Loading summary
Transcript164 lines
- [00:00]
Podcast Advertiser
A PSA from Instacart. It's Sunday, 5pm you had a non stop weekend. You're running on empty and so is your fridge. You're in the trenches of the Sunday scaries. You don't have it in you to go to the store, but this is your reminder. You don't have to. You can get everything you need delivered through Instacart so that you can get what you really need. More time to do whatever you want. Instacart for. For one less Sunday. Scary. We're here.
- [00:32]
Adam Grant
Hey, it's Adam Grant from Ted's podcast Work Life, and this episode is brought to you by ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into. That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 companies use the ServiceNow AI platform. While other platforms duct tape tools together, ServiceNow seamlessly unifies people, data workflows and AI connecting every corner of your business. And with AI agents working together autonomously, anyone in any department can focus on the work that matters Most. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people@servicenow.com Did I talk too much?
- [01:11]
Camille
Can't I just let it go? Thank you so much.
- [01:16]
Podcast Advertiser
Take a breath. You're not alone. Counseling helps you sort through the noise with qualified professionals. Get matched with a therapist online based on your unique needs, and get help with everyday struggles like anxiety or managing tough emotions. Visit betterhelp.com random podcast for 10% off your first month of online therapy and let life feel better.
- [01:41]
Isaac Saul
Coming up, we have the MBS Donald Trump meeting, as well as Trump's threats to maybe execute some Democrats potentially. I address some of the Epstein Israel stuff, which I think needs some explaining. We talk about the gerrymandering wars turning around on Republicans and the James Comey indictment. Things did not go very well for the Trump Justice Department in court. It's a good one. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening and welcome. Welcome to the Suspension of the Rules podcast, a political talk show where we only curse when it's appropriate. Unlike members of Congress in 2025. Cursing's way back in now, fellas.
- [02:34]
Ari Weitzman
Youngster. Oh, yeah, brother.
- [02:36]
Isaac Saul
Yeah. This is. I think if you are an elected Democrat, dropping an F bomb is like how you think you connect with the youth today in America. That seems to be what's going on.
- [02:48]
Ari Weitzman
How many, how many F bombs does it take to connect to the youth? Six, seven?
- [02:52]
Camille
Y.
- [02:54]
Ari Weitzman
A lot.
- [02:55]
Isaac Saul
Well, actually, I don't know. Do the youth even curse anymore? They don't have sex or drink or do drugs or have fun or seek meaning. They're just, like, nihilistic and they are seeking meaning.
- [03:07]
Camille
Actually, they're seeking meaning a lot of.
- [03:09]
Isaac Saul
Yeah, I'm sorry, I shouldn't say that.
- [03:11]
Camille
The churches themselves are experiencing a bit of a bonanza. Young men seeking righteousness and meaning in the pews. So.
- [03:20]
Ari Weitzman
Yeah.
- [03:21]
Isaac Saul
Well, the president is accusing several Democratic lawmakers of seditious conspiracy, punishable by death, which feels like, I guess, a story. I don't know. Do we just ignore that stuff now, or should we actually talk about it? It seems like I actually don't know.
- [03:40]
Ari Weitzman
Well, we're talking about it now, so we're making a decision. It does feel like when Camille mentioned that this had happened, my response was, did you have a story to share? Like, the president's accusing opposition leaders of a crime and wants to throw them in jail and execute them. And then we. Yeah, we kind of already knew that. But that doesn't mean that every time he says it, it's something that we should ignore without mentioning. And there is a little bit more to it this time, too. Yeah.
- [04:09]
Camille
The novelty doesn't grant it consequence. It's consequential because it's a big deal, full stop.
- [04:16]
Isaac Saul
I. Yeah, I don't think we should ever ignore it. I. I mean, it's ins. It's insane. This is. Come on. This is like, we're. It's just so normal for. For those of you who might not know, because literally, this might not even constitute a news blip somehow. I mean, like, this may not even create a news cycle, but. A group of Democrats published a video on X formerly known as Twitter. I don't know if it went up somewhere natively aside from that, but it seems to be going around mostly on Twitter, where they're just urging military members to refuse any illegal orders from the president and accuse the president of pitting, you know, the military and the intelligence community against American citizens. And Trump responded by saying that they had committed that this was seditious behavior at the highest level. Each one of these traitors to our country should be arrested and put on trial. Mind you, this is for a X video they released telling the military not to conduct or not to. Not to stand by or obey idly when they get illegal orders. He said, their words cannot be allowed to stand. We don't have. We won't have a country anymore. An example must be set. And then later said, this is really bad and dangerous to our country. Their words cannot be allowed to Stand seditious behavior from traitors. Lock them up. President djt. Seditious behavior punishable by death, he added in a third post. So he kind of worked himself up, and then he finally got to the death penalty after three. Three truth social posts. Ironic timing, because today we literally answered a question in the newsletter and podcast about whether the president's mental fitness should be evaluated. And look, I know, I know it's like a TDS thing to say, but I'm sorry. Like, I'm just sorry. It is true. If I logged onto Facebook and my uncle was posting this post on Facebook calling for the death penalty for members of Congress, I would like, call up his wife and be like, is Uncle Gary okay? Because he's being crazy on Facebook, like, talking about killing politicians. And it's the President, which doesn't seem great to me. And I'm not. This is. You know, I think that's, like, a pretty objective thing to just be like, this doesn't seem good. I don't know if there's, like, a way to massage behavior like that. It just feels totally unhinged to me. But we're just totally numb to it because it happens all the time now.
- [07:12]
Ari Weitzman
Maybe I can warm up my massage fingers, give it a shot. The. The argument, I think, to normalize it as much as we can would be as follows. The President didn't say we should kill them. The President said, this is behavior that should be tried as seditious, and sedition can carry the death penalty. And he's emphasizing this highest button, pressy, dividing aspect of that statement purposefully, as he's done, as he's always done. And that is purposefully to try to get a reaction, to get people riled up about something and keep him in the news. And that's something that he's also extremely good at, something that we can see sort of in the thought process of, this is sedition. Trying to tell people in the military to ignore orders describing them as unlawful. Actually, that requires a trial. And speaking of trials, you should be put on trial for sedition. Oh, also sedition. I just recalled death penalty. And that's something that can drive the headlines. So it's a little bit different than the President saying we should put Democrats to death. There's a way to interpret it that way. And I'm not going. This is not me saying it's cool. And it's good that the President is telling us that sedition has a death penalty and we should try political enemies under it. That, you know. Yeah, objectively, not great. And objectively, something that we wouldn't say is a normal and healthy thing for a person outside of politics, just a random person without context to say. But based on the way the president operates, I think it fits a pattern. And to that point, like, that's kind of why it's something that we are prone to dismiss because we understand the president's pattern. That's part of it doesn't make it, you know, acceptable, but it does make it a little different than this is something that we should be taking seriously to the highest degree, because the president has given us every reason to not take his words literally. Seriously to the highest degree.
- [09:28]
Isaac Saul
Yeah.
- [09:28]
Camille
I mean, short of completely agreeing with the president's sentiment expressed on Truth Social, that this is, in fact treasonous and seditious and in fact, probably ought to be accompanied by the penalty that usually accompanies sedition, I think your interpretation is as generous an interpretation as possible, Ari, and perhaps even in that respect, a little too generous, perhaps.
- [09:55]
Ari Weitzman
That is the generous interpretation, yes. I'm not saying this is my interpretation. Agreed. I'm the generous one.
- [10:01]
Camille
Yes. And worthwhile to plant that flag firmly. But I'm recalling that we had a conversation about Donald Trump making similar posts about the importance of prosecuting some of his political adversaries. Pam Bondi was mentioned in some of those posts, and there was some speculation about whether or not those were supposed to be direct messages. And at the time that we had the first conversation, I believe it was not yet the case that the indictments had been delivered, and we got them shortly thereafter. So the possibility that these statements are something more than idle speculation, are something more than histrionic, hyperbolic condemnations from the president, it's a real possibility. And it's a real possibility because we've had recent examples of this. The admonition that we ought to take the president seriously, but not literally, is something that we've been hearing since, like, 2016.
- [10:55]
Ari Weitzman
It's like a trope at this point.
- [10:57]
Camille
And, yes, and I think in general, one has to take him both seriously and at least allow for the possibility of a literal meaning. And what is the responsibility of journalists and politicians of either side at this point? I think that is where the conversation probably needs to go. It seems to me that for journalists, the charge is, to the extent you have access to these people, you ask direct questions and you get them to clarify their statements as opposed to lean into the most hysterical interpretation. And if you are someone like, say, Chris Murphy, who is a leader of the opposing political party, that has a pretty substantial platform. Making a public statement about this is totally reasonable. But there are choices that you can make. And I know Chris Murphy just recently released a post and the text of his ex post, because I'm not gonna dead name the social media platform like you, Isaac Saul is the President of the United States just called for Democratic members of Congress to be executed, quote, hang them unquote. He posted. If you're a person of influence in this country and you haven't picked a side, maybe now would be the time to pick a fucking side.
- [12:11]
Ari Weitzman
Whoa, swearing now?
- [12:14]
Camille
The swearing isn't the issue for me. From my standpoint, I can totally understand how you could make a statement like this. I'm not even necessarily going to say this is wrong, but it does seem like there is an opportunity here, even for someone like Chris Murphy, to underscore how unacceptable that kind of rhetoric is and to do something similar to what journalists are doing. The President needs to clarify immediately what he means by this and what he's implying and the notion of kind of side choosing and is this the rise of fascism in America, et cetera. That rhetoric has also been around for a very long time. And there's a point at which the maximalist condemnations begin to lose some of their effect beyond inspiring more maximalist condemnations. And the aspiration to try and understand the opposition, to try and de escalate, is something that just kind of falls by the wayside. And I worry that a very long time ago we left a point in which there was still an interest in kind of pragmatism and deliberation and finding ways to work together towards some reasonable outcome, especially in a world where Marjorie Taylor Greene is defecting from maga. Like it feels like there's an opportunity there. And rather than insisting pick a side, maybe, maybe there's an opportunity to do some of the, I don't know, the pragmatic legislating that you guys are supposed to be there for. You've got six members of Congress who produce a video. Is there a piece of legislation to support this effort? Like, are you actually doing your jobs and finding means by which you can protect people who insist that they're going to decline to carry out orders because they believe them to be illegal. Are the processes clear? Is there a call to action beyond publicly released video declaration that creates a kind of messy public spat between Congress and the White House that can have its effect, but you also have a job and that job has particular duties associated with it. And maybe, just maybe some of those Duties might come in handy right now.
- [14:24]
Ari Weitzman
You know, to the generous interpretation. To give the generous interpretation to Senator Murphy here, too, and to the Marjorie Taylor Greene of it all. I think you could see this as him trying to do that thing of inviting Marjorie Taylor Greene in by saying, pick a side. Like, this is directed towards Republicans in Congress. It's directed to people of influence. It's not saying, hey, President voters, like people who voted for Trump, pick a side. It's saying, I'm noticing some fissures right now. If you're concerned about the President. Cough. You voted for the Epstein thing. Cough. Cough. Maybe you can consider taking a side against the President. Obviously. Pick a side. Probably not the most effective way of phrasing that and maybe won't be effective at accomplishing his goal. Not tactful. But I think that you could see that as the strategy that he's enacting is actually trying to find a way to make a path forward to work with Republicans in Congress.
- [15:26]
Isaac Saul
You know, I'm just sitting here thinking, like, is what? What? And this is actually a hypothetical. I want you guys to answer. What could Trump do at this point or say that would actually cause, you know, a meaningful majority of House Republicans or the US Senate to stand up and be like, no, like. Like this. Ha. This has to stop. It's like, I talked about this a few weeks ago when I wrote about, you know, things being pretty bad. It's like, the Overton window is actually so obliterated now. I'm like, I'm actually being serious. Like, if Trump posted, you know, calling like, a senator's wife a whore and saying that, you know, Hillary Clinton should be nuked into outer space or something. Like, like, it literally. I'm serious. Like, there wouldn't actually be, like, a meaningful blowback from the party for that. So, like, okay, like, what's sort of like a worse violation of decorum? Like how, you know, like. Like, he calls. He. He can call everybody, like, you know, called JB Pritzker fat or whatever and make fat jokes. He can.
- [16:49]
Camille
Journalists are piggies.
- [16:50]
Ari Weitzman
Yeah.
- [16:51]
Isaac Saul
Suggesting, like, with clear overtures that, like, these Democrats should be hanged for a video that they put online telling the military not to conduct illegal orders. I honestly don't. Like, he is maybe just gonna start bombing Venezuela. I don't know that that's, like, the probable outcome here, but there's news reportings about a war starting in Venezuela where we are, like, considering an overt, unambiguous overthrow of Maduro that will involve striking the Venezuelan mainland, like, the administration is considering this, and there is no meaningful block of Republicans being. So I'm like, I'm, I'm. I'm honestly not exaggerating when I say, like, I'm trying to think of a. Something Trump could do that's like a realistic thing I could imagine him doing that would actually upset a meaningful or cause like a meaningful rebellion in the Republican Party. And I'm kind of coming up empty, and that seems not great.
- [17:57]
Camille
Yeah, no, I, I would agree with a lot of that. The one thing I'd say, though, is this week in particular, we seem to be finding the level for some of this. I mean, Republicans have pushed back hard against the president on a particular issue, Epstein, and forced him to come around to their position. I mean, the president is not signing this legislation that got sent up to him because this is something he supported. Up until the weekend, he was insisting that this was not something that they ought to do and was forced to come around because there was going to be hugely embarrassing defeat for him. I mean, this is like the most defiant the Congress has been. And it seems to me that this is an opportunity to build on precisely that, that there are definitely Republicans who, concerned by the tariffs, concerned by so many of the recent defeats that Republicans have suffered, including the recent elections, knowing that the midterms are less, less than a year away at this point, knowing that if the economy doesn't improve dramatically, that they're going to have serious problems. There are lots of Republicans who might be willing to lock arms with Democrats in service of pursuing solutions and remedies and perhaps just issuing statements and proclamations that curtailed some of the President's ability to do this stuff while only dealing with kind of limited blowback from within his own party. And I think you see the fissures happening. I mean, we talked about it at length with respect to the broader Republican Party and some of their internal ideological schisms. The kind of Tucker, the Shapiro contest, and now the Marjorie Taylor Greene v. Trump contest. The fractures are there to be exploited by a smart opposition party.
- [19:55]
Ari Weitzman
But I think that's a little bit different than the question that's posed, which is what is something that's going to make a majority of members of Congress say, okay, that's too far, without needing it to be a tipping point on a petition in Congress that you're going to have to side with or else face condemnation from your voters, from your district, when it comes time to explain why you said yes or no on something. Yeah, like this was Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert and our friendly, cantankerous Kentuckians standing up in ways that we're kind of used to them doing, and then tilting the power such that it was obvious where this was going to go so that people kind of aligned in one way. And then it was, I think it was closer than it seemed for a while until the dominoes broke and then things fell. I think the question is, like, what's something that the President could say that, like, called it the Ted Cruz test. That Ted Cruz in Congress will come out and say right away, hey, we don't do that in America. Like, we don't talk that way. And it has to be about somebody that isn't a Democrat or an oppositional person, or it has to be about somebody who is like not a Republican, not on the right, and also not Epstein. So if Trump were to come out and say blank about Obama tomorrow, what could that be? That Senator Ted Cruz, without waiting to gauge the public reaction, would say, that's unacceptable. What would that line be?
- [21:31]
Camille
The hypothetical is tough to address, but I do think that the current landscape suggest that whatever that threshold is, it has been lowered as opposed to raised in recent weeks. And quite frankly, the trajectory doesn't seem particularly good either.
- [21:47]
Ari Weitzman
My agreement real quick.
- [21:48]
Isaac Saul
Yeah, I don't know. I don't, I don't know if I agree with that either. I mean, he just sat in the Oval Office with MBS and called Jamal Khashoggi a guy people didn't really like and suggested that he didn't kill him and undercut this entire CIA assessment. And there wasn't even a peep. I mean, what did I, maybe I missed it, but as far as I know, not a single Republican senator or member of Congress issued any kind of scathing statement about the President responding to a question about the Saudi Crown Prince murdering a Washington Post journalist by framing the journalist as a controversial person a lot of people didn't like, which by the way, isn't even that true. I mean, he was controversial maybe a little bit in Iran and Saudi Arabia because of his reporting, but controversial recording.
- [22:42]
Ari Weitzman
Of the last person he spoke to.
- [22:43]
Isaac Saul
Which was, yes, yeah, my all consuming theory of Trump of like he adopts whatever the last position he heard is, which is good sometimes and bad other times. But like I, you know, it's, I can't, I'm sorry to do it because it's so, again, talk about tropes. But it's just like, you know, Obama doing that with like Bashar al Assad or something, or you know, any Arab leader, it would be wall to wall. Like Obama sits next to the Saudi crown prince and questions takes the Saudi crown prince's side on a CIA assessment about what the crown Prince did in the. From the Oval Office to like, while denigrating a Fox News reporter. I mean, it would be apoplectic. They like, it's just totally bonkers.
- [23:40]
Ari Weitzman
But isn't it similarly apoplectic right now from one side? Like, do you think that apoplecticness would also bipartisan the moderate Democrats in Congress?
- [23:51]
Camille
I think that would be hard. And it's also just a circumstance where the current media ecosystem is different and the volume of scandal and the number of things that the President is actually taking income and fire for from outside of his party, from the media broadly and from within his party, both publicly and behind closed doors, is pretty astonishing. This is an administration in the most substantial crisis it's faced, perhaps more substantial than even the first term when he was facing impeachment. If that's something I could throw out there.
- [24:34]
Isaac Saul
Wait, I'm sorry, what's the actual crisis? I don't think I understand.
- [24:39]
Camille
The President does not have control of the party at this point. The President doesn't have the ability to simply make some declarations and kind of point Republicans in the directions that he would like them to march. Not nearly in the way that he did in, say, April when everyone was kind of quietly accepting the Freedom Day tariffs. Like, try to imagine him pushing an initiative that unpopular with his own party at this particular moment in time. I think it's impossible to imagine it.
- [25:07]
Ari Weitzman
I can imagine that, though.
- [25:08]
Camille
Well, I think you're successfully, successfully pushing it through without this sort of, without the sort of a pushback that he is experiencing now on, say, the Epstein stuff. I think it would be a completely different.
- [25:20]
Ari Weitzman
Do you have a second example? I think Epstein's just like, it's an exception. I don't think that there's a pattern to extrapolate from. I think this is just an area where he's weak.
- [25:31]
Camille
I mean, we've seen this on foreign policy stuff in particular, and certainly the Israel Palestine conflict is something that actually animated a lot of the distress within the party. Before we got to this particular moment, before we got to the Epstein stuff, which again had been lingering for a long time in the background of conversations about the shutdown and everything else was the contest over this. And as was just mentioned a moment ago, it wasn't clear how this would break. It didn't break in the President's direction. And that is after he tried to cast out Marjorie Taylor Greene again. This is not a president whose influence and control over the party is growing. It is a president who sees his influence waning.
- [26:10]
Ari Weitzman
Maybe. Maybe.
- [26:12]
Camille
I mean, it's not inexorable. It could very well turn around for him, but it seems like it would be hard for that. It's hard for me to imagine that turnaround without a lot of deft political operations and maneuvering, as opposed to what seems to be happening now, a kind.
- [26:28]
Ari Weitzman
Of spiraling what kind of hinges on this Epstein report. I think in the way that the like, what's the Justice Department actually going to release and what's going to be in that release and when that's gonna matter a lot, depending on how we extrapolate the president's control of the party. I think.
- [26:53]
Isaac Saul
We'll be right back after this quick break. Why Choose a Sleep number Smart bed.
- [27:01]
Podcast Advertiser
Can I make my site softer?
- [27:02]
Isaac Saul
Can I make my site firmer?
- [27:04]
Camille
Can we sleep cooler?
- [27:06]
Isaac Saul
Sleep number does that cools up to eight times faster and lets you choose your ideal comfort on either side your sleep number setting. Enjoy personalized comfort for better sleep night after night. It's our Black Friday sale recharge this season with a bundle of cozy, soothing comfort. Now only $17.99 for our C2 mattress and base plus free premium delivery. Price is higher in Alaska and Hawaii. Check it out at a Sleep number store or sleepnumber.com today.
- [27:29]
Podcast Advertiser
This holiday season, connection with the kids we love is the best gift of all. Right now, kids on average are spending between five to nine hours a day on screens and studies. Link he used to rising anxiety and depression with social media being at the center of it all. That's why Gab makes kids safe. Phones and watches. No Internet, no social media, just the right features for their age. With Gab's tech in steps approach, kids get the right tech at the right time. So if a phone is on your child's wish list, make it a gab the gift of safe connection. And right now get 50% off all phones and watches. That's up to $100 in savings. Act fast while supplies last for this exclusive holiday offer. Gab.com getgab and use code getgab that's G-A B B.com getgab Gab Tech insteps independence for them. Peace of mind for you.
- [28:34]
Isaac Saul
Okay, so well, we're there now. I mean I was, I wanted to talk a little bit about the MBS meeting, but I mean we gave it a lot of space in today's podcast. And I thought Will had a pretty smart take. I mean I think if I were writing it, I might have focused a little bit more on the Trump family Saudi crown prince relationship. I almost would have gone more extreme in both directions than Will did. Like on the negative side, I think I would have focused more on just the self dealing and how, I mean he will to his credit had this excellent paragraph in this piece about like just as clear about how clear this relationship is. The Trump Organization, its Saudi based development partner Dar Al Arkin announced a project that will allow cryptocurrency investors to buy into Trump branded real estate. Jared Kushner has, is now running a private equity firm that's taking $2 billion with a B from a fund led by the Saudi crown prince. A reminder that like we were losing our minds about hunter Biden making $30,000 a month from Ukrainian energy. In September, real estate developer Dar Global announced it's launching a 1 billion with a B dollar project to build a Trump Plaza in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the second such Trump branded project in the city. There's just like to me you can't remove the context of those things from the deal making that Trump is conducting with the US Government and the Saudis at the same time. On like the flip side of that, I, I think it is remarkable the degree to which Trump is welcoming the Saudis into like the new Western world. And while I don't, I don't suspect Saudi Arabia is going to soon become a hub for democracy and civil rights, I also think like this is the way, this is how you deradicalize, this is how you foster peace in places like the Middle east globally. I mean the, the isolation, the way that we're treating a country like Russia with like sanctions and condemnation and isolation and surrounding and whatever. Like, as much as I think some of that's necessary, I also recognize that that is not a good long term peace plan. Sure. I think like the open arm embrace even of unsavory characters and like showing them how good it is to be in this world and to have relationships with these like you know, Western democratic nations. I think that's good. And so I give Trump a lot of credit for that because I you with Abraham Accords, he moved the ball forward. I think with Saudi Arabia potentially joining the Abraham Accords or building out their own relationship with the United States where you know, they are, there is a, a fundamental understanding that like they are going to be held to a different standard, a better standard. I think all of that's really good. And I'm pretty optimistic about the idea that Trump can pull some of that off. It's just like it's a hard pill to swallow when you know he's gonna get like a two billion dollar hotel out of it too.
- [32:03]
Camille
I agree with most of what you said there and I think the qualification is, of course you can pursue all those good, good things like pulling them in close, making certain you have these kind of mutual interests internationally without the appearance of exceptional levels of corruption and self dealing. You could do that and there could be more transparency about these deals. There could even be a deliberate effort on the part of the President's family, who is still in business and they're still private citizens. So they should be able to do mostly what they want to do. But to evade getting into situations where their deals are likely to be scrutinized because they seem to align so closely with the active, proximate concerns of the United States of America and what they're doing. And it would be easier to give them the benefit of the doubt if they weren't openly doing things like launching the executive club in Washington D.C. where you can pay a lot of money and get insider access to the President or selling cryptocurrencies and the person who buys the most of it gets a meeting with the President of the United States. It's impossible to suggest that you're not directly involved in all of this when in fact you do seem to be involved in it. The one thing I would add to this briefly is to just provide a little bit of historic context specifically for this high level meeting with the Saudis. And there's just something, there's a pattern that I find really, really interesting with the Trump administration where between this, the Helsinki meeting from what back in 2018, that summit with Vladimir Putin, where the President is directly contradicting the intelligence community's assessment of whether or not the Russians were involved in various nefarious actions, which seems very similar in certain respects to him directly condemning reporters for asking questions about this Saudi leader, MbS, and whether or not he had any involvement in the Khashoggi murders, for example. Murder, for example. I think that there's something interesting about the fact that the President tends to have these high stakes meetings in more public settings in ways that are more unguarded, with less preparation than say W or Obama or even a Biden would have had.
- [34:16]
Isaac Saul
Definitely Biden.
- [34:17]
Camille
There used to be with W in particular. I mean there was, this was statecraft, the questions that were being Asked in these meetings were vetted questions. There is not somebody just kind of throwing a grenade into the conversation like, hey, why did you murder Khashoggi? So there doesn't end up being this kind of embarrassing moment. If anything, it's somebody shows up and they throw a shoe. You know, they're asking a question they're not supposed to ask at a time when they're not supposed to ask it and it gets ignored because they're better political operators. The President of the United States doesn't have those skills. He seems to hate the kind of preparatory stuff that precedes a lot of these meetings. And for whatever reason, they insist on doing this stuff in public. So dust ups over controversial things with international partners who in fact are a little bit more controversial, are much more likely to unfold in public in really explosive sorts of ways. Whereas before this might have been a kind of below the fold from insider sources. That's the sort of thing that you're reading. So I do think that that dynamic here is at least interesting to highlight and it does help to explain why we see more of this with the Trump administration relative to prior administrations. It's not that they weren't having high level conversations and even state visits from nefarious characters from time to time. It's that they were better at it in certain respects.
- [35:44]
Ari Weitzman
Better maybe, but this is actually an argument we hear a lot is, well, at least he's upfront about it. Like that's actually a pushback you get all the time is trust me.
- [35:53]
Camille
Yeah, that's why I said better respects in certain respects.
- [35:56]
Ari Weitzman
But like in certain respects. Right, but these are the respects in which not which is the easy refrain that we hear is, okay, Trump a potential self dealing fraud. Xyz, sure. But at least we know about it. Like Biden was doing it behind the scenes. We had to have those, we had to rely on those reports from media operators in order to know about it. We see Trump, he's himself in these meetings. He's coming in off the cuff. We know what he wants. We know who he is. We see the deals that he's signing that are going to be benefiting his holdings, his family. Good. At least we know and I think it doesn't, to be fair, to be clear, my opinion is that those things don't cancel out. The magnitude of self dealing that we're getting from the Oval Office right now is unlike anything that I think the media is prepared to even report on. It's such a different animal, but it does provide a Qualifier that I think does a lot of work in the public for people who are Trump supporters or even Trump curious. I think so. I think it's a feature, not a bug. I guess if I were to lean on a cliche to explain that same thing that you're critiquing.
- [37:10]
Isaac Saul
I mean, I, I love that part of Trump. Like, it is my favorite. Not my favorite, but it's one of my favorite parts of his entire ethos is like, we're just gonna do it live and let you guys watch. I mean, I. But you know, in some respects, in some respects, I think there is a case that he is like the most transparent president of all time. I also think he's covering up a lot of stuff. Like the Epstein file is a good example of him sort of not exercising transparency. Now he is, but it took, it was like pulling teeth and like, you know, he doesn't turn in his financial records and taxes and stuff. I mean, but like from a media accessibility view and just like, like Camille said, sort of not orchestrating events like this to be these perfect curated sit downs, like they're, you know, I mean, what happened with Zelensky? Like, we actually saw something that felt to me authentically like what would happen behind closed doors. But we were in the room and that's really rare. It didn't reflect very well on the President in my opinion. But like, I was still glad for it and I think he deserves credit for that, despite all the wild, abnormal other stuff that might come with it or that he's doing all right. The Epstein stuff has come up a couple times and I think we have to. Look, I'm exhausted by this story. I'll just say up front, I think that's shared.
- [38:47]
Camille
Yes.
- [38:48]
Isaac Saul
Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm tired. But I think, I think there's at least one part of this that we haven't really touched on because we have talked about this a lot that is probably worth addressing. I've seen it come up in our comments section. I've gotten a few emails about it and then most.
- [39:12]
Camille
Are we going to do the pedophilia thing or not? Pedophilia? Are we going to do child abuse?
- [39:16]
Ari Weitzman
Not pedophilia. Okay.
- [39:17]
Isaac Saul
Now. And then I, and then I got the, I got the, the. I have no interest in that. You know, there's like that comics joke. Like if you are trying to delineate between like the pedophilia and the Hebel Philia, there's like no way to do that without sounding like A pedophile, which is a really good joke. You know, the. Then I saw it on the R Tangle News subreddit, which is this sort of demand that I address the Epstein Israel connection, which I think is worth talking about, actually. And I'll say up front, I think my perspective here might be disappointing to the people who are insisting that I talk about this or take it on. I struggle when I read some of these stories to see something that is much deeper and more sinister than what we know about the stories. I don't think that Jeffrey Epstein is a Mossad agent or spy. First of all, if he were, he had an extraordinary amount of free time for somebody who is working for, like, an intelligence agency abroad. His emails are like just those of a roaming rich socialite who is getting his hand involved in every possible little social circle, event, policy issue, whatever that he can. Which I guess if you're coming in with the framework that this guy's a spy, then maybe that's proof of something. But to me, it's just like, no, this is just somebody who builds relationships everywhere he goes and uses those relationships as certain kind of leverage and got really wealthy in some ways doing that, and also built a sort of social life that I think for a lot of people before he went down for these sex crimes was like an envy, you know. But the, you know, there are specific allegations here, like the fact that Ghislaine Maxwell's father worked with Israel. Robert Maxwell, he was, you know, he's alleged, I guess I should say, to have worked for Israeli intelligence and Glenn Maxwell. And obviously Jeffrey Epstein have a relationship. So there's like, that's one point of reference. There's the. Who. Barack, former Prime Minister of Israel. He had a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. There is all these emails of them exchanging notes. You know, Epstein participated in the brokering of security arrangements between Israel and Mongolia. There's, like, back channels that Epstein was trying to access Russia through. He offered himself to the Russian deputy foreign minister as like, somebody who could help him understand Trump better. Everybody sees this stuff and they're just like, this guy has deep ties to the Israeli government. And there is an implication here, and I think an allegation in some cases overtly, with some of the stuff that I've been on the receiving end of the. That Epstein was basically running a sex trafficking ring in order to collect damning information on people that he used in his spy craft while working for Israel. I actually want to hear from both of you guys about this theory. And like, Camille, I know you've been going, you've gone down the rabbit hole a little bit on this topic. I will just offer mine really quick. And I do think I can actually do this pretty quickly, which is when you look at the full picture of Jeffrey Epstein, he is a person who had relationships with foreign governments all over the country or leaders or players in foreign governments all over the world. Excuse me, not just Israel. I think it was very obvious that he was somebody who wanted to leverage these relationships for his financial social gain. I don't think that his, you know, much more sinister dark sexual desires that he was acting on through the sex trafficking ring were part of some intelligence operation. I think they were a product of him being a predator and wanting to live this life as a sexual predator. And I don't think a country like Israel, who, you know, has basically pioneered some of the most advanced military and spycraft technology known to man, like, you know, no click malware and they, they put bombs in pagers of Hezbollah leaders. Like, I don't think they need some random New York City financier having sex with 15 year old girls in order to advance their spy apparatus. Like, I'm sorry, like that sounds as absurd as I just said it is. Like, it sounds as absurd as it is when I say it like that. Because it is a sort of ridiculous notion. Like, I think that Jeffrey Epstein, first of all, the Hud Barack relationship should also. Last thing I'll say is the Hud Barack relationship should also be seen through the lens of like he was a prime minister who was a New York City socialite. Like, this is like a. No, you know, people who understand Israeli politics remember him. You can probably go find it on his Wikipedia page. I don't know, I didn't look. But you could look it up about him. Like he is somebody who was very well connected in this sort of New York power player scene. It wasn't just Jeffrey Epstein. It was like he had these relationships with lots of people. It was a character trait of his. And Epstein was just one person in that kaleidoscope. But when you take all this stuff, you're like, you know, you're doing the always sunny thing, like connecting all the dots and your hair is all frazzled and you're like, this is it. Maybe it sounds a little bit more plausible to you. To me, I don't see that picture. I think like in a vacuum you can take those individual things and explain them pretty easily. And again, it's just like Israel is so, so, so capable and they have so many spies. They have so many people inside the US government who are allies. You know, like an easier way to think about it is almost just like, why do they need Jeffrey Epstein to get, you know, intelligence reports or like US information when they could just call the US Senator who's in their pocket of which there are a couple, you know, like. And that's not like a big Jew conspiracy. It's just like there's a lot of Israeli political influence in US politics. I feel totally comfortable saying that. And there are a lot of US Senators who want to do right by Israel because they view them as like a really powerful ally. The Israeli intelligence services don't need Jeffrey Epstein to sleep with a 15 year old girl to get the information they want. That's just my perspective. So I don't find that story.
- [46:20]
Camille
Maybe they want that, Isaac. That's what they want.
- [46:22]
Isaac Saul
Yeah, right. Yeah, monsters. Yeah, right. I don't find that story particularly interesting. I don't think there's a lot of there there. I think I could like mimic the sort of connections, loose connections and like links and whatever and make a similar story about many, many people with all different kinds of, you know, nations across the country and it would be like equally as unconvincing to me.
- [46:47]
Ari Weitzman
I don't have a lot to disagree with. I mean, I don't know if you do, Camille. I think maybe there's an interesting idea for a Friday piece there of like I'm going to untangle the vast conspiracy with Liberia or pick a random country and just find some connections and build some crystalline structure that is based on spider thread, like thin evidence that you can connect together to make it look larger than it is. But I mean, I don't know, I don't feel especially compelled to add anything to that. I don't know if you do, Camille.
- [47:18]
Camille
Briefly, I think it's interesting that after days, now almost a week with these emails, a lot of people seem interested in trying to fill in holes and perhaps gesture in the direction of broader conspiracy. The involvement with kind of foreign leaders suggest something. I think it is entirely possible to look at all these emails and acknowledge that they uniformly support, to the extent I've seen all the reporting on this or a lot of the reporting on this, but they uniformly support the appearance of someone who is constantly striving for or at least determined to seem consequential. And they are also determined to have proximity to people who one might deem important and consequential. And that is a kind of reinforcing, a self reinforcing loop that one could get into. And that seems to be the kind of person Jeffrey Epstein is like giving to high profile politicians so that you can have direct access to them via text message. Letting people spend the night in your compounds, your palatial Manhattan apartment, because hey, you're rich, you have extra rooms and extra beds. How strange that people are spending the night. Is all of that indicative of someone who is kind of playing 007? I suppose it could be, but it also all seems entirely consistent with high profile socialite who desperately wants to be a man about town and wants to involve themselves in high stakes international diplomatic efforts of various kinds. And that seems all of that is consistent with the evidence that's available. Does one want to go further and try to project or try to defend a much more nefarious interpretation of things? Sure, but I think that old dictum, dramatic exceptional claims ought to demand exceptional evidence. And thus far I just haven't seen the exceptional evidence yet to lead me in the direction of believing in a conspiracy that it would cost me nothing to endorse this conspiracy except for my credibility. And I'm just not, I'm not willing to do that yet.
- [49:32]
Isaac Saul
I just like, Ari, you gave me an example. Actually, I don't remember one of you said it like 20 seconds ago. Yeah, maybe you can just like, I just did like a random. I asked Grok, because by the way, Grok's way faster than ChatGPT. I said, who are like the top financial players in New York City right now? And they gave me a list and I just picked a random one, which was Jane Frazier, the CEO of Citigroup. And I just said, what connections does Jane Fraser have to. And then I thought for a second, I said, french authorities and intelligence services just like pick around the country in Europe. And it was like, no substantiated connections, but. But, yeah, but like, she serves on boards like the Council on Foreign Relations, Business Roundtable and Monetary Authority of Singapore's International Advisory Board. And they, these places have lots of relationships with French government and French intelligence services and they've had these meetings and Citigroup has a Paris hub for European trading advisory and services subject to EU French regulations. And you know, like, and then there's this, and they're like, you know, it's like, you can do this. Like, it is not really hard to craft something like this. And that is literally like, I just picked the first country that came to my mind in Europe and like threw a dart at some random board of like, important New York City financial people. And it's just like all of a sudden making those connections is really not that hard.
- [51:02]
Camille
So this is Ian Carroll, this is Candace Owens. This is what they do all day long. That's it.
- [51:07]
Isaac Saul
Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's like a cheap trick, you know, it's like a crappy version of mentalism or something like, I don't know, there's just you were like, you were making the thing real by speaking it, and I just don't totally buy it.
- [51:24]
Camille
Amen. Amen.
- [51:26]
Isaac Saul
So yeah, I'm happy to field your pushback. You can write to me will w I l l.com if you have theories about Jeffrey Epstein's connections to the Israeli foreign government and intelligence. Yeah, or France. Will W I l l@readtangle.com is a great way to reach me. We'll be right back after this quick break.
- [52:04]
Podcast Advertiser
Busy work weeks can leave you feeling drained. Prolon's five day fasting mimicking diet works at the cellular level to rejuvenate you from the inside out, providing real results that include fat focused, sustainable weight loss with no injection needed. NextGen builds on the original Prolon with 100% organic soups and teas, a richer taste and ready to eat meals. Developed at USC's Longevity Institute and backed by top medical centers, Prolon supports biological age reduction, metabolic health, skin appearance, fat loss and energy. Get 25% off plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe at prolonlife.com start that's prolonlife.com start hi, this is Robert.
- [52:50]
Isaac Saul
Mays from the Athletic. This time of year always gets busy, but that's when having peloton in my life really makes a difference. The new Peloton Cross Training Tread plus, powered by Peloton iq, helps me fit in great workouts no matter what's on my schedule. It's Peloton's most advanced equipment yet, giving you real time guidance and endless ways to move. Peloton IQ plans your workout workouts, tracks your progress and corrects your form so you can train smarter and make the most of your time. Let yourself run, lift, flex, push and go Explore the new peloton cross training tread +@1peloton.com. Okay, I, I do want to get to some a couple of quick hit news stories. Two of them actually. Neither of them are that quick, but I think they're really important. The first one is this Texas gerrymandering ruling that we got. We've been talking about gerrymandering a lot on the show, you know, sharing various debates about Our viewpoints on how Democrats should react to Trump's effort here and in the midst of all of this debating that the three of us have been doing, because this is something where we've actually disagreed quite a bit, I think something maybe none of us really expected. I certainly, I won't speak for you guys. I did not expect what has unfolded in the last week or two, which has been just like a series of breaks for Democrats that feel unlikely. That has kind of flipped the tables on the gerrymandering wars such that Democrats now, after having responded to the offensive from Trump and Republican governors across the country and Republican legislators across the country are now sitting at a net win because this Texas map got struck down by two judges, including one, I believe, including one Trump appointed judge on this three person panel in Texas. So Dave Wasserman, who's very famous in the political world for being like the king of redistricting, his at Handle on X is literally redistrict. He works for Cook Political Report. He is sort of considered like the most credible person covering election outcomes and the way, you know, various districts across the country are operating and leaning, you know, Democrat, whatever. He said if the new ruling blocking Texas Republicans map is upheld, Democrats would be on track to come out ahead by roughly three seats in the redistricting wars with Florida, Louisiana and Virginia the biggest remaining variables which are important states obviously. I mean Florida and Louisiana are going to gerrymander for Republicans, but Virginia will gerrymander for Democrats. And like in a world where that's a wash or even Republicans pick up a couple seats out of that, this basically ends up being a draw when a month ago I would say the absolute consensus among the political chattering class, pollsters, redistricting people was that Republicans had like as many as 7 to 15 seat advantage to come out of this redistricting push. I mean this is like next to the definition of fuck around and find out in like the colloquial dictionary. Trump has started something that I do not think he expected to go this way. I am personally elated, not because I care about Democrats having more seats in the House than Republicans, but because I really, really want to see this nonsense stop. And it feels like stepping on a rake, like this is a good lesson for everybody to maybe not try this stuff in the future. But I'm curious to hear what you guys think about how this has played out, reflections on where we are and maybe, I don't know if this, we maybe maybe this has some sort of meaningful impact on the way people think about doing this stuff in the future.
- [57:05]
Ari Weitzman
It's interesting because I think think both you and I, or all three of us and Camille both your. Your argument, our argument could rush to claim this news as a win for our argument for from my perspective, the idea that Republicans are getting their cases challenged in court where they'll potentially be thrown out, that hasn't happened yet. So it's still potentially means that in a year Democrats will be the one wearing the label of gerrymanders. And memory is a funny thing. In a year's time, we might not remember how this all started. I'm sure a lot of people who are going to be punching their ballot for Dems anyway will. But we'll be looking at California passed this law, they're trying to gerrymander the House. Maybe Democrats win the midterms and we're looking at something that feels tilted and unfair and now Republicans get to wear the mantle of the people who are fighting against an unfair rigged system that Democrats are rigging. And that'll be tough for Democrats to respond to. The argument that I think Camille and I were making was that if you want to stop gerrymandering, you don't gerrymander more. And this ruling is a win for that side of anytime that gerrymandering gets challenged in courts and we're seeing the potential for them to be stopped, then that's a good thing. I would have thought even that this could be detrimental to your argument, Isaac, which was that the best way to get it to stop is that they sort of arms race to this point where we're over the cliff and now we have to come back as it's our only option and the farther we get from the cliff means we're farther away from that being the solution to it. Whereas the stepwise reeling back to the point where we can normalize it and have it be something that states pass multiple laws on and then eventually we can have a federal law about it, maybe even an amendment one can dream that feels like the path that we might be on more so if anything, the thing that I regret the most is not advancing this argument earlier because I would say that it makes Camille and me look really smart to say that this is something that could backfire for Dems. I mean, obviously right now, if they get more seats, it's not gonna backfire in the short term. But to be the ones that want they were the party of election reform previously and now they aren't. And that's not something that they can run on anymore.
- [59:40]
Camille
I mean, they're definitely gonna get questions on this, if only from me at some point in the near future. They're gonna get questions on this. I am pretty sure. Pretty sure. And someone will have to check the tape because I haven't yet that at some point when we were having this conversation over the past couple of weeks, I mentioned the potential outcome in Texas in the courts not going in favor of the Republicans. So we at least noted the possibility. And I would agree with everything else that Ari said. One could interpret this in multiple directions, but certainly it seems like a circumstance where just stick to principles like take the actual high road here, the virtuous road, and defend the value of not cheating. And it does suggest this kind of gamesmanship is actually really, really hard to pull off. Well, and maybe, just maybe this will prevent people from wanting to do this kind of stuff in the future. But yes, it would be great if there was actually some sort of legislative action here on the part of Congress to try and reign some of this conduct in to ensure that this isn't the way that people are competing for votes and to control electoral outcomes.
- [60:56]
Isaac Saul
I think it does help your guys argument in a lot of ways. I mean, I'm still like you reluctantly.
- [61:05]
Camille
Arrived at that position anyways in your defense. So.
- [61:08]
Isaac Saul
Yeah, I mean, wanting more gerrymandering to force everybody, you know, to step back from the brink is understandably like an easy position to criticize. And it's not something that I felt. It's not something, you know, it's like I wanted to shower after making those arguments, you know, something I felt really good about at the same time. Like I. Yeah, I think this outcome was almost like totally outside my purview of expectation. I mean, I just figured with the way the judiciary has been built out by Republicans and the rulings on this kind of stuff that we were getting from the Supreme Court, that we weren't going to see a lot of these maps getting struck down. So I'm surprised that's happening at all. I'm especially surprised it's happening in states with conservative judiciaries like in Texas. I'll be curious to see if they can turn around and appeal this to the Supreme Court in time to overturn the ruling if the Supreme Court would overturn it before the election. I actually read Russell Nystrom, who's our kind of social media manager slash jack of all trades. He sent over the dissenting opinion in the Texas case, which I read the first 15 or 20 pages of, which is, I mean, biting. It's one of the most fiery dissents I've ever read. It's basically this federal judge saying in, like, 37 years, he's never seen a process on the federal bench like he witnessed for this ruling to come down and attacking the ruling itself from a position that looked to me maybe strong again, despite my hatred of gerrymandering, he seemed to have some signals and precedent from Supreme Court rulings we gotten recently on his side. So I don't know what happens with that case long term, but, you know, I suppose this is the system working without Democrats having to respond in kind. And that alone, I think, like, strengthens the position that you guys were talking from, which is just like, you know, let Trump hang himself with this politically. And I guess now judicially, I will say, I mean, this is. It's. It's remarkable the degree to which the Trump administration keeps shooting themselves in the foot. You know, this case happened, which the. The judges who ruled in the majority, I mean, they used comments from the Justice Department and the president as evidence against them that were, you know, to prove that this was like a racial gerrymander, basically, because the way that they operated in court, the public statements they were making, were so unhinged and undisciplined that it basically became something that. That became a problem for them in the ruling. And then at the same time, we're getting the news around this, this James Comey indictment, which was the other thing that I wanted to talk about, and it's actually related in this way because it's like the Trump administration is trying to prosecute James Comey, and the woman on the case is this lady, Lindsey Halligan, who's not really prepared for the job, it seems like. Yeah, I would say she's new at.
- [64:51]
Camille
Legal Intern. Yeah.
- [64:53]
Isaac Saul
Yeah, there is. I am trying to sort the mess a little bit here because I read the New York Times write up of what happened in court with the Comey case, and it was dripping with, I would say, like, quote, unquote, analysis and. Yeah. Derision and subjectivity, despite being a straight news report. Yeah. To just read from a few excerpts from it, the questioning by the judge, Michael S. Nachmanoff. Nachmanoff, yeah, that's a tough one. Took place at an excruciatingly awkward hearing in a federal district court in Alexandria, Virginia, that was nominally held to consider the narrow issue of whether the charges against James Comey had been filed as an act of vindictive retribution by press President Trump. The judge peppered prosecutors with questions on a range of topics, including Mr. Trump's own statements about wanting Comey to be indicted and an earlier decision by career members of the U.S. attorney's office in Alexandria to forego bringing charges. In one remarkable moment, the judge posed some of his questions directly to Lindsey Halligan, the U.S. attorney handpicked by Trump to bring the case, quizzing her on how she had presented it in the grand jury just this week. That subject led another judge involved in the case to suggest that she may have engaged in prosecutorial misconduct. The judge's inquiries were extraordinary by almost any measure, but the answer prosecutors gave to him in return were even more so. At one point, Ms. Halligan admitted that she had never shown the second and final version of the Comey indictment to the full grand jury before the foreperson signed the charging document. Mr. Comey's lawyers immediately seized on that irregularity, calling it another reason to dismiss the case entirely. At another point, one of Ms. Halligan's subordinates acknowledged that someone in the deputy attorney general's office had instructed him not to discuss an open whether his predecessors had or had not written a memo laying out their reasons for not bringing charges because that was privileged information. In the end, appearing unnerved under questioning, he confessed that the prosecutors who had previously handled the case had indeed written a draft of a memo declining prosecution did not sound like a good day for them in court. By the New York Times telling and again, there is, in my view, there are some words in there that I'm not sure should be in a news report like this. Things like excruciatingly awkward, you know, where is the other one? In one remarkable moment, there's just some stuff here that's sort of the judge's inquiries were extraordinary by almost any measure. I don't know. Then I went and read the Wall Street Journal piece, which I'll say this is like a great reason. This is like a use case for tangle. Like why tangle exists, because that's how the New York Times reported on this case. Wall Street Journal sends a reporter to the same place to witness the same court courtroom and they come out and say the Comey case is hit by surprise setbacks on legal basis, on Legal Basics. And their piece said the prosecution of James Comey hit a new and surprising skid Wednesday as the Justice Department acknowledged that a full grand jury never reviewed the final indictment of the former FBI direct director, a concession that could further jeopardize the case. The judge sharply questioned prosecutors about lapses in the case. The judge pressed the Justice Department Tyler Lemons, about why there were Two copies of the Comey indictment, one showing the grand jury had declined to indict on a third count, and the other showing only the two counts the grand jury approved. Mr. Lemons struggled to answer the additional questions. There's, you know, they describe a tense exchange, not necessarily excruciatingly awkward, but they also got into this whole other element of this case, which was that Comey was testing a new kind of legal defense, was kind of how the Wall Street Journal framed it, that he was using the I'm being politically prosecuted defense, which is not something that typically comes up in these cases, because the bar for that is extremely high, though, because Donald Trump tweeted out directions to the attorney general to prosecute him, the bar might be met in this instance. It's a total shit show, basically, is the quickest way to round it up. I don't know what's gonna happen with this case, but it certainly seems like there's a good chance that it gets thrown out based on this reporting. I mean, does not seem like the Trump DOJ is doing a great job right now.
- [69:32]
Camille
It just makes me. I can barely add much there. I do appreciate that the New York Times used the word nominally, which is underutilized. It's giving me a word very valuable. I mean, I like it. It's good. Nominal, good. You could have also gone with notionally there, but nominally is certainly better.
- [69:48]
Ari Weitzman
Profoundly better.
- [69:49]
Camille
Yes, I knew you would agree with that, Ari. Beyond that, it just makes me think, again, not for the first time at all, that if the Trump administration were better at things, the current moment would be a lot scarier in many respects. To the extent you're concerned about politically motivated prosecutions of persons who have run afoul of the administration, one saving grace is not merely that there are checks and balances and various courts one can appeal to. It's that the people who are carrying that out at the moment are just not nearly as competent as one might expect. And a lot of the very capable people who had a lot of experience were purged from government in certain instances early in this administration or refused to work with them. So that is something of a saving grace, although not at all what one hopes to have to depend upon in a circumstance like this. That said, I would hardly suggest that Comey has definitely done nothing wrong in any of these circumstances. There may, in fact be things here that are legitimately prosecutable, but the administration has done itself zero favors whatsoever. So even if you are someone who has had grave concerns about the way that the intelligence community was operating back when, during the first Trump administration, as I did, and continue to. Actually, you can't be happy with the way that the administration is going about doing all of this, essentially creating a great deal of noise. The theater is there, but the actual follow through is nearly always just Sideshow Bob surrounded by rakes, stepping on every imaginable rake at every opportunity.
- [71:36]
Ari Weitzman
What an image. Oh, we love that old Simpsons references galore.
- [71:41]
Camille
I'm a man in his 40s. What can I tell you, Ari?
- [71:44]
Ari Weitzman
Hey, I appreciate it. We all love the Simpsons. We'll leave it at that. The old Simpsons. We'll add more. No, we'll come back. So the idea that we're depending on ineptitude in order to stop executive overreach, I think maybe, maybe not. We're not sure, if not for the prosecutorial error in filing the indictment, if this case would have succeeded. I think our suspicion was that no. But it does prove something interesting. And I'm going to throw a little bit more kudos to members of the TANGLE staff here. Audrey Moorhead answered one of our editors, she answered a question a while back from a reader about why people who are political appointees or members of the federal government staff would resign and what they're trying to hope to achieve. Which was a fun one for Audrey to answer, considering that she's generally conservative and tends to not appreciate or tends to think there's not a lot of value into mass resignations. And one of the theories is when you resign, you are making a statement that that en masse says something and can then inspire others to resign as well and can hamper some actual proceedings that you would oppose. And the way that that ends up working is somebody then gets appointed who, if enough people resign, if there are enough people in the Justice Department who are saying, look, I'm uncomfortable with what we're doing here. I don't like the way we're going about our investigations. They feel more like witch hunts. They feel less like independent inquiries. Then eventually people are going to be promoted who don't have the requisite experience to pursue those cases in ways that are normally competent, normally befitting the level of execution you'd expect from that department. And that's one of the things that can happen when you have resignations and then you bump down to people who aren't ready to step up. So it's just a way to say, look, if you're looking for ways that the quote unquote resistance is working, sometimes they're a little bit harder to see And I think you could say that this is happening here, though I do think it's all, like, washed out by the fact that it probably wouldn't have succeeded anyway. And I'll end by saying, like, I truly hope that this is the last we talk about it, because I think more so than any other case that or any other issue we've covered in tangle. I just, I'm so over talking about James Comey and why we're even, why he's in the news. I get that the political prosecution is an issue, but we're 10 years removed from the thing that we're initially concerned about, the investigation, the counter investigation, now the suit into the investigation about the counter investigation. It's just like, I hope this just dies here and then we're done. And we could talk about other stuff. And I don't know, I feel similarly more so exhausted about this than I do the constancy of Epstein being in the news. There's more recency with that. There's reasons why that's salient. But this great. Maybe Lindsey Hannigan did us or Halligan did us a huge favor. She made a misstep and she's saving us all the agony of having to go through this in headline news any further.
- [75:09]
Isaac Saul
I find it, I think it's so odd that you don't give a shit about this case.
- [75:14]
Ari Weitzman
It's just, I mean, I've said why. So what about that feels off?
- [75:22]
Isaac Saul
I mean, it's like the President is openly prosecuting the former FBI director, who's a registered Republican, maybe most responsible for tanking the career of the president's number one political rival, Hillary Clinton, and. And also obviously played a role in this investigation into Trump and the Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia hoax stuff.
- [75:47]
Ari Weitzman
But 2017, it's all 2017 stuff. Yeah, I've heard it.
- [75:52]
Isaac Saul
Yeah, it, it. I mean, yes, but like, I still feel like there's so many interesting threads of the story, and it is of the political prosecutions or whatever. I shouldn't, you know, of the alleged political prosecutions. Like, to me, this one's a way bigger deal than Leticia James or John Bolton or, you know, some of the other people. It's like, because James Comey, to me, is just a much more important, significant figure in US Politics. Like, he was more powerful. He had a bigger role in all these events. I think there's something that's just surreal about the idea that he could have to go to court and defend himself from this administration. That's crazy. And look, you know, I Don't think you can talk about this without talking about the fact that, like, President Biden's Justice Department went after Trump. And that was also surreal. And there was also something about that that felt like totally mind bending, like a former president being, you know, under investigation, not just by the federal government, but by the state of New York and whatever else. So, you know, we're. I get that it feels dated, but it's also like, it seems important, too.
- [77:15]
Ari Weitzman
But the levels of absurdity feel so meta at this point. Like, I just don't want there to be. Because this. I mean, I'm with you. I think this feels and appears to be openly political prosecution. But I am praying that if a Democrat is in the White House next term, or whoever's in the White House next term, they don't put out a political inquiry into the prosecution of James Comey. Because the shell game is the thing that, like, maybe it's as a writer and as an editor who has had to describe the story several times, the amount of backtracking you have to do in order to talk about the whole thing just feels like it's preventing us from being able to move on to other stuff. Like, it's a narrow thing, it's probably a petty thing on my part. It is an important story to pay attention to, but I'm just exacerbated. That's not the right word. I'm exasperated by the fact that this is still a name we have to discuss. Like, just get it out of the headlines so we can talk about other stuff. Jesus.
- [78:21]
Camille
Yeah, yeah, there's that. That. That.
- [78:23]
Isaac Saul
What is it?
- [78:23]
Camille
Time is a flat circle.
- [78:25]
Isaac Saul
Yeah.
- [78:26]
Camille
It's true, Detective.
- [78:27]
Ari Weitzman
Time is a C that becomes a. That becomes an M, E, Y. Oh, no.
- [78:33]
Camille
Yeah, yeah.
- [78:35]
Isaac Saul
All right, well, we've been at it for. For a bit over an hour now, so I think it's time to start to put a bow on things here. John, you can play the music and we'll sit down for a nice grievance session.
- [78:51]
Camille
The airing of grievances.
- [78:56]
Ari Weitzman
Between you and me, I think your.
- [78:58]
Camille
Country is placing a lot of importance on shoe removal.
- [79:01]
Isaac Saul
All right, I am. This is immediately relevant to me, so I'm gonna go first. I'm exhausted today. I gotta tell you guys, honestly, I mean, I don't know how you. I don't know how you feel. My performance was in the last hour. Hour and 10 minutes, but pretty spectacular, actually.
- [79:17]
Camille
You've been.
- [79:17]
Isaac Saul
Thank you. All right, well, thanks, man. Wow. Spectacular. What a nice word. I went to New York City Last night to just. I took the train in Philadelphia to go see a bunch of former colleagues of mine that I work with. The last company I was at, A plus, was having a, like a happy hour reunion. And that was delightful. It was awesome. Saw some people I hadn't seen in a few years, you know, who I built a newsroom with and worked alongside for seven, eight years. So it was really cool to get to hang out with them. Not my grievance. My grievance is that it's sort of twofold. One is that the Amtrak schedule for New York to Philly and back sucks. There are gaps in it in the wrong places. In my case, my options were to either take a train home at 8pm or. I'm sorry, my. My option were to take a train at 9pm or a little after 10pm and it's this hour and a half train ride where like, you're either getting home at like 10:15 ish if you catch the first train, or like 11:45 if you get the second one based on how long they run. And I was just like, I just really want, like, I want to get home in like the 1030-1130 range. Like, that's the nice time to kind of get home. Like, it's. I'm not going to get as much sleep as I normally do, but maybe a good six or seven hours if I wake up at six. Whatever. Anyway, of course I get peer pressured and talked into not leaving when I was going to leave. So I take the late train home and I get back at like 11:30. I have a really great taxi driver who had a book of gratitude. He asked me to write in in the taxi cab, which I thought was really cool. Yeah, really just making a difference. One ride at a time.
- [81:08]
Podcast Advertiser
Wow.
- [81:10]
Isaac Saul
Yeah. Jamaican guy. So. Of course. Yeah. Always one of mine.
- [81:15]
Ari Weitzman
Good.
- [81:16]
Isaac Saul
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. One of yours. All great. All great. Whatever. I get home, I'm like, oh, my God, I'm so exhausted. I can't wait to just go to sleep. I walk upstairs and I just hear Omri, my son, screaming in his bed. I'm just like, no, he's sleep trained. He never wakes up in the middle of the night. Whatever. I go look at the monitor. He's just standing up in his crib, banging on the door, basically trying to get out of his crib. And I'm like, what is going on? My wife's awake. She's like, he's been doing this for like 10 minutes. I already went in once. We're like, what this so like we slept, sleep trained him probably six, seven months ago. Not once in the six or seven months has he ever not slept through the night. Like literally shooting 100% since then. And I'm like, of course. The one night I'm getting back from a trip to New York, I'm already low on sleep whatever. So I just spend basically 1:30am till like 4:00am Alternatively trying to get him to go to sleep in his room and get him to go to sleep in our bed. My wife has this fantasy of us being like co sleeping parents. She loves the idea of snuggling with him and I'm like, no, get him in his crib, whatever. But so last night she was like, yes, he can come in the bed. Like he needs to snuggle and sleep with us. I'm like, all right, we bring him in the bed. He's just like sitting up in bed, literally just smacking my forehead. Like all he wants to do is play and wrestle. He's fully awake. So yeah, I spent like three hours trying to get him back to sleep and then finally just gave up and put him in his room and let him cry for 10 minutes and he fell asleep without any help. Um, but I then Woke up at 6 o' clock to an alarm which was one of the most devastating wake up alarms I've ever had. Now I'm operating on two or three hours of sleep that were a little bit alcohol influenced due to my sharing time with my former colleagues. Um, so yeah, I'm feeling like the delusion setting in soon. The I'm like, you know when you're so tired your knees kind of hurt a little bit. I'm just like, I could maybe go to bed at six o' clock tonight. So my grievance is that my son picked his first bad night since being sleep trained to be the one night that I didn't get any sleep by the time he woke up and just completely obliterated me today. But my performance here was still spectacular. So all is well in the world.
- [83:41]
Camille
Quite good. I will say one, we'll get someone at Amtrak on this right away. It does seem like Isaac though, like a train every hour and a half or so after 9pm Pretty good actually. Just saying. But I will.
- [83:57]
Isaac Saul
How much money do my taxes give Amtrak?
- [84:00]
Ari Weitzman
But I want to go, I want.
- [84:01]
Camille
To go a step further like this co sleeping business. I think I appreciate why someone might want to do this, but it just feels like it is from a different time and norms have changed and I think my Biggest beef with co sleeping is entirely selfish. And it's not just that it disrupts my ability to actually sleep. Other things I don't like to do. Other things I would prefer to do to sleep. Like sensual communion within my marriage. The kids get in the way. And there was a time when people didn't care about that sort of thing. Like, we're getting down. But we do care about that sort of thing today. So y' all gotta sleep in your bed. Okay. I need that bed for other things. Just saying.
- [84:43]
Isaac Saul
That's a good. I think that's a good norm to uphold. I agree with you. All right, which one of you jokers is next?
- [84:53]
Ari Weitzman
Do you have something, Camille?
- [84:55]
Camille
I mean, we're a couple weeks removed from daylight savings, and I may have complained about this already, and maybe someone else did.
- [85:02]
Isaac Saul
I think you did.
- [85:03]
Camille
But I am still struggling with the time change, and I didn't even have to go to the east coast this week. And I am struggling with the time change. My sleep has been decimated, and it was already bad, and I just cannot get with it. And I think as a nation, it is far past time we defeated slavery. We gave women and other peoples the right to vote in this country. And for whatever reason, we are still struggling with this draconian policy of pretending that something is different about the sun on some regular basis. And we need to save it. Stop it. We don't have an agrarian society anymore. We don't need this preposterous Dark ages nonsense. This is superstitious nonsense. We should do away with daylight savings time. We only need one time, and let's just leave it that way. I'll give you your leap years. You can keep those. Those make sense. Daylight savings time does not make any damn sense. And we should abolish it immediately because it is inconvenient for me personally.
- [86:03]
Ari Weitzman
It's inconvenient for many. That's it. Isaac, we. We covered this a couple years ago, and I think you had a take that ended up being like, you know, actually, if I remember correctly, I think the conclusion was. I think it's okay. Maybe for the best.
- [86:19]
Camille
No.
- [86:20]
Isaac Saul
Yeah. I don't remember exactly where I landed on it. I would love to go re. It's actually one of the ones that, like, I feel like I didn't. My heart wasn't in it so much. I had trouble caring a ton. Now my position has totally changed because I have a kid, and my kids don't understand daylight savings. And so I had Omri on this. Perfect. Go to bed. At 7pm, wake up at 6am every day, and now he wakes up at 5am and he's been doing that for weeks. And there's just nothing we can do about it. Cause it's like he's just like, you set my internal clock. Why aren't all of you awake? What's going on?
- [86:56]
Camille
And he's right.
- [86:58]
Isaac Saul
Yeah, he's right. He's like he's locked into the cycle and his rhythm is all doing what it's supposed to do. And we're the ones who made up some insane nonsense that has totally disrupted his world. It doesn't make any sense.
- [87:10]
Ari Weitzman
I'm going to quote an author to you. His voice may sound somewhat familiar. Quote. After reading all these arguments, though, I think I ultimately landed a place where what we have is, but both annoying and terrible, but also probably better than the alternatives. Josh Barro's piece basically put me over the top. If we want permanent standard time, we'd be getting sunrise in Manhattan at 4:25am in June. Bless. If we go permanent daylight savings time, the sun wouldn't come up until after 8am in the winter. Blech. If we keep what we have, we avoid the worst of both worlds and deal with this miserable week once a year. What do you think of that? Compelling.
- [87:49]
Isaac Saul
I think, yeah, that guy's an idiot. He didn't.
- [87:52]
Camille
He doesn't understand.
- [87:53]
Isaac Saul
He doesn't understand how things work. I think, dude, I think I. I think I just pick darkness till after 8am in the winter. I. I think. Give me that, I'll take it. That's the better of the two options.
- [88:05]
Camille
Yes.
- [88:06]
Isaac Saul
And I don't want to be. I don't want to be outside before 8am in the winter anyway, so what do I care?
- [88:12]
Ari Weitzman
You know, winter's the, the time for dark and cold. For everything there is a season.
- [88:18]
Camille
Rebellion begin.
- [88:19]
Ari Weitzman
A consensus. We've done it, We've solved it.
- [88:23]
Isaac Saul
You're up, Ari. Yeah. And that 20, 20, 23 is to all of us. We're never talking to that guy again.
- [88:30]
Ari Weitzman
May his memory be a blessing. So I have something that I. I feel more internally conflicted about. So now that we have this thing that we all agree on, here's something that I really don't know what to do with. Cali, my dog, 11 year old Australian shepherd. She'd been having some like leg stiffness in the last couple weeks and it looked like it wasn't getting better the way that, you know, it's happened before where she's exercised. We had a couple People visit who had dogs, and she played around with these younger dogs, and so we assumed that she was sore. And sometimes, you know, she'll have, like, a little trouble putting weight on one of her limbs or getting up for a day or two, and then she'll be okay. But it hasn't been getting better. Took her to the vet, and it turns out that she has a torn ACL in her stifle, which is what dogs have instead of knees. I learned. So I don't know what to do. There's good, compelling arguments either way. Getting a dog in ACL surgery feels a little strange when you think about what an ACL surgery means to humans. I mean, Isaac and I played Ultimate Frisbee. I'd venture to say that probably 30% of the people that we've been on teams with in their lifetimes have had ACL surgeries. And the recoveries are terrible. You have to get a graft from a different part of your body, usually hamstring or patella tendon. You get that sort of stretched onto the space where your ACL was to try to do the job of the acl. It learns how to be an acl. It takes about. For professional athletes like Adrian Peterson set the record, it was like four and a half months he was back, which was absurd. For most people, it's nine months until you're doing anything. Usually it's more like a year until you're back to close to 100%. So it feels, like, weird to say we're considering ACL surgery, but for dogs, it's different. They will. Instead of getting the ACL rebuilt, they get their bone reshaped. And it will. The way the joint will operate after surgery will do the work of what an ACL will was doing before, so they no longer need it. And it takes. It's two weeks. The way a friend described it to me was two weeks of hell. Like, they can't move. You have to pick them up, help them go to the bathroom. They're in pain. It's sad, and it, you know, it's no fun for anybody. The next two weeks are hard, but better. And then four weeks of gradually getting them back up to speed. After about eight weeks, you can start doing most activity with them. And then for three to four months, they're pretty much back. It's a little expensive. It's a lot to go through. But on the other hand, it gets you back to kind of where you were. That's the argument in favor, then against. It's like she's 11. She's gonna be slowing down. So would we want to put her through that kind of ordeal? When it's getting into her senior years, it's tough because we don't know how much time she has left. I'm looking at a. I saw a Facebook post from the dog breeder where we got her from today that said one of the. Her dogs just passed away at 15 years old. So it makes me think, you know, if Callie's healthy, do I do a dog ACL surgery and go through the painful recovery, or do I say she can manage and we're just gonna walk a little bit less and try to not put her through that?
- [92:07]
Isaac Saul
I'm just really stuck on, like, the humanification of dogs, you know, like, what's next? We're gonna give dogs DUIs or something. Now they're getting ACL surgeries. This just feels like. I don't know, like, she's a. Does she need it? She's a dog, right? You know what I mean?
- [92:27]
Ari Weitzman
I know what you mean.
- [92:28]
Isaac Saul
Don't you have that voice in your head where you're like, well, I mean.
- [92:31]
Ari Weitzman
This is the thing. Like, when any I've heard friends dogs have their ACLs torn, and you're like, ah, shucks, wait. You're not getting the surge. You're getting your dog in ACL surgery. That feels kind of over the top. But then, like, when it's my dog and I'm watching her struggle to get up and she's not able to go up and down steps the same way she used to and her legs shaking all the time, I'm like, I can do something to fix it. Then I think I want to.
- [92:57]
Isaac Saul
There's definitely a part of my dumb brain that thinks, like, it'll just heal on its own because she's a dog. Like, she's built different, you know?
- [93:04]
Camille
And I guess that's not necessarily.
- [93:06]
Isaac Saul
I will say, actually, I do have a personal anecdote about this, which is, I'm pretty sure my brother's dog got ACL surgery, and it went really well. So there's That. I mean, that's. That's. There's a good, positive story for you.
- [93:18]
Camille
I mean, my. My concern. All right? And one, just. I'm sorry. It sucks. Like, on. On a bunch of levels for you guys and for the dog. Two, even the case you laid out there is, like, the optimistic circumstance where things go well like, over this protracted time period, it is entirely possible to have setbacks, and, I mean, the most insane setbacks. I remember when Our dog injured his tail, had to have a piece of it, amputated and got home and a day later ate the bandage off of his tail and had to have a second surgery to remove the bandage from his lower intestine. So, you know, these things just tend to get worse over time and I don't know, there's no good, good answer in a lot of these circumstances. And, yeah, no, that's tough. It's a tough call.
- [94:11]
Ari Weitzman
Yeah. So if you are listening and you have any advice, just send it. Send it to me@w I l ltangle.com and we'll be sure to take it to heart. But, yeah, I'm actually struggling with this one. I think I'm kind of leaning towards doing the surgery, but I. I need more information.
- [94:30]
Isaac Saul
All right, fellas. Ari, I'm sorry about Callie, too. I love her great dog, all time dog. So whatever happens, I'm sure she'll come out stronger on the other side. Boys, good hanging out. Hopefully we'll do it again next week in a timely fashion. We're pumping out some of this on video, by the way. For those of you interested in that kind of thing, you can go to the Tangle News YouTube channel and check it out. Unless you're watching this on YouTube, in which case, welcome and smash the subscribe button or something. I don't know what the kids say anymore. There's got to be a better, cooler way to do that now.
- [95:08]
Camille
No, I think you nailed it, Fonz.
- [95:11]
Isaac Saul
All right, I'll see you guys soon. Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Lowell. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by managing editor Ari Weitzman, with senior editor Will K. Back and associate editors Hunter Asperson, Audrey Moorhead Bailey, Saul, Lindsey Knuth, and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. To learn more about tango and to sign up for a membership, please visit. Visit our website@retangle.com. Group health insurance can challenge company budgets.
- [95:59]
Ari Weitzman
But now a new form of employer coverage called an ichra can help.
- [96:02]
Adam Grant
Unlike group insurance, ichras offer predictable costs.
- [96:05]
Ari Weitzman
In stable employer countries.
- [96:07]
Isaac Saul
Learn more@ambetterhealth.com ICRA.
- [96:12]
Adam Grant
Hey, it's Adam Grant from Ted's podcast Work Life, and this episode is brought to you by. ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into. That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 companies use the ServiceNow AI platform. While other platforms duct tape tools together, ServiceNow seamlessly unifies people, data, workflows, and AI, connecting every corner of your business. And with AI agents working together autonomously, anyone in any department can focus on the work that matters Most. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people@servicenow.com hi, this is Joe from Vanta.
- [96:51]
Camille
In today's digital world, compliance regulations are changing constantly, and earning customer trust has never mattered more. Vanta helps companies get compliant fast and.
- [97:00]
Isaac Saul
Stay secure here with the most advanced.
- [97:02]
Camille
AI automation and continuous monitoring out there. So whether you're a startup going for your first sock 2 or ISO27001, or a growing enterprise managing vendor risk, Vanta makes it quick, easy, and scalable. And I'm not just saying that because I work here. Get started at Vanta.
- [97:18]
Ari Weitzman
Com.