We've reached the end of the Trump Presidency. Finally. Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman reckon with that fact, discuss the remaining threats and damage that need addressed, and welcome Jennifer Taub, author of Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime, to discuss the rampant corruption that led to this moment. To unlock exclusive content, including Friday Weekender show, become a patron at: http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast
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To see people come and take over the Capitol, the House and the Senate, beat officers, defile the seat of government.
How in the hell could that happen?
Where was Nancy Pelosi?
It's her job to provide Capitol security.
We saw Congressman Boehler taking a group of people for a tour sometime after the 3rd and before the 6th.
It was pretty clear that her team She's not on the home team.
She was with the visitors.
Hey everybody, Jared Yates Saxton here as always with Nick Hausman.
We are at the last day of the Trump presidency.
God, hallelujah, here we are.
Before we get into all that, we are really excited to welcome to the podcast, later on, Jennifer Taub, the author of Big Dirty Money, The Shocking Injustice, and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime.
Can't imagine how that's relevant at all, considering this criminal is going to leave the White House, and we're going to see what happens with it.
But here we are, today, talking about this inauguration, talking about the possible violence that we could see.
I have to ask, Nick, how are you feeling?
Well, I'm kind of, I'm wondering, so does, I'm also a child of the Midwest, so that's what explains the same mindset that I share with you?
It's not having watched, like, Woody Allen films growing up from a way too early age?
I assume that that sort of kowtows into it.
I always, I always kind of bring it around to, you know, it was sort of factory sense, come from a factory family, which is just like, oh, you survived the day at the factory today.
Good luck tomorrow.
Wow.
Okay.
I mean, I think it may be for me, the background is like, you know, we were slaves once, it could happen again.
So, you know, there's probably a similarity there, factory workers and whatnot.
So yes, I can see that.
Yeah, so how are you processing?
So this is coming out.
We're taping this actually on the 18th.
It'll come out on the 19th.
Of course, we have the inauguration on the 20th.
By the way, just for the record, I do not think it should be a public inauguration.
I don't think it should be outside.
I don't think it should be.
It should be in a deep, dark tunnel somewhere, and that feels terrible to say.
How are you feeling going into this entire situation?
I mean, we have, Nick, we have the CEO of MyPillow, who somehow or another, Mike Lindell, who is just a crazy as it comes, apparently going into the White House to talk about martial law and I guess the possibility of trying to overturn this election still and subvert democracy.
I think in a really ominous phrase, things are quiet, a little too quiet.
I honestly don't think that anything is going to happen of consequence.
I think that certainly, you know, at the Capitol, nothing is going to happen because they're going to look at this thing and say it's so tight with, you know, security and whatnot.
It would just be that nothing would get...
I don't know.
I kind of just feel like it's going to fizzle out as all Trump, you know, charades fizzle out into nothingness.
chaos.
So you'd imagine, okay, they'll do it spread across different, you know, municipalities across the country.
That's harder to defend that way, which could happen.
I don't know.
I kind of just feel like it's going to fizzle out as all Trump, you know, charades fizzle out into the nothingness.
I think the thing that we're going to deal with tomorrow will simply be 100 pardons.
I think minimum is in the list right now is 100 people are going to get pardons.
And it will then, that will just trigger a whole firestorm of legal things that could happen.
And then he's going to sneak out.
Like, listen, if you want to go to this little soiree he's having before he leaves at Edwards Air Force Base, whatever it's going to be, you got to be there like 6am.
He's not making it easy on anybody to attend this sort of event.
So, I think that's going to be the big thing, is he's going to get the hell out of there early, and he's going to issue all the pardons just before he leaves, and then these people are going to be milling about, looking for something, but it's not going to happen today, tomorrow.
So, I've been spending a lot of time over the past few days, like, really putting my ear to the ground.
One of the things that ended up happening, and we can have a conversation about this, and I think we'll actually talk about this more in the, you know, very near future, because I think it's a topic that deserves a little bit more conversation and a little bit more consideration, is, like, once Parler got dropped, and once all these people
once these people started to be like purged off of social media, they started going even deeper underground.
So one of the things that we've actually seen over the past few days is that right-wing extremists have started actually patterning themselves after ISIS and Al-Qaeda, like they have for a while.
You know, they've been using the ISIS, Al-Qaeda sort of extremist playbook and how to radicalize people, how to recruit via social media.
And they're now going underground in terms of their communication.
But the places that I've found, the places that are still sort of You know, it's like one of those 1980s sort of, uh, you know, movies where you're like checking the band on the radio and seeing which radio stations are still playing.
You know, the more that I'm looking at it, I, first and foremost, for people who think that like QAnon or these conspiracy theories are just going to flutter away on the 20th, I'm here to tell you that they are not.
And that they are changing and that the story is, uh, the plot is thickening, Nick.
It is, it is taking some turns that we're going to talk about a little bit today.
But I will tell you that I think most of the extremists in this country understand that the focus is on January 20th.
That security is going to be incredibly tight.
That they're not going to allow them to carry out some sort of insider attack.
They're not going to allow them to carry out some sort of moment of mass violence.
It doesn't mean it won't happen.
It doesn't mean that somebody won't go crazy and try something because, my God, there's always a possibility for that.
And these people are narrative driven.
They are becoming more and more focused on a long-term project.
They are focused on what you would call soft targets.
They're looking after things that aren't going to be locked down, like the green zone in Washington, D.C.
They're looking at capitals around the country.
They're looking at places where people are going to be.
My God, if we weren't in a pandemic and we had shopping malls and restaurants and movie theaters, We are looking at the possibility of an insurgency that might look a lot like domestic insurgencies such as what we've seen, you know, in places like Israel or places like Ireland.
We could be looking at a very long drawn-out thing and I have to tell you that a lot of people are very excited to have Joe Biden as president instead of Donald Trump so they can have an oppositional president that they can fight.
Yeah, and by the way, I'm right there with you as far as not having this inauguration outside.
It should just be indoors.
Livestream it.
There's not going to be a huge crowd.
I don't think they're allowing the kind of crowds all the way across like they would have in the past anyway.
So, I think that's a real interesting thing.
My question, I don't know if I brought this up in the last episode or not, but it's like, okay, so they're going to try and do these insurrections or whatever they're going to call these attacks on different capitals, let's just say.
How many until it's considered a civil war?
Let's say at one time.
Is it 25?
Does it have to be 35 of these, you know, Capitol buildings that are under attack at the same time before we consider this a civil war or not?
Because there is a definition there, right?
There is a threshold that gets crossed and all of a sudden we realize even if it's only 15 to 20 million people who really are the crazy Trump people, that's enough.
Yeah, we've been, it's not hyperbole to say that we have been in what you would call a cold civil war for a while.
And you know that we've had all these cultural clashes.
We've obviously lived in these alternate realities.
And I think anybody who sort of denies that fact and sort of the danger of the moment only helps these people.
It only gives them cover to operate and room to be emboldened.
I mean, we were talking about this before we started recording, man.
The FBI is starting to vet National Guard troops ahead of the inauguration.
Like they literally have to talk to people to make sure that they're going to take their oath seriously.
We talked about this in the past during the Black Lives Matter thing and the possibility of Trump possibly trying to have an authoritarian moment where he declared himself the President of Law and Order.
We have, you know, we have the military issuing memos to again remind people that their oath is to the Constitution and that they will be held accountable if they do not stand up to that oath.
One of the things we have to realize is this is not a centralized conspiracy.
This is not a group of people who are on the same like, you know, same ICQ channel.
You know, they're not on like one mass text and they're not doing this thing.
You actually have a lot of people who on January 6th, I think, you had a bunch of different people from a bunch of different groups and also in a bunch of different institutions who looked around and they were like, oh, we're, We're all doing this.
Yeah.
Okay.
And, and, and actually I was, I was watching the, do you have a chance to watch the New Yorkers video of, uh, of the storming of the Capitol?
I did.
There's this moment, I don't know if you noticed it, where they get inside the chambers and there's, there's the groups that we keep talking about, the different groups and they see each other and they're like, here we are in the same place.
We have different goals, same team, same team.
We're on the same team, and oh my god, we have common cause and all this stuff.
And then meanwhile, you have a Capitol policeman who's just like, just take it easy, guys.
Just take it easy, guys.
Well, he's like, what do I have to do to get you guys to leave, you know?
Right, and then there are other people.
There are other people who are like, oh, Pelosi's over here, Schumer's over here.
Not to mention, by the way, that now there's word getting around from Steve Cohen, Representative Steve Cohen.
That Lauren Bovert, our favorite gun-toting maniac freshman congresswoman, apparently gave a large tour of the Capitol.
We don't know who was involved in that tour at this point.
The whole point is, this is a constantly shifting situation.
And you cannot just say it's X but not Y. This is everywhere.
And it's all across the nation.
It's not just red states, blue states.
It's all across society at this point.
And it's a really combustible situation.
You know, I was really surprised, and it was great to kind of see, or not great, but whatever you want to call it, to see these videos from the New Yorker, where, like, I was shocked they didn't desecrate the hallowed hall of the Senate and the House.
You know, taking knives and just ripping up the leather chairs, like that kind of vandalism.
I just was surprised they wouldn't have done that based on the anger they seemed to have about the institution in general.
You do have a guy there, though, who is kind of like, you know, policing everybody.
I think he clearly is some sort of a military background.
And he had a voice that seemed to carry enough weight, even though these people probably didn't have any clue who he was, necessarily, besides this team that you're talking about.
Did you hear what he said?
Yeah.
That this is an intelligence operation?
Right.
An I.O., I believe he used the term.
Yeah, and meanwhile, by the way, you have, like, these group of assholes who are combing through files and stuff, taking pictures of it, videos of it.
By the way, it just came out, I believe, today that somebody who stole a laptop was looking into the possibility of selling the laptop to... Let me check my notes, Nick.
What country could possibly want stolen intelligence of America?
Because... Let me put on my tinfoil hat.
Wait, is that...
Is that Russia I see?
Is that Russia?
They were planning on sending a laptop and selling a laptop to Russia.
Duh.
Duh.
What a situation.
Yeah, well, let's not incriminate her yet.
This lady, you know, said she had it and she did it.
And it might be just a hard drive and not just the whole laptop.
We don't know.
But yes, there's a great video of her scaling a little wall and like slinking out of there in a hurry.
So listen, Lauren Bobert's mom might be the one who's got the bullhorn telling everybody where to go, because she might have been part of that tour that she gave a day or two before and was casing of the joint.
You know, but it's not even just her.
There's a lot of them.
You know, I think there's another another inch of information about how AOC was actually confronted by some of this mob.
And, you know, I'm waiting for the more information to come out.
But it sounds like, you know, they were they were out there and they were having a lot of help.
I think the norms that we also talk about are destroyed.
Here's my issue.
You just mentioned that the armed forces needed to put out a statement to, I guess, assure the country that, oh, don't worry, we're going to observe the Constitution and not be part of any insurrection.
But the fact that they needed to do that, the fact that they need to vet these cops around the Capitol to make sure they're not white supremacists, That's the norm-shattering thing that will never get back, right?
Even though I don't feel reassured about that.
I mean, it's nice, perhaps, if there's no white supremacists who are going to be like Fight Club kind of stuff with these guys.
But, you know, how did we get here?
How did we get to a point where they have to actually say these things?
Well, I mean, you know, we've talked about this in the past, too.
It's allegiances within allegiances.
There are members of the military who swear an oath to the Constitution, but then they swear an extra oath, and the extra oath is like the oath keepers, right?
It's that they believe that the United States Constitution has been subverted, and that they're facing tyranny.
Meanwhile, you have the QAnon people who, you know, are swearing an allegiance to QAnon, and that they're digital soldiers, and it's a group within a group within a group, and it keeps happening to the point where, and this is the problem with an insurgency, You never know who anybody is.
You never know who is on what side.
And then, and I have to tell everyone just to let you know what history shows us, when you're dealing with an insurgency, one of the things that happens, particularly with like hegemonic, like colonial powers, is there's like, kill them all and let God sort them out.
Oh yeah, but wait.
Just smash them and figure it out.
We are going to get, more than likely, a ton of quote-unquote anti-insurgent laws and new surveillance powers.
And by the way, those things, they have a tendency not to be just used in the way that they are quote-unquote designed.
They are used to subvert anybody.
And if you think that that's not going to be turned around, we're taping this by the way, on January 18th, Martin Luther King Day, Yeah.
If you think that intelligence operations aren't going to use those tools to crush dissent and protest on the left, you gotta take a look at a book sometime, because absolutely they will.
But let's not ignore that there's a way for these insurgents to know who's on their team.
There's a physical appearance litmus test that they pass that just, I think, by being white, gets you halfway through the door.
And certainly anybody of color does not fall into that category.
And that's the other.
Now, we did see some people who were mixed in there.
And it's always a very strange, curious sight when you do see that.
But for the most part, these are white people.
That's the gateway there.
And we also can't forget how the Constitution was written itself.
You know, it's not surprising when you learn a certain version of history in school and not taught any kind of critical thinking in school that you can take a lot of what the Constitution says, you know, literally and become a white supremacist who wants all these things and feel vindicated and verified that this is what we're supposed to be doing.
That's what you heard them shouting in the halls as they're leading this coup.
They are thinking that they are representing the United States of America.
And you know, that's like, When you really think about the idea of a civil war or the Confederate States of America, one of the things that we have to talk about is how we reach that point, right?
How we reach the point where all of a sudden like part of the country left and ended up in battlefields.
And a lot of it had to do with movements that not a lot of people thought were going to take off.
Like you had the fire eaters down in the South who were like stoking these conspiracy theories and telling people to leave the Union.
You had newspapers that were fomenting this idea of Southern identity.
Then you had, you know, Southern politicians who were in Congress who were trying to perform For their regional newspapers, right?
So they could get re-elected, so they could fundraise, so that they could build their own little political fiefdoms.
And what ends up happening, and this is one of the situations we're in right now, is, and we've tried to talk about this in the past quite a bit, it's the performance.
It's this idea that you are playing revolutionary, or you are playing a civil war, and one day you look up and you're in the middle of the United States Capitol, Streaming to your followers and your YouTube channels and your parlor account and you look around and you realize oh I was live-action role-playing the role of an insurrectionist Holy shit, right?
I'm an insurrectionist.
Yeah But but then that realization is coming as the FBI is showing up at their door To arrest them and take them away, and I think a lot of them are - Some of them are doing that, and then others are like, I am here to destroy the United States government and realize a fascist ethno state.
And those two groups helped me help each other.
That's the whole thing is those two groups.
They find each other in the Senate chambers.
One person is on their YouTube channel and the other is looking at schematics.
Right.
The genesis of this, by the way, it feels to me like when we first met and you were going, walking around through these Trump rallies and it seemed to me, or even when we had these clashes, quote unquote clashes between different groups, it was like two people who wanted to yell at each other and like 50 people surrounding it was like two people who wanted to yell at each other and That's what it looked like and like people were just desperate for anybody to have any kind of conflict they can get some sort of video footage of.
Not to mention the fact that when you are videoing these things and you're looking at it all through a lens, it separates you from the reality of where you are.
That could be good sometimes.
I suppose if you're in a war situation, you might not realize, oh my god, I was covering the war, let's say, as like Wolf Blitzer in Iraq or something, and it was dangerous.
But it doesn't feel that way because you have this camera sort of in between you.
But where it gets dangerous is like what you described, is that all of a sudden they don't realize that they are in the most dangerous situation that they've created, and it doesn't have any self-reflection or resonance.
They don't understand what they're doing.
We could dedicate every podcast for the rest of our lives to trying to understand the weird, esoteric, abstract nature of this.
Because it is.
It's something that has vexed philosophers for all of time, right?
Like, what is being?
Aren't we all performing?
Life is but a stage, right?
But think about that.
It's like back in the day where you could go to a restaurant and you ordered your food and you wanted to take a picture of your food with a filter to put on your Instagram or put on your Facebook.
All of a sudden, you are taking that meal and you're turning it into a representation of something you want to present to other people.
And you know, like, going back to when you and I first started talking.
When I was going to these Trump rallies, I knew politics.
I understood history.
I didn't understand it like I do now.
As a matter of fact, the first time you and I ever talked, we did an interview for your podcast at the time, right?
Every time I would get on the phone with people, I'd be like, okay, I think I understand what's going on, but I had to project and perform like I knew what I was talking about.
It took me years to actually become sort of the character that I was portraying, right?
I had to, what is it, it's the old term, it's fake until you make it, right?
And there's a weirdness to all of this, and this is what I keep trying to tell people.
The only way to prevent coups and civil wars and all of this violence is to understand that it's possible.
Because these things happen all the time.
People, and we talked about QAnon.
People are like, oh my god, QAnon is crazy bullshit.
Absolutely it is.
But their main tenant, if they believe in it enough and they convince enough people, and by the way, part of it is this Day of the Rope or the Storm or the Great Awakening, which is executing a bunch of people, you may say it's not true and it's a cult.
And by the way, it's not true and it's a cult.
If they go out and they lynch a bunch of people and murder a bunch of people, guess what?
You just live-action role-played yourself into a new existence, and this is a weird situation, and people are having a really hard time wrapping their heads around it.
And we can't ignore that the reporting over the weekend was such that Trump was talking about QAnon and saying, oh, I think they just want better government.
Isn't that all they are?
And he retweets QAnon people, and all of these are signals to them.
And not only does it encourage them, it increases the brand and increases the numbers.
You have a president of the United States espousing these things.
You have people in the Capitol building.
I mean, you know, walking around with a fucking Confederate flag in the Capitol building.
Like, these are the things that should never, ever happen.
They are now happened.
It's all common, you know, at this point.
And there's no getting that back.
There's no hallowed halls anymore.
It's been desecrated.
And I have no idea, unless you can start from the kids who are too young to remember this is going to happen when they get to be adults, That's the only hope we have is to build it from down there.
That's going to take decades.
Well, there are ways to get around it.
I mean, we've talked about this, like how to start de-radicalizing people, which is give them something to do and improve their material conditions.
Like, that's one way that we can actually start to do it.
Because if we want, I mean, we're not going to have re-education camps.
I don't want re-education camps.
Patriotic education.
Yeah, patriotic education.
Like, that's not our side, man.
That ain't it.
That ain't it, Jack.
Um, yeah, this is going to take a very long time.
I mean, the Q people, I, you know, I've been on this Q thing for a while and for a while people are like, why are you studying QAnon?
It's such a dumb bullshit thing.
And it's like, yeah, I understand it's dumb bullshit, but eventually this is going to become mainstream news.
And it has.
And now people are like, well, I mean, he lost.
He's not going to keep the presidency.
Obviously it's going to go away.
And it's like, have you ever?
Actually paid attention to what happens to cults?
They predict shit all the time that doesn't come true.
And what do they do?
They absorb it and redirect it.
And they're like, oh, I thought I got a message from God that, you know, the world was gonna end on Tuesday.
He meant next Tuesday.
He meant two Tuesdays from now.
He meant Tuesday next month.
They are already talking about multiple stories.
They're talking about that Joe Biden is actually dead, that there's a clone that's replaced him.
They're talking about the possibility that Trump is blackmailing Biden and so everything Biden does is actually what Trump wants done.
There's other people who believe that Trump is going to be creating some sort of a resistance France type situation.
Like, there are so many theories at this point because that's what happens with these cults.
They grow and they change and they get new leaders and they move.
This one's decentralized.
I don't know that Q has said anything or posted anything since, like, December.
Like, people are filling the vacuum at this point.
Trump will have his people, Flynn will have his people, Sidney Powell will have her people.
There's going to be all kinds of people who are going in different routes.
They're not going to stop.
This thing doesn't stop.
The only way we can take care of it is to de-radicalize some people and bring the temperature down.
Well, and the reason why this was able to hold so well is that it's the religious aspect of it.
So many of the people who are evangelical go through all their predictions, these wild things, And they never come true, right?
But it doesn't stop them from continuing or moving the goalposts or shifting and then, you know, and there's certainly a through line to all these things, and it's probably rooted in sort of, you know, hate and racism, but still, and white supremacy.
But that's the thing is that it's such an easy conversion for that whole segment of people who are already, you know, been able to just you know, not have any standards to their thinking, you know, going forward and always been like, oh, OK, well, I know I said that the Messiah was coming two weeks ago and I know he didn't come.
That's because he's really going to be coming next week, you know, and then so on and so forth.
And by the way, we're getting ready to go to our interview with Jennifer Taub, who I thought has said some really interesting things about how our confidence and faith can be eroded by people who are engaging in corruption and, you know, and are not being held accountable.
And she's exactly right.
Like, there are these moments where the things that we're supposed to have faith in are institutions, justice under the law, equality.
Those things become so scarce that it creates a vacuum of trust.
And when you're out there trying to gain power and profit for those things, and you're not paying attention to the actual health of society, you end up in a position where people are going to look for, and by the way, we've talked about this for years now, they look for conspiracy theories which give them some sort of an order that explains what has happened.
And the wealthy and the powerful use those conspiracy theories to cover their own tracks and to keep people from understanding what has actually happened.
All right, everybody, so we're going to go now to Jennifer Taub, the author of Big Dirty Money, The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime.
We'll be back.
Hey, everybody, we're really, really lucky today to have Professor Jennifer Taub, who is a legal scholar and the author of Big Dirty Money, The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime.
Her work has been absolutely essential in talking about this current moment and breaking down how we've arrived here.
Thank you so much for coming on.
Thank you both for inviting me.
It's great to be here.
So here we are, 2021.
We are in the last, I'm going to knock on wood, couple of hours of the Trump administration.
White-collar crime personified in the White House with absolutely no real ideology beyond a grift that just keeps on evolving and changing and growing more brazen by the day.
Big question to start.
Can you Talk about and sort of connect the dots a little bit of how in the world we arrived at the point where the personification of white collar crime ended up the President of the United States and basically how government has buckled underneath that.
So, you know, I have I guess a meta story, but I don't want to say I have the only answer.
I'm reminded a bit of I was an English major in college and I studied George Eliot.
Um, and I remember in middle March, there was some guy who claimed he found the key to all mythologies.
Um, and he of course was an ass.
And so I want to be careful and say, here's one theory.
Um, and it seems to me, um, that white collar crime for quite a while, I would say maybe the last.
20 to 30 years has been a tool for advancement for, um, they already somewhat wealthy.
Or the strivers in order for them to gain wealth and power and maintain it.
And so, you know, the most powerful position in the country, if not the world, is the presidency.
So it's not entirely surprising that you would find somebody of that ilk rising to that level.
And in the book, I say, and I stand by this, that If Donald John Trump had actually been held accountable for the many offenses he committed over the decades he was in business, and I should put in business in quotes, if he'd been held accountable, I believe he would have served time in federal prison and not the Oval Office.
So.
Well, I'm kind of curious because, you know, the first impeachment was sort of this vague abuse of power notion.
And I almost feel like corruption itself is a bit of a vague notion, too.
So I thought, can you give us a little bit of an insight of what you're looking for as far as now that he's done, it seems like the gates will now open, the floodgates will open, and these lawsuits will become a lot more, you know, start actually being prosecuted.
Like, what are the things we're looking for here as far as Trump goes and what he's open to prosecution for?
Yeah.
Thanks for asking that.
So he's, um, I guess there's two categories, right?
There's like the Trump, um, and sort of all the fuzz around him, but there's also the big problem we have with, you know, under prosecuted, under enforced white collar crime generally.
Right.
Um, and so let me address Trump second, um, and talk about the other problem.
I mean, there was a time and there've been waves and we cracked down on white collar crime.
I mean, you know, I think you both might be old enough to remember the accounting scandals of the Enron era.
And there actually were people who went to jail.
Prior to that, there was a savings and loan debacle.
A thousand bankers prosecuted and convicted.
But with the, you know, with the Enron situation, you had high level executives prosecuted.
Right.
So in terms of that first category, this first bucket, I'm hoping that a Biden administration led by Merrick Garland is the attorney general.
Doesn't continue to do what's been done over the last 30 years, one of which I guess there's, you know, it's counter kind of person.
One of which is letting corporations become repeat offenders themselves for these deferred and not prosecution agreements and non-prosecution agreements.
We just saw one the other day with Deutsche Bank, and it's like again and again and again.
So there's that.
But there's also even within if we just look at the corporate crime, not holding the senior executives accountable.
I mean, how can you have a corporation plead you don't actually hold them to account.
But somehow you can't find any human inside the business who committed the crime.
It doesn't actually make sense.
So we need that kind of, whether it's corporate or individual crime, individual accountability at the highest level.
That's one thing I think is that we need to be able to find the crime.
And then you're raising your hand, so Nick, go ahead.
I just want to point out that, you know, the Enron case, the lawyer involved in that is none other than Sidney Powell, who I think is... The honorable Sidney Powell.
Yes.
So I just feel like it needed to be said.
Yeah, but you also had Andrew Weissman, too.
So people take different paths.
And, you know, mental health is a real issue.
Mental.
I mean, she seems to me to be one of these people who's not just Corrupt, but there's actually something, I think, deeply wrong with her.
It doesn't excuse her behavior.
We get to that other bucket in terms of the Trump crimes.
It's kind of related.
Like the same arguments that we, you know, we kind of heard before about kind of immunizing, you know, the corporate executives at the top are the kind of the ones we're hearing.
Let's just look at the insurrection.
I know it's not a white collar crime, but it's still a federal crime.
It's all about like, well, these people went on their own, right?
Let's, you know, you hear the law and the only law and order language you hear out of, for example, the Republican Party is, well, it's just terrible that they, like, tore up the Capitol and then some whataboutism, right?
So they throw a point at other places.
But they don't want to, they keep saying, and even Lindsey Graham, let's drop this impeachment because it will create, you know, strife and division.
It's like, well, why is it, why is there always this idea that the person at the top Who let, created the problem, who set the thing in motion.
We're not going to hold them accountable.
You can just look, you know, Trump is to the insurrection what someone like Stumpf was, John Stumpf of the, of Wells Fargo was to the, you know, multi-million numbers of people who had accounts open fraudulently.
That guy, you know, retired in disgrace and I put disgrace in quotes because he made millions of dollars and only after he retired was he banned from the, The industry, maybe he got a little haircut on his, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars he made over the years.
But so what?
There's no lesson learned.
And so I guess what I'm saying is I'm hoping that Mayor Garland, and maybe I'm putting too much hope into this, you know, does no longer, you know, gives breaks to people like Trump, whether it's Trump himself when it comes to prosecuting him after office.
Um, or people who worked with him.
And same thing with, you know, white collar offenders.
We really need an overhaul.
And this is the moment.
You know, we talk a lot on this podcast about the cumulative effect of people not being punished for their crimes and what it does for society at large and how it damages things.
And I was doing research on a new project and I came across this concept in ancient Rome where there were two classes.
And this is, of course, where you move from like the Republic into the Empire, which is like where, you know, fascism has sort of grown in at the level.
You have the humiliores who are commoners who can get prosecuted.
They can be executed.
Violence is totally part of their lives.
And then you have a group called the honest stories who are the elite ruling class who can't be held accountable for things like violence should never touch them.
And so you have like this very stratified society.
Right.
And one group that gets away with everything that they want.
And as a result, they have a competition between themselves over who can push the laws the farthest and who can take the most chances and who can break the most laws.
What have you seen?
Particularly in the past few decades, where you have white collars who aren't being held accountable, where breaking the law actually becomes part and parcel to see who can do the most, who can get away with the most.
What have you seen in the effect of what that does to society at large?
What has that done to us as a country?
So being a lawyer and not a historian of Rome or sociologist, again, that won't stop me from commenting.
I don't care about the limits of my understanding.
But yeah, I just wanted – this is – what you're getting at here is a kind of – what the book gets at too is a caste system.
I called it Big Dirty Money and I didn't, although the white collar crime is in a subtitle, I'm kind of clear that I'm, as one of the chapters says, talking about something called implicit immunity of the underclass.
And so I like how you're mentioning this history of Rome, that there are, you know, untouchables, but not in the sense of Indian caste system, a different kind of untouchable.
And so you do see examples of Um, you know, white and wealthy people or people who judges think, you know, the young man, you know, should get a second chance because it looks like the judge, you know, so you do see whole categories of criminal behavior that you wouldn't call economic crime or you wouldn't associate with what we might call a white collar offense.
And so you have the influenza defense that that guy, Ethan Crouch used.
Until they finally caught him in Mexico after he skipped out on his probation.
Or you have someone like Jeff Epstein, right?
Who both was involved.
I mean, you can't be involved in massive vice crime and abuse without paying people off, right?
And so there's always going to be money laundering and bribery around people who are really brazen and affluent together.
Paying people to, you know, snitches get stitches or don't snitch will give you a lot of money.
I don't, I can't, I don't have a good rhyme.
So I do think we're seeing that.
What does it do?
I think it's demoralizing.
I think the whataboutism that we mock sometimes.
Whataboutism is a real thing for people.
I mean, people often feel like, what the hell?
You know, why should I pay my taxes?
I mean, we're talking about like, you know, people who can kind of get away with it and maybe the upper middle class tier or others.
Why should I pay my taxes?
Why should I?
Follow this law or that law when I see all this lawlessness, right?
It gives people an easy excuse.
And I think it also undermines trust in a lot of ways, you know, whether it is, you know, it's what's really hard here is to be critical, for example, corporate behavior and to point out corporate crime doesn't mean that I want to abolish all corporations, right?
To say corporations should That we should enforce antitrust law doesn't mean that I want everybody like, you know, working, having a blacksmith shop in their backyard where they're like making their own tools, right?
And so this is where it gets really important.
You know, lack of trust in big pharma is one of the reasons why we had the anti-vaxxer movement and so on, right?
And you get to lack of trust in institutions.
And I don't mean blind obedience to institutions.
You know, institutions are filled with people and we need to do better each time.
But to completely like throw out certain institutions and then there's a power vacuum and people like leaders, right?
So if you say you can't trust the press at all, as opposed to, you know, yeah, you're going to get someone who lies in the press, but let's be honest and air that and get that done.
So, you know, don't trust the press.
People say, you know, don't trust corporations or big pharma.
You can't trust government.
So who do you trust?
Some dude on Parler, you know, or do you trust Alex Jones?
You know, so like, you know, to me, Again, if the most important institutions that kind of deal with and make decisions about the allocation of resources and how we live our lives, big business and big government, if they can't, you know, they need to be trustworthy.
And so you have the biggest, you know, big business crook, Trump, and he's also a big government crook at this point.
You know, someone who bragged about, you know, giving money to politicians so he could influence them, you know, all coalescing into one person.
It's so incredibly destructive, right?
And then the fact that even though he is the swamp, the deep irony is people can't see it.
I mean, it's really hard to even describe, but I think some of the lack of cracking down after the financial crisis and all of that and, you know, any kind of economic meltdown.
Sorry to go on this, but when it was all happening, when I was writing my first book, Other People's Houses, You know, I was reading about the Great Depression and, you know, think about the timing of the rise of totalitarianism, of fascism, of the rise of the Soviet Union in the form it was, and the violence that came with that, too.
And you think, so I wasn't freaked out at that time thinking that this was going to happen next.
I'm not surprised at all about the rise.
There's all these so collapses of any time of any type, especially financial collapses, make people susceptible.
So all of it, I believe, if we'd actually held Some bankers are cannibal.
We might not have gotten Trump.
I know that sounds like a weird.
It's hard to go back, but I've often wondered, wondered about that.
Not just Trump, but this idea that I think some of the mistrust in Washington and why an outsider like Trump could say don't trust anybody was because people were very, very mistrustful at that point.
I'm so glad, by the way, that you sort of connected those two things, because the thing that we never learn in our histories is after the crash in the 20s, we see a rise in fascism and totalitarianism in the United States of America.
It's a natural sort of a progression when people aren't held accountable, when our systems sort of, you know, meld down like that, it happens.
Well, I'm kind of curious.
What's fascinating to me is that there's so many different layers that kind of fold into each other.
So the whole caste system we talked about as far as the elites and they can all have a secret handshake knowing that they're not going to get prosecuted and they're all sleeping really well tonight knowing that all the crap that they've been doing is white collar crime is not going to get prosecuted.
I almost feel like there's got to be a similarity to these insurrectionists who are by no means elite people who are, you know, on Wall Street and with all their money.
But they have a similar attitude, it felt like, in the brazenness of just, you know, broadcasting live this insurrection, which of course is now leading to prosecution.
Which gets me to the question I guess I have, which is, is the only thing that keeps these certain people in the country from violating all sorts of laws simply the fear of prosecution?
Is that all it is in our society or specifically with these people?
And that without that fear, perhaps that's why we get the kind of brazen lawlessness that we see.
You know, God, this gets so complicated, right?
Because we're also in the middle of movements to get rid of all jails, movements to defund or change the way police operate, movements, you know, all the decriminalization stuff.
But to pull it all together, Um, I would say, you know, that part of this, what you're describing is a kind of sense of white immunity and the way, um, you know, yeah.
I mean, I just think about the Jenna Ryan, the more you hear from her, the minute the woman who took the private plane to Washington was a real estate broker, you know, peddling her real estate as well.
She's involved in the wrong direction.
I had the interview that was just kind of mind-blowing that I think she just did for NBC or CBS.
And I read it.
I didn't watch it, but I was like, my God, if I did a, you know, if I did like an Edward Albee or Sam Shepard style play, you just like her dialogue.
It's like just this woman with no self-awareness.
And how does she, what is the world in which she is immersed that reinforces this idea that it's not, if I say I'm storming something, She's like, it doesn't mean I'm doing something violent.
And she has this liver dot moment that people can see, have a sense of their own motivation and their own just the justification for any action they take and frame it that way.
But yet, yet we have a black person, Eric Garner, who is doing an economic crime on the street, selling loose cigarettes.
You know, I talked about him in the book.
That's a tax evasion.
And it's just it's considered justifiable to kill him on the street.
That's why they said they didn't.
I don't think it is.
That's why they didn't prosecute him.
Same thing with, you know, anyway, George Floyd, right?
Supposedly passing a $20 bill that was, you know, whether it was counterfeit or not, he doesn't get the opportunity to say, hey man, you know, big deal, you know, he gets killed.
And yet, you know, I mean, just the tremendous difference.
There must be a reason why someone like her would think they can just out in the open do this.
Yeah.
I mean, I wasn't raised that way.
I can't imagine.
And let me just add this.
I helped organize with many people this tax march in 2017, April 15th.
And we had 120,000 people nationwide.
Everyone was kind of doing stuff locally, but we also, we and people doing the D.C.
march, put up a website.
We tried to help.
We didn't want it to get violent.
We didn't want the cause to be undermined by Infiltrators who were trying to hurt it.
So we had all these guidelines and told people, like, I think I did the thing on, um, I did this whole, you know, what was, I can't remember what platform, maybe I did a Google Docs, but like how to contact the police to get a permit, how to tell people to not do nonviolence, how to get legal observers.
Like, look, I was, I was so wanting to control the language around it so that it stayed peaceful.
So, I don't know where these people come from and why they think that, but I have to think that they think that they're immune and they don't hold the same view for people of color.
Well, I'll tell you, I am here for any interview that touches on the caste system of ancient Rome and the plays of Sam Shepard, so I am absolutely thrilled.
Jennifer Taub, thank you so much for coming by here again.
This is Jennifer Taub, the author of Big Dirty Money, The Shocking Injustice, An Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime.
Where can the good people find you?
They can find me on Twitter at all hours of the day and night.
It's at Jentaub, J-E-N-T-A-U-B.
And we have to talk again about Sam Shepard, because I once saw him at a coffee shop in South Dakota.
Oh, wow.
That's wonderful.
We'll just do a Muckrake exclusive just talking about Sam Shepard.
I guarantee 25 people listening to this are very excited.
Thank you so much, Jennifer.
All right, and that was Jennifer Taub, legal scholar and the author of Big Dirty Money, The Shocking Injustice, and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime.
I'm so glad she came on.
I feel like this has been something that we've been talking about forever, these consequences of what happens when these people aren't actually held accountable.
For sure.
I mean, I think there's no question we're going to have a real influx now of cases being prosecuted against Trump now that he's not protected by the presidency.
And I suspect that a lot of those cases... I hope you're right.
I have to imagine a lot of them were just sort of put aside knowing that A, it wouldn't go very far because of this notion of you can't prosecute a sitting president, and then B, the fear that he would probably have them eliminated somehow by you know, William Barr or somebody being able to sort of somehow get rid of him with the power of the presidency.
Now that it's not there, I would imagine we're going to see open season on a lot of these things.
E. Jean Carroll is going to be a big one, I suppose, where she's accusing him and apparently has direct evidence in a Monica Lewinsky kind of way that would be refutable, it sounds like.
Yeah, I'd love to believe in that possibility, but simply because of exactly what Jennifer Dobbs is talking about, there's still a part of me that remains skeptical, right?
And I have to say, again, I've said this a couple times, I got out of graduate school in August of 2008.
Like, I came out into the big, wide, blue world just as, you know, the entire thing was falling apart, and I think one person got held accountable.
Yeah.
One person.
And, you know, I was in college, I was fighting against the Iraq War, and we had truth on our side, and morality on our side, and God on our side, whatever, just go down the list.
We still are in Iraq, you know, like it's so there is a part of me that is always skeptical, but I really hope that that's true.
I hope the floodgates open because this presidency has been an administration.
Let's go ahead and open the umbrella.
This administration has been so overtly corrupt that it will do lasting damage if these people aren't held accountable.
If the truth doesn't come out, we might not be able to get that horse back in the barn if we don't actually hold these people accountable.
For sure.
Absolutely.
And, you know, I did some recon, by the way.
I reached out to find out, you know, somebody who we know, who I know, who is, you know, was a big Trump supporter.
I just, you know, I asked somebody who's in their camp, Has this person, you know, had any realization or sort of felt anything about what this all means about Trump and how he was so complicit in creating all these things?
And I think it's illuminating because it probably represents a huge swath of Republicans and what we're seeing now is that basically the notion is yes, this person realized that he's a flawed individual who has, you know, screwed a lot of things up.
But I don't think that they realize that they screwed up to the point where they basically threatened democracy itself and any kind of norms.
And I think it also says that it's like, sure, we're really excited because we got tax cuts and we got judges and we got a lot of deregulation.
It's just too bad he's an asshole and that's what everyone's going to remember.
I mean, that's sort of what it feels like.
That was what I'm hearing from that.
And that's just unbelievable.
Do you know what I'm hearing from like the far right?
And this is a really fascinating sort of development.
They are saying that Trump is like so honorable.
And so trusting of the democratic institutions that that's why he's not going to be president anymore.
And the real lesson to learn from all of this is that you have to have even less trust in democratic institutions.
And if Trump would have just come out and that's the whole thing is they're now saying that his real downfall was that he would not explicitly call for violence.
And that he should have walked down to the Capitol and if he would have been there, like, they would have stopped the steal, they could have probably killed a few of these people and held them accountable.
So I have to tell you, and I assume that you've seen this over the past few days, Watching the myriad reactions by the right, the delusions by the right, trying to explain why they supported Trump or what has happened over the past couple of years, it's driven me to the point of madness.
Like, it is tiring and frustrating and infuriating.
Right.
Well, I mean, listen, because you expect them to say, oh shit, you were right, I get it now.
Or some version of that, some notion of self-reflection and some notion of, you know, okay, It really seems clear this guy is crazy and it was a mistake that I supported him.
Only because it's like, you know, if you want low unemployment, like Obama had 40 straight months of unemployment going down that Trump basically extended is all he did.
Mike Pence could have gotten you, first of all, it doesn't even matter who was in the White House, any Republican would have gotten all those judges in.
It's McConnell doing that, you know, and Mike Pence would have gotten all sorts of deregulation for you.
So that's what's so scary about that is that, like, not only are they convinced that only he could have done that and deserves all the credit for that, but it's like nobody else could have ever, no Democrat ever had a good economy while he was in the White House, you know, that's the kind of thing.
And it's really just, it's just a mental The only thing he gave them, the only thing that Trump did that they can possibly hang their hat on, is he was the first president who was like, you know everybody who didn't vote for me?
I'm not your president.
Fuck you.
Yeah.
That's it.
Like, again, it was just, he was a troll.
That's what it was for these people.
He was somebody who protected white supremacy, he protected vast inequality, and he pissed off the liberals.
And that's what a lot of these people are hanging their hats on.
By the way, let's just say this.
Good riddance.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Fuck the Donald Trump presidency.
Like, it can't get out of here soon enough.
I can't think of no better way to finish the pod today.
I know, get the hell out.
This will, this will knock on wood be the last podcast of the Donald Trump administration for the Muckrake podcast.
God, what a, what a farce.
What a bleeding shame of bullshit this has been.
A stain.
It's a stain on our history.
I'm hoping very, very badly, Nick, that we're not going to have to do an emergency podcast this week.
I think if we did, that would be a really bad situation.
A reminder to everybody that we do have a bonus show on Fridays, The Weekender.
If you want access to that, all you have to do is go over to the patreon.com slash muckrake podcast.
This week, we're going to take questions from our patrons.
So all you have to do is email us at mccrakepodcast at gmail if you are a patron and let us know some questions.
We'll work our way through it over this weekender.
And meanwhile, we'll be talking about the inauguration, hopefully a peaceful transfer of power.
You know, hopefully this goes off without a hitch, but we have to tell you, everybody, just stay safe out there.
