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A
This episode of the Dispatch Podcast is brought to you by Pacific Legal Foundation. Since they were founded in 1973, PLF has won 18 Supreme Court cases defending the rights of ordinary Americans from government overreach nationwide, including landmark environmental law cases like Sackett vs EPA. Now PLF is doubling down and launching a new environment and natural resources practice. They're on a mission to make more of America's land and resources available for productive use and to make sure freedom drives our environmental and natural resource policy, not fear. To learn more, visit pacificlegal.org flagship.
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Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On this week's roundtable, we'll go deep on the rule of law, talking about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the strikes against boats in the Caribbean and more broadly, about the laws of war. Then we'll get into Donald Trump's pardons and his abuse of presidential pardon power. And finally, as a tribute to Spotify Wrapped and Apple Replay, we'll talk about what we're listening to, both in terms of music and podcasts. I'm joined today by my Dispatch colleagues Jonah Goldberg and Kevin Williamson, as well as David French of the New York Times. Let's dive right in.
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Gentlemen. Welcome. We are going to have something of a rule of law focused episode today that wasn't deliberate, but it's sort of where we ended up, I think, given some of the important issues that are in the news this week. Let me start with the controversy, or the controversies, plural, surrounding Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
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First, the dishonorable and likely illegal US Attacks on boats in the Caribbean, and then the Pentagon inspector general report out Thursday on Hegseth's use of signal to share battlefield details with his colleagues and his wife. Let me start with an attempt to summarize the latest on the boat attacks. It's a fast moving story, but we have had many, many developments over the past several days. So I'll give a quick summary and then we'll jump in. On September 2, the US launched a campaign of airstrike on alleged drug runners in the Caribbean. The first of those strikes eliminated several individuals on the vessel, but there were two survivors. The Washington Post published an explosive story last Friday that really accelerated the reporting, the scrutiny that we've seen over the past week, reporting that the US Conducted a second strike on that same vessel and targeting the two individuals who survived the initial strike. And that strike may have violated the rules of war. The administration's response over the past week has been evolving, I would say is the most polite way to put it first, Hegseth dismissed the Washington Post reporting as fake news without really specifying what was inaccurate. Then he doubled down sort of a. You're damn right I ordered the Code Red posture, saying that the strikes were meant to be lethal and that there would be more of them. Then they argued that the detritus of the boats presented a hazard to other boats in the sea and needed to be further destroyed. Then it was that we undertook these strikes in self defense. And on Thursday, according to an exclusive report in the Wall Street Journal, Admiral Frank Bradley, who reportedly authorized the strikes, will tell lawmakers that the two survivors were attempting to continue their drug run and were therefore legitimate targets. There's a lot there. David, we spoke about this on this podcast several weeks ago and you sort of walked us through your views of the legality or the problems with these attacks on these boats overall. I wonder what you make of what we've seen over the past week with respect to the new information that has entered the discussion and also the administration's response.
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B
Yeah, so I'm, I'm puzzled on a number of fronts here. So let's just put aside the legality of the strikes themselves. So we, we, as you said, we've talked about this. Let's put aside just for the moment, the huge looming issue of are these strikes lawful to begin with and just let's presume for the sake of argument that this is a strike, that the, the strike is other lawful. That this was a, this would be a lawful target. This boat was then the strike itself conducted according to the laws of war. And the way the Washington Post described the story was pretty clearly. No, in other words, that the way they cast the story, this boat was, you know, incapacitated, survive. These are people clinging to wreckage. That this is a classic case. It's such a classic case that, that the Law of War Manual, the Defense Department Law of War Manual says in black and white that an order to destroy shipwrecked individuals is exactly the kind of illegal order you're required to refuse. So it's. This is actually in the DoD law of war manual. So it looks like a very classic case of a law of war violation. And the administration, as you said, angrily denied it, but then went straight into this sort of. I ordered the Code Red. But no, not the specific Code Red. The specific Code Red was Frank Bradley. Like I might have been the general Code Red, but the specific Code Red was Frank Bradley. This is on him. And then, you know, Hexith has this post where he says biden coddled terrorists, we kill them. Which is not exactly a denial of one of the other allegations here, which was there was essentially a kill them all order that what you might call a no quarter order, which is also again, going to the law of. Or Emanuel in black. And that is not, that does not comply with the laws of war.
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A
I mean, it's literally an example given right in the manual.
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B
Yeah, it's, it's black. It, when I say black and white, I mean literally just pull up the PDF, it's in black and white. And so this is very different from sort of the other controversies we've seen say around the war on terror, around rules of engagement. Rules of engagement are not the laws of war. These are the rules that commanders craft that are more restrictive than the laws of war. And Hegseth is long had problems with the rules of engagement. I have had problems with the rules of engagement. No, this is the law of war. Now. What are the circumstances where a second strike is okay? You know, there are circumstances where a second strike would be okay, again, presuming the lawfulness of the operation. Then the second strike would be okay if it didn't disable the boat, for example, if it looked like the boat was able to continue its mission. But in each time you're, you're targeting, you're disabling this boat, you're trying to target it and disable this boat. And so what does the video say? That is, I mean, what, what does the video show us? This is going to be really, really important and critical because you could have people still on the boat and if the boat is burning and incapacitated and, and you know, in an impossible situation, they're still shipwrecked. And the idea that, well, no, they're continuing the mission, you would, you would kind of need to see some concrete evidence of that, I would say. But there's a lot we don't know. But the thing that really is interesting to me here is, okay, if the explanation was that they were not actually clinging to the wreck, that they were not shipwrecked in any way, shape or form, but instead they were attempting to continue the mission, why don't, why don't you just say that right from the beginning rather than sort of do this, this is total fake news. We kill terrorists. What is this? I guess, you know, this is a kind of thing that we were talking about before that they're not actually trying to communicate to the public. They're trying to communicate to Donald Trump. And with Donald Trump, you never provide you're never really forthcoming to the press, truly. You're not explaining things in good faith. You're just attacking, attacking, attacking. But they finally reached a point where they have to be forthcoming and now they're forthcoming with a story. I guess we'll see. That is very different, somewhat different from the Washington Post story. There's just still an awful lot up in the air.
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A
Yeah. Jonah, yesterday at the cabinet meeting, President Trump said was asked about the video of this. They'd released some video of the initial strike but haven't released video of the second strike. He was asked if he was prepared to do that. He said he would be prepared to do what he expects to release all of the video. There are lots of questions about this. There's a lot more to learn. And I think being prudent and sort of in the sort of dispatch fashion of avoiding jumping in conclusions before we have all the details. We'll wait. Maybe there's something in that video that supports the latest of the various claims. But I have to say, just impressionistically, if you look at the arguments that the substantive arguments that they have attempted to put forth, that this, the wreckage of the boat presented a problem or a real hazard to other boats in the area, you know, I saw that. I mean, I'm certainly no expert on, on boating, but that seemed to strain credulity to me. And, and now the idea that we'd be able to tell what exactly it was that these survivors were attempting to do, that the administration can tell from whatever video they have that they know that they were getting back on board the boat or doing whatever they were doing in order to continue the drug run. Again, I'll suspend disbelief for the time being, but it's hard to understand how we would come to that conclusion based on watching whatever the video they release. Am I just too cynical here?
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C
No.
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This gets like a complaint. I've been venting for a while now about why politics in general is so burdensome to talk about. It's that virtually nothing that comes out of the administration and really the Republican Party and to a large extent the Democratic Party.
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Almost none of the arguments are the face value arguments are the good faith arguments that are motivating them. Right at almost every turn, the arguments are pretextual for whatever the real reason is. I mean, we do not have the world's largest aircraft carrier and a massive naval deployment off the coast of Venezuela to stop the flow of fentanyl in speedboats to the United States. Those boats can't reach the United States. Venezuela doesn't produce any fentanyl, but those are the arguments we've been getting for months now. Right? And.
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Similarly, our friend Andy McCarthy over NR had a good piece on this. The White House press secretary had.
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A prepared statement that she read in response to the obvious question about, the obvious questions about the double tap thing. And she leaned into the idea that these ships were there fired the second time out of self defense. Now, I put it to you that.
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A US Naval armada is not much threatened by an intact drug running speedboat, never mind one in flames floating in the ocean. And you can find this time and time again where they come up with the argument that gets them through the moment. And sometimes on the tariff stuff, you can literally change cable channels, cable news channels, and hear contradictory arguments in the same hour about why they're doing X, Y or Z about tariffs. Right? So like, and so one of the things that frustrates me about this is we saw this with the Alien and Enemies act, right? They would say they declared this trend today, Aragua and another gang and MS.13 as enemy combatants or foreign enemies or whatever the legal designation was. And then they would use that asserted authority without backup from Congress against people with no connection to either gang. But they say, you know, and so you always have these guys falling back on, well, aren't you, for rounding up drug gangs, criminal international drug gangs. Yeah, but what does that housekeeper in Chicago have to do with either of those gangs? And the answer is nothing. But it gives you, it gets you through the moment they declared these narco terrorist organizations led. Narco terrorist organizations. Narco terrorist organizations and therefore enemy combatants. And they want to use the language of war.
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And they want the authority that war gives them, not just off the coast of Venezuela, but across, you know, on economic policy, on immigration policy, across the board. And then the moment someone says, okay, well, you know, you're calling it a war, then you have to abide by the rules of war. And then they say, well, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's not a war war, right. It's this other thing that we're doing. You know, anytime any policy gets them into trouble according to their stated rationales for the policy, they change from it's a floor wax to it's a dessert topping. And they make fun of people who take their arguments seriously. And it just becomes exhausting because it's so much bad faith.
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A
Kevin, is it a floor wax or is it dessert topping?
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D
It's a campaign of mass murder being conducted for political theater is what it is. I Mean, if we want to be plain about it, the point of doing this in a lawless way is doing it in a lawless way to demonstrate that it can be done in a lawless way and to demonstrate Trump's contempt for human life of people who are South American in particular, people from Latin America in general. And if it were legal and if it were something that could be done in an honorable way that was consistent with American national security, he wouldn't be doing it. He's doing it because it's a crime and because he wants to demonstrate that, as he said a few years ago, that he can walk out in Fifth Avenue and shoot someone in the face if he wants to and not lose any political support over it.
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A
Let me push back. Let me push back on you quickly there, though it can be argued, I think fairly from people who are supporters of Donald Trump that one of the things he's been most consistent about over his time in public life has been.
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Both illegal immigration and the drug war, sort of broadly understood. He talked about it in his 2016 campaign. He talked about it through his first term. He probably didn't do as much about it in his first term as his supporters would have us believe. But he made noises about it. He attempted to implement policies about it. He campaigned on it in 2024. I would say, other than trade, you'd have to point to sort of the problems with mass migration, including and especially drugs coming into the United States, as one of the things that Donald Trump at least talks most about. I don't know how much he actually cares about it. He talks most about it. And it's also not a non problem. It's not a made up problem. Some of the things Donald Trump seeks to address, I think are mostly made up problems. The trade deficits, for instance, the things he talks about with respect to tariffs. This isn't a made up problem. If you look at cocaine deaths in the United States over the past six years, they've doubled. That's a problem, isn't it? Why are you so sure that Donald Trump is doing this for the purposes of acting unlawfully, rather than just the unlawful acts being a consequence of what might be deeply felt convicted positions on something that matters to Americans.
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D
If it's a drug campaign, where are the drugs? We know there is no Venezuelan fentanyl. It's not something they produce. There have been no drug seizures. If you want to conduct an anti drug campaign, we've got a lot of history of doing that in the United States. And the way that you do that is by arresting low level people like the guys on the speedboats and bringing them in and rolling them up and using them to find out the identities and such of the people that you want to get at the top of the organization. You don't do it by just murdering the low level, street level people who are at the lowest end of the hierarchy, which is who you put on the boats doing the actual smuggling. No one important in a drug organization ever gets in the same vehicle as drugs or money. That's just sort of standard drug organization operating procedure. So, no, it is not that. It's imaginary fentanyl coming from Venezuela. Fentanyl that doesn't exist. Cocaine is a relatively small problem in the United States, although it's a commonly used drug. Cocaine deaths are not really very common and certainly not to the extent that this would be something that you would be conducting. Let's go ahead and repeat this as often as necessary. A campaign of summary execution in contravention of all American law and international law as well. So if we know what's on the boats and who's on the boats and where they're coming from and where they're going, grabbing those boats when they come into places where we have legal jurisdiction to arrest them, bring the crews in, question them, interrogate them, and use that intelligence to further combat these drug smuggling networks would be a relatively easy thing to do. But we don't have any such intelligence, and there's no sense of pretending that we do. What Donald Trump is doing is simply blowing up boats in the Caribbean because they're full of South American people that he would like to murder for political purposes, because it's good theater. If you wanted to have an anti drug policy, there's better ways to do an anti drug policy. This is not an effective anti drug policy. Everyone knows it. And there are lots of ways to bring drugs into the country. And of course, there are drugs that are manufactured inside of the United States as well. And we'll get to this later, but you certainly don't do this while you're pardoning people who actually are major drug smugglers in the hundreds of tons of cocaine business because they were prosecuted by previous administration that you don't like. We'll come back to that later. They talk about narco terrorism, and this is one of those instances where terminology runs away with people. Narco terrorism is a real thing, but what it refers to is terrorist organizations that use narcotics to support their terrorist activity. So FARC was a good example of this. The Taliban, for a While was an example of this or to a lesser extent organizations like Shining Path. But what these were were political organizations that had a terrorist way of doing business that were using drugs to finance their activities. Whatever you think of Trenda Aragua, which seems to be a exaggerated kind of boogeyman that every person we don't like now gets associated with, by the way, we have a legal process for deciding who is a member of a gang and who isn't. It's called validation. We use it in U. S. Prisons and law enforcement all the time and we're not doing any of that stuff here.
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But whatever you think of Trend, they're not a political organization, they're not a terrorist group that's looking to overthrow the government of Venezuela or overthrow the government of the United States or to conduct terrorist campaigns in the United States. They're just a commercial drug trafficking operation as far as we know. So doing this under the pretext of terrorism is just absurd and it's indefensible. The way I always think of this is that in the United States we've got laws about using lethal force in self defense. Like, you know, you can in certain circumstances kill somebody in self defense, but if you walk over to someone's house at 2 o' clock in the morning and shoot them in the face and then you tell the police, well, I was in, you know, fear for my life and because it was two in the morning and gosh, you know, I don't know this guy very well. And it was. No one is under any obligation to take these arguments seriously, to pretend like they're anything other than, than pretext. And we are under no obligation to take what comes out of Donald Trump's mouth or Pete Hex's mouth as anything other than pretext. It would be different if we're talking about people who didn't have a years and years and years long reputation and well established record of lying about everything that comes out of their mouths whenever they get a chance from crowd sizes to, to whether they won the election. You know, these are the people who were trying to convince us a couple years ago that Venezuelan hackers using Italian satellites had thrown the US election. Which requires us to believe that there are Italian satellites like made by fiat that work more than four days a month. And, and everyone knows that's not the.
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C
Case, but chicks dig them in, they.
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D
Look cool and they never work right. You know, that's, that's, that's the Italian model of doing things. And also that there are Venezuelan hackers out there who are super, super capable too. And not a bunch of guys like playing a World of Warcraft or whatever it is that David likes to play. I forget what David's video game, the World of Warcraft.
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B
Yes. Kevin, you remember it? Very. I appreciate that.
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C
Yeah, you're welcome.
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B
Though I have not been able to play and I haven't bought expansion yet. Sad. Sorry.
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A
So sad. Tragic.
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B
Triggering. Triggering, Kevin. Triggering.
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D
So, yeah, I think that the problem we're running into is that, you know, without Congress willing to do anything, the United States isn't, you know, signatory to the, you know, Statute of Rome to charge these guys with, you know, war crimes and have them tried in the Hague the way they probably ought to be. And these things are happening in international water. So it's not clear you could make any sort of, you know, case against them one way or the other.
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Short of extraditing these guys to Venezuela the next time there's a Democratic administration in order to approve that. Which would be both wrong and hilarious.
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You know, it's, it's, it's, as our friend Andy McCarthy would say, essentially, it's maybe a legal issue, but it's a political problem and it has to be solved politically. And there's no one in Washington to solve it politically because the Democrats don't have any power and the Republicans don't have any honor.
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A
All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch podcast.
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B
Fascinating.
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A
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- [25:33]
B
Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings Very unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company Affiliates excludes Massachusetts.
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A
We're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. Jonah, let me go back to you on this. This question of that Kevin raises about.
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The long history of these guys basically being full of. On these questions and other questions, I'm going to play a short clip for you here from Kristi Noemi, Secretary of Homeland Security. Yesterday at the same cabinet meeting, you've.
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B
Saved hundreds of millions of lives with the cocaine you've blown up in the Caribbean.
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A
We're talking about less than two dozen, fewer than two dozen boats that we've blown up. If you look at the cocaine deaths that The CDC.
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Attributes this is not, by the way, only to cocaine. Often people die with cocaine and other things in their system as well. If you look at what the CDC tracks, in 2019, the number was 15,883. 2020, it was 19,447. There has been an increase, a doubling. I think it is a problem. In 2023, the number was 29,449. There has been a problem. But you hear somebody like Kristi Noem say the things that she said, and it invites anybody who's paying even casual attention to dismiss all of these other arguments because they're so unserious. Why should we believe anything she says or anything Trump says or anything Hegseth says, sort of in their own defense or in making the case against these drug runners, given their long history of lying about this and lying about everything.
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C
Well, I mean, I take your point as a general proposition. We shouldn't believe anything politicians say without them providing evidence for it, which, by.
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A
And large, they have not done here.
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C
Right. So that my point is, is that, like, so this, this gets one of my abiding peeves going back to 2015, is the capacity for people who defend the Trump administration or the Trump campaign at the time by being, you know, I think we can all agree the media has gotten some stories wrong, including stuff about Russia over the last 10 years. I'm perfectly happy, you know, I got stuff wrong about Hunter Biden's laptop. Right. These are the things we get people get wrong. Right. Okay. What drives me crazy is the, the aggrieved, righteous indignation. Like, how dare you suggest Donald Trump would ever lie about something like this? How dare you suggest that Pete Hegseth doesn't have the, you know, the best interests of America, you know, at heart, all this kind of stuff, when the previous 10 examples were proven that they didn't. That they were lying. But they wait for the one example where there's evidence on their side, and then they get incredibly sanctimonious about how Trump derangement syndrome made you not believe him. And look, it turns out they were telling the truth all along about this one discrete kind of thing.
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And so the thing that you're pointing to with Kristi Noem talking about the drug death stuff, Pam Bondi's done that, too. A couple other people in the administration have done that, too. When they had fentanyl.
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Grabbed up some fentanyl, they said they literally took the raw amount of fentanyl and then divided it by the amount. You need to overdose and die, and then applied that to the population and then said, donald Trump saved. I think it was Bondi who once said that Donald Trump saved 250 million lives or something like that.
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And given that 90% of the fentanyl that comes into the country is not interdicted, that means we're all dead, by the way. But I've been waiting. We got two, shall we call them, gun enthusiasts on this podcast today. I've been waiting for someone at the NRA to realize that this logic is somewhat problematic. Because if you're gonna say that any amount of fentanyl, any amount of cocaine, any amount of heroin, whatever you want, can automatically be assumed to be the lethal dose that would have killed somebody had it been allowed to enter the country. I can make a very similar argument about bullets.
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B
Yeah.
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C
You know, you can make an argument about bullets and handguns, that if each bullet found a human being, and if you're gonna count. If you're gonna count every. Every gram of fentanyl as if it was a lethal overdose, part of a lethal overdose, then every bullet is part of a murder. Right. And it's just not the way Earth logic works.
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And where I disagree with you is that I agree with you that nobody who's paying attention should believe any of this crap, because it's all nonsense, it's all pretextual, it's all bad faith and all that kind of stuff. But to the extent any of these people care about any audience other than Donald Trump.
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Which is not always clear, that they do care about any audience other than Donald Trump, but whether they do is they know people like Megyn Kelly, people like the entire primetime lineup at Fox News.
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Are likely not always. Megyn Kelly sometimes will pick a fight, but Jesse Watters will not.
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But they know that there are people who will take the tendentious, ridiculous, absurd interpretation that the Trump people are putting out there and run with it and use it to defend them like they will use these. And the stupidity of them is part of the point, because, first of all, it's a way to humiliate your supporters into saying stupid things and showing that you have complete control over them. But it's also a way of a nuanced, clever argument is not a demagogic argument. And they want demagogic arguments. And that means the other side is in favor of 50 million people dying from fentanyl. And that's why you're against these boat strikes. And that's the kind of arguments that they want to make. This kind of Arguments that Donald Trump can understand.
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D
Megyn Kelly, by the way, I think it's worth noting these operations have not been brutal enough for her taste. You know, she was talking about how she wishes they could arrange things so that these guys would be partially dismembered and bleed out and suffer a little bit. So I remember a couple years ago, she was getting a little bit of grief for her insistence that Jesus is a white man, as she put it. So white Jesus apparently is a little different from Middle Eastern Jesus, and he wants us to dismember people and enjoy their suffering and watch them bleed out. That is the state of discourse on the right right now. It's worth keeping in mind.
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C
Pastor French, could we get a fact check on this white French, white Jesus thing?
- [32:29]
B
I've got issues. I've got issues with this whole Megyn Kelly. And by the way, every now and then, when you see this iteration of Megyn Kelly, I. I just am reminded that she was not always like this. And it's to such an extent that Trump attacked her in the most brutal ways imaginable. And anyway, that. That's neither here nor there. But, you know, to pick up on what both Jonah and Kevin were talking about, the pattern here with the administration of just saying whatever is necessary to get through the moment is so relentless and constant, it is now coming to judicial notice. And so you're beginning to see a lot of the early explanations that were offered to justify, for example, National Guard deployments, things that were shouted from the rooftops of Fox News about these things happened to these ICE officers, et cetera, that when you actually go back and look at the body camera footage and when you actually investigate the underlying incidents time and time again, the breathless story we were told turns out not to be the case at all. They're being found out. They're being caught in lie after lie after lie in the judicial realm. And this is when they're making arguments to courts, to Article 3 judges. They have no moorings in the truth at all. And so every single story I'm hearing from the administration, I just take it with a giant grain of salt. That's why, you know, when I wrote about the boat strikes, I was saying, let's see the video, let's hear the audio. I don't care about your spin. I want to see the video. I want to see the audio. I want to see the redacted for to remove the classified information, but the operative portions of the underlying order. Because if you did have a kill them all order, either verbal or written. That's a war crime. And, you know, I know I said in my initial, you know, when I was first talking, let's set aside the legality of the underlying campaign. Well, let's take that back off the shelf and just reiterate that everything that Kevin said here is absolutely correct. This is an unlawful, illegal military campaign. And one of the ways you can tell is when, when we had that, our initial times reporting, following up on the Washington Post reporting, and we talked about this, you know, this is when you began to really see, okay, how much were these people sort of out of the fight or whatever. But in the story, we made the point, what fight? You know, what fight? You know, normally, because under the laws of war, when a ship is burning, you can continue firing on it until it strikes its colors or it somehow or ceases its own resistance. In other words, that there is a clear delineation that it is now out of the fight. But how could these guys do that? They didn't even know they were in a fight. You know, they didn't know that this was a war. Right. And at what point were they going to be able to say, strike the colors, lads. The Navy has bested us? No, I mean, this is not what was going on. And so this whole thing is just a farce piled on a farce piled on a farce colored by grossly illegal killings of human beings. And one other thing to point out, anybody who will sit here and say with a straight face that we got 81 or whatever drug dealers has a lot more confidence in the intelligence process than I do. And look, I have participated in airstrike decisions. I have participated in planning campaigns that included airstrikes. I have been a part of this process. And I know our intelligence is not foolproof. It is not. And when you're operating in an environment where I was in Iraq, a congressionally authorized military conflict conducted according to the laws of war, we could still make mistakes and did make mistakes. This is not congressionally authorized. It's not conducted in accordance with the laws of war. We have no visibility. Is this administration, which is so shockingly incompetent in its law enforcement here at home, suddenly they're 100% when they are striking from the air in South America, maybe, maybe we've been lucky. But the reality is here, the layers of trust that are being put on this untrustworthy administration with human lives on the line, it's just completely unjustifiable. Completely unjustifiable.
- [37:08]
C
One quick point. I've been writing for almost 20 years now about my problems with the concept of moral equivalent to war. And I usually apply it to things like climate change or I don't apply the moral Cold war. I have problems with people who apply the concept of more colonial war to things like climate change. Fighting climate change may be as worthwhile and as important as a lot of people claim. It's not war. It's just a different thing. The war on poverty. It's a different thing. There are all sorts of things, psychologically.
- [37:44]
Legally, morally, sociologically.
- [37:49]
That kick in when you're in an actual war that are much more like a state of nature than they are about, like a rule of law kind of society. And that's why, you know, there are real problems with the idea of the drug war. If we're at war, if this is like the drug war. And remember the first time this administration talked about how they were embracing the drug war, it wasn't about anything in Latin America. It was Peter Navarro going on TV saying the first round of tariffs against Canada, where the cartels, in his words, had taken over. Not the maple syrup cartels, the drug cartels had taken over Canada. And so he said, so these terrorists, this set of terrorists, this is about the drug war, right? And war gives you permission in politics to do all sorts of things other concepts won't. And I could teach a seminar about the history of this. I don't want to get too deep in all of it. My point is that they're using war metaphorically, except when they're not about the National Guard. In American cities, Trump talks about the enemy within. He's invoking war powers again and again and again when he can get away with it, about trade and immigration and that if this was a real war, right? Let's just say the terrorist cartel, these drug cartels are Nazis, right? In World War II, then everybody who buys cocaine.
- [39:20]
From one of Don Jr. S friends in the bathroom at Mar a Lago or something.
- [39:26]
They should be arrested. They could be shot because they're not wearing uniforms according to the laws, according to the Geneva Convention, that they're essentially spies in the United States working for a foreign power. People who buy drugs should be, you know, penalized for collaborating with the enemy, like you can. If it's a real war. You can see how stupid it is to call it a real war if you're not willing to live with the consequences of what it would be like if it were a real war. And I think at the end of the day, what Trump just wants is the atmospherics. I think Kevin's right to. I mean, I. Is that he wants to be seen as a guy who can get away with whatever he wants to get away with. And the rhetoric of war is the thing that lets him get closest to doing that, which is why he's now talking about just deporting Somali Americans. Right. It's just he wants war powers. And we have become so softened and so inured to this rhetoric about the moral equivalent of war. And the reason why it's so effective is because it triggers our lizard brains in ways that allow us to turn off our logic centers a bit.
- [40:41]
That we have a hard time arguing with it just on the facts. It is absurd, but it's music to the ears of a lot of conservatives and a lot of right wingers in America in much the way that the moral colonial war stuff is music to the ears on the left for people who want to, you know, shut up, climate deniers and that kind of thing.
- [41:03]
B
And the threshold for war is lowered to such an extent that Sarah and I were talking on advisory opinions about the evidentiary foundation for the National Guard deployment to Portland. And one of the elements that the Trump administration used, and God knows if this is true or not, was, well, some protesters slashed the tires. Slashed the tires of an ICE vehicle. Guys, that's not war. That, like, high school students do that to their gym teacher. Like, what are we talking about here? But then you get Fox on there, they slash the tires, well, golly gee, let's bring in the F18s. I mean, this is absolutely astonishing, the extent to which we are ratcheting up the stakes for the use of the most lethal forces to try to justify the use of the most lethal forces in the world on our home soil. It's just. It's bizarre and dangerous at a level that's hard to comprehend.
- [42:04]
A
And I have to say, just to point out, Kevin, the history here of the administration's rhetoric with respect to constraints on war making. I mean, I think I take Jonah's point about whether this is a war and why they use the rhetoric of war. But we have a long history, and I think this helps create the kind of dangerous environment that we're in right now, where top Trump administration officials have pretty consistently shrugged off the idea, in some cases, the idea that there are even such things as war crimes times.
- [42:44]
Pete Hegseth, in a book that he published in 2024, walked through in some detail a situation in which his troops were being briefed by JAG officers. He said JAG lawyers spend more time prosecuting our troops than they do putting away bad guys. It's easier to get promoted that way. And said, this is why JAG officers are so. Are often not so affectionately known as JAG offs. He walks through this scenario in the book where he describes a JAG officer coming up with a hypothetical where a terrorist is holding an RPG and asks if they could shoot him. And the men, per Hegseth's telling, all say, of course. And the JAG officer says, that's wrong. You can't do that. Hegseth says that they sat in stunned silence and then he told his troops to ignore the legal advice. And I'm going to read the quote here. After this briefing, I pulled my platoon together, huddling amid their confusion to tell them, I will not allow that nonsense to filter into your brains, men. If you see any enemy who you believe is a threat, you engage in and destroy the threat. That's a bull rule that's going to get people killed and I will have your back, just like our commander. We are coming home. The enemy will not. Now, I take David's point from earlier that there are real debates about rules of engagement. I think we had some of those during Iraq and Afghanistan. And I probably would be more sympathetic to arguments in some cases like the ones that Hegseth made there than some of the sort of hyper technical ones that we have gotten and gotten public from the JAG officers back then. But if you look at the kinds of things that Donald Trump has said all along that J.D. vance said in this context about this specific thing, he was on Twitter on September 6 and tweeted, Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military. A liberal influencer, I guess, named Brian Krassenstein tweeted back at him, killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime. And Vance tweeted back simply, I don't give a shit what you call it. How much? And, David, ask this question to Kevin first, and then I want you to weigh in. How much does that matter in terms of the overall understanding of what the American public thinks of war crimes and how serious this is? And then specifically, what does this say to the troops? What does it say to the people who are responsible for actually doing this, particularly in the context of what we've seen from Donald Trump over the past decade?
- [45:28]
D
Yeah, I think the way to think of this.
- [45:31]
Uncomfortable it is to say is that Venezuela is Ukraine and we are the Russians.
- [45:38]
B
Yeah. Yep.
- [45:39]
D
So if you are the sort of person who admires what Putin has done. And you want to emulate that sort of brutality. You think it's a way of advertising your masculinity, your seriousness, your patriotism, any of that stuff, this is what you do. There are no Nazis running the government in Kiev. There is no fentanyl in Venezuela. These are all pretextual stories that are made up. And, you know, Jonah likes to cite Birds of Prey speech a lot about the effects that sending young men off to the East India Company to be brutal occupiers and exploiters had, not just on the Indians, but on the British administrative and ruling class as they came back home with the assumptions that what they had learned as colonial powers could be applied at home in a similar kind of way. I think that this has a corrupting influence on people, necessarily. When you're being asked to do things that are illegal, that you probably know are illegal, certainly that you know are immoral, and you're going to go along with it anyway because you want to have a military career or you don't, or you want to have a career in the Senate, and in either case, you don't have the guts to stand up to the people who are telling you to do wrong and, and, and tell them no. So I think that is where that is at. I think that.
- [46:53]
Again, another remnant bingo card here thing for Jonah's benefit with the Lord Acton quote about absolute power corrupting absolutely, which a lot of people misunderstand. It's about its effects on people around it. Trump's ability to get people to do these sorts of things is a result of that kind of corruption that people think they can behave in a way that is unaccountable and amoral or immoral because there won't be any consequences for them. And so far, they're right. On one minor point, though, I wanted to add, David was talking about the issue of the reliability of intelligence. And David may not know this, but he's not the only one who's been involved in this. And earlier part of my life, I was involved in. In this issue as well. And I can tell you that even when they tell you it's cocaine, it's not always cocaine.
- [47:47]
B
Oh, man.
- [47:48]
A
I'm not going to touch that.
- [47:49]
C
And they won't give you your money back.
- [47:53]
D
David.
- [47:54]
A
What?
- [47:54]
D
I'm going to go to Caracas and get my money back one of these days.
- [48:00]
A
David, if you are sort of, you know, rank and file military official, enlisted soldier.
- [48:09]
How much do these macro messages that you hear from the country's political leadership and Pentagon leadership, how much they matter. Is there some comfort in the fact that you're basically, you've been told, I would say sometimes rather directly, sometimes indirectly, hey, don't worry about it. We got your back. Do what you need to do. We got your back. We're not going to be picky about this stuff. We're not wussies like the Biden administration. Does that matter to those enlisted men and women? Should it matter as they carry out their duties?
- [48:41]
B
So the bluster of politicians matters very, very, very little to the rank and file. I'll just say that they are not even aware of it. I mean, your typical soldier, including many, most of your younger officers, are way outside of the political world. Like, this is not the. The military, by and large of just like any group of people, you're going to have some people in there who are just real political obsessives and they really drill down on what's going on. But that's very much a minority. So you've got a lot of people who are just very, very disconnected. But what does matter is leadership and personnel. And so if all we were dealing with was a situation where you had the President sort of blustering a lot, but you had Mattis as Secretary of Defense, which is what we had at the first part of the first term. It's a huge. It's. It's night and day difference. But what we've had here is worse bluster and purges of personnel. And that gets the military's attention all up and down the ranks. When you change sort of the funnel and the method of promotion, what is it that gets you the attention at the higher ranks? What is it that gets you. What is it that can secure your rocket ship to the top? That's when you start to really influence an institution, not just the military, any institution. This is just common sense. You change the criteria for promotion, you change the criteria for advancement that has an influence all the way up and down. So that's something that is really worrying me is if you're purging people who would be tapping the brakes on or slamming the brakes on illegal activity, and you're putting in place people who are just not even acknowledged, say, the existence of a legal restraint at all or draw the legal restraints way outside of the lines, then you're going to have a big impact. But one other thing. Can I just object. I just want to say I object to. There's something about that Pete Hexseth story about the briefing he got In Iraq. That absolutely does not sit right with me. It doesn't sit right with me because I served in Iraq in 07, right after he was there, and those were not the rules of engagement that we were. That is not what I briefed as the rules of engagement. That is not something that I. That I don't want to say it didn't happen. But let me just say, if he received a brief like that, it would really surprise me because I've also seen the rules of engagement that were in effect before I was there. And so all of this, when I read that story, I have, I think this is fabulism or he encountered a very rogue JAG officer who was not briefing correctly, which would not then require you to tell your platoon to defy. What you then do is you ask for clarification above. Is this the standard? Really? Truly. And so I am extremely skeptical, to be honest, about that story. Just extreme. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but I'm extremely skeptical.
- [51:52]
A
If we had a Pentagon press corps who was still allowed to go to the Pentagon, they might be in a position to ask if the administration had briefings with real reporters. But instead, we have a new Pentagon press corps that includes the likes of Matt Gaetz and Laura Loomer. We need to move on to pardons. I want to ask Kevin about his terrific piece for our website yesterday on pardons and.
- [52:15]
What we've been talking about for the first 45 minutes here. But before we do that, David, I want to just give you an opportunity to respond quickly to the news reports that we've seen about the inspector general report at the Pentagon on Pete Hegseth and this use of signal.
- [52:33]
B
Yeah.
- [52:33]
A
To summarize the news reports briefly, they said that he put national security, US national security at risk. He shouldn't have done this. This wasn't secure. Sort of everything that you. All of the kinds of things that you would expect an IG report to say based on what we know happened, what they've admitted happened.
- [52:54]
Is in that IG report, according again, to these news reports. But the Pentagon, the chief spokesman of the Pentagon, Sean Parnell, came out and because the IG report acknowledges that Hegseth has broad declassification authority, called this a quote, complete. Well, I don't know if the complete is in the quotes. Called this an exoneration of hegseth. Is it an exoneration of egseth? And how should we understand what happened?
- [53:24]
B
It's a damning indictment of Hegseth. Because what. What the inspector General found. And this is based on reporting about the IG report. It's classified as of now. I think an unclassified version will be released. But he took, according to the reporting, he took information that was clearly marked classified and put it into the signal chat. He put the core information that had been marked from a marked classified source and put it straight into the signal chat. There's no evidence he went through any kind of declassification process. So once again, we've got data deja vu all over again. Remember with Donald Trump, can you declassify in your mind is moving something into a unsecure place? Is that a form of declassification that you can't touch? But the relevant statute here doesn't necessarily deal. So even if he did, declassified in his mind is still grotesquely irresponsible to do it. And number two, one of the key underlying statutes here is not limited to classified information. It's national defense information. It's information pertaining to the national defense. So it's still information pertaining to the national defense being moved from its proper place and placed into an unsecure, unclassified civilian messaging app. With a journalist in the group. With a journalist in the group.
- [54:51]
C
Not me, by the way. Just it was not me.
- [54:53]
A
Seems problematic. Jeff Goldberg.
- [54:57]
B
Thank the Lord that Jeff Goldberg is a patriotic enough American to not immediately spill out information that could have harmed U.S. pilots. But the, the reality is this is just to put this in context, I would view this as 10x the Hillary Clinton email scandal. And I was, I believe she should have been prosecuted. But as far as actual potential operational harm to Americans transmitting in an unclassified forum the strike information of an imminent strike against a force that we believed had surface to air missiles and anti aircraft capacity. It's staggering to me. It's just staggering. But this is one of the things where the administration is following the playbook of we just brazen this thing out.
- [55:46]
D
Out.
- [55:46]
B
Yeah, it is what it is. We're going to declare it all to be fine, even though it'd be a career ender for any other sec def in any other administration in American history. Possibly prosecutable. They're just going to brazen this thing out.
- [56:00]
A
There's no way to interpret again, based on the news reports, which include some quotes, some excerpts from this IG report. There's just no way to interpret it as a total exoneration. Which again goes to the the point that we were discussing earlier about the administration's eagerness to just lie and lie in big ways. We're going to take a break, but we'll be back shortly.
- [56:23]
D
Hablas espanol spries du dzoitsk?
- [56:26]
A
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- [57:24]
A
Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. We need to move to pardons. We could have spent more time on pardons, but one of the reasons I didn't, and I wanted to go long on the first part of our conversation is because I have before me the three people who have written the best pieces on presidential pardons that I've read.
- [57:44]
And we're going to put them all in the show notes. And I strongly encourage everybody who's listening to go and read each of these pieces. Truly exceptional, all making sort of different, sometimes overlapping or related points. Let me start with you, Kevin, because you mentioned in passing earlier, and I think this is sort of the.
- [58:05]
I shouldn't say, if you go back 15, 20 years, one of the phrases that was very popular when people saw something, read something that they liked or saw a clip that they liked, they would, you know, say, straight into my veins. I suppose that's a fraught thing to say in the context of big discussions about, about drugs and drug wars, drug use. But when I read your column yesterday about this, that was my reaction. I thought about it the entire time, straight into my veins. And I'm going to resist the temptation to just read your piece because other people can do that. And the Dispatch now has audio available, so go listen to it if you want to. But you connected the conversation that we had in the first part of this episode with the pardon power in, I thought, a really compelling and powerful way. Can you just walk us through your argument?
- [59:02]
D
The pardon power is actually, this is an idea that I think I originally first heard suggested by David, in all seriousness, which is that we should probably think about amending the Constitution to change the way we handle the pardon power to require Senate sign off either a majority or even a super majority, or give the Senate or Congress some sort of veto power over it. Because the way the sort of unilateral nature of the power of the pardon has become very, very corrupting. And Americans apparently no longer know better than to elect people like Donald Trump to presidency. So the pardon power is, as I alluded to earlier, I think, something that is profoundly corrupting, particularly in the context of this administration. I don't think you would see people like Pete Heth doing what they're doing if they weren't confident that there was a pardon waiting for them if they get charged with something. I suspect that might even be the case for the admiral in question here, that, that he believes that if he's breaking the law that there'll be a pardon for him on the way out the door. And Trump, of course, has reason to believe that he has some kind of made up immunity thanks to Supreme Court discovering that immunity, which exists nowhere in the text of the Constitution or any American law.
- [60:13]
Yeah, we should probably do something about this. We should probably try to reel this power in and give the president less leeway on that. You know, for a long time, it was, it was the sort of thing we could trust our presidents with because of the sort of people we elected to the presidency. Even the people who were sort of bad people had a sense of propriety and shame and care for their reputations and things like that. It's difficult to even imagine, you know, a character like Richard Nixon or Warren G. Harding just sort of auctioning off pardons essentially the way that the Trump administration has. It's hard to see them pardoning a figure like the former Honduran president who was a major, major drug smuggler and convicted by our government of smuggling, depending on who you ask, either 400 or 500 tons of cocaine in the United States. And that means it was probably more like 4,000 or 5,000, because, you know, you only get a little, a little part of it. And yeah, I think it's, it's a little bit of a monarchical hangover as well. You know, pardons are things that were related to kings, not to, not to Republican executives and maybe it's just time to rethink this thing entirely.
- [61:21]
A
Kevin, can you walk people through this pardon? I mean, to me, the most devastating part of your piece was the top, contrasting what we are hearing from the administration with respect to the importance that the necessity of launching a full scale war potentially on what they call narco terrorists to keep drugs from coming into the the country. And the President's pardon of the former Honduran president who, as you say, was indicted with serving prison sentence for his role in bringing in at least several hundred tons of cocaine. I mean, if it was the case that President Trump has saved hundreds of millions of lives, per Kristi Noem or Pam Bondi, by These strikes on 21 boats in the Caribbean, think of how many lives we could have saved by blocking the activities of the former Honduran president who is alleged to in court have brought hundreds of tons into the United States. And I think that that argument, I mean, it's hard to square what they're doing.
- [62:30]
D
We don't know an exact amount, but you figure it's probably good for a couple of upside points on the Dow Jones Industrial Average during that period. There's a little optimism down there in downtown thanks to his, his product making its way onto the American streets. Yeah, I don't really know what else to say about that, except for the guy is he's figured out what a lot of other people have figured out, which is that Donald Trump is easy to flatter. And if you just declare yourself on his side and this guy presents himself as a, you know, Trumpy figure who's a bulwark against the radical left, as he puts it.
- [63:01]
A
And the pardon, we should just make, make abundantly clear. Sorry to interrupt.
- [63:05]
D
Yeah.
- [63:05]
A
The pardon came in the middle of this campaign.
- [63:09]
D
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [63:10]
A
This just happen.
- [63:12]
D
Happened. Yeah.
- [63:13]
A
In the middle of the President making the case that we need to go to war to prevent cocaine from coming to the United States. He pardoned this guy who had a role and was convicted, was sentenced, was serving in prison for his role in bringing cocaine into the United States in mass quantities. This happened all at the same time. For people who have not been paying attention to every single detail of the news on this.
- [63:33]
D
Yeah, it's one of those things where it's really easy to write a column because all you have to do is just reiterate the facts.
- [63:39]
You don't have to jump up and down and yell about it too much. It's just, just an outrage on its, on its surface. And, you know, we'll Find out in a few months or a few years that there was some way of enriching the Trump family or some Trump ally involved in this, or that there was some person getting a favor who's connected to the guy. We don't know exactly what it is right now. Or it could just be flattery. You know, Trump is susceptible to flattery and to people who, who claim to be his. His political allies. I will note that radical left really means something rather different in Honduras than it does in the United States, the country with a real radical left in a way that maybe we. We haven't had in a long time. But, no, it's a. It's a fairly outrageous thing. But, you know, for my bingo card this time is the. Is the T.S. eliot line about trying to dream up systems so perfect that no one needs to be good. This is a reminder that our constitutional guardrails are not sufficient in and of themselves, that if you elect bad people to offices with tremendous power, you'll get tremendously bad outcomes.
- [64:33]
A
Yes. Joda, you wrote in no Checks, no Balances about the need for a constitutional amendment to restrain this pardon abuse. You are not a fan, I should note, of constitutional amendments generally. Why do you think we need one in this instance?
- [64:56]
C
Because, you know, and David can sing from this hymnal quite well as well. But the, the simple fact is there's a large number of things that are unconstitutional or illegal but that are not justiceable, which simply means that the courts are not going to take up the issue because someone doesn't have standing or because it's a political question. You know, whether Congress declares war or not has been largely incidental to whether or not we use.
- [65:25]
The military in lots of cases, because the court is just not going to get in the middle of all that kind of thing. And so we have a system of. So one of the things that Congress is there for is to be a check on the unconstitutional things that courts can't get into. Right. The whole idea is that this is the one thing that drives me crazy, is congressmen and senators, they take an oath to uphold the Constitution. And that's come to mean we won't do anything that violates what the Supreme Court says we can't do. But otherwise we'll do whatever the hell we want.
- [66:00]
D
Want.
- [66:01]
C
And that's not what the Founders intended. The Founders intended that every branch of government. We don't need to get into departmentalism, but they intended that every branch of government would abide by the Constitution in toto. Right. But now we have this thing where instead of the Supreme Court simply being the final authority on what the Constitution means, it's become the only authority on what the Constitution means. And so Congress feels free to not do its job. Its job. This up in the Caribbean is all because Congress lacks. I don't want to genderize this, but lacks the manhood to actually assert its prerogatives and its responsibilities about what it's authorizing and has not authorized. Same thing with terrorists, right?
- [66:48]
When you take an oath as a congressman or senator, you take an oath to play the role that the Constitution envisions for the first branch of government. And part of that is impeachment. Impeachment is a dead letter in this country now. It is purely a partisan exercise. It doesn't work the way it's supposed to work. And the problem is, is that pardons are not justiceable. Courts will not review them. I understand why they won't review them. They are simply. The President's pardon power for federal crimes is absolute. The founders worried about this at the Constitutional, the ratifying convention in Virginia, I think it was. George Mason asked James Madison about this pardon power stuff, and he says, this is crazy. You could have a president who could just simply have goons and henchmen do stuff at his bidding and say, don't worry, I'll pardon you for it and use it for his own ends. And Madison rolled his eyes and said, yeah, but what you're forgetting is impeachment power. That kind of behavior would be obviously impeachable. Well, Trump has issued in his first term and his second term, I've lost count how many just flagrantly impeachable pardons. And the response you get from people in Congress is, well, he has the power to do that. And you never hear anybody say, well, you have the power to impeach him for it. And if you don't have impeachment, if people don't take impeachment seriously and you can have presidents just wildly abuse their pardon power, then you are on the road to Caesarism. Because what you're basically saying is all of your cronies, all of your henchmen can literally commit federal crimes. You can sell pardons. I mean, that came up in the immunity case. Like, you can literally sell pardons, which I think Bill Clinton did with the Mark Rich thing in effect back in 2000. And, you know, and Andy McCarthy was one of the Justice Department guys looking into that at the time. We've name checked Andy a bunch today, and his conclusion was, it's outrageous. But it's not reviewable. It's like once the pardon goes in, it goes in. So giving. Having a president with bad character who is willing to sell and abuse the pardon power is untenable when Congress is no longer willing to do its job. So we gotta take it away from the president. We gotta figure out a way to have some new check or balance to it, have a national federal pardoning commission that can look at things. I mean, I'm not for getting rid of pardons, but the guy Kevin's talking about, the drug dealer, what Honduran guy? It's also supposed to be after you fulfilled. Most often supposed to be after you fulfill your prison sentence or your punishment and you've shown contrition and you turned your life around. Trump this week has pardoned people who had barely figured out where the bathroom is in jail. It is, and it's going on out in the open. Congress doesn't give a rat's ass. And it is incredibly dangerous. And I predict it here, I predicted it already elsewhere. He is going to pardon basically the entire leadership of the doj, the entire leadership of the Pentagon, preemptively in advance before he leaves office. In some ways, he has to, because the Democrats are gonna go after everybody if they get back in power for good reasons and for bad. And that is the tit for tat thing that we've got now. And we just can't have regimes come in, administrations come in and out where they are planning on being pardoned for doing the president's wishes.
- [70:18]
I don't get hysterical about threats to democracy stuff very often on here, but it is really dangerous. Yeah.
- [70:24]
A
David, before I ask about your call, I wanna point out that the Honduran president, Juan Orlando Hernandez, did write a letter to President Trump. Trump, whom he called your Excellency. And the letter came after a long, long campaign. By speaking of Trump cronies, Roger Stone, who started making this argument almost immediately after Trump was sworn in, according to Axios, he's written, published three separate substack posts calling for the pardon of Hernandez. And when Trump was asked about that pardon, he couldn't give any details, but he said, you know, people told me that Hernandez was the victim of overzealous prosecution by the Biden administration. That was good enough for me. David, your column in the New York Times from a couple of weeks ago began by walking through four different pardons. Fascinating sort of collection of pardons, all with very different stories and very different reasons behind them. I wonder what you think as you survey the Pardon landscape. Is there a pardon in your mind that sticks out as the most egregious? And you worried in your column about this being one of the Founders greatest fears being realized. What do you mean by that?
- [71:53]
B
Yeah, so let me take the latter first. Look, if you're, if you read the debate between the Federalists and the Antifederalists, there were certain very salient issues that came up. One of them, perhaps the most famous, is the debate over the Bill of Rights, which the Antifederalists won. We, we got a Bill of Rights and thank the Lord that we did. But there was also a lot of debate about the pardon power. And you can go to the Virginia ratification debates. You can go to the, you can go to statements by founder anti Federalists like Cato or a person writing under the name an old wig. And they made this argument again and again that this was a vestige of royalty, that what we were dealing with was the pardon power was a vestige of monarchy, that if abused, could be catastrophic, that the abuse of the pardon power would be absolutely catastrophic. And so when the debate came up in Virginia, George Mason raised this objection and Madison answered him by saying, well, impeachment will fix this. And we now know impeachment is essentially a dead letter. As a check on presidents, it's just a dead letter. But the Founders would have said, well, we've got a couple of other firewalls here. One is the Electoral College. I don't think the Founders could quite imagine that the electoral College, which they envisioned, which was not what we have, but what they envisioned was sort of a committee meeting of esteemed citizens to decide who was going to be the esteemed citizen to become president. That's not what ended up happening, but that would be in their mind, a firewall against a truly unscrupulous individual. And then the other one was they also had a very specific person in mind for the job of president, and that was George Washington. So in a lot of ways, you're reading a job description written for George Washington, and if you go read an old wig number five, which great name for a bourbon, an old wig number five, is that if you go and you look at that and you read his essay, he very clearly says that the odds that we're always going to have people of the character of George Washington are one in a million. That we cannot run our country on the basis that the leaders are going to have the character of George Washington. That's not, not what's going to happen. And look, history has proven that to Be true. And when you go back and you look at some of, you know, the most egregious uses of the pardon power, a lot of them are concentrated in this Trump term, for sure. But we've had some serious abuses in the past, not least including some of the breadth of the pardons that Andrew Johnson gave.
- [74:36]
A
Yes.
- [74:37]
B
After the Civil War, which really helped lay the groundwork for the return to power of some of the worst characters from the Confederacy, who then went on to enjoy enormous power and influence in the United States following these grants of amnesty after launching this treasonous war. And so this is something that a lot of people for a long time have warned about. Now, what's the worst with Trump? It's so hard to tell. But I will tell you this. The pardon of the Binance founder. The closer you, the more you look at that, that the. This is the pardon of Changping Zao. The more you look at that, the worse it gets. And there was just a lawsuit filed, and the suit is filed by victims of Hamas's October 7th attack. So victims of one of the most brutal terror attacks the world has ever seen. And there are allegations in this that Binance, this is, this is Zhao's company, helped transfer about a billion dollars to the accounts of terror groups responsible for the atrocity. And this is something that, you know, this is a complaint. It's filed, it has not been. You know, we'll see how the facts develop. But if that is true or close to true, it's horrifying. And by the way, we also have the drug trafficker we've just been talking about. Let's not forget this, people convicted of seditious conspiracy after January 6th. So. So it's hard to really pinpoint, but the Binance pardon is just all the bad things in one you have. Binance helps facilitate the explosive growth of Trump's own crypto business. So Binance helps enrich the Trump family immensely. He gets a pardon. We find out that he may have helped hamas prior to October 7th. What are we doing here? What are we doing here? This. This should be a wake up call.
- [76:37]
A
Yeah. I would say even if, even if the facts in that complaint don't end up bearing out, and there are reasons to believe that some of them will, the facts as we know them today, the facts as they've been reported today are horrific enough.
- [76:51]
D
Yeah.
- [76:51]
A
Are absolutely jaw dropping. We need to move on to not worth your time. If you've been online at all over the past last week, or certainly if you have young people in your life, you will have noticed a phenomenon where people are sharing their Spotify Wrapped or their Apple Replay, either the music that they listen to most over the past year or the podcasts they've listened to most. We're pleased to have been mentioned in many of these. Thank you for sending them to us. Feel free to tweet that out on on social media, share it with your Facebook followers that you've been listening to the three Dispatch podcasts. But I thought it would be fun to just go around the horn real quick and see what you all have. If you have Spotify wrapped, if you have Apple Replay, or even if you don't, what you've spent the most time over the past year listening to. And I'll start with you, Jonah.
- [77:48]
C
Yeah, so it's a little unfair because I don't use Spotify at all. And I do use the Apple Podcast, but it's not my primary app, so it wouldn't work for those purposes. But I was going to say it's not entirely fair because as a matter of due diligence, I of course listen to all of our podcasts and they would probably be at the top of any sort of compilation. So excluding those also, I would say excluding a couple other podcasts that I listen to, partly because they're friends, partly because it helps me sort of understand where our where the right is. So like I listen to the editors at National Review pretty religiously. I listen to commentary podcasts. Maybe not every single day because that's a lot of John Pedorts, but quite a bit. And so we can put all those aside.
- [78:41]
I would say by far the podcast I most attentively listened to, outside of work and family, as it were, is the Rest Is History Podcast. It's a hit. Just a fantastic history podcast. They're wrong about America quite a bit, but that's okay. They're wrong in interesting ways. And I find that I will listen. I listen to that mostly on weekends because it's sort of a reward to me because I have to listen to news stuff during the week so much that. So on weekends I can listen to stuff about, you know, Elizabeth, the reign of Elizabeth I or whatnot.
- [79:20]
Other than that, you know, it's. It won't be surprised to anybody who listens to me on the Remnant because I. I do so much damn talking on that thing, I can't exactly hide what I'm listening to. And so I like Econ talk quite a bit. And our friends at the Telegraph, their Ukraine. The latest podcast I listen to quite A bit. Again, not as. Not every day. I've actually made the case to them that I should have a Friday wrap up that summarizes the week's news rather than the daily TikTok. And they're taking under advisement. And I guess that's about it.
- [79:53]
A
You treat the history podcast on the weekend the way I treat my fantasy football podcasts. They're a reward for having to slog through the news all week. Kevin, do you have a Spotify wrapped?
- [80:05]
D
I do not. I don't use the Apple service either. I'm a playlists guy. I like to be mechanically in charge of my own stuff.
- [80:13]
A
Were you a mixtape guy back in high school?
- [80:15]
D
Oh, absolutely. I would. I would totally burn you a question. So was I. Yeah, that's. That's. That's good stuff. So I was thinking on the podcast front, I'm. I'm a real company man on this. I really like our podcasts and I do listen to them and I enjoy them all for different reasons. I also put in a good word for the podcast done by the European Council on Foreign Relations called World in 30 Minutes, which is really very good. BBC's Daily News podcast is quite good. Although what I'm thinking about right now is music, because for Thanksgiving, we went from where we live down in southwestern Virginia up to my wife's family's place in Massachusetts, not far from Boston, which meant 12 hours in the car each way with four children under the age three and under. So I had 24 hours of like Sesame street music. And so I came home and I'm looking at what I've been listening to for the last couple of days. And I've had like hours and hours and hours like Slayer and Damage Plan and some Wagner in there and a few other things to get me back to kind of a normal place mentally after all this Elmo stuff. Although I gotta say, Caribbean Amphibian with Jimmy Buffett's a pretty good song from the Sesame street universe.
- [81:30]
A
Can I make a recommendation? As somebody who'd been through that a long time ago? The key is to find shows or music that you can use to entertain the kids, but is also good. That's why a show like Blue. I love Bluey. I think it's a fun show. We're sort of graduated from the bluey stages in terms of television, but it was always sort of a funny show communicated to parents on a different level than the kids. But in terms of music, there was a great show back in the day called Backyardigans that had really Funky actually good music. So the kids could, could watch it and, and I could listen. So I, I recommend you, you try those.
- [82:09]
D
So because we are those parents, our kids don't watch shows. Our kids never seen a movie or a video or anything like that that won't last forever, but it's lasting for now. So we don't, we don't show them videos and stuff in the car. Although my oldest boy has discovered he kind of likes sort of doo wop era Billy Joel like the Longest Time and songs like that. He really likes the Longest Time or Uptown Girl in those songs, which for me actually is about halfway between Sesame street and good music. So I think that's kind of, he's, he's moving in the right direction so we can handle, we can handle some Billy Joel. And he also likes, much to his credit, he likes early rock and roll, he's a big Chuck Berry fan and particularly my, my hometown guy, Buddy Holly he likes to listen to. So we can do that. But the triplets are, they're requiring some education still and they're really into the, to the Elmo stuff right now and.
- [83:06]
A
Well, that's good. Hold off on the video as long as you possibly can. David, do you do Spotify?
- [83:10]
B
I do Apple and I, I don't know that it has a wrap for podcast. I don't if there is one, I don't haven't seen it. But yeah, I, I, I watch or I listen to, you know, Dispatch. I do quality control, listens on ao. I listen to probably one out of every two or three just all the way through to see how they are. I listen to Ezra's and Ross's podcasts.
- [83:36]
A
I, Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat at.
- [83:39]
B
The time, your Times colleagues at the Times, Yes. But I have a kind of an array of podcasts or not news cycle oriented podcasts that I really enjoy. One is called Empire, which is a podcast that is pretty self explanatory about empires. It's throughout history and it's really, really interesting and fascinating. Another podcast called Revolutions, which is spoiler alert about revolutions throughout history. That's really quite good. Also, I believe wasn't he a guest recently on a Dispatch podcast or the remnant? Aaron McLean and he has a podcast called School of War just this week.
- [84:17]
A
Terrific conversation with Aaron. Love love School of War. Great podcast.
- [84:21]
B
School of War is tremendous. It's a tremendous podcast. I really, really urge people if you have any interest in milit at all. I, I feel like it's just fantastic. And Aaron has, you know, Aaron does a great job as a host. He. He is. Has on the ground experience as a Marine officer in Afghanistan, but it ranges far beyond just, you know, contemporary conflicts. Yeah, fantastic. Can't say enough good about that.
- [84:45]
A
Yeah, it jumps from history to the battlefield in Ukraine to brain science and the effects on. On war making. And Aaron, I mean, as people who listen to. I talked to him on the Remnant this week. People who listen to him on that podcast will have discovered he talks in normal human language. It is not. It is accessible for people who are not military historians.
- [85:09]
B
Yeah, yeah. Excellent podcast. And then I've had great fun. Nancy and I were driving back from Nashville to Chicago over Thanksgiving and driving through Blizzard, we got very much slowed down. So we listened to a true crime podcast. It's a. It's wild. It's called Unicorn Girl. And it's about a person who became a leady, a leading figure in the anti trafficking influencer space. And not all was what it seemed. And the stories are wild. Like it's one of these. It's one of these cases of a sort of a fabulous con artist who wasn't all the way a fabulist and con artist, which then makes the actual con that much more convincing, really fascinating. So I've got a bunch, you know, in addition to the Dispatch and Times collection, Remnant AO Dispod, we've got, you know, in Ezra and Ross and the Daily. I really do enjoy. And then also my favorite NBA podcast, Zach Lowe. Low Zach Lowe, if you want to, like, really get deep into the X's and O's of the NBA. And then, yeah, Bill Simmons. I got a whole sports podcast rabbit hole to go down. I'm a loyal listener of Bill Simmons podcast and the Ringer Podcast network. So, yeah, when you say it out loud, it sounds like we listen to a lot of podcasts.
- [86:37]
A
Yeah, well, I imagine we do.
- [86:39]
D
When people move to Hollywood and kind of go Hollywood, you know, you'll notice that parties, they'll start to like drop names. Like, just call people by their first names. Like, we're hoping Robert De Niro becomes Bobby and that sort of thing. And David is now doing that with New York Times, you know, Ezra and Ross and these people. Like, everybody's supposed to know who he's talking about there.
- [86:55]
B
These are all people y' all know. I mean, come on.
- [86:59]
A
Yeah.
- [87:01]
I can't listen to. I don't follow the NBA very closely, but I think I'm likely, with the drama surrounding my Milwaukee Bucks, likely to soon be following it even less than I I have followed it to this point. So my I think I have similar podcast listening habits to the three of you, adding in a dash more than a dash of fantasy football podcasts during the late summer and through the fall. At least as long as my fantasy teams are still competitive. But I found my so I don't do Spotify. I found my Apple Replay list on music this year very interesting. I have mentioned on this podcast before that I have fallen in love with a band called Goose. I found in my Apple Replay statistics just how much I have fallen in love with the band called Goose. I have some 10,000 minutes of listening to Goose this year and my second place band is a band called Orebolo, which is basically acoustic acoustic Goose and that accounts for another 3,000 minutes. So I've become a bit obsessive I would say. My third band is an acoustic duo called Penny and Sparrow out of Texas, then a band called Camp and Noah Khan is my fifth place. So a lot of sort of alt country indie rock in my listening habits this year. Thank you all for listening and indulging us as we talk about our Spotify wrap. I think we probably come off as a little bit unk, as my kids would say in discussing these trends.
- [88:40]
B
I don't even know what that is.
- [88:41]
A
Well then that makes you super Unk, David. Or maybe I'm unk because I'm pretending to know what unk means.
- [88:47]
B
Am I giving unk so Unk.
- [88:51]
A
If you look it up, it's not the University of North Carolina shortened and colloquial term for uncle or quote unquote old head. It is often used humorously to imply someone is getting old or acts out of touch with current trends. So we are potentially revealing our ankh status.
- [89:11]
D
You are the man from unk.
- [89:14]
A
The fact that we all know what that means reveals us to be an thanks all for joining us. We will talk to you again next week.
- [89:27]
If you like what we're doing here, there are a few easy ways to support support us. You can rate, review and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. And we hope you'll consider becoming a member of the Dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles. You can sign up@thedispatch.com join and if you use my promo Code Roundtable, you'll get one month free and help me win the ongoing, deeply scientific internal debate over which Dispatch podcast is the true flagship. And if ads aren't your thing, you can upgrade to a Premium membership. No ads, early access to all episodes, exclusive town halls with founders and more. Shout out to a few folks who joined recently as Premium members Ellen Hohenfeld, Mike Kibler, and Matt Chesky. We're glad to have you aboard. As always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns or corrections, you can email us@roundtablethedispatch.com we read everything, even the ones from those of you who probably need a presidential pardon. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in. And a big thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible. Max Miller, Victoria Holmes and Noah Hickey. We couldn't do it without you. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.
- [90:47]
D
Sam.