9, 12, 10, 28, 2, 23. This is Deep State Radio, coming to you direct from our super secret studio in the third sub-basement of the Ministry of Snark in Washington, D.C. and from other undisclosed locations across America and around the world. Hello and welcome to DSR's Words Matter. It's that time of the week when we get together and tell you how you should feel about what's happening in your life. I'm David Rothkoff. You're a passive host who asks the questions here and then stands back. And I'm joined this week by the man I stand back for and bowed down to, the king of insight in Washington, D.C. Norm Ornstein. He can't help from laughing even as he says it. No, it's true. And I realize that we've been doing this, no, I don't know, a couple years, but I keep asking the same question every time, which is how do you feel? And I'm not going to do that this time because I've learned my... You know the answer. I know the answer. So let me start with a different question for you, Norm. What has you pissed off today? I would say the thing that pisses me off the most today is Todd Blanche. Not that it's the first time. But let's just go through a couple of the stories from yesterday. One, the Justice Department is dropping the potential criminal charges against Andy Ogles, one of the worst Republican members of the House who has lied about many things, including his resume. But the worst part of it is, some years ago, he had a stillborn child. He did a fundraising to create a memorial park for his stillborn child, raised $25,000, not one penny went to any park, it went to his own personal luxuries. And not only did the Justice Department say they were going to drop the investigation, they want to destroy all the evidence so that no future Justice Department can prosecute him. Okay, that's one thing. Then you have, and it just boggles the mind that this could possibly happen, Todd Blanche wants the Justice Department going to the Supreme Court to intervene and make the Justice Department the defendants in the case involving E. Gene Carroll's $83 million judgment against Trump for defamation. Why? They're trying to claim that this is because he was a president when this had nothing to do with him as a president. But you cannot sue the Justice Department for defamation. In other words, if this happens, there is no judgment for E. Gene Carroll, despite the fact that a jury basically said Donald Trump raped E. Gene Carroll, the judge defined it as rape, and he repeatedly slimed E. Gene and therefore got even more judgments against him, which totaled $83 million and probably are building to a little bit more. Now frankly, for Trump, given the grift going on in the White House, that's not a large amount. They probably grift that every single day, but it doesn't matter. The idea that we have a Justice Department that is acting as Trump's personal lawyer is beyond outrageous. Then you have the third case, which is not just the Justice Department, but we know that apparently from Journalistic Reports, Journalism Reports, Lindsey Halligan, another one of Trump's lawyers who got installed for a time at the Eastern District in Virginia, told the Justice Department, you need to go after Louise Lucas, the president pro tem of the Virginia Senate, a very feisty Democrat who helped to get this referendum on redistricting in Virginia. You have to go after her not because she's done anything wrong, but because she's an opponent of Donald Trump. So we see the politicization of the Justice Department dropping investigations against Trump's allies, bringing up political investigations against those they view as their adversaries, and acting as Trump's personal lawyer to try and screw Eugene Carroll out of the money that she has owed because Trump not only assaulted her sexually in a dressing room at, I believe, Bergdorf Goodmans, but then defamed her repeatedly and has a judgment done by a jury of his peers and trying to get out of that. So that is what pisses me off. I'll add one other thing, David, that's really frosted me, which is the story that Cash Patel is going after the Atlantic journalist who reported based on dozens of sources that he was drunk on the job and misbehaving all the time. And I am now told by people I trust that at clubs around Washington, Patel has been drunk and disorderly, shall we say. I am, this is second hand, I cannot vouch for it. And then we have this incredible journalist at the Atlantic who in the face of this pressure from the FBI came out with another story that Patel has personalized bottles of bourbon with the FBI logo and all of that that he hands out, probably using himself, and doubling down. We have the worst acting attorney general in the history of the country, and it is saying something that he has surpassed Pam Bondi. We have a major threat to national security in Cash Patel, and that's among the things that have rankled me in the last date. Is that all? Look, I'm being restrained. Yeah, no, no, I see that, and I appreciate that. But it strikes me, and I think that it's great that you put all of those pieces together, that the Justice Department really should not be referred to as the Justice Department anymore. It not only no longer resembles the Justice Department at any point in our history, but it is the Department of the obstruction of justice. It is the Department of the violation of justice. It is the Department of injustices. And most importantly, it's really Donald Trump's private law firm, where he is stopping prosecutions of white-collar criminals like him, stopping prosecutions of people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th in his name, stopping prosecutions of people who illegally tried to meddle with election results, and going after his adversaries. But the reason he's able to do this norm, and see, I just wanted to start you off slow so that I could really get you wound up, is one of your other favorite subjects. The reason he's able to do it is that the Roberts Court said he could do it. And the Roberts Court did so in the same decision. It granted him immunity. But essentially, it's said almost explicitly, if the President wants to use the Justice Department as his personal law firm, he can, because they want presidents to have maximum control over the executive branch. Now, also this week, just the other day, John Roberts, your favorite person in America, Roger Tawny II, came out and he said, I don't understand why people don't get us. I feel we're misunderstood. We're not doing anything political. We're just coming to the right answers. And it's a struggle. And please, give me a big hug. And I was just wondering if you saw that and what your reaction was. I saw it and I gagged, as I also gagged when Amy Coney Barrett said, it's absolutely wrong if you look at the data that on the big decisions, we divide along partisan lines. That's just wrong. Now, I will say, Amy Coney Barrett, back not long after she was confirmed, which you remember happened eight days before the 2020 election, violating every norm done by Mitch McConnell. Not long after she was confirmed and was a Supreme Court justice, she went to Kentucky with Mitch McConnell, a breach in fundamental ethics, her benefactor. And what did she say on the steps of the McConnell Center as he stood next to her? I'm here to tell you, we're not just a bunch of partisan hacks. They are a bunch of partisan hacks. And much as I gag at John Roberts, who is worse than Roger Taney, much worse, even though Taney has gone down in history as the worst Chief Justice, because his violations of the fundamentals of our country, of democracy, of our Constitution, are far broader than what Roger Taney did. And he's returning us to a Jim Crow era. But let me focus for a moment on Sam Alito, who authored this vicious retort to Katanji Brown Jackson. After Katanji Brown Jackson went after Alito and the others on this case Calais, which has blown up, of course, any hope of having racial justice or fundamental decency in the districting process. And why did Katanji Brown Jackson have a vigorous dissent? The Supreme Court for many years had adopted something called the Purcell principle. The Purcell principle is that you don't change election results, outcomes, district lines, laws, close to an election, when you could distort the results of that election. And especially because you might be doing it where voting has already started. So, repeatedly, when it involves a case that could go against Republicans, one example, Alabama, which back in the day when we had a Voting Rights Act, had an unconstitutional gerrymander that was racially based. And Alito and his colleagues said, we're going to leave that district in place, that redistricting in Alabama in place, because it's too close to the election. In the case of Calais, instead of following the normal Supreme Court process, which is you issue a ruling and you leave a little more than a month after it before it actually takes effect, so you give time for the losing party to appeal or for any other actions to take place. From what I can see, the second time ever said, no, no, we're going to have this take effect immediately. In other words, Purcell applies when it would hurt Republicans. There is no such thing as Purcell when it would hurt Democrats. And what made this particularly outrageous was they did it immediately so that in Louisiana, where voting had already started, and tens of thousands of people had already voted, they gave a green light to their governor, Jeff Landry, to void that election and redraw the line so that they could take away a majority-minority district. And I would say, bad as John Roberts is, Sam Alito is worse. And of course, that doesn't even get us to Clarence Thomas or some of the others who are ethically disastrous and highly partisan. Clarence Thomas, by the way, who is about to become the second longest serving Supreme Court Justice after William O. Douglas. He's about to pass 34 years, which does bring us to the whole idea which you and I've talked about regularly, that we need structural reform. And one of the things we need is term limits for these guys. Because here was a mistake, not of George W. Bush, but of George H. W. Bush. Right? Isn't that correct? Yeah, it was. And we can't ignore the reality that Joe Biden is responsible for this in part as well. Joe Biden was the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time of the Thomas hearings. And for a variety of reasons, which maybe seemed not as bad at the time, but were, we know that when we had these allegations brought up of the sexual harassment and abuse that Thomas had engaged in, there were other women who went to the Judiciary Committee and said, we can corroborate Anita Hill. And to maintain comedy on the committee, to keep from making it look like they were going after an African American Republican, Biden didn't let them testify. Yeah, look, you know, the scene in Shakespeare's play about Julius Caesar, where Mark Antony gives the speech after Caesar's killed me says, but they were all honorable men. Yeah. You know, I feel I have to begin every speech about Joe Biden with, but he was an honorable man. I love Joe Biden. I have a lot of affection for Joe Biden in part because he is a genuinely compassionate, empathetic man who was there for me when I lost my son. But even honorable men can do bad things. To stay up to date on all the news that you need to know, there's no better place than right here on the DSR network. And there's no better way to enjoy the DSR network than by becoming a member. Members enjoy an ad free listening experience, access to our discord community, exclusive content, early episode access, and more. Use code DSR26 for a 25% off discount on sign up at the DSR network.com. That's code DSR26 at the DSR network.com slash by thank you and enjoy the show. 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Well, and also in Washington, institutionalism is a synonym for preserving embedded forms of corruption and inequity. And he was an institutionalist and he didn't want to hear almost, it literally almost as if here's a guy who was in the Senate for a long time. And it's almost as if he would cover his hands to his ears and say, la, la, la, let's not speak ill of the Senate in much the same way that Merrick Garland, his attorney general, felt that way about the Department of Justice. And so if you look at the record, you know, institutionalists may mean well, they may be seeking comedy, but they are being used by people within those institutions who know how to work the system like Mitch McConnell, who then take advantage of them, who don't care about comedy, don't care about justice, just care about advancing the agenda, which is not a political hack agenda usually in Washington. It's a corrupt agenda. It's an agenda where they get a payoff at the end of the day. I agree completely. And I will say, you know, Biden, when he came to the Senate, we don't want to make this all about Biden, but when Biden came to the Senate, he was, he had just turned 30, the minimum age, or 35, excuse me, and no, 30. 30. He was elected when he was 29. Yeah. And of course, he lost his wife and daughter in a horrible car accident, both of his sons in the hospital for months. He almost dropped out. He was convinced to stay. And in his first year in the Senate, almost everybody, the segregationist Democrats, the right-wing Republicans, rallied around him and, you know, were warm and comforting and helped him get through it. And that gave him a view of the Senate that may be applied in some respects back then, many decades ago. But he carried that attitude forward to a point where it didn't apply anymore. And the reality is, if you look at Democrats in the Senate now, they still, many, many of them, maybe most of them, treat it the same way as the old boy network. They're palling around inside, sharing jokes with the likes of Lindsey Graham. They still have relationships with people who they view through one lens that doesn't reflect the evil that these people are perpetrating inside the Senate as lap dogs and licks spittles to Donald Trump. And, you know, as with a willingness to destroy the fabric of American democracy. So that's absolutely the case. What's also the case, as you know, full well, is that there are far too many Democrats who have the attitude that, if we behave in an honorable fashion, it will make them look worse and that the American people will see that we're the honorable ones and they're the dishonorable ones. And the fact is, when they go low, if we go high, they go lower. And there is no credit given for being honorable in that fashion. You have to maintain your principles, but you also have to play hardball when they are not just playing hardball, but they're violating every rule in the book. Yeah, I don't think people have communicated terribly effectively. The role that culture plays in Washington, the role, you know, Kissinger made reference to it, the role that inertia plays in Washington. People, you know, in the Senate view themselves as a club, an elite club. They like their privileges. They like, you know, making little jokes among themselves. They like appearing above the fray. And they benefit. People enter the House, they enter the Senate, and they become richer and richer and richer. They know that when they leave, there is a law firm or there is a company or there is a consulting firm that is going to produce big paydays. And this is not just true with senators or congressmen. It's true with presidents. You know, Clinton said no money when they came in. They had a lot of money when they came out. The Obama's had no money when they came in. They had a lot of money when they came out. It's not just Republicans. The whole culture of the place is oriented towards, you know, benefits for those who are in a position of power. And nobody wants to rock that boat too much. It's considered bad form. It's not self-interested. And so they sit in the breakfast room at the Four Seasons or the breakfast room at the Hay Adams Hotel or the luncheon room up on Capitol Hill. And they maintain the momentum of a system that has metastasized over time. And whereas it may have been okay once upon a time for Tip O'Neill to rub elbows with Ronald Reagan, frankly, I don't think it was. I think Tip O'Neill had a bit of a blind spot in that regard. We are now at a moment where the malevolent forces in this system are trying to kill the country, kill people, kicking millions of people off health care, waging wars that are already illegal, suggesting that people shouldn't have medication, you know, strip mining our, you know, national parts, destroying our long-term legacy. They're not oh, you know, just a policy difference away from the rest of us normal people. They're fucking evil. And if you don't say these people are fucking evil and we can't normalize them and we have to stop them. And when they go low, we do whatever it takes to stop them because it's going to kill us, then you get where we are. It's just the attitude you've been talking about that have brought us to a point where what once were policy divisions are now existential choices for the country. You know, it's interesting. I had a small exchange with a very conservative Republican lawyer named Greg Nunziata, who helps to run an organization of conservative Republicans, former members of the Justice Department and elsewhere who are fighting for the right things, for law. And what I said was, Greg, I disagree profoundly with you on so many issues, but I respect you because you have integrity on the fundamentals. And if only we could get back to a point where we argue tooth and nail or vigorously about policies instead of where we are now. But I would take what you said, David, even further, because it's not just the politicians who are cosseted in this system. It is lawyers and law firms. It is businesses who are only out for their own profits. And we're going to have a limiting case here. My guess is that Todd Blanche, doing what he's doing, believes that no matter how far he goes, the Bar associations will not disbar him. And when he leaves, bathed in dishonor, that there will be a law firm, maybe Jones Day, which hires all of these election denying people, that will give him three to four to five million dollars a year to join them because he was either the acting attorney general, or if he keeps doing what he's doing in this audition, he will become the attorney general. I suspect that Trump is going to keep him as acting because they don't want to go through another confirmation hearing. And because the more that he's acting and auditioning for the job, the more he'll do absolutely horrible things to try and win the job directly. But he is confident that no matter what he does, he'll emerge from this even more rich and powerful than he was before. And that's a failure much broader than the culture of politics in Washington, and even the culture more broadly of government. It is a larger cultural emptiness or a moral framework that we have to face in this society. And we have to find ways, if and when this changes, to make sure that all of those who have engaged in this duplicity are held accountable. It's true. But you bring up a really good point. Because there are a lot of lawyers that I know in Washington, D.C., who privately over a meal will decry what's happening. The Bar Associations could act right now. They could disbar him. They could disbar Pam Bondi. They could disbar Emil Bove. They could go after these people, Eileen Cannon, for violating the law, for violating their oaths as a lawyer, for violating their responsibilities as officers of the court, by defending criminals, by defending corruption, by obstructing justice. And frankly, disbarring the people who are running the Department of Justice would send an incredibly powerful message. But it would also block their path to remuneration and riches when they left office. They would make it harder to do it. And I don't understand why they don't get... Look, we've got a couple of minutes more. I just want to ask you about one more thing. If that's okay. I didn't mean to interrupt you. Of course it's okay. Okay. So you're far too young to remember the Nixon administration. You were just in knee pants at Lake Minnetonkar, wherever you were up there in Minnesota, by the way. Lake Harriet. Yeah. So our condolences on your Timberwolves last night, in any event. In 1971, a guy named Daniel Ellsberg got his hands on a bunch of files about the conduct of the Vietnam War. And he gave them to the New York Times. The New York Times ran the files. And what it said was that systematically, the U.S. government was lying about what's happening in the war, about our losses, about our position, about everything associated with the war. Now, here we are today, light years away from that. Most people don't remember what the Pentagon papers are. And yet, I must say, to the credit of the press, we have stories like one that appeared just yesterday in the Washington Post that says that they looked at satellite images and 238 base or, you know, places throughout the Middle East sustained extreme damage from the Iranians, that the administration has covered up. We have other stories that say the administration is lying about the cost of the war. We have other stories that we've seen with our own eyes, where the administration has said the nuclear program was obliterated, and then the intelligence community leaks it and says it wasn't. The administration says the drone capacity and the missile capacity in Iran was eliminated. And then the intel community leaks the story and says, oh, no, they still have 50 or 60% of their missile launch capacity and roughly the same amount of their drone capacity. We have example after example, where they lied about injuries to U.S. troops, where they lied about the reason for the injuries to U.S. troops. We're not even sure what the purposes of certain missions that took place here were, where Pete Hegseth on a regular basis, and I might add with General Kane next to him, stand up and they mislead and lie about this war, just as they, by the way, have done about attacks on boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific and so forth. But this pattern of deception is every bit as complete and in some ways even more pernicious than the pattern we saw around the Pentagon Papers in the Vietnam War. And yet for some reason, it's not a scandal in Washington. And as you know, I wrote a column on this yesterday for The Daily Beast and I know that there are other stories coming up, by the way, I know there's going to be a story in a major paper later today about another area in which they are lying. And I know journalists who are working on more stories about the lies. And we know, and I'm quit with this, that Pete Hegseth has shut down the Department of Defense to reporters, to real journalism. He answers questions from the Pillow Guys TV Network. He doesn't take real questions. He yells at people who ask real questions. It's the least transparent Department of Defense in history. And I'm just, I'm trying to wind you up, I guess, but I'm also wondering, why isn't this the scandal now it was then? You know, we've lost our capacity for outrage. This is, as Moynihan said, Daniel Patrick Moynihan defining deviancy down. That's a part of it. I want to talk about this in two other ways, so David, and of course you're right. We talk a lot about cacostocracy, about government by the worst among us. What we know from this war, among other things, is the devastation to all of our bases in the region, the people who were killed unnecessarily because they had no protection. What we know is a lot of that damage was because we're spending a trillion dollars on outmoded weapons systems that Pete Hegseth loves because you can drop a bunker buster bomb and blow up a whole lot. But we are in no way prepared for the warfare of the 21st century. Thousand dollar or 10,000 or 30,000 dollar drones come and do a billion dollars worth of damage to our radar systems and sophisticated equipment in these bases, blow up the bases, and if we manage to intercept any of them, it's with a 30 million dollar missile to take out a thousand dollar drone. And we're not prepared at all for that. What Pete Hegseth has done, some of this precedes him, it's true, but what he has done is to not just lie about a war, about the costs of the war, about the people killed or injured as a consequence. He has undermined our capacity to have a national security that works in the 21st century. That's one part of this. The second part of this is something else that happened this week, which is not only Donald Trump saying that he was issuing an executive order, that the Presidential Records Act meant that he could destroy every document because all the records belong to him personally, not to the United States. Which by the way is the opposite of what it said. It's the exact opposite, just as in the Calais decision, it was the exact opposite of what the Constitution in the 14th and 15th Amendments and the Voting Rights Act said that was destroyed by the Supreme Court. But we know that they're now moving forward in his Justice Department to codify this. Now, I'll take this to another level, hope that some of the people who are listening or watching will, are people in the government who will pay attention. When the Hungarian election took place, in Magyar I, but before he was seated, there were all of these stories, including pictures, of people in their bureaus and agencies shredding documents, desperately trying to get away from what had happened. What we've learned, I've learned from people who know a lot about the inside story is that many of them made a visible sign of shredding the documents, but before that had made thumb drives of them and are turning them over to Magyar. So there are people loyal to the fundamentals of a small D-Democratic political system who had to go along when they were there, but now, and maybe it's partly to save their own skins if they're going to be trials for those who have violated the fundamentals, but they're preserving the evidence. If, let's say, we get to a 2028 election and a Democrat wins, that's early November. This administration will be in office until January 20th, and they will systematically try to destroy all of the incriminating evidence, all that we know is in documents in the Pentagon, in emails and texts and memoranda, in the Justice Department, in every agency out there, one other outrage this week. The Department of Homeland Security is dismantling the Bureau that looks at misconduct in detention centers. In other words, they're going to give them a complete green light to kill people, to torture them, to rape them, to do all of the horrible things they're doing in Dilly and these other places. They will have documents in there about how they have deliberately defied court orders, how they have used racial profiling, how they've tortured people, and they're going to try and destroy them all. We need patriots among those who will still be inside these agencies, officers in the Pentagon, lawyers and others in the Justice Department, people who are bureaucrats in the Department of Homeland Security, in the Department of the Interior, in the Environmental Protection Agency where Lee Zeldin is basically undermining the law and our environment, to find ways before they destroy these documents, to copy them, to put them on thumb drives, to preserve the incriminating evidence so if and when we have the ability to look back at how they've defiled every element of decency, the law, the constitution, that they can be held accountable. If you're listening, it's just like, hey, Russia, if you're listening, hey, patriots, if you're listening, make sure they can't destroy all the incriminating evidence. Yeah, and by all means, also if you're listening and you're in the intelligence community and you're in the DOD or if you're in the Justice Department or any of these other places, you know, it is serving the country to get the truth out. It is your patriotic duty to blow the whistle. And whether the administration likes it or not is not only beside the point, it is the point. And I totally agree with you, but I just do want to say with regard to this war, we know it's bad, but we don't know how bad because they're not telling us the truth. And that I think will remain to be the case and it is kind of their signature across the board. I guess, you know, this goes back to your theme, you know, the movie that ultimately they will make out of our podcast called Adventures in Cacostochristy. In any event, Norm, as ever, it has been therapeutic, for me to talk to you. And I am sure that that is the reaction that all of our viewers and listeners have had. If you are watching this on YouTube, by all means, subscribe. Our fastest growing area of subscribers. If you want to support what we're doing, go to the DSRnetwork.com, click on it, become a member. It's like less than the price of a cup of coffee. Frankly, right now, it's less than the price of a gallon of gasoline each month. And it does support independent perspectives like the ones you're from Norm and from other experts here at a time when you need those. And so we hope you will join us in supporting this kind of endeavor. But for now, thanks, Norm. Thanks, everybody. Bye-bye.
