Barr and Other Hacks
We are halfway through the attempted coup – formerly known as the presidential transition process – and the United States has not completely collapsed (yet) so, yay? What a way to end 2020! We also discuss the vaccines and Biden’s electoral college win, so it’s not all bad news, we promise.
Chris Murphy:
Right now, the most serious attempt to overthrow our democracy in the history of this country is underway. Those who are pushing to make Donald Trump president for a second term, no matter the outcome of the election, are engaged in a treachery against their nation. You cannot, at the same time, love America and hate democracy. But as we speak, a whole lot of flag waving Republicans are nakedly trying to invalidate millions of legal votes because that is the only way that they can make Donald Trump president again. It is the only way they can make Donald Trump president again because he didn't win.
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the best selling books: The View From Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones. Our opening clip was Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut speaking on the floor of Congress.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the Trump administration and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
Remember, if we can defeat those bizarre Trumpists in Georgia who should both be under investigation for insider trading, and elect these wholesome patriots—Jon Ossoff and Reverend Raphael Warnock—to the Senate, the Democrats officially control the US Senate and Kamala Harris, the soon to be Vice President of the United States, will be the tiebreaker vote. This needs to happen.
Andrea Chalupa:
A whole new chance for humanity lays before us if we can manage to do this together, and we're going to be pushing for much needed financial relief for the millions plunged into poverty, a much needed climate legislation, much needed vote protection and election security legislation that Mitch McConnell has been blocking because he is evil and rotting from the inside. So, do what you can. Give to Jon Ossoff and Reverend Raphael Warnock. Go to their official campaign websites, donate and sign up to volunteer there. Commit to tweeting and posting on other social media sites about their campaigns every day, every other day, do what you can to get the word out.
Andrea Chalupa:
Join me and my dad in The Save Humanity From Mitch McConnell Gaslit Nation Challenge, make 1000 calls or send 1000 texts or send 1000 postcards by the deadline (which I believe is December 23rd) to voters in Georgia to get out to vote for Ossoff and Warnock. You have until Election Day, January 5th, to get the vote out by phone calls and texts.
Andrea Chalupa:
We're going to select three winners who tweet at us @gaslitnation on Twitter. Tell us how you're getting out to vote in Georgia, and we'll have those three winners on the show in the new year and send them each a signed copy of Sarah's book, Hiding in Plain Sight and a signed movie poster for Mr. Jones. Understand that our democracy does not work unless we do. So, please roll up your sleeves and do what you can.
Andrea Chalupa:
Now we have exciting news for humanity. We have two vaccines finally approved in the US by the FDA; Moderna and Pfizer. This is huge news. I just want to point out, not to be nationalistic or anything, but the world really didn't rejoice until these two global efforts of the Pfizer vaccine and the Moderna vaccine finally getting approval. Keep in mind that Russia weeks ago came out with its vaccine, and the world was like, mm-hmm (affirmative). [laughs] No one paid attention.
Andrea Chalupa:
Something like 150,000 poor souls had to get this Russia vaccine. Russia is trying to shove its vaccine around the world to its allies out there. I believe India and Brazil are being asked to take some. Russia's vaccine is like the Jan Brady of the vaccines. I know Putin is a thug. I know Putin, one of his strengths is that he goes there. He dares to go there and do ridiculous things that most countries have the decency not to, even though they certainly have the means. But at the same time, true power lies in trust and people choosing to follow you.
Andrea Chalupa:
That goes to show that for all the effort Putin's Kremlin puts into destabilizing democracies around the world, how much are they just self-inflicting their own wound and isolating themselves by us not showing up for their vaccine? So credit to the US and the other countries involved, and that includes Germany, had a lab involved, and all the scientists around the world rallying to get the information out there for these two vaccines, real substantial, trustworthy vaccines to finally come out on the scene. This is major.
Andrea Chalupa:
One thing we want to point everyone's attention to (which we'll link to in the show notes) is an article from ABC News on how more pandemics are likely due to climate change and humans pressuring the natural world, increasing our exposure to exotic animals and animals generally, and just vulnerabilities created by how we raise the animals that we eat.
Andrea Chalupa:
Pandemics are going to increasingly become a way of life unless we elect good people—empathetic people—who trust and believe science to positions of power. Let's not forget, through this great test for humanity, we saw again and again how countries, led by women, had the strongest records of confronting the pandemic. So, elect more women to Office wherever you live.
Andrea Chalupa:
The great test of our age for all of us now is to ensure election cycle after election cycle, no matter where we live, in our communities, we elect good people that believe in science. When you go to the ballot box, vote for the people that you know will protect you and your family when the next pandemic hits again, because it is inevitable. We're entering now an age of pandemics because of the human population exploding and the pressure it's putting on the natural world. So, understand that. It's better to be prepared and know what's coming and live your life accordingly.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, stay engaged in your local civic actions, join a community, go to the Gaslit Nation Action Guide on gaslitnationpod.com, and be smart about who you elect clearly and who you recruit to run and who you primary and how, and please build your community to protect your community.
Andrea Chalupa:
But a happy story now: we are going to thank all of the men and women from around the world who contributed to this vaccine, countless heroes to thank. One of these heroes who worked tirelessly in the dark for many, many years. We're going to share her story now. Her name is Kate Karikó and she is a Hungarian immigrant. What's incredible is that the two vaccines, Pfizer and Moderna, they're made possible thanks to new mRNA technology pioneered by a tenacious Hungarian immigrant.
Andrea Chalupa:
From the Telegraph: "How one scientist unwavering belief in mRNA gave the world a COVID-19 vaccine. For Katalin Karikó, this week's vaccine news is a validation of 40 years of hard work and opens a door to a new generation of medicines. For the Hungarian born scientist, a breakthrough goes beyond the hope that the new vaccine will help turn the tide of the pandemic. It is a validation of her career-long belief in the therapeutic potential of synthetic messenger RNA, a technology that could open the door to a new generation of medical treatments and cures. For more than four decades, Professor Karikó has relentlessly explored how the single stranded molecules of genetic code could be used to treat conditions from strokes and cancer to influenza. Despite demotions, countless grant rejections and at points deep skepticism from fellow scientists, she ploughed on."
Andrea Chalupa:
There's a quote from her. "’When I am knocked down, I know how to pick myself up,’ she said, speaking to the Telegraph from her home in Philadelphia on Thursday. Philly saves the day again. ‘But I always enjoyed working. I imagined all of the diseases I could treat.’ Professor Karikó first began work on the mRNA at a lab in Hungary in 1978 before moving to the US after her position at the biological research center was terminated in 1985. A decade later, when at the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Karikó was again demoted when her focus on mRNA failed to attract financial backing. But determination runs in the family. Professor Karikó's daughter, Susan Francia won a gold medal for the American rowing team during the 2012 London Olympics, and the scientist also persisted. Thanks to her work and her colleagues and all those who believed in her and her team, we have two of the fastest vaccines on record, both over 90% effective."
Andrea Chalupa:
I just want to remind everyone as dark as this winter is and it's, of course, going to get darker because there's nearly 40 days left of the Trump crime family being in power, and we'll be talking about that on the show, but let's remember to always have faith in the passionate people toiling away in the dark, whose names we may never know, who plant powerful seeds of hope. Let's be those people. Let's support those people. Let's build and fund and expand systems to help mentor, develop and elevate those people.
Andrea Chalupa:
Civilization evolved from cooperation and community, and that's how we're going to build a better world in the important years ahead.
Sarah Kendzior:
All right, well, thank you for that update, Andrea, and that heartwarming story. Now, back to the coup. We are now halfway through the attempted coup—by which I mean the presidential transition period, as it was formerly known—and the United States has not completely collapsed yet. So, yay, I guess. This was another busy and tragic week in American history with the COVID-19 death toll passing 300,000 Americans, and our national security getting devoured from both within and from abroad.
Sarah Kendzior:
We have a lot of topics to cover today. But let's get started with the resignation of the worst Attorney General ever, Bill Barr, who has resigned to, according to Trump, spend more time with his family, a totally normal thing for the Attorney General to do 27 days before his term is set to end. Barr is going to be replaced by Jeffrey Rosen, who has the rare opportunity to beat out Jeff Sessions and become only the second worst Attorney General of all time.
Sarah Kendzior:
Given Jeffrey Rosen's past as a Paul Manafort lackey, this is certainly possible because Rosen is the guy, of course, who got Manafort out of Rikers. Anyway, Bill Barr's resignation was greeted with a lot of excitement and a lot of speculation. Here are some of my initial thoughts. We actually anticipated this last week so I encourage you to listen to last week's episode, which was called “Donald Trump is a Terrorist Attack on America”, another subtle title from Gaslit Nation.
Sarah Kendzior:
What we said last week is that no one from the inner core of the Trump crime cult actually leaves. This is true of Manafort, Bannon, Stone, Flynn, and of people who were never officially in the Trump administration but who were still working for it (like mercenary, Erik Prince). Barr is part of this inner sanctum of corrupt Republicans that goes all the way back to Iran-Contra. He is implicated in the Trump Russia case, he is implicated in the Jeffrey Epstein case, and in countless other crimes, again, going all the way back to the '80s, many of them involving white collar crime in banking.
Sarah Kendzior:
He has spent his career being the GOP cover up guy, alternating between criming on the inside from the White House and criming from the outside as a "consultant” or “advisor". It is likely that Bill Barr will continue his crime spree from a distance, now that he has accomplished his goals, which consisted of acting as Trump's personal attorney and burying both the Mueller probe and the Epstein case. This was just a classic Bill Barr run.
Sarah Kendzior:
My second point is do not dare rehabilitate Bill Barr. He did not see the light. He is not on our side. I should not have to even fucking say this, but it was white washing by institutionalist propagandists that caused this debacle to begin with, when all these people were just duped into trusting Bill Barr, thinking he was a good guy, thinking he was there to help out Mueller instead of maybe thinking, “wow, it's not a great sign that Mueller is best buddies with this longtime GOP career criminal operative whose misdeeds can be found on Wikipedia.”
Sarah Kendzior:
Bill Barr is the same person he was the whole time. He was not a secret white hat in disguise. Don't even try this. There's going to be people who try it, because they are so mortified that they vouched for Barr when they shouldn't have. It's hurt their own reputations, and that's all that those folks really care about. This third point is the question of is it possible that Trump is about to do something that is super illegal and Barr does not want to be directly involved?
Sarah Kendzior:
Yes, I think that this is possible. You may remember about a month ago, the Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper abruptly resigned. This led to speculation that the Trump crime cult was about to do something so horrible that even Esper, who is not a good guy by any means, found too abhorrent to stay in and to bear it. Among the suggestions about what may be in store are the still brewing war in Iran—which Pompeo is seeking, others in the Trump administration have long been seeking—or perhaps the total decimation of our cyber security this week by a Russian attack, which was likely made possible by Trump's team leaving the backdoor open, and we're going to get to that in great detail later in the episode.
Sarah Kendzior:
Anyway, it's possible that whatever the Trump team had planned for the next month up to inauguration would require a commitment from Barr that he is simply not willing to give in public, and I stress in public here, because he is very likely working behind the scenes. Other potential situations that might be difficult for Barr to be involved with publicly are Trump simply refusing to leave office—especially after Barr rejected Trump's claims of election fraud—or Trump enacting a "national emergency" on fabricated grounds and trying to use either the military or paramilitary groups on Americans.
Sarah Kendzior:
We saw a preview of this last June. We saw that Barr was quite fine with it, but was harshly condemned for it. The tight rope that Bill Barr walks has become a live wire and so he has jumped off. Andrea, what are your thoughts?
Andrea Chalupa:
Well, I have plenty, and I want to issue a slight correction because I know time is warped under Trumpism. We actually have 35 days until-
Sarah Kendzior:
Oh. Thank you.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yes.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's wishful thinking. It's my brain forcing it ahead.
Andrea Chalupa:
I know. You try to speed it up, but I don't blame you. But we're likely going to see a freak show of pardons come down the pipe. But in terms of Barr, this whole cockamamie nonsense that he's resigning because he can't stand to put his name on whatever is coming up next...Barr has no bottom. His resignation letter was humiliating. He opens by saying how Trump gave a unifying speech when he first won the election, and he was still smacked in the face by this witch hunt by the Democrats with their fake collusion investigation into Russia.
Andrea Chalupa:
This letter is going to go down in history as one of those making Chamberlain look like a Marvel superhero, basically. We have to remind ourselves that Barr came in from the private sector where he represented clients linked to Kremlin interests, as we've reported on the show. He did what he needed to do. He led a muddling of the truth. Barr was very skilled as the Iran Contra cleanup guy. He came back and did it again with the Mueller investigation.
Andrea Chalupa:
He got the major legacy newspapers of America to run front page headlines, claiming that Mueller exonerated Trump. That was Barr's work. Let's not forget, Barr brought back capital punishment.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, he brought back firing squads, which I don't think is something you do without a reason in mind.
Andrea Chalupa:
So there is no low for Barr. Barr even did a soft campaign for the president of the United States by traveling the country in the weeks leading up to the election talking about the importance of law and order. He didn't come out and say who to vote for, of course, because that'd be a blatant violation of the Hatch Act, which he leaves to the Trump kids, as Ivanka did at that podium on the people's lawn—the White House lawn—where she spoke at the Republican convention, which was held at the White House, okay?
Andrea Chalupa:
But Barr still went around talking to local law enforcement and being this political official. That's a big special visit. He was hitting up states like Wisconsin and other places. So Barr is just likely on his way out because he wants to save himself the indignity of being fired by tweet. Let's not forget that Rex Tillerson was on his way abroad as Secretary of State when he found out that he was fired. Imagine what it was like for him landing and having to take all these meetings that he had planned knowing that he's no longer a Secretary of State.
Andrea Chalupa:
So Barr was just saving himself the inevitable, utter humiliation and just settled for a soft humiliation with his resignation letter. I think Rosen is just going to be the next punching bag for Donald Trump, as we saw in the first... How many debates? Again, the time under Trumpism… There were three debates.
Sarah Kendzior:
There were three. I know we've blocked out the majority of this year but yes, three debates, I think.
Andrea Chalupa:
The first debate was an all out assault-
Sarah Kendzior:
Maybe there weren't three.
Andrea Chalupa:
Maybe there weren't. [laughs] What happened between September and October of 2020?
Sarah Kendzior:
This is where we're at. This is the Gaslit Nation 2020, end of the year special. We don't know what the hell's going on. [laughs]
Andrea Chalupa:
There's no looking back memorial of the year. You tell us what happened.
Sarah Kendzior:
We are counting like a Trump money launderer. We don't know what's up, we don't know what's down, we're just- [laughs]
Andrea Chalupa:
We have Trump-inflicted Alzheimer's. So there was the first debate with Chris Wallace, where Donald Trump steamrolled Chris Wallace and Biden and the American people, and all of us got a sense of just how demoralizing and emotionally abusive it must be to work for this guy. And I think Barr just saw the signs and just got out. I don't think there's anything else to it. Yes, there's worse things coming, but no, Barr certainly wouldn't mind to be a part of that. Look at all the horrible things he's been a part of so far.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's more fun to be a part of it in the background, where you're free of legal implication. He can go retreat into the warm arms of Opus Dei and mercenary armies and Kirkland and Ellis and white collar crime legal protection. That's his world, in Kremlin dark money and GOP extremism and theocracy and handmaid's tale land. There are plenty of places that are going to be perfectly fine with Bill Barr.
Sarah Kendzior:
Then on top of that, you're probably going to get a bunch of jackasses who are going to say, yeah, nice mainstream Bill Barr, he was good the whole time. They are going to gaslight you, as we always say. They're going to whitewash this hell of a man.
Andrea Chalupa:
Exactly. They're going to say this respectable looking white man who cleans up nice in a suit held the line for the American people. And yes, there were things like the Durham Reporter, and Hunter Biden, these other flying monkeys from a gutted, corrupted Barr DOJ that he could have unleashed leading up to the election. Deep down inside, you have to kind of wonder where Barr probably got in, did what he needed to do, he felt. He did produce quite a bit, like I mentioned, the Mueller muddling of the truth being a big one.
Sarah Kendzior:
And Epstein, in which his father is implicated, which is another reason I think he returned to the fold. I don't find it coincidental that Epstein was finally arrested and then allegedly died in prison under Barr's watch, and then none of that was investigated at all, and the story has absolutely disappeared from the radar of everybody, except for basically QAnon, a few podcasts like us. That's an important story. That was an espionage story, a crime story, a politics story, a dark money story, a big interconnected story at which the Barr family—not just Bill Barr, but his father—played a central role, and he got rid of that story. He got a lot of people out of trouble by getting rid of that story and having Epstein disappear.
Sarah Kendzior:
Maxwell is still in there, Ghislaine Maxwell, I would just sort of remind everyone, keep an eye on that. I don't know what's going to happen. Maybe a pardon, maybe she'll get to be replacing one of these departed advisors. But anyway, go on.
Andrea Chalupa:
Right. Also, he fired Geoffrey Berman, who was the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, who was looking into several financial crimes, alleged financial crimes by the Trump crime family, including looking into Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, his current lawyer, Rudy Giuliani and Trump's Inaugural Committee, among other alleged financial wrongdoing by this international crime syndicate masquerading as a government. We'll link to Vox which has more reporting on that.
Andrea Chalupa:
Like Putin, Barr got a lot of items on his wish list. He came in like Mr. Wolf in Pulp Fiction, and cleaned up what he could, and he's going to get out while the going is good, and he's going to see himself out. He's not going to have Trump pick them up by the back of his jacket and throw him out. Meanwhile, Trump is going to be more dangerous than ever, and we're going to have to take every day as it comes. Yes, it's going to go worse before it gets better. Yes, Trumpism is here to stay, as we saw this past weekend with the violent hate crime march by the Nazi base of Trumpism—the Proud Boys—in Washington, D.C. where they attacked a historically Black church.
Andrea Chalupa:
The 126 Republicans that signed on to this farce of challenging the legitimacy of Biden's very clear win, understand that, yes, they're doing that as a gesture. There's no real teeth behind it. There haven't been any real teeth behind any of these clown car efforts to overturn the election. But the real danger of what they're doing is disinformation. They're spreading harmful disinformation and continuing to convince tens of millions of Trump's voters that they're victimized, that they're oppressed, and therefore justified in using any means possible to attack and undermine what they're perceiving as a "tyrannical system", aka, democracy.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. The coup has moved into its violent stage, and this is what we had predicted before. We had the first stage of the coup, which was Trump attempting to rig the election through things like trying to destroy the Postal Service, trying to delay the mail, making up narratives of election fraud. That has failed. They then went to the courts over 50 times and that failed, most notably, last week in the Supreme Court.
Sarah Kendzior:
Now, we are in the next stage, which is violence, as you said, by white supremacist groups acting on behalf of Trump and backed by the sedition caucus (which you just named) of these 150+ overtly treasonous Republicans. This is the revival of the Confederacy and they should be treated like Confederates. They should be marked as traitors and made to face serious consequences.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's sedition. It cannot be laughed off or treated as just a grift, or dismissed as inconsequential simply because the court cases failed. This is the building blocks of a new narrative—a narrative of violence—and it needs to be dismantled before it can grow. So yes, as you said, we had a violent weekend. We had the beginning of what may be many weeks of these acts of violence.
Sarah Kendzior:
A lot of times when people say Civil War II is coming, they're envisioning something much more clear cut: a union versus the Confederacy. This is why you see these absolutely idiotic and insulting and dangerous narratives of secession or, “let the South secede”, or whatever a bunch of rich white people from the northeast and California seem to be saying, which is just a fundamentally racist narrative, because if you look at who lives in the south and is suffering under these GOP policies, it's primarily Black people, and they seem fine to let that happen.
Sarah Kendzior:
Anyway, sorry, I got on a tangent there. What we're seeing are people who expect a civil war fought like the 19th century are deeply misled. What we're likely to see (and this will continue throughout the Biden administration, just as it was there throughout the Obama administration) are selective incidences of violence increasing; bombings, mass shootings, and things like the desecration of Black churches, white supremacists burning Black Lives Matter banners in the streets in marching, stabbings, things like that, and we're going to continue to see people like Michael Flynn, Alex Jones, these are grifters but they're also extremely dangerous propagandists who have the ability to incite violence, and they were there last weekend trying to rev people up.
Sarah Kendzior:
We also had members of QAnon in attendance, including that one guy who people are convinced—the QAnon folks are convinced—that he is JFK, Jr. emerging from hiding, looking a little bit worse for the wear, after a couple of decades. It was a horrible weekend and I think that we're going to see more of this. One thing that's been interesting for me to see is I sometimes look at QAnon heralded figures and their social media, somebody like Lin Wood, and I'll read what he's saying. Right now, he's calling for everybody to prepare for war, to get supplies and so forth, get bottled water, just basically saying we're going to descend into a new kind of hellish war, which coincidentally is what we're saying over here on Gaslit Nation.
Sarah Kendzior:
What was interesting to me is I read the responses, and instead of people being really pumped up on the Trump end for Civil War II, many of them didn't want it. They were like, "Hey, you know, I support the cause, I support Trump. I don't have any money. I lost my job because of the coronavirus crisis. I can't buy weeks of supplies, I can't buy weaponry." Then somebody else, I saw write, "Do we really have to take it this far? Is this really necessary? I'm tired, I'm hurting."
Sarah Kendzior:
Other people were much more militant and they were like, "Yes, yes, we have to take this far." You can just see this playing out, and it was interesting for me to see it, because there's this idea that's spread often in the mainstream media that all 70 million people who voted for Trump are equivalent to the fanatical base that is willing to take up arms, and that is interested in having actual war between Americans, on American soil. That's just not true. It is a little, tiny slice of that base, and that is still an enormous problem, because you don't need that many people to be fanatical and violent to cause a giant problem in America.
Andrea Chalupa:
Exactly.
Sarah Kendzior:
We know that from our history of mass shootings of somebody like Timothy McVeigh. We only need honestly, a few 100 people for this to be a problem. But I think that there is less unity within these folks than is assumed. I think everybody is feeling the brunt of this horrible, horrible year. So I don't know, maybe this is the lost cause. But I would encourage those who don't want violence, just stand your ground with that. Don't seek violence. There are plenty of people on "the other side"—on the side that voted for Joe Biden—who don't want a war. We don't want violence. We don't want secession. We don't want all this bullshit. We want a fight against elite criminal impunity. We want people who have been committing crimes and hurting ordinary Americans to be held accountable, regardless of their political party. That includes Trump, and it also includes many of the same people that people attracted to QAnon are interested in seeing held to account.
Sarah Kendzior:
People like Jeffrey Epstein, people like the Sackler family. There actually are points of commonality. It's a sad state of affairs that these are the points of commonality so that I can name criminals who have hurt so many people that it unites our broken nation. That's just a sad state of affairs. Anyway, I hope that what I saw there is representative of what's happening. But that said, be very vigilant. Be very careful, and make sure to stand up for those who are being overtly persecuted and attacked, for the Black churches out there that people are trying to set on fire, to desecrate, for the activists in the streets who are fighting back against the Proud Boys who are holding their ground, those are good people, and everybody needs to have their back in the weeks to come.
Andrea Chalupa:
No, I completely agree with you. You just need a couple hundred to be terrorist cells—white domestic terrorist cells—and that's what we have.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, and it's a mounting problem. Everyone's wondering, well, where's the FBI? The FBI has managed to find some of these guys in advance. They managed to prevent Gretchen Whitmer, the Governor of Michigan, from being kidnapped. They managed to prevent some of these plots, but a lot of folks are wondering, are they going to get them all? And also, how in the world did Russia commit, last week, the biggest cyber attack on the United States in our history? How did this get by people when there were so many warning signs, including from us, over the last few years?
Sarah Kendzior:
We have been telling you for a long time that a massive cyber attack on America by Russia was coming. You can listen to our Gaslit Nation interview with Andy Greenberg, the author of the book, Sandworm, that we aired one year ago in December of 2019. We'll get into a bit of background about why we saw this attack, which has now hit so many agencies, I have trouble listing them, later, coming. Cyber attacks by Russia on American departments and infrastructure are not new.
Sarah Kendzior:
During the second term of the Obama administration, They hacked the DOD, the State Department, the White House, the DNC, the RNC, and the emails of seemingly everybody in government with one exception, which is of course, Hillary Clinton, who protected herself by having a private server and was punished for it. So how about that?
Andrea Chalupa:
Never forget that, future historians. Yes, it's as absurd as it sounds.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yes, never forget. We also had a prelude to these tactics—even before all this happened—with Ukraine. I'm going to pass it over to you, because you're an expert on this. Can you please tell everybody how Ukraine has functioned as a laboratory for Kremlin experiments?
Andrea Chalupa:
Well, there's a long list of that. The Kremlin, or Russian suspected hackers, changed the presidential election results of Ukraine's election in 2014. And Ukraine, being Ukraine and a country that only exists because it has survived centuries of oppression under the Kremlin, knows better and offers the world a lot of hard fought lessons on how to resist and survive Kremlin aggression and how to push back. They were able to catch this early and change it so it wasn't too disruptive.
Andrea Chalupa:
There was also famously the NotPetya attack in 2017, which is known, according to Politico, as the largest and most destructive digital attack in history. What the Kremlin has done in this latest hacking attack of the federal government here in the US is compared to that. What NotPetya did was, according to Politico, that incident began when Russian hackers infected the software updates of the Ukrainian tax software maker, M.E.Doc.
Andrea Chalupa:
Security researchers believe that the Russians only intended to spy on certain Ukrainian targets, but the NotPetya malware quickly spread around the world, causing as much as $10 billion in damage for victims that included the shipping giant, Maersk and the pharmaceutical titan, Merck.
Andrea Chalupa:
We had on the show Andy Greenberg of Wired Magazine, who wrote an extraordinary book on the forensics of looking into this massive, massive cyber warfare crime. That book is an extraordinary must read. Get it for yourself. Get it for friends and family this holiday season. It is called Sandworm, because these super nerdy Russian hackers left behind a bunch of breadcrumbs that eventually led to building the case that yes, this was Russia. Part of it included references to the Dune novel.
Andrea Chalupa:
I cannot recommend Sandworm highly enough. It gives you extremely important historical context for why Ukraine matters to the world today, and lessons for all of us on understanding and confronting the Kremlin's aggression, which is going to be ongoing even if Putin dies, which he may in the next 10 years or so. He's arguably the richest person on the planet. Bill Browder, who is the leader of the Magnitsky Act Movement has said that, with all the research he's done into Putin's criminality and corruption. Putin is going to probably be with us for some time, but even when he finally goes, Putinism is going to replace him. There's going to be just another mafioso in the Kremlin who's going to stand up and just keep the entrenched warfare mindset.
Andrea Chalupa:
Meanwhile, regular Russian people are suffering under this. It's really sad for those young kids, teenagers, children that are out there, protesting corruption. As we saw in this stunning reporting by the investigative journalism unit, Bellingcat, and CNN, the Kremlin had an entire team of FSB agents following Alexander Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, poisoning not only him but also his wife, and also making a second attempted poisoning on Navalny, trying to kill him. And he survived, miraculously.
Andrea Chalupa:
We strongly urge you to watch this CNN segment on how the FSB operates in producing a nerve agent that is illegal by international law. They should not be doing this, and they're doing it anyway. The Russians are also the number one suspects of producing a full on microwave ray gun that zaps people's brain and produces long term brain damage. The Russians are brazenly using science fiction, dystopian weapons against their enemies around the world, not just on Russian soil but in places like, of course, the UK. Even in the US, it happened.
Andrea Chalupa:
Understand that... Please read Sandworm to know a deeper sense of these dystopian dark arts that the Kremlin has no problem using, and know the larger history of Kremlin aggression, because this is going to be a challenge that's going to stay with us for the foreseeable future and we have to learn how to stand up to this, to identify it and read through any of the Newsspeak that tries to dumb it down. Because in order to cover this, you do need a deeper understanding of the history of the different players, the different countries, and unfortunately, as we've seen in a lot of this bad reporting that has come out over the years, not all journalists have that.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, educate yourselves to understand the larger threat of the Kremlin and how it's going to loom over us for the foreseeable future.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. One other thing to mention, of course, is that on top of its elections being hacked, Ukraine's power grid was hacked, causing a massive blackout with humanitarian consequences. We know that Russia infiltrated the power grid in the United States. John McCain spoke about this at hearings before he died, and this was actually something that our officials were looking at quite seriously in 2017-2018. It basically seems to have dropped off the radar.
Sarah Kendzior:
I don't quite know why, because the danger had only gotten much more explicit with a Kremlin asset in power. But that's something we have feared for a long time. I wrote several articles about this possibility for Fast Company Magazine and for other places. So yeah, I guess another thread of commonality there, if you can afford to just get a little extra supplies, due to the pandemic, due to possibly a grid attack, it's a good idea. Check on your neighbors, to make sure that they have what they need. Because it's possible, I'm not saying it's going to happen. I'm just saying it's something to watch out for.
Sarah Kendzior:
Anyway, who got hacked this time around? We now have so far the Department of Homeland Security, the Treasury Department, the Department of Commerce, parts of the Pentagon, the State Department, the National Institutes of Health, and thousands of businesses that have interacted with them. Reuters today wrote that technology company, SolarWinds—which was the key stepping stone used by the hackers—said up to 18,000 of its customers had downloaded a compromised software update that allowed hackers to spy unnoticed on businesses and agencies for almost nine months.
Sarah Kendzior:
The United States issued an emergency warning on Sunday, ordering government users to disconnect SolarWinds's software, which it said had been compromised by malicious actors. As I was saying, this is a massive, massive hack, and it comes four years after our government was run by a Kremlin agent backed by a transnational crime syndicate.
Sarah Kendzior:
What I'm wondering—and I think is completely plausible—is whether Trump made good on his 2017 promise to form what he called an "impenetrable cyber security unit” with Putin, and allowed his attacks to happen. This is something he tweeted back then. He says, “Putin and I discussed forming an impenetrable cyber security unit so the election hacking and many other things will be guarded”. I basically took this as yet another admission of collaboration with the Kremlin, which we knew by that point had infiltrated our elections, and obviously hacked all the departments that I had named before.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our national security was already decimated before this new, massive hack took place. What you need to consider here is what Andrea has said many times on the show, which is that the election of Trump was a marriage between the Russian mafia in the West, and the Russian mafia in the east. These attacks, in a way, are their progeny. They may well have been assisted by people in the Trump administration, and are not completely a coming from the outside sort of attack, but more of a collaboration, as Trump put it.
Sarah Kendzior:
One of the main reasons I'm suggesting this, and please, I'll be clear, this is a suggestion on my part, not something I know for sure, but what I do know for sure, is that the Treasury was hijacked by Russia in 2015, when the Obama administration was in power, and no one did anything about that, except punish the whistleblower.
Sarah Kendzior:
We've discussed this on Gaslit Nation so many times because it is one of the most critical revelations that broke through during the Trump era. But we only heard about it in December 2018, thanks to BuzzFeed who broke that story. When Mnuchin was chosen by Trump to lead the Treasury, it was because he was willing to continue this. He was willing to enable Russian oligarchs who would otherwise have faced enforced sanctions, and he was chosen because of his own longtime immersion in white collar crime.
Sarah Kendzior:
Mnuchin is part of the core crime cult of corporate raiders along with his pal, Wilbur Ross, who is the Secretary of Commerce. It's notable that both Mnuchin and Ross were chosen not by Trump, but by Trump's longtime mentor, Carl Icahn, the notorious corporate raider who himself was briefly in the Trump administration before the Mueller probe started investigating him for ethics violations in late 2017, at which time he resigned. Nothing ever came of that investigation, much like most of the Mueller probe.
Sarah Kendzior:
Anyway, my point here is that both the Treasury and the Commerce Departments were already compromised because of the men who were chosen to lead them. The hacking just places the activity solely on a foreign power, when the reality is that the Americans who were appointed to these departments were never loyal to America in the first place.
Sarah Kendzior:
I have a couple more speculative points about this. So far, the Trump administration itself has not commented much on the hacks. Information about them was leaked to the media by anonymous officials, I believe from the intelligence community. One thing I'm wondering is whether the Trump administration would have admitted to this at all, or would have pinned them on another malicious foreign actor—for example, Iran—instead of admitting that Russia did it.
Sarah Kendzior:
The Trump administration has been seeking a pretext for Iran for a long time, and in 2018, they changed the Nuclear Posture Review so that nukes could be used to respond to massive cyber attacks. I don't know what they're going to do with the fact that this has been declared to be Russia, but part of me wonders if maybe those who leaked this information were trying to stave off the absolutely horrible possibility of a war in Iran by a lame duck president who is obsessed with using nuclear weapons.
Sarah Kendzior:
If you want more information about that, you can listen to, gosh, all two and a half years of our episodes, but especially the last month or so since they've started getting more aggressive towards Iran. Then finally, we saw that right after the massive cyber attack was revealed, Putin congratulated Biden on his election victory. His congratulatory words also follow the official tally of Biden's vote in the electoral college on Monday, which was a landmark moment in formalizing his win.
Sarah Kendzior:
Some people are interpreting Putin's congrats as a signal that Putin has abandoned his asset, Trump, but I have my doubts about that. You have to think beyond whether an individual holds particular power and look at what the general outcome is here for the United States and the cumulative effect of different attacks and what that means for the power of the Kremlin.
Sarah Kendzior:
Biden's administration is now severely weakened by both the cavalcade of cyber attacks from Russia and by the gutting of the institutions that were supposed to protect our national security, a gutting that was purposefully done by Trump and his lackeys. On top of that, of course, you have a large number of Trump administration officials who are perfectly happy to work with the Kremlin, as well as with other malicious foreign actors, in order to bring Biden down.
Sarah Kendzior:
Putin is obviously not being sincere here. He's not looking for a "reset” with the Biden administration, and he certainly does not deserve one. He is, in my view, flaunting his impunity. What are your thoughts?
Andrea Chalupa:
They are allies, Trump and Putin, for a reason. They're both having their temper tantrum of destruction and intimidating people. These are mafia tactics, plain and simple. I want to point out something alarming from Newsweek. This is how we found out about the hack. This is super chilling. “A widespread hack of software giant, SolarWinds was found by cybersecurity firm, FireEye, as it investigated how its own systems were infiltrated in the same campaign, which is suspected of being the work of Russia.
Andrea Chalupa:
“Officials from California-based, FireEye's Incident Response Division, known as Mandiant, confirmed on Monday that its teams were first to raise the alarm to SolarWinds and US law enforcement after discovering the far reaching security compromise.” Now, listen to this. “The National Security Agency, the NSA”—which is a massive agency—”was apparently not aware until alerted by FireEye, The New York Times reported.”
Andrea Chalupa:
Okay, so it was a private company that alerted the NSA. Here's a quote from someone from FireEye: "If this actor did hit not FireEye, there is a chance that this campaign could have gone on for much, much longer." What the hell?
Sarah Kendzior:
What the fuck are these people even doing? Sorry, this is just my gut reaction to things. That's pretty much my gut reaction to everything. But yeah, we already know that these attacks have been going on for nine months. We know that there were precursor attacks that have been going on for years. We know that our president is a Kremlin asset. We know that he has fired the cyber security directors. That's something else that I should have mentioned before, but these attacks were going on even when we did have cyber security officials in place.
Sarah Kendzior:
So, what is the NSA doing? What are our intelligence agencies doing? I feel like Trump puts to rest, finally, the idea of a powerful deep state, at least one that represents American interests. I do think there's something analogous to a deep state. There is a swamp. There is this kind of inner cabal of malevolent actors—people like Barr, Manafort, Stone, Kushner, Miller—the people who basically can't get fired, they stay in the sanctum, they align themselves with autocrats, mafiosos, basically, everybody described in Robert Mueller's 2011 evolving organized crime threat speech.
Sarah Kendzior:
Then of course, we're supposed to have people in law enforcement—in intelligence—to combat these bad actors. We're supposed to have this NSA that's so powerful, so omnipotent, that it's going through all of our phone records, monitoring us, surveilling us, and I take that seriously. I take the invasion of our privacy and threats to our privacy in the name of "fighting terrorism" very seriously. But if this can happen, if this kind of massive, predictable breach that is going to have consequences for years to come can happen with so much fore-warning, what are they doing?
Sarah Kendzior:
Did Trump successfully purge everyone of competence out of the intelligence community? Because I don't think it was uniform. I'm sure there were people who wanted to protect our country, but maybe they got fired, maybe they weren't listened to. We certainly have seen that before. In the run up to 9/11, there were many officials who warned the Bush administration that the 911 attacks were coming, and they were blown off, and the same thing happened with the Iraq war. They said, "Actually, Saddam doesn't have weapons of mass destruction. You're pulling this out of your ass, and we really shouldn't go to war over it." They were like, "Fuck you." This is a paraphrase.
Sarah Kendzior:
My point is that I wonder about the stability of our intelligence agencies, and of course, they themselves are now affected by this hack as well—every institution—and by the malignant actors who are about to depart this administration who have no interest in protecting state secrets, classified information, no loyalty to country. They're interested in secessionist movements. They're interested in us breaking apart and they're interested in profiting off of that. And that's it. They don't have any loyalty, any sentimentality about America, any love for country, nothing. I'm not sure the Biden administration is completely prepared for this because it seems to me that no one is prepared for it, at least nobody in a position of power to actually do something about it.
Andrea Chalupa:
We need to desperately Putin-proof and Trump-proof our democracy because even if Donald Trump sails off on a golf cart into the sunset, we're stuck with Ivanka Trump, who is moving down to Florida, reportedly, with Jared Kushner. And reports are claiming that there's rumors—that there's talk—of Ivanka eyeing a run for Marco Rubio's Senate seat in Florida in 2022. Typical Trump. She's going to cut the line. No, not going to go for a local state office, not going to even go for a US House office in Florida. She’s going straight for the Senate because she's Ivanka Trump and she can elbow her way into power, just like her dad.
Andrea Chalupa:
We're going to read a dossier of sorts about Ivanka Trump, the mafia princess, just to remind everybody that we're not out of the clear and all of this essential work to rebuild our democracy and strengthen our institutions must happen, or we're going to be right back here again. Remember, we're living in an age of pandemics, so we desperately need to do this work, or we will be back here again, quite literally, stuck at home, people plunged into poverty, mass death, all of it. This is all what the reporting is warning us.
Andrea Chalupa:
Let's start with Ivanka and what we need to look out for there. Trump allegedly looked into pardoning his kids, including Ivanka. Let's not forget Trump looked into pardoning his own children. What does that tell you about the time they spent in the people's house—the White House—and what they were doing with the power they stole from us in 2016? Let's hope that in the years to come some of these items that I'm about to read off lead to an indictment of Ivanka Trump, and hopefully Jared Kushner as well.
Andrea Chalupa:
There's certainly a lot here for investigators and prosecutors to work with. From Salon, “A former federal prosecutor during the Watergate investigation, which uncovered criminal activity that led to former President Richard Nixon's resignation, said the bombshell New York Times report from earlier this fall on President Donald Trump's taxes suggest that he could ultimately face time behind bars along with his daughter, senior White House adviser Ivanka Trump. ‘No question about it’, Nick Akerman told CNNs Erin Burnett, ‘and his daughter could go to jail too. Tax evasion is a five year felony. It's a pretty serious crime and the more money that's stolen, the longer you go to jail.’
Andrea Chalupa:
“‘The Times report, he said, laid out a whole series of activities that could qualify as tax fraud, not tax avoidance.’ While the headline read ‘Trump's tax avoidance’, Akerman said there is a key difference when it comes to fraud, a more serious crime. Ivanka's 2017 financial disclosure showed she received a $747,622 payment from a consulting company called TTT Consulting, which she apparently co-owned with other family members. That figure matches the exact amount that her father wrote off as tax deductions for consulting fees on two Trump Organization hotel projects from the same year.
Andrea Chalupa:
“The arrangement, Akerman said, raises questions about a possible effort on the President's part to reduce his business tax liability by not compensating family members directly. Because Ivanka was already an employee of the Trump Organization, he said, he could think of no legitimate reason as to why her father would have paid her in such a manner, and there may be only one reason why the Trump family would not face criminal liability, Akerman said, the same as yet untested constitutional provision that stymied former special counsel, Robert Mueller, a grand jury impaneled by Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance has subpoenaed Trump's tax returns in order to help inform charging decisions in a broad inquiry into his finances, including possible criminal tax fraud."
Andrea Chalupa:
“The only thing that's saving Trump at this point is the Department of Justice's guidelines that says you can't indict a sitting president, Akerman said. Once he's no longer a sitting president, he is subject to being indicted. Any decent prosecutor could make a pretty viable case, Akerman concluded.”
Andrea Chalupa:
Now, keep in mind, Cy Vance, the Manhattan DA who has the power to push this through, he is being challenged from several different fronts in an upcoming election in 2021 for Manhattan DA. So, the pressure is on him to finally act and repair the damage—the major damage—he did in the past letting the Trump children, Ivanka and Don Jr. walk from a fraud investigation into Trump Soho after Cy Vance received a campaign donation from a Trump family lawyer. So it's all eyes on Cy Vance now.
Andrea Chalupa:
Now, from Slate. Slate is doing a great series, doing God's work, covering all the Trump crime, so please check out this link in our show notes. From Slate, "Let's start with Ivanka, who is the only one of the three to hold a position in Trump's administration, with the title, Advisor to the President. Ivanka's husband, Jared Kushner, is likewise a White House Senior Advisor, but that is a different if related story of graft. Ivanka's role in the White House was initially sold to the public as serving as a moderating influence on our father, but that almost immediately went out the window when her alleged support for the United States remaining in the Paris Climate Agreement failed to convince her father not to abandon the historic deal.
Andrea Chalupa:
“Similarly, Ivanka has said that she opposed separating families who are entering the country, but she did little to actually stop it from taking effect, resulting in a theft of thousands of children, hundreds of whose parents still haven't been located. Her false branding as a moderating force on her father, though, is not nearly as important as the area in which she excels perhaps as much as or more than the rest of her family: public graft.
Andrea Chalupa:
“A little two months into her father's presidency, she was awarded three new trademarks for her lifestyle brand in China on the same night she happened to sit next to the Chinese President during an official dinner at Mar a Lago. In 2018, she was awarded seven new trademarks that just happened to coincide with her father promising to save a Chinese telecommunications company that had previously been punished for violating trade sanctions with Iran and North Korea. Days into Trump's presidency, counselor to the president, Kellyanne Conway, illegally endorsed Ivanka's fashion brand during a Fox news interview in violation of the Hatch Act. There were no repercussions.
Andrea Chalupa:
“Ivanka herself has been party to dozens of Hatch Act violations using her White House position to publicly campaign for her father, endorsing on Instagram a food product brand whose owner supports her father's campaign by holding up a can of Goya beans, and seeming to violate the anti-corruption law eight times in one single 48 hour period earlier in October 2020.
Andrea Chalupa:
“Ivanka and her husband came into the White House with a sprawling series of international conflicts of interest—perhaps most notably in the Middle East—and her father had to overrule career officials to ensure they were granted security clearances that otherwise would have been denied. In May 2017, the State Department promoted Ivanka's book on social media. As of last September 2020, Ivanka and Jared had visited Trump properties during their time at the White House, with the accompanying Secret Service entourages and federal payments to the family business more than any other White House official had, with 36 visits for Ivanka and 39 for Jared.
Andrea Chalupa:
“Ivanka's stake in the Trump Hotel in D.C. generated 4 million for her in 2019 alone. During the spring shelter in place policies that prevented families from hosting holidays together, Ivanka and Jared traveled to the Trump property in Bedminster, New Jersey to hold a family seder. Even after she announced she would shut down her lifestyle brand to avoid further conflicts of interest, it continued to generate upwards of a million in sales for her and she continued to collect overseas trademarks.
Andrea Chalupa:
“In 2018. Alone, Ivanka and Jared reported as much as 135 million in income, much of which came from foreign business. Jared and Ivanka likely broke the law when they pushed the administration to enact tax breaks for so called opportunity zones, a program that happened to benefit the couple to the tune of millions of dollars. Ivanka and her husband threatened to sue the Lincoln Project to try to force it to take down Time Square billboards that were critical of their roles in her father's disastrous COVID-19 response. Given her and her husband's White House jobs, Ivanka is probably the most prolific government grafter of the siblings."
Andrea Chalupa:
We have a long list of further corruption that we’ll go down in other episodes because there's too much to pack into one episode. For example, remember that Ivanka and Jared were instrumental in bringing Manafort onto the campaign. Ivanka is longtime friends with the daughter of a Russian oligarch who happens to be married...or I believe an ex wife now or soon to be ex wife of a major Russian oligarch who is like a son to Putin. This woman was Ivanka's guest at the inauguration in 2017. The inauguration itself is under investigation by the District Attorney's Office in Washington, D.C. and Ivanka had to sit for hours of interviews, where she is warned in emails that they were inflating the prices of using the Trump hotel for the inauguration. They were going well above market rates and they went ahead and signed these contracts anyway. Grifting, grifting, grifting.
Andrea Chalupa:
There's all this investigation of the inauguration and Ivanka's role in that wrongdoing. So, how the hell does Ivanka Trump win an election in Florida or any future election? There's all this reporting by now of her and political ambitions. We've been warning you about this since early 2017 that this is where this was headed, because that's how autocracies and aspiring autocracies work. They become dynastic kleptocracies. All eyes on Ivanka in the years to come, and let's hope to God that some of these investigations stick and that she finally gets indicted.
Andrea Chalupa:
As we saw with the Mueller investigation, Mueller went after the low-hanging fruit and didn't touch Jared or Ivanka, even though they were central to running the Trump campaign, which openly called for and accepted help from the Kremlin. And without the Kremlin's backing in 2016, it's hard to imagine how Trump would have won that election, which he narrowly did.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah. I mean, the list of crimes that Kushner committed is just as long—probably longer—than the ones that you just listed off for Ivanka. This is a crime family. The Kushner family is a crime family with indictments. The Trump crime family is a crime family that has narrowly escaped criminal prosecution, both Donald Trump, as well as Don Jr. and Ivanka with Cy Vance dismissing their felony fraud cases in 2012, and all of the other things that they committed while in office.
Sarah Kendzior:
They are linked to transnational organized crime. They are, again, part of this key node. The oligarch ex wife you brought up before, Dasha Zhukova, who was the ex wife of Roman Abramovich, you can follow this little network and connect all these dots. Roman Abramovich is a Putin lackey and oligarch who was sanctioned. When he was sanctioned, he did what the Russian oligarchs are all doing, which is getting an Israeli passport, claiming Israeli citizenship. And Netanyahu allows this because he likes to have all of that dirty money—that mafia money—pumped into the Israeli economy.
Sarah Kendzior:
Who is Netanyahu's best friend? His old friend from going back several decades? It's Kushner! Netanyahu used to sleep at the Kushner house where Jared's felon father, Charles Kushner, lived. All of these people are deeply intertwined. They have financial entanglements. They have personal relationships, and they don't have any interest in public service, in doing anything for their own country. It's all just about moving money around, profiteering, scraping up resources, causing conflict and then profiting off of American pain. In Jared's case, it was literally profiting off of American death. It was making sure that a maximum amount of Americans died in certain states, both for electoral purposes, but also just because they enjoy it.
Sarah Kendzior:
These are sadistic people on top of it. And speaking of reputational rehab (which we see coming for Bill Barr from institutionalists, corrupt institutionalists), the same moves will be made to try to rehabilitate Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. They have deep roots in New York media, in PR. Maggie Haberman of The New York Times is somebody who writes these little puff piece princess profiles on Ivanka and Jared, and her mother was the Kushner family and the Trump family publicist, or worked for the publicist empire of Howard Rubenstein. I discuss all of this in my book, Hiding in Plain Sight.
Sarah Kendzior:
Rubenstein also represented Jeffrey Epstein, Rupert Murdoch, Adnan Khashoggi. I mean, seriously, when I say it's the same people over and over again, I'm not kidding. It's very important that these people are not in a position of power, because all they will do with power is wield it to brutalize American people and to try to destroy our country.
Sarah Kendzior:
When we talk about consequences and repercussions, it's not the sort of, haha, let's send them to jail popcorn GIF amusing thing that I think a lot of people view this series of events as. We're trying to protect people from harm, because these individuals should be nowhere near the mechanisms of power. They should never be able to decide public policy. They should be in prison because they committed crimes. But the benefit of them being in prison, it has nothing to do with retribution or vengeance or anything like that: it is protecting the American people from a transnational crime syndicate that seeks to harm them. And that's that.
Andrea Chalupa:
That is that. And let me just tell you, if you're laughing this off and saying, "Oh, Trump's over, he's a loser. The Republican Party is going to need to run people that are going to win.", let me just tell you how close we came. This is from Dave Wasserman, of course, the pollster who runs the Cook Political Report. He writes on Twitter, "Fact: in 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.9 million and came within 77,744 votes of winning the presidency. In 2020, Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 7.1 million and came within 65,009 votes of winning reelection."
Andrea Chalupa:
In hindsight, Trump could have lost by 6 million votes nationally and still prevailed in the Electoral College. That's how close we came. So another Trump in power somewhere in the next 10 years is very easy to imagine, unfortunately, and that's what we all have to remain vigilant of.
Andrea Chalupa:
All right, so I think we're going to end this 2020 crawl towards the finish line with an exciting announcement. Sarah and I have, or more I have a really exciting development in our UFO reporting, where we are going to continue our... We are, we're seriously going to continue our discussion about the big bombshell out of Israel of the former head of Israel Space Agency coming out saying, "Yeah, there's aliens, Trump knows about it." After I caught up on sleep this weekend, I woke up with a realization, and I did some digging, and so we're going to add to this story in the Patreon. We're not doing this to tease you. We're doing this because we're trying to keep our show short, and we want to have a big sprawling, holiday party discussion about this on the Patreon with our community there. If you want a really exciting development on this story, join us there.
Andrea Chalupa:
Our discussion continues, and you can get access to that by signing up on our Patreon at the Truth Teller level or higher.
Sarah Kendzior:
We want to encourage you to donate to your local food bank, which is experiencing a spike in demand. We also encourage you to donate to Direct Relief at directrelief.org, which is supplying much needed protective gear to first responders working on the frontlines.
Andrea Chalupa:
We encourage you to donate to the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian relief organization helping refugees from Syria. Donate at rescue.org, and if you want to help critically endangered orangutans already under pressure from the palm oil industry, donate to The Orangutan Project at theorangutanproject.org. Gaslit Nation is produced by Sarah Kendzior, and Andrea Chalupa. If you like what we do, leave us a review on iTunes, it helps us reach more listeners and check out our Patreon, it keeps us going, and subscribe to us on YouTube.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our production managers are Nicholas Torres and Karlyn Daigle. Our episodes are edited by Nicholas Torres and our Patreon exclusive content is edited by Karlyn Daigle.
Andrea Chalupa:
Original music in Gaslit Nation is produced by David Whitehead, Martin Vissenberg, Nick Farr, Demien Arriaga and Karlyn Daigle.
Sarah Kendzior:
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Andrea Chalupa:
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