MAGA cites Obama basketball court to justify Trump White House demo

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Tonight on All In. Nobody's actually seen anything quite like it. I think it'll be one of the great ballrooms anywhere in the world. The White House demolition of Donald Trump. At this moment in time, of course, the ballroom is really the president's main priority. Tonight, why Donald Trump's wrecking ball has captured the nation's attention, and then... Make Argentina ready to get it worked. The growing fury from farmers and ranchers across America at Donald Trump's Farmageddon. To punch in the gut to all of our American cattle ranchers, and they are furious. And the ugly truth of American gambling culture after the stunning arrests of an NBA player and coach. Each defendant in the NBA basketball gambling case has been charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. When all ends starts right now.

Good evening from New York. I'm Chris Hayes. We're on day 23 of the government shutdown. Time and money are dwindling for families on food stamps. Healthcare costs are skyrocketing for millions of Americans. And Donald Trump is tearing down the White House. There it is. Gone. The entire East Wing of the White House is now gone, irreparably, forever, permanently. There's not a lot. Any commentator can really add to this imagery. It's exactly what it looks like. Physical manifestation of what Donald Trump is doing to this country. Where piles of debris now stand, tourists and school kids and dignitaries from around the world entered for public tours and state dinners. The East Wing is where every first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt has maintained an office, along with the White House social and military staff. As political operative Rick Wilson put it, the East Wing was quote where letters are answered and tours are staged, or holiday cards go from Proust to envelopes from military families with tight smiles and damp eyes wait to meet a president who will say we remember. All gone now, literally destroyed, all to build a gilded ballroom that nobody asked for. It is planned to be nearly twice the size of the entire actual White House. He is doing it all without a scintilla of congressional approval or appropriation or anything. Now, this all started over the summer. At first, Trump said the project wouldn't touch the existing structure. And it will cost $200 million to be funded by his private donors, including Comcast, the parent company of this very network. And earlier this week, it was suddenly up to $250 million. And yesterday, Trump revealed the project was going to cost even more $300 million. And then this evening, he jacked up the cost again, and we're now at $350 million. And I'll tell you what, it's really an honor to add that great ballroom to the structures in Washington. It's going to be one of the great ballrooms of the world. And I think it's going to be something you're all going to be very proud of. I think it'll be one of the great ballrooms anywhere in the world. It's about $300 million. That's an interior of the ballroom. And it's the highest level. Have you raised the full $300 million needed to fund your ballroom? And how much specifically are you donating to this construction project? I think $350 million. He's a builder at heart, clearly. And so his heart and his mind is always churning about how to improve things here on the White House grounds. But at this moment in time, of course, the ballroom is really the president's main priority. Oh, yes, a bill at heart. Do you remember just like a few weeks ago when he went to the Fed to try to browbeat Jerome Powell over cost overruns for a Fed renovation and misread the spreadsheet in front of him? This builder at heart is demolishing not one of his properties, which he can do, if you get the right legal say-so, but the people's house without the authorization of the People's Congress during a shutdown where more than a million federal workers are missing their salaries. You didn't consult with historical conservationists or permitting authorities, which, of course, is Donald Trump's MO, skipping over the necessary checks and balances and pretending the rules do not apply to him. So here's a question to ask yourself, what's to stop Donald Trump from tearing down the entire White House? Or every monument in Washington replacing it with one to himself? According to a spokeswoman, nothing.

Can the president tear down anything he wants without oversight? Could he demolish this building or say the Jefferson Memorial? Can any president do such a thing to the White House grounds? There have been many presidents in the past who have made their mark on this beautiful White House complex. So it sounds like the answer is yes, he can tear down whatever he wants. And then secondly, I mean... That's not what we're saying. That's a legal opinion that's been held for many years. Really? That's a legal opinion. It's been held many years? People are all finding this rightly shocking. The UGov snap poll taken back on Tuesday when the East Wing still existed mostly intact, no longer, shows 53% of respondents disapprove of Trump's demolition, more than double the 23% who approved. And if you look at that and ask yourself, well, how are 23% of Americans for this? Well, it's entirely possible they are watching Fox. And this isn't the first time White House that the White House has had work done. Go back to 1902. Teddy Roosevelt added the whole west wing. 1909. Taft added the Oval Office. 33, FDR installed a swimming pool. 52. Truman gutted the entire inside of the White House and added a bowling alley. And then in 2009, outside President Obama added a basketball court. Ah, yes, the Obama basketball court. They're talking about how President Obama had the White House tennis court adapted, not changed or removed, so it could be used for full court basketball games as well. The court was used to host championship teams, distinguished visitors, wounded warriors. I even played there. There I am, those really long blue shorts. It was awesome. The whole thing drove the right insane. They said the president was ignoring real problems to focus on hoops. Even a real estate guy at the time had thoughts about it. He said he has no control over prices, which he does if he gets on the phone or gets off his basketball court or whatever he's doing at the time. I mean, he should be focused on OPEC and getting those prices down. Oh, it was a terrible thing back then. Now it's a rationale for Trump to level the East Wing. Obama built stuff too. Right. Did these things look remotely the same to you? Converting the court, tennis court, and a basketball court? demolishing the East Wing of the White House? Of course, they don't. That's the only kind of spin that Trump knows. Today, the White House unveiled a website to normalize what it called the East Wing expansion, sort of a typically bizarrely trollish document, if you can call it that, complete with a timeline of major events of the White House that includes randomly a picture of Barack Obama and a Churban, which was like famously a part of this whole racist email forward back in 2007-8. It's got a malicious evidence-free claim about Hunter Biden, a dig at Joe Biden for welcoming trans people to the White House. all of this just like middle finger to all of you stuff to justify creating a gaping hole in the White House grounds, the likes of which known has seen, literally since the British burned into the ground more than 200 years ago. And the thing about this is, boy, I think about this a lot. It is genuinely hard to conceptualize in a concrete terms what Donald Trump is doing to the Department of Justice and to Congress and the economy and immigration policy and the Constitution. Even if you're paying attention constantly as I am, this, everybody gets on a visceral level.

Trump's tearing it down. He's inflicting permanent damage. It's gone now. Like, these swings stood there, and it stood there for 100 years, and now it's gone. And that damage to buildings and institutions can't be undone. And it gave me the same feeling I have when I watched the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris burn in 2019. There is something so... arresting and upsetting about this kind of imagery, that feeling of helplessness, watching something that felt like it belonged to everyone just burned down and being powerless to do anything to save it. But the Notre Dame fire was an accident. The demolition of the East Wing is not. Just another willful act of destruction by Donald Trump. Congresswoman Yasim and Ansari's Democrat Arizona, one of three House members who signed onto a letter to Trump demanding answers about his ballroom, near a tendon who served under three administrations and worked in the East Wing also joins me now. Good to have you both. Congresswoman, let me start with you. I just, what do we even know about this situation? I just have never in my life seen anything like it, like backhoes show up. Three days later, the thing's gone. It's gone from 200 million to 350. We have some list of the donors, but no idea like how much money they're giving, who's got the contract to build it. Do you in Congress know any of that? Chris, this is exactly what happens when we hand the keys of the people's house to a wannabe king and a dictator. No, the answer is we know nothing. We know very, very little about Donald Trump's plans. And that's exactly why myself and two of the ranking members of the Oversight Committee, as well as the Natural Resources Committee, wrote a letter directly to President Trump demanding answers. On this, I think the most concerning piece of all of this, of course, the destruction of the East Wing and this building of a palace is unacceptable and insane. But look at the context in which it's happening right now. We are in the midst of a Trump and Republican shutdown. 15 million Americans are going to get kicked off of Medicaid. 24 million Americans are about to see their insurance premiums double or triple. And Donald Trump is literally... Using funding coming directly from billionaires and corporations to build himself a ballroom? I mean, this is disgusting. This is abhorrent. And there are so many questions that need to be answered. First and foremost, I want to know who are the companies and the individuals making these donations. And what have they been promised for those donations? Nira, you work in the White House and in the East Wing. And just first, your reaction to seeing these images.

I mean, I just have to say, honestly, it's really heartbreaking. I mean, as you noted, these are these are hallowed halls, really, where it is a people's house and it's this, these are kind of amazing memories for kids who've gone through the East Wing, for veterans who've gone through the East Wing. And, you know, this is, there's a symmetry to the White House. The East Wing matches the West Wing. It's a beautiful building that. It, like, lives in our national memory. And the, you know, the most important thing is that I serve three presidents who recognized they were renters. You know, they weren't owners. Yes. It wasn't their place to destroy property or reimagine the property in their image because fundamentally, they knew that they were not kings. They were presidents who had a limited time. You know, when you basically do a mass renovation, and I use the term renovation really very loosely, you're an owner. And I think the irony of all of this is after Republicans attacked Democrats and people coming out on the no king's rally, there is no greater testament to this president thinking he's a king than him building a gigantic golden ballroom. to probably match what he's seen in Saudi Arabia and destroy essentially our shared history in the East Wing and the White House. It is... truly revolting to me. And what I find the most disgusting of all of this is the deafening silence of Republican senators and House members who know that this is a violation, probably of the law, but at very least the public trust. Well, on that point, Congresswoman, I... Do you think it's obviously illegal under my reading of the Anti-Deficiency Act, which basically says, look, you can't privatize the... spending on public goods through the government because the Congress controls a purse. And once you do that, you open it up to all sorts of corruption and cronyism. To the point you were making before, we've got a partial list of some of the donors. Altria, Amazon, Apple, Booz Hamilton, Caterbiller, Coinbase, Comcast, Pepe and Amelia Funjule. Good for them. Hard Rock International. Google. Like, this is such an obvious vector for influence training and corruption. And it does seem the most basic line like some legal justification and some full transparent accounting of how the heck this is happening.

Absolutely. And that's, you know, there's a list of questions that we outlined in the letter that we need answers to. And that is part of it. You talked about the budget, the fact that he has been throwing, Donald Trump has been throwing out numbers from the beginning. It went from 200 million to 250, 300, 350. This is insane. What is the budget for this project? Exactly what sort of legal authority does the president have during a government shutdown to actually pursue this at this time? Again, who are the companies involved and what have they been promised for this? I think it just is another, but possibly the most egregious example to date of this pay-to-play system and this, you know, the oligarchy that Donald Trump has been, you know, leading since taking office in January this year. And the path that we are headed down is so beyond authoritarian and we are only in month 10. It is, you know, it is insane to me that Republicans have not stood up and spoken out about this, among so many other things. I mean, in terms of the annals of government by and for the billionaires in the new Gilded Age, today we have the President of United States saying that some billionaire friend sent them $130 million or $230 million to pay the troops. Do we know if that's true? No, it's almost certainly, it would be illegal if it were. a pardon for the guy that founded one of the big crypto exchanges, which is in business with his family's meme coin, which when asked about, he didn't even seem to know about. We've got the president tearing down the ballroom and getting donations from billionaires. And then finally saying that he was going to send a bunch of troops into San Francisco, but his billionaire buddies called him and told him not to so he's not going to. It's like it truly Nira is literal about who exactly gets to make policy under the Trump administration. And it's extremely wealthy people who can call him up. I mean, essentially, we don't know what he's doing for all of these people, right? I mean, it seems like he's handing a pardons for money he's getting. There's who knows exactly what's being offered. We don't know what future pardons there are. I mean, at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, we actually have a new analysis of the amount of money Trump has just made in the last year, in the last 10 months from... profiting off the presidency. It's $1.2 billion. And he's making, you know, millions of dollars just since the shutdown. And the truth is there's no transparency. And there's no transparency because there is no oversight from Republicans. There are rules. He's violating all of them. He's violating all of them because the separation of powers have been destroyed by Republicans who are covering for him. So the fact is, We don't even know what we don't know. We don't know who's getting what for what favor, for what thing. We only can decipher from the pardons he's handing out. So, like, I just think there's a level of corruption that is unmatched in history and that we have to hold, the only people we can hold accountable for this are Republicans in the House and the Senate to do their job.

Well, they should send those backhose up to the Speaker's office in the Capitol because Mike Johnson's not really using it. Congresswoman Yasmin, I'm sorry, and you're attending. Thank you both. Coming up, the President's America first gas lighting reaches a new low why farmers and ranchers across the country are fuming at Donald Trump. That's next. There is a crisis in rural America of Donald Trump's ownmaking. In a recent opinion piece for Fox News, Congresswoman Chantel Brown of Ohio called it, quote, Farmageddon. And this brewing catastrophe is not due to any outside forces. It is not the result of a natural disaster or a bad crop harvest. Those happen. It's solely because of Donald Trump's policy and his alone. He is currently bailing out his right-wing friend, the president of Argentina, and hurting American farmers in the process. As we've covered on this program, Donald Trump is with American money bailing out President Javier Milei to the tune of $20 billion, specifically to prop up Argentina's currency in order to help Javier Milei win his upcoming election. He even says it's not for the Argentine people, it's only for Javier Milei, and if he loses, it goes away. But while Trump is giving his buddy the bailout, Javier Milei is explicitly undercutting American farmers who are genuinely in crisis. First, there is the soybean debacle. American farmers grow a lot of soybeans, and we export the majority of them, about 52% to China. It's billions and billions of dollars worth, or at least we used to, before Donald Trump started his trade war with China. You see, since May, China has responded to our tariffs by not purchasing a single soybean from this country. They are turning to other countries to meet their needs instead. Countries like, yes, you guessed it, Argentina, which, get this, lowered its own export tariffs on the crop last month in order to make things more lucrative for Chinese buyers. So despite record harvests, American farmers are sitting on tons and tons of rotting soybeans, while Argentine farmers reap all of the benefits of Trump's tariffs on China. I'm a free market person, and if anybody tries to mess with it, usually they just mess it up more. And I'm afraid that's what we're going through. We need trade. U.S., especially Illinois, corn and soybeans, need trade. We need international trade. Okay, but it doesn't end there, right? If you've been to the grocery store lately, you may have seen that beef prices are just through the roof. Last month, NPR reported that prices were up by more than 50% since the pre-COVID era. And that, again, is in large part because of Trump's tariffs. Americans eat a lot of beef, about 60 pounds per person per year on average. And to keep up that demand, we have historically imported a ton of it from foreign countries, billions of pounds a year. Much of that beef comes from Brazil, which now faces a combined 76% tariff on the meat. Now, that is also like the melee thing because Donald Trump doesn't like the current president of Brazil and likes the insurrectionist guy that they're going to put on trial who was the last president of Brazil and his ally. Okay? So, this has put Donald Trump in a bit of a cash 22.

On the one hand, he knows he won the last election on the price of groceries, and voters are very unhappy with him about the cost of living. On the other hand, high beef prices are very good for domestic cattle ranchers. And so Republicans are tying themselves and knots trying to have it both ways. We usually get a lot of imports of hamburger from Mexico as well as Brazil because of President Trump's tariffs on Brazil. Those are down as well. So all we do is we import hamburger from these places. We don't make enough hamburger in this country. I'm afraid it's going to take a while to bring those prices of beef down at the market. But meanwhile, it's been a great market for our cattlemen. It's the only bright spot in agriculture right now. This is so perfect. Yes, your beef is expensive, but it's good for the cattlemen, and it's the only bright spot in agriculture because Trump is taking out the rest of it. Just talking out of every side of their mouth. Even Donald Trump is trying to have it both ways. The beef, the ranchers, let's say, who have done a great job, have lost their shirts for many, many years. They've... really been decimated. And I helped them a lot. I put tariffs on things coming in to the country, including beef. And that gave them a chance to finally... have a decent industry. We are going to be talking to them. They're great people, but they've been hurt for 25, 30 years they've been losing because other countries have taken advantage of them. And by putting tariffs on, they've been able to make a few dollars. They've been able to have an industry. But I also want to keep the beef prices low. So I'll be talking with the ranchers, and I'll be speaking with a lot of different people. Do you follow all that? I mean, first of all, they've been getting killed for 25 years. You were president before. I swear to God, I was here for it. You were here for it. We were all there for it. You were present before. So the tariffs helped the beef farmers by making beef expensive, but Trump wants to keep beef prices low. Okay, so what's a solution? You're never going to believe this one, folks. He's going to import more beef from Argentina, which he says, will bring prices down. at the expense of American cattle ranchers who are not happy about it. I think probably what you've heard a lot today is we should just allow our markets to dictate the price of beef. I think most people out here have the view that the government should just be pretty limited and not kind of metal in the free markets and let us... Let us handle it naturally. Well, we are extremely concerned with the plan, but probably more importantly, we are just flat disappointed that this is the approach that the president.

has taken. We understand what he is trying to do, but what he does not realize is that in trying to bring the price of beef down for the consumer, it means he's going to bring down the price being paid for cattle for U.S. producers. So in effect, this is a direct attack on U.S. cattle producers. We need to reduce imports. We need to grow our herd. We need to grow domestic beef in this country. We have the means to do it. I think we should not be looking for new markets to bring beef in here. But Donald Trump thinks those farmers need to stop whining. Quote, the cattle ranchers who I love. Don't understand the only reason they're doing so well for the first time in decades because I put tariffs on cattle coming to the United States, including a 50% tariff on Brazil. If it weren't for me, they would be doing just as they've done for the past 20 years. Terrible. It would be nice if they would understand that, but they also have to get their prices down because the consumer is a very big factor in my thinking also. So this is now the second separate instance of Donald Trump by himself. No, there's no committee doing this. It's just Donald Trump putting the screws on American farmers so that he can help out his so-called anarcho-capitalist buddy in Argentina. For me. Claude, you can talk? I've always had the gift of gab, Nancy. But now you can understand. With pretty litter, the odor neutralizing, long-lasting health indicating kitty litter, that's simply the most luxurious way to bury my poopies and my peepees. Pretty litter was developed with veterinarians. It helps me monitor potential health problems just by changing color. Go to pretty litter.com today. Pretty litter. Not just a pretty litter. Hi, it's Sierra Miller. I can't wait for you to check out my new collection of shoes and accessories at Designer Shoe Warehouse. If you love shoes as much as I do, then trust me, I got you. From cute sneak arenas to the perfect flip-lops to stunning heels. These shoes are all style, no drama. It's a girls' girl's summer and DSW has just the shoes. Shop the Sierra Miller collection right now at your DSW store or DSW.com.

And now, the next chapter of the Serta counting sheep. Hey, Uncle Number One, why aren't we counted anymore? Let me tell you a story. Long ago, Serta invented the perfect sleeper mattress. Oh, no. Oh, yes. It says the all-new Serta Perfect Sleaper with the Q4 support system has four and one perfectly interlinked coils that help relieve aches and back pain for perfect sleep night after night. We'll never get counted again. Uh, nope. Serta, we make the world's best mattress. Donald Trump, the so-called America First President, is hurting America's farmers and ranchers in order to help a right-wing foreign leader, President Javier Milei of Argentina. And if that sounds preposterous to you, like that could really be true, just let Trump tell you himself. My question is, what do you have to say to U.S. farmers who feel that the deal is benefiting Argentina more than it is them as they are talking about. Argentina is fighting for its life, young lady. You don't know anything about it. They're fighting for their life. Nothing is benefiting Argentina. They're fighting for their life. You understand what that means? They have no money. They have no anything. They're fighting so hard to survive. If I can help them survive in a free world, I happen to like the... President of Argentina, I think he's trying to do the best he can. John Tester's a former Democratic Center for Montana. Montana is also a third-generation farmer who still runs his family farm. He joins me now. Senator, it's good to have you on. I want to just start with the kind of level setting where the things are, because I've been really following this closely. I've been watching a lot of local news packages. I've been watching a lot of social media videos by farmers. There's particularly folks that are growing soybean, but not just soybeans. There's corn farmers as well. People really seem like this is the worst crisis rural America farm country has faced since basically the famous 1980s big farm crisis caused by interest rates and stuff like that. You've been in this a long time. Is that your sense? Is that a fair characterization? Yeah, it has potential to be absolutely catastrophic for rural America. And so let me back up a little bit. We were farming. We took over the farm in 78. So I remember the 80s well when a lot of my neighbors left because they went broke. We've got farm policy now right now with these tariffs that are taking away our foreign markets. Without foreign markets, we are dead in the water. There's just no doubt about it. And we're seeing commodity prices tank across the board. And the only one that is making a little bit of money right now is the cattle industry. And they're not making a lot, they're making a little bit. And the president not only gave $20 billion and maybe a hell of a lot more than that to Argentina, to have Argentina sell soybeans that were being bought by the United States, we're being bought by China from the United States, now buying them from Argentina. But now he wants to import Argentinian beef into the United States. Let me tell you this, right off the top. This isn't going to help the consumers, but it's going to kill the cattlemen in this country. And as we go into winter, I think we're going to see a lot of farmers go broke because the price and commodity prices are that bad. And now you're going to put on top of that. The cattlemen are going to be going under, too, because quite frankly, you drop those prices with a bunch of imports from a country, by the way, that we don't know if they got foot and mouth disease or what they have in their product. And we're going to put that into our food system.

It's absolutely insanity. And you combine that with what happened with the bill that was passed earlier this summer, the big beautiful bill, I guess it was called, this cutting funds for rural hospitals. You're seeing energy projects getting cut. You're seeing airport money being cut. You're seeing our commodity prices going down the tubes. Look, this is a recipe for an incredible disaster in rural America that will not help our food security and it's not going to help our economy. I want to ask on the soybean part of this, I've talked to some people about this. So there's, you know, there's soybeans you can keep them for a while, right? They're not, it's not, it's not cheese. It's not sitting out, you know. And there's a hope that you can, you know, there's going to be some big summit between Scott Bessent and, you know, we're going to have some Rob Prochman and some truths. So that some of it can be turned back on. But the thing I keep hearing is, The relationships between buyers and sellers take a while to get created. And then they're being ripped apart and then they're finding replacement. So it's like it's not quite as reversible even if you cut a deal. Yeah, you took the words right out of my mouth. Business-like consistency, and when you take away a market, regardless where the market is, and then say, oh, no, no, we're going to reestablish that market. Look, number one, those folks have went somewhere else to get their product. And number two, they're not trusting that consistency in that market anymore. So you're absolutely right. Being able to turn that switch back on is a heck of a lot harder than it is to turn it off. And it's being turned off in the country right now. Our markets are becoming fewer and fewer. And like I said, we raise more food in this country than we can eat. We have to have those foreign markets if we're going to have a decent price at the farm gate. And right now, for every commodity across the board, and I hate to say every commodity, but I can't think of one where people are making money at it. And they're raising grains, they're raising beans, corn, whatever it might be. for less than a cost of production, that's a recipe for going broke. Anybody in business would know that. If you can't pay your bills, if you can't bring enough revenue to pay your bills, you're going to go broke. And I think that's where much of agriculture is right now in this country. Deb Fisher, Nebraska had sort of, you know, she had sort of raised her hand on Twitter to say, hey, by the way, The one bright spot in ag right now is cattle ranchers maybe don't import those Argentine beef. But I just want to stay on the cattle rancher thing because to me it's such a window into the perils of this kind of like kingly mercantilism we're getting here where the president one day the next slaps a tariff on this and says, you know, high cattle prices are good for some people and bad for others, right? If you're trying to buy beef and beef's expensive, it's bad for you. If you're a cattle rancher and you're selling beef, maybe it's good for you. And now you've got this guy who's like, It's like he's toggling the switch, right? Like, who's going to be the last person in his ear for him to make the choice about what the price is going to be? Yeah, well, look, I appreciate the president saying that Argentina is fighting for their lives, but I'm going to tell you what, rural America is fighting for their lives too. And that's not rural America in Argentina. It's rural America right here. And if we don't...

wake up and start making sure that we have markets that are competitive and have places to be able to sell our commodities, our grains, our food, our cattle, then we're asking these folks to pull a rabbit out of the hat, but it can't do. And we'll be bankers start to look at this stuff and say, you know what? We just can't bore any more money out. We're going to have the fact start calling some of those notes in. And when that happens, the family farms will be, many of them will be gone. Yeah. I mean, land, seed, sons, sun, water, and credit have been the ingredients for farming since basically since the Tigris and Euphrates, right? So, you know, everyone's on credit. And that's, you know, that's what happened in the 80s. You start, those start getting called. You're in trouble. Senator John Tester. Thank you very much. One more thing, Chris. I just say this. This isn't because of insects or disease or drought or bad weather patterns. This is because of decisions that are being made in Washington, D.C., by the President of the United States, that are breaking markets, that are ruining the markets. And where's Congress? For the most part, Chris, they're setting on their hands. They should be having hearings. They should be calling this out, and they're not. All right. Senator, Senator Tester, great to have you on. Come back soon. Still to come after the FBI arrests, a current NBA player and current head coach. America's reckoning with his legalized gambling problem next.

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Over the last few years, without anyone ever sort of coming together and agreeing this is how it's going to be, legalized gambling has infiltrated every corner of American sports life. It's on every broadcast, in every app, and every commercial, on the phones of millions of fans. Everyone is streaming and betting, and it has only been a matter of time before something blew up. And it just did. At a Thursday press conference in New York, FBI director Kash Patel announced more than 30 arrests in what he called a wide sweeping criminal enterprise that envelops both the NBA and La Cozanostra, formal name for the Italian American Mafia. Kash Patel said the operation targeted illegal gambling and sports rigging that ran for years. Among those arrested was an active NBA coach and player in the NBA. Portland Trailblazers head coach Chauncey Billups and Miami Heat Guard Terry Rozier, two names that no one expected to hear in a mob case. That player Rozier is alleged to have altered his performance to affect proposition bets. It's bets on things that he was doing. And the coach, Billups was charged a separate scheme for participating in rigged poker games, the mafia setup. One former NBA player, Damon Jay Jones, was also arrested for allegedly disclosing privileged injury information about a prominent basketball player for legal betting. According to ESPN, that information was about LeBron James. Pablo Tori is the reporter who broke the news. The indictments today has been investigating this story on his podcast. Pablo Tori finds out. Alex Wagner is MSNBC's senior political analyst, hosts of Crooked Media's new podcast, Runaway Country, which premieres today. And they both join me now. It's great to have you here. All right. This is one of those. Hello, Chris. Pablo, one of those, God, have we all seen this coming and been yelling about it? And we've had little smaller examples. But. Taking aside Chauncey Billups, just the Rozier part of it, the Damon Jay Jones, if you have proprietary information, you can bet against yourself and other people, and we all knew this was going to happen. I do want to put Chauncey Billups in it because there is a co-conspirator number eight. He is not named as Chauncey Billups, but he has all of the biographical information of Chauncey Billups, and he is involved, allegedly, according to the indictment. in providing the inside information they reference that allowed someone to bet on his Portland Trailblazers team that was tanking. They were tanking for Victor Wambayama. And so the night before this breaks, here's what Ben, Victor Mbenyama, the future of the NBA. The morning after is the dark present of the NBA. And so look, what this is, is, of course, a legal market in which you can bet on things like... Unders. And I don't know if I need to, I guess I should explain unders to the larger audience. But basically now in the hyper-specific menu of legal gambling, you can bet on whether a player is going to get fewer than the rebounds than the line suggests. For instance, I can go out if I'm a player and have someone bet on I'm going to score less than 10 points. And you know what?

I have pretty good control over whether I'm going to score less than 10 points. It's the easiest way to manipulate a game by sharing inside information. And so this is a through line through this investigation, which started by the way under the Biden administration. It did. Now has been taken over for logical spotlight grabby reasons, I dare say, with Kash Patel showing up. But nonetheless, this is an established technique. You share information about who is going to either not play in a game or who's going to play less than they are going to say publicly, and you take the under. And for years, sports have... worried about this and the integrity and the famous Black Sox scandal in baseball, and now we're here. And the other, so that was the first thought I had today when I was watching this was like, of course. And the second thought I had, Alex, was I'm watching the Department of Justice under Donald Trump do what is a relatively normal thing. You know, U.S. attorneys will announce high profile cases. It was a little weird Kash Patel was there. But then my next thought was like, A, first of all, can you trust anything from this department? Second of all, oh, they found like a kind of fraud or conspirators to commit fraud that they think is important. Like George Santos just got a pardon two days ago. The finance crypto guy just got a pardon today. Lord knows like what Chauncey Billups and Terry Rozier are going to do in terms of like the entire integrity of the system now, even when doing something not prosecuting a political enemy, is incredibly hard to just look at and face value. It's literally pay for play. I mean, it's literally the Binance guy gets pardoned because his company is responsible for enriching the Trump family. That's it. That's full stop. That's what it is. That's why he's where he is. Even if Trump and the Oval Officer in the White House today pretended to not really recollect. Slash couldn't actually remember which one you're... Who are you talking? I'm pardoning so many people that... Which one? He literally said something like, I'm pardoning a lot of people. You're going to have to repeat. You just have to make the, like, the overtures don't even have to be subtle. It's like, how much money do you need for the ballroom? I'll hire a... lawyer that you're familiar with. Tim Parletory seems to be taking on clients. He's working with Pete Hegseth over at the Pentagon. Like, just get a loyalist from inside Trump's circle to represent you in your negotiations and signal that you're ready to throw some cash down. And what does it mean to be indicted? What does it mean to be under investigation? Nothing. And the thing that's crazy, too, the current Department of Justice is pardons are one thing, which has always been a power there, although he's used him liberally and he's really focused on the kinds of folks who have had fraud cases, right? Like, But now with the Department of Justice we saw with the Eric Adams case. Presumably, if you've got the right people to talk to Donald Trump, he could just call the U.S. attorney to be like, drop the case. Oh, yeah, Terry Rozier, his attorney for the record here. We got a statement from him today is a man named James Trustee, Jim Trustee. Jim to all of us. Jim, Jim, to those familiar with his Uber. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So look, there's a playbook, right? There is a marketplace for everything, for bets on a basketball game, for pardons.

for favors from the White House. And so the strategy here is obvious to me. The disappointment, of course, from a larger conceptual premise is in sports, the rules are kind of supposed to matter. That's the whole point. You kind of have to pretend. Yes. Maybe the last place you've got to pretend in America that we care about these rules. It kind of is the last place, because otherwise the whole thing's pointless. Right. And that's the other thing about it is like this idea of a level playing field, right? Like we literally use that metaphor. It's a sports metaphor. is that you can't just have like the rich people buy their way out of it and then everyone else to deal with it, which is what the justice system is, particularly right now when you look at the George Santos treatment and like what it means to be an immigrant in this country right now, walking around where if you're connected and you can get the right lawyer, you can get a pardon. If you're in a Home Depot or outside of Takaria or outside of school or you have a case before an immigration judge. If you're in the system. If you're in the system and you are doing everything right and showing up to court, you can be... grabbed, man-handled, possibly assaulted, tear-gast itself. Well, we explore this on this week's episode of Runaway Country. I talked to an immigration judge. And the issue is not just that, you know, you're not going to have access to legal expertise in all likelihood and that ICE agents are waiting in predatory fashion outside the courtroom. It's that the Trump administration is actively hollowing out the judiciary, the people tasked with adjudicating these like asylum cases. People come because they want to be in the system. They're seeking asylum. They meet their court date. The immigration judges, they're only 600 of them left in the system for 33, sorry, 3.8 million cases. And Trump has fired. Is that right? Yes, Trump has fired 83 of them this year and is hollowing out the number of qualified people who can take on these cases. And basically trying to collapse the system from the inside. In their place, he's bringing in untrained military lawyers, I think, with the idea that they're going to be faster and perhaps do his bidding. But the system itself is collapsing, and that's entirely the point. Not only are you not really, due process as it is written. Which was already, we should say, which was already limited because this is not like a, what we call an Article III court. It's an administrative procedure. It's part of the Department of Justice. Right. But the fact of the matter is they are licked. actively trying to collapse the system around those who need it to function the most, right? I mean, everybody needs it to function. But the backlogs are extraordinary. The cases are already so difficult. And the environment in which these trials are happening with people being nabbed and... you know, screaming and sobbing happening outside the courtroom isn't just traumatic for the people on trial. It's traumatic for anybody in the courtroom, witnesses, interpreters, judges. That's how you get people to stop believing in the system. And then you couple that with what we're seeing and what we're seeing at the highest levels of, you know, white collar crime or maybe even what happens at the NBA. And it's like, oh, wow, the system of justice in the United States doesn't maybe really exist anymore. Yeah. The premise of rules.

I've never felt more like a, you know, just a bundle of sports cliches. Right. But truly, where I'm like... In sports, ostensibly, it's the last place where you can't just buy whatever you want. That's right. That's right. You really have to earn it. Right. And even you spend a lot of money, you still got to go out in the field and you can't buy off the raft, right? It's telling to me that in the NBA, there are two scandals that have overshadowed the actual games. One is this thing that happened today. The other is a story that I have been investigating, the aspiration with Steve Balmer. Yeah. Which is too long to summarize here, but it involves. Please Google it's incredible and it's incredible. Like and subscribe to the YouTube channel. But it's really an investigation. into the richest owner in sports and how he's circumventing rules in order to fully leverage his wealth. And the fact that he might get away with that, the fact that this is happening here, it all feels both like metaphor and actual literal reality. Mark Twain's novel that has sort of been used as the appellation for the name, of course, Gilded Age, which he wrote in the late 19th century, a satire about precisely that, Pablo Torre, Alex Wagner. Check out both. Runaway America. Runaway country. It has a YouTube channel too. Runaway country, like and subscribe. And Pablo Torrey finds out. We'll go right back. That does it for All In. You can catch us every weeknight at 8 o'clock on MSNBC. Don't forget to like us on Facebook. That's facebook.com slash all in with Chris. Real talent is defined by what people can do, not where they learn to do it. So by stopping at the education section of a resume, you might throw away the perfect hire. Skills first hiring helps you see talent others miss, like more than 70 million stars, skilled through alternative routes. Let their story unfold and gain a competitive advantage. Because hiring managers who start with skills are 60% more likely to find a successful hire. Hire skills first. Learn why at tear the paper ceiling.org. Brought to you by Opportunity at Work and the Ad Council.