Can the Big Beautiful Bill Be Stopped?

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Welcome to Pod Save America.

I'm Tommy Vitor.

I'm John Lovett.

And Jon Favreau is out this week.

He's tweeting a lot.

I actually like,

there was a part of his, hey, man,

it's okay.

He was slacked.

Let the man have a vacation.

And yeah, he doesn't, I think this, I think he's in it.

I don't think he feels like he can let go.

He'll deprogram.

It takes a minute.

But Lovett and I are here.

We're going to cover the fate of President Trump's entire second term legislative agenda.

That's right.

No pressure, sir.

Senator Chris Murphy will be joining us in just a minute to talk about the latest with the so-called Big Beautiful bill, its devastating impact, the Republican holdouts, and what might happen when this piece of shit goes back over to the House for final passage.

Aaron Powell, if it does.

If it does.

Right now, as we're recording this, we're recording this Monday.

The bill is up for votes.

It could pass by the time you've heard this.

It could have been pulled by the time you've heard this.

We don't know.

But either way, whether it gets stopped in the Senate or it hopefully can be stopped in the House, it's still about the dynamic between the ways in which it's gotten much worse in the Senate.

Much worse.

But at the same time, becoming more antagonistic to the sort of deficit hawks that were part of the problem of passing in the House.

So whatever happens overnight, it still faces trouble.

But

it's shocking how bad the bill actually is.

Shockingly bad.

Yeah.

Shockingly bad.

It got so much worse on the Senate side.

Please listen to Senator Murphy.

We're going to lead with that interview because it's so important that people understand the stakes of this bill passing.

Levin and I are also going to talk about the latest intelligence about Iran's nuclear program and that it wasn't totally obliterated as Trump promised us.

What a surprise that he overstated it.

Then we'll talk about some new immigration news swirling out there.

So we got it all for you.

But first.

Joining us now to talk about the voterama on Trump's so-called big, beautiful bill is Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy.

Senator, good to see you.

Hey, guys.

So, Senator, you tweeted that 17 million people will lose their health care because of the Medicaid cuts in this bill.

How will that happen?

And can you also explain the impact on the cost of health care premiums for people who get insurance through the Affordable Care Act?

Yeah, so 17 million people lose their health care, both through Medicaid and through people that were on the Affordable Care Act that no longer will be on the Affordable Care Act.

I mean, that is a cataclysm.

You know, that's the equivalent population, I think, of like 12 U.S.

states.

And that will ultimately impact everybody, whether you have health care or not.

So how does that happen?

First, in a whole bunch of different ways, the bill just

slims down the amount of money that goes to states for Medicaid.

So states will have only a couple choices.

They'll either have to cut the amount of money they send to providers, or more likely, they will just throw people off of Medicaid.

Second, it sets up a whole bunch of bullshit work requirements.

It's basically just a ton of paperwork to discourage people from signing up for Medicaid.

So it says you have to prove that you're working, but it does it in a way that we know most people won't be able to comply with.

And so a lot of people that are working but can't sort of prove it through all this paperwork will end up losing Medicaid.

And then it just reduces the subsidies that we have always

used to help people buy Obamacare plans.

And so that means an additional 5 million people will now find it unaffordable to get the Affordable Care Act.

So it's 70 million people lose their health care, but by withdrawing all of that money, $900 billion from the Medicaid system,

it just makes a lot of hospitals, drug treatment centers that were operating on really slim margins unable to continue to operate.

So you'll see sort of mass closures in the country likely of treatment centers, of rural hospitals, and that will mean that a whole bunch of people who have insurance will all of a sudden not be able to find anywhere to go get care.

So, it's just an absolute moral abomination.

It is going to ruin our healthcare system for a lot of people.

Thousands of people will likely die.

Many of them will be really vulnerable folks, people with serious disabilities that can only get insurance through Medicaid.

And it's kind of implausible that a president is out there saying that they're not cutting Medicaid and they are about to ruin the lives of about 12 million people on Medicaid today.

So when this bill came out of the House, it was terrible.

And the assumption was it's going to come over to the Senate.

It's going to be moderated

by the adults in the room in the Senate.

And then the plan was to send it back to the House to jam the right-wingers with something they would have to vote for.

But it feels like the opposite has happened, that somehow in the Senate, the bill has become more radical, more dangerous, more extreme.

And

it's baffling.

And I think we all like to pretend we're pretty kind of, you know, sophisticated people.

It's surprising how much worse it's gotten.

Can you explain the dynamic?

Like, how did we get to this point?

Because all of the moderates with any kind of guts or power in the United States Senate are gone.

There is no meaningful

moderate bloc inside the Republican Party any longer.

And what's happened is over the last 10 years, all of the new Republican senators are straight out of the MAGA wing, right?

They were nominated,

endorsed

by Donald Trump.

And so they hold all of the power, which means the bill gets worse when it gets to the Senate, not better.

And it doesn't just get worse on the healthcare title.

It got a ton worse on the energy title.

So already the House had stripped out all of the renewable energy tax credits, but that wasn't good enough for Senate Republicans.

They wanted to actually apply a new tax on renewable energy.

They just wanted to totally bury the renewable energy industry.

So we never ever build another solar farm or wind turbine in the country.

So the bill's gotten worse on health care.

More people are going to lose their health insurance because of the Senate product.

And the renewable energy industry could ultimately be destroyed.

Now, there's a chance that we might be able to sort of roll that back with an amendment later tonight, but right now, the bill is even worse than the House bill for renewables.

Yeah, I mean, just to add to that, I mean, there's also a new tax break for the coal industry, right?

And so, what we're hearing is, you know, this isn't just like a green energy problem.

This is something that this provision, this new excise tax that will kill the renewable energy industry, will take massive amounts of power offline at a time when we've got data centers and AI companies coming up that are going to need more and more power.

What do you think the impact would be on just sort of like your average consumer?

So, the estimates are are that there's going to be probably a 5 to 20 percent increase in energy prices because what this bill does is cancel renewable projects that are already in motion, that are literally being developed right now.

You've got to be online next year, I think, in order to qualify for the tax credits.

And there's lots of programs that are being built today.

And so when all of that capacity is erased, then the energy distribution companies are going to have to raise rates because they were planning on that supply being part of the grid.

So 5 to 20% rate increases, but also probably brownouts because we just won't have enough energy in order to supply, especially the hotter parts of the country.

So brownouts in Texas, brownouts in the southwest.

You know, we're just going to lack for electricity.

But I think like the most important thing to talk about here is like, why is this happening?

Because it just doesn't make any sense to raise energy prices and to have people go without electricity during the summer.

Remember, Donald Trump brought the oil and gas and coal executives down to Mar-a-Lago at the end of the campaign, and he just kind of dealt with them.

It's been widely reported.

They promised him a billion dollars in campaign contributions, and he promised them whatever they wanted.

And so they're calling in that shit.

They're saying, yeah, it's not good enough to just erase the renewable energy tax credits.

We want to kill the industry and give us some extra help as well.

So that's what you're seeing:

the payoff on the corrupt deal that was done at Mar-a-Lago between the energy industry and Donald Trump.

So there's a very small set of people that benefit from this bill.

Coal industry is one of them.

Trump himself needs a political win.

People in the very highest tax break, the billionaires, some of the richest people in our country.

But you have the building trades saying it'll cost 1.75 million jobs.

You have people like Elon Musk pointing out this is a gift to China.

You have Rand Paul, the Freedom Caucus, Musk as well, other deficit hawks saying it's the biggest increase to the debt in history.

Tom Tillis, your colleague, went to the floor to say that they're going to be punished for lying to the American people.

Josh Hawley explained why he should be against it because it does exactly what he said he wouldn't do, which is cut Medicaid.

Who behind the scenes is for this?

Who's justifying this?

This feels like zombie legislation, right?

Like that there's nobody out there advocating or explaining why this is actually a good thing on its own terms.

Yeah, except everybody that is at Mar-a-Lago, right?

I mean, like, and that's kind of the only thing that matters, right?

That Donald Trump's world is Mar-a-Lago.

The only human beings that matter are the folks who pay dues and pat him on the back at his club.

And this benefits everybody at Mar-a-Lago.

The CEOs at Mar-a-Lago get a big corporate tax cut.

The billionaires at Mar-a-Lago get, you know, an average $270,000 tax cut.

And so Donald Trump's constituency, the ones that lobby him every day, do very, very well here.

And in part because of our closed media environment today, where his base is only hearing from Fox News, they don't know that much about the Medicaid cuts.

Because on Fox News, Donald Trump and

Mike Johnson continue to say there are no Medicaid cuts in this bill.

Two plus two equals seven.

And unfortunately, for a sizable portion of the country, that's what they believe, that this bill actually strengthens Medicaid.

Unfortunately, they will find out pretty quickly when they lose their health care or their hospital closes what the truth is.

Are you worried at all that the way they've done these cuts?

I mean, this is what Tillis was talking about, that some of them, like

the way the reimbursement changes are kind of pushed off to 2026, so they've sort of hidden it before the midterms?

Yeah, I think

there's some truth

to that in terms of when the political impact will be.

But I mean, the jury is kind of in on what people think about this bill.

It's true that, you know, maybe only half of the country knows about it because they're rushing it through.

But when you learn about the bill, you hate it.

And so if we do our job and stay really focused on explaining this bill between now and 2026, even if all the impacts haven't gone into effect, I think it'll have an impact because the story is so simple.

You are throwing 17 million people off their health care in order to afford a quarter million dollar tax cut for the richest Americans.

How long did that take me to say?

15 seconds?

That's a story that I think can be impactful for the midterms.

Yeah, I think the polling on the bill ranges from like 19 points underwater to 29 points underwater.

So I feel like that's bad.

Yeah, it's not great.

So speaking of,

look, we can campaign if they pass it.

What is the hope, like, what is the best thing to be saying today to try to stop this?

Do you have any hope for your colleague Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Tom Tillis is a no?

Rand Paul could be a no.

There's a few others on the table.

What are you hearing?

What are your hopes?

Yeah, no, listen, I am not hopeless.

I mean, in part part because, you know, had we done an interview at this time in the Affordable Care Act repeal debate in 2017,

we would have been pretty pessimistic.

There were lots of people at that moment, 10 hours before final passage in the Senate, that said, of course, Republicans are going to pass it.

This is their number one campaign and political priority, repealing the Affordable Care Act.

And then there was a surprise.

And there still are surprises left in politics, especially when the American people mobilize.

And that's what they're doing right now.

These offices, Susan Collins' office, Lisa Murkowski's office, are being flooded with phone calls.

Tomorrow, there'll be hundreds of people at their district offices.

So yes, I think there is still a chance that they vote no.

Now that might not kill the bill permanently, but

it would at least force them back to the drawing board and give us some more time to continue to explain to the American public what's in here.

So the prescription is pretty simple.

Just keep calling, keep showing up.

This bill might not pass tonight.

You might still have tomorrow to make those phone calls and show up to those offices.

And who knows?

Like in 2017, we might actually beat this thing.

Senator, I think we're used to Republicans and Trump lying about how much their plans cost.

But what's happening with this bill is kind of hard to wrap your head around.

I was wondering if you could help explain the way they are scoring this bill and what kind of precedent that might set for a future Democratic or any other

Congress.

Well, one interesting thing to say is that they have now twice changed the rules of the Senate in order to get their agenda passed.

They did it once a few weeks ago in order to try to cancel a California state environmental regulation that normally we can't do in the Senate.

And they're doing it right now to hide the cost of this bill, changing the rules of the Senate.

That has implications because, you know, if there was any question that Democrats were going to get rid of the filibuster to pass pass really popular things if we get control, now there's no excuse not to do that because the Senate Republicans are changing the rules on a pretty regular basis.

But what they're specifically doing is they are trying to hide the deficit cost of this bill.

This bill will

create $4 trillion worth of new debt for this country.

But they are doing a scoring gimmick to pretend that that number is zero.

But in fact, we know it's not zero, even though they will have a piece of paper that says this bill creates no deficits, because also in the bill is an increase in the debt ceiling of $5 trillion.

And we will immediately start to have to borrow additional money.

We will actually borrow $4 trillion

of new debt as part of this bill.

So yes, they will have a piece of paper that says this bill creates no debt,

but we will borrow $4 trillion in new money.

So it'll be pretty quickly apparent that the piece of paper they have means nothing.

But it does help them deceive voters on Fox News because they'll wave that piece of paper on Fox News and tell folks that there's no debt increase.

Well, they are literally going out to the bond market and borrowing $4 trillion of additional debt.

You know, when Tom, when your colleague Senator Tillis spoke

about the bill, you know,

a lot of the clips are around the fact that Republicans will pay because this is a lie, that this is going to throw 600 and some odd thousand people off of Medicaid in the state.

But he talked about the lack of interest or awareness about the details about what the bill actually does.

He talked about governing and that this is not a Congress that's interested in governing.

You're right, they'll have a number that they can say on Fox News, but

Susan Collins knows that that's not real.

Lisa Murkowski knows that that's not real.

Mitch McConnell knows that that's not real.

What is it like behind the scenes talking to them?

Rand Paul certainly knows it's not real.

He genuinely cares about deficits.

Like, I don't understand how they're defending this or if they're even bothering to defend this when there aren't any cameras and if there's hope there in getting them and what you're saying when you talk to these people.

Yeah, I mean, this is a 900-page bill that got introduced late on Saturday.

Not a single one of them has read it.

We are just discovering, as we speak, new things that are in the bill.

I just read a provision that creates creates a $100 million fund to go find inefficiencies in the federal government.

I'm not sure why you need $100 million to go find inefficiencies, but it looks to me just like a kind of nice sludge fund for the sludge fund for the OMB director.

Yeah, I mean, this isn't a governing party any longer.

This is a cult.

And a cult does whatever the leader says without question.

That is kind of the definition of a cult, that you are sort of no longer interested in getting involved in the rationale of your organization's operations.

You just want to stay in favor of the cult leader.

So there is no sort of intellectual curiosity left over in this party, maybe with the exception of Tom Tillis and Rand Paul.

They all just take orders from Donald Trump and Donald Trump has given the orders, pass this bill, because it's good for my friends at Mar-a-Lago.

I wish there was a more complicated answer than that, but that's just kind of how the Republican Party operates today.

Yeah, but that's not Murkowski, right?

That's not Collins.

I mean, that's a lot of them, but that's not those people, right?

Like, those people seem like we should be trying to get them.

Like,

a big part of the bill that was meant to help Alaska just got taken out by the parliamentarian, right?

Like, this bill just got a lot worse for her state.

Like, it seems like these people should be people we can get.

Yeah, but like, that's the list, right?

Like, you might, like, you might have just,

read the beginning and the end of the list.

So that's why I'm not

fatalist right now.

That's why we are literally working as we speak on the Senate floor trying to figure out new ways to convince Senator Murkowski and Senator Collins to vote against this.

Because if they both vote against this and Tillis and Paul stay nose, then this bill fails.

So there's still a path,

but they're behind closed doors, also as we speak, trying to find ways to potentially get enough money to Alaska and Maine so that those two senators just look the other way.

We'll see who wins in the end.

Rational thought, which I do think both of those senators still have the capacity to engage in,

or the power of the cult.

So, you know, folks are, you know, we're targeting Alaska and Maine.

Rand Paul has always been his own man on kind of spending and deficit and debt questions, right?

Tom Tillis had to resign to find enough courage to vote against his bill, but we're grateful to him.

I saw, though, that this thing will have to go back over over to the House side where it will be voted on again.

I saw that Elon Musk just tweeted: every member of Congress who campaigned on reducing government spending and then immediately voted for the biggest debt increase in history should hang their head in shame, and they will lose their primary next year if it's the last thing I do on this earth.

I know the primary fear among Republicans is of getting primaried by a Donald Trump-endorsed candidate, but that's interesting.

That's a new wrinkle, right?

Yeah, I don't know.

Is it?

I mean, come on, come on, man.

I mean, I don't know.

I mean, didn't didn't we just have that battle between Donald Trump and Elon Musk?

Elon Musk lost, and it's like,

whatever his ketamine high says next week, right, will cause him to forget what he said this week.

Yeah, but listen, there's still a problem in the House.

And the problem in the House is that there is a more sizable group of moderates there that do care about two things, the size of the Medicaid cuts and this issue over state and local deductibility.

And the deal they cut in the House on state and local tax deductibility got a lot worse in the Senate and the Medicaid cuts got a lot bigger.

So you are going to have a group of

semi-moderate, if you can call them that, House Republicans that are going to have a big problem with what comes back.

And Rand Paul, by sort of holding the line on the deficit, definitely made it a little bit harder for people who follow him and think like him in the House to swallow when this thing comes back.

So

no, this is not done.

I mean, the House may have to amend it again.

They may have to send it back to the Senate again.

And again, every day that this thing hangs out on the clothesline, it stinks more and more.

It gives us more of an opportunity to go out and explain to the American public why they should vote out of office, anybody that votes for it.

So any delay in this thing passing makes it a little bit less likely that it'll ever get to the president's desk.

Kind of a branding question, because

since it's come over to the Senate and since they've now put on the table really like a dismantling a big part of Medicaid, it's really gotten much, much worse since it's come to the Senate.

Are we doing enough to convey the scale of what it's trying to do on healthcare?

Like we're referring to it as massive Medicaid cuts, which is certainly true, but I think that undersells the effect it'll have on everybody with insurance if rural hospitals don't have the resources to function, if this causes a whole bunch of providers to have to lay people off.

Is there a way we should be talking about this that conveys it more as a kind of a

version of Trump care, that this is a fundamental

reform of the healthcare system, that they will own all of it, all the consequences over the next couple of years.

Yeah, it's a good question.

I mean, it's a tax on health care, right?

This is the Trump tax on health care.

Everybody, you are either going to lose your health care or you are going to pay a whole lot more for it.

There are only two outcomes here, right?

And so I think we do need to do a better job of explaining that because I think it is still true that 75% of the country is not on Medicaid.

25% is.

So that 75% probably says to themselves, well, this is a Medicaid bill.

I don't love that you're kicking people off of Medicaid.

I still like that program, but this doesn't probably impact me.

So I think we need to do a more consistent job of not just talking about the 17 million people who are going to lose coverage, but everybody else who's going to see, you know, probably a double-digit increase in their premiums.

If you are an a 60-year-old couple in Connecticut and you make $80,000 a year, you are probably on the exchange and that couple will see a $26,000 annual increase in their premiums.

Jesus, 400%

increase in their out-of-pocket expenses.

We have not really told that story, right?

Because we've been so focused on the people who are losing coverage, but you just shook your head in disbelief that that's actually a part of this bill, and it is.

So, that's a story that we have to tell.

And by the way, we're not going to stop telling the story.

If this bill does pass, we are going to explain the impact on people who even retain their health care

throughout the rest of the year and throughout all of next year.

This storytelling doesn't stop.

Yeah.

One quick Iran question for you, Senator.

Folks, I'm sure we're watching the U.S.

strike on Iran's nuclear facilities.

Trump said the program was totally obliterated.

You got a briefing last week where you said

we have not obliterated Iran's nuclear program.

The president was deliberately misleading.

They still have significant capability and equipment.

I know you can't talk about anything classified and you would never disclose anything from that briefing, but can you just sort of help us understand Iran's nuclear capability as you know it after the Israeli and U.S.

military campaign?

Yeah, and a lot has been publicly reported, so I certainly can talk about that.

There's no doubt we set back their nuclear program because they just don't have working research sites.

But there has been publicly available satellite imagery that shows that the Iranians are actively excavating, digging out, and recovering recovering material from both of those sites.

And the public reporting has been pretty clear that Iran still has centrifuges, Iran still has enriched uranium up to the 60% level, and Iran still has scientists that know what to do with the centrifuges and with the enriched material.

So if you have those three things, centrifuges, 60% enriched uranium, and scientists who know how to build what are called the cascades, the connected centrifuges that allow you to move 60% enriched uranium to 90% enriched uranium, then you are definitely only months away from being able to rebuild that program.

You have not obliterated that program.

And so that's just the truth and it is dangerously misleading for the president or Republicans to use terms like obliteration.

What is more dangerous is that we were at the table negotiating a deal and the only way to get Iran permanently off a path to a nuclear weapon once they have all of that equipment and once they have all that knowledge is a diplomatic agreement.

And we were literally at the table with them.

We interrupted those negotiations, and there's no guarantee that we will ever get back because we have scrambled Iranian politics to the point where they might not now be able to make those concessions that they could have made before the United States and Israel struck them.

So we have made the Iranian threat in the medium and long term worse,

even though in the short run, in the next three or four months,

we did destroy their capacity.

And so that's the story that we have to tell.

And though I can't disclose anything I've heard behind closed doors, the public reporting has been very clear.

We didn't get everything.

And if we didn't get everything and we don't have a negotiating table,

that's not good for the United States.

And frankly, that's not good for Israel.

I believe the Israelis killed the political leader overseeing the negotiations.

So

not going to be a good idea.

Well, I don't know, Senator Murphy.

Keep talking like this.

You're not going to get a statue in the $40 million Garden of Heroes, which is also included in the bill.

Included in the bill.

A new Garden of MAGA Heroes.

$40 million.

We're going to kick kids off of their nutrition benefits, but we're going to get a statue of Andrew Tate.

Jesus Christ.

What a time to be alive.

Senator, thank you so much.

Thank you, Senator Murphy.

Appreciate it.

All right, we're going to take a quick break, but two quick things before we do that.

If this reconciliation bill passes the Senate, it is going back to the House and you can make a big difference there.

Go to votesaveamerica.com to find out how to take action.

Also, love it.

Loli is seeking asylum north of the border.

Oh, yeah, that's right.

We're going to Just for Laughs in Montreal.

Just for Laughs is back and Love to Leave is going.

We'll be there on July 24th.

You can get those tickets at crooked.com/slash events.

We're going to have an amazing lineup of guests that I'll tell you about later because I'm going on vacation.

Okay, great.

Grab tickets now at crooked.com slash events.

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So, Levitas, we just heard from Senator Chris Murphy, despite Trump's claims to the contrary, there is growing evidence that the U.S.

strikes over a week ago did not, in fact, completely and totally obliterate Iran's nuclear program.

So Rafael Grossi, the head of the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, told CBS News that Iran could begin producing enriched uranium in, quote, a matter of months.

The Washington Post also reported that the United States has intercepted private communications between senior Iranian officials, which revealed that the attacks were not as destructive as the Iranians thought they would be.

White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt called the Post reporting shameful and said, quote, the notion that unnamed Iranian officials know what happened under hundreds of feet of rubble is nonsense.

I love that her position is that President Trump has perfect visibility into that pile of rubble, but the Iranians who live there do not.

Right.

It's like if anybody knows, maybe nobody knows, but how do we know?

It wouldn't be us.

Presumably the way we would find out without being there was from what they were saying.

We're spying on them.

Right.

That's why we're spying on them.

Yeah.

Although maybe it does look kind of like

they're sort of standing around a microphone just being like, ham it up, say how bad it was.

I mean, like they all know they're being fucking bugged.

That's 100% a possibility.

But as always, Trump and by extension his administration have responded not by admitting error, but by doubling down, including threatening journalists and Democrats.

Trump talked about all of this in an interview with Fox News's Maria Bartaromo that aired on Sunday.

Here's a clip.

We call it the 12-day war.

That was an intensive war.

You tweeted, the Democrats leaked an intelligence.

They should be prosecuted.

Who specifically?

Do I know

you're able to find out?

If they wanted, they could find out easily.

You go up and tell the reporter national security.

who gave it.

You have to do that.

And I suspect we'll be doing things like that.

Enrichment doesn't mean like air conditioning and it doesn't mean to jack up your car enrichment is a bad word i love what he explains enrichment doesn't mean the dumbest possible explanation in this context it means something yeah i also hadn't realized he was trying to brand it as the 12-day war because he wants he wants this he wants it to be a big part of history so he feels like six days war now there's a 12 days war

Not working for you?

No.

If you were a reporter, how nervous would you be about those threats?

I think it's serious.

I think it's really scary.

Yeah.

And it depends on what they do.

But,

you know, I was remembering you had Judith Miller went to jail for 85 days because she refused to reveal her source until Scooter Libby came forward.

Matthew Cooper, journalist at Time, almost went to jail, but then Carl Rove came forward and said he was the source.

At that time, that was a serious prosecutor named Patrick Fitzgerald, who was appointed by James Comey, who was appointed by James Ashcroft, who had recused himself because he was too connected.

I mean, this is how far we've fallen.

James Ashcroft recused himself because he was too connected to Karl Rove and the Bush White House.

They were trying to show restraint, show that they had integrity, that they were beyond reproach.

And even then, they went after a journalist in a way that was, I think, deeply, deeply wrong.

They threw Judith Miller, who has a lot of problems with the reporting, but they threw Judith Miller in a jail, even though she said she wouldn't speak for 85 days until Scooter Libby agreed.

And, you know, they can claim it was an intimidation, but of course it was.

He wouldn't have come forward if she hadn't been thrown in jail.

Look,

people were critical of Eric Holder when they went after James Rosen.

So in the Obama administration, people who leaked classified information were prosecuted.

And those prosecutions included the subpoenaing of records from members of the media, including like metadata, I think from James Rosen, who was a Fox News reporter who got a leak about North Korea from someone at the State Department.

But Obama, I think, was very clear that he did not support charging journalists.

And that even extended to WikiLeaks and Julian Assange because the concern was if you charge Julian Assange and you set a precedent, that could then be applied to the mainstream media.

Now, Obama didn't create a precedent, but Trump later prosecuted Assange in 2019 with like 17 counts of espionage.

But then in 2024, it seemed to suggest that he'd consider pardoning Assange.

So, like, who knows where he is on this?

The point is that, so, when the Obama DOJ

was going after a leak, they called Rosen, a co-conspirator, just to get at his information.

The DOJ also gathered the information from AP reporters to get at a different leak around a Yemen plot that the CIA had foiled.

And then ultimately, Holder basically said, we will never put a journalist in jail.

It was a good thing.

But all of that is a way to say

Eric Holder, Patrick Fitzgerald, James Comey, these people have been replaced by Cash Patel, Pam Bondi, people with zero integrity.

So you had a time when journalists were getting locked up for an investigation into something that could look a lot like this under people that, as much as I dislike them, had more scruples than fucking these

Yahoos will ever have.

So it is a genuinely scary prospect if they actually start looking into it.

Yeah, I would be quite nervous, to be honest.

I did notice that Trump just dropped his lawsuit against Anne Seltzer, the longtime Iowa bolster who released polls out on November 2nd.

Yeah, good for him.

Remember her poll had Kamala winning 47-43.

That Anseltzer poll ended up being off by 16 points.

And then Trump wanted to sue her, I think, claiming election interference.

And they just dropped it today out of nowhere.

Yeah, it's frivolous and ridiculous.

So I wonder why.

Why on that one case, they decided maybe they're just, I don't understand.

There's no meat on that bone.

I understand why he's going after Paris.

I understand why a frivolous lawsuit against CBS has a place to go for him.

A frivolous lawsuit against ABC has a place to go for him.

There's wins that he can get.

What are you trying to eke out from the Des Moines register?

What are you trying to get out of Anne Seltzer?

It's stupid.

Made no sense.

In a true social post on Saturday, Trump appeared to leverage military support for Israel, which Republicans and some Democrats always say is sacred, in order to pressure Israel to quit its, quote, witch hunt into Netanyahu's corruption scandals.

That's Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.

He is currently standing trial for charges of bribery, fraud, breach of trust, and these three separate cases that are kind of folded together.

Not long after Trump's post, Israeli courts canceled this week's hearings in the case.

They did so at Netanyahu's request, but the details explaining why are classified.

On Saturday night, Trump posted about the Gaza hostage deal or trying to get a Gaza hostage deal as well.

Love it.

The kind of like 4D chess explanation for Trump suddenly posting on Truth Social that Netanyahu's corruption trial should go away is he thinks alleviating the political pressure of jail time could give Bibi the political space he needs to cut a ceasefire deal and not worry about his government collapsing.

Do you buy that?

Or is he just sympathetic, you know, sympathy for all the corrupt dictators out there?

No, I do not buy that.

In fact, so the the good rule of thumb, the stupidest explanation is usually the correct one.

An official told Axios the president read in an article that BB had to be in court on Monday and thought it's crazy.

He identified with what BB is going through and decided to write something about it.

It seems to be, I mean, look, they could all be full of shit.

Who knows?

Some of this could, maybe there's a phone call where sort of BB ensorceled Trump with the stories of how hard it is for him to both face this trial and get this deal done.

We have no idea.

But basically, someone close to Trump is saying he read an article, thought it was stupid, identified with it, did the post.

So that to me feels, unless proven otherwise, that to me is the most plausible explanation.

I love identified with it.

The things, some of the things that Netanyahu was on trial for are just like so venal.

I mean, so there's, they virtually were numbering the cases.

Like case 1000 said that Netanyahu and his wife accepted like a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of gifts like cigars, jewelry, and champagne in exchange for political favors.

There's another case, case 2000, that Netanyahu is accused of trying to harm.

He was talking to some publisher of a newspaper and told that publisher that he would harm his rival newspaper in exchange for good coverage.

There's another case, case 4000, where Netanyahu allegedly provided regulatory help to a telecom company in exchange for favorable coverage for him and his family by the owner of that telecom company's news website.

So it's just like, there's just so much crap that this guy is accused of.

He's just such a corrupt piece of shit.

Yeah, it's it like it's so

maybe it's just like go, it's so obvious it isn't worth saying, but you know, Benjamin Netanyahu,

he does not disentangle his personal interests with the interests of his country.

Donald Trump does the same.

And by the way, the leadership of Iran does the same thing.

They are not doing what is in the interest of the Iranian people when they pursue this program.

So it's just a group of fucking egomaniacs battling it out, and the stakes are life and death, death, and a lot of people die, and a lot of people suffer

because these three people are in charge.

And that's whatever comes of this, the fact that these countries are led by two of the most corrupt leaders in any democratic or you know, democratish country on earth, and they're sort of negotiating across from despots in Iran puts everyone in those two countries, in all of our countries, everywhere at risk because

we live in fucking hell.

There's also a very weird political story about some State Department political appointee proposing that they use taxpayer money to help Maureen Le Pen appeal her conviction for embezzling funds.

For those who don't know, Marine Le Pen is this far-right French politician.

Her national rally party, some of the founders of it were literally Nazis, like former Waffen-SS members or Vichy French people.

It's just a very weird thing happening in our government right now.

Yeah, like that's a small example, but it's a big deal that J.D.

Vance goes to Germany and excoriates them for not welcoming like what came after Nazis, the sort of the neo-Nazi representative to back to the fold meets with them, right?

Like these people do not see themselves as leaders of all of us, as leaders of nation.

They are leaders of a right-wing movement.

And the people that

believe in that movement no law can hold them.

For the rest of us,

we don't matter.

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All right, let's talk about some immigration news.

So as usual, there's a lot happening here.

As you're listening to this, President Trump is headed to the so-called Alligator Alcatraz, this new migrant detention facility being built in the middle of the Everglades, just to be as cruel as humanly possible to the people who may be imprisoned there.

We also have a story about Christy Noam patting her income as governor of South Dakota by pocketing some of the donation money she solicited for a nonprofit dedicated to advancing her career and raising her profile.

But the biggest news is that on Friday, the Supreme Court ruled in the case on Trump's birthright citizenship order, which really became a case about whether federal judges can order nationwide injunctions.

The justices ruled six to three that judges cannot put nationwide holds on laws and actions they think are unconstitutional.

Love it, I know you talked to our buddies over at Strict Scrutiny about this last week.

What does this mean for this sort of underlying question about Trump's EO ending birthright citizenship?

So, in terms of how the court will rule, they did not rule on the substance of the birthright citizenship case.

But in practice, this ruling is incredibly dangerous, not just on this, but on a host of other issues, because basically what it is saying is:

if, let's say, the Trump administration picks somebody up and says they're not a citizen because of birthrights, they don't have birthright citizenship begins deportation proceedings they sue they get it stopped by a judge they can pick up another person who has the exact same profile exact same set of facts and it can't be stopped because every person i guess needs to go out and get a lawyer uh to sue uh if they are being uh mistreated by the trump administration if the trump administration is brazenly violating the constitution now Kavanaugh says, well, actually, there is a mechanism because you can do class actions.

And so immediately immediately the the the uh legal organization fighting birthright citizenship had that in the can they started the proceedings to create a class and that might be able to mitigate it in some cases.

But then you have Alito coming back and saying, no, don't get too fancy with these class actions.

We're watching that too.

You can't use class action lawsuits to achieve the same end, which is nationwide injunctions.

The bottom line is we have no idea what the impact of this will be.

It will cause a bunch of chaos.

Now,

on birthright citizenship and a host of other other issues, injunctions on brazenly unconstitutional orders was one of the key ways we were able to slow the Trump administration or stop the Trump administration in its tracks.

But it's worth putting together what's happening with the Big Beautiful Bill and what happened at the court because Donald Trump loves complaining about woke liberal judges.

Stephen Miller loves complaining about woke liberal judges.

But when Stephen Miller and Christy Noam went down to go meet with the field directors at the Department of of Homeland Security at ICE.

He was saying how they needed to do more, they needed to arrest more.

And what they were hearing back from the actual people on the ground implementing this policy is that they're resource limited, that they don't have the resources to do all this, that some of the agents don't feel it's their responsibilities, the others feel strapped.

The big, beautiful bill, along with cutting taxes for rich people, along with doing health care cuts, along with raising electricity costs, has a big chunk of money to unleash ICE, to fund detention centers, to fund mass deportations.

And so the combination of the court saying that the only court that can adjudicate the constitutionality of what Donald Trump is doing is the Supreme Court, and the fact that they're about to be, if this bill passes, get a bunch of resources, means there will be very, very little that people can do in the short term to fight back, that it will unleash what the Trump administration wants to do on mass deportations.

So it's extremely dangerous.

It will be dangerous on immigration and a host of other, a whole set of other issues.

What if the administration starts coming after Miver Pristone?

If the administration starts coming after gay and trans people, if the administration starts coming after all kinds of rules around health care access and religious objections, whatever it may be, there is going to be a ton of

rules that the Trump administration puts in place, and we have very few ways to stop it nationally until it reaches the Supreme Court.

Yeah, and just on the deportations, I mean, there's this long, I think it was the New York Times piece about how the State Department is spending most of its time just pushing countries to take deportees, usually it's places like Libya or South Sudan, like places that are as scary and as dangerous as possible because they think that will somehow serve as a deterrent.

And on the injunction piece, Jonathan Van Last at the bulwark had a smart piece on this ruling last week, I believe, and the likelihood that this could lead to patchwork rulings and kind of de facto different federal law in different places because there's different interpretations of the Constitution in different places.

So you could basically have red state laws and blue state state laws, and that means suddenly it's really, really important where you live because your rights and freedoms as guaranteed by the Constitution could be determined by the shittiest judge close to you.

Yes.

You know, it's one of those things where it's hard to talk about because it is really just very bad news.

And I was talking about this with Leah Littman and with Melissa Murray, who hosts Strict.

And

first of all, they pointed out that pressure, that drawing attention to what the judiciary does has an impact.

They see it, they feel it, they respond to it.

But the other part of it is, I'm not a fan of like, you know, you want to heighten the contradiction, right?

You want to like kind of, like, accelerationist, like,

let's have people experience how bad Trump can really be.

I don't believe in that because I think for the same reason, I think we need to stop this bill.

We should try to stop bad things and try to do good things and figure out the politics after.

But Trump has been protected.

You know, they blame the woke judges, but Trump is protected when his worst and most unpopular policies are stopped by judges, right?

This whole thing about calling Trump, you know, taco, all these people, Democrats being like, Trump's chickening out.

Chicken out.

When Trump doesn't do stuff, people love it.

And they think, oh, you know, Donald Trump, he sounds crazy, but he always chickens out.

He always moderates.

Things are never as bad as these liberals say it's going to be.

Well, the liberal judges are no longer going to stand in Trump's way.

He's going to do what he wants to do.

The only people that will be able to stop him at a national level is the Supreme Court.

And that means we are going to live with the consequences of what Donald Trump actually wants to do.

And I think we will start to see more blowback because of it.

I don't want to live in that world, but it's the world we're going to live in.

No, I do.

I feel similar feelings on Iran.

Like, obviously, I don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon.

I don't want the United States to get sucked into some extended, awful regime change war in the Middle East.

But there is this feeling right now, I think, that bombing Iran was cost-free that is based on the kind of compressed day-to-day, hour-to-hour news cycle and the way we judge events that I think is completely underappreciated, or at least not calculating the odds increasing that they will eventually get a nuclear weapon, or that they will respond to the United States or Israel with some sort of terrorist attack, whether it's directly or through proxies, or that there could be some awful like second or third order consequences to what happened, like more nuclear proliferation everywhere.

So I totally,

it's a huge challenge.

And but it's also what happens the next time the U.S.

is negotiating with a country and they don't trust us because when Donald Trump said you have two weeks, he was already planning to bomb someone.

What we're talking about today, whether it's on all of these issues,

you know, they put the huge Medicaid cuts two years out, right?

They have these things sunset so they can claim it's cheaper, but they plan to extend them forever.

They give money to coal companies now and cancel clean energy projects in the future.

Like everything about Trump, and this is a point Ezra Klein makes this often, which is that Trump borrows from the future.

Like when he he spends our credibility, they're literally borrowing trillions of dollars to pay for tax cuts for the rich.

They're going to fuck up clean energy for the next generation with this bill.

Why?

What?

To get a quick hit for some coal companies, for some billionaires right now, to give himself a quick political win before the July 4th holiday.

Same thing with Iran, right?

Like, oh, you know, a 48-hour story about how he feels tough because he saw Bibi was getting good press, so now he wants to bomb Iran.

Who's going to want to trust us?

Who's going to trust our word going forward?

Donald Trump borrows against the future.

And

we will pay in the long run,

whether we admit it or not.

So with these nationwide injunctions off the table for now, a bunch of Trump policies are likely going to go into effect right away.

One of those is from Friday.

Trump is going to end temporary protected status or TPS for immigrants from Haiti.

This was a big campaign promise.

It was centered infamously on his lie that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.

In the announcement, the Department of Homeland Security said: quote, the environmental situation in Haiti has improved enough that it is safe for Haitian citizens to return home.

I cannot overstate how much that is a lie.

This might be news to anyone who's actually been keeping track of what's happening there.

According to an AP tally last year, more than 5,600 people were killed in gang violence.

And from January to March this year, another 1,600 have died.

Love it.

The idea of deporting someone back to Haiti right now is so unimaginably cruel.

It's kind of like hard to wrap your head around it.

I guess this is all just part of the Stephen Miller deterrence.

I'm sure there's just a big bunch of racism in there, too.

Well, it's not even a deterrent.

These people are here legally.

They're following the rules.

Like, this is an attack on legal immigrants.

And

look, they have a, I think they have, I think it's in part, it's largely racist, right?

They don't seem to have a problem with immigrants from certain countries, but have a huge problem with immigrants from others.

But they have an ideological problem with temporary protective status because they don't view it as temporary, right?

People are granted this status, and it's from countries that are in turmoil.

That turmoil does not go away in a matter of months or if not years.

And so people end up having a status that allows them to stay in the country for a long time.

If you want to reform that system, propose some laws.

You want to reform that system over the time.

But they don't.

They're not disciplined.

They have no long-term plan.

They're not governing.

They just...

They want to exact a pain.

And so they're going to punish these people who basically did what we told them to do.

They applied.

They had temporary protective status.

They came.

They built life.

They support local economies.

Their kids go to school here.

Their kids

born here, they become citizens.

And so they're going to punish these people because they don't believe in this program.

And it will start here, but it won't end here because they're going to go after all kinds of other illegal immigrants.

So in Haiti, though, like, let's just, I want to double stamp this.

Like, in Haiti, we're talking about levels of violence that you rarely see outside of active war zones.

Like gangs, armed groups, they control 85% of the capital city, Port-au-Prince.

Last year, there were bloody massacres where like 130, 250 people were butchered with machetes in these like, you know, pogroms.

A million people have been displaced.

Like the government services have just completely collapsed.

Like there's no security.

And we're just, we're going to start deporting people on September 2nd back to that.

Like similar situation in Venezuela where 350,000 people are losing TPS.

Venezuela.

It went from being the richest country in South America in the 70s and 80s to the poorest or one of the poorest.

Obviously, most of the blame lies with Hugo Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro, the current president.

But the United States is sanctioning the shit out of that country.

We are crushing their economy.

We have been for years under a bipartisan group of presidents.

And as you said, like the Biden administration created a process to allow Venezuelan migrants to come to the U.S.

legally.

They followed the rules, and now that's being ripped away from them.

And these people are just going to be sent

home or anywhere or to Libya.

Like, we don't know.

Yeah, there was a time, too, when conservatives viewed people that fled left-wing governments were

politically valuable, right?

That they were people you welcomed because they were refugees from a system you despised.

You didn't hold them responsible for the sins of governments you didn't agree with.

But their first order is getting rid of immigrants, legal immigrants, undocumented immigrants.

Like that is their goal.

That is their agenda.

The rest is immaterial to them.

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Another move that's even weirder or scarier, it's getting less attention is there's this internal DOJ memo issued by the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Division.

This was from early June.

It was reported out by the New Republic and it says, it sort of lays out what the

division's top enforcement priorities should be.

One of the items on the list is prioritizing denaturalization.

It then listed out 10 categories of naturalized citizens who should be targeted for losing their status, including people they deem to be national security threats or who committed fraud or have gang ties and people who lied during the naturalization process as determined by the officials at this deeply partisan and politicized Trump agency.

This is incredibly ominous, given that we've already seen this administration throw people in jail for attending a pro-Palestine protest, for signing an op-ed in support of Palestinian rights.

If suddenly, like, we're just going to denaturalize someone for vague, quote-unquote, natural security concerns.

So, Andy Oggles, who's a Republican congressperson, he posts that Zoran Mamdani, who just won the primary in New York,

if he didn't disclose his advocacy for something on a citizenship forbes, he lied when he became a U.S.

citizen.

If he admitted that, he faces deportation.

If what happens now is any person who is a citizen of the United States, a naturalized citizen of the United States, if they upset the regime, if they say something that a guy like Andy Oggles

doesn't like, if they take a politically unpopular position, if what happens then is a group of political hacks in the Trump administration then start going and pulling forms and looking for any inconsistency, what that says is, if you say something we don't like, your citizenship is in doubt.

And if your citizenship is in doubt, your rights as an American.

That's it.

If your citizenship is fungible, your rights are fungible.

It is so dangerous.

And so obviously their next move once they move on from grabbing people like

Mahmoud Khalil off the streets or others off the streets in Columbia.

He's a leader of pro-Palestinian protests.

And like, this is the slippery slope.

This is the dangerous path, right?

Because suddenly American citizens will not feel safe to speak their mind if they weren't born here.

Because like any of us, if you go, this is why, like, you know, an audit sucks, even if you follow the rules you go into anybody's file you go through remedy you're gonna find a mistake you're gonna find something you can find something and trump it up that's what makes it so dangerous yeah i mean in this uh the the

allegations against zorin mamdani are based on rap lyrics he wrote in 2017 like what are we talking about and caroline levitt got asked about this today at the white house press briefing she said surely if they are true it's something that should be investigated so they they're not walking away from this they're leaning in well there the the thing about that too is what she said in that in that press briefing is that's not something he said it's not something donald trump has said but because these people have no kind of

they're not they don't have a kind of respect for American values they don't really understand what makes America a great place they don't understand freedom and what it's worth she can't do what an honorable

patriotic person would do is say we respect the rights of citizens of the country and we don't target people for their beliefs and he may we may not like this guy but that doesn't mean we're going to suddenly start questioning whether or not they're Americans right they don't they don't have that capacity we're so far gone gone from it, we're used to it now, but it's ridiculous.

Yeah, and then there's, look,

for those who think we might be inflating this, I mean, there's a lower burden of proof for a denaturalization than for a criminal case.

There's no statute of limitations, so they can do this at any time.

From 1907 to 1967, 22,000 Americans were denaturalized.

So this is like the Red Scare era.

Now that dropped way down from the 90s through 2017, but they could certainly ramp this right back up.

Yeah, I mean, look,

you know, people talk about like green card marriages, right, like almost as a joke.

Like, it's not a joke when all of a sudden there is a partisan, politicized effort to throw people out of this country.

Yeah.

All right, finally, we wanted to give you guys an update on the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who has opted to remain in federal custody as his human smuggling case proceeds rather than risk being potentially deported again, which is what the Department of Homeland Security seems primed to do.

On Sunday, the Washington Post reported that the star witness against Abrego Garcia is a three-time felon who has been released from prison early to a halfway house in exchange for cooperating.

That witness has had multiple run-ins with the police for public intoxication, transporting undocumented migrants, drunkenly firing a handgun out of a car window in a residential neighborhood, and a few other things.

Love it.

It basically just seems like the Trump administration is letting an actually dangerous repeat offender free in order to continue their prosecution of someone that they fucked up, they wrongly sent to El Salvador, but now they've deemed a political enemy who is kind of like the keystone holding together the argument for their entire policy of sending Venezuelans mostly to El Salvador.

Yeah, look, they said

that they were going to get criminals off the street.

So they're putting a criminal on the street in order to pursue this, what is clearly a political prosecution.

Whatever evidence they ultimately put forward is a political prosecution.

And we know that because it didn't exist until he was on his way back to the U.S.

to right the previous wrong of their deportation.

But this is what we're seeing across the board.

They claimed that they were going to be going after criminals in our country.

Instead, because of these kind of ad hoc,

chaotic roundups, they are grabbing people who are not criminals at a far higher rate than they were before.

They claim that they want to go after the deficit, so they're going to pass a bill that dramatically increases the debt.

Like they're just, they're just,

they are, they are lying

and they are failing on their own terms.

But

it's just like a small example of how much of this is just rhetoric for the Fox News audience, while in practice, they are rounding up people who are just trying to go to work.

They are not focusing on criminals.

What you're about to talk about next makes that even more clear.

Yeah, I mean, it's just remarkable how often their policies are not just cruel, but also self-defeating.

So, you know, The Times is a big piece today about Trump's deal he cut with El Salvador, with Nae Bukele, that allowed the United States to send people like Kilmar Obrego-Garcia and a couple hundred other Venezuelan men to this nightmare Sukkot prison in El Salvador.

As part of that deal, there was some funding that went to Bukele's government, like you know, five million dollars or something, um, kind of de minimis.

But as part of the deal, the U.S.

also agreed to drop charges against uh a MS-13 gang leader named Vampiro, uh, who is being prosecuted in New York on charges of terrorism, murder, and corruption.

This guy was accused of overseeing killings in at least three countries.

But because we cut this deal with Bukele,

he was sent back to El Salvador.

Now,

Bukele's government says, oh, they'll prosecute him there.

But it seems very likely that the real reason that Bukele wanted this guy, Vampiro, sent back to El Salvador along with several others that he's seeking the release of is because they are gang leaders who could provide or have provided the U.S.

government evidence about Bukele cutting deals with gangs for political reasons.

Basically, the gangs agreed to hide the bodies of the people they were murdering and to help round up support for Bukele around elections in exchange for special favors when they were in prison or, you know, whatever.

And so Trump's policy here is not tough on crime.

It is actually undermining a major prosecution of some of the most senior MS-13 officials that we've ever arrested.

Yeah, and look,

this is why you don't grab people and throw them into a gulag without any form of due process or ability to question their accusers because you don't have all the facts and governments are flawed.

People make mistakes or people are corrupt.

Right now, people are being grabbed on the street in Los Angeles and they're being held.

They're not able to contact their lawyers.

They're not off often.

They don't know where they're being held.

They don't know where they're being taken to.

They're being grabbed off the street by people who are not identifying themselves, who are covering their faces.

It's often not clear what law enforcement agency they're even from or if they're just being working for that law enforcement agency.

And

look, it is dangerous and wrong when it happens in a country like El Salvador, but it's not supposed to happen here because that's why we set up a constitution that has habeas corpus.

That's why we have all of these protections.

That's why we require law enforcement to show their badge and to declare themselves, not just because it is important in that case, it is so that other people know that if someone tries to grab them off the street

and they're not wearing a uniform, you can't later be, what, held in contempt, accused of a crime for obstructing law enforcement because somebody wearing a mask tried to grab you off the street.

I know, yeah.

Did you see this video that was going around over the weekend of this mom in Pasadena who was arrested by a bunch of ICE agents?

Like only two of the three had a badge, none word uniform, and they arrested this woman and they picked up the wrong person.

They arrested the wrong person.

Like they had, they end up having to call 911 on ICE because it just looked like an abduction.

Yeah, they are abductions.

They are abductions.

That's what's happening.

These are abductions.

It's lawless.

It's chaotic.

It's dangerous.

These are abductions.

People are being abducted off the street in America by people wearing masks, taken to places God knows where, often unable to be found by their families or their lawyers.

It's happening.

It's dangerous.

And when you look at what's coming next, when you look at them talking about doing denaturalization proceedings, suddenly that's open to citizens, citizens who weren't born here, here, who they claim may have lied on a form 30 years ago, an inconsistency.

You know,

that is what's going to happen.

That is the danger of what happens when right now,

they don't have the money.

Wait till they have the resources.

Yeah, the way too many.

Yeah, in practice, you know,

dangerous people are getting put back on the street.

And

innocent communities full of people, mostly Latino people here in Los Angeles, are terrorized and scared to leave the house.

And it is just truly awful.

Well, it's also, there's a limited amount of resources.

This push by Stephen Miller and Trump and Noam to go after as many people as possible, it means those are people driving around, grabbing people who are just trying to go to work.

They're not focused on finding the criminals that are still out, right, that have been released.

They're not trying to find the people that they claim that they were going to target, right?

Like there are people walking the streets who Joe Biden and all of us would have thought, oh, that's a person that needs to be found and deported, that found and arrested.

Those are people that are on the streets because that is not how you get the numbers, right?

This is a numbers game.

Yeah.

Hey, Tommy.

Murphy said this: that so Iran still has centrifuges, it still has uranium enriched to 60%, and it still has nuclear scientists.

Have you ever tried to concentrate

when

like on a hard project,

but your dog was barking?

Sure.

And it's like hard to really focus.

How do you do nuclear scientist stuff in Iran?

When you're getting bombed?

I just don't know.

I just think it's hard to concentrate.

That's a scary job.

Yeah.

Talk to me about the Venn diagram overlap between people smart enough to be a nuclear scientist and dumb enough to be a nuclear scientist in Iran.

Yeah, you got to wonder the little coercion here because they've been,

their vehicles have been exploding for a very long time.

This has been a long effort by the tough job.

The Iranian.

It's a tough job.

Yeah.

Well, I'm glad we could end that on an even lighter note.

like if somebody if i lived in iran and someone said hey what do you know about ad apps i'd be like fucking nothing nothing nothing you absolutely nothing nothing nothing i want to start an app uh okay that's it for us from today is that allowed i don't even know i don't know that's it for the show uh dan will be back on thursday with guest host jen sake so that's exciting uh thanks for listening talk to you soon you ran you have never heard of it

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Big announcement.

Dan's in the Epstein files.

You got to get ahead of that.

No, that's not it.

We're here to announce something.

It's called Crooked Con.

In November, it will have been a year since Donald Trump won again.

Everyone has had some time to sit and think about what we've all done and what we haven't done.

And we wanted to get everyone together who doesn't want Donald Trump or someone like Donald Trump to be president again to talk about the path forward.

Truthfully, Republicans have been really smart about this and they gather everyone together.

And sure, at the beginning, it seemed like a bunch of fringe crazies, but guess who's now running the government?

Those fringe crazies.

We need to get together, talk about what's going on, get smarter, get better, maybe try to figure out how we screwed up so bad in the past, move forward.

Get people together in person, have a bunch of conversations with organizers, strategists, politicians, the cool ones.

If you work in politics at any level, from Capitol Hill to in your community, this is the place to go to learn what's happening in this country, to learn from some of the smartest people out there, and meet the people who are on the front lines trying to beat MAGA.

And And in case you guys think it's going to be just us neolib Obama shills, we're going to have

people from across the political spectrum, if that political spectrum is from the left to the center right.

It'll run from the left to Tim Miller.

Basically, that's the, and Sarah, that's, that's really the bounce.

We're going to get everyone together and we're going to have some fun.

We're also going to do a Pate of America show the first night just to kick things off.

And then the next day, we're going to all get together and get down to business.

Yeah, get down to business and fun.

There'll be alcohol.

Yeah, Dan's going to do shots.

Anyway, get your tickets.

Crookedcon.com.

Is it crookedcon.com?

Yeah.

Hey, great job getting crookedcon.com.

Crookedcon.com.

Stay tuned for more information, but we're going to be announcing our lineup soon.

November 6th and 7th, Washington, D.C., Crooked.com.com.

It's like Kim Crook.com.

CrookedCon.com.com.

CrookedCon.com.

CrookedCon.com.

It's going to be wild.

It's going to be wild.

It'll be wild.