Trump's Secret Epstein Letter Revealed

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Welcome to Pod Save America.

I'm Jon Favreau.

I'm Dan Pfeiffer.

Dan, welcome back.

God, what a week.

It's been so long.

Well, then I was gone the week before.

It's been like, this is the longest we haven't podcasted together in a long time.

Here's the thing.

We're always podcasting.

It's just sometimes the microphones are on.

That is very true.

Where did you go on vacation?

I was on a family trip trip with my parents and my brother, my sister-in-law, my niece in Hawaii.

There you go.

Oh, yeah.

It was very nice.

Well, it's good to have you back.

We have a packed show for today.

We're going to talk about Trump threatening to fire the Fed chair, the Republican Congress going after Big Bird and Daniel Tiger, new midterm polling from Trump's pollster that should scare the hell out of Republicans, the party's attempt to pick up seats in Texas by redrawing the maps, the return of Andrew Cuomo, and then Dan's interview with the chair of the House Progressive Caucus, Texas Congressman Greg Kassar.

But we got to start with the question that's weighing heavily on all Americans as they huddle around their kitchen tables each night.

Where are the Epstein files?

We had some of this from Shane Gillis, hosted the Espies this week, and this was at the very beginning of his opening monologue.

Actually, there was supposed to be an Epstein joke here, but

as it got deleted,

Must have probably deleted itself, right?

Probably never existed, actually.

Let's move on as a country and ignore that.

I would say the joke before that was quite funny as well, which was about Trump wanting to stage a UFC fight on the White House lawn and say, last time Trump staged a fight in D.C., Mike Pence almost died.

People weren't sure if they could laugh at that one as hard.

And then I feel like then they got into it and they laughed at the Epstein one pretty hard.

Anyway, this this is basically Donald Trump's answer too, though his is serious and not a joke.

Trump's latest answer is that the Epstein files he promised to release, the files from a child sex trafficking case that Trump's own Department of Justice was set to prosecute in 2019 before Epstein died in federal custody, those files are actually just a big hoax.

created by none other than Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden.

And if you are a supporter of Trump's, who still might have some questions about his latest theory on the Epstein files, you are, according to Trump, quote, stupid, a weakling, and someone whose support he no longer wants.

That's right, according to Trump's latest posts and comments, you are officially excommunicated from the MAGA movement if you still have any questions about his good old friend, his late friend, friend, Jeffrey Epstein, the man he's on his plane at least seven times, partied with him, once said that he knows he likes girls and he likes them young.

This is all Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, but now if you have any questions about the promise he made in the campaign to release the files, you are stupid and you are not welcome in MAGA anymore.

The White House also said on Thursday that the president does not want Pam Bondi to appoint a special prosecutor, even though some of Trump's closest supporters, like Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer, have called for one.

Republicans in Congress blocked votes all week on measures that would force the DOJ to release more information from the Epstein files, though Republican Thomas Massey, who Trump has threatened with the primary challenge, is teaming up with Rocana to force a vote via discharge petition, which is a long and complicated procedure that probably does have enough votes to succeed, which is also one reason why, as we're recording this and Trump's debating this package of cuts that we'll talk about later,

they can't move forward on it because Republicans may attach a measure that may be binding or not binding to vote on whether there should be a release of the Epstein files, probably because they know Massey has the votes on a discharge petition.

And all this is because Donald Trump just keeps making this worse every time he speaks or posts about Epstein.

Here's some of what he said in just the last 24 hours: I call it the Epstein hoax.

The sad part is it's people that are

really doing the Democrats' work.

They're stupid people.

Does that mean that you're effectively disowning any supporters who are out there?

I've lost a lot of faith in certain people.

Yeah, I'd lost

because they got duped by the Democrats.

In the case of Epstein, they've already looked at it and they are looking at it.

And I think all they have to do is put out anything credible.

But, you know, that was run by the Biden administration for four years.

I can imagine what they put into files, just like they did with the others.

I mean, the the Steel Dassier was a total fake.

So Dan, there's this MAGA influencer named Luke Rudowski who is so shocked by Trump's handling of the Epstein scandal that he posted this to his half a million Twitter followers.

What if Donald Trump is being held hostage by a foreign entity and he knows the only way to tell people about this is by being very obvious about it?

Is that believable or not believable?

He had a poll.

So far, not believable is winning, but only 55 to 44.

Wow.

What do you think the margin of error is in that poll?

What do you think?

I think

that's one theory about what's happening here.

The other theory

that seems more plausible to me is that Donald Trump either knows or believes strongly that he's mentioned in the Epstein files, and that's why he is acting like a complete lunatic right now.

It is hard to avoid that conclusion.

And I have been trying in my mind to think about other possibilities.

Also, there's Oliver Darcy broke this news.

There is apparently a Wall Street Journal story in the works with some more.

I don't know if it's evidence from the Epstein files or just elsewhere about Trump's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein that Trump is so mad about.

He is calling everyone at the Wall Street Journal, including the editor, to try to kill the story.

So

everyone's excited about that, except Donald Trump, I guess.

I mean,

when you run through the evidence, right, Trump's long relationship with Epstein, his

long history of sexual misconduct, his long history of complimenting in very gross ways young women, certainly young women below age,

the fact that he is quoted as talking about in the quote you just read, knowing that Jeffrey Epstein liked young girls, that they partied together.

And then you get to the point here where they say they're going to release it.

Pam Bondi says the client list is on her desk.

And then if right after that, they're like, oh, I'm sorry, no client list exists.

There's nothing here.

Turn around, go away.

And then the way Trump talks about it, he keeps saying we'll release anything credible.

And then he keeps making these accusations that anything that there could be some sort of malfeasance on the record.

So if perchance these ever come out through Congress, through subpoena, through leaks, that if Trump's name is in there, then obviously it's part of some Democratic hoax.

And Merritt Garland, who we've known to be very aggressively anti-Trump over the years, was in there just like writing Trump's name in.

Like,

the most plausible answer here is

that Trump's name is in there, and that's why he's acting this way.

I don't know what other reason he would be putting himself through this, acting this way, opposing the special counsel.

If there really was no there, there,

then this would be one way that his closest allies, people who like him the most, like Steve Benn and Laura Loomer, want him to do, but he says no to that.

Can I just point out a potential flaw in the president's logic, in this latest theory, that the Democrats created the Epstein files, or the Democrats under Biden, I guess, slipped in some files that are incriminating for Trump that aren't real?

So

to believe this,

you would have to believe that the Biden administration, Merrick Garland, like you said, starts throwing in some fake, incriminating news about Donald Trump and the Epstein files during the Biden years

chooses not to release them or leak it in any way because I guess they wanted to hold out the possibility that someday if Donald Trump becomes president again

his Department of Justice would stumble upon the fake files and then put out a statement that in no way claims they're fake

Yeah, it does that you have identified a flaw.

You identified a real flaw.

It is so fucking stupid.

This was Democrat.

And it was like, you know,

Obama and Hillary, like, this is like predating any of this stuff, right?

There were three consecutive presidential elections.

We did not use this completely made-up smoking gun that we had.

We were playing the long game.

You

can't be releasing damaging information about Donald Trump while he's running for president a third time.

You've got to wait until he's president and then

still do nothing.

You know, as you mentioned, I was on vacation last week when this was all happening.

And so I have a lot of pent up takes about this.

One of them I would just like to share here is that in the initial, when this started coming out and the MAGA folks were getting mad about it, one of the things you saw a lot of even credible people say is, obviously, there was something bad about Trump in the files while Joe Biden was president and Merrick Garland was attorney general, that would have come out.

Have any of you people met Merrick Garland?

Like,

there's nothing more believable than Merrick Garland was just sitting with a giant smoking gun about Donald Trump of the Epstein files in his top desk drawer for four years and would, and I've met maybe this is admirable, I guess, not violate the independence of the Justice Department in any way, shape, or form.

This idea that obviously Merrick Garland and Joe Biden would have put this out

has never met.

It does not remember how much they love norms, right?

So it's very, that is not, I do not find that to be a compelling answer, reason that there is nothing in these files.

Can I throw out one overly generous possibility here of what's really going on?

You go on the flagrant podcast once, and now you're doing Trump defense?

They would not have an over.

No, Joe, they would not.

They are leading the,

I love what they're doing here.

So I started thinking about this because

both the rumors of the Wall Street Journal story and I read a post from Ben Wittis, who's been on this podcast at Law Fair.

So Ben Wittis's post is like, hey, everyone, of course, DOJ shouldn't be just dumping a bunch of sensitive information from a case that wasn't tried into the public's hands.

And first of all, a lot of the files, a lot of this information is under seal.

by the courts.

And so you would have to get a judge to unseal it.

It's not Pam Bondi's decision.

It's not the Attorney General's decision to just throw this out there.

It would be against the law to release a lot of this information.

Other information, as the Trump people have said, would, you know, involve some of these victims, and you don't want to further hurt the victims by just throwing a bunch of information out there.

And then there is information about people who have not been charged with anything, people who may have given evidence or testimony against Jeffrey Epstein.

And now you're going to just publicly release their testimony.

Now, we might think, well, if it's about Donald Trump or whatever else, I'm like, yeah, of course, let's get it out there.

But as a practice, if you had a Department of Justice that was operating on the up and up, which we do not, but if you did, we would not want the Justice Department to just start, if you go give testimony to the Justice Department or you go talk to give evidence to someone, to just like put everything you said out there, right?

So there's a whole bunch of things.

Now, Ben suggests, which I think is a very good suggestion.

He's like, you can still get a lot of this information.

We have a body called Congress, which can certainly launch an entire investigation.

And the Justice Department is supposed to work with.

And, you know, obviously Democrats don't have subpoena power now, but if we took back the House, you know, then you could imagine a congressional investigation that gets to the bottom of a lot of this.

And then, so you have that, right?

Can I respond to that prep for a second?

Sure, sure, sure.

Yeah.

That is an explanation for why the Epstein file should not be released.

That is not Donald Trump's explanation for why the Epstein file should not be released.

But this is my second part of it, which is, so say this Wall Street Journal story is true and George Conway is tweeting out that he heard a rumor that it might be something about like a birthday card that Trump wrote to Epstein that was overly nice or something.

But like you can imagine that Donald Trump hates anything that's that causes any kind of reputational damage like this, especially if it's such a big deal that has captured the attention of the entire country.

And what if it's just a very sort of gross, like, you're the best, we've had the best times.

And it's not like incriminating, but it's just deeply embarrassing.

And you combine the deeply embarrassing information about Donald Trump that's still not incriminating with the Justice Department thinking, well, we have an excuse, which is we can't release a lot of this information anyway.

Now, again,

it's one possibility.

I don't even think I buy it.

But to me, the reason I bring it up is it is the most generous possibility I could imagine about this whole thing.

I can't imagine another one

that's more generous.

But that he's in there.

Yes,

I don't know how he's not in there.

If he wasn't in there at all and if he felt sure about it, why not just say some version, some Trumpian version of the first thing that I said that Benwood is supposed to, which is like, hey, it's against the law, hands are tied, it's only about victims, there's no other, that's it.

And just like keep repeating that.

Yeah, but he's, he's not doing that, which is the thing.

And we know Donald Trump is,

I have, I was here, some friends texted me today and they said, basically, like, why wouldn't he just release it?

The guy's been

charged.

You know, he's been, he's on the access Hollywood tape.

There's all these accusations out there.

He's a sort of a famous, he's a famous adulterer.

Like, why does he care about this?

I got the same question from some of my high school friends.

But we know he does care about these things because the reason he's a convicted felon is he paid off, he paid a large amount of hush money illegally to Stormy Daniels to try to cover up that affair becoming public.

And so this is actually

the sort of behavior that Trump engages in when he's worried about reputational damage.

And how do you think about the reputational damage with his base right now, with his, like, some of his strongest supporters in MAGA media, influencers, all that?

Because, you know, they've gone back and forth.

I think there was everyone is, a lot of them, most of them, I would say, were pretty upset at the beginning.

Some of them have, you know, gotten back on board with Trump.

Some of them are still trying to figure it out.

You got this from

neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, who dined with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago famously, along with Kanye West right before he launched his third campaign.

He said, fuck you, you suck.

You're fat, you're a joke, you're stupid, you're not funny.

We're going to look back at MAGA movement as the biggest scam in history.

The liberals were right.

Ouch.

Tough.

That's a tough one.

How do you think about this?

Do you think this is long-term damage from these folks, from the MAGA elite, let's call them?

Yeah, I do.

I do think there is a breaking of the core trust here.

Because what happens, let's say they put something out at some point, right?

Either Congress forces them or Trump gives in.

These people aren't going to believe them because they feel that Trump has lied to them and lied to them repeatedly.

And what I think is just really interesting about this is these, not Nick Fuentes per se, but Megan Kelly, Steve Bannon, Laura Loomer, Alex Jones, these are media people.

These people have an audience.

Prior to the Epstein scandal, Fuhrer, whatever you want to call this,

if you were anti-Trump in the right-wing media, there was no place for you.

You faced a terrible backlash.

Places like the Weekly Standard shut down because they were, there was no, there was no business in media in being, in right-wing media and being anti-Trump.

If these

media folks were getting blowback from their audience, they would stop.

But instead, it seems like based on their behavior and some metrics, like they're actually getting a boosted engagement.

And that says something about where at least the hardcore mega base is.

And I think even more importantly over the long term, is it flips the incentive structure in right-wing media, right?

Where now you have it, the incentive was to be as pro-Trump as possible.

That's where the audience was.

That's where the engagement was.

That's where the money was.

There's basically a vibe lane to be to Trump's right, to be an anti-Trump MAGA person.

And that really will change the discourse because Trump has depended on essentially unanimity from his media allies for the last decade.

And if he doesn't have that,

that does have real political ramifications beyond just this scandal.

I would say to either be on Trump's right or to just be part of a crowd that is disappointed with Trump for whatever reason, right?

And this is like not uncommon in politics in general in both parties, right?

You support your candidate, you love your candidate, you get your candidate into office, your candidate now has power, and then your candidate disappoints you in.

some number of ways.

And the more disappointments and the more core the disappointments are to why you supported them in the first place, the angrier you're going to be.

And now he is facing that both with the like super extreme right, some of the Trump curious manosphere types,

some of the podcasts.

Like the folks, the flagrant podcast, Theo.

The Flagrant Prayer, Theo,

Joe Rogan, right?

Like those, those types.

I think it could leave a mark.

I could also see, what do you think Republicans in Congress and Republican politicians are thinking right now?

Because I could also see with them

thinking, you know, we just got to wait for this.

This is just going to blow over at some point because because it is impossible in this information environment to hold people's attention on one thing for too long.

And so, you know, if we make some noise about possible transparency and we're for transparency, and maybe we'll vote on some non-binding resolution, or maybe it'll be binding, but then the DOJ will tell us to go fuck ourselves.

And at some point, people are going to turn to something else and this will blow over.

And we just got to kind of say the right thing now.

And I think we can just hold on tight.

Yeah, I think that's where the congressional Republicans will be is they want to try to chart a lane between

the audience that very much wants transparency and angering Trump too much.

So if they could do some sort of non-binding resolution, what they don't probably don't want is a bunch of votes in a row every time, every time they want to do something for the next 18 months that says that they're against transparency here.

They're against releasing the files because that will have some consequences for them.

Because they need that base to turn out, right?

That's the difference between holding the House and losing the House.

So they're going to try, I think they're going to try to find some sort of probably unsatisfactory middle ground there.

And what about White House options here?

Like I, you know, there was, as I mentioned, Laura Loomer, Steve Bannon, and others were urging Pambandi to announce a special counsel or Trump to tell Pambandi to appoint a special counsel.

Caroline Levitt at the White House briefing today said the president does not want that special counsel.

And I'm wondering what other options they have at the White House to let the air out of this balloon a little bit, or maybe they don't care.

Maybe they just don't, maybe they don't want to even try.

It seems like their strategy is to try to just muscle through to the next crisis.

And Trump's been trying to create them, right?

He's like trying to prosecute his

Adam Schiff.

He's making announcements about the sweeteners use in Coca-Cola.

He's trying to find some way to change the subject.

He has thus far failed to do that.

If they, like, special counsel is an option.

um if they wanted to go that route like even you know i don't know that anyone should ever want a special counsel right there was a very famous meeting in the Clinton administration in the middle of the Whitewater crisis where the, I think it was Bernie Nussbaum's White House Counsel was in the room, the political advisors, like George Stephanopoulos, and they had a debate.

And the political advisors wanted the Clintons to call for an independent counsel.

Back when we had an independent counsel of all, and the lawyers were like, that's insane.

The Clintons agreed with the political people.

They called for an independent counsel.

That independent counsel was Ken Star.

And so it's like the next seven years of their lives were miserable.

It's like maybe you don't want that.

You could say, you could announce we're going to, one way to do this, I don't know that I want to give communications advice to them, but one thing you could do is announce that you're going to do a review and you're going to release everything you can release in 90 days.

Right.

Like that, that's a classic Trump tactic to just kick it down the road.

You could just pretend like Aaron Sorkin's in charge and do, say, we're going to do a two-hour primetime press conference about it.

You could sit and do an interview with.

Certainly not with Trump.

You'd need a person to do that interview.

Trying to think of who could do it.

Who could do it?

Like maybe you send Mark Orubio out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Fellow Floridian, Mark Orubio.

Yeah, no, I think that

they probably just don't care.

I kind of thought they would, I was a little worried that they would say, okay, special counsel, Ed Martin, or, in fact, do you know who Lauren Boebert suggested for special counsel to look into this child sex trafficking case?

I do know the SS, but it's better for the podcast if I pretend like I don't.

Go for it.

Go for it.

It's Matt Gates, right?

It's Matt Gates.

We are almost.

Well, look, if you almost

attorney general who may know a thing or two about a Florida-based sex trafficking ring, yeah, sure, allegedly.

Allegedly.

Yeah, that would be a real troll.

That would be real.

You're getting a subject matter expert there, I guess.

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All right, so no special counsel, but the Justice Department did fire Maureen Comey on Wednesday, an SDNY prosecutor who went after Epstein and Galeene Maxwell.

And yes, if you're wondering, she is related to that Comey.

Maureen happens to be James Comey's daughter.

What do you make of this?

Probably doesn't fix any of Trump's Epstein problems, huh?

No, it seems to make them much, much worse, right?

Like, if you had a lot of, like, you have a lot of questions about what's going on here, then all of a sudden, out of the blue, Trump fires the person who prosecuted Epstein, Maxwell, and Diddy.

The racist questions about Diddy.

What do we know about the connections there?

Like,

I am assuming that this is an idea that has been working its way through the system.

Like, there's someone in charge of like petty revenge, and they finally got around to firing her.

They just happened to do it right at the worst possible moment.

Right person for the wrong thing kind of thing.

Yeah, it's just don't really just a truly insane thing to do right now.

The theory that the New York Times floated in its New York Times way, which is not directly, but just sort of through their kind of vague language, is

she was mentioned in a politico story last week about not wanting to release some of the information and evidence in the Epstein case for the reasons I mentioned earlier because victims, sensitive, under seal, all that.

And I think the New York Times said

she may be getting set up to be a scapegoat by the Trump administration because then they could say, oh, see, she was the one withholding all this evidence.

But I was like, the only problem there is now that they've got rid of her,

who's holding up the evidence now?

Did you just imagine if Trump went to the right-wing MACAPEP and was like, look, I'm trying to do it, but Jim Comey's daughter daughter is stopping me.

Like, and now she's finally out, but she took it with her.

She took the files with her.

My assumption here in Last New York Times Way is that they've been wanting to fire her a long time, but they thought it was going to be a bad idea to fire her in the middle of the Diddy trial.

And so they just waited till that was over and then fired her, which also happened to be in the middle of the Epstein scandal.

You might say that they 86ed her.

Oh, there you go.

The traditional use of that, by the way.

Okay, thank you.

So we're starting to get polling on this.

Quinnipiac poll taken over the weekend has 63% of voters disapproving of Trump's handling of the Epstein situation.

Only 17% approve.

When you narrow that to Republicans, 40% approve, but a full 36% disapprove.

A Reuters poll conducted Tuesday and Wednesday had similar numbers, and it has 69% of voters nice saying they think government is hiding key details about Epstein.

So that's people's views on it.

Not great.

What's your guess on the salience of this issue for people, and particularly Republicans?

I'm just going to guess that if you ask people what they care about most,

cost of living, the economy, jobs, immigration, Epstein's going to fall well below all of those things.

But I think that's sort of an overly pedantic way of looking at this issue.

What this issue is about is not about the Epstein files per se.

It's about, it goes to the crux of what is decided the last several elections, which is a question with like we live in a perpetual change election and it is who people are dissatisfied and angry about the political system that they view to be corrupt and broken and helping protect rich and elites and the politically connected.

And this entire thing is about.

Trump going from someone who was coming to Washington to break up that corrupt political system to being someone who is now wielding power to protect the very elites,

himself included.

And so it goes to something much bigger that I think doesn't show up in polls.

What we really should be tracking on this is how people feel about Trump as a change agent or an outsider or part of the status quo.

We haven't seen that polling yet.

Or I think CNN did ask different qualities.

And this is sort of not the perfect substitute for that, but cares about people like you.

And he's quite low on that.

And he's been low on that for a while.

That's always been.

He lost that to Harrison election.

One notable polling out there is there's a Data Pro progress poll that shows that 55% of Republicans who have heard a lot about the Ef scene files disapprove of how Trump has handled them.

He has a net approval rating among people who have heard some of them and

a decent approval rating of people who've heard none about them, which is weird to have an opinion on that.

But so there is this argument here that the more attention that this gets, the more people hear about what Trump is doing, the very suspicious circumstances in which he changed his position on releasing the files will hurt him more with Republicans.

One more question before we move on this topic.

Maybe for good, probably not.

No, we are talking about this next week.

I'm telling you that right now.

Democrats, they have jumped all over the issue, which, you know, we urged them to do.

And

I was on vacation, but that's right.

I did.

I did.

Me and Tommy did.

It's our special Epstein correspondent, Tommy Vitor.

So,

what do you think about?

Does he broadcast from Epstein Island?

Essentially, yeah, I haven't seen him.

Anything Democrats have to be careful about?

And I ask this only because

you can almost feel Republicans, some of the MAGA people starting to get negatively polarized and that if the Democrats are having too much fun on this, and then I'm going to be, now I'm going to flip and I'll be on Trump's side.

I haven't seen that happen completely yet, but there's a...

There's a balance there.

What do you think about that?

Yeah, I think the Democrats should talk about this.

We want to keep the story in the news.

And I use the news in the most, in the broadest sense of the news, not just in the New York Times, but the social media conversation.

But we shouldn't put too much spin on the ball.

We should want transparency.

We just want answers.

We want the exact same thing Donald Trump said he wanted like six minutes ago.

We want to know what's in the files.

They should be released and leave it at that.

Because there is this risk of polarizing the issue, right?

And where people just revert to their partisan priors if we overdo it.

And there's no real advantage in overdoing it because the audience that we are trying to reach here

is primarily Republicans, right?

And in this case, actually more hardcore partisan Republicans.

And so the best messengers to do that is not Democrats, right?

It is, so I like one thing I wrote a message back to us about this earlier this week where one of the things I encourage Democrats to do is instead of posting your own social media videos about yourself talking about it, just share the conservative.

Yeah, MAGA media fights.

Yeah, the Joe Rogan, Andrew Schultz, all these people, Theo Vaughan,

these people who had real influence with some segment of voters, get that content out there, right?

That's what we should be sharing.

That's more valuable than like a

witty refrain, a tough tweet, you know, whatever else it is.

It's just like, like we should just recognize every messaging strategy begins with understanding your audience.

And then the second question you always ask yourself is, who's the best messenger for that audience?

Very often in this particular situation, the best messenger for that audience is not going to be Democrats themselves.

It doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about it, but how we talk about it matters.

I also think you need to be,

you should be honest about how you've always felt about this case, right?

Like it is, it is not really believable for someone who has never talked about releasing the Epstein files for the last four years to suddenly be like, oh, it's the most important issue to release the Epstein files.

What I do think is that Trump's handling of this case is so like it has even surprised me how insulting it is to his own supporters' intelligence.

And I think he has insulted their intelligence plenty of times over the last decade.

But this is like a new level where

it is obvious that he is lying when he says that this is created by Obama and Hillary Clinton and Biden and it's a hoax and all that shit.

Like it is such an obvious lie that even the even the biggest Trump supporter is not going to believe, at least privately, if not publicly.

And I think getting people to really sit with this idea that this guy that you really believed in and voted for many times is lying to you and thinks you're stupid enough to just kind of believe the lie or really doesn't care if his lie is so bad that you don't believe it, like he just doesn't give a shit about you.

And, you know, as we go on in the next however many years we fucking have to deal with him, it's something to think about the next time he makes a promise, the next time he tells you something, the next time he doesn't fulfill one of the things he promised you'd do in the campaign, you know, you you got to wonder, is he lying again like he was lying in the Epstein files?

So let's talk about more traditional kitchen table issues.

We learned this week from the Labor Department that inflation is on the rise again.

Prices are on the rise again.

Biggest jump since January.

The culprit is Trump's tariffs, which are starting to hit people.

And a hopeful sign that he's willing to change course when presented with new information, Trump did pledge to back off his trade war.

No, just kidding, he didn't do that at all.

He threatened to fire the Fed chair, the Fed chair he appointed because Jerome Powell won't cut interest rates, and he won't cut interest rates on account of Trump's trade war.

On Tuesday night, Trump showed Republicans in Congress a draft termination letter for Powell and asked them whether he should send it.

Firing Powell could do significant economic damage and is illegal.

unless there's actual cause to fire him.

Sure enough, Trump told reporters that, quote, he probably wouldn't do it unless Powell, quote, has to leave for fraud, which is a reference to a multi-billion dollar renovation of the Fed's D.C.

headquarters, which Trump and a lot of his aides and allies are calling fraudulent, as a way to have an excuse to fire Powell.

How big of a deal do you think this is?

I mean, it is potentially a massive deal.

Like, if he, if Trump were to fire Powell, it would fundamentally change how the U.S.

economy is viewed around the world, right?

Like one of our strengths is that the U.S.

dollar is the global reserve currency.

It's the currency that is thought to be so safe and so stable that it's what most federal reserves and other countries keep to ensure stability in their economies.

And so if all of a sudden U.S.

monetary policy is believed to be in the hands of someone who is operating at the whims of an erratic want to be authoritarian, that would have massive impact on the global economy.

It is a deeply dangerous situation.

And just and even just the, like, if you watch the Dow Jones average this week on the date that story came out that he had written that letter, it's like going up, going up, drops right down.

Trump makes his remarks that he's not going to do it.

It goes back again.

Like, this is going to have massive, there'll be massive market volatility around this.

I heard our

old friend and colleague, Jason Furman, talking about this.

Did you listen to Jason Furman on Derek's podcast?

I sure did.

I went for a walk this morning.

That's exactly what I listened to.

And,

well, Jason's point, it helped me understand it too.

He was like,

it's the reason that the Fed is independent, the reason it's important that the Fed is independent and insulated from political pressure is that if you're not insulated from political pressure, you are likely to want to make decisions that help in the short term, or you're tempted to make decisions that help in the short term.

So, like, maybe I'll cut interest rates a little bit now because that'll help juice the economy, you know.

And

if you're completely insulated from political pressure, you can make decisions that might have some issues in the short term, but long term are going to be the best for the economy.

So people know, the rest of the world knows that you are making decisions based on what you believe is best for the American economy, which a lot of the rest of the world depends on.

And if we're just now thrown in fed chairs to cater to the whims, the short-term whims of Donald Trump, who's the most short-term thinker we've ever had as president,

then we're really fucked.

Now, apparently, there's a story in Politico that the lawyers in the White House may have convinced Donald Trump not to do this, A, because he'll lose in court, B, because all the economic damage it can do.

And they just think that this whole like, let's fire Powell for cause and the cause is these renovations that have gone over budget.

And we don't think he was honest to Congress about how they went over budget is just sort of bullshit.

One administration official from the Trump White House said to Politico, whether or not it's illegal, I don't know, but is it a good thing to point out to damage this guy's image?

Yeah.

That was honestly.

That really sums it up, doesn't it?

Yeah, I mean, I think the Wall Street Journal had a very big story on this, and they came sort of the same conclusion that there is no there there on this idea that you could use these renovations to get to cause, right?

Because the cause here that you can be fired for is essentially malfeasance or failure to fulfill your duties.

And the courts have been pretty clear that refusing to cut interest rates at the president's command is not, is neither malfeasance nor failure to fulfill your duty.

And that what Trump is really trying to do here is put so much pressure, political pressure on Powell that he will either resign on his own or cut interest rates earlier to appease Trump.

So according to the Times, the person who drafted the termination letter was Bill Pult.

Pulte, who knows, the Trump lackey who is now in charge of the federal housing finance agency.

Pulte has been attacking Powell on Twitter for not lowering rates, which is what you do as the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

He's also been driving the effort to exploit the renovation thing.

And get this, he's also the person pushing to investigate Tish James and now Adam Schiff for mortgage fraud.

So it seems to me like using one of your top housing appointees to go after your political enemies for phony fraud charges and renovation bullshit is the bigger scandal than maybe splurging on a new Renault.

Yes.

It's not in the job description for the head of the FHA to be just

an attack dog on Twitter or elsewhere.

It's very strange and actually probably makes you raise questions about what's actually happening at FHA if this is how this guy's spending all of his time.

Yeah, someone, you know, in Project 2025 planning clearly looked at housing and was like, oh, this is one way we can go after people.

Mortgage fraud, that's pretty, we can play pretty fast and loose with mortgage fraud.

Pulte, just right before we started recording, just tweeted, I am told by very reliable congressional sources that there may be a criminal referral coming from one or more Congress members to the DOJ for Jay Powell's alleged perjury about the $2.5 billion building.

So now

they're just going to do a criminal referral.

Cool.

Really?

Just like this.

It's very normal country we live in.

Unfucking believable.

But that, like, it, I mean, this is what they want, right?

Oh, did Adam Schiff do anything?

No.

He didn't do anything wrong.

But, like, now people are like, well, Trump says Adam Schiff's a criminal, and Adam Schiff says he didn't do anything.

And I don't know.

And then the administration official that told Politico, well, we're just trying to damage their reputation.

We don't know if it's legal.

You know, that's how they win.

Another Trump lackey on his way to a lifetime appointment is Emil Bove, Trump's former personal lawyer, turned top Justice Department official who told DOJ lawyers they may have to say, fuck you to the courts, brokered the deal to drop the prosecution of Eric Adams in exchange for his complete loyalty to Trump, and oversaw the mass firings of DOJ lawyers who worked on January 6th prosecutions.

On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced Bove's nomination to the full Senate on a party-line vote after Chairman Truck Grassley refused to let Democrats debate the whistleblower report on Bove, which led the Democrats to storm out of the hearing.

What do you think?

Is the fuck you to the courts guy going to get a lifetime seat on the courts?

I mean, this is the Republican Senate that confirmed Tulsi Gabbard to be the head of the DNI and RFK Jr.

to be the head of HHS and a weekend Fox anchor to be head of the Pentagon.

So yeah, it seems like they're probably going to do what Trump wants here again, which is just the amount of disregard you have, must have for your own duties and your own oath of the Constitution to put this guy on the court of all people.

Like there's, because it's not like it's, if it's not him, it's going to be Zoron Mondani.

Like there's just be another right-wing person that Trump would put on there.

And so just to have, like, just, they just don't take their jobs seriously at all.

They have no sense of separation of powers, of independence, of advice and consent.

It's just whatever Trump wants and they do no matter how fucking ridiculous it is.

The person I can't figure out is Tom Fucking Tillis, who is not running again now, talked a lot about how free he is to say what he wants and talked about how, you know, if he, the Pete Hegseth thing, he now regrets that vote and he voted for RFK Jr.

because Bill Cassidy told him to just give him a chance and it would probably be fine.

And then also said, and then voted against Ed Martin, crazy Ed Martin, and said then, well, I'm not voting for any nominees that think that January 6th was okay.

Well, Emil Bove

fired all the January 6th prosecutors and did all the pardons.

And Tillis is somehow just voting for him, voting for him out of committee.

The guy who's told the DOJ, Trump officials, like, hey, we may have to say fuck you to the courts, who encouraged lying to a judge over the deportations.

Like, what is Tom Tillis doing?

What do you have to lose at this point?

His next job.

Unfucking believable, man.

There's just like these heights.

We've seen this before.

There's two dynamics that happen with these people.

We saw it with Jeff Flake.

We've seen it with some other people leaving is

one, they're starting to wonder what they're going to do next.

right which usually involves working at some sort of republican lobbying firm or law firm or trade association and so you have to find find some way to balance your previous independence with doing the party's bidding.

And there's this other like terror, I mean, this is just a stupid way to run a government, but there is this like high school dynamic of Tom Tales has to go have lunch with all these people every week and doesn't want to be the asshole every single time.

And so he will put a different asshole on the court just to, so he has someone to sit next to at the lunch table.

So, yeah, so now the guy who

who put Eric Adams in in his pocket, it's the most corrupt fucking deal ever, is now on a appeals court, gonna go into an appeals court and possibly the Supreme Court if Alito or Thomas retire in the next couple of years.

That's who we could get on the fucking Supreme Court.

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So the Republican Congress is really crushing it this week.

They're about to pass a bill that would claw back about about $9 billion that Congress already appropriated.

Much of it would have gone to help sick, starving people, mostly children, in poor, war-torn countries all over the world.

The cuts will also defund NPR and PBS because local radio and Sesame Street and Daniel Tiger are all too woke for Republicans.

But none of these cuts will come close to making a dent in the $4 trillion that Trump and Republicans just added to the deficit because of an economic plan that gives huge tax cuts to the rich while gutting Obamacare and Medicaid, a vote vote that at least one Republican senator is already regretting.

Missouri Senator Josh Hawley has introduced legislation that would undo some of the Medicaid cuts he just voted for two weeks ago.

Meanwhile, millions of Americans who buy their own health insurance are about to pay a lot more because of what Trump's bill does to the Affordable Care Act, and those price increases are going to hit this winter.

The notices could come as early as this fall.

One of Trump's favorite pollsters, Tony Fabrizio, has been circulating a memo that finds generic Republican candidates trailing generic Democratic House candidates by an average of three points in the country's most competitive House districts.

But Fabrizio says that if Republicans in Congress undo their Obamacare cuts and extend these premium tax credits in the Affordable Care Act, the polling shows they would actually lead the Democrats in these districts.

If they don't extend them and Democrats run on that, polling shows that the Republicans would lose by double digits in these districts.

What do you think the chances are that Republicans will try to run on saving Obamacare?

Is that something we're going to see?

I would love to know who paid Tony Fabrizio for this poll because I just do not.

That coalition of people who are trying to extend the tax credits.

Yeah, there's a couple of people.

There's a combination of like left and right or not.

I assume the insurance companies are involved in here somewhere.

Yeah, I think like insurance companies like it.

I think patient advocates like it, right?

Doctors probably like it.

But just this idea that Trump's poll surf is just out there pushing for the extension of

Obamacare tax credits on his own seems not particularly credible to me.

Having said that, I have seen Democratic polling on this, which shows that it's not, it doesn't ask the exact same questions, but makes it very clear that this is a very powerful issue and that Republicans will pay a price because these premiums will go up next year.

This is not like the Medicaid cuts and everything else that they have kicked past.

the midterms.

And so you will, and it's 24 million people, I think, last I checked.

And so there's a lot of people in all the country who are going to do it.

And Democrats, if we do this right, both in how we handle the one big, beautiful bill and or one big ugly bill or whatever we want to, what are we calling it these days?

And I'm calling it Trump's economic plan because I'm not going to be able to do it.

Trump's economic plan.

Okay, we can self-beautiful bill or big beautiful betrayal or whatever the fuck the Democrats are saying.

Yeah, there's, yeah, it's so hard to say.

But the goal here is to make Republicans own healthcare in America, right?

So that every single decision, whether it's a hospital closing, changing in Medicaid reimbursement rates,

premiums, any premium premium increase anywhere, it has to do with how Republicans have handled this.

And so Democrats should absolutely run on it.

And I don't think, I don't see Republicans coming to save the day here, but we should make them pay for it for sure.

Yeah, I just saw there was a headline in the Detroit Free Press that one insurance, big insurance company in Michigan already announced double-digit premium increases for next year.

And maybe not related directly to what just passed, but double-digit premium increases in addition to losing a credit that was helping people pay for those premiums, is going to be an even higher price for people to pay.

And every single time there's a headline like that, Democrats should fucking scream about it to voters.

And there are a bunch of people who are on Medicaid today who at some point will not be on Medicaid and will have to buy insurance on the exchanges if they're lucky enough to have insurance at all.

And they will pay more because of what the Republicans have done.

Speaking of Medicaid, what do you think about famed Medicaid moderate Josh Hawley's legislation trying to undo the cuts that he just voted for?

Just get the fuck out of here.

I mean, just what are we doing?

Like, you could have, if you don't like the cuts, you know what you could have done?

Vote against the bill.

You could have stopped it.

Unbelievable.

I do think that some of the comments and moves like this from Holly and others are really going to come back to bite them in the midterms.

I mean, to your earlier point about the Epstein stuff, you don't even have to have a bunch of Democrats yelling about healthcare.

You can just have Republicans like Tom Tillis or Josh Hawley

or Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski talking about how this is going to hurt people.

And then you pair that with actual people who are feeling like they're paying a lot more money or lost their health insurance and talking about it.

And it's pretty compelling, I think.

There's a great clip of Hawley talking about how bad these cuts are, like six minutes before he ends up saying he's going to vote for him.

But like, that's something that if he were running a congressional race in Missouri or frankly anywhere else, you could use that.

As long as you just label it Republican Senator, right?

You don't have to believe me.

Here's what Republican Senator Josh Hawley said.

Here's what Republican Senator Tom Taylor said.

Here's what Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said.

On and on.

Any thoughts on the $9 billion in cuts to life-saving aid for poor kids in Daniel Tiger's neighborhood?

I will just say that if

this cut to PBS means that PBS Kids is going to stop making new episodes of Wildcrats, my kids will storm the Capitol like it's January 6th.

Charlie loves Wildcrats.

Wildcrats is, I mean, Wildcrats is a great show.

It has turned my kids, particularly my Jack, my four-year-old son, knows so much about such insane facts about animals.

He will walk.

Yeah,

Charlie will say to him, I'm like, How did you know that?

He's like, Wow,

I was like, Do you have a Wildcats Tony?

He's got the Wildcrats on television.

I always say, Did you learn that in school?

No, I learned that on that on Wildcrats.

Like, he just kept going around telling everyone that the Gila monster lives in the Sonoran desert wherever he goes.

But, like, in a more serious point is

to pass these cuts to life-saving aid for poor kids and to to

public broadcasting a few weeks after you gave a trillion dollars in tax cuts to the top 1% in this country is so gross that it's hard to take.

And as it was happening, as the Senate was debating this, Lisa Murakowski said that there was a tsunami warning in Alaska as the vote was happening.

And that in the rural parts of Alaska, the only way people got to hear about the tsunami warning was on the public airwaves, right?

Local public radio.

And with these cuts in big cities, they're probably going to be able to make up the difference with fundraising and tote bags and all the other things that PBS and NPR do, but it's going to be

rural parts of the country are going to lose their radio stations, lose their local TV because of what Republicans did.

And to what point?

It is a drop in the bucket compared to all the money they just sent out that order rich people.

Yeah, the Republican line now is everyone's got cell phones.

Everyone's got mobile phones.

They don't need, no one gets their alerts, their weather alerts from a public radio.

And then someone was like, only 12% of people do.

And I'm like, well, okay, that's 12% of people who aren't going to get fucking emergency alerts.

What are you talking about?

Just use something else.

Also, I realize foreign aid does not pull well.

I get it.

Like, there's a story in the Atlantic this week that they're incinerating, incinerating about a million dollars worth of food that we already bought, taxpayers already spent the the money on, and was supposed to go again to like starving children in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, and in some war-torn countries, in some really tough places.

And we already bought it.

It was in a warehouse in Dubai.

And now, because Marco, because first Elon fucking Musk and now Marco Rubio refused to do anything about it, now it's expired, could have fed a million and a half kids, million and a half kids, and now it's just incinerated, just wasted food, wasted food.

And now we're cutting,

Tim Miller pointed this out.

So they're going to cut $100 million from UNICEF.

UNICEF like helps kids in life or death situations.

And because we couldn't spend $100 million on that

in the bill, in the economic plan, tucked in the economic plan that just passed, $300 million for security at Mar-a-Lago and all of Trump's other homes.

$300 million for security for Trump, because I guess he can't pay for that.

But $100 million we couldn't do just for UNICEF to help starving kids.

Kind of says everything.

That's where we're at right now, incinerating food and can't even help starving kids.

Fucking ridiculous.

One other way Republicans are trying to improve their midterm chances is by redrawing House districts so they can pick their voters.

Their first target is Texas, where Trump and Governor Greg Abbott are pressuring the Republican state legislature to hold a special session on redistricting years ahead of schedule in order to, in Trump's words, pick up five seats, pick up five House seats.

He's also suggested that other states could follow.

But in a pleasant surprise, Democrats are fighting fire with fire.

Tommy and I sat down with Gavin Newsom this week, who broke news right here in this studio about the options he's considering.

Let's listen.

We can do a special session.

I can call for one today if I chose to.

We can then put something on the ballot.

And I could call a special election.

We can change the Constitution with the consent of the voters.

And I think we would win that.

Or you can look at other avenues, which we are exploring, which are pathways with the legislature, to do urgency clauses with two-thirds of the legislature in both of our houses, to move forward with legislative redistricting in between the constitutional construct, which is every census, the Independent Redistricting Commission does new map, but it's silent about what happens in between.

So it's a novel legal question and it's being explored.

So not every Democrat is on board.

California Assemblymember Alex Lee, head of the state's Progressive caucus, said that, quote, trying to save democracy by destroying democracy is dangerous and foolish.

Another anonymous Democratic consultant told Politico that the optics would be, quote, horrendous and indefensible.

That said, most other Democrats in California and in Washington, D.C.

are supportive.

What do you think?

Is this a close call?

I don't think it's a close call.

I think I wish we lived in a world where we could...

where the Supreme Court thought would rule against partisan gerrymandering as an assault on democracy.

They have chosen not to do that.

I wish we lived in a world where we could pass a law banning partisan gerrymandering, as Democrats tried to do in the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, but we don't.

And so the only way that we can stop partisan gerrymandering is through mutually assured destruction.

Right?

Oh, Texas, you want to do it?

California will do it.

Florida, you want to do it?

New York will want to do it.

And that is what we have to do.

Because if the idea is Republicans do whatever they want and we will wave the white flag, we were never going to solve these problems because we will never have the majorities necessary to actually pass a law to ban nonpartisan redistricting.

If Republicans think that they can come out on the bad end of partisan redistricting nationally, then we can maybe get to the table at some point for them to actually get a deal, to actually pass legislation.

If they think they can always win,

if the dice comes up with the right roll on

at the end of every decade with the census, then they're going to keep doing this.

And so we have to fight fire with fire.

I don't think it's a close call at all.

Yeah, nonpartisan, independent redistricting for everyone or, or we don't disarm unilaterally.

Like, I just, it's very easy because you need, I mean, this is about national house races.

This is about national control of the house.

So it's not a state-by-state thing, really, even though that's who is drawing the districts, right?

And so, I don't know, like, I just, I,

yeah, we can be like, oh, you know what's anti-democracy?

Anti-democracy is like the Republicans winning the House back or winning the House again, and we have no check on Donald Trump for all four years while he's in office.

Like that, that to me is more anti-democracy than trying to fight fire with fire on this one.

So, all right, Dan, here's the Wall Street Journal story has published.

I'm just reading this now for the first time.

The Wall Street Journal has reviewed a book put together for Jeffrey Epstein's 50th birthday.

As part of that book, a letter was submitted by Donald Trump.

Trump's letter features a drawing of a naked woman and this text, which imagines a conversation between Trump and Epstein.

There's a voiceover that says there must be more to life than having everything, the note began.

Donald, yes, there is, but I won't tell you what it is.

Jeffrey, nor will I, since I also know what it is.

Donald, we have certain things in common, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey, yes, we do, come to think of it.

Donald, enigmas never age.

Have you noticed that?

Jeffrey, as a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.

Trump, a pal is a wonderful thing.

Happy birthday, and may every day be another wonderful secret.

Wow.

I mean, what the fuck?

Huh.

Oh, in an interview.

In an interview with the journal.

Oh, no.

We should.

Everyone, hold on.

Everyone, hold on.

In an interview with the journal on Tuesday evening, Trump denied writing the letter or drawing the picture.

This is not me.

This is a fake thing.

It's a fake Wall Street Journal story.

I never wrote a picture in my life.

I don't draw pictures of women.

He said, it's not my language.

It's not my words.

I'm going to sue the Wall Street Journal just like I sued everyone else.

Wow.

Is there.

Did they publish the letter?

Is that in here?

I want a picture.

I want to see the picture.

That is.

Oh, yeah.

Where is the picture?

Here, let's look.

Don't worry.

We'll put it up if we can.

It doesn't look.

I'm not seeing a picture in here, which is real disappointing.

Also, good sources from George Conway.

Yeah.

Yeah, George.

He was pretty.

He was, he nailed that one.

Wow.

That is that is

that is wild.

May every day be another wonderful secret.

We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.

Enigmas never age.

Have you noticed that?

Enigmas never age.

Man, I could really, we could really use a textual analysis of this.

Well, that's what we got for now.

Yeah, I mean,

this is great.

Thank Thank you to the news guys for putting this out in

minute 68 of this podcast or whatever we're on.

Well, and now we can segue seamlessly from that to a couple of other New York fucking bozos.

That was a brilliant segue right on the fly.

We got Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams still to talk about.

Andrew Cuomo announced on Monday that he will give this whole campaign for mayor thing another go by running as an independent candidate in the general election.

Cuomo made the announcement in a video that went viral for all the wrong reasons.

Let's listen.

Hello, I'm Andrew Cuomo.

And unless you've been living under a rock, you probably know that the Democratic primary did not go the way I had hoped.

But as my grandfather used to say, when you get knocked down, learn the lesson and pick yourself back up and get in the game.

And that is what I'm going to do.

My opponent, Mr.

Mandani, offers slick slogans, but no real solutions.

You deserve a mayor with the experience and ideas to make it happen again, and the guts to take on anyone who stands in the way.

The Republican nominee for mayor, perennial candidate Curtis Sliwa, had a quippy retort to Cuomo's candidacy.

Let's take a listen.

Andrew Cuomo is a creep slapping fannies and killing grannies.

Oh, well done.

Well done, Curtis Slewa.

Slapping fannies and killing grannies.

Curtis Slua.

Sliwa?

Sliwa?

Sliwa, I think.

Sliwa.

Yeah, it sounds like Sliwa.

Meanwhile, sitting mayor Eric Adams, who also intends to run as an independent, has just been sued by his own former police commissioner for running the department as a criminal racket.

That follows four similar separate lawsuits from former officers filed last week, accusing Adams of selling promotions, among other things.

I don't know, Dan,

you think Mom Dani has any chance against these powerhouses?

I mean, just what?

I mean, just the Cuomo video is just really, it's a piece of work.

It is a.

Now, Dan, you mocked this video on Twitter.

I did.

It ended up in the New York Post, and a Cuomo campaign staffer, consultant, hit back hard at you.

And all of us, I guess.

We caught some strays, your co-hosts here, because it says, well, if it's coming from the insular guys of Pod Save America, we must be doing something right.

And let me just say, thank you for lessons on insularity, Andrew Cuomo's campaign.

From a guy who did no interviews, talked to no voters, doesn't seem to want the job he's running for, isn't sure why he's running, doesn't know what to do other than run for office, and has decided to.

I mean, we just let's back up a step just with Andrew Cuomo.

He was the Democratic governor of the state.

He is a scion to the most famous Democratic family in New York.

He gets his ass kicked in the primary, right?

He didn't lose.

The Trump family.

Right.

He didn't lose a little bit.

He wasn't close.

There's no allegation of that it was taken from him, but he's running as an independent to try to take it from the Democrat.

I mean, that's a wild thing to do.

And it's wild that anyone of the Democratic Party would support him.

It's wild that much of the Democratic Party establishment, that all the Democratic Party establishment is not united behind Zoron here, right?

That we have a choice of a Democrat, an independent who has been accused of a lot of corruption and malfeasance, a

independent who is engaged in some sort of bribe with Trump, and a Republican.

And we're not going to back Zoran because he is too progressive for you.

It's insane.

The whole thing's insane.

You support the Democratic nominee if you're a Democratic official.

Yeah.

If you're a voter, you do what the fuck you want.

You want to vote for a Republican voter?

Yeah, you can do that.

But if you are a Democratic official in this party, you support the person who wins the primary.

If the person who wins the primary is too conservative for you, you support them.

If they're too liberal for you, you support them.

That's like, we set the rules.

That's what we do.

I will just do some live reporting here, which is I had friends who were at the Wu-Tang show on Wednesday night in Madison Square Garden.

Zoron walks in.

I heard.

Crowd goes bananas.

That's pretty cool.

Yeah, it's a very cool thing.

I don't see the crowd going bananas for Andrew Cuomo.

anywhere you don't think a Wu-Tang crowd?

Yeah, no, I don't think anyone.

Or any crowd.

I mean, the Wu-Tang crowd, I hate to say this because it pains me personally, but maybe not such a young crowd anymore, John.

This is their final tour.

Maybe like a Frank Sinatra cover singer.

I guess, I guess.

I don't know.

Okay, when we get back from the break, you'll hear Dan's conversation with new Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair, Greg Kassar, about redistricting in Texas, what House Democrats are planning to do on the Epstein files, and the federal government's response to the heartbreaking floods in his home state of Texas.

Two quick things before we get to that.

Got some new merch in the crooked store that'll help spread the word that we are not okay with what ICE is doing here in California, if you didn't already know, and around the country.

You can check out our new friend of immigrants and California bear flag teas at crooked.com slash store.

Also, Dan, you're out with a new episode of Polar Coaster.

What did you guys cover?

We went deep on all the polling we've seen about Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein and talked about why this scandal is really not going anywhere for Trump and could leave some lasting damage.

And we also talked about really interesting new polling from Gallup, which shows that Donald Trump and Stephen Miller are making America pro-immigrant again.

That very, it's very, very, very interesting stuff, which shows that Trump may be winning the battle but losing the war on immigration in this country.

Well, if you want to hear that episode, and you should, and submit questions for a future one, head to crooked.com/slash friends or subscribe on Apple Podcasts.

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Joining me now is the new chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Texas Representative Greg Kussar.

Congressman Kussar, welcome to the pod.

Thanks so much for having having me on, man.

All right, we got a lot to talk about today.

Let's start with redistricting in your home state of Texas.

John and I talked about this a little bit earlier on the podcast, but Trump wants Republicans in Texas to redraw your state's congressional map to get them a whole bunch more seats and try to hold on to power in what should be a tough election.

What do you think of their plan and what are the consequences?

Look, Donald Trump doesn't have a plan to win the upcoming midterms.

He has a plan to rig the election rules.

He knows that kicking over 15 million people off of their health care, giving all these benefits to his billionaire buddies is deeply unpopular.

And so he's trying to figure out how he can completely change the rules of the game in the middle of all this.

And he's basically demanding Texas Republicans completely redraw the map, not just nibble around the edges, violate the Voting Rights Act in ways we've never seen before.

and see if he can use that as a roadmap to steal even more districts and even more seats, just all in his quest to hold on to a little bit of power and what's interesting about this is that it likely puts Republican incumbents in a really risky situation because you don't just change five Democrats seats you probably change the entire Texas map and those Republicans could start having crazy districts that don't make sense they could represent whole new areas be vulnerable to Republican primaries be vulnerable to a democratic challenger and so those republican congressmen have to decide whether in this moment where it's their own voters on the line, their own necks, their own districts, whether they're going to stand up for themselves or just be Trump's water boys.

Obviously, we,

even though some Republican incumbents could be at more risk, we do want to stop this plan, right?

And

how can that be stopped?

The House Minority Leader Jefferies urged Texas Democrats to do the quorum bust by leaving the state, something that Texas Democrats have done before.

What's the right way to stop this, the right way to fight this?

There's basically three steps in my mind.

First, we need to buy time.

And that's why House Democrats in the state of Texas need to be ready to filibuster, to bust quorum, which means if 50 House Democrats leave the building, you shut down the session, they need to be able to march in the streets to buy time so that folks like Governor Gavin Newsom, who's out there speaking out, saying that other states may start reaping what the Republicans sow so that that pressure can start to build up.

Republican members of Congress in other states and in Texas, like I said, need to start feeling the pressure as well.

And Democrats need to make sure we fully fund campaigns to be ready to take on those Republican incumbents.

And we use that to buy time.

Then we also need folks to speak up all over the country.

This needs to become a national issue because the Voting Rights Act, as we know it, is under threat here.

Texas is already racially gerrymandered to hell.

If they want to squeeze out five more seats, that means Trump is basically ripping everything up, sending us basically to pre-1965 on many of our voting rights laws.

So we've got to fire up the country.

And then if they end up doing it, we've got to make them pay for it.

We can't let this work because then it will just be their playbook every single time.

How is what they might do violate what remains of the Voters' Rights Act after the Shelby County decision about a decade or so ago?

Yeah,

they got rid of pre-clearance, meaning that states that have a history of discrimination

now are basically off the hook for that past discrimination and can do stuff like this, call session that should be about rebuilding from the flood and instead just do redistricting in a week or two.

That's got, we lost so much of that.

We lost

so much of them now being able to say they can gerrymander in a partisan way, but they're still not allowed under Section 2 to chop up and racially gerrymander such that, say, communities of color can't just be chopped up into five or six districts in a way that completely dilutes their vote.

At this point, if Trump wants to demand five more districts from the Republicans, then he may be trying to completely do away with that section of the Voting Rights Act.

And if he asks the Supreme Court to rubber stamp this Texas map, then that could be essentially what he uses all over the country.

This is a five-alarm fire in Texas.

It's probably, I think, the biggest political story that people haven't heard of.

And this five-alarm fire could start spreading all across the country.

Have you talked to members of the California delegation?

Are they on board with what Governor Newsom is at least floating?

The members of the California delegation, I know, are all in on saying that Republicans might just reap what it is that they sow.

So I ultimately am going to let folks from other states speak up for themselves.

But here's what I'll say.

I think, I believe in ending gerrymandering across the country, but that means across the country.

I think that states,

blue states should say they're going to implement independent commissions when Texas does.

You know, I don't think that you get to national

ends to gerrymandering by blue states just signing up to do it and red states not having to pay any kind of a cost for continued gerrymandering and diluting the votes of communities of color.

Yeah, it seems like there really are only two options to deal with partisan gerrymandering this country because the Supreme Court has opted out of that fight.

Is one

to put it politely, yes, that they have, they have, they basically set up this incredibly absurd system where the way to deal with being gerrymandered is to vote, even though you lost the power of your vote through gerrymandering.

It's very, it's very, very effective.

But two ways.

One is national legislation, right?

Which folks tried to do during the Biden administration.

And then the second way is mutually assured destruction, which is essentially what you're suggesting, which is Texas has to know that if they move, California will move.

Florida has to know if they move, New York will move, and so on.

And

we can't just wave the white flag and let them do it, right?

And in the same sort of analogy, in a world of mutually assured destruction, you can eventually do cooperative,

you get rid of a nuke, I get rid of a nuke.

And eventually you get to nuclear nonproliferation.

And that's where we want to be.

But in my view, we have to stop the growing autocracy and authoritarianism, get back to reasonable democratic majorities, and then no longer have the kinds of Kristen Sinemas and Joe Manchins who, frankly, I think, in my view, put themselves over the future of the country.

No, absolutely.

Okay, we're talking right after the House has passed three big pieces of crypto legislation.

One of them is now headed to Trump.

Two of them are headed to the Senate.

You voted against all of them.

Can you explain to people what these bills do and why you opposed them?

Yeah, so I think what folks need to know is that

these were extremely light touch, in my view, regulation of cryptocurrency.

Look, we established laws to protect us from big market crashes like we had in the 1920s.

We established those laws after the Great Depression.

And of course, they did not foresee cryptocurrency coming, but in my view, there's a lot of lessons to be learned from that.

The Biden administration tried to apply some of those laws to cryptocurrency, and the crypto industry and crypto lobbyists sued the Biden administration, didn't want to follow those laws we created after the Great Depression.

So we wound up in what is kind of a vacuum where they didn't want to follow those laws, and the Trump administration wasn't going to enforce them.

So they put forward this kind of light touch regulation.

What does that mean for you?

If you have cryptocurrency, and there's very light regulation, it means somebody could take advantage of you, could make a killing telling folks that this thing is worth a ton, and then

leave you in the dumps.

People essentially could get screwed out of their money, I think, if there's not strong enough rules.

And if you don't earn cryptocurrency, that's actually my greater concern with this regulation, light touch regulation, because the AFL-CIO came out against these policies because your pension, your retirement funds could get wrapped up in this.

My fear is that five or 10 years from now, these votes and this light touch cryptocurrency regulation could look like credit default swaps in 2008.

It could be the vulnerable point that results in people that had nothing to do with this losing their money.

And in my view, the reason we wound up with light touch regulation rather than something more thoughtful

for this evolving industry is because the cryptocurrency industry bought the president, bought the Republican Party, and took out guys like Sherrod Brown, who were trying to get to, I think, kind of the law of the 1920s upgraded to the 2020s kind of environment.

I mean, a decent number of your Democratic colleagues voted for these bills.

Is that right?

That's right.

And I, you know, of course, everybody gets to vote their district and vote their conscience.

But

I understand their argument that they would rather, if the crypto industry doesn't want to follow the 1920s rules, which I think that they should have, because those are the rules in the books, that they would at least like them to follow these minimal rules.

I fear that if these minimal rules become the baseline, that a lot of people could put their money in this thinking it's safe, thinking it's regulated, and lose it five or 10 years down the line.

And as somebody here in my mid-30s, I can kind of see five or 10 years down the line coming soon.

Yeah, it's fair enough.

There is a sort of a school of thought.

among some, you know, this has been pushed by Mark Fay, you know, fellow Texan, Mark Cuban, among others, that one of the things that hurt Kamala Harris in the election, at least with a segment of younger, voters, particularly young male voters, was the Biden administration's approach to crypto in the sense that they were not pro-regulation, but sort of anti-crypto, right?

Do you think that like this is an industry that exists?

It is, it's developing, that, you know, let's stipulate that these regulations were too light touch.

This is not what you want, but is there a middle ground there you're looking for?

Yeah, I would want to get to a place where you have good rules for the folks that choose to invest in crypto.

I feel like I sit down and talk to actual crypto voters and it's, and there's, we can have a good conversation.

I'm concerned that the crypto lobby written bills are a big problem here.

But look, frankly,

in my view, you know, I was in Nevada during the beginning of the Harris campaign.

I traveled all over the state of Texas.

And what I heard,

I almost never ever from an independent or swing voter heard that cryptocurrency was their top issue.

I heard that paying the rent and making sure that their child care wasn't so damn expensive

and that government actually worked for them and didn't sound so corrupt in both parties.

That's what I heard time after time after time.

And I think that we just got to stop getting pulled into thinking that sort of the DC bubble of politics is

what's dominating there.

But I also understand that there are millions of people, tens of millions of people that have crypto.

And we want to make sure that we're speaking to them as being protected and not just let the industry lobby speak for them.

The Senate last night or this morning, depending on what time, what time zone you're in, passed a bill cutting, essentially codifying the Doge cuts.

It's going to take $9 billion of congressionally appropriated funding for foreign aid and public broadcasting.

I heard you guys were reporting that they're defunding Daniel Tiger.

We're very upset about the Daniel Tiger, Daniel Tiger, but my kids are sort of, they've moved into Wildcrats now and they're very, very upset that Wildcrats could be defunded.

um

in the old days like 10 years ago there used to be three parties on the hill democrats republicans and appropriators and the idea that congress would allow a president to take away money that they appropriated seemed was impossible to imagine is there any chance these rescissions get stopped in the house or are they just going to green light this as they always do well the way that we've been able to slow it down so far is by trying to force votes on releasing the epstein files right That seems to be one of the only places where, you know, these guys just do anything for Donald Trump.

And I don't know why sometimes I get surprised when it's the same thing over and over and over.

You never get your hopes up, right?

Yeah.

No one ever made money betting on the independence of these guys.

It's billionaire boot licking first, but then before first is Trump.

asking you know and so so yeah you know they've got this thing about npr and trump is saying he's going to run over the appropriators and they're headed that way.

Then, you know, we've got, we're saying, well, why don't you release the Epstein files while you're at it?

And that slowed them down a little bit.

But now it sounds like a bunch of the people that have said release the Epstein files a million times are now like, well, you know, maybe after Trump is gone, they'll just do anything the guy asks.

And at the end of the day, you know, I'm, I'm a relatively new member of Congress.

Like this is my third year here.

I was hoping that you would get here and be able to have more reason debates and figure some stuff out in the back room.

But at the end of the day, I just think that for some of these folks, we just have to beat them because there has to be a cost to just being such a bootlicker.

As we're recording this, the Republican House Rules Committee has been meeting.

They're trying to find out.

They're all very worked up by the fact that the Democrats keep asking for votes on the release of the Epstein files.

They're trying to figure out what to do about that.

Is this a Democratic strategy you guys going to keep doing, keep pushing this?

I mean, we absolutely should because we've got to, like I said, we've got to

show people just how absurd the thing is, right?

That Trump and the Republicans went and sold this as one of their top policy platforms.

And as soon as Trump tells them not to,

that they won't.

And so I think we've got to make that really clear.

And then I think it's also part of making clear to independent voters and for people that this is the issue that they care about, that Democrats are willing to say, I want us to show we're willing to say, look, just because you're really rich and powerful, you don't get off the hook.

Because clearly, you know, Epstein was interacting with a bunch of really rich and powerful people.

And rich and powerful people getting off the hook is something that's really upsetting.

And that I think as a Democratic Party, we have to say, release the Epstein files and you don't get a free pass just because you got a lot of money.

Do you have a theory as to why Trump did such a 180 on this?

I'm getting inside inside Trump's head or Laura Loomer's head about why she ended up picking it.

There's already enough mental health strains in this job.

All right, all right.

I will free you from the obligation.

It's like, I make sure I go for a run or another workout every morning and I try to stop getting in Trump and Laura Loomer's heads.

That's too self-care to fair enough.

All right.

I will let the record show you've passed on the opportunity to irresponsibly speculate about what's in the Epstein files.

So we will take that.

For whatever that's worth, you know?

I mean, it would have been great content, but

I understand why you did that.

Moving on to a much more serious topic.

I want to talk briefly about the awful floods in Texas and the administration's response.

You've called for the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security to do an investigation.

What do you see in the response that has you concerned?

And is there any chance that Congress will learn any lessons from this in terms of funding for the National Weather Service or other disaster response or climate resilience or whatever else.

Yes.

So, you know, first of all, the devastation is ongoing.

There's still over 100 people missing.

Search and rescue is ongoing.

All these people dying, including these kids, horrific and tragic.

And I think part of respecting the dead is making sure that there's accountability and that we ask real hard questions.

Like why

FEMA whistleblowers said that Secretary Christian Noam waited 72 hours to approve search and rescue at the federal level.

I mean, you should only have to think about that for 72 seconds max.

So we should be asking those questions.

You have severe understaffing at the National Weather Service.

We need to know whether that reduction in staffing had an impact in this case.

And if, you know, we had one of the chief meteorologists.

for the central Texas area vacant.

They say they brought some other folks in.

Who'd they bring in?

How did that go?

And if there were two disasters happening at once, and as we know, you know, there were floods in Redoso right to this,

what would have happened?

We've got to ask those questions to respect the dead and to see, you know, how do we protect people in the future?

So that's why I authored a letter asking the Inspector General to look into this.

That's an independent investigation.

And I've got some news to break here on your podcast, not on purpose.

As I was putting these AirPods in, my staff mentioned that the Inspector General has confirmed that they're going to launch the investigation.

That's part of being on the oversight committee.

That's one of the pieces of democracy that we still got that we can use.

And so there will be an independent investigation into this.

I also think that we have to call the question about whether we're going to fully fund FEMA and fully staff the National Weather Service after this.

You know, like, we can't just let this this happen, give our thoughts and prayers, and then completely ignore that Elon Musk and Donald Trump have severely cut the staffing at the weather service, which is opposed to anticipate floods and hurricanes and disasters like this, because just a few minutes extra notice, getting to a little bit of higher ground, saves lives.

Myself, some of our listeners are just so heartbroken by what's happened in Texas.

Just reading the stories about the girls at the camp is so horrifying.

Is there anything that our listeners around the country can do to help to contribute to the recovery there?

Yes, there is the Community Foundation of the Hill Country, which so you can, maybe the folks here at PodSafe can put that information up in a place that you can get it.

They are distributing funds.

And that is a really important thing because we are just, we have a lot of rebuilding to do.

And then something else we can all do is recognize that these disasters are going to get worse and worse, more and more frequent.

And places like Texas,

we've used to hurricanes and floods, but not this often, not this big, not this frequent, plus freezes, plus wildfires all over the country.

So making sure that we take care of one another, look out for one another, contribute what you can, even just a few bucks to helping in the hill country, and then keep speaking out because

as a community, we can reduce the damage from these sorts of disasters, but we've got to take care of one another.

And I think getting involved in local government is a huge way of participating.

I'm a former city council member.

And let me tell you, the decisions are getting made there about

putting in the infrastructure to prevent floods and putting in the infrastructure for early warnings or hardening your city against wildfires.

So I'm in Congress now, but I also really encourage folks listening to get involved at the local level because you can make a big difference to save lives in the future.

Congressman, thanks so much for joining us.

It was a pleasure to talk to you.

Thanks a bunch of Dan.

That's our show for today, Tommy Love It and I.

He still does this show.

He's still a co-host.

He's back.

He'll be back with a new show on Tuesday.

Have a great weekend.

Bye, everyone.

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