Musk exposes Trump weakness, in addition to incompetence, with manipulation of spending bill chaos AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast The Rachel Maddow Show

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Episode: Musk exposes Trump weakness, in addition to incompetence, with manipulation of spending bill chaos

Author: Rachel Maddow, MSNBC
Duration: 00:43:45

Episode Shownotes

Donald Trump's transition ahead of his second term in office was already a series of humiliations and failures as his inability to pick qualified members of his administration was laid bare, but the spending bill debacle showed that in addition to that incompetence, Trump is vulnerable to being taken advantage

of, as Elon Musk did with apparent ease.

Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_01
Hey everyone, it's Rachel Maddow. Here's a new thing, and I think this is smart. I've done a whole bunch of podcasts for MSNBC, and my podcasts are not sitting around chatting about the news of the day style podcasts. They are stories.

00:00:15 Speaker_01
They're long form, original, occasionally award winning, original series. And now there is an easy place to get all of them. permanent home where you can always find them.

00:00:26 Speaker_01
It's a new podcast feed that we've set up that's just called Rachel Maddow Presents. So the whole catalog of all the podcasts I've done is there, and it's all free.

00:00:36 Speaker_01
So if you want to, say, binge the entire Bagman series about a crook in the White House, You can do that at the Rachel Maddow Presents podcast feed. The fact of the matter was, he was a crook. You can also binge both seasons of Ultra.

00:00:53 Speaker_01
And hey, let's face it, that remains disturbingly topical.

00:00:57 Speaker_00
He actually says outright, I intend to overthrow the U.S. government. He's open about these objectives and his supporters are armed and ready.

00:01:04 Speaker_01
Bagman, Ultra, every episode of Deja News, all of them are all waiting for you on this new podcast feed. Again, it's called Rachel Maddow Presents. That's also where we'll put our new podcasts when they come out. We're working on a new one right now.

00:01:18 Speaker_01
Search for Rachel Maddow Presents and follow to listen to the entire catalog completely free or subscribe to MSNBC Premium on Apple Podcasts for ad-free listening. And thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. It is December 23rd.

00:01:35 Speaker_01
Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, so Merry Christmas to everybody who celebrates. I actually have two news Christmas presents for you.

00:01:45 Speaker_01
One of them I'll tell you about in a little bit later on this hour, something I am going to give you as a Christmas present on Christmas Day. We will get to that later on this hour. But the other one... is just this.

00:01:58 Speaker_01
It is a true story that I think of as a Christmas present. It, at least I think, can maybe be something helpful for understanding today's news. And it arrives at an auspicious time. All right, this is a story about this man. His name is Joseph E. Davies.

00:02:20 Speaker_01
He was born in Wisconsin to immigrant parents. He got involved in Democratic Party politics. He became Democratic Party chairman in the state of Wisconsin. He then moved to Washington, had some government jobs.

00:02:33 Speaker_01
He ended up getting very, very rich as a corporate lawyer. And then in the 1930s, two things happened in his life. First, he became a diplomat. He became a U.S. ambassador. He was ambassador to Belgium and ambassador to Luxembourg.

00:02:53 Speaker_01
Most famously, he was also America's ambassador to Russia, to the Soviet Union. He was very controversial in that role because he was seen as a real suck-up. He was seen as a real apologist for the Stalin dictatorship in Russia.

00:03:11 Speaker_01
But if you want to know what he was really, really famous for, even more than that, it was the other big thing that happened in his life around the same time that he started this very high-profile diplomatic career.

00:03:22 Speaker_01
The other thing that happened to him right around then is that he got married to the richest woman in America. And this was a very high-profile affair. He got married before he became ambassador to Russia. She was his wife and went with him to Moscow.

00:03:42 Speaker_01
While he was the ambassador in Russia, she had shipped over to Moscow from the United States 25 refrigerators and 2,000 pints of frozen cream, not to distribute in Russia, but all for her, all for the ambassador's residence.

00:04:01 Speaker_01
It was a very high-profile thing. This was a second marriage for him. It was a third marriage for her. They didn't end up having any kids together, but they did stay married for a long time.

00:04:13 Speaker_01
They were married for 20 years, and a lot of that was very much in the public eye. One of the lasting marks of this famous marriage is this, this coat of arms. I mentioned Joseph Davies was the son of immigrants. He was the son of Welsh immigrants.

00:04:33 Speaker_01
His parents were from Wales. And while he was in the middle of his very high-profile diplomatic career in the 1930s, he arranged that the U.K. would issue his family this coat of arms.

00:04:48 Speaker_01
This was the official Davies family crest, their official coat of arms for his ancestral family, for the Davies family.

00:04:59 Speaker_01
And while he was married to the richest woman in the country, the couple had his family crest, his family coat of arms installed at her house, like carved into the fireplace and mounted up on the wall.

00:05:18 Speaker_01
Her house, her name was Marjorie Merriweather Post, her house was her pride and joy. It was a mansion that she had built in South Florida that was called Mar-a-Lago.

00:05:32 Speaker_01
And her house was famously later sold in the 1980s at bargain basement price to a man named Donald Trump.

00:05:44 Speaker_01
Whereupon, Trump took the coat of arms that was up on the wall at this house he just bought, the coat of arms that was carved into the fireplace and up on the wall at Mar-a-Lago, he took this coat of arms, he took the Joseph E. Davies family coat of arms, and he started using it as if it was his own.

00:06:06 Speaker_01
This is the coat of arms for the Joseph Davies family, which was up on the wall at Mar-a-Lago when Donald Trump bought Mar-a-Lago in the 1980s. This is the coat of arms that Trump uses today as if it is his own.

00:06:23 Speaker_01
If you go to the web pages or the advertising materials for any of Trump's properties, you see that he uses this everywhere.

00:06:30 Speaker_01
He uses this coat of arms not only in his advertisements and his iconography for Mar-a-Lago, which is where he found the coat of arms, on the wall, but he also uses it at his golf clubs and all his other properties.

00:06:44 Speaker_01
And so here's your Christmas present. Here it goes, ready?

00:06:48 Speaker_01
See if you can see the difference between these two coat of arms, between the coat of arms that Trump uses on all his stuff now and the original one that he found on the wall at Mar-a-Lago when he bought that house. See if you can spot the difference.

00:07:05 Speaker_01
All right, we'll put them both up on the screen at the same time. On the left, that's the coat of arms that Trump trademarked On the right, that's where he got it from. That's the original.

00:07:20 Speaker_01
You see on the one on the left, on the Trump one, the little scroll on the bottom, it says Trump, like it is the Trump family crest.

00:07:29 Speaker_01
But on the right side of your screen, you can see what word was there originally, the word that Trump took off the coat of arms in order to put his own name on it. The word there is integritas, Integrity.

00:07:47 Speaker_01
He literally removed the word integrity and put himself there instead on somebody else's real family coat of arms that he stole and appropriated for his own purposes.

00:08:04 Speaker_01
When Joseph Davies' grandson died just a few years ago, during the first Trump term, actually, his obituary in the New York Times explained that although the family from whom Trump took this crest was not at all happy about Trump claiming it as if it were his own, Mr. Davies' grandson advised the rest of the family to, quote, not bother suing Mr. Trump, quote, because you'll be in court for years and years and years.

00:08:32 Speaker_01
And so they let it go. And President-elect Donald Trump took that other family's coat of arms, took their family crest, and to this day pretends like it is his own, but he literally had to remove the word integrity in order to do that.

00:08:48 Speaker_01
So, Merry Christmas! The news gods got you a metaphor.

00:08:56 Speaker_01
It maybe has not been a good idea to try to run this presidential transition from Mar-a-Lago, with the bad juju of that family crest stolen from some other family looming over the proceedings, minus its integrity.

00:09:13 Speaker_01
There was the NFL owner with a felony conviction in a famous bribery case involving a riverboat casino license in Louisiana. Trump gave that NFL owner a pardon in his first term as president.

00:09:26 Speaker_01
Now, in the transition to his second term, he decided to give that NFL owner's son-in-law a job in the new administration, decided to give that NFL owner's son-in-law the job of running the DEA, running the Drug Enforcement Agency. Why not?

00:09:44 Speaker_01
He knows his father-in-law, the felon. that he gave the pardon to. Trump awarded this DEA choice, apparently without Googling the son-in-law, the announcement that the son-in-law would get the DEA job that was made by Trump on a Saturday.

00:10:02 Speaker_01
By the following Tuesday, the guy himself had announced that he was pulling himself out of consideration for the job, whereupon Trump himself announced that the guy didn't, quote, pull himself out, I pulled him out.

00:10:16 Speaker_01
Trump had only named this guy to the job three days earlier. I pulled him out. Well, then why did you name him three days ago?

00:10:26 Speaker_01
There was Trump's announcement of his new White House counsel, top lawyer in the White House, who was soon unannounced as White House counsel amid news from Mar-a-Lago that the guy who had pressed for that particular White House counsel had reportedly been demanding cash bribes if you wanted him to put your name in contention for a top job in Trump's White House.

00:10:47 Speaker_01
So, DEA announcement, not DEA announcement. White House Council announcement, not White House Council announcement.

00:10:56 Speaker_01
Amid a lot of chest-pounding about how they weren't gonna let anybody else, like, say, the FBI, do background checks or any vetting on their nominees, that they could handle all the vetting themselves and they didn't need anybody else meddling in it, amid all of their chest-pounding around that, the Trump team themselves ended up

00:11:13 Speaker_01
Proclaiming themselves blindsided by all the skeletons in the closet they didn't know about. From disastrous picks like the Fox News weekend hosts they picked to be defense secretary.

00:11:26 Speaker_01
Shockingly, when you don't vet someone, turns out you don't find out the things that vetting might turn up about them. After picking a serving U.S.

00:11:36 Speaker_01
Senator from Florida for the Secretary of State job, Trump then let it be known that he was personally lobbying Florida's governor to install his son's wife in the newly vacated Senate seat from Florida.

00:11:49 Speaker_01
And that, in itself, is a humiliating, nepotistic farce. You know, President demands Senate seat be given to his daughter-in-law. But it's something else when the President commits to the humiliating farce of that, and then it doesn't work.

00:12:04 Speaker_01
Daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, now publicly removing herself from consideration for that Senate seat after reports out of Florida that after all that, after that humiliating nepotistic farce, she wasn't gonna get the tap after all.

00:12:21 Speaker_01
Then, of course, there was Trump's choice of this man to be Attorney General, Attorney General of the United States. Quote, in sum, the committee found substantial evidence of the following.

00:12:34 Speaker_01
Quote, from at least 2017 to 2020, Representative Gates regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him. In 2017, Representative Gates engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl.

00:12:48 Speaker_01
During the period 2017 to 2019, Representative Gates used or possessed illegal drugs including cocaine and ecstasy on multiple occasions.

00:12:55 Speaker_01
Representative Gates accepted gifts including transportation and lodging in connection with the 2018 trip to the Bahamas in excess of permissible amounts.

00:13:04 Speaker_01
In 2018, Representative Gates arranged for his chief of staff to assist a woman with whom he engaged in sexual activity in obtaining a passport, falsely indicating to the U.S. Department of State that she was a constituent.

00:13:15 Speaker_01
Representative Gates knowingly and willfully sought to impede and obstruct the committee's investigation of his conduct. Representative Gates has acted in a manner that reflects discreditably upon the House of Representatives.

00:13:26 Speaker_01
Based on the above, the committee concludes that there was substantial evidence that Representative Gates violated House rules

00:13:34 Speaker_01
and state and federal laws and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, acceptance of impermissible gifts, the provision of special favors and privileges, and, for good measure, obstruction of Congress.

00:13:53 Speaker_01
Violated House rules and state and federal laws prohibiting prostitution, illicit drug use, statutory rape,

00:14:05 Speaker_01
the House Ethics Report on Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz that was released today, which immediately raised some questions like, given all the evidence that the ethics investigation turned up, how did he avoid getting criminally indicted?

00:14:22 Speaker_01
Also, given roughly 330 million people to choose from in this country, what does it say about a person's judgment if they survey the 330 million people of this country and decide that this guy's the best one?

00:14:35 Speaker_01
This is the best pick in the country to be Attorney General of the United States. State and federal laws prohibiting prostitution, illicit drug use, and statutory rape.

00:14:50 Speaker_01
Now, while Congressman Gates denies all wrongdoing, I think it's beyond inarguable that he has sort of a special place in the Trump transition and will for all history.

00:15:05 Speaker_01
Donald Trump's transition to his second term in office has been a series of humiliations and failures, but none worse than choosing this particular person to be attorney general. a prospect that lasted eight days and then collapsed.

00:15:25 Speaker_01
And during that time, the president-elect himself reportedly called U.S. senators and lobbied them to approve this choice, vouching for the guy, telling senators they needed to support him, putting his own political capital into the game.

00:15:40 Speaker_01
The vice president-elect personally, physically brought this guy in and out of senators' offices, putting his own credibility, his own political capital on the line to vouch for this guy and get this guy approved.

00:15:52 Speaker_01
Multiple Republican senators went on the record indicating, oh yes, absolutely, I'll vote for this guy for Attorney General. Sure, why not? That's my best judgment. Hi, Lindsey Graham. Hi, Tommy Tuberville. Hi, Bill Hagerty.

00:16:05 Speaker_01
Aren't you glad you took the humiliating reputational hit to vouch for Matt Gaetz?

00:16:11 Speaker_01
given that just days later he dropped out and now we've got the Ethics Committee accusing him officially of statutory rape and prostitution and lots and lots of drug use, including him allegedly setting up a fake email address in his congressional office that he specifically used to score pot.

00:16:30 Speaker_01
Was that worth it for you? Do you want to do it again?

00:16:35 Speaker_01
Don't forget all the congressional Republicans who went on the record and voted to make sure that this information would be kept secret so Matt Gaetz could have a chance of becoming Attorney General of the United States without the public ever finding out all the evidence that Congress collected about, again, statutory rape, prostitution, drug use, etc.

00:16:58 Speaker_01
That includes the very, very, very pious, biblically guided Speaker of the House, who went out in public and strenuously argued that the American public should not be allowed to know the evidence that the House had collected about Matt Gaetz.

00:17:16 Speaker_01
And the American public should not be allowed to see that evidence so Matt Gaetz could become Attorney General.

00:17:25 Speaker_01
without anybody knowing about what we now know is the Ethics Committee's conclusions that there is substantial evidence that Matt Gaetz broke all these laws, including, you know, the ones about grown men not having sex with children.

00:17:39 Speaker_01
The deeply pious House Speaker insists that that information must be kept secret from the American people so that Matt Gaetz can become Attorney General of the United States.

00:17:54 Speaker_01
House Speaker Mike Johnson, how do you feel about putting your reputation in this particular dumpster? Would you do it again? Because you're going to be asked to do it again.

00:18:06 Speaker_01
How do you feel about being asked to put your reputation in this particular dumpster, given that the Gates nomination was withdrawn just days later? So you did it for nothing.

00:18:21 Speaker_01
The Trump transition has been a 20-car pileup of errors and humiliations that reflect poorly on Trump as the decision-maker at the top, but that have also inflicted political harm and humiliation on lots of other Republicans who his errors have messed with, including his own vice president and all the senators and all the Republican members of the House who he made go-to-bat for Matt Gaetz.

00:18:46 Speaker_01
All this after an election in which Democrats gained a couple of seats and Republicans lost ground in the House, which means Republicans' margin for getting anything passed in the House is now smaller than at any time in the past century.

00:18:59 Speaker_01
And now, and now, on top of all that, as what we expect to be his last act, presumably before Christmas, we just had Transition Trump run the Republican-controlled House right up to the precipice of another government shutdown, the closest we have been to a government shutdown since the last time Trump was president.

00:19:16 Speaker_01
I mean, Trump has made a lot of errors and unforced humiliating own goals in this transition. And I think the media should cover it more that way.

00:19:28 Speaker_01
The idea that this is a normal transition, this hasn't just been gaffe after gaffe, and own goal after own goal, and reputational harm after reputational harm.

00:19:38 Speaker_01
Trump not only tanking his own political capital, but just sideswiping every other powerful Republican in Washington while he is doing it, as he mishandles all of these nominations. It has been a terrible, shambolic transition.

00:19:56 Speaker_01
but on top of everything else that he has done with all of these nominations and the way he has mishandled them. The brush with a government shutdown this weekend made Trump look not just error-prone and easily confused, but also weak.

00:20:13 Speaker_01
The whole drama over whether or not to shut down the government, you'll remember, was not started by Trump.

00:20:18 Speaker_01
It was started by eccentric right-wing billionaire Elon Musk, who posted online over 150 times about the funding bill to keep the government running, stating lots of things about it that were definitely not true, insisting in increasingly vociferous terms that Republicans needed to tank that bill and not fund the government and shut everything down.

00:20:39 Speaker_01
It was only after Musk had gotten the ball rolling that Trump eventually joined in.

00:20:45 Speaker_01
Once Trump got involved, he did start making demands from the Republican-controlled Congress, telling them what he wanted from them as he was pushing them toward a shutdown. What did he want them to give him?

00:20:56 Speaker_01
He wanted a very specific thing that he asked for explicitly. He wanted the Republican-controlled Congress to abolish the debt ceiling.

00:21:03 Speaker_01
Don't worry, though, you don't have to bother reminding yourself what the debt ceiling is because they didn't do it. Trump wanted it, he demanded it, but he didn't get it.

00:21:12 Speaker_01
They didn't make any change around the debt ceiling, even though that's what Trump was demanding, which makes him look, again, error-prone, easily confused, and weak.

00:21:24 Speaker_01
It particularly makes him look weak compared to Elon Musk, because what did result from the standoff that nearly shut down the government this weekend, what actually did change, is not what would have benefited Trump, is not what Trump asked for, it's not the debt ceiling thing.

00:21:37 Speaker_01
Instead, it's what would have benefited Elon Musk. Because what they did remove from the government funding bill was a provision that would have screened and regulated US investments in China.

00:21:47 Speaker_01
And those new rules could have interfered with Musk's reported plans to build yet another massive manufacturing plant in China, right down the street from the largest Tesla factory on earth, which he has already built in Shanghai.

00:22:02 Speaker_01
Because USA, USA, USA. As David Dayen put it at the American Prospect this weekend, quote, this is the first scandal of the second Trump term. And take a long look, because it's gonna look like all the other scandals.

00:22:20 Speaker_01
This is going to be a constant theme of the next four years. Personal business interests are going to constantly take precedence over governance in the Trump-Musk White House.

00:22:31 Speaker_01
The word for this is oligarchy, and oligarchs do not think about the country first. Luckily, they've already taken integrity off the coat of arms, just sandblasted it right off of there. So we don't have to do it ourselves.

00:22:50 Speaker_01
We are starting the holidays in the midst of a presidential transition that really has been a shambolic mess and it should be covered as such. But on top of all of those mistakes,

00:23:04 Speaker_01
We are now seeing the first signs that the errors and the own goals and the self-inflicted humiliations of this nascent presidency, they may reflect a new president who is not just incompetent, who is not just bad at the basics of what it takes to appoint people to jobs and run a transition.

00:23:24 Speaker_01
We may be seeing the first signs of a new president who is weak enough not just to fail, but to be taken advantage of by some of the brighter bulbs on the tree. More ahead, stay with us.

00:23:44 Speaker_01
Before President Biden was inaugurated in January 2021, the previous president had spent the last months of his presidency rushing to kill as many American prisoners as possible.

00:23:56 Speaker_01
He tried to rush through as many executions as he could at the very end, including three people who he had killed just days before the newly elected President Biden took over.

00:24:08 Speaker_01
It was a really extraordinary rush to the death chamber, and I mean extraordinary in mathematical terms.

00:24:14 Speaker_01
From the time the death penalty was reestablished in 1988, the federal death penalty, it was reestablished in 1988, through June 2020, there had only been three federal executions total. Three in 32 years.

00:24:30 Speaker_01
Then, just during Trump's last six months in office, there were 13. three in 32 years, and then 13 in six months.

00:24:41 Speaker_01
Today, President Biden made sure his successor, of course, is the same guy who preceded him, can't continue on anything like that same pace.

00:24:50 Speaker_01
Today, President Biden commuted death sentences for nearly every federal prisoner on death row in the United States. It doesn't mean that these guys will be set free, but it does mean they will not be killed by the government.

00:25:04 Speaker_01
37 of the 40 federal death row prisoners will now instead serve life without parole. The only exceptions were three prisoners convicted for acts of terrorism or for hate crimes.

00:25:16 Speaker_01
Those were the Boston Marathon Bomber and the Mother Emanuel AME Church Shooter and the Tree of Life Synagogue Shooter. Those three are the only prisoners left on federal death row today.

00:25:28 Speaker_01
after these 37 commutations today, just ahead of Christmas from President Biden. Among the people who've been pushing President Biden to take this kind of step is Bryan Stevenson.

00:25:40 Speaker_01
Bryan Stevenson has been the leading anti-death penalty advocate in this country for decades. In 1989, he founded the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama. It challenges excessive punishment broadly.

00:25:52 Speaker_01
It challenges death sentences in particular all across the country. Bryan Stevenson's best-selling memoir, Just Mercy.

00:25:59 Speaker_01
Among other things, it tells the story of a man who spent six years on death row, who was not just spared execution, he was set free when Bryan Stevenson was able to prove without a shadow of a doubt that that man was innocent, that he had been wrongly convicted.

00:26:15 Speaker_01
He freed him before the state had the chance to kill him. Just Mercy became the basis for an award-winning film of the same name, which of course stars the great Michael B. Jordan.

00:26:28 Speaker_01
After President Biden commuted those 37 federal death sentences today, Bryan Stevenson said this. He said, quote, we do not need to kill people to show that killing is wrong in this country.

00:26:39 Speaker_01
The death penalty is a torturous, flawed, expensive, and error-filled practice that must be abolished. He said, quote, I commend President Biden for this historic act and hope that governors and state executives follow the president's lead.

00:26:54 Speaker_01
Joining us now is Brian Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. Mr. Stevenson, it's a real honor to have you here. Thanks for making the time.

00:27:02 Speaker_03
It's great to be with you.

00:27:07 Speaker_01
Let me just start by asking you to explain why you think this action by President Biden was important today.

00:27:13 Speaker_03
Well, it's historic in the sense that no U.S. president has ever commuted this many death sentences. And certainly in the modern era, it has no precedent.

00:27:24 Speaker_03
But I think it's also significant because I think it could be a turning point in how we think about the death penalty. You know, support for the death penalty is at a five decade low.

00:27:34 Speaker_03
We've seen a real move away from capital punishment in many states that have abolished it, including southern states like Virginia. The death sentencing rates are lower than they've been in decades. The death execution rates are low.

00:27:48 Speaker_03
The recent poll for the first time established that a majority of Americans between 18 and 43 no longer believe in the death penalty.

00:27:57 Speaker_03
So I think the president's commutations could be a turning point if other executives, if other governors, if other leaders follow his lead. There are 700 people on death row in California.

00:28:09 Speaker_03
that could be commuted, and Governor Newsom has talked about that. There are people on death row in North Carolina, in Pennsylvania, in Ohio, and many other states.

00:28:18 Speaker_03
And I just think we have an opportunity to really step back from this punishment that has been so flawed, error prone, and troubling over the last 50 years.

00:28:31 Speaker_01
You've made a powerful case that part of what is wrong about the death penalty is because of what it asks of us as a society, what it asks of our government, that people who do terrible things are more than the worst thing they have ever done in their lives.

00:28:46 Speaker_01
But those of us who think of ourselves as citizens and as people who are responsible to the way that our government behaves also have a responsibility to make sure that one of the things our government

00:28:58 Speaker_01
ought not to do is make it somebody's job to kill people as part of their paycheck, as part of what they do to earn a paycheck. Given that, What do you make of the three exceptions the president made?

00:29:13 Speaker_01
The three crimes that are associated with those three prisoners are obviously some of the most heinous and notorious crimes that have been committed in this country in my lifetime.

00:29:25 Speaker_01
But still, it's notable, by making 37 commutations, that he carved out those three as exceptions.

00:29:32 Speaker_03
Yes, I think that you could characterize those three cases as cases of terrorism, as cases of mass murder. I think what's significant about those three cases is that they're relatively early in the process.

00:29:45 Speaker_03
So that is, they will be able to litigate the issues in their case for several years. I think there will be another opportunity to address those cases before any of those people are subjected to an execution. But you're right.

00:30:00 Speaker_03
I don't think that we should think about the death penalty by asking whether people deserve to die for their crimes they've committed. I think we should be asking, do we deserve to kill? And we have a system that makes so many mistakes.

00:30:14 Speaker_03
This year, we saw the 200th person exonerated and released after being convicted and sentenced to death. shocking rate of error.

00:30:22 Speaker_03
For every eight people we've executed in the United States over the last 50 years, we've identified one innocent person on death row. And we would never tolerate that rate of error in most areas of public administration.

00:30:35 Speaker_03
If somebody told you that there's a toxin on some apples, and one out of eight apples, if you touch one, will kill you, we would stop selling apples. We wouldn't tolerate this in aviation. We wouldn't tolerate this

00:30:45 Speaker_03
in public health, but we continue to tolerate it in the administration of the death penalty. And I do think there is something cruel about forcing people to participate in something so clearly problematic, so clearly torturous.

00:31:01 Speaker_03
You know, we don't expect our officials to rate people who are convicted of rape. We think that's unconscionable. We don't think a government official should torture people who've been convicted of torture.

00:31:12 Speaker_03
But somehow we've persuaded ourselves that asking state employees to kill people who have killed is something that's going to be okay.

00:31:20 Speaker_03
And one of the letters that was submitted to the president in support of these commutations came from correctional officials, wardens, correctional officers who bear the trauma and the weight of having to subject people

00:31:32 Speaker_03
unnecessarily, gratuitously, to these systematic and lethal killings.

00:31:39 Speaker_03
And I think that's what's going to push many of us to keep fighting for those three, and not just those three on the federal death row, but the over 2,000 that are on state death rows across this country.

00:31:53 Speaker_01
Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, the author of Just Mercy, and our nation's leading moral and legal voice on this incredibly important issue.

00:32:07 Speaker_01
Thank you for your time tonight, particularly just up against the holidays. It's really nice to see you and to have you here, sir.

00:32:12 Speaker_03
It's great to see you, too.

00:32:13 Speaker_01
All right. More news ahead. Stay with us. So last week, we talked about a government rule that requires a car company to report whenever a car gets into a crash while it is in self-driving mode.

00:32:30 Speaker_01
Crashes like this one on Thanksgiving Day in 2022, when a Tesla in San Francisco that was in full self-driving mode inexplicably stopped on the highway and caused an eight-car pileup.

00:32:43 Speaker_01
Thanks to this rule that you have to report it when a self-driving car crashes, Tesla had to report that crash to the government.

00:32:51 Speaker_01
Now that the CEO of Tesla is a kind of a co-president-elect, though, Reuters is reporting this, quote, Trump team wants to scrap car crash reporting rule that Tesla opposes.

00:33:06 Speaker_01
For the low, low, low price of financing one presidential election, Tesla may have bought itself a US government that, among other things, no longer requires Tesla to report when it's self-driving software causes wrecks and hurts and kills people.

00:33:21 Speaker_01
But Tesla's interests aren't just in the United States. Arguably, Tesla is more a Chinese car company than it is an American car company.

00:33:29 Speaker_01
The biggest Tesla factory, the factory that makes more of its cars than any other plant, the single factory which makes roughly half the cars it makes globally, is a huge one in Shanghai.

00:33:41 Speaker_01
And Tesla right now is trying to get approval from the Chinese government to operate its self-driving car technology in that country as well. Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk, really wants to keep the Chinese government happy.

00:33:55 Speaker_01
And he really wants to build yet more factories in China. He's really invested in having Chinese workers manufacturing his cars.

00:34:04 Speaker_01
Right down the street from his huge Shanghai Tesla factory that he's already got up and running, Musk is building another huge $200 million Tesla battery factory. Again, to employ Chinese workers.

00:34:19 Speaker_01
While Donald Trump appears to have not gotten what he wanted out of the near government shutdown this weekend, Elon Musk does appear to have successfully maneuvered Republicans in Congress into cutting out of the government funding bill, a provision that would have thrown regulatory roadblocks in the way of his continued massive investment in Chinese manufacturing for his car company.

00:34:41 Speaker_01
We reached out for comment. We have not heard back. We'll let you know if we do.

00:34:46 Speaker_01
But the idea that we have just gone through this near-death experience, right, with another Trump government shutdown potentially happening right before Christmas, even before Trump technically gets back into office, and we did it specifically so his billionaire pseudo-co-president could protect his relationship with the Chinese government and get more of what he wants in terms of Chinese manufacturing,

00:35:09 Speaker_01
I mean, it's unsettling enough from a national security perspective, from a national sovereignty perspective, but it's all the more unsettling given reporting in recent days about the ways in which our own government has found Elon Musk to be a potential national security risk.

00:35:27 Speaker_01
The Wall Street Journal, for example, reported that while there are several hundred employees at SpaceX, Musk's company, who have security clearances for what's known as sensitive compartmented information, Elon Musk is not one of the people who has that level of clearance.

00:35:44 Speaker_01
And that's not normal for companies doing this kind of sensitive work with the government. The Journal reports that the CEOs of other similarly situated companies, they've all been able to get this kind of security clearance, but not Elon Musk.

00:35:57 Speaker_01
If you're wondering why, consider this reporting from Kirsten Grind, Eric Lipton, and Shira Frankel at the New York Times.

00:36:03 Speaker_01
Quote, Elon Musk and his rocket company, SpaceX, have repeatedly failed to comply with federal reporting protocols aimed at protecting state secrets, including by not providing some details of his meetings with foreign leaders.

00:36:17 Speaker_01
according to people with knowledge of the company and internal documents. Quote, concerns about the reporting practices, and particularly about Musk himself, have triggered at least three federal reviews.

00:36:29 Speaker_01
The Defense Department's Office of Inspector General opened a review into the matter this year.

00:36:33 Speaker_01
The Air Force and also the Pentagon's Office of Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security separately initiated reviews last month, as in November.

00:36:44 Speaker_01
The Air Force also recently denied Musk a high-level security access, citing potential security risks.

00:36:52 Speaker_01
Quote, in the past three years, nine different countries, including in Europe and the Middle East, nine different countries have raised security questions about Musk in meetings with U.S. defense officers.

00:37:05 Speaker_01
It seems clear from the reporting that some of these security concerns may have to do with reports about Elon Musk's drug use.

00:37:13 Speaker_01
But there's also these continuing concerns that he has not disclosed all of his meetings with foreign leaders or what was talked about in those meetings and that is required if you want to maintain a security clearance with the US government.

00:37:27 Speaker_01
The question for all of us broadly is why would a person refuse to disclose what's happening at meetings with foreign leaders and foreign governments? What are you talking about with foreign leaders that you don't want the US government to know about?

00:37:40 Speaker_01
And what does it mean to have somebody who's seen as that kind of a security risk essentially single-handedly directing the actions of the U.S. government during a presidential transition?

00:37:50 Speaker_01
Joining us now is New York Times investigative reporter Eric Lifton. Mr. Lifton, thanks very much for your time tonight. I really appreciate you being here.

00:37:57 Speaker_04
Thanks for having me.

00:37:59 Speaker_01
So help me understand the, I guess how surprising it is, how unexpected it might be in the abstract for somebody who is the head of a company like SpaceX, for example, to not have the kind of security clearances that Mr. Musk has either not been able to obtain or has actively been denied.

00:38:23 Speaker_04
There's something called the Special Access Program that is a higher level of classification that SpaceX wanted for Elon Musk that would allow him to participate in some of the most sensitive discussions around, for example, right now SpaceX is helping the National Reconnaissance Office build a spy satellite network around the globe in orbit.

00:38:47 Speaker_04
He's also, you know, in charge of national security launches, putting some of the most sensitive spy satellites and missile tracking equipment into orbit.

00:38:56 Speaker_04
And so the special access program would have given him the ability to participate in some of the most classified discussions around these programs. And that was denied by the Air Force.

00:39:06 Speaker_04
He does have top secret clearance, but he does not have special access program. That's unusual for a CEO.

00:39:13 Speaker_04
It's something that doesn't really happen for a CEO at that level for there to be questions about a special access program ability for someone at that level.

00:39:24 Speaker_04
The fact of the matter is that SpaceX is incredibly involved in the national security and spy system right now. It is not only a launch company, it is actually helping build a spy satellite network

00:39:37 Speaker_04
and also helping, you know, create the satellites that are used for missile tracking, for missile defense programs in the United States. So, it's an incredibly important company in the national security of the United States at the moment.

00:39:48 Speaker_01
an incredibly important company for the national security of the United States whose CEO can't get top-level security clearance to be allowed access to some of what his own company is doing. It just, it seems strange.

00:40:03 Speaker_01
Can I ask you about other countries having reported security concerns about Mr. Musk to U.S. defense officials? Do we know anything about the nature of those concerns that they reported?

00:40:16 Speaker_04
I mean, the most specific thing is from a colleague that worked on the story with us.

00:40:20 Speaker_04
And, you know, that had to do with Israel had some concerns about whether or not, you know, Musk could be trusted to maintain state secrets and was not communicating with potential adversaries information, sharing information that perhaps he had access to.

00:40:36 Speaker_04
And that was one of the number of countries that was shared with us that raised a concern about Musk and whether or not, you know,

00:40:46 Speaker_04
basically could he be trusted I mean the you know the the it's very unusual to have a CEO of a of a major defense contractor be so engaged in foreign business operations directly- as you discussed with respect to China and the extent of his operations in China is.

00:41:04 Speaker_04
And the business interest that that China and the level of leverage, to some extent, that China therefore has over him and his company, is unusual. And I think that that makes folks at the Air Force uncomfortable.

00:41:17 Speaker_01
New York Times investigative reporter Eric Lipton, thank you very much. I know this is a particularly technical area of reporting. It's really hard to report on security clearances and intelligence concerns because of how secret it all is.

00:41:32 Speaker_01
It's been really illuminating to have you and your colleagues working on this. Thank you so much for helping us understand it.

00:41:37 Speaker_04
Thank you.

00:41:37 Speaker_01
All right. We'll be right back. Stay with us.

00:41:43 Speaker_02
There was an old lady who lived in a shoe when a pan caught fire. She knew what to do. Don't pour water on a burning pot and don't pick it up because it's hot.

00:41:55 Speaker_02
First, turn off the heat and try and smother the flames with a lid or a cover or better still to guard against fire. Use a thermally controlled deep fat fryer. The old lady knew just what to do. Do you?

00:42:13 Speaker_01
Do you? I might be that lady. Public service announcements are among my favorite things ever in all of broadcasting. I said at the outset this hour that I have one more Christmas present for you this hour. This is it.

00:42:27 Speaker_01
We have started our own version of a public service announcement.

00:42:32 Speaker_01
With the incoming administration not doing normal vetting or background checks for their nominees, we have started a new series that we are calling Public Servant Announcements to fill in some of the gaps on who's set to get big, important government jobs.

00:42:46 Speaker_01
And we have just started posting them on YouTube. If you go to mattoblog.com, you can get the links to all of them. For Christmas, as your special Christmas present, we are going to drop our newest public, it doesn't fit.

00:43:02 Speaker_01
Our newest public servant announcement, which is about Trump's pick of Dr. Mehmet Oz to run Medicare.

00:43:09 Speaker_01
So on Christmas afternoon, somewhere between tearing down the stockings and carving up the turkey, you can check out our new public servant announcement series. Watch out, I'm feeling very festive this year. I hope you like it.

00:43:30 Speaker_01
One is admittedly a matter of mild personal embarrassment, but two, two means that this is a problem for me, one for which I have no defense. Merry Christmas, that's gonna do it for me for now.