Maxwell Pleads the Fifth To Congress

20:11Ari Melber:Yeah. And that goes again to why, and we've seen this even across both parties when in control of the DOJ, the resistance to get into this because of how it reflects on people inside the DOJ and the history, rather than saying whatever's there needs to be dealt with given the mistakes that are now publicly exposed. So, again, the files continue to lead to new reporting, including what we learned today. So, Julie Kay Brown, Nancy Erica Smith, my thanks to both of you.

20:39Julie K Brown:Thank you. Absolutely.

20:40Ari Melber:Again, I want viewers to understand we've been reporting all of this out. As I mentioned in response to what a guest said, the legalities and the details matter. In New York, Donald Trump was found civilly liable in a case regarding allegations of sexual abuse. It did not state in that case that he was a, quote, convicted rapist. Again, as I mentioned before, in the back and forth, but I want to make sure it is clear as we are trying to be as precise as possible. Mr. Lutnick does have emails that he sent that inquired about visiting the island. As I stated there and want to be clear, we don't have flight records or documentation that has ever confirmed whether or not he did in fact visit the island.

21:21Ari Melber:And he's welcome to speak on this program or elsewhere about those details. All right. That is a lot here for the beginning of the hour. I want to tell you what's coming up. And everyone's talking about the Super Bowl. We have the reaction. We have the ratings and we have some thoughts on bad bunny by the end of the hour. There's also why Donald Trump says he wants to own this economy, which has prices going up. An interesting political problem that Republicans say they would like to move away from as they head towards the midterms. And the profiteering, the crypto, who's got your back in the government.

21:54Ari Melber:A special look at that coming up. Plus, longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon saying this.

22:03Julie K Brown:You have a massive lack of enthusiasm among the base because they're sitting there going, I'm just not feeling it right now.

22:18Ari Melber:Republicans are nervous about the midterms for many different reasons, but we know that the president and Republicans in Congress agree on one thing. We know they are worried they will be punished for the economy. We know that for many reasons, including that Donald Trump has gone out of his way to put two members of the Fed under investigation, fighting it all the way to the Supreme Court, in an effort to get the Fed to do things to help him on the economy. And yet here's Donald Trump on the economy. At what point are we in the Trump economy? Oh, I'd say we're there now. I'm very proud of it.

22:54Ari Melber:We're there and he's proud of it. Americans aren't proud, they're concerned. Indeed, almost 60 % disapprove of this economy. And that's before you get into the fact that the president and his family are spending a lot of time on side hustles to enrich themselves. The Times estimating they've pocketed over a billion dollars in one year, 500 million coming in from the UAE to a Trump crypto business with allegations of potential backroom deals or even the type of bribery conduct that is banned by the Constitution. Here is a longtime conservative lawyer and former prosecutor, Andrew McCarthy, writing, you know what the difference is between the Biden family business and the Trump family business.

23:35Ari Melber:you'd have to add two digits to the sum of what he calls Biden's abuses of power and foreign entanglements and corruption alleged in the report to get near what Trump has raked in from just one country. Now, whether that type of argument in the Conservative National Review targeted at people who are critical of the Bidens is the only way to cut it, or whether taking this much money dwarfs all past presidential scandals combined, either way, it's a big problem in plain sight. But Bannon also concerned.

24:10Julie K Brown:You have a massive lack of enthusiasm among the base because they're sitting there going, I'm just not feeling it right now.

24:19Ari Melber:I want to bring in Jason Johnson. Feeling it. Feeling the high that you get from the low. I don't have to tell you twice. An MSNOW analyst, a professor. Bannon's not feeling it. But reality has a strange way of reoccurring, even in a field full of propaganda. Your thoughts on this one?

24:40Julie K Brown:Here's the thing. Trump's been in office now for over a year, and he's been saying, you know, it's mine, it's mine, it's mine. OK, so whose world is this? The world is yours. This is your world. This is your economy. You're taking full credit for it. And people are unhappy. And Ari, the issue here is that most of the things that people are unhappy about, when When voters are unhappy about the economy, it's usually unemployment. It's usually wages, gasoline, right? Those sorts of things. But people are upset about, like, food prices right now. They're upset about things like housing prices right now, like fundamental elements of the economy that you can't just fix with legislation.

25:15Julie K Brown:And I don't think Trump has a way out of it. Now, for eagle-eared viewers, was The World is Yours an Oz reference or a Scarface reference or both?

25:27Ari Melber:You could pick either one.

25:29Julie K Brown:You could pick either one.

25:30Ari Melber:See, people don't know how Jason does it. I mean, it works on one level, but if you're listening really close, there's these extra, the kids call them Easter eggs, or at least the kids used to. Those kids are probably in their mid-30s now. I want to play you another official Kevin Hassent about jobs.

25:51Ari Melber:There's a chance that job creation lags. productivity skyrockets, profit skyrocket, GDP skyrocket. But then all of a sudden, like you're making 20 widgets and you can make 20 widgets with a fewer person. And then that person has to find a new job. I think that that kind of transition could happen. It's a Trump official and they can't stop everything. The question is, are they trying? We had these terrible January jobs numbers. You have layoffs and they're referring to macroeconomic factors, which frankly no single politician may be in control of. But in the time the president has to go meet with Congress or come up with, you know, an AI proofing fund or tax those tech companies so if they need to bail out later, they've prepaid for it or any number of the ideas that are out there, instead of doing that work, they are literally busy enriching themselves.

26:44And they gave those AI chips abroad because, according to some critics, they were taking money

26:52Ari Melber:as I showed in the intro from UAE.

26:55Julie K Brown:Yeah, Ari, the issue here is that people will be willing to suffer through their own economic pain if they think it's universal. But now you've got a situation where it's very clear that the Trump administration is enriching itself. You've got Trump and his billions. You've got the crypto schemes. And here's the thing, Ari, you know, and you saw it even, say, comparing yesterday's Super Bowl commercials to a couple of years ago. Crypto is less popular now, right? Crypto used to be something the average person thought, hey, I can get into this, etc., etc. Now it seems like something for rich tech guys to get into.

27:25Julie K Brown:So even the kinds of programs that this administration is promoting for people by this coin, by that coin, it's not resonating with regular people. There are fixes to this. Trump could do something about his tariffs. Trump could do something about his foreign aggression, which, again, like I said, affects things like gas prices. But they're not doing any of those things. And that's what really frustrates people because he doesn't seem to have a plan for how to fix things. Yeah.

27:48Ari Melber:And on the UAE front, you know, we have learned over time from various mechanisms that investment, which is in Trump's company, what some call a bribery scream, a quid quid quid quid was secret for over a year. the Atlantic reports, until the journal first ferreted out. Having been caught red-handed, they write, Trump's trying to pretend to have freely disclosed it. And I'm just curious, do you think there is any ceiling here? He's gotten away with this over time. And the question that Bannon and others are asking is, well, if people are mad about their own economic situation, they might not, at least on the right, look as much away from how he's clearly self-dealing.

28:35Julie K Brown:Yeah, people aren't looking away. They're looking at it. And again, this is what's interesting. If you compare it to, say, Hunter Biden in the past, I think the American people have a general level of tolerance for family making money off of your name, but they don't like you making money off of your name. And it used to be we would have conversations about the emoluments clause, that Trump should have sort of vacated or separated himself from all of these businesses before he got into office, but he hasn't. So no matter what level you understand that it's at, whether it's the crypto, whether it's the UAE, whether it's Melania getting$40 million to make a documentary that almost nobody watched that dropped by 67 % after the first weekend in viewership, people are seeing money flowing into this White House, but they're not seeing it flow back out into their pockets.

29:20Julie K Brown:And that's a real issue.

29:22Ari Melber:Yeah, and in a comparison to the first term, for whatever reason, it might've been getting the hang of it, might've been worried about a future election. He was claiming and trying to sort of limit the foreign government money going into his hotels. And while there was plenty of criticism, I will say in all fairness, they put out a report and they gave some of the money to the side. And then people said, was it enough? Now, hundreds of millions of dollars tied to foreign governments and their sovereign wealth funds. I mean, put it aside, he's welcoming it in. And maybe it's a sad, greedy way to to try to cash in and what is a last term.

29:53Ari Melber:but it breaks all the promises he made, including telling his faithful that because he was, quote, already rich, he wouldn't have to worry about money. Now, I'm over on time, but I'll give you a pop quiz, Jason. You haven't seen our rundown, right? You don't know what the later segments are? I have a clue that the later segments are going to be talking about

30:11Julie K Brown:a super fantastic performance from last night. I've heard this. I'm not sure.

30:14Ari Melber:I'm guessing you enjoy it. That's right. You heard that even if you're not in the rundown, you heard the tease. Jason, as one of our part-time music scholars yourself, we're excited to tell you and the viewers we got that coming up I'm hoping to enjoy a little nostalgia from last night good to see you sir great as mentioned Bad Bunny going on offense at the Super Bowl it was fun we're going to relive a little part of it and I'm going to give you my breakdown on what matters here from the politics to the music

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32:21Ari Melber:At Sunday's Super Bowl, the football was often slow, but the fireworks came when singer Bad Bunny went on offense in that lively halftime performance. The Puerto Rican superstar topped the charts in 2025, so many people already know and love his music, clearly. But the halftime show brings the largest audience of the year. So there were certainly some people introduced just now to why Bad Bunny is so beloved in so many countries. This performance showed his dance skills, vocal range, a penchant for celebrating others from those salutes to the traditions of grandparents and family, wholesome picnics to the raucous street parties, and even a moment where he handed off that new Grammy award he just won to a child.

33:08Ari Melber:Benito was fun and inclusive, yet still pretty cool and at times edgy, celebrating his native Puerto Rico and its customs and its iconography while challenging the great power of oppression across colonial history.

33:48Ari Melber:Bad Bunny performed, as you see there in his native Spanish, just as so many other American acts perform around the world in their native English. Many saw this as a love letter to Puerto Rico at a time of well-documented political negativity and even hate towards that island and Latin people, whether they be legally settled in the U.S. or not, or coming and living from somewhere else. There were plenty of nods to economics and colonialism here. The show opened in a sugarcane field that so many people have toiled in, a reference to the territory's centuries-long colonization, as a time review notes.

34:26Ari Melber:It's a parallel to how U.S. grocery stores and restaurants also still rely on people toiling in the fields. Some are legal residents, some are not, but that, of course, continues in the fields today. something that is the backbone of America's food supply chain. Now, this choreography and pageantry wasn't just art imitating life. Many moments actually involved real life. There was a real Puerto Rican icon, Tanita, who actually runs one of the last remaining Caribbean social clubs in Brooklyn to this day, as Rolling Stone noted. And that came during the song Nueva York, which celebrates the contributions of Puerto Ricans in New York, just as so many appreciate Little Italy in New York, or Italians' contributions across American life.

35:15Ari Melber:The show highlighted dancers, and Benito himself at one point climbing up a kind of sparking power line pole as he sang El Apogon, a protest song that is quite specifically about the island's well-known infrastructure failures and blackouts. Puerto Rico has had very serious electrical power problems. They've been worsened by the Trump administration cuts to hurricane relief funding. And the performance really brought those songs to life. Music fans taking in the symbolism.

35:51Julie K Brown:The power line workers. That part right there was so beautiful because he's reminding people, yo, el apagón means the blackout. You know how many times families have to deal with not having electricity? Like the privilege of having electricity that works and how it's affected the island over and over and over.

36:12Ari Melber:And by the way, that is something to mark, to note, and yet still to dance or sing to. As so many musical traditions like the blues in America deal with reality as it is, the sad, the difficult, and yet still find uplift across that. Bad Bunny brought a lot of that together while also brandishing that gigantic Puerto Rican flag, which, we should note, was actually banned on the island for almost a decade, partly because that particular one is more associated with the political independence movement, which again goes to how America has treated this island and its people. It's a performance we saw that was political and joyful, that celebrated Bad Bunny's home, but also was generous of spirit in basically reminding people we all come from somewhere and there's a lot of movement in this hemisphere.

37:04Ari Melber:Some don't like that. And I guess, as with others watching the Super Bowl, they just have to take their L. Music journalist Noah Shackman, a former editor of the Rolling Stone magazine, writing in the Times, said, this was the cultural equivalent of raging about the end of the eight-track tape, referring to the Trumpian MAGA complaints. the change has already happened. And this sort of celebration of Puerto Rico on its own terms by such a favorite son comes, of course, after decades of well-known U.S. government interference across Latin America. So well beyond this island and the older colonial history, you have a lot of governments in the United States that have outright meddled or oppressed other countries in all of wider Latin America.

37:51Ari Melber:Those are the precursors to what we just started the year with, Donald Trump, basically extracting or kidnapping the current president of Venezuela, which is one of the countries that Bad Bunny shouted out. In the end, he had a message of love and unity, of a type of representation where he talked not just about America or a certain vision of Americans, but all the Americas.

38:24Ari Melber:Hawaii, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Panamá, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, República Dominicana, Jamaica, Itilas, Antillas, United States, Canada, and my motherland, my patria, Puerto Rico. Seguimos aquí. spiking a football that says, together we are America. What a different vision than what we are sometimes sold and told. Is it resonating? Yes. To record-breaking levels. We can tell you tonight this is on track to be the most watched halftime show ever, topping 130 million viewers. That's in the moment, basically. and we checked tonight, the halftime show itself, that's people interested in what Bad Bunny did separate from the whole game, has already passed 30 million views on YouTube where it is rising.

39:29Ari Melber:Bad Bunny has mainstream hits. Melodies that viewers might recognize from their kids or cars driving by.

39:44Ari Melber:And when you take it all in and you listen, some of those might have been familiar, like I say, others were deeper cuts. That includes his 2020 dance song, Yo Pereo Sola, which is an anthem about respecting women and their rights. On one level, it's a song that proclaims people simply have the right to dance, even if they're dancing alone. In other words, Esta canción celebra el respeto mucho y la independencia de bailar sola. If it's okay to use both languages sometimes. But I want to tell you tonight, on another level, like so much music and culture, there are other levels to that song. It invokes dancing as a parallel for the human spirit, for each person's independence and their value, and how respecting individuality is essential, but it can also be done, I believe, and I think the song gestures at this, it can be done together.

40:44Ari Melber:How fitting then. That he performed, I dance alone, surrounded by hundreds of dancers, as tens of thousands swayed in that crowd, and we now know over a hundred million watching around the world. Because it's possible to be yourself, as he said at the opening, to believe in yourself beyond your wildest imaginations, possible to dance alone and together. A touching moment of community, and maybe we all need it.

41:23Julie K Brown:Did I understand what Bad Bunny was saying in Spanish? Absolutely not. Did I enjoy the show? I did. Actually simulated the problems with our power grid in Puerto Rico.

41:36Ari Melber:On a stage built to sell beer trucks in Empire, he put a sugar cane plantation as a reminder that this country's wealth was harvested off of brown and black backs.

41:45Julie K Brown:After watching that performance, I feel like I've been adopted by Puerto Ricans.

41:49Ari Melber:Reactions pouring in in these first 24 hours since what is now a record-breaking halftime performance. Over 150 million people cumulatively saw it, and we have a special guest and a fitting one for this. Joining us from San Juan, Puerto Rico, is Resident Commissioner Pablo Jose Hernandez, Puerto Rico's representative in Congress. Welcome.

42:08Julie K Brown:Hi, nice to be with you. Greetings from the warm, tropical climate of Puerto Rico.

42:12Ari Melber:Hey, hey. Tell us what the show meant to you and, of course, the island you represent. And perhaps anything that stood out that not everyone might have noticed.

42:22Julie K Brown:It was a source of incredible pride, a fountain of optimism in an island where we've struggled with pessimism over the past few decades. It's everybody feels very patriotic today, very proud to be Puerto Rican, which is something that coexists with being an American and very proud of being an American as well in the broader sense. You know, the implication that America is not just the United States of America, but that America goes from the northwesternmost point of Alaska to the southeasternmost point of Argentina. And it's a sense of unity, of purpose, and of collective joy that we haven't felt in a long time.

43:08Ari Melber:You know, the NFL, the show, the ads, there's so much there that is materialism and trying to get people to spend money. I think that's well known. What did you think of something that Bad Bunny's done in his album imagery, in his residency, but was clearly on display here for a larger audience? taking the ordinary and making it exalted and special, things that are affordable or accessible to most, right down to the white plastic chairs that any family might gather on, the street scenes. What did you think of that touch?

43:43Julie K Brown:His attention to detail is very striking. You know, my wife and I were commenting this morning at the brief moment where he wakes up a little boy who's asleep in two chairs at a wedding. If you go to any wedding in Puerto Rico, you'll always find the kids sleeping in two chairs around the dancing area. It's so typical of the island. And the little house, the way it's furnished, the way it's built, the old men playing dominoes, the snow cones. I will say the snow cones were round. Puerto Rico, they're triangular. Miller. You could tell that he put a lot of effort into making sure every detail was right.

44:27Julie K Brown:And that's very moving. It also evokes a lot of nostalgia and feelings for Latinos. You know, I was viewing this from Puerto Rico, but many Latinos in the States are viewing this from the States in the cold, reminiscing about their life back home and their family back home and their countries of origin. And it brings back those memories. So it brings a lot of people together.

44:49Ari Melber:40 seconds left what does it mean that he's also affirmatively telling this story not just on the back heel of the political debates or when the island has needed help as other parts of our country have needed help in disasters but in a positive sense

45:03Julie K Brown:the island benefits from permissibility and what he did with the electric poles was highly significant and it's something that I hope will draw attention to our energy crisis and trigger action from the US Congress

45:15Ari Melber:and the President's Administration Understood. Pablo Jose Hernandez, we thought of you. I don't know who you would say represents Puerto Rico more, you or Bad Bunny. It might be close, though. You officially, but he popularly.

45:30Julie K Brown:I really hope you don't put it up for a vote.

45:34Ari Melber:Right. Well, but you both represent it officially, and so we thought to turn to you on a night like this. Thanks so much. I hope you'll come back. Thank you. Great.

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