Debating Biden's Gaza Problem (with Mehdi Hasan)

Transcript

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Speaker 24 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Tommy Vitor.

Speaker 1 I'm Maddie Hassan.

Speaker 24 Maddie, great to see you. Guest hosting today, thank you for joining.

Speaker 1 Thanks for having me. It's always fun to do this.

Speaker 24 One of my favorite people to talk to and debate, although I'm a little anxious because you did write a book about how to win every argument that I believe is coming out in paperback soon.

Speaker 24 So I'm worried I'm going to get brutalized here in this debate.

Speaker 1 When have you and I ever argued about anything, Tommy?

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 24 It's funny. People probably think we're too chummy or cozy now, but you should look at our conversations about drones in the Obama administration if you want to see it get a little spicier.

Speaker 24 On today's show, we're going to talk about what the Biden administration's record on Gaza means for Biden's support here at home and in the critical state of Michigan.

Speaker 24 We will talk about what a smart U.S. approach would look like in Gaza and how Ukraine funding complicates things.

Speaker 24 We'll also talk about what's happening with House Republicans' train wreck of impeachment efforts. And in case you miss it, Donald Trump tells Laura Ingram that he is America's Alexei Navalny.

Speaker 24 Seems like an apt comparison, right? No problems there.

Speaker 1 I mean, he's still alive.

Speaker 24 He is still alive. He's still alive.
But Mehdi, let's start with Gaza because you have a fantastic piece out in The Guardian today

Speaker 24 arguing that President Biden could end the war in Gaza right now with a phone call. You point to an example of President Reagan in 1982 who stopped Israel's bombing of Beirut with a phone call.

Speaker 24 Can you give us sort of that brief history of what happened back in 1982 and how you think it applies to what's happening in Gaza today?

Speaker 1 So, yeah, in 1982, Ronald Reagan was president of the United States, very pro-Israeli, just like Joe Biden.

Speaker 1 The Israelis were led by a very right-wing prime minister, Menachem Begin, a former terrorist, just like today you have Benjamin Nanio, very right-wing right-wing leader.

Speaker 1 And Begin and Ariel Sharon, remember him, was his defense minister, and they go into Lebanon.

Speaker 1 We don't have time to get into why they went into Lebanon, but they're in Lebanon and they're bombing Beirut. They're trying to defeat the PLO who are hiding in tunnels, Tommy.
Sound familiar?

Speaker 1 And they say, we will not leave till we wipe them out. And in the process of trying to wipe them out, they're killing thousands of civilians in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon.

Speaker 1 And at one point, the nightly news is showing an image of a child with limbs missing. Again, sound familiar.

Speaker 1 Ronald Reagan apparently sees this he writes later in his memoir these images shocked me and he calls began and he says you need to stop this now what we're watching is a holocaust reagan used the h-word tommy and began says i know what a holocaust is don't you know don't try and lecture me mr president along those lines and yet 20 minutes later began rings back and says to reagan it's over i've told sharon to stop the bombing and the reason i opened the piece with that anecdote is because reagan apparently put down the phone and said to his deputy chief of staff i didn't realize i had that kind of power now whether he meant it or not, whether it was snark, who knows?

Speaker 1 But American presidents have a lot of power, Tommy. You know that.
I know that. You know that from working in the White House.
I know that from covering presidents for decades.

Speaker 1 And the idea that Joe Biden today, and I get it, a lot of listeners of Pub Save America will say Joe Biden is trying. He wants to stop the war.
We keep hearing leaks that he wants a ceasefire.

Speaker 1 He doesn't like Netanyahu. He's effing and blinding about BB.
But what can we do? Israel is upset after October the 7th, rightly upset. It wants to take out Hamas.
We don't have the leverage.

Speaker 1 And the purpose of my piece was to say, not only do we have leverage in the form of arms and finances and diplomatic protection, but we've always had leverage. Ronald Reagan could do it.

Speaker 1 George Bush Sr. could do it.
And Joe Biden can do it too. He can make that call.
And one of the things I cite in the piece is Israeli officials have said openly, we can't do this without America.

Speaker 1 Defense Minister Gallant early on in the conflict, when he was asked, why are you letting aid in by his own right-wing backbenchers, he said, the Americans told us to.

Speaker 1 What are we supposed to say no uh yitzak brick a very top israeli general told me said if they turn off the tap everyone knows we can't carry on fighting so the israeli military officials are saying we need the americans and yet our government is not saying all right then do what we tell you to and that leads you to the very unfortunate conclusion that the biden administration doesn't want to stop the fighting it's not that it can't it's that it won't

Speaker 24 So I think, look, I first of all, I share your enormous frustration with how Gaza is being handled by the Biden administration.

Speaker 24 We can get into some of the policies we think would make things better in a minute, but

Speaker 24 I think the argument's a little bit overstated. I think it's somewhere between, you know, we can't do anything and one phone call.

Speaker 24 And my argument would be, I think Israel today is very different than 1982 just because of decades of economic growth, frankly, decades of U.S.

Speaker 24 military assistance that has made them increasingly less reliant on the U.S.

Speaker 24 But I think the bigger problem for

Speaker 24 Biden here would be Bibi Netanyahu, because for those who don't know, Netanyahu is only in power because he cobbled together a coalition of some of the most odious, right-wing, racist ministers in Israeli politics.

Speaker 24 And some of those ministers, a guy named Itmar Ben-Gavir, could topple his coalition government at any time.

Speaker 24 And so what Netanyahu is primarily worried about is, you know, if they withdraw support for the coalition and he has to face an election, Netanyahu's party, the Laikud, would get crushed according to polls.

Speaker 24 He'd lose the PM job and he would lose any future hope of using his power as prime minister to get immunity for the many crimes he has committed and is facing prosecution for.

Speaker 24 I think you are absolutely right that Biden pressed Netanyahu to stop bombing Gaza back in 2021. It was reported in books that he said, all right, you're out of runway.
We got to stop this.

Speaker 1 And they stopped within days, and Netanyahu was gone from office within a month.

Speaker 24 That's exactly right. I do think, though, the security situation and the politics are changed after October 7th.

Speaker 24 There was a recent poll by the Israel Democracy Institute and found that about half of Israelis would oppose a deal to end the war in Gaza if it included the establishment of a Palestinian state and peace agreements with other Arab countries.

Speaker 24 Another poll found that 72% of respondents agreed with the statement that, quote, the entry of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip must be stopped until the Israeli prisoners are released.

Speaker 24 I say all of that not because I think it should impact what the U.S. does or what you and I think is right or wrong, but just to acknowledge that there's a scenario where Biden

Speaker 24 trying to tell Netanyahu what to do and then Netanyahu telling him off ends up being good politics for Bibi.

Speaker 24 And maybe there's a scenario where Bibi goes around Biden to Congress and gets some sort of veto-proof bill passed of assistance.

Speaker 24 So look, I think there's a lot more that Biden can and should be doing. But, you know,

Speaker 24 I think there are some limits to our leverage.

Speaker 1 So let me say two things. One is on the specific Israel example.

Speaker 1 I think, as I pointed out, in the piece, I point out not just Israeli officials, but people like Bruce Riedel, who worked for four presidents, saying, no, no, we have lots of leverage and we don't use that leverage, not because it's complicated, not because Netanyahu can go around us, but because of domestic political reasons

Speaker 1 that we don't want to use. That's one issue.
So, you know, that, and you mentioned 2021, Biden literally called Netanyahu and said, stop this, and it worked.

Speaker 1 So that you, at some point, we have to ask the question, how much this is about Biden and not about Netanyahu? Uncomfortable question, I know, for a lot of the listeners.

Speaker 1 And number two, I would say, just on a general point, not just about Israel, Tommy, and you and I have discussed this before, sometimes there's value just in the fight, right?

Speaker 1 We have a president right now whose poll numbers aren't so great, who is getting beaten up on all sides by members of his own party, by members of the media, and by, of course, the Republican Party.

Speaker 1 And sometimes there is value in the fight. Netanyahu's not a popular figure.

Speaker 1 If Biden picks a fight with him and Netanyahu tries to go to Congress, tries to go to Speaker Johnson or even Chuck Schumer, I don't think that's bad politically for Biden in an election year where actually cozying up to Netanyahu could cost him states like Michigan, could cost him a lot of young voters, people of color, Arab-American voters.

Speaker 1 So I think there's a moral reason and a strategic reason to put pressure on Israel to end this morally unsustainable and strategically disastrous war.

Speaker 1 But I also think there's domestic political reasons why picking a fight with Netanyahu is far from a bad thing to do.

Speaker 24 Yeah, I'm in violent agreement with you there. So some things I'd love to see.
I mean, to your point about Biden's approach,

Speaker 24 to date, they have had this approach that's called the Hug Bibi strategy, where basically Biden says he'll disagree with Netanyahu privately, but they don't want to show any daylight in terms of public messaging.

Speaker 24 And that included Biden literally jumping on a plane, flying to Israel, giving Netanyahu a hug on the tarmac. It's become this sort of iconic image.

Speaker 24 I think we need to, I thought that approach was a mistake from the beginning, because not because I think poorly of Joe Biden, because I think incredibly poorly of Bibi Netanyahu. He's a corrupt,

Speaker 24 racist, bad leader who, you know, a year ago was trying to shred the Israeli judicial system, right? You had literally millions of protesters on the street every single weekend protesting him.

Speaker 1 He also, Tommy, wants a Trump presidency. Like,

Speaker 1 they're not hiding this stuff. Like, Ben King,

Speaker 1 a moment ago, said, if Trump was in office, we'd be able to do whatever we want. And Netanyahu clearly is counting down the days to a Trump presidency.

Speaker 1 So the idea that Biden is helping a guy who has always undermined Democratic presidents, you remember Bill Clinton famously emerged for a meeting with Netanyahu and said, who the F is the superpower here?

Speaker 1 Barack Barack Obama was humiliated by Netanyahu, who turned up and undermined his Iran negotiations in Congress on American soil.

Speaker 24 He failed on that front,

Speaker 1 but tried to, you know,

Speaker 24 he was a real pain in the ass, that's for sure.

Speaker 1 Yeah, went to Congress and tried to undermine the U.S. president.

Speaker 1 So this idea that Biden, Obama, Clinton should try and appease a man who has always tried to undermine him in party political terms seems to me absurd from a domestic political calculation.

Speaker 1 I know that Biden has a friendship with Netanyahu going back decades, whatever, right? This is the middle of the, we're in the middle of one of the worst geopolitical crises of our lifetimes.

Speaker 1 We're in the midst of one of the worst.

Speaker 1 You know, a former UN official told the BBC this week, Tommy, that the kill rate in Gaza, by his calculation, the kill rate, the rate of killings is higher than in any episode of violence or conflicts since Rwanda, right?

Speaker 1 That is where we are right now, where former UN officials are pointing out what the death toll looks like right now. 30,000 people, which is a conservative estimate, killed in just over four months.

Speaker 1 So in that moment, you know, put aside all the nonsense about whatever friendship you had, put aside whatever nonsense. Yes, he's a Zionism in his gut and we can have that debate later about Zionism.

Speaker 1 But just from a personal standpoint, as president of the United States, what is he doing here? What is he achieving here? What is he getting here?

Speaker 1 Even if I wasn't pro-Palestinian, forget your politics in the Middle East. I just don't get it from a political, domestic, political situation.
What is going? It's election year.

Speaker 1 Do we want this really happening in November? Does he think he can win with this happening in November?

Speaker 24 No, and look, to your point, I mean, look,

Speaker 24 the Gaza Health Ministry's estimates are 30,000 people are dead. I saw the UN has suggested that it might be as many as 100,000 when you consider people who are missing or unaccounted for

Speaker 24 or confirmed dead. And so I agree with you.
There's a moral imperative here.

Speaker 24 And I also think there is increasingly a growing domestic strategic imperative to put some space and pressure on the Israeli government.

Speaker 24 Look, I do wonder if early on when this conflict started, if Biden could have said, look, we'll work with you, we'll back you, but you've got to get rid of Itmar Ben-Gavir, some of these right-wing ministers.

Speaker 24 I do think the U.S. should be conditioning assistance to Israel

Speaker 24 at a bare minimum so that

Speaker 24 the IDF has to adhere to international law and limit civilian casualties.

Speaker 24 Some people have gone further than that. Bernie Sanders has suggested that we should condition U.S.
military assistance to say Israel must also make progress towards a Palestinian state.

Speaker 24 I think the U.S. needs to stop vetoing every call for a ceasefire at the UN.
It happened again this week. I did see Mehdi that Al Jazeera reported that the U.S.

Speaker 24 has drafted a UN resolution calling for a temporary ceasefire, the release of hostages, and it overtly states that we oppose a ground offensive in Rafah. So I think that's a good step.

Speaker 24 And listen, to folks listening who think this is biased against Israel, I just want to say the reason I support this set of policy guidelines or proposals is because I think it will save innocent Palestinian lives in Gaza.

Speaker 24 But I also think a negotiated ceasefire is the only way to get the remaining hostages back back alive.

Speaker 24 And I think that getting the two parties into a political process that will solve the underlying tensions that fuel this cycle of violence year after year after year is the only way to get to a durable peace.

Speaker 24 You cannot kill every member of Hamas. You cannot kill an idea.

Speaker 1 The Israeli military are saying you cannot kill every member of Hamas and you cannot defeat Hamas in this way. These members of the Israeli war cabinet are saying this.

Speaker 1 And let's not forget, for listeners in America, families of the hostages are saying, please get our family members out alive, end this conflict, do a deal.

Speaker 1 And the vast majority of hostages who have been released were released in that very brief temporary ceasefire that happened, temporary halt of fighting that happened back in, what was it, November?

Speaker 1 Something like 99% of the hostages have been released in that way. How many of the Israelis saved, rescued through military action? Two, three? I think three to kill.

Speaker 1 We're now hearing numbers that they may have killed up to 10, 15, 20 in the Israeli press of their own hostages through airstrikes.

Speaker 1 And we know about the three they shot dead who were carrying white flags. So it's been a disaster even for Israeli innocents this war.
Let's be clear about that.

Speaker 24 Yeah, and listen, I can't even imagine how hard this is if you are a progressive Israeli who feels like, you know, you were like months ago, you were on the streets protesting the Netanyahu government.

Speaker 24 And now you are stuck with these guys leading this war effort that is a moral and strategic disaster. Like I have enormous empathy for people in Israel who feel like October 7th was yesterday.

Speaker 24 That wound does not come close to healing. I have enormous empathy for Jews around the world who are scared as incidents of anti-Semitism rise up.

Speaker 24 But I do think that getting a ceasefire, getting to a negotiated settlement that gets the hostages back is the best way to create a durable peace for everyone involved here.

Speaker 24 One quick thing before we go to break, we have some great stuff planned for members of the Friends of the Pod community here, Crooked.

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Speaker 24 I do want to turn to the domestic politics you mentioned, Nettie. One place it's clear is in Michigan.
Michigan has a large Arab American and Muslim American population.

Speaker 24 The state's primary is on February 27th. There's a bunch of Democrats in Michigan, including Rashida Tlaib and the mayor of Dearborn, who are encouraging Michiganders to vote uncommitted.

Speaker 24 So not vote for Biden, but to write in uncommitted. We talked with an activist organizer and former Corey Bush staffer named Abbas Alawiya about the uncommitted movement.

Speaker 24 He was also a part of a meeting that recently happened in Michigan with some senior members of President Biden's national security team. Here's a clip.

Speaker 28 Part of

Speaker 29 what this movement is coming out of is people have been calling the representatives. They've been calling the White House.
They've been protesting in the streets. They've been shutting down highways.

Speaker 29 And Biden still doesn't seem to be hearing us. So, you know what?

Speaker 28 If you won't hear us when we are calling our representatives or when we are protesting in the streets, maybe you'll hear us when we show you that we've got some votes of people who you can count out.

Speaker 24 So Biden's 2020 margin of victory in Michigan was 154,000 votes.

Speaker 24 According to NPR, Michigan is home to about 200,000 registered voters who are Muslim and 300,000 people who claim ancestry from the Middle East and North Africa.

Speaker 24 If enough of those voters just stay home in November, they don't have to vote for Trump. They could just stay home.
It could have an enormous impact.

Speaker 24 Mehdi, what do you think of this uncommitted movement in Michigan? And what are you hearing from Arab American and Muslim American friends?

Speaker 24 about Gaza and what it means for their vote in this upcoming election and what it might take to get them back if they're leaving the Democratic Party because of the policy.

Speaker 1 Tommy, I'm so glad you guys have raised this issue today because it's a huge issue. I've been warning about this issue since October 9th, 10th.

Speaker 1 I can't remember when I started tweeting saying this is going to be bad from a domestic political perspective.

Speaker 1 Sometimes people get very upset when they hear this. And a lot of folks online have attacked me for even pointing this out, like shooting the messenger here.

Speaker 1 Like I think I came back from Thanksgiving and tweeted, I met a bunch of Muslim family members and friends. Not a single one is voting for Biden.
And these are all ex-Biden voters.

Speaker 1 And people got very upset.

Speaker 1 I know a lot of people in Dearborn, including Abdullah Hamoud, the mayor of Dearborn, and not a single one is going to vote for Biden, they say right now.

Speaker 1 Now, the uncommitted strategy that Abbas, who I also know, laid out there, is exactly that. They're not saying we're never going to vote for Biden.

Speaker 1 They're saying we're trying to put pressure on Biden to come around with the political tool that we have. This is a democracy.
And I think that is a legitimate strategy.

Speaker 1 No one is saying go vote Trump. No one is saying they're all the same.
They're saying. President Biden, can you hear us? And my worry is he's not hearing them.

Speaker 1 I've been talking, I mentioned to people at the White House a while while ago, what are you doing about Georgia?

Speaker 1 I spoke to a Democratic Party official just this week who said, well, you know, we're trying our best, but we also believe we can still win Michigan without that vote.

Speaker 1 That's a risky strategy, given how close the votes have been.

Speaker 1 In not just Michigan, by the way, Tommy, big Muslim and Arab American populations in Georgia, in the Atlanta area, very, very narrow margin of victory.

Speaker 1 Wisconsin, less so in Pennsylvania.

Speaker 1 It's a real issue. And the question then becomes, how do you engage the voters? And my worry is a lot of white liberals who I interact with, a lot of elected Democrats just say, but what about Trump?

Speaker 1 What about the Muslim ban? Yeah, that doesn't work, right? And Abdullah Hamoud wrote a wonderful piece for the New York Times this week. I urge everyone to read it.

Speaker 1 And he says, he says, look, when people come to me as the mayor of Deerwood and say, I lost 80 members of my family, which people have come and told him, right?

Speaker 1 There are people who've lost dozens and dozens of family members in Gaza. You can't say to them, yeah, but...
Trump would have got 100 dead. That just doesn't work.

Speaker 1 You cannot insult them and say, well, what about the Muslim band? They don't care about the Muslim band if they've lost 80 members of their family.

Speaker 1 So you need to meet people where they are, understand the pain and grief that they're going through. And one of the criticisms of Biden is he's this great empath, the comforter in chief.

Speaker 1 We haven't seen that much empathy for Arab American communities. We didn't even get a mention of the Palestinian death toll when he did his 100-day statement about the war in Gaza.

Speaker 1 So we need to see a much more empathy, but also on a policy position. position, understand where these people are coming from and understand why they're doing what they're doing.

Speaker 1 Don't just dismiss them as, oh, this is 2016 lefties again, or this is people who, you know, Turkey's voting for Christmas. They don't know how bad it's going to be with Trump.
They know.

Speaker 1 But people are hurting right now. And that has to be the starting point.
A lot of people in Michigan are hurting from direct connection to loved ones who they've lost.

Speaker 1 And therefore, the administration has to work out what are they going to offer. And if they're going to say nothing, then take your chances in November.
I'm super stressed about Michigan.

Speaker 24 Yeah, I do want to just re-emphasize the point you just made, which is if you see someone talking about this issue on social media, please don't reply to them. Enjoy the Muslim ban.

Speaker 24 Like you cannot scold someone out of caring about the death of innocent lives, above their family, of children.

Speaker 24 I mean, I think we need to approach this issue and any issue with empathy and try to listen to people.

Speaker 24 And the reason, you know, Mehdi,

Speaker 24 we mentioned at the top, President Biden sent John Feiner, his deputy national security advisor, Samantha Power, the head of USAID, who's a genocide scholar, to Michigan Michigan to meet with Abbas and other members of the community in Michigan.

Speaker 24 John Feiner was very clear that they realized they have made mistakes when it comes to messaging. John said in this meeting, an audio recording of it leaked out to the New York Times and other places.

Speaker 24 John said, we have left a very damaging impression based on what has been a wholly inadequate public accounting for how much the president, the administration, and the country values the lives of Palestinians.

Speaker 24 He also said there was no excuse for the release of that White House statement you just mentioned around the 100-day of the war mark that did not address or acknowledge the loss of Palestinian life.

Speaker 24 I've noticed in Biden's comments since that meeting that he has put much more emphasis on the empathy part of it. I do think that there's a lot of work to do still on the policy like we talked about.

Speaker 1 So he spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast and he talked about Palestinians who've lost their homes and lost their lives and the grief that people are going through both here and abroad.

Speaker 1 That was important. Obviously, the problem is that we are helping contribute to that grief.
Let's be very clear. We are complicit in Israel's war in Gaza.

Speaker 1 They could not do what they do without American weapons. Biden has gone around Congress, I think, twice now to get those weapons sent faster.
When Trump did it in Yemen, Democrats were up in arms.

Speaker 1 I'm glad to see some Democrats trying to be consistent, say, let's not do that with Israel. But look, yeah, empathy is at the center of this.

Speaker 1 If you talk to a lot of Arab Americans and Palestinian Americans, they do feel dehumanized. They do feel like their lives don't count.

Speaker 1 They do feel like they're not getting the same attention or concern as American citizens or as American citizens of Arab and Palestinian descent. And that is a problem.

Speaker 1 And Joe Biden, as I say in my Guardian Beast, this is a guy who lost two children. This is a guy who lost his wife.

Speaker 1 This is a man who's always been famous, rightly so, for showing empathy, being able to help ordinary people with their grief. And yet we haven't seen that with the Palestinian American community.

Speaker 1 I know some of the five Muslims who went to the White House a few months ago to talk to Biden about this, and they said he was very different in private.

Speaker 1 He was very apologetic for denying the Palestinian death talk. Tommy, remember he did that at the beginning of the conference? Yes, early on.

Speaker 1 He meant to say Hamas and he said, I don't believe the Palestinians. It's an outrageous thing to say.
He's never publicly withdrawn that remark or apologized.

Speaker 1 Great for John Finer to say it, but let's be honest, Tommy. Nobody knows who John Finer is.
Has to come from the top.

Speaker 1 Truman buckstops here, et cetera.

Speaker 1 It has to be Joe Biden making these amends and trying to reach out to American citizens who are, as I say, genuinely hurting because they are witnessing what they believe to be, and what I believe to be, a genocide in the Middle East that the United States is complicit in.

Speaker 24 I also think it's worth mentioning that this is not just a challenge for Biden within Arab American and Muslim american communities i think you're increasingly seeing concern with younger voters uh my friend peter hamby has a great piece out today for puck where he looks at some exclusive polling about voter sentiment uh about the upcoming election one very concerning finding is that uh among black voters and voters between the age of 18 to 29 they are considerably more likely to feel like the outcome of a trump versus biden election will have no difference for them personally they just are like they're completely apathetic and obviously you know for political addicts like you and me and listeners of this show, that makes you want to pull your hair out.

Speaker 24 It's maddening. But I do think it speaks to a broader lack of faith in a political system

Speaker 24 that provides a headwind for Democrats because we're the party that believes in government and believes that government can do things to help people.

Speaker 24 And Republicans overtly say things like, no, I want to drown, you know, government in the bathtub. I want to make it that small.

Speaker 1 I mean, nihilism helps the Republicans, right?

Speaker 1 If we can create an atmosphere of nihilism in this country, that helps one party, the party that doesn't believe in improving people's lives and doesn't improve, doesn't believe in using the government to do so.

Speaker 1 So, of course, the Republicans love cynicism. They love nihilism.
They love pessimism. They love all of that stuff.
They love depressing turnout, as we know.

Speaker 1 And you're right, it's not just young voters, black voters.

Speaker 1 The New York Times ran a piece recently from a bunch of black pastors in Georgia who said the lack of a ceasefire is a real problem for us with our congregations. It's a moral issue for us in Georgia.

Speaker 1 That wasn't Muslims in mosques. That was Christians in churches.
So it is a problem across the board. And intersectionality is a real thing, even if the right don't like that word.

Speaker 1 One member of Congress told me right at the beginning of this conflict that they had a meeting scheduled with a bunch of young climate change activists in their office.

Speaker 1 And when they rang them, when they called them to say, Is it still happening? They're like, We don't give an F about climate change right now, we only care about Gaza. Right?

Speaker 1 So, a lot of these young activist groups are all interconnected. If you care about climate change, you will tend to care about Gaza, you tend to care about police violence.

Speaker 1 These issues are interconnected, and therefore, you need a kind of offering across the board that engages with young voters, and you've got to do the right thing. So,

Speaker 1 my worry is all of these things meld together and just hurt Biden across the board. And the Democrats need to realize this point.

Speaker 1 A lot of the people I hear complaining about Biden's Gaza policy, they're now saying stuff like, and he's really old and he falls over.

Speaker 1 Because of course, once you go down the TikTok or Instagram or Twitter rabbit hole of being anti-someone, the algorithm serves you up everything else. So it becomes very easy to lose

Speaker 1 a voter on one issue. And then they're anti-your on everything.
That's very easy in our social media age, sadly.

Speaker 24 Yeah, it is.

Speaker 24 One the things I want to talk about, speaking of the social media age, Mehdi, so there was a report in Semaphore recently about how a DC-based PR firm with very close ties to the Biden administration has been policing press coverage of the war in Gaza, including going as far as researching tweets that journalists sent back when they were in college, like back in 2008, 2009, 2011.

Speaker 24 You are on the front lines, you know, talking about this stuff every day and have been for a long time, the front lines of social media, of Twitter.

Speaker 24 Can you talk about the pressure that you and other journalists feel, both internally at news organizations, but also on social media when it comes to covering the Middle East in particular?

Speaker 24 And how do you avoid being intimidated while also trying to listen to feedback and genuinely be balanced in your coverage?

Speaker 1 It's such an important question.

Speaker 1 And right now, I know and you know that there are many journalists who are very concerned about the pressure that's being applied, about the sensitivities of this conflict.

Speaker 1 And let's just be very clear here. We have the Israeli government has a lot of supporters in in Congress, has a lot of supporters in the media, has a lot of supporters in activist groups on K-Street.

Speaker 1 There is a quote-unquote pro-Israel lobby, which does apply pressure on media organizing.

Speaker 1 If you've worked like I have, both in American media, British media, you've seen the emails from honestreporting.com and Camera and some of these groups your listeners may never have heard of.

Speaker 1 But I'll tell you what, every newsroom has heard of these groups because you get badgered into why is your headline this and why is your reporter showing bias? And as you say, why do they tweet this?

Speaker 1 In this recent case, it's Louisa Lovelock, who is a British journalist at at the Washington Post.

Speaker 1 It's a fantastic Middle East correspondence, covered Syria, covered Iraq, covered Gaza, covered a bunch of things. It's so absurd, the dossier they've produced against her, Tommy.

Speaker 1 One of the things they go after is that she took part in student protests at university in England against tuition fees.

Speaker 1 And?

Speaker 1 A, that's a bad thing. B, that means she can't cover Israel's bombing of Gaza.
Like, it's so absurd, the stuff that they pull out.

Speaker 1 With me, of course, I've had stuff going back 20, 30 years that they've thrown at me.

Speaker 1 And it's it's a real problem where people get intimidated into not saying, not speaking what they want to speak about.

Speaker 1 And, you know, we live in a world where the right is obsessed about cancel culture and free speech.

Speaker 1 When, let's be very clear, the greatest victims of quote-unquote cancel culture in this country have always been Palestinian activists, both on campus, in the media, in politics.

Speaker 1 I mean, let's just be clear, Tommy. We have a Congress filled with white supremacists.

Speaker 1 We have a guy, I think, Andy Ogles from Tennessee this week, who was caught on tape saying, killed them all, right?

Speaker 1 None of these guys get any attention, no votes of censure. Who is the only member of Congress who's been censured since October the 7th? The one Palestinian woman.

Speaker 1 So let's just be very clear who the victims of quote unquote cancel culture and suppression and intimidation are. It tends to be people who speak out on behalf of Palestinians.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that's the case with reporters who aren't even taking positions. They're just reporting what they're seeing.

Speaker 1 And what they're seeing, of course, is not favorable to the Israeli narrative because what they're seeing is mass starvation. What they're seeing are mass killings.

Speaker 1 What they're seeing are kids being pulled out from the rubble. And of course, that doesn't help the Israeli narratives.
You have firms like, what is it? What's it called?

Speaker 1 SKDKEC, I'm the name of the firm, which Anita Dunn, top advisor to Biden, used to work at. A bunch of Biden people used to work there.
Let me ask you this, Tommy.

Speaker 1 Do you believe, as someone who's ex-administration, do you believe it would be helpful for our democracy? We talked about the system and people being disillusioned with the system.

Speaker 1 If we could have clearer barriers between the private sector and the public sector, between people working in government and people working in PR?

Speaker 24 Yeah, I mean, it's hard to know how it would apply to PR. I do think that, yes, some sort of writer line cooling off period like we have with ethics and lobbying reform could apply.

Speaker 24 I haven't thought deeply about how it would apply to PR firms in full disclosure.

Speaker 24 I mean, I left government and started a speechwriting firm with Jon Favreau before we started selling underwear ads for a living. So I'm probably complicit here.

Speaker 24 I did read that.

Speaker 1 Tommy, don't write off the power of the underwear lobby.

Speaker 24 Tommy John is a powerful lobby. You don't want to cross those guys.

Speaker 24 Maybe I read that Washington Post story and I thought, like, on one level, okay, everything we all tweet and post and whatever is like in the public domain forever, and we just all have to be aware of that.

Speaker 24 But really, when I read into like some of the things they were attacking Louise Lovelock for, it was like she said Obama's failure to put out a statement about an Egyptian election was deplorable.

Speaker 24 And I was like, I think that's almost terminally dorky, but I don't really find a ton of bias in this dossier here. But I do think, look, this issue in particular is one where people think if they

Speaker 1 speak out, they will get slapped down.

Speaker 24 And I think it leads to caution and inaction and a lack of courage, both in media circles, but also among government staffers, because I know that I could never, ever be confirmed for some sort of State Department job ever again, based on what I've said about Netanyahu alone.

Speaker 24 And there's a lot of people that are just not going to make that decision.

Speaker 1 Tommy, forget State Department. Recently there was a Muslim judge who was up for a judgeship and went before the Senate a few weeks ago.
And Tom Cotton, was it Tom Cotton or Josh Hawley?

Speaker 1 I interchanged all those freaks. And one of them, one of them said, I think it was Cotton, said, you know, what do you think of

Speaker 1 Israel, Zionism, two states? I can't remember what it was. It was something about Israel.
And the judge was like, I'm a judge in America. Nobody cares about my views on that issue.

Speaker 1 Why are you asking me that? Like, that's the point we've reached now, where you have those kind of theatrics in the Senate.

Speaker 1 You have Elise Stefanik in the House accusing every college president of being being an anti-Semite. Meanwhile, she pushes great replacement theory.

Speaker 1 I mean, the use and abuse of anti-Semitism to shut down critics of Israel is also part of the problem here, which is why a lot of reporters rightly don't want to be called anti-Semitic, don't want to be teemed bigots.

Speaker 1 So that also leads to kind of chilling atmosphere around free speech on this issue. And of course, we should speak out against anti-Semitism wherever we see it.

Speaker 1 And there is a lot of it around, sadly, right now, including in the media. But that doesn't mean you can just not have reporters saying what they need to say about what's happening in the Middle East.

Speaker 1 That, for me, is a fundamental problem. And it's a real free speech initiative.
We have Republicans trying to pass laws banning American businesses from being able to boycott Israel.

Speaker 1 You don't have to support a boycott of Israel. But the idea that an American business owner can't make that decision on their own is absurd.

Speaker 24 Yeah. I mean, look, anti-Semitism is a real problem.
Anti-Semitism is a growing problem, especially since October 7th. It's something I'm quite worried about.

Speaker 24 I think we all should be calling out and highlighting. But I think the thing that people can't let happen is the conflation of anti-Semitism with criticism of Israeli government policies.

Speaker 24 You are not anti-American if you think that Trump's Muslim ban is bad. You are criticizing a platform or a policy put forward by a leader.
Those are very different things.

Speaker 24 And I think when defenders of Israel call criticism of Israel anti-Semitic, they are actually putting Jews at risk because they are conflating the two and they're making people feel like you can take out all your anger about the Israeli government and what it's doing in Gaza on some guy who lives down the street from you who wears a yarmulke.

Speaker 24 And that is very, very dangerous.

Speaker 1 Let's not forget also, some of the most eloquent, passionate, and principled opponents in the streets against the war in the Middle East since October 7th are groups like JVP, Jewish Voice for Peace, if not now, a young Jewish activist group.

Speaker 1 These are Jewish Americans. They are not anti-Semites.
The leading opponent of sending more money to Netanyahu is a Jewish senator named Bernie Sanders. Yep, yep.

Speaker 24 Mehdi, complicating the kind of the policy discussion about what to do about Gaza is the fact that Aid to Israel is part of a broader bill that also includes desperately needed aid for Ukraine.

Speaker 24 So the Senate passed this supplemental funding bill with 70 votes, overwhelming bipartisan support that you don't often see these days.

Speaker 24 But Speaker Johnson over on the House side is too scared to bring it to the floor for a vote because, I don't know, Marjorie Taylor Greene might get him ejected from his job. He's just a coward.

Speaker 24 There's also progressive Democrats who say they won't vote for the supplemental bill because aid to Israel doesn't include some of the conditions we talked about earlier.

Speaker 24 By the way, this is why being in the House of Representatives sucks. You don't get to vote on clean bills.
You have to get these things kind of squished together for political value.

Speaker 1 What do you think the right move is here?

Speaker 24 You're a principled person. You want to support Ukraine.
You're also concerned about what's happening in Gaza. What the hell do you do if you're a member of the House?

Speaker 1 It's a great question. And three Democrats in the Senate, of course, opposed this, Peter Welch and Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Jeff Merkley.

Speaker 1 And they said their reasons. Their reasons are right now in this moment, we can't have $14 billion of extra aid.

Speaker 1 We already give every year $3 to $4 billion of military and economic aid to Israel to a country that is accused, let's remind our listeners, of a plausible genocide by the International Court of Justice.

Speaker 1 That is what is at stake. right now.
And I think for me, it's a no-brainer.

Speaker 1 I understand the importance of funding aid to Ukraine. I'm not someone who is soft on Putin.

Speaker 1 But I think right now, we need our best minds in government to find a way to fund Ukraine without funding Netanyahu's war in Gaza, which, as I say, the top court in the world says could be a genocide.

Speaker 1 I think history will judge us very harshly if we continue voting for aid, if our elected representatives continue voting for aid to a government that is accused of war crimes, whose ministers are talking openly about ethnic cleansing.

Speaker 1 I think that's a real problem.

Speaker 1 And I, you know, if we were, if it was just the occupation, which is bad enough, like if it was pre-October 7th, maybe we could have some debate about, well, you know, the pros and cons of Ukraine aid versus Israel.

Speaker 1 I think in the middle of this right now, where we're not even ensuring a ceasefire or using any kind of leverage, I think it's a real problem.

Speaker 1 And I think, as I say, I think in years to come, this will be like the Iraq war, where now everyone's like, of course, everyone wants to say they opposed Iraq.

Speaker 1 You'll never find anyone who says they defended Iraq, apart from John Bolton. But everyone else is like, we never supported Iraq.
And

Speaker 1 I think that's what Gaza is going to look like in 5, 10, 15 years from now. So I appreciate what Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch and Jeff Motley did, as difficult as it is.

Speaker 1 And I'm sure in our labyrinthine process that we have in Senate and House, we can find another way to, we have to find another way to get the right aid to Ukraine.

Speaker 1 The reality is the American public, if you poll them,

Speaker 1 how supportive are they of either? That's the reality. American voters will look at this stuff and they are kind of, what about us? What about the money at home?

Speaker 1 And I'm not saying that's right or wrong, but I mean, that is the political context here in election.

Speaker 24 Yeah, that kind of America first nationalist argument is exactly what you're hearing from the MAGA Republicans. It's a powerful one, both currently and historically and in other countries.

Speaker 24 I was surprised and kind of heartened by a recent Pew poll that found 74% of Americans view the war in Ukraine as important to U.S. national interests and 59% said it was important to them personally.

Speaker 24 So that did make me think maybe they would be more open to aid than I thought.

Speaker 1 I mean, maybe you're, you know, and I am involved in that, but there's also polling showing a lot of American support aid to Israel with conditions. Yes.

Speaker 1 Yes. And don't forget, that's what U.S.
law says. That's what the Leahy law says, that you can't just give aid willy-nilly to foreign militaries who are accused of committing war crimes.

Speaker 24 Yeah, and sometimes people talk about this in terms of, well, we shouldn't single out Israel.

Speaker 24 The point you're making is very important here, which is conditioning aid to say you have to follow international law would be what we do with every other country.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 1 Very briefly on that singling out, I just want to say one thing.

Speaker 1 If Donald Trump were president right now, tell me, God help us all, I think you'd see a lot of liberals, a lot of Democrats much more upset about the war in Gaza.

Speaker 1 And they would be much more supportive of conditions on aid because they would see this as a Trump Netanyahu thing.

Speaker 1 And we saw that when he was supporting Saudi Arabia, there was a big support to get conditions on aid to Saudi Arabia and arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the killings.

Speaker 1 Remember, they passed a resolution in the Senate on the War Powers Act. And that is the reality right now.
That if this was any other, the irony, we're not singling out Israel.

Speaker 1 If Israel was any other country and we were in a different place, we would say, wow, what the hell are we doing here? Why are we supporting this? And that's what we want.

Speaker 1 We just want some consistency on human rights grounds.

Speaker 24 And you don't want to let partisanship sort of swamp the security and moral

Speaker 24 interests here. Last Friday, we learned a great setup for the Trump piece of this.
We learned that a Russian opposition leader named Alexei Navalny had been killed.

Speaker 24 Navalny was being held in a Russian penal colony in the Arctic Circle when he died. Putin tried to poison Navalny several times before throwing him in jail for 30 years on trumped-up charges.

Speaker 24 So we should all assume that this was just a state-sanctioned murder of Alexei Navalny.

Speaker 24 Now that everyone listening knows that context, I want you to hear a clip from President Trump at a Fox News town hall last night.

Speaker 30 President, the crowd's going crazy here, but during this campaign, a huge amount of your time has been spent in court, in the courtroom, in New York, and so forth.

Speaker 30 Now, in this New York civil fraud case, this judge Arthur Engeron ruled against you for

Speaker 30 almost a half a billion dollars plus interest that runs every day.

Speaker 30 When I first read this, like $87,000 a day, how would you put up that kind of money because you have a bond to put up even if if you appeal you got to put up escrow money that's

Speaker 30 it's a lot of no

Speaker 1 form of nivalny it is a form of communism or fascism how could it be navalny and communism and fascism i feel like that's that doesn't quite work i mean it's uh it's unlike trump to speak in an incoherent manner than any historical or sense or english sentence um i mean maga i made this point recently on social media MAGA want to have their cake and eat it.

Speaker 1 They want Trump to be Putin and the victim of Putin at the same time. He'll play any role going, right?

Speaker 1 So it's, and also this whole Navalny comparison is so absurd. And the whole, anytime something happens abroad, you know, Newt Kingridge jumps up and says, this is what's happening to Trump.

Speaker 1 It's like, no, it's not.

Speaker 1 You know, if only Merrick Garland worked for Vladimir Putin, if only he had an attorney general who refused to do what needed to be done in the timeframe that he had.

Speaker 1 You know, Trump is the luckiest man in the world. He incited an insurrection.
Then the next guy came in and said, Let's look forward, not back.

Speaker 1 And the next guy appointed an attorney general who said, Let's not go after Donald Trump too, obviously.

Speaker 1 And now we're in an election year, and none of the trials might be concluded or even start before people get to vote. So, this idea that he's like Navalny is absurd.

Speaker 1 He's actually the luckiest accused criminal I've ever come across.

Speaker 1 And Teflon Trump continues to dodge prosecution. Look, Navalny was almost certainly killed.
I mean, the Russian defense is that he died. What was it? Sudden death syndrome

Speaker 1 exists for adults, as far as I'm aware. He's 47.

Speaker 1 So it's absurd. And by the way, on a serious note, Tommy, there are Republicans now who are claiming that Trump is going to get assassinated.
The deep state wants to kill him.

Speaker 1 And you remember, and we can laugh. But these are the people who thought, including Trump, that Scalia had been assassinated

Speaker 1 in 2016, when that seat or 2015, whatever it was, when that seat became available. These people are obsessed with this stuff.
So look, this is not Russia, obviously.

Speaker 1 We have a president who's not actually involved in any of the trials, has

Speaker 1 run away from any involvement with any prosecutions of Trump. And again, to go back to the Russia issue, I was never a big kind of quote-unquote Russia gate, as the right puts it, person.

Speaker 1 I was never somebody who thought the biggest problem with Donald Trump's presidency was that he was an agent of Russia.

Speaker 1 But I always did wonder, how come the guy who slams everyone on earth, calls everyone an insult and a nickname, never says anything about Putin? How come he never, ever criticize it?

Speaker 1 Like, find me one statement where he insults, belittle. He even mocked Kim Jong-un as little rocket man before he fell in love with it.
True.

Speaker 1 Putin, nothing. Nada, not from before presidency, not during presidency, not since.
And even now with Navalny, refuses to say anything critical of Putin.

Speaker 1 So for me, that's always been a problem that nags away at me.

Speaker 24 Yeah, and the irony here is that Navalny, you know, built his career fighting corruption, exposing corruption from people like Dmitry Medvedev, who was the former president of Russia or Vladimir Putin.

Speaker 24 But you're right to call out the people who think Trump will be assassinated because people who believe things like that will do things like January 6th, and it's worrisome.

Speaker 1 Well, Tucker Coulson, who is kind of wants to be Trump's VP,

Speaker 1 he was asked in Dubai, I think.

Speaker 1 He flies from one oasis of democracy to another. And he said, he sat there and they said to him about, you know, you didn't bring up all the killings under Putin when you did your interview with him.

Speaker 1 And he said, well, you know, every leader has to kill people. And it's like, that is now the mindset on the right.
Like, this is not your Ronald Reagan's Republican Party.

Speaker 1 This is the party that just says, and remember, Trump said that to Bill O'Reilly. Like, you think we're not killers?

Speaker 1 And in one sense, as a lefty, I would say, I'm glad people are bringing up the fact that we've killed a lot of innocent people.

Speaker 1 But the idea that Republicans now are just going around saying, it's fine for foreign dictators to assassinate people because... because Merrick Garland's coming after our guy.
I mean,

Speaker 1 they're not the same thing.

Speaker 24 Yeah, because Trump cheated on his taxes.

Speaker 24 Well, I i want to ask you about tucker carlson so he went to moscow he interviewed putin he forgot to ask about navalny but he did have time to film some propaganda videos about the subway being nice and about the grocery stores do we think tucker carlson uses a subway in this country no no you know he's black cars only for the last 30 years i would love your point your take on this i i don't really have a problem with interviewing vladimir putin i do think like if you're going to do it you do it right like don't throw the guy softballs in the middle of a war you're known for doing really tough interviews people often retweet the videos of them and and wonder, why the hell did this person agree to go on Netty's show?

Speaker 24 What's your philosophy on interviewing bad actors like Vladimir Putin?

Speaker 1 So totally, we should interview Vladimir Putin. How can we not? And the lie that Tucker told in that video that he did announcing the interview was that nobody else, nobody wants to interview him.

Speaker 1 That's why I came here, which is, which even Putin's spokesman said, that's not true. We turn down interview requests from the West every day.

Speaker 1 Like even Putin's own spokesman disowned Tucker Carlson's nonsense. So of course people want to interview him.
It's how you interview him. It's not in a kind of friendly, chatty, sycophantic way.
And

Speaker 1 we've seen Tucker's interview with Trump was very sycophantic and with Putin.

Speaker 1 And look, if I was interviewing Vladimir Putin, and by the way, Putin has now told other interviewers, I was very disappointed with this interview. I thought it would be more challenging.

Speaker 1 Imagine Vladimir Putin mocking you and saying, you were too soft on me.

Speaker 1 So good.

Speaker 1 Right. That's just, I mean, take that to your epitaph.

Speaker 1 For me,

Speaker 1 what I find fascinating about Vladimir Putin is he's taken some interesting stances in the past.

Speaker 1 And like, if I sat down with Vladimir Putin, if he ever let me do an interview, which he probably wouldn't, you know, I would want to talk about what he's done to Ukraine in the context of years of pontificating about national sovereignty and borders, right?

Speaker 1 Putin was the guy in 2003 who stood up against George W. Bush and Tony Blair and said, you cannot invade Iraq.
That's an illegal invasion.

Speaker 1 It's going to be a disastrous occupation and you're violating national sovereignty. Hello, Ukraine, 2014 and 2022.

Speaker 1 I feel like you can have actually a quite interesting back and forth pushing him on the inconsistencies of foreign policy. And of course, he's a gaslighter like Trump.

Speaker 1 You're not going to go too far with such people, but I think exposing contradictions and inconsistencies is always an important thing for interviewers to do.

Speaker 24 I would love to hear that interview.

Speaker 1 I'd probably be in a cell next to poor Evan, who we should remember as well, an American journalist who is still being held.

Speaker 24 Yes, it's a very good point. Putin is detained.
A Wall Street Journal reporter named Evan Gershkovich.

Speaker 24 Yeah, Mehdi, if I were you and you interviewed Putin, I would probably not drink the tea that you're offered.

Speaker 1 I would do it via Zoom. Yeah, Yeah, good idea.

Speaker 24 Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk about how impeachment is blowing up in Republicans' faces.

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Speaker 24 So Republicans went into this election season hoping to run hard on border security and the idea of the so-called Biden crime family.

Speaker 24 Lately, it seems like both of those issues are kind of blowing up in their faces.

Speaker 24 So, last week, the Justice Department indicted an FBI informant named Alexander Smirnov, who is a confidential source at the center of the Republican allegations that President Biden benefited from Hunter Biden's business dealings in Ukraine.

Speaker 24 This is the guy who allegedly said that Burisma, this Ukrainian natural gas company, had added Hunter to its board to curry favor with Joe Biden and that there had been some sort of bribe or a shakedown or something by the Bidens to get a prosecutor fired.

Speaker 24 Turns out, Mehdi, it's all fake, and there's evidence that Smirnov might be a Russian intelligence asset.

Speaker 24 In a new court filing on Tuesday, Justice Department prosecutors alleged that Smirnov had, quote, recent and extensive contact with Russian intelligence officials who were involved in passing him information about Hunter Biden.

Speaker 24 So today, President Biden's brother James is appearing before the House Oversight Committee, and Hunter Biden is set to testify as part of the impeachment inquiry next week.

Speaker 24 So, Mehdi, the whole paragraph I just read you about this Smirnov guy, and what a name, it's all giving me flashbacks to 2016, 2017, the Steel dossier, the Russian interference. You know the story.

Speaker 24 What do you think Democrats do here? There seems like some credible evidence of Russian involvement, but I just, I don't want to sound like I'm wearing a tinfoil hat again and deal with this nonsense.

Speaker 1 Which shows you the power of Republican propaganda that even you and I sitting on Pun Save America are like, oh my God, not Russia again.

Speaker 1 Like they've so beaten into us that the Russian thing was nothing burger when it wasn't a nothing burger that we're now kind of getting PTSD and getting defensive. Let's be clear.

Speaker 1 The indictment is not just from the Biden DOJ. It's from a Trump-appointed prosecutor, David Weiss Weiss, I can never pronounce his last name, who has brought these charges saying this is ridiculous.

Speaker 1 This guy was not a credible informant or witness. And don't forget, the entire Republican impeachment strategy against Joe Biden depended on this guy.

Speaker 1 Like Ted Cruz, I believe I saw someone tweet that Ted Cruz did dozens of his podcast episodes just on this guy's allegations. James Comer called him a credible witness.

Speaker 1 Chuck Grassley, when he's not out looking for pigeons, was citing this guy. They were all there, like bigging up Smirnoff.

Speaker 1 Remember, the FBI didn't want to give the form with this guy's evidence on it because they said, we don't think he's valid.

Speaker 1 Republicans insisted, give it to us, give it to us, and then built their entire impeachment case around this guy who the FBI said, hey, this guy's not credible. He's now being charged.

Speaker 1 I mean, the indictment, by the way, if Pod Save America listeners have some time tonight, sit down with a copy of the indictment.

Speaker 1 Because I'll tell you what, I've become a fan of reading DOJ indictments recently. They are very well written.
Of Of course you are.

Speaker 1 Whether they're written by David Weiss or whether they're written by Jack Smith, there's some good stuff in there.

Speaker 1 I mean, going back to the Mar-a-Lago Bathroom photo, like I've become a fan of DOJ indictments, like put that on my reading list. This one has a whole section, Tommy, where they talk about Mr.

Speaker 1 Smirnoff meeting with Russian official one, who Smirnoff describes as the son of some government minister, who apparently is in charge of assassinations abroad.

Speaker 1 Come on, where do you get color and detail like that, even in the best of novels? So Smirnoff, the Republicans guy, is talking to a Russian official who's in charge of assassinations abroad.

Speaker 1 I guess they have a different team for assassinations at home. But this is who he is.
And the idea that the entire Biden impeachment campaign could have been a Russian op is hilarious. But yes,

Speaker 1 will be treated by a lot of MAGA folks as, oh, that's just another conspiracy. That's Democrats blaming Russia.

Speaker 1 But what's interesting is in the indictment, they make it very clear, this isn't just about Russian officials. It's about demonstrable evidence of falsehoods.

Speaker 1 Like he said, Hunter Biden was in Ukraine when Hunter Biden never went to Ukraine. He's, you know, he made certain specific time and date allegations which weren't true.

Speaker 1 Of course, we've never found any evidence of $5 million going to Joe Biden. And I do want to add one thing, Tommy.
I am no defender of Hunter Biden or James Biden.

Speaker 1 I do believe they did trade off their name. I do believe they did get jobs and contracts because they were related to Joe Biden.
That's a different argument.

Speaker 1 Were Biden family members behaving in an unseemly, morally corrupt, I don't know, financially corrupt way? Perhaps. Probably.

Speaker 1 That is not the same thing as saying the president of the United States took a bribe, which is a big allegation, which is an impeachable allegation.

Speaker 1 There has been zero evidence of that from the very beginning. And the Republicans needed this dodgy dude called Smirnoff to try and make it.
And look, they don't care.

Speaker 1 Fox is not even covering the stuff. Sean Hannan made it the centerpiece of his programming.
They'll never do a fact check, which is why I refuse to call them Fox News, not a news channel.

Speaker 1 It's a problem. Yeah, they're not a new channel.

Speaker 24 I love the idea of like you waking up in the morning, brewing some coffee, just flipping through some indictments. Don't read that Robert Herr one.
Well, maybe read it.

Speaker 24 It starts shitty, shitty, but by the end we get to get into it.

Speaker 1 Good to the details. Yeah.
Tonight, honey, which indictment from the DOJ did we download from?

Speaker 24 Meddy's indebted with a three-ring binder and a little flashlight.

Speaker 1 Okay, so just do it on screen. PDF, baby.

Speaker 24 Oh, there we go.

Speaker 24 So plan B, Meddy, since you're, as you pointed out, they cannot find any evidence that Joe Biden benefited financially in any way from his son's business dealings, is impeaching the Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Majorkis.

Speaker 24 This is like the consolation prize, right, of the Biden. impeachment.

Speaker 1 Who could we impeach next? Who else? What's our list?

Speaker 24 Let's go down.

Speaker 24 It's basically like the Republicans think that

Speaker 24 they're impeaching him because they don't agree with the Biden immigration policy, basically. The Mayorkis impeachment passed the House by one vote.
It took them two tries, but it finally passed.

Speaker 24 The presumption was it was dead in the Senate. We're now learning that a bunch of conservative senators like Rick Scott, J.D.

Speaker 24 Vance, Ted Cruz, et cetera, they want Mitch McConnell to force a full impeachment trial. They might have been meeting with the parliamentarian to figure out a way to do it.

Speaker 24 So there's sort of two schools of thought, Meddy, on how Democrats should handle this. One is dismiss impeachment via procedural means, just kind of like get it off the table.

Speaker 24 The other is call the Republicans bluff, have a trial, make the case about how absurd all of this is. Do you have a take on what is smarter politically?

Speaker 1 I would say the first option only because the second option only works if you're good at that kind of political trench warfare and Senate Democrats are not.

Speaker 1 I don't have any faith that the Democratic leadership or the Democrats in the Senate would be able to fight fire with fire in the same way.

Speaker 1 You know, I just watched recently Chris Murphy, who's a senator I have a lot of time for, is

Speaker 1 very good on a lot of issues. You know, he was coming out recently and praising my Republican friends in the Senate.

Speaker 1 And I'm always like, I never hear Republican senators talk about their Democratic friends. Funny that.

Speaker 1 But look, this is a dumb thing to do by the House.

Speaker 1 Dumb is the word I think Kevin Kramer, a Republican senator, used recently, saying it's dumb why we can't entertain this. But yes, Cruz, Mike Lee, the usual suspects are pushing it.

Speaker 1 People like Ted Cruz and Mike Lee shouldn't even be in the Senate. They should have been expelled for their role in inciting an insurrection.

Speaker 1 The fact that people like Hawley and Cruz are even still senators, I know we've all moved on.

Speaker 1 I'm still mad about the fact that there was never a full ethics committee investigation of Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz's role in trying to overturn American democracy.

Speaker 1 So the idea that we should take lectures from them about impeachment is absurd.

Speaker 1 No, I would try and get rid of it.

Speaker 1 I do not believe in this this democratic party argument that hey let's talk about immigration and talk about how we did this bipartisan bill and they turned it down and actually we're playing 3d chess no sorry you look at the polling do you see the polls after that bipartisan bill failed they said they blame biden more than trump for that failure people don't follow this stuff closely when they think of immigration they think republicans tough democrats weak republicans win democrats lose the idea that you should want to be talking about the border going into the presidential election and that the idea that that helps anyone other than the Republicans is mad.

Speaker 24 I agree with you broadly. I think you need an answer on the border.
And I think that the Republicans negotiating and then killing their own bipartisan immigration bill is that answer.

Speaker 24 And you're absolutely right.

Speaker 24 There was some polling that came out right away that showed the majority of voters blame President Biden for what happened, which, as you note, shows that they're just not paying attention and they just have negative feelings about Biden.

Speaker 24 So they're blaming him for anything. So I do think there will need to be some paid media efforts to get that message in front of voters so they are better educated on the issue.

Speaker 24 I do not think an impeachment hearing is going to do it. I also think the Democrats just need to highlight how extreme Trump would be on immigration and second term.

Speaker 1 That for me is very important.

Speaker 24 See the post today, deportations with the military?

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 And going back to our earlier conversation about Michigan and Muslims, when I talk to people who are skeptical about Biden and say, one of the things that comes up is we're like, Are you okay with a Trump term?

Speaker 1 And they're like, they're either not okay with the Trump term or they'll say something like, well, we survived Trump once. We can survive him again.

Speaker 1 And then what I do in that case, Tommy, is I lay out what's coming in Trump term two, because Trump two is not Trump one, right? This is not a sequel to a movie, which is the same as the first movie.

Speaker 1 It is very different what is coming down the line. It is full-blown fascism.
And I'm not just saying this in a hyperbolic way as a critic.

Speaker 1 This is the stuff they're saying, what Stephen Miller is saying, what Mike Davis is saying, what Donald Trump is saying, what Steve Bannon is saying.

Speaker 1 And I lay out what's coming up, including massive detention camps to sweep up people well inside the interior of this country from day one. The use of the Insurrection Act to deploy the military.

Speaker 1 So a friend of mine said recently, well, you know, we marched against Trump. We'll do it again.
And I said, yeah, this time you might get shot at. And that's, again, not hyperbole.

Speaker 1 We know from Esper, his former Defense Secretary, that Trump said, why can't we shoot them in the legs? The George Floyd protest. And he said, you can't do that, Mr.
President.

Speaker 1 Next time round, Defense Secretary Cash Patel will not say, you can't do that, Mr. President.
He'll say, let's do it. So this is what's coming down the line.

Speaker 1 And actually, when you talk to people and explain what's coming, actually, you do get some sense of there are persuadables.

Speaker 1 And I think the Democrats need to be doing that full ball right now, 24-7 of what is coming from a Trump second term and not this whole my Republican friends in the Senate.

Speaker 1 It's the fascist enablers who are coming down the track.

Speaker 24 Yes, totally agree. And luckily, Trump is kind of helping us tell that story.
I'm believing.

Speaker 1 He says it out loud every single day.

Speaker 24 Yeah, so he did a Fox Town hall last night.

Speaker 24 It was with Laura Ingram, where he was his usual thoughtful coach and self, talking about his legal prowess many other things how he's loved by billionaires let's take a listen to a little supercut we did there's crime there's violent crime there's migraine crime we have a new category of crime it's called migraine crime and it's going to be worse than any other form of crime

Speaker 31 I have to say I don't this is in a very positive way Tim's got he has been much better for me than he was for himself I watched this campaign

Speaker 31 they come out with faucets where no water comes out.

Speaker 31 You know, if you go and buy a home and they know what I mean, the showers, you stand under a shower and there's no water coming and you're saying, you end up standing there five times longer.

Speaker 31 If you have mail-in voting, you automatically have fraud.

Speaker 1 If you have

Speaker 1 mail-in voting in Florida and you want Hugh, that's right.

Speaker 1 If you have it, you're going to have fraud. But you want

Speaker 24 sort of a greatest hits, some new stuff.

Speaker 1 The greatest hits are there, the shower, the obsession with showers and faucets and water pressure.

Speaker 1 That is a book in itself. One day we will discover why Donald Trump is obsessed.
And when people say to me, oh, Joe Biden, he confused Cece with the president of Mexico.

Speaker 1 I'm like, the other guy wants to inject Clorox into your veins and is obsessed with toilet flush levels, right? It's insane.

Speaker 1 You would get up and walk away from the guy on the subway, on Tucker Carlson subway, who talked about shower pressure incessantly. By the way, in that clip, Tommy, he yet again admits to crimes.

Speaker 1 Because he says mail-in voting is fraud. That makes him a fraudster because he didn't apply mail in Florida in 2020 in the GOP primary.

Speaker 1 So once again, he can't help himself but just admit to all sorts of wrongdoing, even on his own terms. If it's fraud, then he's a fraudster.

Speaker 24 We're going to have to listen to a lot more of those.

Speaker 24 CNN reported that President Biden personally told his staff to be more aggressive in highlighting the stuff Trump is saying, the inflammatory comments, et cetera.

Speaker 1 The crazy shit, I think, was the first time.

Speaker 24 Yeah, the crazy shit is exactly, which was as reported on CNN. It's nice of Trump to make it easy for us.
So, yes, clearly they will keep doing this. Mehdi, thank you so much for doing the show today.

Speaker 24 It's so great to talk with you, as always. And everyone should buy your book.

Speaker 24 Win every argument because then you can just, you know, beat everyone in your family over holidays or whatever debate you need to do.

Speaker 1 Or ahead of an election if you're trying to persuade people. Yeah, there's that one.
Yeah, there's a lot of that too. That too.
Well, thank you for having me.

Speaker 1 I look forward to coming back next week as well. You're not getting rid of me that easily, Tommy.

Speaker 24 Damn right.

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Speaker 1 Really, he just got right back into it.

Speaker 33 Yeah, like we're going back in time, wiser, you know, more, you know, more lines. Hotter.

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