Indictment Eve

Speaker 1 Hey, Ryan Reynolds here, wishing you a very happy half-off holiday because right now Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service.

Speaker 1 Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price.

Speaker 2 So that means a half day.

Speaker 1 Yeah? Give it a try at mintmobile.com/slash switch.

Speaker 2 Upfront payment of $45 for three month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required. New customer offers for first three months only.
Speed slow out of 35 gigabytes of networks busy.

Speaker 2 Taxes and fees extra.

Speaker 1 See mintmobile.com.

Speaker 1 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favreau.
I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's show, Donald Trump prepares to be charged with more crimes.

Speaker 1 Mike Pence and Chris Christie jump into the race with some pointed criticism of the man who almost killed them. Matt Gates foils Kevin McCarthy's plan to protect your gas stove.

Speaker 1 And later, White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zeint stops by to talk to Dan about the debt ceiling deal and what's next on Biden's agenda.

Speaker 1 But first, if you are in the San Francisco area, June 22nd and 23rd,

Speaker 1 sounds like you, Dan.

Speaker 3 I'm unfortunately out of town, but I am being blown up with people looking for comp tickets to see Lovett.

Speaker 1 It is Love It or Leave It coming to San Francisco at the Palace of Fine Arts.

Speaker 1 Love it will be joined by a great lineup of guests, including Chris Fleming, Casey Newton, Dylan McKeever, Adam Savage, and some more surprise guests.

Speaker 1 Head to crooked.com slash events to get your tickets today.

Speaker 1 Also, Crooked's newest limited series podcast, Dreamtown, the story of Adelanto, has premiered with two episodes out now.

Speaker 1 Dreamtown is the story of a small California city named Adelanto in the desert that is about to go bankrupt until a stranger comes to town with a pitch to make Atalanto great again by becoming the first city in Southern California to legalize commercial weed cultivation.

Speaker 1 It's a great story, wild, local politics with a lot of national political themes in the backdrop. Search for Dreamtown, the story of Atalanto, and listen for free wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 All right, let's get to the news.

Speaker 1 So we are currently on Trump indictment watch again, with multiple reports suggesting that the twice-impeached criminal defendant could be charged any day now with violating the Espionage Act and obstructing justice in connection with classified information he refused to give back to the government.

Speaker 1 We also got reports that, in addition to the grand jury in D.C., Special Counsel Jack Smith has a second grand jury in Miami, where he is expected to possibly bring charges,

Speaker 1 and that he also let the former president's lawyers know last week that Trump is, in in fact, a target of the investigation. Dan,

Speaker 1 care to comment on the unverified report that Jack Smith has delayed the indictment so that it comes right after we hit publish on this episode of Pod Save America.

Speaker 3 I just hope when that moment comes, the appropriate people in America thank us. Because if big news only breaks after we pod, if we don't pod, no big news.

Speaker 1 Ergo. Look, I'm ready.
I'm ready.

Speaker 1 I've got the afternoon cleared. I'm ready to jump back into the studio.

Speaker 1 Just for you people.

Speaker 3 Clearing the afternoon was a huge mistake. That is messing with the indictment karma gods.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. Well, I am busy till around one.
So it'll probably, it could happen up until one.

Speaker 3 Okay. All right.
I feel, I feel good.

Speaker 1 Just so people know on the timing, there was some news

Speaker 1 yesterday saying it could be today.

Speaker 1 Others are saying that the fact that the Miami grand jury was hearing witnesses just yesterday suggests that, yes, the indictment is imminent, but imminent can be next week, week after.

Speaker 1 But more importantly, we are having a live show Monday night in New York City with the New York Attorney General and Hillary Clinton joining. So maybe they could get it done by then.
Just maybe.

Speaker 3 It would be nice if them.

Speaker 1 Who will think of the content, Dan?

Speaker 3 Our content, specifically. Our content.
Yes.

Speaker 1 Okay, so can you use the legal degree that you got from Twitter and strict scrutiny to explain what the flurry of developments over the last few days in the classified documents case actually mean?

Speaker 3 So I want to try to do this in like a schoolhouse rocks version of how do you imprison a former president.

Speaker 3 We have to go back in time a little bit because I do think that this has gotten, we're just, there are so many cases. There's one in Fulton County.
There's the one in New York with the Manhattan DA.

Speaker 3 There is what Jack Smith is doing. And so let's go back.

Speaker 3 After there were, it came out that Donald Trump was hoarding classified documents at his beach house, Merritt Garland appointed a special counsel named Jack Smith to investigate all Trump investigations because Trump was running for president against Joe Biden.

Speaker 3 It's pretty typical to have a special counsel when there could be allegations of political interference. This is exactly why

Speaker 3 the Republican, why the Republican Deputy Attorney General appointed Bob Mueller, our hero and savior, to investigate Donald Trump and the Russian gate and stuff.

Speaker 3 So Jack Smith impanels the grand jury in Washington, D.C. to start hearing from witnesses.
We don't know a ton.

Speaker 3 Every once in a while, something leaks out or a Trump witness goes out and says that they got hauled in so that they can get their story out there before Trump hits Truth Social to attack them for whatever.

Speaker 3 And we kind of know that they are looking at at least two things. One is classified documents.

Speaker 3 The other is what role Trump may have played in trying to overthrow the election, either through violence on January 6th or through a cock and hibi scam of fake electors.

Speaker 3 As you mentioned in your thing, a couple important things have happened in the last few weeks.

Speaker 3 Apparently, at some point in May, Trump got what's called a target letter, which is when a federal investigator tells someone that they are the subject of the investigation. They're not a witness.

Speaker 3 They might actually be the person charged. That is often followed by a meeting.
with the investigators.

Speaker 3 Last week, Trump's attorneys went in there to meet with the Department of Justice to try to suss out the nature of the charges, the state of the case.

Speaker 3 Based on Trump's all caps truths, after that, it appears the meeting did not go well.

Speaker 3 And so here we are, we are now waiting to find out if and when the, at least in the classified documents cases, is the one we understand, according to reporting, that Trump is the target in, when that indictment will come down.

Speaker 1 Direct relationship between the number of capital letters and truths from Trump and how he's feeling about

Speaker 1 the fact that he may get indicted. So that's what you, when there, when there's more caps, more truths, we're getting close.
We're getting close to an indictment. That's usually the rule.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you don't want a target letter. You don't want a letter letting you know that you're the target of a federal investigation.

Speaker 1 Just I have no legal degree, but that's just something that you want to avoid. What do you think is going on with the second jury in Florida?

Speaker 3 is an opportunity for everyone who is a lawyer, went to law school, or met a lawyer to speculate recklessly on Twitter about what it can mean.

Speaker 3 But I will offer you the short menu of what are possible options here. One is very simple logistics, which is Mar-a-Lago is in Florida.

Speaker 3 A lot of the potential witnesses to Trump's potential crimes, like the people who work at Mar-a-Lago, the Secret Service agents, are all in Florida.

Speaker 3 You can make life easier on yourself and the witnesses to impanel a grand jury in Florida. So they can just like drive there instead of flying to Washington, D.C.
to appear before that grand jury.

Speaker 3 It also can happen a little bit more outside of the view of the press than when they all get marched in front of the stakeout of cameras at the D.C. federal courthouse.

Speaker 3 The other, and I think more likely reason based on some reporting from Carol Lenning at the Washington Post, is that if Jack Smith is going to try Trump, he wants to do it in Florida.

Speaker 3 Because even though he legally could, because of

Speaker 3 the nature of a crime like the Espionage Act or obstruction of justice, he could charge it in D.C.

Speaker 3 But the argument for charging in Florida is if the case is charged in D.C., the very first thing Trump's attorneys will do is

Speaker 3 run to Fox News. After that, they will then file a motion to try to

Speaker 3 object to the venue and try to have it move to Florida, which will take a bunch of time.

Speaker 3 And it is very much in Jack Smith's interests for the country, for the state of the case to get it resolved as fast as possible, certainly before Donald Trump can pardon himself potentially in January of 2025.

Speaker 3 And so this, this, while this probably, there's some legal risk to this, you, different jury pooled, it may be more favorable to Trump in Florida than Washington, D.C., certainly based on partisanship, if you, if you want to look at it that way, you could get one of those crazy judges like the like the ones

Speaker 1 Eileen Cannon.

Speaker 3 Eileen Cannon is an option there.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's not good.

Speaker 3 But that if we're trying to get to our resolution of the case as quickly as possible, you might get a delay in the indictment of a couple of weeks because

Speaker 3 Jack Smith then has to go to Florida and read the Florida grand jury the testimony and evidence offered in Washington. But you might get a faster resolution of the case if they go the Florida route.

Speaker 1 There's one more aspect to the venue question.

Speaker 1 Former Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissman, also Pot Save America guest, Andrew Weissman, he wrote up something today saying that Jack Smith has to get the venue right, not just because of the potential for delay, as you mentioned, but

Speaker 1 if you end up going with the wrong venue, and you get a conviction, but then on appeal, they say, oh, well, this was never supposed to be tried in D.C. in the first place.

Speaker 1 The Supreme Court is currently hearing a case about whether you can try the person again just because of a venue, because the government screwed up the venue. And we don't know what they have decided.

Speaker 1 But to be extra cautious, Jack Smith may bring charges in both D.C. and Florida just to make sure he's doing it right.

Speaker 1 But he may bring the bulk of the charges in Florida just because he wants to play it safe and does not want any risk of some judge saying, by the way, it shouldn't have have been in D.C.

Speaker 1 and now the whole case is gone.

Speaker 1 So there you go.

Speaker 3 We've learned a lot about the law, is what I would say.

Speaker 1 We learned a lot about the law. I'll just say, my Twitter list of legal experts,

Speaker 1 they have a lot to say. People seem very sure that he is getting indicted.
More sure than they were before the Hush Money case.

Speaker 1 And partly that's based on just the mountain of evidence that we know about over the last several months in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, both on the taking the documents, withholding the documents, potentially obstructing justice, potentially disseminating classified information.

Speaker 1 It doesn't seem great. It doesn't seem great for him.

Speaker 3 Yeah, there are three pieces of evidence that have come out in the last couple of weeks, and most likely from grand jury witnesses who've been asked about this.

Speaker 3 The first is the long voice memo that Trump's attorney dictated to himself about his interactions with Trump on this case, which became evidence because the fraud exception and attorney-client privilege was found.

Speaker 3 Second, that Trump is reportedly on tape with a group of people doing Mark Meadows' memoirs, admitting he has a classified document that he can't show them, thus proving he didn't declassify it, an argument he never really used.

Speaker 3 We talked about that last week. And then, this thing you guys talked about, about how they accidentally drained the pool into the server room at the Ed Mara Lago.

Speaker 1 Who among us?

Speaker 1 You know, we also learned this week that Trump's last chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has testified before the grand jury in both the classified documents investigation and the January 6th investigation.

Speaker 1 Again, my Twitter list of legal experts all seem to think that was huge news. Some were even saying it was bigger news than any of the Mar-a-Lago stuff that happened this week.
What do you think?

Speaker 3 I have the same list of Twitter liars, so I feel exactly the same as you do.

Speaker 3 Mark Meadows is important because he is one of the very few witnesses who was in the White House when Trump packed up all of his stuff, was in contact with Trump after the White House, and was intimately involved with efforts around the post-election insurrection planning, including being a person who was in contact with the quote-unquote war room in Virginia with Roger Stone and the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.

Speaker 3 That's where the rally and

Speaker 3 eventual assaults on the Capitol were planned.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and of course, Cassidy Hutchinson testified in the January 6th hearing that he said to her, January 6th could be really bad, really bad. It sounds like he had

Speaker 1 some knowledge that something might be going on. How are you feeling?

Speaker 1 We talked about a little bit this on Tuesday, but gut feeling right now about the potential political impact of an indictment in the classified documents case?

Speaker 3 Call me naive. Call me a wild-eyed optimist, but I just have to imagine that being charged with a crime under the Espionage Act is not a political winner, even in this Republican primary.

Speaker 1 I know.

Speaker 1 I feel the same way. I also think the other difference between this case and the Hutch Money case is this is happening at a time where a bunch of other Republican candidates have announced.

Speaker 1 A couple that we're about to talk about have actually gone directly after Trump.

Speaker 1 And whether they attack Trump for this or not, if he's indicted, now Republican voters who are maybe feeling a little hesitant about all the crimes, they have another place to go because they are now starting to see other candidates.

Speaker 1 So I do think that's different. And I think it's an easier case to understand than Hush Money.
In the Hush Money case, there was a lot of novel legal theory commentary going on.

Speaker 1 This is not a novel legal theory. This is pretty straightforward.

Speaker 1 You can't steal classified information and then hoard it in your beach house and then pass it out to whoever you'd like and then obstruct justice when they ask for it back.

Speaker 1 Pretty easy. All right, well, let's talk about the rest of the field.
Mike Pence, Chris Christie, and my man Doug Bergham are officially running for president.

Speaker 1 The former vice president, who was nearly killed by his own voters after Donald Trump attacked him for not overturning the election, had some choice words for his old boss in an announcement speech where he let it all hang out.

Speaker 3 I believe that anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be President of the United States.

Speaker 3 And anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be President of the United States again.

Speaker 3 But the American people deserve to know that on that day, President Trump also demanded that I choose between him

Speaker 3 and the Constitution.

Speaker 3 Now voters will be faced with the same choice.

Speaker 3 I chose the Constitution,

Speaker 3 and I always will.

Speaker 1 It's a pretty good line. Would you say that Mike Pence is getting the hang of it?

Speaker 3 Once again, Mike Pence, the only person in polite society you can make fun of their near murder.

Speaker 1 Were you surprised? that Pence went directly at Trump in a way that was sharper than he ever has before.

Speaker 1 And I know the answer is yes, because your first draft of the outline was like, Mike Pence did an announcement and didn't really go after Trump, unlike Chris Christie.

Speaker 1 And boy, did Mike Pence prove you wrong.

Speaker 3 I would just note for the record that we work under arduous deadlines at Potsdam America. So my outline was done before the Pence speech.
So I was wrong.

Speaker 3 Was sharp the word you used there?

Speaker 1 I originally thought about the word tougher, and then I changed it to sharper because I don't know if it was tough, it was sharp.

Speaker 3 It was sharp compared to cotton.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 he said he should never be president.

Speaker 3 I think you were grading him on a curve, and I think in the long history of attempted murder,

Speaker 3 no attempted murder victim has ever had a more milquetose response to his attempted murderer than Mike Pence did right there.

Speaker 1 If we stopped grading any of these Republicans on a curve, we would have nothing to talk about.

Speaker 1 They are all on a curve right now. The whole

Speaker 3 since

Speaker 3 our next guest.

Speaker 1 Since 2016, we've been on a big old curve that we're grading all of them on. And you know what, Mike Pence, good for you.
Good for you. Yeah, I was a little surprised.

Speaker 1 I was a little surprised, but I guess if the guy you're running against almost had you killed and your whole claim to fame was

Speaker 1 that one time at the very end of the first term doing the right thing.

Speaker 1 Might as well say something about it.

Speaker 3 Sure.

Speaker 3 Kudos. Right?

Speaker 1 The Wi-Fi password at his event, at his announcement event, was

Speaker 1 kept his oath.

Speaker 3 That's the Wi-Fi.

Speaker 1 How do I get on this Wi-Fi? It's kept his oath. So Pence was later interviewed by Dan of Ash during a CNN town hall.

Speaker 1 On the plus side, he said that unlike Trump, he wouldn't pardon the people convicted of crimes in connection with January 6th, and he thinks that Vladimir Putin is a war criminal, not a genius, as Trump said.

Speaker 1 On the minus side, Pence refused to say whether he would pardon Donald Trump, doesn't think that Trump should be indicted in the classified documents case because even though he supports the rule of law and thinks that no one should be above the law, he thinks an indictment would be too divisive.

Speaker 1 And then he said this to Dan Abash about whether he'd support Trump if he is the nominee.

Speaker 4 You just spent a lot of time, both here and earlier today, explaining why you think that the former president did not uphold his oath to the Constitution.

Speaker 4 So then, how can you say that you would support him if he's the nominee?

Speaker 3 Well, because I don't think Donald Trump's going to be the nomination of the President. What if he is?

Speaker 3 I don't think he's going to be the nominee. What if he is? I have great confidence in Republican primary voters.

Speaker 3 We have a field of strong and experienced candidates that grew by one today.

Speaker 1 I'm glad he has great confidence in Republican voters.

Speaker 1 These are the same people who put up the gallows, started chanting Hang Mike Pence, just FYI.

Speaker 1 Why do you think that Pence was willing to tell people Donald Trump violated the Constitution and should never be president, but wasn't willing to say he won't support him if he's the nominee?

Speaker 3 Because every Republican candidate has theoretically signed a loyalty pledge put out by the rnc that as a if you want to be on the debate stage which all these candidates need to be they have to say they're willing to support the nominee now i think absent that loyalty pledge they would also support the nominee i definitely believe that to be the case but the most technical reason is the loyalty pledge yeah i mean

Speaker 1 if i was mike pence

Speaker 1 running for president, I was Chris Christie, and let's say I was going to be courageous and that at the end of this nomination, if Donald Trump wins, I was going to say, no, I'm not supporting him.

Speaker 1 I would definitely say I'm supporting him now because I need to get on that debate stage. It's the only chance these people have to win, to get on that debate stage.
So, yeah. And

Speaker 1 guess who lied about whether or not they'd support the nominee last time? Donald Trump. Donald Trump also lied about whether he would accept the results of the election.
No one fucking cared.

Speaker 3 I also think there's a lot. Everyone keeps dunking on these Republican candidates for saying, for leaving open the idea that they will pardon Trump.
And

Speaker 3 morally, that is in an abhorrent position. Strategically, it's kind of brilliant.
Because here's what you want.

Speaker 3 If you win the nomination, you want Trump to have some serious skin in the game for your victory.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. You want to dangle the pardon out there so that he doesn't burn the whole fucking house down while you're trying to run for president and win.

Speaker 1 Yep. Now, Asa Hutchinson tried to,

Speaker 1 for those of you who may have forgotten, which you are forgiven for, Asa Hutchinson, Arkansas governor governor who is running for president on the Republican side, been very critical of Trump.

Speaker 1 He tried to square this circle by saying that the RNC should change the pledge so that you only,

Speaker 1 you don't have to support the nominee if they've been convicted of espionage or another serious felony,

Speaker 1 which could happen to anyone.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, also, it's just so notable that you feel so strongly about that. It has to be put in writing.

Speaker 1 Mark Short, one of Pence's top advisors, he was top advisor in the White House, now in the campaign. He was also apparently crying during the announcement.
He was so moved by Mike Pence.

Speaker 1 He said to Dave Weigel at Semaphore that they've seen focus groups, not that they've conducted, they've been shown focus groups, where Republicans agree with what Pence did on January 6th after they hear him lay out his side of the story.

Speaker 1 And Mark Short's argument is voters have only heard the mainstream media side of the story on January 6th. Once they hear the conservative side of the story from Mike Pence,

Speaker 1 that's going to be our ticket to the nomination. Do you buy that? And in general, like, what do you think Pence's theory of the case is here?

Speaker 3 Well, let me answer your second question first. Pence's theory of the case is the same theory of the case that all of us have when we buy a Powerball ticket.
It's like, we might win. It could happen.

Speaker 3 I don't know. If we do, it'd be cool.

Speaker 3 I

Speaker 3 do think it's possible that there have been focus groups that show that you can convince Republican voters that Mike Pence's refusal to commit treason is an acceptable thing. Because even

Speaker 3 if even for all the Republicans who wrongly believe that Trump won the election, there was fraud, et cetera, most of them still don't like what happened on January 6th, the day.

Speaker 3 So I think you can probably sell people that.

Speaker 3 I think it says a lot about the party that in the con column for Mike Pence, for most voters is that he didn't commit treason but you know we'll let them we'll let them figure that out

Speaker 1 the guy has higher negatives than any of his opponents is the highest negatives of anyone running Mike Pence Adam Wren wrote a piece for Politico about sort of the the Pence case theory of the case and it is that uh Trump and DeSantis kill each other because they keep going at each other the whole time, kill each other in Iowa, and then Pence scoops up the evangelical vote in that state because he's got a high name ID, probably because he's a white dude.

Speaker 1 He's going to visit all 99 counties in Iowa. He's going to stake everything on Iowa and hope that Trump and DeSantis just kind of cancel each other out.
And that's it.

Speaker 1 That's the Mike Pence theory.

Speaker 3 High name ID and high unfavorables is not a good thing.

Speaker 1 Mm-mm.

Speaker 1 Mm-mm.

Speaker 1 Because people know you and they have formed an opinion.

Speaker 1 Let's talk about the other new Republican candidate whose life Donald Trump almost ended, his old debate coach, Chris Christie.

Speaker 1 No announcement video from Christie, no big teleprompter speech, just a town hall where, as promised, he kicked the ever-living shit out of Donald Trump.

Speaker 3 Let's listen.

Speaker 5 A lonely, self-consumed, self-serving mirror hog is not a leader. Well, let me be clear, in case I have not been already.

Speaker 3 The person I am talking about is Donald Trump.

Speaker 6 I am going out there to take out Donald Trump, but here's why.

Speaker 3 I want to win.

Speaker 3 And I don't want him to win. There are not multiple lanes to the Republican nomination.
There is one lane to the Republican nomination, and he's in front of it.

Speaker 3 And if you want to win, you better go right through him.

Speaker 6 The grift from this family is breathtaking. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Kushner walk out of the White House and months later get $2 billion from the Saudis?

Speaker 6 You think it's because he's some kind of investing genius? Or do you think it's because he was sitting next to the President of the United States for four years doing favors for the Saudis?

Speaker 6 That's your money he stole and gave it to his family. You know what that makes us? A banana republic.

Speaker 3 Because he's the only person outside the state of Delaware to have ever lost to Joe Biden.

Speaker 3 Every time before Donald Trump, that Joe Biden ever tried to run for anything outside the tiny little state of Delaware, he lost. He said once.

Speaker 3 Because he got to run against against Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 So my first reaction to that clip when I heard the Jared and Ivanka hit was that I didn't know that Tommy and Ben were speechwriting for Chris Christie now.

Speaker 3 Sending that clip to Tommy really made my week because it made him so happy. He was so excited.

Speaker 1 So that was fun. What'd you think? What did you think of Chris Christie?

Speaker 3 I think.

Speaker 3 Well, after hearing that, the question I have to ask is, how many delegates does the winner of Resistance Twitter get for the Republican nomination?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 it depends on the delegates are awarded proportionally on how many RTs you get. From the Krassensteins.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 it's an RT-based allocation of delegates. So we'll see.

Speaker 3 Okay. He's got a shot then.

Speaker 1 I loved it. Of course.
Of course. How could you not love that? Christie was later asked by Brett Baer to reckon with his past support of Donald Trump, and here's what he said.

Speaker 3 What changed? He changed.

Speaker 5 He changed, Brett, in material ways. I've known him for 22 years.

Speaker 5 And what I was hoping to do by endorsing him early, recognizing that he had won in New Hampshire, he had won in South Carolina and almost won in Iowa.

Speaker 3 He was the nominee.

Speaker 5 And I thought as a longtime friend, I could make him a better candidate and a better president.

Speaker 3 I was wrong.

Speaker 1 You think that's good enough? And how much does it matter?

Speaker 3 It matters.

Speaker 3 A little. It's fine.

Speaker 3 Every one of these people have the same problem, which is how do you make a case against Trump when you were just slavishly defending every terrible thing he did six months ago?

Speaker 3 And at least Christie says he's wrong. Yeah.
I mean, Mike Pett probably has the best version of this, which is he tried to kill me. And that really opened my eyes to the problem.

Speaker 3 I guess Christie could have just said that, too.

Speaker 1 It's talking about a deathbed conversion, you know?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 It's fine. It's fine as an answer.
Chris Christie's inability to reckon with his previous support or his challenges reckoning with the previous support is not his biggest problem.

Speaker 3 His biggest problem is Republicans hate him. Right.

Speaker 3 Yeah. He has a minus 51% net approval among Republicans.

Speaker 1 Yeah, just slightly, just slightly beating out pence. Yeah.

Speaker 1 There was like one poll, there was one poll that had 60% of Republicans say they won't even consider Chris Christie as a potential nominee. No, he won't even consider 60%.
That's tough.

Speaker 1 That's a tough path.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's not. Well, I mean, UK, I mean, that's 40% is Trump won with less than 40% in 2016.
So just got to consolidate every other single human being on the planet. You can win.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, obviously, as you said, all of these people who are taking on Trump have issues in that they all supported Trump and basically said nothing during the whole time he was president.

Speaker 1 Here's the thing. I don't really care.
I don't care.

Speaker 1 Because I don't care if the people who kick the shit out of Trump are heroes. or assholes or hypocrites.
I just care that they're kicking the shit out of Trump.

Speaker 1 You know, like, and I especially don't care about Chris Christie because he's not going to be president.

Speaker 1 He's not going to win this nomination.

Speaker 1 And if he wants to go down just every day kicking the shit out of Donald Trump and actually criticizing him like he should be criticized and not doing the whole, it was also funny listening, Christie did this like mocking thing of the other candidates being like, there's someone that I won't name who's, you know, is not good and blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1 And he was like making fun of that. I like that.
Good. Go for it.
You know, and if that gets a bunch of media attention

Speaker 1 because the media likes conflict and someone actually kicking the shit out of Trump, then great. Perfect.
Go for it. Have a blast.

Speaker 3 I think it's probably Christie's best strategy. Like as you said, he's almost certainly not going to win, but he understands that.

Speaker 3 So he is trying to have a different strategy than all these other Yahoos. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but it's high variance.
And that's what you need with your launch.

Speaker 1 Maggie Haberman said that it was difficult to find actual Republican voters at Christie's town Hall, and that apparently almost every single voter that they talked to was a registered independent.

Speaker 1 If you want to stop Trump,

Speaker 1 don't you actually have to talk to Republican voters at some point?

Speaker 3 I mean, he's just, he's warming up. Let him just walk into the pool slowly, right?

Speaker 1 He did go on Fox and have that interview with Brett Baer where he said he was wrong. But it does crystallize why he needs the debate so badly, maybe more than anyone else.

Speaker 1 Because if he doesn't get on that debate stage, like, where is he getting his message out aside from, you know, the liberal media that can't be trusted?

Speaker 3 Yeah, he absolutely needs to be on the base stage. Trump should not want him on the debate stage because he's pretty good at this.

Speaker 3 As a just political performer, he is leaps and bounds better than everyone else on that stage except for Trump. I mean, Pence has no personality.
DeSantis is awkward. Haley's not that great.

Speaker 3 Tim Scott, I mean, I don't think Doug Bergham, your boy, is making the stage. So, yeah, I mean, it's better TV for all of America and more challenging for Trump if he gets there.

Speaker 3 So, I hope he gets there.

Speaker 1 I do think it's a challenge if Trump doesn't show up. Yeah.
Then, then I don't know what Christie does. I guess Chrissy then just has a chance to whack Trump for an hour and a half.

Speaker 3 It's like when they would do the junior varsity debates on the Republican Science 2016, and then like Lindsey Graham would really show out

Speaker 3 against the, you know, I don't know, Carly Fiorina or whoever else the other people were up there. And so I'm sure he'll look great compared to these other people.

Speaker 1 We haven't talked about this yet, but what do you think about

Speaker 1 like, so the Iowa caucuses go first. There is no Democratic Iowa caucus this time around, just Republicans.
And then in New Hampshire, of course,

Speaker 1 you know, independents can jump into the primary and there won't really be a Democratic primary in New Hampshire either. So

Speaker 1 do you think that like part of a strategy for Christie could be getting Democrats and independents to vote for him in the primary just as a way to stop Trump? Is that like a realistic possibility?

Speaker 3 I don't think that's a real strategy, but

Speaker 3 because independents can vote in either primary just by showing up on that day or non-I don't think they're technically independents. I think so there's non-party affiliated MPA voters.

Speaker 3 The role they play in an individual party's primary is dictated by what's happening on the other side of the ballot. One of the theories for why Obama underperformed in New Hampshire in

Speaker 3 2008 is a lot of independent voters thought that Obama had it locked up. So some of them voted for McCain because they had previously supported, there was some overlap in Obama and McCain voters.

Speaker 3 You know, you could see so you could see a world in which if Christy, I mean, look, what are we talking about here? This is insane. This is a stupid thing to talk about.

Speaker 1 Well, Christy or someone else, I'm wondering about sort of just the gener in general, the capacity for Democrats and independents to meddle in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary on the Republican side.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 3 I don't think they can meddle in the caucus on the Republican side.

Speaker 3 I think they would have to re-register as Republicans in Iowa, I think.

Speaker 3 The Democratic caucus was open to independence. I don't think the Republican one is, but I could be wrong.
I think that's all on the margins. I think

Speaker 3 the increased number of independent voters who will be voting in the Republican primary in New Hampshire will have an impact. I don't think it's part of a specific strategy.

Speaker 3 It's just the fact that there's not

Speaker 3 a competing Democratic primary happening. So, but I don't think somebody, I don't think there's going to be, you can already see

Speaker 3 these people like re-registering as Republicans to vote for Christie or some dumb shit like that.

Speaker 3 That is, even if that happens, that is not going to, I don't think, I think that is not mathematically significant.

Speaker 1 Got it. Okay, so when we come back, Dan talks to White House Chief of Staff, Jeff Seins.

Speaker 8 October brings it all. Halloween parties, tailgates, crisp fall nights.
At Total Wine and Moore, you'll find just what you need for them all. Mixing up something spooky?

Speaker 8 Total Wine and Moore is your cocktail central for all your Halloween concoctions.

Speaker 8 With the lowest prices for over 30 years, you'll always find what you love and love what you find only at Total Wine and Moore. Curbside pickup and delivery available in most areas.

Speaker 8 See TotalWine.com for details. Spirits not sold in Virginia and North Carolina.
Drink responsibly. B21.

Speaker 9 The Kia Sportage Turbo Hybrid has a bold design, a spacious interior with 232 horsepower, and a 12.3-inch panoramic display to keep the adventure going and fit with the way you live.

Speaker 9 And with SiriusXM, every drive comes alive, bringing you closer to the music, sports, talk, and podcasts you love, right in your vehicle or on the Sirius XM app.

Speaker 9 Every Sirius XM-equipped Kia Sportage Turbo Hybrid includes a three-month trial subscription to SiriusXM, so the experience begins the moment you drive.

Speaker 9 Learn more at kia.com/slash sportage dash hybrid. Kia movement that inspires

Speaker 9 stitch fix.

Speaker 4 Shopping is hard.

Speaker 3 Let's talk about it. I don't have time to shop, so I buy all my clothes or I buy my seafood.
I just want someone to tell me what shirt goes with what pants.

Speaker 9 I just want jeans that fit. Stitch Fix makes shopping easy.
Just show your size, style, and budget, and your stylist sends personalized looks right to your door.

Speaker 9 No subscription required, plus free shipping and returns.

Speaker 3 Man, that was easy.

Speaker 1 That looked good.

Speaker 9 Stitch Fix, online personal styling for everyone. Take your style quiz today at stitchfix.com.

Speaker 3 Joining us now for the first time on Pod Save America's White House Chief of Staff, Jeff Saints Jeff, welcome to the pod.

Speaker 7 Well, thank you for having me. I'm a big listener and Dan, it's great to see you.

Speaker 3 It's good to see you. Congratulations

Speaker 3 crisis as chief of staff. That's no small thing.

Speaker 7 No, it was an incredible case study and leadership, starting with the president and the teamwork here. both at the White House and working across the agency and with the Hill, I think is just a plus.

Speaker 7 And I think that was how we got the outcome we got, which I think is a good outcome for the American people.

Speaker 3 We'll get a little bit into what's in the deal, but I want to start a little bit with what you mentioned is the president's leadership, because

Speaker 3 there have been debt limit deals before, there have been budget deals before, but this president's operating in sort of a different kind of politics than we've had, or a worse, maybe a worse kind of politics.

Speaker 3 Just what does it say about Joe Biden and how he goes about politics that he's able to strike deals like this with a Republican Party that the vast majority of whom refuse to acknowledge that he even won the presidency legitimately?

Speaker 3 They go after his family. They go after his health.
What was his approach to getting this done with this group of people?

Speaker 7 Look, I think this is a natural gift of the presidents, but he also spent a lot of time, decades, on the Hill.

Speaker 7 And then, as you know, Dan, who worked with him for eight years as vice president and now a couple of, I think, historic years years as president. He's a leader and he's experienced and he's wise.

Speaker 7 And I think from the beginning, he said, this is going to take time. It's going to have its ups and downs.
We can't overreact to either when it feels really good or when it feels really bad.

Speaker 7 We've got to play the long game here. And I, you know, my first night of work was the State of the Union.

Speaker 7 So those few days before the State of the Union, when Ron was winding down as chief of staff and I was cranking up. I spent time in the rehearsals for the State of the Union.

Speaker 7 Dan, you remember those sessions?

Speaker 3 Those were important sessions.

Speaker 7 The State of the Union is a state of union's a big deal because it brings together the priorities for the upcoming year or two of the presidency.

Speaker 7 So you can imagine the process that goes into figuring out what the most important priorities are, how to frame them for the American people.

Speaker 7 So I sat in on a couple of those sessions, and central to it was Social Security and Medicare and the fact that we were not going to

Speaker 7 undermine the social security system or Medicare, which tens of millions of Americans rely on.

Speaker 7 Now, we didn't know that someone would shout out from the Republican caucus that the president wasn't telling the truth when he pointed out that some Republicans wanted to cut Social Security and Medicare.

Speaker 7 But the great news is within a matter of a few weeks, the Republicans had taken Social Security and Medicare off the table.

Speaker 7 So the president's leadership, I think, on the debt ceiling really began that night at the State of the Union when he protected Social Security and Medicare.

Speaker 7 And throughout, it was his strategy and his leadership and our teamwork that I described earlier that enabled us to get to this point.

Speaker 7 You know, at the end, Dan, those last several days, you can imagine If you were in your old job as communications director, leader of the White House, the pressure that Anita Dunn and team were under to punch back

Speaker 7 as Republicans were criticizing the president, as they were declaring victory. And the president's instruction to all of us was, let's give this negotiation the space that it needs.

Speaker 7 I think we're headed to a good outcome, particularly in this context of divided government for the American people and for Democrats. Let's be patient.
Let's play the long game.

Speaker 7 And that's what led to that discipline that I think was hard to implement, but was absolutely hard to be disciplined about at times.

Speaker 7 But I think we did a really good job of implementing and it really mattered. And again, that was the president's direction.

Speaker 7 You know, in the middle, we were under a lot of pressure, Dan, as you know, to negotiate. McCarthy kept saying, it's been 50 days since we've met.

Speaker 7 It's been 70 days.

Speaker 7 Well, the president was very clear when they first met, and that was also just around the State of the Union, that he was going to put out his budget, which would show our our plan for deficit reduction it had over three trillion dollars of deficit reduction importantly it had new revenue corporations paying their fair share wealthy individuals the average billionaire pays eight percent the idea of a minimum tax on billionaires so billionaires pay their fair share the way same way teachers and firefighters do who now pay more on a percentage basis by a multiple than the average billionaire.

Speaker 7 Having revenue in an equation when you're putting together a budget is really important. It's not just about spending.
The Republicans only want to focus on spending.

Speaker 7 So having the Republicans asking McCarthy to first put forward his plan for deficit reduction before and a budget and priorities so he can contrast our priorities, our values with the Republican values was something the president said in that very first meeting.

Speaker 7 And we kept insisting upon that. And then, you know, what was it, three months later, they passed the bill, which showed their priorities and their values.

Speaker 7 and they're very very different than our democratic values and the president's values and at the end of the day making uh sure that they put their priorities on the table before we began to negotiate was hard day to day absolutely right answer that the president had and the team executed well against that too

Speaker 3 was that the pivot point when you went from you know the president started this out saying i'm not going to negotiate that had been sort of an article of faith um among democrats since president obama went through this when you and i were in the white house in 2013

Speaker 3 to go from saying I'm not going to negotiate to sitting down with McCarthy and having his team do it. Was that the point when they put their budget out? Like, how did you, how did that pivot happen?

Speaker 7 Look, the president always had a framework that said, we're not going to negotiate over the debt ceiling. We will negotiate over the budget.
Show me your budget. Here's my budget.
Here's my values.

Speaker 7 Here's my deficit reduction. Here's my new sources of revenue.
from, as I said, large corporations, closing tax loopholes, billionaires paying their fair share.

Speaker 7 once we got uh the the so-called plan of the republicans on the table there wasn't a lot of detail um but there were it certainly gave a direction of where they wanted to head at that point we entered into the budget negotiations you know clearly having the debt ceiling created pressure to get to the budget agreement we did um and we can talk more later about you know that's not a great system uh to govern or legislate in this country and how do we change that going forward but i think where we've come out of here which which is a two-year extension of the debt ceiling with all the president's priorities from infrastructure to the Chips and Science Act to clean energy investments to reducing prescription drug costs and reducing Medicare prices, not coverage, prices are costs for the U.S.

Speaker 7 government is really, really important. All of the president's priorities were protected, even though the Republicans wanted to undo a lot of those things.

Speaker 3 Now, I know.

Speaker 3 Two years is a long time from now,

Speaker 3 but it's going to be here very fast.

Speaker 3 This agreement will expire in January of 2025.

Speaker 3 Well, you guys, you know, if and when the president is re-elected, one of his, the first things he's going to have to deal with is the debt limit all over again.

Speaker 3 When the president was asked about this right after the

Speaker 3 agreement was struck, he brought up the idea of potentially looking at the 14th Amendment next time. How are you guys thinking about avoiding going down this path?

Speaker 3 Because the outcome you got, both in terms of the substance of the deal and avoiding the damage to the economy was great this time, but that may not happen next time.

Speaker 7 I agree with you, Dan.

Speaker 7 I mean, you know, divided government is difficult and you don't get everything you want, but I agree with you, Nett, we did very, very well under the president's leadership here.

Speaker 7 As I said a few minutes ago, this is not the way to run an operation, to run the railroad, if you will. The idea that every year or two, you have a debt ceiling and that creates this pressure.

Speaker 7 So we need to figure out if we can fix that.

Speaker 7 And we will be looking at that. You know, you mentioned the 14th Amendment.

Speaker 7 What other legal or constitutional avenues should we look at in addition to potentially the 14th Amendment? Are there legislative fixes? But

Speaker 7 whether it's a Democrat in the White House or a Republican in the White House, independent of what the composition is of the Senate or the House, we should get out of this.

Speaker 7 This is not a good way to run a country or to legislate.

Speaker 3 After the deal was struck, one of the in the White House, the president and the White House staff were talking about sort of what you got out of this deal.

Speaker 3 There was the, as you've mentioned very critically, protecting the president's priorities through certainly the balance of his term and into the future.

Speaker 3 But he also talked about running room that having this behind you meant the White House can be able to do more.

Speaker 3 What is sort of on the agenda next?

Speaker 3 How are you going to use that running room?

Speaker 7 It's a good question, Dan. And we're really excited to have that

Speaker 7 running room. If you will, we've been parallel processing.
As the president says, we can walk and chew gum at the same time.

Speaker 7 So it's a lot of continuation of what we've been doing, but we can now focus on it even even more.

Speaker 7 So, with these historic pieces of legislation, it creates this enormous opportunity to invest in America. New bridges, new factories, more prescription drug cost

Speaker 7 decreases, pricing decreases that benefit the American people. There's so much to do that is enabled by those historic pieces of legislation.

Speaker 7 Our job now is to implement, execute, get things done, and then show the American people how this is changing their lives lives day to day. Better jobs, less expensive health care.

Speaker 7 And, you know, at the same time, there are

Speaker 7 things like junk fees. You know, we talked to the president going back to the State of the Union, called for

Speaker 7 families to be able to sit together when they travel on an airplane without having to pay more money. That's happened.
We're going to continue to make people's lives better

Speaker 7 with issues they deal with every day, the cost of things, the ability to get from point A to to point B without sitting in a lot of traffic, having better transportation options in their cities and towns across the country.

Speaker 7 You know, this manufacturing renaissance is real. The amount of investment in manufacturing that's happening across this country is completely unprecedented.

Speaker 7 And that's enabled by the president's leadership and this historic legislation, but it's very much obviously a public-private partnership that's working. So we've got a lot to do and we're doing it.

Speaker 7 And we've got to just keep pushing on all fronts.

Speaker 3 You know, I'm sure the president will continue and want to look for things to get done legislatively. Obviously, that's probably a limited menu given

Speaker 3 certainly the position that Kevin McCarthy finds himself in right now after this deal. But one thing that actually has to get done from the administration's point of view is more funding for Ukraine.

Speaker 3 Kevin McCarthy came out the other day and said there would not be a supplemental. How are you guys going to approach making the case for additional funding to support Ukraine against Russia?

Speaker 7 Look, Ukraine is so important

Speaker 7 for the people in Ukraine, for the people in Europe, and for the world. I mean, this is about freedom and protecting freedom.

Speaker 7 And I think as we continue to support the Ukrainians and their tremendous courage

Speaker 7 and performance, that people will continue to see that appropriate funding from the U.S. and from our allies.

Speaker 7 I think it's really important that this is part of an effort that our allies are supporting, the same way we're supporting, is really important, again, for the people of Ukraine and for freedom around the world.

Speaker 7 So I think this is a top priority

Speaker 7 for the president. And I think Congress will continue to support it.

Speaker 3 There is support. You believe there's support in the Republican, we're among Senate Republicans for this.
Do you think you can pressure the House to go along?

Speaker 7 I think so. I mean, look, if you step back,

Speaker 7 you know, when the president was campaigning and talked about bipartisanship, people sort of scoffed like that doesn't exist anymore.

Speaker 7 But we've got, you know, and the agreement that we started talking about at the beginning, which is so important in protecting the president's priorities and Democrats' priorities and is so good for the American people, was a bipartisan agreement.

Speaker 7 Now, at the end of the day, Dan, I do want to put the data on the table, which is 75% of the House caucus supported the budget agreement. 90% of the Senate Democratic caucus supported the agreement.

Speaker 7 I think if we were talking four or five, six weeks ago or four or five, six months ago, you probably would have said, good luck with that one, right?

Speaker 3 In fact, I did say that, yes. Yes.

Speaker 7 But at the same time, you know, there were Republicans supporting

Speaker 7 in both the Senate and the House. And it was a bipartisan agreement, the same way the infrastructure, historic infrastructure agreement law was bipartisan.
So there are bipartisan opportunities.

Speaker 7 There's been bipartisan support for Ukraine and our efforts to support the people of Ukraine. And I believe that'll continue in both the Senate and the House.

Speaker 3 One of the elements of the budget deal involved ending the pause on student loan payments, but you are also dealing with, which I know the administration was planning to do eventually anyway, but you're also awaiting a Supreme Court decision on the student debt cancellation plan that the president put in place.

Speaker 3 How much planning are you guys doing to think around how to what would happen from an adverse ruling from the Supreme Court?

Speaker 7 Look, we believe the court's going to do the right thing. We believe believe it's really important that people have relief.
90% of the people who have relief

Speaker 7 have family incomes less than $75,000. We're talking about $10,000, $20,000 relief that's really important.

Speaker 7 And at the same time, I was with the president yesterday and we were talking about this very topic, Dan, the importance of student debt relief. And he brought up the

Speaker 7 loans that people got or the grants that people got for the PPP program

Speaker 7 and

Speaker 7 how that went to many people who are now voting or pushing against student debt. And you can't help but to contrast that

Speaker 7 and how important this is for working class Americans, middle-class Americans.

Speaker 7 The president has done historic work on student debt relief with the program that you're referring to that's in front of the Supreme Court, where again, we hope that the court does the right thing.

Speaker 7 You're right that that's likely to come in the next week or two or three. So we're watching very closely there.
At the same time, he's put in place income-based repayment programs.

Speaker 7 So you're only paying a certain percent of your income, an affordable amount of your income each month on student debt and no more. And that program's really important and is taken off.

Speaker 7 Also, relief, student debt relief for public service, people who participate as teachers or in the federal government or in state government. Really important.

Speaker 7 And the president is going to keep fighting for student debt relief. And we will do that in any outcome in the Supreme Court.

Speaker 7 But again, we're cautiously optimistic that the court will do the right thing.

Speaker 3 Last question for you.

Speaker 3 One of the issues that I imagine probably wasn't at the top of the president's list when he took over as president a couple of years ago, but has quickly risen in salience and concern among the public and others is the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence.

Speaker 3 How are you guys thinking about a policy process, a regulatory process to protect against whatever risks that even some of the people building this technology say are existential?

Speaker 7 Yeah. No, Dan, it's probably one of the top three issues at the White House and across agencies right now.
We had the CEOs of the leading companies in a couple of weeks ago.

Speaker 7 The president came to that meeting. The vice president sat through that meeting.
It's a tip-top priority.

Speaker 7 Corporations, the leading corporations need to do the right thing, and they're stepping forward with commitments that we're working on right now that will be announced relatively shortly.

Speaker 7 We're working across all agencies of the federal government to figure out what we can do from a regulatory perspective so that we can do appropriate smart regulation here.

Speaker 7 One of the things that's really challenging, you know, Dan, when you worked together a decade ago, the regulatory process can be relatively slow.

Speaker 7 And here we cannot afford to wait a year or two to figure out what makes sense, what smart regulation that balances

Speaker 7 the potential of AI to make our lives better, but at the same time, make sure we're managing the risk for it to do things that would not be good for us here in our country or across the world.

Speaker 7 So getting that balance right, being smart, but moving really fast because AI changes every day. So it's not the standard regulatory process of months or years.

Speaker 7 We've got to act in a much quicker timeframe. And we're geared up to do that.
And you'll see that the president will continue to lead on AI.

Speaker 7 We'll do all we can with our executive branch powers and also work with the Hill to advance smart legislation.

Speaker 3 Well, we'll keep our eyes on that. Jeff, thank you so much.
Good luck out there. You have the hardest job in all of politics.

Speaker 7 Well, it's great to see you. How can you look even better and even younger than you did a decade ago?

Speaker 3 I stopped coming to a meeting in that office at 7:30 every morning.

Speaker 7 Well, you're welcome back anytime. Thanks, Dan.

Speaker 10 Did you know 39% of teen drivers admit to texting while driving? Even scarier, those who text are more likely to speed and run red lights. Shockingly, 94% know it's dangerous, but do it anyway.

Speaker 10 As a parent, you can't always be in the car, but you can stay connected to their safety with Greenlight Infinity's driving reports.

Speaker 10 Monitor their driving habits, see if they're using their phone, speeding, and more. These reports provide real data for meaningful conversations about safety.

Speaker 10 Plus, with weekly updates, you can track their progress over time. Help keep your team safe.
Sign up for Greenlight Infinity at greenlight.com/slash podcast.

Speaker 11 With TikTok ads, our revenue went up $10 million year over year during back-to-school season. Penn Foster is online education.

Speaker 11 TikTok is great because the reach is incredible for finding a lot of different types of audiences on the platform. Creator content at scale allowed us to easily develop and distribute creator-led ads.

Speaker 11 Our return on ad spend for TikTok is 21% higher than the Nexbus channel.

Speaker 1 Start growing your business today. Head over to getstarted.tiktok.com slash TikTok ads.

Speaker 12 A BetterHelp ad.

Speaker 12 This November, BetterHelp is encouraging people to reach out, grab lunch with an old friend, call your parents, or even find support in therapy.

Speaker 12 BetterHelp makes it easy with its therapist match commitment and over 12 years of online therapy experience, matching members with qualified professionals.

Speaker 12 And just like that lunch with an old friend, once you do reach out, you'll wonder, why didn't I do this sooner? Start now at betterhelp.com for 10% off your first month.

Speaker 1 All right, before we go, this week, the legislative mastermind of his generation, Kevin McCarthy, rode the momentum from his big debt ceiling victory right off a cliff.

Speaker 1 The speaker held a vote to protect us from jackbooted feds busting down our doors and confiscating our precious gas stoves, which is something that absolutely no one in the federal government has proposed, though one agency did say they're considering some kind of regulation on new gas stoves because they are a growing source of childhood asthma and other harmful emissions.

Speaker 1 But of course, Republicans need to pretend that they're coming for your stove to keep their voters nice and angry, so screw the kids with asthma.

Speaker 1 Problem is, McCarthy's vote failed because 12 12 of the biggest MAGA Republicans decided to tank the bill as retaliation for the Speaker negotiating a bipartisan deal with Joe Biden to save us all from default.

Speaker 1 And apparently, they're going to keep tanking bills. Matt Gates tweeted, House leadership couldn't hold the line.
Now we hold the floor. Little, I'm the captain now for Matt Gates.

Speaker 1 And here's Gates on why they're so pissed.

Speaker 3 McCarthy has to decide who's his coalition partner going to be, Hakeem Jeffries or us? And if he chooses, you know, he can't, he can't. The way the cartel works is

Speaker 3 he'd rather have Hakeem Jeffries. We're going to sell that in spending.
But we're going to force him into a monogamous relationship with one or the other.

Speaker 3 What we're not going to do is hang out with him for five months and then watch him go jump in the back seat with Hakeem Jeffries, you know, and sell the nation out and underwrite $4 trillion in debt.

Speaker 1 That was colorful.

Speaker 1 That was a colorful explanation from Matt Gates to

Speaker 1 the newly subpoenaed Steve Bannon, also just got a subpoena in the January 6th investigation that he'll sure y'all ignore. What do you think of this whole mess?

Speaker 3 Enjoyable.

Speaker 1 Absolutely enjoyable.

Speaker 3 Look, I warned the folks at Punch Bowl not to erect the bronze statue of Kevin McCarthy within seven minutes of the deal happening, but they did. And now they're paying the price for it.

Speaker 1 I am still giving credit to Kevin McCarthy for doing the responsible thing here, which is negotiating the deal with Joe Biden to avert defaults and not listening to these fucking goobers who are now trying to destroy his speakership and just cause chaos in the House.

Speaker 1 Also, these people, I just want to talk about the gas stoves for a second.

Speaker 1 I know we've talked about the gas stoves when they first became a controversy, but these fucking people are like, this is the greatest threat and the government is coming for your gas stoves.

Speaker 1 And what are we going to do? So what do they do? First of all, they set up a like fake vote that doesn't really matter because it's just a messaging bill that will die in the Senate anyway.

Speaker 1 So, there was no, there was just no danger of this ever becoming law. Also, Joe Biden's the president, right? So, it's never going to become law.

Speaker 1 But, of course, it's so important to them that they protect us from the federal government stealing our gas stoves that they kill the vote because they're pissed at Kevin McCarthy.

Speaker 1 It's unbelievable.

Speaker 3 I mean, when you get to gas stove confiscation, you are scraping the bottom of the grievance barrel pretty bad.

Speaker 1 I mean, but you know, and it's also, we have not talked about this today, but the, because of the uh, Canadian wildfires, the New York, D.C.,

Speaker 1 a lot of the East Coast is like blanketed in like just dirty, polluted, very dangerous to your health air right now.

Speaker 1 And the Republicans have now, just like the gas stove thing, right, where a bunch of kids are getting asthma from gas stoves, they don't give a shit because they got to own the libs.

Speaker 1 They are now treating the, what you can see when you walk around New York, just the pictures are like you can barely see five feet in front of you.

Speaker 1 And they've all decided that this is the media and Democrats using the fires to hype up climate again.

Speaker 1 This is one of the clips on Fox News recently.

Speaker 13 But the reality is there's no health risk. We have this kind of air in India and China all the time.

Speaker 3 No public health emergency.

Speaker 13 This doesn't kill anybody. This doesn't make anybody cough.
This is is not a health event. Particulate matter is very fine soot.

Speaker 3 Oh, you don't want to be breathing that at all. All the carbon particles are innocuous.

Speaker 1 Lancet study said that pollution killed 2.9 million Indians in 2019 alone.

Speaker 1 And that's just not what that, like,

Speaker 1 this is their standard line on this. This is the Republican standard line on this.

Speaker 3 It's smoke.

Speaker 3 No one wants to breathe smoke.

Speaker 3 It's like, what are we doing?

Speaker 3 It's just, it's so funny.

Speaker 1 It does remind me of like how the conspiracies about the COVID vaccines have now spread to like all vaccines.

Speaker 1 Like now when you look at like charts of Republicans, the anti-vax sentiment is not just on COVID vaccines, but on all the rest of the vaccines is now rising. Same thing.

Speaker 1 It's like they've been against climate as the answer to anything.

Speaker 1 They've been against, they've been against the idea that climate change is real for so long that now they're even saying that like air pollution isn't real, that like smoke isn't a problem just things that people can see and feel for themselves when they walk out of their fucking houses if they weren't so goddamn stupid you would think that all these people were democratic sleeper cells trying to kill republican voters with their ideas

Speaker 3 It's just insane.

Speaker 3 Your base electorate is older Americans and what you tell them to do is don't get vaccinated and go breathe smoke.

Speaker 1 In fact, go breathe smoke to own the lips. That's it.
If you want to, you want to stick it to those lips, you go outside, you inhale some of that pollution, you did it. You own the lips.

Speaker 3 Congratulations.

Speaker 1 But anyway, great stuff in the house.

Speaker 1 I don't know how this is going to end because they said that they're going to block a bunch of shit until what? Until Kevin McCarthy goes back in time and undoes the debt ceiling deal.

Speaker 1 Like, I don't know what they're hoping for here.

Speaker 3 I think what there's a serious thing here, which is Kevin McCarthy has to win their support back. And to do that, he's going to have to agree to something pretty fucking crazy and bad.

Speaker 3 And so that's what we have to keep our eye on. What ransom does he pay? Because for all of his big talk about the debt limit, he's the hostage now.

Speaker 1 I'm the hostage now. Yeah, that is true.

Speaker 1 Though, you know, when the Senate's controlled by Democrats and the White House is controlled by Democrats, Fucking around with the debt ceiling was really the only leverage they had.

Speaker 1 I guess we could be headed for a government shutdown now, maybe. I don't know.

Speaker 3 It could be government shutdown because they still have to pass

Speaker 3 the budget deal, as important as it was, doesn't guarantee there's no shutdown, but it could also just be performative bullshit. Like who do they have to impeach, right? What do they have to subpoena?

Speaker 3 I mean, this is how we got.

Speaker 3 It was a similar thing that came on the heels of yet another fiscal deal that led John Boehner to appoint the Benghazi special committee years after every government agency and the Republican House committees had already proven all the conspiracy theories about that tragedy wrong.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well, everything.
The only only thing people need to know is that the Republican House doesn't want to protect your gas stoves.

Speaker 1 That's what you should know. Despite what they say, they care more about sticking it to Kevin McCarthy, who, as you said, is the hostage.
That's our show for today. Thank you, Jeff Zeitz, for joining.

Speaker 1 Everyone have a fantastic weekend. And Monday night is going to be the next Pod Save America.
We are live in New York City. Alex Wagner is a co-host.
We got Roy Wood Jr.

Speaker 1 We got Tish James and Hillary Clinton. Dan will be there.
John, Tommy, me, we're all going to be there. It's going to be so fun.

Speaker 1 So that show will come out Tuesday morning and it will be recorded Monday night. So we'll talk to you then.
Everyone, have a great weekend. Bye, everyone.

Speaker 1 Pods Dave America is a crooked media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez.
Our producers are Andy Gardner-Bernstein and Olivia Martinez. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick.

Speaker 1 Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer with audio support from Kyle Kyle Seglund and Charlotte Landis.

Speaker 1 Thanks to Hallie Kiefer, Madeline Herringer, Ari Schwartz, Andy Taft, and Justine Howe for production support.

Speaker 1 And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Mia Kelman, Ben Hefco, and David Toles.

Speaker 1 Subscribe to Pod Save America on YouTube to catch full episodes, exclusive content, and other community events. Find us at youtube.com slash at PodSave America.

Speaker 1 You know those conversations you play over and over in your head but find really difficult to actually have? That's exactly what the show Death, Sex, and Money is for.

Speaker 1 It's hosted by Anna Sale, who has surprisingly comfortable conversations with her guests about uncomfortable topics, like the devastating impact the far right could have on a marriage, or how Welsh coal miners led to the invention of Viagra.

Speaker 3 Hmm.

Speaker 1 Some of her guests are famous, some not, and very often they're from the community of listeners, all talking about what we're figuring out as we go along. Those coal miners sure hit the mother load.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 3 Wow, very good.

Speaker 10 join in and find death sex and money from w nyc studios wherever you listen to podcasts did you know that parents rank financial literacy as the number one most difficult life skill to teach meet greenlight the debit card and money app for families with green light you can set up chores automate allowance and keep an eye on your kids spending with real-time notifications kids learn to earn save and spend wisely and parents can rest easy knowing their kids are learning about money with guardrails in place sign Sign up for Greenlight today at greenlight.com/slash podcast.

Speaker 14 Being an American right now is a wild ride. The headlines come fast, but what do they actually mean for people's lives?

Speaker 14 I'm Alex Wagner, and on my new crooked media podcast, Runaway Country, I'm talking to people across the nation to uncover how political chaos is shaping their everyday realities.

Speaker 14 Join me and some of the smartest thinkers in politics to ask how we take back the reins of a runaway nation.

Speaker 14 Listen to Runaway Country with Alex Wagner every Thursday, wherever you get our podcasts or watch full episodes on YouTube.