't do justice to the years upon years of work by the first responders, by labor leaders, by advocates that led to this moment. But to suffice it to say, this is not a day of joy for them. or for this bill's authors, rather it's a day of relief. For 18 years, those first responders, some of whom are here in the gallery, have watched their brothers and sisters get sick because they rushed bravely to the towers at ground zero. This was obviously the right thing to do.

I mean, when you really think about it, for so long, lawmakers exploited that tragedy for their own political agenda, and to turn, for our Congress to turn its back on the first responders when they need support the most is just disgusting. So I'm happy that the Senate has passed this permanent 9-11 victims fund. Again, it was the right thing to do. Yeah. Yeah, to make this such a long, drawn-out process while every step of the way cloaking themselves with, we support the first responders, we love cops, go blue, and all that.

And like imagine going back to that day and you have all these people rushing to go help. And you're stopping me like, hold up, you're going to get really sick. And then you're going to spend the next two decades fighting to get the U.S. government, which otherwise loves showering money into people who are serving its country. They say, yeah, it's going to be really hard. And you better hope that there's a political comedian who's going to help you out. It's amazing. It really is.

And I love that you brought up, you know, just the military spending. We spend so much on the military. very little of that money goes to our soldiers. Soldiers make a little over $19,000 when they first begin in the military. And it's disgusting. I mean, they're risking their lives. They're put in these dangerous situations. And we keep hearing this nonsense about how our lawmakers want to support their troops.

If you really want to support the troops, take care of them, both when they're in the military and also later, when they're veterans and they need the health care and the resources to live decent lives. Now, again, there were two senators who voted against this. The final vote came after the Senate voted down amendments from Senators Rand Paul from Kentucky and Mike Lee from Utah that would have limited the scope of the bill. Paul and Lee were the only two votes against the bill. And of course, Senator Rand Paul, who voted in favor of the $2 trillion Trump tax cuts, claims that it's all about the funding, that's what I'm really concerned about. Quote, while I support our heroic first responders, no you don't.

No, you don't. I can't in good conscience vote for legislation, which to my dismay remains unfunded. We have a nearly trillion dollar deficit and 22 trillion dollars in debt. Spending is out of control. Well, you shouldn't have voted in favor of cutting taxes to the tune of two trillion dollars over the next decade. Yeah, like take it up with your party, man. It's pathetic.

And I support our first responders. Ask them to list one way that they want you to support them. I think I know what it's gonna be. I don't think they're really interested in any of the other ways. I think this is the one that's important to them. All right, let's move on to Caesar Seyak. Caesar Seyak is the man who sent pipe bombs to members, Democratic members of Congress and also to CNN, and now his defense attorney is arguing that, look, he's got mental health

issues, and he was persuaded by the type of language that you hear on Fox News. So why don't we lower his sentence to 10 years, roughly 10 years? Now he's already pleaded guilty to sending the explosive devices to these individuals, and so he is gonna spend time in prison. The question is how long, and the public defender's memo is making this case that, hey, again, he was persuaded by the type of content he was consuming, both online and also on Fox. So I'm gonna read from the public defender's sentencing statement.

It reads as follows. Mr. Sayak began watching Fox News religiously and following Trump supporters on social media. He became a vocal political participant on Facebook, something he had not done previously. He was not discerning of the pro-Trump information he received. And by the time of his arrest, he was connected to hundreds of right-wing Facebook groups. Now, this is the second day in a row where we've covered stories involving people who clearly have mental health issues, getting persuaded by right-wing online forums or by Fox News. Yesterday's story had to do with a 24-year-old man who gunned down a mob boss or alleged

mob boss, and he believed that there was some deep state conspiracy theory against Donald Trump, which is why he went after this guy. Someone was murdered as a result of these nonsense conspiracy theories online. Yeah, and the guy that said that AOC needs around, he said that as he was sharing on Facebook, right wing fake news, that seems to be a link between them. I would take it seriously. It's interesting to say he's not a big threat. He just went crazy because the right wing was manipulating him.

He should only give him 10 years, which would probably be fine because in that time, the right wing media will moderate itself and he won't be released into an atmosphere where, like, Jesse Waters' nephew is telling him that the deep state controls the EPA or something? I want to go to an ABC news report on this, because they give you a little more detail into how much he was radicalized by these insane people in right-wing media. He's somebody who, they say, lost everything in the Great Recession. He lived out of his van for 10 years. That van, you'll remember, was festooned with stickers supporting President Trump and critical

of some of the critics of President Trump. And in those circumstances, his lawyers say in this darkness that Sayak found light in Donald J. Trump. And he developed a real obsession with President Trump. And he followed social media postings and conservative media conspiracy theories. And those really sort of drove him. And you know, even though there have been numerous cases. of people actually carrying out acts of violence, you're right.

I mean, the right wing media has not moderated itself. And Sean Hannity is one of the highest paid people in media, right? He's on Fox, you know, pushing these conspiracy theories on a regular basis, and that does have an impact. It does incite people, especially people who have mental health issues. The attorneys claimed Seahawks history of severe learning disabilities, sexual abuse in school, and dependence on steroids had drastically. affected his life, which is why he was allegedly vulnerable to this type of rhetoric.

And I mean, again, with any story, you should take a step back and look at the bigger picture because this isn't like an isolated thing. We have so many different issues in our society that lead to acts of violence like this. The fact that people do not have access, and I hate the word access, people don't have the resources to afford mental health care. Mental health care is not provided by this country. And so you have people who are either undiagnosed or people who do not get the treatment that they need. Then you have this added disaster of crazy violent rhetoric on the right.

Yeah, people are going to be pushed to violence. Yeah. Yeah, using specifically violent imagery telling people that your way a life is going to be destroyed, you're going to be destroyed, they're coming for you, they're coming for your family. If you hear that all the time day after day, you might be fine and I might be fine. It might be fine, skip maybe, we'll see. But there are some unbalanced people out there, there are enough unbalanced people out there.

I'm not gonna go in depth, I put a video yesterday on the damage report, it's something about the guy who wanted aOC to be shot, but about stochastic terrorism. When you put a message out there and there's enough crazies that it's individually impossible to predict who will act on it, but it's statistically predictable that somebody will. And we have Cesar Seyak, and we have people running to churches, and we have the Coast Guard lieutenant, We have all these people, we already have the pattern, we know that these crazies are out there, and so maybe be careful about the things that you say. And if you're not careful, at this late date, we can look at that and say, you know what you're doing.

You must want the outcome that is assured. Well, also, look, I don't, I don't know if they want that outcome. But what I do know- They don't mind it. They certainly don't moderate their behavior, regardless of how many instances of violence we've seen. But what I do know is that outrage is a very lucrative and profitable business. And that is what they're peddling out there. There are all sorts of hate merchants, fear merchants, people who push these, again, conspiracy

theories which leads to paranoia in various communities throughout the country. I mean, that's why you hear about people paranoid about white genocide in America. And that's what pushes someone like the person who walked into a church and a black church and murdered dozens of people. Yeah. It's sick. And this country is just driven by money in the worst ways. And I don't know, I feel like it's never gonna get better.

I'm sorry for that sad note, but- Yeah, that was the good news, right? That was not the good news. Oh, sorry, that was bad news, okay. The 9-11 victim spun, that was the good news, but it pretty much stops there. The rest of the news is bad. And we're going to have more of it when we come back for the second hour with Brooke Thomas and Nandovila. Thank you so much for joining us, John. Anytime.

All right, guys. We'll be right back. Very close. I think it's becoming. 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. At apple.com slash TYT.

I'm your host, Jank Yugar, and I'll see you soon.