March 22, 2023 • 38 mins
EPISODE 159: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:41) SPECIAL COMMENT: Apparently it's the 12 DAYS of Trumpmas: the Judge who was supervising Special Counsel Jack Smith's Grand Jury wrote that Smith had presented prima facie evidence "that the former president had committed criminal violations" and the documents - and NOTES OF AUDIO RECORDINGS - she ordered Trump's attorney to turn over to Smith were part of Trump's "criminal scheme."
And all this has NOTHING to do with the Stormy Daniels story. But per The New York Times, Trump, in his madness, "has told friends and associates that he welcomes the idea of being paraded by the authorities before a throng of reporters and news cameras. He has even mused openly about whether he should smile for the assembled media... and is said to have described the potential spectacle as A FUN EXPERIENCE."
Norma Desmond Trump is ready for his close-up, Mr. D.A. DeMille!
B-Block (20:00) IN SPORTS: It was the greatest performance in basketball history, and he only scored 4 points during it. New York Knicks legend Willis Reed, who won the 1970 NBA title virtually only by showing up, has died. And ESPN has parted ways with the executive who did the most to direct SportsCenter away from what the audience wanted. (26:10) THE WORST PERSONS IN THE WORLD: The U.S. government is terrified of Elon Musk's foreign partners and might yet step in to end his ownership of twitter, while somebody FINALLY asks Rep. James Comer about his college girlfriend's allegation that he beat her and threatened her life - and he confesses to leaking damaging emails about the blogger who first reported the story!
C-Block (32:00) EVERY DOG HAS ITS DAY: Moose Tracks, on death row in New York (33:00) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: It was Episode 7 of Aaron Sorkin's "Newsroom" and Jeff Daniels said one line - and every one of my old girlfriends contacted me and said "Wait. Wasn't that what your Dad always said?"
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. So
apparently this is the twelve Days of Trump mus forget
(00:27):
Stormy Daniels for the time being, concentrated instead on Beryl Howell.
Until last Friday, Beryl Howell was the judge supervising special
counsel Jack Smith's grand jury, and sources who have seen
the document in question say she wrote, of prima facie
evidence quote that the former president had committed criminal violations
(00:49):
and that the records Trump's lawyers now had to hand
over despite attorney client privilege pertained to Trump's quote criminal
scheme unquote. Those are phrases that wind up in indictments.
We do not know what timetable Jack Smith is working on,
nor whether he would finish the investigation of every Trump
(01:10):
potential crime first and then and only then indict on
any of them. But Trump might still be on trial
because of Beryl Howell, long before he's on trial because
of Stormy Daniels, and obviously it would be for much
higher stakes. There is a second revelation nearly as telling,
(01:31):
hiding behind Judge Howell's use of the phrases criminal violations
and criminal scheme. It's not just the judge's phrasing that matters.
It's that she needed to assess whether the violations and
the scheme were criminal, because clearly the Special Counsel was
trying to convince her that they were criminal. This is
all part of a story broken last night by ABC
(01:53):
News that understandably got buried behind the circus here in
New York and the one at Marilago and the continuing, unrelenting,
spiraling cyclone of panic inside the Trump cult. Quote. Prosecutors
in the Special Counsel's office have presented compelling preliminary evidence
that Trump knowingly and deliberately misled his own attorneys about
(02:16):
his retention of classified materials. That's the beginning of the
ABC News report. And clearly the judge did not say that,
only to have Jack Smith then say, why, well, that
wasn't my intent. I don't think it was criminal. That
point is underscored again later. Quote. Howell also ordered Corkran
to hand over a number of records tied to what
(02:37):
Howe described as Trump's alleged criminal scheme. Echoing prosecutors, one
would think it would be obvious that a special counsel
investigating criminality or potential criminality by a former president. Would
you believe the former president was guilty of criminality? That
(03:00):
that would be a given going in, But after Bob Muller,
who knows anymore? This story kind of eliminates the margin
of doubt. I am grateful to this story. It is
not as much fun nor as visceral as contemplating a
Trump mug shot taken by the Boudoir photographers from the
Manhattan District Attorney's office and then printed on the front
(03:23):
page of every newspaper in the world, but it's way
more important. There are caveats in the rest of the
ABC story. It is sourced to begin with the details
of the document in which Judge Howell wrote, all this
come courtesy quote sources who described its contents to ABC News,
and prima facie is still the lowest of three standards
(03:44):
of evidence. As ABC writes, how agreed, prosecutors made a
sufficient showing that, on its face would appear to show
Trump committed crimes. The judge made it clear that prosecutors
would still need to meet a higher standard of evidence
in order to seek charges against Trump, and more still,
to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Unquote, there
(04:05):
is one other detail, the sealed filing that somebody described
to ABC News instructed Trump attorney Evan Corkran to testify
on six separate lines of inquiry about which Judge Howell
says attorney client privilege no longer applies and the quote
records on quote Corkran must hand over to the Special
(04:27):
Council's office include handwritten notes, invoices, and transcriptions of personal
audio recordings unquote, Lordie, Lordie. There are tapes. There is
also dramatic courtroom news from Fox and Dominion and this
(04:48):
Maria Bardaromo Tucker Carlson booking producer who Monday night revealed
anti semitism and misogyny at a Tucker Carlson office debate
over the fability of the respective candidates for governor of Michigan.
But let's finish up Trump first. Most of the screams
of rage and terror from his supporters, alike those of
(05:09):
Rand Paul, this arrest is an illegal, abusive power. So
instead abuse this power and arrest the district attorney or
the new one from Kevin McCarthy asked a direct question
about not Trump's arrest, but what he's accused of doing
to silence Stormy Daniels. McCarthy answered, not about Stormy Daniels,
(05:32):
nor about Trump, but about Hillary Clinton or the other
screams of rage and terror alike. You can't arrest Trump,
God sent him. Only God can arrest him. Only God
can fingerprint him. Only God can take him down and
book him. But those few substantial complaints about the law
(05:52):
here sent her on something else, selective prosecution and the
assumption that nobody ever gets prosecuted for falsifying business records,
certainly not as a felony charge. And Trump would be
charged for something nobody's ever charged for, just because it's Trump.
And it turns out that that assumption is hilariously laugh
out loud wrong. The website just Security found a few
(06:18):
felony prosecutions falsifying business records in the first degree, not
just a few of them, just in New York, just
in the last decade, twenty seven of them twenty seven.
And they run the gamut from getting food stamps by
inventing an imaginary person on your books to getting insurance
payoffs on things lost in a fire that we're on
(06:41):
your books but weren't lost in a fire, And they
go all the way from that stuff to the owner
of a New York business falsifying the records of his
own business to make it look like he made a
million dollars less than he did. Second degree falsifying business
records is when you falsify the business records to falsify
the business records. First degree is when you do that
(07:05):
with quote intent to commit another crime or to aid
or conceal the commission thereof. That is New York Penal
Code one seventy five point ten and that starts with
P and that rhymes with T, and that stands for Trump.
Now to those blights on society who are getting their
(07:25):
asses sued for defaming on Trump's behalf. When Tuesday began,
Fox was in a world or hurt. Today Fox is
in two worlds of hurt. Fox and Dominion finally got
into a Delaware courtroom yesterday, and basically the judge greeted
them by slapping the Fox lawyer in the face with
a glove and all but asking about his seconds and
(07:46):
about pistols. At dawn. Fox invoked what is called neutral
reportage as a defense against the defamation charges, and it
insisted that Dominion could not prove actual malice and the
judge basically then said to Fox, but your side has
admitted to making stuff up and asking it off as news,
so how could you claim neutral reportage as a defense.
(08:10):
And Judge Eric Davis literally brought up Lou Dobbs and asked,
with incredulity, this is Davis's actual quote, asked, you're saying
he's a neutral reporter, not great Bob Fox quote News unquote.
Suddenly Yesterday dropped its attempt to silence the former Maria
(08:31):
Bartomo and current Tucker Carlson producer Abbie Grossberg, probably because
before they could silence her, she got out almost all
of her accusations about Fox lawyers trying to coerce her
into lying about and within the dominion voting defamation case,
and also just a couple dozen of her accusations about
jokes about the Jews made at Tucker Carlson Fox headquarters
(08:54):
and the pictures of Nancy Pelosi in a revealing swim
suit at Tucker Carlson Fox headquarters, and the debate at
Tucker Carlson Fox headquarters Gretchen Whitmer versus Tutor Dixon, and
we're not talking polling numbers, the legal documents, Miss Grossberg
submitted to the courts as part of her lawsuits, named
the Murdocks and one particular Fox executive senior vice president
(09:18):
David Clark, who was in charge of weekends, and judging
by the bug eyes in David Clark's photo, I am
pretty sure he is the Dave Clark who edited audio
tape at the Archaeo Radio Network when I worked there
in nineteen eighty, eighty one and eighty two. That's kind
of besides the point, but it did sort of strike
me as relevant anyway. These documents also mentioned the time
(09:42):
Grossberg asked for the day off because your father was
in the ICU after brain surgery, and Fox management said
find your own replacement or show up. We don't care.
And I know people at NBC you've been treated like that.
Several attorneys noted that for all the blood and guts
and questions about a possible Maria Bardaromo Kevin McCarthy's sexual relationship,
(10:05):
the real point of the Abbey Grossberg story is that
all of a sudden, Fox could be dealing not with
defamation civil suits, but with criminal charges. If you are
Fox and your lawyers sat there and coached and directed
and threatened your producer away from telling the truth in
her depositions and her testimony. That's called subornation of perjury.
(10:28):
That's a crime, Not great, Bob Tucker. Carlson, meanwhile, continues
to look like an out of control train with no breaks,
going down an incline at one hundred miles an hour,
and the engineer designs the problem is he's not going
fast enough, so let's make it one hundred and twenty five.
Joan Walsh re upped her twenty nineteen piece from Salon
(10:51):
in which she wrote that nine years earlier than that,
so that's twenty ten. When she was at Salon, she'd
had an intern reach out to Carlson to write some
opinion piece about Obama, and Carlson responded by telling intern, well,
he called her the C word to the intern, and
he insisted to the intern that she needed desperately to
(11:13):
have sex. This is where Carlson throttled up last night.
He insisted that January sixth was not an insurrection, not
at all. They didn't have guns. They were just patriotic
Americans who was just people who believed the election was
stolen and they certainly had reason to think that. And
on election night, when they went to sleep at dusk,
Trump was winning, and then in the morning the fake
(11:35):
news said, and then and you're thinking, You're thinking, where
is he going with all this? Because this could be
the audition tape for Newsmax or Mike Lindell TV. Because
after Tucker Carlson attacked Trump, if he also attacked the
Jews and all the women, Fox has been sued by
in the past and is going to be sued by now.
(11:57):
If he's actually done all that, Fox is going to
have to fire him, in which case I will buy
everybody in America a martini. A couple of last Trump
notes on what again might be Trump Miss Eve but
probably isn't. They are one an interview the laughable Pierce
(12:18):
Morgan did with the laughable Ron de Santis, about which
nobody in Trump world is laughing because sufficient homage was
not paid by De santist to Trump number two. Then
there's that smarmie New York Congresswoman Elias Stefanic, the dolorous
umbrage of the piece who sold her soul to Trump
for god knows what, but who told punch Bowl News
(12:41):
that she briefed Trump Monday night quote about our efforts
on the Judiciary Committee, on the Oversight Committee to get
an immediate investigation of Manhattan DA. Bragg presumably she did
not tell him. Bragg can completely ignore the Republicans on
this investigation because only the Department of Justice could ever
pursue any kind of contempt of Congress charge, and the
(13:02):
DJ would never force a DA to reveal details of
a criminal investigation and reveal those details to politicians. Stefanik
also said Ron DeSantis was tepid in his defense of
the Fureer and DeSantis is quote going to see slippage
in his poles. And I hear that, and I think
DeSantis pole slippage. We'll just get him higher, high heels.
(13:26):
One last gem from stefanic quote, we that's her. And
Trump also talked a lot about what I've heard from
his supporters in my district and across the country. He's
never been in a stronger position in terms of rallying
that support. I think you'll see his poll numbers go up. Unquote,
if Stefanik had added, I also told him he was
young and handsome and fit and powerful and inspires worship,
(13:50):
and his more strong, more masculine, more extraordinary, more virile,
more domineering, more irresistible. Oh wait, sorry, that's the last
speech from the end of the Jack Nicholson movie Carnal Knowledge. Sorry,
the third and final of the three Trump pss. There
is yet another insider Trump piece in The New York
(14:12):
Times from Maga Haberman. But this quote is spectacular. Thank you, Maga.
Quote Behind closed Doors at Marilago, the former president has
told friends and associates that he welcomes the idea of
being paraded by the authorities before a throng of reporters
and news cameras. He has even mused openly about whether
(14:35):
he should smile for the assembled media, and he has
pondered how the public would react, and is said to
have described the potential spectacle as a fun experience unquote.
And if that doesn't sound like the completely whacked out
Norma Desmond coming down the stairs after murdering her lover
(14:57):
at the end of the movie Sunset Boulevard, I don't
know what does. I'm ready for my close up, Miss
your da still ahead of us. In this edition of Countdown,
(15:21):
Good God, somebody, somebody finally brought up Congressman Jamie Comber's
college girlfriend and her charge that he beat her up,
and the side show about stolen emails that linked the
blogger who broke the story to the husband of somebody
who was running for office against Comber, whereupon Comber confessed
that he was responsible for leaking those emails. The statute
(15:47):
of limitations, of course, has already run out, but it's
a start. The story of the day. An Aaron Sorkin
character said one phrase in one episode of one show,
and every one of my ex girlfriends contacted me immediately
and said, wait, isn't that what your dad always used
to saying. It was because Sorkin got it from my dad.
(16:07):
And it can be argued that the greatest performance by
a basketball player in history came in an NBA Finals
game that was not shown on live television, and came
in a game in which that player scored exactly four points.
A man who gave that greatest performance, who won an
NBA title by literally just showing up, has passed away.
(16:31):
That's next. This is countdown. This is countdown with Keith Oberman.
(16:57):
This is SportsCenter. Wait, check that not anymore. This is
countdown with Keith Albermann. In sports it is easily the
most important game by any player in basketball history who
in the game scored four points. Game seven of the
(17:20):
NBA Finals May eighth, nineteen seventy, the New York Knicks
ahead in the series three games to two over the
Los Angeles Lakers, but then blown out in Game six
after their star center and captain Willis Reid tore a
muscle in his thigh and did not play. A minute
and twenty minutes before Game seven, and Reid was nowhere
(17:41):
to be seen, the visiting Los Angeles Lakers were on
the court at Madison Square Garden. They thought they had
already won the seventh game and thus the championship, and
the Knicks thought they had already lost. And then with
minutes left before tip off, an extraordinary roar started at
Madison Square Garden, and it grew and grew and grew
(18:03):
as nineteen thousand pairs of eyes turned to one spot.
It was Willis Reid hobbling out of the tunnel from
the dressing room onto the court for warm ups. He
was going to play. The Lakers players just stared in disbelief,
and they played that way the entire game. Willis Reid
(18:23):
could barely move. He only took five shots, played about
half the game, he only grabbed three rebounds, but he
scored New York's first basket, and they were quickly up
by twenty nine over the absolutely discombobulated Lakers. The Knicks
would win one hundred thirteen to ninety nine over La
and Wilt Chamberlain and Jerry West to claim their first
(18:47):
NBA crown. Willis Reid died yesterday at the age of eighty.
He led New York to its only other title in
nineteen seventy three. He later served as coach and general manager,
and had the same job with the New Jersey Nets,
and was named one of the NBA's fifty Greatest Players Ever.
If they made such a list for the NBA's fifty
Greatest people Ever, Willis Reid would have been on that
(19:09):
one too. It is impossible to convey this now, but
other than the nineteen thousand fans in Madison Square Garden
on that pretty spring Friday nineteen nineteen seventy, the only
way people experienced Willis Reid's emergence from the tunnel in
real time was on radio, with the play by play
(19:31):
of the Knicks announcer Marv Albert or the Lakers announcer
Chick Hearne. The nineteen seventy NBA Finals were not shown
on live television, in part because basketball was really bad
for TV ratings in those days, and in part also
out of the fear that if they showed it live
(19:52):
that would cut into ticket sales for the seventh game
of the NBA Finals. Many NBA playoff games were shown
that way as late as nineteen eighty six. So first
Willis Reid was heard coming out under the court, then
the Knicks won the championship, and then at eleven thirty
at night, the Knicks fans of New York got to
(20:12):
see it. Rest in peace, Willis Reid, And speaking of television,
a shake up at ESPN amid a reported new round
of mass layoffs coming there. Executive vice president Rob King,
a twenty year veteran of the company, says he has
left ESPN. But that is not what The New York
Post is reporting, and one of its columnists is a
(20:33):
disgruntled x ESPN employee. The Post says King was fired
for harassment in social media posts. This much is clear.
His ESPN biography page has already been wiped off its website.
No other details provided even by rumor either way, if
you think Sports Center lost its direction this century, you
(20:56):
can point to Rob King. It is inconceivable that anybody
who ever ran that epic franchise had less of an
idea of what sports fans wanted from that broadcast. His
most infamous of many bad decisions was to take a
decent enough talk show called Numbers Never Lie with two
pretty good anchors named Jamel Hill and Michael Smith, rename
(21:19):
it His and Hers, and then shortly thereafter rename it
the six pm edition of Sports Center, without ever really
changing what poor Hill and poor Smith were doing, arguing
that the chemistry between the two of them was strong
enough to not only not require them to do or
learn anything they hadn't done on a talk show, but
(21:40):
that it was strong enough to recreate Sports Center in
their image. This guy King basically left two people who
did not cover sports news on television per se to
get absolutely fried by public opinion when they tried to
with no help, they got blamed. Hill ran into political problems,
(22:01):
She left the network. Smith left the network. Rob King
stayed at the network until yesterday. Thank you, Nancy Faust.
(22:29):
And to quote Joseph Cotton in Citizen Kane, what a
disagreeable old man, I have become still ahead on countdown.
(22:50):
In Aaron Sorkin's TV series Newsroom, Jeff Daniels said, New York,
It'll be a great town whenever they finish it, and
the moment the words were out of his videotaped mouth,
like every one of my ex girlfriends texted, emailed, or
called asking the same question, isn't that what your dad
always said? Coming up first time for the daily roundup
(23:13):
of the miscrants, morons, and dunning Kruger Effect specimens who
constitute today's worst persons in the world. The Bronze elon
Musk Bloomberg News reporting that the man who got rich
on other people's ideas is suspected of giving access to
sensitive Twitter data to a Saudi prince, a Qatari sovereign
(23:35):
wealth finance fund, and a Chinese crypto guy, all of
whom helped fund Musk's purchase of Twitter. Bloomberg quotes an
unnamed US official who describes Musk's Tesla as a Chinese
company with an American subsidiary. It quotes Senator Mark Warner saying,
I don't think there is another American more dependent upon
(23:57):
the largess of the Communist Party than Elon Musk, and
most importantly, Bloomberg reports the Biden administration and his weighing
whether or not to have Musk's purchase of Twitter. Will
the Chinese Saudi Qatari Musk purchase of Twitter reviewed and
possibly blocked reversed for national security concerns by the Committee
(24:18):
on Foreign Investment in the United States. Hey, Alon, you've
stolen a lot of memes. Any of them memes ever
read by Felicia the runner up Kentucky Congress and Jamie Comer,
the new Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, would be
inquisitor who complained that the late bow Diet Biden had
died before somebody could investigate him class act. This Comber,
(24:42):
profiled by The New York Times, Comer made an unbelievable
comparison about trying to manage the blithering oral spasms of
Marjorie Taylor Barney Rubble Green quote, It's hard for a
coach to tell Lebron James what he's doing wrong. The
only thing Green and Lebron James have in common is
(25:02):
that they've both been to a gym. But our winner,
also Congressman Jamie Coomer. That Times piece is pretty much
the standard access journalism fluff job. But down there in
paragraph nine, somebody finally mentioned the still unresolved charges from
twenty fifteen that I have repeatedly mentioned here that Coomber
(25:22):
beat his college girlfriend, called her parents and to them,
threatened her life, drove her to get an abortion, and
became enraged when she used his name on the abortion paperwork.
It is not until paragraph thirty one that the big
news comes out, though in the Time story there were
emails connecting the blogger who first reported this story to
(25:45):
the husband of somebody running against Coomber in the big
Kentucky governor's race of twenty fifteen. Somehow those emails got
out and they leaked. Quote. In an interview with The Times,
mister Coomber confirmed for the first time that he had
been behind the leak and strongly hinted he had gotten
the emails from the server. The Times quoted Comber then
(26:08):
as saying, I've had two servers in my lifetime. Hunter
Biden's is one, and you can I'm not going to
say who the other one was, but you can use
your imagination. It ended up in my lap. I'll put
it like that. Unquote, and the Times pretty much dropped
it there. Chairman James. Comer is a common thief, and
(26:28):
after eight years, nobody has disproved the other allegations that
he's also a common domestic abuser and a violent scumbag.
Comber has no business driving a bus let alone serving
in Congress. James, it ended up in my lap. Comber,
Today's worst person in the world, Still ahead on Countdown.
(27:02):
Aaron Sorkin has created two different television series based largely
on my career. One of them, Sports Night, he boasted
was largely about my career. The other Newsroom, he denied
I had anything to do with it, even after he
had hired me as a consultant and hired away my
assistant as an actress and named another character after her. Oh,
(27:24):
and then he quoted my dad word for word in
episode seven things I promised not to tell next First.
In each edition of Countdown, we feature a dog in
need you can help. Every dog has its day back
here in New York, Moose Tracks is in a world
of hurt, a terrified stray mixed breed big dog, blue
brown eyes, kind of freckly. He only arrived in the
(27:46):
New York Pound a week ago. Yesterday but he's already
on death row. He's too terrified to be released from
his kennel. Yet he's gentle when taking treats the age
of three. He's crying out for help at great risk
to be killed. There. Our pledges will help defray the
costs of a rescue to pull him and save his life.
Look for tracks on my Twitter feeds I thank you
(28:08):
and Moose tracks Thanks You. I heard Jeff Daniels say
the words, and in the next minute my cell phone rang.
It was an ex girlfriend. While we were talking, an
(28:30):
email arrived from another ex girlfriend, and then in came
at text from the current girlfriend at her folkshouse. Then
two more emails, and before I was off the phone,
two voicemails, and then regular friends started to contact me.
This is just over ten years ago now. Was Sunday,
August fifth, twenty twelve. Jeff Daniels was playing the controversial
(28:51):
newscaster and commentator on Aaron Sorkin's HBO series Newsroom, which
was based structurally on Me and Countdown. And I know
this because Aaron Sorkin told me so before he filmed
any of it. And I know this because he asked
me if he could base the pilot episode on What
Happened to Me at MSNBC in the spring and summer
(29:12):
of twenty ten. And I know this because he came
in and shadowed the staff of Countdown for two days
to get the feel for the place. And I know
this because he wound up basing one character, Maggie Jordan,
on my assistant Margaret Judson, and then hiring Margaret Judson
as a consultant, and then hiring her as an actress
to play a part that wasn't supposed to be her.
(29:34):
And I know this because he was furious when I
would not fly to Denver. I think it was to
do a cameo in the pilot. And I know this
because he said he was hiring me as a consultant.
And I know this because I never saw a dime
out of it. This was the second time Aaron Sorkin
had based one of his TV series on one of
my TV series. The other was called Sports Night, and
(29:57):
Esquire magazine once asked me to interview Sorkin about Sports Night,
and I asked him the real tough question, what was
the origin of Sports Night? And his answer was, quote,
you are the origin. So when the New York Times
had called me about Newsroom. I lightheartedly said that it
was nice to know in advance this time that Aaron
Sorkin was making a TV series about me. Sorkin did
(30:21):
not like this at all, and he told all his
actors to tell all their interviewers that this was not true.
And I know that because Jeff Daniels told me that
was what Sorkin had told him. Sorkin is interesting. I
had known him for about ten or twelve years when
he came into Countdown to see what it looked and
felt like, and he was twenty minutes late. And my
(30:43):
assistant Margaret after whom he named Maggie Jordan, whom he
then hired away from me, and whom he finally hired
as an actress to play Tess Weston, and she was great.
By the way. Margaret brings him in and he apologizes
for being late, and he says he's staying in a
hotel two blocks away and he should have just walked,
but instead he got in a car, and the next
thing he knew, he was six blocks away caught him.
(31:04):
Traffic caused by the complete shutdown of one of the
crosstown streets for midday construction, and I laughed and I said, well,
like my late father, the architect used to say, New York,
it'll be a great town whenever they finish it. And
he laughed, and I laughed. And two years later, in
the seventh episode of the HBO Newsroom series first aired
(31:26):
on August fifth, twenty twelve, and reaired throughout the week,
Jeff Daniels as the anchorman, Will McAvoy, who wasn't me
but actually kind of was me, is late to his
newsroom because he gets caught in Manhattan traffic caused by
Sunday night street construction, and he says to his exasperated producer,
new York, it'll be a great town whenever they finish it.
(31:49):
That's when my phone and email blew up. And the
then girlfriend, and like forty percent of all of my
exes ever all had the same question, New York, It'll
be a great town whenever they finish it. Isn't that
what your dad used to say? Even the ones who
never met my dad knew this because I used to
quote him constantly, Because the real humor in the quote
(32:11):
is the fact that my dad was an architect and
construction was his business. New York it'll be a great
town whenever they finish it, and then one of the
last of the exes reached out. She waited until the
show was over. Now, I don't think any of us
is proud of this, but she had also dated Sorkin
once or twice, and since she had written celebrity stories
(32:34):
for a New York newspaper, he had later asked her
by email what the world of gossip reporting was like,
and she told him by email, And what she now
told me made Aaron Sorkin's use of my dad's quote
and other parts of my life seemed like possible coincidences.
She said she was watching the third, maybe fourth episode
(32:54):
of Newsroom, and in walked a new character, a gossip columnist,
a woman, and the first sentence the character said was
my friend and ex said were for word, something she
had sent to Sorkin in one of the emails about
the gossip business. She said when she heard it, her
face started to get red and it would keep getting redder.
(33:15):
The gossip columnist character's second line had also been cut
and pasted from my ex's email, then her long speech,
then all of her dialogue. She said in her second scene,
my ex actually managed to record that episode and to
find her own email to Sorkin and to compare them,
and she said, other than changing a couple of tenses,
he had used her answers verbatim. I met the actor
(33:39):
Josh Charles during the two thousand World Series. I was
there anchoring it for Fox Sports. Josh was there promoting
his new show on Fox. Josh had played Dan Rydell
on Sorkin's Sports Night series, and even Sorkin and I agreed,
dan Rydell is just me with a different haircut. I
was walking up Sixth Avenue one day in October two thousand,
(34:00):
and from several blocks away, I saw Josh Charles walking
towards me, so I had several minutes to prepare what
I could say to him. This was not spontaneous, sadly,
but after our eyes met and I smiled and he
gave me that yes, I'm on TV look that I
recognize and have myself deployed. He switched suddenly to shock
(34:21):
and even a little apprehension, And I said in the
line I had been rehearsing in my head for several minutes.
Excuse me. You don't get to say this often in life.
But didn't you used to play me on TV right
there on sixth aven You Josh told me about the
ordeal of working with and for Aaron Sorkin, and I
thought he just met for actors, but I later found
(34:43):
out because New York, it'll be a great town wherever
they finish it. Josh and I are still friends. We've
gone to ball games together. We were in a fantasy
baseball league together. And one night on my ESPN two show,
we came back from commercial, giving the audience no warning
or explanation, and we simply started co anchoring the show
and calling it Sports Night and making reference to the
(35:05):
program and to Newsroom. And then he said, why did
we keep reading this? And I said, I don't know.
I just assumed Sorkin had run out of new ideas.
The mutual laughter that followed was sincere. There is one
more punchline to the Newsroom Sorkin story, because I was
like his seventh guest ever. When Stephen Colbert wrapped up
(35:26):
the Colbert Rapport on Comedy Central, I was invited to
be on the final farewell episode, me and like ninety
nine other people. There were so many of us, ranging
from Barry Manilow to Brian Cranston to Big Bird that
they had like nine green rooms in the Comedy Central building.
And I get there and they send me to the
(35:47):
green room I would be sharing with several other people.
And I trudge up a bunch of stairs to the
top floor and in this big room there is only
one other performer there yet it's Jeff Daniels. Without saying hello,
he says, now, wait, let me explain. Sorkin told me,
and I explained, and then he explained, and then I
explained some more, and Jeff said, oh a lot, and
(36:12):
once he said oops, and Serkin didn't tell me that.
And after about three minutes he said, so I owe
you an apology and I said, no, you don't. It's
not your fault. And he smiled and he said, well great,
I'm glad. So can we take a picture together that
I can put out on Twitter? And I said, yeah, absolutely,
but only if you captured in it New York. It'll
(36:35):
be a great town whenever they finish it. I've done
all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening.
Here the credits. Most of the music was arranged, produced,
(36:55):
and performed by Aaron Sorkin, now by Brian Ray and
John Philip Channel, who are the countdown musical directors. All
orchestration and keyboards by Aaron Sorkin now John Philip Channel,
guitarist basin, drums by Aaron who wrote this. Guitars, bass
and drums by Brian Ray, produced by t Ko Brothers
(37:16):
and Eron Serkin. Other Beethoven selections have been arranged and
performed by No Horns allowed. The sports music is the
Olderman theme from ESPN Too, and it was written by
Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of the ESPN Inc. Musical comments
by Nancy Faust. The best baseball stadium organist ever. Our
announcer today was Stevie Van's Aunt. Everything else is pretty
(37:38):
much my fault. So let's countdown for this, the eight
hundred and sixth day since Donald Trump's first attempt at
coup against the democratically elected government of the United States.
Arrest him now while we still can, or if it's
already happened as you're listening to this, arrest him again
while we still can. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow.
(37:59):
Until then, I'm Keith Olberman. Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight,
and good luck. Countdown with Keith Alderman is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
(38:22):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. So
apparently this is the twelve Days of Trump mus forget
(00:27):
Stormy Daniels for the time being, concentrated instead on Beryl Howell.
Until last Friday, Beryl Howell was the judge supervising special
counsel Jack Smith's grand jury, and sources who have seen
the document in question say she wrote, of prima facie
evidence quote that the former president had committed criminal violations
(00:49):
and that the records Trump's lawyers now had to hand
over despite attorney client privilege pertained to Trump's quote criminal
scheme unquote. Those are phrases that wind up in indictments.
We do not know what timetable Jack Smith is working on,
nor whether he would finish the investigation of every Trump
(01:10):
potential crime first and then and only then indict on
any of them. But Trump might still be on trial
because of Beryl Howell, long before he's on trial because
of Stormy Daniels, and obviously it would be for much
higher stakes. There is a second revelation nearly as telling,
(01:31):
hiding behind Judge Howell's use of the phrases criminal violations
and criminal scheme. It's not just the judge's phrasing that matters.
It's that she needed to assess whether the violations and
the scheme were criminal, because clearly the Special Counsel was
trying to convince her that they were criminal. This is
all part of a story broken last night by ABC
(01:53):
News that understandably got buried behind the circus here in
New York and the one at Marilago and the continuing, unrelenting,
spiraling cyclone of panic inside the Trump cult. Quote. Prosecutors
in the Special Counsel's office have presented compelling preliminary evidence
that Trump knowingly and deliberately misled his own attorneys about
(02:16):
his retention of classified materials. That's the beginning of the
ABC News report. And clearly the judge did not say that,
only to have Jack Smith then say, why, well, that
wasn't my intent. I don't think it was criminal. That
point is underscored again later. Quote. Howell also ordered Corkran
to hand over a number of records tied to what
(02:37):
Howe described as Trump's alleged criminal scheme. Echoing prosecutors, one
would think it would be obvious that a special counsel
investigating criminality or potential criminality by a former president. Would
you believe the former president was guilty of criminality? That
(03:00):
that would be a given going in, But after Bob Muller,
who knows anymore? This story kind of eliminates the margin
of doubt. I am grateful to this story. It is
not as much fun nor as visceral as contemplating a
Trump mug shot taken by the Boudoir photographers from the
Manhattan District Attorney's office and then printed on the front
(03:23):
page of every newspaper in the world, but it's way
more important. There are caveats in the rest of the
ABC story. It is sourced to begin with the details
of the document in which Judge Howell wrote, all this
come courtesy quote sources who described its contents to ABC News,
and prima facie is still the lowest of three standards
(03:44):
of evidence. As ABC writes, how agreed, prosecutors made a
sufficient showing that, on its face would appear to show
Trump committed crimes. The judge made it clear that prosecutors
would still need to meet a higher standard of evidence
in order to seek charges against Trump, and more still,
to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Unquote, there
(04:05):
is one other detail, the sealed filing that somebody described
to ABC News instructed Trump attorney Evan Corkran to testify
on six separate lines of inquiry about which Judge Howell
says attorney client privilege no longer applies and the quote
records on quote Corkran must hand over to the Special
(04:27):
Council's office include handwritten notes, invoices, and transcriptions of personal
audio recordings unquote, Lordie, Lordie. There are tapes. There is
also dramatic courtroom news from Fox and Dominion and this
(04:48):
Maria Bardaromo Tucker Carlson booking producer who Monday night revealed
anti semitism and misogyny at a Tucker Carlson office debate
over the fability of the respective candidates for governor of Michigan.
But let's finish up Trump first. Most of the screams
of rage and terror from his supporters, alike those of
(05:09):
Rand Paul, this arrest is an illegal, abusive power. So
instead abuse this power and arrest the district attorney or
the new one from Kevin McCarthy asked a direct question
about not Trump's arrest, but what he's accused of doing
to silence Stormy Daniels. McCarthy answered, not about Stormy Daniels,
(05:32):
nor about Trump, but about Hillary Clinton or the other
screams of rage and terror alike. You can't arrest Trump,
God sent him. Only God can arrest him. Only God
can fingerprint him. Only God can take him down and
book him. But those few substantial complaints about the law
(05:52):
here sent her on something else, selective prosecution and the
assumption that nobody ever gets prosecuted for falsifying business records,
certainly not as a felony charge. And Trump would be
charged for something nobody's ever charged for, just because it's Trump.
And it turns out that that assumption is hilariously laugh
out loud wrong. The website just Security found a few
(06:18):
felony prosecutions falsifying business records in the first degree, not
just a few of them, just in New York, just
in the last decade, twenty seven of them twenty seven.
And they run the gamut from getting food stamps by
inventing an imaginary person on your books to getting insurance
payoffs on things lost in a fire that we're on
(06:41):
your books but weren't lost in a fire, And they
go all the way from that stuff to the owner
of a New York business falsifying the records of his
own business to make it look like he made a
million dollars less than he did. Second degree falsifying business
records is when you falsify the business records to falsify
the business records. First degree is when you do that
(07:05):
with quote intent to commit another crime or to aid
or conceal the commission thereof. That is New York Penal
Code one seventy five point ten and that starts with
P and that rhymes with T, and that stands for Trump.
Now to those blights on society who are getting their
(07:25):
asses sued for defaming on Trump's behalf. When Tuesday began,
Fox was in a world or hurt. Today Fox is
in two worlds of hurt. Fox and Dominion finally got
into a Delaware courtroom yesterday, and basically the judge greeted
them by slapping the Fox lawyer in the face with
a glove and all but asking about his seconds and
(07:46):
about pistols. At dawn. Fox invoked what is called neutral
reportage as a defense against the defamation charges, and it
insisted that Dominion could not prove actual malice and the
judge basically then said to Fox, but your side has
admitted to making stuff up and asking it off as news,
so how could you claim neutral reportage as a defense.
(08:10):
And Judge Eric Davis literally brought up Lou Dobbs and asked,
with incredulity, this is Davis's actual quote, asked, you're saying
he's a neutral reporter, not great Bob Fox quote News unquote.
Suddenly Yesterday dropped its attempt to silence the former Maria
(08:31):
Bartomo and current Tucker Carlson producer Abbie Grossberg, probably because
before they could silence her, she got out almost all
of her accusations about Fox lawyers trying to coerce her
into lying about and within the dominion voting defamation case,
and also just a couple dozen of her accusations about
jokes about the Jews made at Tucker Carlson Fox headquarters
(08:54):
and the pictures of Nancy Pelosi in a revealing swim
suit at Tucker Carlson Fox headquarters, and the debate at
Tucker Carlson Fox headquarters Gretchen Whitmer versus Tutor Dixon, and
we're not talking polling numbers, the legal documents, Miss Grossberg
submitted to the courts as part of her lawsuits, named
the Murdocks and one particular Fox executive senior vice president
(09:18):
David Clark, who was in charge of weekends, and judging
by the bug eyes in David Clark's photo, I am
pretty sure he is the Dave Clark who edited audio
tape at the Archaeo Radio Network when I worked there
in nineteen eighty, eighty one and eighty two. That's kind
of besides the point, but it did sort of strike
me as relevant anyway. These documents also mentioned the time
(09:42):
Grossberg asked for the day off because your father was
in the ICU after brain surgery, and Fox management said
find your own replacement or show up. We don't care.
And I know people at NBC you've been treated like that.
Several attorneys noted that for all the blood and guts
and questions about a possible Maria Bardaromo Kevin McCarthy's sexual relationship,
(10:05):
the real point of the Abbey Grossberg story is that
all of a sudden, Fox could be dealing not with
defamation civil suits, but with criminal charges. If you are
Fox and your lawyers sat there and coached and directed
and threatened your producer away from telling the truth in
her depositions and her testimony. That's called subornation of perjury.
(10:28):
That's a crime, Not great, Bob Tucker. Carlson, meanwhile, continues
to look like an out of control train with no breaks,
going down an incline at one hundred miles an hour,
and the engineer designs the problem is he's not going
fast enough, so let's make it one hundred and twenty five.
Joan Walsh re upped her twenty nineteen piece from Salon
(10:51):
in which she wrote that nine years earlier than that,
so that's twenty ten. When she was at Salon, she'd
had an intern reach out to Carlson to write some
opinion piece about Obama, and Carlson responded by telling intern, well,
he called her the C word to the intern, and
he insisted to the intern that she needed desperately to
(11:13):
have sex. This is where Carlson throttled up last night.
He insisted that January sixth was not an insurrection, not
at all. They didn't have guns. They were just patriotic
Americans who was just people who believed the election was
stolen and they certainly had reason to think that. And
on election night, when they went to sleep at dusk,
Trump was winning, and then in the morning the fake
(11:35):
news said, and then and you're thinking, You're thinking, where
is he going with all this? Because this could be
the audition tape for Newsmax or Mike Lindell TV. Because
after Tucker Carlson attacked Trump, if he also attacked the
Jews and all the women, Fox has been sued by
in the past and is going to be sued by now.
(11:57):
If he's actually done all that, Fox is going to
have to fire him, in which case I will buy
everybody in America a martini. A couple of last Trump
notes on what again might be Trump Miss Eve but
probably isn't. They are one an interview the laughable Pierce
(12:18):
Morgan did with the laughable Ron de Santis, about which
nobody in Trump world is laughing because sufficient homage was
not paid by De santist to Trump number two. Then
there's that smarmie New York Congresswoman Elias Stefanic, the dolorous
umbrage of the piece who sold her soul to Trump
for god knows what, but who told punch Bowl News
(12:41):
that she briefed Trump Monday night quote about our efforts
on the Judiciary Committee, on the Oversight Committee to get
an immediate investigation of Manhattan DA. Bragg presumably she did
not tell him. Bragg can completely ignore the Republicans on
this investigation because only the Department of Justice could ever
pursue any kind of contempt of Congress charge, and the
(13:02):
DJ would never force a DA to reveal details of
a criminal investigation and reveal those details to politicians. Stefanik
also said Ron DeSantis was tepid in his defense of
the Fureer and DeSantis is quote going to see slippage
in his poles. And I hear that, and I think
DeSantis pole slippage. We'll just get him higher, high heels.
(13:26):
One last gem from stefanic quote, we that's her. And
Trump also talked a lot about what I've heard from
his supporters in my district and across the country. He's
never been in a stronger position in terms of rallying
that support. I think you'll see his poll numbers go up. Unquote,
if Stefanik had added, I also told him he was
young and handsome and fit and powerful and inspires worship,
(13:50):
and his more strong, more masculine, more extraordinary, more virile,
more domineering, more irresistible. Oh wait, sorry, that's the last
speech from the end of the Jack Nicholson movie Carnal Knowledge. Sorry,
the third and final of the three Trump pss. There
is yet another insider Trump piece in The New York
(14:12):
Times from Maga Haberman. But this quote is spectacular. Thank you, Maga.
Quote Behind closed Doors at Marilago, the former president has
told friends and associates that he welcomes the idea of
being paraded by the authorities before a throng of reporters
and news cameras. He has even mused openly about whether
(14:35):
he should smile for the assembled media, and he has
pondered how the public would react, and is said to
have described the potential spectacle as a fun experience unquote.
And if that doesn't sound like the completely whacked out
Norma Desmond coming down the stairs after murdering her lover
(14:57):
at the end of the movie Sunset Boulevard, I don't
know what does. I'm ready for my close up, Miss
your da still ahead of us. In this edition of Countdown,
(15:21):
Good God, somebody, somebody finally brought up Congressman Jamie Comber's
college girlfriend and her charge that he beat her up,
and the side show about stolen emails that linked the
blogger who broke the story to the husband of somebody
who was running for office against Comber, whereupon Comber confessed
that he was responsible for leaking those emails. The statute
(15:47):
of limitations, of course, has already run out, but it's
a start. The story of the day. An Aaron Sorkin
character said one phrase in one episode of one show,
and every one of my ex girlfriends contacted me immediately
and said, wait, isn't that what your dad always used
to saying. It was because Sorkin got it from my dad.
(16:07):
And it can be argued that the greatest performance by
a basketball player in history came in an NBA Finals
game that was not shown on live television, and came
in a game in which that player scored exactly four points.
A man who gave that greatest performance, who won an
NBA title by literally just showing up, has passed away.
(16:31):
That's next. This is countdown. This is countdown with Keith Oberman.
(16:57):
This is SportsCenter. Wait, check that not anymore. This is
countdown with Keith Albermann. In sports it is easily the
most important game by any player in basketball history who
in the game scored four points. Game seven of the
(17:20):
NBA Finals May eighth, nineteen seventy, the New York Knicks
ahead in the series three games to two over the
Los Angeles Lakers, but then blown out in Game six
after their star center and captain Willis Reid tore a
muscle in his thigh and did not play. A minute
and twenty minutes before Game seven, and Reid was nowhere
(17:41):
to be seen, the visiting Los Angeles Lakers were on
the court at Madison Square Garden. They thought they had
already won the seventh game and thus the championship, and
the Knicks thought they had already lost. And then with
minutes left before tip off, an extraordinary roar started at
Madison Square Garden, and it grew and grew and grew
(18:03):
as nineteen thousand pairs of eyes turned to one spot.
It was Willis Reid hobbling out of the tunnel from
the dressing room onto the court for warm ups. He
was going to play. The Lakers players just stared in disbelief,
and they played that way the entire game. Willis Reid
(18:23):
could barely move. He only took five shots, played about
half the game, he only grabbed three rebounds, but he
scored New York's first basket, and they were quickly up
by twenty nine over the absolutely discombobulated Lakers. The Knicks
would win one hundred thirteen to ninety nine over La
and Wilt Chamberlain and Jerry West to claim their first
(18:47):
NBA crown. Willis Reid died yesterday at the age of eighty.
He led New York to its only other title in
nineteen seventy three. He later served as coach and general manager,
and had the same job with the New Jersey Nets,
and was named one of the NBA's fifty Greatest Players Ever.
If they made such a list for the NBA's fifty
Greatest people Ever, Willis Reid would have been on that
(19:09):
one too. It is impossible to convey this now, but
other than the nineteen thousand fans in Madison Square Garden
on that pretty spring Friday nineteen nineteen seventy, the only
way people experienced Willis Reid's emergence from the tunnel in
real time was on radio, with the play by play
(19:31):
of the Knicks announcer Marv Albert or the Lakers announcer
Chick Hearne. The nineteen seventy NBA Finals were not shown
on live television, in part because basketball was really bad
for TV ratings in those days, and in part also
out of the fear that if they showed it live
(19:52):
that would cut into ticket sales for the seventh game
of the NBA Finals. Many NBA playoff games were shown
that way as late as nineteen eighty six. So first
Willis Reid was heard coming out under the court, then
the Knicks won the championship, and then at eleven thirty
at night, the Knicks fans of New York got to
(20:12):
see it. Rest in peace, Willis Reid, And speaking of television,
a shake up at ESPN amid a reported new round
of mass layoffs coming there. Executive vice president Rob King,
a twenty year veteran of the company, says he has
left ESPN. But that is not what The New York
Post is reporting, and one of its columnists is a
(20:33):
disgruntled x ESPN employee. The Post says King was fired
for harassment in social media posts. This much is clear.
His ESPN biography page has already been wiped off its website.
No other details provided even by rumor either way, if
you think Sports Center lost its direction this century, you
(20:56):
can point to Rob King. It is inconceivable that anybody
who ever ran that epic franchise had less of an
idea of what sports fans wanted from that broadcast. His
most infamous of many bad decisions was to take a
decent enough talk show called Numbers Never Lie with two
pretty good anchors named Jamel Hill and Michael Smith, rename
(21:19):
it His and Hers, and then shortly thereafter rename it
the six pm edition of Sports Center, without ever really
changing what poor Hill and poor Smith were doing, arguing
that the chemistry between the two of them was strong
enough to not only not require them to do or
learn anything they hadn't done on a talk show, but
(21:40):
that it was strong enough to recreate Sports Center in
their image. This guy King basically left two people who
did not cover sports news on television per se to
get absolutely fried by public opinion when they tried to
with no help, they got blamed. Hill ran into political problems,
(22:01):
She left the network. Smith left the network. Rob King
stayed at the network until yesterday. Thank you, Nancy Faust.
(22:29):
And to quote Joseph Cotton in Citizen Kane, what a
disagreeable old man, I have become still ahead on countdown.
(22:50):
In Aaron Sorkin's TV series Newsroom, Jeff Daniels said, New York,
It'll be a great town whenever they finish it, and
the moment the words were out of his videotaped mouth,
like every one of my ex girlfriends texted, emailed, or
called asking the same question, isn't that what your dad
always said? Coming up first time for the daily roundup
(23:13):
of the miscrants, morons, and dunning Kruger Effect specimens who
constitute today's worst persons in the world. The Bronze elon
Musk Bloomberg News reporting that the man who got rich
on other people's ideas is suspected of giving access to
sensitive Twitter data to a Saudi prince, a Qatari sovereign
(23:35):
wealth finance fund, and a Chinese crypto guy, all of
whom helped fund Musk's purchase of Twitter. Bloomberg quotes an
unnamed US official who describes Musk's Tesla as a Chinese
company with an American subsidiary. It quotes Senator Mark Warner saying,
I don't think there is another American more dependent upon
(23:57):
the largess of the Communist Party than Elon Musk, and
most importantly, Bloomberg reports the Biden administration and his weighing
whether or not to have Musk's purchase of Twitter. Will
the Chinese Saudi Qatari Musk purchase of Twitter reviewed and
possibly blocked reversed for national security concerns by the Committee
(24:18):
on Foreign Investment in the United States. Hey, Alon, you've
stolen a lot of memes. Any of them memes ever
read by Felicia the runner up Kentucky Congress and Jamie Comer,
the new Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, would be
inquisitor who complained that the late bow Diet Biden had
died before somebody could investigate him class act. This Comber,
(24:42):
profiled by The New York Times, Comer made an unbelievable
comparison about trying to manage the blithering oral spasms of
Marjorie Taylor Barney Rubble Green quote, It's hard for a
coach to tell Lebron James what he's doing wrong. The
only thing Green and Lebron James have in common is
(25:02):
that they've both been to a gym. But our winner,
also Congressman Jamie Coomer. That Times piece is pretty much
the standard access journalism fluff job. But down there in
paragraph nine, somebody finally mentioned the still unresolved charges from
twenty fifteen that I have repeatedly mentioned here that Coomber
(25:22):
beat his college girlfriend, called her parents and to them,
threatened her life, drove her to get an abortion, and
became enraged when she used his name on the abortion paperwork.
It is not until paragraph thirty one that the big
news comes out, though in the Time story there were
emails connecting the blogger who first reported this story to
(25:45):
the husband of somebody running against Coomber in the big
Kentucky governor's race of twenty fifteen. Somehow those emails got
out and they leaked. Quote. In an interview with The Times,
mister Coomber confirmed for the first time that he had
been behind the leak and strongly hinted he had gotten
the emails from the server. The Times quoted Comber then
(26:08):
as saying, I've had two servers in my lifetime. Hunter
Biden's is one, and you can I'm not going to
say who the other one was, but you can use
your imagination. It ended up in my lap. I'll put
it like that. Unquote, and the Times pretty much dropped
it there. Chairman James. Comer is a common thief, and
(26:28):
after eight years, nobody has disproved the other allegations that
he's also a common domestic abuser and a violent scumbag.
Comber has no business driving a bus let alone serving
in Congress. James, it ended up in my lap. Comber,
Today's worst person in the world, Still ahead on Countdown.
(27:02):
Aaron Sorkin has created two different television series based largely
on my career. One of them, Sports Night, he boasted
was largely about my career. The other Newsroom, he denied
I had anything to do with it, even after he
had hired me as a consultant and hired away my
assistant as an actress and named another character after her. Oh,
(27:24):
and then he quoted my dad word for word in
episode seven things I promised not to tell next First.
In each edition of Countdown, we feature a dog in
need you can help. Every dog has its day back
here in New York, Moose Tracks is in a world
of hurt, a terrified stray mixed breed big dog, blue
brown eyes, kind of freckly. He only arrived in the
(27:46):
New York Pound a week ago. Yesterday but he's already
on death row. He's too terrified to be released from
his kennel. Yet he's gentle when taking treats the age
of three. He's crying out for help at great risk
to be killed. There. Our pledges will help defray the
costs of a rescue to pull him and save his life.
Look for tracks on my Twitter feeds I thank you
(28:08):
and Moose tracks Thanks You. I heard Jeff Daniels say
the words, and in the next minute my cell phone rang.
It was an ex girlfriend. While we were talking, an
(28:30):
email arrived from another ex girlfriend, and then in came
at text from the current girlfriend at her folkshouse. Then
two more emails, and before I was off the phone,
two voicemails, and then regular friends started to contact me.
This is just over ten years ago now. Was Sunday,
August fifth, twenty twelve. Jeff Daniels was playing the controversial
(28:51):
newscaster and commentator on Aaron Sorkin's HBO series Newsroom, which
was based structurally on Me and Countdown. And I know
this because Aaron Sorkin told me so before he filmed
any of it. And I know this because he asked
me if he could base the pilot episode on What
Happened to Me at MSNBC in the spring and summer
(29:12):
of twenty ten. And I know this because he came
in and shadowed the staff of Countdown for two days
to get the feel for the place. And I know
this because he wound up basing one character, Maggie Jordan,
on my assistant Margaret Judson, and then hiring Margaret Judson
as a consultant, and then hiring her as an actress
to play a part that wasn't supposed to be her.
(29:34):
And I know this because he was furious when I
would not fly to Denver. I think it was to
do a cameo in the pilot. And I know this
because he said he was hiring me as a consultant.
And I know this because I never saw a dime
out of it. This was the second time Aaron Sorkin
had based one of his TV series on one of
my TV series. The other was called Sports Night, and
(29:57):
Esquire magazine once asked me to interview Sorkin about Sports Night,
and I asked him the real tough question, what was
the origin of Sports Night? And his answer was, quote,
you are the origin. So when the New York Times
had called me about Newsroom. I lightheartedly said that it
was nice to know in advance this time that Aaron
Sorkin was making a TV series about me. Sorkin did
(30:21):
not like this at all, and he told all his
actors to tell all their interviewers that this was not true.
And I know that because Jeff Daniels told me that
was what Sorkin had told him. Sorkin is interesting. I
had known him for about ten or twelve years when
he came into Countdown to see what it looked and
felt like, and he was twenty minutes late. And my
(30:43):
assistant Margaret after whom he named Maggie Jordan, whom he
then hired away from me, and whom he finally hired
as an actress to play Tess Weston, and she was great.
By the way. Margaret brings him in and he apologizes
for being late, and he says he's staying in a
hotel two blocks away and he should have just walked,
but instead he got in a car, and the next
thing he knew, he was six blocks away caught him.
(31:04):
Traffic caused by the complete shutdown of one of the
crosstown streets for midday construction, and I laughed and I said, well,
like my late father, the architect used to say, New York,
it'll be a great town whenever they finish it. And
he laughed, and I laughed. And two years later, in
the seventh episode of the HBO Newsroom series first aired
(31:26):
on August fifth, twenty twelve, and reaired throughout the week,
Jeff Daniels as the anchorman, Will McAvoy, who wasn't me
but actually kind of was me, is late to his
newsroom because he gets caught in Manhattan traffic caused by
Sunday night street construction, and he says to his exasperated producer,
new York, it'll be a great town whenever they finish it.
(31:49):
That's when my phone and email blew up. And the
then girlfriend, and like forty percent of all of my
exes ever all had the same question, New York, It'll
be a great town whenever they finish it. Isn't that
what your dad used to say? Even the ones who
never met my dad knew this because I used to
quote him constantly, Because the real humor in the quote
(32:11):
is the fact that my dad was an architect and
construction was his business. New York it'll be a great
town whenever they finish it, and then one of the
last of the exes reached out. She waited until the
show was over. Now, I don't think any of us
is proud of this, but she had also dated Sorkin
once or twice, and since she had written celebrity stories
(32:34):
for a New York newspaper, he had later asked her
by email what the world of gossip reporting was like,
and she told him by email, And what she now
told me made Aaron Sorkin's use of my dad's quote
and other parts of my life seemed like possible coincidences.
She said she was watching the third, maybe fourth episode
(32:54):
of Newsroom, and in walked a new character, a gossip columnist,
a woman, and the first sentence the character said was
my friend and ex said were for word, something she
had sent to Sorkin in one of the emails about
the gossip business. She said when she heard it, her
face started to get red and it would keep getting redder.
(33:15):
The gossip columnist character's second line had also been cut
and pasted from my ex's email, then her long speech,
then all of her dialogue. She said in her second scene,
my ex actually managed to record that episode and to
find her own email to Sorkin and to compare them,
and she said, other than changing a couple of tenses,
he had used her answers verbatim. I met the actor
(33:39):
Josh Charles during the two thousand World Series. I was
there anchoring it for Fox Sports. Josh was there promoting
his new show on Fox. Josh had played Dan Rydell
on Sorkin's Sports Night series, and even Sorkin and I agreed,
dan Rydell is just me with a different haircut. I
was walking up Sixth Avenue one day in October two thousand,
(34:00):
and from several blocks away, I saw Josh Charles walking
towards me, so I had several minutes to prepare what
I could say to him. This was not spontaneous, sadly,
but after our eyes met and I smiled and he
gave me that yes, I'm on TV look that I
recognize and have myself deployed. He switched suddenly to shock
(34:21):
and even a little apprehension, And I said in the
line I had been rehearsing in my head for several minutes.
Excuse me. You don't get to say this often in life.
But didn't you used to play me on TV right
there on sixth aven You Josh told me about the
ordeal of working with and for Aaron Sorkin, and I
thought he just met for actors, but I later found
(34:43):
out because New York, it'll be a great town wherever
they finish it. Josh and I are still friends. We've
gone to ball games together. We were in a fantasy
baseball league together. And one night on my ESPN two show,
we came back from commercial, giving the audience no warning
or explanation, and we simply started co anchoring the show
and calling it Sports Night and making reference to the
(35:05):
program and to Newsroom. And then he said, why did
we keep reading this? And I said, I don't know.
I just assumed Sorkin had run out of new ideas.
The mutual laughter that followed was sincere. There is one
more punchline to the Newsroom Sorkin story, because I was
like his seventh guest ever. When Stephen Colbert wrapped up
(35:26):
the Colbert Rapport on Comedy Central, I was invited to
be on the final farewell episode, me and like ninety
nine other people. There were so many of us, ranging
from Barry Manilow to Brian Cranston to Big Bird that
they had like nine green rooms in the Comedy Central building.
And I get there and they send me to the
(35:47):
green room I would be sharing with several other people.
And I trudge up a bunch of stairs to the
top floor and in this big room there is only
one other performer there yet it's Jeff Daniels. Without saying hello,
he says, now, wait, let me explain. Sorkin told me,
and I explained, and then he explained, and then I
explained some more, and Jeff said, oh a lot, and
(36:12):
once he said oops, and Serkin didn't tell me that.
And after about three minutes he said, so I owe
you an apology and I said, no, you don't. It's
not your fault. And he smiled and he said, well great,
I'm glad. So can we take a picture together that
I can put out on Twitter? And I said, yeah, absolutely,
but only if you captured in it New York. It'll
(36:35):
be a great town whenever they finish it. I've done
all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening.
Here the credits. Most of the music was arranged, produced,
(36:55):
and performed by Aaron Sorkin, now by Brian Ray and
John Philip Channel, who are the countdown musical directors. All
orchestration and keyboards by Aaron Sorkin now John Philip Channel,
guitarist basin, drums by Aaron who wrote this. Guitars, bass
and drums by Brian Ray, produced by t Ko Brothers
(37:16):
and Eron Serkin. Other Beethoven selections have been arranged and
performed by No Horns allowed. The sports music is the
Olderman theme from ESPN Too, and it was written by
Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of the ESPN Inc. Musical comments
by Nancy Faust. The best baseball stadium organist ever. Our
announcer today was Stevie Van's Aunt. Everything else is pretty
(37:38):
much my fault. So let's countdown for this, the eight
hundred and sixth day since Donald Trump's first attempt at
coup against the democratically elected government of the United States.
Arrest him now while we still can, or if it's
already happened as you're listening to this, arrest him again
while we still can. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow.
(37:59):
Until then, I'm Keith Olberman. Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight,
and good luck. Countdown with Keith Alderman is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
(38:22):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Keith Olbermann
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