March 4, 2024 • 49 mins
The Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson roasts the GOP’s failure to land a punch on Hunter Biden in their closed-door hearing. Rolling Stone’s Noah Shachtman details the prescription drug abuses in the Trump White House. The 5-4 Podcast hosts Michael Liroff & Peter Shamshiri about the Supreme Court's latest descent into being a vehicle for MAGA activism.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Of today's best minds.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
And Donald Trump's rally crowd went silent when he confused
Obama and President Biden. Yet again. We have such an
interesting show today. Former Rolling Stone editor Noah Shackman joins
us to talk about prescription drug use in the Trump
White House.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Then we'll talk to the host.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Of the five to four podcast, Michael Leroff and Peter
sham Shurry about the Supreme Court's latest descent into maga.
But first we have the host of the Enemy's List,
the Lincoln Project's own Rick Wilson. Welcome back, too, Fast Politics,
my friend and yours, Rick.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Wilson, Mollie Jong Fast.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
As always, I am delighted to join you on the
stage of history.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Exactly on the stage of history which will absorb us
like everyone else. This is such an interesting week because
I feel like this is a week that the Biden
administration did a lot of politically useful things that are
like election focused. And that's not a criticism, it's actually
a compliment because of the enormous stakes of this election.
(01:16):
But you and I talked on the phone a little
bit earlier, and the thing we wanted to start by
talking about was the hottest crack addict we know, Hunter Biden.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
Look, I have to tell you the fact that he
finally sat down for their behind closed doors deposition, wiped
the floor and knocked, as we say in the South,
there Dickson the dirt.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
I've never heard that.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
He absolutely shamed and humiliated the moron crew of comer
Jordan Gates, et cetera, et cetera. He just absolutely kicked
their asses up one side and down the other. And
his opening statement had a combination of very very well written,
(02:01):
clear denunciation of their tactics and also absolutely dismantled the
four witnesses that they have in this thing as criminals, frauds,
people who are in jail for fraud, or Russian intelligence assets.
It was masterful, and there's a reason they wanted to
do this behind closed doors because they were afraid something
(02:22):
like this could happen.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
I thought they wanted to do it behind closed doors
because they hoped that they could then spin it.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
They did. But the fact that the deal was a
release of the transcript, that was absolutely a masterstroke in
this thing that prevented them from you know, just going
on on Sean Hannity and saying, well, we found another
seven hundred witnesses at Maurisma who said that we're perls
of cash were taken to Delaware and look, this impeachment
(02:49):
is dead. It is dead. It has no political viability.
I spoke to a source last night who has some
visibility into the thinking of the leadership left of it.
They want this over, they want this over.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Is that Colber's service dog, I mean, who is that?
Speaker 3 (03:07):
No, well, it's somebody with visibility into what's going on.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Into the dusty attic that is James Comer's brain.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
Into the flaming pit of wild stupidity that is James Commer. Yes,
but at the leadership level there are even people who
you would sink are very maga, who are now like
this has to stop. This is crazy.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
The only person I think who was like a little
excited about it was maga Mad Gates.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
I'd be real careful, like talking about other people's addictions.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
That's sadd And you're not the only person who said
that Hunter Biden said that to him.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
He did.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Indeed, I'm trying to find where he said to mad
Gates that if I wouldn't be arguing about substance abuse
if I were you.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Pretty incredible.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
But also there was Eric Swallwell saying, did you get
two billion dollar from the Saudi government?
Speaker 2 (04:02):
I know, I know, I know.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
Listen, you know I got to say. I think the
two people that have legitimately the most sort of like, yeah,
there's this old phrase called berzuker Gang, which meant like
the fury of the vikings, right, the two guys with
the Berserker Gang, with the real excitement here, they love
to go oh fuck me, no, in fact, fuck y'all
to the magas are Moskowitz and Swallow, and they just
(04:27):
they've become masters at inverting the bullshit gotcha game that
has been the Fox News producer's greatest ally for the
last ten years. They don't want to do this anymore
on the Republican side in public because they know now
there are people who are going to clown them with
better and more photogenic moments.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Producer Jesse has come along and saved usk.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Mister Gates, were you on drugs when you were on
the Barisma board?
Speaker 2 (04:51):
The witness otherwise known as Hunter Biden.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Mister Gates, look me in the eye, you really think
that's appropriate to ask me, mister Gates, absolutely the witness
of all the people sitting around this table, do you
think that's appropriate to ask me Matt Gates?
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Unbelievable?
Speaker 3 (05:07):
Yeah, listen, Matt Or as they call him now in Florida,
Governor Gates, who is running for who? No, No, he's
running for governor in Florida. He keeps denying it, but
then he comes to Tallahassee and sits down and has
meetings with all of the political operatives in the state
that are ready to go for his run for governor.
This is a guy who has never spent a day
of his life worried about consequences because Daddy would always
(05:30):
spend the money, write the check, get him out of trouble.
A lot of the crap that they've laid on Hunter
Biden and look, Molly, you can speak to this, but
a lot of the stuff about Hunter he was taking
responsibility for his addiction is something these fuckers would never
do in a million years. And a lot of them
have their own suite of addictions, including the ko Kayim.
And I mean, I would say sex addiction is probably
(05:52):
more prevalent on Capitol Hill than on a per capita
basis in any place I've ever been.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
Yeah, this is the thing.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
They have a very just completely fucked up view of
how this is going to go. I also think what's
interesting to me, and we talked about this before, and
I want to talk about the Biden border trip now,
is that what they're doing in the White House is
And I know because I was.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
I was also there this week and we were talking
about it.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
Yeah, drop that a bad Yeah, baby, I didn't get any.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
Of the cookies.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
They have these cookies with a seal, and I forgot
to get the fucking you can ask for.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
The cook and they have em.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
And m's I'm aworried. The two things they said. They're
really trying to do this thing where they fight back.
So Biden goes on the same day that Trump goes
to the border. Biden goes the border, and Biden says, Okay,
you want to make immigration this issue, let's go. You know,
he's really calling their bluff, right. They have this very
(06:52):
very right leaning bill gives them everything they want, can
close the border, can do this, can do that, and
and I mean the speech that Biden gave was like,
you know, they can come to the table anytime they want.
I mean, it's annoying on some level because as someone
who doesn't necessarily think that a guy who is not
(07:14):
the president should be setting the tone, it's annoying, but
it's also brilliant discuss.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Look, Joe Biden has recognized that you can take the
strong argument on immigration, okay, which is we're going to
secure the border. We're going to appropriately and humanly manage
our border. We're going to toughen up border patrol, We're
going to give ice and border patrol resources that they
need to do their jobs, and that Donald Trump is
(07:41):
the one guy who is stopping that. The White House
realized that, the Biden campaign realized that, Joe Biden himself
realized that, and now they're putting it back on Donald Trump.
They're saying, Okay, y know, if this is such a crisis,
if the fentanyl is rolling in by the dump truck load,
and it's an immediate crisis. If the child smugglers are
bringing the babies across the border for bad people, then
(08:02):
it's an immediate crisis. If there's one bajillion, trillion, gazillion
immigrants crossing over every day with their with their with
their strange foreign languages and their delicious ethnic foods. We
have to stop it.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
If that's the case, language is that no one's ever
heard languages no one speaks.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Yeah, in Donald Trump's case, one of those languages would
be English. But this idea that they've inverted the dynamic
of power and the strong side of the argument, assertive
side of the argument. You know, Biden is now the
guy who wants to close the border. He wants to
enforce the border, and this popular Fox illusion of Biden
(08:42):
opened the border for the brown caravans. It's all a lie.
It is about as truthful as the Hunter Biden evidence,
which was to say, not truthful at all. And so
now Biden's like, Okay, Donald, come to the table, Matto
and Manno, If the dividing line in this race becomes
Joe Biden saying we should secure the border and Donald
Trump saying we should build concentration camps before we deport them,
(09:05):
Joe Biden's gonna win on that issue.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
And I think that's the cow goes Sean Hannity, perhaps
you'll remember him, said, Biden visiting the border is a
cynical sit political stunt, and beyond disgraceful. Joe Biden should
know that the only people allowed to visit the border
for sick political stunts are Republicans. He then, in the
same brats plugs his upcoming show with Trump to be
(09:29):
aired from the border.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
I will never get over, you know, seeing Lindsey Graham
and Tim Scott and Ted Cruz and all these other
guys down there wearing their wish dot Com, fake LBB
bulletproof best plate carriers, and they're wrap around Oakley's thinking
that there's some sort of like costplay special operator bullshit.
(09:52):
All of them go down to the border at the
drop of the hat, stare across the rio grad and say,
dear God, the care that it sweeps the horizon, and
it's all people with not a single blue eyed soul
among them. Oh my god, the drama, the drama that
these assholes indulge themselves in about the border. It's only
(10:14):
increased because, like heroin addicts, they're chasing the dragon of
that first flush of how great it was, you know
when they first started going down there. Now they have
to do the barbed wire barricades and the floating razor
balls and all that crap in the river and they've
become part of the Fox News production cycle. They've become
part of the scare tactic cycle, over and over and
(10:36):
over again.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
We are a country of immigrants, right, I mean, the
whole premise of this fucking country is that we all
became here and then killed all the indigenous people because
this was the dream of America. So the idea, and again,
like the other thing which I think even Democrats have
gotten a little bit removed frum is like immigrants are
good for the economy, Like you have a tight line market,
(11:01):
you need these people.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
Let me just say this not super widely known, but
my family is in agriculture, citrus, soy hogs, peanuts, corn.
Florida agriculture right now is in a desperate collapse because
you know what, nobody's here anymore. They can't get workers.
They can't get people to come and do the work.
(11:24):
And so the idea of oh, well, well, of course
these immigrants are taking this backbreaking minimum wage labor away
from deserving white men.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
People who don't want it.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
Yeah, guess what, you can't get people right now in Florida.
You can't get him in California and Arizona. We are
killing a giant sector of our economy, the ag sector
in particular is suffering. But you know, this is also
why states are like, we've got to get those thirteen
year olds working again. My god, the moral failing of
(11:56):
this country where the kids can't go down the urine
for the coal mine.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Right exactly, But it is, I mean, that is is
a really good point. And like I yesterday, I was
talking to a guy who works at pro publica does
very cool private sure partnerships with local news, and he
was talking about they have been writing about the farmers
in Wisconsin. Right there are a ton of undocumented people
working in farms in Wisconsin, and a lot of them
(12:22):
don't speak English.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
What is interesting on the ground is he told.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
Me that people who are employing these people know that
they need that.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
They absolutely understand it, They absolutely know it, and they
don't care. Right, they don't care.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
It is an.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Astounding and bitter reality. This is a country that its
largest trading partner is south of the border. We have
a crossflow of work and workers and products back and forth.
And this idea that the border is wide open is
of course a lie. But we need in this country
for the first time in forty five years to assis
(13:00):
establish a legitimate, straight up guess worker system where they
pay taxes in the system. And the fact that Donald
Trump is the one holding the border open right now,
all the negative consequences of having a border that is
not being enforced right now, the whole fantasy of that
they're smuggling hundreds of Al Qaeda in every day, and
(13:20):
you know that five million children are trafficked over the
border every half hour, and all this other garbage. There
are bad things that happen at the border. There are
legitimate concerns at the border, but they are not at
the scale that you would think they are on Fox News.
And the downsides of the idea of putting an iron
wall across the border is that we're going to collapse
(13:40):
several sectors of our economy pretty dramatically if we had
the fantasy wall of Donald Trump from Baja to Brownsville.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
The idea that somehow building an enormous.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Wall with I mean, the fact that we're even talking
about this eight years later, right is such proof that
everything has gotten so stupid.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
Right, there's no world in which an.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Enormous concrete wall in a porous border it's going to
do anything but enriched the construction companies, which is why
it's such a great trumpy scam.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Right.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
Look, I mean Steve Bannon and his people. They wanted
to take it private and build their a private.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Wall, yes, where you have to pay to look at it.
The whole thing is preposterous.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
It's absurdity.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
But speaking of preposterous, there's one last thing we have
to talk about, which is Donald Trump a master at
punting when it comes to his legal challenges.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
Discuss Well, Look, the court as I call it now,
the Red Court. They gave Donald Trump two great gifts.
They gave him time, and they gave him this comfort. Basically,
the time that they gave him to push this thing
into July is the clock running on Merrick Garland. Hey,
how you'll like Merrick Garland. Now by the way out there,
(14:55):
I'm just saying, but Merrick Garland is going to pick
up the phone to Jack Smith and say, hey, look
you did a great job. Clock ran out where it goes.
You got to wrap it up. He's the Republican nominee,
and that was the thing they gave Trump.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
Is by that.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
Point the convention won't matter. He'll have the delegates and
they're going to do it by acclamation. Sooner than later
he'll be the Republican nominee, and that is going to
buy him a hall pass on this and the Court.
For all that people say, oh, John Roberts is an
institutionalist and he was to protect you. Guess what, John Roberts.
There are three people on the Court who are the
(15:32):
products of the MAGA era. Okay, Gorsich, Cavanaugh and Comy Barrett.
They are for all Donald Trump makes jokes about it,
they are his people. To whatever degree Alito and Thomas
represented an earlier time, they are both now obviously locked
in on a partisan frame where they don't care. I
think Clarence Thomas now is even though his wife is
(15:55):
a part of the case and he should recuse himself.
He's basically an extend the little finger to the country,
and Roberts doesn't even have the moral courage to tell
Thomas he should recuse. I'm not going to give John
Roberts a lot more grace and running room here because
this was a decision. Look, I was around for Bush v.
Gore and they took it up in three days.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
Yeah, we're gonna not talk about bushfe Gore. Thank you.
Rick Wilson any time. Did you know?
Speaker 1 (16:26):
Rick Wilson and I are bringing together some friends for
a general election kickoff party at City Winery in New
York on March sixth. We're going to be chatting right
after Super Tuesday about what's going on, and it is
going to probably be the one fun night for the
next eighty days.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
If you're in.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
The New York area, please come by and join us.
You can go to City Winery's website and grab a ticket.
And Noah Shackman is the former editor in chief of Rolings.
Don't welcome back, frend boss, colleague, Noah Schapman.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Yo, my mind, let's talk about drugs.
Speaker 4 (17:12):
Great, one of my favorite.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
You have a huge scoop that has just dropped today.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
It's Monday, or at least it'll be Monday and you're
listening to this, or maybe it will be Tuesday, Wednesday, whatever.
It centers on the Trump White House and all the
stuff that everyone was taking.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
So talk us through exactly how this went down.
Speaker 4 (17:33):
Sure, so, about six weeks ago there was a report
by the Defense Departments Inspector General that laid up all
these irregularities in the way that they were handing out
prescription medications, but it was all kind of vague and
it was all kind of weird. And addedly, white houses
have been for a long time handing out prescription medications
(17:54):
on flights to make sure that you know, ambient, to
make sure people, you know, sleep on an overseas fly
or something like that. But what my colleague and I
discovered is freaking crazy, which is and there's a couple
of different parts to it. Let's go over the first
part first, which is just wide spread abuse of a
very powerful stimulant called provigel or medopinos, the generic name.
(18:19):
It's a drug that the military pilots us to keep
awake when they're on like long, long, long, long missions.
But in the Trump White House it was being passed
around like old school speed. And in fact, when we
talked to Trump White House staffers, they talked about a
White House that was quote a wash in speed. And
(18:42):
if you're taking the speed before or any of these uppers,
they do not exactly produce clear thinking over the long haul.
They do not exactly produce rational thought in the long term,
even if they're good at keeping you awake in the
short term. So that's the first of several things which felt.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
We don't know who was taking it though, right, it
could be anyone in that White House.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
It wasn't clear who.
Speaker 4 (19:06):
Well put it to you this way, there was thousands
and thousands and thousands of pills ordered over a very
short time, like a few months, so it not only
literally could have been anybody, it might have literally been everybody,
if you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
I mean, how does this compare to normal white houses?
Speaker 4 (19:23):
There's really no comparison. So let's just say that my
colleagues Win Soups saying, and I talked to like everybody involved,
including people that were involved in other white houses. And
while they would occasionally hand out this drug if you know,
there was like an overnight flight and someone had trouble
sleeping and need to be up for a meeting with
a world leader the next day, they never ever used
it like the Trump white House did, which was you know,
(19:45):
speech writers would use it to jam out speeches, comms,
people would use it to spin the media. Lawyers or
I'm not sure about lawyers, but people responding to Robert
Mueller's probe would use it to you know, try to insist,
you know, called with new es for the why they
totally weren't in bed with Russia, like it was really
a pretty widespread usage.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Is this all Ronnie Jackson? I mean, where does this originated?
Speaker 4 (20:10):
Right? So, Ronnie Jackson, who was the head of the
White House medical Unit and physician to the President under
both Obama and Trump, this all seems to circle back
on him. Now Ronnie Jackson is.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
He's now a member of Congress, which is the most
amazing part of this whole story.
Speaker 4 (20:27):
Yeah, which is wild. He was not the planet's most
respected doctor. So for Corple, the Pentagon did a different
report about his behavior when he was Obama's doctor, and
he seem to have a habit of getting wasted and
banging on female subordinates hotel room doors. They couldn't verify
(20:48):
whether he had gotten wasted and crashed a carl. There
was that allegation. And this is my favorite part is
that they interviewed sixty of his current and former subordinates
and fifty six saw him being abusive or had him
being abusive to them. So he's not the best and
so a lot of these problems were traced back to him.
That said. Jackson was out of the Trump White House
(21:10):
by twenty nintheen and even though his subordinates, his minions
were kind of running the shop. These problems persist in
the Trump White House right to the very end.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
Right so when he left there was another doctor who
came from the same scool of doctor Fieldgod Madison Well.
Speaker 4 (21:27):
I would say that Jackson had both installed his minions
and key spots throughout the administration on the medical side,
and that the culture that he had promoted, what one
source told us was a kind of wild West in
which any one quote got anything they wanted. That that
culture took a long time to unwind, and really took
at least through the Trump administration through the end of it.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
What else is sort of shocking.
Speaker 4 (21:51):
The medofinal the military grade speed was only the beginning of.
Like I said, there was a culture of anything, anytime,
anywhere you need. And one of the drugs that people
seem to need the most was xanax, which is an
anti anxiety medication. Why is it and it's also a
very powerful sedative you.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Know need I'm a Jewish woman. You don't need to
tell me what xanax's now.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
That said, I have been sober since I was nineteen,
but you know, you explaining xanax to me like, Okay, what.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
You take to come down from cocaine anyway?
Speaker 4 (22:22):
Continue, That's like explaining like astronomy on ride.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (22:26):
So, not only was the Trump White House an incredibly
stressful place to work, but if you're already hopped up
on uppers, you need something to be able to sleep
in a couple hours through the night. And so there
was a pretty widespread culture of Xanax usage too. Now
that's important for a bunch of different reasons, including a
(22:47):
Xanax was never mentioned in that initial Pentagonal report. I
mentioned that was one of the things. So that was
not written down in these ledgers that they obtained of
all these various drugs that were prescribed at the Trump
White House as something else. And then the other thing
is that they were not only taking xanax, but many
of them were taking xanax and drinking too. Now, one
xan x by itself can mellow you out. You started
(23:09):
taking xan x and having a couple of drinks with it,
and it can be really serious, and you know, you
do too much of that and can have huge risks
to your health. So doing sort of uppers and xen
x with booze. That is a really scary rollercoaster to ride.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Do you think that this will have repercussions to doctor Jackson?
Speaker 4 (23:30):
I don't know, Honestly, I didn't surprise he hasn't suffered
war repercussions already. I'm surprised he got into Congress. So
I'm not sure what the consequences will be for doctor Jackson.
I think the consequences for the country if this kind
of drugstore cowboy rodeo returns to the White House, I
think are really serious. I mean, we already know the
(23:51):
will be.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
He'll be visiting us in fortunately a man.
Speaker 4 (23:55):
Yes, continue, well, I mean I feel like, look, we
already know these guys have some some really kooky plans
in place. So if you layer on top of that
kookie plans and even you know, kookie or decision making
more erratic, more hopped up, that seems like a really
bad combination.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
It does.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
And we've seen lots of authoritarian regimes that were powered
by speed.
Speaker 4 (24:20):
Yeah, it's true. And then you know the other thing
speaking of authoritarian regimes is like, you know, there's a
real climate in the Trump White House of fear and paranoia,
you know, and New was sometimes the benefits of reporters
like us, where you know, people would be more inclined
to snitch on their you know, bureaucratic rivals than they
(24:42):
were to actually do their jobs. And people are constantly
scared and constantly trying to jockey for position, to get
in Trump's favor, and it created this atmosphere, especially with
Roddy Jackson, of fear and paranoia. And we uncovered something
new that really added to that climate of fear and paranoia,
which is I tracked down a mental health worker who
(25:07):
was doing therapy sessions for administration officials in the Trump
White House. And what this source told me was that
they were marched to a particular you know, officials office,
the therapy session would happen, and then immediately afterwards the
therapist was grilled about what the Trump officials said in
(25:30):
therapy amazing, which is it's.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Not how any of this is supposed to work, but
it's really not.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Wow.
Speaker 4 (25:42):
Yeah, And so reaching that kind of therapist confidentiality, you know,
it was particularly shocking to me. I'm I'm married to
a psychiatrist, and obviously, as a as a New York.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
Jew, therapy is something near and dear to your.
Speaker 4 (25:55):
Heart, But I mean, I think it's shocking to pretty
much everyone. The one of the senior people at the
White House Medical, a professional named Keith Bass who's now
at the VA and who served many presidents. He claimed
that this was all just to make sure that people
that were military members were still fit for duty and
still fit for top secret clearance. That was his claim
(26:16):
and pulled it to us on the record. So he
admitted that the therapist was grilled after sessions. However, then
I went back to the therapist and was like, what's
up with this, and the therapist said, no, no, no, that's
not right. First of all, you know, I saw both
military and civilians, so that military only things long. And
number two, the therapist really felt like while the question
(26:37):
started out broad, they really went down a slippery slope
and really just contributed to anything goes atmosphere where could
hand out any drug and say anything about any patient
behind their back, and that information was really handled loosely.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Yeah, I'm shocked. Yeah, I know, it's one of these things.
Speaker 4 (26:54):
Like to me, it like honestly, it helped make a
little bit more sense of that madhouse because people were
literally on drugs and spying on each other.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
Yeah, who could have seen it? It's basically everything you think.
It strikes me that it seems like there hasn't been
a ton of accountability for any of this.
Speaker 4 (27:12):
No, there hasn't been.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Call me a Pollyanna, but like, isn't there a world
where people get in trouble for doing bad illegal stuff?
Speaker 2 (27:20):
For now?
Speaker 4 (27:21):
Yeah? I mean, look, I think I'm a little surprised
there hasn't been also, like just medical repercussions for people,
Like a little surprised people involved in this haven't suffered
any repercussions, you know, just within their their licensing bureaus
or whatever. That sounds like small potatoes, prefer doctor. It's
really not.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
So.
Speaker 4 (27:37):
No, there haven't been a repercussions yet. But I think
what we've been able to do is really show like
a little bit more why things happen the way they
happen at the Trump White House and what might happen
in the future. Like I just want to say the
other thing, like, you know, this is a story for
Rolling Stone, right, Rolling Stone is on anti drug you know,
outfit or anything like that. Yes, yes, I'm aware, So
(27:59):
I'm not trying to be all sober. Yeah, I'm hardly that,
as you know. But like I think, there's a big
difference between having some fun or expanding your mind in
the way you choose and abusing prescription meds at the
highest levels of government. Those would be like two different things.
And so you know, I'm not trying to be all
par clutching here, but this is fund Yeah, this is
(28:20):
the ain't great And honestly I was shot with what
I found, really shot.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Noah shank Man, thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 4 (28:27):
Thanks wellie.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Michael Leirov and Peter Shamshery are the hosts of the podcast.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Five to four.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
My favorite podcast is this podcast called five to four
about how the Supreme Court.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
Sucks and I'm a huge fan.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
And yesterday when the Supreme Court did yet another incredibly
fucked up thing, I thought, wonder if I could email
Leon and ask him if we could get two of
the hosts of five to four.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
So we did and they're here. Help me.
Speaker 5 (28:59):
Welcome Michael, Hi, everybody, very pleased to be here.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
Well, we're thrilled to have you and Peter hello, and
very excited to have you both.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
Two of the three hosts. Rihanna's not here. Someone talk
us through what the fuck happened yesterday?
Speaker 4 (29:13):
I can walk you through the basics.
Speaker 5 (29:16):
I guess Donald Trump is Obviously, he's been indicted in
a few different states by a few different actors, but
one of them, the Special Council Jack Smith, has indicted
him in federal court in the District of Columbia for
crimes related to the January sixth riot, including conspiracy against
rights and conspiracy to defraud the United States. President Trump
(29:39):
has raised a defense saying he is immune from criminal
prosecution for his actions around and leading up to January sixth,
and yesterday the Supreme Court agreed to hear that argument
and scheduled oral argument for late April, which had the
effect of delaying the ability to try Donald Trump on
(30:03):
these charges and take that trial to completion before the election.
That seems impossible now.
Speaker 6 (30:09):
And if I can add some color here, the DC
Circuit had basically ruled against Trump earlier this month, So
the Supreme Court had a couple of options. They could
have just allowed that to stand and said you're not
immune the trials going forward, or they could have taken
up the case in some form or fashion, which is
what they did. What they did that was so bizarre.
I think a lot of people expected that they might
(30:30):
take up the case. But what they did that was
so bizarre was take it up on such a kind
of slow schedule. Usually they'd take something like this up
on an expedited basis, so that we're getting it dealt
with in the span of a few weeks rather than
a few months, like Bush versus Gore right, or like
they've sped along some other Trump proceedings like the Fourteenth
(30:51):
Amendment claim, which they dealt with relatively quickly, and I think,
you know, we'll probably see an opinion a little bit
faster in that case. So they expedited things all the time.
It's not uncommon, and it's pretty telling it they didn't
do it here.
Speaker 5 (31:04):
Yeah, And to make that point even stronger, back in December,
when Donald Trump indicated he was going to appeal on
the basis of this immunity, the Special Council brought this
to the Supreme Court and said, let's skip the DC circuit.
This is a big important issue. It's going to end
up here anyway, so why don't you just take this up?
And the Court could have done that in December. They
(31:25):
did that. They've skipped Circuit review in for example, the
student loan case where they nullified Biden's student debt relief.
They skipped the Circuit Court of Appeals there, this is
something they could do, they've done recently. Instead, they kicked
it down to the DC Circuit and wasted three months
(31:46):
and then took it up just a total just wasting
everybody's time.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
Clearly just delaying.
Speaker 5 (31:53):
This to put any possible resolution past the elections. The
only possible explanation, the only plausible explanation.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
They granted cert. Right, can you explain what that means?
Speaker 6 (32:05):
Yeah, cert is just the court accepting a case. You
need four justices to grant cert as opposed to five
for an actual majority. They're just saying, yeah, we're going
to hear this case on the merits. I think again,
that was something people expected. People just didn't expect them
to put it on a slow moving schedule.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
Right.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
If you were trying to help out Donald Trump, this
would be the way you would do it.
Speaker 5 (32:30):
Absolutely. Trump's main tactic, his main litigation strategy and all
these cases has been delay, delayed, delayed, delay, with the
hopes that he can win the twenty twenty four election
and then use his power as president to shut down
the investigations or prosecutions on the federal level and shields
himself from having to pay any judgments or serve any
(32:54):
prison time at the state level. That's what he's trying
to do, and the court is helping him. They are
just straight up enabling him.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
So I think of it as like there are three
Trump installed justices, right, the smartest of whom is Amy.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
Comy Barrett by a large margin, but she's still a
zellin yes, yes.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
And then you have like the Fox News brain damaged
Alito and Thomas, and then you have like the sort
of Roberts who is still like pretending that he's normal
but he's not.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Well.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
You look at this case, almost everyone thought that this
would absolutely not be called up.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
And I'm hoping you talk about this week.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
On your excellent podcast, you guys talked about the Nixon case,
which sets the which is is really preposterous.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
Will you talk about that and how that plays into
all of this.
Speaker 6 (33:45):
Yeah, sure, So Nixon Vie Fitzgerald is really the only
Supreme Court case that has dealt with immunity for presidents.
It was from nineteen eighty two. It was by Nixon, standards,
relatively small potatoes. It's just a guy who testified he
was in the Air Force, and then Nixon fired him
once Nixon got into office on the basis that he
(34:07):
didn't like his testimony, and the guy sued for basically
wrongful termination, and the Supreme Court said, well, we're not
going to allow civil damages against presidents for things they
do in office, for like official acts they take in office.
There is really no case that deals with criminal immunity.
(34:27):
So the Nixon case is sort of all we have,
and frankly, it's just not really on point. You know,
I think everyone agrees that, you know, hiring and firing
within the military or executive agencies is something that is
a part of the president's job to some degree. Whether
facilitating a coup is part of the president's job is a.
Speaker 2 (34:49):
Whole different question.
Speaker 6 (34:50):
So we're in a totally different scenario here, and you know,
we're sort of just staring at the Nixon case thinking, well,
is there anything it can tell us about the Trump situation. Frankly,
I'm not sure that there's too much.
Speaker 5 (35:01):
Yeah, I think that's right, And it's hard to say
what precisely attack the Supreme Court is going to take here.
But it does seem like they might be setting this
up to say, well, does the Nixon I. Fitzgerald case
extend to criminal liability as well, and to say no, no,
that does not mean you're immune from criminal liability.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
They have no leg to stand on here though.
Speaker 6 (35:25):
No.
Speaker 5 (35:25):
Yeah, it's it's a crazy and frankly frivolous argument. The
Constitution explicitly contemplates the president being subject to criminal process
after leaving the office. In the impeachment judgment clause, it says,
after you're impeached, you know, that doesn't stop you from
being prosecuted for crimes that you committed while in office.
(35:49):
So it's right there in the text of the Constitution.
It's a pretty wild claim, but it's not when I
think Trump expected to win on just to drag this
out long enough. His lacky's on the co have obliged him.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
In that everyone.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
I mean, I actually was talking on the phone or
I was talking in person to it was one of
those like very smart people who were like, oh, they're
never going to take this up. And I feel like
this Supreme Court does tend to plumb the depths.
Speaker 5 (36:18):
Yeah, you know, you'll never go broke betting that they
will just whatever like the worst Fox News strained like
you know fourteen or Reddit commenter wants them to do.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
It's pretty wild.
Speaker 5 (36:32):
This is very very hackish and in the tank for
Trump in a way that is like even a little
surprising to me, to be honest, And we are pretty
cynical about this court.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
Peter, are you surprised?
Speaker 6 (36:45):
I don't think I'm as surprised as a lot of
other people. I do think that, you know, if you
look at a lot of commentators from a few days ago,
they were saying, well, the worst case scenario is that
the Court will take up the case and drag this
through late March, and what they actually did was drag
it through late April at the earliest. So I do
think it was a situation where just about everyone was
(37:08):
caught off guard by the scale of what they did,
whether you predicted some little part of it or not.
So I don't want to pretend that I was the
one person to see this coming. I really didn't see
all of it coming. But it doesn't surprise me that
four or five justices on the Court would want to
deal with the immunity issue themselves rather than have the
(37:28):
DC circuit be the last word.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
But do you think again, Jesse says, like bad podcasting
is trying to predict the future.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
But it's so crazy.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
I mean, you think they're going to be like, you
can be immune from all the crimes you did.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
No, I think that.
Speaker 4 (37:43):
You know.
Speaker 6 (37:43):
Trump's bringing a few different arguments. The craziest one is basically,
you know, the court lacks jurisdiction to review any of
this due to separation of powers, which would basically mean
that the president is a god king and can amit
all sorts of heinous crimes as long as there's.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
Just Seal Team six, right, right.
Speaker 6 (38:05):
This is the theory that, like, you know, you can
just kill your political opponent, and when Congress tries to
impeach you, you kill them too, and this is all
somehow technically legal, right. I don't think the court buys that.
But there are some slightly subtler arguments that he is making.
One is that they can just say, well, look, he's
(38:25):
immune for certain types of actions, and this is one
of those actions that we are going to say that
this is sort of this is an official act, which
is the term that the Court and Nixon v. Fitzgerald
used Now Is that a good argument. No, but it
is sort of a limiting principle that might prevent the
worst case sort of scenarios. The other thing they can
do is basically say that impeachment is the proper process
(38:50):
to go through here, and that you sort of need
to move your way through the entire impeachment and conviction
process for any criminal proceeding to that and come thereafter.
That's an argument that Trump has made. He's also made
the complete reverse argument before when he was getting impeached.
She said, no, you have to criminally prosecute me first.
But he's making some arguments that are maybe just a
(39:13):
little I don't think they're better arguments, but they are
a little more tolerable to the median person in the
United States. So the court might bounce some of those around.
Speaker 4 (39:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
I think ultimately it seems.
Speaker 5 (39:25):
Like a very John Roberts sort of move to say,
you know, within a couple weeks of each other or
a couple months of each other, Donald Trump has to
be on the ballot. You can't use the Fourteenth Amendment
insurrection band to bar him from the ballot. But he
also has to stay in trial for any crimes he
(39:47):
may have committed while in office, a real classic Roberts
split the baby type thing. And oh, hopefully you don't
notice why we were coming to this decision, this magnanimous decision.
We delayed the trial well passed when it would have
any political impact. That all feels very like his style.
They did something similar with this case Trump vi. Mezaars,
(40:09):
which was about subpoenaing the president, and they delayed that.
They ultimately resolved it and Trump lost, but after it
had any force or meaning because he had left office.
So it wouldn't be surprising to me if that's the
direction they go here. I think six seven years ago
(40:31):
the political media might have been taken in by that approach.
Speaker 2 (40:34):
They don't seem as.
Speaker 4 (40:36):
Easily fooled by it.
Speaker 3 (40:38):
You know.
Speaker 5 (40:38):
The New York Times had an editorial last night saying
this was a huge win for Trump, and their front
page this morning framed this as a victory for Trump.
I think people are sort of wise to this little
game that Roberts likes to play at this point, and
the court has lost any benefit of the doubt it
used to get, and I think that's a good thing.
(41:00):
I think they should feel political repercussions for this you know,
if the Democratic Party wants to impose them, I think
it would be well received by the public.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
I have a question about this, which is this court
when they overturned Row, they sort of made a decision,
would you know, politics be damned? What's the political calculus
of taking this case.
Speaker 6 (41:22):
Yeah, if you're looking at the big picture political calculus,
it's probably bad for the institution of the court. But
there are some pretty strong indicators that the justices don't
really care about that and have basically made the decision
that whatever happens to the institution of the Court, the
Democrats don't have the political jews to pack the court.
(41:44):
They don't have the political jews to impeach Clarence Thomas
or anything along those lines. So will people get mad, sure,
But that's sort of the cost of doing business. And meanwhile,
you know, they're getting high fives at the Federal Society meetings.
So from their perspective, you know, who cares. Maybe you
(42:05):
get some bad op eds in the New York Times,
but cost of doing business. That's the price you pay
in their view for being a fearless truth teller who
is defending Donald Trump, right. I think that's the Sam
Alito calculus. Frankly, I do think it's somewhat detached from reality,
but there's also a pragmatism to it. I think it's
true that the Democratic Party doesn't really have the muscle
(42:27):
right now to hold the Court accountable, and I think
the Court's aware of that.
Speaker 5 (42:31):
Yeah, I think they learned a lesson from Dobbs, the
case overturning Roe v. Wade, and not the one we
would have wanted. Obviously, the Republican Party underperformed historically compared
to expectations in the midterm elections that followed. But Joe Biden,
the President, was very against any efforts to push back
(42:52):
and reform the Court in the wake of Dobbs. He
didn't really want to take them on at the time.
And the Supreme Court care that the Republicans took a loss. Right,
they're still in power. They are still able to overturn
the student debt relief, for example, or end affirmative action,
or any of the other number of horrible things they've
(43:13):
done or will do. Get up there saying we'll hold
all the cards, and you guys aren't even willing to
talk about doing anything to take them from our hands.
So why would we slow down. I think it's ultimately
until an institutional counter emerges to them from either Congress
or the executive that is willing to actually push back
(43:35):
on them, they are going to feel completely uninhibited. And
that's frightening.
Speaker 4 (43:40):
That's frightening to me.
Speaker 1 (43:41):
Thank you guys for coming on the show and making
me more depressed. But also it's such an interesting problem
because it really is Democrats have to get going on it.
Speaker 5 (43:53):
Yeah, you know, it's one of those things where I
think their voters will be with you. Nobody's very happy
with the court right now. You just got to do it.
You got to fight the bullet.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
No moment, Rick Wilson, do you want me to go first?
Or do you want to go first?
Speaker 3 (44:10):
You go first, you roll your moment of fuckery.
Speaker 1 (44:13):
Okay, So my moment of fuckery is, like we've been
talking a lot about, like Republicans making absolutely moronic political
decisions that will later cause them to lose everything. Continuing
that theme, my moment of fuckery is Cindy Hyde Smith who.
Speaker 2 (44:29):
You may know her as Mema mem Yes, as mem She's.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
A United States senator, or at least they've sort of
propped her.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
By the way Alabama.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
They have found every white woman who is like about
eighty who may or may not be totally with it
and prop them up right. They're like, we have women here.
Cindy Hide Smith, she's from Mississippi. She once dressed up
as a Confederate soldier. Because who among us Tammy Duckrose
brought tried to codify IVF. We're not even talking about abortion.
(45:06):
We're not even talking about, like you know, same sex marriage.
We're talking about IVF. It's something that probably more Republicans
because richer people tend to do IVF, but so probably
more Republicans than Democrats. Who even knows, but a lot
of people use IVF. Is not a controversial way to
conceive a child. No, we are now Republicans refused. Cindy
(45:30):
Hindsmith refused to do a vote to codify IVF. So
the Republicans have now explained to us that they do
not give a fuck.
Speaker 3 (45:38):
If I had gone first, I would have given you
the exact same moment of fuckery. I want to actually
encourage the Republicans to do something. Be true to yourselves,
go out and say it. Say you don't want anybody
to get IVF. Because after Hide Smith did it. Not
one of them was out there saying, my god, my
colleague on my side of the aisle is wrong. You
know what they did. They all shut up and they hit.
(46:00):
And guys, if you're gonna do this, if Republicans going
to go this way and go up against against a
process that is costly, painful, desperate of families who are hurting,
desperate to have a child, if you guys want to
go that way, have at it. Enjoy.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
Can I just ask you a question about this, because
you actually know about the dark arts here. I just
remember from when I got IVF because we had these
two children made in a lab in New Jersey because
we carried a Jewish genetic disease. When I was there,
I was like, this doctor's office is so fucking fancy.
They have fancy magazines, they have fancy coffee, they have fancy, fancy, fancy,
(46:38):
And I thought to myself, these doctors make a ton
of money.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
So let me just ask you.
Speaker 1 (46:43):
We don't have tort reform, right, we don't have tort
reform because of that.
Speaker 2 (46:47):
Isn't this an enormous lobbying group?
Speaker 1 (46:50):
I mean, aren't these doctors gonna just lobby the hell
out of Congress.
Speaker 3 (46:54):
It won't take the doctors to do it. Moly, It'll
be the families. It'll be the people who. I mean, look,
I had a long talk with a friend who has
also done IVF the other day, and this is somebody
who's not incredibly political, and she's like, I am furious.
She said, two kids through IVF and it was painful
and costly and hard. And these are not people who
(47:16):
are super wealthy either, and they had to like, you know,
second mortgage on their house to do this thing, and
they were desperate for children. And it's like, do they
know how many of us there are? And they clearly don't.
They clearly don't. I think it's really an interesting moment
right now of just how broken brained the Republican Party
is to think that this is a winning issue for them.
(47:38):
I mean, look, they sent out a Polton memo last
week to their members saying don't do this, don't say this,
But that didn't stop Mema and the rest of these
weirdos from leaping into the deep end of the pool.
Speaker 1 (47:49):
It is amazing, though, And that is a really good point.
And I also think, like the other thing we're going
to see and we're seeing in an Oklahoma already as
they're coming after Iud's why.
Speaker 3 (47:58):
Do you Dieud Molly kind of tramp.
Speaker 2 (48:01):
You know, that's basically the fucking message.
Speaker 6 (48:04):
You know.
Speaker 1 (48:04):
I feel like this is like it reminds me of
Tip or Gore coming after a pornography. It's like, this
is such a loser, and I look forward to you
losing on it.
Speaker 3 (48:14):
I really want them if they want to go all
the way, go all the way, you know. And then
again we've joked about or talked about eventually, you know,
it's like, oh, you can't divorce your husband while you're
a pregnant little lady. You're not thinking clearly, why do
you need a check book? Honey? The whole thing inevitably
grinds down to this roaring, insane hatred of women. That's
my moment of thuckery, and we shared a moment of thuckery.
(48:35):
We'll see you all this week on Wednesday in New
York City at the City Watery if you can still
get a ticket, which you probably can't. About ten left,
ten left, get on it.
Speaker 1 (48:49):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to hear the best minds
in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you
enjoyed well heard, please send it to a friend and
keep the conversation going. And again thanks for listening.
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Of today's best minds.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
And Donald Trump's rally crowd went silent when he confused
Obama and President Biden. Yet again. We have such an
interesting show today. Former Rolling Stone editor Noah Shackman joins
us to talk about prescription drug use in the Trump
White House.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Then we'll talk to the host.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Of the five to four podcast, Michael Leroff and Peter
sham Shurry about the Supreme Court's latest descent into maga.
But first we have the host of the Enemy's List,
the Lincoln Project's own Rick Wilson. Welcome back, too, Fast Politics,
my friend and yours, Rick.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Wilson, Mollie Jong Fast.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
As always, I am delighted to join you on the
stage of history.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Exactly on the stage of history which will absorb us
like everyone else. This is such an interesting week because
I feel like this is a week that the Biden
administration did a lot of politically useful things that are
like election focused. And that's not a criticism, it's actually
a compliment because of the enormous stakes of this election.
(01:16):
But you and I talked on the phone a little
bit earlier, and the thing we wanted to start by
talking about was the hottest crack addict we know, Hunter Biden.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
Look, I have to tell you the fact that he
finally sat down for their behind closed doors deposition, wiped
the floor and knocked, as we say in the South,
there Dickson the dirt.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
I've never heard that.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
He absolutely shamed and humiliated the moron crew of comer
Jordan Gates, et cetera, et cetera. He just absolutely kicked
their asses up one side and down the other. And
his opening statement had a combination of very very well written,
(02:01):
clear denunciation of their tactics and also absolutely dismantled the
four witnesses that they have in this thing as criminals, frauds,
people who are in jail for fraud, or Russian intelligence assets.
It was masterful, and there's a reason they wanted to
do this behind closed doors because they were afraid something
(02:22):
like this could happen.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
I thought they wanted to do it behind closed doors
because they hoped that they could then spin it.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
They did. But the fact that the deal was a
release of the transcript, that was absolutely a masterstroke in
this thing that prevented them from you know, just going
on on Sean Hannity and saying, well, we found another
seven hundred witnesses at Maurisma who said that we're perls
of cash were taken to Delaware and look, this impeachment
(02:49):
is dead. It is dead. It has no political viability.
I spoke to a source last night who has some
visibility into the thinking of the leadership left of it.
They want this over, they want this over.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Is that Colber's service dog, I mean, who is that?
Speaker 3 (03:07):
No, well, it's somebody with visibility into what's going on.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Into the dusty attic that is James Comer's brain.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
Into the flaming pit of wild stupidity that is James Commer. Yes,
but at the leadership level there are even people who
you would sink are very maga, who are now like
this has to stop. This is crazy.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
The only person I think who was like a little
excited about it was maga Mad Gates.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
I'd be real careful, like talking about other people's addictions.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
That's sadd And you're not the only person who said
that Hunter Biden said that to him.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
He did.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Indeed, I'm trying to find where he said to mad
Gates that if I wouldn't be arguing about substance abuse
if I were you.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Pretty incredible.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
But also there was Eric Swallwell saying, did you get
two billion dollar from the Saudi government?
Speaker 2 (04:02):
I know, I know, I know.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
Listen, you know I got to say. I think the
two people that have legitimately the most sort of like, yeah,
there's this old phrase called berzuker Gang, which meant like
the fury of the vikings, right, the two guys with
the Berserker Gang, with the real excitement here, they love
to go oh fuck me, no, in fact, fuck y'all
to the magas are Moskowitz and Swallow, and they just
(04:27):
they've become masters at inverting the bullshit gotcha game that
has been the Fox News producer's greatest ally for the
last ten years. They don't want to do this anymore
on the Republican side in public because they know now
there are people who are going to clown them with
better and more photogenic moments.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
Producer Jesse has come along and saved usk.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Mister Gates, were you on drugs when you were on
the Barisma board?
Speaker 2 (04:51):
The witness otherwise known as Hunter Biden.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Mister Gates, look me in the eye, you really think
that's appropriate to ask me, mister Gates, absolutely the witness
of all the people sitting around this table, do you
think that's appropriate to ask me Matt Gates?
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Unbelievable?
Speaker 3 (05:07):
Yeah, listen, Matt Or as they call him now in Florida,
Governor Gates, who is running for who? No, No, he's
running for governor in Florida. He keeps denying it, but
then he comes to Tallahassee and sits down and has
meetings with all of the political operatives in the state
that are ready to go for his run for governor.
This is a guy who has never spent a day
of his life worried about consequences because Daddy would always
(05:30):
spend the money, write the check, get him out of trouble.
A lot of the crap that they've laid on Hunter
Biden and look, Molly, you can speak to this, but
a lot of the stuff about Hunter he was taking
responsibility for his addiction is something these fuckers would never
do in a million years. And a lot of them
have their own suite of addictions, including the ko Kayim.
And I mean, I would say sex addiction is probably
(05:52):
more prevalent on Capitol Hill than on a per capita
basis in any place I've ever been.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
Yeah, this is the thing.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
They have a very just completely fucked up view of
how this is going to go. I also think what's
interesting to me, and we talked about this before, and
I want to talk about the Biden border trip now,
is that what they're doing in the White House is
And I know because I was.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
I was also there this week and we were talking
about it.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
Yeah, drop that a bad Yeah, baby, I didn't get any.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
Of the cookies.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
They have these cookies with a seal, and I forgot
to get the fucking you can ask for.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
The cook and they have em.
Speaker 1 (06:30):
And m's I'm aworried. The two things they said. They're
really trying to do this thing where they fight back.
So Biden goes on the same day that Trump goes
to the border. Biden goes the border, and Biden says, Okay,
you want to make immigration this issue, let's go. You know,
he's really calling their bluff, right. They have this very
(06:52):
very right leaning bill gives them everything they want, can
close the border, can do this, can do that, and
and I mean the speech that Biden gave was like,
you know, they can come to the table anytime they want.
I mean, it's annoying on some level because as someone
who doesn't necessarily think that a guy who is not
(07:14):
the president should be setting the tone, it's annoying, but
it's also brilliant discuss.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Look, Joe Biden has recognized that you can take the
strong argument on immigration, okay, which is we're going to
secure the border. We're going to appropriately and humanly manage
our border. We're going to toughen up border patrol, We're
going to give ice and border patrol resources that they
need to do their jobs, and that Donald Trump is
(07:41):
the one guy who is stopping that. The White House
realized that, the Biden campaign realized that, Joe Biden himself
realized that, and now they're putting it back on Donald Trump.
They're saying, Okay, y know, if this is such a crisis,
if the fentanyl is rolling in by the dump truck load,
and it's an immediate crisis. If the child smugglers are
bringing the babies across the border for bad people, then
(08:02):
it's an immediate crisis. If there's one bajillion, trillion, gazillion
immigrants crossing over every day with their with their with
their strange foreign languages and their delicious ethnic foods. We
have to stop it.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
If that's the case, language is that no one's ever
heard languages no one speaks.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Yeah, in Donald Trump's case, one of those languages would
be English. But this idea that they've inverted the dynamic
of power and the strong side of the argument, assertive
side of the argument. You know, Biden is now the
guy who wants to close the border. He wants to
enforce the border, and this popular Fox illusion of Biden
(08:42):
opened the border for the brown caravans. It's all a lie.
It is about as truthful as the Hunter Biden evidence,
which was to say, not truthful at all. And so
now Biden's like, Okay, Donald, come to the table, Matto
and Manno, If the dividing line in this race becomes
Joe Biden saying we should secure the border and Donald
Trump saying we should build concentration camps before we deport them,
(09:05):
Joe Biden's gonna win on that issue.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
And I think that's the cow goes Sean Hannity, perhaps
you'll remember him, said, Biden visiting the border is a
cynical sit political stunt, and beyond disgraceful. Joe Biden should
know that the only people allowed to visit the border
for sick political stunts are Republicans. He then, in the
same brats plugs his upcoming show with Trump to be
(09:29):
aired from the border.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
I will never get over, you know, seeing Lindsey Graham
and Tim Scott and Ted Cruz and all these other
guys down there wearing their wish dot Com, fake LBB
bulletproof best plate carriers, and they're wrap around Oakley's thinking
that there's some sort of like costplay special operator bullshit.
(09:52):
All of them go down to the border at the
drop of the hat, stare across the rio grad and say,
dear God, the care that it sweeps the horizon, and
it's all people with not a single blue eyed soul
among them. Oh my god, the drama, the drama that
these assholes indulge themselves in about the border. It's only
(10:14):
increased because, like heroin addicts, they're chasing the dragon of
that first flush of how great it was, you know
when they first started going down there. Now they have
to do the barbed wire barricades and the floating razor
balls and all that crap in the river and they've
become part of the Fox News production cycle. They've become
part of the scare tactic cycle, over and over and
(10:36):
over again.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
We are a country of immigrants, right, I mean, the
whole premise of this fucking country is that we all
became here and then killed all the indigenous people because
this was the dream of America. So the idea, and again,
like the other thing which I think even Democrats have
gotten a little bit removed frum is like immigrants are
good for the economy, Like you have a tight line market,
(11:01):
you need these people.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
Let me just say this not super widely known, but
my family is in agriculture, citrus, soy hogs, peanuts, corn.
Florida agriculture right now is in a desperate collapse because
you know what, nobody's here anymore. They can't get workers.
They can't get people to come and do the work.
(11:24):
And so the idea of oh, well, well, of course
these immigrants are taking this backbreaking minimum wage labor away
from deserving white men.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
People who don't want it.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
Yeah, guess what, you can't get people right now in Florida.
You can't get him in California and Arizona. We are
killing a giant sector of our economy, the ag sector
in particular is suffering. But you know, this is also
why states are like, we've got to get those thirteen
year olds working again. My god, the moral failing of
(11:56):
this country where the kids can't go down the urine
for the coal mine.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Right exactly, But it is, I mean, that is is
a really good point. And like I yesterday, I was
talking to a guy who works at pro publica does
very cool private sure partnerships with local news, and he
was talking about they have been writing about the farmers
in Wisconsin. Right there are a ton of undocumented people
working in farms in Wisconsin, and a lot of them
(12:22):
don't speak English.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
What is interesting on the ground is he told.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
Me that people who are employing these people know that
they need that.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
They absolutely understand it, They absolutely know it, and they
don't care. Right, they don't care.
Speaker 2 (12:39):
It is an.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Astounding and bitter reality. This is a country that its
largest trading partner is south of the border. We have
a crossflow of work and workers and products back and forth.
And this idea that the border is wide open is
of course a lie. But we need in this country
for the first time in forty five years to assis
(13:00):
establish a legitimate, straight up guess worker system where they
pay taxes in the system. And the fact that Donald
Trump is the one holding the border open right now,
all the negative consequences of having a border that is
not being enforced right now, the whole fantasy of that
they're smuggling hundreds of Al Qaeda in every day, and
(13:20):
you know that five million children are trafficked over the
border every half hour, and all this other garbage. There
are bad things that happen at the border. There are
legitimate concerns at the border, but they are not at
the scale that you would think they are on Fox News.
And the downsides of the idea of putting an iron
wall across the border is that we're going to collapse
(13:40):
several sectors of our economy pretty dramatically if we had
the fantasy wall of Donald Trump from Baja to Brownsville.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
The idea that somehow building an enormous.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
Wall with I mean, the fact that we're even talking
about this eight years later, right is such proof that
everything has gotten so stupid.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
Right, there's no world in which an.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Enormous concrete wall in a porous border it's going to
do anything but enriched the construction companies, which is why
it's such a great trumpy scam.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Right.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
Look, I mean Steve Bannon and his people. They wanted
to take it private and build their a private.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
Wall, yes, where you have to pay to look at it.
The whole thing is preposterous.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
It's absurdity.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
But speaking of preposterous, there's one last thing we have
to talk about, which is Donald Trump a master at
punting when it comes to his legal challenges.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
Discuss Well, Look, the court as I call it now,
the Red Court. They gave Donald Trump two great gifts.
They gave him time, and they gave him this comfort. Basically,
the time that they gave him to push this thing
into July is the clock running on Merrick Garland. Hey,
how you'll like Merrick Garland. Now by the way out there,
(14:55):
I'm just saying, but Merrick Garland is going to pick
up the phone to Jack Smith and say, hey, look
you did a great job. Clock ran out where it goes.
You got to wrap it up. He's the Republican nominee,
and that was the thing they gave Trump.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
Is by that.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
Point the convention won't matter. He'll have the delegates and
they're going to do it by acclamation. Sooner than later
he'll be the Republican nominee, and that is going to
buy him a hall pass on this and the Court.
For all that people say, oh, John Roberts is an
institutionalist and he was to protect you. Guess what, John Roberts.
There are three people on the Court who are the
(15:32):
products of the MAGA era. Okay, Gorsich, Cavanaugh and Comy Barrett.
They are for all Donald Trump makes jokes about it,
they are his people. To whatever degree Alito and Thomas
represented an earlier time, they are both now obviously locked
in on a partisan frame where they don't care. I
think Clarence Thomas now is even though his wife is
(15:55):
a part of the case and he should recuse himself.
He's basically an extend the little finger to the country,
and Roberts doesn't even have the moral courage to tell
Thomas he should recuse. I'm not going to give John
Roberts a lot more grace and running room here because
this was a decision. Look, I was around for Bush v.
Gore and they took it up in three days.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
Yeah, we're gonna not talk about bushfe Gore. Thank you.
Rick Wilson any time. Did you know?
Speaker 1 (16:26):
Rick Wilson and I are bringing together some friends for
a general election kickoff party at City Winery in New
York on March sixth. We're going to be chatting right
after Super Tuesday about what's going on, and it is
going to probably be the one fun night for the
next eighty days.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
If you're in.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
The New York area, please come by and join us.
You can go to City Winery's website and grab a ticket.
And Noah Shackman is the former editor in chief of Rolings.
Don't welcome back, frend boss, colleague, Noah Schapman.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Yo, my mind, let's talk about drugs.
Speaker 4 (17:12):
Great, one of my favorite.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
You have a huge scoop that has just dropped today.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
It's Monday, or at least it'll be Monday and you're
listening to this, or maybe it will be Tuesday, Wednesday, whatever.
It centers on the Trump White House and all the
stuff that everyone was taking.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
So talk us through exactly how this went down.
Speaker 4 (17:33):
Sure, so, about six weeks ago there was a report
by the Defense Departments Inspector General that laid up all
these irregularities in the way that they were handing out
prescription medications, but it was all kind of vague and
it was all kind of weird. And addedly, white houses
have been for a long time handing out prescription medications
(17:54):
on flights to make sure that you know, ambient, to
make sure people, you know, sleep on an overseas fly
or something like that. But what my colleague and I
discovered is freaking crazy, which is and there's a couple
of different parts to it. Let's go over the first
part first, which is just wide spread abuse of a
very powerful stimulant called provigel or medopinos, the generic name.
(18:19):
It's a drug that the military pilots us to keep
awake when they're on like long, long, long, long missions.
But in the Trump White House it was being passed
around like old school speed. And in fact, when we
talked to Trump White House staffers, they talked about a
White House that was quote a wash in speed. And
(18:42):
if you're taking the speed before or any of these uppers,
they do not exactly produce clear thinking over the long haul.
They do not exactly produce rational thought in the long term,
even if they're good at keeping you awake in the
short term. So that's the first of several things which felt.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
We don't know who was taking it though, right, it
could be anyone in that White House.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
It wasn't clear who.
Speaker 4 (19:06):
Well put it to you this way, there was thousands
and thousands and thousands of pills ordered over a very
short time, like a few months, so it not only
literally could have been anybody, it might have literally been everybody,
if you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
I mean, how does this compare to normal white houses?
Speaker 4 (19:23):
There's really no comparison. So let's just say that my
colleagues Win Soups saying, and I talked to like everybody involved,
including people that were involved in other white houses. And
while they would occasionally hand out this drug if you know,
there was like an overnight flight and someone had trouble
sleeping and need to be up for a meeting with
a world leader the next day, they never ever used
it like the Trump white House did, which was you know,
(19:45):
speech writers would use it to jam out speeches, comms,
people would use it to spin the media. Lawyers or
I'm not sure about lawyers, but people responding to Robert
Mueller's probe would use it to you know, try to insist,
you know, called with new es for the why they
totally weren't in bed with Russia, like it was really
a pretty widespread usage.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Is this all Ronnie Jackson? I mean, where does this originated?
Speaker 4 (20:10):
Right? So, Ronnie Jackson, who was the head of the
White House medical Unit and physician to the President under
both Obama and Trump, this all seems to circle back
on him. Now Ronnie Jackson is.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
He's now a member of Congress, which is the most
amazing part of this whole story.
Speaker 4 (20:27):
Yeah, which is wild. He was not the planet's most
respected doctor. So for Corple, the Pentagon did a different
report about his behavior when he was Obama's doctor, and
he seem to have a habit of getting wasted and
banging on female subordinates hotel room doors. They couldn't verify
(20:48):
whether he had gotten wasted and crashed a carl. There
was that allegation. And this is my favorite part is
that they interviewed sixty of his current and former subordinates
and fifty six saw him being abusive or had him
being abusive to them. So he's not the best and
so a lot of these problems were traced back to him.
That said. Jackson was out of the Trump White House
(21:10):
by twenty nintheen and even though his subordinates, his minions
were kind of running the shop. These problems persist in
the Trump White House right to the very end.
Speaker 1 (21:19):
Right so when he left there was another doctor who
came from the same scool of doctor Fieldgod Madison Well.
Speaker 4 (21:27):
I would say that Jackson had both installed his minions
and key spots throughout the administration on the medical side,
and that the culture that he had promoted, what one
source told us was a kind of wild West in
which any one quote got anything they wanted. That that
culture took a long time to unwind, and really took
at least through the Trump administration through the end of it.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
What else is sort of shocking.
Speaker 4 (21:51):
The medofinal the military grade speed was only the beginning of.
Like I said, there was a culture of anything, anytime,
anywhere you need. And one of the drugs that people
seem to need the most was xanax, which is an
anti anxiety medication. Why is it and it's also a
very powerful sedative you.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
Know need I'm a Jewish woman. You don't need to
tell me what xanax's now.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
That said, I have been sober since I was nineteen,
but you know, you explaining xanax to me like, Okay, what.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
You take to come down from cocaine anyway?
Speaker 4 (22:22):
Continue, That's like explaining like astronomy on ride.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (22:26):
So, not only was the Trump White House an incredibly
stressful place to work, but if you're already hopped up
on uppers, you need something to be able to sleep
in a couple hours through the night. And so there
was a pretty widespread culture of Xanax usage too. Now
that's important for a bunch of different reasons, including a
(22:47):
Xanax was never mentioned in that initial Pentagonal report. I
mentioned that was one of the things. So that was
not written down in these ledgers that they obtained of
all these various drugs that were prescribed at the Trump
White House as something else. And then the other thing
is that they were not only taking xanax, but many
of them were taking xanax and drinking too. Now, one
xan x by itself can mellow you out. You started
(23:09):
taking xan x and having a couple of drinks with it,
and it can be really serious, and you know, you
do too much of that and can have huge risks
to your health. So doing sort of uppers and xen
x with booze. That is a really scary rollercoaster to ride.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
Do you think that this will have repercussions to doctor Jackson?
Speaker 4 (23:30):
I don't know, Honestly, I didn't surprise he hasn't suffered
war repercussions already. I'm surprised he got into Congress. So
I'm not sure what the consequences will be for doctor Jackson.
I think the consequences for the country if this kind
of drugstore cowboy rodeo returns to the White House, I
think are really serious. I mean, we already know the
(23:51):
will be.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
He'll be visiting us in fortunately a man.
Speaker 4 (23:55):
Yes, continue, well, I mean I feel like, look, we
already know these guys have some some really kooky plans
in place. So if you layer on top of that
kookie plans and even you know, kookie or decision making
more erratic, more hopped up, that seems like a really
bad combination.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
It does.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
And we've seen lots of authoritarian regimes that were powered
by speed.
Speaker 4 (24:20):
Yeah, it's true. And then you know the other thing
speaking of authoritarian regimes is like, you know, there's a
real climate in the Trump White House of fear and paranoia,
you know, and New was sometimes the benefits of reporters
like us, where you know, people would be more inclined
to snitch on their you know, bureaucratic rivals than they
(24:42):
were to actually do their jobs. And people are constantly
scared and constantly trying to jockey for position, to get
in Trump's favor, and it created this atmosphere, especially with
Roddy Jackson, of fear and paranoia. And we uncovered something
new that really added to that climate of fear and paranoia,
which is I tracked down a mental health worker who
(25:07):
was doing therapy sessions for administration officials in the Trump
White House. And what this source told me was that
they were marched to a particular you know, officials office,
the therapy session would happen, and then immediately afterwards the
therapist was grilled about what the Trump officials said in
(25:30):
therapy amazing, which is it's.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Not how any of this is supposed to work, but
it's really not.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Wow.
Speaker 4 (25:42):
Yeah, And so reaching that kind of therapist confidentiality, you know,
it was particularly shocking to me. I'm I'm married to
a psychiatrist, and obviously, as a as a New York.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
Jew, therapy is something near and dear to your.
Speaker 4 (25:55):
Heart, But I mean, I think it's shocking to pretty
much everyone. The one of the senior people at the
White House Medical, a professional named Keith Bass who's now
at the VA and who served many presidents. He claimed
that this was all just to make sure that people
that were military members were still fit for duty and
still fit for top secret clearance. That was his claim
(26:16):
and pulled it to us on the record. So he
admitted that the therapist was grilled after sessions. However, then
I went back to the therapist and was like, what's
up with this, and the therapist said, no, no, no, that's
not right. First of all, you know, I saw both
military and civilians, so that military only things long. And
number two, the therapist really felt like while the question
(26:37):
started out broad, they really went down a slippery slope
and really just contributed to anything goes atmosphere where could
hand out any drug and say anything about any patient
behind their back, and that information was really handled loosely.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Yeah, I'm shocked. Yeah, I know, it's one of these things.
Speaker 4 (26:54):
Like to me, it like honestly, it helped make a
little bit more sense of that madhouse because people were
literally on drugs and spying on each other.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
Yeah, who could have seen it? It's basically everything you think.
It strikes me that it seems like there hasn't been
a ton of accountability for any of this.
Speaker 4 (27:12):
No, there hasn't been.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Call me a Pollyanna, but like, isn't there a world
where people get in trouble for doing bad illegal stuff?
Speaker 2 (27:20):
For now?
Speaker 4 (27:21):
Yeah? I mean, look, I think I'm a little surprised
there hasn't been also, like just medical repercussions for people,
Like a little surprised people involved in this haven't suffered
any repercussions, you know, just within their their licensing bureaus
or whatever. That sounds like small potatoes, prefer doctor. It's
really not.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
So.
Speaker 4 (27:37):
No, there haven't been a repercussions yet. But I think
what we've been able to do is really show like
a little bit more why things happen the way they
happen at the Trump White House and what might happen
in the future. Like I just want to say the
other thing, like, you know, this is a story for
Rolling Stone, right, Rolling Stone is on anti drug you know,
outfit or anything like that. Yes, yes, I'm aware, So
(27:59):
I'm not trying to be all sober. Yeah, I'm hardly that,
as you know. But like I think, there's a big
difference between having some fun or expanding your mind in
the way you choose and abusing prescription meds at the
highest levels of government. Those would be like two different things.
And so you know, I'm not trying to be all
par clutching here, but this is fund Yeah, this is
(28:20):
the ain't great And honestly I was shot with what
I found, really shot.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Noah shank Man, thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 4 (28:27):
Thanks wellie.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Michael Leirov and Peter Shamshery are the hosts of the podcast.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
Five to four.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
My favorite podcast is this podcast called five to four
about how the Supreme Court.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
Sucks and I'm a huge fan.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
And yesterday when the Supreme Court did yet another incredibly
fucked up thing, I thought, wonder if I could email
Leon and ask him if we could get two of
the hosts of five to four.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
So we did and they're here. Help me.
Speaker 5 (28:59):
Welcome Michael, Hi, everybody, very pleased to be here.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
Well, we're thrilled to have you and Peter hello, and
very excited to have you both.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
Two of the three hosts. Rihanna's not here. Someone talk
us through what the fuck happened yesterday?
Speaker 4 (29:13):
I can walk you through the basics.
Speaker 5 (29:16):
I guess Donald Trump is Obviously, he's been indicted in
a few different states by a few different actors, but
one of them, the Special Council Jack Smith, has indicted
him in federal court in the District of Columbia for
crimes related to the January sixth riot, including conspiracy against
rights and conspiracy to defraud the United States. President Trump
(29:39):
has raised a defense saying he is immune from criminal
prosecution for his actions around and leading up to January sixth,
and yesterday the Supreme Court agreed to hear that argument
and scheduled oral argument for late April, which had the
effect of delaying the ability to try Donald Trump on
(30:03):
these charges and take that trial to completion before the election.
That seems impossible now.
Speaker 6 (30:09):
And if I can add some color here, the DC
Circuit had basically ruled against Trump earlier this month, So
the Supreme Court had a couple of options. They could
have just allowed that to stand and said you're not
immune the trials going forward, or they could have taken
up the case in some form or fashion, which is
what they did. What they did that was so bizarre.
I think a lot of people expected that they might
(30:30):
take up the case. But what they did that was
so bizarre was take it up on such a kind
of slow schedule. Usually they'd take something like this up
on an expedited basis, so that we're getting it dealt
with in the span of a few weeks rather than
a few months, like Bush versus Gore right, or like
they've sped along some other Trump proceedings like the Fourteenth
(30:51):
Amendment claim, which they dealt with relatively quickly, and I think,
you know, we'll probably see an opinion a little bit
faster in that case. So they expedited things all the time.
It's not uncommon, and it's pretty telling it they didn't
do it here.
Speaker 5 (31:04):
Yeah, And to make that point even stronger, back in December,
when Donald Trump indicated he was going to appeal on
the basis of this immunity, the Special Council brought this
to the Supreme Court and said, let's skip the DC circuit.
This is a big important issue. It's going to end
up here anyway, so why don't you just take this up?
And the Court could have done that in December. They
(31:25):
did that. They've skipped Circuit review in for example, the
student loan case where they nullified Biden's student debt relief.
They skipped the Circuit Court of Appeals there, this is
something they could do, they've done recently. Instead, they kicked
it down to the DC Circuit and wasted three months
(31:46):
and then took it up just a total just wasting
everybody's time.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
Clearly just delaying.
Speaker 5 (31:53):
This to put any possible resolution past the elections. The
only possible explanation, the only plausible explanation.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
They granted cert. Right, can you explain what that means?
Speaker 6 (32:05):
Yeah, cert is just the court accepting a case. You
need four justices to grant cert as opposed to five
for an actual majority. They're just saying, yeah, we're going
to hear this case on the merits. I think again,
that was something people expected. People just didn't expect them
to put it on a slow moving schedule.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
Right.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
If you were trying to help out Donald Trump, this
would be the way you would do it.
Speaker 5 (32:30):
Absolutely. Trump's main tactic, his main litigation strategy and all
these cases has been delay, delayed, delayed, delay, with the
hopes that he can win the twenty twenty four election
and then use his power as president to shut down
the investigations or prosecutions on the federal level and shields
himself from having to pay any judgments or serve any
(32:54):
prison time at the state level. That's what he's trying
to do, and the court is helping him. They are
just straight up enabling him.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
So I think of it as like there are three
Trump installed justices, right, the smartest of whom is Amy.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
Comy Barrett by a large margin, but she's still a
zellin yes, yes.
Speaker 1 (33:13):
And then you have like the Fox News brain damaged
Alito and Thomas, and then you have like the sort
of Roberts who is still like pretending that he's normal
but he's not.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Well.
Speaker 1 (33:24):
You look at this case, almost everyone thought that this
would absolutely not be called up.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
And I'm hoping you talk about this week.
Speaker 1 (33:33):
On your excellent podcast, you guys talked about the Nixon case,
which sets the which is is really preposterous.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
Will you talk about that and how that plays into
all of this.
Speaker 6 (33:45):
Yeah, sure, So Nixon Vie Fitzgerald is really the only
Supreme Court case that has dealt with immunity for presidents.
It was from nineteen eighty two. It was by Nixon, standards,
relatively small potatoes. It's just a guy who testified he
was in the Air Force, and then Nixon fired him
once Nixon got into office on the basis that he
(34:07):
didn't like his testimony, and the guy sued for basically
wrongful termination, and the Supreme Court said, well, we're not
going to allow civil damages against presidents for things they
do in office, for like official acts they take in office.
There is really no case that deals with criminal immunity.
(34:27):
So the Nixon case is sort of all we have,
and frankly, it's just not really on point. You know,
I think everyone agrees that, you know, hiring and firing
within the military or executive agencies is something that is
a part of the president's job to some degree. Whether
facilitating a coup is part of the president's job is a.
Speaker 2 (34:49):
Whole different question.
Speaker 6 (34:50):
So we're in a totally different scenario here, and you know,
we're sort of just staring at the Nixon case thinking, well,
is there anything it can tell us about the Trump situation. Frankly,
I'm not sure that there's too much.
Speaker 5 (35:01):
Yeah, I think that's right, And it's hard to say
what precisely attack the Supreme Court is going to take here.
But it does seem like they might be setting this
up to say, well, does the Nixon I. Fitzgerald case
extend to criminal liability as well, and to say no, no,
that does not mean you're immune from criminal liability.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
They have no leg to stand on here though.
Speaker 6 (35:25):
No.
Speaker 5 (35:25):
Yeah, it's it's a crazy and frankly frivolous argument. The
Constitution explicitly contemplates the president being subject to criminal process
after leaving the office. In the impeachment judgment clause, it says,
after you're impeached, you know, that doesn't stop you from
being prosecuted for crimes that you committed while in office.
(35:49):
So it's right there in the text of the Constitution.
It's a pretty wild claim, but it's not when I
think Trump expected to win on just to drag this
out long enough. His lacky's on the co have obliged him.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
In that everyone.
Speaker 1 (36:02):
I mean, I actually was talking on the phone or
I was talking in person to it was one of
those like very smart people who were like, oh, they're
never going to take this up. And I feel like
this Supreme Court does tend to plumb the depths.
Speaker 5 (36:18):
Yeah, you know, you'll never go broke betting that they
will just whatever like the worst Fox News strained like
you know fourteen or Reddit commenter wants them to do.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
It's pretty wild.
Speaker 5 (36:32):
This is very very hackish and in the tank for
Trump in a way that is like even a little
surprising to me, to be honest, And we are pretty
cynical about this court.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
Peter, are you surprised?
Speaker 6 (36:45):
I don't think I'm as surprised as a lot of
other people. I do think that, you know, if you
look at a lot of commentators from a few days ago,
they were saying, well, the worst case scenario is that
the Court will take up the case and drag this
through late March, and what they actually did was drag
it through late April at the earliest. So I do
think it was a situation where just about everyone was
(37:08):
caught off guard by the scale of what they did,
whether you predicted some little part of it or not.
So I don't want to pretend that I was the
one person to see this coming. I really didn't see
all of it coming. But it doesn't surprise me that
four or five justices on the Court would want to
deal with the immunity issue themselves rather than have the
(37:28):
DC circuit be the last word.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
But do you think again, Jesse says, like bad podcasting
is trying to predict the future.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
But it's so crazy.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
I mean, you think they're going to be like, you
can be immune from all the crimes you did.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
No, I think that.
Speaker 4 (37:43):
You know.
Speaker 6 (37:43):
Trump's bringing a few different arguments. The craziest one is basically,
you know, the court lacks jurisdiction to review any of
this due to separation of powers, which would basically mean
that the president is a god king and can amit
all sorts of heinous crimes as long as there's.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
Just Seal Team six, right, right.
Speaker 6 (38:05):
This is the theory that, like, you know, you can
just kill your political opponent, and when Congress tries to
impeach you, you kill them too, and this is all
somehow technically legal, right. I don't think the court buys that.
But there are some slightly subtler arguments that he is making.
One is that they can just say, well, look, he's
(38:25):
immune for certain types of actions, and this is one
of those actions that we are going to say that
this is sort of this is an official act, which
is the term that the Court and Nixon v. Fitzgerald
used Now Is that a good argument. No, but it
is sort of a limiting principle that might prevent the
worst case sort of scenarios. The other thing they can
do is basically say that impeachment is the proper process
(38:50):
to go through here, and that you sort of need
to move your way through the entire impeachment and conviction
process for any criminal proceeding to that and come thereafter.
That's an argument that Trump has made. He's also made
the complete reverse argument before when he was getting impeached.
She said, no, you have to criminally prosecute me first.
But he's making some arguments that are maybe just a
(39:13):
little I don't think they're better arguments, but they are
a little more tolerable to the median person in the
United States. So the court might bounce some of those around.
Speaker 4 (39:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
I think ultimately it seems.
Speaker 5 (39:25):
Like a very John Roberts sort of move to say,
you know, within a couple weeks of each other or
a couple months of each other, Donald Trump has to
be on the ballot. You can't use the Fourteenth Amendment
insurrection band to bar him from the ballot. But he
also has to stay in trial for any crimes he
(39:47):
may have committed while in office, a real classic Roberts
split the baby type thing. And oh, hopefully you don't
notice why we were coming to this decision, this magnanimous decision.
We delayed the trial well passed when it would have
any political impact. That all feels very like his style.
They did something similar with this case Trump vi. Mezaars,
(40:09):
which was about subpoenaing the president, and they delayed that.
They ultimately resolved it and Trump lost, but after it
had any force or meaning because he had left office.
So it wouldn't be surprising to me if that's the
direction they go here. I think six seven years ago
(40:31):
the political media might have been taken in by that approach.
Speaker 2 (40:34):
They don't seem as.
Speaker 4 (40:36):
Easily fooled by it.
Speaker 3 (40:38):
You know.
Speaker 5 (40:38):
The New York Times had an editorial last night saying
this was a huge win for Trump, and their front
page this morning framed this as a victory for Trump.
I think people are sort of wise to this little
game that Roberts likes to play at this point, and
the court has lost any benefit of the doubt it
used to get, and I think that's a good thing.
(41:00):
I think they should feel political repercussions for this you know,
if the Democratic Party wants to impose them, I think
it would be well received by the public.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
I have a question about this, which is this court
when they overturned Row, they sort of made a decision,
would you know, politics be damned? What's the political calculus
of taking this case.
Speaker 6 (41:22):
Yeah, if you're looking at the big picture political calculus,
it's probably bad for the institution of the court. But
there are some pretty strong indicators that the justices don't
really care about that and have basically made the decision
that whatever happens to the institution of the Court, the
Democrats don't have the political jews to pack the court.
(41:44):
They don't have the political jews to impeach Clarence Thomas
or anything along those lines. So will people get mad, sure,
But that's sort of the cost of doing business. And meanwhile,
you know, they're getting high fives at the Federal Society meetings.
So from their perspective, you know, who cares. Maybe you
(42:05):
get some bad op eds in the New York Times,
but cost of doing business. That's the price you pay
in their view for being a fearless truth teller who
is defending Donald Trump, right. I think that's the Sam
Alito calculus. Frankly, I do think it's somewhat detached from reality,
but there's also a pragmatism to it. I think it's
true that the Democratic Party doesn't really have the muscle
(42:27):
right now to hold the Court accountable, and I think
the Court's aware of that.
Speaker 5 (42:31):
Yeah, I think they learned a lesson from Dobbs, the
case overturning Roe v. Wade, and not the one we
would have wanted. Obviously, the Republican Party underperformed historically compared
to expectations in the midterm elections that followed. But Joe Biden,
the President, was very against any efforts to push back
(42:52):
and reform the Court in the wake of Dobbs. He
didn't really want to take them on at the time.
And the Supreme Court care that the Republicans took a loss. Right,
they're still in power. They are still able to overturn
the student debt relief, for example, or end affirmative action,
or any of the other number of horrible things they've
(43:13):
done or will do. Get up there saying we'll hold
all the cards, and you guys aren't even willing to
talk about doing anything to take them from our hands.
So why would we slow down. I think it's ultimately
until an institutional counter emerges to them from either Congress
or the executive that is willing to actually push back
(43:35):
on them, they are going to feel completely uninhibited. And
that's frightening.
Speaker 4 (43:40):
That's frightening to me.
Speaker 1 (43:41):
Thank you guys for coming on the show and making
me more depressed. But also it's such an interesting problem
because it really is Democrats have to get going on it.
Speaker 5 (43:53):
Yeah, you know, it's one of those things where I
think their voters will be with you. Nobody's very happy
with the court right now. You just got to do it.
You got to fight the bullet.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
No moment, Rick Wilson, do you want me to go first?
Or do you want to go first?
Speaker 3 (44:10):
You go first, you roll your moment of fuckery.
Speaker 1 (44:13):
Okay, So my moment of fuckery is, like we've been
talking a lot about, like Republicans making absolutely moronic political
decisions that will later cause them to lose everything. Continuing
that theme, my moment of fuckery is Cindy Hyde Smith who.
Speaker 2 (44:29):
You may know her as Mema mem Yes, as mem She's.
Speaker 1 (44:34):
A United States senator, or at least they've sort of
propped her.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
By the way Alabama.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
They have found every white woman who is like about
eighty who may or may not be totally with it
and prop them up right. They're like, we have women here.
Cindy Hide Smith, she's from Mississippi. She once dressed up
as a Confederate soldier. Because who among us Tammy Duckrose
brought tried to codify IVF. We're not even talking about abortion.
(45:06):
We're not even talking about, like you know, same sex marriage.
We're talking about IVF. It's something that probably more Republicans
because richer people tend to do IVF, but so probably
more Republicans than Democrats. Who even knows, but a lot
of people use IVF. Is not a controversial way to
conceive a child. No, we are now Republicans refused. Cindy
(45:30):
Hindsmith refused to do a vote to codify IVF. So
the Republicans have now explained to us that they do
not give a fuck.
Speaker 3 (45:38):
If I had gone first, I would have given you
the exact same moment of fuckery. I want to actually
encourage the Republicans to do something. Be true to yourselves,
go out and say it. Say you don't want anybody
to get IVF. Because after Hide Smith did it. Not
one of them was out there saying, my god, my
colleague on my side of the aisle is wrong. You
know what they did. They all shut up and they hit.
(46:00):
And guys, if you're gonna do this, if Republicans going
to go this way and go up against against a
process that is costly, painful, desperate of families who are hurting,
desperate to have a child, if you guys want to
go that way, have at it. Enjoy.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
Can I just ask you a question about this, because
you actually know about the dark arts here. I just
remember from when I got IVF because we had these
two children made in a lab in New Jersey because
we carried a Jewish genetic disease. When I was there,
I was like, this doctor's office is so fucking fancy.
They have fancy magazines, they have fancy coffee, they have fancy, fancy, fancy,
(46:38):
And I thought to myself, these doctors make a ton
of money.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
So let me just ask you.
Speaker 1 (46:43):
We don't have tort reform, right, we don't have tort
reform because of that.
Speaker 2 (46:47):
Isn't this an enormous lobbying group?
Speaker 1 (46:50):
I mean, aren't these doctors gonna just lobby the hell
out of Congress.
Speaker 3 (46:54):
It won't take the doctors to do it. Moly, It'll
be the families. It'll be the people who. I mean, look,
I had a long talk with a friend who has
also done IVF the other day, and this is somebody
who's not incredibly political, and she's like, I am furious.
She said, two kids through IVF and it was painful
and costly and hard. And these are not people who
(47:16):
are super wealthy either, and they had to like, you know,
second mortgage on their house to do this thing, and
they were desperate for children. And it's like, do they
know how many of us there are? And they clearly don't.
They clearly don't. I think it's really an interesting moment
right now of just how broken brained the Republican Party
is to think that this is a winning issue for them.
(47:38):
I mean, look, they sent out a Polton memo last
week to their members saying don't do this, don't say this,
But that didn't stop Mema and the rest of these
weirdos from leaping into the deep end of the pool.
Speaker 1 (47:49):
It is amazing, though, And that is a really good point.
And I also think, like the other thing we're going
to see and we're seeing in an Oklahoma already as
they're coming after Iud's why.
Speaker 3 (47:58):
Do you Dieud Molly kind of tramp.
Speaker 2 (48:01):
You know, that's basically the fucking message.
Speaker 6 (48:04):
You know.
Speaker 1 (48:04):
I feel like this is like it reminds me of
Tip or Gore coming after a pornography. It's like, this
is such a loser, and I look forward to you
losing on it.
Speaker 3 (48:14):
I really want them if they want to go all
the way, go all the way, you know. And then
again we've joked about or talked about eventually, you know,
it's like, oh, you can't divorce your husband while you're
a pregnant little lady. You're not thinking clearly, why do
you need a check book? Honey? The whole thing inevitably
grinds down to this roaring, insane hatred of women. That's
my moment of thuckery, and we shared a moment of thuckery.
(48:35):
We'll see you all this week on Wednesday in New
York City at the City Watery if you can still
get a ticket, which you probably can't. About ten left,
ten left, get on it.
Speaker 1 (48:49):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to hear the best minds
in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you
enjoyed well heard, please send it to a friend and
keep the conversation going. And again thanks for listening.
Host
Molly Jong-Fast
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