Christine Rosen (3:03)

I agree.

John Pothorotz (3:04)

Okay.

Christine Rosen (3:05)

Sorry I interrupted our introduction.

John Pothorotz (3:06)

That's fine. And of course, Washington Free Beacon editor Eliana Johnson Hi, Eliana.

Eliana Johnson (3:11)

Hi, John.

John Pothorotz (3:13)

So I noticed in the last couple of days the following trope, because for some reason, I was flicking around on the evening news last night, which I almost never do, as does nobody in America, apparently, flick around on the evening news. And I was noticing this.

John Pothorotz (3:31)

Phrase used over and over again as being used in newspapers, which is something like, the noose is tightening around the neck of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. More questions are being raised about Pete Hexseth. Pete Hegseth is coming under increasing fire, and so on and so forth. And I don't think that's the story of the last three days. Sorry, the last three days is that the story that was developing against Pete Hegseth got complicated, not simplified, by the fact that there are now credible denials that he gave, you know, that, you know, he. He ordered the code red, that he gave the order to fire on people in the water, on the. You know, in the. In the. In the strike on the. On the Venezuelan drug boat on September 2nd. Today, I gather Admiral Bailey will be testifying before Congress where he will be asked tough questions. And I'm not saying they're not tough, and I'm not saying that I'm an admirer of Hegseth in his tenure at the Department of Defense. I do think that some of his conduct in the last week has been morally impeachable, if not actually impeachable. Like the tweeting out of the children, the parody of the children's book Franklin with Franklin the turtle holding a machine gun hanging out of a helicopter, you know, saying, you know, the killing has only begun, or something like that. Like, that's gross. It's not appropriate. This is a deadly serious matter. If the United States is going to use kinetic action militarily, it's dangerous to our. To our armed forces. We are. We are doing something that should only be done as a last resort if we are using martial force against people from another country. And it should be taken with utmost seriousness and seriousness of purpose. And that does not seem to be something that is in Pete Hegsess wheelhouse. So I'm not defending him. However, I do think that the idea that the story is getting worse. Maybe, Eliana, you can help. Tell me if I'm. You know, I'm looking at this too granularly, and it is getting worse because we pay incredibly close attention, and most people don't.

Eliana Johnson (5:53)

Well, I think you're right, but I do think you're looking at it too granularly in that we need to zoom out and look at what this administration and this president's relationship with Pete Hegseth has been, which is that he was nominated. He had an incredibly difficult confirmation that was called into question at several points. Donald Trump stood by him. But if you recall, Jane Mayer did a huge expose in the New Yorker talking about accusations of that he overlooked sexual harassment and, you know, this and that. And there were several mainstream media pieces to that effect. He mismanaged funds at nonprofits, and it wasn't clear he was going to make it over the finish line. Thom Tillis, the North Carolina senator, was wavering at certain points. So that was the first difficult situation that he weathered, and the president stuck by him.

Eliana Johnson (6:49)

Didn'T pull his nomination. The second was Signal Gate, which was really messy and I think on the merits, a worse scandal than this one by far. And the president stood by him, didn't waver, didn't ask him to resign. And now we come to this where on a. Oh, and let's add another one. Hegseth, dismissing some of his closest allies and people he had brought into the administration, his close friends of many years, accusing them of leaking. And I would say, you know, it's not totally clear what the facts are on that matter, but it drew a lot of mainstream media and Beltway attention that surely made its way to the president and the vice president. And again, the president didn't demand his resignation. Stuck by him, weathered a lot of headlines. So this is the fourth, now comes Venezuela and the boat strikes. And as you say, the story has gotten better for Hagseth, not worse. You know, maybe he should leave the Franklin the Turtle stuff for the Beacon to do. It's very much in our wheelhouse. Maybe not the department.

John Pothorotz (8:01)

Well, you're not ordering. You're not ordering strikes against anybody. Right.

Eliana Johnson (8:04)

But we're for them, you know, as the Beacon would always be for in general, mostly for strikes on people. But what's clear to me is that Donald Trump likes this guy. And it's going to take something much bigger than these sort of Beltway scandals that the New York Times and the Washington Post and PBS News get really invested in. And they hate Hegseth. They don't think he's qualified for the job. They think he's a stupid, handsome Fox News host, and they are keen to take him down. And what is the best signal of that? Jane Mayer of the New Yorker is his biggest enemy. She did the expose. And so I just think the president likes him. And it's going to take a lot to take him down.

Christine Rosen (8:47)

I will. I do think there's one other reason that this week we're seeing the nooses tightening language, and that's that the, the inspector general's report about Signal Gate, which I completely agree with Eliana, was, was a huge screw up in terms of a person running the Department of Defense allowing that sort of security breach that comes out today, a redacted version, obviously, but the Senate, Senate's going to see the unredacted version of that report. And I think it's going to probably reveal a lot worse than what we've seen from news media out. And that I think also should be noted that Hegseth has not exactly endeared himself to any sort of oversight. He refused to sit down and talk to the inspector general about what had happened. He sent a little written statement. There's a lot of contempt that he, him and his office has demonstrated not only to, I don't mind the contempt for the media, I think that's a healthy adversarial relationship that should continue, but the contempt for the process and even within the Pentagon, contempt for the way things have worked, longstanding departments that he just got rid of on a whim, things like that. So he is, he's embattled, not only because they don't like Hegseth, the media doesn't like Hegseth. I'm not sure Trump's going to want to stand by him long term if these continue. I mean, Eliana, listing all those, I had forgotten about a few of them. He, he's a troublesome cabinet member and he doesn't react well under pressure. I think Trump does like him, but he's got to be able to respond well under pressure. Trump does pretty well under pressure. Hegseth kind of loses his mind and they have to pull him back. And he still has been unable to fill a lot of those roles of the folks he fired. There are a lot of really high positions at the Pentagon right now that are empty. Things aren't getting done and people don't want to work for him. So that's another problem long term, I think, for this administration.

Abe Greenwald (10:32)

Can I just say I want to, I tend to weigh in on Eliana's side here because.

Abe Greenwald (10:39)

You also look at how Trump is talking about operations in the Caribbean now and military action against Venezuela. He's saying we're going to be doing it on land soon. So he's getting more aggressive about this whole thing. Don't forget he made Hegseth not only the chief at the Pentagon, but he's the secretary of war now. So I think Trump has to lean into this for, to sort of fill out his larger message in braggadocio on about what his he's up to vis a vis Venezuela.

John Pothorotz (11:24)

I think it's pretty simple that if Hegseth has lied this week and it comes out that he has lied, he's toasted. But if it turns out that he hasn't lied and that he's only behaved, you know, as I say, in sort of untoward manner, and that these accusations against him, you know, in part, you know, surfaced by a Washington Post story that said on him, two sources said that he said kill those people in the water if, if, if that's not true. And five people told the New York Times that it wasn't true. And Bradley will presumably.

John Pothorotz (12:01)

When he goes to testify, will, will I imagine, say that it's not true unless something comes out otherwise that demonstrates that this is a lie. He will survive this, as he is clearly going to survive signal gate, which is a, which was the, you know, which was the distribution of class of, of a deeply classified chat in part to Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, which again, also is not sufficient unto the day to have a cabinet secretaries, a confirmed cabinet secretary.

John Pothorotz (12:40)

Thrown out of office. Really. I mean, it was inadvertent. It's not like he, you know, he knowingly and purposefully leaked something to Jeffrey Goldberg to kill policy. It was incompetence and stupidity, which is bad. And I'm not saying that under other circumstances, maybe some, somebody would be so ashamed of his behavior that he wouldn't resign in disgrace, but we have, we do not live in those times. Let us just say the last time somebody resigned in disgrace, I don't even know if I was alive. It was like John Fumo in 1963. Okay, but the, I guess that wasn't even here.

Christine Rosen (13:15)

I'm going to interrupt to say the incompetence actually is a problem. If it's, if it's the through line of his tenure as secretary, it's not a problem. No, but I'm not saying it's not. I'm saying politically, senators looking at, I guess again, we, that story, that signal leak story, we do not know the full story. They will see that full story in the inspector general's report. That plus whatever, whatever weasel words he might use to get out or whatever Bradley says today. I mean, somebody has to take ownership of the decision that was made. Now, that doesn't mean that he ordered a war crime. But this question of ownership of the decision. That's where Hegseth is incredibly bad at his job. He doesn't say, yeah, I did this. If you notice, he's very quick to behave, almost like he's on a cable news debate show. And that kind of where the buck stops at the Pentagon matters. And it matters to the American people, not just to the Senate oversight folks and to the media. And so that's where I think he. I'd be curious if anyone's done any polling on his popularity among Republican voters, because he is a problem. I mean, you don't. You have a cabinet that is kind of a clown car show at some. Someone's always popping off, doing something crazy. But the lack of competence for the person who heads the Department of War really should matter. And I think ultimately does matter to the American people.

Abe Greenwald (14:31)

Okay, just since we're going through his greatest hits, we forgot his embarrassing speech before the military brass.

John Pothorotz (14:39)

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Abe Greenwald (14:40)

Where he, you know, spoke about their. Their being slovenly and fat and. Yeah, and all the rest of it.

John Pothorotz (14:47)

Yeah. Okay, so my point. My point here. So we have two. Two tracks here, which is should, in an ideal world, should Pete Hagseth be Secretary of War, Secretary of Defense, given his conduct over the last, you know, whatever it is, eight months that he has been the confirmed Secretary of War Defense? Maybe not. Will he be forced out?

John Pothorotz (15:12)

Not unless something else. Not unless another shoe drops that he. That reveals that he has not been candid and. And that is, in fact, been, you know, temporizing or wouldn't be interviewed by the inspector general because he had lied about what he was doing and has lied about this as well. I don't think that's. That's survivable. It is interesting to note the belligerency with which Trump is pursuing this.

John Pothorotz (15:42)

War with Venezuela. I mean, if you had said to me, like, In December of 2024, after Trump won the election that we would be in some kind of weird semi state of war with Venezuela, I would have told you to go take a, you know, maybe get some, you know, electroconvulsive therapy, because this was not. He was going in exactly the opposite direction in terms of the way he talked and spoke about things. And Venezuela wasn't on anybody's radar of two stolen elections. And, you know, we had done various things to try to oppose those or speak out against them and all of that, but, you know, was this a place where we were going to make our.

John Pothorotz (16:27)

Hemispheric stand, you know, the border?

Christine Rosen (16:31)

It's especially odd because he wants to be known as the Great Ender of Wars, and he's recently renamed the Institute of Peace after himself. And yet now there's this belligerent war talk. I mean, there is a bit of a contradiction. I'm just, you know.

John Pothorotz (16:43)

Yeah, it's, it is very interesting and it is, it remains a very puzzling thing that is happening here because it is not being met with what one would ordinarily imagine would happen if a out of nowhere policy were being pursued, which is new information has come to light that shows that Venezuela is upping its, you know, efforts to destabilize us or.

John Pothorotz (17:13)

The cartels are, you know, increasingly controlling the government and they're getting much more aggressive about bringing fentanyl into the country. That requires us to use unusual methods to stop them or something like that. But we're not even getting any of that. And we're not getting, like Trump doctrine articles where, as I said the other day, somebody brings in a foreign policy intellectual like Walter Russell Mead or something to give them the download on how they should think about what is consistent in Trump's pursuit of American foreign policy across the globe with a, with, with Venezuela being highlighted. None of that has happened. So we don't really know why he's doing it exactly. Except he doesn't, you know, fentanyl and drugs and it's bad and boats and, and he can do it unilaterally. Another thing that he's doing unilaterally. And I got to start pointing out that this is starting to really look crazy and is he announced another pardon last night of somebody who had been to reform the presidential party by the Trump administration. He pardoned Democratic Representative Henry Cuellar the day before. So if he's going to be like pardoning two or three people a week, the only. We really are in Caudillo territory here. I mean, it's just. Or, you know, Les Tass Moi, you know, using sort of like an unambiguous presidential power that has no check on it. This is one of the very few. There is literally no constitutional check on the president's pardon power, only press only, sort of like historical precedent. And so he gets to exercise it because no one can stop him. And he's apparently enjoying the exercise of it. The only positive I can see here is, as more and more people say, given Biden's pardons of his family and all that, if Trump keeps going down this road, the minute that he leaves office, there will be a huge bipartisan consensus that the 29th Amendment needs to be passed, doing something to check the president's pardon power because you will have a complete bipartisan consensus that the president has got. The presidents have gone too far here.

Abe Greenwald (19:36)

That's optimistic, though, because it also could be that, well, we've had two consecutive presidents who are pardoning like crazy. When I get in now, I, I'm free to pardon who I want to pardon. So it could also just become the new, the new norm, new standard.

John Pothorotz (19:55)

Remember that the.

Christine Rosen (19:56)

Yeah.

Christine Rosen (19:58)

There are two constitutional amendments this country needs. One is a reform of the presidential pardon power and the other is age ceiling, since we have an age floor for the presidency. Those two things I think are generally would generally be pretty popular after the Biden administration and the Trump administration because both in some ways have raised these questions over and over again. Not always fairly in the case of Trump, but I think they will become a pressing concern to the people.

John Pothorotz (20:23)

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John Pothorotz (23:44)

Remember it doesn't Whether or not if the next President says I want the same pardon power. That's why constitutional amendments exist. The President can't veto a constitutional amendment if it goes through the proper process of becoming constitutional amendment, which is that 38 states or 3/4 of the House and 2/3 of the Senate approve it. And I'm just saying that in the history of constitutional amendments, dealing with presidential misbehavior in the last hundred years is after the presidency where the thing happens that has violated the rules or is too frightening a first.

John Pothorotz (24:29)

FDR going for four terms when the precedent had been set that a president was only supposed to serve two. But there was no block against FDR seeking for and then dying in office on his fourth and God saving us from the possibility that Henry Wallace would have been the President when when Roosevelt died in office in February of 1945 instead of Harry Truman, then we could have had basically a Soviet agent as the President of, you know, an implicit Soviet agent as President of the United States. So the constitutional amendment was passed limiting the President to two terms. And then of course, it was the revelations not only of Woodrow Wilson's infirmities, but of the but privately of the kind of medical care that JFK had received before his assassination that led to the passage of the 25th Amendment in 1967, both of which, again, highly partisan moments and all of that, and yet very easily passed by Congress and stuff that were like, this is good, not good. Like, this is really not good. And the simplest thing for us to do is to just say, you can't just pardon everybody you want to at any moment. I don't know what, how. How that will be written or how. What it will. How. What the draft of that constitutional amendment will be. But, you know, if Trump doesn't cool it, yeah, it's, it's gonna happen. And I don't see him cooling it because it's obviously too much. I mean, to do it twice in one week when like. But you know, what makes it worse?

Abe Greenwald (26:05)

It's all made worse by the contrast of Trump still going around acting in other ways as if he's the law and order president.

John Pothorotz (26:14)

Right, yeah. No, obviously that, that's part of the justification of the Venezuela actions. Right. Which are. He's alighting the difference between drug trafficking and terrorism. But the idea is essentially that this is a domestic law enforcement action that has been taken out onto the high seas because he is going to do something about crime in America, crime being, you know, the illicit drug trade inside the United States that is poisoning people and doing all sorts of terrible things to people. So, yeah, I mean, that stuff is, you know, for him to walk around again, like, you know, his huge. Was very useful to him in 2024 to talk about the Biden crime family. And he was on to something since, of course, Biden then did pardon his entire family.

John Pothorotz (27:09)

And all of that. But, you know, there he is, he's got his sons, he's got Witkoff's kid and various other people going around making deals where they're doing peace negotiations and things like that. And, you know, and so there you have this question again of whether or not the presidency is being used as a personal and familial enrichment machine in a way that no one has ever even remotely attempted to. We can assume that it's happened over time without us. Really.

Christine Rosen (27:43)

Well, this isn't, isn't this always been the, the inherent contradiction in MAGA world where Trump, Trump will argue, well, the other side did this too, so I'm going to do it. You know, they broke the norm. Why should I follow a norm that's already been destroyed? And then on the other hand, to Abe's earlier point, he also then wants to be held up as some paragon of a new kind of way of wielding power that's better than what came before, that's less corrupt, because it's just straightforward. And I'm going to go after our enemies, whoever they are. And weirdly, it worked. It worked for a little while, but it is that that contradiction is being exposed. I think every week in this administration in various policy forms. He has been consistent and good on some of the things that we often talk about on the podcast. But that internal contradiction has always existed. People overlooked it. But when it comes to the pardon power and when it comes to the self dealing, which actually hasn't received, except from a few, you know, stories here and there in the mainstream press, it hasn't received a lot of attention. It will start to come out, particularly if the Republicans lose Congress, because investigations will begin into some of these issues. And they are serious issues. I mean, from, from, you know, cryptocurrency to some of the deals going on in terms of real estate development in some of these countries, there's a lot of grift happening. And the grift of the Biden administration was bad, and it was one of the reasons he got reelected. If he has his own version of the grift, I don't think that's a sustainable argument for him to make to the people.

Abe Greenwald (29:04)

By the way, there's another area in which he does this. Lawfare. I'm not, I don't do lawfare. They did lawfare. They, you did law firm. Meanwhile, his, his whole, you know, Justice Department is geared towards these revenge cases.

John Pothorotz (29:23)

Right? Look, before we went daily on this podcast in 2020, when, when we were much, much smaller, much more modest, Noah Rothman and I would talk about this all the time. And Abe, we talk about this fact that when the Democrats had Trump in their sights to impeach.

John Pothorotz (29:46)

They went after the wrong thing. They went after the place, the issue, the topic, the subject on which the president has the most constitutional power and authority, which is his conduct of foreign policy, where not only did the supreme have, does the Constitution grant the presidency, essentially the, you know, the whip hand in foreign policy with some oversight, but also Supreme Court decisions and court decisions, and all of this have, have enshrined that as a key fact of the separation of powers. And yet the impeachment of Trump had to do with how he conducted the perfect phone call with Zelensky and how he handled Ukraine as opposed to emoluments grift, which, you know, people taking hotel rooms at enormous you know, premiums at the Trump Hotel in Washington, things like that. And politically, it always seemed deranged to me because the Ukraine story was impossible to explain to any rational human being what it was that he had actually done wrong since he said he wanted X and he didn't get it. It's not like he pushed Zelensky to do to fire the prosecutor, and then Zelensky fired the prosecutor. But were people renting hotel rooms at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars at the Trump Hotel to curry favor with Trump? Yes, they were. Was somebody telling them to do that? We don't know. But if you were going to go at Trump in a way that was going to have populist underpinnings and shake Maga loose from him a little bit or shake the American people loose from him, A, that's the direction that you would have gone. But they were so bonkers. Russiagate drove them so bonkers that they could not get. And Nancy Pelosi, remember, did not want to impeach Trump on the Ukraine charges. Certainly she would have been perfectly fine within if she could have said, let's do it because Trump's a crook, then that would have been.

Abe Greenwald (31:54)

She would have some problems there.

John Pothorotz (31:56)

Well, okay, fair enough.

Christine Rosen (31:57)

Yeah.

John Pothorotz (31:58)

I'm just saying get your hooks into a guy on a matter that is something that, you know, Joe in East Palestine could actually, aside from, you know, what went on with the train, could understand what it was you were saying Trump was doing bad.

John Pothorotz (32:17)

And that's going to be. That's an interesting question. Should they succeed in 2026 in capturing control of one or both of the Houses of Congresses, if they're going to pursue him, as I expect they will, whether they will do so looking for grounds that ordinary people can understand, like something weird is going on with this pardon power. Now, that would be a mistake to impeach them on also, maybe because the pardon power is absolute and because unless they have somebody on tape saying, I'm going to pay ex Trump official or Trump family member $2 billion to get a pardon, so we'll get the pardon. If they don't have that, then that's not a good thing to impeach them on. But I mean, the crypto stuff and the Witkoff family stuff in gutter and maybe in Moscow and maybe in post Venezuela Caracas, who knows? Like that would be a post Maduro Caracas. That would be, you know, that would be something that might be of help to them. It's like this question of whether or not in the wake of the close but no cigar special election in Tennessee. Are Democrats going to look at this and say, you know, we could have won that seat if we didn't have a lunatic, idiot.

John Pothorotz (33:42)

Commie monster running in a red, in a, you know, in a, in a, in a deep red district. Maybe if we have like a rational, sane person running, running in a deep red district with the country turning against Trump, we could take that seat and take the Congress. But they are who they are and they live in their own world of delusions. Oh, speaking of which, Elian, I gotta ask you, you have a story up about speaking of the world of delusion. So the world of delusions is run by Ms. We can't even call it MSNBC anymore. Although maybe we should just, like Twitter. We should just call it MSNB NBC instead of Ms. Now, its new name. Right. I turned it on last night and it's now lost its distinctive look because they tore all the sets down and they moved somewhere else. And now it looks like something on a cable, in a movie, in a disaster movie about the end of the world. Like a generic fake cable channel.

Christine Rosen (34:41)

They're even their own ads. I was in a taxi and I heard an ad for Ms. Now because the guy had the radio on. And even the ads are sort of, they seem embarrassed. They're like, you might remember us from msnbc.

Eliana Johnson (34:56)

We did a piece about a month ago, maybe we talked about it on the podcast, but they have Rachel Maddow interspersed with Martin Luther King Jr. And, you know, civil rights icons. But then they hired all these black actors. Yeah, they got no black people left on the air over there, hardly any of them. So they hired the black actors to.

John Pothorotz (35:14)

Well, when I turned it on, Simone Sanders was on, so I have to say she was there. But you have a story about, like, I would say, the signature political podcast on show. Excuse me. On Ms. Now in the free Beacon. On Ms. Now about Morning Joe and about how Morning Joe is.

John Pothorotz (35:39)

Joe is like.

John Pothorotz (35:41)

Meredith Grey on Grey's Anatomy. Grey's Anatomy has now been on for 22 years. And Ellen Pompeo, whose name, who plays the character Meredith Gray on the show Grey's Anatomy is now on the show four times a year. So Grey's Anatomy is, you know, missing Grey. And apparently Morning Joe is missing Joe.

Eliana Johnson (36:02)

And Mika.

John Pothorotz (36:03)

And Mika, right. His wife.

Eliana Johnson (36:04)

I mean, they're married. So we got to give a hat tip. There's that. There's an entertainment reporter who has a very gossipy substack. His name is Rob Shooter. And so he did an item on his substack about the missing Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, and that staffers on the show are annoyed about this because they're working their butts off. And meanwhile, the marquee anchors on the show, Joe and Mika, haven't shown up for many episodes and he did account. Then we ran our own count from Labor Day until now. And I'll just read, Scarborough missed 29 shows, while Brzezinski skipped 41 or one out of every three workdays. In July, she was out for two consecutive weeks, appearing on only about half of that month's episodes. And then both of them were gone for 16 shows, leaving the C list, which is Jonathan Lemire, Willie Geist and Katty K. To fill in. And Catty K says one morning, I'm Katty K. In for Joe, Mika and Willie. Everybody's up except me. I'm sorry.

Eliana Johnson (37:13)

So this is led to speculation about.

Eliana Johnson (37:17)

Are Joe and me, you know, what's going on between the two of them because sometimes they're not together when they appear. It's just a gossipy, fun item. But they get paid to get to the more serious part. They get paid a huge amount of money to, you know, not show up for work one of every four days, one of every three days. That's crazy for an industry in decline. But they've been on every day since Ms. Now rebranded. So the message must have gone down.

John Pothorotz (37:49)

Okay, I'm going to be.

Abe Greenwald (37:51)

Can I be such a downer here? What if there's genuine their lives, that is my role. But what if there's a genuine crisis in their lives?

John Pothorotz (38:01)

I know. I feel I'm only amused because the only reason I bring this up is to say that the, the effort to.

John Pothorotz (38:11)

The world of.

John Pothorotz (38:14)

Mainstream propagandistic support, both left and right. I would say the world in which the messages are transmitted for the marching orders for people on each side of the ideological dividend that used to come from cable channels is now increasingly coming not from cable channels. Right. It's coming not. We're not big enough to make this claim. But you know, it's coming from podcasts, it's coming from these transmission vectors that are neither that don't come through a television screen, they come through a computer screen. I noted that according to YouTube, the fifth most popular YouTube podcast is the Midas Touch, which as far as I know didn't exist two years ago and is a far left wing daily summary of lunacy.

John Pothorotz (39:18)

And it's hugely popular. Joe Rogan is number one Like a number one, probably by an enormous margin. Theo Vaughan is in there. And a couple of. But Midas touch is like, must be much more influential in terms of the daily message for liberals and leftists than Morning Joe is. Probably has a larger viewing audience than Morning Joe does. And, and is. And so you're Joe Scarborough and you're making $30 million a year or whatever, and it sort of doesn't matter whether on or not somehow in terms of the purpose that people think your podcast is for, which is, what is the, what is the agenda that we are pursuing today? If what we want to do is be the resistance?

Abe Greenwald (40:09)

I will say this. That show in particular has, throughout Trump's political career, sort of fumbled its, its take on Trump. I mean, it's never got, it's never stood in one place and, and gotten it right and defended it. You know, they, they had him on constantly when he was running the, the, the first time they were, you know, joking around with him, playing around. Then the second he became president, they were freaked out. They couldn't believe it. They're yelling at Bill Kristol. They're going crazy now they're going down back down to Mar a Lago, their buddy, buddy. Like, they didn't. If they wanted to be part of the resistance, they, they, they blew it.

John Pothorotz (40:53)

Like, you want to see something funny if you can find it. I don't even know if you can still find it. But in. I was on Morning Joe twice.

Abe Greenwald (41:01)

I remember this so well.

John Pothorotz (41:02)

Several years pretty much from like 2016 to 2019. So Covid ended my, ended my career at MSNBC. But there was. The head of MSNBC had this idea that he wanted a crew of people who were non Trump but on the right, who could, basically, when Trump went away, they would, you know, FOX would have discredited itself and then there would be this kind of population of people, me, Noah, some other types like that. And so I was on a lot. And in 2017, I wrote something or other about how terrible Trump was and they had me on to talk about it. It was either on the Commentary blog or was in the New York Post. And they said it was me kind of ranting and Joe and Mika going, john, it's gonna be all right. Don't worry. Everything's gonna be fine. Like, you're, you're, you know, this is American politics. Like, you gotta, you gotta cool down a little bit. Like, you know, like this. And then as, as the Trump administration continued, I cooled down a little bit and they went bananas. They went completely Bananas. So, so, and now, you know, what is, what is the definition of versant? The new, the, the new knock on corporation bananas.

Eliana Johnson (42:29)

Because that's where the ratings are and that's what the audience wants to hear, right?

John Pothorotz (42:33)

But now the ratings, as I say, if you want to follow this is going, the energy is no longer on a cable show. All of whose ads are for, you know, senility drugs. I mean, to be fair, all television advertising as I now see it, the amount of advertising about drugs on network television, if you watch network television is.

Christine Rosen (42:57)

Well, it's for the. Also for the people trapped in hospital rooms, you know, they can't change the channel.

John Pothorotz (43:02)

You know, it's like, it's like there are drug names that, you know, I mean, you know, and we're talking about drugs that are often for very specific conditions. You know, it's like if you have graves disease, type L here is Quamoxin, you know, and then someone's playing golf and somebody else is cooking, you know, is like making a salad. And they're, they're so much better because the. Anyway, it's. I don't know where I'm going with this.

Eliana Johnson (43:31)

Well, you know, it's interesting you mentioned Midas Touch and I knew, I had just read something about them, but I mean they were actually founded as a PAC five years ago and, and I had just read that they added over 2 million subscribers on YouTube just this year and they have rocketed up on the podcast charts. So I doubt that 2 million people are watching Morning Joe every day.

John Pothorotz (43:56)

That's what I'm saying. And the thing is, look, it's valuable. One of the guys who runs Midas Touch, Ron, Ron Philipowski, who has a very left wing Twitter feed, is if you want to, if you're people like us and you want to know what the enemy is thinking, it's a very valuable Twitter feed. He does a lot of clipping, you know, finding things that right wingers say that are outrageous or whatever. That's part sort of where he emerged from. He's a kind of Florida lawyer, Paul failed Paul, something like that. Now obviously worth many, in excess of many multiples of what he was making as a lawyer as, as the editor in chief of Midas Touch. But it's not as though what they are offering people, the market is speaking like Morning Joe doesn't matter. And the Midas Touch matters. And the, then the numbers are showing it. And if you want revenue growth, you get revenue growth on YouTube. Like there is no revenue growth like that anywhere.

John Pothorotz (44:54)

So it's just kind of an interesting little side note about where things are and how things are going.

Eliana Johnson (45:03)

Yeah, I think it is a reflection that the cables and in many cases the New York Times, the Washington Post, cnn, msnbc, the mainstream are reporters talking to each other rather than really reaching normal people across the country. And increasingly the podcasts, you know, Joe Rogan, Midas, Touch. These other things are the way regular people are actually consuming new news and media. That certainly was my experience when I was at CNN a lot was that like, okay, this is just another way to go, you know, talk to reporters about your story. And it's like, it's very circular and incestuous in a way. And it's not, it's really not impactful.

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John Pothorotz (48:29)

Well, look, just take as an example, take two careers as an example. Fox careers, right? Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly. So Megyn Kelly leaves Fox for the mainstream, right? She leaves, she gets a huge contract from, from, from NBC to do the Today show and.

John Pothorotz (48:52)

The knives are out for her the minute she leaves Fox and everybody at NBC wants to kill her and they leak incredibly hostile things about her and she does a little dance on the air with Hoda Kotb that gets clipped and everybody looks at Megan dancing and says, oh, she look so silly. And, and she was dead in the water with a $60 million contract because nobody at the network who had spent a year negotiating to pay her this enormous amount of money to be this major figure even bothered to defend her or help her do anything. They just finally sort of bent to the will of, you know, their staffers and, you know, whoever else didn't like her and paid her off and she went away and then she licked her wounds and she started this podcast a couple years later. And Tucker, right, who was fired in the wake of the Dominion Voting machine settlement, the $787 million settlement, and Rupert Murdoch decided to add Tucker as a scalp. So, so Tucker's fired. Tucker, horrified, brokenhearted, whatever, there they both are. And I don't think that either of them, to put it mildly, is are doing themselves credit with where they have gone with these podcasts. But imagine a world in which Megan had stayed on Fox and Tucker hadn't been fired by Fox. Would they have the impact today that they're having now? Tucker's impact is psychotic. And you know, I mean, it's very bad for the country, it's very bad for him and his soul and, you know, his eternal soul, because God is not going to look favorably upon the way he is behaving when he goes to meet his maker and he is destroying our public fabric and all that. And Megan, increasingly irresponsible and sort of buying into that, but.

John Pothorotz (50:48)

Seems to me they're even bigger than they were then.

Eliana Johnson (50:52)

I don't agree with that.

John Pothorotz (50:53)

Somebody like Sean Hannity seems to be smaller than he was like, four or five years ago.

Abe Greenwald (50:59)

But just before Eliana disagrees, I just want to say, John, when you're describing it, what it makes me think is that. But the rise of reality TV eventually came for the news. People got tired of scripted news and podcasts and all these new formats are the equivalent of reality TV for news analysis. And just as with reality tv, what we're now finding out is reality TV news is fake.

Christine Rosen (51:32)

Well, it's all made, yes, because we're a nation of voyeurs, and people love podcasts because they feel like they're listening in on a conversation which can go in many directions, including into paranoid unreality. But, yes, I think that's absolutely right, and that's why.

John Pothorotz (51:48)

I want to hear Eliana's disagreement. But one point, since we're, like, off on this weird tangent. So I, of course, am as cynical as anybody about. I understand that reality TV is fake. I understand things. I knew that. I know things like. Like when American Idol started, when Carrie Underwood was on American Idol, you know, and that was like 24 weeks of whatever. They knew the first week that Carrie Underwood was on American Idol that she was gonna win. Like, she was getting 10 times the number of votes on those 1900 phone calls that you made to vote for American Idol, that people at. People at American Idol knew that it was a runaway. And they had to build suspense nonetheless and. And. And pretend through all kinds of editing, artful things. They kept bringing people up and then throwing them down and this and that and the other thing. But it was like always. So I Knew that, like 15, 20 years ago, I knew that this was a thing with reality television. But I just found out last week the one thing that, like, my sisters and I share, one of the things my sisters and I share in common is they love of these crazy shows on HGTV about people who are choosing between three houses to buy. Like, this is a thing, right? They go there. Are they going to love it or list, are they going to buy a new house? Are they going to. They're going to renovate their old house. Are they going to. There are three houses they won a lottery. There are three houses they could buy. Or there's this and there's that. And like, I watch these show. They're like, total brain deadening, you know, Like, I'm sitting there just watching them and I'm like, well, that's an interesting. It is an interesting choice. This is closer to the beach, but that one has a larger basement and da, da, da, da. And it turns out that in most of the cases of these shows, the person has already bought the house and that the other two houses, the whole show is based on them pretending that they're looking at two other houses to buy when they bought the house a year ago. And so I'm like, that's terrible. How could they trick me this way? I'm so disillusioned. Can't believe there's my million dollar lottery home and House Hunters and House Hunters International. And they've all been lying to me. That's all I wanted to say, that even I, a cynical person who's been in media for more than four years and knows that reality television is a fraud, had got suckered in by this, by this whole vein of show. There are like 10 of them on HGTV. Anyway, Eliana, I said Tucker and Megan are in better shape in terms of their influence than they would be if they had stayed on Fox. And you don't agree.

Eliana Johnson (54:39)

Sorry, she had to unmute. Myself. I'm going to push back. I'm not positive I believe what I'm going to say, but I think I.

John Pothorotz (54:47)

Do push back is always good.

Eliana Johnson (54:49)

Okay. Tucker was hugely influential when he was, when he had the Fox show, he had the biggest show on cable. And I just recall in that era that he would invade against some congressman or some bill that was going on the House floor and like that actually mattered. That could move votes, that could strike terror in the hearts of. I mean, at the time, I believe it was Speaker Kevin McCarthy, like, that was a big deal. And I just don't think that's the case today where if he were to take on some, you know, matter on the, on the House floor or, you know, the like. I don't believe that the reason that the Epstein files moved the way they did was because he was rattling the cages about it.

Eliana Johnson (55:37)

And so I just think that his influence on Republicans, the course of the party, like what was actually diminished when he was taken off the airwaves, that the platform of Fox, which I would say, by the way, is different from it matters more. They have more viewers. Regular people actually do watch it. I think it matters more than the other cables. I think it is diminished. And by the way, like I say this, yeah, I think his influence is diminished. And this is not to like, pooh, pooh what either of them have done by like clawing their way back from Being, you know, defenestrated from the network like that, that's impressive and hard. So I think that's my initial reaction and I think it would be hard to say, by the way, to take the left, their left wing counterparts that like Jim Acosta and Joy Reid and whoever these people are, you know, not that they were influential at cnn, but like nobody thinks or talks about them now when they're like streaming videos of, you know, Parkland, the chat GPT version of Parkland shooting survivors on Substack.

Abe Greenwald (56:53)

Well, I think.

Abe Greenwald (56:55)

Very good pushback made me think and I'm wondering though, if we frame it as I think they were more politically influential then, now they're more culturally influential.

John Pothorotz (57:11)

Yeah.

Abe Greenwald (57:12)

They exchange one form for another, which is the game. If we still believe that politics is downstream of culture.

Abe Greenwald (57:21)

I would argue that they're still more influential now.

John Pothorotz (57:27)

Well, what they, they still had. I mean, first of all, Megyn Kelly's story is obviously very different from Tucker's. Megyn Kelly's story is the.

John Pothorotz (57:37)

You're not allowed to go into the mainstream if you're on the right. You're not allowed. They will. They are. Or then before COVID and everything, then you're not allowed. They'll just kill you. Don't try. You make, you're making a mistake. It's not worth the, you know, like even the. More money is not worth it because they have cultural power over you that.

Eliana Johnson (57:59)

They didn't have preach you as a colleague or embrace you as one of their own.

John Pothorotz (58:04)

Right. And you know, we have other examples of that, like Meg, our friend Megan McCain who left the View because it was monstrous for her. She came on our, on, on our show to talk about it like she was treated disgustingly by her colleagues in a way that is not normal, you know, like that.

Eliana Johnson (58:23)

So my theory of this, by the way, yeah. Is that they will embrace people who are what they want the right to be. So it's the trolls, the cranks, the embarrassments. They will not embrace the impressive, articulate, smart ones.

John Pothorotz (58:43)

Right.

Eliana Johnson (58:44)

Like, you know, Megyn Kelly when she was at NBC coming off, you know, really impressive career at Fox News. That was not okay. And by the way, I should note, Scott Jennings's position at CNN is disprove, you know, is not consistent with this. But other than that, like there are so many cases of the left wing media holding up poor examples of, you know, what they want the right to be as opposed to what the right actually is.

John Pothorotz (59:13)

Scott has a demeanor that is almost surreal in the world. And they Almost the history of cable.

John Pothorotz (59:23)

Conflict, ideological conflict, which is that he never gets rattled and he's got five people coming at him on these panels and he's enjoying the hell out of himself.

Eliana Johnson (59:38)

And he's actually funny, I mean, most funny.

John Pothorotz (59:41)

And he's funny and he's enjoying himself. And if he weren't there, the shows would have no juice because he's the spark plug and he's the one that they all jump on and then it's like, let's see how he gets out of this one like that. So CNN obviously sees his value even though they don't like him. I mean, I'm sure they like him personally fine, but I mean, they don't. They, you know, they, it's not, they, they got lightning in a model when they, when they got Scott on there. So that is, that is sort of like the exception that, that proves the rule a little because I don't even. There's not even a person like that on, on, on fox. There isn't a single per. They used to have like Washington generals like versus the Harlem Globetrotters. People, you know, they had like, you know, Alan Combs up against Sean Hannity or, you know, Gutfeld would have one red eye or would have one liberal on or the five used to have one liberal on to fight ineffectively or something like that. Scott Jennings wins these arguments on CNN as far as I can tell. And they're, they seem to be content with that. But.

John Pothorotz (60:55)

I don't know. Anyway, Eliana, you have an important thing you want to expostulate on a little bit about one of the most important political stories probably of the decade that was ignored for the last, for a very long time and suddenly has become a central feature, but something that you and others have been following for a very long time. The Minnesota Somali Covid aid and Somali community leaders exploitation of the social justice world inside the Minnesota nice politics of our land of 10,000 lakes.

Eliana Johnson (61:42)

It was not ignored on this podcast, by the way. Listeners of this podcast I think will remember you all talking about a piece we did at the beginning, Beacon on the scandal, which is dubbed the Feeding Our Future scandal because that is the program that was, that was taken advantage of. But yes. So I think anybody reading the news these days will have seen the Somali headlines about Somali fraud in Minnesota. And it's wonderful. I think that national attention is now on these gobsmacking welfare frauds that have been perpetrated mostly by members of the Somali community in Minneapolis. But I wanted to add an asterisk to try to help our audience understand what's actually going on here. Because I think a sort of damaging misimpression has been created that this is a scandal about the siphoning of taxpayer dollars to fund terrorism in Somalia, particularly to siphon taxpayer dollars to the Al Shabaab terrorist group. So Tom Emmer, a Minnesota Congressman in the House Majority Whip, has sent a tweet saying, we're demanding answers to this and we're confident that U.S. attorney Daniel Rosen in Minnesota will uncover the truth and hold terror funding fraudsters and those who enable them accountable. And the Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessant, has announced an investigation and he says.

Eliana Johnson (63:08)

At my direction, U.S. treasury is investigating allegations that under the feckless mismanagement of the Biden administration and Governor Tim Walls, hardworking Minnesotans, tax dollars may have been diverted to the terrorist organization Al Shabaab. So forgive me in advance for going on a little rant because I think the idea that the core issue here is about the siphoning of taxpayer dollars to terrorists and that we need a new investigation into this is a real distraction from what's actually the issue, which is that a massive fraud was perpetrated because people are greedy. So the first point, I think, is that the entire reason that we know about these frauds and we have known about them, they have been in public view is because they were investigated. So they were aggressively investigated and Prosecuted by the U.S. attorney's office in Minnesota. We don't need new investigations. So two trials have taken place. One took place in 2024, one took place in 2025. Earlier this year, 78 people have been indicted in connection with these schemes. And as a part of these trials, prosecutors, this is all in the public record. Prosecutors hired three forensic accountants and they have traced virtually every dollar of these stolen funds and found that the vast majority of these funds in the billions of dollars were used. The fraudsters used them to enrich themselves and to fund luxury lifestyles. Some of that money was actually sent abroad, mostly to Kenya and China. There were real estate purchases in Kenya, for example. A smaller portion of that money was sent to family members of these fraudsters in Somalia. Now, that money is harder to trace because Somalia is not a part of the Western banking system. It is a cash society. But prosecutors put the amount, that amount of money in the single digit millions. It is a very small portion of the money that was stolen. Some of that money landed in areas controlled by Al Shabaab. That is true. Al Shabaab takes a tax. We don't know actually how much money landed with Al Shabaab. But the intent, I think it's important for people to understand, was not on the part of the fraudsters to fund terrorism, to siphon money to Al Shabaab. And I think the other point, which is just so indicative of where our politics are today is that these calls for investigations are basically social media posturing. Nobody's going to conduct a new investigation. The U.S. attorney's office in Minnesota already has IRS agents from the Treasury Department on the case. And my understanding is that the Besson treasury investigation consists of an offer to send more IRS agents if they need them. So I think that in itself tells you who the protagonists are in this case. They are the U.S. attorney Office in Minnesota, both under the Biden administration and under the Trump administration. And what this is really all about.

John Pothorotz (66:25)

And of course, we have a gubernatorial election coming up in Minnesota in 2026, and obviously a full slate of the House will be, will be up. And the very fact that.

John Pothorotz (66:40)

All of this is done means that the prosecution of the case against Tim Walls and the political atmosphere in this state and the turning a blind eye toward the misbehavior of.

John Pothorotz (66:57)

Supposed nonprofits for political reasons and fear of being.

John Pothorotz (67:04)

What Tom Wolf called MAU MAU, that you would be, you would be accused of racism. And therefore you were not supposed to look too closely at how these organizations were being funded or spending their, their funding. It's all there to be used as a political case. Like Walls can't say, well, this is still under invested. I can't speak about it because it's still under. I want to get to the bottom of it, too. The bottom has been gotten to. And the question now is how much accountability can be assigned to him, to his administration, and to the political class in Minnesota that will be running for office in 2026 for this multi billion dollar fraud, which may be the largest in American, maybe the largest single act of, of defrauding the federal government in American history. I mean, as. As far as I'm aware, these numbers are without precedent. My guess is they're not without precedent during COVID elsewhere in the United States, which is the question of whether or not other investigations will now start in other places about other nonprofits and their behavior. With this as a template, if you're an ambitious US Attorney somewhere, you might want to be, you know, opening, you know, assigning a couple of people to see what they can dig up about what happened to Covid money in California or in New York or in, you know, Illinois or some big state that where you know the amount of money passed through by the federal government to state and local actors to help keep people afloat during COVID was.

John Pothorotz (68:54)

Unthinkably large. Like trillions of dollars went in transfers from the federal government to the states. It's not a joke, it's like the opposite of a joke.

John Pothorotz (69:08)

So thank you for that. Eliana and Christine, you have a recommendation?

Christine Rosen (69:13)

I do. You always know. I've been on a couple long plane flights because here comes the weird fiction recommendation. So I do have one of those. It's a. It's a novel, a crime fiction novel written by Natsuo Kirino. K I R I N O I know, I know. I can't help myself. It was great. So she is a Japanese writer. This book came out in Japanese in the 1990s but it wasn't translated into English until about 20 years ago. It's called out and it is very good hard boiled crime fiction but with a wonderful under current of the worst parts of human nature. It's set in Tokyo and it tells the story of four women who work the overnight the graveyard shift at a bento box factory. So it's kind of a great setup and you. Throughout the novel you sort of follow the backstories of each of these women and a crime occurs. I'm not going to spoil it. And the four of them somehow become. They've been kind of acquaintances at the factory but they all become engaged in dealing with the repercussions of this. I will warn you, extremely violent and gruesome aftermath of this crime. Don't read it if you're squeamish at all the parts that, that there are a few parts that you can't be squeamish reading but it is. What I love about it is that it's. It gives you this version of Tokyo that is quite dark. If you've ever spent any time in Tokyo or read any crime fiction set in Japan. I mean there's obviously a whole criminal underworld going on. But she comes at it from an entirely different angle. The fact that the most of the protagonists are women is also interesting but she's. It's not a kind of feminist crime fiction thing, thank goodness. It's just really great hard boiled fiction, crime fiction if you like that sort of thing. And I think there's only one other of her books that's been translated. I'm going to track it down. And she's written a lot, she's widely regarded, she's won a bunch of prizes but not all of her work has been translated yet, so I would recommend starting with this. It's called out by Natsuo N a t S U O Kirino K I.

John Pothorotz (71:11)

R I N O.

John Pothorotz (71:13)

Okay, well, we'll be back tomorrow. For Abe, Eliana and Christine, I'm John Pothorotz. Keep the candle bur.

John Pothorotz (71:30)

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