Incompetence or corruption? Inside Trump’s baffling Saudi deal

With Instagram teen accounts, protections are turned on by default. Yo, look at this real. Okay, the secret is in the timing. Don't rush it. Built in content and contact settings. And automatic time reminders. Mom, heading out back. Instagram teen accounts. Nothing to turn on. Safer from the start. Your morning starts. Your coffee pours. The city moves. But beneath it all, something else is moving. It's energy transfer, one of America's largest pipeline companies, transporting oil, natural gas, and refined products across the U.S. These products keep homes warm, businesses running, and everyday life on track. People rely on energy transfer to safely deliver oil and gas whenever and wherever it's needed. Learn more at energy transfer.com. Tonight on All-in. Well, Americans aren't against the work. A poll just came out. A president stuck in denial over his war tries to cut a deal. Yes, this deal with Saudi Arabia. The energy deal is contingent on this condition. Tonight, the Saudi nuclear deal after the Trump family cashes in. And never mind Hunter Biden, the wild new reporting on the billions Donald Trump Jr. is raking in. Let's talk about who profited off of whose public service. Happy to do it. Then Trump's DOJ forced to retract their subpoenas targeting the New York Times. Acting Attorney General and nominee Todd Blanche was the one who authorized the issuance of these subpoenas to the three New York Times reporters. And inside the Democrats' doomsday prepping for whatever Trump is planning in November. Why is this moment different? We have never had a president like Donald Trump, whose ambition is to overturn the election and cheated the election. But all in starts right now. Good evening from New York. I'm Chris Hayes. As Donald Trump's reckless war with Iran stretches on indefinitely, the man is transparently desperate for a win, any kind of win in the Middle East. And to that end, he shocked the world this week by announcing a big nuclear agreement with, of all places, Saudi Arabia. Basically, under the terms of the deal, as we understand them, Saudi Arabia will be able to develop a civilian nuclear program, which does include enriching uranium, which can be weaponized, but, and in exchange, American companies will make billions by building the infrastructure for said program. That's basically the terms of deal. Now, if you know anything about the art of Donald Trump's dealmaking, and at this point, don't we all, you're not going to be shocked to learn the deal is a lot less impressive than it looks. In fact, it seems to be already falling apart. Today, after the agreement was already signed, right? The announcement, the agreement signed, there's pen and paper. Donald Trump is desperately trying to alter the terms via social media. Writing the agreement quote is totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham records. In other words, normalizing relations with Israel. Now, the Saudis have long maintained that such a process would require Israel to recognize a Palestinian state, which Benjamin Netanyahu's extreme right-wing government has vowed will never happen. And that's even before Israel responded to the October 7 terror attacks by a mass campaign of death and destruction in Gaza that killed an estimated 15,000 children.

So the Saudis are, I think it's fair to say, not pleased with the alteration to the deal they already made announced the day after on social media. The entire thing might fall apart now. Who knows? Because of the slap dash way Donald Trump put the whole thing together. And now, basically, everyone is furious then. The Israelis are really furious because the deal left out the only part they care about, right? The Saudis are presumably not going to agree to join the Abraham Accords. The Middle East Hawks here at home think the deal was too lenient in its safeguards against the Saudis possibly making a nuclear weapon since they're not going to be able to enrich uranium. And so now Trump's Secretary of State has to run defense for him. Doesn't having a less than gold standard agreement in the Middle East run a risk? Well, I'm not going to opine directly on that agreement. We're going to put out, even when the moment is appropriate, we'll put out that in writing. We have to do it with Congress anyways. So we'll certainly do it publicly. But suffice it to say the U.S. is not going to reach any agreement with any country in the world. That leads to the risk of proliferation. I mean, in point of fact here, Marco, the reason you're being asked about this is the president put out the announcement of the deal, right? Frankly, it's kind of beside the point. The Saudis have a mutual defense pack of Pakistan, which does quite famously have nuclear weapons. It's long been speculated the kingdom could simply acquire nuclear weapon from them if it's so desired. But the hawks are still angry. Everyone is angry. And so we're forced to ask the question, where did this come from? Why did Donald Trump make this deal announce this deal that everyone suddenly hates so much? And there's a few possibilities worth considering, which are illuminating to the broader context we find ourselves in. One is that he is completely flailing in the Middle East right now. I mean, hour to hour, minute to minute. The Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen are firing at Saudi tankers in the Red Sea across from the Strait of Hormuz. This is another shipping channel, which could lead to a wider regional conflict. It also means that oil can't get out of there. Iran, meanwhile, has kept the Strait of Hormuzh shut. They've been firing on oil tankers. Passage to the Strait is back down to the low, low levels it was during the hottest days of the war. Oil, in turn... has crossed $100 a barrel again. Gas prices then, as the dominoes fall, are back up well over $4 and still rising very, very quickly. I bet you've noticed this in the last few days I sure have. Trump is also cratering in the polls. The last few days have seen some of his worst polling we've seen this year by far. He's responding by threatening war crimes constantly, on the phone, on TV, on social media, which the populace, by the way, has no appetite for. And throughout all this, Fox is basically looking into the camera and begging him to end this war.

I think the president's in kind of a tough spot here in that sense. And, you know, he promised to keep us out of endless wars or unsatisfactory wars. And now he's in one, and it's not at all clear how it's going to end. So he's vulnerable on this point. And I was in political terms, he does need to get this over with. And with the midterm elections a little more than 100 days away, the clock is ticking for President Trump to get out of this war before voters head to the polls. It's making a lot of Republicans nervous. It's already, as we know, unpopular. According to the New Washington Post, Ipsos polls, 69% of Americans disapprove of the handling of this conflict. Republicans cannot let this become an endless distraction, especially if they want to win in November. Wrap it up, says Laura Ingram. Let's get this show on the road. Okay, so one possibility is given all that context, Trump's just desperate for a win, right? Like, oh, look at this. Look, I did something. Maybe he thought a deal with the Saudis would somehow give him a parachute to escape the political crisis of his own making he is currently trapped in. It's not exactly clear how he thought that would happen, but it would at least explain why he rushed into an agreement he is now desperately trying to get out of and renegotiate the terms of less than 24 hours after announcing. Of course, the other possible reason Donald Trump made this deal, and one we truly have to consider, is that there was a quid pro quo after all. It's just not the one that Israel wanted. After all, Donald Trump's family sure does make a lot of money from the Saudis. Remember when the Saudi sovereign wealth fund gave Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner $2 billion out of the gate for his investment firm over objections from some of its advisors who on the board of the fund were like, this doesn't check out. Why are we doing this? And keep in mind, Derek Jared Kushner is still gallivanting around the region with Trump's buddy Steve Wickkoss, ostensibly trying to broker peace deals while also continue to raise money for the fund. Meanwhile, the Trump organization has a $10 billion deal to develop a bunch of so-called luxury properties throughout Saudi Arabia, including in Riyadh and on the West Coast near the Red Sea. In fact, as Forbes reports in 2024 alone, Trump and his family made an estimated $50 million just from their dealing to Saudi Arabia. Now, of course, Trump says, he doesn't do any of this wheeling and dealing directly. This is all taken care of by someone else and it has no impact on what he does in president. And you can decide if you think that's credible. Regardless, no one disputes his family benefits financially. That's not, no one's disputing or denying that. When you consider that context, it seems at least possible that Trump would want to cut the Saudis a pretty family deal. And again, it is not like this is unprecedented. We've just been through this right before the inauguration, right before. An official from the United Arab Emirates, just down the peninsula from Saudi Arabia, quietly struck a half a billion dollar deal with the crypto company founded by the sons of Donald Trump and oh, look at that, Steve Witkoff. Not long after, the Trump administration reversed course on a binary policy and allowed the UAE to purchase and import high-end processing chips used for AI that had been banned before that they desperately wanted to get their hands on. The White House would like you to believe that was a coincidence.

What I will say is that it sure looks like on multiple occasions now, the Trump family received a quid from a foreign government shortly before that country received a quo from us, the United States, via official policy. At the end of the day, we can't really save for certain if this deal was born of flailing incompetence or corruption or some combination of both or some other third thing. All we can say definitively is that every single decision this president makes, almost without fail, particularly in this region, is making everything worse. Ben Rhodes served as Deputy National Security Advisor in President Obama. He's now co-host of Crooked Media's Potsave the World and he joins me now. Well, this has been a world win. I mean, from the announcement of it to the backlash to the attempts to, you know, renegotiated the terms of the deal. What do you make of it all? Well, let me just try to add to your very good summary, Chris. First of all, what do Americans get from this deal? I mean, nobody's prices are going to go down. There's not a clamoring out in the heartland for the Saudis to have a domestic nuclear enrichment capability. So first of all, it's not a win in the sense that nobody wins except Mohammed bin Salman. Maybe Jared greases the skids for another, you know, contribution to his investment fund. That's the first thing. The only other rationale I might introduce, Chris, is in addition to personal profit and vanity. Trump has been flailing to try to hold together this coalition of Gulf countries, most of whom did not want this war with Iran. And he needs the Saudis for everything from U.S. military operations that pass through the Saudi territory to the Saudis kind of holding firm if the Houthis keep shooting at their oil tankers in the Red Sea as they've begun to do. So this also could be just him trying to keep what is left of America's friends in that region on side while he flails in this war. But the bottom line is. This does not only does it not do anything to fix the Iran crisis, it makes it harder because how are you going to go to Iran if we ever get back in negotiations with them and say, hey, you can't have a domestic enrichment capability. Oh, by the way, we're building a domestic enrichment capability for your enemy that is right across the street. Yes. And here today, I mean, there, so yes, I think you're right. The third other thing is the dynamics of whatever sort of. very tenuous coalition of the willing there was around a war of Iran, and particularly as he contemplates and there's reporting indicating that there's, you know, transport planes going there in special forces and medics going to, you know, Germany for, as they contemplate an actual, like, larger military escalation, right? So that to keep the coalition together, this was sort of a price for the Saudis, right? Yes. But then it's like, what's so crazy about all of this is... It's like, well, that's going to, people are, you're going to have to announce it. And then other people are going to react to that. So here's Levitt today at the podium, like trying to undo and redo the deal after it was signed. Take a listen. Do the Saudis agree with this interpretation since it wasn't part of the initial agreement? And has the president talked to NBS since this new condition was now?

As you know, the president just put out this statement a few hours ago. I don't believe he's had a call with Mohammed bin Salman in the hours since. In the past, the Saudi government has said they will not consider entering into the Abraham Accords unless until there's a Palestinian state. What makes you think that they're going to change their minds on their position regarding that? Again, I won't get ahead of the president's conversations, but this is something that he feels very strongly about and is spoken about it in the past and will continue to uphold. Hold. And what's so striking here, Ben, is this is exactly the structure of the MOU with Iran. You sign a deal that you try to basically have both ways where you have your own interpretation and asterisk to it. But that's not the way it works. Like the other party on the, the counterparty gets a say. And the counterparty, in these cases, are nation states engaged in like military actions and geostrategic decisions, not some other developer that you're trying to screw over over a piece of land in Manhattan. Yeah. And look, this is not the first time this has happened with respect to Israel. If you think about the MOU, Chris, you may remember they signed the MOU. It's a ceasefire. One of the conditions in the MOU was that Israel ceases fire in Lebanon. And it didn't seem that Israel knew the United States had negotiated in Pakistan that they would have to stop their war in Lebanon. So you remember then there was that scramble for a period of weeks where essentially Israel just kept bombing. Right. So this isn't the first time that he does a deal that has something in it that Benjamin Netanyahu doesn't like. Presumably Benjamin Netanyahu gets on the phone and says, what just happened? Trump scrambles. And now he says, the Abraham Accords is a part of it. The Saudis will not agree to that. There's no way that they didn't throughout the Biden years when this was dangled in front of them for normalization. They're not going to do it now, given the conditions inside of Gaza. And I just wanted to take this opportunity to say one thing. Trump credits the Abraham Accords as this popular deal. It was a catastrophe. It was framed as a peace deal. It was framed as it was going to bring peace to the Middle East. It was going to isolate Iran. Where are we? five years after the Abram Accords. So why are we even clinging to that framework is something that is somehow going to bring peace? It brings attention to Donald Trump. I mean, the thing, no one, I mean, you got Laura Ingram on Fox reciting the Fox News polling of a 29% approval of the president on Iran, right, specifically. No one, there seems to be no buy-in. For escalation here, honestly. Like, I don't even think the regional partners want it. The Israeli smotech says the other day, like, you know, we're kind of, we don't want to do. So, and then when you go and talk to Americans, like, here's our own Alex Tabett, just talking to voters about it. They hate it. They hate it. They hate it. They hate it. Take Alyssa. President Trump campaigned on No More Foreign Wars. You've obviously supported him. Three times. Three times. Very disappointed. My entire family is very disappointed. I don't feel like it is our war to fight, but here we are. And I did not think when the war started that it was going to be a 12 day, a two week, a two month. I'm like, here we go. And here we are. And I don't see it ending anytime soon. And I was a Trump supporter.

I'm very disappointed. I mean, that's most of the country right now. I think it's a lot of people in the region. There's just no constituency, and yet he has to, he's so painted into a corner here, and it's so obvious to anyone watching the situation. It is. And look, I can't think of anything in the 25 years that I've been involved in politics that has had so much of an absence of a constituency. Like, who is asking for this escalation, you know, in Congress among voters? And the thing about this war is, this is a war that you can't hide the consequences from American people because even if they don't. get the geostrategic disaster that it's been, they're paying higher prices. They're paying higher prices at the pump. And increasingly, they're going to be paying higher prices for things like fertilizer, right? This is going to start to hit agriculture in this country, too. A lot of stuff goes through that straight. And so he cannot spin his way out of it because people know it's not going well. He cannot even really lie his way out of it, because how many times has he said he's destroyed the Iranian military? And then the Iranian military is clearly not destroyed. And look, the people who know this, are the Iranians. So they know that as long as they can kind of weather these airstrikes, demonstrate they have a capacity to shut down or even just disrupt the strait of Hormuz, that they have all this leverage on Trump. And the Trump's not going to be able to sustain some escalatory campaign for months because of the politics in this country. So he's in a dead end and he can't really find any way out of it. Yeah, and so announce a new nuclear deal. Ben Rhodes, thanks your time tonight. I appreciate it. You can hear much more from Ben on Crooked on MS Now. That's Saturdays at 9 p.m. Eastern. Coming up, a big win in court today. Fascinating hearing, a win for the First Amendment as the D.C. Media prepares to celebrate freedom of the press. That's next. In a country that never stops moving, reliable energy is essential. People need oil and natural gas for heating, transportation, and everyday items like clothing, cell phones, and contact lenses. Behind the scenes, one of America's largest pipeline operators, energy transfer works all day, every day, to transport the energy that our communities depend on. Energy transfer invests in modern infrastructure as technologies like AI drive greater need for reliable natural gas. Learn more at energy transfer.com. Summer routines live or die by how easy they are, and honestly, if something takes too much effort, I'm out. That's why Grooons is my go-to. It's one daily pack of gummies covering my greens, vitamins, and minerals. Plus, it has six grams of prebiotic fiber, which is more than two cups of broccoli. No mixing powders, no giant pills, no hassle. I just rip open the pack and I'm done. They taste good and make it easy to stay on top of my health. even when life gets busy. Save up to 52% off with code podcast at grooms.co. That's code podcast at gruns.co. An undisturbed sleep is a beautiful thing. That's why a beauty rest mattress is designed to give you unparalleled motion separation. Isolating movement with our pocketed coil technology to help you sleep soundly no matter what's moving on the other side of the bed. While providing individualized support for every sleeping position.

People at their best get their beauty rest for 100 years. When Donald Trump departed for the NATO summit in Turkey earlier this month on his flying bribery palace, the luxury 747 gifted to him by Qatar, only to switch to the old smaller Air Force one for his return trip, he gave a strange and somewhat hard to believe excuse for swapping planes, including he switched to the old jet, quote, for old time's sake. What a nostalgic. The New York Times was first to report the real reason was for the change were security concerns. Trump's new Qatari-gifted jet lacks crucial defensive capabilities like advanced anti-miss missile systems and key mission communication functions. And remember that flight was going to happen after hostility of Iran had broken back out. Now, two days after the Times broke that story, Trump's Department of Justice had those reporters who reported and wrote it, subpoenaed. Feds even sought the phone record of the journalist and their family members, including one journalist's mother. The Times fought the subpoenas in court. Today we saw a major reversal from Trump's DOJ after Justice Department attorneys were grilled for an hour by a federal judge who indicated he would unilaterally quash the subpoenas himself, the government failed to withdraw them. The DOJ withdrew their subpoenas. Lisa Rubin, senior legal reporter for MS Now, was in that hearing today. She joins me now. Lisa, this sounded pretty dramatic. Take us through what happened today. Absolutely dramatic, Chris. And Judge Arun's Subramanian gave a master course in how to conduct a cross-examination, even though he wasn't a lawyer, because he really put the representative of the U.S. Attorney's Office, Sean Buckley, to his paces and extracting various admissions from him about what went wrong in the issuance of these subpoenas. And ultimately, he got Sean Buckley to admit. Two critical things. The first was that the Department of Justice didn't take all reasonable steps to get the information they were seeking about the reporter's sources from any other available source. That's something that's required by federal regulation as well as federal case law. And the way that the Department of Justice admitted this, it was an own goal. In their own letter, they asked to pause the subpoenas for two weeks. Judge Subramanian said, if you're going to pause it for two weeks because you want to take other investigative steps. Isn't that an admission that you haven't done all that is legally required already? The second problem was that they had to admit that they gave the times no advance notice, no notice of the subpoenas to the reporters directly, and certainly no notice of the subpoenas to the phone providers. And again, regulations and law require that you're supposed to do that. absent either three things, a substantial threat to the investigation, a risk of grave harm to national security, or imminent death or bodily injury threats. And in all three cases, when the judge asked them, has that determination been made by the attorney general, which is what the regulations required? Sean Buckley, a representative of the U.S. Attorney's Office, said, I can't get into that here in public. And so for all of those reasons, Chris, the judge put the choice to the Department of Justice.

Either I'm going to quash it or you can withdraw it. And you can come back here if you need to at a later point in time. And by the end, he extracted not only the withdrawal from them, but a promise that he then memorialized in an order. If they're going to do this again, they have to give him the judge advance notice before they go back to the times. Yeah, it was such an incredible move to be like, I'm going to quash it. So you guys want to rescind this or what? And then you get this, I want to read the DOJ statement, which is sort of extremely churlish. This judge threatened our attorneys with sanctions until subpoenas were withdrawn, blocked us from presenting the meticulous process of investigation. The grand juries are right to hear testimony from all material witnesses and federal criminal investigation. The judge's conduct overrides clear longstanding principles and common sense. Make no mistake, this investigation remains ongoing. We will pursue justice against those threatening national security by leaking classified information, a serious federal crime. So they're not happy about it. But in the end, what's happened here is they have had to rescind the subpoenas and the New York Times, which came out of the case. fighting, like no, like right away has one in court. You know, this is a point that our colleague Rachel Maddo makes all the time. You capitulate and you just lose again and again. You fight. You stand to fight another day. And the Times, you know, showed that today in full force. I want to raise another point that the judge made because it shows that he's paying attention not only to the papers that were put before him, but to the larger public discourse. At one point he said, I don't want to hear that somebody else has served with a subpoena while they're watching sheep detectives with their family. That is, in fact, something that happened to one of the New York Times reporters. And the only way that Judge the Romanian could have known that is because he listened to the July 17th edition of the Daily on which Michael Barbaro interviews all of the Times journalists who were subpoenaed. That wasn't in the papers. He's clearly listening to what's going on. And he warned the Justice Department also. The regulations that he was referring to earlier, he says, are extremely detailed. They have a number of provisions that are designed to safeguard the interests of the media and the press and reporters and ensure that subpoenas are a tool of last resort. And that's why I had this exchange with Mr. Buckley because he's in charge and he's indicated on the record that the government is going to follow these moving forward, even if there have been hiccups to put it mildly to this point. Again, excoriating from the judge today and a real embarrassment for the Department of Justice, particularly when Mr. Buckley was seen outside in the hallway by MS Now's news gathering intern. on his phone, apparently talking to folks at a higher level at the Department of Justice. We don't know who he was talking to. Was it Todd Blanche? Was it the Deputy Attorney General? But somebody in a position to make a decision that wasn't him, that's what resulted in him walking into court, you know, tail between his legs and saying, we'll withdraw your honor. We know Todd Blanche approved it. Finally, last 30 seconds here. Our own reporting from our MS. Now, colleagues, said some light here, which is that Kash Patel is on thin ice. He's sitting on the tarmac. He gets pulled back to the White House.

to basically get called in the principal's office, these subpoenas, as far as we know, essentially directly flowed from that meaning and appear to be... an attempt to kind of, you know, gain favor with the boss, maybe save his job, that might account for the sort of procedural deficiencies here, right? That absolutely could account for the procedural deficiencies here. But, you know, just being called to the White House to save your job doesn't justify issuing subpoenas to members of the news media, particularly when there are federal regulations and controlling case law. To the contrary, Kash Patel was called to the White House the morning of July 10th. Those subpoenas were served later that evening, leaving absolutely no time to take the sort of investigative steps that the U.S. Attorney's Office has now conceded were necessary. And the acting attorney general who is up for a vote, we believe next week, approved these subpoenas, which have now been quashed. This is not the first time that he has had a judge basically tell him to his face via writing in an order, you're doing a terrible job and possibly engaging in sanctionable conduct. Lisa Rubin, thanks so much. Thanks, Chris. Still had new reporting on the really mind-boggling billions that Donald Trump's oldest son is raking in next. Summer routines live or die by how easy they are. And honestly, if something takes too much effort, I'm out. And that's why Grooons is my go-to. It's one daily pack of gummies covering my greens, vitamins, and minerals. Plus, it has six grams of prebiotic fiber, which is more than two cups of broccoli. No mixing powders, no giant pills, no hassle. I just rip open the pack and I'm done. They taste good and make it easy to stay on top of my health, even when life gets busy. Save up to 52% off with code podcast at grooms.co. That's code podcast at gr-un-s.com. And now, the next chapter of the Serta counting sheep. Hey, Uncle Number One, why aren't we counting? anymore. Let me tell you a story. Long ago, Sert 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. 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. If I were to tell you that the president of Turkey had a son and that the son's three-year-old investment firm was making, say, 200% in annual returns, would your first thought be, oh, wow, he must be a financial wizard? Or would it be, that sounds like that's probably a pretty corrupt situation? I know where I've land. What if we're Vladimir Putin's son or Mohammed bin Salman's or... You know where I'm going President Donald Trump's son. Because yes, that is what is actually happening right here in front of all our eyes. Out in the open, the eldest son of her own president, investment genius, Donald Trump Jr. Here it is in the New York Times. Donald Trump Jr.'s investment firm posts staggering returns of 200 percent, quote, just two years ago, 1789 Capital, the investment fund Trump runs with business partner Omid Malik. managed a few hundred million dollars. It now oversees more than $3 billion. Its main investment fund generated returns of roughly 200% as of June 30th, according to a person familiar with the firm's performance. While still early in its investment cycle, those returns eclips the average returns of about 21% for venture capital firms started in 2023, according to Pitch Book. Now, we should note, Donald Trump Jr. and his partner at 1789 are not accused of doing anything illegal. But wow, he really got very, very good at this very quickly. In interviews the New York Times, executives of 1789's portfolio companies said they viewed involvement in 1789 as a way to get close to the Trump orbit. And this is just the latest in a daily, I mean, sometimes multiple times a day drumbeat of headlines about what is unquestionably the most corrupt American administration in my lifetime and possibly ever. Congressman Jamie Raskin is a Democrat of Maryland, and he joins me now. I think every time I read one of these stories, I have that like there ought to be a law, cliche reaction. Because I don't think there's anything illegal here. The president's son can create what seems transparently corrupt transactional fund that people put money into as means of purchasing access to the most powerful person in the world. But man, does it not feel right? Well, it's definitely a hallmark of authoritarian regimes all over the world. As you were saying, if you go to Saudi Arabia or Turkey or Egypt, you would expect the sons of the president to have clairvoyant investing knowledge and understanding of the full panorama around them. But I wouldn't conclude so quickly that there are no laws being violated. For one thing, the... You know, the companies that are being invested in by 1789, which is his investment firm, are getting a radically disproportionate share of no-bid government contracts. And there are laws and rules that govern when no-bid contracts can be.

passed out. There's also the fact that the government itself cannot be used for the purposes of running a private business. The White House cannot be used like that. The Department of Defense cannot be used like that. So here you're talking about an investment firm that was worth less than $1 billion. And then in the course of the first year and a half of the administration now has more than $3.5 billion in assets. It's posting these staggering... returns of 200% 10 times what other private venture firms are averaging in the same time period. So, yeah, either he's an investment genius or he's the luckiest guy on the planet. Yeah, and your point is well taken. I mean, we don't, you know, all of the stuff that we're getting, we should note, all of these headlines about corruption and tip of the cap to the reporters that have ferreted this all out. The New York Times in particular has been doing incredible work on this beat. It's not coming from, you know, actual, it's certainly not coming from GEOJ investigations or the SEC or the CFTC. It's not coming from congressional oversight because Republicans are in control of Congress and basically wields subpoena power. So. we are just seeing kind of the, I mean, do you get the sense? We're just seeing the top of the iceberg in that sense. We don't, we don't have any special access or knowledge how this is all actually working behind the scenes. Right. Well, a vastly disproportionate share of the businesses that 1789 is investing their client's assets in are government-related. So they do seem to have an uncanny ability to predict what government is going to do in terms of government contracts. There are private companies they're investing in, but a lot of those are subject. to government regulation and therefore their, you know, the rise in their value or declining their value is very much tied to what the government does. It's interesting that 1789 and Donald Trump Jr. has invested the money of their clients in Jewel, which was stymied by not being able to do e-cigarettes, lots of controversy about it. And then the government regulators say they can do e-cigarettes and just Recently, the FDA, in addition to approving them generally, has put out a rule for consideration to allow them to do flavored e-cigarettes, which have been very much disfavored by the health community, by doctors, medical associations, because they're getting kids hooked on cherry flavor and menthol flavored and different kind of sweet-flavored e-cigarettes. But, you know, apparently 1789 is a company to follow because, you know, they either have amazing precognitive skills or they have some inside track on what's going to happen.

I mean, here's another example, the company Grab a Gun, which is one of the companies in their portfolio, went public last year, merged with a 1789 company. Now, the idea here is direct consumer mailed gun purchases in sales, which, again, call me a bleeding heart lib. Don't, doesn't sound like a great idea to me. But that, of course, would rely on federal regulations to be loosened. And sure enough, Donald Trump assigned an executive order that would. loosen the regulations on precisely or promulgated regulation that would loosen the regulations precisely on the thing that is the kind of dispositive regulatory question for their whole business model. That's right. And the same thing happened with Polly Market as well, because originally there'd been a ban on taking wagers from U.S. residents. And then what do you know under the Trump administration, they turn around on that. And 1789 had been a big investor in that. And the value of that company is just absolutely skyrocketed with that favorable government treatment. I guess the question here is like, what are the steps, right? Obviously, there's no oversight that's going to happen now. But and we don't know if laws have been broken. There is a kind of incredible brazenness this whole thing. It's flagrant. What do you see as your role if Democrats win back a majority in Congress? And I mean, you can say oversight or subpoenas, but like there is a lot to dig into here. Yes, you got it, Chris. Well, look, first of all, we're not sitting on our hands now. When we learn of these things, we do everything in our power to get all the information we can. And when we go out on TV or we go out in the public and newspaper articles are published, we then hear from whistleblowers, people on the inside who understand exactly how various rip-offs and schemes like this are taking place. So we're gathering the information we can, even though we don't control the gavels now. If and when we win and we begin to restore the rule of law, we will get to the bottom of exposing all of this corruption, and we will not be afraid to follow the path of accountability for anybody who has violated any existing laws or regulations. And if... They're simply, you know, violating the norms of the country and things that people would have thought completely outrageous before. Then we're going to have to move, and we probably will have to move to legislate to prevent this kind of raw and rampant corruption and prostitution of our government. Very quickly here, you're working on a discharge petition for a bill that would ban the proposed slush fund, which I don't think is dead in any way. We're looking to set a record for successful discharge petitions, I think, in this Congress. Do you think you have a shot at actually getting the 218 you need?

Yes, well, we got all 212 Democrats on over the last couple of weeks. So now we are looking for six good Republicans, and lots of Republicans across the political spectrum of country have been denouncing this outrageous $1.8 billion rip-off of the taxpayers, which a federal judge in Florida, has described as essentially a fraud on the court and therefore a fraud on the country. While the attorney general designate. or nominee has said it's not moving forward. Well, we know it will move forward as soon as Donald Trump thinks that it's safe. And in any event, they're using other channels to get their money out the door to the people they want to get it to. Like Michael Flynn, like Carter Page, we do not want them using the judgment fund of the United States of America, which is for jury verdicts against the country and real valid causes of action to pay off the foot soldiers in their private militia. Congressman Jamie Raskin, thanks for your time tonight, sir. Silicon Center Ruben Gallego on the Democratic plan for an election doomsday scenario. The war gaming happening right now. That's next.

As Donald Trump continues and even escalates his dangerous rhetoric ahead of the midterms, Democrats are preparing for a worst-case doomsday scenario. MS Now is reporting nearly a dozen centers met privately yesterday, rehearsing some of their darkest fears and possibilities and contingencies for the November elections. These include disinformation triggering voter roll purges in key states before election day, National Guard troops being deployed to polling places as voters cast their ballots, the machinery of a free election seizing up in real time. MS Now's Ali Vitale spoke with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer after this closed-door meeting. The exercise that you just did, I imagine in all of your years here in the Senate, you've never prepared for a midterm election that way. Is that right? That is exactly right. So why is this moment different? We have never had a president like Donald Trump, whose ambition, whose sole focus and desire, it seems, is to overturn the election and cheated the election. What do you think about the fact that most senators on the Republican side see that you're doing this and say they're being hyperbolic, they're being emotional? If you could do a truth serum. and give it to Republican senators, about 80% of them would agree he's trying to steal the election. The trouble is they're too damn scared to say anything about it. Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego was among the senators who participated in that election doomsday scenario meeting yesterday, and he joins us now. Sarah, just walk us through how you and others in this meeting are sort of thinking about this. Obviously, we don't know what's going to happen in the future. There's kind of a limited means that you directly as a senator in terms of what your individual authority is to deal with this. So what did you discuss? Well, I basically ran through the scenarios of what I thought could happen, what our responses could be as they escalated throughout. an election period, whether it was trying to stop people from voting, whether it was trying to stop the count from voting, whether it was sending people to polling places, such as ICE agents, whether it was shutting down polling places, all these different scenarios. And I brought my experience, basically, from, you know, being in Arizona, which has had problems in the past with people trying to intimidate people at voting booths. We've had problems with, you know, counts, things of that nature. And so, and with a disformation around that. So I tried to basically bring very realistic in understanding what... could possibly happen. And let's be real, we're not alarmist, right? We are the people that survived January 6th. We saw what happened on January 6th. And before January 6th, many of us were saying that this is bad. And we were told by the same senators, the same Republicans right now in the House, that you're being alarmist. And what happened that day is the fact that they try to overthrow our government. So right now, yes, we are taking everything, every possible scenario and being prepared for that because they have tried this before.

They're telling us we're going to try it again, and we should listen to them and actually be prepared this time. Yeah, and in fact, your state of Arizona had its primary on Tuesday, and the Republicans that won there are a sort of slate of election deniers, including Andy Biggs. I mean, Andy Biggs, who's a member of Congress in the Arizona caucus, you served alongside him as a Democrat. He's a Republican, obviously. He'll be the nominee for governor, Alexander Coloden, Warren Peterson. But Andy Biggs wasn't just a, you know, he wasn't just someone who sort of was around and, you know, voted not to certify. He was. one of the more central figures, and he's, you know, running for governor. Absolutely. And, like, they're all active pushers of election denialism. altogether, not just for the 2020 election, for the 2022 election, for the 2024 election. Basically, anytime Democrats win, it must have been stolen from them. It's not just that they have horrible politics and they're horrible politicians. But fact is, you know, if these guys win by some sheer miracle, because I don't think they are, this is pretty much a slate of losers. But if they win, they will actively do whatever this president wants them to do in order for them to secure the 2028 election for Republicans. So, you know, I'm glad that we have. slate of Democrats are going to stop, you know, these guys. These are probably the worst of the worst Republicans that are running. Luckily, the Arizona voter is fairly moderate, believes in democracy, whether Democrats, Republicans are independent, and they're going to stop these crazies from being elected. But it does not mean that we can really trust the DOJ, DHS, or anything that is going to be led by Donald Trump is not going to act in a nefarious manner come 2026 election. So we have to prepare for every possibility. Since I have you here, people know I think he served as a Marine in Iraq. And I want to ask you about a story we just saw that I really find heads crashing. The Department of Defense has subtracted and lowered the number of U.S. deaths in combat in Iran from 18 to 14. They have subtracted by four. Now, the reason they have done that, according to the reporting here that's on the Washington Post, three military officials, or sorry, the New York Times, three military officials said that one reason behind the change was that the Trump administration decided to remove four service members killed this past weekend from the list, three in Jim Jordan and one in northern Iraq, because their deaths occurred after prison Trump declared a ceasefire in the war in April. What do you think of that? Well, I mean, it's absolute BS because what really matters is what do these families feel? You know, I was in a conflict, technically, in the Iraq War. That's what they called it. But it was war. I lost my best friend. I still talk to his widow and his kids, who I help as much as I can nowadays. War is war. The only reason they're doing this is so the president can have this arbitrary number that he could point to and say, like, no, not that many people died.

But at the end of the day, these are kids that are dying. These are somebody's husbands, somebody's daughters, somebody's wives that are dying right now. And you have these very small men, both in Pete Hegseth and this president and everyone around him, they're more willing to actually fudge numbers and actually deal with the reality that they got us into a stupid war. They don't know how to get us out of the stupid war. And because of them, a lot of young men and women are going to die because these guys are just... absolute idiots and are more selfish and more worried about their own personal ego than the safety of these men and women. How worried are you that the way they try to get out of this? I mean, there's some reporting indicating that there have been, there's mobilization headed towards the Gulf right now as the president contemplates an escalation. It's clear that he's sort of boxed in now with the status quo. And I guess how worried are you that he tries to sort of go for broke? The only way to get out of this is some huge escalation, possibly ground troops, etc. Look, you're dealing with some pretty dumb people. Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are not the brightest people, you know, the brightest people in general. And so they may try to go deeper into a war to try to get out of the war. The problem is that the Iranians, you know, are very sophisticated and they understand this. And they're probably preparing for that. What they should be doing is actually investing in real, real, real negotiators. You know, they said, Tuddle Dean, Tududum, to Iran with his, with Jared Kushner and, you know, the other dude over there. And, you know, you said two real estate brokers to, you know, go against people that have been negotiating for, you know, basically decades, and they're surprised that we don't have a quick exit. We need to have some serious diplomacy. We need to figure out how for us to get out of this situation and get this out of the situation a manner that we end up being safe and the whole regions of being safe. But right now, you don't have that. You have a president that's more worried about his ego. You have Pete Hegseth who decided to change the Department of War. The name of the Department of Defense Department Warren is already losing his first war ever involved in, instead of trying to figure out what a good safe exit is for this country that gives us both victory and or at least a stalemate that we can all say, you know, has stabilized the region. Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona. Thanks for time tonight, sir. Stay tuned to just a few minutes. Jen Saki will be speaking with former Washington Post editor Marty Barron on a big day for press freedom. We'll be right back.

That does it for All In. You can catch us every weeknight at 8 o'clock on MS now. Don't forget to like us on Facebook. That's Facebook.com slash all on with Chris. Snoring, gasping for air during sleep, daytime sleepiness. I'm Shaquille O'Neill, and this shouldn't be anybody's experience. As your doctor about Zep bound to hepatine. The first and only FDA approved prescription medicine for moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea in adults with obesity. Zep bound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, OSA, and obesity to improve their OSA. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15 milligram injection. Zepound contains chrezepotide and should not be used with other chrezepotide containing products or any GLP1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens or reuse needles. Don't take up allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop stepbound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia. If you're nursing, pregnant, plan-to-be, or taking birth control pills, taking Zepbound with a sulfonal urea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems. Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-9 or visit zepbound.lily.com.