Ryan and Emily discuss Susie Wiles caught in lie, Bari Weiss Kirk interview flop, NYT mocks Epstein 'conspiracies', MIT scientist murdered, Trump Palestine travel ban.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Speaker 3 (00:33):
Donald Trump has responded to Susie Wilds shocking eleven interviews
with Vanity Fair that were reported out in a two
part series yesterday that absolutely stunned Washington. Everybody was trying
to figure out exactly what happened here. Trump was asked
by The New York Post if he stands by Susie
(00:54):
Wiles after she was quoted in Vanity Ferris, Hey, he
has a quote alcoholics personal. Trump basically is like, yep,
spot the lie sounds about right. Uh, And you know, ry,
I actually think of all of the Wilds quotes to
pull out and say this is problematic or super newsworthy.
(01:15):
That is the least of almost all of them in
this long two part series from Chris Whipple in Vanity Fair.
Because again, like he's self deprecating, and he understands what
she means by that. I think we kind of all
understand what she means by that. So of course it's
interesting to see her talking like that about her boss
(01:35):
in a liberal media outlet. But also I think it
just speaks to like Trump understands when you call him
things like that, Like what did he say to Ron?
Speaker 4 (01:46):
He's like, I've been called much.
Speaker 5 (01:47):
Worse than Yeah.
Speaker 6 (01:50):
Trump famously doesn't drink, but he has said and he
said again if he did, he would have. He has
an addictive personality. He likely would have become an alcoholic.
His brother was, which the formative experience in his own life.
He has the big personality and the wild mood swings
of some of that kind of person which Wiles, which
Wilds talked about, kind of like a dry drunk who
(02:13):
was never a drunk. I Caroline Levitt was asked how
what went wrong?
Speaker 5 (02:20):
Let's let's get a response on Fox here.
Speaker 7 (02:22):
I wanted to ask you, Caroline, about the two part
series of articles in Vanity Fair on Susie Wilds, the
chief of Staff, and the President's inner circle. I mean,
clearly there was a lot of cooperation between the White
House and Vanity Fair on this, because there's numerous interviews
that Susie Wilds had with the writer over the course
of pretty much a year. Portraits were taken of his
(02:44):
inner circle, including her JD Vance Stephen Miller. I mean,
it looks like the White House was working hand in
glove with Vanity Fair. And yet here's Susie Wiles's reaction
to the series of articles. Quote. The article published early
this morning is a disingenuously framed hit piece on me
and the finest president, white House, staff, and cabinet in history.
Significant context was disregarded, and much of what I and
(03:06):
others said about the team and the president was left
out of the story. I assume after reading it that
this was done to payt an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative
narrative about the president and our team. She goes on
after that you can read the full thing on X
But what happened, what went wrong?
Speaker 8 (03:23):
Well, look, I would just echo my boss Susie Wiles,
who is the best chief of staff in our nation's history,
working for the greatest president in our nation's history, and
that this was unfortunately another attempt at fake news by
a reporter who was acting disingenuously and really did take
the chief's words out of context. But I think most importantly,
(03:44):
the bias of omission was ever present throughout this story.
The reporter omitted all of the positive things that Susie
and our team said about the President and the inner
workings of the White House, And as Susie said today,
it's deeply unfortunate that happened, but it won't distract us
from making America great again. And President Trump has been
such a productive president and has accomplished more in eleven
(04:07):
months than most presidents do in eight years because of
his vision and his tenacity, which is executed on and
facilitated by our great White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles,
whom I'm very proud of to call a boss and
a mentor and a friend.
Speaker 6 (04:21):
The whole taken out of context, and the whole you
didn't include all the good things we did. Is so
silly because nobody reads the articles anyway, So even if
they included from the administrati's perspective all the amazing things
that they think that they did, people would just pull
out the quotes and circulate them on TikTok and Twitter
and talk about them well.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
And it's non responsive to John Roberts question, which is
basically like, why is the White House cooperaated?
Speaker 4 (04:48):
Why would Susie Wiles a.
Speaker 5 (04:48):
White House chief That's how Vanity Fair did the story.
Speaker 4 (04:51):
Exactly, yeah, exactly, Like you all.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
Are more aware than any administration in history how the
media and you are like probably the most sharp or ardent.
You're probably the most ardent opponents of the media in
history of presidential administrations.
Speaker 4 (05:10):
And that's a high bar.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
So why would you ever allow for eleven long interviews?
Why was your chief of staff, who, by the way,
in a stroke of complete irony, is the one person
who's seen as Trump's gatekeeper, the only person who has
successfully sort of kept Trump in line, Meaning you're not
letting random articles from like Gateway Pundit being printed out
(05:34):
and put it on put on his desk. You're not
letting random like Laura Lumer into the Oval office. Reportedly,
Suzy Wiws is the one Laura Lumer was at the
White House last night, by the way, but is the
one who sort of keeps that type of.
Speaker 4 (05:45):
Thing at arm's length.
Speaker 5 (05:47):
Was at the White House last night?
Speaker 4 (05:48):
Yeah, I think it was for Honka celebration.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
But anyway, going to moving on, Trump announced your engagement.
You haven't seen this video, We're actually not moving on.
Speaker 6 (05:57):
So we got yeah, and so he also announced like
banning post Indians from the country.
Speaker 5 (06:00):
Is this coincidence or great question?
Speaker 3 (06:03):
But this is the irony of ironies, is that Susie
Wiles is the person who is like the gatekeeper of
media access, and Susie Wiles is the person then who
was giving eleven interviews. My best theory on this is
that she, for a shreot of an operator she reportedly is,
probably thought she was off the record or would have
quote approval or something like that from the journalist. Whether
(06:24):
it was a miscommunication or naivete on her part, I
doubt that it was naivete. We're going to get into
a second one second about the validity of the quotes themselves.
But the Caroline Levitt point here is to emphasize there
was a massive circling of the wagons yesterday now we
could put this next element D three up on the screen.
This is all like cabinet secretaries, people from every corner
(06:48):
of Trump world going on the record in defense of
Suzie Wiles yesterday. And so there's this question hanging in
the air when Crystal and Sager covered the story because
the revelation that Susie Wilders had said all of these
things and spoken eleven times with this Vanity Fair.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
Reporter, is she out?
Speaker 3 (07:06):
Is she going to be out of a job? Because
Trump is going to look at this as disloyal. It's
going to look like a massive error in judgment from
the one person who is supposed to have the best
judgment in the administration. And then we pretty quickly, within
a couple of hours, got to answer that question and
it's no. And that question was important because that means
the Trump White House without Susie Wiles would likely look
more like the first administration. It would probably start to
(07:30):
become even more chaotic. If you think it's chaotic now,
it'd probably become even more chaotic. But circling the wagons happened.
Susie Wiles seems to be perfectly safe in her job
for now. Let's put D four up on the screen.
This gets into the validity of what actually happened here.
So Wiles said it was ridiculous in an interview with
(07:50):
The New York Times, that she would have commented on
elon musk and ketamine.
Speaker 5 (07:56):
Well, which is a lot of why is why is
that ridiculous?
Speaker 4 (07:59):
Yea sounds like something someone would.
Speaker 5 (08:01):
Comment on it.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
But anyway, go ahead, right, Well, the author of the
Vanity Fair story, according to The New York Times, played
a recording for The Times where Susie Wiles is heard
saying that quote.
Speaker 6 (08:14):
So shockingly the thing she was said, she was the
thing she was quoted saying. She actually did say.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
So if there are any people, so Wiles said, he
was quote an avowed ketemine user at quote odd odd duck,
she is.
Speaker 4 (08:27):
But all of these things is defensible.
Speaker 5 (08:31):
She calls him brilliant. The full quote is odd odd duck,
like a lot of brilliant people are, or something like that. Yes, yes,
he is an odd duck. Does anybody say that's a
normal duck?
Speaker 4 (08:41):
No, a normal duck.
Speaker 5 (08:42):
He's not a normal duck.
Speaker 4 (08:43):
You should make T shirts. Drops that T shirts. That's
the normal duck.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
But anyway, they so this is like, you can see
how Susie Wiles is in a probably very friendly back
and forth with a Vanity Fair reporter, maybe think she's
going to have quote, maybe think she's on background or something,
and is saying what everybody talks about privately when it
comes to Elon Musk over the course of the last year,
(09:08):
and it ends up in print. Tries to say it
didn't happen. So if there were any people in the
administration who were saying, we think some of these quotes
are fully made up, this revelation from The New York
Times that the author has the recordings.
Speaker 4 (09:23):
That's not ideal.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
Susie obviously said these things, but the question of the context,
I don't doubt, and I don't think either of us
doubts that some of these things probably are more sensational,
that there's context left out that might make them more
sensational than they actually were in conversation.
Speaker 4 (09:41):
But that is that's what journalists do.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
It's you have your principle, the White House chief of
Staff saying something, it's probably going to be sensationalized in print,
which is why you don't talk to Vanity Fair.
Speaker 4 (09:52):
If you're Susie.
Speaker 6 (09:52):
Wilds and A main thing we really just learned is
that she has the same thoughts as most Americans on
most of the these people, which like when it came
into JD Vance, for instance, she's like, yeah, I think
his conversion from like never Trumper to pro Trump was
kind of political in a way. It's like, okay, so
you're willing to just not lie about that that conversion.
(10:15):
When it comes to who's the who's the like complete
lunatic over at O m B.
Speaker 5 (10:22):
Yes, Russ Vote, She's like, yeah, that guy's a complete Look.
Speaker 4 (10:26):
She called him a zealot.
Speaker 5 (10:27):
She called him a hard right wing zealous Russ Vote.
Speaker 4 (10:29):
Yeah, Rust Vote is.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
I think anybody on the right would tell you Russ
Vote is a hard right wing zealot and MAGA people
would be like, hell, yeah he is.
Speaker 5 (10:37):
Last night he said he's shutting down.
Speaker 6 (10:41):
The climate the atmospheric Measurement agency that's based out of Colorado,
because he said they've been doing climate alarmism for too long.
Speaker 5 (10:50):
So like, yeah, this guy is a like a total
right wing revolutionary revolutionary.
Speaker 6 (10:57):
Yeah, counter revolutionary, but we'd have to have a revel
to have a counter revolutionary.
Speaker 5 (11:02):
He is.
Speaker 6 (11:02):
He's out there and and she and she agrees with that.
She said that we had a.
Speaker 4 (11:08):
Revolution after Woodrow Wilson. Okay, we don't know.
Speaker 6 (11:10):
She said she thought it was a little bit nuts
for Trump to pardon every single January sixther and she
was overruled on that.
Speaker 5 (11:16):
She said it was.
Speaker 6 (11:16):
Nuts for Musk to completely eliminate Doge and put at
risk all the people that were getting PEP far and
the AIDS treatment so like, and and that she immediately
then scrambled to do everything she could to rescue like
the best parts of of us A I D.
Speaker 5 (11:34):
So like we And we also got her defense.
Speaker 6 (11:40):
Of like RFK juniors, like he's a kook, but my
kook or something and whatever something something like that, and
that you know, you need somebody who's you know, Gunna.
Maybe is he pushing too hard? Yeah, maybe he is,
but you have to do that to like get back
to balance. So she doesn't really insight into kind of
like you know, who she is and what her what
her what her politics are. I wouldn't read too much
(12:01):
into the defenses though of her, because as up until
the second that she is chief of staff, she's the
gatekeeper and she's in charge, and if you work for her,
you praise her, you praise her out like whether you
agree with it or not, and maybe you praise her
republic and privately you're working to get her out.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
Although rebuttal to that just quickly is that if you
think Trump is pissed at her, you don't praise her.
So that's where I think there's it was safe to
read a bit into it is that they wouldn't have
gone out of it because it's Trump and then her,
And so if they were, if it was being telegraphed
to them that Trump was furious about what Zuozie did.
Speaker 6 (12:38):
Once Trump defended, then it's like, all right, let's all
get in the pools.
Speaker 4 (12:41):
Let's jump on in. Yep.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
And finally the I mean another reason you see Fox
asking Caroline Lovett, like what you clearly cooperated very closely
with Vanity Fair because they did these photo shoots and
then of course like made the photos look as unflattering
as is humanly possible. We can put this up on
the screen. Last element here, this is the Trump team.
(13:06):
You see James Blair, you see Dan Scavino, Stephen Miller,
Susie Wiles, Carolyn Levitt, jd Vance, Marco Rubio. It's interesting
to me that you have two cabinet secretaries in this
picture with like staffers. Not that Stephen Miller is just
a mere staffer, but he is a staffer. He's not
in the cabinet. So I thought that was actually kind
of interesting in and of itself. I mean, it's clearly
(13:28):
Trump's inner circle. Among people who are at the White House,
they compare it to yes, we do This immediately reminded
people of another photo shoot.
Speaker 6 (13:38):
Ryan, What do you think do we have any staffers
there who we got in the back?
Speaker 5 (13:42):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (13:42):
We do, so we've got Actually this is mostly you're right,
this is mostly.
Speaker 6 (13:49):
Well Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, vice president President.
Speaker 5 (13:55):
That's any carters you call.
Speaker 6 (13:58):
Stafford who was head of National you know NSA, depends
on what point in the presidency?
Speaker 5 (14:02):
This was right? Yeah, what Andy Carter? And then who's the.
Speaker 4 (14:06):
Other chief of say Andy Carter's chief of staff.
Speaker 5 (14:07):
Who's the other dude there?
Speaker 4 (14:09):
Oh George Tennant?
Speaker 5 (14:11):
Oh? Ci yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:13):
So but look at that power poses all around.
Speaker 6 (14:16):
Uh did I did one of those for Politico magazine?
No way, intercept there's a profile of us in like
twenty nineteen, after like the AOC election.
Speaker 4 (14:26):
Really is it still around?
Speaker 5 (14:27):
Oh yeah, yeah, gon.
Speaker 6 (14:28):
Google like Politico Intercept twenty nineteen or something.
Speaker 4 (14:31):
It's a dangerous thing to pose for.
Speaker 5 (14:34):
It was. It was fine. We look, Maddie was still
with us. So he's in the picture.
Speaker 4 (14:39):
Oh I see it. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
You're doing the crossed arms and everything.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
That's just something funny. We're adding this in post.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
You look intimidating, right, yeah, look out, I'm scared if
you're a corporate democrat in twenty nineteen, you were.
Speaker 4 (14:53):
This guy's got his sleeves rolled up.
Speaker 5 (14:55):
Yeah, they asked me to roll the sleeves up. I
was like, all right, they asked you to roll the
sleeve though, but I don't do that. They're like, I
don't care, let's do it.
Speaker 4 (15:02):
Oh my gosh. Yeah, I mean it's a dangerous. I
don't know if you got this.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
Trump in the Oval office was when he had the
miracle the guys from Minnesota, the Miracle hockey team, and
the other day they had him put on a cowboy
hat and he was like, there is a man.
Speaker 4 (15:16):
Named Michael Dukakis. It's like they put on the hat.
Didn't that go over him?
Speaker 5 (15:22):
Well?
Speaker 3 (15:22):
Yeah, So he's very conscious of these image questions, which
we all know.
Speaker 4 (15:26):
And by the way, that the last point I'll.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
Make about this big story is if you don't think
people of the White House believe some of these decisions
are crazy, then you have not been paying enough attention.
Speaker 4 (15:39):
You do not understand the right in Trump's under Trump's.
Speaker 3 (15:43):
Republican Party, because the dissension privately about a lot of
these policies is constant.
Speaker 6 (15:50):
And she was like, I think I thought his terrif
ideas were wrong, and like, yes, I didn't want him
to roll it out and it hasn't worked.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
And sometimes, by the way, sometimes you see that playing
out on camera. There was disagreement in the Trump administration
at the time publicly between Elon Musk and I mean,
Jameson Greer others about the tariff policy. And so the
story it's very interesting to see how Wiles is describing it.
It's fascinating to see that she did this to a journalist.
Speaker 4 (16:18):
But just know this stuff is.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
Of course what people are thinking behind closed doors, and
you can make up your judgment about whether or not
that's good or bad, but it's happening.
Speaker 6 (16:27):
Last point for people who might be confused Chris Whipple
is he's most famous as the author of a book
on White House chiefs of staff. Yes, And so if
I had to guess, she maybe thought that this was
coming out after her tenure was over, and maybe her tenure.
Speaker 5 (16:44):
Is about to be over.
Speaker 4 (16:44):
That's so good. Interesting.
Speaker 6 (16:46):
And I think that their first conversation was pre inauguration,
And I think as they continued to have conversations and
no article came out, despite her saying kind of controversial things,
she got more and more comfortable that, oh, yeah, this
is this has come later.
Speaker 5 (17:00):
This is not a problem for you now.
Speaker 6 (17:01):
So I'm just going to be completely honest and so
that I can get my perspective, give my perspective to
like the historian of American chiefs of.
Speaker 5 (17:09):
Staff of presidents.
Speaker 6 (17:10):
Yeah, he's not just a normal journalist from Vanity Fair
like that's the thing he's known for. So's she's speaking
to her own legacy.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
Yeah, she agrees to give a book interview. And Kushner
has recommended this guy's books, by the way, So that's
one of the rumors of how maybe this happened that
is going around is did Kushner make everyone feel comfortable?
Speaker 5 (17:31):
She probably has also talked to former chiefs of staff.
Speaker 6 (17:33):
Yeah, like what we should know about the job, and
they would have spoken well of him because.
Speaker 5 (17:38):
She probably will in a year.
Speaker 4 (17:40):
Principles, you know this probather than I do.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
But principles get afraid about book interviews because you never
know how it's actually going to be used and what
context is going to come out in.
Speaker 4 (17:47):
And so that actually seems like a pretty.
Speaker 5 (17:49):
Good theory too.
Speaker 6 (17:53):
Let's have some fun with Barry Weiss. So, first of all,
the New York Times and we'll talk about this later
in the segment. New York Times did it like the
thirty thousand word or something article.
Speaker 4 (18:01):
New York Magazine. I was wrong, So this is New York.
Speaker 6 (18:03):
New York Times did a Jeffrey Epstein piece, So we'll
talk about that in the back half of this segment.
But yes, New York Magazine is out with a new
profile of Barry Weiss's return from the wilderness of Los Angeles,
and we'll also talk about her town Hall on Saturday
Night with Eric Kirk and how poorly the ratings turned out.
(18:26):
But so tell us about this New York Magazine profile
of Barry Weiss, and like, what do we learn about
the way that she went from effectively fired but sort
of quitting, pushed out of the New York Times, and
now at the top of the kind of world of journalism.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
Yeah, and if people don't remember, Barry Weiss was pushed
out of the New York Times because she was writing
journalism that made people uncomfortable over me too stuff. There
were constant leaks about the New York Times of the
New York Times, like internal slack channel of people just
like gossiping about Barry because honestly, a lot of it
(19:09):
started with what she was writing on me Too. And
Bill Maher in this New York Magazine article talks about
how he read that me two piece that Barry wrote
it went pretty viral at the time, and said, I'm
gonna make this woman famous. So he's sort of trying
to take credit for Barry wise to New York Magazine.
But when it all started to crescendo was after the
New York Times published that Tom Cotton op ed then
(19:31):
retracted the Tom Cotton OpEd the bunch of staffers.
Speaker 5 (19:33):
At the time he said send in.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
The guard They put the headline on it that said
send in the troops. So it's June of twenty twenty,
and it said we should use the Insurrection Act to
quell violent protests, did specifically say violent protest. New York
Times staffers posted in Unison that the piece put black
New York Times staffers in danger. It became a very
very twenty twenty controversy, and James Bennett gets fired. Barry
(19:57):
kind of self deport after that too. Ends up with
Nellie Bowles, who was also at The New York Times,
a reporter at the New York Times but married now
they have kids. They were in Los Angeles for a
really long time, and what we learned from the story
is that her arc at the Times. She'd been at
the Journal before her arc at the Times actually piqued
(20:20):
the interest of some people in Los Angeles when she
was originally blogging on her subset called common Sense, which
turned into the Free Press. And this is interesting because
there were salon dinners happening reportedly in LA and I
had heard about some of this, I didn't know the
extent of it with CEOs and Hollywood.
Speaker 4 (20:39):
Actors, where Barry was being sort.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
Of commoditized as the hot dinner guest in LA. There
was a joke on curb about it at the time
actually too that some people might remember, but.
Speaker 4 (20:52):
She was.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
People were convening Salon type dinners to have Barry talk
about the stifling a free expression and censorship.
Speaker 4 (21:02):
And what was going on with the left. And this
is a lot of rich people. So you could kind
of see then how.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
This congealed and built to twenty twenty four and then
to the Ellison deal, which brought in the Free Press.
Because what was happening in the background is as there
were struggle sessions literally happening at so many of these corporations,
as you would imagine, there was some dissent, and it
(21:29):
seemed as though because you had Barry Weiss, this centrist
social I don't even know what you would say. I
would call her sort of socially liberal, but what does
that even mean, I don't know. But you have this
like kind of centrist lesbian from mainstream media that made
people feel comfortable venting their frustrations with the left, and
(21:53):
that builds into common sense becoming big, getting major investors
at the Free Press. And so the New York Magazine
piece tells that story and shows the extent to which
it was bringing in extremely rich people, extremely powerful people
all around Barry, and it helps us, I think, contextualize
(22:15):
what she means to Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, which
is she became the go.
Speaker 5 (22:22):
To and yes.
Speaker 6 (22:24):
And her early career and her college activism was around
Israel Palestine, where she led a bunch of campaigns to
try to get Palestinian professors fired, and a lot of
people remembered that when she emerged at as this like
leading cancel culture voice, Like wait a minute, the same
(22:47):
person who was like literally leading cancel culture before it
was a thing trying to get people fired for their
political views, is now saying that you should not try
to get people fired for their political views. But she never,
in the twenty twenty to twenty three range. Never, she
didn't make Zionism or canceling Palestinian professors remotely part of
(23:10):
her politics.
Speaker 5 (23:10):
No one bit It wasn't.
Speaker 6 (23:12):
And you can go through her like social media and
her writing at the time, it's basically absent from there.
And so the thing that the rich people in Los
Angeles were really glomming onto was like, oh, yeah, somebody
who looks young and liberal but saying things that I
agree with, and then when they find out later it's
not Ben Shapiro October seventh, that she's also like a
(23:35):
hard core supporter of Israel and will bend all journalistic
norms to defend Israel. They're like, well, that's a wonderful bonus,
and so they got the whole package there.
Speaker 5 (23:47):
So then Ellison.
Speaker 6 (23:48):
Winds up getting lunch with her or whatever they meet,
and she's like and that he talks about poaching her
to come to CBS if he ends up buying it,
and to her credit, she's like, cool, I'll do it.
I'll running right. I'm going to be the boss.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
And she reports to him, not to the news division
like she is the head, reporting just to.
Speaker 6 (24:10):
Him and taking a very unusual turn for an executive,
turning the camera around right on her because she thinks
that what the American right apparently once is more people
like Barry Weiss on the camera.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
David Elison, by the way, to just quickly before we
move on to the ratings, I think that's where we're
about to go.
Speaker 4 (24:28):
He I pulled his FEC record last night.
Speaker 3 (24:31):
He was in twenty twenty four a big DEM donor,
and yeah, and it just makes the point that you were,
because apparently it was in twenty twenty four when he
met with Barry and started talking about whether they could
do some type of merger. And in the piece that's
mentioning how she's getting introduced to Jeff Bezos and I mean,
some of the richest people who have ever walked the
face of the earth, and they are fascinated by her.
Speaker 4 (24:54):
And it just makes.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
So much more sense that you have this one hundred
and one hundred and fifty million dollar deal between Paramount
and the Free Press, because she is not She's seen
as like this giant among journalists by these people who
just are I think she's the best thing since sliced bread,
because they had some well founded fears about illiberalism creeping
(25:19):
into the mainstream. The Tom cottonnap ed was legitimately a
bad decision. Retracting that was legitimately a bad decision from
The New York Times, And so she then becomes the
focal point of that angst. And it makes I think
that the story helps everyone makes sense. They kind of
we had this fuzzy knowledge that this was happening, but
(25:39):
it really fleshes out exactly how it was happening.
Speaker 6 (25:43):
Yeah, and so she comes to CBS News Saturday night.
She did a town hall. There was an Army Navy
game leading into the town hall, and ratings into it
absolutely nose dived and then has climbed again after the
town hall was over.
Speaker 5 (26:04):
Glenn Greenwald can put up E two here.
Speaker 6 (26:07):
Making the point CBS News has seven million subscribers on YouTube.
Beyond the anemic ratings, they also put Barry's Primetimes special
on their YouTube channel and it has a grand toll
of seventy two thousand views after two days, which, in
fairness to Barry, is ten times more than most free
press videos get. He also had said, I actually didn't
(26:29):
think it was possible to take one of the three
major TV networks and in primetime drag it down to
the lowliest ratings level of Yet Barry Weiss in her
first on camera special, managed to accomplish this remarkable feat.
And he was sharing a Dylan Byer's article there which
we can put up This is E three. So the
(26:51):
numbers coming in one point so one point nine total viewers.
One point nine million total viewers is across streaming on
broadcast networks. This is CBS's framing of it. Is up
thirty two percent boost in the CBS timeslot outpacing CBS
seasons at eight for Saturdays at eight pm, But if
(27:14):
you compare it to a year ago, it was down substantially.
Speaker 5 (27:18):
Now, I will give her credit.
Speaker 6 (27:19):
It says one hundred and eighty five million views on
social Now a bunch of those views are made up
oh social views.
Speaker 5 (27:24):
Instagram and Twitter, but they're bullshit.
Speaker 6 (27:26):
Even let's say it's ten percent of that. Like we
covered it, like we talked about it. Yeah, it was
on social media like nothing else that CBS News has
ever done.
Speaker 5 (27:36):
It like or CBS has done at.
Speaker 6 (27:38):
Eight pm on a Saturday is actually making hey on
social media. Now, most people were making fun of it,
so I don't know if that's what people were.
Speaker 4 (27:49):
Really talking about it.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
I mean, it definitely had people engaging in like discourse.
Speaker 4 (27:55):
Erka Kirk, Yeah, I mean it was definitely. It was
definitely newsy.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
But the question of whether you're able to draw people
back to CBS with newsiness, that's the problem she's supposed
to be solving, right not I mean, she's supposed to
be doing like good journalism and the like, but also
that's supposed to be a magnet for more and more eyeballs,
and that's where you see them boosting those social numbers.
(28:19):
But we all know, and I'm sure their executives know,
though I'm constantly surprised by how gullible some of these
folks are. That Twitter just counts like people scrolling past
it as a view sometimes, and sure it's the same
is true on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, that you don't have
to actually tune into much of it. It could be
a couple of seconds to count it as a view.
(28:40):
So are you monetizing and are you, like, is your
influence scaling up with those numbers. That's a huge, huge question,
And that's I think what Glenn is getting at. It's you,
you can say, season to day, going up with a
big interview like that, people would probably expect bigger numbers
(29:00):
for such a big get. I wasn't surprised by those
numbers at all. I just Erica Kirk is still not
It's not like getting the president.
Speaker 6 (29:09):
She's everywhere too. Didn't she hosts The Five? I don't know,
she like guest hosted The Five? Like, there's no shortage
of Erica Kirk contents. If that's your thing. We are
running late, so we'll try to do this real quickly.
But if you put up E four new like investigation
(29:30):
by The New York Times, it runs like tens of
thousands of words called scams, schemes, ruthless cons the untold
story of how Jeffrey Epstein got rich. Now, the point
of this seemed to be to knock down conspiracy theories
one of their lines in here, in his first two
decades of business, we found that Epstein was less a
(29:51):
financial genius than a prodigious manipulator and liar. Abundant conspiracy
theories hold that Epstein worked for spy services or ran
a lucrative blackmail operation. But we found a more prosaic
explanation for how he built a fortune.
Speaker 5 (30:08):
Classic New York Times formulation.
Speaker 6 (30:11):
Abundant conspiracy theorists say X, but we found a thing
that is completely non responsive to that thing, Like I
don't know anybody that's claiming that his blackmail operation was lucrative.
Do you know, Like I've never seen somebody say the
way he made his money.
Speaker 5 (30:29):
Was through a blackmail operation.
Speaker 6 (30:31):
If you want to talk to the conspiracy theorist at
the point, the blackmail is on behalf of intelligence agencies
and also helps him stay out of jail for all
of the different crimes that he's committing, Like that would
be the theory behind the blackmail operation that I've never
even seen, the theory that he was shaking people down.
(30:51):
Now I think Leon Black actually like maybe like there
might be a little bit of like, Okay, I'll pay
forty million a year because you know what we've been doing,
and just we're just hypothesizing here, not talking not not
we're all and we're talking all in the realm of allegations.
But that so anyway, so nothing that they found here
(31:13):
to me disproves that he worked for spy services.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
I was so curious to get your take on this
because I saw people bouncing the story around social media saying.
Speaker 4 (31:24):
We learned so much from it and closed.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
And it's okay, So it does it fill in some details?
Speaker 4 (31:30):
Yes, absolutely, it fills in some details.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
Yeah, it's interesting stuff about people who were investing with
him early in his career, but it absolutely you get
through all of these thousands of words and it's not
case closed at all about how he made.
Speaker 4 (31:44):
So much money.
Speaker 3 (31:45):
The implication of the suggestion, or in some case, the accusation,
is that his fortune was kind of from uh siphoning
off funds from people like by the way, I'm sure
that is Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure that's true. It
doesn't It still does not ex blane how he went
from a fail like he was basically pushed out of
(32:06):
bear Stearns, and this article explains that, and then how
you keep failing up and up and up. It doesn't
actually ultimately explain that at all. That still remains. If anything,
it's more of a mystery after you see how many
people were screwed over by him, powerful people were screwed
over by him in his early years and actually throughout
his entire career. Seemingly, it doesn't make any more sense,
(32:27):
I don't think at least.
Speaker 6 (32:28):
Yeah, And so the Epstein Transparency Act kicks in Friday.
We're supposed to get a big release of information, will
probably come five o'clock on the Friday before the Christmas break,
but that'll be interesting to see what's in there. We
have to cut this short, but two things I would
point to, and we'll have a story on this hopefully
by Friday, because then we can talk about it on
(32:49):
the Friday at dropsite.
Speaker 5 (32:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (32:52):
Where so two things I would flag in here that
are interesting that raised more questions than they answer, so
he says they started, so he's talking about this, He
said that year, the couple traveled to England. While they
were there, Hale took Epstein to visit a rich acquaintance
of hers, Nick Lease, at his family's countryside manor. There
(33:12):
they met Nick Nick's father, Douglas Lease, a defense contractor
with extensive connections in the arms industry in the British government.
Speaker 5 (33:20):
He took an immediate liking to Epstein.
Speaker 6 (33:22):
Sorry, we've been working on focuses significantly on this Douglas
Lee's character. Go ahead and look up Douglas Lease. If
you're in the New York Times, you think it's sufficient
to just tell your your readership that he's a quote
defense contractor with extensive connections in the arms industry, You're
gonna have to wait for drops on News to tell
you a little bit more about who Douglas Lease is
and who these connections were in the arms industry. And
(33:45):
you know who he did is defense quote unquote defense
contracting with.
Speaker 5 (33:51):
You won't be surprised to.
Speaker 4 (33:52):
Was it Venezuela.
Speaker 5 (33:54):
It was not Venezuela.
Speaker 6 (33:55):
A lot of it going on in the Middle East. Separately,
they they say, and this is a useful revelation.
Speaker 5 (34:04):
That quote.
Speaker 6 (34:06):
Back in New York, he joined forces with John Stanley Pottinger,
a lawyer who had recently left a senior post in
the Justice Department. Epstein, Pottinger, and Pottinger's brother rented a
penthouse office in the Hotel Saint Marie's on Central Park South.
The broker told us that Epstein initially stiffed her on
the commission, and then they kind of just move on.
(34:26):
Who was Pottinger a central figure in the Iran contra,
in which the US worked with Israel to send weapons
to Iran in exchange from cash that they would eagerly
send to the contrast, we'll get it, We'll get a
lot more into that.
Speaker 4 (34:42):
So Robert Maxwell, So they've all.
Speaker 6 (34:45):
Kind of Maxwell, We're tight. So we've connected you. So
New York Times connected him to Lease, which he had
denied a connection to Douglas Lease. By the way, they
don't even mention that in the past he had angrily
rejected any connection to Douglas Lease and said maybe he
knew the kid, and there's a reason he would want
to angrily reject a connection to Douglas Leaves. And then
(35:07):
he's got him connected to a key figure in around contry.
But to the New York Times, this is more prosaic.
Speaker 4 (35:19):
Yes, just yep.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (35:21):
I'm glad you're doing reporting because when I saw the
line defense contract goes like this is again not answering questions.
Speaker 4 (35:27):
You are creating questions like yes.
Speaker 3 (35:31):
Because I clicked on the link from somebody who had
posted and been like lots of questions answered here, and
as I'm reading it, I'm like, no, lots of questions raised.
Speaker 4 (35:38):
Yeah, what are you talking about? All right?
Speaker 3 (35:42):
Looking forward to that draft site report and hopefully we'll
be able to talk about it on the Friday Show.
Let's move on to updates in the Brown University shooting
that left two students dead. Cash Betel announced yesterday they're
offering a reward.
Speaker 4 (35:56):
We can put this video up on the screen. You'll
watch it. You can.
Speaker 3 (35:59):
You can see that put out a video of a
person of interest in that shooting at Brown University from
the weekend. They have now announced a fifty thousand dollars reward.
You can see the person. If you're listening to this,
you can see the person walking around different parts of
the Brown campus in the seemingly of the Brown campus
in the daylight. Person is dressed in all black. Can't
(36:23):
really make out details of who it is, but that's
where the FBI announced yesterday actually they have this person
of interest.
Speaker 4 (36:34):
It came though, as we learned.
Speaker 3 (36:36):
Next element up on the screen that MIT, which is
of course in Boston, not all that far well, Cambridge,
if we're going to do that thing, not all that
far from Providence. A professor at MIT who was a
nuclear scientist. Essentially, it was shot to death at home
in Brookline. So huge, huge update potentially in the Brown story.
(37:02):
We have no evidence that this is connected or not.
But Brian Bryan, as you saw, I was combining Brown
and Ryan the Brown was the next video we put
this up on the screen over at Brown.
Speaker 4 (37:13):
You see the FBI agent. I don't want to laugh at.
Speaker 3 (37:19):
This ride because they're just scraping the snow here looking
for evidence, and they're like tripping around as they're kicking
the snow looking for evidence. So I'm sure that we're
going to get to the bottom this soon enough. But
as you put earlier, you either have two people on
the loose or one person who has now killed three
(37:40):
people right on the loose in New England.
Speaker 6 (37:42):
And so the FBI scrambling is now offering a fifty
thousand dollars reward or presumably you can get a private
flight to Vegas with cash. Bettel valued at fifty thousand dollars.
He recently appeared on Katie Miller's podcast.
Speaker 4 (37:58):
Yeah jocol last night.
Speaker 5 (38:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (38:02):
Apparently it was recorded before the Brown shooting.
Speaker 5 (38:04):
Okay, in any event, it's about him and his little his.
Speaker 3 (38:08):
Girlfriend, right, tell them maybe to hold the episode until afterwards.
Speaker 5 (38:12):
Or maybe don't do that at all, Like, what are
you doing?
Speaker 4 (38:15):
Well, there's that too.
Speaker 6 (38:16):
Yes, when he was appointed, I said good, because I
think it's good to have an incompetent boob running an
agency that does a lot of bad things. I now
am regretting that, Like, apparently you do need some level
of competence at the head of this agency.
Speaker 5 (38:36):
Like come on, well, in the case of.
Speaker 3 (38:38):
Brown, if this Mit shooting turns out murder turns out
to be connected to the Brown murder mass shooting, you
have a situation where in Brown, the authorities were saying,
first of all, Patel said they had He said they
had detained, they had somebody who was a suspect and
detention and it was kind of it was like a
(39:00):
long ex post and the tone of it was sort
of we got the guy, And maybe I'm being uncharitable
and reading too much into that, but that was the
tone that I took from Patel's post on X and
the authorities in Providence were basically like, everything is fine.
Speaker 4 (39:14):
Everyone should feel safe.
Speaker 3 (39:15):
So if it turns out that the same person shot
then murdered another professor at this time at MIT so
someone else from a campus, they're going to look even
dumber for trying to assuage the fears of the community,
which we're like learning as.
Speaker 4 (39:35):
The person is still in the loose actually should.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
Be that people should be afraid in Providence because they
don't have the person.
Speaker 6 (39:42):
And obviously all human life is precious. Nuno Learero appears
to be like one of the most brilliant guys. You
can imagine like just a brain that it just just
has like an inconceivable level of intelligence in it. And
so like tributes are pouring in from people talking about
the you know what he will now be on what
(40:04):
he will now be unable to contribute to society is
and it's something we can't even conceive of because He's
one of those kinds of people who is able to
you know, think beyond you know other you know, other
mere mortals.
Speaker 4 (40:19):
And obviously there's speculation happening right now that this is.
Speaker 3 (40:24):
Foreign policy related when you have a leading nuclear science science.
Speaker 6 (40:27):
Yeah, according to according to Israel, he is a completely
legitimate target, like all nuclear scientists, to them are are
legitimate targets, which is which I hope that underscore is
just how barbaric it is mm hmm to be bombing
nuclear scientists and their families.
Speaker 3 (40:44):
At will will obviously keep everybody updated on the story,
because if it's connected to the Brown case, if it's
connected to any foreign policy.
Speaker 4 (40:51):
It's huge.
Speaker 3 (40:52):
Uh. And so we're going to follow it really really closely. Ryan,
should we move on to Gaza.
Speaker 6 (41:02):
So, first of all, in a kind of out of nowhere,
Trump issued a new travel band expanding the list of
countries to include the Palestinian Authority. So putting people from
the Palestinian Authority on the travel ban has an added
layer of cruelty because they don't have their own country,
(41:23):
Like it's it's one thing if you ban people from
Chad from traveling, they can they can be in Chad
but in the Palestinian authority if if like they are,
they may be at extreme risk from the occupying country.
They don't have their own sovereignty to fall to fall
back on. And so we'll be we'll be exploring that
and the consequences of it, you know, more more thoroughly
(41:46):
and in the days, in the days to come. But
today I wanted to talk about living conditions in Gaza
in a way that goes beyond the kind of normal
headlines that we get. We had a story yesterday and
drops that you could it up g two here. The
headline tells it all garbage is poisoning Gaza. And this
(42:06):
is by Abdel Katter Saba, who's a videographer and photographer
in Gaza, who works with our editor Shreef Abdel Caduz,
who co authored uh this piece. And the footage and
the photos that will be showing you here of of
the trash pile up is from Abdul Cotter Saba. So
(42:26):
you can roll the roll the next element. I'll just
read some of this piece here. Over the past two years,
Gaza's civilian infrastructure has been systematically destroyed by the Israeli military,
including waste management services, is what you're looking at. Here
are is a transfer station and in a typical this
is the Yarmook waste transfer site. So typically at a
(42:48):
transfer site, people bring in garbage and then it gets
transferred to its final resting place or its incineration place,
or a.
Speaker 5 (42:58):
Landfill or what have you.
Speaker 6 (43:00):
The final waste treatment facility where this transfer site would transfer.
The waiste too, is now behind the yellow line that
Israel has drawn, and so they're they're not taking anymore.
So every day more and more trucks coming in, and
(43:21):
it just it just piles up. You see children playing
on it there, you see people setting up their tents.
You know, you're absolutely right right next to it. The
quotes that uh that Abdol Katsava got from people who
are living there are just just horrifying. One one person
(43:45):
told them that this is my tent and this is
the garbage dump I'm living across from. We don't sleep,
not at night nor during the day because of the garbage.
The smell comes at us constantly, and our children are
all ill. They suffer from severe headaches. We're dealing with
an infestation of germs and insects. Another, yeah, you can
(44:06):
absolutely understand it. Another person said, we were displaced from
the city of bay Leahea and the northern Gaza Strip,
and we came to Gaza City. We found that the
displaced were crowded in every corner of the strip. We
were forced to live among garbage in the Yarmouth garbage
site of the Gaza Municipality. We had thought we'd stay
somewhere safe, somewhere decent, but we were forced here. Nowhere
(44:28):
else to go. We were forced to stay at this dump.
I'm suffering because of this dump, suffering from the germs,
the rats and dogs. Every day I find twenty or
thirty rats inside my tent, right inside of it. I
don't even have a tent fit for human life.
Speaker 5 (44:42):
So that is.
Speaker 6 (44:44):
In the best of scenarios. Like that's when the weather
is nice, the sun is in the sky. The last
couple of weeks have seen have seen the opposite. Maybe
we can roll to g five. Here you can this
young kid giving a tour of the tent village that
(45:06):
is now constructed. You don't have to be able to
understand Arabic to understand the absolute fury at what the
world is delivering. Here as the wind blows, you know,
people have been living now three years. So you can
see garbage blowing into their tent. You can see their
(45:27):
their tents blowing away. It's a third winter that people
are going into with these tents, while sufficient supplies for
over a million people are sitting outside of Gaza, just
outside in trucks.
Speaker 5 (45:44):
Just outside this is Al Shifa Hospital, So even.
Speaker 6 (45:47):
The hospitals are we're flooding from this, from this, from
this storm, and if so and so, the just just
to underline that supplies for more than a million people
facing these conditions are in trucks outside of Gaza. We
(46:08):
have a ceasefire, we have a ceasefire agreed to. They're
supposed to allow that in. They're just simply not allowing
it in. We talked to the head of a relief
organization who's in Gaza, and he said his theory is
that they're trying to make it just utterly unlivable. And
they've you know, they've they've offered to open the Rafa
(46:29):
border in one direction out to say like look and
feels like it's like okay, look, if you were holding
on hope for the war to end and then you
were going to stay, what we're trying to do is
destroy that hope because now the war has technically ended,
yet your life is just unlivable, So why don't you
(46:51):
just leave like that? That is the message that he
believes that Israel Netyahu's sending.
Speaker 3 (46:57):
With this well, and that's one of my questions forream
was going to be. Is the US involvement in it's
the best word for this being the shrpa over this
peace process? What is the what is the US involvement
right now looking like? And is this then also a
(47:21):
US strategy to squeeze gosins for the raising of the
strip into Mara Gaza or whatever?
Speaker 6 (47:29):
Right, I mean, you would you would think it has
to be the policy is what it's doing. The US military,
you know, they set up this coordination center with Israel
to try to deconflict during the ceasefire, which Israel breaks
effectively every single day and announces that it has broken it.
But we so we the US military sent some of
(47:50):
our top logistics experts that we have and the US
military does have like when it comes to logistics, like
they have been taking it extremely seriously for two hundred
year and have some of the best at it. So
we sent our best and Brightest to this coordination center
to figure out how is it that we're not able
to get the supplies in and get the supplies distributed
(48:12):
to the population within weeks. They all left because they
were like, oh, this is not a logistics problem, this
is a political problem. And the military said this publicly
that the problem is the Israelis have a list of
things that they call dual use, dual military use that
they won't let in. And the list includes tent poles, pencils, paper,
(48:38):
most like cooking. Fuel is almost non existent at this point,
and so they're like, what you don't need us. We're
not the answer to this problem. The logistics are solvable.
The political problem is what you need to deal.
Speaker 4 (48:53):
With those images.
Speaker 3 (48:56):
If people were just listening to this, go ahead and
find the YouTube video of the segment, because you can
see the proximity of the tents to the garbage and
it's horrifying.
Speaker 6 (49:06):
Yeah, and just getting worse every single day as it
piles up and piles up. Meanwhile, there was a I
don't know if you saw this, there was an AI
image going around of a fake account who's trying to
just raise money on chuffed saying like, look at my
family and it's like twelve Palestinians in a tent, but
the water's up to their waist, which is of course
(49:29):
is impossible because the tents are not water tight, so
you're not getting like and there wouldn't be that pactent,
but it was.
Speaker 5 (49:35):
It was other than that. Wasn't the water. You look
at it, it's like, wow, that looks real.
Speaker 6 (49:41):
So you're going to see a lot of and it
to excess credit, it did have a note on it
that said this is AI generated because they could figure
out with the hands and stuff like that and also
the water level. But like so people like AI is
going in and just exploiting this misery.
Speaker 3 (49:56):
Yeah, and obviously I know you're reporting follows as close.
But everyone is happy that the war is over, you know,
humane people are happy that the war is over. But
on the other side of that, the political incentives to
keep an eye on the humanitarian crisis are obviously diminished
(50:17):
at this point, right here in the US and all
over the world.
Speaker 5 (50:21):
Yes, indeed awful. So yeah, so we will be back on.
Speaker 6 (50:28):
Friday, and then we'll have we'll roll out it for
a couple of weeks.
Speaker 5 (50:32):
Two weeks six. We're gonna have like pre tape segments.
Speaker 6 (50:35):
Yesterday I interviewed Nathaniel Raymond, who's a Yale humanitarian researcher
at on Sudan.
Speaker 5 (50:42):
I think we'll post his video.
Speaker 6 (50:45):
That was an incredible and sobering, intense interview with this
guy talking about like like as as bad as things
are in Gaza, like the in Sudan, like the number
of people getting killed and starved, like we're if it
continues like this, we're going to be at Rwanda levels,
(51:05):
and then we'll for twenty years, we'll have people talking
about why nobody did anything.
Speaker 3 (51:11):
I'll look forward to watching that. Yeah, we have some
great pre recorded content coming out right.
Speaker 5 (51:15):
I interviewed Emily, I.
Speaker 3 (51:16):
Interviewed Ryan, so that'll be fun. And we will have
a Friday show this week. So this isn't us signing
off until twenty twenty six. You will still get another
dose of US on Friday, and then some pre recorded
doses of US over the holiday. But I'm looking forward
to being back here in the new year. Ryan Wednesday,
the first Wednesday of the new year is going to
(51:37):
be January seven, all right, So it's going to be
a while before we're back in the studio.
Speaker 6 (51:43):
All right, stay safe, we'll see you then see yeah.
Hey, guys, Saga and Crystal here.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
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Speaker 3 (00:33):
Donald Trump has responded to Susie Wilds shocking eleven interviews
with Vanity Fair that were reported out in a two
part series yesterday that absolutely stunned Washington. Everybody was trying
to figure out exactly what happened here. Trump was asked
by The New York Post if he stands by Susie
(00:54):
Wiles after she was quoted in Vanity Ferris, Hey, he
has a quote alcoholics personal. Trump basically is like, yep,
spot the lie sounds about right. Uh, And you know, ry,
I actually think of all of the Wilds quotes to
pull out and say this is problematic or super newsworthy.
(01:15):
That is the least of almost all of them in
this long two part series from Chris Whipple in Vanity Fair.
Because again, like he's self deprecating, and he understands what
she means by that. I think we kind of all
understand what she means by that. So of course it's
interesting to see her talking like that about her boss
(01:35):
in a liberal media outlet. But also I think it
just speaks to like Trump understands when you call him
things like that, Like what did he say to Ron?
Speaker 4 (01:46):
He's like, I've been called much.
Speaker 5 (01:47):
Worse than Yeah.
Speaker 6 (01:50):
Trump famously doesn't drink, but he has said and he
said again if he did, he would have. He has
an addictive personality. He likely would have become an alcoholic.
His brother was, which the formative experience in his own life.
He has the big personality and the wild mood swings
of some of that kind of person which Wiles, which
Wilds talked about, kind of like a dry drunk who
(02:13):
was never a drunk. I Caroline Levitt was asked how
what went wrong?
Speaker 5 (02:20):
Let's let's get a response on Fox here.
Speaker 7 (02:22):
I wanted to ask you, Caroline, about the two part
series of articles in Vanity Fair on Susie Wilds, the
chief of Staff, and the President's inner circle. I mean,
clearly there was a lot of cooperation between the White
House and Vanity Fair on this, because there's numerous interviews
that Susie Wilds had with the writer over the course
of pretty much a year. Portraits were taken of his
(02:44):
inner circle, including her JD Vance Stephen Miller. I mean,
it looks like the White House was working hand in
glove with Vanity Fair. And yet here's Susie Wiles's reaction
to the series of articles. Quote. The article published early
this morning is a disingenuously framed hit piece on me
and the finest president, white House, staff, and cabinet in history.
Significant context was disregarded, and much of what I and
(03:06):
others said about the team and the president was left
out of the story. I assume after reading it that
this was done to payt an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative
narrative about the president and our team. She goes on
after that you can read the full thing on X
But what happened, what went wrong?
Speaker 8 (03:23):
Well, look, I would just echo my boss Susie Wiles,
who is the best chief of staff in our nation's history,
working for the greatest president in our nation's history, and
that this was unfortunately another attempt at fake news by
a reporter who was acting disingenuously and really did take
the chief's words out of context. But I think most importantly,
(03:44):
the bias of omission was ever present throughout this story.
The reporter omitted all of the positive things that Susie
and our team said about the President and the inner
workings of the White House, And as Susie said today,
it's deeply unfortunate that happened, but it won't distract us
from making America great again. And President Trump has been
such a productive president and has accomplished more in eleven
(04:07):
months than most presidents do in eight years because of
his vision and his tenacity, which is executed on and
facilitated by our great White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles,
whom I'm very proud of to call a boss and
a mentor and a friend.
Speaker 6 (04:21):
The whole taken out of context, and the whole you
didn't include all the good things we did. Is so
silly because nobody reads the articles anyway, So even if
they included from the administrati's perspective all the amazing things
that they think that they did, people would just pull
out the quotes and circulate them on TikTok and Twitter
and talk about them well.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
And it's non responsive to John Roberts question, which is
basically like, why is the White House cooperaated?
Speaker 4 (04:48):
Why would Susie Wiles a.
Speaker 5 (04:48):
White House chief That's how Vanity Fair did the story.
Speaker 4 (04:51):
Exactly, yeah, exactly, Like you all.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
Are more aware than any administration in history how the
media and you are like probably the most sharp or ardent.
You're probably the most ardent opponents of the media in
history of presidential administrations.
Speaker 4 (05:10):
And that's a high bar.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
So why would you ever allow for eleven long interviews?
Why was your chief of staff, who, by the way,
in a stroke of complete irony, is the one person
who's seen as Trump's gatekeeper, the only person who has
successfully sort of kept Trump in line, Meaning you're not
letting random articles from like Gateway Pundit being printed out
(05:34):
and put it on put on his desk. You're not
letting random like Laura Lumer into the Oval office. Reportedly,
Suzy Wiws is the one Laura Lumer was at the
White House last night, by the way, but is the
one who sort of keeps that type of.
Speaker 4 (05:45):
Thing at arm's length.
Speaker 5 (05:47):
Was at the White House last night?
Speaker 4 (05:48):
Yeah, I think it was for Honka celebration.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
But anyway, going to moving on, Trump announced your engagement.
You haven't seen this video, We're actually not moving on.
Speaker 6 (05:57):
So we got yeah, and so he also announced like
banning post Indians from the country.
Speaker 5 (06:00):
Is this coincidence or great question?
Speaker 3 (06:03):
But this is the irony of ironies, is that Susie
Wiles is the person who is like the gatekeeper of
media access, and Susie Wiles is the person then who
was giving eleven interviews. My best theory on this is
that she, for a shreot of an operator she reportedly is,
probably thought she was off the record or would have
quote approval or something like that from the journalist. Whether
(06:24):
it was a miscommunication or naivete on her part, I
doubt that it was naivete. We're going to get into
a second one second about the validity of the quotes themselves.
But the Caroline Levitt point here is to emphasize there
was a massive circling of the wagons yesterday now we
could put this next element D three up on the screen.
This is all like cabinet secretaries, people from every corner
(06:48):
of Trump world going on the record in defense of
Suzie Wiles yesterday. And so there's this question hanging in
the air when Crystal and Sager covered the story because
the revelation that Susie Wilders had said all of these
things and spoken eleven times with this Vanity Fair.
Speaker 4 (07:04):
Reporter, is she out?
Speaker 3 (07:06):
Is she going to be out of a job? Because
Trump is going to look at this as disloyal. It's
going to look like a massive error in judgment from
the one person who is supposed to have the best
judgment in the administration. And then we pretty quickly, within
a couple of hours, got to answer that question and
it's no. And that question was important because that means
the Trump White House without Susie Wiles would likely look
more like the first administration. It would probably start to
(07:30):
become even more chaotic. If you think it's chaotic now,
it'd probably become even more chaotic. But circling the wagons happened.
Susie Wiles seems to be perfectly safe in her job
for now. Let's put D four up on the screen.
This gets into the validity of what actually happened here.
So Wiles said it was ridiculous in an interview with
(07:50):
The New York Times, that she would have commented on
elon musk and ketamine.
Speaker 5 (07:56):
Well, which is a lot of why is why is
that ridiculous?
Speaker 4 (07:59):
Yea sounds like something someone would.
Speaker 5 (08:01):
Comment on it.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
But anyway, go ahead, right, Well, the author of the
Vanity Fair story, according to The New York Times, played
a recording for The Times where Susie Wiles is heard
saying that quote.
Speaker 6 (08:14):
So shockingly the thing she was said, she was the
thing she was quoted saying. She actually did say.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
So if there are any people, so Wiles said, he
was quote an avowed ketemine user at quote odd odd duck,
she is.
Speaker 4 (08:27):
But all of these things is defensible.
Speaker 5 (08:31):
She calls him brilliant. The full quote is odd odd duck,
like a lot of brilliant people are, or something like that. Yes, yes,
he is an odd duck. Does anybody say that's a
normal duck?
Speaker 4 (08:41):
No, a normal duck.
Speaker 5 (08:42):
He's not a normal duck.
Speaker 4 (08:43):
You should make T shirts. Drops that T shirts. That's
the normal duck.
Speaker 3 (08:47):
But anyway, they so this is like, you can see
how Susie Wiles is in a probably very friendly back
and forth with a Vanity Fair reporter, maybe think she's
going to have quote, maybe think she's on background or something,
and is saying what everybody talks about privately when it
comes to Elon Musk over the course of the last year,
(09:08):
and it ends up in print. Tries to say it
didn't happen. So if there were any people in the
administration who were saying, we think some of these quotes
are fully made up, this revelation from The New York
Times that the author has the recordings.
Speaker 4 (09:23):
That's not ideal.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
Susie obviously said these things, but the question of the context,
I don't doubt, and I don't think either of us
doubts that some of these things probably are more sensational,
that there's context left out that might make them more
sensational than they actually were in conversation.
Speaker 4 (09:41):
But that is that's what journalists do.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
It's you have your principle, the White House chief of
Staff saying something, it's probably going to be sensationalized in print,
which is why you don't talk to Vanity Fair.
Speaker 4 (09:52):
If you're Susie.
Speaker 6 (09:52):
Wilds and A main thing we really just learned is
that she has the same thoughts as most Americans on
most of the these people, which like when it came
into JD Vance, for instance, she's like, yeah, I think
his conversion from like never Trumper to pro Trump was
kind of political in a way. It's like, okay, so
you're willing to just not lie about that that conversion.
(10:15):
When it comes to who's the who's the like complete
lunatic over at O m B.
Speaker 5 (10:22):
Yes, Russ Vote, She's like, yeah, that guy's a complete Look.
Speaker 4 (10:26):
She called him a zealot.
Speaker 5 (10:27):
She called him a hard right wing zealous Russ Vote.
Speaker 4 (10:29):
Yeah, Rust Vote is.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
I think anybody on the right would tell you Russ
Vote is a hard right wing zealot and MAGA people
would be like, hell, yeah he is.
Speaker 5 (10:37):
Last night he said he's shutting down.
Speaker 6 (10:41):
The climate the atmospheric Measurement agency that's based out of Colorado,
because he said they've been doing climate alarmism for too long.
Speaker 5 (10:50):
So like, yeah, this guy is a like a total
right wing revolutionary revolutionary.
Speaker 6 (10:57):
Yeah, counter revolutionary, but we'd have to have a revel
to have a counter revolutionary.
Speaker 5 (11:02):
He is.
Speaker 6 (11:02):
He's out there and and she and she agrees with that.
She said that we had a.
Speaker 4 (11:08):
Revolution after Woodrow Wilson. Okay, we don't know.
Speaker 6 (11:10):
She said she thought it was a little bit nuts
for Trump to pardon every single January sixther and she
was overruled on that.
Speaker 5 (11:16):
She said it was.
Speaker 6 (11:16):
Nuts for Musk to completely eliminate Doge and put at
risk all the people that were getting PEP far and
the AIDS treatment so like, and and that she immediately
then scrambled to do everything she could to rescue like
the best parts of of us A I D.
Speaker 5 (11:34):
So like we And we also got her defense.
Speaker 6 (11:40):
Of like RFK juniors, like he's a kook, but my
kook or something and whatever something something like that, and
that you know, you need somebody who's you know, Gunna.
Maybe is he pushing too hard? Yeah, maybe he is,
but you have to do that to like get back
to balance. So she doesn't really insight into kind of
like you know, who she is and what her what
her what her politics are. I wouldn't read too much
(12:01):
into the defenses though of her, because as up until
the second that she is chief of staff, she's the
gatekeeper and she's in charge, and if you work for her,
you praise her, you praise her out like whether you
agree with it or not, and maybe you praise her
republic and privately you're working to get her out.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
Although rebuttal to that just quickly is that if you
think Trump is pissed at her, you don't praise her.
So that's where I think there's it was safe to
read a bit into it is that they wouldn't have
gone out of it because it's Trump and then her,
And so if they were, if it was being telegraphed
to them that Trump was furious about what Zuozie did.
Speaker 6 (12:38):
Once Trump defended, then it's like, all right, let's all
get in the pools.
Speaker 4 (12:41):
Let's jump on in. Yep.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
And finally the I mean another reason you see Fox
asking Caroline Lovett, like what you clearly cooperated very closely
with Vanity Fair because they did these photo shoots and
then of course like made the photos look as unflattering
as is humanly possible. We can put this up on
the screen. Last element here, this is the Trump team.
(13:06):
You see James Blair, you see Dan Scavino, Stephen Miller,
Susie Wiles, Carolyn Levitt, jd Vance, Marco Rubio. It's interesting
to me that you have two cabinet secretaries in this
picture with like staffers. Not that Stephen Miller is just
a mere staffer, but he is a staffer. He's not
in the cabinet. So I thought that was actually kind
of interesting in and of itself. I mean, it's clearly
(13:28):
Trump's inner circle. Among people who are at the White House,
they compare it to yes, we do This immediately reminded
people of another photo shoot.
Speaker 6 (13:38):
Ryan, What do you think do we have any staffers
there who we got in the back?
Speaker 5 (13:42):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (13:42):
We do, so we've got Actually this is mostly you're right,
this is mostly.
Speaker 6 (13:49):
Well Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, vice president President.
Speaker 5 (13:55):
That's any carters you call.
Speaker 6 (13:58):
Stafford who was head of National you know NSA, depends
on what point in the presidency?
Speaker 5 (14:02):
This was right? Yeah, what Andy Carter? And then who's the.
Speaker 4 (14:06):
Other chief of say Andy Carter's chief of staff.
Speaker 5 (14:07):
Who's the other dude there?
Speaker 4 (14:09):
Oh George Tennant?
Speaker 5 (14:11):
Oh? Ci yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 3 (14:13):
So but look at that power poses all around.
Speaker 6 (14:16):
Uh did I did one of those for Politico magazine?
No way, intercept there's a profile of us in like
twenty nineteen, after like the AOC election.
Speaker 4 (14:26):
Really is it still around?
Speaker 5 (14:27):
Oh yeah, yeah, gon.
Speaker 6 (14:28):
Google like Politico Intercept twenty nineteen or something.
Speaker 4 (14:31):
It's a dangerous thing to pose for.
Speaker 5 (14:34):
It was. It was fine. We look, Maddie was still
with us. So he's in the picture.
Speaker 4 (14:39):
Oh I see it. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3 (14:41):
You're doing the crossed arms and everything.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
That's just something funny. We're adding this in post.
Speaker 3 (14:47):
You look intimidating, right, yeah, look out, I'm scared if
you're a corporate democrat in twenty nineteen, you were.
Speaker 4 (14:53):
This guy's got his sleeves rolled up.
Speaker 5 (14:55):
Yeah, they asked me to roll the sleeves up. I
was like, all right, they asked you to roll the
sleeve though, but I don't do that. They're like, I
don't care, let's do it.
Speaker 4 (15:02):
Oh my gosh. Yeah, I mean it's a dangerous. I
don't know if you got this.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
Trump in the Oval office was when he had the
miracle the guys from Minnesota, the Miracle hockey team, and
the other day they had him put on a cowboy
hat and he was like, there is a man.
Speaker 4 (15:16):
Named Michael Dukakis. It's like they put on the hat.
Didn't that go over him?
Speaker 5 (15:22):
Well?
Speaker 3 (15:22):
Yeah, So he's very conscious of these image questions, which
we all know.
Speaker 4 (15:26):
And by the way, that the last point I'll.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
Make about this big story is if you don't think
people of the White House believe some of these decisions
are crazy, then you have not been paying enough attention.
Speaker 4 (15:39):
You do not understand the right in Trump's under Trump's.
Speaker 3 (15:43):
Republican Party, because the dissension privately about a lot of
these policies is constant.
Speaker 6 (15:50):
And she was like, I think I thought his terrif
ideas were wrong, and like, yes, I didn't want him
to roll it out and it hasn't worked.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
And sometimes, by the way, sometimes you see that playing
out on camera. There was disagreement in the Trump administration
at the time publicly between Elon Musk and I mean,
Jameson Greer others about the tariff policy. And so the
story it's very interesting to see how Wiles is describing it.
It's fascinating to see that she did this to a journalist.
Speaker 4 (16:18):
But just know this stuff is.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
Of course what people are thinking behind closed doors, and
you can make up your judgment about whether or not
that's good or bad, but it's happening.
Speaker 6 (16:27):
Last point for people who might be confused Chris Whipple
is he's most famous as the author of a book
on White House chiefs of staff. Yes, And so if
I had to guess, she maybe thought that this was
coming out after her tenure was over, and maybe her tenure.
Speaker 5 (16:44):
Is about to be over.
Speaker 4 (16:44):
That's so good. Interesting.
Speaker 6 (16:46):
And I think that their first conversation was pre inauguration,
And I think as they continued to have conversations and
no article came out, despite her saying kind of controversial things,
she got more and more comfortable that, oh, yeah, this
is this has come later.
Speaker 5 (17:00):
This is not a problem for you now.
Speaker 6 (17:01):
So I'm just going to be completely honest and so
that I can get my perspective, give my perspective to
like the historian of American chiefs of.
Speaker 5 (17:09):
Staff of presidents.
Speaker 6 (17:10):
Yeah, he's not just a normal journalist from Vanity Fair
like that's the thing he's known for. So's she's speaking
to her own legacy.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
Yeah, she agrees to give a book interview. And Kushner
has recommended this guy's books, by the way, So that's
one of the rumors of how maybe this happened that
is going around is did Kushner make everyone feel comfortable?
Speaker 5 (17:31):
She probably has also talked to former chiefs of staff.
Speaker 6 (17:33):
Yeah, like what we should know about the job, and
they would have spoken well of him because.
Speaker 5 (17:38):
She probably will in a year.
Speaker 4 (17:40):
Principles, you know this probather than I do.
Speaker 3 (17:41):
But principles get afraid about book interviews because you never
know how it's actually going to be used and what
context is going to come out in.
Speaker 4 (17:47):
And so that actually seems like a pretty.
Speaker 5 (17:49):
Good theory too.
Speaker 6 (17:53):
Let's have some fun with Barry Weiss. So, first of all,
the New York Times and we'll talk about this later
in the segment. New York Times did it like the
thirty thousand word or something article.
Speaker 4 (18:01):
New York Magazine. I was wrong, So this is New York.
Speaker 6 (18:03):
New York Times did a Jeffrey Epstein piece, So we'll
talk about that in the back half of this segment.
But yes, New York Magazine is out with a new
profile of Barry Weiss's return from the wilderness of Los Angeles,
and we'll also talk about her town Hall on Saturday
Night with Eric Kirk and how poorly the ratings turned out.
(18:26):
But so tell us about this New York Magazine profile
of Barry Weiss, and like, what do we learn about
the way that she went from effectively fired but sort
of quitting, pushed out of the New York Times, and
now at the top of the kind of world of journalism.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
Yeah, and if people don't remember, Barry Weiss was pushed
out of the New York Times because she was writing
journalism that made people uncomfortable over me too stuff. There
were constant leaks about the New York Times of the
New York Times, like internal slack channel of people just
like gossiping about Barry because honestly, a lot of it
(19:09):
started with what she was writing on me Too. And
Bill Maher in this New York Magazine article talks about
how he read that me two piece that Barry wrote
it went pretty viral at the time, and said, I'm
gonna make this woman famous. So he's sort of trying
to take credit for Barry wise to New York Magazine.
But when it all started to crescendo was after the
New York Times published that Tom Cotton op ed then
(19:31):
retracted the Tom Cotton OpEd the bunch of staffers.
Speaker 5 (19:33):
At the time he said send in.
Speaker 3 (19:35):
The guard They put the headline on it that said
send in the troops. So it's June of twenty twenty,
and it said we should use the Insurrection Act to
quell violent protests, did specifically say violent protest. New York
Times staffers posted in Unison that the piece put black
New York Times staffers in danger. It became a very
very twenty twenty controversy, and James Bennett gets fired. Barry
(19:57):
kind of self deport after that too. Ends up with
Nellie Bowles, who was also at The New York Times,
a reporter at the New York Times but married now
they have kids. They were in Los Angeles for a
really long time, and what we learned from the story
is that her arc at the Times. She'd been at
the Journal before her arc at the Times actually piqued
(20:20):
the interest of some people in Los Angeles when she
was originally blogging on her subset called common Sense, which
turned into the Free Press. And this is interesting because
there were salon dinners happening reportedly in LA and I
had heard about some of this, I didn't know the
extent of it with CEOs and Hollywood.
Speaker 4 (20:39):
Actors, where Barry was being sort.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
Of commoditized as the hot dinner guest in LA. There
was a joke on curb about it at the time
actually too that some people might remember, but.
Speaker 4 (20:52):
She was.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
People were convening Salon type dinners to have Barry talk
about the stifling a free expression and censorship.
Speaker 4 (21:02):
And what was going on with the left. And this
is a lot of rich people. So you could kind
of see then how.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
This congealed and built to twenty twenty four and then
to the Ellison deal, which brought in the Free Press.
Because what was happening in the background is as there
were struggle sessions literally happening at so many of these corporations,
as you would imagine, there was some dissent, and it
(21:29):
seemed as though because you had Barry Weiss, this centrist
social I don't even know what you would say. I
would call her sort of socially liberal, but what does
that even mean, I don't know. But you have this
like kind of centrist lesbian from mainstream media that made
people feel comfortable venting their frustrations with the left, and
(21:53):
that builds into common sense becoming big, getting major investors
at the Free Press. And so the New York Magazine
piece tells that story and shows the extent to which
it was bringing in extremely rich people, extremely powerful people
all around Barry, and it helps us, I think, contextualize
(22:15):
what she means to Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, which
is she became the go.
Speaker 5 (22:22):
To and yes.
Speaker 6 (22:24):
And her early career and her college activism was around
Israel Palestine, where she led a bunch of campaigns to
try to get Palestinian professors fired, and a lot of
people remembered that when she emerged at as this like
leading cancel culture voice, Like wait a minute, the same
(22:47):
person who was like literally leading cancel culture before it
was a thing trying to get people fired for their
political views, is now saying that you should not try
to get people fired for their political views. But she never,
in the twenty twenty to twenty three range. Never, she
didn't make Zionism or canceling Palestinian professors remotely part of
(23:10):
her politics.
Speaker 5 (23:10):
No one bit It wasn't.
Speaker 6 (23:12):
And you can go through her like social media and
her writing at the time, it's basically absent from there.
And so the thing that the rich people in Los
Angeles were really glomming onto was like, oh, yeah, somebody
who looks young and liberal but saying things that I
agree with, and then when they find out later it's
not Ben Shapiro October seventh, that she's also like a
(23:35):
hard core supporter of Israel and will bend all journalistic
norms to defend Israel. They're like, well, that's a wonderful bonus,
and so they got the whole package there.
Speaker 5 (23:47):
So then Ellison.
Speaker 6 (23:48):
Winds up getting lunch with her or whatever they meet,
and she's like and that he talks about poaching her
to come to CBS if he ends up buying it,
and to her credit, she's like, cool, I'll do it.
I'll running right. I'm going to be the boss.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
And she reports to him, not to the news division
like she is the head, reporting just to.
Speaker 6 (24:10):
Him and taking a very unusual turn for an executive,
turning the camera around right on her because she thinks
that what the American right apparently once is more people
like Barry Weiss on the camera.
Speaker 3 (24:23):
David Elison, by the way, to just quickly before we
move on to the ratings, I think that's where we're
about to go.
Speaker 4 (24:28):
He I pulled his FEC record last night.
Speaker 3 (24:31):
He was in twenty twenty four a big DEM donor,
and yeah, and it just makes the point that you were,
because apparently it was in twenty twenty four when he
met with Barry and started talking about whether they could
do some type of merger. And in the piece that's
mentioning how she's getting introduced to Jeff Bezos and I mean,
some of the richest people who have ever walked the
face of the earth, and they are fascinated by her.
Speaker 4 (24:54):
And it just makes.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
So much more sense that you have this one hundred
and one hundred and fifty million dollar deal between Paramount
and the Free Press, because she is not She's seen
as like this giant among journalists by these people who
just are I think she's the best thing since sliced bread,
because they had some well founded fears about illiberalism creeping
(25:19):
into the mainstream. The Tom cottonnap ed was legitimately a
bad decision. Retracting that was legitimately a bad decision from
The New York Times, And so she then becomes the
focal point of that angst. And it makes I think
that the story helps everyone makes sense. They kind of
we had this fuzzy knowledge that this was happening, but
(25:39):
it really fleshes out exactly how it was happening.
Speaker 6 (25:43):
Yeah, and so she comes to CBS News Saturday night.
She did a town hall. There was an Army Navy
game leading into the town hall, and ratings into it
absolutely nose dived and then has climbed again after the
town hall was over.
Speaker 5 (26:04):
Glenn Greenwald can put up E two here.
Speaker 6 (26:07):
Making the point CBS News has seven million subscribers on YouTube.
Beyond the anemic ratings, they also put Barry's Primetimes special
on their YouTube channel and it has a grand toll
of seventy two thousand views after two days, which, in
fairness to Barry, is ten times more than most free
press videos get. He also had said, I actually didn't
(26:29):
think it was possible to take one of the three
major TV networks and in primetime drag it down to
the lowliest ratings level of Yet Barry Weiss in her
first on camera special, managed to accomplish this remarkable feat.
And he was sharing a Dylan Byer's article there which
we can put up This is E three. So the
(26:51):
numbers coming in one point so one point nine total viewers.
One point nine million total viewers is across streaming on
broadcast networks. This is CBS's framing of it. Is up
thirty two percent boost in the CBS timeslot outpacing CBS
seasons at eight for Saturdays at eight pm, But if
(27:14):
you compare it to a year ago, it was down substantially.
Speaker 5 (27:18):
Now, I will give her credit.
Speaker 6 (27:19):
It says one hundred and eighty five million views on
social Now a bunch of those views are made up
oh social views.
Speaker 5 (27:24):
Instagram and Twitter, but they're bullshit.
Speaker 6 (27:26):
Even let's say it's ten percent of that. Like we
covered it, like we talked about it. Yeah, it was
on social media like nothing else that CBS News has
ever done.
Speaker 5 (27:36):
It like or CBS has done at.
Speaker 6 (27:38):
Eight pm on a Saturday is actually making hey on
social media. Now, most people were making fun of it,
so I don't know if that's what people were.
Speaker 4 (27:49):
Really talking about it.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
I mean, it definitely had people engaging in like discourse.
Speaker 4 (27:55):
Erka Kirk, Yeah, I mean it was definitely. It was
definitely newsy.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
But the question of whether you're able to draw people
back to CBS with newsiness, that's the problem she's supposed
to be solving, right not I mean, she's supposed to
be doing like good journalism and the like, but also
that's supposed to be a magnet for more and more eyeballs,
and that's where you see them boosting those social numbers.
(28:19):
But we all know, and I'm sure their executives know,
though I'm constantly surprised by how gullible some of these
folks are. That Twitter just counts like people scrolling past
it as a view sometimes, and sure it's the same
is true on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, that you don't have
to actually tune into much of it. It could be
a couple of seconds to count it as a view.
(28:40):
So are you monetizing and are you, like, is your
influence scaling up with those numbers. That's a huge, huge question,
And that's I think what Glenn is getting at. It's you,
you can say, season to day, going up with a
big interview like that, people would probably expect bigger numbers
(29:00):
for such a big get. I wasn't surprised by those
numbers at all. I just Erica Kirk is still not
It's not like getting the president.
Speaker 6 (29:09):
She's everywhere too. Didn't she hosts The Five? I don't know,
she like guest hosted The Five? Like, there's no shortage
of Erica Kirk contents. If that's your thing. We are
running late, so we'll try to do this real quickly.
But if you put up E four new like investigation
(29:30):
by The New York Times, it runs like tens of
thousands of words called scams, schemes, ruthless cons the untold
story of how Jeffrey Epstein got rich. Now, the point
of this seemed to be to knock down conspiracy theories
one of their lines in here, in his first two
decades of business, we found that Epstein was less a
(29:51):
financial genius than a prodigious manipulator and liar. Abundant conspiracy
theories hold that Epstein worked for spy services or ran
a lucrative blackmail operation. But we found a more prosaic
explanation for how he built a fortune.
Speaker 5 (30:08):
Classic New York Times formulation.
Speaker 6 (30:11):
Abundant conspiracy theorists say X, but we found a thing
that is completely non responsive to that thing, Like I
don't know anybody that's claiming that his blackmail operation was lucrative.
Do you know, Like I've never seen somebody say the
way he made his money.
Speaker 5 (30:29):
Was through a blackmail operation.
Speaker 6 (30:31):
If you want to talk to the conspiracy theorist at
the point, the blackmail is on behalf of intelligence agencies
and also helps him stay out of jail for all
of the different crimes that he's committing, Like that would
be the theory behind the blackmail operation that I've never
even seen, the theory that he was shaking people down.
(30:51):
Now I think Leon Black actually like maybe like there
might be a little bit of like, Okay, I'll pay
forty million a year because you know what we've been doing,
and just we're just hypothesizing here, not talking not not
we're all and we're talking all in the realm of allegations.
But that so anyway, so nothing that they found here
(31:13):
to me disproves that he worked for spy services.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
I was so curious to get your take on this
because I saw people bouncing the story around social media saying.
Speaker 4 (31:24):
We learned so much from it and closed.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
And it's okay, So it does it fill in some details?
Speaker 4 (31:30):
Yes, absolutely, it fills in some details.
Speaker 3 (31:32):
Yeah, it's interesting stuff about people who were investing with
him early in his career, but it absolutely you get
through all of these thousands of words and it's not
case closed at all about how he made.
Speaker 4 (31:44):
So much money.
Speaker 3 (31:45):
The implication of the suggestion, or in some case, the accusation,
is that his fortune was kind of from uh siphoning
off funds from people like by the way, I'm sure
that is Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure that's true. It
doesn't It still does not ex blane how he went
from a fail like he was basically pushed out of
(32:06):
bear Stearns, and this article explains that, and then how
you keep failing up and up and up. It doesn't
actually ultimately explain that at all. That still remains. If anything,
it's more of a mystery after you see how many
people were screwed over by him, powerful people were screwed
over by him in his early years and actually throughout
his entire career. Seemingly, it doesn't make any more sense,
(32:27):
I don't think at least.
Speaker 6 (32:28):
Yeah, And so the Epstein Transparency Act kicks in Friday.
We're supposed to get a big release of information, will
probably come five o'clock on the Friday before the Christmas break,
but that'll be interesting to see what's in there. We
have to cut this short, but two things I would
point to, and we'll have a story on this hopefully
by Friday, because then we can talk about it on
(32:49):
the Friday at dropsite.
Speaker 5 (32:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (32:52):
Where so two things I would flag in here that
are interesting that raised more questions than they answer, so
he says they started, so he's talking about this, He
said that year, the couple traveled to England. While they
were there, Hale took Epstein to visit a rich acquaintance
of hers, Nick Lease, at his family's countryside manor. There
(33:12):
they met Nick Nick's father, Douglas Lease, a defense contractor
with extensive connections in the arms industry in the British government.
Speaker 5 (33:20):
He took an immediate liking to Epstein.
Speaker 6 (33:22):
Sorry, we've been working on focuses significantly on this Douglas
Lee's character. Go ahead and look up Douglas Lease. If
you're in the New York Times, you think it's sufficient
to just tell your your readership that he's a quote
defense contractor with extensive connections in the arms industry, You're
gonna have to wait for drops on News to tell
you a little bit more about who Douglas Lease is
and who these connections were in the arms industry. And
(33:45):
you know who he did is defense quote unquote defense
contracting with.
Speaker 5 (33:51):
You won't be surprised to.
Speaker 4 (33:52):
Was it Venezuela.
Speaker 5 (33:54):
It was not Venezuela.
Speaker 6 (33:55):
A lot of it going on in the Middle East. Separately,
they they say, and this is a useful revelation.
Speaker 5 (34:04):
That quote.
Speaker 6 (34:06):
Back in New York, he joined forces with John Stanley Pottinger,
a lawyer who had recently left a senior post in
the Justice Department. Epstein, Pottinger, and Pottinger's brother rented a
penthouse office in the Hotel Saint Marie's on Central Park South.
The broker told us that Epstein initially stiffed her on
the commission, and then they kind of just move on.
(34:26):
Who was Pottinger a central figure in the Iran contra,
in which the US worked with Israel to send weapons
to Iran in exchange from cash that they would eagerly
send to the contrast, we'll get it, We'll get a
lot more into that.
Speaker 4 (34:42):
So Robert Maxwell, So they've all.
Speaker 6 (34:45):
Kind of Maxwell, We're tight. So we've connected you. So
New York Times connected him to Lease, which he had
denied a connection to Douglas Lease. By the way, they
don't even mention that in the past he had angrily
rejected any connection to Douglas Lease and said maybe he
knew the kid, and there's a reason he would want
to angrily reject a connection to Douglas Leaves. And then
(35:07):
he's got him connected to a key figure in around contry.
But to the New York Times, this is more prosaic.
Speaker 4 (35:19):
Yes, just yep.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (35:21):
I'm glad you're doing reporting because when I saw the
line defense contract goes like this is again not answering questions.
Speaker 4 (35:27):
You are creating questions like yes.
Speaker 3 (35:31):
Because I clicked on the link from somebody who had
posted and been like lots of questions answered here, and
as I'm reading it, I'm like, no, lots of questions raised.
Speaker 4 (35:38):
Yeah, what are you talking about? All right?
Speaker 3 (35:42):
Looking forward to that draft site report and hopefully we'll
be able to talk about it on the Friday Show.
Let's move on to updates in the Brown University shooting
that left two students dead. Cash Betel announced yesterday they're
offering a reward.
Speaker 4 (35:56):
We can put this video up on the screen. You'll
watch it. You can.
Speaker 3 (35:59):
You can see that put out a video of a
person of interest in that shooting at Brown University from
the weekend. They have now announced a fifty thousand dollars reward.
You can see the person. If you're listening to this,
you can see the person walking around different parts of
the Brown campus in the seemingly of the Brown campus
in the daylight. Person is dressed in all black. Can't
(36:23):
really make out details of who it is, but that's
where the FBI announced yesterday actually they have this person
of interest.
Speaker 4 (36:34):
It came though, as we learned.
Speaker 3 (36:36):
Next element up on the screen that MIT, which is
of course in Boston, not all that far well, Cambridge,
if we're going to do that thing, not all that
far from Providence. A professor at MIT who was a
nuclear scientist. Essentially, it was shot to death at home
in Brookline. So huge, huge update potentially in the Brown story.
(37:02):
We have no evidence that this is connected or not.
But Brian Bryan, as you saw, I was combining Brown
and Ryan the Brown was the next video we put
this up on the screen over at Brown.
Speaker 4 (37:13):
You see the FBI agent. I don't want to laugh at.
Speaker 3 (37:19):
This ride because they're just scraping the snow here looking
for evidence, and they're like tripping around as they're kicking
the snow looking for evidence. So I'm sure that we're
going to get to the bottom this soon enough. But
as you put earlier, you either have two people on
the loose or one person who has now killed three
(37:40):
people right on the loose in New England.
Speaker 6 (37:42):
And so the FBI scrambling is now offering a fifty
thousand dollars reward or presumably you can get a private
flight to Vegas with cash. Bettel valued at fifty thousand dollars.
He recently appeared on Katie Miller's podcast.
Speaker 4 (37:58):
Yeah jocol last night.
Speaker 5 (38:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (38:02):
Apparently it was recorded before the Brown shooting.
Speaker 5 (38:04):
Okay, in any event, it's about him and his little his.
Speaker 3 (38:08):
Girlfriend, right, tell them maybe to hold the episode until afterwards.
Speaker 5 (38:12):
Or maybe don't do that at all, Like, what are
you doing?
Speaker 4 (38:15):
Well, there's that too.
Speaker 6 (38:16):
Yes, when he was appointed, I said good, because I
think it's good to have an incompetent boob running an
agency that does a lot of bad things. I now
am regretting that, Like, apparently you do need some level
of competence at the head of this agency.
Speaker 5 (38:36):
Like come on, well, in the case of.
Speaker 3 (38:38):
Brown, if this Mit shooting turns out murder turns out
to be connected to the Brown murder mass shooting, you
have a situation where in Brown, the authorities were saying,
first of all, Patel said they had He said they
had detained, they had somebody who was a suspect and
detention and it was kind of it was like a
(39:00):
long ex post and the tone of it was sort
of we got the guy, And maybe I'm being uncharitable
and reading too much into that, but that was the
tone that I took from Patel's post on X and
the authorities in Providence were basically like, everything is fine.
Speaker 4 (39:14):
Everyone should feel safe.
Speaker 3 (39:15):
So if it turns out that the same person shot
then murdered another professor at this time at MIT so
someone else from a campus, they're going to look even
dumber for trying to assuage the fears of the community,
which we're like learning as.
Speaker 4 (39:35):
The person is still in the loose actually should.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
Be that people should be afraid in Providence because they
don't have the person.
Speaker 6 (39:42):
And obviously all human life is precious. Nuno Learero appears
to be like one of the most brilliant guys. You
can imagine like just a brain that it just just
has like an inconceivable level of intelligence in it. And
so like tributes are pouring in from people talking about
the you know what he will now be on what
(40:04):
he will now be unable to contribute to society is
and it's something we can't even conceive of because He's
one of those kinds of people who is able to
you know, think beyond you know other you know, other
mere mortals.
Speaker 4 (40:19):
And obviously there's speculation happening right now that this is.
Speaker 3 (40:24):
Foreign policy related when you have a leading nuclear science science.
Speaker 6 (40:27):
Yeah, according to according to Israel, he is a completely
legitimate target, like all nuclear scientists, to them are are
legitimate targets, which is which I hope that underscore is
just how barbaric it is mm hmm to be bombing
nuclear scientists and their families.
Speaker 3 (40:44):
At will will obviously keep everybody updated on the story,
because if it's connected to the Brown case, if it's
connected to any foreign policy.
Speaker 4 (40:51):
It's huge.
Speaker 3 (40:52):
Uh. And so we're going to follow it really really closely. Ryan,
should we move on to Gaza.
Speaker 6 (41:02):
So, first of all, in a kind of out of nowhere,
Trump issued a new travel band expanding the list of
countries to include the Palestinian Authority. So putting people from
the Palestinian Authority on the travel ban has an added
layer of cruelty because they don't have their own country,
(41:23):
Like it's it's one thing if you ban people from
Chad from traveling, they can they can be in Chad
but in the Palestinian authority if if like they are,
they may be at extreme risk from the occupying country.
They don't have their own sovereignty to fall to fall
back on. And so we'll be we'll be exploring that
and the consequences of it, you know, more more thoroughly
(41:46):
and in the days, in the days to come. But
today I wanted to talk about living conditions in Gaza
in a way that goes beyond the kind of normal
headlines that we get. We had a story yesterday and
drops that you could it up g two here. The
headline tells it all garbage is poisoning Gaza. And this
(42:06):
is by Abdel Katter Saba, who's a videographer and photographer
in Gaza, who works with our editor Shreef Abdel Caduz,
who co authored uh this piece. And the footage and
the photos that will be showing you here of of
the trash pile up is from Abdul Cotter Saba. So
(42:26):
you can roll the roll the next element. I'll just
read some of this piece here. Over the past two years,
Gaza's civilian infrastructure has been systematically destroyed by the Israeli military,
including waste management services, is what you're looking at. Here
are is a transfer station and in a typical this
is the Yarmook waste transfer site. So typically at a
(42:48):
transfer site, people bring in garbage and then it gets
transferred to its final resting place or its incineration place,
or a.
Speaker 5 (42:58):
Landfill or what have you.
Speaker 6 (43:00):
The final waste treatment facility where this transfer site would transfer.
The waiste too, is now behind the yellow line that
Israel has drawn, and so they're they're not taking anymore.
So every day more and more trucks coming in, and
(43:21):
it just it just piles up. You see children playing
on it there, you see people setting up their tents.
You know, you're absolutely right right next to it. The
quotes that uh that Abdol Katsava got from people who
are living there are just just horrifying. One one person
(43:45):
told them that this is my tent and this is
the garbage dump I'm living across from. We don't sleep,
not at night nor during the day because of the garbage.
The smell comes at us constantly, and our children are
all ill. They suffer from severe headaches. We're dealing with
an infestation of germs and insects. Another, yeah, you can
(44:06):
absolutely understand it. Another person said, we were displaced from
the city of bay Leahea and the northern Gaza Strip,
and we came to Gaza City. We found that the
displaced were crowded in every corner of the strip. We
were forced to live among garbage in the Yarmouth garbage
site of the Gaza Municipality. We had thought we'd stay
somewhere safe, somewhere decent, but we were forced here. Nowhere
(44:28):
else to go. We were forced to stay at this dump.
I'm suffering because of this dump, suffering from the germs,
the rats and dogs. Every day I find twenty or
thirty rats inside my tent, right inside of it. I
don't even have a tent fit for human life.
Speaker 5 (44:42):
So that is.
Speaker 6 (44:44):
In the best of scenarios. Like that's when the weather
is nice, the sun is in the sky. The last
couple of weeks have seen have seen the opposite. Maybe
we can roll to g five. Here you can this
young kid giving a tour of the tent village that
(45:06):
is now constructed. You don't have to be able to
understand Arabic to understand the absolute fury at what the
world is delivering. Here as the wind blows, you know,
people have been living now three years. So you can
see garbage blowing into their tent. You can see their
(45:27):
their tents blowing away. It's a third winter that people
are going into with these tents, while sufficient supplies for
over a million people are sitting outside of Gaza, just
outside in trucks.
Speaker 5 (45:44):
Just outside this is Al Shifa Hospital, So even.
Speaker 6 (45:47):
The hospitals are we're flooding from this, from this, from
this storm, and if so and so, the just just
to underline that supplies for more than a million people
facing these conditions are in trucks outside of Gaza. We
(46:08):
have a ceasefire, we have a ceasefire agreed to. They're
supposed to allow that in. They're just simply not allowing
it in. We talked to the head of a relief
organization who's in Gaza, and he said his theory is
that they're trying to make it just utterly unlivable. And
they've you know, they've they've offered to open the Rafa
(46:29):
border in one direction out to say like look and
feels like it's like okay, look, if you were holding
on hope for the war to end and then you
were going to stay, what we're trying to do is
destroy that hope because now the war has technically ended,
yet your life is just unlivable, So why don't you
(46:51):
just leave like that? That is the message that he
believes that Israel Netyahu's sending.
Speaker 3 (46:57):
With this well, and that's one of my questions forream
was going to be. Is the US involvement in it's
the best word for this being the shrpa over this
peace process? What is the what is the US involvement
right now looking like? And is this then also a
(47:21):
US strategy to squeeze gosins for the raising of the
strip into Mara Gaza or whatever?
Speaker 6 (47:29):
Right, I mean, you would you would think it has
to be the policy is what it's doing. The US military,
you know, they set up this coordination center with Israel
to try to deconflict during the ceasefire, which Israel breaks
effectively every single day and announces that it has broken it.
But we so we the US military sent some of
(47:50):
our top logistics experts that we have and the US
military does have like when it comes to logistics, like
they have been taking it extremely seriously for two hundred
year and have some of the best at it. So
we sent our best and Brightest to this coordination center
to figure out how is it that we're not able
to get the supplies in and get the supplies distributed
(48:12):
to the population within weeks. They all left because they
were like, oh, this is not a logistics problem, this
is a political problem. And the military said this publicly
that the problem is the Israelis have a list of
things that they call dual use, dual military use that
they won't let in. And the list includes tent poles, pencils, paper,
(48:38):
most like cooking. Fuel is almost non existent at this point,
and so they're like, what you don't need us. We're
not the answer to this problem. The logistics are solvable.
The political problem is what you need to deal.
Speaker 4 (48:53):
With those images.
Speaker 3 (48:56):
If people were just listening to this, go ahead and
find the YouTube video of the segment, because you can
see the proximity of the tents to the garbage and
it's horrifying.
Speaker 6 (49:06):
Yeah, and just getting worse every single day as it
piles up and piles up. Meanwhile, there was a I
don't know if you saw this, there was an AI
image going around of a fake account who's trying to
just raise money on chuffed saying like, look at my
family and it's like twelve Palestinians in a tent, but
the water's up to their waist, which is of course
(49:29):
is impossible because the tents are not water tight, so
you're not getting like and there wouldn't be that pactent,
but it was.
Speaker 5 (49:35):
It was other than that. Wasn't the water. You look
at it, it's like, wow, that looks real.
Speaker 6 (49:41):
So you're going to see a lot of and it
to excess credit, it did have a note on it
that said this is AI generated because they could figure
out with the hands and stuff like that and also
the water level. But like so people like AI is
going in and just exploiting this misery.
Speaker 3 (49:56):
Yeah, and obviously I know you're reporting follows as close.
But everyone is happy that the war is over, you know,
humane people are happy that the war is over. But
on the other side of that, the political incentives to
keep an eye on the humanitarian crisis are obviously diminished
(50:17):
at this point, right here in the US and all
over the world.
Speaker 5 (50:21):
Yes, indeed awful. So yeah, so we will be back on.
Speaker 6 (50:28):
Friday, and then we'll have we'll roll out it for
a couple of weeks.
Speaker 5 (50:32):
Two weeks six. We're gonna have like pre tape segments.
Speaker 6 (50:35):
Yesterday I interviewed Nathaniel Raymond, who's a Yale humanitarian researcher
at on Sudan.
Speaker 5 (50:42):
I think we'll post his video.
Speaker 6 (50:45):
That was an incredible and sobering, intense interview with this
guy talking about like like as as bad as things
are in Gaza, like the in Sudan, like the number
of people getting killed and starved, like we're if it
continues like this, we're going to be at Rwanda levels,
(51:05):
and then we'll for twenty years, we'll have people talking
about why nobody did anything.
Speaker 3 (51:11):
I'll look forward to watching that. Yeah, we have some
great pre recorded content coming out right.
Speaker 5 (51:15):
I interviewed Emily, I.
Speaker 3 (51:16):
Interviewed Ryan, so that'll be fun. And we will have
a Friday show this week. So this isn't us signing
off until twenty twenty six. You will still get another
dose of US on Friday, and then some pre recorded
doses of US over the holiday. But I'm looking forward
to being back here in the new year. Ryan Wednesday,
the first Wednesday of the new year is going to
(51:37):
be January seven, all right, So it's going to be
a while before we're back in the studio.
Speaker 6 (51:43):
All right, stay safe, we'll see you then see yeah.
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