June 5, 2023 • 60 mins
EPISODE 217: COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN
A-Block (1:43) SPECIAL COMMENT: As reports swirl, we seem to be on the verge of SOMETHING from Special Counsel Jack Smith and the Grand Jury. It is reportedly to reconvene this week after a month off. And DOJ is reportedly set to meet with Trump's lawyers. And now a new question: would DOJ make at least a token plea deal offer to him? A LOT going on.
(7:29) SPECIAL COMMENT: Having learned nothing from anything, Just to convince the RNC to give the network a Republican Presidential Primary debate, CNN is reportedly ready to partner with a far right website - and even have one of its propagandists co-moderate the debate WITH a CNN star ON CNN. And NBC is also prostituting itself to get a shot at a Republican debate, sending Lester Holt to try to talk them into it.
And we continue to have fallout from Tim Alberta's profile of CNN CEO Chris Licht in The Atlantic. Actually, it's less fallout and more an autopsy because Licht would have fared better if he'd gone into the Atlantic OCEAN. There is soooo much to discuss, but not too many possibilities as to what might happen next. As Burt Lancaster says to Tony Curtis in "Sweet Smell of Success": "You're dead, son. Get yourself buried."
B-Block (35:50) POSTSCRIPTS TO THE NEWS: "When I took over ‘Meet The Press’,” said Chuck Todd on Meet The Press as he announced his own firing FROM Meet The Press, “it was a Sunday show that had a lot of people questioning whether it still could have a place in the modern media space. Well, I think we’ve answered THAT question and then some.” He's self-aware to the last. And Lauren Boebert caught in a huge lie: she didn't fail to vote on the Debt Ceiling in protest; she just didn't make it in time - and it's on tape. IN SPORTS: the ultimate fan protest in a replica uniform and the Mets with a novel Hall of Fame induction (46:10) WORSTS: Marine LePen DOESN'T prove her French party wasn't associated with the Russians, Elon Musk's lawyers make a court filing that essentially disproves "The Twitter Files;" And a "comedian" goes on NewsMax and makes what she thinks is a joke but is actually a 150-year old racist trope about fried chicken.
C-Block (50:40) EVERY DOG HAS ITS DAY: Lola in Miami (51:40) THINGS I PROMISED NOT TO TELL: The day my ability to tolerate Chuck Todd for one more moment snapped like a dry twig during a drought and I could no longer bear to even be in the...same fantasy football league as him.
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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 special
Counsel Jack Smith may ask his stolen documents grand jury
(00:26):
to vote to indict Trump as early as this week.
Justice Department officials may meet with some of Trump's attorneys
as early as this week. And there is even the
plausible inference that these two stories put together, suggest the
DOJ could make at least a token offer of a
(00:47):
plea deal to Trump. There's a lot of ifs here,
and a lot of reporteds, and some of the reports
conflict with other reports so wildly that there is literally
no way that all of what's out there can all happen.
And I have been debating skipping all of this and
getting right to the startling news that Chris licktup CNN
is now so desperate to get not a Trump town
(01:08):
hall but an entire Republican presidential debate on his dying
network that he has offered to formally partner with a
right wing media outlet and even have one of its
people elevated to co moderator of that debate with a
CNN anchor on CNN. But then again, these podcasts can
(01:29):
be infinitely long, so let me review where the Trump
thing stands, because one thing seems certain. We're close. I
don't know what the hell we're close to, but we're close. Okay.
So it's NBC News that is reporting the Grand Jury
is going back into session after a month off this week,
with NBC's correspondence going further on air implying it could
(01:54):
be to vote on indictments. It could be a lot
of things. But CBS News is reporting that the Special
Council's decision on whether or not to try to charge
Trump and if so or what might happen this month,
while CBS also reports the possible Trump lawyer's DOJ meeting
this week and that plea deal idea that is our
(02:17):
friend John Dean looking at the CBS report and looking
at the latest superb work from the website Just Security,
and writing, every high level official who violates national security
laws appears to be offered a deal that includes losing
security clearance? Will Special Counsel Smith offer Trump a deal?
(02:39):
John points the rest of us to the model prosecution
memo on the stolen Trump documents, which is heavy lifting
unless you're a lawyer, but which parallels the exact kind
of internal exercise DOJ would produce before indictment decisions were made,
and eighty eight pages into the thing, there is what
amounts to the entire history of when the DOJ has
(03:01):
decided to prosecute for violations of mishandling the government documents,
including violations of the Espionage Act, and when it hasn't.
And the pattern becomes almost instantaneously clear. If you are
Kendra Kingsbury or James Hitzelberger or Harold Martin the third
and you take classified documents home and they catch you,
(03:24):
they indict you, and they put you on trial, and
if you're smart, you plead guilty as soon as possible.
But if you're former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, and
you go into the National Archives and you perloin three
copies of one classified document, and you stuff them into
your socks and you take them and you destroy them.
(03:46):
Or your former Director of Central Intelligence John Deutsch, and
you were storing classified info on your home computer, or
if you were General David Petraeus and you kept your
black books with all the war strategy and the NSC
discussions and the identities of the covert officers in them,
so that your girlfriend could use them to write her
biography of you guess what the Department of Justice offers
(04:10):
you a deal on lesser charges and the forfeiture of
your security clearance. John Deane points out, and the Just
Security Model memo repeats it again and again, that the
DOJ prosecution decisions depend to an amazing degree on how
they have prosecuted similar cases or just similar parts of
(04:31):
dissimilar cases before. The Justice Department seems at times more
obsessed with precedent than does the Supreme Court. Well, if
that's the case, it would seem almost to given that
if Jack Smith were on the verge of indicting Trump,
they would offer Trump a deal. They would have to
talk to Trump's lawyers. But, as John also notes, if
(04:54):
you demanded the Trump forfeits national security clearance, how would
that work? How could he run for president having agreed
never to look at classified documents again in his life? Well,
I can handle that one. He would promise he would
run and if elected, he would pardon himself. Or maybe
(05:15):
he wouldn't even have to go that far, because, of
course the Department of Justice that would have to prosecute
him for looking at national security documents, violating the plea
deal he himself made months earlier, would be run by
people he had just appointed to run it. Before we
drop this and move on to this is CNN and
(05:36):
also Breitbart. Let me just review the eleven days in
this story and lead to that bigger conclusion I mentioned.
It started then eleven days ago with the Washington Post
report that Trump kept classified documents in his office in
Florida and showed them to people who did not have
the right to see them. Then last Tuesday, it was
(05:57):
the Post reporting that the other guy who moved the
boxes of classified documents for Trump and was caught on
security video doing so, just happened to ask the Marri
Lago it guy how soon before the security system automatically
deleted the old videos. That it was the Guardian reporting
the same day that Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran's notes had
(06:17):
shown he was essentially prevented from searching for documents anywhere
but in the storage room, when most of the documents
were actually in the office. And it was last Wednesday
that CNN reported about the smoking gun that there is
an audio recording made for Mark Meadows Ghostwriters, in which
Trump tells people who shouldn't even know that it exists,
(06:38):
that there is a four page US military plan for
an attack on Iran, and on the tape it sounds
like he is reading from it and rustling it. And
then there was the follow up that there are many
such Trump tapes and Jack Smith has all of them.
And Friday there was the New York Times follow up
that the DOJ subpoenaed it, but his lawyers could not
(07:01):
find that Iran war document, and Saturday it was there
aren't just Evan Corkoran notes, There are Evan Corkoran dear
diary iPhone memos And yes, maybe the grand jury meets
this week to vote on indicting him, and maybe it
does not, and maybe the DOJ will meet with his
lawyers this week, and maybe it won't, and maybe there's
(07:23):
a plea offer in the works, and maybe there isn't.
But damn does it sound like something large is about
to go down now to CNN's Chris Licked reportedly being
willing to bribe the Republican Party by actually letting some
figure from an ultra right wing outlet co moderate a
(07:44):
Republican presidential primary debate on CNN, establishing an actual CNN
working partnership with who are we talking about here? Breitbart, Newsmax,
The Daily Stormer, Ben Shapiro, Christina Bob, Steve Bannon, Lara Trump.
What did American television news organizations learn from the last
(08:07):
eight years of Trump? Nothing? Not a damn thing. What
did CNN learn from the Trump town Hall? Nothing? Not
a damn thing. What did Chris Lickt learn from his
vivisection by magazine in The Atlantic? Nothing not a damn thing.
It's slipped by because of so much other news about
(08:29):
two of the principal players. But CNN and NBC are
both reportedly prostituting themselves to try to get the rights
to host a Republican presidential primary debate or debates at least.
Chris Licht's argument for this is not look how well
the Trump town hall worked or didn't I come off
(08:50):
well in that piece in the Atlantic. This week, Lickt
has suggested to the Republican National Committee that the debate
could run on CNN plus other networks owned by Warner Bros.
Discovery and their digital channels, and maybe streaming. But then
comes the evil ps the Resistance. Quoting Axios, Lickt has
(09:11):
also offered to partner with a conservative leaning outlet on
the debates again, a conservative leaning outlet. Why would Newsmax
lower itself to be involved with CNN? It isn't going
to be Fox News, So where are we now? Gateway Pundit,
Lindell TV, Truth Social. That partnership, two sources told Axios,
(09:36):
could include giving a journalist from the partner outlet a
comoderator spot sweet Jesus on hockey skates. Conservative leaning outlets
don't have journalists. And if you think that is just
liberal hyperbole, name one the National Review, which has half
(09:57):
the footprint of the Epoch Times. So it's who's the comoderator?
Rich Lowry, can Patel? Here are your event moderators, Anderson
Cooper and Nick Fuentes. And if he heard those names,
how many times would Chris lickt recoil? And how many
(10:17):
times would Chris lickt jot them down? Let me put
lickt aside for a moment. For while NBC's self prostitution
is not as pronounced as CNN's, it is in some
ways a little more disillusioning. Axios is now reporting that
not only has NBC offered to put a Republican debate
(10:40):
on NBC on MSNBC, on CNBC on Telemundo and on
its streaming news service, but that it made a pitch
at an RNC meeting in February, and the pitch starred
Lester Holt, the anchor of NBC Nightly News, letting himself
and his not very hard earned credibility as the centerpiece
(11:03):
of NBC's attens to convince the Republicans, Trump, DeSantis all
of the others to bring their festival of lies to NBC.
It's shameful. I haven't spoken about Lester Holt here before
because I only worked in the same organization with him
for eight years. Thus I know next to nothing about him,
(11:25):
and everybody I knew there said that that was all
there was to know about him. He's a cipher. He's
a guy with good suits and a sunny smile who
can read the prompter well and was known at MSNBC
twenty years ago as mister iron Pants. That's it, and
now he's let himself be trotted out like the prize
(11:46):
winning pig at the Republican County Fair. Semaphore News reporting
the RNC was impressed by Lester Holt's pitch. Instead of
trying to impress the fascists, NBC and for that matter, CNN,
You guys should be offering whatever non journalistic bells and
(12:06):
whistles are necessary if you really want to put them
on your air, but that to get on your networks,
any participant must say on the record and publicly and
loudly and clearly that Biden won the twenty twenty election,
and any claim to the contrary is dishonesty or madness
or both, or they will not be platformed period. You
do anything less than that, and you're no longer a
(12:28):
news organization. NBC CNN. Yeah, I know, and this isn't
even the most prominent of CNN's problems at the moment.
His bosses have finally cut one of Chris Licht's legs.
He has many of them out from under him. He's
(12:51):
a centipede. Warner Bros. Has named a man named David
Levy as CNN's new COO, and OO is the operative
part of that. Lickt has told his people that he
decided to do that, that it would be a go
I did to give up all the network's business responsibilities
to somebody else so he can concentrate on continuing to
improve the product. And when I say continuing to improve
(13:14):
the product. I mean trying to find anybody who works
for him at CNN who can today still take him seriously.
After Tim Alberta's new fifteen thousand word iliad of a
piece in the Atlantic about Lickt and his methodical destruction
of CNN, out of ninety plus minutes of them, there
is one particularly grim line from the classic about journalism
(13:35):
gone mad, Sweet Smell of Success, the movie in which
Bert Lancaster says to Tony Curtis, your dead son, get
yourself buried. As I read Tim Alberta's profile of Lickt,
in which the only person who was willing to go
on the record supporting what Lickt is doing was his
(13:56):
personal trainer, I thought of three things, I told you so,
and the line I just mentioned from Sweet Smell of Success,
and that the Lichtian world that Alberta describes is so hopeless,
so screwed up, that it seemed, as I read his
piece at the last paragraph would have to turn out
(14:17):
to be a description of Licht getting fired by his
equally dim witted CNN masters. Something like finally came the
call Lickt was out fired. At least he would have
more time to spend with his trainer. It is hard
to imagine a profile of anybody anywhere, anybody less egregiously
(14:40):
damaging to society than a serial killer that could begin
with this one line and then somehow go downhill from there. Quote.
How are we going to cover Trump? That's not something
I stay up night thinking about. Chris lick told me.
It's very simple. It is, of course, everything but simple.
It has paralyzed journalists in every medium, in every American city,
(15:03):
with every degree of intelligence and experience and seriousness in
solving this problem. And yet Licked goes on. The media
has absolutely I believe, learned its lesson. Licked said, thank you,
Senator Collins. Lickt, sensing my surprise, he grinned, I really do,
Lickt said, I think they know he's playing them, At
(15:24):
least the people in my organization. We've had discussions about this.
We know that we're getting played, so we're going to
resist it. The man foolish enough to put Trump on
live in a town hall after he told a reporter
that he was going to resist being played by Trump.
The man foolish enough to make deals with Trump and
give control over who sat in the audience to Trump
(15:47):
and to court, Trump actually said these things and meant them,
and never for a moment stopped to think that maybe
he was not going to exploit Trump, but he was
going to be exploited by Trump. Quote. In the days
before the town hall, Alberta writes, concerns about the audience
spiked as lits description of the crowd quote extra Trumpy
(16:08):
wound its way through slack channels and text message threads. Quote.
Live television is a volatile thing. People and sets and
scripts are always being changed for all kinds of reasons,
wrote Tim Alberta. Still, CNN employees had reasons to be suspicious.
They wondered if some sort of deal had been cut
with Trump's team promising the placement of approved panelists in
(16:32):
exchange for his participation in the town hall. At least,
even absent some official agreement, it seemed obvious that CNN
leaders had been contorting the coverage to keep Trump happy,
perhaps to prevent him from walking off stage. At one
point during the pregame show, when the words sexual abuse
(16:53):
appeared on the CNN Chiron, one of Licht's lieutenants phoned
the control room. His instructions stunned everyone who overheard them.
The chiron needed to come down in immediately. Unquote. If
that's true, and I have no reason to doubt that
it's true. It sounds like something Licked would do. No,
(17:14):
it sounds like something Licked would make somebody else do.
And it's indefensible. It's a fireable offense. It should have
gotten Licked fired. In fact, it will get him fired.
And on that day when he gets kicked upstairs to
the coordinator of Crapulen Synergistic, he will never understand what happened.
(17:35):
No journalist, let alone a deluded, self appointed defender of
journalism like Chris Licked, can ever put himself or his
network in a position to make it look like it
made a deal to provide a political candidate with a
live crowd of cheerleaders. Yet Extra Trumpy Licked proudly and
clearly sold out CNN's objectivity, and if the Axio support
(18:00):
is correct, is prepared to do it again. Here's your
co host, Matt walshblog again, quoting Alberta's piece in The Atlantic.
I asked Lickt whether there was anything he regretted about
the event, the Extra Trumpy makeup of the crowd. No,
Licht said, because it was representative of the Republican base,
(18:21):
allowing the audience to cheer at will No, Licht said,
because instructing them to hold their applause, as debate moderators
regularly do, would have altered the reality of the event unquote.
Twice Alberta catches Chris Licht on the record on the
fringes tap dancing along the line of COVID denihalism, Lickt
(18:45):
suggests to a group of students that case and death
numbers may have been exaggerated. Quote, we don't know how
many deaths were from COVID. He explains he knows this
because his father was a doctor. My father was an architect,
and I can't build a house of playing cards. Licht
also actually believes seeing coverage of the pandemic before he
(19:07):
got there was bad. Said it turned into quote a
place where oh wow, we got to keep getting those ratings.
We got to keep getting the sense of urgency. He
slapped his palms on the table between us, mimicking the
feverish pace of an imaginary broadcaster. COVID, COVID, COVID, look
at the case numbers, Look at this unquote. If I
(19:27):
were a CNN employee, who had lost somebody to COVID.
I would now feel entitled to punch Chris Lickt in
the mouth throughout the piece, as throughout so much of
the coverage of Chris Licht's disastrous tenure running CNN, running
it into the ground, unprecedented even among the amazing gallery
(19:48):
of rogues and idiots who have run the cable news
networks over the decades, and I met all of them.
Lickt is still portrayed in this piece in the Atlantic
as the genius producer at MSNBC when he produced a
nighttime Last Play show, and then a genius morning producer
when he produced a morning Last Place show, then at
(20:11):
CBS News where he produced another morning Last Place show,
then at CBS Late Night where he produced another Last
Place show. The portrayal, of course, was forged, and I
use that word in all its meanings by Lickt himself.
To those of us who were there when he was
He seemed at MSNBC to have a passable sense of
(20:31):
graphics and which camera should shoot, which backdrop, and otherwise
he did only two things, act as a henchman for
the deplorable Joe Scarborough and spend hours each day trying
to undermine MSNBC's other shows so that Scarborough would somehow
look better, and so that Scarborough's friends among Conservatives would
not be criticized. He spent so much time stabbing us
(20:54):
that there were times Mattow and I thought he lived
behind our backs. Now he really does think he's not
just a journalist, but the journalist suddenly. Tim Alberta writes,
lickt was animated. But I would say that for anyone
who does want me to fail, what are you going for?
(21:14):
Who would you want in this seat? You want a journalist,
You want someone who is a direct line to the
corporation and can make a phone call and go, hey,
what the f do you want? Someone who's done the job,
who's done a lot of jobs, who understands exactly what
it takes to do what I'm asking, Someone who believes
that our future is based on executing great journalism. Maybe
they don't like my style or whatever, but I'm not
(21:36):
quite sure what you're going for if you want me
to fail. Unquote, No, Chris Licht will never understand he
is not the person he described there, not even close,
not even in the same universe that he understands. None
of what it takes. Most importantly, he will never understand
that it doesn't matter if anybody else wants him to fail.
(21:58):
He will fail all by himself, without anybody else's help.
If that wasn't obvious to him after Christian I'm on poor,
deftly and politely vivisected him after the Trump town hall,
If it isn't obvious to him now after this Tim
Alberta piece, He's even blinder than I thought, and I
thought he was damn blind. Alberta recounts in great detail
(22:21):
his negotiations to get the man who inflicted lict on America,
David pay your rioters, Zaslav, to do an on the
record interview about lickt and CNN. Alberta says, Zaslav, you
remember him. He was the guy who was interrupted during
his speech at BEU. The guy looks like Biff Tannin,
he says. Zaslav originally agreed to it, then demanded quote approval,
(22:44):
then finally, through a press aide, backed out of anything
other than an interview quote on background only and the boilerplate.
We have great confidence in the progress that Chris blah
blah blah blah blah. Pro tip if your boss won't
defend you on the record. Your boss is not defending
(23:09):
you off the record. Your dead son, get yourself buried.
The thing is there's still a chance that Licked will
read the piece or have it read to him and
attack Tim Alberta. Alberta reports the previous criticism by Robert
(23:30):
Reisch on Substack led to a phone call from Licht
that a fairly mild piece by Kurt Bardella in the
La Times made Licht vow to quote destroy Bardella. We
know that late last month, the Washington Post columnist Jennifer
Rubin wrote that aman Por should be running CNN and
not Licked, and was attacked on Twitter by CNNSPR guy
in a screeching screed worthy of a teenager rejected by
(23:52):
his crush. When I first criticized Licked, somebody leaked to
one of the websites that I was only doing so
because lickt had turned me down for a job. I
have not spoken to Chris Licked, nor tried to since
two thousand seventeen, but I will say it did please
me that a couple of months ago in New York
Times called me for a comment, and the guy from
(24:12):
the papers first question was at MSNBC. Did Chris Lick
really eat paste? If there were not enough in raging
parts to this story, I mean in raging enough that
I wonder if I've been too easy on Chris Lick.
This sent me into apoplexy. Quote. We are not an
(24:35):
advocacy network. We are providing something different. And when the
spit hits the fan in this world, you're not going
to have time for that advocacy anymore. First of all, Chris,
the spit has hit the fan. A political party, one
of the two larger ones, is trying to end American democracy.
(24:57):
Chris Lick does not seem to have noticed that. Chris
lickt also does not seem to have noticed that journalism
must advocate, must advocate for democracy, and advocating is not partisanship.
And this fundamental misunderstanding of his own job is spreading
throughout television and media. We can't run that it might
(25:18):
offend those people trying to destroy the country, fascists by
sneakers too. The spit has long since hit the fan,
and Chris Licked is worried about the feelings of those
who threw the spit, and the spit itself. To me,
(25:40):
most of what Tim Alberta wrote had the effect I
used to hear from Countdown viewers in the years two
thousand and six and two thousand and seven. Oh thank god,
somebody else is seeing this. I thought I was alone
out here, but he managed to reveal something I never
knew about and never would have been able to guess,
not fully anyway. But for years I have assumed there
was something else in the Chris Licked story, some other
(26:04):
Milan moronic influence that would help explain all the damage
he did at NBC and CBS, and the fatal damage
he is still doing today at CNN. And there in
this article it is Alberta is in the apartment of
a USC professor who has convinced Lick to talk to
sixteen of his students, and what follows is both maudling
(26:27):
and terrifying. To quote the piece again, Chris was absolutely, positively,
without question, the right choice for CNN, the teacher told
his students, motioning them toward the man seed in front
of them. There is nothing more important in America today
than trust. I'm praying that Chris is successful. I want
him to have this job for ten years, because anything
(26:48):
less than ten years will not give him the opportunity
to make the most important changes to the most important
news source on the face of the earth. I have
every faith that he will succeed, and every fear for
this country if he doesn't. He turned to face licked
the teacher. His eyes were watery, his voice was choked
with emotions. My hopes and dreams are embodied in you,
(27:13):
he said. This was quite an introduction, especially considering the
man who gave it, Frank Lunce unquote Frank Lunz. Frank Lunz,
Frank Lunz. Why that's Frank Luntz's name. Is there somebody
else out there named Frank Lunz besides that? Frank Lunz,
(27:35):
The rabid, biased, subjective, Republican folster who can make a
focus group defend any conservative idea and then make that
group get up and sing. Who let the dogs out?
The mercenary who has worked for every news organization, The
man who every eighteen to twenty four months goes through
a phase or an act in which he pretends to
not be a conservative but just a middle of the
road surveyor of the American landscape. That's Chris Licht's mentor
(28:02):
his spirit animal is Frank uns the great flaming fraud
that is Frank Lunz, the horror that is Chris Licked. Well,
that's the missing piece in the Chris Licked story adored
by Beholden two, influenced by one of the great confidence
tricksters of American media and politics and specifically polling. Let
(28:25):
me tell you how I know that. I know that
because Frank Lunz once did his horror act on my
behalf or at least four by benefit. In two thousand
and three, I had gone back to NBC Sports and
as a peace gesture towards my still angry ex employers
at MSNBC, I went over to New Jersey and I
(28:47):
filled in for one of their ailing show hosts. And
while I was there, with absolutely no belief, no intention
that I was going to stay there more than a week,
they told me about a new show they were going
to launch at eight o'clock every night called Countdown, and
how they were deep in fruitful negotiations to buy from
ABC News the contract of their dream host for Countdown.
(29:09):
Their ideal for the new show, Sam Donaldson. I blanched.
Apparently I was working at ABC News at the time
in radio and I knew that ABC was so desperate
to get Sam Donaldson to quit his contract that they
had taken him completely off TV and stuck him only
(29:30):
on radio. And when that hadn't gotten him to quit,
they had just relegated his radio show to Internet only
in two thousand and three internet only. I knew this
because I had filled in on the Sam Donaldson Show
before it was over. I knew we had about four listeners. Now.
It was the executive who told me this, who blanched,
(29:53):
what do we do? The job offers on Donaldson's desk,
and it's on my boss's desk. He looked around the room.
Would you do it? Would you do another nightly show
for us? Another eight o'clock? Oh buddy, I shrugged. I'm sure,
and I'll need time off for the Olympics and the
other sports stuff that I signed with Dick Eversol to do.
But oh god, thanks, Wait wait, I know how to
(30:15):
do this, Rainy, get me Frank Lunz. I heard his
end of the conversation. I mean, it's possibly he wasn't
talking to Frank Lunz, But why would they go through
this whole sharad if they weren't talking to each other.
He told Lunce or whoever that was on the other
end of the phone of his crisis. He invoked the
name of the then president of NBC News, Neil Shapiro.
(30:37):
You know Neil loves focus groups, Frank, can you get
me a focus group that says it hates Sam Donaldson
and another focus group that says it loves Keith Oldman.
Can you do it by day after tomorrow? Great? Thanks buddy.
Neil Shapiro's office called my agent to offer me the
eight PM show. Three days later, the focus groups convinced
(31:04):
resident of NBC News. So that's who Chris Lickt is
listening to, and that's who thinks Chris licked is the messiah.
Frank once back to Tim Alberta. Quote. Every employee I
(31:25):
spoke with was asking some variation of the same question.
Did lict have any idea what he was doing? Un
quote duh no, I told you that already. Alberta also
provided the requisite punchline quote. Then Lickt said something I'd
never heard before. I don't want people to think of CNN,
(31:49):
Fox and MSNBC. In the same sentence, he said, well
least he got that done. CNN is now often in
fourth place in the ratings, behind the semi professional Newsmax
or on Good Nights. It is such a distant third
behind Fox and MSNBC that no, Chris, nobody does think
(32:12):
of CNN, Fox and MSNBC in the same sentence anymore. Bravo,
Chris licked. Also of note, today, Chuck Todd got fired
as the host of Meet the Press. That's next, this
(32:32):
is counting? Oh wait, I was recording ahem, postscripts for
(32:58):
the news, some headlines, some updates, some snarks, some predictions,
date line thirty rock quote when I took over Meet
the Press, said Chuck Todd on Meet the Press, as
he announced his own firing from Meet the Press. It
was a Sunday show that had a lot of people
questioning whether it's still could have a place in the
modern media space. Well, I think we've answered that question
(33:19):
and then some to the end, Chuck Todd remains a
master of self unawareness. First of all, even if you
think your meaning of that line is correct, how do
you phrase it that way to let yourself get run
over by your critics. It was a Sunday show that
(33:41):
had a lot of people questioning whether it could still
have a place in the modern media space. While I
think we've answered that question, second of all, it isn't true.
Meet the Press never reached more prestigious heights than on Sunday,
June eighth, two thousand and eight. The topic of the show,
which was on early because of the French open coverage
(34:01):
on NBC, was Hillary Clinton finally seeding the two thousand
and eight Democratic primary. The guests were all NBC political
correspondents Ron Allen, Lee Collen, David Gregory, Andrew Mitchell, Kelly O'Donnell,
and Chuck Todd. The host, as the host had ben
since December eighth, nineteen ninety one, was Tim Russert. The
(34:22):
show mattered. Russert had gotten Colin Powell to admit WMD
in Iraq was a lie. He was the consensus gold
standard in political media and capable of keeping the Democrats
off the backs of NBC's more conservative commentators and the
Republicans off the backs of NBC's more liberal ones me
in particular, And five days later Tim Russeer died. Tom
(34:45):
Brokaw took the job over until December, when David Gregory
got the position because of the good will left over
from Russert. He was given six years to try to
make it work, and he did not make it work.
Chuck Todd took over on September seventh, twenty fourteen. Yesterday
he said I'd rather leave a little bit too soon
than stay a tad bit too long, And if he
actually meant that, he would have left on September eighth,
(35:07):
twenty fourteen. Chuck did two things and two things alone
in that show, and he will stay on until September
when Kristin Welker takes over, and she will neither fail
nor succeed in the job, which is exactly what NBC
News wants at a moment when someone is needed at
some national broadcast network to ask some actual questions once
(35:28):
in a while, Chuck did two things and two things only. First,
there is no issue he could not apply raging both
sidesism too. He once asked on air if America could
handle the prosecution of an ex president. He asked that
of a Republican governor. He and his staff once did
a feature on how American media should cover Trump if
(35:50):
he ran again. They asked Republican staffers Chuck would platform anybody,
and when Kelly An khanjob frick a side him in
that famous Alternative Facts episode. Chuck and NBC News really
thought they had done some sort of service to the country.
Chuck and thus his program had no understanding that they
(36:11):
were covering anything more meaningful than a sports league. And
he made up quotes and meanings and attributed them to
people like Alexandria Acazio Cortes. And that's when what was
left of my professional friendship with him snapped. And I'll
tell you that story at the end of the podcast.
The other thing Chuck did number two of two was
(36:32):
something Russard always refused to do. He overbooked meet the press,
and thus his natural inclination to not prod or push
or demand proof for what the guy just said was
exacerbated by the fact that each interview was boxed in
time wise, he couldn't dig deeper. He had to get
to the next commercial. Or, as Trevor Noah said at
(36:53):
the twenty twenty two White House Correspondence dinner in a
SHIV disguised as a joke, Chuck Todd is here, Chuck
you here? How you doing? I'd ask a follow up,
but I know you don't know what those are? They
say Chuck is staying on as a political analyst and
will also do long form journalism for NBC. And that
(37:14):
is the plight wave of saying, you've been here sixteen
years since Russard asked everybody he trusted, like Broken Kelly,
O'Donnell and even me, if he should hire him, and
we all said yes, So Chuck, We'll let you play
out your contracts and if you get another offer, go on,
have a good time. We'll throw you in real nice
going away party. They'll even be a cake. As I said,
(37:35):
I will come back to this in things I promised
not to tell later, but for now, this championship joke
on Twitter from Frank Galton and I don't know who
Frank Galton is, but I would like to shake his hand,
he wrote, quote Charles Todd wants you to forget about Chuck.
(37:59):
Thank you, Nancy Faust, Dateline, Washington. Once again, democracy is preserved,
least by the dedication of those of us trying to
save it, more by the idiocy of those trying to
destroy it. Lauren Bobert super Genius, did not vote on
the debt ceiling bill in the House. She then proclaimed
she had refused to vote as a protest against more
(38:22):
DC self created garbage, self created garbage? Bobo, did Chuck
Todd write that line for you? The saving grace of
these morons is that they don't notice when they sign
the receipts that are later produced self created garbage. Bobert's
self righteous claim of protest evidently riled or at least
(38:42):
got the attention of a CNN Capitol Hill producer named
Morgan Rimmer, who tweeted nothing less than a video of
herself explaining to Bobert that the vote was over. They
closed it, she says, and that Bobert had missed the vote.
And this producer said that as Bobert was running up
the steps of the Capitol clearly intending to vote, since,
(39:05):
as Mizrimmer notes in the audio version of the tape,
you will now hear after she told Bobert that the
vote had been closed, Bobert kept on running up the
goddamn steps. Yeah, two things, I'd like to nominate Morgan
(39:27):
Rimmer as the next CEO of CNN. And that scene
and I'll retweak the video is exactly the way the
famous Monty Python's Flying Circus episode ends with nobody expects
the Spanish Inquisition. As the program credits come to a close,
the members of the Spanish Inquisition are desperately racing to
(39:47):
get to a courtroom to deliver their line. They get
off a bus, they run up the steps, they burst
into the room, and just as Michael Palin is about
to say nobody expects, the scene goes dark and the
words the end appear and he says, oh bu I
didn't hear Bobert say oh bugger, self created garbage and
(40:11):
Dateline New York. I'm fine, thank you, thank you for
abiding my day off. It was not walking pneumonion or
rocking pneumonion or any of the other harrowing things my
doctor contemplated, like a blood clot in my lungs. It
looks like it was exhaustion, insufficient exercise, and decreasing youth.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
This is Sports Center. Wait, check that not anymore. This
is Countdown with Keith Alberman in sports We've spoken previously
of the Oakland Ney Kansas City Ney Philadelphia soon to
be Las Vegas A's, and how owner John Fisher starved
(41:06):
that franchise to death in the Bay Area. Even though
the team is tied for the second most World Series
championships in baseball for the last half century. From Reddit
one Oakland A's fans revenge spotted at an A's game
wearing his replica A's jersey. The number on the back
is zero and the name above it is traded a
(41:29):
different baseball note from a franchise gradually rebuilding its reputation.
The New York Mets inducted four members into their Hall
of Fame Saturday, including my friends the announcers Gary Cohen
and Howie Rose, and pitcher Al Lighter.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
Who I have known a combined eighty nine years for
crying out loud. He also inducted the great Mets eighties
star Howard Johnson, and congratulations again to each of them.
Now one note, you don't often hear crowds gasp at
these events. A lot of cheering, a lot of applause,
a lot of names, not so much gasping. But there
(42:01):
it was on Saturday, because before the ceremony began, the
Mets had positioned four giant triangular baseball cards on the
field showing each of the four new inductees. They just
looked like kind of creative, clever props. And when the
first of the new inductees Howard Johnson was introduced. The
(42:23):
side of his giant baseball card opened and Howard emerged
from inside the baseball card. And there were gasps in
the stadium, though to be fair, and not as many
gaps as if one of the guys had gotten stuck.
Uh yeah, nine one one, Yeah, this is the Mets calling.
(42:44):
We have a Hall of Famer trapped in a giant
baseball card. And hello, nine one one, you're there. Hello.
(43:06):
I like that one, particularly coming up back to Chuck
Todd And yes, we were actually close enough friends that
we were in the same fantasy football league for a decade,
and then I just couldn't take him anymore. First the
daily round up, the miss Grants Warns and Dunning Kruger
effects specimens who constitute today's worst persons in the world.
The Bronze to France's white supremacist political party, now called
(43:29):
the National Rally, formerly the National Front, its critics would say,
formerly the HM HM with the Z in it. France's
parliament established a Committee of Inquiry to look into links
between Marine Lepenz party and Russia. She was hoping to
prove there weren't any sources, though, tell the agens Franz
Press that not only did the National Front constantly repeat
(43:52):
and promote Russian government propaganda in the last decade in France,
per this report by the French Parliament, sometimes word for word,
but that La Penz Party also got a huge loan
a few years ago from an obscure Russian bank, and
then the bank mysteriously went out of business. The runner up,
Elon Musk in illegal filing and a lawsuit being heard
(44:13):
in San Francisco. His attorneys. Twitter's attorneys state under penalty
of perjury that at no point was the government paying
it nor pressuring it to censor anybody, and that the
new CEO will not enact any changes in Twitter's content
moderation policy. Wait, wouldn't that mean that the whole Twitter
file stuff was crap? I mean more crap, but our winner.
(44:39):
An alleged comedian named Chrissy Mayer, appearing on Newsmax to
defend Chick fil A from the latest right Wing Boy
Every right Winger is Softish church music Umbradge Festival. I
hate to make a fried chicken joke, she said, but
they sell fried chicken to Chick fil A, and I
(44:59):
don't know how much more inclusive, we could get here
happily for Ms Mayor. That isn't a joke. That's just
a racist trope that goes back at least a century
and a half in this country. So if you use
it in your act on TV, that makes you a racist. Chrissy. Hey,
Chris Linked I got your Republican debate co moderator right here. Mayor,
(45:24):
Today's worst person in the world. This is Countdown with
Keith Olberman still ahead on Countdown, and now he belongs
to the Ages. Chuck Todd fired as the host of
(45:48):
Meet the Press. I'd like to thank the Good Lord
for letting me live to see this day. I'll return
to my favorite topic, me and the day, my fragile
willingness to tolerate Chuck Todd snapped in half and things
I promised not to tell first. In each edition of Countdown,
we've you're a dog in need, you can help. Every
dog has its day. Poor Lola in Miami, a seven
(46:10):
year old Chihuahua terrible hernia and like so many dogs,
especially small dogs, these awful, life threatening things can be
cleared up in hours with treatment and surgery. So naturally,
Lola's alleged human abandoned her. Paw Patrol Rescue rescued her,
got her to surgery. She'll soon be recovering at a
foster home. She's fine, and they're trying to get donations
(46:30):
to cover the money they put out upfront to save her.
So if you can help Lola on cuddly dot com
or on my Twitter feeds, they're trying to raise like
three hundred dollars, I thank you, and Lola thanks you.
(47:02):
I knew Chuck for about fifteen years early in his career,
when he was with the DC Insider publication the Hotline.
He was a frequent guest on Countdown, and in two
thousand and seven, when Tim Russert was thinking of hiring
him at NBC News, mine was one of dozens of
temperatures Tim Tuck. As Chuck later wrote to me, quote,
you certainly were a tremendous advocate and cheerleader for me
(47:24):
over the years, and I don't forget that. Yeah, well
that wasn't true. He forgot it, all right, But I'm
veering away from the main story. In two thousand and eight,
a couple of Washington political types started a fantasy football league.
If you don't think fantasy football leagues are important. You
should know that last spring, a major league baseball player
(47:45):
in uniform walked up to another Major League baseball player
in uniform on a Major League baseball field with thousands
of people already in the stands, and he slapped him
in the face over a roster move that the second
player had made in their fantasy football league. The second
had managed to retain the rights to an injured player,
(48:08):
and the first guy was upset about this. So six
months after their fantasy season ended, this major league baseball
player walked up and slapped the other Major League baseball player.
If slaps or duels or kidnappings are not everyday occurrences
in fantasy football, they do represent the kind of baseline
intensity of the thing. So when I and others were
(48:29):
approached about this Washington centric league in two thousand and eight,
it was already a big deal, even before we were
all sworn to secrecy, because a spot in the league
was being held open for some DC guy named Barack Obama.
It turned out he did not join our league, some
excuse about too much work, when obviously he was just
(48:50):
afraid of my fantasy football skills. But some people in
his White House did join the league, and I still
will not identify them because the premise of this league
was the first rule of Fantasy football club is you
do not talk about fantasy football club. I will say
that Chuck Todd, like me, was an original player. We
call ourselves owners because we are nuts and it's a fantasy.
(49:11):
It's in the title Fantasy Football Fantasy Football Owners. And
one year, I think it was twenty ten, I had
assembled in this league, mostly by accident, a team that
was almost perfect. It literally lost one game all season,
and that was in the middle of the year to
Chuck Todd's team. And the night after I lost to
Chuck Todd's team, he was giving a speech I think
(49:33):
at the University of Virginia, and witnesses called to tell
me that he began his speech by saying, I have
much to tell you, but first I have to tell
you that I am in a fantasy football league with
Keith Alderman, and he has a great team this year,
and this week I upset him by a final score
of one hundred and forty three to one hundred and
forty one or whatever the score was. I thought it
was pretty dumb, but by twenty ten, Chuck was the
(49:57):
NBC News White House correspondent, and we all cringed whenever
we saw he was going to be on with one
of us on MSNBC. See, some people respond well to
pressure and success, and some people do not, and some
people become entirely different people. So when Chuck violated the
prime directive of this fantasy football league and talked about it,
(50:18):
I shrugged. The other guys in the league did not.
Chuck was actually punished. The commissioner of the league ordered
that he had to skip his fourth choice in the
following year's player draft. Chuck was berefed. He believed this
would destroy his chances. He apologized to me every week,
and finally I said, you know, guys, maybe this is
(50:39):
too much. And as the supposed victim in the equation,
I got final say and Chuck got to keep his
fourth draft choice. By twenty sixteen, Chuck was because Tim
Russer died, Tom Brokaw retired, and David Gregory flamed out.
Chuck was the host to Meet the Press. He was
also Political director of NBC News, another part of russer
(50:59):
It's old portfolio. But whereas Tim was a master who
could convince the Republicans. He was ordering that I be
punished for what I said, when in fact he would
be calling me and asking me what stupid, meaningless thing
I could think of to tell the Republicans he was
punishing me with or four. He was sublime, subtlety, not Chuck.
(51:19):
No subtlety. There. In twenty sixteen, Chuck was preparing to
not name my ex lib in girlfriend Katie Turr as
the new NBC White House correspondent, even though she had
suffered as the primary NBC correspondent covering the Trump campaign,
and out of nowhere, Chuck emails me that he's going
to be in New York and he wants to take
me to dinner. I had known him more than a
(51:41):
decade by then. We had never as much as shared
pieces of the same pizza. I had not seen him
in the flesh in more than five years, and I
knew as we sat down that Chuck's idea was to
get me to tell Katie that she was not going
to be White House correspondent so he did not have to.
He kept bringing it up, what do you think Katie
would think? And then I'd switch the topic to fantasy football,
(52:03):
and then he'd say, well, let me ask you about
Katie in the White House job. We did this for
ninety minutes, and finally I said, Okay, Chuck, I've avoided
it long enough. Maybe I could call her and soften
the blow for her. And that's when he said, well,
I'm going back to DC tonight, so if I want
to catch that last train, I better leave. Bye. Chuck
(52:24):
is not subtle. I'll spare you the other crap from
the fantasy league. Suffice to say, I was reminded of
how annoyingly and obviously he used to conduct himself when
I read that last May, one of Chuck's guest bookers
for the now no longer on TV Meet the Press
Daily show had emailed the office of Alaska Congressman Don
Jung hoping to get Young to appear the next day,
(52:45):
which would have been the ultimate great guest get because
Don Jung had died two months earlier. Anyway, this fantasy
football league was fun and unique in that there had
only been one change in its composition in all that time.
Chuck's team defeated mine in the Fantasy Football super Bowl
one year, and mostly he was just annoying, like he
(53:07):
was on the air. Nothing worse than that, and then
on June nineteenth, twenty nineteen, Representative Alexandria Ocazio Cortes AOC
ripped the Trump administration's migrant policies. She said, quote, the
United States is running concentration camps on our southern border,
and that is exactly what they are. They are concentration camps.
End quote. Chuck went on MSNBC and said the following
(53:29):
in response, quote, you can call our government's detention of
migrants many things, depending on how you see it. It's
a stain on our nation, maybe, a necessary evil to
others to deal with an untenable situation, perhaps, but do
you know what you can't call it. Chuck then played
the clip of AOC calling it concentration camps, and Chuck resumed,
if you want to criticize the shameful treatment of people
(53:50):
at our southern border, fine, you'll have plenty of company,
but be careful comparing them to Nazi concentration camps, because
they're not at all comparable in the slightest A lot
of people me included, were stunned. Well. Kasio Cortes never
mentioned the Nazis, and concentration camps did not begin with
(54:10):
the Nazis or Hitler. They began with the British in
the Boer War in South Africa at the turn of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet here was Chuck putting
a word in her mouth, and that word was Nazi,
and then he attacked her for something she never said.
He lied about her. He lied, Chuck Todd made it
up on the news. I was furious enough to email
(54:31):
him that night. I thought by now somebody at NBC
would have pointed out that concentration camps and Nazi death
camps are not the same thing. But no, NBC had
simply tweeted out the clip of Chuck lying about the
congresswoman and putting the word Nazi in her mouth, as
if it were something NBC News should be proud of.
(54:53):
Chuck was furious at me. He emailed back, quote, come on,
own up, that she invoked the wrong image and should
have simply walked the imagery back. And I wrote him
back that the person who had to walk back imagery
here him, since he had said Nazi and she had
not said Nazi. On my angriest day, he now replied,
I'd like to think I treated you with more respect
(55:14):
than this sad. I feel like we won't recover from this,
and we had recovered from a lot. I wrote back
to Chuck that we weren't going to recover from anything
if he insisted that all concentration camps were Nazi death
camps and that somebody who never said Nazis owed somebody
else an apology for what not saying Nazis. There was
(55:34):
no getting past the reality that Chuck had no idea
that he was one hundred percent in the wrong here,
historically wrong, factually wrong, ethically wrong, not a leg to
stand on. So I of course began to contemplate the
year ahead in fantasy football. I couldn't face it. I'm sorry,
(55:55):
I let real life and fantasy sports mix, and I
just I just couldn't spend another autumn having to deal
with Chuck Todd. Chuck had offen and said that he
was now just too busy to play in the league
anymore and he would have to leave it this year.
So on August eleventh, twenty nineteen, more in sadness than
an anger, I asked the commissioner of the league if
(56:17):
Chuck was coming back for the twenty nineteen season. I
don't know, maybe not was the answer. I said, Look,
this is not him or me. I'm not asking you
to not let him come back. It's not like that.
But if he tells you one way or the other,
let me know, because I just can't stand another year
of him. He takes all the fun of it out
of it for me. I understand, said the commissioner. It's
(56:40):
a shame, but why do it if it's not fun.
At eight am on the morning of August fourteenth, twenty nineteen,
the official email notifying everybody of the new fantasy football
season went out. I was not listed among the players.
Nineteen minutes later, I got an email from Chuck Todd's
subject line, it's just a game content quote just play.
(57:00):
I won't speak to you, and please do me the
same courtesy. Grow the f up and know I am
not editing this. He really wrote, grow the f up.
I wrote back that I thought he'd become part of
the problem that imperils our nation and I didn't want
to have anything more to do with him. I ended
it with quote, do not contact me again. At ten
(57:21):
thirteen am, he contacted me again. Amazing, how you believe
what you believe about me? I'm sorry for ever helping
you get credibility. I did not reply. At ten eighteen,
he wrote me again again. I'm happy to never speak
with you again. I'd prefer to pretend you don't exist.
Don't make me care about you that boy. When Chuck
(57:43):
Todd asks you to not make him care about you,
you are in deep and dangerous waters. Boy. Another Chuck
email at ten twenty nine, you are truly a tiny
little man. I don't even feel sorry for you anymore.
You have done this to yourself, and here I made
a mistake. I did not ask him what he felt
sorry for me about and what I had done to myself. Zoom,
(58:05):
it was about losing the twenty eighteen Fantasy Football Super
Bowl to him. At eleven oh nine, another email quote,
you deliberately misinterpreted what I said shot first, and then
rationalized the mistaken shot with some convoluted, full of bleef explanation.
This presumably was the silly little detail about him lying
and saying Representative Ocasio Cortes had referred to Nazi concentration camps.
(58:29):
Then he wrote that what she said quote evokes Gash Chambers,
and I think that's where we should leave it. A
fantasy sports league is just a fantasy sports league, and
having been in various kinds of them since nineteen good
God eighty five, I often wonder if they aren't kind
of therapeutic, cathartic pressure valve for our inner demons. I
(58:53):
do know this. You find out a lot about the
other people in a fantasy sports league. So when that
baseball player slapped the other baseball player over the reserve
running back, they kept on his roster, and most people said,
I just don't understand why he slapped him. I said, oh,
I understand why he slapped him. I've done all the
(59:27):
damage I can do. Here. Countdown has come to you
from the Vin Scully Studio at the World headquarters of
the Olderman Broadcasting Empire in New York. I hope it
was of sufficient length to make up for their not
being one last Friday. Here are the credits. Most of
the music was arranged, produced, and performed by Brian Ray
and John Phillip Chanel, who are the Countdown musical directors.
All orchestration and keyboards by John Phillip Chanel, guitars, bass
(59:49):
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. The sports music is
the Olderman theme from ESPN two, and it was written
by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc. Comments from
Nancy Faust The best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer
today was my friend John Deane. Everything else was pretty
(01:00:12):
much my fault. So that's countdown for this, the eight
hundred and eighty first day since Donald Trump's first attempted
coup against the democratically elected government of the United States.
Don't forget to keep arresting him while we still can.
Happy birthday, Sis. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Till then,
I'm Keith Ouldraman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and
good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio.
(01:00:44):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts.
Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio special
Counsel Jack Smith may ask his stolen documents grand jury
(00:26):
to vote to indict Trump as early as this week.
Justice Department officials may meet with some of Trump's attorneys
as early as this week. And there is even the
plausible inference that these two stories put together, suggest the
DOJ could make at least a token offer of a
(00:47):
plea deal to Trump. There's a lot of ifs here,
and a lot of reporteds, and some of the reports
conflict with other reports so wildly that there is literally
no way that all of what's out there can all happen.
And I have been debating skipping all of this and
getting right to the startling news that Chris licktup CNN
is now so desperate to get not a Trump town
(01:08):
hall but an entire Republican presidential debate on his dying
network that he has offered to formally partner with a
right wing media outlet and even have one of its
people elevated to co moderator of that debate with a
CNN anchor on CNN. But then again, these podcasts can
(01:29):
be infinitely long, so let me review where the Trump
thing stands, because one thing seems certain. We're close. I
don't know what the hell we're close to, but we're close. Okay.
So it's NBC News that is reporting the Grand Jury
is going back into session after a month off this week,
with NBC's correspondence going further on air implying it could
(01:54):
be to vote on indictments. It could be a lot
of things. But CBS News is reporting that the Special
Council's decision on whether or not to try to charge
Trump and if so or what might happen this month,
while CBS also reports the possible Trump lawyer's DOJ meeting
this week and that plea deal idea that is our
(02:17):
friend John Dean looking at the CBS report and looking
at the latest superb work from the website Just Security,
and writing, every high level official who violates national security
laws appears to be offered a deal that includes losing
security clearance? Will Special Counsel Smith offer Trump a deal?
(02:39):
John points the rest of us to the model prosecution
memo on the stolen Trump documents, which is heavy lifting
unless you're a lawyer, but which parallels the exact kind
of internal exercise DOJ would produce before indictment decisions were made,
and eighty eight pages into the thing, there is what
amounts to the entire history of when the DOJ has
(03:01):
decided to prosecute for violations of mishandling the government documents,
including violations of the Espionage Act, and when it hasn't.
And the pattern becomes almost instantaneously clear. If you are
Kendra Kingsbury or James Hitzelberger or Harold Martin the third
and you take classified documents home and they catch you,
(03:24):
they indict you, and they put you on trial, and
if you're smart, you plead guilty as soon as possible.
But if you're former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, and
you go into the National Archives and you perloin three
copies of one classified document, and you stuff them into
your socks and you take them and you destroy them.
(03:46):
Or your former Director of Central Intelligence John Deutsch, and
you were storing classified info on your home computer, or
if you were General David Petraeus and you kept your
black books with all the war strategy and the NSC
discussions and the identities of the covert officers in them,
so that your girlfriend could use them to write her
biography of you guess what the Department of Justice offers
(04:10):
you a deal on lesser charges and the forfeiture of
your security clearance. John Deane points out, and the Just
Security Model memo repeats it again and again, that the
DOJ prosecution decisions depend to an amazing degree on how
they have prosecuted similar cases or just similar parts of
(04:31):
dissimilar cases before. The Justice Department seems at times more
obsessed with precedent than does the Supreme Court. Well, if
that's the case, it would seem almost to given that
if Jack Smith were on the verge of indicting Trump,
they would offer Trump a deal. They would have to
talk to Trump's lawyers. But, as John also notes, if
(04:54):
you demanded the Trump forfeits national security clearance, how would
that work? How could he run for president having agreed
never to look at classified documents again in his life? Well,
I can handle that one. He would promise he would
run and if elected, he would pardon himself. Or maybe
(05:15):
he wouldn't even have to go that far, because, of
course the Department of Justice that would have to prosecute
him for looking at national security documents, violating the plea
deal he himself made months earlier, would be run by
people he had just appointed to run it. Before we
drop this and move on to this is CNN and
(05:36):
also Breitbart. Let me just review the eleven days in
this story and lead to that bigger conclusion I mentioned.
It started then eleven days ago with the Washington Post
report that Trump kept classified documents in his office in
Florida and showed them to people who did not have
the right to see them. Then last Tuesday, it was
(05:57):
the Post reporting that the other guy who moved the
boxes of classified documents for Trump and was caught on
security video doing so, just happened to ask the Marri
Lago it guy how soon before the security system automatically
deleted the old videos. That it was the Guardian reporting
the same day that Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran's notes had
(06:17):
shown he was essentially prevented from searching for documents anywhere
but in the storage room, when most of the documents
were actually in the office. And it was last Wednesday
that CNN reported about the smoking gun that there is
an audio recording made for Mark Meadows Ghostwriters, in which
Trump tells people who shouldn't even know that it exists,
(06:38):
that there is a four page US military plan for
an attack on Iran, and on the tape it sounds
like he is reading from it and rustling it. And
then there was the follow up that there are many
such Trump tapes and Jack Smith has all of them.
And Friday there was the New York Times follow up
that the DOJ subpoenaed it, but his lawyers could not
(07:01):
find that Iran war document, and Saturday it was there
aren't just Evan Corkoran notes, There are Evan Corkoran dear
diary iPhone memos And yes, maybe the grand jury meets
this week to vote on indicting him, and maybe it
does not, and maybe the DOJ will meet with his
lawyers this week, and maybe it won't, and maybe there's
(07:23):
a plea offer in the works, and maybe there isn't.
But damn does it sound like something large is about
to go down now to CNN's Chris Licked reportedly being
willing to bribe the Republican Party by actually letting some
figure from an ultra right wing outlet co moderate a
(07:44):
Republican presidential primary debate on CNN, establishing an actual CNN
working partnership with who are we talking about here? Breitbart, Newsmax,
The Daily Stormer, Ben Shapiro, Christina Bob, Steve Bannon, Lara Trump.
What did American television news organizations learn from the last
(08:07):
eight years of Trump? Nothing? Not a damn thing. What
did CNN learn from the Trump town Hall? Nothing? Not
a damn thing. What did Chris Lickt learn from his
vivisection by magazine in The Atlantic? Nothing not a damn thing.
It's slipped by because of so much other news about
(08:29):
two of the principal players. But CNN and NBC are
both reportedly prostituting themselves to try to get the rights
to host a Republican presidential primary debate or debates at least.
Chris Licht's argument for this is not look how well
the Trump town hall worked or didn't I come off
(08:50):
well in that piece in the Atlantic. This week, Lickt
has suggested to the Republican National Committee that the debate
could run on CNN plus other networks owned by Warner Bros.
Discovery and their digital channels, and maybe streaming. But then
comes the evil ps the Resistance. Quoting Axios, Lickt has
(09:11):
also offered to partner with a conservative leaning outlet on
the debates again, a conservative leaning outlet. Why would Newsmax
lower itself to be involved with CNN? It isn't going
to be Fox News, So where are we now? Gateway Pundit,
Lindell TV, Truth Social. That partnership, two sources told Axios,
(09:36):
could include giving a journalist from the partner outlet a
comoderator spot sweet Jesus on hockey skates. Conservative leaning outlets
don't have journalists. And if you think that is just
liberal hyperbole, name one the National Review, which has half
(09:57):
the footprint of the Epoch Times. So it's who's the comoderator?
Rich Lowry, can Patel? Here are your event moderators, Anderson
Cooper and Nick Fuentes. And if he heard those names,
how many times would Chris lickt recoil? And how many
(10:17):
times would Chris lickt jot them down? Let me put
lickt aside for a moment. For while NBC's self prostitution
is not as pronounced as CNN's, it is in some
ways a little more disillusioning. Axios is now reporting that
not only has NBC offered to put a Republican debate
(10:40):
on NBC on MSNBC, on CNBC on Telemundo and on
its streaming news service, but that it made a pitch
at an RNC meeting in February, and the pitch starred
Lester Holt, the anchor of NBC Nightly News, letting himself
and his not very hard earned credibility as the centerpiece
(11:03):
of NBC's attens to convince the Republicans, Trump, DeSantis all
of the others to bring their festival of lies to NBC.
It's shameful. I haven't spoken about Lester Holt here before
because I only worked in the same organization with him
for eight years. Thus I know next to nothing about him,
(11:25):
and everybody I knew there said that that was all
there was to know about him. He's a cipher. He's
a guy with good suits and a sunny smile who
can read the prompter well and was known at MSNBC
twenty years ago as mister iron Pants. That's it, and
now he's let himself be trotted out like the prize
(11:46):
winning pig at the Republican County Fair. Semaphore News reporting
the RNC was impressed by Lester Holt's pitch. Instead of
trying to impress the fascists, NBC and for that matter, CNN,
You guys should be offering whatever non journalistic bells and
(12:06):
whistles are necessary if you really want to put them
on your air, but that to get on your networks,
any participant must say on the record and publicly and
loudly and clearly that Biden won the twenty twenty election,
and any claim to the contrary is dishonesty or madness
or both, or they will not be platformed period. You
do anything less than that, and you're no longer a
(12:28):
news organization. NBC CNN. Yeah, I know, and this isn't
even the most prominent of CNN's problems at the moment.
His bosses have finally cut one of Chris Licht's legs.
He has many of them out from under him. He's
(12:51):
a centipede. Warner Bros. Has named a man named David
Levy as CNN's new COO, and OO is the operative
part of that. Lickt has told his people that he
decided to do that, that it would be a go
I did to give up all the network's business responsibilities
to somebody else so he can concentrate on continuing to
improve the product. And when I say continuing to improve
(13:14):
the product. I mean trying to find anybody who works
for him at CNN who can today still take him seriously.
After Tim Alberta's new fifteen thousand word iliad of a
piece in the Atlantic about Lickt and his methodical destruction
of CNN, out of ninety plus minutes of them, there
is one particularly grim line from the classic about journalism
(13:35):
gone mad, Sweet Smell of Success, the movie in which
Bert Lancaster says to Tony Curtis, your dead son, get
yourself buried. As I read Tim Alberta's profile of Lickt,
in which the only person who was willing to go
on the record supporting what Lickt is doing was his
(13:56):
personal trainer, I thought of three things, I told you so,
and the line I just mentioned from Sweet Smell of Success,
and that the Lichtian world that Alberta describes is so hopeless,
so screwed up, that it seemed, as I read his
piece at the last paragraph would have to turn out
(14:17):
to be a description of Licht getting fired by his
equally dim witted CNN masters. Something like finally came the
call Lickt was out fired. At least he would have
more time to spend with his trainer. It is hard
to imagine a profile of anybody anywhere, anybody less egregiously
(14:40):
damaging to society than a serial killer that could begin
with this one line and then somehow go downhill from there. Quote.
How are we going to cover Trump? That's not something
I stay up night thinking about. Chris lick told me.
It's very simple. It is, of course, everything but simple.
It has paralyzed journalists in every medium, in every American city,
(15:03):
with every degree of intelligence and experience and seriousness in
solving this problem. And yet Licked goes on. The media
has absolutely I believe, learned its lesson. Licked said, thank you,
Senator Collins. Lickt, sensing my surprise, he grinned, I really do,
Lickt said, I think they know he's playing them, At
(15:24):
least the people in my organization. We've had discussions about this.
We know that we're getting played, so we're going to
resist it. The man foolish enough to put Trump on
live in a town hall after he told a reporter
that he was going to resist being played by Trump.
The man foolish enough to make deals with Trump and
give control over who sat in the audience to Trump
(15:47):
and to court, Trump actually said these things and meant them,
and never for a moment stopped to think that maybe
he was not going to exploit Trump, but he was
going to be exploited by Trump. Quote. In the days
before the town hall, Alberta writes, concerns about the audience
spiked as lits description of the crowd quote extra Trumpy
(16:08):
wound its way through slack channels and text message threads. Quote.
Live television is a volatile thing. People and sets and
scripts are always being changed for all kinds of reasons,
wrote Tim Alberta. Still, CNN employees had reasons to be suspicious.
They wondered if some sort of deal had been cut
with Trump's team promising the placement of approved panelists in
(16:32):
exchange for his participation in the town hall. At least,
even absent some official agreement, it seemed obvious that CNN
leaders had been contorting the coverage to keep Trump happy,
perhaps to prevent him from walking off stage. At one
point during the pregame show, when the words sexual abuse
(16:53):
appeared on the CNN Chiron, one of Licht's lieutenants phoned
the control room. His instructions stunned everyone who overheard them.
The chiron needed to come down in immediately. Unquote. If
that's true, and I have no reason to doubt that
it's true. It sounds like something Licked would do. No,
(17:14):
it sounds like something Licked would make somebody else do.
And it's indefensible. It's a fireable offense. It should have
gotten Licked fired. In fact, it will get him fired.
And on that day when he gets kicked upstairs to
the coordinator of Crapulen Synergistic, he will never understand what happened.
(17:35):
No journalist, let alone a deluded, self appointed defender of
journalism like Chris Licked, can ever put himself or his
network in a position to make it look like it
made a deal to provide a political candidate with a
live crowd of cheerleaders. Yet Extra Trumpy Licked proudly and
clearly sold out CNN's objectivity, and if the Axio support
(18:00):
is correct, is prepared to do it again. Here's your
co host, Matt walshblog again, quoting Alberta's piece in The Atlantic.
I asked Lickt whether there was anything he regretted about
the event, the Extra Trumpy makeup of the crowd. No,
Licht said, because it was representative of the Republican base,
(18:21):
allowing the audience to cheer at will No, Licht said,
because instructing them to hold their applause, as debate moderators
regularly do, would have altered the reality of the event unquote.
Twice Alberta catches Chris Licht on the record on the
fringes tap dancing along the line of COVID denihalism, Lickt
(18:45):
suggests to a group of students that case and death
numbers may have been exaggerated. Quote, we don't know how
many deaths were from COVID. He explains he knows this
because his father was a doctor. My father was an architect,
and I can't build a house of playing cards. Licht
also actually believes seeing coverage of the pandemic before he
(19:07):
got there was bad. Said it turned into quote a
place where oh wow, we got to keep getting those ratings.
We got to keep getting the sense of urgency. He
slapped his palms on the table between us, mimicking the
feverish pace of an imaginary broadcaster. COVID, COVID, COVID, look
at the case numbers, Look at this unquote. If I
(19:27):
were a CNN employee, who had lost somebody to COVID.
I would now feel entitled to punch Chris Lickt in
the mouth throughout the piece, as throughout so much of
the coverage of Chris Licht's disastrous tenure running CNN, running
it into the ground, unprecedented even among the amazing gallery
(19:48):
of rogues and idiots who have run the cable news
networks over the decades, and I met all of them.
Lickt is still portrayed in this piece in the Atlantic
as the genius producer at MSNBC when he produced a
nighttime Last Play show, and then a genius morning producer
when he produced a morning Last Place show, then at
(20:11):
CBS News where he produced another morning Last Place show,
then at CBS Late Night where he produced another Last
Place show. The portrayal, of course, was forged, and I
use that word in all its meanings by Lickt himself.
To those of us who were there when he was
He seemed at MSNBC to have a passable sense of
(20:31):
graphics and which camera should shoot, which backdrop, and otherwise
he did only two things, act as a henchman for
the deplorable Joe Scarborough and spend hours each day trying
to undermine MSNBC's other shows so that Scarborough would somehow
look better, and so that Scarborough's friends among Conservatives would
not be criticized. He spent so much time stabbing us
(20:54):
that there were times Mattow and I thought he lived
behind our backs. Now he really does think he's not
just a journalist, but the journalist suddenly. Tim Alberta writes,
lickt was animated. But I would say that for anyone
who does want me to fail, what are you going for?
(21:14):
Who would you want in this seat? You want a journalist,
You want someone who is a direct line to the
corporation and can make a phone call and go, hey,
what the f do you want? Someone who's done the job,
who's done a lot of jobs, who understands exactly what
it takes to do what I'm asking, Someone who believes
that our future is based on executing great journalism. Maybe
they don't like my style or whatever, but I'm not
(21:36):
quite sure what you're going for if you want me
to fail. Unquote, No, Chris Licht will never understand he
is not the person he described there, not even close,
not even in the same universe that he understands. None
of what it takes. Most importantly, he will never understand
that it doesn't matter if anybody else wants him to fail.
(21:58):
He will fail all by himself, without anybody else's help.
If that wasn't obvious to him after Christian I'm on poor,
deftly and politely vivisected him after the Trump town hall,
If it isn't obvious to him now after this Tim
Alberta piece, He's even blinder than I thought, and I
thought he was damn blind. Alberta recounts in great detail
(22:21):
his negotiations to get the man who inflicted lict on America,
David pay your rioters, Zaslav, to do an on the
record interview about lickt and CNN. Alberta says, Zaslav, you
remember him. He was the guy who was interrupted during
his speech at BEU. The guy looks like Biff Tannin,
he says. Zaslav originally agreed to it, then demanded quote approval,
(22:44):
then finally, through a press aide, backed out of anything
other than an interview quote on background only and the boilerplate.
We have great confidence in the progress that Chris blah
blah blah blah blah. Pro tip if your boss won't
defend you on the record. Your boss is not defending
(23:09):
you off the record. Your dead son, get yourself buried.
The thing is there's still a chance that Licked will
read the piece or have it read to him and
attack Tim Alberta. Alberta reports the previous criticism by Robert
(23:30):
Reisch on Substack led to a phone call from Licht
that a fairly mild piece by Kurt Bardella in the
La Times made Licht vow to quote destroy Bardella. We
know that late last month, the Washington Post columnist Jennifer
Rubin wrote that aman Por should be running CNN and
not Licked, and was attacked on Twitter by CNNSPR guy
in a screeching screed worthy of a teenager rejected by
(23:52):
his crush. When I first criticized Licked, somebody leaked to
one of the websites that I was only doing so
because lickt had turned me down for a job. I
have not spoken to Chris Licked, nor tried to since
two thousand seventeen, but I will say it did please
me that a couple of months ago in New York
Times called me for a comment, and the guy from
(24:12):
the papers first question was at MSNBC. Did Chris Lick
really eat paste? If there were not enough in raging
parts to this story, I mean in raging enough that
I wonder if I've been too easy on Chris Lick.
This sent me into apoplexy. Quote. We are not an
(24:35):
advocacy network. We are providing something different. And when the
spit hits the fan in this world, you're not going
to have time for that advocacy anymore. First of all, Chris,
the spit has hit the fan. A political party, one
of the two larger ones, is trying to end American democracy.
(24:57):
Chris Lick does not seem to have noticed that. Chris
lickt also does not seem to have noticed that journalism
must advocate, must advocate for democracy, and advocating is not partisanship.
And this fundamental misunderstanding of his own job is spreading
throughout television and media. We can't run that it might
(25:18):
offend those people trying to destroy the country, fascists by
sneakers too. The spit has long since hit the fan,
and Chris Licked is worried about the feelings of those
who threw the spit, and the spit itself. To me,
(25:40):
most of what Tim Alberta wrote had the effect I
used to hear from Countdown viewers in the years two
thousand and six and two thousand and seven. Oh thank god,
somebody else is seeing this. I thought I was alone
out here, but he managed to reveal something I never
knew about and never would have been able to guess,
not fully anyway. But for years I have assumed there
was something else in the Chris Licked story, some other
(26:04):
Milan moronic influence that would help explain all the damage
he did at NBC and CBS, and the fatal damage
he is still doing today at CNN. And there in
this article it is Alberta is in the apartment of
a USC professor who has convinced Lick to talk to
sixteen of his students, and what follows is both maudling
(26:27):
and terrifying. To quote the piece again, Chris was absolutely, positively,
without question, the right choice for CNN, the teacher told
his students, motioning them toward the man seed in front
of them. There is nothing more important in America today
than trust. I'm praying that Chris is successful. I want
him to have this job for ten years, because anything
(26:48):
less than ten years will not give him the opportunity
to make the most important changes to the most important
news source on the face of the earth. I have
every faith that he will succeed, and every fear for
this country if he doesn't. He turned to face licked
the teacher. His eyes were watery, his voice was choked
with emotions. My hopes and dreams are embodied in you,
(27:13):
he said. This was quite an introduction, especially considering the
man who gave it, Frank Lunce unquote Frank Lunz. Frank Lunz,
Frank Lunz. Why that's Frank Luntz's name. Is there somebody
else out there named Frank Lunz besides that? Frank Lunz,
(27:35):
The rabid, biased, subjective, Republican folster who can make a
focus group defend any conservative idea and then make that
group get up and sing. Who let the dogs out?
The mercenary who has worked for every news organization, The
man who every eighteen to twenty four months goes through
a phase or an act in which he pretends to
not be a conservative but just a middle of the
road surveyor of the American landscape. That's Chris Licht's mentor
(28:02):
his spirit animal is Frank uns the great flaming fraud
that is Frank Lunz, the horror that is Chris Licked. Well,
that's the missing piece in the Chris Licked story adored
by Beholden two, influenced by one of the great confidence
tricksters of American media and politics and specifically polling. Let
(28:25):
me tell you how I know that. I know that
because Frank Lunz once did his horror act on my
behalf or at least four by benefit. In two thousand
and three, I had gone back to NBC Sports and
as a peace gesture towards my still angry ex employers
at MSNBC, I went over to New Jersey and I
(28:47):
filled in for one of their ailing show hosts. And
while I was there, with absolutely no belief, no intention
that I was going to stay there more than a week,
they told me about a new show they were going
to launch at eight o'clock every night called Countdown, and
how they were deep in fruitful negotiations to buy from
ABC News the contract of their dream host for Countdown.
(29:09):
Their ideal for the new show, Sam Donaldson. I blanched.
Apparently I was working at ABC News at the time
in radio and I knew that ABC was so desperate
to get Sam Donaldson to quit his contract that they
had taken him completely off TV and stuck him only
(29:30):
on radio. And when that hadn't gotten him to quit,
they had just relegated his radio show to Internet only
in two thousand and three internet only. I knew this
because I had filled in on the Sam Donaldson Show
before it was over. I knew we had about four listeners. Now.
It was the executive who told me this, who blanched,
(29:53):
what do we do? The job offers on Donaldson's desk,
and it's on my boss's desk. He looked around the room.
Would you do it? Would you do another nightly show
for us? Another eight o'clock? Oh buddy, I shrugged. I'm sure,
and I'll need time off for the Olympics and the
other sports stuff that I signed with Dick Eversol to do.
But oh god, thanks, Wait wait, I know how to
(30:15):
do this, Rainy, get me Frank Lunz. I heard his
end of the conversation. I mean, it's possibly he wasn't
talking to Frank Lunz, But why would they go through
this whole sharad if they weren't talking to each other.
He told Lunce or whoever that was on the other
end of the phone of his crisis. He invoked the
name of the then president of NBC News, Neil Shapiro.
(30:37):
You know Neil loves focus groups, Frank, can you get
me a focus group that says it hates Sam Donaldson
and another focus group that says it loves Keith Oldman.
Can you do it by day after tomorrow? Great? Thanks buddy.
Neil Shapiro's office called my agent to offer me the
eight PM show. Three days later, the focus groups convinced
(31:04):
resident of NBC News. So that's who Chris Lickt is
listening to, and that's who thinks Chris licked is the messiah.
Frank once back to Tim Alberta. Quote. Every employee I
(31:25):
spoke with was asking some variation of the same question.
Did lict have any idea what he was doing? Un
quote duh no, I told you that already. Alberta also
provided the requisite punchline quote. Then Lickt said something I'd
never heard before. I don't want people to think of CNN,
(31:49):
Fox and MSNBC. In the same sentence, he said, well
least he got that done. CNN is now often in
fourth place in the ratings, behind the semi professional Newsmax
or on Good Nights. It is such a distant third
behind Fox and MSNBC that no, Chris, nobody does think
(32:12):
of CNN, Fox and MSNBC in the same sentence anymore. Bravo,
Chris licked. Also of note, today, Chuck Todd got fired
as the host of Meet the Press. That's next, this
(32:32):
is counting? Oh wait, I was recording ahem, postscripts for
(32:58):
the news, some headlines, some updates, some snarks, some predictions,
date line thirty rock quote when I took over Meet
the Press, said Chuck Todd on Meet the Press, as
he announced his own firing from Meet the Press. It
was a Sunday show that had a lot of people
questioning whether it's still could have a place in the
modern media space. Well, I think we've answered that question
(33:19):
and then some to the end, Chuck Todd remains a
master of self unawareness. First of all, even if you
think your meaning of that line is correct, how do
you phrase it that way to let yourself get run
over by your critics. It was a Sunday show that
(33:41):
had a lot of people questioning whether it could still
have a place in the modern media space. While I
think we've answered that question, second of all, it isn't true.
Meet the Press never reached more prestigious heights than on Sunday,
June eighth, two thousand and eight. The topic of the show,
which was on early because of the French open coverage
(34:01):
on NBC, was Hillary Clinton finally seeding the two thousand
and eight Democratic primary. The guests were all NBC political
correspondents Ron Allen, Lee Collen, David Gregory, Andrew Mitchell, Kelly O'Donnell,
and Chuck Todd. The host, as the host had ben
since December eighth, nineteen ninety one, was Tim Russert. The
(34:22):
show mattered. Russert had gotten Colin Powell to admit WMD
in Iraq was a lie. He was the consensus gold
standard in political media and capable of keeping the Democrats
off the backs of NBC's more conservative commentators and the
Republicans off the backs of NBC's more liberal ones me
in particular, And five days later Tim Russeer died. Tom
(34:45):
Brokaw took the job over until December, when David Gregory
got the position because of the good will left over
from Russert. He was given six years to try to
make it work, and he did not make it work.
Chuck Todd took over on September seventh, twenty fourteen. Yesterday
he said I'd rather leave a little bit too soon
than stay a tad bit too long, And if he
actually meant that, he would have left on September eighth,
(35:07):
twenty fourteen. Chuck did two things and two things alone
in that show, and he will stay on until September
when Kristin Welker takes over, and she will neither fail
nor succeed in the job, which is exactly what NBC
News wants at a moment when someone is needed at
some national broadcast network to ask some actual questions once
(35:28):
in a while, Chuck did two things and two things only. First,
there is no issue he could not apply raging both
sidesism too. He once asked on air if America could
handle the prosecution of an ex president. He asked that
of a Republican governor. He and his staff once did
a feature on how American media should cover Trump if
(35:50):
he ran again. They asked Republican staffers Chuck would platform anybody,
and when Kelly An khanjob frick a side him in
that famous Alternative Facts episode. Chuck and NBC News really
thought they had done some sort of service to the country.
Chuck and thus his program had no understanding that they
(36:11):
were covering anything more meaningful than a sports league. And
he made up quotes and meanings and attributed them to
people like Alexandria Acazio Cortes. And that's when what was
left of my professional friendship with him snapped. And I'll
tell you that story at the end of the podcast.
The other thing Chuck did number two of two was
(36:32):
something Russard always refused to do. He overbooked meet the press,
and thus his natural inclination to not prod or push
or demand proof for what the guy just said was
exacerbated by the fact that each interview was boxed in
time wise, he couldn't dig deeper. He had to get
to the next commercial. Or, as Trevor Noah said at
(36:53):
the twenty twenty two White House Correspondence dinner in a
SHIV disguised as a joke, Chuck Todd is here, Chuck
you here? How you doing? I'd ask a follow up,
but I know you don't know what those are? They
say Chuck is staying on as a political analyst and
will also do long form journalism for NBC. And that
(37:14):
is the plight wave of saying, you've been here sixteen
years since Russard asked everybody he trusted, like Broken Kelly,
O'Donnell and even me, if he should hire him, and
we all said yes, So Chuck, We'll let you play
out your contracts and if you get another offer, go on,
have a good time. We'll throw you in real nice
going away party. They'll even be a cake. As I said,
(37:35):
I will come back to this in things I promised
not to tell later, but for now, this championship joke
on Twitter from Frank Galton and I don't know who
Frank Galton is, but I would like to shake his hand,
he wrote, quote Charles Todd wants you to forget about Chuck.
(37:59):
Thank you, Nancy Faust, Dateline, Washington. Once again, democracy is preserved,
least by the dedication of those of us trying to
save it, more by the idiocy of those trying to
destroy it. Lauren Bobert super Genius, did not vote on
the debt ceiling bill in the House. She then proclaimed
she had refused to vote as a protest against more
(38:22):
DC self created garbage, self created garbage? Bobo, did Chuck
Todd write that line for you? The saving grace of
these morons is that they don't notice when they sign
the receipts that are later produced self created garbage. Bobert's
self righteous claim of protest evidently riled or at least
(38:42):
got the attention of a CNN Capitol Hill producer named
Morgan Rimmer, who tweeted nothing less than a video of
herself explaining to Bobert that the vote was over. They
closed it, she says, and that Bobert had missed the vote.
And this producer said that as Bobert was running up
the steps of the Capitol clearly intending to vote, since,
(39:05):
as Mizrimmer notes in the audio version of the tape,
you will now hear after she told Bobert that the
vote had been closed, Bobert kept on running up the
goddamn steps. Yeah, two things, I'd like to nominate Morgan
(39:27):
Rimmer as the next CEO of CNN. And that scene
and I'll retweak the video is exactly the way the
famous Monty Python's Flying Circus episode ends with nobody expects
the Spanish Inquisition. As the program credits come to a close,
the members of the Spanish Inquisition are desperately racing to
(39:47):
get to a courtroom to deliver their line. They get
off a bus, they run up the steps, they burst
into the room, and just as Michael Palin is about
to say nobody expects, the scene goes dark and the
words the end appear and he says, oh bu I
didn't hear Bobert say oh bugger, self created garbage and
(40:11):
Dateline New York. I'm fine, thank you, thank you for
abiding my day off. It was not walking pneumonion or
rocking pneumonion or any of the other harrowing things my
doctor contemplated, like a blood clot in my lungs. It
looks like it was exhaustion, insufficient exercise, and decreasing youth.
Speaker 2 (40:45):
This is Sports Center. Wait, check that not anymore. This
is Countdown with Keith Alberman in sports We've spoken previously
of the Oakland Ney Kansas City Ney Philadelphia soon to
be Las Vegas A's, and how owner John Fisher starved
(41:06):
that franchise to death in the Bay Area. Even though
the team is tied for the second most World Series
championships in baseball for the last half century. From Reddit
one Oakland A's fans revenge spotted at an A's game
wearing his replica A's jersey. The number on the back
is zero and the name above it is traded a
(41:29):
different baseball note from a franchise gradually rebuilding its reputation.
The New York Mets inducted four members into their Hall
of Fame Saturday, including my friends the announcers Gary Cohen
and Howie Rose, and pitcher Al Lighter.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
Who I have known a combined eighty nine years for
crying out loud. He also inducted the great Mets eighties
star Howard Johnson, and congratulations again to each of them.
Now one note, you don't often hear crowds gasp at
these events. A lot of cheering, a lot of applause,
a lot of names, not so much gasping. But there
(42:01):
it was on Saturday, because before the ceremony began, the
Mets had positioned four giant triangular baseball cards on the
field showing each of the four new inductees. They just
looked like kind of creative, clever props. And when the
first of the new inductees Howard Johnson was introduced. The
(42:23):
side of his giant baseball card opened and Howard emerged
from inside the baseball card. And there were gasps in
the stadium, though to be fair, and not as many
gaps as if one of the guys had gotten stuck.
Uh yeah, nine one one, Yeah, this is the Mets calling.
(42:44):
We have a Hall of Famer trapped in a giant
baseball card. And hello, nine one one, you're there. Hello.
(43:06):
I like that one, particularly coming up back to Chuck
Todd And yes, we were actually close enough friends that
we were in the same fantasy football league for a decade,
and then I just couldn't take him anymore. First the
daily round up, the miss Grants Warns and Dunning Kruger
effects specimens who constitute today's worst persons in the world.
The Bronze to France's white supremacist political party, now called
(43:29):
the National Rally, formerly the National Front, its critics would say,
formerly the HM HM with the Z in it. France's
parliament established a Committee of Inquiry to look into links
between Marine Lepenz party and Russia. She was hoping to
prove there weren't any sources, though, tell the agens Franz
Press that not only did the National Front constantly repeat
(43:52):
and promote Russian government propaganda in the last decade in France,
per this report by the French Parliament, sometimes word for word,
but that La Penz Party also got a huge loan
a few years ago from an obscure Russian bank, and
then the bank mysteriously went out of business. The runner up,
Elon Musk in illegal filing and a lawsuit being heard
(44:13):
in San Francisco. His attorneys. Twitter's attorneys state under penalty
of perjury that at no point was the government paying
it nor pressuring it to censor anybody, and that the
new CEO will not enact any changes in Twitter's content
moderation policy. Wait, wouldn't that mean that the whole Twitter
file stuff was crap? I mean more crap, but our winner.
(44:39):
An alleged comedian named Chrissy Mayer, appearing on Newsmax to
defend Chick fil A from the latest right Wing Boy
Every right Winger is Softish church music Umbradge Festival. I
hate to make a fried chicken joke, she said, but
they sell fried chicken to Chick fil A, and I
(44:59):
don't know how much more inclusive, we could get here
happily for Ms Mayor. That isn't a joke. That's just
a racist trope that goes back at least a century
and a half in this country. So if you use
it in your act on TV, that makes you a racist. Chrissy. Hey,
Chris Linked I got your Republican debate co moderator right here. Mayor,
(45:24):
Today's worst person in the world. This is Countdown with
Keith Olberman still ahead on Countdown, and now he belongs
to the Ages. Chuck Todd fired as the host of
(45:48):
Meet the Press. I'd like to thank the Good Lord
for letting me live to see this day. I'll return
to my favorite topic, me and the day, my fragile
willingness to tolerate Chuck Todd snapped in half and things
I promised not to tell first. In each edition of Countdown,
we've you're a dog in need, you can help. Every
dog has its day. Poor Lola in Miami, a seven
(46:10):
year old Chihuahua terrible hernia and like so many dogs,
especially small dogs, these awful, life threatening things can be
cleared up in hours with treatment and surgery. So naturally,
Lola's alleged human abandoned her. Paw Patrol Rescue rescued her,
got her to surgery. She'll soon be recovering at a
foster home. She's fine, and they're trying to get donations
(46:30):
to cover the money they put out upfront to save her.
So if you can help Lola on cuddly dot com
or on my Twitter feeds, they're trying to raise like
three hundred dollars, I thank you, and Lola thanks you.
(47:02):
I knew Chuck for about fifteen years early in his career,
when he was with the DC Insider publication the Hotline.
He was a frequent guest on Countdown, and in two
thousand and seven, when Tim Russert was thinking of hiring
him at NBC News, mine was one of dozens of
temperatures Tim Tuck. As Chuck later wrote to me, quote,
you certainly were a tremendous advocate and cheerleader for me
(47:24):
over the years, and I don't forget that. Yeah, well
that wasn't true. He forgot it, all right, But I'm
veering away from the main story. In two thousand and eight,
a couple of Washington political types started a fantasy football league.
If you don't think fantasy football leagues are important. You
should know that last spring, a major league baseball player
(47:45):
in uniform walked up to another Major League baseball player
in uniform on a Major League baseball field with thousands
of people already in the stands, and he slapped him
in the face over a roster move that the second
player had made in their fantasy football league. The second
had managed to retain the rights to an injured player,
(48:08):
and the first guy was upset about this. So six
months after their fantasy season ended, this major league baseball
player walked up and slapped the other Major League baseball player.
If slaps or duels or kidnappings are not everyday occurrences
in fantasy football, they do represent the kind of baseline
intensity of the thing. So when I and others were
(48:29):
approached about this Washington centric league in two thousand and eight,
it was already a big deal, even before we were
all sworn to secrecy, because a spot in the league
was being held open for some DC guy named Barack Obama.
It turned out he did not join our league, some
excuse about too much work, when obviously he was just
(48:50):
afraid of my fantasy football skills. But some people in
his White House did join the league, and I still
will not identify them because the premise of this league
was the first rule of Fantasy football club is you
do not talk about fantasy football club. I will say
that Chuck Todd, like me, was an original player. We
call ourselves owners because we are nuts and it's a fantasy.
(49:11):
It's in the title Fantasy Football Fantasy Football Owners. And
one year, I think it was twenty ten, I had
assembled in this league, mostly by accident, a team that
was almost perfect. It literally lost one game all season,
and that was in the middle of the year to
Chuck Todd's team. And the night after I lost to
Chuck Todd's team, he was giving a speech I think
(49:33):
at the University of Virginia, and witnesses called to tell
me that he began his speech by saying, I have
much to tell you, but first I have to tell
you that I am in a fantasy football league with
Keith Alderman, and he has a great team this year,
and this week I upset him by a final score
of one hundred and forty three to one hundred and
forty one or whatever the score was. I thought it
was pretty dumb, but by twenty ten, Chuck was the
(49:57):
NBC News White House correspondent, and we all cringed whenever
we saw he was going to be on with one
of us on MSNBC. See, some people respond well to
pressure and success, and some people do not, and some
people become entirely different people. So when Chuck violated the
prime directive of this fantasy football league and talked about it,
(50:18):
I shrugged. The other guys in the league did not.
Chuck was actually punished. The commissioner of the league ordered
that he had to skip his fourth choice in the
following year's player draft. Chuck was berefed. He believed this
would destroy his chances. He apologized to me every week,
and finally I said, you know, guys, maybe this is
(50:39):
too much. And as the supposed victim in the equation,
I got final say and Chuck got to keep his
fourth draft choice. By twenty sixteen, Chuck was because Tim
Russer died, Tom Brokaw retired, and David Gregory flamed out.
Chuck was the host to Meet the Press. He was
also Political director of NBC News, another part of russer
(50:59):
It's old portfolio. But whereas Tim was a master who
could convince the Republicans. He was ordering that I be
punished for what I said, when in fact he would
be calling me and asking me what stupid, meaningless thing
I could think of to tell the Republicans he was
punishing me with or four. He was sublime, subtlety, not Chuck.
(51:19):
No subtlety. There. In twenty sixteen, Chuck was preparing to
not name my ex lib in girlfriend Katie Turr as
the new NBC White House correspondent, even though she had
suffered as the primary NBC correspondent covering the Trump campaign,
and out of nowhere, Chuck emails me that he's going
to be in New York and he wants to take
me to dinner. I had known him more than a
(51:41):
decade by then. We had never as much as shared
pieces of the same pizza. I had not seen him
in the flesh in more than five years, and I
knew as we sat down that Chuck's idea was to
get me to tell Katie that she was not going
to be White House correspondent so he did not have to.
He kept bringing it up, what do you think Katie
would think? And then I'd switch the topic to fantasy football,
(52:03):
and then he'd say, well, let me ask you about
Katie in the White House job. We did this for
ninety minutes, and finally I said, Okay, Chuck, I've avoided
it long enough. Maybe I could call her and soften
the blow for her. And that's when he said, well,
I'm going back to DC tonight, so if I want
to catch that last train, I better leave. Bye. Chuck
(52:24):
is not subtle. I'll spare you the other crap from
the fantasy league. Suffice to say, I was reminded of
how annoyingly and obviously he used to conduct himself when
I read that last May, one of Chuck's guest bookers
for the now no longer on TV Meet the Press
Daily show had emailed the office of Alaska Congressman Don
Jung hoping to get Young to appear the next day,
(52:45):
which would have been the ultimate great guest get because
Don Jung had died two months earlier. Anyway, this fantasy
football league was fun and unique in that there had
only been one change in its composition in all that time.
Chuck's team defeated mine in the Fantasy Football super Bowl
one year, and mostly he was just annoying, like he
(53:07):
was on the air. Nothing worse than that, and then
on June nineteenth, twenty nineteen, Representative Alexandria Ocazio Cortes AOC
ripped the Trump administration's migrant policies. She said, quote, the
United States is running concentration camps on our southern border,
and that is exactly what they are. They are concentration camps.
End quote. Chuck went on MSNBC and said the following
(53:29):
in response, quote, you can call our government's detention of
migrants many things, depending on how you see it. It's
a stain on our nation, maybe, a necessary evil to
others to deal with an untenable situation, perhaps, but do
you know what you can't call it. Chuck then played
the clip of AOC calling it concentration camps, and Chuck resumed,
if you want to criticize the shameful treatment of people
(53:50):
at our southern border, fine, you'll have plenty of company,
but be careful comparing them to Nazi concentration camps, because
they're not at all comparable in the slightest A lot
of people me included, were stunned. Well. Kasio Cortes never
mentioned the Nazis, and concentration camps did not begin with
(54:10):
the Nazis or Hitler. They began with the British in
the Boer War in South Africa at the turn of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet here was Chuck putting
a word in her mouth, and that word was Nazi,
and then he attacked her for something she never said.
He lied about her. He lied, Chuck Todd made it
up on the news. I was furious enough to email
(54:31):
him that night. I thought by now somebody at NBC
would have pointed out that concentration camps and Nazi death
camps are not the same thing. But no, NBC had
simply tweeted out the clip of Chuck lying about the
congresswoman and putting the word Nazi in her mouth, as
if it were something NBC News should be proud of.
(54:53):
Chuck was furious at me. He emailed back, quote, come on,
own up, that she invoked the wrong image and should
have simply walked the imagery back. And I wrote him
back that the person who had to walk back imagery
here him, since he had said Nazi and she had
not said Nazi. On my angriest day, he now replied,
I'd like to think I treated you with more respect
(55:14):
than this sad. I feel like we won't recover from this,
and we had recovered from a lot. I wrote back
to Chuck that we weren't going to recover from anything
if he insisted that all concentration camps were Nazi death
camps and that somebody who never said Nazis owed somebody
else an apology for what not saying Nazis. There was
(55:34):
no getting past the reality that Chuck had no idea
that he was one hundred percent in the wrong here,
historically wrong, factually wrong, ethically wrong, not a leg to
stand on. So I of course began to contemplate the
year ahead in fantasy football. I couldn't face it. I'm sorry,
(55:55):
I let real life and fantasy sports mix, and I
just I just couldn't spend another autumn having to deal
with Chuck Todd. Chuck had offen and said that he
was now just too busy to play in the league
anymore and he would have to leave it this year.
So on August eleventh, twenty nineteen, more in sadness than
an anger, I asked the commissioner of the league if
(56:17):
Chuck was coming back for the twenty nineteen season. I
don't know, maybe not was the answer. I said, Look,
this is not him or me. I'm not asking you
to not let him come back. It's not like that.
But if he tells you one way or the other,
let me know, because I just can't stand another year
of him. He takes all the fun of it out
of it for me. I understand, said the commissioner. It's
(56:40):
a shame, but why do it if it's not fun.
At eight am on the morning of August fourteenth, twenty nineteen,
the official email notifying everybody of the new fantasy football
season went out. I was not listed among the players.
Nineteen minutes later, I got an email from Chuck Todd's
subject line, it's just a game content quote just play.
(57:00):
I won't speak to you, and please do me the
same courtesy. Grow the f up and know I am
not editing this. He really wrote, grow the f up.
I wrote back that I thought he'd become part of
the problem that imperils our nation and I didn't want
to have anything more to do with him. I ended
it with quote, do not contact me again. At ten
(57:21):
thirteen am, he contacted me again. Amazing, how you believe
what you believe about me? I'm sorry for ever helping
you get credibility. I did not reply. At ten eighteen,
he wrote me again again. I'm happy to never speak
with you again. I'd prefer to pretend you don't exist.
Don't make me care about you that boy. When Chuck
(57:43):
Todd asks you to not make him care about you,
you are in deep and dangerous waters. Boy. Another Chuck
email at ten twenty nine, you are truly a tiny
little man. I don't even feel sorry for you anymore.
You have done this to yourself, and here I made
a mistake. I did not ask him what he felt
sorry for me about and what I had done to myself. Zoom,
(58:05):
it was about losing the twenty eighteen Fantasy Football Super
Bowl to him. At eleven oh nine, another email quote,
you deliberately misinterpreted what I said shot first, and then
rationalized the mistaken shot with some convoluted, full of bleef explanation.
This presumably was the silly little detail about him lying
and saying Representative Ocasio Cortes had referred to Nazi concentration camps.
(58:29):
Then he wrote that what she said quote evokes Gash Chambers,
and I think that's where we should leave it. A
fantasy sports league is just a fantasy sports league, and
having been in various kinds of them since nineteen good
God eighty five, I often wonder if they aren't kind
of therapeutic, cathartic pressure valve for our inner demons. I
(58:53):
do know this. You find out a lot about the
other people in a fantasy sports league. So when that
baseball player slapped the other baseball player over the reserve
running back, they kept on his roster, and most people said,
I just don't understand why he slapped him. I said, oh,
I understand why he slapped him. I've done all the
(59:27):
damage I can do. Here. Countdown has come to you
from the Vin Scully Studio at the World headquarters of
the Olderman Broadcasting Empire in New York. I hope it
was of sufficient length to make up for their not
being one last Friday. Here are the credits. Most of
the music was arranged, produced, and performed by Brian Ray
and John Phillip Chanel, who are the Countdown musical directors.
All orchestration and keyboards by John Phillip Chanel, guitars, bass
(59:49):
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. The sports music is
the Olderman theme from ESPN two, and it was written
by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc. Comments from
Nancy Faust The best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer
today was my friend John Deane. Everything else was pretty
(01:00:12):
much my fault. So that's countdown for this, the eight
hundred and eighty first day since Donald Trump's first attempted
coup against the democratically elected government of the United States.
Don't forget to keep arresting him while we still can.
Happy birthday, Sis. The next scheduled countdown is tomorrow. Till then,
I'm Keith Ouldraman. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and
good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio.
(01:00:44):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
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