Overtime - Episode #430: Suing Trump, Online Extremism, Climate, Stocks

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

Richard Payner, my surprise comedian.

Really nice.

Showing it up.

What's the basis of your group's lawsuit against President Trump?

You got a lawsuit too.

There's the lawsuit side of the table.

Yeah, which lawsuit against President Trump?

There's so many of them.

This lawsuit brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington is about the money the president is getting from foreign governments.

And

yeah, that's actually illegal.

The founders of our country figured that out, that foreign governments would like to bribe other countries' political leaders because they were doing it all over there in England.

The parliament was getting bought off by not only the king of Great Britain, but the English parliament is being bought off by the king of France.

And so they figured, you know, we don't want that going on here.

So they have this provision in the Constitution called the Emoluments Clause.

If they drafted it in the 1970s when I was growing up, they would have called it Payola Cause, but it's the same idea.

That nobody holding a position of trust with the United States government can receive profits or benefits, gifts, any of that from foreign governments.

And that includes companies controlled by foreign governments, including the Bank of China, which is apparently loaning the Trump organization some money.

And I know a lot of people say it's about the hotel rooms, and that's part of it.

We talk about the the hotel rooms, the diplomats run them out, and then they rent the ballroom, they have a big party, and all the Middle Eastern countries want a party at the Trump Hotel.

And you go over to the Willard if you want to meet Democrats, but

so that's the deal.

We think this is unconstitutional.

So we're going into federal court in New York and we're asking a judge to look at this and look at all the money the president's got.

I don't know if you smoke pot, but I'm going to try to.

Should Jared Kushner's security clearance be revoked while he is under investigation?

Oh, I do.

Yes.

And lose such a vital part of our government?

Anyone want to tackle that one?

He is a busy man.

He's a busy lot of responsibility.

He's in the Middle East.

He's back in the U.S.

Oh, he's back.

Did he solve it already?

It's in the works.

It's in the works, right?

I knew it would only take a while.

But the question is, will it?

And it won't.

I mean, the president lost his right arm with Michael Flynn being gone, Jared Kushner's his left.

He's not going to get a shit.

His administration is becoming a family business.

Six months from now, it might be just Donald and Ivanka and Jared, and that may be the entire administration.

Just like every banana republic.

Is there no legal way to take it away when somebody's under investigation?

Is it up to the president?

It's up to the president.

The legal way is to get rid of the president.

It's like phone calls.

One after another.

Majid, what responsibilities do tech companies like Facebook and Twitter have in policing online extremism?

Well, there is a responsibility.

The British Prime Minister recently announced, Theresa May, that she was going to regulate the internet, police the internet.

I'm not so sure that's the solution.

I think that that's...

Yeah, it's not a solution, and it's not possible.

I think the way forward is to encourage more counter-speech.

So ISIS and other jihadists.

More you is what I say.

I say more you.

Thank you.

It's kind of you to say.

I wouldn't say that about myself.

But ISIS and other jihadist groups are active online.

They actually are ahead of us, you know, way ahead of us when it comes to online recruitment.

And their propaganda videos are, as we all know, of a quality that is really effective.

So we need to be both countering their message online and producing, so that's counter-narratives, and also producing alternative narratives online to really get to

those young people and get to them before ISIS gets together.

Have you seen evidence of that?

The work is at a very nascent stage.

It's really sad, actually.

So much more needs to be done.

And the tech companies are beginning to invest in some of this.

Facebook has just announced a measure where they're going to be looking at some of this.

But they are way behind in this stuff.

Okay.

Bradley, are you hopeful that citizens' efforts on climate change can counteract the Trump's administration's harmful environmental policies?

Yes, I actually am.

I've been working with a group called Citizens Climate Lobby, and they work in a very interesting way.

They sort of train you to talk to Republicans about climate change.

It's kind of a combination of like DEF CON 5 marital therapy and

how to work with a bear in heat, like no sudden movements.

But it actually is

exciting.

It was really exciting to me, especially in these polarizing times.

Carlos Carbello,

from Florida, I think the 26th district, is a Republican who you should have on the show because their voices are very powerful.

And what you do is, like, it's so much,

it's fun to stand in righteous indignation and scream at somebody who's denying science to you, but it doesn't move the ball.

And it actually makes it worse.

So you find common ground, and there's a lot of economic common ground

in dealing with climate change.

There's tremendous economic opportunity.

Corporations are actually, they want predictability.

They want us to deal with it.

My frustration with these corporations who say that they're upset about pulling out of the Paris Accords is they say they believe that climate change is happening, but they don't make it a lobbying priority.

And we need to call out these seemingly benevolent, and many of them are, corporations, and say, if you're saying that climate change is happening, if you're saying it is the threat that it is, you need to make it a priority.

You're in power.

You got a lot of money.

Together, you can beat the Koch brothers.

All right.

Final question.

I think we're the the best one to answer this.

What explains why the U.S.

stock market continues to rise?

Well, look, the president inherited a relatively sound economy.

We're continuing to add some 200,000 jobs each month.

Nothing catastrophic has happened in the world, be it any sort of side.

Well, we've talked about cyber attacks, but no terrorist attacks, no financial crisis thus yet.

Interest rates are relatively low.

So the market continues to ride the way it does.

I mean, I think what's surprising is that we expected to see massive sell-offs following Brexit.

We expected to see sell-offs following the election here.

And also, I always thought that the market hated above all volatility.

And the year we had Mr.

Volatility in office.

I thought that would spook them, but apparently that was not the case.

Yeah, we had one or two day blips where the market would tank a couple of times, but other than that, the market's been relatively slow.

I think it's a Trump bubble.

I think we'll look back on it.

There's not enough fear.

Usually, when you have a stock market that's rising this fast, there's a certain amount of anxiety there that the absence of that fear tells me that that it's going to, we're going to see it as a bubble at some point.

And there's also anticipation, remember, of

tax cuts, of all of his plans that he laid out and that he ran on.

The market is still anticipating that that will come to fruition.

Money rules.

Thank you, everybody.

Thank you, panel.

You were terrific.

Okay.

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