Overtime – Episode #493: Adam Schiff, Bob Costas, John Avlon, Zerlina Maxwell, Grover Norquist

This podcast is supported by Progressive, a leader in RV Insurance.

RVs are for sharing adventures with family, friends, and even your pets.

So, if you bring your cats and dogs along for the ride, you'll want Progressive RV Insurance.

They protect your cats and dogs like family by offering up to $1,000 in optional coverage for vet bills in case of an RV accident, making it a great companion for the responsible pet owner who loves to travel.

See Progressive's other benefits and more when you quote RV Insurance at progressive.com today.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates, pet injuries, and additional coverage and subject to policy terms.

CRM was supposed to improve customer relationships.

Instead, it's shorthand for can't resolve much.

Which means you may have sunk a fortune into software that just bounces customer issues around but never actually solves them.

On the ServiceNow AI platform, CRM stands for something better.

With AI built into one platform, customers aren't mired in endless loops of automated indifference.

They get what they need when they need it.

Bad CRM was then.

This is ServiceNow.

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Ma.

Okay, we're back.

All right, Congressman, how do you propose to deal with the White House's refusal to let its aides testify before Congress?

Oh, yeah, that's the latest obstruction.

Well, we're going to have to force the issue.

We're going to have to litigate it in court.

And we're going to have to look at other options as well.

And that may mean devices we've used in the past where we cut off funding for certain offices within certain agencies if they don't cooperate.

So we'll look at whatever tools that we have

because at the end of the day if this president can succeed in stonewalling the Congress it means that our power of oversight is effectively nullified and that will obviously have serious repercussions when you have someone who lacks character in the Oval Office.

but it will also have repercussions for any president who follows.

And so there's a lot at stake in this fight.

It's not just over whether a certain witness testifies, it's over whether we have a system of checks and balances that still works.

Okay.

Grover?

By the way,

you go on Fox News.

Grover just told me he went up at the comedy store last night.

Yeah?

The comedy store?

That takes balls because that's not

a conservative audience.

Did you do stand up?

Did they laugh?

Yeah,

we did well.

You can make

how many judges.

Just we.

Who's the slave puppet?

The club.

It was a,

I think about 12 people performing.

It was a conservative slate, you're saying?

No, no, no.

Everybody else was talking about sex.

I tried to do some just regular, I didn't go blue.

Everyone else went deep blue.

You'd have been happy.

Was it mostly about taxes?

No, it wasn't about taxes at all.

Oh.

It was like jokes.

It was comedy.

Oh, okay.

There's no jokes about taxes.

Okay.

We were making fun of the French.

With a puppy.

Making fun of the French.

Well, we can all get in on that French.

That's a piece of it.

Do you think Stephen Moore, also a frequent guest on our show, should be on the Fed board?

Now, Stephen is an economist like Dr.

Pepper's a doctor, but,

you know.

Okay.

Yeah, no,

I think Steve should, and I think he will be on the Fed board.

Really, besides the fact that he agrees, he's totally on your page with taxes.

He's the, you know.

He's fine on taxes, but he's also, look, he's also for commodity-backed currency.

But does he know

that?

A country's central bank is sort of key to keeping our shit together and not having the, what is it, unfucked?

Unfuck America.

Unfucked America.

When you undermine the institutions that are supposed to keep a president accountable, the independent institutions, law enforcement, the Fed, balance of powers, journalists, Trump goes after these intentionally and constantly.

And the appointment of Moore is just an effort effort to do that.

He'd put a crony on the board of the Fed.

It's his old play.

So many stooges.

Come on.

This is a stooge.

You may disagree with Moore's policy of sort of stooping.

No, let's harden.

I don't know what you're talking about.

Let's talk about qualifications.

You really think he has the qualifications?

Yeah.

Look, he's a serious guy.

He's a serious student of economics.

The tax plan that he put together turned the economy from one that wasn't growing very rapidly to growing at 3%.

Today, we just found out the last quarter, the economy grew at 3.2%.

Good GDP.

This is rather significant.

It's a quarter number.

But that has nothing to do with whether Steve Moore should be on the Fed, which is something that he has attacked constantly throughout his career.

Did Steve helped write the tax bill that did that, which is more than other people have done.

This has nothing to do with whether or not the qualifications were sitting on the Fed.

However, it might be relevant that he made several comments over the years.

Ridiculously misogynistic, sexist comments.

Shouldn't be female sports casters unless they look like so-and-so or unless they dress like so-and-so.

These

personally.

Yeah, I did.

As a matter of fact.

These would have been retrograde positions in Kate Smith's time,

let alone more recently.

But he almost said that women shouldn't be at men's basketball games because it's so annoying to see women.

Isn't there a place that men can go?

This has nothing to do with interest rates.

No,

I don't think he should.

So is there anything you can do about this, Stephen Moore, on the court, on the Fed bench?

Well, you know, I share the view he doesn't belong there.

He's not qualified to be there.

You can't stop him.

And if you're going to cite the tax giveaway bill as a credential, that's all the more reason not to have him in that position.

Okay.

Bob Costas, what's your reaction to the right-wing's embrace of Putin, considering you were criticized by people like Rush Limbaugh for being too favorable towards him in 2014?

I remember that.

Well,

let's start out with the false premise to begin with.

Right.

What I said about Putin, among many things said about Putin in the course of hosting the Olympics from Sochi, was that Forbes, not Mother Jones or the nation, Forbes had named him for 2013 the most influential world leader, dropping Obama to two.

Now, naturally, the right-wing crowd took that out of context.

I became a straw man.

That became a talking point.

They ignored the fact that prior to that and after it, I noted he has the mentality of the former KGB agent that he was, that he's an international thug, that journalists and dissidents are suppressed or worse

in Russia.

They have anti-gay laws.

They sponsor repressive regimes like Syria.

It didn't make any difference that I said all those things because that wasn't useful to their business model.

However, you look at the way Trump has cozied up to Putin and all those curious moments where he could have made clear that he was an American first and did not, okay, but to that crowd, it's all a matter of, you know,

that's their tribe.

And they cheat at the Olympics.

Oh, they absolutely cheated at the Olympics.

They cheated right under the IOC's nose at the Sochi Olympics.

There should be be no Russian meddling.

Meddling, get it?

I get it.

Okay.

All right.

John Avalon, do you have any thoughts on why Bill Barr would jeopardize his legacy to appease Trump?

Look, it is crystal clear that he misled the American people intentionally by putting forward the most positive spin possible on the report

and closing the door on obstruction, you know, at least unless Congress picks it up.

I think because there's an Overton window with Trump, right?

He didn't nominate Chris Kobach for AG, so all of a sudden Bill Barr is comparatively respected.

If you look at his record in the George H.W.

Bush administration, this is a play he's done before.

He's done these memos that sort of summarize, he says, what an underlying opinion says.

And then after it's subpoenaed two, three years later, you find out actually it's a very different deal.

He's clearly making good on his 19-page memo that he wrote for the president about Mueller.

I don't, I think he will go down in history.

This will be a real mark not only against him and the administration, but this was a total distortion and attempt to frame the debate in a way that's favorable to the president, and it did not represent the contents of the Mueller report.

You may not be unhappy they didn't go far enough, but there's a lot there.

There are 12 open cases,

and I think there's a lot more investigations that you're going to be done in the House about follow the money and other things.

I don't care.

It felt good to rip Mueller a new asshole.

There you go.

The other thing that is so

galling about Barr is, of course, Mueller wrote his own summary.

If he wanted to give a preview and not wait until the whole report was out,

Mueller had a summary, but the whole communication strategy was get Barr out there to misrepresent the report.

Why did Barr want the job?

I marvel at this with so many people who are willing to completely debase themselves for a seat at Donald Trump's table.

A guy who's so disloyal to others.

When Rudy Giuliani first went on the talk show circuit as a surrogate of Trump, I wrote a tweet, and unlike the president, I have my staff review it to see if it's insane.

And

my draft said, you know, whatever happened to America as a mayor, why are so many people willing to completely debase themselves receipt at Donald Trump's table?

And two of my staff said, you can't possibly send that out.

You can't possibly send that out.

They were both New Yorkers, and I said, why?

And they said, because he completely debased himself long before now.

I used to work for Rudy Giuliani when he was mayor, and I was proud to do it.

But I do think this is a different chapter.

I do think folks have a tendency to show a lot of loyalty and fealty to somebody

who does not show loyalty in return.

And just back on the bar thing, the most egregious thing was he repeated six times in the presser of the day and in the memo the exonerating,

the non-exonerating language, right?

The other half of the sentence said that the Trump campaign expected to benefit from Russian efforts to influence the election.

That's as crystal clear as it get.

That effort's ongoing today, and Donald Trump is still in denial.

Yeah, it's completely insane.

All right.

Thank you, everybody.

Thank you, audience.

We'll see you next week.

Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Ma every Friday night at 10, or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand.

For more information, log on to HBO.com.