GOP's Inane Retaliation On Ilhan Omar, with Mike Leon
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Host Nick Hauselman welcomes on the show Mike Leon of the Can We Please Talk? Podcast to discuss the GOP's tit for tat response of voting to remove Congresswoman Ilhan Omar from her committee assignment in retaliation for Nancy Pelosi stripping Marjorie Taylor Green and Paul Gosar of their committees for spreading anti-semitism and violence towards fellow members. The GOP corruption continues with more George Santos news as his treasurer resigns and more details come to light.
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Jared is not here with us today, but I am pleased to bring on the show Michael Leon, who is the host of the Can We Please Talk podcast, and we're pleased to bring him on to discuss what's going on in the news today.
So, Michael, thanks for coming on the show.
I appreciate it.
Nick, thank you so much for having me.
We got a little bit darker complexion Jared here, less facial hair, a lot of less facial hair, especially up on the top here, this cul-de-sac.
You can't see it on video, but thank you so much for inviting me on the podcast.
And I got big shoes to fill.
I mean, this guy, your host has got a book out here.
He's got thousands of followers.
I got a few hundred, so happy to fill in.
Hey, my pleasure, and I'm glad that we can maybe parse for a minute that facial hair.
The top of the head counts as facial hair, too?
Yeah, I would say, well, it depends.
Sideburns, and then if you get a little scruff here, but if, you know, the costanza, if the enemy's advancing past here, there's no more hair going to be growing there, Nick.
So, unfortunately, I'm a bald man, you know?
I hear you.
Well, I'm battling that.
I'm kind of winning so far, but, you know, I used to have a t-shirt that said, just another sexy, bald guy, and perhaps I'll need that.
And, you know, you definitely could wear that shirt, Michael.
Oh, I love that.
Defeat's inevitable, Nick, but it's how you get defeated is the key there.
That is true.
Well, speaking of being defeated, we had a vote today in Congress that yanked Ilhan Omar off of her committee assignment.
And I find that interesting because the Foreign Affairs Committee is an important thing.
I'm kind of curious.
I looked it up because I kind of wanted to get a handle on what that committee really does.
I feel like sometimes we get in the weeds here.
We don't necessarily realize what all the different committees are and why they're more lucrative or not.
Do you have a sense of what that purpose of the Foreign Affairs Committee is?
Yes, you know I'm so glad you said that and by the way, fantastic transition there, because I was looking it up as well earlier and you know we've had members of Congress on our podcast before.
And I remember representative Jamal Bowman who's very close with Ilhan Omar, telling me about some of the subcommittees and committees that he's on and they all act in a bipartisan nature.
The Foreign Affairs Committee that she's on, you know, they're responsible for oversight and legislation from everything, like foreign assistance, that includes development assistance, the Peace Corps, national security, things that happen across the pond in our embassies, so it's really a strategic planning and agreements type of committee, and you know, Ilhan Omar, and we're going to get into it, I know you're going to play some sound in a bit, but
This is really what's happening to her being removed from this committee is eerily similar, at least from the Republican side is what they're telling you, to what happened last year with Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar getting removed off committees.
Now, the two are not comparable.
I mean, they're not even apples and oranges.
If you if you just talk about soundbites from Ilhan Omar, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar.
But this committee is pretty important.
And obviously, you know, House GOP has Hit January and now into February with a bang and they're doing a bunch of different things there.
I got a committee to weaponize as a foreign government or weaponize the federal government, excuse me.
We're going to get into that in a second because nobody knows what the hell that means and that's an oxymoron of a sentence.
But there's a bunch that they're trying to do and this was almost like one of the things that they ran on In the fall during the election cycle, like, we will get the squads, particularly AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and all of those folks off of committees and, you know, we will take back power from Nancy Pelosi.
And now you're seeing this kind of play out and this is what they've done.
Yeah, it's kind of fascinating because at some point, way back in the day, the Speaker pretty much had control over all the committees and could decide.
And that is still the case for a few of them, but from a lot of the committees, it's still done by a vote.
And it felt like there wouldn't be a problem at all to have Ilhan Omar remain on the committee that she's been on.
She, you know, she's an important voice to have that isn't some sort of like completely propagandized version of America and her background would give her that kind of credence that she could speak on those things.
You know, it's funny, embassy security is also one of those things that the Foreign Affairs Committee deals with.
Work me back to like this whole thing kind of starts with Benghazi and Hillary Clinton and you know the argument or the accusation that as Secretary of State she wasn't overseeing like the embassy security well enough when the Benghazi embassy was attacked.
And here we are, this is the committee that was really in charge of that kind of thing, as well as public diplomacy and war powers and treaties.
And obviously we know that what they're really doing is tit for tat, which is ridiculous.
And I think there's a lot of Republicans that feel that way.
And what they're trying to point at is an interesting trope that deals with anti-Semitism in Israel.
And I find that fascinating because there's always been a problem with a certain section of this country with, you know, criticism of Israel isn't necessarily anti-Semitism, but that seems lost on certainly the majority of the GOP now.
Do you recognize that?
You know, again, really glad that you said that because the George Santos made a statement earlier today on the House floor.
I think it was earlier today about, you know, Ilhan Omar's removal from the committee and the anti-Semitism language and rhetoric that she's, you know, responsible for.
And like, this is a show of like that we support Israel and the Jewish folks in Israel.
So funny for him, because obviously everybody knows he's Jewish, but it's What I've noticed is that, just like you said, that if you are critical of Israel, and I'm not going to sit here and pretend to be a mastermind on Israel-Palestinian relations or things that have happened, but we have had people on the program, specifically, you know, analysts that covered the region, historical professors that have talked about the conflict overall.
There are things done with respect to the Palestinian folks that don't get covered maybe at length like they would with this attack that just happened in Israel, right, where seven people lost their lives.
And so I think Ilyan Omar, and again not going back into her rhetoric of speeches or whatever it is, but obviously she's of Muslim faith, and so she probably feels, you know, this kingship or connection at least To the stories of the Palestinian folks, right?
And just like my buddy Ayman Mohideen, who's on MSNBC on Sundays and Saturday nights, he has the same thing, right?
Like we always neglect the issues that are happening with the Palestinian state, but we only tend to cover what's happening with Israel.
And if we speak bad about Israel, we're all of a sudden anti-Semitic.
Anybody, members of Congress or you and I, Nick, and I know you and I are not, but so I think that's a big thing that Maybe Kevin McCarthy is trying to play this as a bargaining chip or something with respect to voters.
Voters have short-term memories.
I mean, it's 2023, but maybe this is something that, hey, look, we're keeping our promises.
We took off somebody who is very anti-Semitic and against the Jewish community.
And we took her off a committee of foreign affairs that handles, you know, like you said, embassy securities and stuff like that.
So we would prevent a Benghazi from happening again.
And I just gave the Republicans a playbook.
For stuff they could run on in 2024.
Maybe I should be a GOP strategist, but this could be something that they're trying to do.
Again, maybe I thought three or four steps ahead of their plan, but I do notice it.
Just like you said, if you talk bad about some of the things That Israel has done over the past decade, 20, 30 plus years, or even what Bibi Netanyahu is doing right now with respect to his government, you're all of a sudden anti-Semitic.
And that is not the case as Elian Omar and others have mentioned about what is happening with respect to Palestine and Israeli relations.
So it's important because I kind of wanted to bring her in here to hear what she was saying and how she characterizes what's happening to her with this vote.
Let's hear what she has to say.
This debate today, it's about who gets to be an American.
What opinions do we get to have, do we have to have to be counted as Americans?
This is what this debate is about, Madam Speaker.
So, she's right.
There is a notion that you're supposed to be able to have free speech.
You're supposed to have a varying opinion.
Certainly, these committees tend to work a lot better when you have perspective and it's not all yes-men on the same page.
It sounds to me like what she's advocating for, it sounds very familiar to me.
It sounds very similar to what we hear Republicans constantly saying when they fear being cancelled.
You know, when they fear that they'll say something incendiary that's going to end up having them be pulled off these committees, like Gosar did with him sharing a violent meme or cartoon that wanted AOC to be harmed and Marjorie Taylor Greene saying things that were really incendiary.
So, it's almost like they want to argue that they are allowed to say whatever they want to say, but then they turn it around, and it's almost, in a mad genius way, a perfect manipulation to nearly benefit them only, and it becomes something that's so intellectually dishonest that it just strikes me how easy it is for them to dupe their followers and the other people in their party into following this.
Yeah.
No, I agree with you.
Like, it never makes sense.
And I know Jared, he's mentioned it when he's been on our pod and he's mentioned it here.
I've listened to you guys before about the theater, right?
The professional wrestling element of some of this stuff with respect to what they believe and what they don't believe.
One of the things that I've been trying to do in the new year, this is a New Year's resolution.
Your listeners can take this home with them.
Try to look at things with respect to policy.
Who does this impact?
Whether it's an economical impact, or if we take this away, or if we add this program, who will it actually impact?
And stop putting things with an R&D designation.
Sure, there are people in the Republican Party that feel a certain way, but there are also other people in the Republican Party that just believe in smaller government, and they are Christian in faith, and don't believe in the extremisms of Christianity.
Same thing on the Democratic side, right?
Like, I try to take out the political designations and really try to call out hypocrisy when it lives on both sides.
You can't say that you're being cancelled here or X, Y, Z. You see this all the time with conservatives saying they're being silenced by big tech and stuff like that.
And then you go to Barnes and Nobles and their book is right there in the front of the store.
And then their podcast comes up on your related searches and then they're showing up on your Twitter feed even before Elon Musk.
So, you know, you're not being silenced when, you know, you tweet out something because it's a private company.
He can do whatever he wants there.
You're free to start your own Twitter app.
And I say this as somebody who's worked in product and technology for 15 years and has launched apps for major companies before that have similar functionality to Twitter.
So your free speech is not being limited.
But back to your overall point, Nick, like it's so funny and comical to me.
Where we are right now in America, where, and again, I don't remember 2010, I remember things being hypocritical, to a certain extent, right and obviously the coverage of Barack Obama is something you know for another pod, but I don't remember things being so like this where it's like,
Even today Eric Swalwell was on the house of the floor and pointed out a tweet because they're talking about anti-semitism and he points out the tweet from the house GOP that the account is run by Jim Jordan and it says Kanye Elon Trump It's literally from their account and it's of a couple of guys that have embraced, you know, the Nazis I mean we all heard Kanye West what he said there with Alex Jones and Here's a tweet an official tweet from the account of the house GOP
And now we're doing a committee to get rid of Ilian Omar?
Like we're getting Ilian Omar, excuse me, off of a committee because of something, what, she said?
Actions that she said?
It's just, they're just doing a tit-for-tat thing and we're not governing.
And the people that are suffering from it, Nick, To a lesser extent, are you and I?
To an even more, you know, extent is the people that listen to this show, the everyday folks that are impacted by this hypocrisy and this lunacy and not actually getting back to policy and determining what will work for the American people.
And that committee keeps our folks across the pond and in other locations worldwide safe.
Like that's supposed to be bipartisan.
This isn't an R&D thing.
This is a right-wrong thing.
This committee is a right-wrong thing and analyzes things like that and oversight.
And there's no reason to take her currently right now off of that committee, just based off what the committee's intent and purpose is and her work that she's done in Congress, in my opinion.
Sure.
And, you know, Swalwell was kind of worked up.
Let's bring him in here for a second to hear a quick bit of that because I thought it was worthy when you get to, you know, I was often here, guys.
Well, maybe even now you're doing the bombastic times of Congress, but here's a chance to hear Swalwell getting a little hotter on the collar.
Madam Speaker, when I heard that we're going to remove a member of this House from their committee for anti-Semitism, I raced down here because I thought, finally, finally in this chamber there's going to be some accountability.
Some accountability from this conference that continues to allow its members to root for rioters, to show sympathy for the insurrection, a conference that harbors a wanted international criminal, And has members who choose violence over voting every single day.
Finally!
And so I thought, we're going to hold someone accountable for anti-semitism.
Surely it's the author of this tweet.
Kanye, Elon, Trump.
October 6th.
Written by Chairman Jim Jordan.
October 8th.
What does Kanye say?
I'm going to declare DEFCON 3 on the Jews.
Okay, so yeah, and he goes on and on to flesh it out and it's a great argument he is right, especially when you consider the reasons behind why we had we had to take or sorry, Pelosi had to remove those two GOP members from their congressional to have a punishment for them.
And the answer that McCarthy gives is, well, we just, that's what we promised we would do.
We would simply remove them in retaliation.
They didn't do anything.
I mean, the fact that he'd smeared Swalwell and tried to, you know, McCarthy had said last week, if you had read what I read from the FBI report about his interaction with the Chinese spy, you would never have him in Congress, something like that.
And that's completely and utterly bullshit.
Like, that did not happen at all.
There's nothing that Swalwell did with his relationship with this woman who comes from China that had any that had any implications towards national security.
Nothing.
So he's completely lying about something like that.
And then there also the thing with Adam Schiff, you know, he or he uses a turn of phrase that we all understood was a metaphor.
And that triggered them to such a degree that they wanted to make it seem like he was a liar.
And then also in terms of the whether or not he knew the whistleblower when they had the impeachment is sort of immaterial to yaking him off a committee where he was the ranking member.
So this is just a problem.
I do feel like it will ultimately continue the clown show that is the GOP in Congress right now.
And I think it will ultimately hurt them.
I think that they just look bad overall to enough Americans that you'll see a problem coming up in the next, not in the next midterm, but in 2024.
Yeah, well, Clown Show, I know we're gonna get to George Santos speaking of Clown Show, but I wanted to just real quick, before we get into that, you know, you were talking about Eric Swalwell there, you know, with respect to his case, and I've talked to, you know, members of the FBI, former members of the FBI, we've had an agent, we've had, you know, a head of counterintelligence on the program before.
I I have not seen anything that is so alarming like Kevin McCarthy is saying about Representative Swalwell and the inappropriate relationship that he had with this woman.
If you have that evidence and you're being so transparent or you're starting all these committees for transparency and this and that, if you have seen something like that, Why aren't you sharing that information with the American people?
Why are you holding it in your back pocket as if like any of us can see your back pocket?
Like if something is so damning and you think that it would undermine all the credibility of this congressman,
Speaker McCarthy, like release the information or at least get you know whatever redacted levels of information need to be redacted and then push that out from your Twitter accounts from whatever official channels like you can't tell me you have something it's it's the old you know I got a secret I can't tell you though and then it's like well now you got to tell me right because no no no if I tell you it'll it'll blow up everything I'm telling you this is big And then 11 years go by or this was in 2015, right?
I believe when he reported her to the FBI.
So, you know, seven years now, eight years.
Give us something.
If you do have something, give us something.
I'm all for some of the things in principle of the committees that they want to do, right?
Like weaponization of the federal government.
OK, if we're going to be serious about some of these things, you and Jared have talked about this.
OK, yeah, let's let's open up the door.
Let's let's, you know, open up the windows.
Let's see some of the stuff.
That the American people, I mean there's four million classified holders in this country.
A former FBI agent that now is a government contractor told us that four million people have access to classified information given their classifications.
Okay.
If we all know that, let's get some information out there to the American people.
We still don't even know what are in the classified docs specifically that have been found with Trump, President Biden, and Vice President Pence.
We may never know.
And so when Speaker McCarthy says something like that, show us the goods, man.
Show it to us so that way the American people can make a determination and it'll affect them in the next voting cycle when he is up for re-election.
But so far, you know, it's the boy of Crow Wolf.
Well, I have something to tell you, Michael.
Are you sitting down?
Let me sit down.
There is no evidence.
He will not be able to show you anything.
And it's the same pattern that we've seen.
And this is what Trump laid out when, even when he tried to shake down, you know, Zelensky in the Ukrainian government, all he said was, just announce that you're having an investigation into Biden and his stuff with your country.
You don't have to actually even do the investigation.
We just need you to announce that the appearance of something like that goes so much farther than anything they have to do.
Now, we talked about this in the last pod with Durham.
Same idea.
They can simply launch the investigation, lie about it when they even found that there was criminal activity on Trump's part, and they were able to leak just enough where it made it seem like they were going to find criminal activity on the other side.
That's all you need.
You don't have to have any results.
People will forget it anyway.
It could even die.
Like this Durham report is just going to fade away into nothing.
And that doesn't matter.
All the people do is remember that there was a report and that they were screaming bloody murder and there must be a lot of evidence that we're never going to know.
That is an interesting key.
I think that Nixon and, you know, from then on through Reagan used a lot of this as well.
But it's now out in the open.
They don't have to lie about it.
They don't have to try and obfuscate.
It is simply, you know, Thrown out there shamelessly, pretty much by one party.
And that's why we have such a problem here because it's not the same reality between parties.
And I don't know how you wanted to try and ignore R&D and kind of come to some, you know, intrinsic understanding of this whole thing.
But like, there definitely seems to be some sides here and some reality here that if you can't get to the same basis for reality, I don't ever know how we're going to make this all come back together again.
Yeah, I totally agree about that.
If you're not steeped in reality, you know, a fact, a true, you know, fact, you got a black shirt on, does it make you, you know, look a certain way?
One's an opinion, one's a fact.
And so you got to be in the fact category.
And I agree with not my facts, not your facts, the actual facts.
So I agree with you on that.
We're losing reality here.
Yes.
And speaking of someone who's already lost reality, we have to talk about George Santos because every day, more and more stuff comes out.
His treasurer resigns.
Now, I've been saying this loudly since he was elected and some of the stuff started trickling out.
He is going to resign.
And I think the last thing I had said was probably like, you know, I wanted to give him like the end of March, and I kind of still feel OK about that.
But, you know, these things do go a little slowly.
He's already taken himself, recused himself of the two committee assignments he already had.
His treasurer quits.
There's more revelations.
And by the way, it doesn't seem to make sense.
And what I always felt like was it's not going to matter any of the bio stuff that he lied about in terms of what his experience was.
I think what's going to take him down is, uh, I don't know.
Is there any way to put this more, more kindly?
The money laundering.
It's clear that there, there's a lot of problems that he's done with the money.
Now, even FEC violations that I want to ask you about in a second, uh, you know, are, can, can, can be, you know, found and can be proven, but I just ultimately think that it's going to get more nefarious and it's going to be about money laundering from his previous activities, um, with his other company he was with, uh, that's going to bring him down.
What do you think?
You know, Nick, I don't know if your other sports show is doing betting lines and odds, but if a major sports book wants to put some odds out there about George Santos and March, you would get a lot of bets on that on the over under there because I think that's a pretty good A month to pick because first the committee, you know resignments.
Again, I don't look too much into that I think, obviously, him going out there saying no no no I don't, I wasn't told to resign I resign on my own, come on, like everyone takes marching orders you're a freshman in Congress, you take your marching orders right from from the, from the leader.
I think more and more about this story, and I'm with you.
I do think, I'm not listening to Ben Shapiro about money is not the key in money laundering.
I don't know if you heard that stupid clip that's been making the rounds on social media a few weeks ago.
But it is, sorry Ben, I'm here to tell you, it is about the money in the money laundering.
That's why it leads first instead of laundering leading first.
But more and more about this George Santos story, and I'm with you.
The bio stuff, a lot of people are not gonna care about that.
That is all.
And you're seeing it because we've seen comments from people on our show pages across social media that have been like, what is the difference between George Santos lying about his bio and Biden lying about this?
And I had to say, well, first off, I didn't think this was that hard, but he never worked at those companies.
Biden never said he worked at a company.
He just told you he was going to maybe cancel student loan debt when he was on the campaign trail.
And then he realized when he became president, he doesn't have the authority to do that.
Those are two different things, like how people don't make those correlations.
is beyond me but I do think going back to what you said about his treasurer resigning and then the FEC last week you know with the $500,000 loan a lot of a lot of six-figure numbers start to raise some eyebrows and now you're seeing more investigations I'm curious about the Brazil investigation because that is something that who knows where that nets out But that is not here.
That's not based in the U.S.
We don't have, you know, a vision into what's happening there with respect to that investigation.
And is Lula's administration, you know, really trying to fast track that one?
We have no idea.
We have no idea what's going on with Brazil.
But I'd be curious to see where that one nets out.
But I'm with you.
I think six figure money laundering stuff That will get him.
And by the way, I am so shocked we talked about this with journalists before covering George Santos.
We talked about it off-air.
Kudos to the people that are covering him now every day as soon as he opens his office door to just try to go get a coffee, just asking him questions.
Where were you guys, you know, when he was actually running for office like you said, Nick?
But the fact that Tulsi Gabbard Has been the toughest interview that George Santos has had this entire time that he has been running for Congress, elected into Congress, and now actually sitting in Congress is wild to me.
Like, Tulsi Gabbard at 8pm on Fox News is the toughest interview that George Santos has had about all of this.
Like, we need to do better and be more responsible as a journalistic community out there.
And the media needs to start doing a little bit more to help at least expedite some of the pressures that these investigations will ratchet up.
Not that they will, but at least to the public.
We'll take away, we'll say, okay, at least, you know, everybody's covering this daily, and I'm with you.
We have to cover this daily.
I haven't seen a George Santos in Congress.
We saw him, to a certain extent, in the presidency a few years back, but we haven't seen one in Congress in maybe forever.
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