Jared and Nick discuss the Georgia indictment and how the Republicans continue to shift the goalposts in order to defend the indefensible. They then take a number of great questions from the Muckrake Hotline that range from Bill Barr's involvement in all of this to whether people are too afraid to protest due to potential violence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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| Hi, everybody. | |
| Welcome to the Muckery Podcast Weekender Edition. | |
| I'm here with my buddy, Nick Hausman. | |
| Nick, how are you doing? | |
| I'm recovering. | |
| I was in, I think, the worst air quality in the United States in the last couple days near a fire in the middle of Oregon. | |
| Very exciting. | |
| Oh, man. | |
| These are fun times. | |
| Really? | |
| And we knew about it. | |
| That's the other thing that's weird is before we even landed, we're like, this is a fire warning. | |
| They knew fire was going to break out and they fight, they break out anyway. | |
| And, um, I mean, you couldn't really go outside. | |
| I started, I had a coughing fit for about a day and a half straight dealing with the, uh, the, uh, so you can hear it in my voice. | |
| It was not great, Bob. | |
| That's awful. | |
| I hate that for you and everybody else. | |
| You know, actually, on that note, just programming note, we're going to talk about Hawaii next week. | |
| There's some truly grotesque things happening out there. | |
| In the meantime, everybody, welcome to The Weekender. | |
| We have a bunch of questions from people. | |
| Fantastic questions. | |
| We got to talk about developing news that happened since we recorded the last episode. | |
| Before we do, though, This coming Wednesday, August 23rd. | |
| Nick, it's the first Republican primary debate. | |
| How are you feeling? | |
| Have you caught the fever? | |
| Oh my goodness. | |
| Um, it's gonna be a shitshow, right? | |
| It's gonna be an all-out hate fest, hootenanny, and white supremacy hour. | |
| Maybe there'll be a little bit less white supremacy without Trump. | |
| What do you think? | |
| No, there's gonna be plenty of white supremacy. | |
| Plenty? | |
| Okay. | |
| Patriarchy and white, yeah, okay. | |
| Just, just, just hold on to it. | |
| It's gonna get there. | |
| Don't worry about it. | |
| Yeah, and I think the problem we have here is that in order to get more airtime, which they desperately all need because they're so far behind, they're going to have to one-up each other on it, and it's going to be gross. | |
| They're going to go to town. | |
| But the good news, everybody, is that that is why you listen to this podcast. | |
| Because Nick and I are professionals. | |
| We deal with this bullshit. | |
| So on Wednesday, August 23rd, the first debate is from Milwaukee. | |
| It starts on television at 9 p.m. | |
| Eastern. | |
| As soon as that is over, you need to head over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast because our patrons are going to have live post-debate coverage. | |
| Myself, Nick Halseman, we're going to talk about it. | |
| We're going to unpack it. | |
| We're going to talk about all of the disgustingness and tell you where this thing is going. | |
| That is this coming Wednesday. | |
| You need to head over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast. | |
| Also to support the show and also to listen to the rest of this show where we have incredible questions. | |
| But before we get there, Nick, we talked about it on Tuesday's show. | |
| We recorded just right before the hammer fell. | |
| That's right, everybody. | |
| Donald Trump has been indicted again, and he's not alone. | |
| He's been indicted with 18 of his favorite cronies. | |
| The gang's all here, Nick. | |
| We got Giuliani. | |
| We got Eastman. | |
| Mark Meadows! | |
| It's like one of those old Rat Pack variety hours. | |
| Mark Meadows is doing this thing. | |
| There are 41 counts, including a bunch of RICO violations stemming from the attempt to steal the 2020 election. | |
| They have until August 25th to surrender themselves to the authorities in Georgia. | |
| Look at all these charges, man. | |
| We've got forgery, impersonating public officers, influencing witnesses, conspiracy to commit election fraud, computer fraud. | |
| You name it, it's all here. | |
| This is... | |
| I'm not a legal expert. | |
| It's not great. | |
| It doesn't look great. | |
| No. | |
| I think you said Rico. | |
| Did you say Rico? | |
| Rico! | |
| Rico Law. | |
| Yeah, it's a lot of interesting stuff. | |
| I love the Giuliani response, too, because he was one of the first guys to actually prosecute the Rico Law in New York. | |
| Giuliani's entire career is based on pushing RICO as a way to go after organized crime. | |
| This is why you know who Rudy Giuliani is. | |
| The poetic justice here is very, very sweet. | |
| Yeah, it doesn't have to be the mafia. | |
| I know it was designed to catch that catch that. | |
| But when you have a group of people who are all conspiring to break the law like this, that is what Rico is for. | |
| Giuliani certainly knows this. | |
| And it's just it's truly amazing how willing they are to stretch their reasoning and their excuses, basically, because no one's really even refuting what they did. | |
| Right, like you can listen carefully to what, you know, Jenny Ellis is on there and has come out and talked there. | |
| No one's refuting it. | |
| They're simply trying to use a basically First Amendment rights as their defense, and I'm no legal expert, but I'm going to tell you there that pretty sure that that ain't good either. | |
| It ain't great. | |
| The thing that keeps happening... I love, by the way, that Donald Trump will not shut up about this. | |
| Like, if he is not sending out truth-gabber-gabbers, whatever it is he's doing, I mean, he's promising to come out, I believe this coming Monday, in a press conference. | |
| And by the way, Nick, I don't know if you saw this, it's at his golf course. | |
| Which is fantastic. | |
| He doesn't really want to be bothered to have to go anywhere to show his evidence that the 2020 election was stolen. | |
| By the way, last time I checked, it's 2023, and we're just now getting the master document. | |
| People have been working around the clock. | |
| I have to imagine There's going to be as much handiwork in this as there was in showing that Barack Obama was not actually an American and had forged his birth certificate, but don't worry. | |
| He's going to make all this go away. | |
| He's going to prove that the 2020 election was stolen, which he hadn't gotten around to in three years, and all of these charges are going to go away. | |
| Don't worry. | |
| Easy peasy. | |
| Everything's good. | |
| Oh, and I'm sure I'll have a two-drink minimum when you walk in there before you cover the, uh, it's gonna make you pay for something, but when you walk in there. | |
| Yeah, somehow or another, you walk out from covering it, you have a timeshare. | |
| Yeah, yeah, that's hilarious. | |
| Have you ever, have you ever gotten roped into those things? | |
| No! | |
| Like night free, and then, but you gotta listen to a whole pitch. | |
| Oh, I mean, I've certainly been part of those pitches and, you know, it takes a lot to say no when you get out of there. | |
| Now, that said, I instantly was transformed to the press conference he had. | |
| Remember when he finally refuted that Obama was not born in America, right? | |
| He's like, I started it and I ended it. | |
| Remember that press conference? | |
| One of the most amazing, and I'm not using hyperbole here, one of the most amazing moments in American political history, Donald Trump, after building his political brand on birtherism, stands up and says, hey, Barack Obama, turns out he was born in America. | |
| We wouldn't have found out if it wasn't for me. | |
| You're welcome, everybody. | |
| There's just an incredible amount of brainpower that went into that. | |
| And I got the impression he probably vowed to himself he would never do that again. | |
| He would never go back on something that he had said in that manner, because he was kind of pressuring into doing it at that time, so he would never do that again. | |
| But now I actually engage a little bit on Twitter with some of the MAGA folks, as one does, and some of them are convinced that he will present some evidence that has not been presented. | |
| But you know he's just going to do the whole thing with the Suitcases under the table and then Ruby Freeman is going to be once again targeted. | |
| All that stuff is going to happen again, I'm sure. | |
| By the way, do we even go into that? | |
| Because my favorite part of this is that they're going to indict the lady that tried to convince Ruby Freeman to admit to the things that she didn't do. | |
| First, she was Kanye's press secretary, or whatever, and then did this. | |
| That was probably the worst, most nefarious part of this all, because here is this woman who was just, you know, being a good citizen working for the election, and they send someone that looks like her, right? | |
| This is the pressure that they were going to put on her to, like, convince her to just admit it so they can have something to cling to when they try and, you know, contest this election. | |
| It was so terrible, and I'm so glad that she was part of this indictment. | |
| Let me make a quick prediction on Trump's press conference. | |
| Number one, I don't think it's going to happen. | |
| Second of all, if it does, it's literally going to be him waving around printed off pages from the internet that were printed on a Hewlett Packard printer from 1995. | |
| That's what that's going to be. | |
| Go ahead, GeoCities stuff. | |
| Second of all, I agree. | |
| One of the things that happened here And most of the time, Nick, when we talk about politics, we talk about it from sort of the 30,000 feet sort of scale, right? | |
| Like we're looking at it historically, but we're also looking at it nationally. | |
| What happened here in Georgia? | |
| And people forget this. | |
| When you say the 2020 presidential election, of course, it involved all 50 of the American states. | |
| Think about how much damage was wrought in each of these states. | |
| Think about Raffensperger. | |
| Think about his family being, you know, hunted from place to place. | |
| Election officials being harangued and publicly humiliated and targeted and spotlight. | |
| It was almost immediate after these charges were handed down that every, and I stress this, Every member of the grand jury that voted to bring these charges against Donald Trump, every single one of them was doxed online, putting them and their families in danger. | |
| It's hard to state how in the state of Georgia, and by the way, let's point out, these are state charges, Nick. | |
| That's a little bit different from something that somebody can get into the White House and possibly pardon away. | |
| This is sticky. | |
| They went into Georgia. | |
| And they were trying to overturn the election, and they got involved in so many people's lives and put their lives in danger. | |
| And their lives are still in danger. | |
| And you look around and you say, you know, someone like Fannie Willis, you really don't have a choice. | |
| You really, truly don't. | |
| You either just let them go roughshod over your entire state, or you say, hey, guess what? | |
| You committed not just crimes, You committed so many damn crimes that you are now an organized crime unit. | |
| We have to bring something to you. | |
| It doesn't matter if they burn one of our cities to the ground, if they try and assassinate public officials. | |
| It does not matter. | |
| We have to do something. | |
| You have done so much and broken so many laws. | |
| We have absolutely no choice but to bring these charges. | |
| For sure. | |
| And Rico is a little bit easier in the court of law to prosecute. | |
| And so it was very smart. | |
| All these lawyers seem to think that was a very smart thing that she did to use that. | |
| I thought it was interesting to note that Mark Meadows is wrapped up in this where he is clearly cooperating with Jack Smith. | |
| Can we point out that Mark Meadows probably set a land speed record in agreeing to cut a deal? | |
| Right. | |
| Oh yeah. | |
| Well, here's the thing. | |
| Mr. Meadows, we brought you in here today. | |
| I'll take it. | |
| We didn't even tell you the terms. | |
| I don't care. | |
| We're ready to go. | |
| I don't think they finished the word Mr. before he said I'll take it. | |
| Because you have to imagine, he was in the middle of it all, right? | |
| He's sitting on that couch, like Cassie Hutchinson's describing, he's on the phone, he's doing all this stuff. | |
| And you have to wonder, he's probably like looking around going like, yeah, I'm going to need this part in it right away. | |
| I'm going to need something, which they all begged for. | |
| But he obviously had cut a deal with Jack Smith. | |
| And obviously, Jack Smith and Fonny Willis are not talking to each other. | |
| There was no coordination, which might have been maybe that's the ethical thing to have it done. | |
| But you would have thought they would have coordinated a little bit because Now, that could make it a little bit harder for the agreement that he has with Jack Smith if he's going to be folded up into this one. | |
| And he's already filed a motion to try and, you know, change the venue or change the, make it into, oh no, he wants to make it into a federal case and not a state case. | |
| That thing is just going to cause an unnecessary delay, unfortunately, but they'll straighten it out. | |
| But did you find that interesting, what Smith and Willis didn't coordinate? | |
| I know I don't. | |
| And I actually think I was going to ask you about this. | |
| You know, we're busy, guys. | |
| We're out there. | |
| We're moving and shaking. | |
| You're in a different state than you usually are. | |
| You took some travel, all that. | |
| I don't know about you, Nick, but one of the major stressors in my life is logistics, trying to figure out where I need to be and how I need to get there and how I need to go from one place to the next. | |
| I think about like what Donald Trump is going to have to do in terms of his court cases and his court appearances. | |
| I look at this thing and it makes me want to break out in hives. | |
| And you have to imagine, and I'll go ahead and I'll bring this into the political realm, it's almost impossible to run for president when you're doing this. | |
| When you're literally jumping, I mean, God knows how many indictments there's going to be before this whole thing's said and done. | |
| Like, I have a hard time planning a weekend getaway. | |
| Much less trying to figure out how in the hell you're going to run for President of the United States while defending yourself in God knows how many states and against how many charges. | |
| This is, um, this is huge. | |
| I mean, Jared, imagine if you, if you're feeling that way about how Trump must feel, imagine how his fucking lawyers must feel. | |
| Oh my! | |
| Because they have a client who at any moment will say something that will hurt him in the courts, and they're begging him not to go on Monday and say anything about this. | |
| You know that they're so nervous he's going to say something stupid in one of these rallies he has, which he will. | |
| Oh, I get, but let's go ahead and bet the house on that one. | |
| He will say something stupid at one of his rallies. | |
| Yeah, and it ends up leading to some sort of a threatening, you know, line to anybody involved in the case. | |
| You know, he, again, it's interesting, I was having a discussion with my brother-in-law about whether he'd be ever thrown in prison. | |
| You know, remember, he's out on bail, so there are, you know, they have control over his behavior to some degree unless, you know, if he doesn't want to go to jail. | |
| But, you know, with Secret Service protection, the argument would be like, yeah, you can't put him in jail. | |
| I mean, how would that ever work? | |
| I suppose you could put him in house arrest, right? | |
| But I wonder if the Secret Service would actually even honor that or they would let him, hey, go, you know, we'll let you sneak out or whatever. | |
| But then again, he'd be noticed. | |
| Either way, it's a problem. | |
| The only thing we talked about last time was, which I really liked, was that Judge Chutkan would say, fine, instead of putting you in jail or whatever, we're just going to speed up the trial. | |
| And we'll just have the trial a lot earlier. | |
| I have no idea what's going to happen here. | |
| I'm going to go ahead and throw in the first question from a viewer. | |
| And again, thank you for contributing these. | |
| I think they ask fantastic questions. | |
| I think it makes this a great show here on Fridays. | |
| On this subject, Carolyn said, Hello, Jared and Nick. | |
| What are your thoughts about a televised trial of Donald Trump right as the primary season begins? | |
| Do you think it would be a circus atmosphere? | |
| Yeah, yeah, I do. | |
| Possibly the greatest Trump rally of all time. | |
| Our way to finally turn the folks who still support him in the GOP away from him forever. | |
| Also, would you two go on assignment to cover this live? | |
| It would be awesome. | |
| Nick, what are you? | |
| First of all, yeah, we would cover this. | |
| I'd be happy to. | |
| Getting credentials to that stuff sometimes is a little bit difficult, but if the opportunity presented itself, I think I would be into it. | |
| But Nick, what do you I'm trying to wrap my head around this, because one of the things that we always have to do is we have to take facts as we know them, facts as we have known them, and sort of project them out and sort of try and understand what things will look like or feel like. | |
| I mean, we have a pretty good track record with that. | |
| I'm trying to wrap my head around exactly what this will be like, because it sounds like in Georgia, he probably would have a televised trial. | |
| What do you see this looking like going into the primary season? | |
| Because it is... | |
| I mean, unprecedented. | |
| We have to stop saying unprecedented. | |
| I know. | |
| We need a synonym away from unprecedented. | |
| Well, I think that I wish the federal stuff would be on TV as well. | |
| I think it all needs to be televised in that same way as the Watergate hearings were. | |
| And I know the Watergate hearings were hearings and not a trial, but there were witnesses and there were questions. | |
| There was that kind of spectacle. | |
| I know people were running home every night to watch this riveted. | |
| Now, remember, Nixon's approval rating when he left office was 25%, which is still kind of crazy because it really should have been zero. | |
| But you have to imagine before the hearings were televised, it was higher than that. | |
| So if we're talking about the 50,000 people in three states that are going to decide this fucking election in 2024, if you can cleave off a few thousand of those people because these are televised and they can see for themselves, then it's definitely worth it. | |
| But the circus atmosphere is probably going to be lessened because we know that Trump is not going to testify. | |
| And you have been listening to a free preview of our Patreon exclusive weekender show. | |
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| So you should do that. | |
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