Heckuva time to make an appearance: Trump's FEMA chief drops in on Texas flood zone

Speaker 1 This episode is presented by Planned Parenthood Federation of America. This year, lawmakers have attacked our rights, stretched the truth, and taken away access to health care.

Speaker 1 Through it all, Planned Parenthood has been on the front lines, providing care, defending patients, fighting back.

Speaker 1 But the Trump administration and Congress passed a law to defund Planned Parenthood, putting care for 1.1 million patients at risk. Planned Parenthood isn't backing down.

Speaker 1 They're still here, protecting access to birth control, cancer screenings, abortion, and more. Visit plannedparenthood.org/slash defend and donate today.

Speaker 2 AI agents are everywhere, automating tasks and making decisions at machine speed. But agents make mistakes.

Speaker 2 Just one rogue agent can do big damage before you even notice.

Speaker 2 Rubrik Agent Cloud is the only platform that helps you monitor agents, set guardrails, and rewind mistakes so you can unleash agents, not risk. Accelerate your AI transformation at rubric.com.

Speaker 2 That's r-u-b-r-i-k.com.

Speaker 4 Really happy to have you here.

Speaker 4 You ready?

Speaker 4 Pop quiz.

Speaker 4 Who is this man?

Speaker 4 Who is this man?

Speaker 4 There's several men in this picture. Can we zoom in, please, on the man in question?

Speaker 4 Ah,

Speaker 4 now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, Maddo, Honestly, can you please not zoom in any further?

Speaker 3 I get it.

Speaker 4 I get it. You're talking about the Saturday Night Fever guy here.
We don't need to see this any closer. We understand.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 4 I get it. How about a different view? Same guy,

Speaker 4 same number of buttons,

Speaker 4 but you are perhaps not as distressed by that in this picture because it's very hard not to focus in this picture on the hat.

Speaker 4 And actually, this one, it gets worse if you zoom out rather than zoom in. Somehow the hat actually gets worse and more alarming when you see it in a broader context.

Speaker 4 Usually getting closer makes things worse, but in this case, something about the hat and maybe the shoes, I don't know, maybe just the contrast with the normal person standing next to him,

Speaker 4 I don't know.

Speaker 4 Somehow worse, wider.

Speaker 4 Do you know who this person is?

Speaker 4 It's okay if you don't.

Speaker 4 I'm about to tell you who it is, and honestly, it's still not going to help.

Speaker 4 His name is David Richardson.

Speaker 4 And I don't know if that name means anything to you it probably doesn't it's okay if it doesn't

Speaker 4 but here's who he is

Speaker 4 you might remember if you're old enough to remember you might remember that when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans the person who President George W.

Speaker 4 Bush had put in charge of FEMA was a guy he called Brownie Remember heck of a job Brownie his name was Michael Brown and Republican President George W.

Speaker 4 Bush in his infinite wisdom had put Michael Brown in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, put him in charge of FEMA.

Speaker 4 This is a man whose main experience in disasters was that he had caused some minor organizational disasters in his tenure as head of an Arabian Horse Association.

Speaker 4 How did he end up at FEMA? I don't know. He was a friend of George W.
Bush's campaign manager. And he was a Republican.

Speaker 4 And once when he was a kid, he had been the assistant to Edmund Oklahoma's city manager. That had been, I think, back in the late 1970s, maybe the early 80s.

Speaker 4 That was as close as he ever got to relevant experience in running disaster management for the federal government before George W. Bush elevated him for some reason to FEMA.

Speaker 4 But then we really needed FEMA. Hurricane Katrina hit and more than a thousand people died.
And we all but lost a beautiful and historic and important major American city.

Speaker 4 And in the aftermath of that, President George W.

Speaker 4 Bush inexplicably allowed himself to be photographed flying over the devastation and looking down on it from the comfort of Air Force One, just peering down like he was enjoying his trip to the aquarium.

Speaker 4 And as his government's response just failed and failed and failed and failed, And the death toll day by day rose and rose.

Speaker 4 President George W. Bush never could quite answer why he praised Brownie, why he praised his FEMA director, Michael Brown, for doing a heck of a job,

Speaker 4 or more importantly, why he'd put this guy, why he'd put the Arabian Horse Association guy with zero disaster experience in that job in the first place.

Speaker 4 And so, this,

Speaker 4 this guy, answer to your pop quiz tonight, this is David Richardson.

Speaker 4 He is Republican President Donald Trump's appointee to run FEMA.

Speaker 4 And I'm sorry that these are the kinds of photos that we've got of him, but these are the photos that we've got of him for now. Just for the first time, we've got photos of him.

Speaker 4 Because the Guadalupe River in central Texas burst its banks and rose more than 20 feet in an hour in the overnight hours, the night of Thursday, July 3rd.

Speaker 4 and all of those people died and all of those kids died.

Speaker 4 And we did not see the guy running FEMA for Donald Trump when that happened. And then it was, you know, July 4th the next day and we didn't see anybody from FEMA.

Speaker 4 And then it was July 5th and we didn't see him from FEMA. And then it was July 6th and we didn't see him from FEMA.
And then it was July 7th and we didn't see him from FEMA.

Speaker 4 And then it was July 8th and then it was July 9th. And then it was July 10th and then it was July 11th.
And then finally, it was finally this weekend when he showed up for the first time.

Speaker 4 The first time anybody had seen hide or hair of President Donald Trump's man running FEMA after one of the biggest floods in this country in decades was this weekend when he

Speaker 4 finally showed up, and this is him.

Speaker 4 In the immediate aftermath of the flood, Trump's Homeland Security Department, of which FEMA is a part,

Speaker 4 they apparently forgot or at least neglected to extend the contract to pay the people who answer the phones when you call FEMA for help. So all the people at the FEMA call center got fired

Speaker 4 on July 5th.

Speaker 4 And more than 80% of calls for help after the flood did not get answered. as of the Monday after the flood.

Speaker 4 So it's not like there weren't questions for Trump's FEMA director to answer.

Speaker 4 Hey, why'd you guys fire all the people answering the phones in the immediate aftermath of the disaster when everybody was calling for help?

Speaker 4 It's not like he didn't have questions to answer, but he didn't make it there till this weekend. So I'm sure it was, you know, hard just getting oriented and stuff.
What does this mean here?

Speaker 4 Let me tell you why it's really important to get your hat right for things like this. Image is everything, young man.

Speaker 4 You definitely don't want to make the kinds of insensitive mistakes that other people have very famously made after disasters like this in our country.

Speaker 4 So make sure you don't make any of these exact same mistakes.

Speaker 4 Did I mention that Trump's FEMA pick is the first person to run FEMA since Brownie, who has no disaster response or emergency management experience at all?

Speaker 4 He did remember that great photo of George W. Bush, though, and made sure to take pains to replicate it exactly this weekend.

Speaker 4 Did you know that he had no disaster management, no emergency management experience at all? Or was that just clear from the photos? Did I not need to say that?

Speaker 4 I mean, if you knew anything about this person before, if you knew anything before about who it was that Donald Trump put in charge of emergency management for the American government, it was probably headlines like these after he told FEMA staff that he was unaware that there was such thing as a hurricane season.

Speaker 4 The White House tried to say that was all just a big misunderstanding. Of course, he must have been joking.

Speaker 4 But now, at least, we have something else to picture. Now we know what he looks like.

Speaker 4 So, when you think of the Donald Trump presidency and what it looks like for them to be in charge of really, really, really important parts of the government,

Speaker 4 now at least you can picture this.

Speaker 4 Or you can picture this.

Speaker 5 President Trump promised to end the wars.

Speaker 5 He promised to release the Epstein files.

Speaker 5 Did anyone really think

Speaker 5 the sexual predator president who used to party with Jeffrey Epstein was going to release the Epstein files?

Speaker 4 Democratic Georgia U.S. Senator John Ossoff this weekend speaking at a kind of huge town hall rally that he held in Savannah, Georgia.
Look at this.

Speaker 4 John Ossoff is not up for re-election until next year.

Speaker 4 One Georgia Democrat who attended this rally in Savannah this weekend told the Atlanta Journal Constitution that even though that election is nearly 16 months away, the energy, the atmosphere at that rally for John Ossoff, for the Democratic senator from Georgia, quote, had more of a month out from the election feel than a 16 months out from the election feel.

Speaker 4 Some of that crowd very obviously fired up about this debacle Senator Osoff was describing, in which the president and his administration

Speaker 4 have riled their supporters into believing every conspiracy theory under the sun about the Jeffrey Epstein case, and then they nevertheless abruptly announced that all the conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein must now be over and we will never talk about them again.

Speaker 4 And no, we're not going to release any more information about this case, even though we told you not only for years leading up to the election, but for months since the election, that we would reveal all about this terrible conspiracy.

Speaker 4 Now we plan to reveal none and you should shut up about it.

Speaker 4 I mean, whatever you think about the conspiracy theories around Jeffrey Epstein, the consternation and bewilderment that Trump has caused his own people and his own movement and his own strongest supporters on that issue is just a deeply, deeply, profoundly stupid political screw-up.

Speaker 4 And one that they apparently have no way out of. It's just getting worse for them every single day.

Speaker 4 Also, in their infinite wisdom, you might have seen today that the Pentagon made a big announcement about AI.

Speaker 4 Huge new spending on artificial intelligence at the Pentagon.

Speaker 4 And I don't know about you, but I'm thinking they probably knew for a little while at least that they were going to make this investment, that they were going to have to make an announcement about this big new investment.

Speaker 4 And I don't know, I never worked for the government or anything, but something tells me that if I was going to make an announcement about the U.S.

Speaker 4 military adopting Grok, adopting Elon Musk's AI chatbot, I might adjust the timing on that announcement so it did not come immediately on the heels of all of the recent headlines about Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok proclaiming itself to be Hitler.

Speaker 4 and calling for the extermination of the Jewish people and giving detailed strategic instructions on how best to get away with rape. I don't know.

Speaker 4 Seeing headlines like that, if I knew we had a big Grok announcement to make, I might maybe hit pause on that for a minute. Maybe hit pause on the plan to announce that the U.S.

Speaker 4 military is hereby adopting Grok.

Speaker 4 But nope, they made that announcement today.

Speaker 4 They're not sending their best. Trump had previously said he was going to abolish FEMA.

Speaker 4 His Homeland Security Secretary, Christy Noam, had said proudly at a cabinet meeting on camera that her job was to abolish FEMA. Now apparently they seem not so sure.

Speaker 4 They may not abolish FEMA after all after the debacle in Texas and all those people killed.

Speaker 4 They apparently do still want to abolish the Department of Education for some reason, even though by huge majorities the American people do not want them to abolish the Department of Education.

Speaker 4 The right-wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court today ruled that Trump can go ahead with his plans to end the U.S.

Speaker 4 Department of Education, despite the fact that Congress established it and appropriates its funds.

Speaker 4 The Social Security Administration has been so destroyed by Trump that not only the website, but the helpline for people to call to get their Social Security problems sorted out has repeatedly crashed and become non-functional.

Speaker 4 Now we learn that the Social Security Administration under Donald Trump is going to take a thousand people out of their already swamped and broken field offices to put those people to work instead on their swamped and broken telephone helpline.

Speaker 4 Because that's how Trump is handling the previously just fine, totally normal agency that used to run Social Security without any problems at all. They really, really are not sending their best.

Speaker 4 And the country knows it.

Speaker 4 This was the protest this weekend at the Texas state capitol in Austin, Texas. Trump drowns Texas kids.

Speaker 4 You see all the orange in this picture? That's people wearing life jackets at this protest in Texas this weekend. Trump drowns Texas kids.

Speaker 4 Fund sirens, not big oil. Fund FEMA, not fracking.

Speaker 4 This is the protest this weekend in New Mexico, in Santa Teresa, New Mexico.

Speaker 4 Locals there turning out to protest Trump's quiet new declaration that this whole swath of New Mexico is now officially a militarized zone where the U.S. military is in charge here on U.S.
soil.

Speaker 4 Trump has quietly turned hundreds of miles of land in multiple states into military zones and put the U.S. active duty military in charge of policing these huge zones, even though the U.S.

Speaker 4 military under law is not allowed to police the domestic civilian population of this country.

Speaker 4 This was the protest this weekend outside Trump Tower in New York City, a protest protest to stop Trump from closing down the 988 suicide prevention hotline for LGBT kids, which Trump has slated to shut down as of this week.

Speaker 4 These were protests this weekend in Charleston, South Carolina. A group rallying in all different sites all over Charleston this weekend under the banner silence is not an option.

Speaker 4 This was Tacoma, Washington this weekend, where people protested outside the ICE immigration prison this weekend in Tacoma, while simultaneously in nearby Seattle, people held a party to celebrate the elderly Seattle woman who has lived in this country for decades, who they were successfully able to get released from ICE custody by protesting on her behalf.

Speaker 4 Celebrate the wind. Show people that protest works.
Protest at least helps.

Speaker 4 This was Memphis, Tennessee today.

Speaker 4 Protesters in procession led by the Reverend William Barber and other members of the clergy.

Speaker 4 So they're holding coffins, coffins to signify the people who will likely die when millions of Americans are cut off their health insurance by the bill Republicans just passed and Trump just signed.

Speaker 4 Again, that's Memphis, Tennessee today.

Speaker 4 This was Little Rock, Arkansas this weekend. Hundreds of people had to move their anti-Trump protest under an underpass.

Speaker 4 simply for the shade because of the summer heat. But still hundreds of people turned out in Arkansas, in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Speaker 4 This was New Iberia, Louisiana, at a protest they called Good Trouble this weekend.

Speaker 4 You're going to hear that phrase this week a lot.

Speaker 4 More than 1,500 different towns and cities across the country are planning Good Trouble protests against President Donald Trump this Thursday, July 17th, on the birthday of civil rights icon John Lewis.

Speaker 4 You know, towards the end of George W. Bush's disastrous presidency,

Speaker 4 the book Legacy of Ashes won the National Book Award, a history of the CIA.

Speaker 4 It quickly established itself as the definitive history of the CIA during the whole 20th century.

Speaker 4 This book also induced a lot of people to learn the history of the CIA in the 20th century because this book, Legacy of Ashes, not only won the National Book Award, it also sold a ton of copies.

Speaker 4 And because the author of this book, Tim Weiner, is both a Pulitzer Prize winner and a really, really, really good writer, like an I can't put this book down kind of writer,

Speaker 4 that book, Legacy of Ashes, became one of those rare nonfiction bestsellers where everyone who bought it actually read it, which is rarer than you might think.

Speaker 4 But with that book and with its success, and with the fact that people who bought it actually read it,

Speaker 4 Tim Weiner did something important. He really cemented, I think,

Speaker 4 an uncommonly realistic, but not complimentary, popular understanding of one very important

Speaker 4 and potentially lethal part of our nation's government, our premier national intelligence organization, the CIA.

Speaker 4 And even as the CIA has had notable successes, And even as what we imagine about the CIA has spawned a gazillion spy novels and TV shows that I love as much as anyone.

Speaker 4 If you just look at the top-line history of the CIA in terms of what it's supposed to do, that history in the 20th century, as summarized in Legacy of Ashes,

Speaker 4 it's basically a litany of how much the CIA has screwed up all of the most important stuff, right?

Speaker 4 If the bottom line for a spy agency is in fact spying, if what they are supposed to do is find out other countries' secrets and give the U.S.

Speaker 4 government a heads up on what important things are about to happen in the world, well, the CIA

Speaker 4 doesn't, for most of its history, have a good track record at all.

Speaker 4 The CIA was founded in 1947. Two years later, in 1949, they were totally surprised when the Soviet Union exploded a nuclear bomb.

Speaker 4 The year after that, they were totally surprised when North Korea invaded South Korea.

Speaker 4 Throughout the whole next decade, they were totally surprised by the uprisings in Eastern Europe against the Soviet Union. In 1962, oh, wow, seriously, what? The Soviets have missiles in Cuba?

Speaker 4 Totally surprised by that.

Speaker 4 In 1973, the CIA did not foresee the Arab-Israeli war. They did not foresee the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
They did not foresee the Iranian revolution.

Speaker 4 They did not foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Speaker 4 When Iraq invaded Kuwait, they learned about that in the newspaper, like all the rest of us.

Speaker 4 So it's... I mean, the record is not good.
Even before they cooked the intel on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to give George W.

Speaker 4 Bush the pretext he wanted for his disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003. Even before that, the legacy was not good, hence legacy of ashes, right?

Speaker 4 But what do we do with knowing that kind of history now, now in this moment that we are in? Because now

Speaker 4 we've got a presidency underway that makes you wonder whether it's still okay to call the George W. Bush presidency disastrous, right? If we're going to grade on a curve,

Speaker 4 I think it's still okay. But you have to think about it.
I mean, now we've got a presidency underway where,

Speaker 4 in comparison, you know, maybe Brownie wasn't so bad as FEMA chief.

Speaker 4 Where in the intelligence world, they kicked things off at the start of this presidency by sending the president's top campaign donor a list of all the new CIA officers in an unclassified email.

Speaker 4 And then gave him and this mysterious government agency that he was supposedly running, running gave them access to the operating budgets for all of America's intelligence agencies, including their covert payment systems, meaning they gave the president's top campaign donor a roadmap to all the sources and spies the CIA secretly has on the payroll everywhere in the world.

Speaker 4 Don't worry, though, it's not like the president will ever have a falling out with that campaign donor.

Speaker 4 Not like they'll ever be at odds or want to do something to hurt each other, right?

Speaker 4 Now we've got a presidency where Trump's hand-picked director of national intelligence is described on Russian state television as a, quote, Russian agent and as, quote, our girlfriend.

Speaker 4 And right now, according to the Washington Post, she is pursuing a genius plan to collect all internal communications from our country's intelligence agencies, all of them, so she can run AI tools.

Speaker 4 on those communications to root out the president's secret enemies or something.

Speaker 4 I don't exactly know what they're looking for, but definitely put all the secret internal communications of all the spy agencies into one big pile and then start running outside software on them.

Speaker 4 Sure, what could possibly go wrong? It's not like they ever talk about anything sensitive or dangerous, right?

Speaker 4 I mean, so that's where we are now, right? In the midst of the dismantling. of much of what counts as the U.S.
government, including some of the important bits.

Speaker 4 And it is one thing to be critical and hard-eyed and realistic about the failings of really important and lethally powerful parts of the US government. It's very important, in fact.

Speaker 4 But it feels different to do that now

Speaker 4 when we are in the middle of an authoritarian takeover by somebody who is trying to consolidate dictatorial powers and destroy the US government to do it.

Speaker 4 And that's the moment that we are in. And in that moment, Tim Weiner, tomorrow, is publishing his follow-up.

Speaker 4 It's called The Mission, the CIA in the 21st Century.

Speaker 4 It's 25 years of a lot of disasters and also some brilliant successes, like, for example, dismantling the AQCon nuclear smuggling ring and the Biden-era CIA correctly and publicly predicting every single thing about Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Speaker 4 But it culminates now with the decline into authoritarianism that American citizens are fighting actively right now under underpasses in Little Rock and in borderlands in New Mexico and everywhere in between.

Speaker 4 And it culminates with this, I think, really important and powerful warning about how dangerous our very powerful, very flawed, very unaccountable government agencies could be

Speaker 4 in the hands of an authoritarian, in the hands of somebody trying to consolidate a dictatorship.

Speaker 4 And I quote,

Speaker 4 America faced danger at home and abroad as the president assaulted its civil liberties and democratic institutions, seeking to finish the job his mob had started.

Speaker 4 The instruments of its intelligence and national security were in the hands of amateurs and toadies.

Speaker 4 The foundations of its foreign policy are corroding and crumbling. The State Department was shuttering embassies and consulates around the world.

Speaker 4 The diplomatic cover they gave dozens of CIA stations and bases was disappearing. The ranks of the CIA's most experienced spies and analysts were thinning.

Speaker 4 Its irreplaceable ties to its closest international allies were fraying. The risk of a

Speaker 4 catastrophic intelligence failure was as high as it had been at the start of the 21st century with 9-11.

Speaker 4 Imagine what could happen if the United States were struck again by a surprise attack in days to come. What would stop the president from declaring martial law or canceling elections?

Speaker 4 Could Congress or the Supreme Court oppose him? Who would disobey him if he ordered the clandestine service to rebuild the secret prisons, to overthrow a sovereign nation,

Speaker 4 or to assassinate his political enemies?

Speaker 4 The CIA did not defy presidents, but the CIA officers with the greatest morality could resist him, and years might pass before their stories would be be told.

Speaker 4 Pulitzer Prize winner, National Book Award winner Tim Weiner joins us here next. Stay with us.

Speaker 6 New reports from UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, warn that brutal winter weather and funding cuts are putting refugees at risk. Staff on the ground report devastating conditions as the cold sets in.

Speaker 6 Families living in flimsy shelters with no heat. Children exposed to freezing winds without warm clothes are at risk of frostbite.

Speaker 6 Sick and elderly people sleeping on the frozen ground without blankets or protection. Here's the harsh reality: funding shortages are so severe that the lives of refugees are now at risk.

Speaker 6 At this critical moment, your support can make a life-saving difference and reach a refugee within 72 hours of an emergency.

Speaker 6 Donate today to help UNHCR deliver winter survival kits, including warm blankets, heating stoves, shelter materials, and winter clothes to those facing the harshest conditions. Please don't wait.

Speaker 6 Donate now at UNrefugees.org/slash Rachel.

Speaker 1 This episode is presented by Planned Parenthood Federation of America. This year, lawmakers have attacked our rights, stretched the truth, and taken away access to health care.

Speaker 1 Through it all, Planned Parenthood has been on the front lines, providing care, defending patients, fighting back.

Speaker 1 But the Trump administration and Congress passed a law to defund Planned Parenthood, putting care for 1.1 million patients at risk. Planned Parenthood isn't backing down.

Speaker 1 They're still here, protecting access to birth control, cancer screenings, abortion, and more. Visit plannedparenthood.org slash defend and donate today.

Speaker 7 Is it time to reimagine your future? The right business skills may make a difference in your career.

Speaker 7 At Capella University, we offer a relevant education that's designed to focus on what you need to know in the business world.

Speaker 7 We'll teach professional skills to help you pursue your goals, like business management, strategic planning, and effective communication. And you can apply these skills right away.

Speaker 7 A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella.edu

Speaker 4 in January, President Trump said if Russia didn't end the war in Ukraine, he would hit him with new sanctions and also tariffs.

Speaker 4 Vladimir Putin ignored him, and then Trump did nothing in response. Then in March, Trump made the same threat again.

Speaker 4 Sanctions or tariffs. And once again, Putin ignored him and Trump did nothing in response.

Speaker 4 A couple weeks later, Trump made lots of headlines by saying that he was, quote, very angry, so angry with Vladimir Putin. He threatened that he would put tariffs on Russia.
Really meant it this time.

Speaker 4 And Putin ignored him and Trump did nothing in response. Then in May, Shockingly, the exact same thing.
Trump threatened sanctions if Putin did not end the war in Ukraine.

Speaker 4 And Putin effectively laughed in his face and escalated the war in Ukraine, and Trump did nothing in response. And that brings us to today, and can you guess how it went?

Speaker 4 Headline, Trump threatens very severe sanctions.

Speaker 4 Very severe tariffs

Speaker 4 against Russia if no Ukraine deal within 50 days. So Putin gets to keep doing whatever he wants in Ukraine for another 50 days.
But after that, if Putin doesn't knock it off, then

Speaker 4 look out. Trump says he's going to impose tariffs.

Speaker 4 Ooh, tariffs, like he's imposing on every other country in the world.

Speaker 4 And even if he did follow through this time, you think he will? Since we don't do any trade with Russia, tariffs would mean nothing to them at all. It's like multiplying by zero.

Speaker 4 It doesn't matter the multiple. It's always zero impact.

Speaker 4 If you feel embarrassed watching the President of the United States of America embarrass himself over and over and over again when it comes to his bootlicking relationship with Russia and Vladimir Putin.

Speaker 4 Just imagine watching it

Speaker 4 from inside your career at the CIA.

Speaker 4 The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tim Weiner has this new book that's coming out tomorrow about the CIA in the 21st century.

Speaker 4 He did an extraordinary number of on-the-record interviews with longtime CIA agents and officers who are generally not the world's most talkative people.

Speaker 4 Weiner writes that over these last six months, as Trump has moved to upend just about every institution in the post-World War II international order.

Speaker 4 For CIA veterans, quote, what truly shocked their conscience was Trump's cold betrayal of Ukraine and his open embrace of Russia.

Speaker 4 He continues, quote, for a decade, American spies, politicians, citizens, and journalists had wondered aloud about the president's affinity for Putin. Was Trump really his useful idiot?

Speaker 4 Could the Russians have something on him? Was it conceivable that he had been recruited or had he recruited himself?

Speaker 4 Was it simply that he liked Putin because he wanted to be like Putin, an autocrat with absolute power?

Speaker 4 It had been a mystery. But now the answer was apparent, as clear as a bolt of lightning.
Trump wasn't Putin's agent. He was his ally.

Speaker 4 The President of the United States had gone over to the other side.

Speaker 4 Joining us now is Tim Weiner. He's the author of The Indispensable History of the CIA in the 20th Century, Legacy of Ashes, and his new book comes out tomorrow.

Speaker 4 It is The Mission, the CIA in the 21st Century.

Speaker 4 And it's excellent. Tim, thanks very much for being here.
Congratulations on the book. I know this was a labor of love, but one that took a long time and a lot of work.

Speaker 3 Thanks, Rachel. It was a labor of love.

Speaker 4 Let me ask you about that last point I just mentioned. Why is Trump's stance toward Russia and Ukraine so particularly galling and upsetting for so many people you spoke to at the CIA?

Speaker 3 Since 2014, when Putin seized the Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine, the CIA has been on the ground in Kyiv and beyond, working to help Ukraine survive.

Speaker 3 And it has played a crucial role in that survival.

Speaker 3 When the CIA stole Putin's war plans for Ukraine in late 2021 and told the world about it,

Speaker 3 initially, NATO nations were skeptical, like, really?

Speaker 3 Aren't you the people that told us that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction? But the intelligence was true. And that had an electrifying, galvanizing effect on NATO.

Speaker 3 And that support flowing from Europe has, in addition to U.S. support, ensured, helped ensured, Ukraine's survival.

Speaker 3 The CIA's been working against the Russians since 1947

Speaker 3 and now for a decade for Ukraine.

Speaker 3 Imagine you wake up, you're a CIA officer, and you realize early in this administration that the President of the United States has joined the authoritarian Axis, that he is voting with Russia and North Korea and Iran, the United Nations, against a resolution condemning Russia's occupation of Ukraine.

Speaker 3 It was a head-spinning, gut-wrenching day for them when that vote took place in February. And every day these guys go to work

Speaker 3 trying to, you know, subvert the Kremlin and support Ukraine. And

Speaker 3 it's been a difficult six months.

Speaker 4 In addition to that reorientation to, as you put it, the authoritarian axis, I feel like one of the things that I and so many others have learned from you about the CIA is that presidents can really misuse it.

Speaker 4 I mean, presidents can fight with the CIA, they can undermine it, they can throw it under the bus, sure, but they can also use the CIA and manipulate the CIA and some of the mythology around it for nefarious purposes.

Speaker 4 And it's to the detriment of the country when it happens. I was struck by a quote by one of the people you spoke to in the book who talked about

Speaker 4 recognizing some of the errors that the George W.

Speaker 4 Bush administration was making around the war on terror as being errors that we would pay for for 40 years in terms of our reputation and our capacity capacity as an international actor when we made some of those mistakes.

Speaker 4 Given that I've learned so much from you about how presidents have done wrong with and by the CIA,

Speaker 4 what have you learned about what makes Trump a uniquely dangerous figure,

Speaker 4 again, in the eyes of the CIA veterans who you spoke with?

Speaker 3 Ideology is the enemy of intelligence. If you're an ideologue, you don't care what the intelligence says.
Your mind is made up. Why be confused with facts?

Speaker 3 The danger today, Rachel, is that you've got a guy running the CIA, John Ratcliffe,

Speaker 3 who will tell Trump anything Trump wants to hear. You've got a rank amateur running the Pentagon.
You've got a conspiracy theorist as director of national intelligence.

Speaker 3 And you've got an FBI director who is actively dismantling the national security and counterintelligence directorates at the FBI.

Speaker 3 This makes us as vulnerable to attack as we were in the months before 9-11. The risk of a catastrophic intelligence failure with these amateurs and toadies in charge of national security is high.

Speaker 3 At CIA, you've got thousands of people who are trying to figure out what's going on in the world and warn of dangers over the horizon, approaching dangers.

Speaker 3 The president doesn't want to hear what they have to say. He literally has said, forget about the intelligence.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 this is not how it's supposed to work. Intelligence is supposed to inform

Speaker 3 wise foreign policy. That's not happening.

Speaker 4 Tim Weiner is the author of The Mission, the CIA in the 21st Century. It comes out tomorrow.
It reads like a thriller

Speaker 4 and it's really important in this moment. Tim, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you for writing this book. Thank you

Speaker 4 to your sources for being willing to speak with you and go on the record for this book. It's a remarkable collection of information we never had before and wouldn't have without you.
Thank you.

Speaker 3 Thank you, Rachel.

Speaker 4 All right, much more ahead. Congressman Maxwell Frost is going to join us live here next.
Stay with us.

Speaker 8 TikTok for Business is helping owners like you reach new customers every day.

Speaker 9 We saw up to a 10X return on our TikTok shop ads. A few years ago, I started sharing my love for fashion on social media and Willow Boutique was born.
We're not just a place to shop.

Speaker 9 We've really become a community. TikTok allows us to find more people to have that great experience.
I cannot imagine my business without TikTok.

Speaker 9 It's completely changed my life and I could not be happier.

Speaker 8 Head over to getstarted.tiktok.com slash TikTok ads.

Speaker 1 Come to DSW for the shoes. Stay for the fun.
Because be honest, if shoe shopping isn't fun, are you even doing it right? So go ahead, try something new. Try something different,

Speaker 1 good different. Try something that feels like you.

Speaker 4 You know, the real you.

Speaker 1 And then definitely brag about it later. Because at DSW, you've got unlimited freedom to play.
Buy the shoes that get you at prices that get your budget at DSW stores or at dsw.com.

Speaker 1 Let us surprise you.

Speaker 10 Home to the Rachel Maddow Show, Morning Joe, the briefing with Jen Saki, and more voices you know and trust. MS Now is your source for news, opinion, and the world.

Speaker 10 Our name is new, but you'll find the same commitment to justice, progress, and the truth that you've relied on for decades.

Speaker 10 We'll continue to cover the day's news, ask the tough questions, and explain how it impacts you. MS Now.

Speaker 10 Same mission, new name. Learn more at MS.now.

Speaker 11 They are using cages.

Speaker 11 These detainees are living in cages.

Speaker 11 The pictures that you've seen don't do it justice.

Speaker 4 That was Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Florida Democrat, describing the conditions at what she, I think, reasonably is calling the Trump administration's new internment camp.

Speaker 4 The immigration prison, the Trump administration and the state of Florida have stood up in the Florida Everglades.

Speaker 4 For weeks now, protesters have been making their opposition to this new prison camp known.

Speaker 4 Protests like this, signs like these, swamps not cells,

Speaker 4 and stop alligator alcatraz, and no concentration camps on preserved land.

Speaker 4 And, you know, don't let anybody tell you that pushback and protest don't have an effect. One of the ways you can see it have an effect is through the heaven-sent divine miracle that is shame.

Speaker 4 Since the country has learned about this internment camp, and protests against it have happened in Florida and all across the country, companies whose food trucks had been seen coming and going from the site have made public apologies for their involvement.

Speaker 4 Contractors who worked on the site have started covering up the logos on their trucks with tape and cardboard, even hiding their DOT, their Department of Transportation tracking numbers, which is something you are not supposed to do.

Speaker 4 This weekend, the Miami Herald managed to get a list of prisoners who are already being held in this Everglades prison camp or who are slated for transfer into it.

Speaker 4 Of the number of people that they found on this list, the Herald found that a huge proportion of them have no criminal convictions at all or any pending charges in the United States.

Speaker 4 They keep saying it's the worst of the worst, but these are people with no criminal convictions and no pending charges.

Speaker 4 As the Everglades immigration prison has sprung up and filled up, elected Democrats, Democratic lawmakers have been pushing hard too.

Speaker 4 They've tried to get inside to perform their oversight duties to see what the conditions inside are like so they can tell the country what's going on there.

Speaker 4 They're not letting this place become a secret black site.

Speaker 4 A week and a half ago, it was state-level lawmakers, Florida Democrats. They were turned away at the site, so they filed a lawsuit to be allowed to get in.

Speaker 4 Before their suit could play out in court, the state ultimately invited those lawmakers in.

Speaker 4 On Saturday, five members of Congress and around 20 state lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans, got what Democrats are calling a sanitized tour of the site.

Speaker 4 According to Florida Congressman Maxwell Frost, who was among the Democratic members of Congress to tour the facility,

Speaker 4 these legislators were not allowed to speak directly with any of the prisoners. They were not allowed to see the medical facilities on site.

Speaker 4 Even so, what they did see sounds difficult to forget.

Speaker 12 People are being held in cages. These cages hold 32 people per cage.
There are three toilets in each cage for the group of 32 people, and their drinking water comes from the toilet.

Speaker 12 There's a little spigot on top of the toilet, and that's where they drink their water.

Speaker 4 Congressman Max Paul Frost of Florida joins us live here next. Stay with us.

Speaker 12 We actually heard reports from many immigrants that are within the facility that said, well, yesterday out of nowhere, they let us take a shower. They had to let us take a shower all week.

Speaker 12 Yesterday out of nowhere, the food, you know, got a little better than it's been before. And of course, all of this is in connection to the tour we were doing.
That's why

Speaker 12 these visits from elected officials are so important.

Speaker 4 Florida Democratic Congressman Maxwell Frost describing what he and other Democrats are saying was a sanitized tour that they got this weekend of the immigration prison that Trump and the state of Florida have built in the Everglades.

Speaker 4 Congressman Frost joins us now live. Sir, thank you very much for being with us tonight.
It's a pleasure to have you here.

Speaker 13 Thanks for having me.

Speaker 4 Let's talk big picture here for a second. Why is it important to you

Speaker 4 that you get in there, for you as an elected official to see for yourself the conditions in there and for you to describe them to the public?

Speaker 13 Well, number one, it's important because I'm one of the only people that's able to go inside that facility, walk outside of it, and deliver the truth.

Speaker 13 Say exactly what I saw and exactly what's going on.

Speaker 13 When I went in and we were standing at that door, looking at the cages, looking at the hundreds of men in there, I saw myself in those cages.

Speaker 13 I saw people who were my age, people who looked exactly like me. And I thought when we were walking out of those doors of the internment camp, I thought...

Speaker 13 I'm one of the only people that looks like me and that's my age.

Speaker 13 It's going to actually walk out of this place without being deported or without being a staff member that's not allowed to really talk about what's going on in there.

Speaker 13 That's why it's so important for members of Congress to conduct oversight on these facilities. And we were some of the first people to go in there with a notebook, with a pen.
I had pictures.

Speaker 13 I have a full notebook full of questions that I was looking to get answered, pictures of my constituents, information about their stories. And I'm going to be back.

Speaker 13 You know, we originally planned this as an unannounced tour. Somehow they found out about it and they ended up inviting us on the same day and time we were going to show up anyway.

Speaker 13 But we got to be clear, I don't need Ron DeSantis' permission.

Speaker 13 I don't need anybody's permission to pull up to an immigration detention center and do my job, which is to go and conduct oversight and tell the public about what's going on.

Speaker 4 In terms of this facility, you use the term internment camp, and I saw your colleague W.B. Wasserman Schultz use that same phrase.

Speaker 4 Obviously, that's very evocative language with history in this country that is

Speaker 4 difficult for a lot of people. Talk about why you think that term is appropriate.
I've been struggling with that myself, just as a broadcaster, in terms of how to talk about these things.

Speaker 4 I mean, in technical terms, if you've got a facility that's holding people indefinitely and there's no legal process to get in there and there's no legal process to get out,

Speaker 4 that is traditionally called a concentration camp or an internment camp.

Speaker 4 And I wonder about your specificity in using that language.

Speaker 13 Well, sure as hell, I'm not going to to use what they're calling it. You know, what they're calling it is to make light of the situation.

Speaker 13 What they're calling it is to make it a giggle or something you can sell merch on. And so I encourage people, don't call it what they're calling it.

Speaker 13 You know, and everyone's using different language, different names. You know,

Speaker 13 I'm going with internment or even prison,

Speaker 13 detention center, because this And this isn't even detention center, right?

Speaker 13 The thing people have to realize, too, is when an immigrant is being detained, they're being detained because they're going through the legal process of deportation.

Speaker 13 They have not been convicted of a crime. They're not serving a sentence for a crime.
And so they should not be treated in this way.

Speaker 13 And to be honest, even if you're treated as a, even if you've been convicted of a crime in this country, you don't, you shouldn't be treated this way as well. The conditions were horrible.

Speaker 13 And it's nothing less than what I called it. And I like to be very clear about things because we have too much BS in this world and in this politics where people want to sanitize stuff.

Speaker 13 We can't sanitize what's going on in the Everglades because it's going on around the country.

Speaker 4 Let me ask you about some breaking news that's just happened within the past hour. The Washington Post is reporting under this headline.

Speaker 4 ICE declares millions of undocumented immigrants ineligible for bond hearings.

Speaker 4 This is a new revisited, quote, revisited legal position on detention and release authorities from the Trump administration.

Speaker 4 They're saying that anybody who came into the United States illegally is no longer eligible for a bond hearing.

Speaker 4 And that might sound like a technical bit of legalese, but what they're saying is that that means millions of people who crossed the border into this country, came to this country illegally, can be arrested now

Speaker 4 and have no right to get out. It literally could mean millions of people to be incarcerated.
indefinitely for the duration of any of their immigration proceedings, which can take months or years.

Speaker 4 Lawyers are responding to this by saying that this could mean the incarceration of millions of immigrants who came here over the past few decades, not people who have just arrived recently.

Speaker 4 Let me get, I know you may or may not have had a chance to observe this since this news just broke, but I wanted to get your instant reaction to it.

Speaker 13 No, no, no, I saw it, and

Speaker 13 it's a complete perversion. of a law and long-standing legal standard as it relates to detention.

Speaker 13 You know, for about a century in this country, if you are an immigrant, you're someone that's undocumented and you're going through a process, maybe you've been arrested or detained, you're able to bond out, you're able to go back out in the world, continue to work, continue to be with your family as you go through the legal process.

Speaker 13 And that's been the standard for a century.

Speaker 13 In 1996, Congress passed a law that would essentially introduce this concept of mandatory detention for certain people saying, well, judges can't give some immigrants the ability to bond out if they're a flight risk, if they've committed a crime, they have to remain detained.

Speaker 13 Now, the Trump administration is saying, well, that 1996 law applies to everyone, and it doesn't. They're completely wrong.

Speaker 13 And actually, this has already been settled in court in Washington at a detention center in Tacoma. So this will be litigated, but this points to something bigger.
They want more people behind bars.

Speaker 13 They want to incarcerate more people and they want to ethnically cleanse this country of certain types of immigrants. Because here's the thing.

Speaker 13 They're not going for every person here that's undocumented. Because when I was in that internment camp in the Everglades, I didn't see any Europeans who overstayed their visa.

Speaker 13 I saw nothing but Latino men and Haitian men. And as we look at these operations going around the country, they are targeting specific types of people.
And it's a type of people that look like me.

Speaker 4 Congressman Maxwell Frost, thank you, sir.

Speaker 4 We will be right back. Stay with us.

Speaker 4 All right, that's going to do it for me tonight. Thank you so much for being here.

Speaker 1 Holiday PSA from DSW.

Speaker 4 This is a reminder that shoes are a gift, literally.

Speaker 4 So unwrap something good, like boots that inspire your next big adventure, or cozy slippers that give you an excuse to stay in, or sneakers that feel like pure joy.

Speaker 1 Because shoes aren't just shoes, they're exactly what you wanted. Let us surprise you so you can surprise them.

Speaker 1 Find shoes that get you and everyone on your list at prices that get your budget at DSWstores or dsw.com.