74. BONUS: Patreon After Show
2018Show notes
Transcript
Tap a timestamp or any sentence to play from there · machine transcribed (mlx:mlx-community/whisper-large-v3-turbo), expect mistakesMerlinThe dodgy dossier, as Carter Page likes to say, there's two major things in there that have not had evidence behind them. There's the one thing that we all know. Then the other thing is, you'll remember after it came out. That Tommy gun of hydration, if you will.
MaxYes.
MerlinMichael Cohen in a brilliant lawyerly move posted a photo of the front of his passport and said I've never been to Prague. So leaving aside the Tommy gun for just a minute. Do we think it will eventually come out that he has multiple passports and has been to Prague.
MaxBut I have been to tons of countries where for whatever reason that transpired I didn't get a passport stamp.
Speaker ADoesn't that suck?
MaxAnd it bothers me.
MerlinIt's totally random. They're in like totally random. It's not like showing a bill of lading.
MaxGetting a stamp on your passport is an old-fashioned thing, I think. I think it used to be in an analog world, they were very rigorous about every time you crossed the border, you got the stamp because that was how you tracked it. But now I think they basically barcode the passport and it goes in a computer system. And that's how you know when someone's crossed the border.
MerlinThat's for them, not for you.
MaxRight. But I have been to many countries, including like I believe I think when I went to China. So I landed in China and I transferred airplanes, but for whatever reason, we went through customs in China and then I had to go through customs again to fly out to Vietnam. And I didn't get a passport stamp and I was really upset because I was like, it would be cool to get a passport stamp in China. And I'm telling you, everyone should have an interest. If they were doing passport stamps as some kind of security or verification, then everyone would care that I have a stamp from China.
MerlinRight, right, right, right. so i mean we haven't talked about michael cohen like do you have a quick thought on michael cohen oh he's completely he's totally he's dirt all does it seem like this shit might be going down
Alexa little bit is he fucked like actually fucked all the trump people are seems pretty fucked and i got
Merlina thought about the taxi medallions too for what it's worth all the i don't know anything about that you'll have to explain that to me he owns dozens of taxi medallions and i got a feeling it's going to come down to he my guess is so he worked for the shady guy involving taxis he's done many medallions back when they were worth a million dollars. I think it's going to emerge that he has been borrowing against the taxi medallions. And now the value of the taxi medallions has gone down like all these other guys. Now he's scrambled. Am I being a dingus?
AlexWhat's a taxi medallion? Is this old school Bitcoin? I actually don't know what this is.
MerlinUsually like in New York City, you can be awarded a tax, like a liquor license. It's something of value that allows you to do a thing. And so it used to be like in San Francisco, a taxi medallion was like, I mean, it's a huge deal. It's a license to make money, like a liquor license. They only give so many of them. And he owns something like 20 of them.
MaxIt is. It's old school Bitcoin. You know what? I know what you're talking about. Yeah, yeah. No, I think that Merlin, I think you might be right. I mean, let me, like,
Merlinthey dropped precipitously in value after Uber got big. Right. And it became a huge fucking deal because there's all these people. I heard about this on various NPR shows about that these guys who were like, on paper, were worth millions and millions of dollars. I think they were all mobbed.
MaxI think they was all mobbed up back in the day, too.
MerlinRight. But the thing was, you could, that was an asset that you could borrow against your taxi medallions.
MaxWell, and we know that Trump did, was in bed with the mob. Oh, absolutely. And various times. I mean, we know that. In fact, there's like lawsuits and evidence in court presented that show.
MerlinThere's too many people that he's one person away from. You know what I'm saying? Oh, yeah. He did dirty. It may not be like a Frank Sinatra thing, but there's a lot of people he's one shady person away from.
MaxI mean, apparently you didn't, you just, nobody did construction in the time that Trump was doing construction in Manhattan without interfacing with the mafia. But he also specifically there were lawsuits and stuff involving that. But anyway, just to take a step back, like Michael Cohen is definitely fucked. I mean, if you think of all the different people who conservative Republican judges who approved this warrant and the fact that the FBI did a bar is it's so high. And the fact that the FBI did a no knock raid simultaneously on three locations, it indicates that maybe they have him on like a conspiracy charge.
MerlinAnd it's something you know, it's something we don't know. Is it election stuff? I don't think it is. Is it Stormy Daniels stuff? No, that's part of it. I think there's something fucking huge that maybe, and I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be like that guy, but I agree with you. It's out there. The enormity of going to the president's lawyer with a no-knock search in three places is a very fucking big deal. I'm going to say, I think it's something we don't even know about yet. I agree. I think it's going to be something, I'm not even talking about the hundreds, Bannon says there's dozens or hundreds of deals with women out there. I think it's going to be something we can't even fucking imagine at this point.
MaxI actually am inclined to agree with you. I would guess based on – so the fact that they got the no-knock warrant on three locations at once to me indicates –
MerlinThat's like a ticking bomb scenario.
MaxTo me, it's like some sort of conspiracy charge because what you're worried about is that there's other associates and confederates who would coordinate to destroy evidence. So that's what makes me think that maybe it's –
MerlinWhat do you think the nature of it is?
MaxOrganized crime or something along those lines. We don't know yet.
MerlinSee, I'm thinking it's something, maybe not terrorism, but it's something of grave import to something structural. I mean, beyond the election. So the whole like, oh, this is about, you know, illegal. I don't know about that. I don't know about that. You have to remember how stupid. Well, but I mean. You have to remember how stupid. Do you think it's election? Do you think it's election violations?
MaxMerlin, you just have to remember how stupid and petty these people are and what they want out of life. They're not Bond villains. They're not big thinkers. They're small thinkers. So it's probably like he was probably laundering mob money in a golf course. Do you see what I'm saying? It's small. It's so gross and sad. It's like small and stupid. You have to think small and stupid, not big and stupid with the Trump people. Do you see what I'm saying?
MerlinNo, no, I do, and I wish I hadn't used the word terrorism because you're going to think I'm an idiot. No, I mean more like every single one of these guys, what it comes down to is they need money. Almost all of these guys. Oh, sure. Paul Manafort of every single person from Manafort through Kushner through Trump.
MaxManafort was a huge— Every fucking one of these people, they need money from somebody. Manafort was a huge financial crime.
MerlinHe owed money to the Russian mob.
MaxYes, it was a huge financial crime. But when I say small and stupid, what I mean is that he got busted because he was laundering money through an expensive rug shop, right? Yeah, and his suits. Right, and he was buying $10,000 suits and rugs. That's what I mean by small and stupid. So it's not going to be that he was a Bond villain and he had an underground submarine and that he was buying all the world's newspapers. And it's no QAnon thing. It's like it's probably that he was using his money from his own charity to buy oil paintings of himself, if you can imagine something that crazy.
MerlinThe other thing everybody knows about – everybody who's an idiot and follows this knows is that Cohen is not a lawyer in the conventional sense. He has one employee pretty much. He did not get called up to the bigs because, A, who knows where his bodies are buried, and, B, he needed to preserve the lawyer-client privilege by not being in the White House, where he would have lost that privilege. He needed to stay in Manhattan. But what has he mostly done? Yes, B, he's fixed things and intimidated people and bullied. But, A, he's a deal guy. That's the thing.
Cohen's huge value to Trump, apart from making women go away, is the deals. But here's the thing. If it was deals, wouldn't that most likely have been under Mueller's purview? I don't know. Like, what is it? The interesting part is if he threw this to the Southern District—
MaxI think the women—maybe it could be the women or it could be a—
MerlinIt could be the women.
MaxA mob thing or a women thing would be better resource to handle in the New York judge. But anyhow, I just want to take a step back for a second because I know I got excited about the raids and all of that. And like the president's personal lawyer getting raided, like, God, Jesus Christ. Like, not even Nixon did that level of insane cronyism. And then the bald face, like, denials. And, oh, Michael Cohen, we've never heard of the guy. Like, you know, all that. That whole act.
MerlinGive me an opportunity to use one of my all-time favorite names, B.B. Rebozo. I love the name B.B. Rebozo.
MaxBut anyhow. Take a step back. Yeah. You know, yeah, Cohen's dirty. Trump's whole inner circle is dirty his shitty kids are dirty Jared Kushner certainly I think that guy's fucked
AlexKushner seems like the most Bond villain of any of them
MaxKushner is certainly going to jail and the thing was
Merlinwe're hearing so little about him which is very odd
Maxwell right remember he was the superstar and now we don't hear about him at all because they probably know how fucked he is he may become the fall guy he just seems like the kind of fucking witless sap that they would all throw under the bus too as soon as things get tough
Alexoh Ivanka's gonna fuck him over
MaxSo a lot of these guys are really fucked. And I – but so what? Like what is that – what do people think that means? Like I heard on Twitter the whole take I've been hearing this week is like, oh, my God. Trump's going to start – this whole war – people were saying like don't pay any attention to this war in Syria. Don't get distracted because Trump is going to use that to fire Mueller. And it's like you fucking idiots. It's like, don't you understand that the war in Syria is the thing? That's the bad thing.
That's why it matters. Who gives a fuck about Mueller or Kushner or the mob or Michael Cohen or any of this shit? It doesn't matter. It's completely immaterial to your lives. It's just the...
MerlinI disagree a little bit. I disagree a little bit because I think we are getting more push.
MaxI'm completely Dr. Manhattan on this. I'm sitting on the moon going, I'm tired of the earthlings and their petty affairs. I'm completely Dr. Manhattaned out. I don't care. I don't care. It doesn't affect me. What I care about is— But what if he wipes out everybody?
MerlinLike maybe he can't technically fire Mueller, but what if he has a really bad day this afternoon and he gets rid of Sessions, he gets rid of Rosenstein, and he gets rid of Ray?
MaxWell, what Maggie Haberman said is that he has given that or he has said to his staff— this was interesting.
MerlinBack in December when they thought the Deutsche Bank stuff was going to come out, that was the last big time that McGahn had to talk him off the ledge.
MaxRight but what Maggie Heyerman said on Twitter over the weekend was Trump said get rid of Mueller many times to his staff and they don't feel that they have the authority to do that or that it's actionable what the president is saying meaning yeah he could have a bad day and get drunk and yell at the White House paintings and they won't listen to what he's saying
AlexThe most I mean
MaxNow all I want to say is it doesn't matter it doesn't matter we have to have a political victory because if Trump is let's say that the entire administration is sent to jail and all you want to say mike pence is sent to jail fine then then uh steve paul ryan's retiring then fine steve scalise becomes president what do you want it's like tom tom pruitt becomes president i am terrified of trump being impeached because then it's then
Alexthen it's the the it doesn't matter what is it does matter though because if trump is impeached then it's then it's the the alt-right was was right then we then it's us we we did all this these conspiracies to get him out of office and that is what do you mean we did these conspiracies think of all like his base is okay yeah what do you mean his base goes fucking insane if he's
Maximpeached and oh you think there's going to be like rioting not actual like yeah but they're all taking like kratom they're they're all they're all infirm did you did you see the latest meg
Merlinhaberman no um this is weird uh the fbi agents who raided the office and hotel this is her anna puso and mike schmidt um fbi agents who raided the office and hotel of president trump's lawyer on monday were seeking all records related to the access hollywood tape this is according to three sources. What? What the fuck? According to three people who have been briefed on the content of a federal search warrant. Why?
MaxFBI agents sought all records related to the Access Hollywood tape when they raided the office on Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen. They wanted evidence of whether Cohen suppressed damaging info on Trump during the campaign. So it might be the election angle. Well, probably.
MerlinThat seems like small potatoes.
MaxWell, that's what I'm saying. Small and stupid, Merlin.
MerlinThey're small enough. They're peewee potatoes.
Maxthey're small it's it's it's small and stupid barely visible but i wonder i wonder if he stole i wonder if he watergated some of those tapes or something
Merlinand i just my wife and i just like you know you hear me at the end of this episode the 10 people will listen to and you realize how much attention i pay to a lot of this stuff i don't like that about myself but i just know my wife and i would just be like you know he you hear him speak publicly now and you realize how dumb the president is. He's really not smart. And honestly, I'm sorry to say this. Obviously, he's losing his mental agility a little bit.
AlexYou can say he's crazy. It's not ableist to say he's losing decades of audio. He's not crazy.
MaxThis man has dementia. He's not crazy. He's demented.
MerlinHe's demented. That's what I'm saying. You know the way that he talks and he wants to impress everybody in the room for no particular reason. Where's all the fucking audio of this guy? It's got to be out there somewhere. I just worry because I don't, the reason I think this stuff is important is not just for the salacious value and because it gives me a thrill to see him be unhappy. It's because I'm, it keeps coming back to the same thing for me, which is not fun and sexy, which is, I think it's really a bummer that the reps representatives in particular,
the house of representatives has been. So we explained about this and I have pretty good concerns about what the new
Maxdetails from the warrant reveal. The prosecutors are keenly interested in Mr. Cohen's unofficial role in the Trump campaign, and they help explain why Mr. Trump was furious about the raid. People close to Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen regard the warrant as an attempt by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, to pry into Trump's personal life using other prosecutors as his proxy. So it's a combination of leverage. It's a combination of like leverage and they're
Merlinfinding little crimes. Like I bet. Oh, so you think this is in part a move to flip Cohen or
Maxlike pressure is the prosecutor's friend. Maybe it's not flip them, but maybe it's neutralize or maybe it's get other people. Maybe it's to get the other people that he's talking to. Like the more that if like, listen, if Cohn is the rock, right? If Trump, these people all call Trump in a panic and he says, Cohn's going to get us out of it. Like I have a team. And then Mueller goes and does this big show of rating Cohn's house. Maybe it makes the other people flip because they fucking lose their mind the same way that we are. But regardless, that is the thing about when I say small and stupid,
if these guys do a million little shitty crimes, right, who knows how they got those excess Hollywood tapes, maybe they stole them, or they threatened them, or maybe they, do you know how they go after people for the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for like using the wrong password, or you know, someone does an unauthorized login, and then they go to jail as a hacker, like Matthew Keyes, maybe they did a Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
MerlinWell, in this case, as Avanada Keyes bringing up, I think very interestingly, the fact that, there's just so many parts of this that don't line up, from a logical standpoint. So he's a guy who, under his bar rules, his client is supposed to know what he's doing in any kind of arrangement that involves deals or trials. So, okay, so he struck a deal without telling his client, okay, that's a bar problem. He somehow found this money and paid for it. Okay, well, it's definitely at least an election violation. See, now, Avenatti is saying, very interestingly,
when you, and you can tell me if this is true, when you go to borrow money of any kind, against your house, your home loan, whatever, that you're supposed to say on the line what you're going to do with the money. And as everybody keeps saying, it's very unlikely that he said it's to pay off a porn star. Ditto the setting up an LLC. I know this is all, as you say, small potatoes. When you set up an LLC, you're supposed to say what it's for. Does that LLC say to pay off a porn star? That's the kind of thing they might get him on as well. It's like super small potato stuff.
Access Hollywood.
AlexI'm still mad that she only got $100,000. that's not enough
Merlinthat's because she was forced to do this and they had to have to give her something
Maxthey threatened her as well
Alexit was a carrot and a stick no I know the thing though is maybe that's why he's a good you guys know this it's very hard for me to follow this because I feel helpless and I feel like there's nothing I can do there's no connections I have can I just
Maxgo on
AlexI want to respond to that. Focus to like, like,
MaxI want to respond to that.
AlexI, there, I feel like there's nothing I can do. So I focus on like local Chicago stuff or EFF stuff where I feel like I have some knowledge. I have some, not expertise, but I know not, it's not that I have the knowledge, but I know how to get the correct answers and know the folks who are smart and can help. Does that make sense?
MerlinYes. It's something, it's something that you can, so it's something that you care about in a primary way. It's something that you can understand and something with a path to where it's almost like you're going through some kind of rehabilitation. Like you're able to say like, when I do these kinds of things, the world improves in these ways. Maybe not in a huge way.
AlexIt might be an ego trip for me.
MerlinBy doing this, by my paying attention to this and putting my time and resources and attention here, I can see the following improvement in actual real ways.
AlexAnd I feel like Max disagrees, but in an interesting way.
MerlinNo, I don't.
MaxSo I just think-
AlexNo, that wasn't a blow. I'm serious.
MaxI mean, I think there's two things. if you're feel that i'm listen no i'm feel it drives this stuff drives me insane that's why i have to have my dr manhattan attitude because otherwise i go otherwise i go insane and i and i do my red string board you know with like i can't have a fucking string board in my house connecting yeah i can't have a crazy wall in my basement so you know so to me like there's two and i would give this as advice to anyone who feels anxiety or is stressed out about trump or any of this stuff, which is number one, just think about, you have to think about power and what
you can do with your time and your life in the same way that Republicans do. Republicans don't get mad online and spend all their time like tone policing other Republicans and doing these like insular arguments about whether comedians were ever funny or not. They take their anger about the world and they channel it into their local school board race. And then they take over the school board and make it so you can't teach evolution. If you live, why don't our audience is a million times smarter and they have better taste on how to spend their money than any of any Republican out there. Why don't you channel your energy?
If you don't want to run for, I mean, a run for office, run for dog catcher, run for school board, run for seriously, run for County board, run for, run for just fine. Run for the fucking library board.
MerlinI have progressive hills.
MaxI have progressive friends who ran for the library board and, And all their job is is just making sure that they're abolishing library fines and giving free information to people in their community. That's amazing. That is so much more productive than all of these fucking prognosticators and whiners and paladins on Twitter who go charging into battle every day like medieval times jousting, right? Where you knock each other's helmets off and then reset for tomorrow's show. You can't fight my fireball.
AlexThat's pretty fun.
MaxSo, so anyway, that's number one is, is run for office or get involved in a local race. For me, I wound up jumping into, I mean, I worked on a number of primaries here, but then I really threw myself into this water reclamation district race. That's a race like, like, I don't want to say that that race is behind me is beneath me normally, but I will like, like, but definitely like, I had, I had the extra, I had the extra energy in this cycle to do it because it was like a little material thing that I was like, you know what, here's somewhere where I can do something. like I can't fix everything but I can just keep this guy on the board to to have clean drinking
water that that's what I can do today so just it's like what Merlin talked about the Martian thinking just think in terms of capabilities what can you do today is that can you volunteer on a campaign can you raise some money can you do something that's number that's tranche a tranche b like if you want to think of a different bucket that is more like culture war e kind of stuff and like more twitter based stuff or whatever which is not as good as bucket a which is actually materially doing something. But bucket B is pick an issue that you think is motivational to people, right? So I just mentioned a great one, which is abolition of library fines.
Library fines are bullshit. They don't work. They're regressive. They're terrible. And I know some people who that's their thing in life is they want to do away with library fines. That's good. I like that. Just pick an issue like that.
MerlinWe should John Oliver, that shit. That's a good one.
MaxIt's a great one. I mean, I think you'll be hearing more about this movement in the future. But just pick something, right? Maybe it's you think that pretrial, a detention of people in jail, of people of color in jail is creating like a debtor's prison and a permanent underclass of people who never get a trial. Or maybe you think that—
MerlinSpace just creates and props up the bail bond industry.
MaxYeah. I mean, I don't know. Maybe you're mad about clean air, clean drinking water, whatever it is. Just pick something and start small. Just pick a small local issue of something that really bugs you that no one else really cares about. Maybe you care about net neutrality or campaign finance or education or whatever it is. But don't pick a huge, broad topic. Focus in on one little thing. We want modern textbooks for our school's classrooms. And just fix it. Raise awareness of it. Do what the Parkland kids are doing. You pick one specific thing. You get your little wedge, one little doorstop, and you just drive it in. And every day, you're just trying to pound that thing in one millimeter more until you get people talking about it and you get them to care about your issue.
MerlinIt's harder to get distracted when you're a one-issue person.
MaxYeah, so find your issue and hammer away on it. And, you know, I mean, whatever. Don't pick something else that everyone else is mad about too, right? So don't pick representation of different races and genders in superhero movies because that's – we already have – we've got our best guys on the case, you know?
We've already assigned a detail to that. We already have the 5th, 3rd, and 4th armies marching on that theater.
Speaker AOh, boy.
MaxYou know what I'm saying?
MerlinYes, yes, yes. All right, that's good. Two hours and 37 minutes. That ought to give them something.