The Young Turks - The Young Turks 01.31.18: Trey Gowdy, Nunes Memo, ICE, and Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald

Episode Date: February 1, 2018

A portion of our Young Turks Main Show from January 31, 2018. For more go to http://www.tytnetwork.com/join. Hour 1:  Cenk & John. Rep. Trey Gowdy retiring. Trump's chief of staff said on Wednesday the White House would soon allow for the release of a highly controversial Republican memo alleging the FBI abused its surveillance tools. "We have certainly coordinated with members of Congress as is appropriate. As to specifics on this, I just don't know the answer," press secretary Sarah Sanders said on CNN's "New Day." "I'm not aware of any conversations or coordination with Congressman Nunes," Sanders said. During the House Intelligence Committee's business meeting on Monday to vote on releasing the Nunes memo, Illinois Democratic Rep. Mike Quigley pressed Nunes about whether he or his staff had coordinated with the White House on the memo, Quigley told CNN on Wednesday. Quigley said Nunes became "quite agitated" when pressed whether any of his staffers were involved in producing the memo, and refused to answer the question. Hour 2: Cenk & Ana. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) deported Amer Othman Adi, a Palestinian man who lived in Ohio, on Monday. Donald Trump's top public health official resigned Wednesday amid mounting questions about financial conflicts of interest. Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald's resignation comes one day after POLITICO reported that one month into her tenure as CDC director, she bought shares in a tobacco company. Fitzgerald had long championed efforts to cut tobacco use, which is the leading cause of preventable death. 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. You're about to watch what we call an extended clip of the Young Turks, and the reality is somewhere in the middle. It's a little longer than our YouTube clips, but it's actually shorter than the whole two-hour show, which you can get if you're a member. You can get an ad-free and make sure you catch every new story we do that day. You're going to love it as a full show. That's at t-y-tnetwork.com slash join.

Thanks for watching. All right, well, the young Turks, Jake, you, or John, Iroll it with you guys. I am sick. When we were done with the State of the Union last night, I was trembling in the car. But then here's a rage. No, no, from being sick. But then I passed out immediately. And I didn't think it was coming in today, so I just, I didn't set the alarm.

I got 10 and a half hours of sleep. How did I feel? Oh, I felt amazing. That's getting to too long. That's like, I wake up and it's too much. Wrong. No such thing is too much when it comes to sleep. Yeah.

When I was a kid, I used to sleep 12 hours all the time. Oh, it was so great. Yeah. It was like the best times of my life. I'd go to the, I'd sleep in the basement when I was in, like, senior in high school, and there's no sunlight down there, like in the summertime? Just never wake up. Oh, you never wake up.

You wake up at 2 in the afternoon. Oh, it's like the greatest thing that ever happened. But yeah, considering how sick you were yesterday, I don't, I want to make sure that you get credit for sucking it up, coming into work, and making sure that you get me sick before my birthday trip to Vegas. So thank you. No problem. Can do.

Can do. I appreciate that. All right. We got a hell of a show for you guys today, of course, as we do every day. And people are being rounded up. We're going to tell you about that. Floods are not being rounded up. We're going to tell you about that.

And Trump doing favors for his donors. No. Weird. Weird. Okay. So let's get started. Okay, let's do it. Today we have yet another Republican committee chairman

who is choosing not to run for re-election this fall. This one is a name that you might have heard. before it's Trey Gowdy, who is probably best known for his chairmanship of the House Benghazi Committee and also his new boy band hairstyle. And so he is, yes, he is out and he put out a statement. We're not going to read the whole thing because it's just, it's just terrible. But we're going to read part of it. He said, I will not be filing for re-election of Congress, nor seeking any other political or elected office. Instead, I will be returning to the justice system. Whatever skills I may have are better utilized in a courtroom than in Congress. And I enjoy our

justice system more than our political system, as I look back on my career, it is the jobs that both seek and reward fairness that are most rewarding. There is a time to come and a time to go, this is the right time for me to leave politics and return to the justice system. Okay, so there's a number of issues here. Some are similar to other Republicans who have retired and some are distinct for Trey Gowdy. Yes. So he, one thing that is different, he's now, I think, the 37.

sixth person. They have different counts. I don't know why. One article says 34 to another one says 36. Republican to say they're not coming back for another term. Retiring, resigning, some in disgrace, some because they're going to lose their elections. Most because they're going to lose their elections. That's where Gowdy is different than the rest. He's in a district that's plus 25 for Trump. He was unlikely to lose an election even in a massive swing year. So that most of the 36 are going because of that. Now, one thing that he does share with some other folks that have left, mainly Chaffetz, is he is, he was charged with overseeing the Trump administration because he's the head of the oversight committee. That's not an enviable position.

That puts you in a tight spot because, now, for reasons that we're probably not even aware of yet, and remember, they have intelligence that we do not, right? They have information, we do not. So he's either going to piss off his base and say, I'm going to do my job here and tell and hold Trump accountable, or I'm going to have to sell my soul. And he doesn't have much left after the Benghese investigation and the IRS investigation. Now, there's one other thing that's really critical in the case of Gowdy. On Tuesday, a seat on a Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals opened up in South Carolina. That covers South Carolina. And he obviously, based on the statement that John read to you right there, obviously wants that to go back into the judiciary where he had served before, into the justice system, as he called it.

And that seat opening up and him wanting to reside immediately thereafter is not a coincidence. So that seems like a nice safe harbor for him. Get the hell out of Dodge. This thing's not going to end well. And then there's a nice soft seat for me there on a prestigious court. and then maybe he dreams that that could open him up to Supreme Court one day, maybe if he's got the right Republican president. But for the moment being, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals is a great, great position if he can land it. And with the Republicans in charge, he probably can't.

And if not, he's a well-known and probably well-connected Republican. If he wanted to go into lobbying, he could do that. He didn't mention it here, but of course he's not going to, but he could do it anyway. And I'm glad that you pointed out the context of his district, as you said, 25 points towards Trump, which means that he would be safe for re-election unless we were in a context where challengers were regularly doing better than plus 25 over the previous.

We need to talk about a relatively new show called Un-F-Inging the Republic, or UNFTR. As a Young Turks fan, you already know that the government, the media, and corporations are constantly peddling lies that serve the interests of the rich and powerful. But now there's a podcast dedicated

to unraveling those lies, debunking the conventional wisdom. In each episode of Un-B-The-Republic, or UNFTR, the host delves into a different historical episode or topic that's generally misunderstood or purposely obfuscated by the so-called powers that be. Featuring in-depth research, razor-sharp commentary, and just the right amount of vulgarity, the UNFTR podcast takes a sledgehammer to what you thought you knew about some of the nation's most sacred historical cows. But don't just take my word for it. The New York Times described UNFTR as consistently compelling and educational, aiming to challenge conventional wisdom and upend the historical narratives that were taught in school. For as the great philosopher Yoda once put it,

You must unlearn what you have learned. 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. Which is actually where we are. That doesn't mean that it would have happened in this one, but there have been people getting 36-point swings over the previous fall.

A little bit more background information for him leaving. This is from Politico's saying that Gowdy rarely participated in house GOP events, rarely attending the weekly GOP conference, for example. He often talked privately about resenting the increasingly partisan atmosphere, of which he had no part as head of the Benghazi committee. And he loved to say that he wished he was home watching cheesy hallmark movies with his wife. Isn't that sweet? So there are parts of that I believe and parts I do not.

So look, he was asked to chair those committees, partly because for whatever reason, in Washington, he had credibility at that point. But in reality, to me, what was maybe even more egregious than the Benghazi hearings were the IRS hearings. The IRS hearings were we found out that, no, liberal groups had been investigated just as much as conservative groups had. And that so-called controversy was purely made up. And it was made up to try to discredit the IRS so they couldn't collect taxes from rich people. And now, the person who's most likely to be the head of the IRS, according to our own reporting at TYT Investigates,

is a guy whose main job was to make sure that rich people can avoid taxes. Yet another person who is going to be assigned to a part of the government to help destroy that part of the government. That was the whole point of the IRS investigation. So when Gowdy says, oh, golly, gee, I don't like partisan politics, and he went to go help his rich Republican donors with that investigation, color me a little skeptical. Now, on the other hand, the Republicans did push him to do Benghazi.

And when he didn't say Hillary Clinton should be locked up, previous friends like Jim Jordan and others were furious at him. They're like, it was a nice hatchet job, but not good enough. We wanted you to finish her and demand that she be sent to a federal penitentiary. Yeah. So now, remember all the Benghazi hearings, because that was the reality, concluded. that there was no laws broken at all. Yeah.

Now, just for the larger context that this is a part of, as we said, is not just another Republican congressman choosing not to run again. It's a committee chairman. And what's interesting about this is for a lot of people in the House, you spend years working your way up so that you can eventually be in a position where if your party takes control, you can become a chairperson. Because that's where a lot of the power in the House actually lies. I mean, the House is a lot more, it's not quite the same as the Senate,

where individual members don't have as much autonomous power. But if you're a chairman, you do have some power. So for so many of them to choose to leave implies that they don't think that that power is likely to be a lasting thing. And we want to go over some of the different chairman who are leaving, because I believe right now it's at eight, which is nine now. Nine now, but that's a huge number. So you have the House Financial Services Committee, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, which I'm sure probably doesn't have much on its plate these days since he doesn't believe in any of those things. the House Judiciary Committee, House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, House Foreign Affairs Committee, House Appropriations Committee, which is obviously a huge thing for the House, and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which again doesn't have much on its plate. But that is a lot of Chairman all in one cycle choosing not to go, and we're not done yet.

We still have a couple more months of the primaries left where many of them could feel comfortable to resign in the next few weeks or months. In fact, both of those are records, record number of incumbents from one party resigning and record number of committee chairman leaving at once. It was a record already a couple of chairman ago, and two chairman decided to step down just this week, Freel housing, Freelinghausen earlier this week and now Gowdy. And as you look at that list, if you follow politics closely, those are some of the Republican so-called all-stars, giant names on that list going, I got to get the hell out of Dodge. Now, look, in Gowdy's case, one more thing that's relevant. So he wasn't likely to

lose his seat, but he was likely to lose the committee chairmanship because the Democrats are now favored to win back the House in 2018, in which case those, the Republicans go into the minority, and then those chair positions are no longer the leads of those committees. And that's also irrelevant. But mainly, I think the two most important things here, and what's your real takeaways are, he wants that seat in the judiciary. It was a good time to go. And he's seen information. This is my theory. He's seen information on Trump. And he does not want to be in a position where he's going to have to stake his political career on overseeing Donald Trump. Yeah. Well, why don't we turn to someone who is taking their political career on overseeing and

in this case, helping out Donald Trump. Donald Trump is apparently now considering whether he will release the big memo implicating the FBI in some sort of gigantic conspiracy to take down Donald Trump, including the possibility of some sort of secret society. And so this is the Devin Nunes memo. And as of last night, at the State of the Union, we have a little bit of video for you that implies that he is actually planning to release it. So let's watch that.

Let's release the memo. Oh, don't warn't 100%. Can you imagine you? Yes, sir. He'd be too angry. So he was speaking there with some giant that had wandered in the room. That was the largest person I've ever seen in my life. But anyway, it was a little bit hard to hear the audio, but he said whether the guy asked him,

are you going to release it? And he said 100%, which, I mean, he's not great at math, but that's all the percent. I mean, that's he's going to do it. But then it turns out maybe not so much, because according to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump still hasn't seen the memo. And when asked on CNN if there's a chance he wouldn't release the memo, Sanders said there's always a chance. Well, there's always a chance unless there's 100% chance he's going to do it.

So there's a bit of a miscommunication there between them. But yeah, so this is a guy who's talking constantly about how important and damning this memo is. Has he read it? No, no, no. That's reading. He doesn't want to read. No, John. See, that's where I think there's a twist there. So, first of all, the guy he's talking to is Jeff Duncan, who wandered in from the other side

of the wall. Exactly. I think John Snow let him in. Now, obviously, he's up on the seats there in the State of the Union. But I choose to think he's a giant. Yeah, I like that I had to clarify that he's not, in fact, a giant from the other side of the wall. So anyway.

Hagrid asked him. Yeah. So when Sarah Alcabee Sanders was asked by Chris Corman on CNN, has the presidency in the memo yet? her answer was telling she said not that I'm aware of now that's a classic non-denial denial okay that's not a no that's cover my ass well I don't know it I made sure that I don't know that he saw it now why is that relevant because there are now reports that Nunes worked with Trump on the memo oh here we go there are now reports that Jank Ugar will die on stage.

Yes, actually, a little bit later on, there was some breaking news in this area. Once we've done with this story, we can get into that. But yeah, there's a lot of discussion going on about to what extent Nunes, not just early on in the investigation when there was some questionable trips to the White House, but continues to coordinate with the White House on this, on something that is not just acting as a distraction from the actual investigation, but was clearly designed to be a distraction. Yeah. So if in fact Trump has or people in the Trump White House have worked with Nunes or his staffers on crafting the memo, then of course he's going to release it. That's why he said 100% to Duncan. And he said, can you imagine that? Like can you imagine me not releasing it? Now, why might they not release it? Well, all the intelligence agencies that work under Trump in the executive branch have come to Trump and said, don't release the memo. That's it, it is misleading, it is inaccurate, don't do it, it's a really bad idea.

But if Trump helped write the memo, of course he's going to release the memo. That's why he says it's 100%. The whole point is not to be accurate, it's to do a hatch a job on the FBI. So when the FBI comes and says, please don't do it, he's like, right, right, right, right, right. I actually have their statement. I can read a bit of that if you want. This is put out earlier today from the FBI. saying with regard to the House Intelligence Committee's memorandum, the FBI was provided a limited opportunity to review this memo the day before the committee voted to release it.

As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material emissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo's accuracy. So I think when you hear that the FBI doesn't want it to be released, my initial guess would be that there's some sort of classified information that they're worried about getting out, which generally is not something that I'm overly concerned about. I think that we have need of a lot of information. But here they're saying, no, it is purposefully misleading. And of course it's going to be this entire thing has been so ridiculous. This whole release of memo thing, which is of interest largely to Sean Hannity and some bot networks online. It is an op-ed written by Devin Nunes, who is clearly attempting to protect Donald Trump that is designed to do that. And so what's going to be in the memo?

It's going to be like selected information that makes the FBI look bad. Well, what's new about that? Sean Hannity and any number of Republican congressmen have spent the past six months on a daily basis smearing the FBI. There's nothing new about that. And it's going to end up being a lot like the information of the testimony that comes out of Fusion GPS, where they kept saying they wanted to be released, but then not allowing it to be released because the implication is far more damaging than the actual information in the testimony or in this case the memo. The material omissions of fact that the FBI referred to is not the bug in the memo, it's the feature.

The whole point is to smear the FBI, and that's why the Trump administration and Nunes, who worked and the transition team for Trump, are in favor of putting it out because the FBI is doing the investigation of Donald Trump, so they want to cover up for him. So, look, this is much to do about nothing. I actually have now gotten to a point. point where, like, as usual, we're stuck in this conundrum of. This is a total non-issue, but the right wing yells so loudly about it that we feel compelled to counter it. But on the other hand, we're covering a non-issue. It's a memo written by a highly partisan guy who was part of the Trump team telling us that Trump is right. Who cares? Who cares about that? But that's the problem with the state of this country. The right wing is so loud that they changed the national conversation on so many issues

that if we had a rational discourse, they'd be like, oh, okay, the Republicans think Trump is right. That's like your opinion, man. Democrats think he's wrong. That's your opinion, man. Now, what's the reality? But we're outside of the reality zone here. Yeah. I have a couple other pieces of information sort of around this that might not be non-issues,

but we'll see. I'll run them past you. A lot of this information breaking in just the hour. two before we went live. But Devin Nunes today says that because from his point of view at least, the FBI is currently under investigation by his committee. Because they're under investigation, no one from the FBI can be used to brief the committee on any information about dossiers or any other information. So it's sort of a get out of jail free card and the FBI providing information where he's just saying all of you are suspect so you can't be used

anymore. I don't see that playing out the way he plans necessarily, but that is his goal, at least today, is to stonewall the FBI from being involved in any of these investigations. We also found out earlier today, I believe this is a CNN breaking news story, that back in December, Donald Trump had a conversation with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, where he asked him if he was, quote, on my team, which is not the same thing as asking for a loyalty pledge, which he famously did with James Comey, but it's in that neighborhood. Yeah. Now, Rod Rosenstein had said in his testimony to Congress that he had not been asked to take

part in any sort of loyalty pledge or anything like that. So it appears that he didn't perceive it that way either. But that is from a guy like Donald Trump, who we know is very interested in loyalty. I think that that's not nothing. Well, so a couple of important things there. On Rod Rosenstein's testimony, he pointed. refused to answer questions about whether he'd been asked about loyalty, but then went on to say, well, I didn't give a loyalty pledge. So that would make this story now fit in to that, to his

testimony, which is already on the record. So it turns out, Donald Trump said, are you on my team? Again, asking for loyalty. And Rosenstein, in his interpretation, did not give that pledge. And so, Well, he did say that he was on his team, or he's on the team, I think he said. No, no, he, the report said that it was an awkward situation, which it most certainly is, because he's part of the executive branch run by Donald Trump. And he said, well, Mr. President, we're all part of the same team, right? And I mean, to give the guy credit, what can you say in a situation like that? No, piss off, no, you can't say that.

No, I am your enemy. Right, and you also can't say, yes, I promise to be on your team. and not the American government's team, et cetera. So he's going to, Trump puts him in an untenable spot as he did with Comey and so many others. And Trump, to this late date, either doesn't understand that you can't ask people to Justice Department whether they are on your team, especially when they're charged with investigating you. Yeah. Or understands that and thinks, no, I am fundamentally corrupt. I don't care. I demand corruption. Yeah.

From people. And both are possible given his lack of intelligence and his, uh, and his, uh, deep nature as a corrupt person that has been around forever and ever if you go back to all of his business dealings in Trump University, etc. So now on Nunes, one last thing, Mike Quigley, who's a Democrat from Illinois, said that in a private meeting of congressman, he asked Nunes if the Trump White House worked with him on this secret memo that is so important that is, you know, launched this release the memo thing. And Nunes said, no, I didn't work on it. And when he asked him, did your staff work on it with the White House?

He was like, I'm not going to answer that. Ah, I see. So in other words, your staff did work with the White House. So this memo is even more useless. So it's basically written by the Trump White House and is seen as some sort of gotcha of the FBI. Proposterous. Well, I've got one more breaking thing today, another preposterous gotcha of the FBI. So I can never pronounce this guy's name.

Peter Strach. Is this Strock? Yeah, Strock. Yeah, for fun. So Peter Strach, he's one of the two, as Trump has called him and tweets, the lovers and the FBI who were tweeting treasonous information about Donald Trump. They were the two who revealed that there is an FBI secret society that I found out on Infoars today is planning to nuke Washington, D.C., which is an especially clever plan since that's

where the deep state is. is, but they're nuking their own city. Anyway, so for a while now, after it was revealed, I believe several months ago, that six months prior, they had been sending some tweets that could be interpreted as derogatory about Donald Trump. Now, Mueller immediately removed them months before anybody even knew about this, but that was still being used. The presence of those tweets was being used to discredit the entire investigation. Even though Peter Strach was also texting derogatory information about Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, we We now find out today that that same Peter Strach took part in writing a letter, encouraging

James Comey to reopen the email investigation into Hillary Clinton in fall of 2016. So this secret society is a complex place. I don't necessarily understand their plans, but this guy who wanted to do nothing but take down Donald Trump apparently was also doing whatever he could to take down Hillary Clinton. Or maybe he works with the FBI. Well, that's what I'm saying. The idea that they can take this one tweet and then imply that he's part of some sort of coup against Donald Trump is ridiculous. Just like James Comey, he was involved in investigations that target both sides.

So his lover, Lisa Page, where does the word secret society that phrase come from? She had written in a text kidding, like, why are you guys having a meeting without me? This wasn't in my calendar. Is this part of a secret society? And after all this nonsense secret society talk, even Ron Johnson, the senator from Wisconsin, who started it, had to go and say, yeah, perhaps that was made in jest. Sorry about that. Anyway, so now, Strach, if he, now we know, based on this latest news, that he was counseled to reopen the investigation on Hillary Clinton. Since he did that, a lot of Democrats, I don't know that I agree with them, although it did have a huge swing of the election.

think that that was the reason Hillary Clinton lost because Comey, shortly before the election, reopened the investigation. This dramatic thing of like, oh my God, we've got a laptop and we've got to reopen the investigation on Hillary Clinton. By the time they had concluded that, that the damage was done. I think that was one of many, many factors that led to Hillary Clinton losing. I think a lot of Democrats think that was the factor. So if Strach had a plan to undermine one candidate, well, he did it, and it was against Hillary Clinton, and it worked. So now, the damning text from Strach about Trump is that Strach thinks Trump's an idiot, which at least 60% of the country agrees with.

Like, even a lot of the Republicans who voted for him, like, I mean, he is an idiot. So, like, you're, like, the big conspiracy is, Strach agrees with the overwhelming majority of the country. But if there's one candidate, he actually did something too, it was Hillary Clinton. Now, look, and again, this is so frustrating because the right wing throws out so many stupid, insane conspiracy theories. And then we wind up having giant conversations about them, and then cable news takes over. It gets started with sometimes literally from info wars with their insane things about they dropping a two. They said the secret society was going to drop a 2,000 pound bomb on the White House. Now they're talking about nuking DC and it starts from the insane and works this way outside the asylum.

And Matt Gates was on info words the other days of Republican congressman. He's on with an alt-right troll and invited an alt-right troll who is in ups, like more insane than even Alex Jones. A Holocaust scenario and an insane person to the state of the union. So there's a congressman, then it jumps to a senator, and then it goes to Fox News, and then it goes to CNN, and then it goes to MSNBC, and then the whole country is talking about insanity. There is no goddamn secret society, and Strach and Page didn't like Trump, but they hated Bernie Sanders.

Yeah. And they didn't much like Hillary Clinton, and apparently they totally screwed Hillary Clinton over. Yeah. Turns out they liked Lincoln Chafee, though. But that plot to get him to be president didn't work out that well. No, not so much. He was close. He was close.

Hashtag feel a chafe. Anyway, so we should probably take our first break, though. When we come back, we want to dive into infrastructure and infrastructure reform. It was a big topic in the State of the Union last night. What are they actually planning? League details make it pretty clear and not that surprising. Thanks for listening to this podcast. You're only halfway through.

Hold, hold, stay right here. Just want to remind you if you want to get all five segments of the Young Turks commercial free, these are just two of them. Every day we do it. So go to t-y-tnetwork.com slash join, and you'll get the whole five segments, two hours. Add free. Do it now. All right, back on the Young Turks, Jank Uyghur, Anna Kasparian with you guys.

Is that new? It's new. All right. Fun for everybody. So we've got a couple of tweets on the Baltimore cop story that we did, and then we briefly mentioned Bernie, and of course, that lit everything up. So first on the cops, Zappa fan says, more corrupt cops, who would have thought that every single person without blinders on?

But as you know, of course, there are a lot of folks with blinders on. And Dee Moore says about their strategy of, you know, driving fast and then suddenly stopping and having people disperse and chasing the people who ran. He says, there's no nice way to put it, that's human hunting by any other name. It's what you do when you're duck hunting. Shoot around into the ground, kill the ducks that fly away. Whoa. It's really sad, but unfortunately, that is an apt analogy for what they did in Baltimore.

And then, of course, they have the toy guns to plant on their kids, which is just heartbreaking. Okay. Angels advocate, now moving on to Bernie v. Hillary says, Bernie isn't splitting the ticket. He's the only one people are buying tickets too because most people don't want to go to the Dem's shitty party. I think that that is generally true, as we explained in our live state of the union coverage yesterday. And by the way, of course, that's up for the members. TYT network.com slash join. And look, part of the reason for this birthday party that we're doing is that I want to do rallies more often. And I want to then, I want to work up.

to Bernie, right? And I want to get people to start joining us and talking about progressive ideas. That's part of the reason why I want Alison Hartson to come to this one. And then for trusted progressives to come to more and more. So if you want to be there on February 15, that's t.ytnetwork.com slash party in this case, literally. Michael Napin writes the hashtag never Hillary people didn't think the primary wasn't over they didn't want another corporate establishment candidate Michael I hear you brother and neither

did we that's why we fought tooth and nail against Hillary Clinton in the primary and for Bernie Sanders to the point where I did something where the rest of the media told me I should never do I wouldn't introduce Bernie Sanders in his California stops but the other person who agreed with me that the primary was over was Bernie Sanders and said that he would, that Hillary Clinton, like I said, would be a better choice than Donald Trump. And even if you thought Jill Stein would have been a better choice than either one of those folks, did you really think she was going to win? Is that? Look, I don't want to reopen the debate.

All I'm telling you is my position was identical to Bernie Sanders position. All right. Anyway, one last one here. Dave's gone mad rights in. Aren't you guys even a little bit worried that lifelong Democrats over the age of 40 will stay home rather than vote for someone that refused to join the party? The fact that Senators wants to be the head of a party, he refuses to join is insulting to lifelong Dems. You know, some people might see it that way, but I am perplexed by that. Maybe because I was never on any team, right? Yeah, yeah, I didn't realize how much.

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we would discuss. There was international relations, comparative politics, whatever. But American politics was fascinating, especially when we looked at, um, you know, voting habits. And the argument was by some political scholars that people who vote along party lines are the low information voters, right? They're the ones who don't have the time. And by the way, it doesn't mean that they're dumb or anything.

It just means that people are busy. People don't do what we do every day. They have families to take care of, jobs to deal with. So it's a very limited resource to sit there and research every topic. So those who vote along party lines, low information voters there. But no, I think that it's now completely shifted toward people who just, they have like this tribal mentality and they don't want to vote for, even if they agree with every policy position a politician has.

If that individual does not identify as a part of their team, they will vote against them or not show up to the polls to vote for them. It's the weirdest thing. Please just focus on the policies. I don't care about whether they're a Democrat or Republican, independent. It doesn't matter. What do they want to do for the country? That's what should concern every single voter, not which team they're on. Yeah, I just literally don't understand that way of thinking. It's just devastating.

So, name a corporate Democrat. Joe Lieberman was a lifelong Democrat, right? Until he lost the Democratic primary, then immediately he became an independent. Isn't that funny how that works? But it was a lifelong Democrat. And he was a terrible Democrat. He voted against progressive priorities. See, to me, putting the Democratic loyalty to a party over the actual policy positions,

I just, it's so weird to me, because isn't this about policies and this about real change in people's lives? And I guess some people think, no, it's about my team winning. And I don't give a shit what the team stands for. And that's just, I don't get it. I don't get it. No, I don't care at all what Bernie calls himself. I care about his policy positions. Okay, let's do the rest of the news.

Immigration officials continue to deport individuals who have been in the country for decades and have not committed a crime. The recent case that has made national headlines involves a Palestinian man who has actually been in the United States for nearly 40 years. And he was not only someone who is here for a long period of time. He was also a small business owner who had employed several people in the state of Ohio. And he also had a wife and daughters who were U.S. citizens or are U.S. citizens. But it didn't matter. The ICE officials who made the decision to deport him even went so far as to ignoring an order from a, from the judiciary. committee in Congress that urge them to allow him to stay so they can actually investigate the

situation. So now let me give you the details. His name is Omer Othman Adi. And again, he has been here for nearly 40 years, 39 to be specific. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had kept him in detention for two weeks ignoring a House Judiciary Committee request that the Department of Homeland Security review his case, which would have allowed him to temporarily remain in the U.S. So he would have temporarily remained in the U.S. for about six months while his case gets investigated. And the reason why his case needed to be investigated was because there was an accusation that his previous marriage was a fraud, just so he can get a green card. Now, his ex-wife came out and said, no, I was coerced into my initial statement, but our marriage was not a fraud. And he was in a relationship with me, and he's never committed any crimes.

This needs to be investigated. He should stay here in the United States. But it doesn't matter. Ice officials decided to deport him anyway. Now, according to Representative Tim Ryan, who has been on the war path in regard to this particular case, he said that a mayor was a pillar of the community and brought commerce to a downtown that craved investment. He hired members of our community. He paid taxes. He did everything right. There are violent criminals walking the streets, yet our government wasted our precious resources in car. incarcerating him. So I'll give you more details, but Cenk, I want you to jump in. Yeah, first of all, great statement by Congressman Tim Ryan, appreciate his hard work on this issue. And I think a lot of people in Ohio do. So saying nearly, the manner in which ICE enforce this is also deeply troubling. So he was going to check in with ICE, and now this is a story we've heard so many times over and over again. He's doing his regular

check is that he thinks everything is fine. And then all of a sudden, they spring this on them and they say, okay, now we're gonna kick you out of the country. So make plans to leave, okay? So he's like, wow, that's terrible. And, but he's a law-abiding citizen. I just told him this. He makes plans to, to leave. He and his wife, his current wife, they sold their home. They sold their home and bought tickets to fly to Jordan, which is where he was born. And then ICE got back to him and said,

oh, no, no, wait a minute, no, actually you're going to be fine. This might be investigated. You don't have to leave. He goes in for a second check-in with ICE officials, and then they detain him. Yeah, the first one that was problematic, there was many,

but the one that we were telling you about, they strap an ankle bracelet on them and say, we're going to kick you out of the country. Then they bring him back in at a later time go, no, just kidding, we're not going to do that. Everything's going to be fine. Next time he comes in, they arrest him, and they put him in jail for two weeks. But look, he was already following your orders. That was already appeared to be the worst case scenario, but leave it to the Trump administration,

take a worst case scenario, and make it even worse. By needlessly keeping him in jail and detention for several weeks, before then moving him to Chicago and then getting him on a flight to Amman Jordan, and with barely an ability to say goodbye to his family here in America. Is this who we are? Unfortunately, with Trump in charge, yes, uprooting families, destroying businesses, all in the name of politics and demagoguery. That's what he's turned America into.

This is insane. And it's our taxpayer money going toward deporting people like a mayor, okay? This notion that they're only going after these dangerous criminals. And as Trump put it during his state of the union, these MS-13 gang members. Yeah, everyone wants the MS-13 gang members gone. Everyone wants real criminals out of the country. There's no question about that. Everyone's in agreement.

But there's no reason why a man who's been in the country for 40 years is a job creator, hasn't done anything wrong. There's no reason why we should be deporting him, spending our resources and our time to, you know, tear his his family apart and destroy his business. His wife's an American citizen, all four of his daughters are American citizens. I mean, this is preposterous. And it's not about the criminals. And one last thing, you know, we talked last line in our live coverage of the State of the Union about the projection that Republicans do.

And they do it on almost every issue. But think about it in the context of this issue. So Trump says, oh, the people coming in here are undocumented without papers, and a lot of them are criminals and rapists. Now, who does that describe best? Now, it's very uncomfortable, and a lot of people in this country don't like to talk about it. But the original settlers here, they were undocumented immigrants. They didn't come with any papers. They didn't present any papers to Native Americans.

And what did they do? A lot of them were criminals. And when you read the history of Christopher Columbus, they were rapists. So they came in and raped and pillaged this land. And spread diseases. Right. Yeah. And now they turn around and project that on to people coming into this country to work for

the lowest wages we have to provide for their families, the most powerless people that we have. So it's not just that it's not true of these immigrants. It's that it was true of the people that they formed their identity around and now projected on to those immigrants. So that's the reality of today. And yet we lose another valuable member of the community today when Trump was pretending to care about just criminals. No, his programs have always been about uprooting people who don't look like him. Yeah. Well, there's been a lot of turnover in the federal government. So let's discuss that. Even more turnover than you know about. The director of the Centers for Disease Control, Brenda Fritzgerald, has decided to resign from her post following an investigation that determined that she had purchased stock in the tobacco industry, immediately following her new position with the CDC.

drums. So let me give you the details. Fitzgerald bought tens of thousands of dollars in new stock holdings in at least a dozen companies, including Japan tobacco, one of the largest tobacco companies in the world. In fact, that company produces four different brands of tobacco products here in the United States. Now, the day after the purchase, she toured the CDC's tobacco laboratory, which researchers how the chemicals in tobacco. harm human health. And she was quoted as saying that too many Americans are harmed by cigarette smoking, which is the nation's leading preventable cause of death and disease. And she also vowed to continue to use proven strategies to help smokers quit and to prevent children from using any tobacco products. So obviously there was a clear conflict of interest here. You can't be the director of the CDC and then immediately buy stock in tobacco products.

especially when that is the exact type of product that you want to help Americans stop using. Yeah, the leading cause of death in the country, but also the leading cause of my profits. Now, what she did was an obvious conflict of interest, clearly unacceptable. Her stepping down makes sense. We could leave the story there. And I'm going to preface this by saying this is some degree of speculation by me. But why would you go into the CDC and then buy stocks of tobacco companies right after? Because it's not like she had the stocks from long ago, and she forgot that they were in her portfolio or anything like that.

She bought them afterwards. You might do that if you know that you're actually not going to do much to fight tobacco smoking. Duh, yes, yes. That is why it's a huge conflict of interest. Also, look, we're dealing with a huge opioid crisis, which is, you know, partly to blame, or mostly to blame on pharmaceutical companies and, you know, laxed regulations. Well, keep in mind that she also invested in pharmaceutical companies, including Merck and Bayer. So Merck and Bayer, as far as I know, don't produce the opioids in question, but it doesn't matter.

There's still pharmaceutical companies that, in my opinion, need to be regulated to prevent, you know, the abuse of certain drugs or the overprescription of certain drugs, to know that she's she purchased that stock after getting this, you know, position at the CDC should concern everyone. Because it means she's not going to aggressively go after them. That's going to hurt their profits, which in turn is going to hurt her profits. Yeah. And the more she goes after them, the more money she might lose. I mean, you think that's not going to affect her? It's as if we had a division of the government that was to prevent gun use. Well, theoretically, I guess you could say the ATF, right?

And a guy leading the ATF goes, oh, great, I bought a lot of stock and gun companies. I mean, I actually don't think it's that far-fetched that that's already happened or is happening. Right. So, and what does Trump do? He puts in charge of departments the people intended to destroy those departments. Scott Pruitt at the EPA, tried to destroy the EPA when he was outside of it. Rick Perry, a Department of Energy, and the list goes on and up. So is it that surprising that somebody you put in charge of the CDC was quietly betting against the CDC to make profits for herself at the expense of the rest of us?

No, the best part is that she was placed in that position by Tom Price, who had to resign from his position in the federal government because of his overuse of private jets, you know, using taxpayer money. And by the way, Tom Price famously would go on cable news and talk about how Democrats. are wasting money on these flights, then he proceeded to use these private jets and make U.S. taxpayers pay for it. What do we tell you all the time? Republican 101 is projection. Tom Price knows that he's ripping off taxpayers

by using private jets. So he goes on cable news and says, can you believe how the Democrats are ripping us off by using private jets? So, but my favorite part of the story is when I thought I was making a trenchant observation and then I went, duh. I like how you're like, this is speculation, might be controversial.

No, it's clear as day. I think it's fair to speculate on that. Okay, all right, we got to take a break. Let's do that. And when we come back, Stormy talks to Jimmy Kimmel, drama ensues. I'll tell you what that drama is. You don't want to miss it. And then Ken Bone, if you can remember from 2016, he was at one of the debates between Trump

and Clinton. He called Trump out last night during the State of the Union. I'll give you the details to that and more. Thanks for watching what I hope was a lovely edition of the Young Turks. Now, you know that that is two of the five segments that we do because that's free. We want to have you support independent media and come watch the whole show that we do every day. That's five segments overall. No ads at all.

That's at t-y-tnetwork.com slash join. Come become a member. Thanks for watching either way. 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 dot co slash t yt i'm your host jank huger and i'll see you soon