"Donald Trump and crypto corruption"

0:007 million Californians depend on community health clinics for their care, but Proposition 44 cuts billions from clinics. Under 44, hundreds of clinics will close, and health services will be eliminated. That's why Prop 44 is opposed by nurses, doctors, and patients. Vote no on the clinic shutdown proposition. No, on 44. Add paid for by no on Prop 44. Stop the attack on patients in community health clinics, sponsored by California Primary Care Association Advocates. Add Committee's top funders ultimate health services in California Primary Care Association Advocates. My assignment is to find the truth, follow the story, and to bring people with me. Journalism Good Storytelling gives us tools and power. The assignment with Antonio Hilton weekends at 1 p.m. Eastern on MS now. This government has done some s**t, no government has ever done before, and one of them is the crypto stuff. The crypto stuff's not. Well, it's like Trump has made billions in crypto. Yeah, it's a bad look. Government's so f**k. And then you got his sons, and his sons are involved in all these weird business deals,

1:04where the business deals have to do with some things that Trump put, and then the sons are involved in these businesses, and there's a lot of money flowing around that you could dig in and start arresting people. I can hear you groaning from here. Hi again everybody, it's 5 o'clock in New York. Now we showed you that because he's part of the reason Trump is president a second time. He and his millions of listeners, like it or not, millions of people get a lot of their political information from Joe Rogan. But he's spot on there. There is a lot of money flowing around, and a lot of taxpayer dollars mixed up in it. $1.4 billion in 2025 alone is how much Donald Trump made from his family's crypto currency businesses alone, which include a Trump meme coin and a crypto firm created by the guy's DeRogans talking about their, his sons. It was called, or it is called, World Liberty Financial. Trump's embrace of digital currencies won him a lot of support from the kind of young men who

2:07listened to Joe Rogan ahead of the 2024 election. Crypto execs donated tens of millions of dollars to Trump's campaign and Super PAC and Trump made huge gains among young male voters. But now, two years and billions that Trump personally earned later, and the self-dilling encryption are impossible to ignore as you heard Joe Rogan calling it out. Washington Post finds that Trump is now losing favor, losing political support from this segment of the population. Crypto fans are crypto bros. Quote, as dissatisfaction grows with Trump's economic performance, questions about how he and his family profit from the presidency have taken on more bite. Some of the loudest complaints are coming from young male crypto enthusiasts who were initially energized by candidate Trump's embrace of the industry. A crypto focused streamer with more than two million followers on TikTok told the Washington Post this, quote, Trump was the hero in crypto, like a couple of years ago, and now it's like the exact opposite. Crypto already has a branding of

3:12it's just a bunch of scams and scammers, and this didn't help because now even the top guy did the same thing that people hate. While Trump and his family have been getting wildly massively richer off their new crypto ventures, those who invested in them lost big time. In July, the New York Times reported that nearly one million people who bought Trump's meme coin lost money, a lost totaling $3.81 billion. I think it's attorney Virginia Cantor pointed out how perfect a set up this is for someone like Trump. President Trump has sold stakes. He sold gold sneakers, bibles. How is this any different? At least those had some intrinsic value. This is like a perfect vehicle to funnel money to him and his family to enrich them. So the crypto stuff had less value than a Trump stake. Let that sink in. The new post investigative

4:13reporting reveals that it is no longer just ethics lawyers who are unhappy and uncomfortable with this. Washington Post describes participants in a focus group of independent and moderate 18 to 24 year olds who call out Donald Trump for just this. A participant named Cole called the meme coin a cash grab for Donald Trump to prey on his younger followers. He's a grifter, Cole said, quote, many things can be said about Donald Trump, but he knows that it make money, not necessarily in an honest way. Making money, not necessarily in an honest way, is where we begin the hour. The former deputy national security adviser to President Obama, now the co-host of Pod Save the World, contributor Ben Rhodes is back and also back with me, former department of Justice, pardon attorney Liz Oyer's here. She's now the host of the podcast. Is this really legal? But I have tried to center myself to not have any feelings about the fact that crypto grows swung wildly because of people like Joe Rogan toward Donald Trump. And I want to simply

5:17point out how bad things are for Donald Trump when he's actually lost this segment of the electorate. It leaves and we were joking the last hour with Michael Steele. Like who were the 17 percent who approve of his economic performance? They're basically the tech bros who were at the White House this week for lunch, deciding to regulate themselves. But this is a really bad political sign, along with another rung lower on America as a corrupt state ladder. Yeah, I mean, if this was happening in another country, we just described this as like a wildly corrupt autocratic government where the economy is kind of rigged to enrich the leader and his family, which is something that happens. But it's happening on a larger scale here because it's United States. Like this has been happening to call. I mean, I won't groan, but he was doing this right away after he was reelected. I mean, some of those meme coins were launched at the beginning of the administration. Some of the scams are frankly quid pro quo is where farmed governments were

6:21making huge investments in world liberty financial like United Arab Emirates, for instance, that happened early in the Trump administration. I think part of what's going on here, Nicole, is number one, this scale and obvious nature of this corruption is much simpler of a story to tell than some of the more bank shot corruption of the first term, right? You know, Saudis paying a lot of money to stay in Trump hotel rooms or something like that. The scale is billions of dollars and it's pretty clear when you juice like a men coin and then it collapses in value and you walk away with a lot of money and all the people that you commence to invest in it walk away losing a lot of money. Well, that's an easy story to tell. So that's the first thing, the scale of it and how clear it is. I think the second thing that's really important here is that the economy is not good. That prices are still up. If the economy is going gangbusters for people and oil wasn't through the roof and the price of groceries wasn't through the roof, maybe, maybe some of these people would be kind of less focused on this. But the reality is it's that

7:26context. It's those two things together. Most people cannot afford things and Donald Trump is getting fabulously wealthy in the process. Like that is a lethal political combination. And that's something that frankly some Democrats are going to suffer making this case, but you almost don't have to. It's just it's even a Joe Rogan is doing his own research and coming to the same conclusion. What's amazing to me, Ben, as someone who's covered Trump most days for a decade than that's on me, is to see how much he hates his voters. And I always thought that Steve Bannon was for his political views and his contribution to the degradation of our politics odious, but as a political person inside Trump's operation genius and he made Trump's voters think that Trump cared about them. His absence or his refusal to do whatever he did the first time has taken the mask off and Trump hates his own voters more than he hates any of us. Because we never

8:26thought he was anything other than someone who would make the secret service to his hotels and make foreign governments by hotel rooms and ever slept in. We read all David Ferrenfolds reporting in the first term and believed it. He was stealing from the government. The people that voted for a second and third time either didn't believe it or didn't care. And the fact that there's no one around Trump that can protect his voters from knowing that he hates them so much that he didn't just fail on the economy after he promised to fix it. He is stealing from them. No, none of us invested in his meme coin. I barely know what that is, but they did. And the fact that he can't even pretend to respect his voters is to me just an epic political story. It is. And look, yes, some of it's that they don't follow the same information we do. But some of it is that he knows that they're the ones who will be the suckers, right? Like, you know, we're not going to buy a Trump meme coin. Like, you know, the people that will buy Trump's stakes are the same people that will buy a Trump crypto venture, right? And so he counts on the people who are the most

9:28blindly loyal to him are the people who are the easiest for him to take advantage of. And that's a really dark truth, but it is a truth of American politics and Trump family corruption. The people that they need to take advantage of, the people that most believe in them. I think two other really quick points here, whoever thinks that they're going to benefit by getting close to Trump, you know, always ends up losing the end. I mean, you know, like whether it's his voters or whether it's the people that line up behind him. And to that point, I'd say the crypto industry thought, well, this guy's great. He's, you know, he's coming along and it's kind of a quick broke quote. We'll give his campaign a lot of money and we'll get some votes for him and he'll deregulate our industry. And he'll make sure that, you know, the securities and exchange commission, you know, drops all crypto investigations as it did. But the reality is that's not good for that industry either because he's made it such a corrupt deregulated, wild west that it has become the worst version of itself. And that is both this credit and crypto in general. And that's going to compel regulation in the

10:31future. This look on a much larger scale, the same thing may be happening with AI. Like those people may have thought they bought deregulation from Donald Trump, but now look at public opinion on AI. He's not, he's actually not doing them any favors by not regulating them. So he's actually discrediting not, he's only, you know, screwing over his own voters. He's actually like a danger to the very people who thought that what they were kind of purchasing with their support for him was this deregulatory embrace. Yeah, I mean, this is one of my favorite lines of reporting about the Trump era for all the appeasers. They sort of enraged me as a pro democracy person, but the losers are always the appeasers. And right now 76 76% of Americans think AI is out of control and unregulated and a potential danger. So that is, that includes a whole bunch of people who voted for Donald Trump. Well, I think the real losers are the American people really across the, yeah, across the political spectrum all the time. And the issue here is not just that this is corrupt. It's that Donald Trump is regulating industries at the same time he is profiting off of them, which just gives him a

11:35fundamental conflict of interest where his own personal interests, his own financial interests always trump the interests of the American people. Every single time he sides with his own financial interests, and that's clearer. Nowhere than in the cryptocurrency industry, cryptocurrency is what criminal organizations use to keep their operations alive. And Donald Trump has dismantled the elite task force at the Justice Department that is supposed to enforce the laws related to cryptocurrency. He has made it easier for elderly people to be defrauded with cryptocurrency scams. He has made it easier for the very terrorist organizations and criminal organizations that he is supposedly fighting to continue to operate because he has walked away from enforcing the laws related to cryptocurrency. And it's all because it's profitable for him. So that is really, it's really hard to imagine a bigger conflict of interest and a bigger betrayal of the interests of the American people. Is it legal? What he's doing with crypto? Well, conflicts of interest laws in the federal government leave the president out. So there is a major gap in federal conflict of interest laws

12:39that needs to be filled. The president, you know, he likes to say the president can't have a conflict of interest. That's not true. The president can have a conflict of interest, but the laws don't prohibit it. And in the past, we have relied on norms. We've relied on presidents to voluntarily do the right thing, which is not to trade stocks while they're occupying the presidency, not to make major decisions in areas where they're heavily invested, not to allow their children to profit off of their access to the presidency. But none of that is codified in law. And that's a really big issue that Congress will need to take up in the future. Let me read you some of the reporting events since you mentioned the AI and the executives. A new public citizen analysis reveals that the CEOs that gathered at the White House meeting this week donated more than $227 million to Trump's Super PAC and various pet projects over the last two years. Mark Zuckerberg gave 23 million Elon Musk 105 million Google 23 open AI 26 Amazon $29 million. They're buying to your point the regulations

13:47with the lack of criminal exposure or whatever it is, I think they're going to encounter the next two and a half years. But what is the cost as Liz is saying to the American people and ultimately to their businesses? Well, there's so many things about this that are outrageous. First and foremost, 20 million here, 20 million there are people that are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. It's like us giving a $100 donation to something. It just shows you how broken our system is to Liz's point about gaps in the law because of Citizens United, the capacity for this kind of unlimited money to flow in so that the very people that want a regulatory outcome, these tech oligarchs can just spend tens of millions of dollars to try to buy elections. That's what's wrong with American politics here. Now, the risk for them though is that there was a nascent regulatory framework. Biden had an executive order and it was trending the direction of requiring things like testing AI models before they're released, having third party auditing

14:49of AI models. All of the things that they're rushing to say that they're not going to do on their own self-regulate. I don't think anybody really trust those people, some of the stranger people that you could see telling us, don't worry, we've got this. The problem for them is that I rarely seen in Nikolai when you talk to people in politics, public opinion moves so fast on an issue than on AI and data centers in the last year. The data centers are just a physical manifestation of what people don't like. They don't like the wealth and our concentration in these people's hands. They don't like the looming job displacement. They don't like the fact that their kids, you know, or maybe befriended by chatbots. They don't like the security risks that they're starting to hear about. And the reality is because Donald Trump is doing nothing, frankly, there is going to be huge liability risk for these companies, but put that aside. Because Donald Trump is doing nothing, public opinion is swinging much harder against these people than ever by the law. And the demand, bipartisan demand, I think, because this is a bipartisan issue, is going to be on much more severe regulation, much stricter regulation. Because people look at

15:52that tabloid at the White House yesterday and they don't trust it, and they're right not to trust it. And they're right to suspect that those people bought access and bought deregulation, and that Donald Trump is in his family are probably in some fashion profiting off of this, right? And so again, the reckoning that is on its way is going to be much more intense because of how out in the open this all is. And so the profits that they obtained in the short term may imperil their business models in the medium term. Now, maybe they're fine with that. I mean, I just think I'm going to make my hundreds of billions of dollars and tuck it away, and that's fine. As Liz said, the rest of us are the ones that are really going to suffer because of this, but I do think the reckoning has arrived for the tech sector, particularly in AI. What's amazing to me is that no one has benefited more from America than these folks. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Stepizos by building companies in a country with a educated workforce,

16:53with a reward system for entrepreneurship. I mean, the idea that they feel like they owe America nothing but a middle finger is stunning to me. What happens in the absence of the rule of law to companies? Well, we've really seen the death of expertise throughout the government, and we've seen a situation where people like the Jeff Bezos of the world can fill these voids in governance because there are no experts inside the government. We have a defense department that's being run by a television host. We have a justice department that's being run by a Be List attorney who is a sick event to Donald Trump. We've got all of these high level officials who really don't have any subject matter expertise. Cash Patel's another great example of that. And so people in corporate America are getting in the president's ear and they're having unprecedented influence under the laws and policies that are being shaped by this administration. It's remarkable. Liz, thank you for spending time with us over the two hours. Ben sticks around when we come back. How Donald Trump is planning to escalate the war with Iran, but not until

17:55after November's midterm elections. We have new reporting on that and how supply shortages at the Pentagon may complicate whatever Trump's plans really are. Congressman Jason Crow will be our guest. Also, he had new details on the most embarrassing gap in a congressional hearing in, well, in a very long time. Exclusive brand new reporting on how the Republican senator who tried to drop Jack Smith in a perjury trap this week was actually warned ahead of time against doing what he tried to do before it blew up spectacularly. And later, there is new information about how campus police at Cornell University failed to report a woman's complaint that she had been raped at a fraternity house in 2024. The growing fallout from a story that has horrified our country later in the hour. Deadland White House continues after a quick break. Don't go anywhere. Seven million Californians depend on community health clinics for their care. But proposition 44 cuts billions from clinics. Under 44, hundreds of clinics will close and health services will

18:56be eliminated. That's why Prop 44 is opposed by nurses, doctors and patients. Vote no on the clinic shutdown proposition. No, on 44. Add paid for by no on prop 44. Stop the attack on patients and community health clinics sponsored by California Primary Care Association Advocates. Add committees top funders ultimate health services in California Primary Care Association Advocates. Ever since I was young, I've watched people working hard, chasing opportunity, making sacrifices, doing everything that can to build a better life. And now we're shining a light on what matters most. Our economy, our national identity, our democracy, our future. The stakes have never been higher. It's all on the line. I'm the line with Ombicia Menendez, weekdays at 12 p.m. Easter on MS now. You can save four weeks, but it could be six. It could be eight. It could be three. A couple of weeks and won't be much longer. This is not endless. The war is going to be over

19:57in three days. My prediction. We should be able to do it in that one hour. We want to know the truth. We blow them up. Make a deal. But the time is coming. It's going to end very soon in one way. They lost me after eight weeks, three weeks, three days, one hour. It's still going on. After repeated promises back by a whole lot of bluster and nonsense, we are now so far into Donald Trump's war of choice against Iran that we've nearly arrived at the midterm elections. Public approval of Donald Trump's handling of the war in Iran is now at a record low of 28%, 69% of all Americans say the war has not been worth fighting. And Trump now tells Time magazine that it's quote, possible he'll ramp up bombing Iran, but only after the midterms turns out to no one surprised Trump's new plan is once again a miscalculation lawmakers and former officials telling MSNOW that even after the midterms, American munitions stockpiles will still be running low and Washington would struggle to protect Gulf partners from the Iranian retaliation.

21:01And while Donald Trump expects Iran to make a deal after November 3rd because it quote, doesn't make sense for them not to whatever that means, some lawmakers briefed on current operations were more skeptical about America's ability to ramp things up both tactically and strategically. Let's bring into our coverage Democratic Congressman Jason Crowe of Colorado. He served three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he's a member of the House Armed Services and Intelligence Committee's ban is still here as well and is going to jump in. Congressman, this is in some ways a political story ahead of the midterms, but if your son or daughter or mom or dad or husband or wife is in the military, it's life and death, it's everything. What does it mean or how does it land inside the military when the timeline on the war is eight weeks, three weeks, three days, one hour? Well, I mean it lands differently if you're actually somebody that has to do the fighting and the dying and the suffering or the pain of taxes to pay for all of this as hardworking working class

22:06Americans do. If you're a five-time draft Dodger, a silver spoon pedigree like Donald Trump and most of the sick of fans around them, why should you care? You never have to do the fighting, you never have to do the dying and you certainly aren't paying your taxes to pay for it. So that's why there's a level of impunity around that. And then you add on top of it, every single one of our nations failed wars. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan involved this same combination, a lack of a congressional accountability, a lack of American buy-in and public support for it. And presidents who said that the answer to it was to escalate. The problem is not that we lack a strategy or don't have public support or shouldn't be doing it. The problem is we're not doing enough and we need to escalate and do more. It's crazy. It's never worked and it's not going to work here, which is why we need to stop it as soon as possible. I don't know if you took in Pete Hugs' speech yesterday. I don't even know how to formulate a question without injecting. Well, I'll just

23:11show you some of what he said and you can react to it. Here's Pete Hugs, the nation's secretary different. No fatties, no trannies, no beardows, no weirdoes, no wimps, no radicals. Just worries. The ideological clowns are out. The patriotic cowboys are in with testosterone testing on top. I actually listened to it a few times before I could figure out who the ideological clowns were in that line and who the patriotic cowboys were. I think it's pretty clear to anyone watching now that he's the ideological clown. But what do you do with the Pentagon led by someone obsessed with his hair and testosterone testing? We try to get him as fired as quickly as possible. We retake the majority in November. We reestablish a bulwark in protection against this runaway lawless corrupt and competent presidency. We go after Pete Hugs' eff with no apologies, relentlessly

24:13with tremendous vigor. That's my project. I write down the battleground share, so I'm responsible for helping us retake the majority. I'm all in on that. Once we do that and we retake power, I'm coming after Pete Hugs' eff. Not because I want to, I think this is going to be fun, but because he's putting our service members at risk, at great risk. He's destroying something as precious as civilian control of our military, a nonpartisan military that reflects the culture and values of this nation. He is trying to destroy that. It has taken us decades and generations to build that, and I'm not going to let him destroy it and tear it down. Are you surprised that Thomas Massey, who essentially has the same view that you do on Pete Hugs' eff and I think others have suggested that Speaker Johnson only recessed the House and them home because he didn't want to preside over the impeachment at Pete Hugs' eff. Are you surprised

25:15that Trump still has in there or do you think it's part of a different project? I'm not surprised about Thomas Massey actually because Thomas Massey and a handful of congressional Republicans are the only mega congressional Republicans that actually believe in anything anymore. They actually have an ideology and a belief set and they're willing to pursue policy that's consistent with that. Everybody else has given up on believing in anything and having ideology, of having conservative principles, of responding to their constituents, which of course is why they are ducking town halls and hiding from their constituents right now because they know that they've given up on their people. Do I always agree with Thomas Massey? No. I mean, obviously I disagree with him on a number of things, but the guy actually believes in something and he's consistent, so you got to give him that. Yeah, I mean, Ben, let me pull you in on this. I think Thomas Massey also reminds voters that what is bipartisan is discussed with Pete Hugs' eff. Thomas Massey feels the same way about Pete Hugs' eff as Congressman Kro does. The idea that there's

26:20any partisanship that the Pentagon is only coming from inside the Trump coalition. Yeah, I mean, look, what Thomas Massey also believes is what bipartisan American voters believe, which is that they didn't want to get into wars like the war in Iran after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that this is a broken promise of Donald Trump's. And just to put a fine point on Nicole to kind of combine these conversations at a time in which we are mired and yet another forever war with a country of 94 million people with no strategy to end it other than as Congressman Kro rightly says to escalate it. He's giving like weekend Fox News TED talks about testosterone in front of a giant American flag like he's in a remake of that movie Patton. Like, what is going on here? Like this person is not even focused on the problem that he started. He's named curious about solving the problem that he started. At the same time that Americans have been killed,

27:23that were running dangerously low on munitions, that American bases have been destroyed across the Middle East, that are our partners in the region are continuing to bombardment because are a lack of a strategy. And that's what he's doing. At the same time that he's broken the promised American voters just keep us out of these wars that they're pointless and that never end in success and just telling us that don't worry, we'll bomb them some more and at some point it will all work out. I mean, it's really the the height of the irresponsibility and recklessness and kind of almost uncaring about either policy or politics that we see in the second Trump administration. It desparately cries out for a check on the executive. And look, the only reason Pete Hanks at this still there is because he'll do whatever Donald Trump wants. He'll purge people that are not ideologically loyal to Donald Trump. He'll elevate people that are that are maga, he'll go out and he'll say things that aren't true to the cameras again and again like you played

28:23so that that's something we saw with our eyes. That's why he's there and it shows a shocking lack of regard for competence in the person running the most powerful military in the history of the world. And helping to drive Trump's numbers down to historic lows. He's not doing Trump any any political favors. Congressman Jason Crowe, thank you so much for joining us today. Ben Rose, thank you for spending most of the hour with us when we come back. As if Republicans, Senator Eric Schmidt's lame attempt to catch Jack Smith in a gacha moment wasn't lame and pathetic and embarrassing enough for him. We have new reporting about how avoidable it was for him and how eager Schmidt was to run with it anyway. We'll bring that to you after short break. Hey everyone, it's Chris Hayes. This week on my podcast, Why is this happening? Cultural critic and author Jamila Lemieux on her new book, Black Single Mother, Real Life Tales of Longing and Belonging. I went into this book wanting to defend us, wanting to stand up for us, wanting to give us our flowers.

29:29I've come out of the process of writing the book and living with it in the world and being on tour, I've become radicalized. Now I would go so far to say that I think Black single mothers are the most essential group of people in the Black community and arguably one of the most important, most productive, high functioning and significant groups of people in our society. That's this week on Why is this happening? Listen wherever you get your podcasts and find more on the MSNOW app. He gave his answer and I guess that's his answer. It just looked like you had a gotcha for him. Like you're gonna purge yourself are you lying now? Well, he was at a basketball game. But the other one I asked him if he was in the land and he said no he said he was in the other game. That's his answer. So how did that mistake happen? There's not a mistake I asked him if he was in the land. So that wasn't like an embarrassing moment or something from where you're staying? I asked questions. I asked questions and we'll see if he answers truthfully. Just a question, Asker. I don't care what the answer is. I never ever preconceived

30:32notion of how you're gonna answer it or the political gotcha game in play. I'm just a seeker of information. It's the most ridiculous answer I have heard him give in the third day of one of the greatest political debacles in the era of political debacles. If you believe that they're like a million bridges we can sell you. Turns out Missouri Senator Eric Schmidt could have avoided becoming a national laughing stock and a joke but of jokes. If his team had done a basic fact check that they were pointed to like horse led to water. You're reporting from MSNOW's Carolinic Kendelanian and Michael Schnell is highlighting that Schmitz's political face plan was so avoidable that other Republicans people ostensibly he still believes. What did nothing to do with the text that Schmidt so proudly had produced and mocked up with graphics and pictures and plastered on post-aborder board instead of returning calls to any constituents in the time it took whatever staffer to do that. He was so obsessed with doing that and trying to have a gotcha moment with

31:35Jack Smith that he refused to protect himself from the fact that none of it was true. From that reporting quote Republican staff on the Senate Judiciary Committee gave Senator Eric Schmidt the text they had obtained from the Justice Department which Schmidt suggested was proof that Smith had colluded with the Georgia State prosecutor were unveded according to a source with direct knowledge of the conversation. After Schmidt's team expressed interest they received access to the text the source said Judiciary staff however explicitly warned Schmidt's team that the text were unveded and that it was their responsibility to verify the information according to the source. Neither Schmidt's office nor the Justice Department immediately responded to MSNOW's request for comment. I want to bring in our Capitol Hill reporter who broke this story Michael Schnell also joining us political analyst the former senator Claire McCaskill the great state of Missouri is here she's the host of the new series political potluck which is fantastic for our members. Michael take us for your reporting. Nicole I think that went a lot of folks were

32:37watching the Senate Judiciary hearing with Jack Smith and they saw the line of questioning from Eric Schmidt they asked first off where does this information come from and then secondly how did it end up in the hands of a United States Senator during such a pivotal and important committee meeting and my colleagues Carol and Ken Nellini and I are now learning where this information came from and what the pipeline was essentially it began at the Justice Department with the DOJ giving this information in lots others to the Judiciary Committee I'll note it's not unusual for small pieces of information to be shared between the DOJ and the committee of jurisdiction though it isn't usual when you have a lot of high level information particularly from a special counsel's office being shared but anyway this information was sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee and then Eric Schmidt's team had gone to the Judiciary Committee and asked if they had any material showing some sort of nexus connection between Jack Smith's investigation and Fawni Willis's investigation down in Georgia they found these text messages and then they gave the text messages to Eric Schmidt's

33:38office but they had explicitly said this is unvedited we have not corroborated it and when I say that I mean they have not confirmed that it is significant in the context it was given and by the way the due diligence is on the office of Eric Schmidt to figure out whether or not these are verified and worth discussing during the hearing now obviously we now know how this played out because we saw in the hearing Eric Schmidt accused Jack Smith of being in Georgia at the time and in Atlanta Hawks game when he was actually in College Park Maryland watching an Iowa Hawkeyes game and this could have been solved if the team would have looked beforehand given they had this heads up and one more thing I want to note Nicole that sort of underscores the skepticism that Republicans had brought to this raw piece of information Chuck Grassley's office the chairman of the committee prepares a memorandum for all Republicans on the committee during before key important hearings these text messages were not in that memo that's what sources are telling Carol Ken and I so it wasn't even significant enough or verified enough for the chairman of the

34:42committee to disseminate it to members and Eric Schmidt despite having this warning decided it was important he went out he disseminated it and he asked it to Jack Smith we now know it was not true let me just push back respectfully on the idea that it's normal I mean if DOJ had evidence that Jack Smith had committed a crime or committed perjury why wouldn't they charge it himself why would they feed Oppo to a Republican senator exactly I mean I think that's a very fair question I think it's true I think another question is if Chuck Grassley thought that he had a smoking gun here in placing and by the way smoking gun it's you know it's a pretty big conspiracy theory about the coordination between Jack Smith's office and Fahny Willis's office but even if Chuck Grassley knew that he had this information as a disposal there's a question of why he would let Eric Schmidt discuss it during the hearing and not have himself as the chairman of the committee discuss it during this hearing so yes it is the fact that if the DOJ had this information and they felt that it was enough to bring charges of some sort you would assume they would have done it on their own and then Chuck Grassley sort of casting it aside and not putting it in this memo it had been overlooked

35:47by so many different layers of Republicans Eric Schmidt found it he was given the warning that it was unvetted but he decided to use it anyway I mean Claire I think the Russians have a technical term for people like Eric Schmidt I think they call them useful idiots yeah this is a thirsty guy and he is trying to emulate the boss he is trying to show the boss that he can be just as untruthful and tell us his many lies but the difference is Nicole nobody in the Oval Office stands up to Donald Trump and says hey you're lying about this this isn't true and in a sudden hearing you have very smart people they're not afraid of you like Amy Klobuchar who immediately realized something was amiss she knew Jack Smith would never lie about whether or not he had been in Atlanta at a game much less ever even net Fahny Willis and the other thing is hearing shows like I got to get this out here you know this guy runs around saying he was a prosecutor he'd been mind that the prosecutors in Missouri that handle criminal cases are county prosecutors not

36:54the attorney general the attorney general handles appeals every once in a while they might get a conflict case I think he's set at a table for one conflict trial so we can issue a press release this guy said across examine and witness in a criminal trial in his life and it showed he he didn't understand the basic rules of questioning and adverse witness which is you've got to have your facts you've got to know the answers to your questions before you ask them it showed his incompetence not just as a senator but also as somebody who likes to call himself a prosecutor what a joke I mean here's the other thing Claire like if Jack Smith and Fahny Willis had like woken up and made pancakes together I still don't understand what the conspiracy was that he was pursuing and Jack Smith was never in Atlanta anyway but what what was in the best scenario he trying to do when he was trying to do is do what Trump does he's trying to take something and they take nothing make something out of it he was trying he was going to try to say because he was in Atlanta and something happened on the funny Fanny Willis case the day before that somehow Jack Smith was now

37:56involved um clearly there is no evidence that those two people have ever had a conversation or met one another so it was just a stupid stupid mega performance circus trick and it didn't turn out so well for him I think he has ruined his cachet I think the guy who works for him was supposed to go to work at the White House on Friday and I think they've called that off now because he's kind of an embarrassment not only for people who disagree with Donald Trump but I think he's an embarrassment within the ranks of Republicans who realizes guy went too far and made him all look stupid when you're too bad for the Trump White House it's really thanks to you. I'm not even able to say that. Well I go to now and Claire Rick outskill thank you both so much for joining us when we come back there's brand new reporting about how Cornell University initially handled the students allegations of a brutal rape in a campus fraternity house and the key details about the case campus police left out of their initial report we'll bring you that reporting next.

39:01We're learning brand new details today about the alleged gang rape at Cornell University. Brand new reporting in the New York Times sheds new light on how Cornell University initially handled a 2024 investigation into the incredibly disturbing allegations made by a woman who is a student at the time that seven male students raped her in October of that year. The cases now come under renewed scrutiny after the woman identified only as Jane Doe filed a civil lawsuit earlier this month. The New York Times obtained a copy of the private title 9 report compiled by campus police after the interview Jane Doe in November of 2024. She detailed to the officers that what started as a consensual encounter quote spiraled into a prolonged drug-fueled attack by several men inside the Chi-Fi fraternity house quote I don't remember the very end of the event where I was raped she told them quote I can say with 100 percent confidence that I was raped but as the Times reports campus police condensed that

40:04interview into a six-page report that quote omitted some of the more forceful and definitive language she had used and it was missing her unequivocal statement that she'd been raped. That condensed report is what was given to the district attorney who then decided there wasn't enough evidence to bring criminal charges against the seven men. The DA has now reopened the case and made growing pressure from students and the public to explain how the case was handled. Cornell University has also agreed to an independent investigation none of the men accused have been criminally charged in the case and lawyers for at least three of the accused men have broadly denied criminal wrongdoing I want to bring in one of the journalists on this New York Times reporting that we just read from one of the reporters who contributed to that report Claire I'm going to say this from Fahey you say. That's right. Right Fahey. Okay Claire first of all this time story is sort of the the first new chunk of information that we're learning and what's new is the specificity with which the victim describes what happened to her at the time to those who investigated it then.

41:10That's right she's incredibly detailed in speaking with the investigator and she lays out in night that as you said started consensually and then becomes something else and what our story delved into today was those three weeks between the night and question and when she reported where she really comes to see this night differently and she decides to speak up until what happened. Let me read a little bit more from the reporting. Some women around her the victim document show were quick to say they viewed the events of the evening of October 19th as a sexual assault but Jane Doe the interviews and text messages reveal first appeared to grapple with shame, humiliation and concerns about her reputation before she began to consider herself an assault victim. Quote I don't really remember her ever kind of citing that she had said yes to anything that occurred when her roommates had said according to the title nine files. The roommate was plainly concerned. Initially she said Jane Doe was quote kind of recounting it as this sort of crazy thing that she had done.

42:11By November 3rd Jane Doe appears to have concluded that she was assaulted at the October party. Four days later on November 7th according to the documents Jane Doe went to the emergency room in Ithaca and requested a rape kit. Now if you know even a little bit about victims of sexual assault this this piece in here just is like a lightning bolt that she was grappling initially with shame and humiliation and concerns about her reputation. That's right and one of her friends also notes that while recounting it was clear that she was still processing the events of that night and she came back and she spoke to her roommates eventually she speaks to her big and the story that she was in and they have concerns about what she's telling them about that night. I want to read a little bit more about what's going to happen and ask you what's going to happen now. Ms. Doe said in court filings that she had never heard back from the campus police or prosecutors after giving her initial statement about the encounter to police. Some of the men involved were expelled and others were suspended according to the university which is not disclosed the punishments that each

43:14man received citing privacy rules. Is that still the case? Do they do does the victim and her legal team still not know what if any punishment the men received? So we're not clear on that. We are continuing to report that out. There are obviously seven men named and it's not clear what exactly happened to each individual person in this case. These are obviously allegations and the district attorney has said that he wants to speak to the victim and decide how to proceed. What is your sense of where this has? Does this now head squarely into sort of a criminal process? You know this is a very messy situation. The records really show that there's a lot of witness testimony and things of that nature to sort through and it's really unclear where this has next. Does it look like from the initial report she gave campus police? I mean condensed is the word that you guys use. Was it was it was it sanitized? Was it watered down? What is your sense of what is in the initial report and then what gets transmitted? She sits with this investigator. There's a lot of back and

44:18forth. She recounts parts and then the investigator will say read it back and see if she agrees with the wording and things of that nature. We know that there were handwritten edits from her on the statement and that she eventually signed the statement. And then not all of that goes over to the district attorney? That's not entirely clear. She did sign the statement and there was a lot of back and forth while they decided what went into the final statement. Thank you so much for your reporting on this. We really appreciate it. Thank you for having me here. Quick break for us. We'll be right back. My guest in this week's episode of the Best People podcast is Pete Buttigieg and he is Muslusson. He has a long enough resume that we sometimes forget that he deployed to Afghanistan while he was mayor of South Bend, Indiana. I got to talk to him about Pete Hegseth and how the Trump administration is treating members of the military and led of all the reporting we've covered here

45:20about the USS Abraham Lincoln and the war in Iran. You can watch the entire conversation right now in YouTube by scanning the QR code on your screen or you can listen to the conversation wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you so much for letting us in to your homes tonight. We are grateful. Hey everyone. It's Rachel Maddo here to tell you about the MSNOW membership. You can connect directly with your favorite hosts and other MSNOW fans. You can stream live TV and much more. Visit MSNOW slash membership to join.