What A Day - Special Report-a-thon: Russia and Afghanistan

Episode Date: December 10, 2019

A report from the Inspector General has revealed Trump’s claim that the FBI spied on him in 2016 to be false. We talk about what else we learned from this scorching hot doc. Report two is from the Washington Post, about how American officials repeatedly lied and hid evidence that the conflict there was unwinnable. We discuss.  And in headlines: Golden Globe noms, the case of Cannon v. Shady, and Warren wins the war for transparency.

It's Tuesday, December 10th. I'm Akilah Hughes. I'm Gideon Resnick, and this is What A Day, the sweet potato french fry of daily news shows. Is it even fries if it doesn't have vitamin A? The important questions. On today's show, a whole mess of reports. One new report finds that the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign was justified. Another report details devastating findings on America's forever war in Afghanistan. Then some headlines.

But first, an impeachment news blast. Oh, yeah. Yeah, blast it. All right. So today, Democrats are expected to announce the articles of impeachment against Donald Trump. According to reports, they are likely to draft two articles, one on abuse of power and one on obstruction of Congress. Democrats have called a news conference at 9 a.m. where we should learn more. A vote on the articles is expected as soon as this week in the Judiciary Committee. That's the first step before impeachment heads to a full House vote. And that was your impeachment news blast.

Okay, now we want to take you back to the Russia investigation, specifically the investigation of the investigators. You may remember when former Attorney General Jeff Sessions directed Inspector General Michael Horowitz to launch an internal investigation into the origins of the Russia probe after Trump accused the FBI of spying on him and his campaign aide Carter Page. That was all during Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. Well, the IG report is now available and there are a few new findings to go through before we check out the ways Democrats and Republicans are characterizing this report. Yes. Takeaway one, the report found no evidence to support Trump's claim that the FBI spied on him.

Zero. Zilch. Embarrassing. Furthermore, the report says that there is no, quote, evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced the decisions to open the four individual investigations into Trump campaign aides, which is to say that the claim that the FBI was investigating because they have a liberal bias is also false. Actually, the report uncovered several pro-Trump text messages exchanged between two FBI employees the day after Trump won the election. And that brings us to takeaway number two. The Republican claim that the FBI used the Steele dossier to start the Russia probe is also false. IG Horowitz found that FBI investigators didn't even get the Steele dossier until after their investigation had been launched.

The report says that the FBI had sufficient evidence in July 2016 to lawfully open the investigation. Yeah, which sidebar is hilariously named Crossfire Hurricane, which sounds just like a Kool-Aid Jammer's flavor from the 90s. Very tasty. But also the report found that there were several errors from the FBI, including omitting important details from its applications for a FISA warrant on Carter Page, the guy we referenced just a few moments ago.

And this also involved the alteration of an email by an FBI lawyer. Horowitz also said that the team overstated Steele's reliability, and some of Page's other statements were omitted, including denials of meeting with Russian officials. Not great. But takeaway three, Steele called the allegation that he was biased against Trump, quote, ridiculous. According to the report, Steele says he was, quote, favorably disposed to the Trumps before he began his research on the dossier. The report says Steele visited a Trump family member at Trump Tower and had been friendly with that person for years. Oh, really? Well, ABC News reviewed emails from the timeline described by Steele and are now reporting that that family member that he's been friendly with, yeah, it's first daughter and sweatshop clothing

designer Ivanka Trump. Shock. And now to the party responses to these new details. Democrats rightly pointed out that the findings undermine all of the conspiracy theories Trump and his administration have been peddling when it comes to the Russian investigation. Akilah, how did Republicans react, though? Yeah, how do you think they reacted, Gideon? Reasonably and very nicely. They got too much money in the deep state conspiracy so they they did exactly what you think so fans of the sci-fi programming on fox news got a different version of the report than you know people who watch the credible news networks here's a clip the ig report claims that none of these abuses were politically motivated now that's a subjective judgment it's hard to know but it's also hard to

swallow that claim only a partisan could believe something as absurd as the Steele dossier. But let's say the IG report is right and none of these abuses were politically motivated. Okay, fine. We'll grant you that. Does that reassure you? Yes, Tucker. That's exactly what we need to be reassured. The facts remain.

The FBI used flimsy excuses to spy on an american citizen and monitor a rival presidential campaign it repeatedly engaged in abusive behavior to ensure that that spying continued illegitimately yeah so that was tucker carlson and trump's attorney general bill barr agreed with him right so attorney general william, quote, The inspector general's report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken, which would garner A.G. Barr a D minus on a ninth grade reading comprehension quiz. But I digress. Yeah. Also, just one last sidebar. The report found no proof of Ukraine meddling in the 2016 election at all. Shocker. In an interview with ABC yesterday, FBI Director Chris Wray added that, quote, as far as the 2020 election itself goes, we think Russia represents the most significant threat. So, yeah, everybody else was right. Maybe let's focus on that, guys.

Let's fix that. And now to our second major report of the day. The Washington Post published a stunning set of government documents on Monday revealing that senior American officials had lied throughout the course of the war in Afghanistan, the longest war in American history, frequently saying that progress was being made and obfuscating evidence that the conflict was unwinnable. It comes as the Trump administration is negotiating with the Taliban and considering whether to withdraw the remaining 13,000 U.S. troops who are still in Afghanistan. Yeah, the 2,000 pages of documents were from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

That's a federal project that began in 2008 and served as a government watchdog for the war in Afghanistan. Basically, this group did a ton of interviews with officials about the war and collected a bunch of data from them. The Washington Post has been trying to get these documents for three years, and they were finally able to obtain them through a Freedom of Information Act request. Yeah. That's right. The documents include unbelievable quotes like this, quote, we were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. We didn't know what we were doing. It's not from some random person. I mean, that's from Douglas Lute, a three star army general who served as the White House's Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama

administrations. According to the Post, he went on to on to say quote what are we trying to do here we didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking yeah so this is an army general that doesn't know what the operation is yeah i mean the entire story is is essentially a bunch of people throughout an ongoing process being like we just have no idea how this is supposed to be pieced together. Well, for some context, let's run through a few of the numbers in Afghanistan. So since 2001, almost 800,000 American troops have been sent to Afghanistan. 2,300 troops died there and over 20,000 were wounded. Overall, an estimated 157,000 people have been killed in the war, including more than 38,000 Afghan civilians.

So, yeah, very costly to be in a war forever. All told, the war has cost at least a trillion dollars. And some have said that it costs as high as $2 trillion. Again, for a war that people don't even know what they're doing. Right. For 18 years. And the office conducting these interviews called their project Lessons Learned and interviewed more than 600 people with firsthand experience of the war. Now, according to the Post, they also obtained hundreds of pages of previously classified memos that were dictated by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld between 2001 and 2006. In one of those memos, just six months after the war began, Rumsfeld wrote, quote, I may be impatient. In fact, I know I'm a bit impatient. We are never going to get the U.S. military out of Afghanistan unless we take care to see that there is something going on that will provide the stability that will be necessary for us to leave. Help is how he ended

it. Help. Oh, wow. Well, there was even confusion about who the United States was fighting and why. Rumsfeld also said, quote, in a 2003 memo, I have no visibility into who the bad guys are. So, you know, it could have been Al Qaeda, Taliban, Pakistan. Who knows? He didn't know. And while that all was happening, everybody was spinning a story for years as things continued going south. Throughout the entire war, presidents and American officials have emphasized that they've made progress. In the story, a senior National Security Council official is quoted as saying that there was pressure from the Obama White House and the Pentagon to basically come up with numbers that showed the troop surge of 2009 to 2011 was working despite evidence that they had to the contrary. This official said, quote, it was impossible to create

good metrics. We tried using troop numbers, trained violence levels, control of territory, and none of it painted an accurate picture. That's what this official told government interviewers in 2016. This official goes on to say, quote, the metrics were always manipulated for the duration of the war. Yeah. Overall, the documents detail chaotic strategy, shifting goals and failed efforts at nation building, all while the United States government tried to paint a rosy picture about what was going on. The head of the agency that conducted the interviews told the Post, quote, the American people have constantly been lied to. There's lots more in this unbelievable report.

So we encourage our listeners to check out the full story from the Washington Post and read it in depth. We're going to have a link in our show notes. And now to some ads. Okay, Gideon, how many towels do you have in your apartment? I have more than one, but less than five. In your whole apartment? Yes. It's not enough towels. It's never enough towels. Okay. Don't worry. We live in a world with Nordstrom Rack and guess what? They have hella towels. Yeah. I mean, you know, now that I'm

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CROOKED. C-R-O-O-K-E-D. Great. Nordstrom Rack. It's where it's at. Let's wrap up with some headlines. Headlines. domestic abusers from owning firearms. In a press conference on Monday, Police Chief Art Acevedo called out Senators Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, and John Cornyn for siding with the NRA and not reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, which bars abusers from having firearms.

His statement comes after a sergeant and his force was fatally shot while responding to a domestic disturbance over the weekend. Acevedo has been avidly pressuring lawmakers to act, saying, quote, do something about it or retire. We have an update to our story yesterday on the beef between Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg. On Monday, Buttigieg said that he will, in fact, be opening his doors to his private fundraising events and publicly releasing the names of his top donors. That's seemingly bowing to the peer pressure from reporters and Warren. Also, Buttigieg's former employer, corporate consulting firm McKinsey, has allowed him to break his NDA. That means he can finally release the names of the clients he worked with during

his time at the firm. It would not surprise me if one of them was panic at the disco. Yeah, that's a major conflict of interest. Eminem has vomit on his sweater already this week, and it's because he's really worried about doing a rap battle with Nick Cannon After Eminem reignited his 10-year-old feud with Cannon By calling him, quote, whipped and neutered On the new Fat Joe album Cannon fired back with a song called An Invitation It's a diss track released on Monday

Where Cannon challenges Eminem to face him on his show Wild N' Out Actually, Scary Guy Suge Knight also appears on the track calling in from prison where he's serving 28 years for a hit and run. And Cannon gives Eminem a devastating new nickname, Elvis Pussley. Hate to say it, but this one's gonna stick.

In 50 years, no one will know who Eminem was and we'll all call into oldie stations to request My Name Is by Elvis Pussley. Everyone in this room belongs in the Hague for that. Hollywood's little award show that could, The Golden Globes, announced their nominees Monday, complete with some big surprises. A few takeaways. No women were nominated for Best Director,

a category Greta Gerwig was eligible for with Little Women. Lupita Nyong'o's dual performance as Nice Mom and Scary Mom in Us got snubbed, and so did Game of Thrones and Watchmen for Best TV Drama, Sad Boy rapper Jeremy Strong for Best Actor in Succession, and a lot more. Netflix, though, was the big winner, racking up 34 nominations, but somehow they did not nab most impressive old man face technology for The Irishman. Come on, Netflix. Keep up. And those are the headlines.

That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, give us a rating, help me paint my entire body silver from head to toe, and tell your friends to listen. By the way, if you're into reading and not just your boss's email absolutely ripping apart your big presentation, What A Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. New URL. I'm Akilah Hughes.

I'm Gideon Resnick. And that's why we're going to Graceland to visit Elvis Pussley. I'm sorry, Mom. What A Day is a product of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis. Sonia Tun is our assistant producer. Our head writer is John Milstein, and our senior producer is Katie Long. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka.