transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] To stay up to date on all the news that you need to know, there's no better place than right here on The DSR Network. And there's no better way to enjoy The DSR Network than by becoming a member. Members enjoy an ad-free listening experience, access to our Discord community, exclusive content, early episode access, and more. Use code DSR26 for a 25% off discount on sign up at thedsrnetwork.com. That's code DSR26 at thedsrnetwork.com/buy. Thank you and enjoy the show.

Speaker 2:
[00:55] Hello, and welcome to The DSR Daily. I'm David Rothkopf, joined by Riley Fessler and Minna Stein. We're here to talk about the news. We have a whole weekend that we could talk about. Weekend went like super fast. Dad, have you noticed weekends getting shorter? Do you think the Trump administration is like shaving minutes off of weekends and giving them to billionaires?

Speaker 3:
[01:18] It wouldn't surprise me in the least.

Speaker 1:
[01:22] Nothing would surprise me at this point.

Speaker 2:
[01:24] Yeah, well, that's the thing, you know. As the exploited working class, the billionaires own our time anyway, right?

Speaker 3:
[01:31] That's very true.

Speaker 2:
[01:32] Power to the people. Yeah, exactly. Well, let's make the best of it. Go on, throw a story out there. Give us your sense of it. Well, we'll take it from here. Let's go.

Speaker 1:
[01:46] Well, as predicted, the US-Iran ceasefire is on the brink of collapse.

Speaker 2:
[01:52] Wait a minute, I thought the war was over. We were celebrating on Friday.

Speaker 1:
[01:56] Perhaps we celebrated prematurely because, who else? But US Marines seized an Iranian cargo ship, leading Tehran to withdraw from the schedule to peace talks in Pakistan and vowing retaliation. Of course, oil prices surged 6 percent in response to the escalation. Both nations have now traded more threats about strikes against civilian infrastructure.

Speaker 2:
[02:23] Then some Iranians said, well, maybe we should talk anyway. The war is not in our interests. Then Trump is like, yeah, we should. Here's the thing, we're in a little bit of a game. What you're seeing happening with stopping these ships and saying things are good and saying things are bad, it's all a negotiation. You think the negotiation is happening in Islamabad, but it's not. It's actually happening in the Strait of Hormuz. It's happening in the airways, and it happens in a variety of ways. For example, the Iranians know that the thing that Trump doesn't have is time, so they want to drag it out. The other thing the Iranians know is that the thing that is really intolerable to Trump is pushing up the price of oil and making markets go down. They know that every time they push back, it gives them a little bit more leverage. Trump, on the other hand, still seems to think that he can bully the Iranians into a deal, even though that has not worked at any time. Where is it going to end up? I think Trump's pretty close to doing a mediocre deal that the Iranians will take. Because I think we have to remember that the one big thing that Trump has talked about, which is getting rid of nukes, having the Iranians promise not to produce a nuclear weapon, is their national policy. He just is too dumb or obtuse to acknowledge it. It was what they agreed to in the JCPOA in 2015. So getting them to agree to that, no big deal. If they can agree to something they've agreed to in the past and get a bunch of cash released into their system, good for them. As far as the other promises, keeping the straight open, if they can keep the straight open and make some money off of it, which they were never doing before, then that's a win for them. The deal will somehow smell out somewhere around that. Who's going to go negotiate? There were, you know, that went back and forth over the weekend. It would be a team. The VP would go. The VP wouldn't go. Trump would go. Trump wouldn't go. There was a team. All optics. I suspect this week there will be meetings. There will be talks. There will be some progress. There will be some pushback. I think, you know, what I would advise everybody is to have some perspective, understand that both sides want it over. Trump a little more than the Iranians. That will lead to the nature of the deal. And if you want to understand a little bit more about this, I wrote a whole Substack column yesterday. And the five things about the war that aren't really getting played up, that I think are really, really important. So that's David Rothkopf's Substack and called Need to Know. So go look at that and share it with your friends. Okay, Mena, what do you have?

Speaker 3:
[05:40] Well, Joe DiGenova, a former Trump campaign lawyer and a man instrumental in trying to overturn the election in 2020, has been appointed to lead a wide-ranging federal investigation targeting officials who previously investigated Donald Trump. The probe, which is being overseen in where else but Florida, aims to examine claims of a long-running conspiracy, conspiracy, quote, unquote.

Speaker 2:
[06:11] You sound a little bitter about your home state.

Speaker 3:
[06:15] It's just like with these stories, one day there's a win for Florida, and then what is it, the saying, one step forward, three steps back.

Speaker 2:
[06:23] Yeah. Well, in the case-

Speaker 3:
[06:25] Story is like 10 steps back.

Speaker 2:
[06:27] Look, it's just what it is. Trump is based in Florida. If Trump could move the National White House to Mar-a-Lago poolside, he would do it. He would make it all very Trumpy. He would rename Florida Trump state, and he would rename it the United States of Trump. He would do whatever he could get away with, and this is really, I mean, that sounds like, oh yeah, overstatement. This is pretty egregious, because Joe DiGenova, completely corrupt lawyer who is one of the president's tools is now going to conduct an investigation. Not into the crimes Trump committed, not following up on all the evidence of those crimes that independent lawyers and investigators from the FBI and other places came up with, but to investigate the investigators, to punish them for honoring their oaths and for seeking justice. Now what will happen? Will he indict some people and have those people end up winning in court? Yeah, that's what's going to happen. Will he make those people spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to defend themselves? Yeah, because what they're trying to do is penalize them in the court of public opinion, penalize them in their pocketbooks. It's pretty darned disgusting. You can expect more of this also later this week from Cash Patel. The underfire FBI director who has said, we're going to go after some of the president's opponents this week. That's his desperate attempt to stay in the job that he currently has. They all realize what Trump wants is to use the police like the police in a police state, not to uphold the law, but to punish people who are not sufficiently loyal to Trump.

Speaker 3:
[08:26] Where is Cash Patel by the way?

Speaker 2:
[08:28] I don't know. Is he with you?

Speaker 3:
[08:30] I haven't seen him.

Speaker 2:
[08:32] No. He looks a mess. He was on the TV yesterday. There is an article in The Atlantic on Friday that just blew him up and said he was drunk and he said, I'm going to sue. In fact, he said he will sue them today. Of course, he's not going to sue them. He's just going to threaten to sue them. He may file a suit, but he will never follow through with the suit for a couple of reasons. One of which is he would lose it on its merits. Second of which, you think Casper Tell wants to do discovery in a lawsuit where he has to answer under oath all the questions of the people that he is suing? Because that will put him in a pretty awkward position about the way he has abused his authority or neglected his responsibilities as director of the FBI. Not to mention other things. It might put him in a bad position saying what Trump did did not approve or say. No way, no way the lawsuit actually materializes.

Speaker 1:
[09:33] Well, the Trump administration has started the unenviable task of refunding over $166 billion in tariffs to US businesses after the Supreme Court struck down their use of emergency powers to tax imports. And as you might expect while corporations can get their money back, you and I and millions of other normal everyday Americans cannot. And we remain ineligible for direct relief.

Speaker 2:
[10:02] You're characterizing yourself as a normal American?

Speaker 1:
[10:05] Yes, I would characterize myself as such.

Speaker 2:
[10:09] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[10:10] I characterize myself as a corporation. Can I get my money back?

Speaker 2:
[10:13] Yeah, call the government. See how that works. You'd have a better shot as a corporation. As I'd like to point out, the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution, which guarantees all equal protection under the law, has been used more time since it was passed following the Civil War to protect and identify and expand the rights of corporations who are identified under it as people than it has been actual people. For 140, 50 years, the United States has given corporations, which are actually fictional people, which were created to serve the state. The whole idea of the corporation is that a business doesn't die when the people who run it die, and thus continues to provide economic benefit to the state. The whole idea has been turned on its head, and we now all work to serve corporations that are kind of super citizens, that have more powers and rights and more political influence because they can get money, because Citizens United and so forth. This is not communist propaganda. This is just where we are. Now, of course, the tariffs should never have been levied in the first place. They were illegal. Imposing them did create a hardship for the corporations. But as Riley points out, the corporations passed it on to us. Who's going to benefit at the end of this? You, me? No. The corporations, to some extent, but really the people who own the corporations, who direct windfalls in ways that benefit them, stock buybacks and bonuses and so forth. So, more scamming for the oligarchs going on here.

Speaker 3:
[12:13] Well, speaking of scamming, the Department of Justice demanded access to about 865,000 2024 ballots and election materials from Wayne County as part of a broader investigation into election integrity. They really want to investigate election integrity, I would start by looking in the mirror, and I'm not a lawyer, so that's just a piece of unknowing advice. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[12:41] Well, it's informed by facts, but again, what have we ended up with here? They are systematically trying to get voter rolls. Why? Why? They don't have any right to the voter rolls. Lot of states are fighting back against it, but they want the voter rolls so they can identify people on the voter rolls who they feel are not... Who they would like to intimidate away from voting or they would like to disqualify from voting and so forth. This is all part of an effort to manipulate the elections, to steal the elections, a job which is growing more urgent for them, not just because we're getting closer to the elections every day, but every single day there is a new poll out that shows Donald Trump, the Republicans in Congress, Republican Party and the policies they stand for, deeper and deeper underwater. Roughly two-thirds of Americans do not approve of the war in Iran. That bottom third, they always approve of Trump, or they don't understand the question, or they're lying. It's probably more than two-thirds of Americans. Nobody likes the war. So things are getting worse. And if you can't win fair, then you're going to try to cheat. And that's just what they're going to try to do. We, of course, will be here, and we will point this out to them, point it out to you, bring in experts to point it out throughout the week, because that's what we do here at The DSR Network. So please follow us here at The DSR Network. Subscribe to our podcast and so forth at thedsrnetwork.com. Or, easier yet for you, go to YouTube, subscribe to The DSR Network feed, and you'll get lots of streaming content and the chance to provide comments to us, which we will then use to guide what we're doing. And we may read them in the podcast. You know, Riley, a minute ago, when you find good comments, let's talk about them right here on the podcast. For now, we're ready for Monday, you're ready for Monday. Let's all go Monday. We'll see you soon.