Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds and a pardon.

January sixth, Rider is accused of threatening to kill a minority leader, Jeffries.

Who could have seen it?

Not I We have such a great show for you today.

To The Contrary's own Charlie psych stops by to talk about Trump's destruction of the White House, both literally and metaphorically.

And we'll talk to law Fair's own Anna Bauer about her insane text with Prosecutor Lindsey Halligan.

But first the news Smiley Ice got that generous budget, and you know, we've seen some reports that they're not having the easiest time hiring, which is why they're giving student loan forgiveness and very sad hiring.

Basically anybody who could grudge ooh immigrants there.

Yes, slap on some Oakley's bad boy.

You're coming Ice.

So there's a new report here from independent journalist jud Legum on what they did buy and it's pretty fucking horrifying.

Yeah, here's the story.

Ice has ten billion dollars and they're spending it.

Actually, it's more it's like forty eight billion dollars and they're spending on seven hundred percent more on weapons.

What they bought will terrify you.

So in twenty nineteen they spent just five point seven million on the small arms category.

Now they're buying things like Tomahawk missiles.

Now they're buying things like guns, armor guided missile warheads with explosive components.

Those are very good in cities.

These are people, by the way, who couldn't get into the army or the police.

Okay, so Chicago is gonna be everywhere like that's what we're seeing.

Like the minute New York is able to elect a mayor that is not in the tank for Trump, Donald Trump is going to send ice here and I think we all see that coming them all the way.

By the way, the susident should not be threatening states like this is not how any of this is supposed to work.

Yeah.

I don't like the idea of people like this having weapons in our streets, that there's no recourse about what they do, and it seems they can just do whatever they want.

Speak for yourself.

I love it, Just kidding, Molly.

You and I have a upcoming project on regulation.

We love it.

We do.

And one of the things we talk about it is collusion in real estate and all the fuckery that can go on to raise housing prices which helps squeeze Americans, and how regulation protects you from it.

But the US Supreme Court is declined to revive an antitrust lawsuit against Siloh.

Corporate corruption they love it.

In case you're wondering, this crew very big on corporate corruption.

No one should be surprised that this Supreme Court has decided that if you're a big company and you want to do crimes, it's all good.

I'm not surprised by any of those, but I do think you know, they can't just rule for Trump.

They also have to rule for big businesses.

You know, this Supreme Court, they are very involved in radically making the country to look like their image, and I for one, am not surprised.

Yeah, we're going to definitely need to have courts that actually keep our regulations intact and directives and actually have these agencies like the FTC be able to have teeth in the future.

So let's hope we get there someday.

Yeah, you know, the court is going to have to be looked at, But for today, they are just going to blank check any corrupt Republican thing they can.

So I'm going to shock you.

And we've never discussed this on this podcast ever.

No, never independent newspapers.

They are dying in a lot of this is because of private investment firms.

So we are in a local news crisis right now.

Not surprising, but very annoying.

We got here through ibate equity firms buying newspapers trying to make them more profitable by and basically crushing them.

You know, we are in a news desert.

So the more you have no local news, the more you don't trust local news, the more you start trusting, you know, ai news that says your city is a healscape when you can walk down the street and see it's not.

And this is like this scary, uncanny valley stuff.

So more than a third of the eight thousand, eight hundred and ninety one US newspapers that existed twenty one years ago are gone two hundred and thirteen have zero locally based news sources.

That means that you are just you know, and some of these places have only one news source and it's a conservative news source or it is like a Sinclair or something.

Yeah, a lot of time, it's those ones that are real big aggregates where they're just not really doing local news anymore, and it's just news from across the state, aggregated from a few different papers, and it's kind of useless to your local area.

Yeah, and that's what we're seeing, and that is kind of shocking.

So North Carolina's advanced new congressional maps to help Republicans get additional House seats.

So welcome to the arms race where Republicans tried desperately to prevent a midterm loss by redistricting.

This is like an insane thing to do.

And what they're doing here is they're trying to rob black people of representation.

That's something that the Supreme Court is looking into.

Two.

This is section two of the Voting Rights Act, which they are going to rule on.

So Republicans have eleven hour fourteen seats in North Carolina.

Again, here's what's happening.

And I think it's really important to Republicans in Texas give Trump five House seats because he doesn't want to lose.

Then Gavin Newsom goes and gets five for the Democrats.

Then even now we're seeing different Republican states will redraw in order to please the Mango god king.

I want to point out something that I think is really important, which is, and I think this is really really really important.

A normal, healthy democracy has checks and balances.

So when the president says I'm doing unpopular stuff some of it is criminal, I don't want to get investigated, So redraw the congressional maps for me.

The people say, no, we're not going to do that.

That's not what's happening here.

What's happening here is that the administration that serves this president is just doing whatever whatever he wants.

We're going to see more like this.

Charlie Sykes is the author of the Newsletter to the Contrary and the book The Iconic, the Brilliant and also very charming Charlie Sykes.

Boy, that's you're putting a little pressure on today.

Sorry.

Right now we're going to talk about the Nazi group chats, not one, but do Nazi group chats.

You know, if you didn't know better, It's almost like it's a pattern, isn't it.

I mean, you know, why why does this keep happening to this nice bunch of guys?

But it is awfully interesting.

Okay, let's leave the yrs aside for the moment is Paul and Grascia, who's the nominated to run the office of the Office I mean special counsel.

I mean it's a it's a big deal job.

And you know what, it's not actually shocking if you know anything about Paul and Grossia that he writes stuff like this.

The fact that it hasn't been disqualifying yet, that's what speaks volumes.

I mean, this is the key thing.

Guys go around.

You know, I love Hitler, you know, I'm kind of a Nazi, and it's like they are still in good standing in MAGA and I don't know, what do you think, Molly, what are the odds JD.

Van's going to come out and say, oh, come on, we got to stop this pearl clutching.

Tell us more about Paul Grossia, because I don't know who he is, so it sounds like you have some experience with him.

I'm just actually curious.

Well, I don't have the notes in front of me, but but I will say that he's one of those guys you know, on the far edges of the fever swamps who's been a troll for some time.

As the extremes have become the mainstream.

He's sort of been dragged along with with the tide, and I don't can it Just like this one almost feels like a digression because before we see its taping this, I'm looking at Barry Weiss's the Free Press.

I was actually going to ask you about Barry Weis, so go.

On, yes, well, and they had this piece They're they're kind of now getting concerned about it.

It kind of seems like something's happening on the right that they seem to be, you know, being overrun by all these extremists, these conspiracy theories and these nut jobs, and it's like, huh, you know, how long has this been going on?

Really?

You know, and when you have the the nick fuintes Is, who's basically a neo Nazi except for the Neil part, sort of pounding on the door and going okay, I'm next, I'm next up, you know.

And so if some of us have been saying, you know, you are perhaps identifying a pattern that has been right in front of your face for the last ten years.

And this, I think is ultimately going to be Barry Wise's problem.

And it's the problem that a lot of Republicans have found themselves on, which is there's not a wide lane in that party for socially liberal and right like you're gay, you're zionist.

Okay, a lot of conservatives or Zionists that that been diagrammed.

But then the Nazi stuff that kind of knocks you out of the contention there.

You would think, so, you know, I would well have to check back in about a month or so to you know, find out what's acceptable and what's not.

I mean, I think the extraordinary thing about last week with the you know, Hitler Hitler standing young Republicans was that the Vice President of the United States felt the need to step forward to minimize and defend them.

Now, yeah, you know, so again if they were just sort of washed out, everybody said, okay, yeah, definitely that's a red line.

Yeah, that's disqualifying.

You know, fine, let's move on.

Embarrassing.

But it is interesting that that JD.

Vance had to come out and signal to them, I got your back, because the most of the world sees that as an incredible outrage JD.

Vance.

And this is the key to sup why there's a little substance here.

He thinks those are his constituents, not necessarily the people on the chat, but the people who are adjacent to the chat, and so all the rhetoric about pearl clutching and yeah, you know, kids will be kids, they weren't kids.

Some of them were fortunate.

Jd.

Vance does not want to be outflanked on the right.

So everybody is like, look, everybody knows Paul and Grassey is a complete nut.

I mean they all know that.

I mean, look, we have Cash Battel and we have you know, Telsea Gabbard and RFK Junior.

Yeah.

But the thing is that right now, it's not even about right left ideology.

It's about absolute slavish adoration and a refusal to break with MAGA in any way whatsoever.

And this is going to be the problem with that, you know, the Barry Weiss I think and by the way, I'm not as down on her as other I think she's going to be way out of her depth there, way out of her depth.

But on both sides, things becomes shakier as the Republican Party becomes more like more like North Korea, you know what I mean, you know you know where I'm getting that here.

Yeah, And you know, I want to just say this should be disqualifying on the left and the right Nazi stuff.

Yeah, right.

And and look, Democrats, you know, can't get into the loop of thinking, well, if they're not going to disqualify anyone on their side, we have to stick with them.

No.

You know again, that's the difference between insane party and the sane party.

And also, this is one of those moments where Democrats, I think, have they Well, they're going to have to make this decision over and over again.

Do you want to, you know, go down in flames with your guy, Do you want to scratch your ideological id or are you going to do what it takes to win either the House or the Senate or both of them?

Because quite frankly, I mean, here's the thing.

No, King's great, fantastic, wonderful, successful, beyond the wildest expectations.

And yet you're not going to have a meaningful resistance to Donald Trump unless benefessially, yeah, unless you win the election.

That's going to require a certain ruthlessness.

Yeah.

I didn't mean to step on your punchline there, because it is important and you got to win those elections, and you also got to run in this redistricting arms race.

The Supreme Court has this opportunity to shut down this redistricting arms race to say, like no redistrict day.

Maybe they get to even maybe they throw out the Voting Rights Act and they Republicans get twenty seats.

Either way, the Founding Fathers did not.

This was not the plan.

Like clearly there was no textualist interpretation where like the President wanted them to just cut away, you know, like talk us through how insane this is.

Well, I mean it is insane, and it is dangerous, and it will make absolutely everything worse.

It will become very, very difficult to unwine.

The Supreme Court opened the door to this.

I think it was involving the Wisconsin case where they basically said partisan jerrymandering is not a problem.

Look, I agree with you.

I will be glad to have them shut this down.

I think that that in fact, though there will show difference to the States.

Look, you want to talk about originalism in the Constitution, and I'm going off a little bit of a tangent here.

The originalist interpretation of both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence is no kings right.

It is the entire point click of the original text of the Constitution was to divide power so that you would not have an emperor who would be able to dictate to the country.

It's why you create three branches of government, why create checks and balances, why you create why you have a Bill of rights, why you enumerate the powers the government has and it doesn't have.

So you look at all the stuff that's going on right here, and no, I think, Molly, I think it's safe to say that this is not what.

The founders.

He said.

So the Supreme Court justices who say our job is to revive the original intent of the Constitution, look out of your fucking windows.

Do you honestly exact?

This is this what I mean?

Know?

And I hope we talk about Donald Trump being, you know, the first president to actually begin to destroy the White House at some point, because again, I the founding fathers that kind of probably remember when the British burned down everything, probably had a different attitude toward the vandalization of the White House.

Right now, but I'm sorry, now, I'm now, I'm just now I'm wandering now, I'm just I'm just.

I wonder if you could talk about the White House, those pictures of the White House ball because I actually think there are a couple of things this administration is doing that are like, I mean, small relative to some of the other stuff they're doing, but I actually think are really going to hurt them in profound ways.

And I believe that what Donald Trump is doing to the East wing right now those pictures that I saw, people are I think deeply affected by them, and I don't think that this administration has like completely priced in how traumatic those pictures are.

I hope you're right about this, because you could certainly imagine, you know, on Earth one point zero, somebody is saying that the president, you know, at a time when the government is shut down, when people are faced with massive increases in their healthcare prices and inflation is resurging, the only optics of tearing down the White House to install a two hundred and fifty million dollars goldfist stooned ballroom paid by your billionaire oligarch friends.

That just wouldn't look right, you know.

It kind of cuts against your populist grain.

And so you have a you have a you know, the critics, the Democrats have a bit have an opportunity to connect some dots here.

You know that.

And by the way, as I wrote in my newsletter the sometimes called wait just to the contrary to Actually I actually led with this, and I said, you know, sometimes the symbolism is just two on the nose, too obvious.

Here's Donald Trump vandalizing the White House.

So I think people ought to be offended at the arrogance it shows, but also how out of touch this, you know, the the people's president really is when you're talking about this gaudy ballroom that he's that he's doing this.

They can fit nine ninety nine people, not a thousand going.

Yeah, So I mean, I I hope that they make that case.

I mean, you know, we we've I don't want to be the ten millionth person to comment on the Democrats messaging issues, but I think that you can connect some dots to this, this overriding thing that, you know what, Donald Trump is really not on your side.

Donald Trump really doesn't give a shit about you.

Donald Trump will shit on you, but he really doesn't give a shit about the problems you have.

And because who was he for, He's for himself and his you know, his age of Gilded Age friends, creating this Gilded Age obscenity in the White House.

I wonder if you could talk about the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson has sent them home.

There's a calendar.

I'm sure you've seen this graphic of account.

Yeah, they've worked like an hour.

I mean, basically talk us through what you think about that.

Well, it is interesting.

I mean, here you have Mike Johnson who's got plenty of time to provide commentary about the No King's rally, which you call the Hate America Rally, and then he's actually defending the Trump's AI thing where he takes a dump on on the love satire, Donald tru satire, and yeah, Mike Johnson really is a student of satires.

It's the kind of thing you would find in deuterotomy right where the Old Testament, that kind of that kind of thing.

The larger point is that everything that's happening is happening again, going back to the Founders.

The Founders thought that the constant that the that the Congress was the most powerful branch of government.

Under Mike Johnson, the Congress is gone.

They're not just potted plants.

They are elsewhere.

You look at that calendar, and he's basically shut them down.

They are taking a very very very very long taxpayer funded vacation, and I think it's worth noting that one of the reasons they're doing that is because he so desperately does not want to have a vote on the Epstein files, I mean tweet coming back.

Those Epstein files had become so important, are so sticky that the Congress of the United States has essentially shut down for the duration and Mike Johnson again is he's not even swearing in the new congressman.

But it is remarkable.

I would urge people to look at that calendar because I think I'm trying to remember what I wrote about this.

I mean, with what the numbers are.

I think they've been in session, like you know what, you know, sixteen days over the last six I mean twenty days over the last sixteen weeks or or something like that.

Something absolutely something absurd like that.

And they're being paid, and they have staffs, and they have the best healthcare in the world, which is kind of amazing.

So usually in a shutdown, what happens is that you keep the branches in even if they're not doing anything, because they're negotiating because it looks better.

You think Mike Johnson is making a mistake here.

I don't think Mike Johnson has any power.

I mean yes, I mean, yes, there's there's cascading mistakes, but I mean the fundamental thing is that, and this is the sign of our times, is that he's got a very very narrow house majority.

He doesn't necess really have complete control, and his entire function is to do what Donald Trump tells him to do.

I mean, there was once a time when the Speaker of the United States would if he met with the president, he would meet as a virtual coequal, at least in terms of like what's going to happen next.

That's not the you know, that's not the situation right now.

So Mike Johnson is Mike Johnson is willing to do something the founders never imagined.

Surrender all of his clouts, surrender all of his power, go home in service of Donald Trump's, you know, demand that he cover up for pedophiles and do whatever he wants him to do.

Yeah, and it is just amazing.

So one of the things when I've talked to people about the shutdown in leadership, obviously not on the Republican side, they say something to the effect of, like, this shutdown lasts until Donald Trump wants it to end.

Because they don't see likely that he's the way out of this, or they make some kind of deal, but that if he wants to end it tomorrow he can well.

Again, the Democrats have some agency, They have a little bit of clout.

I am a little concerned about what the Democrats' endgame is.

Do they have an exit strategy?

If Donald Trump does call them up and say, Okay, I'm going to give you the healthcare subsidies?

Are we good?

Are we just going to go back?

Are you going to sign on to a deal that you know that they won't live up to.

They've made it clear that there are more decisions.

How do you even sign a piece of paper with them when they've announced that they're going to ignore it, not to mention, like everything else that's going on.

How will the base react?

What will the people have turned out for no Kings feel when King j Jeffries and Chuck Schumer go to the White House and say, Okay, we've decided to reopen Donald Trump's government.

I mean, this is this.

Is this is just a problem.

Problem problem.

Yeah, I mean, I mean one you know, one scenario that I certainly you know I am not looking forward to, is that Republicans just simply basically say fuck it, We're going to do away with the filibuster.

We're going to pass this with our own votes.

We're going to open the government, which has the advantage at least short term, of sparing the Democrats voting to refund Donald Trump's state.

That could really happen.

I do think though, there's a weakness in the Senate, like you could see a world where the Republicans peel off a few people, but you have seen Republican appropriators saying this is not don't make a deal with these people.

Yeah.

So I again, I think that part of the part of the weird, the weird dynamic of this shutdown is that frankly, nobody seems to be talking about it that much.

You know, given given given the new cycle of who notice this, all the conversations that you have with people, know there are twenty things to talk about in any given day, and it's certainly possible you won't you won't get even to the shutdown to lighteen or nineteen.

So the normal sort of pressure on the part needs to settle, like oh my god, this cannot go on, we can't do anything.

Has not happened and we haven't had the kind of pain.

You know.

We obviously social Security checks will go out, the military is still being paid, so you know, until there is some irreversible pain, I don't know what the pressure is going to be.

So I mean I see people now speculating that we might have a shutdown until Thanksgiving.

I don't think that that's out of the remal possibility.

Charlie Sikes, thank you, thank you.

Thank you.

How the right lost its mind?

Anna Bauer is a senior editor at law Fair.

Welcome to Fast Politics, Anna, thank you so much for coming on.

No, I'm so happy to be here.

I, like I said, huge fan of your work and really grateful that you're having you on.

So you write a lot about the courts, the law, the fuckery happening, and the Trump administration, but this is an amazing I want you first to talk about a text message you got.

Yeah.

So two saturdays ago, I was sitting in my apartment.

I was about to watch Netflix.

I'd spend the morning tweeting, touching up on the news, particularly about the indictment that had just been handed down against New York Attorney General Letitia James.

A woman named Lindsay Halligan is handling that case.

She's also handling the case against former FBI director James Comey.

She had been brought in too, because no one else would sign off on this.

And Lindsay Halligan, friend of Trumps, had originally been a Parking lawyer.

No, well, no, so that's a different Trump lawyer.

So Lindsay Halligan was a Florida insurance lawyer who was brought in to be one of Trump's personal lawyers around twenty twenty two.

That was when the criminal investigations were heating up.

She was one of the people who joined his criminal defense team.

For some time.

At the time, I had just started cover during the criminal cases against Trump.

People might remember there was the mar A Lago search, all these efforts by Trump's team to kind of put a stop to the Justice Department's investigation of retention of class by documents.

And one of the people who worked on that case was Lindsay Halligan.

And at the time I actually ran into her a few years ago while I was covering this case after a hearing, she was eating dinner at the same restaurant I was with another criminal defense attorney for Trump named Jim Trusty.

All of which is kind of context for what comes next, which is fast forward years later.

I have not spoken to Lindsay Halligan.

She's embroiled in controversy over the fact that she's been placed as the top prosecutor by Trump in the Eastern District of Virginia to prosecute his perceived political enemies.

And I'm sitting there on a Saturday in my apartment about to watch TV when I get a text message on Signal, which is a messaging app that Mini j lest use to speak with sources, and the person who's texting me claims to be Lindsay Halligan.

It's not every day, even as someone who covers legal issues, it's not every day that I get a message from a sitting United States attorney, much less the attorney who is prosecuting the president's political enemies.

I thought it was a hoax, thought it was a troll of some sort, or at most a phishing effort by someone you know.

And so I respond on the off chance that maybe it really is her, by asking her where we first met and who she was with.

And that is why I brought up that I had met her a few years earlier, because.

And then what does she say.

She immediately correctly responds, she says, you know, I was with Trustee, and then she named the place where we met in Florida after this hearing.

And so I'm like, oh, maybe this really is Lindsay Halligan, because I've never spoken publicly about the fact that we ran into each other briefly a few years ago.

So I start asking her some questions as any journalist would, and it becomes clear that what she's reaching out to me about is quite unusual in a number of respects.

The first is that she is reaching out to me about some tweets that I'd sent earlier that day that didn't include my own reporting about the Letitia James case, but instead some arized a New York Times story that had been published about the Letitia James case, and in that tweet, I summarized this report specifically about grand jury testimony in the case.

Now this is really important because for people who aren't familiar with, you know, how Justice Department.

Norms and federal law works.

Typically, federal prosecutors a don't talk about active investigations or ongoing prosecutions because there's just like so many things that can go wrong if you do there's all kinds of ways that defense counsel can pick apart what a prosecutor says.

It might result in pre trial publicity emotions, you know, where the defense is arguing, oh, they they've said things that are prejudicial to my client.

You know, we want to move the case to a different district.

Like, you know, there's that kind of thing.

But particularly with grand jury matters, there's a really strict rule under the federal rules of criminal procedure that prohibits an attorney for the government from disclosing anything that occurred before the grand jury.

And she's reaching out to me about a story that involves grand jury testimony in my summary of that testimony.

So it was very surprising to me in that context because typically federal prosecutors like don't even go anywhere near that kind of subject matter.

But in her defense, she has no idea what the folks she's doing.

Right, So, and this is one of the reasons why you know, we found all of this in the end to be quite us work, is that, like it clearly underscores that this is a woman who does not seem to understand the norms around prosecutions and the law and does not have the relevant experience that you know, a normal federal prosecutor in her position would.

But what is really strange to me, Molly, and you are as aware of this kind of thing as I am, is the kind of media engagement element of it all.

Where like, even though this woman has no prosecutorial experience, she is a person who has experienced engaging with the media, right Like she has an undergraduate degree in broadcast journalism.

She worked on Trump's criminal defense team for several years.

That's a very high profile position where she made many, you know, television appearances on behalf of her client.

She then worked in the White House.

Everyone in Washington knows that when you are a public official, you are talking to a reporter, clearly a reporter you don't know, you don't have an ongoing kind of relationship with.

At the outside of that conversation, you talk about the basis on which you are speaking, whether that is, you know, maybe you want to speak off the record, and that means the reporter can't report anything that you discuss.

Instead, Lindsay Halligan didn't say anything about the basis on which we're speaking, And the default rule is that that means everything is on the record.

Again.

I just can't underscore how weird all of this is, because she's a city United States attorney talking on the record to a reporter about someone else's reporting that concerned grand jury testimony, and all of that put together is just highly strange.

And we spoke to a number of former prosecutors, current and former journalists to see if in their experience, they'd ever heard of anything like it, and the universal answer was no, So.

Explain to us she talks to you, and then what happen?

Yeah, So she talks to me, mostly complaining about my reporting, trying to suggest that I got something wrong in my summary of this New York Times story.

I try to follow up multiple times to understand what was inaccurate.

You know, I think I asked four or five times, like what specifically is wrong with my post?

She never answers the question.

Look, I kind of didn't quite understand if she was serious about opening a line of communication with me, because at one point she offers to answer any questions that I might have.

So, you know, as any journalist would, I try to ask her questions about the case.

It eventually becomes clear she's not interested in actually engaging with me.

And then you know, she starts, she starts ghosting me.

And so as.

We're writing the story a few hours before we published, after we confirm that it actually was her number by obtaining her phone number which connected to her signal account, we went to the Justice Department to seek comment, which is the thing that you always do as a reporter.

So we gave them an opportunity to comment.

All that we said in the request for comment was we're publishing this story today about this exchange.

Here's a transcript of the exchange.

And then we listed a number of questions that we had, you know, for example, does Lindsay Alligan deny that these are her genuine messages?

You know, things like that, And we.

Gave them a four fifteen pm deadline, and after days of ghosting me, at four to ten, before we'd even heard back from the Justice Department, Lindsay Halligan reactivates our signal chat and says to me, by the way, everything I said was off the record.

Again, if you know how these things typically work, that is not how it works.

You don't get to say retroactively, or to demand retroactively that something you said as a public officials off the record, and so I expressed that to her and said, that's not how this works.

I'm sorry, and she said, yes, it is how it works off record, And again I said I would have been happy to speak with you on that basis, which I definitely would have.

You would have had to specified, yeah, but.

We had no agreement, and I still haven't agreed to speak to you on that basis.

And her response to that was, it was obvious it was off the record.

It was on signal, disappearing messages were set and you know, to mee, yeah, ViBe's based agreement.

Yeah, I think that.

To me, this is again I want to underscore that, Like, there are occasions when if you have an ongoing kind of source reporter relationship with someone, you might have an agreement with that person that everything is off the record unless we agree otherwise, right, like the inverse of the normal kind of assumption.

So there are contextual situations when you know, you kind of implicitly understand that something might have been off the record.

This is not one of those.

She approached me.

She's the most high profile prosecutor in the country quite literally, anything she says about these cases is going to be newsworthy, and she never once even suggested that we were off the record.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department, while you know, verifying that these were indeed genuine messages, claimed that I was threatening to lead the conversation.

That's their favorite, by the way.

That's like, you know, it's like that Pentagon thing.

We might just have to arrest you to see what happened, you know.

Yeah, And look, I think it was particularly ironic here because Lindsey Halligan is messaging me about this ongoing prosecution, and then a few days later reportedly fired some career prosecutors and released a statement around it, suggesting that they have leaked information about an ongoing prosecution.

She claimed that the Eastern District of Virginia, which she oversees as a zero tolerance policy on unauthorized disclosure to the media, that's not true, right, And then Chad bill Martin with the Justice Department had a long statement about we speak through our filings, we don't comment on ongoing prosecutions.

Well, then she should have texted you, right, Yeah.

So it's all very just kind of you know, I think it shows her inexperience, but it also it shows that, like, look, there are so many ways that the defense can pick apart this kind of communication and this kind of conduct.

I don't know if they will.

But Abby Lowell, who is Letitia James's defense.

Counsel, pretty good lawyer.

Yeah yeah, I mean, look, and he's handling all types of these high profile cases.

And I will not be surprised if we see some about this interaction and these comments that she's made find their way into some type of motion that Abby Lowell might file or already plans to file, you know, related to the case.

And all of it really just you know, is still kind of baffling to me that you.

Would risk that in the position that she's in.

So what can you extrapolate from this?

Like I want you to put on your psychiatrist hat, like why do you think she texted you?

And what do you think the game was there?

And what do you think it speaks to.

I've thought about this over and over and over again, and everything that I can come up with is pure speculation, because of course I.

Still don't understand it.

If I had to guess, I would say.

Like she's under immense pressure and public scrutiny and has been heavily criticized by so many for bringing this case that does not appear to be strong at all.

You can read the piece to understand why we don't have to go into that.

But she's under this immense pressure, and I think maybe it's just she had a moment of frustration where she's, you know, happens to be online on a Saturday and see someone posting about something, and maybe that's what it was.

Frankly, I just don't understand it, and I don't know Mollie, Like, what do you make of it?

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.

I think she knows she's over her head, and I think she's scared my gas.

And again, this is all conjecture, because you know, I mean, you know her, I don't.

But I think when people email other people or text them about what they post, they're usually trying to control the narrative.

I think she's trying, and I think it's scary because she knows there's no world in which she's you know, will Trump protect her?

I mean, did Trump protect Rudy Giuliani?

No?

Yeah, I mean there's a lot of examples of people who, you know, were Trump lawyers who things did not end well for them.

You know, I believe it was Hugo Lowell at The Guardian who said, you reported at one point that Lindsay Alligan told law school asso she had at one time that she wanted to be the next Hope Picks.

Well, look, I covered Trump's criminal trial in New York, and here's how things ended for Hope Picks.

She was on the witness stand as a witness against him in his criminal trial.

She ended up breaking down crying about it.

That's how they there not a great ending.

Those still better than Rudy Giuliani.

Yeah right, I.

Mean Rudy Giuliani.

There's all kinds of bar discipline issues and all that.

I think overall that what this shows is that there's a reason why you've put really experienced, qualified people in these United States attorneys positions, because they are people who would know better.

But Lindsay Halligan apparently did not.

Yeah, so interesting.

I mean, most importantly, you have now birthed the meme, which I think those who are interested in internet culture, you have now birthed the meme.

By the way, Dash, Dash, everything I ever sent you is off record.

Period.

You're not a journalist, so it's weird saying that, but just letting you.

Know, it's incredible, No more perfectly Jesse Cannon.

So Molly Laura Ingram, Fox News host.

She talked on and on about Hunter Biden's arisma, all this business collusion, how it's corrupt selling the office of the presidency.

Who do you think she's in business with?

Now?

Is it Hunter Biden?

No?

Is it Ashley Biden?

No?

Now they're too busy stealing her diary?

Is it Don Junior?

It is Don Junior, a man whose eyes do very strange things what he talks.

Wait, so you're telling me that Laura Ingram, a journalist, is also doing a business deal with Don t from Junior.

I am shocked, I tell you shocked.

Yeah, it's almost like at this point, it's like a satire.

You know.

I heard somebody say that they're just dabbing on us all the time, and that's kind of what this feels like.

If it's just like, yeah, you know, I remember what we told you, we cared about what.

We don't care about the rules.

We really don't.

No, they really don't care about their rules.

The rules are for dems, yeah and losers.

Yeah.

It reminds me of that tweet that says democrats often treat politics like watching a dog dunk a basketball, and say a dog can't dunk a basketball, and the dog just keeps dunking the basketball.

Yeah, it turns out dogs can, in fact dunk.

Air Bud is real.

There's no special dogs can dunk.

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