Samantha Power, Rep. Jim Himes & Hugo Lowell

Congressman Jim Himes explains to us why Washington, DC should make laws for itself. Then USAID's Samantha Power talks to us about the war in Ukraine as it enters year two and a post-earthquake Turkey. Plus, Hugo Lowell gives us a wrap-up of CPAC and Trump's controversial speech.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds, and Carry Lake beat Ronda Santis in
a sepack straw Paul to beat Trump's running mate in
whatever that means. We have a fascinating show for you today.
Congressman Jim Hines explains to us why Washington, DC should

(00:23):
make laws for itself. Then we have USA AIDS Samantha
Power talking to us about the war in Ukraine as
it enters year two, and a post earthquake Turkey. But
first we have the Guardians Political Investigations reporter Hugo Law.
Welcome back to Fast Politics, Hugo Law, Hi, thanks for

(00:43):
having me so sepack discuss he was the Trump Show
for real. I think the first few days when Trump
wasn't there, it was really low key and the biggest
draw was Steve Bannon and the last day was Trump.
And when Trump was there, it was just Trump. I

(01:06):
wasn't at the seatback, which you know, because what I
noticed was that it seemed more sparsely attended than usual.
Do you think that's right? Yeah? Look, I think the
first few days when Trump wasn't there, It was very
sparsely attended, even for some of the keynote speeches. For
people who you think might draw big crowds in MAGA world,

(01:29):
people like Matt Gates, people like Lie Stefanik, Nikki Haiti
might compare. The auditorium was maybe at best forty percent ful.
And I was watching Steve Bannon do his show live
just outside the conference center. There were people in the
crowd talking to themselves being like, oh, you know Matt
Gates on now, do you want to go see Matt Gates?
And they'll be like, now, what would want to go

(01:50):
see Matt Gates? The real show is here? And so
I think that kind of encapsulates how, you know, even
the MAGA members of Congress to the Ultramaga you know,
Trump supporters, to them, it's not really as interesting as
someone like Steve Bannon, who they see as the real
kind of maga og celebrity. You're blowing my brain here
for a minute. You're saying that ce Bannon is more

(02:12):
central to MAGA world now than Macates. Yeah. I mean
the two chants that you heard the most during sepack
was Trump, Trump, Trump, or let's take down the CCP
and let's take down the CCP is the kind of
jingle slash music that Bannon plays in the intro and
outro to his show. I think he really is. You know,

(02:36):
he has taken the MAGA brand further right than even
in twenty sixteen and through the administration. And I think
the member of Congress, you know, they were talking about
like policy and how like Biden was bad, and you know,
the sepackack crowd, I think, you know, gives appreciation for that,
and you would hear like the smattering of applause. But
what they really were therefore was Trump and anything beyond that.

(02:58):
If it wasn't Bannon a bit of a sideshow, what
about Don Junior? I mean what I've read was that
Don Junior and Kimberly go Foil and Marjorie Taylor Green
who is a huge small dollar raiser, that all three
of them could barely put together crowds. Yeah, their speeches,

(03:19):
you know, they're roughly around twenty minutes thirty minutes long,
and they could not fill the auditorium. The only person
outside Trump who was able to fill the auditorium really
was banned. And he probably got to want to say
about sixty and I think it's just the reflection of
it's Trump or nothing. I don't know how else to
describe it. It's like it's become more trumpy than any

(03:41):
other seapack before. And I don't know if this is
a reaction to kind of his ultra loyal supporters being like,
you know, we have to show that we're still behind
Trump and you know, all this discussion about DeSantis is
garbage and we need to we need to, you know,
show our enthusiasm more. Or if it is just that
this particular crowd that came to this particular seepack was

(04:04):
particularly trumping. But either way, you know, none of the
other members of Congress, as as Trump allied as they were,
were able to generate the sort of enthusiasm and crowds
that you might otherwise expect. It was really notable. It's
so interesting to me because, I mean, how much of
this do you think is because of the allegation surrounding

(04:28):
match Lab, the herschel Walker staffer who is suing match
Lab for eight point seven million dollars And how much
of this do you think is just because Mago world
is split or Trump World is split. I think it's
a bit of both. I think initially, you know, in
the first few days when it really was empty, because
it really was empty like it was, it was surprising

(04:51):
the extent to which people were not there. And I
think originally people are like, oh, you know, this is
really because match Lab and you know, people don't want
to be associated seapack, especially the vendors and you know,
even the far right kind of media outlets, you don't
want to be associated with Seapack Box was not there
this year. The headline media sponsor was Newsmax kind of

(05:11):
sad and RAV and RSPN What's Rav, Real America's Voice
which host Bannon Show, and then RSPN Right Side Broadcasting News, Yes,
which I've watched before commiserations Yeah exactly, makes Fox look
like yeah, look like the BBC. No, that's basically right.

(05:36):
And I think by the time that Trump got to
the stage, though, I think it had filled out. And
I wonder if you know, people clearly came for Trump
on that final day on Saturday as well, so maybe
they put their reservations about match Lap aside and they
were like, we want to see Trump speak, or it
was not exactly clear. Is the is the answer for now?
Even among the attendees, there was an acknowledgment that yes,

(05:59):
you know, the allegations around match Lap are kind of
not great, and you know, we don't want to be
associated with that. So I listened to that speech and
I thought it seemed pretty bad. But it seems like people,
some people who are like more even Trump versed than me,
were even more horrified like that. Some of the lines

(06:23):
he said were like the furthest he's ever gone. Do
you think that's true? And do you agree with that, Adam?
What do you think? So? I have three takeaways from
the speech. The first was it was really energetic at
the start. You know, when he was talking about the
Department of Justice and how DJ is coming after him
and how Jack Smith is an animal. You know, that
really fired him up. You could see that person and

(06:45):
he kind of animated him in a way that the
policy stuff he was talking about really didn't as much
as he liked. Right. But you know, but like you know,
this is kind of emblematic of kind of what gets
him going and what really puts kind of fire and
in his campaign. And it makes sense because remember in
twenty twenty, they decided not to have a platform, right

(07:06):
and you know, when he's talking about the policy and like, oh,
you know, I want to have you know, a baby boom,
and you know I want to you know, I want
to send MS that team back to All of the
policy points to me were things he'd said before, you know,
things like ending the Department of Education. You know, he
has said all of this before. Baby boom. I have
never heard him talk about a baby boom. That's straight

(07:26):
out of Turkey. I mean, that's real authoritarian stuff right there,
right that's ethno nationalism. I mean that I do think
is now no fair enough. But I think if you
if you take those speech as a whole, a lot
of the content, you know, he had said elsewhere, whether
it wasn't the gaggle that he did previously or kind
of previous appearances or previous speeches, the content as a

(07:48):
whole was not new. The thing that really animated him
was the DOJ stuff. And when he was complaining about
personal grievances, not only did that animate him, but because
he was so energized by that, it also energize the crowd.
And I think if you speak, you know, I spoke
to his advisors yesterday night and this morning. They were like,
you know that clearly resonated, and that's the kind of

(08:10):
thing we're actually going to message going forward because it
does boost both his supporters as well as him himself.
So you didn't see authoritarian leaning there, or you just
saw the standard trumpy authoritarianism. I thought it was the
standard Trump authoritarism. I mean, not to discount the fact
that I think they were you know, authoritarian on the

(08:31):
turns throughout the speech, right, But this is not particularly
new for Trump, and I kind of expect this from
Trump now. You know, if he didn't have authoritarian on
the tones, I'd be like whoa, you know, yeah, I
would going on right, and this is this is a
dangerous territory. Something's wrong. So you think there's sort of
I am your retribution. There'll be more of that going forward. Yeah,

(08:51):
And I mean, look, you you speak to the campaign
that like this is what worked in twenty sixteen. We
talk so much about how you know, he is not
the same person as he was in twenty sixteen. The
country is not in the same place as the twenty
sixteen having been a president who now comes with that baggage,
so he can't be the underdog that he was. You know,
two cycles ago, but he wants to play that playbook

(09:13):
and he's going to do it regardless of whatever anyone
tells him. And that was on display. I think, you know,
it was a very bleak speech. It was how Biden's
America was supposedly destroying the country. How you know you
couldn't you didn't have any money to buy groceries or like,
you know, everyone's incomes have been set back. And you

(09:34):
know MS. He was back about MS thirteen. I mean,
we hadn't had that for a while. Like, he's back
about MS thirteen and it was really dark and then
he kind of portrays himself. But I'm your savior. He
does always have really dark speech. I mean remember his
his inauguration speech, right, but it was right out of that. Yeah,
w was like this was that was some weird shit.

(09:55):
It was straight out of the inauguration speech. You know,
Ross Worthington had a role in writing the speech, but
so did you know Stephen Miller, and so did Jason
who you know, these two guys who are back on
the campaign pretty much. So I think more of that
to come, and more attacks on the Department of Justice
because he has chilly found that that is a message
that lands with the base, and he's been struggling to

(10:17):
find that a little bit, and I think he actually
found that over seatback. Let's just game this out for
a minute. Trump continues doing this. I mean, he won
the straw poll Fox News and the donors all want
to Santis right, so they have their guy. So you

(10:37):
think that it doesn't matter and Trump will just keep running. Yeah,
And I think if you, I mean, from the campaign's perspective,
they look at feedback and they think of it as
a reset, right. They see this, as you know, seed
pack is a good representation of the right wing aliment,
of the Republican base right, and they're like, well, what
do the base want? The base want to Trump? Nicki

(10:58):
Haley gave a speech and while Nikki Hardy was taking
photos with her supporters, all the other attendees, you know,
came around and circled home or shot Trump Trump Trump,
and Nikki Hady couldn't get a path right, Like this
was a repudiation of the anti Trump sentiment. And the
campaign looked at that and thought, you know, this is

(11:19):
exactly the kind of thing we need more of. And
seepack reaffirms our belief that the base actually wants Trump.
And even if you know the Washington kind of lobbyists
and the establishment as they like to see it, think
they want the santis the campaigns like what doesn't matter,
because what does the base want? The base wants Trump? Right?
What other things were stand out for you that you saw?

(11:41):
And then I'll tell you what I found horrifying. I
keep connect to Bannon because you know, Bannon has not
been really a topic of discussion at all since January
sixth week his comments about how it's gonna be a
wild day, right, it was very interesting to see how
the base was kind of in tune with Bannon. They

(12:04):
loved his speech. I mean, short of Trump, the next
most frenzied speech where the crowd really went wild was
for Bannon, and he did fill out return. Are you
surprised that Don Junior has sort of I mean, he
used to be so beloved by that crowd and now
they just don't really seem to care. No, they didn't
seem to care. Yeah, it was a shift. Isn't that

(12:26):
strange to you? I don't know if it's if it's
so strange, I think it's been a shift, I think,
but it's I think it's a wider shift, and they'll
you know, I keep coming back to the same point.
I don't want to labor it. But the real takeaway
from this weekend was the base kind of fell back
in line behind Trump and they were like, look, you
know they're all these other maga you know, personalities, whether

(12:48):
it's mtg or Matt Gates or Bowbird or even Don Junior.
But the sense I got was they saw their president
under siege and they came out to support him, and
that was the mentality. So if that is true, then
indictments will only help him. Yeah. And you know he
said in the in the in the gaggle with reporters

(13:09):
before he did a speech, you know, he was asked
by newsmaxes James Risen, you know, would you continue to
run if you're indicted? And Trump very quickly said yes.
And even though he didn't appreciate the question, you know,
he was very confident in saying that. And you know,
we had always expected that, right. It was it was
not like Trump is going to be like, oh, you
inded to me, You got me, that's right. You know,

(13:30):
the campaign was just a ruse. I'm going to stop running,
right He clearly saw the reception that he got, and
especially when he was mentioning Jack Smith and the criminal
investigations into the multiple criminal investigations into him, and how
the crowd came to his defense, and he knows that
if he is indicted, it will only like increase his

(13:52):
support amongst the base, and it would probably lead to
to I think other candidates being unable to match the
kind of frenzy that come with the surface of trumping,
Like I'm an indicted presidential candidate and Democrats are just
trying to take me down. I think that's probably true.
Now here's my question for you. Then explain this to me.

(14:12):
So the base came out for Trump, but I mean,
like this was only the fourth media event he's done
since he declared. Right, you won't think the sort of
poor showing at Sepack is proof, and again I don't either,
But I want to know what you think is proof
that trump Ism is on its way out. I don't
think Trumpism is on its way out at all. I

(14:35):
think going into Sepack, there was a lot of doubt
as to whether Trump was on his way out. Now
coming out of it. On the other endment, looking back
into trump speech, I think the base is more behind
Trump than they ever have been in the last few
months since he's announced as candidacy. As for trump Ism,
it's never really been about the policies, really, you know,

(14:56):
it's been it has been about the characters and about
Trump in particular. And so if Trump is not down,
then I don't see Trumpism as being down because you can't.
To me, at least, you can't really have one without
the other. Otherwise you just get, you know, right wing authoritarianism.
That's kind of how I see the Santis right. Do
you think it was a mistake of DeSantis not to

(15:17):
go at all? If you think about like what Trump
would have done in that situation, he would have gone.
It's a really interesting question. And I thought about this
a lot over the weekend, and I think ultimately what
DeSantis did was probably quite strategic. It was a very
maga lineup. It was very trumpy if you think about
the speakers who were there. You know, Tom Finton was
there for instance, right, They were all real, really big

(15:40):
kind of Trump supporters, and given how the crowd turned out,
it was a very trumpy crowd. And I think if
DeSantis had gone, not only he would he have lost
the straw poll, but he would have suffered the ignomy
of losing a straw poll and also being there and
maybe also booed, and so you know, if you're not there,
you're like, God, well, yeah, I wasn't there, So who

(16:01):
cares if I lost the straw pole, as unscientific as
it is. And so I think it was probably a
pretty well calculated decision for him not to have gone.
Don't you think that's the problem with all of these candidates,
is like you can pretend to ignore Trump is hum
or Trump, You could pretend to ignore Trump, but ultimately
you need that bass if you want to win the nomination. Yeah,

(16:23):
and then that's what Trump is counting on. And I
think that's why Trump came out of that speech and
his advisors came out of that speech, you know, really
void by the reception that he got. Because everyone knows this,
including Haley and Pompeo and the Santis. They do need,
you know, at least part of that bass because now

(16:43):
you can win the nomination without it. It's like there
is an underlying you know thirty percent right, that is
very you know, Trump focused and Trump heavy. I just
didn't think it made any difference if the Santis had
done something else or gone and like she was always
going to lose that straw pole he was. He's always
not going to be the same as Trump. But it
does seem like these candidates are sort of ignoring Trump

(17:07):
or trying to run parallel to him. And again, I'm
no fan of just Santis. I'm more just talking about
the math here. The only way you possibly defeat someone
like Trump is by running against him and not around him. Yeah,
you know, if you're gonna go for the king, you know,
you got to you gotta knock him over, right, Like
there's no point just kind of hurting him. You really

(17:28):
have to kind of take him out. And it's not
clear that any other candidate to Santis or otherwise has
figured out what that potent knockout blow is going to be.
It certainly hasn't been evident. Based on what Haley was
saying in her speech, she had some interesting points. You know,
she talked about barn policy and how you know when
she was you an ambassador, you know, she started taking

(17:50):
away you know, eight countries that you know, we're quote
unquote kind of harming the United States, and that got
a good reception. But you know, anytime she made any
sort of implicit to Trump, you know, the crowd was
not having it. And I think all of these candidates
have this problem. I'll trying to figure out how do
they take out Trump in one fell suit that actually
really does take him out? And I'm not sure that

(18:11):
there is an outflet to that. Hugo Lowe, thank you
so much. I hope you will come back. Congressman Jim
Hines represents Connecticut's fourth district. Welcome to Fast Politics. Representative
Jim Mines, thanks for having me, Molly. First, let's talk
about I feel like it's the breaking news that wasn't

(18:32):
the Wall Street Journal, lablak piece. Sure, let's talk about that.
Let's talk briefly, Please briefly about balloons, if you want
to talk about it. So I've spent the last three
weeks talking about balloons, and then something tells me you
might want to talk a little politics, which I'm happy
to do as well. Perfect, But yeah, sure, let's start
with the lab leap. I'll tell you that that's a
story where there is a lot less than meets the eye, right,

(18:53):
And let me tell you this, it's pretty hard to
figure out the source of a pandemic with great precision,
when you have all the facts, when you can actually
interview people and you know, take soil samples and whatever
it is that you know people at the CDC do.
We're of course struggling with the fact that we're being
obfiscated from doing that by the Chinese government. And so

(19:13):
I say all that just to say, look, there's probably
always going to be some uncertainty here. So anybody who
says they know exactly what happened, they are not telling
you the truth what has happened. And the reason this
is in the press right now is that one of
seventeen elements of the intelligence community, specifically the Department of Energy,
moved away from thinking it was a lab leak to
thinking that it might have been a lab leak. And

(19:34):
by the way, they think it might have been a
lab leak with a low degree of confidence. So that's
why I tell you that this is really a story
where there's a lot less than meets the eye. Dissatisfyingly,
we may never actually know the answer. And like everything
else that's been politicized, like you know, the Biden administration
is hiding things, and why aren't they being tougher on China.

(19:54):
But really it's a story where it's just a lot
less than meets the eye. In my mind, the interesting
thing about the lab leak versus the wet market theory
is that isn't the answer, like, yes, yes, make wet
markets more secure and prevent this kind of thing from
happening again. And also, yes, make labs more secure and
prevent this kind of thing. Like I don't understand how

(20:16):
this changes the calculus of anything. Well, exactly exactly. I
was actually just talking to somebody about this yesterday. Here's
where I sit up and say, holy smokes. I sit
up and say, holy smokes. If you can say that
this is a virus that was created by somebody, we're
altered with a specific aim of killing lots of people. Now,
there's a whole bunch of reasons why that's a very

(20:37):
bad idea, not least of which is you can't control
who a virus kills. But that's when I sit up
and say, holy smokes. You know, the truth is that
lab leaks happen all the time. Is it possible that
this was a ladleak? Absolutely? Would we change our approach
to the Chinese other than to say Hey, you guys
probably should be a little stricter around your labs. I mean,
I guess we could get a lot of political hey
about saying look how bad they are, But yeah, fundamentally

(20:58):
this doesn't radically change regardless of what the final determination
may or may not be. And look, by the way,
you could even have a you know, a case in between.
What if you had a virus that the Wuhan Center
for Coronavirus whatever it's called, found in the wild, brought
into the lab and then at LEAs who knows, and sadly,
because of the obfuscation of the Chinese government, we may

(21:19):
never know for sure. I mean, there's sort of gotcha
here from the right, is that somehow that somehow the
media was trying to mislead them, And there's like a
lot of supposition between low confidence of a lab of
an accidental lab leak to this was part you know,
like there you can sort of see the wheels turning.

(21:42):
I mean, I've watched a lot of conservative television lately,
including Seapack, so I know that the move after that
is this was Anthony Fauci's lie. Right, So this story
is getting a lot of airtime because it wins both
the Platinum and the Goal medal of right wing anger Right.

(22:03):
The Platinum award goes to the ability to paint the
Chinese as ineluctably evil. They were irresponsible, They've covered it up.
That's just right wing oscar territory. The other thing it
allows them to do, and here's the Gold medal and
the right wing media sweep Stakes, is to criticize the
US government even though there's no evidence whatsoever that the

(22:25):
US government should be criticized. You know, they can just say, oh, well,
you know, two years ago, this bureaucrat said that, and
now they're saying, you know, now the Department of Energy
is saying something different. And in some ways that's what
makes me most nervous, because I hear this twenty four seven,
which is ever since Donald Trump decided that because federal
bureaucrats are in the business they're not always successful in this,

(22:47):
but because they're in the business of trying to use
evidence based methods to keep our food supply safe, to
keep our society a rule of law society. Truth is
a toxin to that way of thinking, and therefore this
whole deep state theory grows up. And anytime they have
an opportunity, even if there's not a shred of evidence
to make the claim that the government is hiding something

(23:09):
or incompetent, or Fauci is in league with George Soros.
That's just you know, catint for them. Yes, and so
speaking of China, the whole idea here is the idea
on the conservative side that somehow democrats like China better
than Russia. As we both know, Republicans have done a
lot of bonding with Russia, they like it, and various

(23:32):
autocrats and now we're in this involved in this Ukraine.
So there are certainly a lot of the sort of
far right fringe that loves Russia, and they sort of
they sort of are trying to imply the Democrats like China.
That's going to move us to our next question about
the balloons. I'm sorry, I apologize in advance for the balloons.
The idea here Conservatives were furious at the balloon that

(23:56):
Biden had not shot down the balloons sooner, even though
it does seem that he was advised not to shoot
down the balloon sooner. Just quickly, let's do the balloons
for five minutes. Also, isn't it interesting that nobody the
balloons have completely disappeared now from the consciousness. Let's talk balloons.
But let's spend forty five seconds on what you just say,
because it's really important. I think you're right. I do

(24:18):
think that in some right wing circles there is this
notion that, you know, the Democrats somehow like China better
than they like Russia. And look, this goes back to
Donald Trump, right, who you know, loved Vladimir Putin, right,
stood there with Vladimir Putin and said, I don't believe
my own intelligence community. I believe you standing there in Rakjevic, right.
And you know, there's all sorts of background reasons why

(24:39):
the right wing likes Russia. Right. You know, Vladimir Putin
is blue brutal on the LGBT population. You know, if
you're Donald Trump and you you have the power to
make your security services hurl your opponents from seven story windows,
as seems to happen an awful lot in Russia. If
you're Donald Trump sitting in marlagoh man, you wish you
could do that, right, But I mean, my god, look
at the history here, right. You know who the opening

(25:00):
to China. It was Richard Nixon, Republican president who did
the sort of opening to Gorbachev, you know, it was
Ronald Reagan, you know. So my point is that the
notion that we like one country more than the other,
it's just sort of an absurd notion that reflects their
own Trumpian views of the world. But onto balloons, great,
onto balloons, yes, more importantly, onto balloons, well, equally important

(25:21):
because the other thing I think that's really important that
we talk about is this idea we really are in
a situation as a country where we want neither war
with Russia nor China. Yeah, that's right, and for good reason, right,
I mean, these are nuclear armed powers, right, we want
to go to great links to avoid war. But again
we need we need to just have the very basic

(25:43):
smarts here. Right. Russia is a country that does not
matter to us a lot economically. Right. It's very uncomfortable
when they stop sending their oil to Germany. Right, but
it's very tiny. It's economy is smaller than California, exactly,
well smaller than California. So and by the way, they
are I think of them as almost sort of vandals, right,

(26:04):
you know, they just sort of go they just do
things in the world to destabilize democracies and stuff the Chinese. Look,
there's all kinds of reasons to be angry at the Chinese.
Their human rights record, the way they treat the Muslims
in their western provinces, the way they steal our I mean,
I could go on all day. There's all kinds of
reasons to be angry at the Chinese as well, not
least of which is they're perhaps interest invading Taiwan. But

(26:26):
they're different, right, They own a trillion dollars of United
States Treasury bonds. Right, that's a problem. There's something like
six or seven hundred billion dollars. They're one of our
largest trading partners. So you just need to think about
them a little bit differently, right, Exactly, it's not the same.
The two things are not comparable. But just the balloons quickly,
I mean, these are like eleven miles up, these balloons, right. Yeah.

(26:50):
The idea here on the conservative side was that somehow
these balloons going over Montana, we're spying in a way.
The Chinese satellites were not discussed. There's reasons why you
might want balloons. Why a fancy satellite can cost you
a billion dollars, right, A balloon costs you almost nothing.
So you know, if you have a strategy that says
we're going to float balloons over Taiwan to see what's

(27:11):
going on, that balloon's gonna get shot down in one day.
But you know what, it doesn't cost us much. There's
reasons right. Satellite is also move pretty fast. Balloons moved
pretty slow, so if you really want to get a
good look at something, so there's a logic why you
might want to have a balloon. The first balloon was
absolutely a Chinese five balloon. Everybody's angry, or at least
the Republicans are angry at Biden for not shooting it down,
to which I would say two things. As we watched

(27:31):
that balloon drift over the United States, Boy did we
learn a lot about that balloon that we wouldn't have
learned if we'd blown it out of the sky over
the Pacific. Number two, they say, oh, but lots of
secret Scott exposed folks under the Open Skies Treaty. You
can look it up on Wikipedia. Under the Open Skies Treaty,
Russian military aircraft overfly our missile fields with some regularity,

(27:52):
and by the way, we do that with them too,
and the idea is that we get a look at
what they're doing to make sure they're abiding by their agreements.
So it turns out we're really really good when we
know that a Russian aircraft is coming, or in particular
Russian aircraft or a Chinese balloon, we're really good at
closing the doors and hiding the stuff that we don't
want to see. So I don't think a lot of
good stuff was lost to that balloon, and we got

(28:12):
a chance to get a really good look at how
it behaves, what it's made of, what its attributes are.
So I think the President did the right thing. His
military commanders advised him not to shoot it down because
of the risk of people on the ground. And again
back to the Republicans, if the President has shot it
down over Montana, they would be blowing him up for
ignoring the advice of his military commander. So exactly, so,
I want to know, we were talking about the Chinese balloons,

(28:36):
talking about China, talking about how do you work in
the new McCarthy Congress. Let's go well, so in my
own little world of the Intelligence Committee, we're working pretty well.
My Republican chairman, Mike Turner is a serious national security guy.
I see him making a real effort to be bipartisan.

(28:56):
He did not like the way the Intelligence Committee was
in the last couple of years when it so politicized.
So he's making a good effort. Bigger picture, Republicans aren't
going to really pass anything. Certainly are not going to
pass anything that became law. And I want you and
everybody else to look at what they're doing and think
what we did two years, right, we control the place.
Two years we capped drug prices insulin thirty five dollars.

(29:16):
We made the biggest investment in our infrastructure since the
Eisenhower era. We made the biggest investment in addressing climate
change ever. You know, we did a bipartisan gun safety think.
I could go on. I could talk for the next
ten minutes about the things that we did that will,
over time make a life better for the American people.
And you know what we've seen out of a Republican Congress.
They kicked ill on Omar off the Foreign Affairs Committee.

(29:39):
Yesterday we got this weird plan to reduce inflation by
making the president determine how inflationary and executive order is.
It's just bananas, right, and because I have a fundamental
faith in the intelligence of the American people. At the
end of two years under McCarthy, they're going to say,
oh my god, what did you guys? Do you focused
on Hunter Biden's la top You focused on drag story

(30:03):
hours at library? Democrats cut the price of our prescription drugs. Man,
let me run in twenty twenty four. With that as
the contrast, Biden has said this much. It seems like
the Republican Congress is very much helping the Democrats. Yeah. Again,
there are serious issues out there. I hear them every

(30:23):
single day in Fairfield County, Connecticut. Forget about rural Mississippi,
serious issues, economic anxiety, drug prices are too high, the
rent is too high. If the Republicans spend the next
two years fighting culture war battles about drag story hour
at some library in Orlando, they're going to get dusted

(30:47):
in twenty twenty four. Right, exactly, how are you about
this DC Council Joe Biden thing, because that seems like
there's a call for DC statehood. Can you explain it
to our listeners and just where you come down on it. Yeah, yeah,
So the explanation is pretty straightforward. The City of Washington,

(31:07):
as a federal city doesn't really control its own destiny.
And what I mean by that is that Congress can
override the decisions that the mayor and the City Council
of Washington make. That's just the law. I don't think
it should be the law because I happen to believe
in democracy and that people should govern themselves. Crazy idea,
I know, but that's the fact. And so, and when

(31:32):
two bills came before the House three weeks ago to
override two different laws that the City Council and do
Order were made for the city of Washington, I voted
no on overriding them. I didn't even think too too
hard about what those laws were because my fundamental belief
is that the people of Washington should determine the laws

(31:52):
that they live under, and that the representative from Connecticut's
fourth District shouldn't override their will. Again, all the crazy,
but I believe in self determination and democracy. Now the
President has made a different choice. You know, he apparently
is going to let this go through. I'm not going
to try to explain to you why he is doing that,
but I am puzzled because he supports DC statehood which

(32:15):
presumably means he supports the people of the city of
the District of Columbia controlling their own destiny. And that's
not what's about to happen if he vetoes this thing.
So I'm trying to be consistent. Again. I can't imagine
a case in which I would seek to override a
law that was democratically passed by the city of Washington.
But the President obviously has a different view. Yeah, it's

(32:37):
so interesting. Tell me what's on your radar for now
that what's coming up. Yeah, you know, the big thing
on my radar is not something that is going to
make a lot of headlines. But we've got a lot
of work to do to make sure that the incredible
stuff that we passed in the last Congress, and I'm
talking about the immense amounts of infrastructure investment that is
going to you know, rebuild our bridges and provide broadband

(32:58):
to people who don't have it. Today, I'm talking about
the Chips Semiconductor Bill, which is supposefully going to move
a lot of the semiconductor business back to our shores.
We have a lot of work to do to make
sure that that those resources get deployed intelligently, without fraud,
without waste, and that they get deployed quickly, right because
these problems are not problems five years from now, they're

(33:20):
problems today. So that's not sexy stuff that sort of
falls into the category of oversight and implementation. But if
we're going to turn a bunch of headlines into real
benefit for the people that I represent, it's going to
be because we really push to get that investment made
intelligently and quickly. I love chips and we have had
many many Inport Jesse. We've had many, many interviews about

(33:44):
the Chips Act, including Gina Romando. It's really an important issue,
the Chips Act. There is an environmental rule in the
Chips Act that there's been some encouragement that the administration
should sort of right right around four. Are you going
to push them to follow that environmental the more standard

(34:09):
environmental laws that we have. Yeah, yeah, So let me
answer that. Not with chips, because with chips we're building factories, okay,
and you're building factories. You're talking about a lot of
local zoning, a lot of this, and that I will
tell you that we need to do this quickly. Right,
It's not good enough to have fixed this problem twenty
years from now. But let me redirect your question a

(34:31):
little bit around the infrastructure, right, because the infrastructure is
in a couple of factories. The infrastructure is rebuilding our
electrical our national electrical transmission system. And here's why that's
an interesting topic, more interesting than it sounds on the surface. Right.
You know, we are doing advanced battery technology, we're trying
to transition to electric cars. You know, we're building out

(34:52):
charging stations. In order for all of that stuff to work,
we need to rebuild our electrical transmission system. Now, these
are the wire You see these in certain places out
west and everywhere. You see them on the horizon, massive
towers carrying power, carrying wind power from Texas to you
wherever it goes. And we need to rebuild that. And
the problem is that if we move at the same

(35:13):
pace that we typically move, we'll rebuild it thirty years
from now, which is not fast enough to address the
carbon problem in our atmosphere. So the answer to your
question at the end of that long speech is yes,
we absolutely need to do permitting reform that balances the
need to not do stupid things environmentally with the absolute

(35:35):
imperative that we rebuild our energy system in as rapid
a pace as possible so that we don't end up
with a planet that is uninhabitable. So I do support
permitting reform. I know the President supports permitting reform. That's
not to say a responsible permitting reform. But if we're
going to change the way we still our atmosphere with
carbon quickly, it's because we're going to move a lot

(35:56):
more rapidly on the projects that we need to do
to actually do that solve that problem. Jim Himes, thank
you so much for joining us. Thank you, Molly. Always
fun to talk. Samantha Power is the administrator of USAID.
Welcome too fast Politics. Samantha Power. Great to be here.
We have so much to talk about. First, I wanted

(36:19):
to talk to you about what is the sort of
most recent thing that you guys have been working on,
which is the situation in Ukraine. Can you talk to
us a little bit about It's a year and that's
been a very important moment for a lot of reasons,
and including in the refugee crisis. Just stepping back, it's

(36:40):
a year since Putin gratuitously decided to inflict brutality and
try to take over a sovereign member of the United Nations,
and a year in which President Biden rallied the democracies
of the world, but not only the democracies of the world,
more than one hundred and four countries at the UN

(37:01):
to condemn the invasion multiple times now, which I know
from having been a UN ambassador is not easy because
people's interests fade. The intimidation and pressure that the Russian
Federation places on countries not to vote to do something
that might to the outsiders seem kind of symbolic, which
is vote against Russia is pretty hard for small countries

(37:22):
to withstand, particularly those who are invulnerable parts of the world.
So the coalition is held really strong. As President Biden
often talks about, Putin went in thinking he would take
Ukraine in a matter of days and also thought he
would weaken NATO and divide the world, and it's really
been quite the contrary. Basically, just about everything that Putin

(37:43):
thought would happen has not happened, and its opposite has happened.
In terms of USAID, which is the part that I
get to work on every day, and I feel just
really fortunate to be in this job at this time.
We are touching a lot of aspects of the war,
and in a way that a lot of Americans probably
aren't that aware of. Can you back up for a
second and explain, because I don't know that everybody knows

(38:06):
what USAID is. So USAID is the world's premier development
and humanitarian agency, and we basically do everything from respond
to humanitarian emergencies, sending disaster assistance response teams like we
just did in response to the earthquake in Syria and Turkey,
figuring out in a sense where we spend taxpayer resources,

(38:29):
which humanitarian organizations we give them those resources, to feeding people,
providing medical care, providing mental health services to women who've
suffered sexual violence, you name it. So that's all in
the emergency space. And then in the so called development space,
we're doing everything from vaccinating the world as we did

(38:51):
over the course of the the last couple of years, the
developing countries, I should say, particularly to investing in food
security to make sure that farmers actually have access to
see needs that are more drought and heat resistant, given
what's the climate change that is walloping so many countries period,
so many communities period, but especially those living on the
margins are the hardest hit, as is so often the case.

(39:13):
And then we do democracy support, helping countries build independent
media sectors. In Ukraine well before this invasion, we help
the country build up its anti corruption institutions, which of
course we're not working flawlessly, but nonetheless are are part
of what President Zelenski's been using to crack down on

(39:33):
corruption allegations. Even during the war. We've helped the Ukrainians
again pre war, pre this war, build something called the
Ministry of Digital Transformation. They have some of the best
cybersecurity in the world. That's USAID investments there, and now
that the war has started, just to pivot to that,
when Putin tries to take out critical energy infrastructure, it

(39:54):
is USAID more than any other actor and more than
any other country that is whooping in to provide everything
from generators to boilers, to replacement pipes, to additional engineering support,
to rotating power plants or mobile power plants. And so
we've dedicated about four hundred billion dollars to so called

(40:18):
winterization efforts, namely, as Putin tried to weaponize winter and
in a sense freeze people into wanting to turn over
territory or end the war, we try to offset that
tactic and keep people warm, and we're heading towards spring here.
We're not there yet. It's still bitter cold in many
parts of Ukraine, but at least in a sense to

(40:40):
buy time, so that again the Ukrainian military, which has
been so brave and so fearsome really on the battlefield,
you know, you would hate for something on the civilian
side to be the difference between whether on the military
side they were able to prevail. But if the lights
were to go out on the state, if pension weren't
get weren't to get paid, if health services were to

(41:02):
shut down, and those are all things that USAID is
helping support again thanks to bipartisan support from Congress. You know,
that would really undermine the war effort as a whole.
So while the latest military system, you know, gets the headlines,
how medical institutions in Ukraine continue to function for civilians,
how people manage not to freeze to death, that's all

(41:24):
in the purview of USAID. USAID. Yes, you've been a
war correspondent, You've won a Pulitzer Prize, not nothing, and
you've had, you know, all of these government jobs. I'm curious,
like how that informs you know, you were in Bosnia, right,
which was like one of the worst wars of our lifetime.

(41:46):
I mean, just can you explain a little bit. Now
you are running an organization that serves the people that
you couldn't serve when you were reporting on Bosnia, I mean,
how does that inform Yeah, no, it's it's a great question.
I'd say a couple of things. I mean, first, just
on the specifics of having covered Bosnia as a war

(42:06):
correspondent and now seeing Ukraine, it's chillingly familiar in many
respects the use of sexual violence as a seemingly willful
tactic of war. A fair amount of evidence just in
the sense that everywhere Russian forces have occupied you see
women who have been subjected to gang rape and imprisoned
and again having had sexual torture inflicted upon them, and

(42:31):
then the mass graves of course emerging for every territory
that Ukraine takes back. That's a lot like what was
happening in the form of Yugoslavia. And recall that was
an anomaly at the time where it felt like an anomaly,
and that the Cold War had ended, people were feeling
very hopeful. So Union had collapsed. It looked like democracy
was on the march. Now, I think what is so

(42:54):
grim about today's war in Ukraine is it is a
superpower bringing those same tactics, that same effort to strip
a people of their identity, of their dignity, and again
to just inflict horrific suffering with the population size of
the Russian Federation, with the military stockpiles of the Russian Federation,

(43:17):
you know, not not just some small makeshift Bosnian Serb army,
you know, back in the day. And so when you combine,
even if the Russians are performing very badly and obviously
didn't think this through or plan properly, nonetheless they have
a lot of firepower to bring to bear on behalf
of the war crimes that they appear to be committing

(43:38):
in the areas that they operate. So it's it's kind
of it takes what I experienced up close in a
small scale. I mean, it was a big scale for
anybody who was suffering at the time, but it just
puts it on steroids almost, And that's what's chilling. I
will say, I do take some solace from my experience
in that when I was a war correspond and so

(44:00):
many of our years. In my colleagues who are still
you know, around and writing, you know, had that seminal
experience as well, because it was really where a lot
of journalists kind of cut their teeth at that time
in the nineties. But we would never have guessed that
these warlords and political leaders who were inflicting such pain

(44:20):
on civilians that they ever would have been held accountable.
It would have been it would have been like saying,
you know, my next job was going to be to
be an astronaut, like it was, so it would have
been so crazy. They were so filled with arrogance and confidence.
And it's not to say that there are inevitable parallels
between what's happening in Ukraine and what happened in Bosnia,

(44:40):
but it is to say, you just don't know. And
so there's a lot of skepticism. Oh okay, usaid, you're
helping document all these war crimes. We've helped document more
than thirty thousand war crime alleged work crimes so far
in Ukraine. But people said, oh, yeah, but look at Putin.
You know, he's there at his long table, and how
is that ever going to change? And people are afraid
of him? And not to say again that anybody can

(45:02):
predict precisely what's going to happen, right, but you have
this reference point of Bosnia. Yeah, it's a contingent, you know,
and all you can you know, like I always say
to my kids, control what you can control. All we
can control at this point, as it relates on that matter,
is to document, to take depositions, you know, to establish

(45:22):
courtroom ready stockpiles of evidence. And it could be anything
from a Russian who travels and then and that has happened,
you know, and travels and then gets extradited to Ukraine.
Or it could be that the International Criminal Court ends
up taking up a case because they've opened an investigation.
We are building this evidence at the Human Rights Council.

(45:42):
So again the point is simply, we know from history
that life is long and unfortunately the people being having
these walcomes inflicted. The pain is now. But we do
have responsibility to build that record and history may turn.
And just to close the loop on Bosnia, of course,
these names are now you know, bit nobody's talking about
these people in any board but rock Go Lottage, sloban On, Miloshevich,

(46:04):
Rodivan carriage. They just you know, they were strutting around
and they all ended up behind bars. Yeah, it strikes
me that there are like a number of issues with
what's happening in Ukraine and China's relationship with Russia and
how you guys navigate that, you know, it is very,
very challenging. China is a permanent member of the Security Council,

(46:26):
as is the United States, as is Russia. We would
expect that the People's Republic of China, which has long
stressed the importance of sovereignty right as a way of
keeping countries from looking into human rights conditions inside the PRC.
Chinese diplomats have always talked about sovereignty and it's every
state's right to do what it wants within its borders

(46:49):
and territorial integrity and all the like. We would have
expected a country that, for so many years, I should
say we would have expected, we would have hoped that
a country that over so many years made so much
of sovereignty and territorial integrity would leap to publicly and
plainly make clear that what the Russian Federation is doing,

(47:11):
namely trying to erase a UN member state, is not
only antithetical to the UN Charter, and to all international
humanitarian law in terms of the way they're prosecuting that war,
but completely antithetical to what the Chinese leadership have been
saying four decades that, you know, what has been the
core of the foreign policy message from Beijing that has

(47:32):
not happened. Obviously, the growing relationship prior to this war
between President Putin and President She their shared interest in
not having human rights norms, wanting human rights norms to
be weakened, hoping that they would not have traction, wanting
to be able to lock up who they want within
their own borders or do what they want to ethnic

(47:55):
minorities within their borders. So they have a lot of
shared interests of that nature in terms of what they
want the international rules of the road to be. And
as a result, I think you see Beijing again acting
and talking inconsistently in many respects from their previous positions.
Now that said, Molly, you know what's noteworthy is notwithstanding

(48:18):
the closeness of that personal relationship between the two leaders,
I think they referred prior to the wars this being
a relationship without limits. That was the language. And yet
the PARC is not standing with Russia either, So they
are notably abstaining and in a sense trying to stay
trying to still sort of say that they're very much

(48:39):
in favor of sovereignty in tertial integrity, and yet also
now having just put forward a peace plan. I think
we are You and I are talking during a week
where we in the United States and our allies have
expressed concern that the PARC may take decisions now that
would put them more squarely on on Russia's side in

(49:01):
waging this war of aggression, namely, if they were to
provide lethal assistance that would be moving the PRC into
a much more frontally aligned position with Moscow. We have
seen no indication, to be clear, that they have yet
made this decision. You've seen a lot of US diplomacy
and public statements to just underscore what a terrible mistake

(49:22):
that would be. So Beijing again appears not to have
taken off the table, but we haven't yet seen an
indication that they're going to move forward. And that's good news.
It would be better news if it was off the
table entirely because it would be such a mistake. But
certainly we think it's very important for the war to end,
which is what Chinese officials do say they want for

(49:44):
the costs of Russia's actions to be borne by Russian officials,
by the Russian government, because the way wars end is
when the costs outweigh the perceived benefits were going on.
So it would not be good for the cause of
peace if you know, China were to get involved on
the lethal side. It would be very inconsistent with the

(50:07):
peace plan that the PARC has just put forward. And
I think an important point is that in the long term,
the PARC is you know, wants to be a world leader,
you know, wants very much to increase its standing in
the global South. Those are the markets for Chinese goods,
you know, that have really helped fuel Chinese economic development,

(50:27):
which has been so explosive prior to the pandemic and
has lifted so many Chinese citizens out of poverty. I mean,
they are they are playing this longer game, you know,
with an eye through the Belt and Road initiative and
their building and their development assistance and their very substantial
loans which unfortunately carry very high interest rates in developing countries.

(50:48):
But nonetheless they are you know, doing all of this well. Again,
more than one hundred and forty countries within the UN
have condemned Russia. For Beijing to throw its lot in
with Russia in this or I think would be very
counterproductive in light of those larger ambitions. So I want
to ask you about the earthquake and air dewan in

(51:09):
Turkey time, thinking about there's been this rise in these
authoritarian states, and Turkey now has this earthquake. I mean,
first of all, it's just a syriing event in the
lives of you know, easily well over a million a
million people in Syria, and I think if you take
Turkey and Syria together, it's more than ten million people

(51:31):
likely affected. About three million people have lost their homes
and are imagine again it's still winter. It's extremely difficult.
We saw the as we attempted to support the rescue
with our search and rescue teams, just the dead of
winter and the snow and the frigid conditions making that
even more challenging than it always is. You know, our

(51:52):
objective is to come in behind national authorities when they
have the capacity to respond, and certainly that was true
in Turkey. They're in a sensible protection FEMA equivalent did
a very good job that the scope and the scale
of what they were up against was woe, you know,
just not something that any any agency couldn't prepare for.

(52:12):
I think Syria syrias worse off, right, It's just so
much more challenging because you have the regime, of course,
which had gassed its people and inflicted on its people
the equivalent of daily earthquakes by pulverizing civilian centers and
apartment buildings and medical facilities throughout that war continuously for

(52:32):
years and years and years, yeah, continuously, and so creating
scenes just like that. But you know, if there had
been a respite in a community and somebody might have
been displaced two, three, four times from different places that
ASSAD had terrorized, maybe they finally had an apartment and
then if they were in it live or Aleppo, maybe
that apartment in all likelihood, you know, has either been
damaged or destroyed in this earthquake. So it's just compounding

(52:54):
crisis after compounding crisis. We don't work of course with
the Syrian government there slated, they're sanctioned. We are continue
to hold them accountable for the atrocities in these ways.
The epicenter of harm occurred actually in opposition controlled areas
because there are still parts of Syria that are controlled
by opposition elements. The challenge there is extremist groups, of course,

(53:18):
have been present in many of those areas, and there
are a lot of restrictions or safeguards that we have
to have in place so that our resources are not
going to an ISIS affiliate or to an Alkada affiliate.
It's hard to find quote unquote good god, Well, no,
there there are plenty haoker guys. To be clear, there
are plenty of like the White Helmets famously are They're

(53:40):
digging people out of the rubble with the most rudimentary
support from much of the outside world. But you just
always know that these extremists lurk and can take advantage
of these circumstances, so you just have to be careful.
So I think all of that to say, the response
was much much slower the international response. There wasn't that
same national infrastruct sure because as SAD again is not

(54:01):
present in the worst affected areas, that scale up is happening.
The United States have announced one hundred and eighty five
million dollars worth of assistance so far. Most of our
assistance that flows from this point is likely to go
to Syria to try to compensate again for the much
more rudimentary infrastructure there. But it is going to be
a dark and long road to recovery, just again because

(54:25):
of the pre existing conditions in the communities that have
been afflicted. Yeah, oh no, I'm sure. Do you think
that sort of Turkey might have a moment of being
able to sort of dislodge airdan Well, I mean, they
have their democratic elections are coming up here, and I
think it's unclear how the earthquake is going to affect

(54:45):
either the conditions. I mean a lot of people are
worried about where they're going to sleep the next night,
and so whether they're also thinking about voting or not,
you know, I don't know. I'm not close enough to it.
But also in general, when emergencies hit, it's very unpredictable
kind of what the effect of an emergency, or the
response to the emergency, or questions about decisions made prior

(55:06):
to the emergency. He all of that comes together to
inform voter opinion. So again I wouldn't comment on that,
But the UN has issued a four hundred million dollars
appeal for Syria, but you know that's just several months
worth of resources. Would we need to needed to just
even provide temporary shelter. The Turkish appeal is a billion
dollars and not to have every aspect of our conversation

(55:29):
be depressing and dark, but it is. This earthquake just
lands at a time when you have almost a billion people,
you know, facing very severe food insecurity, and where the
knock on effects of Putin's invasion of Ukraine because Ukraine
was the bread basket of the world. Forty percent of
the World Food Program's food comes from Ukraine, Jesus, and
so you know, for Putin to invade, take out so

(55:52):
many of the major ports, you know, block or you
reduced to a trickle the export of grain from the
world's bread basket. Put On exploded ordinances and land mines
all over land, even that his forces were vacating. I mean,
it's it is just such a horrible gratuitous compounding factor.

(56:12):
And it was bad enough, you know, before the earthquake,
and then the earthquake hit, and suddenly there's more than
ten million people who are in need of some form
of assistance between Turkey and Syria. So so it's a
very difficult time. You ever more scarce resources and ever
more demands on those resources. So if your listeners are
inclined to want to help with any of these emergencies,

(56:34):
we have at USAID on our website just a list
of organizations that are vetted and our great partners of ours.
So it's CIDI dot org, Cidi dot org, and whether
the earthquake or the war in Ukraine, there are lots
of ways to contribute. Thank you, Samantha Power, thank you
Molly Jess Canon. You know, one of my least favorite

(57:00):
things is that these Daily Wire nerds. They represent nobody,
No one believes things they believe, but they get a huge,
huge platform through these bots. They do really well on Facebook.
They do really well on Facebook because they buy a
lot of Facebook adds that they've had a lot of audience.
They botted their podcasts, as we've seen people prove, and
now they get to talk at seapack at what happens.

(57:21):
Why don't we bought art? No, I'm just kidding, that's
a great idea. Yes, let's bot our podcast. Michael Knowles,
host of The Michael Knowles Show. Again, who the fuck
is that of the Daily Wire? So, like think of
Ben Shapiro, but lesser, a lesser Ben Shapiro, if that's
even possible, gave a speech at Seapack which at moments

(57:42):
sounded as he might say genocide all And here's the
direct quote. The problem with transgenderism is not that it's
inappropriate for children under the age of nine. He said,
the problem is that it isn't true. And then he
went on to sort of imply that transgender people should

(58:04):
not exist. You got a lot of publicity off of
that line and people saying that he was saying that
transgender people shouldn't exist, and he got furious because he
said he wasn't saying that, and decided he would sue
all these outlets. But of course he was saying that.
And again, this dance is the way in which people
on the far right try to use the media to

(58:26):
gin up engagement and raise money. And for that he
gets a hearty moment of fuckery. Michael Knowles, the lesser
Ben Shapiro, who is the lesser Tucker Carlson. That's it
for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday,
Wednesday and Friday to hear the best minds in politics

(58:47):
makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what
you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep
the conversation going. And again thanks for listening.