Bill Kristol: The Preposterous and Ridiculous Lies About the FBI

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All right, hey, guys. A few programming notes on this January 6th anniversary.
Before we get to Bill, the first, we are launching a newsletter this week focused on the Trump immigration regime. It's going to be led by Adrian Carasquillo.
Love Adrian. Been working with him for for a long time he's a great reporter and uh he's great for this uh he knows the immigration beat he's been doing this for a while and i'm just glad to have somebody of his caliber on one of what might be the most important or maybe top two or three most important issues of the trump administration um the newsletter is going to be called huddled masses i'll out twice a week.
You can sign up at thebork.com slash subscribe if you haven't. Former congressional candidate John Avalon, who's been in the Extended Bork fam for a while now, has a new pod series we're hosting called How to Fix It.
The first episode of this season is out on civics education. Some folks have given us feedback.
They're looking for more off the news and solutions oriented content. I totally get that.
And I'm glad John is going to be taking that on and providing it. So the first episode of that is already out how to fix it with John Avalon.
Number three, we're leaning into YouTube this year. We've been leaning into it.
But me and Sam and others are gonna be doing some interviews and hot takes that don't fit the daily pod schedule. I know a lot of you guys are kind of in a, you're in a routine.
I've got this routine with other pods where, you know, you got your afternoon, it's a daily. And so when there are other things that don't really fit that schedule, either because of breaking news or because it's kind of a niche topic or somebody wrote an interesting article I want to go a little deeper on, We're going to be popping those up on YouTube.
So if you want more, make sure to

subscribe to our YouTube page. We'll also have a salutary announcement for somebody in the fam at the end of the pod.
So please stick around for that. All right.
Up next, it's Monday. So it's Bill Kristol.

Now we gather, due to a selfish man's injured pride and the outrage of supporters who he has deliberately misinformed for the past two months and stirred to action this very morning. What happened here today was an insurrection incited by the president of the United States.
Those who choose to continue to support his dangerous gambit by objecting to the results of a legitimate democratic election will forever be seen as being complicit in an unprecedented attack against our democracy. Fairly or not, they'll be remembered for their role in the shameful episode in American history.
That will be their legacy. That was Mitt Romney four years ago today.
It certainly raises some questions about how the participants of that insurrection will now be remembered. And it's Monday, so I've got Bill Kristol here to discuss.
Bill, what you think? Is that going to be their legacy? We're on the four-year anniversary here of the January 6th insurrection. You know, I hope it's their legacy on the eight-year anniversary or 9th or 10th or 11th, but right now the leader of that insurrection, the inspirer of it, kind of the organizer really, Donald J.
Trump, is going to be inaugurated in two weeks as President of the United States. His administration will be stuffed full of defenders, excusers, defenders, now cheerleaders for the January 6th insurrection and for the attempted coup that kind of preceded it for a couple of months within the government.
And they're going to pardon Romney. Trump will pardon a lot of the January 6th.
Romney might need a pardon the next two weeks. Well, that's right.
He'll prosecute Romney and Liz Cheney, who told the truth about January 6th, and will pardon the January 6th rioters. So four years ago and the day after, among conservatives, not just Mitt Romney, but among all kinds of people, this was the one thing that everyone repudiated.
This was shameful. For the people who like Trump, they were telling him this is going to ruin your reputation and everyone was walking away from it and here we are four months later and it's a um you have to be a excuser slash defender of j6 uh of the insurrection to have a future in the trump administration pretty much or in republican politics and they're in they're running the country yeah and you get mocked for acting like it's a big deal.
And it's like, oh, are you guys not over that now? That was four years ago. That's ancient history.
You guys are still talking about that? We just have a ton of coverage on January 6th because we're not going to be cowed by their jeers. And I want to get through a couple of the different pieces because there's some interesting news as well.
But you led your morning newsletter with George Orwell saying restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. It is important to restate the obvious.
I think especially as memories start to fade. One of the guys we have writing on the site this morning is Sergeant Annell.
He's the Capitol Police officer who was defending the Capitol that day against the mob. He writes this, this is the fourth anniversary of January 6th.
This one hits harder than the other three and makes the moral injury far greater. What took place was an unforgivable cardinal sin, but clearly much of the country, including one of our political parties, has chosen to reward those who committed it.
I do think it's valuable to spend time discussing the obvious about why that was bad. That's a very moving piece by Sajak Goodell, which people should read.
And I found it moving and a bit depressing, of course. You know, your friend Steve Bannon, who's smart and often, you know, he actually sees around the corner a little more than some of his mega buddies.
Two days, I think after the insurrection on January 8th, 2021, he was already understanding that fighting for the interpretation of January 6th would be extremely important. He wanted to do some stuff in the last two weeks of the Trump presidency that didn't work out, further demonstrations and showing they weren't embarrassed by it.
But he understood from the beginning that the definition of January 5th,th, looking back, would be a defining thing going forward. And I think Trump had an instinct to that too, obviously, pretty early on and worked pretty hard on that for the last three or four years.
And then so many others just capitulated and went along. And it is just extraordinary that when you do read what people said, when it was fresh in people's minds and when they knew enough to know what had happened.
And incidentally, it's not as if we've learned new things that have made it less horrible, less contemptible, less damaging what happened on January 6th. Quite the opposite.
We have the January 6th committee report, which Trump's people hate, but which is none of its factual conclusions have really been challenged, which shows how much more was going on behind the scenes that we didn't quite know about right at the justice department and elsewhere so people should be more upset by what trump tried to do and it said he's managed they've managed to really uh reverse the narrative yeah and and to your point trump's instinct to defend himself with self-preservation right it was ego right like versus what man and others were doing we're the potential death of the movement what should have been the death of the movement right that day um you could do this for a million people so i almost hate to pick on eric erickson but um it's his uh his post that day was so jarring to your point about where people's minds were in the moment to remind people of that here's eric erickson at 302 on january 6th shoot the protesters wave the rules impeach wave the rules convict wave the rules deny the ability to run for election again it's just worth stating that because it's just so plainly stated right that it was not this was not like oh only the never trumpers, only MSNBC thought he should convict, right?

It was people that were actively supporting Donald Trump, active members of the conservative movement, people that host conservative gatherings, MAGA gatherings, saying that the protesters should be punished by, should be shot by police and that Donald Trump should be denied the ability to run again. And what we have today is a report from Bloomberg, which says Trump is expected to grant clemency to over 1000 people tied to January 6.
That was a report out this morning. And going from shoot the protesters to clemency for the 1000 people involved, it's a pretty dramatic switch.
The Times had a pretty good piece. This began walking through how this happened happened so a little bit of the frog in boiling water over the last four years first well it wasn't as bad there was antifa people and then a little there was some misled people and pelosi should have taken more responsibility for security but within about a couple of years it just became pro january 6th and that's certainly where it's been that trump has not hidden his views on that quite the contrary he started playing i remember writing something what six nine months eight months ago maybe when he started playing that january 6th quote anthem at the rallies and how appalling that was and now as you say he's going to pardon them various republican members of congress are inviting some of these uh felons i don't know i guess they're out of jail by now those to be there at the inauguration.
And this is what authoritarian movements do. Two things, I guess I would say.
This is if other people who studied this stuff say, the authoritarian movements take a defeat and have to turn it into a victory. Now, there may be a short-term defeat.
They get people put in jail, but it has to become a martyrology, not something wrong, right? And they've done that all in. And the other thing I'd say about authoritarian movements is they radicalize.
I think we've seen that so much over the years. And things that were at the fringe of the movement, you know, six months after January 6th, Julie Kelly and sort of Bannon's people and the kind of, we need to stand up for these people, now totally mainstream.
Now the Wall Street Journal, having been very nice to Trump for the last year basically a little upset about the pardons you know i mean these somebody they actually someone they actually looked at what some of these people did i guess maybe someone there on the page saw some of the videos was reminded of what happened to sergeant goodell and others at the capitol police and so they kind of refer the trump not pardon all the ones especially the ones who to violence. It doesn't make them rethink any of their endorsement of this man to be president.
Basically endorsement. I guess they don't formally endorse.
Endorsement of this man to be president of the United States, though. You know, even there, the kind of establishment Republicans are, they're not going to be cheering the pardons, but they've done their little wish that it wouldn't happen.
And it's not going to stop them from being all in on a million different things Trump's doing. Or it's not going to stop them from totally refusing to reflect more broadly on what it means that Trump is the next president and what kind of administration he's going to be running if it's a pro-January 6th, pro-insurrection, pro-authoritarian, pro-violence, pro-political violence administration.
Just one more point. I think in March of 2023, a law was passed saying the House should put up a plaque honoring the police officers who fought so gravely on that day, Capitol Police who work for the Congress, you know, protect those members of the House and the Senate.
And the Republican House has not done that. I guess Mike Johnson just can't, thinks it's just to be a bridge too far to actually say anything nice about these police officers.
Maybe it'll save the lives of some of these members of Congress. Yeah, I just kind of want to sit with that for a second because I just don't, like, what can you even say, right? And that is that House Republicans specifically, you know, stating like that they are on the side of the perpetrators, not of the defenders of the Capitol, and that the people that risked their lives that day don't deserve to be honored at all.
It does make hollow a lot of their comments about Abbey Gate and such. It feels like we should be able to honor the people that defended the country, no matter the circumstance, the political circumstance.
Your point, though, about the Wall Street Journal's tepid editorial on these pardons, and really the silence from Republican elected officials. There's been this conventional wisdom congeal that it's like, well, you know, Trump won, and he won the popular vote, so what are you going to expect? Everybody's just like, you know, you just got to go along now.
And there's no actual reason for that, right? I mean, all of these people that were elected to the Senate and the House could choose to reflect their own values or views of their state or district and say, you know, we'll try to advance the parts of the agenda I agree with and speak out against those who are opposed. That was like the standard in 2017, right? They didn't end up acting on it in a lot of cases.
That's how Marco Rubio said he was going to act. Remember running that he was a check on Trump at 17.
It's how the speaker at the time, Paul Ryan, said he was planning on acting during this period in 2017. You wrote for the newsletter last week about this within the context of Trumpism being fully triumphant.
And you're right that we're in this unprecedented moment where an utterly shameless demagogue of the head of authoritarian movement is in control of the executive branch and to a considerable degree, Congress with a massive media infrastructure behind him, oligarchs supporting him and with a demoralized opposition, trying to prop up unsteady guardrails and how different that is from 2017 when, you there was still it kind of even within the republican party these forces that were feeling him out trying to you know call balls and strikes um and all of this and you know you would think that this moment on this anniversary these pardons this would be a time to to call i never know how that metaphor works do you call a ball or do you call a strike do something bad? To call a ball, I guess you don't see it at all. Yeah, it's not as if they don't have access to putting out press releases or making statements or being giving interviews.
Today is January 6th. To my knowledge, I haven't exhaustively looked at what's happening on every cable network, obviously, or what's being put out by every senator or house office.
Is any Republican noticing that fact? Is anyone saying, gee, four years ago ago we had this terrible moment is even mitch mcconnell people who spoke eloquently at the time i don't know maybe one or two of them as republicans are saying things i think democrats are saying a fair amount but the ones who don't want to address it are memory holding it and the others are uh excusing it and then sort of getting pretty close to celebrating it and uh they're the ones who were making all the noise. And the most notable event, an event that was unprecedented in, I would say, modern American history, but maybe in American history.
Let's pretend it didn't happen. Very depressing.
And essentially, I mentioned that piece, I guess, to moralize opposition. President Biden had a little op-ed in the Washington Post this morning, which the spirit of it was good in the sense that he was saying, we can't forget it.
We can't memory hole it. We need to call what happened.
But he wrote

it in a polite way. He's sort of tough on the people who attacked the Capitol, but he doesn't

mention the name of the person who was behind the attack on the Capitol. Donald Trump's name is

nowhere in that. Now, I suppose from his point of view, he's two weeks from now, Donald Trump

becomes president. He wants to have a polite transition he'll attend the inauguration it's more effective perhaps not to make it look like he's taking a shot at trump i'm sure that's what he tells they tell themselves there in the white house but i mean really it reads weirdly did you edit right i mean when you read it it's like well there was this assault on the capitol very bad really We can't memory hole it.
Like, why did this assault happen? I mean, you know. I mean, the problem here is the man that sent them there and then the man that is planning to pardon them for their actions, actually.
And so, like, that is the person worth focusing on. The forward-looking side of this, I think, is also important.
And we have Tom Jocelyn, who worked on the January 6th committee, and eisen in the board this morning analyzing cash patel's interviews and he gave he had a very active podcasting career between his attempt to overthrow the government and now being nominated to run the fbi cash had a segment called cash's corner on the epoch times just a conspiracy rag and i just i just want to play one clip from it how do we have eight people there and christopher ray we'll get to him in a second refuse to answer questions about it you have to ask yourself okay well that was in planning for at least a year what was the fbi doing planning january 6th for a year so the incoming nominated fbi director seems to either believe or want to perpetrate a lie that the fbi was planning january 6th that the that the institution that he wants to lead was part of an effort to plan the attack on the capital it's unclear that is possible, given that they didn't know that

Donald Trump was going to lose for a year, among the million reasons that that wasn't possible. You didn't know that Donald Trump was going to challenge the election.
Did the FBI have people from the future that flew back to let them know that there was going to be a large stop the steal effort following Donald Trump's clear loss in the 2020 election? It's unclear how this would work, but it is pretty relevant, I believe, that this person that is coming in claims that the FBI was involved and has said so repeatedly. That was not just one clip.
In an interview with Tim Poole, who's another conspiracy guy, kind of a horseshoe MAGA, far lefty turned MAGA guy, Poole said that while he could not prove it definitively, it looks like you have a preponderance of evidence suggesting there may have been federal law enforcement involved in making January 6th happen. Patel eagerly went further, I'll get you beyond a reasonable doubt.
So again, he is very clear that he believes that the people that he is set to be in charge of instigated, organized, thought up the attack on the Capitol. How does that work? Like, how are those, these people supposed to report to him? Is he going to have an internal investigation when he starts to figure out who is behind this? Or are we just going to pretend like he didn't, doesn't think this or didn't say this? Do you have any thoughts? Well, I should actually, we'll do internal investigations and firings.
And they're certainly already preparing to do that in the justice department as a whole and the fbi has been usually separated out from a lot of that except the director himself trump fired comey but i think patel would love nothing better than to have 30 loyalists at top levels of the fbi instead of career people as you say the quotes are amazing and it's really worth looking at it and really worth then saying, okay, this is not a case of a guy who, you know, wasn't really involved, but was on some show and didn't quarrel when some host said something. He was spending a lot of time pushing these conspiracies.
Yes. I mean, he had some credibility in MAGA world, because he had served in the Trump administration in various national security kind of related positions.
Intelligence-related. Intelligence-related, right.
He had dealt with the FBI. He before that had been in the Justice Department, I think, at the end of the Obama administration, actually.
And so he was a major figure in pushing this sort of stuff, much more than, I don't know, other people who were just sort of reading talking points, you might say, from MAGA world, not that they should be excused either. either yeah it's just unbelievable to nominate him as head of the fb i mean it's unsuited for so many other reasons as well but the willingness to indulge a conspiracy theories and ones that are derogatory as the word we're trying to say you know libelous in effect i mean to sort of to the people in the institution you're taking over i mean he seems to want to say that chris ray who was trump appointed head of the fbi in 2017 and who has been serving for seven years what can criticize decisions chris ray made one from from both sides probably is he really saying that chris ray this was an fbi disinformation deep state campaign launched by chris ray that seems to be what he wants to say might be nice if chris ray who i think has already announced he's quitting before Brazil takes over, you know, would say, I don't know, maybe it wouldn't help, but you know, after he quits, at least that this man should not be the next FBI director.
Trump's entitled, Chris Ray might say, to have someone who didn't get in fights with Trump and who's sort of a fresh face and all this, not someone who's indulged in and propagated these kinds of really dangerous conspiracy theories. Yeah, or offer to testify against him or say that he lied or go in front of the committee and, you know, provide information.
Because sometimes it's just worth just stating clearly what the conspiracy that Cash Patel is saying the FBI was involved with is. Because it just shows the preposterousness of it when you state it out loud.
And I hope that there will be Democratic senators during these confirmation hearings that take this process very seriously and walk it through with him. Because the theory that he's promoting is that the FBI knew that Donald Trump would attempt to roll back his loss in the election, right? Like the FBI knew that Donald Trump was going to try to stop the steal, so to speak.
And so in order to undermine that effort, they concocted this notion that they were going to put FBI agents among the MAGA masses and encourage them to storm the Capitol to undermine MAGA, right? Like that's the theory that the FBI was able to recognize that if they just put eight or 20, whatever, undercover MAGA folks in red hats amidst a crowd on the mall, that they could convince the crowd to storm the Capitol, attack police officers, shit on the Capitol, like raise Trump and Confederate flags, do all of these things that would then undermine the movement. Like, that's the theory.
And it's like, it's nonsensical. It makes no sense.
or like there's no, there are all these things that would then undermine the movement like that's the theory and it's like it's nonsensical like it makes no sense right like there's no there are all these things that you would have to know you know in advance like for starters that the people would go along with this right like imagine yourself being at a protest and having a person on your side being like tim you know i'm trying to think of the last protest i was at i was at some gay rights protests around the, you know, Supreme Court rulings. And it's like, you know, you had some people in rainbow hats that are like, Tim, what we really should do is storm the Capitol and, you know, storm the offices of the anti-gay marriage officials.
I'd be like, what are you talking about? So like the idea that this plot would actually work even if they had conceived of it, is preposterous. And now that the man that is perpetrating this is set to lead the FBI, leads to all these questions.
And you have John Thune on the Sunday shows this weekend talking about how, well, yeah, the FBI could use some reform. And so I'm actually, I'm pretty confident that you're going to have cash in there.
I would like to know from John Thune, is this the kind of reform that you think it is needed? You want somebody that perpetrated a lie about the FBI officials and said that they were part of a anti-American insurrection effort? Like you want, that's the type of reform you're looking for? You want somebody that is going to try to target political foes? That's going to make up things about people like Ray Epps, like frame random Americans? You want someone that's going to try to target political foes that's going to make up things about people like ray epps like frame random americans if you want someone that's going to try to frame random americans and publicly accuse them of you know being part of a plot with no evidence that's the person that you want at the charge of fb fbi john thune the whole thing is just ridiculous on its face and i do feel like it's almost so ridiculous that people don't know how to deal, like journalists don't know how to deal with it. And Republicans are getting away with excusing it in a way that I really hope does not happen over the next few weeks.
Sorry for my rant there. No, that was very good.
And John, wasn't John Thune the guy who people sort of were happy to see win the majority of leadership because he was the least Trumpy of the three candidates he's not exactly let's see if he stands up at all i mean we democratic senators i hope do a serious job on the question i hope a few republicans think maybe they should think of themselves as united states senators and not simply republican party operatics loyal to trump and and especially in these national security and law enforcement jobs if they want to give trump some you know ridiculous education secretary what's her name melinda bickman okay you know i don't really i'm not gonna fall my sword on that but um though if you actually were like on the education committee you might care a little bit about the education bill and for someone more competent in there but or more who knows something about education but leave that aside These are serious national security and law enforcement positions, Justice Department, FBI, intelligence, National Intelligence, Defense Department. Surely some Republican senators think it matters who runs those departments.
Surely? Well, no, I mean, yes, that surely was a question mark. I'm sorry, I just had to sit on that for a second, because I don't know.
Yeah, maybe not, actually. Probably not, I would say.
But we will see as the hearings will begin, maybe at the end of this week, early next week? I think next week, we'll say. And then Patel apparently might be a couple more weeks off because they'll do the Attorney General and maybe the Deputy AG first.
I think Patel, I mean, it'll be interesting to say, I intend to try to to keep writing about patel and i know tom jocelyn has done a ton of research and he's a very very good researcher spent most of his career researching islamist extremist groups and many of them overseas and and what he's been so struck by is how much of this gets to your other point i mean how much the media in general just underestimates the network of extremism on the right the fbi was right to try to have informers in the proud boys the proud boys were violent yes you know and they proved it on january 6th they did it and if only honestly if the fbi had maybe been you know taking some of the informers a little more seriously and been able to do a little more but they were constrained in other ways you know to stop them from organizing the insurrection and having the weapons they had and so forth, it would have been a good thing, not a bad thing. God knows we've seen enough instances of right-wing extremist violence here in the U.S.
in the last many years that the FBI needs to worry about it, and they have to some degree. But Kash Patel is not going to be very interested.
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One tell from Chris Ray about what he expects from the next administration in Kash Patel was a news item for the back end of last week. I didn't have a chance to get to.
The FBI released new

information that they had never released before about the unknown suspect who planted two pipe bombs near the headquarters of the Republican and Democratic National Committee in Washington, D.C. They showed video of the person.
They gave a height five foot seven so they can be seen wearing distinctive Nike Air Max Speed Turf shoes in yellow, black, and gray. I'm saying less than 25,000 of those are sold, so that was maybe the most distinctive feature of the person.
To me, the timing here is so telling, right? That it's like they feel like this investigation is over under the new administration, and this is a last-ditch effort to try to identify the person that really intended to cause much more harm and carnage on that day. And I believe Kamala Harris was in the DNC around the time that the pipe bomb was discovered.
So a huge crisis averted there. And I think it's pretty telling that this was the moment that the FBI decided to kind of release that tip publicly.

It was also at the end of last week, I guess, a couple of resignations that weren't widely reported. I think they were reported a little bit this weekend from the Justice Department, quite senior levels, career people who had been in the national security side of things, and including the person who ended, whose name I'm now blanking on, but he wasn't that well known, honestly, beyond legal world, I think very well respected, who led the investigation of Trump's taking all the documents to Mar-a-Lago, which is a cut and dry investigation.
They seem to have done a competent job of discovering which documents were there and securing them and so forth. And then indicting Trump on a very good case, which, of course, Judge Cannon has totally delayed and now is presumably going to make moot when Trump orders the Justice Department to dismiss it.
So he retired, and I think a deputy, perhaps, who had also worked with the special counsel, retired. I don't blame them for retiring.
People have their own reasons, their own considerations. I don't want to second guess someone saying, I'm not going to hang around and possibly get fired and go, they'll try and take away my retirement benefits.
I mean, who knows what it is, or it's just, you know, it's hopeless anyway to fight that. So why not just leave a week earlier, but the degree to which you're going to have, whether they get fired or people resign early and without being judgy about that, the degree to which you'll have a lot of chances for Bondi as AG and Patel at the FBI and others to put their own people in.
And then of course, the Schedule F reform. We can have a federal government six months from now that really does not look recognizable in some ways.
And this could be especially true in key agencies. That's what's so worrisome about Patel and about the Justice Department stuff.
Jay Brat, that's the name of the person you're referencing. In this specific instance, I'm not going to use the word judge people, but I think that people that are in these agencies that are responsible public servants that do not have, you know, what's the word, exposure with regards to Trump, I think it is kind of incumbent upon them to stay.
Obviously, personal issues, et cetera, excepted somebody like this, somebody like Brat, they're going after him. You know, I mean, Trump has talked about how like this, you know, the raiding of my home, you know, was the most outrageous thing that's ever happened in the history of the country.
And so for somebody like that, I think, A, they're on the top of the potential lists of folks that patel is going to come in and try to root out internally and potentially externally i have no judgment for people that were involved in those investigations that did the responsible thing and are now going to find themselves you know on the other end of the the barrel of the government all right we are kicking off the new year and we are back with our friends at OneSkin. I was in Colorado over the holidays.
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Might help you feel a little bit more energized when you're up there at altitude, when you're 5280 in Denver or even higher up there in the mountains. But it's just not enough.
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After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about heard about them please support our show and tell them we sent you invest in the health and longevity of your skin with one skin your future self will thank you i want to do a couple of other closing items about trump but uh there is one other news uh news related i try to stay away from media news on this and being too navel-gazy. It's like media people love talking about media news.
I don't know if regular people love talking about it as much. But it's gotten to a point where it is a real news item, I think, what is happening at the Washington Post that is relevant to kind of our broader discussion about pre-surrender to the Trump administration and how our institutions are going to handle it.
I mean, this is the institution that had, you know, democracy dies in darkness, is their kind of cringey slogan, you know, in the early Trump 1.0 years. Now you have Jeff Bezos, Amazon agreeing to do a documentary, a flattering documentary of Melania with somebody that had some serious Me Too accusations against him being the director so amazon has picked that up right at a moment where where everybody uh all the people i know in hollywood world and in streaming world when you know who are trying to pitch shows or pitch political related things everybody's like no no we're too scared of politics right now politics is too risky we're not going to do politics shows.
We're not going to do any documentary shows. Well, we'll do one exception.
Trump's wife. We'll do a suck up documentary to her.
Bezos doing that. And at the same time, you have just a mass exodus from the Washington Post.
Just Josh Dossie today going to Wall Street Journal, Leanne Caldwell leaving, going to Puck. Others are coming.
There may be some firings coming. It sounds like there's some reporting today.
And there's been a long list of people leaving the Post. It's pretty astonishing what's happening over there.
I'm wondering what your thoughts are. It is.
Now, if they end up in other places and continue to do good reporting, maybe we're just watching a transition where the Post is no longer a major figure, major player in American journalism. And Puck and the bulwark are you know and i do think there's some truth to that obviously right and and i don't know about politico but well i know okay your point is i'm being nice to them i don't know axios whatever any of these places you know like smart brevity anyway but yes whatever happens but you know the post is sort of came to Washington in 85, went to the education department.
The Post had one reporter, a younger reporter, it wasn't a prestigious assignment, but a good reporter, assigned to education and labor, I think it was. And she covered us and she covered, you know, policy initiatives and the usual kinds of things.
Secretary Bennett testified to Congress and so forth. But she also dug and found things that had gone wrong and controversies and cases where we were fighting the career bureaucracy.
The Post actually did more of that than the Times. The Post was really a Washington kind of inside baseball paper.
There were trade journals that did the real detailed stuff to some degree and a couple of the places like the National Journal, which barely exists anymore. But the Post was kind of the place that kept an eye on what's happening at these agencies.
To the degree that that's already been collapsing for a couple of decades. I bet the Post now has one reporter assigned to nine domestic policy agencies, not two, you know.
But nonetheless, they keep some eye on these things. And the idea that Trump's just going to be running an administration here, putting God knows who in key political positions, doing God knows what to drive out bureaucrats who are on some heritage list of someone who honestly tried to implement a law correctly five years ago and ignored some conservatives, doing all these kinds of things, money going, again, God knows where, from grants and so forth and contracts.
And who's going to keep an eye on this? So in that respect, I mean, again, it was never great. I don't i don't exaggerate and the post wasn't you know plenty of stuff happened to government that shouldn't have happened when the washington post was much bigger but i do think it's uh it's bad for this to be happening at the same time of trump taking over with a genuine authoritarian playbook and surrounded by grifters and people happy to take advantage of the federal there but I think it's a real problem, actually, the decline of the post in this moment, because to exactly your point, and look, there are going to be other people doing investigative work.
It's a good ProPublica piece over the weekend. They're independent groups such as that.
We're moving more into reporting, as I mentioned, in the top. The Times is a BMF.
They'll still exist. But, you know, like the amount of crap that is going to be coming down the pike from this administration, you know, the fire hose of shit, beginning day one, and to have the paper record in the city be just totally collapsing like this and making strong signals towards capitulation, even frankly, in certain cases when it comes to Bezos.
And having a moment, Sam Stein has reported on this for us that a lot of the also traditional outside watchdog groups that just kind of behind the curtain here a little bit on how Washington works, a lot of these groups that are in the nonprofit watchdog groups that are doing these investigations and then feeding stuff into the main outlets, right? Like they're doing investigations and then working with reporters with information they've found to try to uncover more. A lot of those are collapsing, kind of the good government, you know, the crews and things of this nature are not getting funding, you know, because the donors don't want the exposure, I presume.
All of that happening simultaneously, it's not like there's going to be no scrutiny on this administration. There will still be people doing good work, but it isn't going to be as robust, I don't think, as it was in 2017.
And I think, to take the piece we had from Tom Jocelyn and Norm Eisen this morning, it's getting retweeted and people are going to, obviously, will get to Democratic and get to democratic and hopefully Republican senators. And they're just asked to use for questioning for Patel and others can

follow up on some of the investigative stuff.

But I was told this morning,

someone who said called and said a great piece,

but he had been trying separately and just to push it.

He's more of an activist,

you know,

who'd read the beast and was trying to push it to activist groups to get

them to promote it and make a little bit deal of it and get it out more

into the country.

So people could call from,

you know,

the state of North Carolina called Tom Tillis.

So I'm going to promote it and make a little deal of it and get it out more into the country so people could call from you know in the state of north carolina call tom tillis so i'm making that up you know what i mean and say what they what about this you can't confirm this guy he said a lot of these groups did not want to really take it on and these are left these are basically left-wing groups i mean these are liberal right these are not trump supporters because they're worried about what patel's gonna do right. Right.
And it probably won't work. We'll keep our powder dry.
We're going to have to defend a million other things we care about. I don't begrudge them that.
And we're going to have to defend civil rights programs we care about and other government programs we care about. And we don't need to have some nomination fight that may not succeed.
There is a kind of self, I don't know what's the word, what does Tim Snyder call it? Pre-capitulation? Yeah, pre-submission, pre-capitulation. Yeah, kind of going on.
Now, if it's really keeping their powder dry so they'll be even more effective when Trump announces the deportations on January 21st, okay, maybe I take that point. But generally, that's not how politics works.
If you fight the first fight, you build up steam. If you win one, you really build up momentum.
Then you're better off when you fight the second or third fight, even if you lost the first fight, incidentally, I would say often. You give in on the first fight to hold the powder, keep the powder dry for the second fight.
It's often a good reason to keep the powder dry for the second fight for the third fight. Then there'll be a fourth fight is when the deportations will start off probably pretty small with just some real criminals.
So let's not make too big deal of that. get to the our new newsletter can report on all this of course very intelligently but and with much more detail than i have but i i just worry that there's a ton of rationalization going on that's leading people again not out of bad motives really and not out of personal cowardice or anything like that but is leading people to accommodate much more than they should.
Yeah, well, you got your homework assignment then, people. Go hassle your senator with Tom Jocelyn's article about Kash Patel's conspiracy mongering.
If you've got a minute today. Coming up on the inauguration, there's one item of news related to Jimmy Carter.
We discussed Jimmy Carter's death last week on the pod, but I wanted to give you one update here bill donald trump's not happy about something related to carter's death traditionally after and honestly maybe this is the moment to get rid of this tradition because i'm not going to want to do this when donald trump dies but uh traditionally after a president dies the flags are at half half staff for 30 days i think whatever it is there's a traditional period and that period will overlap with the inauguration. And this upsets Donald Trump.
He writes this, the Democrats are all giddy about our magnificent American flag potentially being at half mast, I don't think he knows the difference, during my inauguration. They think it's so great, and are so happy about it, because they don't love our country.
They only think about themselves. In any event, because of the death of Jimmy Carter, the flag made for the first time ever during an inauguration of a future president, be it half-masked, nobody wants to see this and no American can be happy about it.
Let's see how this plays out. It's kind of like when you hit the USS John McCain when he's going to Japan.
Totally. No American could be happy about it, Tim.
I think 30 days, honestly, is a little excessive, but it's in some regulation or something. It's not, Biden didn't invent this.
I mean, I think it's been done for the last X number of presidents. So he just did what has been done in appropriate respect and kind of weird to change it now suddenly.
Maybe they could just turn the flag upside down instead, you martha and alita yeah maybe yeah that would be maybe in front of the supreme court in honor of justice alita you know right suddenly trump's so concerned about proper flying of the flag when all of it when has there been any movement in american history that has abused the american flag more than mega i mean you know it's upside down backwards on every piece of clothing every thing right that they putting blue lines on it we're putting 1776 on it there's more heartwarming january 6th anniversary piece out that i wanted to close on and that was michael cruz wrote about this for politico i love um i took a shot of political earlier but michael cruz like is maybe the best profile writer writer out there right now, certainly in the top tier. And he wrote about an exchange between Al Gore and Mike Pence.
At Joe Lieberman's memorial, Al Gore thanked Pence for his actions on January 6th. And Pence said something surprising in response, Cruz writes.
He suggested to Gore he had done what he'd done that day in part because of what he had seen as a newly sworn in member of Congress on January 6, 2001. He had witnessed a vice president stand up to pressure from his own party to defy the Constitution, even though doing so by definition meant personal defeat.
I never forgot it, Pence said to Gore. You don't know how much that means coming from you, Gore said back.
That was very nice it is nice yeah we have a lot of horrors on this anniversary so i thought i thought people might want to well it is worth it is worth yes remembering that pence did the right thing and other people weighed in and did the right thing and the guardrails did pretty much hold from november 3rd through january 6th to 20th of 2020, 2021, which makes it all the more tragic, really, right? It wasn't as if everything came crashing down and it was a free fall afterwards. And so you got to expect, in a sense, that the center would not hold, that the principles of peaceful transfer of power and no storming of the Capitol and no political violence and no inciting to violence.
it wasn't crazy to think that those principles could and should hold it had been a little too close for comfort on january 6th but now they could biden was in charge what's really terrible is that you know in the biden administration kind of went out of its way to respect a lot of those principles and nonetheless trump wins the nomination and the whole republican party's with him i was trying on a positive, Bill. And he explicitly does it with this repudiation or endorsement, I guess.
All right, let's go back to Gore. Sorry to ruin your...
Cut that out. Have our crack producers take that out.
We're going to keep it in. I'm going back to you on Gore.
This will give people a little something. We've got to update our priors on Gore a little bit.
I mean, you know, I think back, I was a child during this time, but like the sore loser man stickers, you know, that were around in the early 2000s. Pretty astonishing what Al Gore did.
It was nice that Mike Pence mentioned that to him in retrospect. Very much so, I agree.
All right, one last thing. Our good friend A.B.
Stoddard is going to be stepping back for the bulwark. This is a stressful life.
We're not coal mining out here. We're not looking for sympathy, but having to care about this every day is a burden.
And A.B. has been caring about it for about a decade.
And I just appreciate her so much. I didn't know A.B.
that well. I knew her a little bit from work, pitching stories or whatever, back when I was with Flackack but before trump had even won the nomination so this is very early in 2015 i saw her in a in a green room at msnbc and she pulled me aside and we started kind of in whispered voice started talking about how bad it was and that what was coming and and she started sharing with me her apocalyptic views about what uh what was what was ahead of us and i knew that i had a um a soul sister in that moment somebody that i was aligned with i felt like very early on uh as you as well uh we were among the people that were sounding the alarm that this is actually worse than people think.
And this is potentially, you know, going to go to the depths of hell in a way that a lot of the conventional wisdom did not anticipate. And so I'm sad that we were both proven out on that point, even if maybe, you know, we don't have t-shirts about how AB and Tim are always right.
But we were proven out on this one point.

And so I do feel a kind of cosmic connection with her that dates back that,

about a decade now.

She's still going to be around.

We're going to have her on the pod from time to time after she can have a few breaths from looking at the fucking Twitter,

which she well deserves.

And so I just wanted to give her a little

shout out on that point bill i don't know if you have anything dad no that's great she's one of my

favorite people really and i've known her probably pretty well for quite a while and you know we

broke with the republican party and people say that was the right thing to do i hope they have

to say that and some people excessively say it was you know courageous and all this but

ab's world was very much the centrist sort of establishment world, I'm going to say this in a good sense, in Washington. She worked for mainstream journals.
She covered the hills. She was friendlier, I think it's safe to say, with the moderate Republicans and the moderate Democrats.
That's her own personal disposition. A lot of them, though, did not go into the let's confront, as we were discussing earlier, in a sense, the let's confront Trump camp.
They went into the, they weren't Trumpy, but they went into the let's not overreact camp. And I think she was courageous and she really felt so strongly about this.
She wanted to join the Bulwark. We were thrilled to have her, obviously.
Sorry that she feels she has to take a little time, certainly understandable, though, to just get away from it for a bit. But she's really a terrific person.
And I also look forward to, yes, seeing her around socially. But also, I hope she'll do a few podcasts, write a few pieces, and she'll certainly be part of the extended family.
Yeah, always part of the family. We love AB.
She'll be back around. And we've got a lot coming, as I mentioned in the intro.

There'll be even more than the folks that we have already announced to come.

So the opinions will be plentiful.

The outrage will be plentiful here.

Maybe the darkness not quite as dark without AB every week.

I appreciate her very much.

Appreciate all of you for tuning in.

We'll be back here tomorrow for another edition of the Bulldog Podcast.

We'll see you all then.

Peace. Peace.
Painted with a scar And The more I straighten out The less it wants to try The feelings start to rock One week at a time Police can swear to God Love's in peace Love's in peace We'll be right back. Ring of snow, all the rage, my little dark age I breathe in stereo, the stereo sounds strange I know that if you hide, it doesn't go away

If you get out of bed, and find me standing all alone

Open eye, burn the page, my little dark age.

The Bulldog Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brough.