The Purge, Accelerated
Welcome to attempted coup week four! Trump still refuses to concede and meanwhile he is gutting every department in sight. We discuss the new executive order that aims to fire 88% of civil servants and possibly replace them with Trump lackeys (or lead the positions unfilled altogether) and how this reflects the broader goal of Trump and the GOP to destroy the US government from within.
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the bestselling 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.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the Trump administration and rising autocracy around the world.
Andrea Chalupa:
And the way we are confronting that rising autocracy is by turning Georgia blue again and you can help us in that by joining me and Sarah this Wednesday, December 2nd from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM Eastern Time where Gaslit Nation is going to join our friends at Swing Left and Vote Forward to write letters that we're then going to send to voters in Georgia to get out and vote.
Andrea Chalupa:
You can find a link to that at the top of our show notes for this week's episode on our Patreon page where we always publish our show notes week after week. Any clips that you hear in our episodes, any links you want, they're going to be in our show notes on our weekly episode page on Patreon.
Andrea Chalupa:
We know that, as Sarah's going to go into today, in order to save humanity from Mitch McConnell, we absolutely must do all that we can to donate and make phone calls and send texts and write letters to make sure that Raphael Warnock and John Ossoff, both of them, win their Senate races in Georgia on January 5th, 2021. It's going to be gridlock in Congress again and again if we do not take the senate away from the black hands of Mitch McConnell.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, please, join us for that and tweet @GaslitNation and tell us what you're doing. If you're going to be hitting our target of 1000 phone calls, 1000 texts, 1000 letters to get out to vote in Georgia, tweet us @GaslitNation, we'll re-tweet that and out of the entries we get we're going to choose three people to come on Gaslit Nation in the new year and each person will win a signed copy of Sarah's book, Hiding in Plain Sight, and a signed poster of my film, Mr. Jones.
Sarah Kendzior:
All right, and so yes, it is absolutely critical that Ossoff and Warnock win Georgia and I'm going to just play out a little doomsday scenario here. I know you're shocked to see such a thing on Gaslit Nation. Without those wins, the Senate is going to be 51-48, with 51 on the GOP side. My question is, will the GOP confirm any of Biden's nominees for cabinet positions or is Mitch McConnell going to do a Merrick Garland-style obstructionist extravaganza and shut them all down, regardless of qualifications?
Sarah Kendzior:
On that note, if the positions aren't filled, then what happens? Who is going to run the departments that have already been gutted by Trump and his officials, many of whom were installed in order to dismantle the departments that they were supposed to lead and many of whom have remained there in a "acting capacity", basically so there's less oversight into the kind of crimes that they're committed?
Sarah Kendzior:
We haven't had this situation before. We haven't had a transition that is so fractured by a GOP that seeks to be not a government serving the people, but a one party autocrat state, that they would engage in this kind of activity. Their goal is not to govern, but to rule.
Sarah Kendzior:
To look a test case here of how I see this playing out, we could look at Neera Tanden who is the nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget, and this is the person that I think they're going to launch this strategy on because she is widely disliked by a variety of people, both on the Left (because of feuds that she's gotten into with the Sanders campaign and their supporters) and of course, on the Right (where she's been a critic of the Republican Party and of course, of Trump's crime cult).
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm not going down a Neera Tanden wormhole. I refuse to do this. There are better things to think about, so I'm not going to get into her as a person. I will just say, she's qualified for this position and that's the thing that worries me, is that the qualifications of the individuals appointed, their goals for actual policy, may be moot here.
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm going to read a little bit from the Wall Street Journal about some things I think the Biden team should really be prepared for, and this is in regards to Tanden. It says, "Republicans began expressing their concerns over the weekend after the Wall Street Journal reported she was the pick. Josh Holmes, an advisor to Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell referred to her nomination on Twitter as a ‘sacrifice to the confirmation gods.’ ‘I think that in the light of her combative and insulting comments about many members of the Senate, mainly on our side of the aisle, that it creates a problematic path,’ said Senator John Cornyn on Monday. He said, ‘Republicans were willing to work with Mr. Biden but Ms. Tanden, "strikes me as maybe his worst nominee so far.’ It wasn't known if the pushback would endanger the pick as senators return to Washington on Monday. ‘She's not just a liberal ideologue; she's a partisan activist who's gone after the senators of the majority party,’ said Senator Kevin Kramer, a member of the senate's Budget Committee. ‘She seems to have chosen a path that doesn't lead to a Senate confirmed office.’"
Sarah Kendzior:
This is horse shit because if you're going to go after somebody for their tweets, you obviously go after Trump who has tried to start nuclear wars, has told people to drink bleach, has threatened private citizens, threatened public servants, lied pathologically. I doubt the sincerity of the GOP's commitment to honesty and integrity in politics. But what I do see is that they are going to use whatever facile excuse they come up with for every nominee in order to strike them down.
Sarah Kendzior:
That's what I'm worried about, is that this will push the U.S. closer and closer to a failed state. We are not out of this situation. We are still in the midst of an ongoing attempted coup and they are still going to try to leave all of these institutions—all of these departments—as bereft of oversight and of actual people in there to try to do something to serve the American public as possible, because that is how they maintain their power. It's through chaos. It's through destruction. It's through the American public feeling desperate, having very little leverage, and the Democratic Party having very little leverage as well.
Sarah Kendzior:
I don't know what the Biden team's plan for this possible scenario is. I'd love to hear it, but I'm just praying to God they have one. Do you have thoughts on that?
Andrea Chalupa:
Well, I do think that Neera Tanden is a high profile nominee, and I do think it's interesting, out of the list that they put forward in this latest batch, that she's on there. She seems like somebody that you might think would stay in that media/social media realm to be more of a bull dog putting herself out there because she's not afraid clearly to be in the arena. She gets arrows from all directions on what she says and pushes and fights for.
Andrea Chalupa:
She's feisty. So it's surprising that they would pluck someone out of the media realm who's scrappy and could be pushing a lot of the communications for them and put them into a roll up your sleeves, get into the trenches, big administrative job.
Andrea Chalupa:
Part of me wonders if Neera Tanden is going into this as agreeing to be the sacrificial lamb, because she's that bright shiny object to distract the Republicans and make them basically refuse to confirm her, so they feel satisfied that they were able to get a scalp during this confirmation hearing and they'll be proud of that and they could rally their base and then show their base that they're being ruthless and obstructionist. Meanwhile, Biden's other nominees go through, who are more under the radar, more classic technocrats. I'm almost wondering if the Biden campaign's driving defensively here by tossing Neera out to be sacrificed and Neera's fine with it because she's so used to being a punching bag from the Right and the Left.
Andrea Chalupa:
That's just my read on it. I do think it is a dangerous situation of having Mitch McConnell's Senate be so obstructionist and ruthless in their pursuit of power, and being just so gifted in those dark arts that I also think that if there is any intentional defense strategy by the Biden campaign to sacrifice one of their own here, I don't think it will satisfy the beast that is Mitch McConnell. I think those guys just simply can't get enough and they'll want to really flex their muscle and really bring the progressive wing of the Democratic Party to heal and do that in a very visible way to show their power—show off their power—because that's what autocrats do.
Andrea Chalupa:
We're in for a brawl, but I do have faith, though, in Biden's relationships on Capitol Hill. He is widely liked. He knows these guys. He's worked with him for decades. I do think that working together with the Senate that he knows, I do think that, as rocky as it will inevitably be, I do think they'll manage to get some things done and he will be happy with the cabinet he ultimately produces.
Sarah Kendzior:
I hope so. I think he should nominate you for a diplomatic post from what you just said, the very careful phrasing there. But yeah, hopefully you're right and the worst we'll see is a sacrificial lamb, and then they'll be content with their trophy head there, but unfortunately, because of the GOP-
Andrea Chalupa:
But let's all be terrified, though. But let's all be terrified, because we have to fight like hell for Georgia, guys. I'm telling you, imagine that all of us today have returned from a time machine from the future, and we see what it's like if we do not get Georgia. We will have such strength and power with Jon Ossoff and Reverend Warnock in the Senate. We will be passing big, green, climate fighting legislation. We'll be protecting jobs, bringing the stimulus money that millions of Americans plunging into poverty desperately need right now.
Andrea Chalupa:
I cannot tell you what a different future this country and the world will have if we can get Ossoff and Warnock into the Senate. We are standing at the crossroads of two very different paths, and please, everyone, just leave it all on the field for Georgia. I just want to stress that.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, and remember that, in a 50-50 Senate, Kamala Harris is the tiebreaker, which means the Democrats actually will finally wrest the Senate away from McConnell. It will actually be meaningful. Will you get everything you want? Undoubtedly, no, because it's the Biden administration. But you will no longer be struggling with an openly fascist, sadistic party that has absolutely no desire to serve the people. When you're dealing with things like COVID-19 and climate change and existential crises, you want to have the Democrats in control regardless of other concerns.
Sarah Kendzior:
Speaking of one party autocratic states, there are more horrible developments going on in coup land. We now have Trump trying to strip civil service protections from 88% of the employees at the OMB. That's the department actually that Neera Tanden would ultimately head if she were confirmed. Other departments are likely to follow.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is a step toward executive autocracy. It's the kind of government that you see in Viktor Orban's Hungary, or in Erdoğan's Turkey. I'm going to read this thread we got here from Representative Don Beyer of Virginia, who says, I'm just going to read the whole thing because he puts it better than we do. "This is an extremely important story that isn't getting the attention it deserves." That's the story I just mentioned. "After GSA initiated the presidential transition, I warned that there would be new Trump sabotage to come. This is exactly what I was concerned about. Here's what's happening. Presidents appoint leaders of federal agencies, for instance, cabinet secretaries and their staffs. But most civil servants are career federal employees, a professional staff that provides continuity no matter what party is in power.
Sarah Kendzior:
“Congress passed laws to create this system. It wasn't always this way. There was a time when an incoming president handed out government jobs to loyalists and supporters after taking office, and the Civil Service constantly turned over with administrations. That was terrible for the country. Congress passed the Pendleton Act in 1883 to end this practice—the "spoils system"—and over time created a permanent, professional civil service that works for the American people, not for the benefit of one person.
Sarah Kendzior:
“Trump is trying to undo that now. To bypass laws enacted by Congress that protect career civil servants from being fired for political reasons, Trump issued an executive order just before the election, creating a new classification of federal employees "Schedule F", who can be terminated without cause. The White House ordered every agency to reclassify some of its workforce a Schedule F by January 19th, 2021, the day before the inauguration. At the time, Trump believed he would get a second term and planned to fire protected employees like Dr. Fauci for imagined disloyalty. But once it became clear Trump lost the election, a new goal came into view: sabotaging President Elect Biden.
Sarah Kendzior:
“Sometime in the last week, the Office of Management and Budget produced a memo which classified 88% of its workers as Schedule F. Trump now believes he can fire nearly everyone at OMB at will. More agencies are likely to follow OMB in reclassifying portions of their workforces as Schedule F soon. Trump likely hopes to replace swathes of the career federal workforce with loyalists.
Sarah Kendzior:
“Obviously, we are not taking this sitting down. Democrats in both House and Senate have filed legislation to nullify Trump's Schedule F order. The Oversight Dems Committee is pursuing an investigation to track other reclassifications of workers so that we can see where this is happening. Lawsuits have been filed and a big fight over this is coming." This was written on November 27th, by the way.
Sarah Kendzior:
"I'm working with colleagues to block funding for reclassification of federal workers under Trump's order. Trump hopes to leave his successor with a sabotaged government amid a pandemic and economic crisis. It's contemptible, and we have to stop him. One more thing: some of you may remember that a top public official Trump appointed to oversee the federal workforce resigned last month because he could not in good conscience cooperate with the new order from the president. He resigned over this." That is Don Beyer. You should go and check out the thread.
Sarah Kendzior:
There is also a note from Georgetown Professor, Don Moynihan, who specializes, I believe in studies of American government, who notes that a 2017 Domestic Policy Council member from another Heritage Foundation alum laid out the framework for dismantling public sector unions and making it easier to fire employees including the "originalist theory" that the president can fire anyone. He has a long thread about this, as well. It's just extreme abuse of executive power which, of course, has been the hallmark of Trump's entire tenure in office.
Sarah Kendzior:
Apparently, it is difficult to undo. There have been people that are like, all right, fine, Trump fires everybody, can Biden hire them back immediately on January 21st? I guess, because now if he is doing this in a non king-like way, it has to be an open position with a traditional hiring process, it takes time. I don't know what the hell to do in this situation because if Trump is going to take the gutting and the purging that he's already begun and accelerate it to this level, so say we're losing 88% of—interesting number he chose there, I'm just realizing—of every department on the way out, along with all of these firings that have already occurred in the DoD, in other bureaus that have to do with military engagement (later in the show, we're going to talk about Iran), it's very troubling. They've hollowed out our government, and that leaves the American people very vulnerable, and it also is a bonanza for any kind of hostile state that wants to take advantage of the situation as well as for the criminals within the Trump administration who are very likely wrapping up heists, reallocations of resources into their own pockets, you know, the sort of things they've been doing for four years, as they make their way out the door, assuming they make it out the door.
Andrea Chalupa:
This is deeply disturbing, and I think the key point here is that Trump was engineering this mass purge, because that's what this is. This is the purge, accelerated. He's switching the status of tons of civil servants across the federal government so he could fire them, replace them with loyalists. This was all done in anticipation of Trump getting a second term in office. This validates everybody's claim, including ours, that if Trump got four more years, it would be full blown autocrat time. The first term was spent being an aspiring autocrat and spending a lot of time with actual autocrats, like North Korea's dictator and Putin and praising those guys and inviting Hungary's Orban into the White House (which I don't think Americans understand how that visual is as disturbing as the American president visiting North Korea and doing all these pageantry photo ops with the flags, American and North Korean flags side by side with the dictator of North Korea, of the Hermit Kingdom, whose little autocracy is a prison. It's a duck camp.)
Andrea Chalupa:
Imagine if the aspiring autocrat got four more years. What we're talking about here—engineering a mass purge—basically confirms our worst fears. I think the most troubling thing here is, next time we're going to get posh Trump. We're going to get a cleaned up version of Trump. Maybe it'll be Josh Hawley out of Missouri who has a boyish smile. Maybe it'll be him. It's going to be somebody like that that they're going to try to run and clean up nice for the American public.
Andrea Chalupa:
Whoever they put in, the same culture, the same genocidal ideology of hate, the same staunch anti-immigration policy nightmares that want to deliberately engineer human rights crises and torture people by separating families, and so forth, all those organizations, that entire culture across America, backed by the tens of millions that voted for Trump in 2020, they're seeing this and they're paying close attention, and they're not going to wait until their second term to engineer something like this. They're going to do it right off the bat, as soon as they get in.
Andrea Chalupa:
I think the important, blazing neon sign for all of us is that the next autocrat is going to learn from all Trump's mistakes and improve upon them and have a much clearer roadmap on how to accelerate the purge and how to rule above accountability and how to dismantle more efficiently and how to push their agenda as a much more effective steamroll than even Trump managed to do. That's the real danger here.
Andrea Chalupa:
If you want proof of that—that we're going to get a posh Trump next time around—look at how good Republicans were at learning from the 2018 Democratic blue wave where you had a huge, historic rise of women come into the House of Representatives, and especially women of color. What did the Republicans learn from that, and what did they do in 2020? Well, look at all of the Dem losses in the House. A lot of those Democrats lost to women and people of color, because the Republicans learned and they paid attention and they were able to gaslight the public by running women and minorities against these more vulnerable Democrats in these swing districts.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, Republicans are learning and they're positioning themselves stronger, and they're weaponizing the power of gaslighting by hiding behind what the public wants. Oh, you want women, you want minorities? Okay, we'll give you that. Oh, you want a less offensive autocrat, somebody that cleans up nice and can string sentences together? We'll give you that. You can't stand Trump's tweets, you find him tiring? All right, we'll give you somebody that doesn't do that. But it's going to be the same vicious policies, the same war on the poor, the same war on minorities and the same war on our fight for fairness and equality and sustainability and the environment. I just want everybody to understand this to the core and know that democracy is fragile, and we're not out of the woods by any means.
Andrea Chalupa:
I just want to stress that... I don't know if you saw this, Sarah, because it was a very sort of New York centric thing that happened on Twitter this week, where some New Yorker posted a comment about bodegas.
Sarah Kendzior:
Oh God, yes, I saw that. The New Yorker who never heard of the gas station or a convenience store.
Andrea Chalupa:
I want to bring that up because it was just this really inane Twitter debate about a New Yorker saying we love our bodegas, it's the corner deli where there's always a cat and it's your corner deli and you know everyone there and they all know you and you come in and you buy whatever and you impulse buy. Those little independent mom and pop stores.
Andrea Chalupa:
The rest of America was like, "We don't have bodegas, but we have 711, we have Walgreens." It was just this whole, like, shut up New York, stop thinking you're superior because of your bodegas kind of debate. I was really struck by this debate on Twitter because I don't remember the last time American Twitter has such a stupid debate and went after each other over the stupidest stuff like this. It was sort of like, oh, wow, we're no longer living Hunger Games on American Twitter, where we're fighting for our own survival and against this existential threat of a growing dystopia in our government. It’s this weird return to normalcy where Americans can fight each other over the stupidest stuff, just like we did before Trump hijacked our democracy.
Andrea Chalupa:
At one point, I'm comforted that we're returning to normal Twitter fights, but at the same time, I don't want people to exhale so much and just succumb to the relief and become complacent when the threats remain. We have a Republican party that is brilliant at gaslighting. Almost like, think of the machines in the Matrix. They're really good at showing you what you want to see in order to come in and get their way with you.
Andrea Chalupa:
Everyone needs to remain vigilant and remain engaged and understand that if we don't treat democracy like a lifestyle and join our communities—strengthen our communities, run for office, get the smartest, most empathetic people we know to run for office—we're going to end up back in the Hunger Games. It's a very, very thin line, and it's very easy for us to cross it here in the united states, currently.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, I mean I think there's been plenty of petty, inane Twitter debates that have gone on over the last four years. So, I think you've just made the wise decision to not spend as much time on Twitter as me or other people, and have thankfully missed some of them. But I definitely see a return to that mindset in coverage, like this obsessive coverage of Joe Biden, who injured his foot. Like, oh, my God, what does it mean?
Sarah Kendzior:
Meanwhile, we have President COVID. President, I have mysterious medical appointments at Walter Reed, president, Dr. Nick Riviera from the Simpsons is my doctor. It's just... Don't let that go, that big mystery, oh, yeah, that's cool. Let's focus on Biden's foot. Let's focus on digging through Neera Tanden's Twitter account, while you cannot figure out that the majority of the Trump administration has been linked to organized crime for 40 years.
Sarah Kendzior:
People are very comfortable with these little, trifling disputes. And why not? It's fun to not have to think about an existential crisis, an existential threat to our very survival. Unfortunately, that threat remains there, whether it's COVID-19, or the climate crisis, or autocracy, or, we will now discuss war in Iran. This is a thing that has been building for a while. We've done several episodes recently on Gaslit Nation about Trump and his backers’ desire, long-held, for war in Iran kicking up a notch, basically coinciding with his presidential loss.
Sarah Kendzior:
He went on a little hiring and firing spree in which we lost the Secretary of Defense and gained a lot of warmongering lackeys. Now, the situation has gotten even more severe. On Friday, Iran's leading nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who is basically the J. Robert Oppenheimer of Iran, was assassinated outside Tehran. The assassination came as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was pressuring the incoming Biden administration to drop the Iran nuclear deal created during the Obama years.
Sarah Kendzior:
Netanyahu had long been interested in Fakhrizadeh, saying at a 2018 news conference, "Remember that name." There is some debate going on as to how exactly Fakhrizadeh was murdered, but no one doubts that it's an assassination, and he's the second major Iranian official to be assassinated this year. The first was Qasem Soleimani, whose assassination nearly brought us to the brink of World War III back in January 2020. And yes, it's the same 2020, believe it or not, the endless year of hell.
Sarah Kendzior:
So, it is important to note that regardless of what you think of these two individuals and their goals, their assassinations were illegal under international law, and are obviously intended not only to wound Iran, but to inflame an entire region. As of now, it's not entirely clear who killed Fakhrizadeh, but most experts are assuming that it was Israel's doing, and tactically, the attack on him resembles prior attacks by Mossad.
Sarah Kendzior:
As we discuss all of this, it's important to remember that Netanyahu is deeply intertwined with the worst elements of the Trump administration—particularly with Jared Kushner—and that these ties go back decades, as does their mutual lust for war with Iran and their hatred for the Obama administration and the Iran deal that they have tried to pass.
Sarah Kendzior:
So I'm going to read an excerpt from my book, Hiding in Plain Sight, to give you a quick background on all of these individuals. I wrote this in early 2019 and it is frightening to see it playing out now. All right, so I'm just going to read a few excerpts here about the security threat that is Jared Kushner. “Both Jared and Ivanka hold an SF-86 security clearance, which requires a thorough background check in which state officials look for vulnerabilities, like debt, that can be exploited by hostile states, as well as demonstrations of deceit and disloyalty that render an individual a danger to the United States.
Sarah Kendzior:
“Kushner's massive debt and tax manipulation schemes should have prevented him from holding any kind of clearance, but not in Trump's dynastic kleptocracy. Kushner's foreign ties were not a deterrent either, even though his lifelong relationship with Netanyahu—a relationship so close that Netanyahu slept in Jared's childhood bedroom when visiting the Kushner family—posed an obvious conflict of interest, one that deepened when Kushner was selected by Trump to be a liaison to the Middle East.”
Sarah Kendzior:
Then moving on a bit. “The Kushner family are investors in illegal West Bank settlements, meaning that Jared has not only a political conflict of interest by serving as a White House adviser on the Middle East, but a financial one. It is also a humanitarian conflict of interest. As Netanyahu transforms Israel into a more hard right state, employing extreme violence against Palestinians, and lobbying vitriolic rhetoric against liberal Jews in Israel and in the diaspora, extremist rabbis have flourished and Kushner favors them.
Sarah Kendzior:
“In 2018, Ivanka and Jared were blessed by Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, who calls Black people “monkeys” and believes that non-Jews exist in Israel solely to be the slaves of Jews. This racist rhetoric bears that of the Trump administration, including that of Christian evangelicals like Mike Pence or Mike Pompeo, who align with Israeli extremists in order to fill their own political ambitions and sate their own religious fanaticism.
Sarah Kendzior:
“Contrary to press portrayals, Jared and Ivanka were never outliers in the extremism of the Trump administration. According to Kushner biographer, Vicky Ward, Kushner's devotion to Netanyahu is all encompassing. Aside from the countries that interest him as targets for kleptocratic shakedown schemes, like Qatar, which ultimately paid off his 666 Fifth Avenue debt through Brookfield, a company backed by the Qatar Investment Authority, Israel is Kushner's major foreign policy concern.
Sarah Kendzior:
“Ward writes of a December 2016 attempt by Kushner to rig a UN vote in favor of Israel before taking office. This plan required the aid of the aforementioned Vitaly Churkin, who had remained in Trump's orbit decades later as Russia's ambassador to the United Nations.” And then to quote Ward: "What was highly unusual was the battle between the transition team and the sitting government. It was as if Kushner viewed Netanyahu as his boss, and Obama as his enemy."
Sarah Kendzior:
That is from Hiding in Plain Sight and the reason that I wanted to read that now is because Kushner is currently headed to the Middle East. In the next few days, he's going to be in Saudi Arabia and in Qatar, and is planning to meet with the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), best known for butchering the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. He's also meeting with the Emir of Qatar, the country, which as I just mentioned, helped pay off his massive dirty debt for 666 Fifth Avenue in exchange for foreign policy favors.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is an axis of autocrats in the Middle East, that Kushner and others in the Trump administration have been putting together not in the interest of peace as it's euphemistically defined by them, but in the interest of big money, personal favors and likely, war, as Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states set their sights on Iran, while Russia, sated by deals with the Trump administration, has agreed to look the other way.
Sarah Kendzior:
As we’ve discussed on Gaslit Nation over the past three weeks, Kushner was preceded in his visit to the middle east by Mike Pompeo, a rapture fiend who has been similarly lusting for war in Iran and seemingly heading for a man made apocalypse. According to a article in The Daily Beast that came out today, December 1st, “Pompeo has been given permission by Trump to do whatever he wants in Iran,” and I'm quoting here, "Trump has given some of his most hawkish administration officials—particularly his top diplomat, Mike Pompeo—carte blanche to squeeze and punish the Islamic Republic as aggressively as they wish in the coming weeks. All Trump asks is that they don't risk starting World War III, as the President has specifically put it in several private conversations Pompeo and others, according to two senior administration officials."
Sarah Kendzior:
Now, I believe this quote about Pompeo, because we've been watching this in action, basically, since Pompeo entered this administration. I have some doubts about the veracity of the World War III section quote. I don't doubt that Trump said it, I doubt that he meant it, because Trump does not want to be blamed for starting World War III—because that would entail assuming responsibility—but would he welcome a situation that he could spin as having no choice but to pursue World War III by, "Striking back"? Yes, he would. Would that allow him to carry out long-held desires, like using nuclear weapons, which we've documented extensively on this show and in my articles? Yes, it would. Would this war cause chaos for the impending Biden administration, or even be used as a pretext for Trump to stay in office under an emergency decree? Yes, it would. Is it possible that Iran will finally strike back with their most likely response being a cyber attack? Yes, and here, it's important to note that the Trump administration rewrote the Nuclear Posture Review in 2018 so that a nuclear weapon is now deemed an appropriate response to a major cyber attack, and they continue to label Iran as the main cyber adversary of the US.
Sarah Kendzior:
So yes, this could mean war, a war conducted by a variety of dangerous actors for a variety of horrific reasons, a war in which ordinary Iranians and Americans will suffer most. This is another war that we do not want. These are all worst case scenarios, and hopefully they will not come to pass, but given that nearly everything that transpired since 2016 is a worst case scenario that did come to pass, nothing should be ruled out.
Andrea Chalupa:
It's surreal that we started 2020 with the assassination of Soleimani, who was of course, the top general of Iran, a beloved figure, a charismatic leader. I think, whether it's Biden or Trump in the White House, I think Iran is going to be determined to avenge that assassination. I do think that puts an even bigger target on death to America in the years to come. Even though the assassination of Soleimani adds a whole new layer of uncertainty, which of course opens up potential floodgates to war—asymmetrical warfare, like you mentioned, the cyber attacks—I do still think that there is leverage for the incoming Biden administration, thanks to all of the crippling sanctions that Trump has imposed on Iran which have just decimated the economy in Iran, the value of its currency, its oil exports, all of it.
Andrea Chalupa:
When Obama successfully led the negotiation of the Iran deal and sanctions on Iran were lifted for a time, obviously, under Obama, you saw celebrations in the street, people driving their cars and caravans, cheering out the windows. The people of Iran are desperately hurting, and on top of that, you have this pandemic and they are one of the hardest hit. We saw that very early on in 2020 with videos top Iranian officials sweating on camera because they had COVID. They were, I believe, one of the first governments that lost people in top official posts to COVID-19.
Andrea Chalupa:
Iran is greatly suffering. An incoming Biden administration can bring back the Iran deal saying, okay, commit to those terms, we already worked those out, slow down your nuclear activities and if we can get this all hammered out, we'll of course, roll back these sanctions.
Andrea Chalupa:
With Iran, I think there is a possibility there, a turning of the page for them, one that they desperately need for the sake of their own people. I know you might think, oh, well, why would a dictatorship care about its own people? It's because the Iranian people have been leading protests before the pandemic and protesting their government. So, they need these sanctions lifted for the sake of the stability of the country and the regime. It's a desperate situation on the ground there.
Andrea Chalupa:
I think a more interesting question for US foreign policy is what the Biden administration, what their relationship will be like with Israel. Currently, in Israel, the current ruling coalition is falling apart. It looks like Israel's headed to a new election in early 2020, and as we know, the hardliners in Israel hate the Iran deal, hated Obama. There's a lot of tension between Obama and Netanyahu's government, and Trump was like a giant flowery fruit basket for Netanyahu's government. Netanyahu had a really good four years under Trump and Putin. When he was campaigning again, there was a giant billboard of a picture of him shaking hands with Putin. So, he enjoyed this axis of autocrats, and Netanyahu, like Trump, being an aspiring autocrat, there's been really disturbing editorials coming out of Israel of Netanyahu trying to steer Israel towards autocracy. Being very corrupt, and of course, he and his wife are both indicted. It's amazing that he's been able to survive for so long.
Andrea Chalupa:
I think the question really remains on how Biden comes in, cleans up the Iran mess that Trump left behind, and in doing so, where does that leave his administration's relationship with Israel? Depending on who is in charge in Israel. Netanyahu may very well be on his way out, which would be a great thing for the Biden administration, I believe—given how hardline Netanyahu is—and a great thing for the Israeli people.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, if Netanyahu leaves as Prime Minister, the entire world will benefit. You can see this turn towards hard right governments that's been in play for about 10 to 15 years. Israel was one of the oldest examples of that when Netanyahu came in, in 2009, and you're even seeing the kind of things that you see with autocracies, things like brain drain, where Israelis who can't abide living under him, who can't abide extreme human rights violations—I think especially after 2014 and his actions in Gaza—they're leaving. They're leaving out of conscience. They're leaving out of a desire for freedom.
Sarah Kendzior:
We also see, I believe it's week 23 of protests from Israelis against Netanyahu. Netanyahu is one of these key nodes in this transnational crime syndicate that we talk about. He's, I think, just as essential to it as Putin. They love to say, “all roads lead to Putin”, and generally speaking, they do. But they also lead to Netanyahu. They lead to MBS. They often lead to Erdoğan. There are a variety of actors there. Under Netanyahu, Israel has become a paradise for money launderers. We see a lot of oligarchs—people like Roman Abramovich—getting Israeli passports so that they could avoid the kind of sanctions that have been put in place due to things like the Magnitsky Act. We see this very fluid use of the right of return in order to allow criminal elements to thrive with Netanyahu's protection.
Sarah Kendzior:
That used to be something that Israel rejected. Back when Meyer Lansky tried to get Israeli citizenship, I think it was Golda Meir, who was like, "Get the hell out of here, this isn't going to happen." Netanyahu welcomes these folks with open arms, and it's extraordinarily dangerous. I think that if Israelis are able to get a better official in there—one that could have a better relationship with the Biden administration, one that doesn't hold them in open content and that doesn't live for bloodshed and that isn't intertwined with key people than the way he was with Kushner, which is still extraordinarily dangerous—the whole world will be in a better place.
Sarah Kendzior:
But that said, and this will also lead into, we're going to talk about Flynn in a second, I am very, very worried about what is going to happen to the classified information that has been accumulated by people like Kushner, by people like Steve Bannon, by all of these individuals in this revolving door autocracy who've gone in, gotten security clearance they never should have gotten, know the world's secrets, and know the secrets of the United States government itself.
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm thinking of memorable events in US history that maybe were not investigated as thoroughly as they should have. There are a lot of different ways to blackmail a government. We often think of operations like Jeffrey Epstein—where again, by the way, you see an Israel connection, a Saudi connection, a Russia connection—but there's also just knowledge of the interior workings of the government itself. That's what WikiLeaks was searching for. That's what the Kremlin was searching for when Snowden went over there. This is extremely valuable information, and there's no doubt in my mind that someone like Jared Kushner would sell that information for profit or trade it for favors. And it's not just Kushner, it's all of these bureaucrats, these lackeys who will have lost their position, and it's Trump himself.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is one of the reasons that we keep calling for accountability and for investigation and for indictment when necessary, because all of these people are national security risks. We have had a Kremlin asset linked to a transnational crime syndicate in the White House for four years, surrounded by people of like mind, surrounded by traitors and criminals, and they hold all of our secrets. Our national security has been shattered; our sovereignty is in grave danger.
Sarah Kendzior:
If people don't understand this... none of this is about revenge, it's not about petty grievances, it's really about our survival as a nation. This issue is going to continue whether or not the Trump administration is in power (and it looks like they're not going to be in power) and whether or not Netanyahu is. It's just such a massive, massive crisis.
Sarah Kendzior:
I want to hear your thoughts, but after that, I want to discuss Flynn because he's another example of this. He's a classic example of this phenomenon in action.
Andrea Chalupa:
Well, how is it different from members of Congress and any presidential administration leaving to go lobby for corporate interests or work on K Street? I don't see how it's so different. I mean, Kushner, the Trump family, knowing all of our state secrets and profiting off of them clearly during these last four years, and then continuing to do so, it's very similar spirit to the massive lobbying industry and the revolving door. If you look at the SEC—which is supposed to be the watchdog of Wall Street—it's this revolving door between Wall Street and the SEC, these guys just go in and out in and out, and it's always been that way with the DOJ, where these lawyers in the DOJ then jump to private firms, and then you have, who was it, the former head of the FBI, was it Louis Freeh-
Sarah Kendzior:
Louis Freeh and William Sessions, both working as lobbyists for the Russian mafia, yeah.
Andrea Chalupa:
Representing the Russian mob. So just to comfort everyone, it's just more of the same, which doesn't make it right and clearly it's been weakening our democracy to the point where our intelligence community let a Russian asset hijack our democracy in 2016 and become president, and then further to dismantle democracy in the western Alliance and give Putin his wish list.
Andrea Chalupa:
I mean it’s just the same old swamp that Trump pretends not to be profiting off of and making grow. I think it's more, this has gone on for too long, and Elizabeth Warren, on her campaign website, had a big fat plan for this. If you read her corruption plan on what she was going to do to close these loopholes, you needed to take a nap afterwards because the cesspool ran so deep.
Andrea Chalupa:
I do think that we need to change the overall culture and we need to run candidates and recruit candidates—a whole generation of Katie Porters and AOCs—who are fluent in understanding how this cesspool works and how to confront it and talk truth to power and pass laws in order to close these loopholes. The fact that that hasn't been done yet, it's what gave us Trump in the first place. Also, in addition to that, with the insecurity of our international intelligence being out there and monetized essentially, well look, the Chinese and the Russians have been hacking us for years. They hacked the White House. They hacked the department in the federal government that holds everybody's records when you get a job, when you get vetted for a job, and they collect all this intelligence on you to make sure you're of sound mind, and finances and all of it to make sure that you can work in some of the highest levels of government. The Chinese took that data from us.
Andrea Chalupa:
We, for years, have existed with all of these vulnerabilities, and it's about damn time somebody did something about it. I just wish that we had more of a movement, or I wish people could really commit in their minds and their hearts to say, look, how do I live in this country and ensure that these things will stop happening, Trumps will stop rising to power, Putin assets will stop hijacking elections? Well, you confront all the loopholes and the systems that allow corruption to flourish in the first place, and that's it.
Andrea Chalupa:
I know people might want to have their hair on fire over all of this, but guys, it's also part and parcel to American politics. As we always say, corruption is an industry.
Sarah Kendzior:
But I think the difference is that the stakes are much higher. One, because of the ticking clock of-
Andrea Chalupa:
They've always been high. How do you think we got a Russian asset?
Sarah Kendzior:
Well, that's my point, that's my point is that-
Andrea Chalupa:
It was high in 2015, it was high in 2016.
Sarah Kendzior:
But then we got the Russian asset. All of this was building for decades on end with no accountability in place, with people like Manafort—who, when he finally was indicted, it was for crimes he committed in 2002—just running free euphemistically, describing themselves as consultants, as lobbyists. We now have all of this out in the open, and we have a government that is just openly anti-American, that has no interest in America even remaining as a sovereign nation. They only want to pick at the scraps.
Sarah Kendzior:
I think that the kind of corruption we've had before wasn't fully against that kind of sovereignty. It was like, there was an interest in the United States remaining a global superpower, for better or for worse, and when you look at something like George W. Bush's administration, it was obviously for worse. It was for imperialism. It was to commit acts of war and consume their profit this way.
Andrea Chalupa:
Sarah, you can't tell me you bought the gaslighting that these guys were really about American democracy and America's position in the world when they brought us into two wars that weakened our standing. It's like, Trump just gave the game away. The others have been doing it all this time, too, and that doesn't change.
Sarah Kendzior:
That's my point. But I think that at this point, they achieved the goal. One of the key things that they wanted to do was to have somebody in this position of executive power, who would, as Steven Bannon said, dismantle the administrative state, and not in this kind of step-by-step way that we've been seeing since the Reagan era, but very quickly, with great acceleration, all at once, leaving scraps behind.
Sarah Kendzior:
And so I think that, yes, obviously, all of these things... One thing leads to another, this is typical of American politics. We can't survive it anymore. We were barely surviving it by 2016, that's how Trump was able to get in, in the first place. If it continues onward, without accountability, without investigation, without a rigorous examination of the crisis itself, I don't think we'll make it to 2022 to 2024, and if we do make it, it will be under the guidance of an openly fascist GOP autocratic ruler. Then I think all of our dire predictions from previous episodes about things like the US potentially splitting up, or just a fully fascist administration, will come to pass.
Sarah Kendzior:
Once again, that's why it's important to fight it off now and as you said, vote for people who will make these progressive changes, shift the leverage of governments so that it is in the Democrats control, but, they need to be aggressive. It's not, as I said, out of vengeance or partisanship; it's just for basic survival. We won't last it. I don't think we're going to last Flynn, if you want to get to that, unless you had more to say.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, no, a really good report that everyone should read, which we'll link to the top of the show notes, is out of the EU, which is looking at the last 20 years of American politics where the Republican Party became increasingly autocratic, resembling more like Erdoğan's leading party or Orban's in Hungary. Everyone should understand that Trump was just an acceleration of a larger trend that had been going on for two decades. What's really interesting is that if we're looking at the last 20 years (this report said it was the last 20 years this has been taking place), well, what happened roughly 20 years ago? Fox News launched in America. Rupert Murdoch brought his disease of disinformation to America in a very big way. It's no surprise that with the rise of far-right propaganda, we had the rise of an unapologetically far-right Republican Party with autocratic tendencies, and Trump just came in and finished off the job. Next time around, posh Trump is coming. We're warning you, posh Trump is coming.
Andrea Chalupa:
George W. Bush and Cheney, they were anti-American. Trump and Jared Kushner, they're anti American. The Republican Party of the last 20 years is blatantly anti-American and works against the interests of our own country and weakens our standing in the world and our alliances. Yeah, we need a reset in America in a very big way, and we're not going to get that unless the grassroots strengthen. The way I've watched Ukraine confront these issues is... Its own country, corruption, officials and judges that actively work against Ukraine's own interests and sovereignty, is you have a very strong civic society. It's the independent journalists, it's that whole culture that's strong on the ground that's able to fight for a reset with a popular uprising which Ukraine did twice; in 2004 with the Orange Revolution where they overturned a corrupt presidential election, and in 2013, of course, with the Revolution of Dignity, Euromaidan.
Andrea Chalupa:
So if anybody's listening to this going, "Oh, my God, what a big job ahead of us.", well, not for you individually, because if you go to the Gaslit Nation Action Guide on our website, gaslitnationpod.com, and just pick off what you can chew, just pick one little bit that you can actively engage in. If you don't have the time, then make sure you set up automatic donations to all these groups so they can build, so they can expand and hire more people to do this essential work on the ground. It's on each of us now to do our bit and to be good citizens and to engage. That's how we do it. If everybody breaks off a piece of this, we can lift this giant boulder up this hill and clean up our system. But that's the work that needs to get done. It's like a cultural reset that's going to happen over time by all of us working hard and staying engaged and remaining vigilant.
Sarah Kendzior:
Agree, Agree, Agree, and I hope that progressive candidates are thinking about this as a national security issue. It's like when we had Timothy Snyder on our show and he was talking about ways to fight fascism. All the things that you should do to fight fascism are just things that you should be doing anyway to strengthen democracy, because democracies that are genuinely strong, that don't have false unity but unity based on something that you're striving for, on policies that benefit everyone, they don't go through the kind of crises that we have been enduring for a very long time.
Sarah Kendzior:
The latest of those is that Michael Flynn has been pardoned for everything. He has been given an extremely sweeping pardon by Trump, which absolves Flynn of lying to the FBI, but also absolves him of "any and all possible offenses arising from the facts set forth, or that might arise or be charged, claimed or asserted, based on the Mueller investigation or on any grand jury." This is like a reverse Minority Report for pre-crime. He's getting pre-pardoned for his future crimes.
Sarah Kendzior:
The pardon for Flynn is sweeping due to the sheer volume of crimes that Flynn committed, and I'll just give a little brief list of those. I don't think I have all of them in here; lying to the FBI, attempting to kidnap a Turkish cleric residing in Pennsylvania, being an unregistered foreign agent for Russia, being an unregistered foreign agent for Turkey, illegally attempting to sell nuclear materials to the Saudis, illegally brokering a sanctions deal with the Russians. Here it's worth looking at exactly what Flynn pled guilty to when he was lying to the FBI: it was about working with Russia to manipulate a UN law over Israeli settlements.
Sarah Kendzior:
Russia's ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin—this is the same guy I had mentioned when I was reading from Hiding in Plain Sight—was a witness to this incident, but he died suddenly and without explanation six days after Flynn left office in 2017. So, there's that. Anyway, I'm going to read a little from the original indictment of Michael Flynn in 2017, so we remember what he did. “On or about December 21st, 2016, Egypt submitted a resolution to the UN Security Council on the issue of Israeli settlements. The UN Security Council was scheduled to vote on the resolution the following day. On or about December 22nd, 2016, a very senior member of the Presidential Transition Team,”—this turned out to be Kushner—”directed Flynn to contact officials from foreign governments, including Russia, to learn where each government stood on the resolution and to influence those governments to delay the vote or defeat the resolution.
Sarah Kendzior:
“On or about December 22nd, 2016, Flynn contacted the Russian ambassador,”—that would be Churkin, the deceased Churkin—”about the pending vote. Flynn informed the Russian ambassador about the incoming administration's opposition to the resolution and requested that Russia vote against or delay the resolution.” So, once again, we are back to this collaboration between Israel and Russia, and a series of trade offs that have been made by the Trump crime cabal regarding US foreign policy.
Sarah Kendzior:
Initially, this was thought to be a really big deal by US government officials, and a violation of our sovereignty. In March 2017, for example, you saw Jackie Speier, the representative, raising this question at a hearing about Flynn. “The fact that he was actively asking the Russians through the ambassador to vote against the United States at the UN with regard to Israeli settlements, have you looked further into that issue? Because that clearly involves a private citizen conducting foreign policy,” which I will remind you, is illegal.
Sarah Kendzior:
What's so sad when I look back at this is that I can barely imagine a hearing now, in this Democratic, Nancy Pelosi led House, with these sorts of straightforward and important questions. Representative Speier, for example, was also the person who used to be leading an investigation into oligarch partner, Len Blavatnik, only to have that investigation disappear once Blavatnik gave a record donation to the Democrats, to the DCCC.
Sarah Kendzior:
We do not have a real opposition party to root out actors of corrupt influence even in this era of obvious danger. Unless things change, that means time is running out for a free and independent United States. And we'll see what the Biden administration does once they actually get into office—and I'm just going to assume they get in there—but judging by how the House has behaved over the last few years, things do not look promising. I hope I'm wrong. I hope it's different, and I hope that they take these concerns seriously, again.
Andrea Chalupa:
No shit. [laughs] That's all I'm going to say about that. That's my two cents. Oh, it's going to be-
Sarah Kendzior:
A pardon extravaganza.
Andrea Chalupa:
The pardon shop is open. It's open for business. I want to give some people... I want to leave our audience off with some hope because it's going to be raining pardons between now and Inauguration Day. A great book for all of us to read to find some justice in this world is Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime. Read that book. It's by the great Jennifer Taub. We're going to have her on the show and do a big, fat Gaslit Nation special about how blood money corruption like Paul Manafort and Flynn and Steve Bannon, how the justice system fails at holding those guys accountable and preventing them from rising to power and what we can do about it.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, get angry. With every pardon that comes, an angel in heaven puts on their armor and reads Big Dirty Money. Know that the fight is in our hands now. We are going to take our democracy back little by little, it's an uphill battle. But just stay informed and stay vigilant and read Big Dirty Money and get ready for our interview with Jennifer. Send us any questions you may have for her. We're really excited about that.
Andrea Chalupa:
I just want to point out something that Sarah said before we started taping and I completely agree with this point, is that Flynn was let loose with this pardon because Flynn is a really good fluff boy. He's really good at working up the crowd. He and his son were Mr. Pizzagate. They were the ones that were pushing the original version of QAnon, with Pizzagate, saying that the Clintons had some child sex dungeon in the basement of a pizza parlor in the heart of our nation's capitol, which incited some guy to drive up to North Carolina and blast off his shotgun when people were inside eating.
Andrea Chalupa:
Then this quaint little pizza place had to get a guard at the door. It was horrific. Know that Flynn is really, really good at leveraging the weapon of conspiracy theories. Because what they do is they create a culture where people become so brainwashed that they act, they become vicious, they become violent. This is what we've seen again and again under the rise of Trumpism. Get ready for that with the vaccine getting rolled out under a Biden administration and governments across the country having to do all sorts of things to finally contain this pandemic effectively under new leadership.
Andrea Chalupa:
Flynn's going to be Mr. Disinformation... What does that guy call that comes out, the pump up guy? You know what I'm saying?
Sarah Kendzior:
I know what you're talking about. I don't know what that's called. The hype man? I don't know.
Andrea Chalupa:
The hype man! Yes! Michael Flynn is the hype man of Trumpism. That is a wonderful boost that Trumpism is about to get, because let's be real, the Republicans are not going to want to run a loser in 2024. They're going to find some all new posh Trump to run for president, and Trump and his family are going to be very hurt by that. So, they're going to need a General Flynn on their side in trying to leverage their own brand, their own power, against the Republican establishment that's going to be forced to put up some new, brave face to go after the Democrats in 2024. So, yep, it's interesting times.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, no, I'm glad you reminded me of that, because Flynn is basically useful now for two things. It's not like if Trump hadn't pardoned him, he wouldn't be out talking, anyway. He's been talking non stop for two years. But this pseudo legitimizes him, I think, to a certain kind of Republican that maybe would have hesitated to quote a directed felon or help out the initiatives of a convicted felon.
Sarah Kendzior:
With Flynn, you get him pushing the Trump election rigging narrative, which is still going on and which is still a very big deal. It's a big deal that he hasn't conceded. It's a big deal that he's lying about election fraud-
Andrea Chalupa:
Lawsuits are continuing.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, lawsuits are continuing. It's like people have gotten used to it now, because it's been almost a month of this. This is absolutely nothing that you should get used to. And it's not a matter of will he win? (Although there is still the possibility of that, and that's very frightening.) It's the culture. It's breaking down the culture of our political system, of expectations of election integrity. Again, this is a situation where you need to make sure we have election integrity and transparency in the vote in hand-marked paper ballots, that it makes it a lot harder for Trump to make these claims. This is one of the reasons, actually, he's having trouble making them now, because there's been so many hand-marked paper ballots.
Sarah Kendzior:
But the other thing is, just like everyone else in the Trump administration, including Steve Bannon and Mattis and McMaster and John Kelly and all of these other departed goons, Flynn is obsessed with war in Iran. That was one of the reasons that he hated Obama so much, is because he hated the Iran deal. So, they're pardoning Flynn right in time for the assassination of this scientist, these firings at the DoD. It's hard for me to look at this as disparate and unconnected. And yes, the Trump administration is known for doing a ton of horrific things at once and they're not always connected by anything beyond the fact that they're corrupt and horrific, but this is a little too much on the nose timing wise. So, I think folks should be looking out for that.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, and what's going to be interesting to see this Kremlin clown car all get pardoned—Manafort, the whole bunch—is as they make their way through the world pardoned, they're going to be committing more crimes. It's like they're on the radar. Trump can't pardon clearly future crimes. We're going to keep getting-
Sarah Kendzior:
Well, he did though! He just pardoned Flynn's future... That's what's so insane.
Andrea Chalupa:
You can't though. You really can't.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's like reverse Minority Report.
Andrea Chalupa:
You can't though. You absolutely cannot.
Sarah Kendzior:
Well, I mean technically you can't but he's decided you can. I think right now I see legal experts on Twitter just being like, "What the actual fuck? How is this going to work? Is this even a thing you can do?" They had the same reaction you did, which is basically like, this is nuts. But the thing is, they've done so many things that are insane. They're against the law until they write the law themselves, until they rewrite the law themselves, then it becomes the law.
Sarah Kendzior:
It's not protocol until they do it, and then it becomes protocol, it becomes precedent, and that's why it's just so, so dangerous, and that's why it's so dangerous and irresponsible when people like Mueller or Pelosi or the FBI or whoever, when they don't take people to account when they've committed really obvious crimes, or they've set a precedent for the newer, slicker Trumps of the future to follow. So, yeah, I don't know legally what the hell is up with this gigundo pardon, but-
Andrea Chalupa:
Okay, let me just tell you, legally, this is the Four Seasons Total Landscaping of pardons. It's not going to hold. Their entire pardoning strategy is like their let's steal the election strategy. It's a clown car coup. It's going to blow up in their faces. They're going to go out and commit more crimes. I think they're going to be dousing themselves in the flames of FARA. I think they're going to be collecting all of these dirty clients from abroad and getting busted on that, and probably tax evasion and money laundering. That's how I see these guys living out their golden years, just getting busted for fraud left and right, because as we always say on the show, being clownish is how they get away with it because people think they're so stupid that they underestimate them, and they laugh at them. They think there's no way these clowns are going to get into the White House, and then they do.
Andrea Chalupa:
Let's put it this way, a lot of the legal pundits on cable TV have job security with these guys running amok in the world. They're going to have a lot of new cases and investigations following them around because of their stench.
Sarah Kendzior:
I hope so, because the next one I saw that's looking for the future crimes pardon-
Andrea Chalupa:
Giuliani.
Sarah Kendzior:
Is Giuliani, exactly. I'm like, of course, of course. You have enough previous crimes that his pardon is going to be excessively lengthy, but he's gunning for more. He can't get enough. Not enough crimin’.
Andrea Chalupa:
He's gunning for an Oscar in his Borat performance.
Sarah Kendzior:
The fact that people forget that. There's just all these things that just the press, they'll go on and on about the minutiae of something—like what they're doing with Biden's foot injury, like I said before—and it's like Giuliani is on video procuring sexual services from what he thought to be an underage girl.
Andrea Chalupa:
Imagine what he does on his trips to Ukraine, guys, which is unfortunately a known sex tourism country.
Sarah Kendzior:
And they just are like, "Hey, Giuliani, why don't you come on TV and discuss the election results?" I'm like, Jesus Christ! It's like the same thing when Trump had his press conference and wished Ghislaine Maxwell well, and it's like she's a child rape trafficker, and you all think this is normal for some reason—you in the media—you seem to think this is just totally normal behavior, and you don't need to write a story about that or point out to the American public that this is, to say the least, problematic behavior. Oh my God. Anyway, we should wrap this up because we're just going to keep going. I can sense it. We're going to go do some Q&A-
Andrea Chalupa:
Yes.
Sarah Kendzior:
... for our Patreon subscribers. If you want keep going-
Andrea Chalupa:
If you want more of this, come join us at the Patreon-only Q&A where Sarah and I rant and rave even some more because that's what we like to do. And please, for the love of God, don't get complacent because that is like my pet peeve of Americans or anybody in a democracy. Democracies are fragile. Please go to the Gaslit Nation Action Guide and get in where you fit in and just adopt an action on the Gaslit Nation Action Guide on gaslitnationpod.com.
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:
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