Jonathan V. Last: We Got a Billionaire Problem

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Bulwark Podcast

Episode: Jonathan V. Last: We Got a Billionaire Problem (June 4, 2026)
Host: Tim Miller
Main Guests: Jonathan V. Last (“JVL”), Katherine Pompilio

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into two primary topics:

• In the first segment, Tim Miller and JVL dissect the current Iran conflict, war powers, the twisted incentives of American politics, the "madman theory" of markets and politics, media capture by billionaires, and the dangers of concentrated wealth in the hands of figures like Elon Musk.
• The second segment features journalist Katherine Pompilio, who reveals disturbing new data on January 6th insurrectionists—specifically, how many Trump-pardoned individuals have gone on to commit further crimes.

The episode balances sharp political analysis, humorous jabs, and a sobering discussion on the threats facing democracy and civic trust.

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Segment 1: Politics, Iran, and the Billionaire Problem

With Jonathan V. Last (JVL), 00:12–48:02

1. War Powers and the Iran Conflict

[01:11–09:48]

• The House passed a War Powers Resolution requiring Trump to remove U.S. forces from hostilities with Iran unless authorized by Congress.
• Only four Republicans joined Democrats, signaling a partisan split.
• Tim and JVL agree most Americans don’t focus on foreign policy, but this signals Trump’s political weakness.
• JVL breaks down the evasive language of the Trump administration (“It’s not a war... not a war... Oh, the war is over...”), stressing the administration's legal obfuscations.
  • JVL: “The word ‘war’ has a legal meaning... not a euphemism... it's a thing that requires an actual chain of legal things... the administration just lied.” (03:05)
• The persistence of the Iran issue is likened to an own-goal for Trump; he hasn’t cut a deal or “run away” as expected, possibly to the country’s detriment.

2. Madman Theory: Stock Markets and Foreign Players

[05:23–09:48]

• Despite global chaos (e.g., Strait of Hormuz closed), markets keep hitting highs.
• JVL’s “madman theory”: in chaotic times, investors assume irrationality as normal, so brief moments of good news are overvalued.
• JVL: “Madman theory doesn’t do much for you in foreign policy, but in the stock market it does fundamentally change things.” (05:38)
• Tim riffs on the “real” madmen in the Iran situation: perhaps Bibi Netanyahu or Iran’s fractious leadership, not Trump.

3. America’s Weak Negotiating Position

[08:09–09:48]

• JVL and Tim discuss the limits of U.S. leverage: “It’s almost as if we don’t have any cards, Tim.”
• The only “card” Trump has—massive escalation—is mostly a bluff.
• JVL: “We’re not going to do it. Every day that this goes on... the eventual cost to us goes up. Pay them whatever they need... and get out.” (09:27)

4. Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, and 2028 Presidential Chess

[11:53–16:59]

• JVL analyzes Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance’s positioning on Iran and loyalty to Trump.
• Rubio’s deft at “gotcha” media clips and has closely calculated his political survival—willing to change his public stance to stay on Trump’s side.
  • “I don’t know that Marco honestly has any principles other than... he wants the Castro regime gone in Cuba.” (15:11)
• Tim and JVL agree Rubio is the consummate survivor, contrasting with J.D. Vance, who was right on Iran but, ironically, will be punished by Trump for it.

5. The Slow Collapse of Mainstream Media & Ellison’s 60 Minutes Takeover

[17:06–22:57]

• Bari Weiss’s rumored role at 60 Minutes sparks a discussion on media capture by billionaires.
• Staff exoduses, rebranding, and the risk of a “state-approved news network” under conservative billionaire ownership.
• JVL: “This is something close to a state-approved news network where... you’re not really going to get anything the regime doesn’t want unless the regime is run by Democrats.” (24:14)
• The decline in trusted news sources hurts democracy, especially when remaining outlets have huge, agenda-setting power.

6. Billionaire Power, Elon Musk, and the Bastardization of Capitalism

[25:19–35:58]

• NASDAQ rule changes for SpaceX’s IPO: “It’s just a fucking bank heist. It’s an insane thing.” (31:32)
• Exchange rules were rewritten to force index funds to buy more SpaceX stock, artificially inflating value so Musk and early insiders can cash out at a peak.
• JVL: “These are casino games... people sitting around figuring out how can we alter rules, how can we use our size to force existing institutions to alter rules that benefit us...” (32:34)
• Lively discussion on the need for wealth caps—not out of fairness, but to prevent excessive power over society.
  • JVL: “When people get too rich, it gives them the ability to distort society.” (35:07)
  • Quote from Tim: “This is enough to make you ready to go full DSA, full Bernie, isn’t it?”

Memorable Moment

[36:08]

• Tim reads a savage tweet from Doja Cat to Elon Musk:
  • “You frog-billed looking bitch. Barrel-chested Ewok. You look like you eat sand and I like that.” (36:26)
  • JVL admits: “I don’t even know what Doja Cat is. Is that a band?”

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Segment 2: January 6th Insurrectionists—Crimes After Pardons

With Katherine Pompilio, 53:31–66:43

1. New Research: Post-Pardon Crime Spree

[53:31–54:26]

• Katherine Pompilio, Lawfare journalist, reveals that 97 Trump-pardoned insurrectionists have been arrested, charged, or convicted of subsequent crimes—far more than previous estimates (which were in the 30s and 40s).

2. Why Is Tracking These Criminals So Hard?

[54:37–55:16]

• Pardoned individuals have no post-release monitoring, common names, crimes scattered in county courts, and deleted DOJ records.
• Pompilio: “The DOJ has been deleting recently Jan 6 defendant records, which Lawfare has been archiving... 1,600 people kind of creates this diffusion of attention.”

3. The Investigation Process

[55:16–56:21]

• The research required hyper-local news searches and help from AI assistants like Claude to match criminal records to Jan. 6 names.
• Often, the evidence is only in local news or obscure court docs.

4. What Are the New Crimes?

[56:21–58:44]

• Ranges from murder, rape, and child sexual exploitation to assaults, DUIs “with injuries,” and even odd cases (jaywalking near FBI HQ).
• Some especially shocking:
  • Mark Maza: Assaulted a 12-year-old for criticizing Trump.
  • Howard C. Richardson: Seriously injured a motorcyclist.
  • Eric Beauchen: Allegedly hit his daughter, keeps calling the court clerk for updates.

5. Nature and Roots of Repeat Offenses

[61:25–64:36]

• Some offenders are remorseful and blame mental health and being caught up in election propaganda; others are defiant, invoking Trump’s pardon as blanket immunity.
• Example:
  • Brian Burton’s attorney: “I’m confident that but for Brian’s mental health issues and the propaganda Brian came to believe, he would never have participated in January 6.” (62:41)

6. Broader Consequences and Tragedy

[64:36–65:40]

• Tim and Katherine discuss how right-wing propaganda and pardons exacerbated lives already at the margins—ripping apart families, causing deaths (including suicides), and harming new victims.
• Katherine: “There are two cases... people died by suicide because they didn’t want to go back to jail as Jan Sixers.”

7. Final Reflections

[65:58–66:37]

• There are almost certainly more offenders the public doesn’t know about.
• Katherine: “As long as we know who these people are, we can hopefully make the right decisions about how to treat them going forward.”

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Additional Highlights & Quotes

• JVL on billionaires and democracy:
  “There is a level, a number of billions that I think shouldn’t exist... The reason we do antitrust is because when companies become too big they’re able to distort markets and hurt the markets. I think the exact same view should be used with individual wealth.” (34:20)

• JVL on media consolidation:
  “It’s not just a network being dismantled by boobs who don’t know what they’re doing... This is something close to a state-approved news network...” (24:14)

• Katherine Pompilio (about her reporting):
  “The DOJ has been deleting recently Jan6 defendant records... this data is just out there in news stories, but also in sentencing memoranda...” (54:37–55:16)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment Description | Timestamp | |---------------------------------------------------|-------------| | Iran War Powers Resolution / Trump’s Weakness | 01:11–09:48 | | Madman Theory & Foreign Policy | 05:23–09:48 | | Billionaires, SpaceX, and Rule-Bending IPO | 25:19–35:58 | | January 6th Offenders’ Post-Pardon Crimes (Pompilio) | 53:31–66:37 | | Notable Doja Cat quote about Elon Musk | 36:08–36:46 |

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Tone and Style

The conversation is direct, irreverent, and sometimes darkly funny—never shying away from sharp criticism of political actors (Trump, Rubio, Musk), institutions (CBS, NASDAQ), and comfortable narratives. JVL’s analytical, often cynical style contrasts with Tim’s more performative, exasperated energy. Katherine Pompilio’s segment is more sobering and quiet, but with a commitment to facts and transparency.

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Conclusion

This episode of The Bulwark Podcast melds snappy analysis and thorough reporting to puncture the veil of both American political theatre and deeper systemic risks: from runaway billionaire power to cynical mass pardons and their very real victims. For listeners worried about the state of democracy, or curious for the stories behind the headlines, this episode delivers both insight and a call for continued vigilance.

Transcript

[Katherine Pompilio]

Foreign.

[Tim Miller]

Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We got another doubleheader for you today in segment two. Katherine Pompilio has a bombshell lawfare story out today that reveals many, many, many, many more. January 6th pardon recipients have committed subsequent crimes and previously known. Shocker.

[JVL]

No kidding.

[Tim Miller]

Criminals do crimeing. Yeah. That's interesting story. There he is now. You know who's first. He's the author of the Triad newsletter, which you better have signed up for. He's a pinball Wizard. He's a 2026 people's champion for his work on that very newsletter. It's jvl. What's up, man?

[JVL]

Hey, babe. It is good to be here with you, my friend.

[Tim Miller]

Thank you for doing this. Doing a little extra podcast work this week. You've got the secret podcast tomorrow. Every Friday. If people haven't signed up for BUL

[JVL]

work, I'm not on the secret. Tomorrow they're going to do it without me because tomorrow's Flash's graduation.

[Tim Miller]

There's a secret, but you're not in it.

[JVL]

There is a secret, but it's a

[Tim Miller]

no JVL secret guest every Friday, at least one of JVL and Sarah have a bonus behind the Paywall podcast for you. And congratulations on Flash's graduation. He's. Thank you, man. What a young man you've raised. All right, let's do some politics. I know you love foreign policy and believe that people care deeply about it, so I wanted to start with that. I feel like it should have been kind of bigger news. I don't know. The House passed a War Powers Resolution yesterday and it directed Trump to remove US Armed forces from hostilities with Iran unless Congress votes to declare war, authorizes using military force, which is kind of an interesting concept. This is one of those stories for me that's like, well, on the one hand, it is better than what could have been, which is everybody just allowing Trump to do whatever he wants. On the other hand, it's far short of what we would wish for our Democratic Republic. Only four Republicans voted with all the Democrats on this. Fitzpatrick, Massey, Davidson, Tom Baird of Michigan. Notable that all the Democrats have now come along and there were a handful of stinkers at the beginning of this war, even though US neocons, former neocons, were like, this is the stupidest shit we've ever seen. A couple of Democrats got fooled by it. So. So all the Democrats have gotten in line. Four Republicans voting for this. What'd you make of it?

[JVL]

It's Pretty bad for Trump, I think.

[Tim Miller]

Oh, bad for Trump. Great. I thought bad for Trump. I think. Bad for America.

[JVL]

No, no, it's, it's like reasonably good for America.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah.

[JVL]

I mean, I sort of lost my mind. Nobody cares about these things. Like, I get hung up on words because of what I do for a living. But when Rubio was testifying on the Hill this week, he said that the war is over. It was like, oh, the war. Oh, there was a war. Because you have been telling us for 90 days now that this isn't a war. It's not a war. Not a war, not a war. You know, because the word war has a legal meaning. Like, it's, it's not a euphemism. It's a, it's a thing that requires actual, like, you know, they're, they're a chain of legal things which has to happen when you are in a war. And the administration just lied about not being in a war. And now that they are trying to get out of.

[Tim Miller]

More on Marco in a second. But similarly, he said that we could have a deal today, tomorrow, any day, any day now.

[JVL]

And you know what? He's right. We could have a deal any day now, and eventually we will have a deal. And when we do, all the people who said we could have a deal anytime soon will be proven right. And they can, they can go out and say, look at me, look at me, I was there. No, it's good. I would say probably doesn't help the negotiating position of President Trump, but on the other hand, I would say that that's actually probably good because the President does not seem to understand how weak his position is, which is why he didn't cut a deal soon. I mean, he should have just run away from this thing weeks and weeks and weeks ago and taken the loss. He didn't.

[Tim Miller]

Which shows a very rare case of the Bulwark. I forget where you were on this, but many of us at the Bulwark overestimating Trump. You never hear that. We never get critiqued for us overestimating Trump too much. But that was what I thought he was going to do from the beginning. Totally.

[JVL]

I assume that the whole thing would be over in four days because I just thought, he can't be this stupid. He does have political self preservation instincts. So in a weird way, if this helps Trump have someone else to blame for America's loss, then maybe that encourages him to finally pay the Iranians whatever needs to be. Whatever they need to be paid and get out. Like that actually winds up Being better for America than continuing to drag this out. Because, I mean, you had Luke Ruster on the other, you know, yesterday.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah.

[JVL]

And he said, you know, hey, we're not going to have the straight open until the end of the summer at least, if true. Let me put it this way. If you could go back to the, the markets in the, you know, early April and say, by the way, the Strait of Hormuz is going to be closed through Labor Day. People have lost their damn minds.

[Tim Miller]

But they haven't. This has been a JVL beat. I think we hit another S and P high the other day.

[JVL]

Yeah, I think that's right.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah.

[JVL]

Because why not? I mean, I, I wrote a long piece about this a couple months ago with a madman theory of the stock market.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah.

[JVL]

Which is that madman theory doesn't do much for you in foreign policy, but in the stock market it does fundamentally change things. When everybody knows that the market is constantly being manipulated and that everything is chaos, it does mean that chaos is the baseline assumption. And so why trade on that? Right. Or why trade down on that? Instead you just take whatever. Whenever there is a momentary gain, go out and take the momentary gain because you know that it's all irrational fundamentally anyway. I think that's where we are. How do you think of it?

[Tim Miller]

I loved that triad. We'll put a link to it in the show notes because that theory works for me as good as any. I think I raised it on the Joe Weisenthal podcast because he's follows this stuff as close as anybody. Closer than anybody. I mean, I don't know when he sleeps and he seems flummoxed by why things aren't worse. And I do think that that kind of unites this notion that, like, okay, well, if there's some fundamental growth happening in the economy, which right now is happening by AI and maybe that bubble pops eventually. So you know that there's this fallback stability and you have all this craziness and manipulation happening. Then in the moments when craziness is not happening, there's a run up. Right.

[JVL]

Yeah, why not?

[Tim Miller]

Why not? I noticed this. Got no engagement on the Reddit because people on the Bulwark Reddit love to. When I make a single off color joke, love to have 200 comment threads about the pros and cons of that. And we appreciate their engagement in your fandom. Love that. But I thought this was an interesting post. Somebody I think had one like. But I'm going to raise it here. So congratulations to you, Redditor. I'm uplifting your content. It was what if madman theory is true in the Iran negotiations? It's just that we don't have the madman. And I kind of like that idea. Right. Well, it's Bibi the madman, whoever's in charge of Iran right now. Right. Like we have that Trump, as fucking crazy and deranged as he is because of his desire to not be in war. Like, he is acting a little bit more rationally now. And you've got the Iranians that are doing like the Persian bazaar style negotiation, and then you have Bibi who's like desperate to bomb as many Iranians as possible. And so that, like, Trump's madman theory doesn't work because he's been outflanked by two other players in the negotiations. I kind of liked that about the weakness of Trump's position right now.

[JVL]

Yeah, I do too. And in a weird way, I mean, nobody knows the extent to which the Iranian leadership is fractured or not, but to the extent that it, it can be portrayed as fractured, that helps their negotiating position. Right. Because then they can always say, well, we would really love to take this, but the problem is that those five guys over there, they're really surging in power right now and they say no, so we need to have another sweetener. It's almost as if we don't have any cards, Tim. We don't have the cards.

[Tim Miller]

It's almost as if we don't have. And it seems like we have one card which he keeps pretending to play.

[JVL]

Which is what? Genocide.

[Tim Miller]

Right. Which is more full scale genocide.

[JVL]

Yeah. Except that we don't actually have that. I don't think. I don't believe that we have that guard. I don't think he could.

[Tim Miller]

Why not?

[JVL]

Because he's not going to do it, right. To do something like that. The Iranians have showed their capacity to destroy energy infrastructure throughout the Middle East. I mean, right now they've closed the Strait of Hormuz and caused the biggest oil shock in world history. We could go from biggest oil shock on world history to total meltdown of the global financial system if they decided they wanted to just start taking out liquid natural gas production fields.

[Tim Miller]

Right.

[JVL]

And stuff like that. That is going to hurt advanced economies a whole lot more than it's going to hurt the Iranian economy. So we're not going to, we're not going to do it. Every day that this goes on more, the eventual cost to us goes up. And so you might as well just bite the bullet, pay them whatever they need to be paid and get out.

[Tim Miller]

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[JVL]

Today's ride was actually spurred on by listening to you and Luke yesterday. And it does occur to me that JD's real problem here is that he was right about Iran and Trump will never forgive him for that because Iran turned out to be a shit show. Had Iran worked, had it been just like Venezuela part two and he was

[Tim Miller]

kind of like the micro version of our relationship with our former Republican friends who will never forgive us for being right about Trump.

[JVL]

No, no, it's exactly right. It's exactly right. Then Trump would have just like, made fun of him from time to time. Remember what a worry weren't you were J.D. but it would have been fine. But because J.D. was right. And even though he's been totally on board publicly, he's never questioned.

[Tim Miller]

Right.

[JVL]

Trump knows that JD Was the one who didn't want to do this thing, which has fucked his presidency six ways till Sunday. And Marco was not. By the reporting we have. Marco was. Oh, yeah, no, no. We could do a lot there. It's really important. Marco was a good neocon on this stuff.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, pretty good. The only thing we've heard at all about Marco that is not all gas, no breaks, was in that one New York Times story about the BB presentation in the Situation Room. I guess Marco supposedly said something to the effect of they're overstating how easy it's going to be or something. But, like, that's it. Like, besides that, this is. And this is not only Marco's war, but it's his. It's the flourishing of his worldview.

[JVL]

It is. Well, except that here, this is an interesting question. Is this a flourishing of Marco's neocon worldview or is this a flourishing of Marco's political instincts, which are that he realized that being right or wrong about Iran was less important for his political future than making sure that he figured out where Trump wanted to be and got there so that he could be on Trump's side so that win or lose with Iran, whether the war went well or badly, he was always with Trump. Right. And so the king would look. Well, my loyal courtier, Marco was with me. I mean, I gotta say, based on Marco's career of figuring out where he needs to be to get ahead politically, the only misstep he's ever made was being anti Trump in 2016.

[Tim Miller]

It was running the autopsy campaign in 2016. And honestly, like, Marco was like a pretty mainstream state legislature, normal Republican. This was like the origin story of all the Jeb stuff, which I never cared about, but like the old school Jeb people did. Right. Then he kind of shivs Jeb and like, goes Tea Party. Yep. Like, right, populist. Right. When the Tea Party stuff comes, that obviously was right. He challenges an establishment Republican in that Senate race, which looks obvious now in retrospect, but at the time was risky. Was correct. And then in 2016, he runs the autopsy campaign, basically he runs the campaign that all of the smarty smarts and the Republican Party thought was the way to win a majority. That was a rational thing to think at the time. And by the way, maybe. Right. We still never know. Maybe it's a Hillary weakness. And maybe Marco actually, if he won the nomination, maybe he does actually become president still.

[JVL]

Who knows if Chris Christie doesn't go kamikaze in New Hampshire, right.

[Tim Miller]

Who knows?

[JVL]

Who knows?

[Tim Miller]

But then now he gets. Comes around and gets back on board. So you're right. Like, he has been very calculating throughout all of this.

[JVL]

Yeah, really calculating. And so that's why I don't know that he got here. Because this is adherence to neocon principles or because I don't know that Marco honestly has any principles other than in the very long game. He wants the Castro regime gone in Cuba.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, right, right.

[JVL]

I mean, that, that, that is his.

[Tim Miller]

It's kind of like Trump's tariffs. The one thing that he actually is

[JVL]

one religious, one thing he really cares about is Cuba.

[Tim Miller]

That's interesting. And the White House put out a Marco hype video the other day. I don't know if you saw that on social media.

[JVL]

Oh, yeah, I saw that.

[Tim Miller]

So he definitely is there. The potential weakness of the bet

[JVL]

is

[Tim Miller]

on Iran getting really hinky if it ends up being kind of normal bad. And by 2027, gas prices are still 4 bucks a gallon or whatever. It's a little annoying things. You know, there are some geopolitical issues, right. But like in the broad sweep of things, that wasn't just a total catastrophe to regular people. Right. Like maybe there's a geopolitical catastrophe that people like Bob Kagan care about, but. Right. That like normal people don't. That's survivable if he's on Trump's good side. And then if Trump supports him, what

[JVL]

would you think would be really hinky? What would that look like?

[Tim Miller]

Something that becomes a real debacle, like total economic.

[JVL]

It's like a recession, just like a normal recession. Does that count as a debacle?

[Tim Miller]

I think a normal recession would count. I think terrorist attack on us, like, related to this would count.

[JVL]

Would sending troops in and getting involved in a ground war count?

[Tim Miller]

I think so.

[JVL]

I think so, Yeah.

[Tim Miller]

I think so. Yeah.

[JVL]

I think Trump understands that.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, I do too. I don't think that's likely, but I don't think any of those things are zero percent chance. No. You know.

[JVL]

No, not at all. Yeah.

[Tim Miller]

I want to get to you on. We talked about this also, Luke, yesterday But you've written, I think, 17 newsletters on the 60 Minute situation and Barry Weiss.

[JVL]

17 or 18. Yeah.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah. And so I think it matters to

[JVL]

me because basically I've been in Scott Pelley's chair. And so for me, I am reliving a dark period in my time, in my history.

[Tim Miller]

You were the anchor of CBS News.

[JVL]

I was not the anchor of CBS News, but I was there when a bunch of pro Trump assholes came in and tried to fuck with my magazine and then, then murdered the magazine. So, you know, yeah, I lost my job because of not being insufficiently Trump. And.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, that's true. Yeah, you've turned out okay on the other side, I guess. There are two things to this that I think are interesting. One is like my ongoing conversation and, and I get lots of feedback from people about this is that, like, I'm just kind of less worried about CBS News collapsing and like, what that means about our democracy than I think some other folks are. And so I'm curious on that. So I think that's like the most important issue. And then I'm not usually a media gossip person. Since I didn't come from the media. I don't like to really care that much. They're like 19 media gossip newsletters that get shared in our slack all the time. And I just generally don't care about what's happening. I am kind of fascinated, though, by, like, who's actually going to be on 60 Minutes in the fall. I think that that is like an interesting kind of parlor game. And so anyway, why don't you take number one first and then we'll. Then we'll play the parlor game.

[JVL]

Yeah, it'll be. I mean, there was some. Who is it? The New York Times pitch bot was like, next on 60 Minutes, Joe Rogan and Cat Turd.

[Tim Miller]

Okay, well, let's do, let's do that part first, then let's do the fun part first. Here's the problem, because I was playing this game with my friend on Text yesterday and the pro Israel interests of Bari Weiss and her natural state, or the state that she wanted to be in at the Free Press when it started of being the place for contrarian thinkers that are right 1 out of 5 times and totally wrong 4 out of 5 times, but only talk about the one thing that they're right about, that's her bread and butter. Most of those people are anti Israel. I was thinking in my head, who would you go to for something like this? Our first call when we were going back and forth throwing Names that you would think about. It's like somebody like Megyn Kelly. She is a big name. She's been on tv. You could bring her in. She would, I think, find it delicious to be back on network TV after getting kicked out of NBC. But she's gone hard against Israel. I don't think the Elessants can bring somebody like her in. No. And so then. Right, so then you start to think

[JVL]

about names and it's like dangerous ideas. She has dangerous ideas.

[Tim Miller]

I know, yeah. So then who fits? I really struggled to come up with people.

[JVL]

Non famous people.

[Tim Miller]

Non famous people is the answer.

[JVL]

Non famous people. I mean, look, I'm picking Nick Bilton to run 60 minutes is itself. Can you imagine how many people they must have offered that job to first in order for them to get down to Nick Bolton to do it?

[Tim Miller]

I mean, it's the Major Garrett does the BB interview, right? Like Major Garrett who's, you know, I don't have anything against him personally, but he's had a long career in Washington and you know, not stardom style career. And so you find somebody like that that like wants to be on tv, it's like happy to do a softball interview with bb.

[JVL]

You find other people within CBS who have signaled that they would like to move up the ladder. Right. And there will be some people like that. I don't know if it's Gayle King or Nora o' Donnell or. But there will be people. You make Tony D, I don't know, contributor, Right.

[Tim Miller]

Tony d is doing 60 minutes.

[JVL]

Let Tony D, you know, just read stuff. My guess, and this is just informed speculation, not, I don't have any inside, inside information here is that Leslie Stahl is going to leave and Bill Whitaker, I suspect both of them are going to be out the door before the summer is over. And when that happened and that's it,

[Tim Miller]

that leaves literally nobody. All of the, all of the main correspondents are gone then.

[JVL]

But not only that sports guy, if that happens, I suspect those guys are going to set up their own shop somewhere and when they do, they'll take their producing team with them.

[Tim Miller]

Right.

[JVL]

So those are the correspondents, those are the, the famous people.

[Tim Miller]

But all the reporters create a 60 Minutes competitor.

[JVL]

I don't know if it's competitor, like, you know, if it'll be online or something like that, but they'll find a gig which allows them to hire their teams and bring them with them, I suspect. And like at that point, I mean, who's left in the building?

[Tim Miller]

You know, they have the CBS Sunday morning people. So, you know, you can find some.

[JVL]

Yeah, but you know what, honestly, the other thing to think about, how much do you need a big staff to report on what's happening on the Oberlin campus?

[Tim Miller]

Right.

[JVL]

And this is because you don't. Right. I mean, because what they'll replace it with is not in depth. You know, takes a month and 50 people to report what's happening at CCOT. It'll be, hey, we found a seventh grade trans girl who got a silver ribbon at her county 800 meter race. And let's all look at that and how terrible it is. Right?

[Tim Miller]

And here's our interview with this unknown superstar in the Trump administration. You didn't know how great that they were doing on, you know, promoting free speech.

[JVL]

Tonight we sit down with Erica Kirk.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, right. Yeah.

[JVL]

Okay, I'm sorry. Last thing is because of Barry's access to the administration, a lot of high level administration interviews. So for sure, you know, tonight on 60 Minutes, Major Garrett sits down with Pete Hegseth, part 75.

[Tim Miller]

For sure. So where are you on that question that I started with of like, how bad this is for, you know, our liberal democracy now? And I mean, just narrowly we share the view that the oligarch takeover and the vast right wing conspiracy and taking over the media companies and the platforms is bad. I'm talking narrowly about CBS News.

[JVL]

Yeah, I mean, narrowly, I think it's pretty bad. There are only three major networks and they are declining, but they're still pretty important. They're big. And here's the thing that I think people don't quite appreciate. Yes, in total viewership, networks are declining, but also in a world of super fracturization and super balkanization of information resources, even having a large audience, a smaller, but still an absolutely large audience. You know, I think 60 Minutes was getting 9 million viewers or something like that. Yeah, that becomes increasingly valuable because in, in a world of, you know, with a hundred different choices, it's very hard to get. Nobody can get to 30 million viewers. But even getting to 9 is really hard and really valuable. And if you can have that, you have a lot of power to set agendas. You have a lot of power to spread ideas and information. And so I think it's, it's not great. And it would be not great if it was all based on incompetence. It's really not great because it's based on corruption. And what you have is essentially not just a network being dismantled by boobs who don't know what they're doing. That would be bad, but it's fixable. This is something different. This is something close to like a state approved news network where, you know, you're not really going to get anything that the regime doesn't want unless the regime is run by Democrats.

[Tim Miller]

And then who knows, right?

[JVL]

Which is the weird right. There'll be this, you know, mask on, mask off. Like I am sure that they will be able to do great investigative reporting when Democrats are in office because Larry Ellison won't worry about a President Ossoff revoking his FCC license because that's illiberal and isn't what they do. So how do you fix those two separate rule sets? And I don't have an answer to that. I don't know if you do or not because it's something that I think about a lot and I worry about.

[Tim Miller]

I think that the FEC should be bulked back up the FCC and there should be in a more legitimate manner in which Bill Pulte looked into people's mortgages. I think that it would be appropriate to look into the way that political money is being spent and going into coordination. Rul and I do think that there are ways to kind of do a more within the rule of law, liberal democracy version of the Trump's. One weird trick that we've talked about a lot is that you've talked about a bunch in particular in your newsletters is this. I'm going to find ways to break the rules that aren't technically illegal. You can turn that on its head and say, hey, I'm going to find the ways that they broke the rules, that they did things that are illegal based on narrow rules that weren't really being enforced for a long time. I'm sure this exists in other places. The Federal Election Commission is one that I'm the most familiar with since that's not my background. But the FEC has basically not existed for 20 years now. Trump broke a lot of laws in 2024 and Trump and Elon did. I don't know, maybe it's worth looking into those to that point on Elon, I just was kind of dying to get your take on this because I've been trying to follow it, but we talked about a little bit earlier this week. But this SpaceX IPO, it feels like there are a lot of rules being broken there as well. They're changing the rules for getting into the NASDAQ, which means that SpaceX, when it IPOs, is going to be part of people's portfolios that are investing in index funds, which obviously helps them raise money. The rules have been, like, pretty dramatically changed, you know, in order to get SpaceX in there. The valuation is insane, you know, based on, you know What? It's actually 2 trillion. Karen and I were talking about this, and Kara's just like, and there's one good business in the satellites attached to shitty businesses that are, like, losing money. And I just kind of want to put a quarter in and get JBL's take on what's happening with Elon and SpaceX.

[JVL]

Okay, so not to brag on myself, but do you know when I wrote about this for the first time, Tim? March 12, everybody has been freaking out about the rules change to NASDAQ over the last two weeks. And I started writing about this in mid March. Ding, ding, ding. This is, you know, my newsletters have people see around corners. So here's what happened. SpaceX was shopping which exchange they were going to IPO on. Like a sports team trying to get cities to compete against one another, to build them stadiums that were boondoggles. They were looking to get the exchanges to bid against one another to make it worth SpaceX's while to be on them. This is one of the problems with being too big. Right. Companies should not be so big that they can exert leverage over the exchange itself. How did NASDAQ win the SpaceX IPO war? They did it by saying, we will change a bunch of rules which will allow you to be included into index funds early. And the result of that will be that it will force index funds to buy your stock. Now, this is going to get a little complicated, and so I'm just going to sort of hand wave away some stuff and hope you can follow with me. Right?

[Tim Miller]

Yeah.

[JVL]

Okay. When we talk about inclusion into an index fund, part of that is based on what's called float. So if only 5% of your stock as a company is for sale, then when index funds are calculating how much of your stock they have to buy, it's based on that the more stock you float, the more stock the index fund is forced to buy based on their own rules. Okay.

[Tim Miller]

Okay.

[JVL]

Part of what NASDAQ did was say, oh, under these new rules for certain companies whose names begin with S and end in X when they are initially included, if their float is below 20%, then index funds must use a 5x multiplier on their float number in order to calculate how much stock they have to buy.

[Tim Miller]

No.

[JVL]

Yes. And so the idea here is not only are they rushing the SpaceX into the index Funds, but they are jiggering with the float percentages and making people buy more relative, more. Making index funds buy more relative SpaceX shares relative to the amount of SpaceX shares that are actually for sale, which is going to drive the price up. Okay, the final thing they did here was say that the rebalance, because the, these float calculations are then rebalanced because they change. Right. They said the rebalance will only occur at the scheduled quarterly rebalancings, which for SpaceX, based on when they're gonna debut, will be December 18th, I believe. Now, if you recall, when Milan first brought up the idea of doing this ipo, he was like, yeah, mid June, because then the Venus is in the house of Mars. And he gave like some stupid cockamamie astrological. No, that's not why he's doing the IPO in June. The reason he's doing the IPO in June is because. So when this IPO happens, they will have a certain percentage of stock which is for sale. And then the people who are holding stock pre existing on the private market, we're in what's called a lockup period where they can't sell.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah.

[JVL]

That lockup period is going to end a few days before the quarterly rebalancing on December 18, which means that for five months we will have an artificially very high valuation for SpaceX shares. Before the rebalancing brings those shares back to back to Earth, Elon and all his friends will get to sell.

[Tim Miller]

Right?

[JVL]

The lockup period for them will end. And I mean, it's just a fucking bank heist. It's an insane thing. And this is, I would say I've always thought that Elon has one true genius, which is that he understands how to use his chip stack. He understands that he has so much money that the money actually begins to act like its own asset in ways which are different as a class, different as a category. And it allows him to do shit like this. And when this is all done, he's going to be worth at least a trillion and a half dollars. He'll be halfway to his second trillion when this is over. Tim.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, I mean, Sarah, close your ears. But this is really enough to make you just ready to go full dsa, full burning, isn't it? Full burning. It's just like, how is this real capitalism? Like, it's not. This is not. This is not capitalism in any text.

[JVL]

These are casino games. Yeah, right. These are casino games, right? These are people sitting around figuring out how can we alter rules, how can we use our Size to force existing institutions to alter rules that benefit us, the shareholders, in the most narrow, short term way possible. I think it's very bad.

[Tim Miller]

And also not contribute back to society. I mean the opposite. Right. Then uses all that money to manipulate politics so that he doesn't have to contribute back to the public good at all. The sell before the rebalancing will be taxable at the capital gains rate, which is lower than the income rate. But the rest of.

[JVL]

Not legal advice.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, but the rest won't be taxable. I can't just sit on all of that. And this guy goes to the wealth tax debate in California. It's like, what? As an academic matter. I'm not that moved by creative tax games where we send somebody from Washington to your house to look at your art and decide how much your assets are and tax you based on that. But eventually there has to be some type of counterbalance to this type of hoarding of wealth and theft.

[JVL]

Can I throw something at you, Tim? Sarah and I talked a little bit about this on the Secret last week as I was trying to get her to our AOC adjacent. I am not. Billionaires shouldn't exist. But there is a level, a number of billions that I think shouldn't exist. You know, like a billion dollars fine. $10 billion fine. I don't know where the line is.

[Tim Miller]

And you can't spend 200 billion in a life.

[JVL]

Right.

[Tim Miller]

Unless you're buying elections and buying off people.

[JVL]

Yeah. There is some number that's probably pretty close to 15 billion where I say, I'm sorry, no, no more than that. And I think it is wrong to think about this in terms of fairness. And it is more proper and more convincing to me at least to think about it in terms of hedging risks, about abuse of power. Because I think of this in the same way I do antitrust. Like the reason we do antitrust is because when companies become too big, they're able to distort markets and hurt the markets. I think the exact same view should be used with individual wealth. Because when people get too rich, it gives them the ability to distort society.

[Tim Miller]

Yes.

[JVL]

And hurt society.

[Tim Miller]

That's happened already with Elon. He already distorted society. Yeah.

[JVL]

And so that, that is the argument I would make about why a certain level of billion and let's just call it 15 billion. Let's say, you know, every, every cent after 15 billion. I'm sorry, no.

[Tim Miller]

Or 90%, you just go back to the old short, you know, pre Reagan tax rate. Like, you know, you can keep of that next billion, you can keep 100 billion. That's not too bad. It's not too bad. This is my big objection. Every time I have the tech people and I'm asking them about this, I always say it's about the money. It's about the money. It's about dick measuring in the end. Like at the end. It's about dick measuring. Like there's after a certain point, like it's not even like that noticeable. It's about where you are in the lists, you know, it's about power. It's about things that you like.

[JVL]

It is about power.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, that's.

[JVL]

That's what it is. Right. It's not about the access that you can already have the best yacht that you can possibly buy.

[Tim Miller]

Correct.

[JVL]

It is about having the power to then manipulate the next interaction you have with the market or the government to

[Tim Miller]

the point that it's about ego and power. There is one thing that Elon will never have, which is love. If you get sad like I do thinking about Elon making a trillion dollars, I just want to share this tweet from Doja Cat yesterday. Hey Elon, if you see this, please put the audio post feature back on here. X. Thanks by the way, you frog billed looking bitch. Barrel chested ewok. You look like you eat sand and I like that. He has to live with that. That's how Doja Cat thinks about him. Do you have a favorite Doja Cat song?

[JVL]

I don't even know what Doja Cat is. Is that a band?

[Tim Miller]

It's an artist. She's a pop girly. She's a pop artist. Really great.

[JVL]

I can't wait to explore her catalog later today.

[Tim Miller]

I highly recommend. Yeah, Toulouse listens to it and there are some curse words in it. So I'd warn you about that for your children.

[JVL]

We have by kid 4. Nobody cares about cursing.

[Tim Miller]

Nobody cares about the curse words. I mean, there are some bad ones in this one. She was singing it with, I think, was it my dad? With one of my parents around, they were like, what? So anyway, FYI. But Doja Cat's great on California. I just want to do some brief politicking with you before we talk about Spencer Pratt. I want to take the lines back a little bit and set something up because I feel like this is podcaster accountability. I want to look inside a little bit and our colleague Lauren Egan and I think Sam shares this view. He talked about it a little bit on the next level. Wrote a newsletter this week talking about how successful Democratic vanilla candidates are. Have been so far this cycle. We don't know anything yet. We haven't had any elections. But just based on the polls, you have the Roy Coopers of the world, the Mary Paul Tolas, the people that are. There's a poll out in Ohio, Sherrod Brown, 53, John Houston, 45. There's all this talk about Platner, Telo, etc. And like, these more boring vanilla candidates are the ones that are doing better for now, at least in the polling. And I felt a little bit chastened by that because that's my natural state of liking those type of candidates. But I also exist in this podcast Internet sphere, and there are some bad incentives that sometimes I get sucked into, I think. And part of it is I'm very, like, 2028 focused. And I do think that vanilla is probably bad. Not necessarily. But I'm open to the idea that vanilla does not work in a 2028 presidential setting in the way that it does in a midterm congressional setting. So I think my interest in candidates to break the mold from what the Democrats have had the last three cycles is not wrong at a presidential level. But sometimes that analysis then seeps down to these other races where it becomes wrong. You know, obviously, there's not a lot to talk about. I'd love to talk about the North Carolina Senate race every day. What do you even say? Like, it's been the same. Roy Cooper has already been the governor. He just kind of puts one foot in front of the other every day. Like, what would you even talk about? But I don't know. I'm wondering if, when you saw Lauren's newsletter, whether that made you think about things any differently.

[JVL]

It's great newsletter. Everybody should read it. It was very good. Lauren Egan, the opposition. I have a couple thoughts. The first is that you do kind of have to hand it to Chuck Schumer. And look, Chuck Schumer is not inspiring. He may not be the person. He may not. He probably. He almost certainly is not the opposition to lead the future in the opposition.

[Tim Miller]

Can we just say on messaging, he sucks? And his initial response to the Iran war and even up till today was, like, pretty bad. So putting those two things over here, put a lot of hands into him. And this. Yeah, you have to hand it to him.

[JVL]

Ready? Go on. Candidate recruitment. With a couple exceptions, one of which is Mills. And he did win the shutdown fights.

[Tim Miller]

Yep.

[JVL]

Correct. Right. I mean, he won the show. He did. He won. Now, you could basically, while we're talking

[Tim Miller]

about how Chase and diamond, the politics analysis, that was something that I was totally correct about. Nobody, nobody agreed with that. Everybody bitched at him. In retrospect, absolutely won those fights.

[JVL]

I think people get a little blinded by their dislike of Schumer and their sense that, oh, he's bad on XYZ or he's terrible in messaging, or he's not the fighter we need. And all those things may be true. Right. And it may be true that he has to go anyway. But also, I'm sorry, just look at the scoreboard. Right. The second thing is, I think we also haven't fully readjusted our, our understanding of the world from what it was six months ago. Because, you know, November 2025, I think these candidate numbers look very different six months ago when Trump is at like 44% approval. And that has changed. And a lot of things become possible when you have a shift as profound as we've had. And in a shift like that, maybe vanilla candidates perform better. Right. Because again, I'm just thinking this, right. I'm not saying that this is. I'm just trying to think it through. Right?

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, sure.

[JVL]

When the incumbent is that bad and people hate the incumbent that much, then the vanilla candidate sort of has a whole bunch of advantages baked in. Because the vanilla candidate doesn't have to motivate your base. Right. I mean, the base is motivated by how much they hate the guy who's, who's screwing everything up.

[Tim Miller]

Right.

[JVL]

The vanilla candidate can lure in converts without turning people away. Your advantages shift as the environment shifts. And so I am open to the idea that in a world where Trump is at like 44% approval and he's only net like minus 4 or minus

[Tim Miller]

6, you really need a Talarico. You need somebody with a lot of juice to try to overcome it. Right. Especially if you're in a red tinted

[JVL]

state or even nationally. Right. You need somebody who is going to like really break the mold and try to reshare. But when Trump, what is he? Minus 16 at minus 16, it's different.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah.

[JVL]

And the dynamics auger for different candidates. I will say in 2020, Joe Biden won more votes than any person who has ever run for president in the history of our country and he won the second highest percentage of the vote since Reagan's reelection. So it's not as if plain vanilla candidates haven't demonstrated an ability to win gigantic victories at the top of a ticket. In cases where everything's a shit show, Right. And the candidate is very unpopular, the

[Tim Miller]

counterplay to that is like, I think everybody is like, given how much of a shit show it was in 2020, that level of victory was kind of a failure, actually. Even though maybe you could simultaneously get more in history. But yeah, maybe also feel like it needed to be bigger.

[JVL]

Maybe running a candidate like Bernie in 2020 would have not. You see what I'm saying? Like, again, if you look at the environment, it is possible that these things are dynamic and that in one environment you need one kind of candidate for to increase your chances of success. And in another kind of environment you need a different kind of.

[Tim Miller]

So now this takes us to the Spencer Pratt race. And there are kind of two elements to what's happening in this LA mayor's race that I want to get your take on that are more relevant to the broader dynamics than who actually is the mayor of Los Angeles. And that is, we talked to the next level about this kind of moment that Spencer Pratt type candidates were having. And I threw out the RuPaul's Drag Race care tool. I will for judging whether or not a candidate has charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent. You can check out the acronym if you'd like. Like whatever you think about Pratt or Platinum or Tall Rico or whatever, they have those things right. And that helps you overperform in the Internet world. Does that help you overperform on the ballot box? That kind of remains to be seen a little bit. And what we have now is it looked like on election night there was a lot of crowing from the Spencer Pratt crowd that he had overperformed, he was going to be in the top two. He might not even make it to the runoff now. Now he's actually the underdog to make it to the runoff, even though he's winning in the raw vote count. Nithya, as a progressive challenger to Karen Bass, seems likely that she is going to pass Pratt. And so just looking at that race, I have two things I'm wondering if that informs your view at all about the charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent. And also this California counting system. I mean, how bad is this for democracy? Adam Carlson is a guy I followed on social media really good. He said it will probably take a week or more to know where Pratt and Rahman truly stand. Nithya Raman Ron Desanctimonious posted. California keeps dumping votes. Odds are shifting for Pratt because the vote dumps always seem to go one way count until you get the result you want. So Ron Desantimonious is doing Trump style, stop the steal stuff.

[JVL]

Yeah.

[Tim Miller]

Is this just bad because we are election nerds or is this bad for democracy that California can't count their fucking votes?

[JVL]

So I, I think it's very bad. And look, I, I am not a California expert. We could talk to our friends the Pod Save guys. I'm sure they, maybe they could explain to me that there's a rational reason why California uniquely.

[Tim Miller]

I can explain you the rest of the reason. They want to get as many, they want to have as broad as access as possible. And so you can turn in mail in ballots up to election day and so you can mail your ballot up till election day. And so some of the ballots don't even come in until today. But then other stuff is just general bureaucratic nonsense. Like for example, Sacramento didn't count Wednesday or Thursday, they counted Tuesday and Friday.

[JVL]

It's like what I mean, I suppose I like ballot access.

[Tim Miller]

You have to have rules.

[JVL]

The problem is that in a post liberal age where one of the two major political parties is attempting to destroy the legitimacy of elections and move to a post liberal democratic order, having a major vote center not be able to deliver votes in a timely way helps the other side destroy public legitimacy in elections. Yes, California should be balancing voter access for California citizens and sort of what the marginal change of policy does to how many marginal extra votes it's able to bring into the process versus the harm it is causing to the citizens of California by giving ammunition to the post liberal factions elsewhere in America. Man love, if Gavin Newsom could do something on this before he gets out of there. I suppose that's probably not possible. I don't know. Am I wrong about this?

[Tim Miller]

No. I mean I have to worry that I'm wrong about it because I get pushback from my friends in California and others on this. But like my hair is on fire about it. I just think it's a insane. I have plenty of early vote.

[JVL]

Do more like back up the early voting. Give five more days of early voting. Right. You know, like you could take the absolute number just move the window over sometimes.

[Tim Miller]

This is where like goody two shoes progressive stuff sometimes just becomes self harm. It's like we have an election day. I'm sorry, you got to vote by election day. Okay. So like if you're going to mail in your ballot, you got to mail it in a couple days earlier or they have dropboxes everywhere. Or if you missed your chance to mail it in, you got to drop it into the Dropbox. But I'm sorry, we can't do this. You can't shut down voting. Vote counting for two days in the middle of the week on election day. I think it's crazy.

[JVL]

No, I'm with you. If the answer is that right now California has a 30 day window, I don't know. They do. I'm just picking a number. Right. And we believe that that 30 day window is adequate to. To get everybody who wants to vote to vote. Great. Just take the fucking 30 days and slide the window back by five days so that the mail end has a deadline and then everybody's still getting the same number of days to vote and count.

[Tim Miller]

Make people work. You can pay the union rate or whatever you have to do. I don't know. But like, yeah, you got to count the ballots. All right, we're over. So maybe more Spencer Pratt thoughts later this week. If JVL had any Spencer Pratt thoughts. Maybe you'll just sign up for his newsletter. Maybe he'll do some later. Who knows? It is kind of delicious that he might not make the runoff, though. We can get some joy in that. I mean, it's kind of delicious. After all the hype. After all the hype.

[JVL]

If it's what you say it is, I love it.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah, politico was floating 2028 anyway. Dark JBL. I want to end with this. I was thinking about what I wanted to talk to you about and I was like, you know what would be a fun little game is I want to ask Dark JVL for something that haunts him, something that he's alarmed about, something he's worried about that you don't think is the most likely thing that's going to happen. Not a 51% likelihood, but not zero either. Like a 20%. Like a 1 in 5, 1 in 10 chance to happen to our democracy that people might not be thinking about. Do you have a dark JVL idea for me?

[JVL]

So I have a dark jvl. It's not about the democracy. And I'm sorry. So I'm swerving. I wrote last week about drones and the sort of the impact on drone warfare, of drones, on modern warfare and how Trump fucked everything up. And while I was researching the piece, lot of talk about aerial drones, not as much talk about naval drones. And naval drones are also like your belly button. No, not, not those ones. Sea drones. So putting drones in the water. And what worries me about that is that sea drones, sea based drones will wind up being categorically different from aerial drones because of the way data transfer works through water. Because what it means is where you can transmit Data and so you can have human control over aerial drones and land based drones either through, you know, broadcast means or through wire. Right. You know, fly by wire, which is what a lot of the Ukrainian drones are. Once you get into sea based drones, by definition they're almost going to all

[Tim Miller]

have to be autonomous AI, autonomous sea based naval drones. Right.

[JVL]

And so you know like people are concerned about autonomous drones on the battlefield and in the air. And I am also concerned about that because I think in a weird way that's like the perfect use case for AI. You know, AI has all sorts of like, it fucks up a certain percentage of the time. And one place where humans are historically very comfortable with fuck ups is war fighting. Humans have often said I do not care if this technology kills the wrong people and some civilians so long as it kills a lot of the people I also want to kill. So I think we're going to have a very high tolerance for that sort of thing with aerial drones and land based drones. We're going to get there with drones, sea based drones and they're all going to have to be autonomous. Not a 20% scenario. This isn't like a thing that tomorrow worries me but when I project forward what the future of, of war fighting

[Tim Miller]

looks like, so you see like the end of international shipping. You see the sea based drones going crazy and just totally like killing all the marine life in the Persian Gulf. Like what about sea life? I mean it just worst case scenario for you here.

[JVL]

It strikes me as being like one of these things where it has the potential to be really disruptive in ways that we can't quite imagine. You know what I'm saying? Like you like hold on, all of a sudden navies are going to be able to fight wars by launching these 15 foot long essentially guided autonomous torpedoes that just go around and do whatever the fuck they want or whatever the AI is inside is telling them to do. I don't know. Seems like there are a lot of things that could go wrong in that and we can't fully predict what those things will be. Don't love it.

[Tim Miller]

I don't like being on the ocean that much anyway and so I love this dark JVL because I feel like I'm going to be safe. I don't see myself on a CRU cruise. Occasionally I'll swim just very near to the shore of the beach at a tourist destination.

[JVL]

I'll be pretty safe there.

[Tim Miller]

I think I'll probably be pretty safe there, but I love that. You know what I love about this gambit is that I just have no idea where you're going to go. You could have gone anywhere. Never would have saw this one coming. And maybe we'll reprise it the next time you're on. Thank you for doing this, jvl.

[JVL]

Thanks for having me, buddy.

[Tim Miller]

I appreciate you very much. Congratulations to Flash on his graduation. Enjoy. Don't cry too much tomorrow. Or no, actually, I take that back. Cry a lot.

[JVL]

I'm a crier. I'm a cry.

[Tim Miller]

Cry a lot. Cry a lot.

[JVL]

Do you know that I'm a crier.

[Tim Miller]

I don't think I've ever seen you cry.

[JVL]

Oh, I cry all the time, dude.

[Tim Miller]

I'm gonna ask Shannon to send us a video for tomorrow so I can have that image in my head. Thanks to jbl. Up next, Katherine Pompilio. Stick around. All right. She's an associate editor at Lawfare and author of a new piece out today on Lawfare. New York Times has also covered is about how many January Sixers have committed other crimes. And I know that our listeners are going to be shocked to hear many, many more than we had previously known. It's Katherine Pompilio. How are you doing, girl?

[Katherine Pompilio]

I'm good. How are you, Tim? Good to be here.

[Tim Miller]

I am. Well, why don't you just give us the top line of where we were before you started the reporting, what we thought we knew about the January Sixers and what the reality is.

[Katherine Pompilio]

Yeah. So there have been almost 1600 people that have been prosecuted by the Justice Department that have been pardoned since then because of the executive order from President Trump. And then there have been a whole bunch of estimates about the number of people that have gone on to commit other crimes since their participation in the attack. Crew put out a report a few months ago that had about 33 people. The new York Times did an editorial. Their number was 39. So I felt that that number was way too small. So I did a series of searches, and the number is actually 97 people who have been arrested, charged, or convicted of other crimes since their participation in the attack.

[Tim Miller]

Talk to me about that process. Like, why is this so hard? Like, this feels like a knowable thing to figure out. What are the barriers to knowing how many criminals Donald Trump pardoned?

[Katherine Pompilio]

Yeah, so there's a few reasons for that. The first, pardoned individuals have no monitoring requirements at all. They're not like parolees. So they honestly just kind of disappear from government record. A lot of them have common names, and they also end up, you know, they all aren't committing federal crimes. So they end up on county level court systems with no reference to January 6th at all. And then to make matters more difficult, the DOJ has been deleting recently Jan6 defendant records, which lawfare has been archiving. But also, you know, there's the sheer volume of pardons. 1600 people kind of creates this diffusion of attention. So the story is told in little drips that are never aggregated.

[Tim Miller]

So did you use Claude to figure this out or were you like, flying to Little Rock to go through the county records, or what does that look like?

[Katherine Pompilio]

I had a lot of quirky phone calls with a lot of quirky county clerks who were like, so excited to talk about this. The first thing I did was we did hyper local news searches. So when you Google these people, you know, a lot of the news reporting on them is not the Times, it's not the Post, it's, you know, the Winchester Star. And so you have to go through a bunch of searches to find them. So we use Claude to automate those searches on Google. And from there I found those 97 people. Also worth noting that this data is just out there in news stories, but also in sentencing memoranda in the federal cases. Anybody that has been sentenced in their Jan6 case has a little paragraph written about them by prosecutors titled characteristics of the defendant. And in there, for at least, I think at least 10 of the people that I have listed here, it outlined crimes committed since the Jan6 attack that were unrelated to the attack.

[Tim Miller]

It's probably bleak going through all of these records. So I am wondering, did you just. Did your love of America get reinvigorated a little bit speaking to the county clerks?

[Katherine Pompilio]

Yeah, 100%. They, they, they were, they were still

[Tim Miller]

good people out there.

[Katherine Pompilio]

They're still good people. And they were so excited to talk about this. There was one guy who I have in the piece who calls them periodically to give them updates on his life that they don't ask for. So he's allegedly in Vietnam, but we don't know.

[Tim Miller]

The January Sixer calls the clerk to give the clerk update on their life. It's kind of dark, kind of lonely. Well, there are a couple other examples of that. But first, to get to the serious parts first. I mean, again, just doing the math. One in 15 of the insurrectionists were arrested for or charged with other crimes. Some of them are minor, but a lot of very serious crimes. Fifteen have been charged with sex crimes or crimes related to child sexual abuse material. Six have faced domestic violence charges. So, yeah, I just talk about kind of the nature of the crimes. And the 97 does not include people that, like, were driving 21 miles per hour over the speed limit.

[Katherine Pompilio]

No. The crimes range, honestly from everything from murder, rape, csam, possession, child sexual exploitation, to we had one jaywalking charge. Right. Which was kind of, you know, disguise. He was outside of an FBI headquarters. These are people that have not previously been widely reported on that have done some really serious, serious, scary things. So the Times and crew got most of the more serious offenders. But there was Mark Maza, who picked a boy up by the neck on the street, and he was 12 and slammed him to the ground because he criticized President Trump. There was Howard C. Richardson, who, in an attempt to block a motorcyclist, knocked him off the bike. And the person needed surgery to their leg. And they said in the court documents that they took a chunk out of his leg. And then there's Eric Beauchen, who's the one who calls the clerk's office, who, you know, hit his daughter on the head and pushed her into a side table, allegedly. These are just three stories of the 97. There are a bunch of DUIs, a bunch of DUIs that have resulted in injuries to people. There was a dog attack. The list goes on. There was a lot happening here.

[Tim Miller]

One of the recent cases in Colorado is this guy, Tim arvidson. He was January 6th, bragged about on social media, ran for Colorado Senate. Kind of surprised he didn't win the nomination, given what's happening with the Colorado nominations. I mean, the leader in the governor's race right now is like a person who's also interested in exorcisms and has lied about murders in the past. So, you know, he didn't quite make it. But according to the story, he alerted his friends on Facebook that the FBI came, knocked on his door after his younger, fat, childless woke sister had alerted them that he was there the day after he was pardoned. He wrote that he felt as if a dark cloud had been lifted. I guess the dark cloud came back because now he's been charged with allegedly shooting and killing a man on the side of the road in Colorado Springs.

[Katherine Pompilio]

Yeah, he is one of those people that was. He was never formally prosecuted for January 6th, though. Like you said, we knew he was there, but you have to think that there are literally thousands more people that were at this riot that have probably likely gone on to commit other crimes that we have no idea about, because we just haven't been able to keep track of them. So there are definitely more people out There like him, for sure.

[Tim Miller]

Yeah. And there are a couple in particular you write about that. I mean, we know that their new crimes were the cause of the clemency. Right. Like in this case, that guy hadn't been convicted. But there are other cases where people were in prison, then were let out of prison and subsequently committed crimes. We have Andrew Paul Johnson. This is one that has been public. We talked about him before, but he was the one that was convicted of five charges, including child molestation in February. I believe he was also the one that was telling the kids that he was molesting, that he was about to get a payout from the government, so they should shut up because he was gonna pay him out. Zachary Allum did grand larcery in Burgundy. Ryan Nichols, he was charged with. With deadly conduct and harassment after threatening a person with a gun in a church parking lot. And so some of these people were, like, literally let out of prison because of this pardon and then did these horrible crimes.

[Katherine Pompilio]

Yeah. So we know of five. There were probably more that we don't know about.

[Tim Miller]

What just struck you about the nature of all these people and did it seem like these are criminals who were attracted to a crazy spot, is that people that just got really wrapped up, maybe had mental health issues and really got wrapped up in Trump's lives. Folks that life unraveled were wrong place. How would you describe, as you're learning about all of the lives of these people that subsequently offended?

[Katherine Pompilio]

There's a range. They range from extremely, extremely remorseful to completely unremorseful and thinking that they're completely justified in their crimes, in their participation in Jan.6, and then also asserting that their crimes since the riot should also be covered by Trump's pardon. I spoke on the phone yesterday with Emily Hernandez's lawyer. She was in a drunk driving accident and she ended up killing a woman. And she apparently, according to her lawyer, is extremely remorseful. Wishes, you know, she was completely caught up in kind of the Trump world for her participation in the riot and feels really bad about hurting somebody else. And she said that if she could switch places with that person, she absolutely would. There are other people who have just. Their lawyers got back to me, and they said that it was the tentacles of lawfare, not my Lawfare, the Trumpian lawfare. The tentacles of lawfare that are the reason for this prosecution and that they are being unjustly targeted by the media. They were unjustly targeted by the Biden Justice Department, and they received a pardon, and then that pardon should apply to these crimes. So there's a range.

[Tim Miller]

I thought this one was interesting. You read about Brian Burton, who was charged with assaulting police officers on January 6. This was not somebody that was just there. He was convicted of a bunch of other crimes. His attorney replied to you. You just talked about one other person's attorney. Not very many attorneys replied to you, but this person, Burton's attorney, said, this Brian does much better when he receives mental health treatment. I believe Brian came to believe the false narrative that has been prompted by Fox News. Most of his recent criminal issues in Michigan surrounded interactions with his immediate family. I believe a pardon should be reserved for situations that are thoroughly vetted. Whether Brian was treated fairly by the Justice Department is a question. I think the circumstances justified a pardon, but absent a very thorough investigation for each and every participant, that no one should have been pardoned. I'm confident that. But for Brian's mental health issues and the propaganda, Brian came to believe if he would never have participated in January 6th, I do think that that's pretty important and telling to just talk about the relationship between all of the media figures, commentators, politicians that echoed Donald Trump's lies about the election and the subsequent criminal behavior from some of these people that had mental health issues.

[Katherine Pompilio]

Yeah, 100%. The lawyers that did get back to me were quick to specify that their clients during January 6th just showed up. They thought they were being patri and they didn't hurt people. Burton did. But, you know, I think that it was a display of the real harm that these lies and these election propaganda, this election propaganda did to this country, to these people's lives. And I think that. I know these people are, a lot of them are feeling remorseful, but I honestly think that because the messaging has continued and they feel justified and they've received this pardon, which has been just, you know, kind of excused a lot of this horrible behavior, it's emboldened them to act more.

[Tim Miller]

It's one of the things that makes me get really mad, especially when JD Vance gets on his high horse about this stuff, is they actually ruined the lives of a lot of people who they claim to fight for, who are the supposedly forgotten men and women and people like Burton. Right. Whether that's people that didn't take the vaccine and died, or people like this that got caught up in January 6th, that never would have been there that day, that were drugged down this rabbit hole and ended up having their whole lives unraveling. And then there's like, the butterfly effect of them. The people that they went on to hurt like the other victims of these other crimes. And it really is tragic.

[Katherine Pompilio]

Yeah. I mean, there's people with mental health issues. There are two cases that I know in this report, people died by suicide because they didn't. One of them stated before Matthew Huddle, who has been widely reported on. He stated, I can't go back to jail. I'm a Jan Sixer and I can't go. Go back to jail. There was another one who he had just been sentenced to a few more years of probation, I believe, and he also committed suicide shortly after. So, yeah, it's more than also just jail time. It's people's lives that have been taken from them.

[Tim Miller]

Well, thank you for doing this dark work. It's probably not that uplifting, but it is important for people to see the scale of destruction, those wrought by Trump's lies and then his subsequent actions. Anything else that I missed you wanted to share with folks?

[Katherine Pompilio]

I just want to emphasize that there are probably more. And so if people want to look into this themselves using this data and add to this list of people, it would be much appreciated. I know that the Justice Department's anti weaponization fund, I think, is now dead, according to Blanche. But the Trump administration is no stranger to providing payouts, as in they did with Michael Flynn, or just favoring people that they believe have been allies to them or they who believe have been politically persecuted. And so as long as we know who these people are, we can hopefully make the right decisions about how to treat them going forward.

[Tim Miller]

Appreciate that, everybody. Go support the work of Lawfare. You guys are doing the Lord's work over there, and we'll be talking to you soon.

[Katherine Pompilio]

All right, thank you, Tim.

[Tim Miller]

All right, thanks so much to JVL and to Kathryn. We'll be back here tomorrow for a Friday edition of the podcast. We'll see you all then. Peace. The Bork podcast is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Katie Lutz and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.