May 26, 2023 • 46 mins
EPISODE 211: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:43) SPECIAL COMMENT: The Washington Post's choice of its headline was the Mar-a-Lago workers moving boxes full of classified documents the day before the Justice Department stopped by to pick up what they’d subpoenaed, but that’s not THE headline in the story. THE headline in the story is really startling and could be the biggest in this week-long festival of leaks, this waterfall of sources-saying because this leak the Post DIDN’T think was the headline suggests Jack Smith has witnesses who saw Donald Trump commit not just obstruction of justice but espionage.
“Prosecutors…have gathered evidence indicating that Trump at times kept classified documents in his office in a place where they were visible and sometimes showed them to others… (they) have been told by more than one witness that Trump at times kept classified documents out in the open in his Florida office, where others could see them… and sometimes showed them to people, including aides and visitors,” unquote. So that’s literally espionage. Ten years or a fine or both. Per count. 18 USS Code 793 “Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information”paragraph “E.” Keeping classified documents is one thing. But having “unauthorized possession” of any document relating to the national defense and then being that guy who “willfully communicates, delivers, transmits, or causes to be communicated… to any person not entitled to receive it” is the point at which the option to not prosecute for espionage has typically ended.
Also: the Ron DeSantis Twitter disaster has been explained by tech experts. It's not tech, it's - what else - the cheapness of Elon Musk. Plus the judge not only throws the book at Oathkeepers culprit Stewart Rhodes but tells him to his face that he's not a "political prisoner" and most importantly of all, warns the courtroom and the nation that we could have another January 6th. And the TPM website decided to work backwards in its files on Rhodes and find where he made his national TV debut. You may not be that surprised by the answer.
Lastly just for laughs: Trump gets the year wrong and Junior tries to insult DeSantis but winds up saying "Trump" instead.
B-Block (15:28) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: I lament what my invention, MSNBC, has become. Once we were liberal skeptics, calling out lies and pressing Democrats to earn our support and do what's right. Now it is a place where if NBC decided tomorrow to go right wing, all most of the hosts would need to do would be change names or dye hair and they'd get away with it. Because it's now about them. Happily, seven years ago this week Lawrence O'Donnell confessed he and the current crowd had "broken" my invention.
C-Block (35:05) Sam, the two-year old female in NYC (36:05) FRIDAYS WITH JAMES THURBER: My father's favorite Thurber story, the amazing saga of Thurber's 4th Grade Class and the other students who had been in it for decades: "I Went To Sullivant."
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. The
Washington Post's choice of its headline was the Mari Lago
(00:26):
workers moving boxes full of classified documents the day before
the Justice Department stopped by to pick up what it
had subpoened. But that's not the actual headline in the
Washington Post story. And the actual headline in the Washington
Post story is really startling. It could be the biggest
in this week long festival of leaks, this waterfall of
(00:47):
sources say Jack Smith is doing this because this leak,
the one the Post did not think was the headline,
suggests the Special Council is going to charge Donald Trump
not just with obstruction, but with espionage. Quote. Prosecutors have
gathered evidence indicating that Trump at times kept classified documents
(01:09):
in his office in a place where they were visible,
and sometimes showed them to others. They have been told
by more than one witness that Trump at times kept
classified documents out in the open in his Florida office
where others could see them, and sometimes showed them to people,
including aids and visitors. Un quote. So that is literally
(01:33):
textbook espionage ten years or fine or both, per count
eighteen US Code seven ninety three gathering, transmitting, or losing
defense information Paragraph e. Keeping classified documents is one thing.
But having unauthorized possession of any document relating to the
(01:54):
national defense and then willfully communicates, delivers, transmits, or causes
to be communicated to any person not entitled to receive it.
That is the point the transmission, the communication, That is
the point at which the option not to prosecute for
espionage has typically ended. Now, Trump keeping classified documents in
(02:19):
his office and showing them to people including aids and
visitors and Mary Lago newlyweds and golfers and passers by
and lord knows who else, is thus way more egregious.
But as I have mentioned before, it also comes with
a complication. Trump has satisfactorily fuzzed up this declassification idea
(02:40):
that he could conceivably get away with it by quoting
that first part in that statute about unauthorized possession, and
it says, no, I granted myself authorized possession, and it's
nonsensical but stuck under the nose of the correct judge,
like one he himself appointed, and the espionage stuff could
disappear from the counts. The rest of what is in
(03:03):
the Washington Post report is about the much more straightforward
charges that a different part of the piece implies are
clearly happening soon. And I'll get to that clearly happening
soon part in a minute. The Post reports boxes were
moved by marri Lago staffers under the guidance of the
valet Walt Nahouda, which we knew. It's been reported for months.
It's what's on the security video, some of which may
(03:26):
have been deleted from the security video. The Post also
has the colorful anecdote that Trump had a dress rehearsal
for moving these boxes even before the subpoena got there.
The Post has the lawyer for one of the Naouda
cruz saying his client was loading boxes onto an suv
a year ago next Saturday. And they've been showing video
of that since literally last summer. Remember the suv parked
(03:49):
next to the private jet with bankers boxes being loaded
from the car to the plane bound for Trump's golf
course and cemetery in Bedminster, New Jersey, a year ago
next Saturday. And don't forget it, Bedminster. If your ball
gets stuck in soft ground near the t do not
reach into the ground. Do not reach into the ground
(04:09):
at Bedminster at the first hole. What you never saw
the movie Carrie wandered off again. Sorry. All of that
stuff goes to willful retention of those documents, especially the
idea of a rehearsal for hiding the boxes, and it
again renders actual classified status irrelevant, because obstruction of justice
(04:30):
is still obstruction of justice. If the government has subpoened
the documents and you say you are going to give
them the documents, and you say you are giving them
the documents, and then you say you have given them
the documents, then it turns out, no, you deliberately hid
some of the documents and the government does not have them,
and no, by the way, practiced hiding them. At that point,
it doesn't matter what the documents are. They don't have
(04:50):
to be classified. They could be old scripts of the
Countdown podcast. There were two other items in the post
report that you can think about over the holiday weekend,
because they imply his judgment cometh and that rights quote.
The grand jury working on the investigation apparently has not
met since May five, after months of frenetic activity at
(05:14):
the federal courthouse in Washington, which can only mean Smith
is a already done, or B he's about to be done,
or C he has another grand jury elsewhere collecting some
final evidence. And then there's the quote that suggests the
correct answer is a he's done quote. People familiar with
(05:36):
the situation said, Smith's team believes it has uncovered a
handful of distinct episodes of obstructionist conduct. For that to
be correct, it requires that Smith's team has everything it
needs to conclude anything. If Smith's team believes it has
found multiple distinct episodes of obstructionist conduct, and if Smith's
(06:00):
team has shared this with anybody like whoever then shared
it with the Washington Post, it means they've got indictments ready.
I know, I know, MDS Mullard derangement syndrome. I know,
I know, I know. So Also a little more on
(06:22):
Ron DeSantis and that wonderful unplanned moment of silence for
his presidential campaign during his presidential campaign announcement on whatever
is left of the website formerly known as Twitter. The
website platformer has the technical explanation. It is not, in
fact a technical explanation. It is an explanation of cheapness. Quote.
(06:44):
Perhaps the most important thing to know about Space's technical
problems over the past several months. Musk cut the space's team,
which once numbered as many as one hundred employees, down
to roughly three people. Three people. Wait, there's more quote.
Musk's own Twitter app crashed repeatedly during the event. We're told,
(07:09):
nice work, Elmo, and it turns out there have been
two other ron de glitches. As Axios reported the promotional
video for the campaign launch, you couldn't hear on Twitter
spaces it was, as we say in the business sweetened
the pack never back Down took a speech by DeSantis
(07:29):
in Fort Saint Lucie, Florida, on November fifth, twenty twenty two,
a speech which was not during a military flyover, and
it used AI to add in fighter jets in the
sky over DeSantis's shoulder and also the woosh they made.
Then last night, DeSantis resumed his TV tour his we
(07:51):
should watch things are going so badly, maybe a studio
light will fall on him TV tour. He went on
the Eric Bowling Show on Newsmax. Yes that's the one
that's been beating Anderson Cooper. In the ratings and mid interview,
the split screen of Bowling and DeSantis froze, but the
audio continued, So you saw Bowling eyes almost completely closed,
(08:15):
looking stoned, in other words, looking like he always does.
And DeSantis eyebrows locked in the upright position, and shoulders
hunched and frozen in a way that made him look
shorter than he even is. All the time DeSantis kept
talking without moving his mouth. I mean, at some point
(08:37):
you may want to look into whether or not all
these things are signs Ronda and Elmer Stewart. Rhodes will
go to jail insisting he is a political prisoner, and
guess what he's not. And the judge who sentenced him
yesterday said, plain of day, he's not. Judge amit Meta
(08:57):
sentenced the founder of the Oathkeepers to eighteen years in
prison for his role in January sixth, and he sentenced
Kelly Meg's of the Oath Keepers to twelve years. And
after Rhodes then went off in one of his angry
rationalizations about saving the country, Judge made us silenced roads
and per reporters on the scene silenced the courtroom itself
when he then said, we all now hold our collective breaths.
(09:19):
With an election approaching, will we have another January sixth?
Somebody gets it all this you probably already knew. What
you may not know was uncovered by David Kurtz of TPM,
who decided to examine his website's archives to see if
his memory was correct and that they had been covering
(09:39):
roads for years, long before he descended into vigilantism and
delusions of grandeur and sedition. Rhodes was once a Ron
Paul staffer. He was at Yale Law. He started the
oath Keepers in two thousand and nine and within months,
literally on February nineteenth, twenty ten, in a suit and
(10:00):
a tie, and before he allegedly lost an eye after
drop his gun while he was serving as a gun
safety instructor. He got his first national exposure, the first
national television hit for Stuart Rose, his first step down
the public path to eighteen years in prison for sedition
(10:22):
and who platformed him first? Where was Stuart Rhoad's first
national TV Oathkeepers interview? It was on Fox News with
Bill O'Reilly, I told you so, all right, let me
(10:44):
leave you laughing Trump Junior trying to insult DeSantis but
instead swapping his own father's name for DeSantis and winding
up insulting Dad Check and Dad thinking as he's talking
about Jack Smith that the upcoming vote is the twenty
twenty election. Check policy, grounds or personality. Trump has the
(11:06):
charisma of a mortician and the energy that makes Jack Smith.
He's a harasser and an abuser of our people. In
order to obstruct and interfere with the twenty twenty presidential election,
that's why they're doing it. Geniuses, father and son. So
(11:27):
it's Memorial Day weekend, and I will have a podcast
for you on Monday, and I'm not sure if it
will be new or old or half and half because
we have all kinds of possible breaking news. Although I
really doubt Trump will be indicted on Memorial Day weekend.
Then again, I didn't think Ronald McDaniel would say that
a default on the national debt would bode well for
the Republican presidential candidates, confirming that the Republican Party has
(11:48):
completely lost any understanding that its political posturing and judicial
and legislative terrorism has actual consequences, including, in this case,
immeasurable damage to the very corporations that own said Republican
presidential candidates, losing understanding that what you do and say
means more than just points on some scoreboard. That exists
(12:11):
only in your own head, that it affects the real
world and people's lives. This may be the theme of
America in the twenty first century. It happens everywhere. It
has happened at MSNBC. That's next, This is countdown. This
is countdown with Keith Olberman. I was surprised to be
(12:38):
going through my notes and find that this moment of
confession was seven years ago. This week, I may have
indicated that I lament what one of my inventions, MSNBC
has become. It has slipped from analysis and cynicism into
talking points and posturing and cheerleading. And if NBC suddenly
(13:01):
wanted it to be a right wing operation, a lot
of the hosts could stay and just grow mustaches or
dye their hair or use aliases, because it long ago
ceased to be about the issues and instead became about them.
The good news for MSNBC in this context is that
CNN is a tire fire with no signs of dying down.
(13:23):
The bad news is the political spectrum needs a healthy,
robust MSNBC advocating from the liberal point of view, but
just as importantly pushing democrats to actually earn our support.
The entire primetime lineup at MSNBC still consists of, depending
on the night, either only people who were my guest
(13:44):
hosts who we spun off into their own shows, or
them and another person we considered for doing that with,
but she could not be bothered to learn how to
use a teleprompter. Most of them turned out personally, sadly,
to have been false friends and mercilessly ambitious and brutal.
(14:06):
I never saw any of this coming. On the other hand,
one day one of them admitted it. Early on the
afternoon of Monday, May twenty third, twenty sixteen, I bounced
out of my New York City apartment building, began to
walk past the tourist trap brunch spot in the lobby,
(14:28):
and froze there at one of the cramped outdoor tables.
Staring up at me in blank surprise that must have
matched my own staring down at him in blank surprise,
was Lawrence O'Donnell. I decided to go silly, Hey, get
out of my house. He laughed, I laughed. It didn't
seem forced. He introduced me to his companion, his daughter. This,
(14:52):
my dear is Keith Ulderman. Keith started us all at MSNBC,
and then he left, and and here Lawrence gave one
of his long pauses, and we crashed it. I wanted
to be generous, I started to politely contradict him, and
I just couldn't do it. Yeah, pretty much anyway, About
(15:15):
thirty seconds of courteous nothingness followed, and I wish the
O'Donnell's well, and then I left. It was the most
pleasant experience I ever had with Lawrence o'donald. In fact,
it might have been the only pleasant experience I ever
had with Lawrence O'Donnell. After I finally convinced and bullied
and blackmailed MSNBC management into letting Rachel Meadow become the
(15:37):
regular guest host for my show, and she aced it,
and then rightly got her own show, and she aced
that and became a star. I went looking for a
new guest host. My first idea was a frequent guest
we had named Chris Hayes. I didn't get far. Management
had its own idea and my input was not required.
They wanted former Vermont governor and Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean.
(16:02):
And Howard is a really smart guy and great on TV.
But Howard had a bit of a teleprompter problem. One
of my producers swears that Howard once read Good Evening.
I'm Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont. This is countdown.
I do know. Whatever he did on the air, it
was bad enough that one week when I was off
(16:24):
and at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York,
and a baseball news story broke and he was filling
in for me. My producers called me there and asked
me to come on from the streets of Cooperstown and
be a guest on my own show, just to help
Howard Dean out. Anyway. Their next idea was a guy
who had been kicking around MSNBC since its founding in
(16:46):
nineteen ninety six. Lawrence O'Donnell was one of the original
MSNBC Friends, The MSNBC Friends, political pundits who sat on
clearstools at a clear table or in a set designed
to look like a booth at a coffee shop. No,
I'm not making this up. Among the friends were and
(17:09):
Colter and Laura Ingram. If you can believe it, once
or twice an hour, the rather CNN like all news
coverage on MSNBC in its first couple of years would
pause and three or more of these friends would appear,
chew over the MSNBC headlines, and then disappear. Lawrence O'Donnell
(17:33):
was one of the friends. It was as bad as
it sounds. Then Lawrence o'donald pretty much disappeared. You would
see him on MSNBC as a guest every once in
a while, but mostly he pursued his acting and producing career.
He played President Bartlett's father on the West Wing, the
one who beat him throughout college. Lawrence was very convincing,
(17:55):
and then around two thousand and eight, we started getting
pressure to bring him in as a guest on Countdown,
like once a week or twice a week. I was
not sure what that was all about, but he had
been a Senate staffer and he knew the healthcare debate
and other wonky stuff pretty well. So I gave my
assent for whatever that was worth. Not long after that,
Lawrence came into my office. He really needed my support,
(18:18):
he said, to get him more involved in MSNBC. He
knew I had gone to bat for Rachel, and before her,
I'd gone to bat for Tom Brokaw and for people
like Chuck Todd and Chris Hayes and others who are
now getting steady incomes from NBC. I don't remember his
argument on his own behalf. I do remember I didn't
have much of a reason to say no, and he
(18:38):
wasn't asking me to do a lot, so I said yes.
The next thing I knew, I was reading a memo
announcing that Lawrence O'Donnell had been appointed as the new
full time guest host of Countdown. This was in the
winter of two thousand and nine twenty ten, when my
late dad was fighting so valiantly to stay alive after
colon cancer and more importantly, a series of infections. Dad
(19:01):
had the immune system of an alien. The average white
cell count in a healthy adults between four thousand and
eleven thousand. One night, Dad's was at thirty three thousand,
and the doctors told me to prepare to make the
call to let him go. They had one antibiotic left
to try on him. The next morning, Dad's white cell count,
(19:21):
which had been thirty three thousand, was eight thousand. Onward,
he fought, Unfortunately, he was eighty years old and he
had not exercised since Harry Truman was president, and eventually
he ran out of Houdini tricks. I had been visiting
him twice a day for six months while still doing
(19:41):
Countdown and the NBC Sunday Night Football Show. But now,
as it hit late February of twenty ten, his bright
days became fewer and farther in between, and the hope
that was propelling me to keep being his full time
caregiver and Countdown's full time host both began to fade.
In the last two weeks of my dad's life, as
the doctors tried all the long shot things, I asked
(20:04):
MSNBC for a leave of absence. Finally the inevitability became inarguable,
and we let Dad go. On Saturday, March thirteenth, twenty ten.
My sister held his hand and I read him his
favorite Thurber story, and as soon as I finished it,
he exhaled deeply and peacefully, and he died. I think
I took another week off, maybe two, and I vaguely
(20:28):
recall emails from friends at Countdown that I may have
paid passing attention to, but I really didn't. Most of
the staff, including people who came up from Washington like
Howard Feynman or Gene Robinson of the Washington post always
friends to me. They attended my dad's memorial service. I
believe Lawrence O'Donnell, who was, of course filling in for
(20:51):
me on Countdown, was there too, but maybe not, I
do not remember. And then came the day when I
went back to the office full time and my assistant
grabbed me both hands on my wrist. You did not
answer my email, she said, with a fervency she rarely exhibited.
For God's sake, do not ever leave me alone with
Lawrence O'Donnell again, I snapped back to attention. Had he
(21:17):
bothered her? Not that way, she said, But he's a
son of a bitch. He treats me and everybody who
is in a producer here like dirt. And since you
didn't read my emails, I just have to tell you this.
He's trying to get you fired so he can take
over Countdown. And if you think he's nuts, one of
your senior producers is in on it too with him.
I have to admit, even now, of all the things
(21:40):
I went through at that very very strange place MSNBC,
even now, this story still shocks me. The senior producers
of Countdown consisted of a guy who'd been a producer
who booked satellite transmissions for MSNBC until I asked that
he'd be promoted. And one was a guest booker for
(22:01):
the daytime shows until I asked that she be promoted.
Another was a line producer who was well regarded only
for his ability to time a show until I asked
for him to be promoted. And then there was the
old friend of mine who had been blown out of
ESPN in a sexual harassment porn link email scandal and
was headed back to college to start his career all
over again, until I asked that he'd be hired and
(22:23):
then promoted. I did some digging, and I was going
to confront O'Donnell about it when somebody told me he
had tweeted something negative about me and about countdown. So
I got a hold of him and I said, this
did not seem to be in keeping with MSNBC traditions
and rules, you know, the ones about not peeing inside
the tent. And he said, what do you know about
MSNBC traditions. I've been here since nineteen ninety six. I
(22:47):
never left and came back. So I went to my boss,
the president of the network, Phil Griffin, the one who
would not hire Rachel Meadow. And before I could say
they'd have to get rid of him, Griffin said it
was all academic. They were preparing the press release as
we spoke for Lawrence's new show at ten o'clock call
the last Word, and oh, by the way, Keith, two
(23:07):
of your senior producers are going with him to run
his show. If this sounds vaguely familiar to you, it
is the plot of the pilot for the old Aaron
Sorkin HBO series Newsroom. I was still friendly with Aaron then,
so he actually asked. As I related this to him
in real time in emails and phone calls, he asked
(23:30):
if he could use it in the plot, rather than
just what he often did, which was to use it
without asking. The problem was none of this made any
sense in the real world. Although it made a pretty
good pilot for Aaron Sorkin in going into the ten
PM slot, Lawrence O'Donnell would be replacing a rerun of Countdown,
and even if o'donald did much better in the ratings,
(23:52):
much much better, there was no way it could ever
make enough money to make the move make sense. O'Donnell's
new show would necessarily cost MSNBC between ten and fifteen
million dollars to produce every year. Didn't have anything to
do with him. That was the cost. The Countdown rerun
cost not ten fifteen million dollars a year. It count. However,
(24:16):
much they paid the guy who pushed the play button
that fired up the videotape of the Countdown replay amortized.
Later that day, a sympathetic NBC executive called me up
and explained the move to me. First, Griffin was convinced
O'Donnell was about to leave us and sign with CNN.
(24:39):
I said, well, that's a good idea for everybody involved
except CNN. Turned out CNN had not even talked to him,
but Griffin did not know that. More importantly, Comcast had
already finalized its agreement to buy NBC effective the following January,
and as part of the deal, they were entitled to
review what all the executives in the company had done,
(24:59):
and they had already looked at MSNBC president Phil Griffin
and discovered he had never done anything. In panic, Griffin
told colleagues he had to launch a new show of
his own immediately. This is the series Aaron Sorkin should
have made As to the producers who left my show
(25:20):
to go with O'Donnell while my father was dying, one
of them told me a couple of years after she
left MSNBC for the last time, every day when I
went into that last Word office, I realized you were
getting your revenge on me without even having to lift
a finger. Lots of people I've worked with, probably a
majority of people i've helped, have behaved like Lawrence O'Donnell,
(25:44):
because remember, it's television. It is a mental illness. The
comparatively healthy people are the ones who acknowledge it's a
mental illness. But Lawrence O'Donnell was something special. A year
before my dad died, almost to the day, In fact,
I was in Los Angeles appearing on Bill Maher's show,
and one of the other guests that night was the
(26:04):
act Carrie Washington. She was very nice to me, very sweet,
a very big fan, and she asked to stay in touch.
Sure enough, after my father died, after the memorial, after
I was back at work, I had to go to
his house for the first time since he had passed away.
It was about as much fun as it sounds. In
the car on the way back into New York City.
(26:25):
The solemnity of it. Both my parents died within eleven
months of each other. It really hit me for some
reason for the first time, full force, and I was
about to lose it when the car approached a billboard
overlooking the West Side Highway in New York City. And
whose big smiling face was on the ad on that billboard,
(26:47):
Carrie Washington, And it flashed me right back to her
kindness in LA and it helped me overcome this bump
in my morning. So I wanted to drop her a note,
nothing big, nothing suggestive. I wasn't hinting at asking her out.
Just you never know how you might help somebody in
a time of crisis. Thanks for letting me smile. That
(27:10):
was the whole message. I asked my assistant to figure
out how to get it to her, and that was
the end of it, except a week later, the fact
that I wrote her a note wound up in a
column written by an colter. I was astonished, how why,
and colter it was her usual the brain doesn't quite
(27:35):
work right kind of stuff. She implied. I was hitting
on Carrie Washington and said how stupid I had to
be to not realize she was involved with somebody, and
on and on and on, no mention of my father's passing,
or the mar show or the billboard or her smiling face.
I went back to my assistant and I said, hey,
what on earth did you do with that note to
(27:56):
Carrie Washington? And she said, oh, I gave it to
this Laurence O'Donnell guy. And I said, good God, why
did you do that? And she said, well, he's dating
Kerrie Washington. I thought you knew that. I thought that's
why you asked me to get it to her. So
it wasn't hard to figure out from there. Lawrence had
(28:17):
called his old friend from the old MSNBC Friends of
nineteen ninety six and Colter and told her about the note,
inventing whatever motive his jealous little mind could dream up.
It should have gotten him fired from NBC, but unfortunately
his boss was just as much of a fourteen year
old emotionally as he was. And meanwhile, I had decided
to get out of MSNBC anyway when the time was ripe.
(28:40):
As it turned out, it ripened in January twenty eleven.
I've told that story in other episodes, like sixty of them.
It's kind of complicated. And since nobody ever actually asked
me why count Down the TV show ended, I've probably
got another sixty episodes worth of information about that anyway
in twenty fifteen, since repeatedly over the following ten years,
(29:03):
there were overtures by both sides to bring Countdown and
Me back to MSNBC. In twenty fifteen, during the World Series,
in fact, the then president of NBC News, Andy Lack,
asked me to come back and do a new show
at MSNBC and move to Los Angeles and have a
co host, a conservative, and not do any commentaries. And
(29:24):
actually this new show was somehow less appealing than it sounds.
But the punchline of all punchlines is contained in what
Lack wanted to call my new twenty fifteen MSNBC show
That Never Was. It tells you all you really need
to know about the last word with Lawrence O'Donnell and
MSNBC and O'Donnell's place in TV history at its demise
(29:46):
and the end of MSNBC. NBC new president Lack was
brimming with enthusiasm about this name that he had come
up with for my new show, A good the perfect
title Lack told me, we're going to call it The
Last Word with Keith Olberman, and I didn't laugh for guffaw.
I just said, Andy, you have a show called the
(30:09):
Last Word, The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell. Andy Lack
now laughed, huh, hopefully not for much longer. I don't
still ahead on Countdown Fridays with Thurber and my father's
favorite Thurber story. Of many favorites, it's the one he
(30:31):
like best. First. In each tradition of Countdown, we feature
a dog. Indeed, you can help. Every dog has its day.
Sam warms up from shy to friendly to silently resting
her head in your lap. She's forty seven pounds, mixed breed,
a golden brown, two years old, and she was dumped
at the kill shelter in New York by her humans
(30:52):
after some kind of altercation, they said, with her sister.
Nobody knows what happened, but it was Sam who wound
up with bite marks and with that kind of history,
even if it was all made up, the New York
Pound will kill her sooner rather than later. She can
be adopted by almost anybody on the East Coast. She's
ready to go, or you can pledge to make a
donation to help a rescue pull her. If she does
(31:12):
not make it out, you're under no obligation. If she does,
we'll let you know how to fulfill your pledge. Look
for Sam photos and video of her on my Twitter feeds. Hi,
thank you and Sam, thanks you to the number one
(31:46):
story on the Countdown and Friday's with Thurber. And I
don't know when I went to Sullivan became my father's
favorite Thurber story. I suspect it was in the hospital
when I was reading to him in the last six
months of his life. I know I read it to
him at least half a dozen times, the first five
by his quest. The last time he did not request it.
(32:09):
In fact, and this is the most perverse kind of
compliment I think any res writer has ever received. I
read this story to him. It was the last thing
that I read to him. In fact, it was the
last thing he did on earth, was to listen to
this story in a state of semi consciousness. He waited
till the end of it. He took one deep, satisfied breath,
(32:30):
and he died. I don't recommend this, but I think
it does speak to the quality of the writing I
went to Sullivant by James Thurber. I was reminded the
other morning by what I don't remember, and it doesn't matter,
of a crisp September morning last year when I went
to the Grand Central to see a little boy of
(32:52):
ten get excitedly on a special coach that was to
take him to a boys' school somewhere north of Boston.
He had never been away to school before. The coach
was squirming with youngsters. You could tell after a while
the novitiates shining and tremulous, and a little odd from
the more aloof boys who had been away to school before.
(33:14):
But they were very much alike at first glance. There
was for me, in case you thought I was leading
up to that, no sharp feeling of old lost years
in the tense atmosphere of that coach. Because I never
went away to a private school. When I was a
little boy. I went to Sullivant School in Columbus. I
thought about it as I walked back to my hotel.
(33:36):
Sullivant was an ordinary public school, and yet it was
not like any other I have ever known of. In
seeking an adjective to describe the Sullivant School, of my
years nineteen hundred and nineteen hundred and eight, I can
only think of tough. Sullivant School was tough. The boys
of Sullivant came mostly from the region around Central Market,
(33:59):
a poorish district with many families of the laboring class.
School district also included a number of homes of the
upper classes, because at the turn of the century, one
or two old residential streets still lingered near the shouting
and rumbling of the market, reluctant to surrender their fine
old houses to the encroaching rabble of commerce and become
(34:20):
as a last. They now have more vulgar business streets.
I remember always, first of all, the Celibant baseball team.
Most grammar school baseball teams are made up of boys
in the seventh and eighth grades, or they were in
my day, But with Sullibant it was different. Several of
its best players were in the fourth grade, known to
(34:42):
the teachers of the school as the terrible fourth. In
that grade you first encountered fractions and long division, and
many pupils lodged there for years like logs in a brook.
(35:02):
Some of the more able baseball players had been in
the fourth grade for seven or eight years. Then too,
there were a number of boys who had not been
in the class past the normal time, but were nevertheless
deep into their teens. They had avoided starting to school
by eluding the truant officer until they were ready to
go into long pants, but he always got them in
(35:24):
the end. One or two of these fourth graders were
seventeen or eighteen years old, but the dean of the
squad was a tall, husky young man of twenty two
who was in the fifth grade. The teachers of the
third and fourth had got tired of having him around
as the years rolled along and had pushed him on.
His name was Dana Wayeney, and he had a mustache.
(35:50):
Don't ask me why his parents allowed him to stay
in school so long. There were many mysteries at Sullivans
that were never cleared up. All I know is why
he kept on in school and didn't go to work.
He liked playing on the baseball team, and he had
a pretty easy time in class because the teachers had
given up asking him any questions at all years before.
(36:12):
The story was that he had answered but one question
in the seventeen years he had been going to classes
at Sullivant, and that was what is one use of
the comma the kami, said Dana, embarrassingly unsnarling his long
legs from beneath a desk much too low for him,
is used to shoot marbles with. Kami's was our word
(36:35):
for those cheap ten percent marbles, in case it wasn't yours.
The Sullivant School baseball team of nineteen hundred and five
defeated several high school teams in the city and claimed
the high school championship of the state, to which title
it had, of course, no technical right. I believe the
boys could have proved their moral right to the championship, however,
(36:57):
if they had been allowed to go out of town
and play all the teams they challenged, such as the
powerful Dayton and Toledo Nines. But their road season was
called off after a terrific fight that occurred during one
game at Mount Stirling or Picquah or Xenia, I can't
remember which. Our first baseman, Dana Whaney, crowned the umpire
(37:21):
with a bat during an altercation overcalled strike and the
fight was on. It took place in the fourth inning,
so of course the game was never finished. The battle
continued on down into the business section of the town
and raged for hours, with much destruction of property. But
since Sullivan was ahead of the time seventeen to nothing,
there could have been no doubt as to the outcome.
(37:44):
Nobody was killed. All of us boys were sure our
team could have beaten Ohio State University that year, but
they wouldn't play us. They were scared. Wayney was by
no means the biggest or toughest guy on the Grammar
School team. He was merely the oldest, being about a
year the senior of Floyd, the center fielder who could
(38:05):
jump five feet straight into the air without taking a
running start. Nobody knew, not even the Board of Education,
which once tried to find out whether Floyd was Floyd's
first name or his last name. He apparently only had one.
He didn't have any parents, and nobody, including himself, seemed
(38:26):
to know where he lived. When teachers insisted that he
must have another name to go with Floyd, he would
grow sullen and ominous and they would cease questioning him
because he was a dangerous scholar in his schoolroom brawl,
as mister Harrigan, the janitor found out one morning when
he was called in by a screaming teacher. All our
teachers were women to get Floyd under control. After she
(38:50):
had tried to whip him and he had begun to
take the room apart, beginning with the desks. Floyd broke
into small pieces the switch she had used on him.
Some said he also ate it. I don't know, because
I was home sick at the time with mumps or something.
Harrigan was a burly, iron muscle janitor, a man come
(39:13):
from a long line of coal shovelers, but he was
no match for Floyd, who had to be sure the
considerable advantage of being more aroused than mister Harrigan. When
their fight started, Floyd had him down and was sitting
on his chest in no time, and Harrigan had to
promise to be good and to say that's what I
get ten times before Floyd would let him up. I
(39:35):
don't suppose I would ever have got through Sullivant School
alive if it hadn't been for Floyd. For some reason,
he appointed himself my protector, and I needed one. If
Floyd was known to be on your side, nobody in
the school would dare be after you and chase you home.
I was one of the ten or fifteen male pupils
in Sullivant School who always or almost always knew their lessons,
(40:00):
and I believe Floyd admired the mental prowess of a
youngster who knew how many continents there were and whether
or not the sun was inhabited. Also, one time, when
it came to be my turn to read to the class,
we used to take turns reading American history aloud, I
came across the word ducane and knew how to pronounce it.
(40:22):
That charmed Floyd, who had been slouched in his seat
idly following the printed page of his worn and penciled textbook.
How you know that was ducane, boy, he asked me
after class. I don't know, I said, I just knew it.
He looked at me with round eyes. Oh that's something
(40:42):
he said. After that word got around that Floyd would
beat the tar out of anybody that messed around with me.
I wore glasses from the time I was eight, and
I knew my lessons, and both of those things were
considered pretty terrible at Sullivant. Floyd had one idiosyncrasy, though,
In the early nineteen hundreds, long warm furry gloves that
(41:03):
came almost to your elbows were popular with boys, and
Floyd had one of the biggest pairs in school. He
wore them the year round. Dick Peterson was an either
greater figure on the baseball team and in the school
than Floyd was. He had a way in the classroom
of blurting out a long, deep, rolling be for no
(41:29):
reason at all. Once he licked three boys his own
size single handed, really single handed, for he fought with
his right hand and held a mandolin in his left
hand all the time. It came out uninjured. Dick and
Floyd never met in mortal combats, so nobody ever knew
which one could beat, and the scholars were about evenly
(41:51):
divided in their opinions. Many a fight started among them
after school when the argument came up. I think school
never let out at Sullivan without at least one fight
starting up, and sometimes there were as many as five
or six raging between them. The corner of Oak and
sixth Streets and the corner of Rich and Fourth Streets
four blocks away. Now and again, virtually the whole school
(42:13):
turned out to fight the Catholic boys of the Holy
Cross Academy in fifth Street near town for no reason
at all. In winter with snowballs and ice balls. In
other seasons with fists, brick bats, and clubs, Dick Peterson
was always in the van, yelling, singing, being whirling all
(42:34):
the way around when he swung with his right or
if he hadn't brought his mandle in his left and missed.
He made himself the pitcher on the baseball team because
he was the captain. He was the captain because everybody
else was afraid to challenge his self election except Floyd.
Floyd was too lazy to pitch, and he didn't care
who was captain because he didn't fully uncomprehend what that meant.
(42:57):
On one occasion, when Earl Baddock, a steamfitter's son, had
shut out Mound Street School for six innings without a hit,
Dick took him out of the pitcher's box and went
in himself. He was hit hard and the other team scored,
but it didn't make much difference because the margin of
Sullivant's victory was so great the team didn't lose a
(43:17):
game for five years to another grammar school. When Dick
Peterson was in the sixth grade, he got into a
saloon brawl and was killed. When I go back to Columbus,
I always walked past Sullivant's school, and I have never
happened to get there when classes were letting out, so
I don't know what the pupils are like. Now. I
(43:39):
am sure there are no more Dick Peterson's and no
more Floyd's, unless Floyd is still going to school there.
The playyard is still entirely bare of grass and covered
with gravel, and the sycamore still lining the curve between
the schoolhouse fence and the Oak Street car line. A
streetcar line running past a schoolhouse is a dangerous thing
(44:01):
as a rule, but I remember no one being injured
while I was attending Sullivant. I do remember, however, one
person who came very near being injured. He was a
motorman on the Oak Street line, and once when his
car stopped at the corner of six to let off passengers,
he yelled at Chudy Davidson, who played third base on
the ball team and was a member of the Terrible Fourth,
(44:22):
to get out of the way. Chudy was fourteen years
old but huge for his age, and he was standing
on the tracks taking a chew of tobacco. Come on
down off of that car. I'll not kip lock off,
said Shouty, in what I can only describe as a
sullivant tone of voice. The motorman waited until Shooty moved
(44:43):
slowly off the tracks. Then he went on about his business.
I think it was lucky for him that he did.
There were boys in those days. I went to Sullivant
by James Thurber. I've done all the damage I can
(45:14):
do here. Here are the credits. Most of the music
was arranged, produced and performed by Brian Ray and John
Phillips Chanel, who are the Countdown musical directors. All orchestration
and keyboards by John Phillip Chanelle, guitarist, bass and drums
by Brian Ray, and it was produced by Tko Brothers.
Other Beethoven selections have been arranged and performed by the
group No Horns Allowed. Sports music is the Olberman theme
(45:35):
from ESPN two and it was written by Mitch Warren Davis.
Courtesy of ESPN Inc. Musical comments from Nancy Fauss the
best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer was my friend
John Dean, and everything else was as usual, pretty much
my fault. So that's countdown for this, the eight hundred
and seventy first day since Donald Trump's first attempted coup
against the democratically elected government of the United States. Do
(45:57):
not forget to keep arresting him while we still can.
The next scheduled countdown is Munday, Memorial Day. As I said,
might be a full encore performance, might be headlines in
an encore I don't know. If I've got something, you
download it. If you've heard it before, don't listen anymore.
(46:18):
I won't take it personal till then. On Keith Oldremman,
good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Trump
has the charisma of a mortician. Countdown with Keith Olderman
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
(46:42):
your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. The
Washington Post's choice of its headline was the Mari Lago
(00:26):
workers moving boxes full of classified documents the day before
the Justice Department stopped by to pick up what it
had subpoened. But that's not the actual headline in the
Washington Post story. And the actual headline in the Washington
Post story is really startling. It could be the biggest
in this week long festival of leaks, this waterfall of
(00:47):
sources say Jack Smith is doing this because this leak,
the one the Post did not think was the headline,
suggests the Special Council is going to charge Donald Trump
not just with obstruction, but with espionage. Quote. Prosecutors have
gathered evidence indicating that Trump at times kept classified documents
(01:09):
in his office in a place where they were visible,
and sometimes showed them to others. They have been told
by more than one witness that Trump at times kept
classified documents out in the open in his Florida office
where others could see them, and sometimes showed them to people,
including aids and visitors. Un quote. So that is literally
(01:33):
textbook espionage ten years or fine or both, per count
eighteen US Code seven ninety three gathering, transmitting, or losing
defense information Paragraph e. Keeping classified documents is one thing.
But having unauthorized possession of any document relating to the
(01:54):
national defense and then willfully communicates, delivers, transmits, or causes
to be communicated to any person not entitled to receive it.
That is the point the transmission, the communication, That is
the point at which the option not to prosecute for
espionage has typically ended. Now, Trump keeping classified documents in
(02:19):
his office and showing them to people including aids and
visitors and Mary Lago newlyweds and golfers and passers by
and lord knows who else, is thus way more egregious.
But as I have mentioned before, it also comes with
a complication. Trump has satisfactorily fuzzed up this declassification idea
(02:40):
that he could conceivably get away with it by quoting
that first part in that statute about unauthorized possession, and
it says, no, I granted myself authorized possession, and it's
nonsensical but stuck under the nose of the correct judge,
like one he himself appointed, and the espionage stuff could
disappear from the counts. The rest of what is in
(03:03):
the Washington Post report is about the much more straightforward
charges that a different part of the piece implies are
clearly happening soon. And I'll get to that clearly happening
soon part in a minute. The Post reports boxes were
moved by marri Lago staffers under the guidance of the
valet Walt Nahouda, which we knew. It's been reported for months.
It's what's on the security video, some of which may
(03:26):
have been deleted from the security video. The Post also
has the colorful anecdote that Trump had a dress rehearsal
for moving these boxes even before the subpoena got there.
The Post has the lawyer for one of the Naouda
cruz saying his client was loading boxes onto an suv
a year ago next Saturday. And they've been showing video
of that since literally last summer. Remember the suv parked
(03:49):
next to the private jet with bankers boxes being loaded
from the car to the plane bound for Trump's golf
course and cemetery in Bedminster, New Jersey, a year ago
next Saturday. And don't forget it, Bedminster. If your ball
gets stuck in soft ground near the t do not
reach into the ground. Do not reach into the ground
(04:09):
at Bedminster at the first hole. What you never saw
the movie Carrie wandered off again. Sorry. All of that
stuff goes to willful retention of those documents, especially the
idea of a rehearsal for hiding the boxes, and it
again renders actual classified status irrelevant, because obstruction of justice
(04:30):
is still obstruction of justice. If the government has subpoened
the documents and you say you are going to give
them the documents, and you say you are giving them
the documents, and then you say you have given them
the documents, then it turns out, no, you deliberately hid
some of the documents and the government does not have them,
and no, by the way, practiced hiding them. At that point,
it doesn't matter what the documents are. They don't have
(04:50):
to be classified. They could be old scripts of the
Countdown podcast. There were two other items in the post
report that you can think about over the holiday weekend,
because they imply his judgment cometh and that rights quote.
The grand jury working on the investigation apparently has not
met since May five, after months of frenetic activity at
(05:14):
the federal courthouse in Washington, which can only mean Smith
is a already done, or B he's about to be done,
or C he has another grand jury elsewhere collecting some
final evidence. And then there's the quote that suggests the
correct answer is a he's done quote. People familiar with
(05:36):
the situation said, Smith's team believes it has uncovered a
handful of distinct episodes of obstructionist conduct. For that to
be correct, it requires that Smith's team has everything it
needs to conclude anything. If Smith's team believes it has
found multiple distinct episodes of obstructionist conduct, and if Smith's
(06:00):
team has shared this with anybody like whoever then shared
it with the Washington Post, it means they've got indictments ready.
I know, I know, MDS Mullard derangement syndrome. I know,
I know, I know. So Also a little more on
(06:22):
Ron DeSantis and that wonderful unplanned moment of silence for
his presidential campaign during his presidential campaign announcement on whatever
is left of the website formerly known as Twitter. The
website platformer has the technical explanation. It is not, in
fact a technical explanation. It is an explanation of cheapness. Quote.
(06:44):
Perhaps the most important thing to know about Space's technical
problems over the past several months. Musk cut the space's team,
which once numbered as many as one hundred employees, down
to roughly three people. Three people. Wait, there's more quote.
Musk's own Twitter app crashed repeatedly during the event. We're told,
(07:09):
nice work, Elmo, and it turns out there have been
two other ron de glitches. As Axios reported the promotional
video for the campaign launch, you couldn't hear on Twitter
spaces it was, as we say in the business sweetened
the pack never back Down took a speech by DeSantis
(07:29):
in Fort Saint Lucie, Florida, on November fifth, twenty twenty two,
a speech which was not during a military flyover, and
it used AI to add in fighter jets in the
sky over DeSantis's shoulder and also the woosh they made.
Then last night, DeSantis resumed his TV tour his we
(07:51):
should watch things are going so badly, maybe a studio
light will fall on him TV tour. He went on
the Eric Bowling Show on Newsmax. Yes that's the one
that's been beating Anderson Cooper. In the ratings and mid interview,
the split screen of Bowling and DeSantis froze, but the
audio continued, So you saw Bowling eyes almost completely closed,
(08:15):
looking stoned, in other words, looking like he always does.
And DeSantis eyebrows locked in the upright position, and shoulders
hunched and frozen in a way that made him look
shorter than he even is. All the time DeSantis kept
talking without moving his mouth. I mean, at some point
(08:37):
you may want to look into whether or not all
these things are signs Ronda and Elmer Stewart. Rhodes will
go to jail insisting he is a political prisoner, and
guess what he's not. And the judge who sentenced him
yesterday said, plain of day, he's not. Judge amit Meta
(08:57):
sentenced the founder of the Oathkeepers to eighteen years in
prison for his role in January sixth, and he sentenced
Kelly Meg's of the Oath Keepers to twelve years. And
after Rhodes then went off in one of his angry
rationalizations about saving the country, Judge made us silenced roads
and per reporters on the scene silenced the courtroom itself
when he then said, we all now hold our collective breaths.
(09:19):
With an election approaching, will we have another January sixth?
Somebody gets it all this you probably already knew. What
you may not know was uncovered by David Kurtz of TPM,
who decided to examine his website's archives to see if
his memory was correct and that they had been covering
(09:39):
roads for years, long before he descended into vigilantism and
delusions of grandeur and sedition. Rhodes was once a Ron
Paul staffer. He was at Yale Law. He started the
oath Keepers in two thousand and nine and within months,
literally on February nineteenth, twenty ten, in a suit and
(10:00):
a tie, and before he allegedly lost an eye after
drop his gun while he was serving as a gun
safety instructor. He got his first national exposure, the first
national television hit for Stuart Rose, his first step down
the public path to eighteen years in prison for sedition
(10:22):
and who platformed him first? Where was Stuart Rhoad's first
national TV Oathkeepers interview? It was on Fox News with
Bill O'Reilly, I told you so, all right, let me
(10:44):
leave you laughing Trump Junior trying to insult DeSantis but
instead swapping his own father's name for DeSantis and winding
up insulting Dad Check and Dad thinking as he's talking
about Jack Smith that the upcoming vote is the twenty
twenty election. Check policy, grounds or personality. Trump has the
(11:06):
charisma of a mortician and the energy that makes Jack Smith.
He's a harasser and an abuser of our people. In
order to obstruct and interfere with the twenty twenty presidential election,
that's why they're doing it. Geniuses, father and son. So
(11:27):
it's Memorial Day weekend, and I will have a podcast
for you on Monday, and I'm not sure if it
will be new or old or half and half because
we have all kinds of possible breaking news. Although I
really doubt Trump will be indicted on Memorial Day weekend.
Then again, I didn't think Ronald McDaniel would say that
a default on the national debt would bode well for
the Republican presidential candidates, confirming that the Republican Party has
(11:48):
completely lost any understanding that its political posturing and judicial
and legislative terrorism has actual consequences, including, in this case,
immeasurable damage to the very corporations that own said Republican
presidential candidates, losing understanding that what you do and say
means more than just points on some scoreboard. That exists
(12:11):
only in your own head, that it affects the real
world and people's lives. This may be the theme of
America in the twenty first century. It happens everywhere. It
has happened at MSNBC. That's next, This is countdown. This
is countdown with Keith Olberman. I was surprised to be
(12:38):
going through my notes and find that this moment of
confession was seven years ago. This week, I may have
indicated that I lament what one of my inventions, MSNBC
has become. It has slipped from analysis and cynicism into
talking points and posturing and cheerleading. And if NBC suddenly
(13:01):
wanted it to be a right wing operation, a lot
of the hosts could stay and just grow mustaches or
dye their hair or use aliases, because it long ago
ceased to be about the issues and instead became about them.
The good news for MSNBC in this context is that
CNN is a tire fire with no signs of dying down.
(13:23):
The bad news is the political spectrum needs a healthy,
robust MSNBC advocating from the liberal point of view, but
just as importantly pushing democrats to actually earn our support.
The entire primetime lineup at MSNBC still consists of, depending
on the night, either only people who were my guest
(13:44):
hosts who we spun off into their own shows, or
them and another person we considered for doing that with,
but she could not be bothered to learn how to
use a teleprompter. Most of them turned out personally, sadly,
to have been false friends and mercilessly ambitious and brutal.
(14:06):
I never saw any of this coming. On the other hand,
one day one of them admitted it. Early on the
afternoon of Monday, May twenty third, twenty sixteen, I bounced
out of my New York City apartment building, began to
walk past the tourist trap brunch spot in the lobby,
(14:28):
and froze there at one of the cramped outdoor tables.
Staring up at me in blank surprise that must have
matched my own staring down at him in blank surprise,
was Lawrence O'Donnell. I decided to go silly, Hey, get
out of my house. He laughed, I laughed. It didn't
seem forced. He introduced me to his companion, his daughter. This,
(14:52):
my dear is Keith Ulderman. Keith started us all at MSNBC,
and then he left, and and here Lawrence gave one
of his long pauses, and we crashed it. I wanted
to be generous, I started to politely contradict him, and
I just couldn't do it. Yeah, pretty much anyway, About
(15:15):
thirty seconds of courteous nothingness followed, and I wish the
O'Donnell's well, and then I left. It was the most
pleasant experience I ever had with Lawrence o'donald. In fact,
it might have been the only pleasant experience I ever
had with Lawrence O'Donnell. After I finally convinced and bullied
and blackmailed MSNBC management into letting Rachel Meadow become the
(15:37):
regular guest host for my show, and she aced it,
and then rightly got her own show, and she aced
that and became a star. I went looking for a
new guest host. My first idea was a frequent guest
we had named Chris Hayes. I didn't get far. Management
had its own idea and my input was not required.
They wanted former Vermont governor and Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean.
(16:02):
And Howard is a really smart guy and great on TV.
But Howard had a bit of a teleprompter problem. One
of my producers swears that Howard once read Good Evening.
I'm Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont. This is countdown.
I do know. Whatever he did on the air, it
was bad enough that one week when I was off
(16:24):
and at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York,
and a baseball news story broke and he was filling
in for me. My producers called me there and asked
me to come on from the streets of Cooperstown and
be a guest on my own show, just to help
Howard Dean out. Anyway. Their next idea was a guy
who had been kicking around MSNBC since its founding in
(16:46):
nineteen ninety six. Lawrence O'Donnell was one of the original
MSNBC Friends, The MSNBC Friends, political pundits who sat on
clearstools at a clear table or in a set designed
to look like a booth at a coffee shop. No,
I'm not making this up. Among the friends were and
(17:09):
Colter and Laura Ingram. If you can believe it, once
or twice an hour, the rather CNN like all news
coverage on MSNBC in its first couple of years would
pause and three or more of these friends would appear,
chew over the MSNBC headlines, and then disappear. Lawrence O'Donnell
(17:33):
was one of the friends. It was as bad as
it sounds. Then Lawrence o'donald pretty much disappeared. You would
see him on MSNBC as a guest every once in
a while, but mostly he pursued his acting and producing career.
He played President Bartlett's father on the West Wing, the
one who beat him throughout college. Lawrence was very convincing,
(17:55):
and then around two thousand and eight, we started getting
pressure to bring him in as a guest on Countdown,
like once a week or twice a week. I was
not sure what that was all about, but he had
been a Senate staffer and he knew the healthcare debate
and other wonky stuff pretty well. So I gave my
assent for whatever that was worth. Not long after that,
Lawrence came into my office. He really needed my support,
(18:18):
he said, to get him more involved in MSNBC. He
knew I had gone to bat for Rachel, and before her,
I'd gone to bat for Tom Brokaw and for people
like Chuck Todd and Chris Hayes and others who are
now getting steady incomes from NBC. I don't remember his
argument on his own behalf. I do remember I didn't
have much of a reason to say no, and he
(18:38):
wasn't asking me to do a lot, so I said yes.
The next thing I knew, I was reading a memo
announcing that Lawrence O'Donnell had been appointed as the new
full time guest host of Countdown. This was in the
winter of two thousand and nine twenty ten, when my
late dad was fighting so valiantly to stay alive after
colon cancer and more importantly, a series of infections. Dad
(19:01):
had the immune system of an alien. The average white
cell count in a healthy adults between four thousand and
eleven thousand. One night, Dad's was at thirty three thousand,
and the doctors told me to prepare to make the
call to let him go. They had one antibiotic left
to try on him. The next morning, Dad's white cell count,
(19:21):
which had been thirty three thousand, was eight thousand. Onward,
he fought, Unfortunately, he was eighty years old and he
had not exercised since Harry Truman was president, and eventually
he ran out of Houdini tricks. I had been visiting
him twice a day for six months while still doing
(19:41):
Countdown and the NBC Sunday Night Football Show. But now,
as it hit late February of twenty ten, his bright
days became fewer and farther in between, and the hope
that was propelling me to keep being his full time
caregiver and Countdown's full time host both began to fade.
In the last two weeks of my dad's life, as
the doctors tried all the long shot things, I asked
(20:04):
MSNBC for a leave of absence. Finally the inevitability became inarguable,
and we let Dad go. On Saturday, March thirteenth, twenty ten.
My sister held his hand and I read him his
favorite Thurber story, and as soon as I finished it,
he exhaled deeply and peacefully, and he died. I think
I took another week off, maybe two, and I vaguely
(20:28):
recall emails from friends at Countdown that I may have
paid passing attention to, but I really didn't. Most of
the staff, including people who came up from Washington like
Howard Feynman or Gene Robinson of the Washington post always
friends to me. They attended my dad's memorial service. I
believe Lawrence O'Donnell, who was, of course filling in for
(20:51):
me on Countdown, was there too, but maybe not, I
do not remember. And then came the day when I
went back to the office full time and my assistant
grabbed me both hands on my wrist. You did not
answer my email, she said, with a fervency she rarely exhibited.
For God's sake, do not ever leave me alone with
Lawrence O'Donnell again, I snapped back to attention. Had he
(21:17):
bothered her? Not that way, she said, But he's a
son of a bitch. He treats me and everybody who
is in a producer here like dirt. And since you
didn't read my emails, I just have to tell you this.
He's trying to get you fired so he can take
over Countdown. And if you think he's nuts, one of
your senior producers is in on it too with him.
I have to admit, even now, of all the things
(21:40):
I went through at that very very strange place MSNBC,
even now, this story still shocks me. The senior producers
of Countdown consisted of a guy who'd been a producer
who booked satellite transmissions for MSNBC until I asked that
he'd be promoted. And one was a guest booker for
(22:01):
the daytime shows until I asked that she be promoted.
Another was a line producer who was well regarded only
for his ability to time a show until I asked
for him to be promoted. And then there was the
old friend of mine who had been blown out of
ESPN in a sexual harassment porn link email scandal and
was headed back to college to start his career all
over again, until I asked that he'd be hired and
(22:23):
then promoted. I did some digging, and I was going
to confront O'Donnell about it when somebody told me he
had tweeted something negative about me and about countdown. So
I got a hold of him and I said, this
did not seem to be in keeping with MSNBC traditions
and rules, you know, the ones about not peeing inside
the tent. And he said, what do you know about
MSNBC traditions. I've been here since nineteen ninety six. I
(22:47):
never left and came back. So I went to my boss,
the president of the network, Phil Griffin, the one who
would not hire Rachel Meadow. And before I could say
they'd have to get rid of him, Griffin said it
was all academic. They were preparing the press release as
we spoke for Lawrence's new show at ten o'clock call
the last Word, and oh, by the way, Keith, two
(23:07):
of your senior producers are going with him to run
his show. If this sounds vaguely familiar to you, it
is the plot of the pilot for the old Aaron
Sorkin HBO series Newsroom. I was still friendly with Aaron then,
so he actually asked. As I related this to him
in real time in emails and phone calls, he asked
(23:30):
if he could use it in the plot, rather than
just what he often did, which was to use it
without asking. The problem was none of this made any
sense in the real world. Although it made a pretty
good pilot for Aaron Sorkin in going into the ten
PM slot, Lawrence O'Donnell would be replacing a rerun of Countdown,
and even if o'donald did much better in the ratings,
(23:52):
much much better, there was no way it could ever
make enough money to make the move make sense. O'Donnell's
new show would necessarily cost MSNBC between ten and fifteen
million dollars to produce every year. Didn't have anything to
do with him. That was the cost. The Countdown rerun
cost not ten fifteen million dollars a year. It count. However,
(24:16):
much they paid the guy who pushed the play button
that fired up the videotape of the Countdown replay amortized.
Later that day, a sympathetic NBC executive called me up
and explained the move to me. First, Griffin was convinced
O'Donnell was about to leave us and sign with CNN.
(24:39):
I said, well, that's a good idea for everybody involved
except CNN. Turned out CNN had not even talked to him,
but Griffin did not know that. More importantly, Comcast had
already finalized its agreement to buy NBC effective the following January,
and as part of the deal, they were entitled to
review what all the executives in the company had done,
(24:59):
and they had already looked at MSNBC president Phil Griffin
and discovered he had never done anything. In panic, Griffin
told colleagues he had to launch a new show of
his own immediately. This is the series Aaron Sorkin should
have made As to the producers who left my show
(25:20):
to go with O'Donnell while my father was dying, one
of them told me a couple of years after she
left MSNBC for the last time, every day when I
went into that last Word office, I realized you were
getting your revenge on me without even having to lift
a finger. Lots of people I've worked with, probably a
majority of people i've helped, have behaved like Lawrence O'Donnell,
(25:44):
because remember, it's television. It is a mental illness. The
comparatively healthy people are the ones who acknowledge it's a
mental illness. But Lawrence O'Donnell was something special. A year
before my dad died, almost to the day, In fact,
I was in Los Angeles appearing on Bill Maher's show,
and one of the other guests that night was the
(26:04):
act Carrie Washington. She was very nice to me, very sweet,
a very big fan, and she asked to stay in touch.
Sure enough, after my father died, after the memorial, after
I was back at work, I had to go to
his house for the first time since he had passed away.
It was about as much fun as it sounds. In
the car on the way back into New York City.
(26:25):
The solemnity of it. Both my parents died within eleven
months of each other. It really hit me for some
reason for the first time, full force, and I was
about to lose it when the car approached a billboard
overlooking the West Side Highway in New York City. And
whose big smiling face was on the ad on that billboard,
(26:47):
Carrie Washington, And it flashed me right back to her
kindness in LA and it helped me overcome this bump
in my morning. So I wanted to drop her a note,
nothing big, nothing suggestive. I wasn't hinting at asking her out.
Just you never know how you might help somebody in
a time of crisis. Thanks for letting me smile. That
(27:10):
was the whole message. I asked my assistant to figure
out how to get it to her, and that was
the end of it, except a week later, the fact
that I wrote her a note wound up in a
column written by an colter. I was astonished, how why,
and colter it was her usual the brain doesn't quite
(27:35):
work right kind of stuff. She implied. I was hitting
on Carrie Washington and said how stupid I had to
be to not realize she was involved with somebody, and
on and on and on, no mention of my father's passing,
or the mar show or the billboard or her smiling face.
I went back to my assistant and I said, hey,
what on earth did you do with that note to
(27:56):
Carrie Washington? And she said, oh, I gave it to
this Laurence O'Donnell guy. And I said, good God, why
did you do that? And she said, well, he's dating
Kerrie Washington. I thought you knew that. I thought that's
why you asked me to get it to her. So
it wasn't hard to figure out from there. Lawrence had
(28:17):
called his old friend from the old MSNBC Friends of
nineteen ninety six and Colter and told her about the note,
inventing whatever motive his jealous little mind could dream up.
It should have gotten him fired from NBC, but unfortunately
his boss was just as much of a fourteen year
old emotionally as he was. And meanwhile, I had decided
to get out of MSNBC anyway when the time was ripe.
(28:40):
As it turned out, it ripened in January twenty eleven.
I've told that story in other episodes, like sixty of them.
It's kind of complicated. And since nobody ever actually asked
me why count Down the TV show ended, I've probably
got another sixty episodes worth of information about that anyway
in twenty fifteen, since repeatedly over the following ten years,
(29:03):
there were overtures by both sides to bring Countdown and
Me back to MSNBC. In twenty fifteen, during the World Series,
in fact, the then president of NBC News, Andy Lack,
asked me to come back and do a new show
at MSNBC and move to Los Angeles and have a
co host, a conservative, and not do any commentaries. And
(29:24):
actually this new show was somehow less appealing than it sounds.
But the punchline of all punchlines is contained in what
Lack wanted to call my new twenty fifteen MSNBC show
That Never Was. It tells you all you really need
to know about the last word with Lawrence O'Donnell and
MSNBC and O'Donnell's place in TV history at its demise
(29:46):
and the end of MSNBC. NBC new president Lack was
brimming with enthusiasm about this name that he had come
up with for my new show, A good the perfect
title Lack told me, we're going to call it The
Last Word with Keith Olberman, and I didn't laugh for guffaw.
I just said, Andy, you have a show called the
(30:09):
Last Word, The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell. Andy Lack
now laughed, huh, hopefully not for much longer. I don't
still ahead on Countdown Fridays with Thurber and my father's
favorite Thurber story. Of many favorites, it's the one he
(30:31):
like best. First. In each tradition of Countdown, we feature
a dog. Indeed, you can help. Every dog has its day.
Sam warms up from shy to friendly to silently resting
her head in your lap. She's forty seven pounds, mixed breed,
a golden brown, two years old, and she was dumped
at the kill shelter in New York by her humans
(30:52):
after some kind of altercation, they said, with her sister.
Nobody knows what happened, but it was Sam who wound
up with bite marks and with that kind of history,
even if it was all made up, the New York
Pound will kill her sooner rather than later. She can
be adopted by almost anybody on the East Coast. She's
ready to go, or you can pledge to make a
donation to help a rescue pull her. If she does
(31:12):
not make it out, you're under no obligation. If she does,
we'll let you know how to fulfill your pledge. Look
for Sam photos and video of her on my Twitter feeds. Hi,
thank you and Sam, thanks you to the number one
(31:46):
story on the Countdown and Friday's with Thurber. And I
don't know when I went to Sullivan became my father's
favorite Thurber story. I suspect it was in the hospital
when I was reading to him in the last six
months of his life. I know I read it to
him at least half a dozen times, the first five
by his quest. The last time he did not request it.
(32:09):
In fact, and this is the most perverse kind of
compliment I think any res writer has ever received. I
read this story to him. It was the last thing
that I read to him. In fact, it was the
last thing he did on earth, was to listen to
this story in a state of semi consciousness. He waited
till the end of it. He took one deep, satisfied breath,
(32:30):
and he died. I don't recommend this, but I think
it does speak to the quality of the writing I
went to Sullivant by James Thurber. I was reminded the
other morning by what I don't remember, and it doesn't matter,
of a crisp September morning last year when I went
to the Grand Central to see a little boy of
(32:52):
ten get excitedly on a special coach that was to
take him to a boys' school somewhere north of Boston.
He had never been away to school before. The coach
was squirming with youngsters. You could tell after a while
the novitiates shining and tremulous, and a little odd from
the more aloof boys who had been away to school before.
(33:14):
But they were very much alike at first glance. There
was for me, in case you thought I was leading
up to that, no sharp feeling of old lost years
in the tense atmosphere of that coach. Because I never
went away to a private school. When I was a
little boy. I went to Sullivant School in Columbus. I
thought about it as I walked back to my hotel.
(33:36):
Sullivant was an ordinary public school, and yet it was
not like any other I have ever known of. In
seeking an adjective to describe the Sullivant School, of my
years nineteen hundred and nineteen hundred and eight, I can
only think of tough. Sullivant School was tough. The boys
of Sullivant came mostly from the region around Central Market,
(33:59):
a poorish district with many families of the laboring class.
School district also included a number of homes of the
upper classes, because at the turn of the century, one
or two old residential streets still lingered near the shouting
and rumbling of the market, reluctant to surrender their fine
old houses to the encroaching rabble of commerce and become
(34:20):
as a last. They now have more vulgar business streets.
I remember always, first of all, the Celibant baseball team.
Most grammar school baseball teams are made up of boys
in the seventh and eighth grades, or they were in
my day, But with Sullibant it was different. Several of
its best players were in the fourth grade, known to
(34:42):
the teachers of the school as the terrible fourth. In
that grade you first encountered fractions and long division, and
many pupils lodged there for years like logs in a brook.
(35:02):
Some of the more able baseball players had been in
the fourth grade for seven or eight years. Then too,
there were a number of boys who had not been
in the class past the normal time, but were nevertheless
deep into their teens. They had avoided starting to school
by eluding the truant officer until they were ready to
go into long pants, but he always got them in
(35:24):
the end. One or two of these fourth graders were
seventeen or eighteen years old, but the dean of the
squad was a tall, husky young man of twenty two
who was in the fifth grade. The teachers of the
third and fourth had got tired of having him around
as the years rolled along and had pushed him on.
His name was Dana Wayeney, and he had a mustache.
(35:50):
Don't ask me why his parents allowed him to stay
in school so long. There were many mysteries at Sullivans
that were never cleared up. All I know is why
he kept on in school and didn't go to work.
He liked playing on the baseball team, and he had
a pretty easy time in class because the teachers had
given up asking him any questions at all years before.
(36:12):
The story was that he had answered but one question
in the seventeen years he had been going to classes
at Sullivant, and that was what is one use of
the comma the kami, said Dana, embarrassingly unsnarling his long
legs from beneath a desk much too low for him,
is used to shoot marbles with. Kami's was our word
(36:35):
for those cheap ten percent marbles, in case it wasn't yours.
The Sullivant School baseball team of nineteen hundred and five
defeated several high school teams in the city and claimed
the high school championship of the state, to which title
it had, of course, no technical right. I believe the
boys could have proved their moral right to the championship, however,
(36:57):
if they had been allowed to go out of town
and play all the teams they challenged, such as the
powerful Dayton and Toledo Nines. But their road season was
called off after a terrific fight that occurred during one
game at Mount Stirling or Picquah or Xenia, I can't
remember which. Our first baseman, Dana Whaney, crowned the umpire
(37:21):
with a bat during an altercation overcalled strike and the
fight was on. It took place in the fourth inning,
so of course the game was never finished. The battle
continued on down into the business section of the town
and raged for hours, with much destruction of property. But
since Sullivan was ahead of the time seventeen to nothing,
there could have been no doubt as to the outcome.
(37:44):
Nobody was killed. All of us boys were sure our
team could have beaten Ohio State University that year, but
they wouldn't play us. They were scared. Wayney was by
no means the biggest or toughest guy on the Grammar
School team. He was merely the oldest, being about a
year the senior of Floyd, the center fielder who could
(38:05):
jump five feet straight into the air without taking a
running start. Nobody knew, not even the Board of Education,
which once tried to find out whether Floyd was Floyd's
first name or his last name. He apparently only had one.
He didn't have any parents, and nobody, including himself, seemed
(38:26):
to know where he lived. When teachers insisted that he
must have another name to go with Floyd, he would
grow sullen and ominous and they would cease questioning him
because he was a dangerous scholar in his schoolroom brawl,
as mister Harrigan, the janitor found out one morning when
he was called in by a screaming teacher. All our
teachers were women to get Floyd under control. After she
(38:50):
had tried to whip him and he had begun to
take the room apart, beginning with the desks. Floyd broke
into small pieces the switch she had used on him.
Some said he also ate it. I don't know, because
I was home sick at the time with mumps or something.
Harrigan was a burly, iron muscle janitor, a man come
(39:13):
from a long line of coal shovelers, but he was
no match for Floyd, who had to be sure the
considerable advantage of being more aroused than mister Harrigan. When
their fight started, Floyd had him down and was sitting
on his chest in no time, and Harrigan had to
promise to be good and to say that's what I
get ten times before Floyd would let him up. I
(39:35):
don't suppose I would ever have got through Sullivant School
alive if it hadn't been for Floyd. For some reason,
he appointed himself my protector, and I needed one. If
Floyd was known to be on your side, nobody in
the school would dare be after you and chase you home.
I was one of the ten or fifteen male pupils
in Sullivant School who always or almost always knew their lessons,
(40:00):
and I believe Floyd admired the mental prowess of a
youngster who knew how many continents there were and whether
or not the sun was inhabited. Also, one time, when
it came to be my turn to read to the class,
we used to take turns reading American history aloud, I
came across the word ducane and knew how to pronounce it.
(40:22):
That charmed Floyd, who had been slouched in his seat
idly following the printed page of his worn and penciled textbook.
How you know that was ducane, boy, he asked me
after class. I don't know, I said, I just knew it.
He looked at me with round eyes. Oh that's something
(40:42):
he said. After that word got around that Floyd would
beat the tar out of anybody that messed around with me.
I wore glasses from the time I was eight, and
I knew my lessons, and both of those things were
considered pretty terrible at Sullivant. Floyd had one idiosyncrasy, though,
In the early nineteen hundreds, long warm furry gloves that
(41:03):
came almost to your elbows were popular with boys, and
Floyd had one of the biggest pairs in school. He
wore them the year round. Dick Peterson was an either
greater figure on the baseball team and in the school
than Floyd was. He had a way in the classroom
of blurting out a long, deep, rolling be for no
(41:29):
reason at all. Once he licked three boys his own
size single handed, really single handed, for he fought with
his right hand and held a mandolin in his left
hand all the time. It came out uninjured. Dick and
Floyd never met in mortal combats, so nobody ever knew
which one could beat, and the scholars were about evenly
(41:51):
divided in their opinions. Many a fight started among them
after school when the argument came up. I think school
never let out at Sullivan without at least one fight
starting up, and sometimes there were as many as five
or six raging between them. The corner of Oak and
sixth Streets and the corner of Rich and Fourth Streets
four blocks away. Now and again, virtually the whole school
(42:13):
turned out to fight the Catholic boys of the Holy
Cross Academy in fifth Street near town for no reason
at all. In winter with snowballs and ice balls. In
other seasons with fists, brick bats, and clubs, Dick Peterson
was always in the van, yelling, singing, being whirling all
(42:34):
the way around when he swung with his right or
if he hadn't brought his mandle in his left and missed.
He made himself the pitcher on the baseball team because
he was the captain. He was the captain because everybody
else was afraid to challenge his self election except Floyd.
Floyd was too lazy to pitch, and he didn't care
who was captain because he didn't fully uncomprehend what that meant.
(42:57):
On one occasion, when Earl Baddock, a steamfitter's son, had
shut out Mound Street School for six innings without a hit,
Dick took him out of the pitcher's box and went
in himself. He was hit hard and the other team scored,
but it didn't make much difference because the margin of
Sullivant's victory was so great the team didn't lose a
(43:17):
game for five years to another grammar school. When Dick
Peterson was in the sixth grade, he got into a
saloon brawl and was killed. When I go back to Columbus,
I always walked past Sullivant's school, and I have never
happened to get there when classes were letting out, so
I don't know what the pupils are like. Now. I
(43:39):
am sure there are no more Dick Peterson's and no
more Floyd's, unless Floyd is still going to school there.
The playyard is still entirely bare of grass and covered
with gravel, and the sycamore still lining the curve between
the schoolhouse fence and the Oak Street car line. A
streetcar line running past a schoolhouse is a dangerous thing
(44:01):
as a rule, but I remember no one being injured
while I was attending Sullivant. I do remember, however, one
person who came very near being injured. He was a
motorman on the Oak Street line, and once when his
car stopped at the corner of six to let off passengers,
he yelled at Chudy Davidson, who played third base on
the ball team and was a member of the Terrible Fourth,
(44:22):
to get out of the way. Chudy was fourteen years
old but huge for his age, and he was standing
on the tracks taking a chew of tobacco. Come on
down off of that car. I'll not kip lock off,
said Shouty, in what I can only describe as a
sullivant tone of voice. The motorman waited until Shooty moved
(44:43):
slowly off the tracks. Then he went on about his business.
I think it was lucky for him that he did.
There were boys in those days. I went to Sullivant
by James Thurber. I've done all the damage I can
(45:14):
do here. Here are the credits. Most of the music
was arranged, produced and performed by Brian Ray and John
Phillips Chanel, who are the Countdown musical directors. All orchestration
and keyboards by John Phillip Chanelle, guitarist, bass and drums
by Brian Ray, and it was produced by Tko Brothers.
Other Beethoven selections have been arranged and performed by the
group No Horns Allowed. Sports music is the Olberman theme
(45:35):
from ESPN two and it was written by Mitch Warren Davis.
Courtesy of ESPN Inc. Musical comments from Nancy Fauss the
best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer was my friend
John Dean, and everything else was as usual, pretty much
my fault. So that's countdown for this, the eight hundred
and seventy first day since Donald Trump's first attempted coup
against the democratically elected government of the United States. Do
(45:57):
not forget to keep arresting him while we still can.
The next scheduled countdown is Munday, Memorial Day. As I said,
might be a full encore performance, might be headlines in
an encore I don't know. If I've got something, you
download it. If you've heard it before, don't listen anymore.
(46:18):
I won't take it personal till then. On Keith Oldremman,
good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Trump
has the charisma of a mortician. Countdown with Keith Olderman
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
(46:42):
your podcasts.
Host
Keith Olbermann
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