1045: How Many Nobel Prizes Can Trump Win?

22:32Jon Favreau:And we should use them again. And I think the cuts to Medicaid make these more believable than even they were back in 2022. Yeah. And I think what he was, what he actually meant there was, yeah, you're going to have these savings accounts. Eventually, they could be retirement accounts. And when we someday cut Social Security, this will be fine. This will be your new Social Security. I take him at his word that he wants to private Social Security. Of course they do. Of course they do.

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24:44Jon Favreau:The South is the new political epicenter of the country. Democrats are way on their heels in this region, but Republicans are going through their own reckoning in the South too. I mean the South has always shaped American politics, we know that. The stakes could not be higher, but to win the South you have to understand it. People in the South feel really misunderstood, left behind, put down on, and they want to explain that to somebody. We're traveling across six southern states to explore the people, the issues, the assumptions that no longer hold and what the rest of us are missing about a region that will shape the future of our politics and our country.

25:23Jon Favreau:From left, right and crooked media starting July 27th, watch Long Play series on YouTube at youtube.com slash longplayseries or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

25:39Speaking of investments, it's time for another Corrupt Date.

25:45Corrupt date. I have to say, that was better handled than the one on Tuesday. We're getting better at the sting there. It's really... It's only taken us 12 opportunities to do it.

26:00Jon Favreau:And here's the good news. We could probably do a corrupt date every episode until 2029. So this one comes courtesy of Senator Josh Hawley, whose bill to ban stock trading by members of Congress, the president, and the vice president advanced in the Senate thanks to all the Democrats on the committee voting yes. All of the Republicans, except for Hawley, voted no. Then one very important Republican voiced his displeasure. Trump raged on Truth Social that the bill would be bad for the country, a win for Democrats, and he called Hawley a, quote, second-tier senator. True. Hawley then chatted with Trump.

26:35It's so funny that Trump just does this on Truth Social, by the way. It doesn't, like, call Hawley and be like, hey, what the fuck, man? You know, He just puts him on blast. Can't even call him first. So anyway, then Hawley talks to Trump on the phone. And then he told reporters about his conversation with Trump. And he said that the president said that he's for the stock trading ban. But he was angry because people had told him the bill would force him to sell Mar-a-Lago and divest of all his assets, which isn't true only because of a carve out in the bill that exempts Trump from this requirement.

27:08Jon Favreau:But even that part's not true, right? Like he would not have to sell. I think. No, no. But you do have to. I think I think the after after the Trump administration, the next administration and then future senators and representatives would have to divest of, I think, any kind of equity holdings. Interesting. I think that's what I think. So, you know, which is why Ron Johnson, Rick Scott were very upset. They're like they were saying, you know, this is punishing success and this is going to discourage wealthy people from running for office. What a shame that would be. Oh, no. Oh, no. What do you think about this?

27:45Did Trump just need to make sure nothing would interfere with how hard he's working to profit from the presidency?

27:51Jon Favreau:Yeah, I think so. I think he believed, apparently incorrectly, that the spigot was about to be turned off for his many, many schemes to profit off the presidency, to make money at taxpayer expense. And because he is both corrupt and a moron, he reacted without knowing it was actually in the bill. And originally, the bill included the president and vice president, and then they had to do some compromise where they said, OK, we can include the vice president and president, but only if it's not this president and vice president. Of course. Because like these Republicans in Congress, they're not even protecting themselves in this bill.

28:27They just wanted to protect Donald Trump because I guess that's their that's their own. That's their most important. And then they voted against it anyway. So what was the point? So like Mike Johnson has said that he's for this. So we'll see. I mean, like it advanced out of committee. I guess you could imagine a situation where Thune puts it up for a vote. if Holly's for it and you get a few other Republicans and then it would pass with Democratic and Republican votes? Maybe? I don't know. What do you think the prospects are of this passing?

28:55Jon Favreau:You know, it's a tough no vote, but it really depends on it. Now, it depends on how much Trump cares now that he knows he's exempted from it. If he does not care, then I think it really could pass because if you are a Republican senator who's up this cycle or just someone who has ambition for something in the future, voting to allow yourself to keep doing insider trading, Not a great vote. Hasn't stopped them before from taking bad votes. Well, they've benefited from it not coming up before. That's the thing. Yeah. They've kept it off the floor, I think, for years now. It is wild, though. You just mentioned some of this.

29:31It's like we also learned today Trump is building a ballroom on the White House. $200 million because he's always wanted a ballroom. He's good at ballrooms, he said. So he wants to build one in the White House. $200 million for that.

29:45Jon Favreau:and it's going to be privately funded from donors who can have yet another way to buy access with trump what do you think middle eastern autocrats or tech oligarchs or some combo of both why do you have to choose or oil tycoons uh crypto guys facing indictment there's a whole list arms dealers whatever like what else also basically a pardon silent auction also while the holly thing was going on chris murphy offered an amendment in the senate that would that just said trump can have his plane his billion dollar plane that we all have to pay for from cutter but he can't take it with him when he leaves office because if we're gonna pay the taxpayers are gonna we're all gonna pay a billion dollars to retrofit this fucking plane from the qataris then guess what the next future presidents we should use it for a little while instead of giving it to donald trump as a fucking keepsake all the republicans voted no didn't get a single republican vote amazing for what like what reason what's the reason party favor when he leaves what it's un-fucking-believable we you know what we can't we can't win this midterm we need to we actually need a whole separate podcast called corrupt of date corrupt date corrupt date corrupt date So one thing Donald Trump inexplicably can't stop talking about, Jeffrey Epstein, who he just keeps offering new details about every time he's asked.

31:10Trump got a few questions on Air Force One this week about his claim that he kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago for poaching some of Trump's employees, not because he was a, quote, creep, which is what the White House had originally said. Here's Trump trying to clear all that up. Mr.

31:23Jon Favreau:President, Epstein has a certain reputation, obviously. Just curious, were some of the workers that were taken from you, were some of them young women? Were some of them? Were some of them young women? Well, I don't want to say, but everyone knows the people that were taken. And it was the concept of taking people that work for me is bad. But that story's been pretty well out there. And the answer is yes. Yes, they were. Yeah, in the spa. Yeah, people that work in the spa. I have a great spa, one of the best spas in the world at Mar-a-Lago. And people were taken out of the spa, hired by him. In other words, gone.

32:07Jon Favreau:And other people would come and complain, this guy is taking people from the spa. I didn't know that. And then when I heard about it, I told him, I said, listen, we don't want you taking our people, whether it was spa or not spa. I don't want him taking people. And he was fine. And then not too long after that, he did it again. And I said, out of here. Mr. President, did one of those stolen, you know, persons that include Virginia, I don't know. I think she worked at the spot. I think so. I think that was one of the people. He stole her. And by the way, she had no complaints about us, as you know.

32:50Jon Favreau:None whatsoever. Unbelievable. We originally had just a short clip of that, but I really wanted everyone to just hear the whole thing because his answers evolved. First of all, he's like, I shouldn't say, did he hire young girls? I shouldn't say, I shouldn't say, but yes, the answer is yes. The answer is yes, I should say. And, you know, from the, yes, from the spa. By the way, one of the best spas in the world. Everyone should know. But then, yeah, he stole her. Spa, no spa, don't take it. It's like unbelievable. Then he confirms it was Virginia Giuffre. So just a reminder of the timeline here.

33:27Virginia Giuffre got a summer job working at the Mar-a-Lago spa when she was 16. In 2000, Ghislaine Maxwell approached her at the spa and offered her a job with Epstein, who then sexually abused and trafficked her until 2002. the same year, by the way, that Trump was quoted in New York Magazine saying that his, quote, good friend Jeffrey Epstein, quote, likes women on the younger side, no doubt about it. It wasn't until at least 2004 and maybe later that Trump kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago and ended their friendship. Jufri died by suicide in April, but her family responded to Trump's latest comments with a statement to The Atlantic asking if Trump was aware of Epstein and Maxwell's criminal actions.

34:12He was asked that today, Thursday at an event at the White House. And he sort of said, no, I don't, I don't know. I don't know. Just kind of brushed it off. Feels pretty serious, doesn't it?

34:25Jon Favreau:Yeah. This is a, he admitted that he knew about a 16 year old girl being quote unquote stolen from his spa. After that happened, he remained friends with the guy, praising him in a magazine, talking about how he loves young women for another couple years. And it's just given how close they were in the 90s, the parties they went to, the creepy event with the calendar girls where they brought all these people to Mar-a-Lago for a party and the only two party attendees were Trump and Epstein. It's just impossible to imagine that he did not have some sense that something sketchy was going on. It did not bother him.

35:05Jon Favreau:He stayed friends with a guy for another four years. And that the falling out eventually is not over the, there is no evidence to suggest it's over Epstein taking girls from the spa or anywhere else, the world-class spa, obviously. It is believed to be the reason they stopped being friends is a dispute over a Palm Beach real estate transaction. I have a few questions. Maybe I can answer them. One is, how did Donald Trump come to know about the employment status of a young girl who worked as a locker room attendant in his spa at Mar-a-Lago. Is he deep in the HR records? Details guy. He knows that.

35:46So first of all, very bizarre that he knew this. Second of all, did he think that, was he under the false impression that Jeffrey Epstein owned a competing spa?

35:58Jon Favreau:She was hired to be his personal masseuse. Personal masseuse. Yeah. And so he didn't he so he knew he knew that a 16 year old was hired from Mar-a-Lago to be Jeffrey Epstein's personal masseuse. And then he just kind of sat on that and then called Jeffrey Epstein a great guy who likes young women. And then and then next time he, quote unquote, stole. We're saying stole now like it's like that's Trump. Those are Trump's words. Right. Next time he did it, that was that was too far. What is critical here is that Trump is admitting to contemporaneous knowledge of her being stolen by Epstein. What would have been believable is he just found out years later because she eventually sued Epstein and Maxwell.

36:41Jon Favreau:And her case got a lot of attention in the news. So he could have learned that and his name comes up in the court filings in that case. So he could have, if he were to say, and I learned about this years later, that would be very believable. Just the fact that he's saying in the year 2000, I knew that Jeffrey Epstein, quote unquote, stole a 16 year old from my spa. And I told him not to do it again. He says that he knew at the time that he was going after these young girls. Right. How could he tell him not to do it again if he found out much later? Exactly. That is just a huge critical admission on his part because he is a dummy and he can't figure out how to get out of this.

37:20Jon Favreau:because he can't stop lying about it is the thing. Because he clearly is so afraid about whatever is in the Epstein files, about something that is out there. Whatever it is, I don't know what his fear is. I don't know if it's rational or not, but his behavior is of a man deeply paranoid of the truth getting out. It's wild. And I don't know where it goes from here. You know, Maxwell's lawyer said she wouldn't testify to Congress now unless she gets full immunity, which the people in Congress were saying they're not going to give her full immunity for that. So now we're not getting testimony. We're probably not getting testimony from her in Congress, which is public.

38:02But, you know, we still got Todd Blanche, Deputy Attorney General sat down with her. No one knows what that conversation was like. She's asking for a pardon. I don't know. I don't know what else, where this goes from here.

38:14Jon Favreau:Well, I mean, Trump is going to keep it in the news for sure that's all you have to do that all you have to do is ask him he'll give you new information i mean there is as you guys talked about tuesday there are now documents there is now documents running around which have all the early some of the trump mentions in the epstein files out there will those leak out at some point right will the infamous birthday letter to true to jeffrey epstein leak out we actually see the potentially nobel prize winning drawing there there's just a lot more here. There's a lot of threads to pull. And when the Congress comes back, Democrats will once again push for a vote to compel the release of the Epstein files.

38:53Yeah. So Trump has had most of his administration working overtime to distract from the Epstein scandal by cooking up a laughably dumb conspiracy about Russia involving Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, all his favorite deep staters. Only problem is the whole thing is so convoluted and confusing that even Trump can't keep up with it now. Here he is answering a question about Kash Patel allegedly finding a trove of documents in a burn bag somewhere in the FBI. Mr. President, I've heard that Kash Patel reportedly found burn bags of Russia-gate materials, and I'd love to get your thoughts on that.

39:30Jon Favreau:He said what? Burn bags of Russia-gate materials. I don't know that. I don't know. I don't know what you mean by that statement. Bags full of Russiagate. A burn bag. I thought you said appointed a man named Burn Bank. Go ahead. The whole thing is a scam. It's a scam set up by the Democrats, and they love talking about it. But I would like to see people exposed that might be bad. And we'll see how that all works out. But it's getting to be very old news. You know, if they had anything, they would have done it the week before the election because they were losing by a lot. If they had anything, they would have done it.

40:08Jon Favreau:They controlled the file. The Democrats controlled it. Comey and all the, you know, sleazebags, every one of them that you read about all the time. And I guess they've got some problems now having to do with yet a different scandal. Very big one. He gets a softball served up to him, undoubtedly by some MAGA influencer hack at the White House about Kash Patel, his new deputy, now that Dan Bongino has his mental health days, like a deputy burn bag. So he gets the question to him. And what does he do? Write to Epstein. Cannot help himself. I was saying this to love it. It's like the opposite of the communication strategy advice, like the central advice, like always go back to home base here when you get the question.

41:01Home base is Epstein files. Yes. It's like, we're cooking up this Russiagate conspiracy for you. Barack Obama's committing treason. You got to go to that. No, no, no, no. He's got to go right to Epstein.

41:12Jon Favreau:He cannot help himself because he can't stop thinking about it. Once again, a man deathly afraid of transparency here. Also, I'm not even going to get, I will not get too deep, I promise, into the burn bag. Yeah, please don't. But basically, to believe this, right, which is that there's a whole bunch of documents that were in a burn bag somewhere in the FBI that John Durham, after he conducted an investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation, who John Durham, appointed by Bill Barr, worked for Donald Trump in the first Trump administration, that John Durham left these incriminating documents that would incriminate Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and all the rest of them in a burn bag in the FBI.

41:57would not burn the documents, just wanted to leave them there thinking that after the Biden administration, Trump would return and then someone from the Trump administration would find the documents and expose the lie.

42:13Jon Favreau:Yeah, seems credible. This is what we're supposed to believe. We're supposed to believe. By the way, if you don't know, a burn bag is what you have in the White House and other agencies when you want to, when there's classified material, secret material, and you need to get rid of it you don't want to throw it in the trash because that's not very safe because anyone could go picking through the trash a shredder is not good enough you put it in a burn bag and they actually go burn it right so i don't know what john durham was doing i don't know what cash mattel is talking about but i don't really think it's revealing anything new well i think if it was they would put those documents out yeah well they they have they they have something out today, there's some fucking email that John Durham was like, I think it's a fake email because I think the Russians did something with it.

43:00But anyway, it's this email that's cooked up that says someone's like, I know that Hillary Clinton's going to work with the FBI to cook up Russiagate with Trump and Russia.

43:10Jon Favreau:Once again, a scandal not announced, an FBI investigation not announced before the election, when it would have been very impactful to announce it. Instead, the FBI director announced the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails three weeks before the election. Yeah, that was part of their deal. Let's work together to get Trump. But also, I'm going to turn on you right before the election and help elect Trump. So I guess the FBI is filled with a bunch of double, triple agents. I don't know. It's hard to follow. I know that Fox and MAGA media are all over this story. It doesn't seem to be getting a lot of traction.

43:39Barack Obama is still roaming free, has not been arrested yet. What's going on, Dan?

43:46Jon Favreau:It's really interesting. Theoretically, MAGA media and Fox are all over this, but they really aren't in a real way. Their hearts aren't in it. Their hearts aren't in it. It is not getting attention. It's one of the first times Trump has decided he's in, like he is brought to bear all the forces. He literally had the intelligence community cook up a fake document and sent the - To accuse his predecessor of treason. Punishable by death. He sent Tulsi Gabbard to the White House briefing, all these places, and he can't get traction. So he resonated. He posted a picture of Obama as OJ driving the white Bronco with all the police following him, including the bald J.D.

44:29Vance meme in one of the cars.

44:31Jon Favreau:I mean, that's a bonus there. I mean, there's the AI video of Obama getting arrested in the Oval Office with Trump. A classic. A classic. Who can forget? There's the people in prison jumpsuits, right, of all of our former coworkers. The shady bunch. Yeah, the shady bunch. Yeah. But so if Trump really wants to make something a thing, like he can't always break, get the media, the traditional media to cover it. He can't always make it like really breakthrough. But he has in the past been able to get MAGA right wing media to do his bidding. So Resonate, which is an organization that tracks what stories are trending online.

45:03Jon Favreau:They have a subsec newsletter called What's Resonating. And so they looked at this for Wednesday of this week. And so they track what neutral accounts are doing, left leaning accounts and right leaning accounts are doing. This is across all the platforms. And more right-leaning accounts on Wednesday were posting about Sidney Sweeney and Barack Obama. Like, it's just not working. This is a true fail from the Trump messaging machine. What did she do to commit treason? John, we don't have - Was she part of the Durham investigation as well? We don't have the time. Oh, did she kill Jeffrey Epstein?

45:37Jon Favreau:You know, we can't prove she didn't. Yeah. Someone should ask her where she was on that night. and was she the orange blob spotted in the CBS video no because we know she's wearing jeans

45:50good jeans too good jeans good jeans I did turn on

45:55Jon Favreau:I did open up Twitter and it was like trending American Eagle Sidney Sweeney Nazis I was like close we talked about it on offline this week I can't wait to listen and I'm pretty happy about it

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48:08Jon Favreau:Hi, my name is Mitch Landrieu. My name is Erin Haynes. My name is Jennifer Palmieri, and we're hosting a new series called Long Play. The South is the new political epicenter of the country. Democrats are way on their heels in this region, but Republicans are going through their own reckoning in the South, too. I mean, the South has always shaped American politics. We know that. The stakes could not be higher, but to win the South, you have to understand it. People in the South feel really misunderstood, left behind, put down on, and they want to explain that to somebody. We're traveling across six southern states to explore the people, the issues, the assumptions that no longer hold, and what the rest of us are missing about a region that will shape the future of our politics and our country.

48:54Jon Favreau:From Left, Right and Crooked Media starting July 27th, watch Long Play Series on YouTube at youtube.com slash longplayseries or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

49:11Lest you think all this conspiracy mongering is causing the White House to take its eye off the ball, fear not. The Trump administration announced this week that they'll pay off your student loans and give you a$50 ,000 signing bonus if you're willing to mask up and join Stephen Miller's secret police force. ICE has launched a major recruitment campaign called Defend the Homeland to hire the 10 ,000 additional agents they'll need to hit Miller's goal of 3 ,000 arrests per day and a million deportations this year. One of the ads features the famous picture of Uncle Sam pointing with the tagline, America has been invaded by criminals and predators.

49:48We need you to get them out. So question for you. What kind of qualified rule of law lovers do you think are going to sign up for this one? You think we're going to get a great a great force of just highly qualified Americans who are interested in in law enforcement and doing everything by the book to help protect the homeland? Do you think that's what we're going to get?

50:11Jon Favreau:I would say that over the last six months, Trump, Elon Musk, Stephen Miller have really shown the world the benefits, the stability of government employment. It seems like a very attractive place to work where once you get started, you can build a career there without having someone come in and just fire you for no reason. So I think I imagine this will be the best and the brightest. I mean, this is really, as we can joke about, but it's fucking dark. and it's one of the things I worry about the most of everything because ICE has been bad enough in these last six months. ICE, which doesn't have anywhere near the standards, hiring standards of local police departments, let alone the FBI, and they don't have the same kind of training, rigorous training that you go through.

51:01So you can be pretty unqualified and who knows what kind of political views you might have. You might have been at the Capitol on January 6th.

51:12Jon Favreau:You might have been part of them. We don't know. Who's doing the background checks, right? This administration is going to do a rigorous background check on these people who are now being told that there's an army of illegal migrants that have invaded the country. And they're all the worst of the worst. And they're criminals and child molesters and all this. And you know what? You just come to ICE. We'll give you$50 ,000 signing bonus right off the bat. We'll pay off your student loans. Here's a gun. Here's a mask. Go for it. I mean, the authoritarian leading president of the United States building a massive, unaccountable police force loyal to him, that has some historical echoes that we don't really like.

51:57it's really bad and i don't even like i i don't know what what democrats even do about this i do think that's one area where you know we make it to the midterms and you launch a lot of investigations into what the department of homeland security is doing and ice is doing and who they're hiring uh and to the extent that we can learn that you know between now and the midterms i think that's important too because they're going to hire some really bad people and i think that everything we have been seeing on social media all the videos we've been seeing of ice becoming violent and And especially with not just undocumented immigrants, not just people with criminal records, but legal residents, American citizens, protesters, I think it's going to get much worse.

52:36Jon Favreau:I think Democrats should not be afraid when we have power again to use cutting ICE funding as a point of leverage in negotiations. Yes, 100%. Meanwhile, one of Miller's comrades in the war on immigrants and the rule of law, Trump lawyer turned DOJ hatchet man Emil Bove, got his lifetime appointment to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. He was confirmed by the Senate this week after lying to Congress, telling DOJ officials that if judges wouldn't let them disappear people to a foreign gulag without due process, they might have to tell the courts to fuck off. Not one, not two, three whistleblowers came forward about this guy.

53:15not libs not deep staters not just regular conservatives like trump people trump administration people in doj came forward to say that this guy doesn't want to follow the law he didn't want to follow the law when the judge ordered the plane to be turned around that was going to el salvador he also was instrumental in dropping the charges for eric adams in exchange for eric adams uh just doing the bidding of the Trump administration. He was instrumental in firing all the prosecutors who prosecuted the January 6th defendants. He did all these things. He has had numerous complaints about him even before he was working for Trump as far back as 2018.

53:55People saying he was abusive to staff, that he was corrupt, all this kind of shit. And fucking only Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins voted against him. Tom Tillis, Mitch McConnell, all the rest of them, thumbs up for this guy, lifetime appointment?

54:13Jon Favreau:In general, over the course of time, presidents get their judicial nominees through. But periodically, there are people who are so unqualified, so corrupt, so unfit that members of the president's party will reject them. Just some of them, right? Or the person will not get out of committee and they'll be forced to drop out. This is evidence that the entire confirmation system is a joke in this Republican Party. They do not care about anything other that Trump put that person's name forward. They have no respect for themselves. They have no respect for the institution. They have no respect for the judiciary.

54:45Jon Favreau:They have no respect for their constituents. It is just Donald Trump said jump, so we just said how high. I mean, it's truly embarrassing. This one I really don't understand for people like McConnell and Tillis who have nothing to lose. They're retiring. They're not even running for office again. And Emil Bovet is not like, even if it was a Brett Kavanaugh, an Amy Coney Barrett, a Neil Gorsuch, right? You could say, okay, these are nominations where these people are genuinely right-wing conservatives and like what they stand for and like their judicial philosophy. And it happens to align with what Trump wants.

55:20So that's why they're voting for them, right? Emil Bove, he's just a Trump hatchet man, nothing else. He doesn't have judicial philosophy, doesn't have opinions that he's written, nothing. And it's not like, oh, he's starting off as a federal judge right to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, he could go right from there to the Supreme Court. Just a loyalist to Trump, no judicial philosophy whatsoever. And they're like, thumbs up? It's fucking crazy.

55:47Jon Favreau:Well, it's actually, I think for the two of them, it actually fits with their behavior. Tom Tillis had one moment of courage on Medicaid. He also is the person who introduced Kash Patel at his confirmation hearing. No one has done more to corrupt the judiciary in American history than Mitch McConnell. Man. So this is very much like I know Mitch McConnell is anti-Trump and we have some people have some hopes that maybe he'll do the right thing periodically. And he theoretically does not have the political pressure of people like a Susan Collins or other Republicans who may be up. But this is very much on brand for Mitch McConnell.

56:19Let's check in on the Republican attempts to steal the midterm elections. This week, Texas legislators dropped their new gerrymander of the state's congressional map, a proposal that would create five new House districts that Trump won by 10 points or more in 2024. This would potentially hand Republicans the five extra House seats Trump asked for by packing Democratic voters into urban districts and creating a bunch of new seats that wouldn't have an incumbent but be in very red districts that Trump won. Hakeem Jeffries flew to Texas to huddle with state Democrats to see what they can do to fight back.

56:49Gavin Newsom said he's ready to push forward with a redraw in California if Texas goes through with it. J.B. Pritzker and Kathy Hochul have threatened to do the same in Illinois and New York. Ron DeSantis says he may do the same in Florida, saying the 2020 census was, quote, flawed. Lots of contingencies. Can you walk us through what you think is most likely to happen here?

57:08Jon Favreau:Well, Texas is moving forward. I mean, I think Democrats can and should do everything they possibly can to stop them. When I talked to Congressman Kassar a couple weeks ago, he talked about the importance of it. I've heard Beto talk about the importance of delay. Maybe the legislators, Democratic legislators flee the state so they can't get a quorum. We should try to make this as politically painful for them as possible. But they have the votes to do it. And Trump very much wants them to do it. California, it's complicated, but Gavin Newsom has a plan. I fully expect him to proceed. Illinois, somewhat complicated.

57:41Jon Favreau:New York, very complicated. and New York is limited in what they can do. And it seems based on some analysis, at least I've seen, that absent everything working the right way, it's unlikely that New York would have new maps in place by 2026. Florida, I imagine, will do whatever. Theirs is also somewhat complicated because of the role the Florida Supreme Court plays. So that may be a little bit of bluster because they were limited in how much they could gerrymander in this last time around. But Democrats are doing the right things, right? Like we need a strategy of mutually assured destruction.

58:10Jon Favreau:they do they do this we'll do it republicans just have more opportunities because they have more states where they control the legislature and the governorship and there has not been a ballot initiative constitutional amendment or something else passed that limits the ability of democrats to do to do partisan to a mid-decade redistricting or do something that a partisan redistricting yeah so it's very it's it's very challenging this is what worries me at the end in the end because it's like, you're right. For California, you know, we've talked about this with Newsom. We have to get a ballot initiative and hold like a special election or he can try to just do it and see what the courts say.

58:49Illinois, I think there, he can do it. Pritzker can do it, but it's going to be hard to draw, I guess, to squeeze a few more seats out of Illinois. Yeah. They went through this

59:00Jon Favreau:two years ago or whatever. Two years ago? 2021, they went through this. Yeah. And the reason you're not hearing about a lot more states is because there's just aren't as many states where Democrats have full control over the state legislature and there's more seats to squeeze out and are able to do it because of, you know, that there's not some constitutional amendment or law or whatever else or nonpartisan district commission set up that prevents them from doing it. So it's I am glad Democrats are fighting back, too. I do. People should be aware that it's a very hard fight to pick. And I'm glad they're doing it.

59:35But like, I don't, you know, unclear if it's going to work.

59:38Jon Favreau:Can I just make one point here that I think is, this is, I want to say it's optimistic, but Republicans in Texas are making a very big bet that Trump's numbers with Latinos in 2024 is the new norm. Yeah. And there is really no evidence to support that. Just, I'm going to give you two examples. So nationally, in 2024, Democrats won 54 % of the Latino vote. In the midterms in 2022, we won 62%. Now, here's a stunning number for you. According to exit polls, so take that for what it was, but these are exit polls in Texas. In 2024, Trump won the Latino vote by 11 points in Texas. In 2022, when Beto O 'Rourke was losing by 11 points to Greg Abbott, he won the Latino vote by 17 points.

1:00:32Oh, wow.

1:00:33Jon Favreau:And Abbott won because he won the white vote by 33 points. But so there is like probably they've obviously thought about this. But if the if the Latino vote shifts back to where it was before 2020, these are Republicans are about to create a bunch of really competitive seats and put themselves in great risk. Yeah, I think there's of the five new seats, a couple Trump won by 15 or more. But then a couple he only won by 10 or more, only 10. But if you're talking about numbers like you just did and they're heavily Latino districts, then who knows? Yeah. And given demographics, the percentage of the district that is Latino is going to grow over time.

1:01:13Right.

1:01:14Jon Favreau:And so they could have real troubles in midterms when the midterm Latino electorate, at least in the limited sample size we have where Trump is president, looks very different than when Trump's on the ballot. Okay. Last thing before we get to Tommy's interview with Jason Crow. Kamala Harris announced this week that she will not be running for governor of California after all. We don't know whether that means she'll be running for president in 2028. Her aides have told reporters that people should not read into her decision on the California governor's race, anything about her plans for 2028. But then she also came out with an announcement after that saying that she's going to be devoting her attention to this.

1:01:54Just over a year ago, I launched my campaign for President of the United States. 107 days, traveling the country, fighting for our future. The shortest presidential campaign in modern history. Since leaving office, I've spent a lot of time reflecting on those days. Talking with my team, my family, my friends, and pulling my thoughts together. In essence, writing a journal that is this book, 107 Days. 107 days. She's got a book. What's your guess on the book? Is this going to be an interesting book? Or is it going to be a typical politician book?

1:02:34Jon Favreau:Well, it was reported that she worked with, I don't know if this has been confirmed, but I read this online, a place where nothing's ever wrong, that she worked with Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Geraldine Brooks on it. I read that, yes. I saw that. This is very interesting. As opposed to your typical, and I do not mean this in a pejorative sense, John, your typical political speechwriter, ghostwriter, which is how these things usually happen. Yeah. So I think that's very interesting. And guess what? Those books? Boring. I don't know. Like, obviously don't know what she's going to do next. I would just say, you know, this is a take a lot of people have had online.

1:03:05Jon Favreau:It's like, it was so stupid of her not to run for governor. It's like, I'm just going to guess that maybe she doesn't want to be governor. I was like, good for her was my first reaction because she has seemed from afar that ever since the election that she does not want to be governor of California. there were like plenty of moments where, you know, obviously we've been in the mix, uh, national news cycle, been a big year for Trump sites, uh, over the last six months. And you know, there's, there's times where, you know, she, she would put out statements and stuff like that, but I would think, okay, if she wants to be governor, you would imagine that she'd be out there speaking up about this.

1:03:43And I think, you know, if she, if, if she has decided, I don't want to be governor of California right now. And I want to write this book and I want to do other things for a while. and I want to think about my future, then like, you know, go for it.

1:03:53Jon Favreau:I think that's right. Do you think that she'll, what do you think she's thinking about 2028? Do you think she's genuinely just like, I'll wait and see? Because that could be too. People always think everything's calculated, but she could just be like, all right, I don't know yet. I would say like governor, she has done almost nothing. And maybe the book will kick it off, but she is not, the people who want to be president, right? Or at least we believe are going to want to run for president are out there doing things that make it very clear they want to be president. Yeah. They're going on the podcast.

1:04:20Jon Favreau:there. We've got people traveling to New Hampshire already. We've got people traveling to Iowa, New Hampshire, and we don't even know what the map is going to be. And she has been very, very quiet, which is her right. She gets to choose what she wants to do. But if she knew she wanted to run for president, there are a lot of moments that have happened over the last six months that she could have used as big words. She is the biggest voice in the party other than President Obama right now. If she went out, maybe even actually would probably get more attention if she went out and did something right now than Obama because she has been so quiet since the election.

1:04:51Jon Favreau:And so I think I get the sense she's probably genuinely undecided, which is probably good. Yeah. Right. It was less than a year ago that she, it was basically a year ago now that she got thrown into this thing that she didn't expect to do and then lost. And it's like probably still processing that, which there's plenty of time to do that if she wants to run for president in 2028. Yeah. I mean, we're recording this before we got any news about her appearance on Colbert Thursday night. Maybe she announces and this is going to look stupid. I know. Who knows? But so she, you know, kicking off her public appearance with Colbert.

1:05:24And then I think the book comes out in September. So it'll be interesting to see, like, is the book tour, is she talking a lot about what happened in the campaign and the book? Is she talking about what's happening right now? Some of that will be, of course, dictated by the question she gets. But how interesting is the book?

1:05:38Jon Favreau:Yeah. How interesting is the book? How much she says, what she has to say? You know, you will be able, I think we'll be able to read her intentions about the future pretty quickly when she starts talking. That's fair enough. Okay. When we get back from the break, you'll hear Tommy's conversation with Congressman Jason Crow. Two things before we get to that. In case you missed it, we're hosting our first ever Crooked Con this November. Crooked Con has a chance to join America's smartest organizers and least annoying politicians to strategize, debate, and commiserate about where we go from here.

1:06:06Hopefully up. We'll be in Washington, D.C. November 6th and 7th, starting with a Pod Save America live show at the Warner Theater on Thursday, November 6th. Then on Friday, November 7th, we'll be at the Wharf. The Wharf. The Wharf. Joined by some of the most influential names in politics for a full day of conversations, workshops, and live pods. We're going to be talking about messaging, strategy, organizing. Tickets are on sale now. Head to crookedcon.com for tickets, lineup announcements, and more. That's C-R-O-O-K-E-D-C-O-N.com. We have a limited amount of discounted tickets available. use code FREEDOMANDCONTENT.

1:06:43One word, all caps. That's FREEDOMANDCONTENT. That's your discount code. In the meantime, we got a new episode of Polar Coaster with our own Dan Pfeiffer that just dropped. Dan, what'd you guys talk about this week?

1:06:54Jon Favreau:This is going to shock you, John. So we're glad you're sitting down for this. Sydney Sweeney. No, no, we recorded, I think, before this really blew up with the internet. We were talking about Jeffrey Epstein in the latest polling, why it's staying in the news. We got to talk a little bit about the politics around Trump pardoning a convicted sex traffickers co-conspirator in exchange for favorable testimony. And we talked a lot about Roy Cooper announcing he's running for Senate in North Carolina and a little bit about the Senate maps are going to look like for 2026. Sweet. Tune in, everyone. And if you're not a subscriber, subscribe at crooked.com slash friends or through Apple podcasts.

1:07:31So you can get Dan's pod, you can get our inside 2025 pod terminally online, all kinds of other benefits. It's great. Ad free episodes. of Pod Save America and Pod Save the World and offline and love it or leave it, subscribe. Come join us. It's a fun little community. We all chat.

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1:09:49Jon Favreau:Joining me now in studio, Congressman Jason Crowe from Colorado. You're a decorated Army veteran, one of the Democrats in charge of recruiting candidates for the midterms. Good luck with that. Great to have you. Thanks. Good to be here in the land of the cardboard straw. Thanks for having me back. How's that treating you? Well, I mean, they don't taste good. No. But I appreciate the sentiment. John Lovett's pretty radicalized against those things. Yeah, I'm on the path, the radicalization against the wooden fork and the plastic and the cardboard straw. It's not awesome. There's a corn-based one that I think is a little better than the paper.

1:10:24Jon Favreau:But don't those dissolve and melt with hot liquids? You've got to drink it fast, man. You've got to get that thing down. That's a lot of pressure. Yeah, it is. I want to sip it with leisure. I kind of want to be forced to drink it fast. I want like a ticking clock, like a 24-style get it done. I just saw that the White House announced plans to construct a$200 million, 90 ,000-square-foot ballroom as part of the East Wing of the White House, I guess, so we can hold bigger parties. Right. Would you say that's a good use of money or a great use of money? Yeah, just the best use of money probably, right?

1:10:57Jon Favreau:Right. After kicking 12 million people off their health care, tripling the budget of ICE, opening up camps throughout the country. And now we're going to do this and we'll just add it onto the pile of, you know, the 400 million dollar Qatari jet, which, of course, Donald Trump is likely likely. Yeah. Well, that's that's after we have to actually retrofit this thing and make it workable for Air Force One so that Donald Trump can then keep it when he leaves the presidency. What did you make of the story that they might, the Pentagon might be shifting money from a program to, I believe, refurbish our nuclear missiles or nuclear stockpile to go towards retrofit or making this plane fit for being Air Force One?

1:11:39Jon Favreau:It might cost a billion dollars. Yeah. I mean, they're trying to shift money from a lot of different pots right now. You know, Pete Hegseth has no idea what's going on. Right. You asked this man. Nothing. He's too busy in his vanity mirror and in the new gym that he's built in the Pentagon to really give a crap about what's happening with all this money. But the whole thing is just – it's really beyond the pale, right? They are shifting money around for their culture war agendas, for their political grievances, and we're all the ones that suffer. Yeah. I'm completely derailing my own list of questions.

1:12:13Jon Favreau:But it was, I mean, I'm sure you as someone who served in the military used access to war plans, classified information. Hegseth's suggestion early on that sending like the strike package, the coordinates for like where the military was going to hit in Yemen to take out the Houthi rebels via signal that that was not classified information was really remarkable. It's like I can't imagine him walking around that building and looking at his coworkers with a straight face when they all just know he's lying. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he knows he's lying. too. That's the biggest thing. And he does so without remorse, with a completely straight face.

1:12:48Jon Favreau:You know, the man lies with complete ease, sits in front of Congress and does it, sits in front of the cameras and does it. And there's no accountability. That's the larger issue here is that he knows he can do it because there will be no accountability for it. Right. And what's worse is, you know, Pete Hegseth and I actually come from similar backgrounds, right? We were both infantry officers, infantry lieutenants. We led infantry platoons overseas. So, you know, presumably we were exposed to the same leadership challenges and the same, you know, leadership development. And what I learned when I was in the military is servant leadership is the basis of your leadership.

1:13:29Jon Favreau:It doesn't matter really what you say. It matters more what you do, the example that you set, right? When I was a paratrooper, you jump out of the plane first, right? The commander jumps out first and then the other soldiers follow. You know, when food comes, the other soldiers eat first. You know, the junior folks eat first. And then if there's any leftover, then you eat, right? You suffer the most and you give the benefits to the people underneath you. That's completely put on its head with this administration. No accountability at the top. You know, do as I say, not as I do. And it's corrosive to the culture of the entire organization.

1:14:05Jon Favreau:And look, these organizations, they're made up of people, right? We're all fallible. We all make mistakes and lie sometimes and people get in trouble. But the values that are seen as most important within the military are honesty, candor, accountability, like you just said. And I just wonder what you think the impact is to the rank and file, but also the senior leadership that he works with day-to-day at the Pentagon, for them to have to look this man in the eye that they just know is completely full of shit. Well, there's a leadership impact, and that's that corrosive message to the culture. You can't be the leader of organization and act like this and not have it impact the ethos of the people that are serving under you.

1:14:54Jon Favreau:It just does. It has an impact, right? So that's one. But then there's actually the practical effect operationally of this. The man does not know what he's doing. The majority of his leadership at the Pentagon have resigned in protest to his lack of leadership. And he lied about them. He said that they were disgruntled employees. I'm like, you hired them six weeks ago. You are disgruntling people at an unbelievable pace. And you can't run an organization of over 2 million people that day in and day out conducts hundreds of extremely risky operations that is dealing with our adversaries around the world.

1:15:30Jon Favreau:that daily are doing things to put our soldiers and Americans at risk. You can't run an organization of that complexity with such cavalier and sloppiness and not eventually have something really bad happen. And that's what I'm worried about the most right now. Yeah, me too. Okay. So like I said at the top, you are co-chair for recruitment of the DCCC, the campaign arm for the Democrats. How's it going? And how does this, there's a redistricting push happening in Texas, crisis, maybe a retaliation in California. There's other states kind of talking about that. How does that impact your job? Yeah.

1:16:02Jon Favreau:Well, I'm worried about this redistricting, right? I mean, they have for a long time are saying the quiet part out loud now, you know, Trump and the Republicans, they just don't care. They're just doing whatever they want to do to consolidate power and certainly going to make our job harder. But our recruitment is going very well. You know, my job, among others, is to go out and find those candidates to flip seats, right? And I always try to explain to folks, the task of flipping a seat is a unique political challenge. I flipped a seat in 2018. I'm the first Democrat ever to hold my seat in Congress, actually.

1:16:36Jon Favreau:It was 40 years of Republican seat. And when you're trying to convince people to change their minds, to switch their vote, and to go Republican to Democrat in this environment, and it's gotten worse since I was first elected in 18, that is an extremely hard thing to do. So there's no factor that's more important than the quality of the candidate. Oh, yeah. Right? I mean, you can have all the time people are like, who is the main leader of the Democratic Party? What is our slogan? What's our bumper sticker? What's our unifying message? All important things and all things that we have to refine.

1:17:08Jon Favreau:And I'm happy to talk about that process as well. But in these districts, these 35 targeted seats that we've targeted at this point, what you're trying to do is convince somebody who voted for Donald Trump or who voted for a Republican who supports Donald Trump that change their vote. Right. And what you're getting is, you know, a woman or a man who is deeply rooted in that community, who has an independent streak, who's trusted by people, who has a great bio, usually outside of politics, right? Because they're being voted to be a change maker, not to perpetuate the system, right? So it's not a lot of people with political experience.

1:17:45Jon Favreau:And, you know, that's who we're looking for. That's the tried and tested formula. But it actually takes some work, right? Because I'm having to go and sit in front of these folks and be like, I have a great deal for you. I want you to leave your thriving business. Make less money. They're going to trash your family. Leave your kids half the time. And people are going to say terrible things about you. There's going to be tens of millions of dollars of ads that lie about you. What do you say? Right. It's got to be tough. It's just kind of the job. Imagine you're like a college football coach going into a living room.

1:18:18Jon Favreau:You're like a Coach O from LSU. You're trying to recruit him. Is it kind of like that? It is kind of like that, right? I mean, but first of all, I'm just honest, right? I'm not trying to feed people bullshit, right? I'm just not. I'm honest with them because I'm not doing anybody any favors if I'm not honest about how challenging these races and how tough it is to be in politics right now. But, you know, the appeal is pretty simple, actually. I say how hard it's going to be. I say how excruciating it's going to be. I talk about the impact on everybody around them. And then I say, you know what?

1:18:54Jon Favreau:Your country needs you. We right now are at one of the inflection points. There have been just a handful of them that will absolutely determine the future of this country. And none of us wanted to live in this moment. None of us woke up saying, oh, I want to be in a moment of political extremism where what happens is going to determine the course of the country where the very foundations of our democracy are at risk. No, we didn't ask for it, but we are here, and your country needs you, A. And B, is I'm not asking for a lifetime commitment. I'm asking for a minimum of a couple of years of your life, and after those couple of years, you say this is not for you or if it's not working out, you can go back and do what you're doing.

1:19:32Jon Favreau:But right now, we need you. That's a pretty good pitch. I think so. I'll take it. I'm a cornerback. I'm feeling like I might be a Democrat or never mind. So the House went into recess early because Speaker Johnson was so worried about a vote on releasing the Epstein files. Can you help listeners understand how weird that is, what happened? And won't they just have to deal with this problem in like five or six weeks when you get back? Yeah, I mean, that's exactly what happened, actually, is we were supposed to be in session to the end of the week last week. And Johnson knew that there was going to be a vote forced on releasing the files.

1:20:11Jon Favreau:He knew Republicans were going to vote for it. There'd be a bipartisan vote and they would lose it. He knew that Donald Trump absolutely do not want these files released. So he sent us home. He literally recessed Congress and sent us home instead of actually holding this vote, which is pretty telling. I mean, it is crazy. I would like to say, though, that that's surprising. But the things that I have seen in my six years, six and a half years now in Congress, you know this congress and prior congresses but republicans in particular do it's pretty pretty unbelievable stuff i've gone from feeling like the conspiracy was hiding in plain sight with jeffrey epstein that he was a rich well-connected terrible pedophile awful human being who uses connections to get away with doing evil things to over the last month, watching Trump try to shut down conversations about Epstein to, you know, learning about all the factual discrepancies in the administration's story, the video missing a minute.

1:21:19Jon Favreau:Like I'm completely red pilled on this thing now. I'm just like wondering. Well, watching the mega world's head explode. Yeah. Wait a minute. Like who's side are we supposed to be on here right now? Minecraft head just like swirming off. How do you make sense of this last month? Well, let's not, I think it's important that we not lose sight of the actual substance of this, that you had a longtime sexual predator that was preying on women and girls, and that there had presumably been hundreds of perpetrators and accomplices that have not been brought to justice. DOJ said a thousand victims in that memo.

1:21:52Jon Favreau:Yeah, yeah, hundreds. A thousand victims. Maybe over, you know, God knows how many accomplices, right? Right, shocking. So that in and of itself should be enough for anybody to say, let's release the files and let's have justice. It's never too late to name the names and to call people out. That's really important. That's the most important thing. And then on top of that, you have the corruption and yet another cover up by this administration that doesn't want to be transparent, that's clearly hiding something. I mean, Donald Trump's, you know, constant true social posts trying to get us to move on are damn telling.

1:22:30Jon Favreau:Yeah, not going so well either. No, it's not. On Wednesday of this week, 27 Senate Democrats voted to cut off weapons shipments to Israel. That is a reaction to the horrific images we've seen recently out of Gaza, you know, starved to death children, emaciated children, just massive crowds of people just desperately trying to get food. And so that vote tally, 27 Democrats voting to cut off weapons to Israel, that's unimaginable four or five years ago. Like Ben Rhodes and I did this event with J Street in 2019, did a bunch of the presidential candidates. We tried to get them all to commit to conditioning aid if it were to be used, U.S.

1:23:10Jon Favreau:military aid, if it were to be used in the West Bank. And we basically only got like Bernie on board with that. And now, you know, you see this vote. It's obviously not enough, right? It's not going to stop these weapon shipments. Are you seeing a similar political shift in the House? And how are you thinking about whether we should cut off or condition military aid to Israel around the war? You know, you can't look at those images and see what's happening, not just in the last couple of weeks, but for, you know, a year plus now. You know, the starving children, the sheer desperation of the folks in Gaza, in the settler violence in the West Bank, too.

1:23:46Jon Favreau:Let's not forget about that and how terrible that is and that there was just a Palestinian killed a couple of days ago by a settler in the West Bank. And say that this is horrible stuff and that it doesn't need to happen, right? And that's not mutually exclusive. I'm also saying that Hamas is a terrible organization and a terrible terrorist organization and needs to be destroyed. right, because I also believe that, right? But my own experience at war, I went to war three times for this country, three times in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I was in the position of leading troops in combat where there were civilians everywhere, right?

1:24:23Jon Favreau:Where I had to go after our adversary, you know, the insurgents, but there were civilians all around us. And we constantly had to make decisions about whether to engage or not engage or how to target and to avoid the collateral damage, to avoid killing civilians. And that is why I actually formed, I was one of the founding members of the Protection of Civilians and Conflict Caucus. And I have focused a lot of my efforts on protecting civilians. And that is why I know that it didn't have to be this way. You didn't have to choose between security and going after Hamas and protecting civilians and ensuring that tens of thousands haven't died, that there was a better way.

1:25:01Jon Favreau:And that's why I pushed the administration, Biden administration, to actually just uphold our own standards, right? Our standards are pretty clear. You know, we have a conventional arms transfer policy. We had something called NSM-20, National Security Memorandum 20, which is the way that we actually enforced the conventional arms transfer policy. And I led efforts to say, do the analysis, apply the facts to our own laws and standards, and then make the determination. They unfortunately never went through that process and did that because my belief is let's just apply our own standards like we would to any ally, like we would to ourselves.

1:25:37Jon Favreau:Hold others to the same standards that we hold ourselves to. So that ship has sailed or did under the Biden administration. Right now, what needs to happen is a massive surge of humanitarian aid to Gaza. The distribution system has failed terribly, terribly in every way. That system needs to be completely revamped. The UN and independent aid organizations need to be put in charge because they know how to do this. And there needs to be a massive surge of aid. But I totally agree with that. But I think that there's a concern that there might be this surge of aid. And then Netanyahu will continue the war for political purposes because he has this right-wing part of his coalition that has basically said, we'll dissolve the government if you don't continue the war in perpetuity or adopt the Trump plan.

1:26:25Jon Favreau:which is the full ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip and then the Israelis taking control. So I think there is a hope among a lot of Democrats, like cards on the table, myself included, that this might be a moment where the United States government, hopefully led by the Democratic Party, although I understand that we're not in power anywhere, will try to push Netanyahu to permanently end the war or try to force it. And I think a lot of people think that a broad support for cutting off weapon shipments is part of that. Yeah. Netanyahu is not going to end this on his own. He just won't, as you pointed out.

1:27:00Jon Favreau:Netanyahu hasn't even pushed hard and done what's necessary to get the release of the hostages. And he has repeatedly throughout history undermined opportunities to achieve peace and to dismantle Hamas. Let's not forget that years ago, he was actually the one that helped facilitate and prompt up what became the foundation for Hamas. Right. So he's not going to do that on his own. He's only going to do that if there is external pressure from this administration. And that's why, you know, people speaking up. That's why Republicans, too. Right. I mean, Donald Trump probably doesn't care that much what we have to say, to be honest with you.

1:27:35Jon Favreau:But that's why Republicans and others who are starting to wake up to this. Some of them are. Marjorie Taylor Greene referred to it as a genocide. There are people who are— And is pushing votes to cut off aid. And, like, I don't agree with her on anything. But I think she has spoken pretty movingly and compellingly about her desire to get out of conflicts overseas. You know, when you are trying to build a coalition, when you are trying to increase support for something, it's not enough just to like double down on language and on things that people who already agree with you like and agree with, right?

1:28:11Jon Favreau:We have to be willing to like broaden our aperture here and pull other people into the coalition who know that this is not going the right way and this doesn't serve anyone's interest. It doesn't serve Israel's long-term interest. doesn't serve the Palestinian interest, and is certainly not going to deliver a two-state solution, not even starting on the path towards a two-state solution. And the only way to do that is if we broaden our coalition and pull people in who we may not agree with all the time on all issues, but we have to be willing to do it. Also, I'm sort of hoping there's going to be a structural change around this issue or just the way that we're thinking about it.

1:28:48Jon Favreau:Like, for example, a lot of Democrats, myself included, Ben Rhodes, who you know well, have said Democrats should stop taking money from AIPAC. And that is in part because I think their view, their policy on Gaza has been indefensible, but also because you see AIPAC saying some pretty disgraceful things, like the Twitter account accused Bernie Sanders of blood libel. The 80-year-old Jewish man, his family died in the Holocaust of blood libel for raising concern about the starvation of civilians in Gaza. Do you think Democrats should stop taking money from AIPAC? I think people should be pushed on their policies, right?

1:29:22Jon Favreau:You should look hard at what they have said about this issue and whether or not they want to show leadership on the humanitarian crisis, whether they have a track record of pushing for a two-state solution and making sure that Palestinians have the right to dignity and a future just like the Israelis do. And that is the ultimate goal, and that's where we need to be. And people need to be pressured for that. And people need to hear from their constituents on that. Yeah. I think my concern is APEC is doing counterpressure, right? I mean, they are basically endorsing Republicans. They're intervening in Democratic primaries and taking out progressives.

1:30:01Jon Favreau:And it just feels like they're supporting, you know, January 6th truthers. It just seems like that it's an organization that is not Democratic in nature right now. But, you know, I think that people need to feel pressure from their constituents to do the right thing here and to push back more than any other organization, regardless of what that organization is. And I don't agree with these organizations a lot and on all issues, but they need to feel the pressure on the specific crisis that we have right now. And they need to be pushed. Next month is the four year anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

1:30:41Jon Favreau:And I know Republicans have made this push to revisit the final stages of the withdrawal. But that's about it, I think. Looking back and knowing that you've served in multiple theaters, do you think that we are doing the right kind of accounting of the mistakes we've made since 9-11 and the war on terror or even asking the right questions? I think we are undoubtedly going through that process. And this is something that a lot of people don't know is that we actually created, I helped create, along with Tammy Duckworth and others, an Afghanistan War Commission, which has been a multi-year process.

1:31:18Jon Favreau:It's going to wrap up in another year and a half, but it's going to do a comprehensive look. It's very similar to the 9-11 Commission, actually. They are doing a comprehensive look of every facet of this war. They're looking back over the 20-year history, every administration, Republican and Democrat, every Congress, Republican and Democrat, the civilian leadership, the military leadership, and looking at all of the missteps, all of the missed opportunities, and what went wrong every step of the way. So, like interviews, like how does that work? What do you – you guys are talking to the generals who are in charge of various – Yeah.

1:31:54Jon Favreau:Well, this is an independent, congressionally created commission. So it's not members of Congress that are serving. Sorry, I mean the commission, right? Yeah, the commissioners. Are you talking to the guy running RCE for a couple years? They are. They're doing hundreds of interviews, civilian leadership, military leadership. They're doing hearings around the country. Because ultimately, this is something that I feel very passionate about. We spent 20 years, trillions of dollars, thousands of lost lives, tens of thousands of lost Afghan lives, lost credibility. and it ended poorly by every metric.

1:32:29Jon Favreau:So we just can't do this again. We can't. And what we need to know is, you know, why did it happen? What were the missed opportunities? And again, I will say this happened under just as many Democratic administrations as Republican ones, and just as many Democrat-controlled Congresses as Republican ones. And I actually believe one of the biggest problems behind both Iraq and Afghanistan is the fact that Congress gave up its authority. We have stepped out of our congressionally mandated war powers authority, and we have written a blank check to administration after administration through these authorizations for use of military force, these AUMFs, that basically have allowed president after president to continue military operations in dozens of different countries now without any more debate, without any more votes and largely financed by additional debt.

1:33:22Jon Favreau:Is there any way to require that an AUMF sunsets every year or has to be reauthorized or just because you're right. Look, in hand up, work for Barack Obama. Yeah. We surged troops in Afghanistan. That's something that with the benefit of hindsight, I think was a mistake. I think that it's fair to say that the AUMF was stretched and strained beyond all recognition to justify bombing places where it's impossible to argue that Al-Qaeda proper was there, right, as some sort of affiliate group. Right. These affiliate organizations is the language, right? Like, they name groups in the AUMF, and then they're like affiliates.

1:34:03Jon Favreau:Right. It's like a spin-off. So as they morph, I mean, the idea behind it is understandable, right? They don't want a group just to change its name and rebrand and not being able to target it. But it has really been abused to, like, spin off and be used in pretty abstract ways. right and i actually believe in sunsets this is actually a key component of this debate and i and i'm i'm on that side of the debate that no congress should be able to debate and then take a vote and then wash its hands of it right there there has to be a sunset where both the administration is forced to come back and make the case and congress has to be held accountable right you you have to have more votes and more debate because until that happens where where's the pressure.

1:34:46Jon Favreau:Where's the pressure to end it, right? And the best way to have accountability is through members of Congress, because we are, you know, weekly going home and we're holding town halls and auditoriums and rotary clubs. And we have to stand in front of people and say, yeah, your taxpayer dollars, your sons and daughters should be going off and fighting this war and conflict. And here's why. And if we can't make that case, then we shouldn't be taking in the vote. Yeah, absolutely. And it's so frustrating. I mean, just seeing how much inertia there is and how much easier it is to bomb a place, start a war, perpetuate a conflict, then, you know, get votes on the JCPOA, the Iran nuclear agreement, which was an attempt to solve problems diplomatically.

1:35:27Jon Favreau:And I'm really glad you guys are doing this review of sort of what happened in Afghanistan. But there's also kind of a just a political problem or incentive structure problem that I don't know how to solve in the United States to try to keep us out of these conflicts. Well, this is where you're seeing a little bit of a convergence of, you know, the right and left, if you will, right? Where people are like, no, why are we going to do another war in the Middle East? Why are we spending trillions of dollars? Why? And this is a damn good question because our track record is not really good, right?

1:36:01Jon Favreau:You just can't point to these and be like, oh, we're having great success here. We're not, right? And that actually should be pretty telling, right? And we get pulled into these quagmires. And then on the flip side, Ukraine, which is actually doing its own fighting and is doing a remarkable job, we're not supporting them in the way that we should. So the incentive structures in the politics, to your point, are completely out of whack on this. I know last Sunday you were denied entry trying to get into an ICE detention facility in Aurora. I think it's a facility you've been visiting repeatedly since what, like 2019?

1:36:40Jon Favreau:Since 2019, yeah. I think you guys filed suit yesterday against the Trump administration alleging that ICE officials violated federal law by turning you away. Can you just tell us about what happened and what should have happened and where the lawsuit stands? Yeah. So, I mean, this is something, as you point out, I've been doing for over six years now. So when I first came in as a member of Congress in 2019, this ICE detention center is in my district, in the center of my district, about a mile from where I live. And we immediately started to get reports of disease outbreaks and abuses and problems at this facility.

1:37:13Jon Favreau:So I literally just showed up. I did an unannounced visit in February of 19 and said, hey, I'm a member of Congress. I'm here to do an inspection. They turned me away. So I took numerous attempts before they finally let me in. And my team and I looked at the law and they're like, well, there's no actual law that requires us to have access. So we actually worked with members and we pushed and we passed a law. So we created this law that now says members of Congress have to be provided immediate access to any facility that's run by the DHS that receives congressional funding. So any federal money that flows through DHS that detains migrants.

1:37:55Jon Favreau:and it doesn't matter whether that's ICE, CBP, HHS. Those are the three agencies that run facilities of various types and that it doesn't need to be announced. It can be unannounced visits because that's actually really important oversight, right? You don't want to show up and - It's all spiffied up. It's all spiffy. It's Lysol and fresh paint and the dog and pony show, right? You need to get a real look and you need to see what's actually happening. So we passed this law. It's been on the books for years. I've continued to do oversight. I visited this facility at least nine times. My staff has been dozens of times.

1:38:28Jon Favreau:So I show up a couple of weeks ago, and they say no. Who's they? In this case, it was ICE. Like the person who runs the facility or something? Yeah. Well, GEO, so this is a privately run detention center. Ah, great. And there's no distinction in the law between private and not private. In this case, this is run by the GEO Corporation, which runs all sorts of these facilities around the country. And as a separate issue, I've actually been pushing for years, along with Pramila Jayapal and others, to end the private for-profit detention system. Because it's just gross and perverse. It's crazy, yeah.

1:39:03Jon Favreau:That there's a profit motivation to incarceration. And more people longer is more money. Yeah, I mean, you get all these abuses because it's a profit-motivated system, right? And then you see all these companies in lobbying for the expansion of these. It's really just a really perverse system. So we've been trying to close these facilities overall. But notwithstanding, and that's actually another point of disagreement I have with the Biden administration, because they issued an order ending private detention centers for federal detention, but they exempted and carved out immigration detention facilities.

1:39:38Jon Favreau:So we battled them on that. We weren't successful. So these facilities still exist. So I was denied entry, which is a violation, just a straight up, very clear violation of the law. So yesterday we filed a lawsuit in federal court. And what's the timeframe on that resolving? We don't know. I mean, we just filed it yesterday. There's 12 members total, all of whom were denied access to facilities around the country because this is a feature, not a bug. My denial was not uncommon, unfortunately. I mean, they are denying access. They're impeding oversight. They're obstructing all over the country repeatedly on a mass scale, actually, not just with visits, but all oversight.

1:40:21Jon Favreau:So we are asserting our rights to try to end this obstruction. And what they say is they've implemented a new policy, they being the Trump administration, that they've implemented a new policy that requires seven days notice for a visit, which, of course, guts effective oversight. It's not the law, right? Yeah, and it's not the law, right? They can't just be like, nope, we're going to do something different. That's not how it works. Congress makes the laws. The president's supposed to follow it. They can't, by executive order or fiat, or just their opinion, change it. Well, we wish you the best of luck with that.

1:40:58Jon Favreau:Congressman Crowe, thank you so much for coming in. Great to be here. Good to have you. Thanks. Appreciate it.

1:41:08That's our show for today. Thanks to Congressman Jason Crowe for coming on. Tommy Lovett and I will be back with a new show on Tuesday. Bye, everyone. If you want to listen to Pod Save America ad-free or get access to our subscriber Discord and exclusive podcasts, consider joining our Friends of the Pod community at crooked.com slash friends or subscribe on Apple Podcasts directly from the Pod Save America feed. Also, please consider leaving us a review to help boost this episode and everything we do here at Crooked. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. Our producers are David Toledo, Emma Illick Frank, and Saul Rubin.

1:41:39Our associate producer is Farrah Safari. Austin Fisher is our senior producer. Reid Cherlin is our executive editor. Adrian Hill is our head of news and politics. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer, with audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Matt DeGroat is our head of production. Naomi Sengel is our executive assistant. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Hayley Jones, Ben Hefcoat, Mia Kelman, Carol Pellaviv, David Tolles, and Ryan Young. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

1:42:39Jon Favreau:I mean, the South has always shaped American politics. We know that. The stakes could not be higher, but to win the South, you have to understand it. People in the South feel really misunderstood, left behind, put down on, and they want to explain that to somebody. We're traveling across six Southern states to explore the people, the issues, the assumptions that no longer hold, and what the rest of us are missing about a region that will shape the future of our politics and our country. From Left Right and Crooked Media starting July 27th. Watch Long Play Series on YouTube at youtube.com slash longplayseries or listen wherever you get your podcasts.