Drones and Pardons

Summary

The Commentary Magazine Podcast: "Drones and Pardons" – December 13, 2024

Hosted by Commentary Magazine, this episode delves into the rising concerns over unidentified drone activities in the Northeastern United States and examines the broader implications of presidential pardons under the current administration. The discussion navigates through national security fears, governmental trust deficits, societal paranoia, and the controversial use of pardon powers.

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1. Unidentified Drone Sightings in the Northeast

The episode opens with a pressing issue: a surge of unidentified drones spotted across the Northeastern United States, particularly concentrated in New Jersey and spreading into Pennsylvania, New York, and Connecticut. The panelists express concern over the proliferation of these drones and the lack of a coherent governmental response.

• John Podhoretz [05:20]: Highlights the nonchalant tone of media coverage, questioning whether the administrations' dismissive attitude is appropriate given the potential national security implications.

2. Government Response and Trust Deficit

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the Biden administration's response to the drone sightings. The administration, represented by Admiral Kirby, downplays the threat, stating there is "no evidence... that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or a public safety threat" ([07:17]). However, this reassurance clashes with local officials' apprehensions, fostering a gap in trust between the public and the government.

• Christine Rosen [09:50]: Critiques the administration's dismissal of legitimate concerns, arguing that vague or evasive responses fuel public paranoia instead of alleviating fears.

3. Historical Context and Comparisons

The panel draws parallels between the current drone situation and past incidents, such as the Chinese spy balloons in 2023. These comparisons underscore a recurring pattern of governmental ineptitude in addressing aerial surveillance threats, leading to increased skepticism among citizens.

• Abe Greenwald [11:27]: Suggests that the drone activities might be linked to internal national security operations, such as monitoring President Trump's activities, although this remains speculative.

4. The Role of Social Media and Misinformation

Matthew Continenti introduces the idea that drones symbolize the widespread mistrust and paranoia prevalent in society today. He emphasizes how social media exacerbates these feelings, making it challenging to discern accurate information from misinformation.

• Matthew Continenti [16:43]: Describes drones as "the literal embodiment of our atmospheric free-floating mistrust and paranoia," highlighting the sociological impact of the phenomenon.

5. The Pardon Power and Its Implications

Transitioning from drones, the discussion shifts to the controversial use of presidential pardons by the Biden administration. The panel critiques the administration's recent pardons, including that of Rita Crundwell, who embezzled $53.7 million from Dixon, Illinois, and the pardon of Hunter Biden.

• Christine Rosen [51:17]: Expresses deep concern over the pardon of Rita Crundwell, arguing that it signals a federal government's disregard for local communities and justice.

• Abe Greenwald [56:35]: Explains the inherent problems with the pardon power, deeming it "the most corrupting possible thing" within the U.S. system due to its lack of accountability.

6. Historical Usage and Abuse of Pardon Power

The panelists delve into the historical misuse of pardon powers, illustrating how it has been exploited to favor the connected and influential, thereby undermining public trust in the justice system.

• Abe Greenwald [56:57]: Recounts instances from the past where pardon powers were abused, emphasizing the need for constitutional amendments to regulate this authority.

7. Conclusion: Eroding Trust and the Path Forward

The episode concludes with a reflection on the pervasive trust crisis affecting both national security perceptions and the justice system. The panelists advocate for increased transparency and accountability within the government to bridge the widening trust gap.

• John Podhoretz [54:34]: Criticizes the administration's handling of information, reinforcing the notion that deceit and incompetence are eroding public trust.

• Seth Mandel [58:20]: Calls for a reevaluation of the pardon power to ensure it serves justice rather than political convenience.

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Notable Quotes:

• John Podhoretz [00:04]: "Hope for the best, expect the worst."
• Christine Rosen [09:50]: "The denial, or the worse, I think the dismissal of the concern on the part of the federal government... adds fuel to the concern."
• Abe Greenwald [11:27]: "This has become all but impossible for any such behavior to remain hidden from public view."
• Matthew Continenti [16:43]: "We're living in an age where AI-generated deepfakes make it difficult to trust visual evidence."
• Christine Rosen [51:17]: "This is not what this power is for. I'm starting to become an Andy McCarthy, let's just get rid of presidential pardon power fan now after this particular pardon."
• Abe Greenwald [56:57]: "The pardon power is literally the most corrupting possible thing that exists in our system."

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Insights and Conclusions:

• Trust Crisis: The episode underscores a significant erosion of trust between the American public and the federal government, exacerbated by inconsistent and evasive responses to security threats and controversial use of pardon powers.

• National Security Concerns: Unidentified drone activities highlight vulnerabilities in national security protocols, while governmental dismissiveness may inadvertently encourage conspiracy theories and public fear.

• Judicial Accountability: The unregulated nature of presidential pardons presents a systemic flaw, allowing potential abuses that undermine the integrity of the justice system and harm local communities.

• Call for Reform: The panel collectively advocates for constitutional amendments to regulate and perhaps curtail the pardon power, aiming to restore accountability and public trust in governmental institutions.

For further discussions and inquiries, listeners are encouraged to send questions to podcastcommentary.org. The Commentary Magazine Podcast promises to continue addressing pressing societal and political issues in its upcoming episodes.

Transcript

[John Podhoretz]

Hope for the best, expect the worst.

[Abe Greenwald]

Some preach and pain some diapers the way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best, Expect the worst, hope for the best welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, December 13, 2024. It's a Friday the 13th everybody. I don't know what to say about Friday the 13th, except I never really understood what everybody is afraid of. But I did live and grow up in an apartment building that was 13 stories high, built in 1915, and the top floor was called T instead of 13 because that's really going to fool the bad luck gods who aren't going to realize that the top floor is the number 13. A bad luck site, by the way, not to get totally old man going off in crazy directions because the site of the apartment I grew in was the mansion of the Strauss family that owned Macy's and who died on the Titanic. And so their mansion was torn down and the apartment building that I grew up in was built in its place. So the whole thing was kind of bad luck. Although it was one hell of a rent control department, let me tell you. Anyway, I am John Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary. With me, as always, Executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.

[Matthew Continenti]

Hi John.

[Abe Greenwald]

Washington Commentary columnist Matthew Continenti. Hi Matt.

[John Podhoretz]

Hi John.

[Abe Greenwald]

Media Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.

[Christine Rosen]

Hi John.

[Abe Greenwald]

And Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi Seth.

[Seth Mandel]

Hi John.

[Abe Greenwald]

As we are coming to the end of the year, we're going to be doing some special shows that we're going to tape ahead to run during the at the end of the year when we are not going to be here on a daily basis. And every year we do solicit questions from you, our listeners, on a type of special show that we call Ask Commentary. So if you have any questions for us about what we do, how we do things, anything you want to know about us, anything you want to know about the apartment buildings that other people on this panel grew up. I don't think anybody else on this panel grew up in an apartment building, but maybe the houses that they grew up in, were they haunted, were they not? Horrible Christmas dinner story. Whatever. Whatever comes to your mind if you want to ask us.

[Seth Mandel]

We all live with our own ghosts.

[Abe Greenwald]

John just emailed podcastmentary.org with the header Ask Commentary and we might take your question on.

[John Podhoretz]

We encourage the more political questions.

[Abe Greenwald]

Do we want more political questions?

[John Podhoretz]

Us? The personal is not political.

[Matthew Continenti]

Well, there's a lot between. There's a lot between the political and the personal.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yes. Broad range space, yes.

[John Podhoretz]

But we're not out here to.

[Seth Mandel]

Was the wear our dirty laundry in the place you grew up?

[Abe Greenwald]

I mean, I will. I'll just begin with an Ask Commentary question on my bed. Does anybody here like fruitcake?

[John Podhoretz]

Oh, no.

[Abe Greenwald]

Nobody likes fruitcake.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Okay.

[Matthew Continenti]

Well, I don't, but it's one of those things because I haven't had it in 30 years. I think it's possible that suddenly I would now like it there.

[Abe Greenwald]

There are.

[John Podhoretz]

Yeah. There are certain circumstances where the Italian panettona can be had for breakfast during this season, and it's acceptable.

[Abe Greenwald]

Okay.

[John Podhoretz]

And that is sometimes classified as a fruitcake.

[Abe Greenwald]

Okay.

[John Podhoretz]

Even though it's slightly different.

[Abe Greenwald]

Okay. One of the many things that makes me proud of being Jewish is that we have nothing even remotely analogous to fruitcake. There is no analogy. Except sometimes your grandmother would have on the table this round thing that she would buy at the supermarket that would have nuts and raisins and dried apricots in it. And the thing was that the nuts were always the nuts that nobody ever wanted to eat. You know, a Brazil nut, a macadamia. You like Brazil?

[Seth Mandel]

I love.

[Matthew Continenti]

And I love macadamias.

[Seth Mandel]

I don't just like Brazil nuts. I keep bags of Brazil nuts in my house and I snack on them. I love.

[Abe Greenwald]

Dear God. That is. That is. If I had known that before I hired you, Seth, I don't know where we would have gone with that. Anyway, the only Jewish tradition is there some dried fruit sometimes on your grandmother's table before you have a meal. That's really about all of it. So we have now answered the first Ask Commentary, which is that it's not an entirely negative reading on the fruitcake.

[John Podhoretz]

Fine.

[Abe Greenwald]

Let's go to sleep.

[Seth Mandel]

If you don't ask us questions, we're gonna ask ourselves questions.

[Abe Greenwald]

And this is one Ask us better questions than the ones I'm asking. But I will now ask an important question. Matt and I, our obsession with up first, the NPR morning Podcast.

[John Podhoretz]

You cannot laugh while you're having this cold.

[Abe Greenwald]

I can't because you break out into the coffee. I can't. Anyway, so this morning they did a segment up first about the issue of the spotting all over the Northeast, particularly centering in New Jersey, of these drones by the dozens, if not hundreds, spreading First New Jersey into Pennsylvania. And people are seeing them in New York, they're seeing them in Connecticut. And the overall tone of the story was sort of jaunty, jokey. Where are Mulder and Scully to examine the mysterious. Maybe they're UFOs or isn't this really. Oh, ha ha. Conspiracy theorists all over the place are having a field day. Wasn't it just two years ago that we discovered that the Chinese were flying high altitude spy craft undetected over the United States that were only spotted almost by happenstance? And that the Biden administration had literally no idea what on earth it should do about this phenomenon, Particularly when a second, apparently unmanned balloon spy craft floated right into American airspace after the first one was being allowed to transit the entire continental United States. And here we are at the end of 2024. Something weird is going on in the skies over the industrial northeast of the United States. And the general kind of media administration response is, oh, ho, ho, ho, what a hilarious, funny public interest story this is. Am I missing something? Am I being too non flip? Are they right to be flip?

[John Podhoretz]

No, they're not right to be flip. This has become a political issue, and it was addressed yesterday from the podium of the White House briefing room. And I just want to quote what Admiral Kirby said. And you know it's serious if Admiral Kirby is addressing the issue and not Karine Jean Pierre. So Admiral Kirby says, I just want to add a few comments on the reports of drone activity here on the east coast, particularly in and around New Jersey. We have no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or a public safety threat or have a foreign nexus. The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are investigating these sightings, and they're working closely with state and local law enforcement to provide resources using numerous detection methods to better understand their origin using very sophisticated electronic detection technologies provided by federal authorities. We have not been able to, and neither have state or local law enforcement authorities, corroborate any of the reported visual sightings. To the contrary, upon review of available imagery, it appears that many of the reported sightings are actually manned aircraft that are being operated lawfully. Importantly, there are no reported or confirmed drone sightings in any restricted airspace. So the message from the White House is, this is nothing. This is a nothing burger. But when you contrast that to the response from the local officials in New Jersey and to the elected representatives from the areas of New Jersey where the drones or aircraft have been appearing, it's a huge gap. And that was also elevated to the national discourse when Representative Jeff Vandre floated the idea. And he's not the only one who's floated the idea that some of these drones may be coming from a mother, an Iranian mothership, not a mothership like the Close Encounters mothership, but some type of vessel off the coast that is launching these things, and that was batted down by the Pentagon. So the message from the administration is, there's nothing to see here. There's no story here. Move along, move along. Which, by the way, was exactly their same story right before they were forced to shoot down the Chinese spy balloon over the ocean in the winter of 2023.

[Christine Rosen]

It's one of those examples of. And this happens a lot, and I know this because I read and study a lot of the things that the mainstream media calls conspiracy theories. So you have this void, you have this vacuum. Citizens are concerned. They go to their elected representatives. The elected representatives locally respond and say, oh, wow, there are strange things in the sky, and let's figure out what's going on. They go to the federal government, which is in charge of national security, and say, what's going on? The response is nothing. So, of course, then people start to theorize this is a natural human impulse. They want an explanation for an unexplainable thing in the sky. Hovering. Local people. Local, I think it was a local official sent up a local helicopter to look at it, and the drone turned off its lights, which, of course, created a new risk for the helicopter pilots. So they brought those back down so they wouldn't crash. There's clearly something weird going on here. And the denial, or the worse, I think the dismissal of the concern on the part of the federal government, the Biden administration. Matt's exactly right. Does track with China. I mean, it's. It's. The theories are it could be either Iran or China. We've had drone surveillance over places like Langley and other military installations in this country. We know that over the past four years, that has happened. So the idea that this could be a hostile foreign power doing surveillance is perfectly legitimate. Now, the only. The only charitable explanation for the Biden administration delaying is that they do know who is doing it. They do know what's being drawn up, and they are trying in turn to gather intelligence on these supposed drones. So that's the charitable. But after China, after the Chinese spy balloons, I'm not giving them any charity.

[Abe Greenwald]

Or that we're doing it. In other words, to me, the theory that makes the most sense, based on what we're hearing, is that, of course, as we know, Trump is going to be president again on January 21st, and one of the places that he will be spending time at is his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey. And it's conceivable that the spy agencies of the United States are trying to establish where the no fly zones. And what kind of eyes in the sky can be prevented from keeping an eye on Trump and the Trump White House when it moves to Bedminster. And obviously that's not something that they would want to telegraph, which has, you.

[Seth Mandel]

Know, has been shot at the President, who has been shot at twice. Once.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yes, of course, yes. But I mean, that's a good theory, though. Nobody, I mean, you know, this is something I discussed with our friend Noah Rothman, who lives. Lives in New Jersey. And it's sort of like, well, that seems to be like that. But it's not like anybody is laying that out for us, nor should they. It's just that the world has changed. And if there is a national security element to this in which we, the United States, are. Our government is doing stuff in and around our airspace that it does not want us to know about, it has now become all but impossible for any such behavior to remain hidden from public view. There are 150 million iPhones in the United States, and at any given moment, somebody is training their camera on something and will take a picture of it or a film of it.

[Christine Rosen]

But why can't they just say, this is a. This is a training exercise, a routine training exercise or routine security exercise. They're vague bureaucratic ways of calming people's nerves. And I think that's the problem, is people are nervous.

[Seth Mandel]

By the way, the other part of this is that it's not the federal government versus local officials. The Coast Guard also thinks something's going on. And I think that we should point out the federal government is arguing with the federal government about whether there are drones in the sky over New Jersey. And that is part of what's unsettling people there. The Coast Guard is asking for answers from, you know, from the national security establishment. And the Coast Guard is saying, hey, the other night, one of our boats was followed by 15 drones or something like that, or 6 drones for 15 miles or something. Whatever it was, that's the federal government saying, our vessel was followed by these drones. And so people are watching this, going like the right hand and the left hand, first of all, should get on the same page and tell the rest of us. And then the other thing is that these drones are large, right? If they are drones. And so we don't generally make drones as large as the ones that people claim are being sighted. And that's.

[Abe Greenwald]

Excuse me, that's the other commercial drones you buy at Costco, right? Look like tripods.

[Seth Mandel]

They look like six foot long drones. There is such a thing Militaries use them, but China also apparently develops them for public mass consumption. Whatever you want. And we generally don't. So that's. The other thing is that people are saying, if they're right, that these are, you know, a larger than normal drone, it's less likely that they are an American drone.

[John Podhoretz]

Even if it's just a commercial drone.

[Seth Mandel]

Their own private drone commercial.

[John Podhoretz]

Right, an American commercial.

[Matthew Continenti]

I'm on a slightly different page than all of you on this. I'm interested in it mostly as a sort of sociological phenomenon here. The drones are almost this literal embodiment of our atmospheric free floating mistrust and paranoia. It's the sort of perfect emblematic thing to arise right now. We don't trust the military industrial complex. We don't trust the security apparatus to protect us. We don't trust the Chinese or the Iranians, nor should we. There's a universe of extraterrestrial suspicion out there. And of course we get, we never get answers right. Like anything that happens, we never get answers anymore. So I'm, I'm certainly not where NPR is. I think it's, I think there's reason to be concerned and, but I don't know if this is some sort of runaway phenomenon. Maybe there's some, some drones, maybe, maybe, maybe there's fewer drones than people are saying. Maybe some hobbyists are now throwing their drones up to add to what's going on.

[John Podhoretz]

Such an important point, because once it's taken off to become this national story, and it's interesting to me too, how quickly we've moved from high stakes politics to now moving to kind of interest in Luigi Mangione on one hand, this high profile killing, and now the drones, which are not necessarily, you know, political stories, they have political dimensions, but they're more cultural and sociological, as you say. So once we get past that, once the drones have become this national story, everyone's fascinated by them. There's real concern about how that story intersects with our social media landscape. Where last night, thinking about this issue, preparing for today's discussion, I just did a quick X search on New Jersey drones. And what struck me as I was scrolling through all the posts that came up in the search was I would have to double check each one to know what the source was, whether it's verified. Which drones are we talking about? Seth raises this issue about the Coast Guard vessel which was trailed by a group of drones the other day. That might not, that might not be the same drone you're seeing when you Google New Jersey drones. And then there's one that looks kind of like a plane, actually. Right. So one question we have to answer is what drones are we talking about? And I think that the White House is being very careful in saying, oh, the ones we looked at, there's no problem. The ones we're, the ones we're investigating have nothing to be worried about. There's a whole lot of space there for other unmanned aerial vehicles that maybe they're not aware of or they're not investigating closely.

[Abe Greenwald]

But I think this trust question is at the root of everything. And just thinking back in time to Flight 800 in 1996, where I'd shot down, not, excuse me, crashed over eastern Long island, you know, sort of like right near the hamptons Center, Mauritius. 300 people on board, killed instantly. And three or four people said they saw something in the sky that had like a kind of light in the sky that had gone up behind the plane and the plane had blown up. And Pierre Salinger, who had been John F. Kennedy's press secretary and then was a correspondent at ABC News, was then in his late 70s. Pierre Salinger became absolutely convinced that Flight 800 had been shot down. And he was crushed. His career was destroyed because it was deemed that he had somehow crossed over into, into the land of the psychotic conspiracy theorist area 51. There was no evidence. There was no nothing. Why would the government cover up an effort to destroy an American plane this way off a ship somewhere? Obviously, Pierre had gone crazy and it worked. This was a conspiracy theory around for years, but it never really gained any purchase because it became clear that kind of like the gatekeepers had decided that this was not anything that a rational person should be believing. Now flash forward to 12, 15 years ago, whenever that was, when Malaysian Airlines 370 disappears, and there are, and nobody believes in any of the explanations that have been proffered to explain what happened to that plane at all. Because in between Flight 800 and Flight 370, we lived through almost 20 years of, you know, Iraq was done under false pretenses and everything's false flag and everything's great and Sandy Hook wasn't real and all of that. And so by the time you get to this other thing, no official, soothing official statement that says a tragedy happened here. We don't actually know what it was, but clearly it was a tragedy and we can't really solve it is satisfying to anybody.

[Christine Rosen]

But isn't it? It's not. But they won't even say that. They'll say nothing now. And that's a distinction I Think the American people, when we're talking about the government, in particular, when the American people are asking for answers from their government. I think most thoughtful people will give a certain amount of plausible deniability to a government official who signals that they might not know everything, but they're trying to answer the question. We are now in the age of implausible denialism. At least with the Biden administration, nobody believes them because they actually don't respond to the concern. What they do is give you a kind of a vague. They either stonewall, they mock, or they call it a conspiracy theory, or they give a kind of weird non answer that's almost. That adds fuel to the concern because it doesn't answer the concern, which is different than answering factual questions. I think it's fine for an official to say, we don't know, but here's what we do know, here's what we think, but they don't even do that anymore.

[Matthew Continenti]

I also want to say now, if we take it all literally and if John's initial sort of take on it, which I think is. Would be the most probable explanation of why there would be a lot of drone activity there, if this is the US Doing this, it shows huge gross incompetence. Because when you. When the government conducts a secret program like this, you have to coordinate with local law enforcement so that they don't get hysterical. So. So that. So that they're on the same page. So that there isn't this. Or at least the Coast Guard assess. So that there isn't. There isn't this tension between stories. Then you. Then you can just say, yeah, it's just, you know, it's a. We're doing research or testing or whatever.

[John Podhoretz]

Incompetence, thy name is Biden.

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[Abe Greenwald]

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[Abe Greenwald]

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[Abe Greenwald]

But again, that that connects to the trust gap.

[Matthew Continenti]

Absolutely.

[Abe Greenwald]

Also, why wouldn't they do what you just said? Because they don't trust that local law enforcement won't call Channel 4 and say, you know, they're doing drone flights over Bedminster. Or they don't trust the local congressman who ordinarily would have been briefed on the and other times a congressman with a proper security clearance might have been brought in, invited into a skiff in Washington, told that something was going on in his district that was no concern but was a matter of national security. Just to give you a heads up in case you hear from your constituents and you can reassure them that nothing untoward is going on and that you are in touch with authorities. Nobody trusts anybody anymore. The same way you're just saying like the so so if this is say an NSA operation, they don't trust the Coast Guard. That is not and that yes, that is where we get to not just incompetence being thy name being Biden, but this world in which the Democratic Party and the Biden administration wants to focus on the issue of disinformation, by which they mean political stories that they don't like that are telling things about them that they don't like. That's what they want to dedicate their resources, emotional resources, their sort of public relations resources toward is this idea that the other side is lying about things relating to them and destroying their reputations. And it's terrible. And something really needs to be done about it. And that is the focus of their attention on how to communicate about controversial or delicate or prickly matters. When they themselves are involved in the delicate, prickly or controversial matters, their handling of it is appalling. Is just absolutely appalling. And this goes from things like antisemitism on campus to hate crimes investigations at the federal level to whatever. They provide no assurance that there is a steady hand at the tiller. We've hired them to run things for us. And it's like if the super of your going back to the apartment building, if you, if you, if you discover that the super of your apartment building doesn't know how a furnace works and there's a problem with the heat in your building, you might start getting scared that the building is going to blow up. Well, that is sort of where we are here. If they're actually going to stand around saying that hundreds of people using hundreds of different iPhones are spotting hundreds of drones over the air of the incredibly crowded airspace in New Jersey where there are. There is a major international airport. There is, there are dozens of small private airports that service multi billionaires, things like that. That. This is not something even hobbyists.

[Seth Mandel]

I grew up two miles from an airport in Lakewood, New Jersey. And my close, my childhood friend's grandfather used to fly his plane out of there.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah. I'm just saying, like you're supposed to make us feel better about this. That's what you're there for.

[Seth Mandel]

That's part of the problem because. So when my friend's grandfather would fly his plane, it was known he was flying a plane, right? The air, the airways are very closely regulated and monitored and all that. And so that brings up something that the government tends to do, which doesn't help in these situations, which is there might be a legitimate explanation for what's happening that they don't want to tell us. They give us an excuse that isn't a very smart excuse. Right. They tell you something that isn't very believable even though they know the answer because they can't say the real answer. And so an example in this case is John Kirby getting up and saying, the ones we looked at, there weren't any drones. They were all manned aircraft.

[Christine Rosen]

Right.

[Seth Mandel]

And this is the thing that people say, well, we know who's in the sky. Are they, you know, don't say, don't tell me they look like manned aircraft. If a passenger jet was flying there at that moment.

[Abe Greenwald]

But as you said, we know that.

[Seth Mandel]

A passenger jet was flying there.

[Abe Greenwald]

It doesn't check the logs. It doesn't have to be a passenger jet here in New York City last night or around New York City last night, a plane crashed onto highway, onto Interstate 684, right on the border between New York and Connecticut. And the minute that the plane, it's a small plane, there were two people on it. One died, one survived. It had flown from Linden, New Jersey. It was going to Westchester County Airport. Its flight map was on FlightAware. If you, you can log on to FlightAware and see every plane in the sky in the United States. Right.

[Seth Mandel]

We were just tracking Bashar Assad's plane.

[Abe Greenwald]

There we go.

[Seth Mandel]

We're all looking at the map, going to where it went.

[Abe Greenwald]

So you literally have an example of exactly what you're talking about. Any actual aircraft that has a registered flight plan is visible not only to the FAA or to the federal government, but to everybody in the United States. Those plans are public record. They're in the public domain. And for good reason, which is because there are hobbyists. If somebody were fool enough to want to say, I'm just going to take my plane up right now, he can at least go on Flightware and see if there's anybody in the air around him so that he doesn't fly and smash into another plane. So when John Kirby uses the language that John Kirby used yesterday, which isn't just that there were, as far as we know, it's also that there is no evidence that we are aware of that X. That phrasing, which is very careful, keeps you from a perjury trap or whatever, is the opposite of reassuring. So what you're saying is there is no evidence. That doesn't mean it's not true because there's no evidence that we have in hand now. There could be evidence tomorrow morning.

[Christine Rosen]

Well, and then the people fill the evidence void.

[Abe Greenwald]

I was going to say there's a.

[John Podhoretz]

Lot of cell phone videos that are circulating everywhere.

[Matthew Continenti]

But here's in some sense a darker dimension to this regarding the cell phone videos, which is part of the trust crisis, has to do with our mistrust of one another. And for years we've been watching AI generated videos, deep fake videos, marveling at how realistic they all look, and I don't know what the hell these videos are on social media. I really don't. I mean, so I don't know. Not only do I not. Am I not trusting John Kirby, I don't know that the person with the cell phone is telling the truth or not either.

[Abe Greenwald]

Well, we know that from Pallywood, right? That's the Palestinian propaganda effort that started in 2000 to invent fake film footage showing Israeli war crimes against Palestinians. And then, you know, when somebody would be cradled and a baby would be cradled in the arms of its parent having supposedly died, and then, you know, it would be like, cut. And then the baby would get up and run off to go play. Like that was. That was like the first version of this. And if you remember.

[Seth Mandel]

But what the Aldura affair was, was a really big deal, right? It was, it was something that incited further violence and inflamed.

[Abe Greenwald]

Yeah.

[Seth Mandel]

Happening around the.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right. But we also have evidence that people from time immemorial and I mean since the invention of the iPhone or whatever, have tried this ready made explanation to get themselves out of terrible trouble. Remember Anthony Weiner's first claim was that somebody had hacked his iPhone account and put in a photograph of a male member and it wasn't his and he didn't do it. And amazingly enough, people believed him. Do you remember?

[Matthew Continenti]

They pretended to.

[Abe Greenwald]

No, they believed him and they said Andrew Beitbart was, you know, being incredibly unjust to him because it wasn't real. Joy Reid, having had anti Semitic and anti gay tweets in her Twitter feed beginning in 2007, said, Somebody hacked my account. Whenever anybody says that was a deep fake that was published under my name or somebody hacked my account, you know they're lying. And that in about five hours it's gonna turn out that nobody hacked their account and it wasn't a deep fake. It will at some point start being real. It isn't really real yet. And. But in this case, sure, it's like you say, oh, I saw this over New Jersey. And then somebody does manage to do some kind of weird backfill and say, no, no, that was from 2018 and it was in Arizona, you know, so don't believe everything you see because people do whatever and it is important. But the inability of this administration, having been in power now for four years, to be able ever to say anything that will comfort the nervous American people about the phenomena that they are living through, including like inflation being transitory.

[Christine Rosen]

Well, I was going to say, what about, remember the questioning during the campaign about where did all the money go for all the EV Chargers they were supposed to have built across the nation? It turns out they've only built or something. Nine or nine. Right. But again, the way those questions were answered by an administration that clearly had been caught out for misspending federal money or not spending and doing what it should have done was interesting. It was the same sort of very calculated evasiveness that then turned the question back on the questioner as if they were being falsely accused. And it's a kind of skill, actually, in political speak. And the Biden administration has used it for several years now quite effectively.

[John Podhoretz]

This might be a good segue to bring up a point that Peggy Noonan makes in her weekend column about how Biden is not really the president anymore and that Trump has amazingly assumed that the role of President some 30 days, 40 days before his inauguration. And it's again a reinforcement of the idea that this presidency has been crippled by the president's age and inabilities. And then two, the vice president is nowhere to be seen. I mean, it's incredible that when she releases her schedule, it's always the same, that she's going to be having meetings with staff. These will be closed press meetings. So you don't know really what's going on in the Naval Observatory. And that leaves all these questions to fall on people like Admiral Kirby and Karine Jean Pierre who are not, you know, they're not the most trustworthy sources considering the track record. Christine brings up inflation. You look at the New York Times report that came out the other day showing that the immigration surge under Biden is the largest in American history and that they're now more foreign born residents of the United States than at any point in our history, surpassing the previous record at the kind of the height of the Gilded age between the 19th and 20th centuries. Okay, well, thank you, New York Times. That comes out a month after the election, during which time everyone was saying, look, the border's an issue, but you know, it's, it's racist or xenophobic to bring bring it up. And Biden, of course, began his presidency by saying that the run for the rush for the border was a temp, it was seasonal, a seasonal migratory pattern. So the credibility problem, the trust crisis we're talking about is only magnified when you have a president who is senile and a government that is completely out to lunch. The question is, well, will we begin to get answers when this new government is actually in power and not simply kind of in the ceremonial role of the presidency. Like ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange and posing for Time magazine.

[Abe Greenwald]

Well, you know, the fascinating thing is if you think about Trump and the trust crisis that Trump engendered when he became president, which was real, it was that they lied about nothing. They lied about nourish kite silly things. They lied about how many people were at the inauguration. Poor Sean Spicer had to stand there at the podium telling these cock and bull stories about how there were more people at this inauguration than any other inauguration. He had Trump redrawing the hurricane map so that it would look better for him on camera, that kind of thing. Right. Like these kinds of weird lies that Trump would tell that were often really petty, not really policy driven or important. It was just like, why are you lying about his vanity?

[Christine Rosen]

They were all about his own vanity.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right? Then in comes Joe Biden. And the level of deceit on major matters is almost unthinkable. I mean, it's the New York Times fault that it didn't publish the immigration numbers that it could have in October to sort of like deliver the coup de grace to the Biden administration instead of in December. Fine. But those numbers were talleable by the Biden administration itself, which could also have, like looked at them at the beginning of 2023, seeing the trend line and saying, we better reverse field here or we're not going to be president in 2025 again. But they lied about. They renamed the Inflation Reduction act, which was a green spending act, as the Inflation Reduction Act. They lied about numbers relating to inflation. They, they have had this bizarre phenomenon of tens of billions of dollars disappearing into the green maw for things like electric vehicle charging stations that we have no numbers to.

[Christine Rosen]

Jobs numbers.

[Abe Greenwald]

Jobs numbers revised down 880,000 jobs. The claim of the Biden administration was that there were 880,000 jobs created in a period last year that were never created and that when the final revisions were all in a million jobs had not been created. The jobs numbers that were reported on a monthly basis would not have been the jobs numbers that would have been reported had those numbers been honest. And again, talking about trust deficits in 2012, Jack Welch, then the most respected retired CEO in America, when the Biden, when the Obama administration released really, really sunny jobs numbers in September 2012, said, this looks a little fishy to me. And Welsh's reputation was destroyed in about an hour and a half. It was like really the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the way it calculates its numbers, do you know how it does it they all live in a basement and they're in a basement and there are curtains by the windows and they're locked inside from the outside so that no one can ever get the report out before 8:30 in the morning when they're going to report the jobs numbers because they know that it can move the markets. And this is how it's always been done. And Jack Welch is proffering a conspiracy theory and this is shocking and it's appalling. And that was the end of Jack Welch. Well, let me tell you a quick story myself about working in a White House 25 years earlier than that, right? In 1988, I was asked on jobs day by Ken Duberstein, the White House Chief of staff, to write three paragraphs for Reagan to speak on the White House lawn about how the jobs growth were that morning. Okay, guess what? Duberstein had the numbers Thursday night. They may have been locked in a room with a curtain inside with people in chains rowing and having their vocal cords paralyzed so that no one could ever know the truth. They all knew the numbers. The Secretary of the treasury knew the numbers. Everybody knew the numbers.

[John Podhoretz]

The image of the galley slaves in the bl. Oh, as they get the as like pigeons fly in with the job reports from all around the country.

[Abe Greenwald]

Exactly. Anyway, anyway, the kind of cock and bull nonsense that has offered to defend the honor and integrity of government official government numbers that has gone on that had went on in this country for like 40 years when everybody in the know knew that everything that was coming out in defense in this way was a complete sham, was a pretty amazing act of gaslighting, sort of like high level. Because the idea was it was good if people thought this right, because it would mean that the market would be trying to play games front running with advance numbers. And if you could convince people that nobody really knew, then you would spare yourself a lot of trouble and people wouldn't lose fortunes that they didn't deserve to lose. So there was a kind of moral frame in which you would tell this cock and bull story, but it was a cock and bull story then. The jobs numbers for the years 23 and 24 were cock and bull stories then also. And as I say, like Trump lied, but he lied about things that were self destructive.

[Matthew Continenti]

Because I'm a, excuse me, I'm a broken record on this, but to me, the consequential mammoth Biden lies began during the 2020 campaign with the Hunter laptop, which Joe Biden knew for a fact to be Hunter's laptop, not to be Russian disinformation, which is a pretty consequential lie. And not only did he lie about it, he roped in former national security officials to lie about it or to buy into his story and social media platforms to ban a press outlet over it. And it's reporting the story that's huge. That set the template.

[John Podhoretz]

And it's not just the lie, it's that they stick with it. Just this past week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken testified in Congress about the Afghanistan withdrawal.

[Matthew Continenti]

That's right.

[John Podhoretz]

And he said some three years after that, it made America stronger. The idea that he can say that with a straight face amidst the world that we've been living in since the invasion of Ukraine, since the Hamas attack on Israel, it's.

[Matthew Continenti]

He also said there's nothing that the administration could have done. They were locked into it because of what happened.

[John Podhoretz]

So when you hear Admiral Kirby say, we've looked at this with high tech, that's my favorite part of the state. We've used tools you can only begin to imagine to investigate these drones, and there's nothing to see here. No one believes them.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right.

[Seth Mandel]

But it's also like the. This back to what we were talking about before. And John, you were saying, like the terminology they use that seems engineered to avoid. As if they're on the stand, that Russian disinformation letter, which I believe we later found out the White House was involved in circulating or the campaign. Excuse me, Was. Was. Was involved in. In getting run around. But the. The people who signed that letter then were asked eventually on tv, and they said, well, I didn't say it was Russian disinformation campaign. I said, this bears all the hallmarks of this type of campaign, and so we should be careful. And it's like, that's the other thing. You know exactly what you're saying, and you know exactly what people will hear when you say it. And then you pretend that's not what you were actually saying. And that may be how perjury works, but it's not how communication between normal humans works.

[Abe Greenwald]

Right. And, you know, the other point about the Hunter laptop is imagine a world in which the Biden campaign did not do what it did, did not play this disinformation game, and went in another direction. And the direction was, first of all, it came out on October 21. There were only two weeks left till the election. The idea that, you know, everybody could have gotten their hands on the laptop and done a forensic examination and discovered all kinds of things about Tony Bobulinski and this and that and the other thing, what little bits of information we had about it. If Biden had come out and given a speech and he said, my family has been living through a tragedy with my son Hunter. He's a very sick man and he has done very foolish, dangerous and self destructive things. And it is heartbreaking to me and to us. We are doing what we can to save his life, to save his life for the sake of his children, for.

[Unnamed Speaker]

His grandchild, for the children that he.

[Abe Greenwald]

Is now having, that I don't acknowledge, whatever and that we are aware of. You know, this is a very, very difficult family situation and we ask you, the American people, to understand what it is we're going through and how painful this is for us and that we have to even be dealing with this in the middle of the most important election of our lifetime. You shouldn't have to be thinking about this either, because this is about you. It's not about us, it's not about our family. Something like that. If he had dealt with it without raising these bizarre questions about its authenticity and getting platforms to de platform news stories about the laptop, which again would not have been whatever, you know, like damning information there is on the laptop would not have been sort of like you couldn't have created the narrative fast enough to have an effect on the election. For one thing, 50% of all the votes that were going to be cast in the election had practically already been cast by the time the laptop came out. That was like God's just hubristic punishment that the laptop, they chose this path. He ends up getting elected and the laptop ruins his reputation anyway because it inevitably, inexorably ends with the pardon. Right, the laptop to the pardon. Biden's reputation will never recover from the pardon. And imagine a world in which he hadn't, he hadn't gone there.

[Matthew Continenti]

Oh, they're the total bookends to his administration. But you know, there's another one more aspect to this. I don't know, we're going back in time. But there's one more aspect to the laptop fiasco that has not been brought up as far as I could tell, which is that Vladimir Putin knew that this wasn't Russian disinformation. He's aware of what campaigns are going on. He looks at this and goes, wow, America's a clown show you've got a president with a family scandal and they're blaming it on me, on us. This is going to be fun. This is going to be easy pickings.

[Christine Rosen]

Since we brought up Biden's pardons. And I would argue that the Hunter pardon is probably the only one in which he was fully informed and involved in crafting. We have a whole new raft of Biden administration pardons that came out this week, including one that I have a.

[Abe Greenwald]

Slight obsession with, clemencies and pardons, clemencies.

[Christine Rosen]

And pardons, one of. One of which was for a woman. When we're talking about the trust crisis, and we tend to talk about it in terms of the federal government, this is a. This is a perfect example of why citizens also are increasingly mistrustful of their local government and how federal endorsement of such mistrust has just occurred in the form of a pardon of a woman named Rita Crundwell, who embezzled $53.7 million from the city of Dixon, Illinois, when she was the, I believe, the comptroller. She did. She spent this money when. Even when the city needed it and when local municipalities need to do things like infrastructure repair, you know, local services for constituents. And I know that. I know that people like to say we only grant clemency or pardons to nonviolent offenders, but there is a kind of violence done to a local community when that amount of money is stolen. She spent it on race quarter horses. She had this quarter horse obsession. She. One of which was named something. It's in the federal indictment, Pizzazzi Lady. I mean, she would just spend and spend and spend and then go before the public and other elected officials and lie to their faces about the lack of money in the budget to do the things that the local government needs to do. So she's. She was sentenced to, I think, 19 years. Federal government prosecuted her in, I think, 2013. Sentenced to 19 years. She was just granted clemency. So what message does that send? She's shown, as far as I know, and I looked, no remorse for her behavior. Zero, None. It shows that the federal government under Biden thinks it's okay for someone to do that to a local community. And she's been given clemency so that she didn't even serve the full 19 years. I think she got out after 10 years and was on sort of some sort of home monitoring. I just find this story appalling on a number of levels because these local citizens who then went on the record in the last day or so and said, this is appalling, they're furious with this pardon in the same way that I think a lot of us were furious, including some Democrats like Anita Dunn, were furious with the Hunter pardon. It shows that people have A good moral sense that something is wrong here. This is not what this power is for. I'm starting to become an Andy McCarthy, let's just get rid of presidential pardon power fan now after this particular pardon. So I just.

[Abe Greenwald]

This one bothers me.

[John Podhoretz]

We should just note, too, that there are other pardons coming on January 20th, and those are the pardons of the people who are imprisoned because of their actions on January 6th. And Trump says he's going to review these on a case by case basis. But that will also send a message that we should, we should recognize, and I do think, based on Hunter, based on what's coming. If we were to propose a constitutional amendment, as I assigned my students at American University to do this fall, I would suggest thinking about how to revise the pardon power to make it a little bit, at least a little bit more accountable. Instead, all my students proposed, not all of them, but they proposed, you know, Roe v. WADE as the 28th Amendment, which, not surprising.

[Abe Greenwald]

The every one of these clemencies and pardons, and there were more than 1500 of them, has a story behind it. There is nothing automatic about a petition for clemency. Someone must file it, somebody must champion it in some fashion to get it into the right place to be examined by the clemency or pardon office at the Department of Justice. We know from previous pardons over many, many decades that a lot of rich people pay a lot of money to get documents with, you know, very high powered lawyers who have very good connections to get those pieces of paper at the top of a pile with kind of implicit promises. I assume that there will be such gratitude for the pardon or the clemency that the party in power that granted it will be looked on favorably by said person, you know, in future times. And, you know, the pardon has been a very destructive thing politically. There was a case in Tennessee in the 1970s where the governor of Tennessee, this is where Fred Thompson, the late Fred Thompson, emerged as a major political figure in the state of Tennessee, where an official named Marie can't remember her last name, Sissy Spacek played her in a movie where she discovered that the governor was selling pardons and, you know, ended up being fired as a whistleblower. And then Fred Thompson took her case as, you know, a whistleblowing case. And the governor of Tennessee, who had been selling these pardons went to jail for 10 years. His name was Jim Tom Cooper or something like that.

[John Podhoretz]

Marie Ragianti.

[Abe Greenwald]

Marie Ragiani, thank you very much. Anyway, I mean, the pardon power is literally the most Corrupting possible thing that exists in our system for obvious reasons because it is, it is unappealable close behind it.

[Seth Mandel]

The reason for one of the pardon the commutations yesterday which was the judge who was sentencing kids to you to prison, to juvie, to for profit prisons as part of a kickback scheme. So that's the other is that these are, you know, we talk about power and unaccountable the people being pardoned or having their sentences commuted or getting clemency or whatever. There isn't, there aren't that many people more powerful than a judge who gets to decide whether you're personally whether your kid goes to prison and where. And the person you who sentence you commute is the guy who was taking kickbacks to send them to children to afford. Like this is the sort of thing that we see the people who. There is no check on them. And the pardon power should be, if it's used for anything should be to undo the things in society, the injustices that are done by people who are unaccountable to the other public, normal public mechanisms of political accountability. And instead it's being used in the opposite direction to further insulate these people from.

[Abe Greenwald]

And look, I mean the pardon power exists as a sort of relic of British common law precisely because there were few checks on people at other levels in British law. And that somebody ran afoul of some magistrate who said you should be hanged by the neck until dead. And then somebody went to the king and said that guy didn't do anything. He just flirted with the magistrate's wife. And then the king said all right, let him go, that's fine. Because there were so many injustices built into the system. Our system has so many checks and balances to protect the rights of the accused in this system that the pardon power is itself a very, very, very problematic thing and seems to me to have been used justly only in cases. And I again have to mention my own family interest here because my brother in law was pardoned as part of the in the Iran Contra scandal by George H.W. bush. Part of the reason that he was pardoned was that the process by which he ended up pleading guilty was a process designed by Congress to be unaccountable. That is the special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh in under the independent counsel statute that then sunsetted in 1998, long after his sentence was he was pardoned was designed to be outside of the normal justice system. And he had. There was no check on his except for, you know, a jury. There was no check on what he did. And so George H.W. bush said the independent counsel statute is unjust. People who have had to deal with it in the fashion that these four defendants, among them my brother in law Elliot, were forced into a situation in which they had no proper recourse and they were only serving the interests of the country and they were pardoned. Now it just exists as a way for a president to hand somebody a get out of jail free card for no reason, with no accountability. And so yeah, it's very, it's in the Constitution. It can only be removed by another constitutional amendment. But you can see how, why the founders thought it was still probably a reasonably good idea. I mean, right after the Constitution was passed, John Adams wanted to throw people in jail for saying bad, you know, for talking trash about his administration in the Alien and Sedition Acts. Like, you can see why pardoning was even then thought of as something that might be a necessary thing. Very hard to see it as something necessary now in 2024, particularly after everything that we've seen. All right, well, remember to ask us questions that we will answer during our holiday podcasts. Please send your questions to podcastometary.org we'll be back on Monday for Seth, Matt, Christine and Abram. John Pod Hortz. Keep the camel bur.