Trump WH on Defense Over Iran Concessions

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0:4321 plus in present and select states. First online real money wager only. Minimum$5 wager required for seven consecutive days. $5 first deposit required. Bonus issued as non-withdrawable bonus bets, which expires seven days after receipt. Restrictions apply. See full terms at fanduel.com slash sportsbook. Gambling problem? call 1-800-GAMBLER or 1-800-MY-RESET. Welcome to The Beat. We have a lot that we're tracking tonight. We'll be joined by Democratic Senator Cory Booker with Trump facing pressure on everything from Iran to the economy and a seemingly small matter that has blown up in Trump's face, the reflecting pool debacle, the new embarrassments, and later Andrew Weissman is here on the DOJ's many problems.

1:21We begin, though, with President Trump and his Iran deal. In essence, what we have are an Obama-era style deal that, of all people, Donald Trump was the one who scrapped. So it's kind of a double strike there, if you want to think about it that way. Iran faces these economic benefits that they would receive, which they didn't get under the original Obama deal. There's questions about what this war was supposed to accomplish. Certainly, it didn't reach its goals, and Americans angry about the cost, as Trump hasn't even managed to completely wrap this all up. J.D. Vance claims that Iran has now agreed to international inspections of the nuclear program, but Iran says they haven't.

2:05If Iran were to allow inspectors, the deal would restore, let's be clear, a safeguard from Obama's deal with Tehran, the Washington Post notes, which Trump threw out in his first term. So they're literally trying to claw their way back to something that Trump canceled for reasons only he can explain. The big picture, not much has changed from the war, meaning the U.S. has not gotten much out of this. We know what we didn't get and we know what we paid for. The country's nuclear program was not eliminated. Same on the ballistic missiles. And while it's easy to look back and do Monday morning quarterbacking, The fact is that Iran's aging authoritarian regime has been replaced by a younger hardline authoritarian regime.

2:47It's not only endured. Many analysts say this is worse than where we started. The proxies are a threat and conservatives and MAGA voices are hitting the Trump deal. Now that it's over these many days become clear what it is and what it isn't. Despite all the denials, the MOU is a massive cash cow to the Iranian regime. Stop cozying up to and telling us that the enemy regime in Iran is now more rational, more moderate, and a regime that we can deal with. It's a complete capitulation to the Iranian regime. They're better off than they were before the hostilities began. And I hate to say this, in this deal, the biggest loser is the United States and India.

3:33America has given up all of its leverage in this situation. This doesn't feel like a victory. And if that is what MAGA hawks are saying, you, of course, can imagine where everyone else falls. Donald Trump has made a political career out of lying and bluster and even the threats that we saw revived here in these last few days against Iran. And there are times where on the home front that has worked to win arguments or even an election or two. But war is a different matter. And it seems that even when Donald Trump found that he and J.D. Vance needed an off ramp, needed to give concessions and gave the concessions, they are still.

4:13And what can only be described as a failure of strategy and messaging. They are still at this very hour unable to wrap this thing up, even with the retreat. And that's where we start tonight with David Rothkopf, a foreign policy expert, Council and Foreign Relations member, host of the Deep State podcast. David, this thing looks worse as it goes on, and we can't say from a reporting perspective that it's set and done and over, can we? Your thoughts tonight. Well, it looks worse as it goes on because it gets worse as it goes on. It's very clear there's no real agreement. And J.D. Vance's mission is, if you will, in the language of the military, kind of operation, put lipstick on a pig, right?

4:55Because this war has cost thousands of lives, cost 13 American lives, cost American bases and material, probably has already cost$130 billion to the U.S. may long-term costs be something in the neighborhood, according to one Harvard expert, about a trillion dollars with interest payments and higher costs and so on and so forth. And Iran is strategically stronger now. The countries in the region have sustained$60 billion in damage. And of course, the deal we're getting looks a lot like we are on our knees pleading for a deal. You know, during the JCPOA, which you mentioned, Iran got no cash until there was actually a deal.

5:38In that case, the cash they got was assets of their own that were freed up. It was about$30 billion in total after the deal got done. But in this case, today, the Treasury Department said, we're going to lift sanctions on oil, which should net them something like$9,$10 billion over the next 60 days. There's a$300 billion rebuilding promise in this deal. There's probably$24 billion in assets being relieved. This is many, many multiples of the cash that Iran would have gotten on the last deal. And they're getting it now before they promised anything. There's just one, you know, if you may, there's just one positive way to look at it.

6:22And that's, you know, maybe we'll call that Operation First Rule of Holes. Trump was in a mess. He had no way out of the mess. And putting lipstick on a pig is the only way that he, with his ego, can live with this. And frankly, given how bad the war was, maybe, you know, maybe we ought to be grateful and grit our teeth and move away from what was a catastrophe. it. What does it tell you, David, that from Trump on down, including Vance, they don't seem to know where the lines are and what they have? I mean, that's come across, as I mentioned, in the messaging, let alone the substance. Well, look, this administration effectively shut down the NSC.

7:09It got rid of its nuclear experts. Most of our diplomatic, high-level diplomatic posts around the world are empty. The president doesn't like to have experts. The people he's had negotiating this, Vance, Witkoff, Kushner, are not nuclear experts. This is very, very complicated stuff. So basically for Trump, it just comes down to, do I look okay? You know, can I make it look like this is a win? And the problem is he can't, you know, he can't control himself. The very, very first paragraph of this short MOU was, the sides won't threaten each other. And before the MOU was signed, Trump started threatening Iran.

7:50And so, you know, he's clearly very ambivalent about this because he hates to look weak. But I think he knows that despite everything he says, Iran holds all the cards. The U.S. is not going to go back to war with Iran. And the Iranians know it because there's no political will in the U.S. 70 percent of the American people are against this war. In the moment I have left for you, 60 to 80 seconds, largely the markets have shrugged this and other bad news off under the view that it'll eventually get worked out. Is that sort of cautious optimism still as of this hour, in your view, well placed? I don't think the markets are making a rational analysis of what's going to happen.

8:38I think the markets, people who are playing the markets, are making an analysis of what they think other people will bet over the course of the next couple of weeks. I think they think people will bet this is getting a little better. And I think that in terms of the longer term issues, that's not going to have the effect that it probably ought to have in the course of each day's trading. Yeah, because that's just one of the, again, we look at the reality indicators. And as you said, getting Donald Trump away from his endless, you know, warmongering ego games and just getting us out of this thing is better than continuing this thing, which is a separate point than how bad this thing was done and whether we ever needed to start it.

9:24And so you have that kind of mood globally. But again, we're watching all of it, David. Thank you for being here. I've got a lot coming up. So our thanks to David, Senator Cory Booker standing by, a big player on all these issues. We're going to talk to him live. Andrew Weissman is here. but next we go to the 14 million dollars that trump blew on the reflecting pool i'm back with you on a big night in 90 seconds is it possible for ai to work in the enterprise the short answer is yes the long answer is oh yes users can pick the ai providers they prefer and you can decide which data is off limits, monitor all AI activity, and control every detail.

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11:27We started with some of the most important news in the world. We turn to what Donald Trump's problem is, what he thinks is important, the pool drama. $14 million to renovate the reflecting pool that now has these algae problems and has turned green. A monumental mess outside the Lincoln Memorial. The president says work is being done to fix the reflecting pool after green algae and peeling sealant appeared last week. National Park Service workers scrambling to fix the iconic reflecting pool. It might be the worst pool party ever. President Trump says the reflecting pool will probably need to be drained again.

12:07Trump now claims that vandalism is to blame, but he's provided no evidence. The president claimed that some of them were pouring toxic chemicals into the water. They say they were just touching the paint. It is embarrassing to have the wartime commander in chief floating theories that charitably have no evidence or sound like they're false to make up for the way that the pool problem is not getting any better. Meanwhile, D.C. attorney Janine Pirro says she will work on the vandalism theory and issued a citation to a cyclist arrested. There's a former Olympian who said they didn't harm the pool.

12:43I didn't vandalize anything. I reached in there. I was able to grab a peeling piece. It was attached to the bottom. I didn't remove anything. In other words, being a person in Washington walking around and touching the pool is not the same as, of course, sabotaging it. Trump says toxic chemicals were poured in the water, though. Park workers did add hydrogen peroxide to the water, but that was on government orders to try to stem the algae problem. The conservative Leaning Wall Street Journal has noted hydrogen peroxide can also be used as a paint remover. I'm joined now by Wendy Tolliver, an analyst and author of A More Perfect Party.

13:15We don't pick the stories all the time. This is a real thing in America. What does it tell you about Trump's priorities right now? I think he's creating a lot of self-inflicted hardship, Ari, and it honestly raises the question of why can't he leave things alone that have been functioning completely fine for decades upon decades without him interfering? Because so much of what Trump touches turns into a mess that yields embarrassing, poor results. You use that word repeatedly, and Ari, it is embarrassing, and we have evidence that Trump is embarrassed by it, by how much he's been popping up on social media by the claims he's throwing around without evidence around vandalism and destruction of government property.

13:58And Ari, when I hear those words, I think about when we actually witnessed that as a nation on January 6th, I think about the gravity and the reality of people who left the Trump event on the mall and went to the Capitol building to literally destroy government property, breaking windows, bursting through doors, fighting with police officers. This doesn't match up to that. But Donald Trump is doing everything he can, at least online, to try to create this narrative and distract from the fact that, as you mentioned, he's not paying attention to the clear issues that are impacting this nation right now or the needs of the American public.

14:33Yeah. I'm going to play a little more of it because there's the story, which is silly. And then there's something that a lot of operatives and politicos have pointed out. we're not looking at Trump 1.0 or Trump 2016. When he was talking about the wall, it was misleading. They didn't build a wall. But he was talking about something that did relate to external reality, what we might call the world beyond Donald Trump's petty obsessions. Now the messaging is about this stuff. And his own supporters, of course, have said, and we see it in polls, that the priorities are off. We have the gas. We have the war.

15:10Here's some more of the way the story is going, which is not great for him. I think it smells worse than it looks. That's just, it's not what Trump promised. I think it was a gigantic waste of taxpayer dollars. These tax dollars could be spent on almost anything more important than lies and solutions that don't even work. You heard some more about this? I mean, cleaning up and making it blue? Seems that nature have taken over. you know Juanita projection is when you look at somebody else and you assume they look at the world the way you do uh and in politics a lot of Trump critics felt like oh everyone must see what they see and whether you like it or not there was a period of time in this country where other people didn't see him as petty as lying as these other problems and now what do you think about the fact that stories like this and the more important story we led with um have a lot of people looking at Trump the way many of his critics always have as a kind of a embarrassing failure that would be comical if he didn't have so much impact on our lives.

16:19If he didn't have so much impact and if he wasn't spending taxpayer dollars, Ari, 14 million on this project. I saw an estimate on the Qatari plane taking and requiring a billion dollars to retrofit it to be able to secure Trump and transport him safely as a part of Air Force one or even the billion dollar request Donald Trump made for the ballroom. All of this is connected into the broader theme of how Donald Trump is using U.S. resources to to do these passion projects. And I appreciate voters questioning it because I'm sure they would have preferred any single portion of that money to go to increasing access to affordable health care, to increasing access to affordable child care, to addressing food insecurity across the country or housing issues across the country.

17:05And I feel like this is a hefty drumbeat that absolutely we're going to hear more and more about going into the midterms when people are looking at their real world, their reality, their wallets, which Donald Trump has told reporters again and again he doesn't consider the American situation financially or what's going on with their wallets when he's making decisions, including frivolous decisions about this reflecting pool. Yeah, all fair points. One of the things to Oliver, thank you very much. We have Senator Cory Booker standing by. It's a newsworthy guest, and he's going to discuss, among other things, why Trump has gone basically full Obama on the Iran deal.

17:43But we also have Weissman, Andrew Weissman, rejoining us on this important issue, the revenge cases, the DOJ losing. That's next.

17:59Tonight we covered these war negotiations. We discussed some of the embarrassing setbacks for Trump in D.C. Then there are other things that the Trump administration doesn't want in the news that are kind of a little bit below the radar. And we want to bring these important stories to you because the DOJ is losing again. A federal judge in Minnesota is quashing efforts to misuse subpoenas at top Democrats. They are Walls and Frey saying these are abusive and retaliatory. And all of this is basically trying to criminalize those elected lawmaker and governor's positions about immigration. The ruling notes that initiating a criminal investigation to harass opponents or coerce them into taking official action is a, quote, blatantly unlawful and unethical use of the grand jury process.

18:45So what you see there is a judge saying the Trump DOJ is breaking the law. Many of these revenge cases have sputtered out or met these kind of scathing rebukes. The DOJ still pressing on and it's trying to get other cities through carrot or stick to join in the immigration agenda. We've seen an increased ICE presence, of course, in some cities. But Minnesota is a place where Trump basically lost and was beat back by the combined power of protests and other lawful pushback, including what I just showed you, that the governor and the mayor there decided to basically lead their constituents the way they chose.

19:24The Attorney General Blanche slamming Chicago officials on similar grounds today. It is shocking. It is shocking that leadership won't want nothing to do with any help from the federal government. And the governor, what's he saying about it? He's probably going to come out and criticize President Trump. That's his answer. And it's, you know, look, we're going to keep on doing our job in Chicago and everywhere else, but we wish we had better support from leadership. Now, this acting attorney general is welcome to wish for better support. But all the way back to the founding of this nation, which, of course, we celebrate next weekend, there has been lawful separate authority from the local to the national.

20:08Now, in many eras, it was considered more conservative to prioritize local authority. Donald Trump and his minions here are either not conservative or just want to abuse, as the judge said, these processes to get through threats what they couldn't get through democracy. This is the intersection of law and democracy. And we bring in Andrew Weissman, of course, FBI general counsel, former former prosecutor, author. Your views on what we're seeing tonight, Andrew, because there was so much heat and attention on Minnesota. I mentioned the administration's moved on. They don't necessarily want to score attention for these losses, these L's, if you will.

20:46And yet the dogged long-term battles have at times had real pushback. Yeah, well, the immediate ruling here is exactly like the one that we saw that Judge Boesberg issued when he quashed the grand jury subpoenas about Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve, finding they were taken in bad faith. This is something it's hard to explain to the audience how shocking it is that the DOJ can't meet even that low threshold of being in good faith. That's just the norm in normal Republican and Democratic DOJ's Department of Justices. So here the judge found in Minnesota that six grand jury subpoenas were issued in bad faith.

21:40And importantly to your clip about Todd Blanche, has very choice words about Todd Blanche saying that he said that they, the Department of Justice, are not going to put up with the threats and the terrorist, terrorist activity of Governor Walz and his minions. And then shortly after that, these grand jury subpoenas were issued and the Department of Justice went forward. And the judge today is saying this is in bad faith. It was in retaliation for people doing nothing wrong, just asserting their rights. Remember, the states, they can't interfere with the federal government's law enforcement processes, but they have zero obligation to cooperate in them.

22:29They're two separate entities. And so here, the judge, really, it was a smackdown and very, very choice words about Todd Blanchett, whose confirmation hearing is coming up. You know, you mentioned how strong it was. I want to read from the ruling where the government, The DOJ has tons of advantages here. This is not a random lawyer or law firm. And yet the criticism is they couldn't get anywhere on the evidence. It says the evidence that the child subpoenas were issued for unlawful reasons, meaning DOJ is recklessly breaking the law, is, according to this independent judge, overwhelming. DOJ struggled without success to identify a single plausible investigatory justification for the subpoenas.

23:15at the risk of doubling down on this point, Andrew, how bad is that? This is something that I served for 21 years in the Department of Justice for Republican and Democratic administrations. There is a lot of real crime to investigate. And you go after that. Now, sometimes you make a case, sometimes you don't make a case. But you're trying to bring a righteous case and you're engaging in a righteous investigation. Under normal administrations, that's what happens. And no judge says you don't have the ability to issue a grand jury subpoena. It's such an easy thing to do. Between the Judge Boesberg decision saying that that investigation to the Federal Reserve was retaliatory and against the law.

24:09And now this it is it is such an indictment of the Department of Justice and the Trump administration writ large. But again, I really think it's a it's an important focus because we now have Todd Blanch coming up for his confirmation to be the attorney general. And it is impossible to read this. And if you think this judge is right and got the facts right, as I do, and to be clear, your point is that the DOJ in this case could not articulate a legitimate basis for the case. That is one more reason that Todd Blanche, I think, should have a really hard confirmation battle, because how is he going to defend what the Department of Justice has done under his leadership?

25:00Yeah, I think that's fair. And again, that's a nonpartisan point. You have some retiring Republican senators who've been a little more voluble. You have some who are more upset about this happening to Jerome Powell than other individuals. But when we put the chart back up on the screen, longtime Beat viewers will notice we update this and have put it up more than just about any other item this year because it's actually completely overwhelming. This is Putin style pursuits of all of these individuals who had the audacity to exercise their First Amendment rights. The Minnesota case, as you see, quashed.

25:37That's new tonight on the on the on the green on the right is another setback for DOJ. But if these Republicans in the Senate and, of course, the rest of the Senate care at all about having free and fair elections, once there's this many opponents attacked unlawfully, you have to do more than just criticize it. There has to be sanction, as you say, for someone like Blanche not getting the job and the DOJ getting the message. Or we're going to have this all the way through the coming elections, which is exactly what happens in Russia, which is anyone challenging Putin ends up at a minimum under investigation.

26:12Yeah. And I mean, you can add to this. This is the fellow who interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell and, you know, had softball questions. And right after that interview, she ended up in a camp with with access to, of all things, a puppy, according to the reports. And this is somebody who is a convicted, convicted abuser of minors and women and was found to have been really the right hand and an abuser herself with Jeffrey Epstein. That's also under his watch. You have on that chart six members of Congress who this administration, under Todd Blanche's leadership, they sought to indict them for, as you said, exercising their First Amendment activity in actually speaking out and saying what was true about the fact that people in the military have an obligation not to follow illegal orders.

27:16Remember that illegal, not they weren't saying don't follow legal orders. And so there's just so there's such a litany of issues for Todd Blanch. And I totally agree with you that if confirmed, it is really saying we, the Senate, are giving a stamp of approval for this kind of conduct going forward. And that's the kind of thing where, you know, the Senate, you would hope, would think about sort of the goose gander problem. If they're going to think this is appropriate for the DOJ to do in a Republican administration with respect to Democratic members of Congress, would they really think it's appropriate in the reverse situation where a Democratic president were doing this to Republican members of Congress?

28:01Of course not. It's just inappropriate under any Democratic rules of the game and rules of the law. Yeah. Andrew Weissman, thank you for your clarity in the breakdown. One question here is what are Democrats in Congress doing about it? Well, we'll ask Senator Booker next.