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About this Episode
Hosts & Guests
Transcript
The past two days have seen a growing struggle between Democrats who are demanding accountability
from the Trump administration and Republicans trying to hide what the administration is
up to.
Last night, Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat of Oregon, published a letter he sent to Director
of the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, John Ratcliffe.
Wyden is the longest-serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and is a careful,
hardworking, and dogged member of Congress.
When Wyden speaks, people listen.
Ratcliffe was an attack dog for Trump during his first impeachment trial and had no experience
with intelligence before Trump forced his nomination to become director of national
intelligence through the Senate.
Now he is Trump's appointee to the directorship of the CIA.
Wyden's letter to Ratcliffe said,
I write to alert you to a classified letter I sent you earlier today in which I express
deep concerns about CIA activities.
Thank you for your attention to this important matter.
When Wyard, senior reporter Dell Cameron, who covers different forms of surveillance, commented,
I don't like this.
Wyden reposted the comment.
Wyden is a long history of alerting the public in whatever way he can when something bad
is going on that he cannot reveal because of its classified nature.
This letter appears to be a way to alert the public while also notifying Ratcliffe that
the CIA director will not be able in the future to deny that he received Wyden's letter.
Also last night, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat of New York, and House
Minority Leader Hakim Jeffries, a Democrat of New York, sent Senate Majority Leader John
Thun, a Republican of South Dakota, and House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican of Louisiana,
a letter outlining demands Democrats want incorporated into a measure that will appropriate
more funds for the Department of Homeland Security or DHS.
DHS is the department that contains immigration and customs enforcement or ICE and Border Patrol.
Democrats insisted on stripping DHS funding out of the bills to fund the government for
2026 after ICE and Border Patrol agents began to inflict terror on the country.
Those demands are pretty straightforward, but if written into law is required for the
release of funds, they would change behavior.
The Democrats want federal agents to enter private homes only with a judicial warrant,
as was policy until the administration produced a secret memo saying that DHS officials
themselves could sign off on raids.
They want agents to stop wearing masks and to have their names, agencies, and unique
ID numbers visible on their uniforms, as law enforcement officers do.
They want an end to racial profiling, that is, agents detaining individuals on the basis
of their skin color, place of employment, or language, and to raids of so-called sensitive
sites, medical facilities, schools, childcare facilities, churches, polling places, and courts.
They want agents to be required to have a reasonable use of force policy and to be removed
during an investigation if they violate it.
They want federal agents to coordinate with local and state governments, and for those
governments to have jurisdiction over federal agents who break the law.
They want DHS detention facilities to have the same standards of any detention facility,
and for detainees to have access to their lawyers.
They want states to be able to sue if those conditions are not met, and they want Congress
members to have unscheduled access to the centers to oversee them.
They want body cameras to be used for accountability, but prohibited for gathering and storing information
about protesters, and they want federal agents to have standardized uniforms like those
of regular law enforcement, not paramilitaries.
As Schumer and Jeffries wrote, these are common sense measures that protect Americans
constitutional rights and ensure responsible law enforcement, and should apply to all
federal activity, even without Democrats demanding them.
One has said the demands are very unrealistic and unserious, and Senator John Barrasso
of Wyoming, the second-ranking Senate Republican, called them radical and extreme, and far
left wish list.
But Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, a Republican of Pennsylvania, agreed that agents need body
cameras, they need to remove masks, they need proper training, they need to be conducting
operations that are consistent with their mission.
Trump's determination to prove that he actually won the 2020 election continues to drive the
administration.
This morning, in a rambling and often crazed speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump
told attendees, they rigged the second election, I had to win it, I had to win it, I needed
it for my own ego, I would have had a bad ego for the rest of my life.
Now I have a really big ego though, beating these lunatics was incredible, right?
What a great feeling, winning every swing state, winning the popular vote.
The first time you know, they said I didn't win the popular vote, I did.
The reality that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016
by about 2.9 million votes explains Trump's lie that undocumented immigrants voted in
the election.
Trump also offered yet another explanation for the presence of Director of National Intelligence
Tulsi Gabbard at the FBI raid on a warehouse holding ballots and other election-related materials
in Fulton County, Georgia, saying that Attorney General Pam Bondy wanted Gabbard there.
Real Stewart, Aaron Banco and Jonathan Landay of Reuters reported yesterday that a team
working for Gabbard seized voting machines and data in Puerto Rico.
In what sources told the Reuters reporters was an attempt to prove that Venezuela had hacked
the voting machines there.
The reporters say that Gabbard's team was looking at whether the government of Venezuela's
President Nicolas Maduro hacked the election.
There is no evidence for this theory, but it has strong adherence among Trump's followers.
Legal and political analysts, including Asha Rangapa, Norm Oranstein and Allison Gill,
have noted that administration officials might force Maduro, who is currently in prison
in the U.S. after a raid in which U.S. forces took him and his wife into custody, to cooperate
on this lie.
In the breakdown, Gill notes that while Trump has no role in elections, the Supreme Court
has said that he must be given deference in the conduct of foreign affairs.
He has relied on that deference to justify tariffs, immigration sweeps, attacks on small
boats, and so on.
It is not a stretch to think he is now trying to interfere with the 2026 election by claiming
elections are part of foreign affairs.
After Mark Warner of Virginia, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee,
told the Reuters reporters, what's most alarming here is that director Gabbard's own team
acknowledges there was no evidence of foreign interference, yet they seized voting machines
and election data anyway.
Absent of foreign nexus, intelligence agencies have absolutely no lawful role in domestic
election administration.
This is exactly the kind of overreach Congress wrote the law to prevent, and it raises profound
questions about whether our intelligence tools are being abused.
Tonight, Matt Berg of Crooked Media reported that the FBI has summoned state election
officials from across the country for an unusual briefing on preparations for the midterms
on February 25th.
A top election official from one state told Berg that it's the strangest thing in the
world.
The FBI official who sent the email, Kelly Harteman, used the title FBI election executive.
When Berg asked the FBI for an explanation, the spokesperson wrote, thank you for reaching
out.
The FBI has no comment.
On Monday, Dustin Voles and C. Ryan Barber of the Wall Street Journal reported that Gabbard
had bottled up a May 2025 whistleblower complaint without transmitting it to congressional intelligence
committees as required by law.
Congress members learned about the complaint in November, but the government maintained
it was too highly classified to be shared.
This was deliberate obfuscation.
The gang of eight, which is made up of the leaders from both parties in the House and
Senate and the leaders of the intelligence committees from both parties, was set up precisely
so that Congress could always be informed of classified information.
Today, Gabbard handed over the complaint after heavily redacting it under claims of
executive privilege, which means the president is involved.
The administration's determination to hide the actions of its own members while exposing
opponents has shown dramatically in the redactions in the Epstein files that have been released
to date.
Officials neglected to redact identifying information about survivors and even sexually explicit
photographs of them while blacking out the names of apparent friends and co-conspirators
of the sex offender.
Trump's name appears throughout the files and in an attempt to center former President
Bill Clinton, rather than Trump, in public discussion of the Epstein files, House Oversight
Committee Chair James Comer, a Republican of Kentucky, has subpoenaed Clinton and former
First Lady and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to testify under oath.
He says he doesn't have to do the same for Trump about his relationship with Epstein
because Trump is answering questions for reporters.
Yesterday, the Clinton's agreed to testify.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton posted on social media, for six months, we engaged
Republicans on the Oversight Committee in good faith.
We told them what we know under oath.
They ignored all of it.
They moved the goal posts and turned accountability into an exercise in distraction.
So let's stop the games.
If you want this fight, Representative Comer, let's have it in public.
You'd love to talk about transparency.
There's nothing more transparent than a public hearing, cameras on.
We will be there.
Forcing a former President to testify under threat of contempt establishes the precedent
that Congress can force past presidents and their spouses and families to testify under
threat of criminal charges.
Scott Wong, Melanie Zanona, Sahil Kapoor, and Ryan Nobles of NBC News reported that
Democrats are taking note.
Representative Ted Lu, a Democrat of California, told them, we are absolutely going to have
Donald Trump testify under oath.
Maxwell Frost, a Democrat of Florida, who sits on the Oversight Committee, said that forcing
Clinton to testify does indeed set a precedent.
And we will follow it, he said, Donald Trump, all of his kids, everybody.
Representative Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat of Florida, who flusters Comer so badly,
Comer once cracked and told him he looked like a smurf, a childish insult Moskowitz
needled him over for months, said that after Democrats regain control of the House, Republicans
will blame Comer for what comes next.
The folks here are going to run with it everywhere.
It will be crypto.
It will be their business.
It will be all the investments in the Middle East.
It'll be the Katari plane.
It's going to be the latest thing with the UAE.
It's going to be all of it.
They are giving a license to these new chairman in January, and that will be Comer's legacy.
So when Don Jr. and Eric and their children are all here, they can thank James Comer for
that.
It seems likely Trump has already figured out that forcing Clinton to testify opens up
some avenues he would rather leave closed.
When asked about the Clinton's testimony at the end of the month, he answered, I think
it's a shame to be honest, I always liked him.
Hillary was a very capable woman.
I hate to see it in many ways.
Another court case might tear away some of the administration's obfuscation as well.
Zoe Tillman of Bloomberg reported today that U.S. District Judge Theodore Chwang of
the District of Maryland has denied the government's request to block depositions of Elon Musk
and two other former officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development, or
USAID, in a lawsuit charging Musk with unlawfully dismantling the agency.
Because Musk and the other two likely have personal firsthand knowledge of the fact relevant
and essential to the resolution of this case, Chwang said the testimony could go forward.
While courts have generally said that high-ranking government officials may not be deposed or
called to testify about their reasons for taking official actions, absent extraordinary
circumstances, Chwang said it was not clear that Musk and the other two were, in fact,
high-ranking government officials.
At the same time, the case appeared to meet the criteria for extraordinary circumstances.
The government employees who brought the case argued that Musk personally dismantled USAID
when he had no authority to do so.
The judge noted that the government's failure to produce documents that explained the decisions
killing the agency, as required, suggested that the decisions had been made orally.
So the testimony of Musk and the other two men is crucial to the case.
Finally, the last existing arms treaty between the U.S. and Russia expired today.
The new start treaty of 2011 capped the number of nuclear warheads each country could maintain.
Trump's account on social media posted that instead of extending the terms of the existing
treaty, we should have our nuclear experts work on a new, improved, and modernized treaty
that can last long into the future.
Until that time, though, there is no longer a cap on nuclear weapons for the U.S. or Russia.
Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson.
It was produced at SoundScape Productions, Data Massachusetts, recorded with music composed
by Michael Moss.
