Judge blocks Federal Reserve subpoenas in Trump loss

0:00There's a pill version of Ozempic. Hello, I'm Ozempic. And I'm other GLP-1s kind of like him. Hey, did I hear there's a pill version of Ozempic? Yep, you sure did. Ask your doctor about which FDA-approved uses of the Ozempic pen or pill may be right for you. Call 1-833-OZEMPIC or visit Ozempic.com to view the medication guide and learn more about Ozempic semaglutide tablets 9mg and Ozempic semaglutide injection 2mg. There's a pill version of Ozempic. On any journey using Uber, it helps to know you're getting into the right car. Pin verification adds an extra step to make sure your ride is your ride.

0:37Before the trip begins, your app gives you a unique pin. Just tell it to your driver, and they'll enter it in their app before the ride can start. Hey, what's your pin? Mm-hmm. 2538. That way, you know you're in the right car taking the right trip, and your driver knows you're the right passenger. Make sure your ride is your ride with pin verification from Uber. One more way Uber is putting safety at every turn. Learn more on the Uber app. We begin with the big ruling, a major legal loss for Trump. This is big news, and we're going to get into why it matters. A federal judge here quashing grand jury subpoenas in Trump's effort to harass the Federal Reserve to try to help him in the election.

1:14I'll explain. But bottom line, Trump loses. Federal Reserve Chair Powell wins. This is a blow to the whole thing. And in over 25 pages, Trump learned he is powerless to do the kind of legal harassment that he's trying. I'll just tell you some of the highlights coming out of this blistering rejection of what has been a pattern that you've probably noticed. Trump trying to use or abuse federal powers in the DOJ to go after anyone who disagrees with him. The judge writes, there's abundant evidence these subpoenas dominant, if not sole purpose, is to harass and pressure Powell, either to yield to the president or to resign and make way for a Fed chair who will.

1:52He adds, on the other side of the scale, the government has offered no evidence whatsoever that Powell committed any crime other than displeasing the president. And contends the subpoenas were merely part of a game plan to pressure Powell to bend to the president's wishes or get rid of him. That is a description of Donald Trump breaking the law. In other words, his attempted subpoenas, illegal. The judge says this was a pressure campaign. And of course, the administration has targeted many of Trump's opponents, people who disagree with him, people who've exercised First Amendment rights. Our list here, which we've continued to update, and we updated it today, if you look into, I know it's hard to keep track of all the revenge prosecutions and probes, but if you look in the middle right, you see subpoenas quashed.

2:38That's the update today. Many of these efforts failing against the so-called enemies list. And there's another layer here, because Trump's pressure on the Fed and how he's talked about it himself, sometimes in his social media posts, which are quoted against him, holding his words against him in the ruling, and sometimes in other forums, is he wanted the Fed to do what it wasn't doing, which was distort interest rates and economic policy to give him a short-term sugar rush to help him in the midterms. So this is a story about the rule of law holding, a story about Trump losing in court, and perhaps about him losing going into the midterms.

3:14I want to bring in the dean of Columbia Journalism School, Jelani Cobb, staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. His latest book is Three or More is a Riot. And Che Comandori, a veteran political strategist who has talked to us about the power of fighting back, something Powell clearly did here. Jelani, you look through this ruling, it is a complete rejection of the Trump revenge effort. Why does that matter right now? Oh, it entirely matters. So what we're dealing with, first off, you know this better than anybody else. Of all the institutions, the DOJ is supposed to remain the most independent of the White House, precisely because of the kind of havoc that can result in a president using the Department of Justice in precisely the ways that we've seen this president attempt to.

3:59And so what we're looking at is really pressure testing. Here's a quaint term. Guardrails. Yeah. These ideas of, you know, even some of the things that Trump has done have been innovative in the sense that they've made us actually go back and create rulings around things that were just habit, things that were habitual. And so it's really important. It's also important that when you look at that enemies list there as a distinction between Trump 1 and Trump 2. And there's going to be an interesting historical view of Bob Barr and Jeff Sessions, his two attorney generals in Trump 1, as it relates to what we've seen happen under Pam Bondi.

4:40Yeah, and we'll leave this up while I bring in Che Comanduri, because when they talk about flooding the zone, if that's a message campaign, fine, Che. when it's flooding the zone with illegal harassment efforts and probes, it's not fine. At a certain point, Congress and the country are going to have to decide whether enough of these mean that Pam Bondi has to be impeached because judges are ruling that these are illegal. And yet at the same time, this is a big loss tonight for Trump. I'm curious your view with political strategy and the Democrats at racking up these losses, defeating Trump's efforts in a clear public way, which could send a message to others who have to decide, do you fold or fight?

5:23Yeah, I think that there's no question. You know, there's a line in the movie Roadhouse where Patrick Swayze says, you know, we're going to ask people who are disruptive to leave nicely. We'll talk to them nicely. We'll be very nice until it's time no longer to be nice. And I think for a lot of Democrats, now is the time no longer to be nice. You know, I think we tried with Joe Biden to turn the other cheek, to look past some of Trump's excesses, some of the excesses of his cronies. It clearly did not work. I think you're going to see an increased drumbeat on the idea that we do need to, like, hold people accountable.

6:04People in the DOJ, people like Jeanine Pirro, people like Pam Bondi. Yeah. And I don't want to do deep interest rate talk on a Friday, Che. It's been a week. I think we can all agree. Save it. But bottom line. The Fed has a plan that they reach independently, not to help one party or the other. and Trump committed great, great public effort and risk at trying to harass them to change that plan to help him in the midterms. I've never seen, and I'll just share this to nerd out with everyone, a judicial ruling that starts out, quote, Jerome, too late, Powell's done it again. He's, quote, too late, and in all caps, too angry, too stupid, and too political to have the job of Fed chair.

6:52I won't do the full Trump impression, Che. Again, it's a Friday, But these words are being quoted from Trump and held against him. But it was part of his effort to try to dial in or shake down help for his party in the midterms. How do you, as someone who's worked with Obama and others, view that? Because apparently that's not working either. He's not going to get the interest rate change he wanted. Yeah. And I think part of the issue with the Trump authoritarian project is Trump himself. Trump has hired incredibly incompetent people because they are good on television. I mean, we see this with Pete Hegg said right now.

7:28We also see with Jeanine Pirro. And for Trump, it makes sense. He says, I was good on TV and people hired me to be president. Maybe I should do that and make that the main criteria by which I hire people. Now, I personally don't think Janine Pirro is that good on television. You know, I always thought she was kind of a knockoff Judge Judy. You know, she was kind of the Kid Rock halftime show to the Bad Bunny halftime show. But Trump did think she was really good on TV. And the problem is, is that he has surrounded himself by enormously incompetent people like Cash Patel, like Pam Bondi, like Janine Pirro, simply because they are sycophants and he believes that they are good on television.

8:07Right. and to date myself, Che, you don't necessarily want to have open heart surgery performed by Doogie Howser. Because he's an actor, Jelani. Yeah, I vaguely recall him being an actor. Let me read from the ruling again. We just got this late in the day. I'm going to say also, like really, I would prefer you read from the ruling with the instrumental of Shook One's part two playing in the background. With a little mob deep. Keep it. Here's another thing the judge says. The president and his appointees may not interfere with the Fed chair's choices about monetary policy, what we were just discussing, or use these subpoenas to pressure the chair to take official actions or retaliate against them for policies that they dislike.

8:51The judge is saying as fact, you know, sometimes people say, oh, we have to be fair. And some people say, Jelani, it's harassment. Other people say they want to just clean up the Fed, just like they want to drain the swamp. The judge is adding to the record, having looked through this closer than most. There's not actually a debate. According to the courts tonight, this is an illegal pressure campaign. Yeah. And to the bigger point, and I keep wanting to go to the bigger point, what we're really talking about is institutional independence. If you're talking about the Fed, if you're talking about the DOJ, if you're talking about all these things that, you know, we had taken for granted.

9:31And so, you know, we've seen this harassment campaign for Powell. I mean, there wasn't any attempt to camouflage it, including the gotcha where they attempted to say that the budget was wildly inflated for construction and Powell had to fact check them in real time. Everyone knows what this was lined up to do. And it's really important, I think, as a precedent to see that this happens now. Unfortunately, I think that there'll be other instances where we need to have a similar kind of ruling. Mm-hmm. And Che, when you look at the people on Wall Street or we just had Trump interfering in media mergers.

10:05You're right. In tech, a lot of them have acted like appease him, change the Washington Post for him, change CBS for him. Next, maybe change CNN for him. And there's news on that with the Pentagon today. I wonder if you think that Powell offers a different path than that because he didn't change policy for Trump. Correct. Yeah. And you see the fact that like people like Tom Tillis have done pushback on this attempt to take over the Fed. You saw Powell did not behave, certainly the way a lot of the Wall Street CEOs and the tech titans have behaved, where he simply caved in and gave Trump what he wanted.

10:46But I would also add that there is a little bit of a danger here in this in this ruling. is that Trump has been failed by the DOJ. As an instrument of doing what he wants, it has completely failed him. What has not failed him is the Department of Defense. The Department of Defense and our military is highly competent in large measure because they weren't hired by Trump. You know, they are people who have been given, who are there to do a job and do it very well. So the temptation when Trump sees a ruling like this to say, well, the DOJ isn't working out for me. But here is another thing, however, that I can use and keep using that works extremely well and can show everybody how strong, how macho I am.

11:37That temptation only increases as the DOJ fails him. An astute point and one we've seen also interplay with the courts because he has already tried to put National Guard everywhere and some of that has been trimmed. But it's a fair point. I want to thank Che. Jelani, stick around. I want to talk to you about this domestic Iran pushback. Coming up tonight, I have my special report on Trump bowing to monopolies. Really important. Affects you. And an Epstein update. But first, we turn to the Iran issue. Jelani comes back. The pushback. World on fire. I'll see you in 90 seconds.

12:19Does Donald Trump have an endgame for Iran? We have a lot of questions and conflicts. The Pentagon says six more U.S. service members are dead. That was because of a refueling aircraft that crashed over Iraq. The death toll now totals 13. The Pentagon says it's probing it. They don't know about what kind of fire it was per se, but they're going to look into all that. Trump raising eyebrows, though, with this. I don't think it's going to be long. When it's over, this is going to bounce right back so fast. When are you going to know when it's over? When I feel it. Okay. I feel it in my bones. In his bones.

12:56The U.S. also is reportedly sending 5 ,000 additional Marines and warships to the region. Iran has now strangled the Strait of Hormuz, kneecapping energy supply. Here was the Pentagon today. The only thing prohibiting transit in the straits right now is Iran shooting at shipping. It is open for transit should Iran not do that. That sort of is neither here nor there. It's a war and Iran is doing that. They're also laying mines. The New York Times reports that the U.S. military finds the only way to guarantee that waterway stays open would be to actually take hold of Iranian territory. Retired U.S.

13:33general who led the planning on this said it would require numbers of ground forces to seize the coast. Short of that, the only lasting solution is diplomatic. Jelani Cobb is back. And you see that this isn't aging well if Trump's core claim was, we got this under control and we'll wrap it up. Days 10 to 14 have been worse from the U.S. side than days 0 to 10. Certainly. And also that this will be over in a minute kind of language recalls what we heard about COVID. Those numbers would go down and they would disappear. And then we know the scale of the catastrophe that that was. The other part of this is that, you know, we seem to have gone to war on the fly.

14:17Like, this will be an interesting thing to do this month. Whereas Iran has had, going back to 1953, in understanding when the United States, along with the British, helped orchestrate a coup d 'etat that overthrew their government, they have been thinking about the United States and what our capacity to is to make mischief in their country for decades. And so I don't think they view this conflict in the same way. The other part of it is, and here's an interesting thought, it may not be up to the United States about when the war stops. The Eurekans stop firing. It doesn't mean that they will stop firing back.

14:55They will stop holding up traffic in the Strait of Hormuz. This can go on for an indeterminate amount of time. The other thing I want to ask you is, compared to past military adventures, there's been a common theme of high support that then fades. Trump seems to have broken that. As a student of history, what do you think of that? Well, there are a few things. One is, there are some things, quaint though they may be, that people make a case about why you are engaging the U.S. military in hazardous actions abroad. No such thing happened. And, you know, we're in the middle of a conflict that has yet to really be articulated with an open-ended conflict, with with goals that are hazy and incoherent at best.

15:45And so the public support for this is going to be soft, which has started out soft. And I think we even go lower from there. Yeah. Jelani Cobb, always good to see you. As mentioned, I have it in my hands. Three or more is a riot. You can get that wherever books are sold. Coming up, Trump's failure to crack down on corporate monopolies is rebounding on him with a lot of pushback. That's my special report. And we have the Epstein accountant testimony. Stay with us.

16:18Americans are mad about inflation, rising gas prices, this wider sense the economy is rigged. Workers struggle while CEO pay still skyrockets. Big tech harvesting our data to create their own AI riches. And Trump is using his job to enrich himself. We know corporations wield power sometimes as quasi-monopolies, with critics saying the market concentration has reached illegal levels in several fields. You don't need to be an economist to see the problem. Everyone knows the gay monopoly. Capitalism does require competition, not one person controlling everything and then spiking prices on you. Now, liberals have pushed this point and gotten some progress.

16:58It doesn't even always make headlines, but I'll remind you, President Biden actually cracked down on monopoly-style corporations, blocking mergers that could hurt consumers' access to things like groceries or airline tickets and even the important issue of health care. Now, another monopoly example that just about everyone knows about is Ticketmaster. It merged with its main competitor, Live Nation. They throttle competition. Major artists, many fans have noticed the fees and protested this for years. In fact, the company's jacked up ticket prices by 20 % or more. That's their service fees that apparently they're allowed to charge because there's no competition.

17:39And this has been an issue on huge tours and dozens of locations. It's a giant economic issue because the concert industry tops, get this,$200 billion annually. That's in the U.S. alone. For context, every NFL team combined is$245 billion. So we're talking about a big deal. And Ticketmaster employees under scrutiny have actually been caught looking at all this as a big joke when they drive up your prices. One internally was talking about robbing customers blind, robbing them because of their monopoly power. They can get away with it. Now, this is back in the news this week, and I'll explain why.

18:21But the history is the Biden DOJ actually got tough on the concert giant. It took them to court to try to break them up. That process can take years. And the case finally went to trial this week with testimony that the Live Nation Ticketmaster president was doing the monopoly stuff that critics had always alleged, even threatening a big stadium, that they would just pull concerts if they had to face what we all deal with in the market economy, if they were forced to face competition. Testified that Michael Rapinoe, who was the president of Live Nation, told him the concert might disappear if the venue switched to another ticketing company.

19:02So there's been threats on the record that people are saying under oath. that's what they were saying the case against the company driving headlines there's also states that filed antitrust suits from top democrats in blue states there's also outrage from republicans in congress monopoly ticket price gouging is actually a rare point of agreement across party lines because just about everyone hates it and it's obviously unfair and politicians have music fans as constituents. They all do. And Congress has actually held hearings going at Ticketmaster, quoting Taylor Swift, if that helps you get more interested.

19:42The issue boiling over with outrage because a lot of regular people struggled to get tickets to the much-beloved Taylor-era's tour. What Ticketmaster and its parent company, Live Nation, are doing looks like an illegal monopoly. As a ode to Taylor Swift, I will say we know all too well. This merger between Live Nation and Ticketmaster will absolutely have and continue to have a detrimental effect on their prices. Ticketmaster ought to look in the mirror and say, I'm the problem. It's me. I think it's a nightmare dressed like a daydream. I don't think we ought to go there. They know the lyrics.

20:24That was both parties. and conservative Republicans, along with Democrats and Biden's antitrust prosecutors and music fans, all backed the basic demand for fair competition over monopoly price gouging. Or take a well-known artist and MAGA fan, Kid Rock, hammering Ticketmaster's gouging and testifying to Congress this year about breaking them up. I believe music fans and artists have been getting screwed for far too long by the ticketing system. Should Ticketmaster and Live Nation be broken up? Probably. Trump's happy to use Kid Rock for promotion, for photo ops. But I guess when it comes to policy or Kid Rock's fans, that has its limits.

21:11Because while Trump had reversed virtually all signature Biden policies that are under White House control, the Biden-DOJ antitrust case on this issue continued for over a year and up through this week. And granted, there's been a lot going on this week, which is why we're getting to this update here. That effort, started by Biden, had the wide support I just walked you through. But now the news is the Trump DOJ just backed down. They have jumped ship, settling with Ticketmaster for small tweaks, dropping the long-running bid to actually break them up on behalf of consumers as an illegal monopoly.

21:47A judge still has to approve it. some states say they're not going to back what they view as a weak Trump settlement. Now, the president tries to distract from all kinds of problems and policies that he knows are unpopular, from breaking vows to drain the swamp when you look at the rise in corruption in Washington, to now undercutting his party's claims that they actually cared about lowering prices for you or these monopolies. Politically, it's obviously very popular to do this, but Trump apparently wants to side with the fat cats. A monopolistic corporation beats out the people in Trump's America.

22:27And contrast it to the alternative where Democrats were actually doing things to bring down prices. This is a part of a wider corporate agenda for Trump, even as perhaps fans like Kid Rock are still confused or in denial about his populist claims. And Trump has now gone well beyond, say, the tax cuts of the first term for millionaires to these more extreme measures of crony capitalism, as if this is the last hand in the game and they don't even care how it looks. Abusing the oversight powers to shake down media mergers for partisan political coverage, which has been in the news a lot lately. The Financial Bible, the Wall Street Journal, has criticized Trump's monopoly tendencies and bids to pick winners and losers or to even demand stakes in public companies.

23:14And here's the other thing I want you to remember. This is a long ways from the competitive capitalism that is supposed to work for you. In fact, in history, there are Republicans who even led the trust-busting fight. Take Republican President Teddy Roosevelt. Despite the passing resemblance you see here to Mr. Monopoly himself, a Republican back in the day, Roosevelt fought the moneyed interests in the trust. He advocated a role for government regulating corporations and said Wall Street has to understand, quote, we're not attacking the corporations, but endeavoring to do away with any evil in them.

23:50Trump chooses some corporations over consumers and his own MAGA base. Many leaders, though, in history have actually tried to save capitalism's monopoly tendencies from itself. Anti-stress enforcement, rather, is law enforcement, and we need more of it. Concentrated industries result in concentrated profits. A handful of mega-billionaires and companies controlling what we see and what we hear. Over and over and over, they have found ways to use their monopoly platforms to cheat, steal, and lie. The time is now to start breaking them up. When markets are not competitive, big businesses are able to extract monopoly profits by setting prices that are higher and higher.

24:38They don't want to face juries. And I think the same is true for antitrust enforcement. They do not want to face private enforcers. Note the broad spectrum. Some of the loudest voices here may trend progressive, but populist Republicans also say this is something to fix. not even a close call. Just not the Republicans in the White House. Donald Trump's Ticketmaster cop-out is news this week, and it follows a wider pattern where the Biden DOJ's fight for consumers, whether people knew about it or not, people are busy living their lives, or maybe it wasn't hyped and promoted with all the right memes, but the Biden fight for consumers gets dropped or undercut by Trump.

25:21And this Biden DOJ lawsuit was not alone. There was another one hammering Walmart and Pepsi for a secret plot to collude for higher prices, which affects everyone in every Walmart, red, state, or blue, but it was dropped again by the Trump DOJ. Critics say that move rewards more potential price fixing, which costs you, Americans, millions. Trump ran against high prices and affordability, and then dropped the issue in office. Now he claims the affordability he championed is actually a Democratic scam. But I guess that makes him a scammer since this was the thing he promised to address. These cases show it's actually even worse on policy.

26:04Trump actively dropping these years-long actions just to try to help consumers, you, actually stand up and fight these very powerful, very rich price-gouging corporations, whether that's from tickets, which I showed you, or as big as the NFL, or to groceries, which we all need to stay alive. And these are exactly the things Trump wants to keep out of the news. If you're hearing about this for the first time, well, consider this a little step you're taking that Trump wishes you didn't know about. These anti-consumer actions have real-world consequences. And it undercuts him with his base as they learn about it.

26:43Remember, the lies, they don't override the lived reality of these high prices. 80 % of people say Trump has failed to improve affordability, whether they know about the antitrust history I just mentioned or not. And America has gone from presidents fighting the monopoly man, really from Roosevelt to Biden, to a self-enriching billionaire who apparently would like to be the monopoly man if you and Kid Rock let him get away with it. That's our update. Still ahead, I want to tell you by the end of the hour, we have one of the basketball goats. Isaiah Thomas makes his beat debut tonight. And an Epstein update from the accountant Money Man himself.