EMERGENCY MIDTERM PODCAST with Jamie Raskin and Jim Himes

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And what happens as we're seeing already that Donald Trump and the Trump regime, when they attack elections, when they try to pull all of their tricks and stunts, and they launch the DOJ, and they launch all of their resources to try to undermine free and fair elections. What is going to happen? Earlier today, a close friend of mine sent me a message and she said, Ben, I am very, very scared about Tuesday. I said, what are you scared about? You scared about the results? Are you scared about what worries you? And she says, I'm worried that Donald Trump and this regime are going to try to rig it, that they're not going to allow the votes to come in. They're going to cast doubt. They're not going to seat the members who end up winning. I am deeply worried. I said, well, it's a good thing because I'm hosting a special edition podcast today with two people who are working behind the scenes and in front of the scenes on the front line to protect and preserve our democracy to ensure that this election is safe, to ensure accountability. And I want to bring them in right now. Democratic Congress member Jim Himes, ranking member of the Intelligence Committee, and we've got Democratic Congress member Jamie Raskin, ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, two people who I hope will become the chairman of those respective committees. And I have a great deal of confidence of that, but we'll save that for another conversation. But I want to start with you, Congressman Himes, about your position on the House Intelligence Committee, the work that you've been doing behind the scenes to answer the question that my close friend asked. I'm scared about Tuesday. I'm deeply worried. I see what Trump's doing already. So what do you say to my friend and to the millions of people who watch this network and across the country who feel worried going into Tuesday? Yeah. Well, thanks, Ben. And that's the question, of course. And you know, the starting point is precisely the anxiety that your friend articulated, right? We know that the president is not going to accept the results of an election that looks like it's going to break very hard against him, right? We know that because he never has. And even in the last week or so, you know, the Brazilian election didn't go the way he wanted to. So that, of course, was rigged. The Israeli election didn't go the way he wanted to. So that was rigged. So we know that this is going to happen. And the only question is, what is the story that he will tell and how organized will the effort be? And of course, you know, Jamie Raskin and I both lived through the efforts of late 2020 when he pulled out all the stops. He went to court. He tried. Urged mark might pens to not certify the election. So look, we're making the assumption that absolutely is everything. Everything is on the table. And Jamie and I and our colleague Joe Morelli and others have really divided up the work. You asked me the question first. So as the ranking member of the intelligence committee, my job is to just be all over the possibility that of the many, many scenarios that he may choose to use on election day. One of them may be a variant of the director of the CIA has just informed me that the Iranians have taken control over the election apparatus in Michigan or North Carolina or Florida or California, whatever it might be. Because of course, that would be something that would be very much in the jurisdiction of the intelligence committee. I have spent the last couple of months working with our intelligence community, working with the remnants of our ability to identify such efforts to make sure that we're ready for that. And you know, Jamie can elaborate on this on the domestic side because of course, the FBI and the Department of Justice are as much of a threat. And there's lots of things the president could do to create tension in the moment of election day. But I want to finish my answer by saying, I've had classified briefings as recently as 72 hours ago. And not only have we never seen a successful effort on the part of Russia or China or any other country to interfere with our election, that is to alter vote totals to get into voting on records to get into the voting roles. We're not seeing any foreign country at this point planning or even with the ability to do so. Now draw a distinction here. Of course, they are doing influence operations. You know, the usual garbage on social media and bots trying to influence the election. But as of now, our intelligence community is seeing precisely zero evidence that any of Russia or China or Iran or North Korea have any intent or ability to actually mess around with the mechanics of our election. Congressman Raskin as the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee would love to hear your perspective, what you're hearing in the briefings, what you're seeing, also the levers of accountability that may be able to exist, kind of post this election, if there are steps taken to try to interfere with the free and fair election. Yes, Ben, thank you for having us. And look, there are a lot of different ways to try to affect the outcome of an election. So there's what Putin did in 2016 and 2020, for example, I think of it as polluting the informational atmosphere in the moral atmosphere with propaganda, disinformation, negative ads. He also tried to engage in some espionage and broke into the computers at the DNC and the DCC and so on. That's kind of one level. The next level would be trying to stop people from registering to vote or throwing them off of the roles. And we've seen some of that too in Georgia and North Carolina trying to close some of the polling places down in Texas. That's a battle that's been going on. Another is actually interfering with people's access to the polls. I mean, that would be the classic Jim Crow strategy of Klansmen and you know, racist sheriffs trying to impede people's ability to get into vote. And then there's kind of stealing the election after it happens, which is what, you know, Donald Trump was attempting to do in 2020, either like when he called Secretary of State Brad Rappensburg or in Georgia. They'd just find me 11,780 votes. That's all I want. That wasn't Donald Trump trying to block election fraud. That was Donald Trump trying to commit election fraud. And then finally, what we saw, you know, at the end of the electoral college process on January 6, 2021, when we were supposed to be just memorializing the electoral college votes that came in and suddenly they wanted to create powers for Vice President Pence to actually blockade electoral college votes, reject them and start the process over again and so on. And then violence. So look at this point, we are bearing down on every single aspect and we have been bearing down on every single aspect of the electoral process to see that we do get a free and fair election coming through it. We see how they're starting to throw the spaghetti on the wall with respect to non-citizen voting, which is really a non-issue. It's just infinitesimally small where it does occur. When it does occur, it's as much for Trump as his opponent and it's the states that have been smoking it out. And I guess that's the key point I would make, Ben, that the President of the United States and the executive branch of government have an extremely limited role, if any at all, in the administration of midterm congressional elections. I mean, there's nothing in the Constitution about it. The states are the primary administrators of the election. Congress, of course, has power under Article 1, Section 4 to superimpose its own regulations on the time-place manner of elections, but has not done that in any way that would alter the course of events right now. So really, the major threat to elections is Trump and the executive branch trying to do something or put in another foreign powers trying to do something. But as, you know, Chairman to be Himes says, they have never succeeded in altering actually a ballot results or interfering in the counting of ballots or anything like that. It's always been upstream from that in terms of just propaganda and disinformation in the campaign. It doesn't mean it can't happen, but we're on top of it. A woman in Iowa said to me, can you guarantee us a free and fair election? I said, look, if you want to guarantee, you got to buy a toaster, but if you want a democracy, you got to go out and fight for it. And that's what we've learned during this horrible period of our history. We've got to go and fight every step along the way, but I just want to assure people we are organizing to do that. And it's not just the Democrats at the federal and state and county levels, but it is all these 501(c)(3) groups all over the country and lawyers groups that are working on the ground to make sure nothing untoward happens. Congressman Himes, you and Senator Mark Warner recently wrote a letter to the big AI companies, big tech, big social media companies. about what they are doing to combat election misinformation on their platforms. There's another issue, though, just the manipulations of their algorithms. I mean, we saw with the recent No Kings protests, there were certain allegations that the No Kings Social Media account was taken down. It was taken down, by the way, which Meta then said, "Well, it was just a glitch in the data centers," and, you know, and there's a lot of that. And we look at the Brazilian elections, President Lula talking about a lot of algorithmic manipulations, a lot of strange things happening with social media the day of the election. I know this is top of mind to a lot of our viewers as well, because they've seen these big tech people in the White House shoulder to shoulder, and they really weren't hiding when they'd bring Trump this or that, you know, what they were doing. So what's your perspective on avoiding not just the misinformation that could spread, but also algorithmic manipulation and other types of checanery? Correct. Correct. And of course, you know, as you outline all of these lords of technology, whether we're talking about, you know, Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or the guys who are running the frontier model companies, they've lost the benefit of the doubt. Frankly, they lost the benefit of the doubt on day one of the second Trump administration when they all were paraded like so many hunting trophies by the President at his inauguration. And since then, of course, they've been hit up for millions of dollars to build a ballroom and all sorts of other things, and as you point out, it's all been pretty cozy. And so Mark Warner and I really wanted to send a shot across the bow that we were watching carefully and that they need to abide by their own commitments to identify and to alert the government when they see, you know, activity on the part of the Russians or the North Koreans. But also, again, we're just generally watching Jamie and I again with Joe Morelli and others and lawyers. And as he said, nonprofits, we've, we've, we've wargamed a lot of these scenarios and one of these scenarios. And I'm looking at you here, Elon Musk, because, you know, he in particular has been a massive financial player in this election, hundreds of millions of dollars of his own fortune has gone into supporting Republican candidates. And of course, he controls a major social media platform, X, what used to be Twitter. And one of the scenarios we gained out is that one of these lords of, of technology decides in the middle of the day to start propagating misinformation to, and again, there's a thousand scenarios here, none of which are particularly happy to contemplate. But one of them is that Elon Musk, I don't mean to, you know, say he's the one who's going to do this, but he certainly has the power to alter those algorithms or to tell a story that is false, you know, to say that reports in Michigan are that massive numbers of the undocumented are voting in those elections. And in that moment, this is an opportunity to manipulate people. And if a whole bunch of guys with guns in Michigan see a bunch of social media posts that suggest falsely that, you know, the undocumented are voting in Detroit, you know, what's to stop them from jumping into trucks armed and showing up at polling places. Now, local police are overwhelmed and, you know, heaven forbid, there's some sort of violence and the local police are overwhelmed. What do you think the president's going to do? Well, he's going to send in federal law enforcement. So again, I, I don't want to suggest that that is absolutely the scenario that is going to happen, but you can't be too suspicious or prepared. And so, you know, we have been in contact with, these many leaders who do not have the benefit of that out these days to say, you know, we're watching very closely. There are more importantly, there are lawyers who are watching very closely about whether you take any steps that are either aggressive against the proper functioning of our democracy or negligent. Congressman Raskin, relatedly, the people we would expect to be investigating, malign, foreign actors, manipulations, the FBI, they are apparently according to lots of reporting and common sense and the attacks on the FBI that we see over over again, Trump was attacking the FBI today on social media that they're worried. Reports are showing that they're concerned about they're going to be pressured to take illegal action. Director Patel has refused to publicly commit to keeping federal agents out of polling locations. So what are you hearing from FBI leadership and personnel about what we might see next week? We're doing to prevent this and, you know, we have a lot of law enforcement who watches this network. I mean, I see them out and about in the community and they're glad that we stand up for real law in order. Not the BS Trump saying it, but undermining it. And so what do you say to them, you know, as they're watching this and they've got to make, you know, they may be ordered by Patel to do this or that. So how do you see that situation? Let me underscore the extraordinary nature of the situation we're in that you started off with. And because we obviously have had intensive efforts to disenfranchise people, to shut down balloting, to steal ballots, to fix elections over the course of American history. But the difference here is that it has almost always been the federal government that has been an instrument for democracy, saying, for example, after the Civil War, no, the white supremacist restorationist governments cannot drive black people away from the polls and disenfranchise the newly freed black population. It was during the Civil Rights Movement where, I mean, it was a little ambiguous there with Jay Ecker Hoover and some of the things happening early. But eventually, the Department of Justice really was on the side of voting rights against Jim Crow governments and George Wallace and, you know, other racist state governments and governors who are trying to block people's ability to vote. What's different about the period we're in is that the federal government is now the anti-voting party. And it is the state governments, or overwhelmingly the state governments, that are trying to defend and protect the right to vote against mischief and strategic games being played by the president and executive branch. And that's why this is such a disconcerting and disorienting period for us, right? But here's the good news that when the federal government got involved before, it was under the power of the Voting Rights Act, which has basically been destroyed and decapitated by the administration and by the Robert's Court. And in terms of the normal run of show, the federal government and the President of the United States and the post office and every new agency they try to get involved have nothing to do with it. And so what that means is that the state governors and the secretaries of state and the boards of election have got to defend the integrity of their electoral process against malicious efforts to interfere by the federal government. There's no power to shut down the election. We had midterm elections in the middle of the civil war in the middle of World War II. There is no power just to come in and seize ballots. There's no statute that permits that. And this really is the realm of state governmental sovereignty to conduct the election in order to elect the people who are going to go to Congress. And so we are in a bit of a new period here, but I'm confident that these state attorney generals and secretaries of state and boards of election are getting ready, along with us in Congress, the majority in the House and the Senate, to back them up, along with all of these other not-for-profit groups that are just standing up for the right of the people to vote and are not getting involved in a partisan way, but are getting involved simply on the side of democracy itself. So Congressman Himes, I just asked Congressman Raskin about law enforcement, FBI, under the purview of the Judiciary Committee. Let's talk about the intelligence committee and the intelligence community and what they may be asked to do, what they've already done. And so we all saw, even what you want to call that Oval Office address that Donald Trump gave, but he gave some public address declassifying documents that he claimed to prove that our adversaries interfered with past elections. How might he use the intelligence community to mislead the public? What are you doing to stop that? And the intelligence committee, what's your message to them right now, as they see what's going on. And we know that they've had to really balance this tightrope when it's come to deeper issues. What do you do when Trump's cutting deals with Putin and doing all of these things and they've got to move very carefully as well. So what do you do here in the election country? Yeah. And you're right to make it mainly about information, right? There are all kinds of scenarios. Jamie was just talking about one, where federal law enforcement, the FBI, is asked to do something which is clearly illegal because as he points out, and as obvious in our constitution, the federal government has no role in our elections, even if there is our questions of law enforcement. CIA, needless to say, CIA is the one entity in the intelligence community that has operational capabilities, right? They have guys with guns and there is no circumstances under which those people are allowed to operate inside the United States and there is no circumstance under which the NSA or the massive apparatus of surveillance that the intelligence community has. can in any way be used over, uh, inside the United States. So that, that, uh, with this administration, uh, that doesn't go without saying, which is why I say it, but you're right to, uh, emphasize the information operations. If for no other reason than, uh, the July speech, and let's review what happened in that July speech, which of course got me extremely worried, because we just, you know, why do you give a speech to the nation if you're not teeing up the possibility to, on election day, say, hey, remember in July, and this would be Donald Trump, saying, remember in July, when I said that the Venezuelans or the Chinese did this or that? Well, guess what? So, um, let's go back and remember what happened in July. The president made a whole bunch of claims, um, and there was actually paper, there were reports or, uh, uh, held up and offered up, declassified by the intelligence community, and the president completely mischaracterized what those reports said. He said, well, the Chinese have tried to interfere with our elections, et cetera, et cetera. When you actually looked at those reports, you realize that, um, that, that what he was saying was completely false. Uh, and fortunately that July speech sort of landed with the thud, because if you've looked at the documents that he was saying backed up his, um, argument, they didn't. And, you know, it's worth my repeating what I've now said two times here, which is that we have never seen a successful effort on the part of any foreign country, uh, to actually interfere with, um, the mechanics of our election. Yes, lots of information operations, the way Jamie describes it as sort of, you know, kicking up mud, uh, in the information environment. But, um, we've never seen, and we continue to not see the intention or the capability to actually mess around with the mechanics of the election. And I'll just add, because this is really important, um, uh, 49 of the 50 states, um, uh, excluding Louisiana, have a paper record of how someone has voted. So let's imagine that something happens that we've never seen before, and that by the way is very, very unlikely because our voting machines are not hooked up to the internet. Um, let's just imagine that for the first time ever, uh, a foreign power succeeds in getting into the electronics of our voting, 49 of the 50 states have a paper ballot. So it would be very easy for the local officials whose responsibility it is to do this to identify that even in the very unlikely event that had happened. And the reason I really somewhat adamantly say that is that again, one of the scenarios that we have prepared for is the president midway through election day saying I've been informed that the Russians or the the Iranians are trying to compromise this election, uh, you know, that would then lead to all sorts of extra legal things like I've ordered the FBI to shut down the voting machines in Michigan, uh, or I've ordered the FBI to confiscate or ICE or DHS to confiscate those voting machines so that we can determine how the Iranians got into it. I mean, you can sort of spin out these scenarios, which is why it's really important for Americans to understand that it has never happened. It's unlikely to happen. And if it were to happen, it would be very easy to identify and correct. So Congressman Raskin, I think that's a likely scenario, not necessarily saying the Iran, I mean, I think we should think through, can he say he's, I doubt he's going to say the Russians hacked in, he's going to say, bring me more diesel Putin please or something like that. Um, but, you know, in terms of the Iranians possibly, but he's definitely going to do something. He's definitely going to do, I mean, we've seen far in elections of Trump's allies, you know, do this. I mean, during the Israeli elections, Netanyahu went on social media and he said, it's rigged. It's rigged. The Arab nations, they're rigging this. It's unfair. You know, and he showed photos and there were AI images and he did this whole thing and we see what's happening there. We saw what happened in the recent Serbian elections. There's reporting that Bhuchich was actually seeking whether or not to actually challenge it. He lost so badly to the student list that he decided against it. We see what Bolsonaro is doing. So we actually have templates of Trump's crew of what they're doing. So he's going to do some version where during the day, a few hours in, he's going to do videos and he's going to say the illegal immigrants is how he's going to say, I don't like calling it like this. You know, they're out there, they're voting. We tried to stop it. We tried to do all of this. This is a big issue. This is not fair. Elon Musk will make that the number one trending story. This is what's going to happen. This to me is the most basic scenario that I think is going to happen. This is what they've done in my opinion. And then so what do we tell people to do? We know that you guys are working behind the scenes with the great team of people also in lawyers. But what should, how do we process this? What do we do? How do we tell people don't panic? It's under control when they want to create panic and suppress the vote? Well, I think you got it. I mean, panic is obviously the best friend of the authoritarians. But also that general context is so important for people to see Ben. This is what it means for the democratic nations and peoples and governments of the world to defend our system against the autocrats and the dictators and the bullies and so on. We've come all the way in this campaign. And we're not going to get up to the point of victory and then say, oh no, we're too terrified to go to the polls or oh no, we're confused now. We're falling from propaganda run through Putin or President Xi or Kim Jong Un or any of Donald Trump's other friends. People have understand now how much the claim about illegal alien voting is an absolute fraud. People get that. People also understand that structurally within our constitutional order it's up to the states to determine when there's been when there's been voter fraud. It's not up to the federal government to do that. You know, even if the federal government we're not itself perpetuating frauds all over the country and doing that on a daily basis as a matter of business in the White House. And so we need to, you know, calm people down by letting them see this is the fight between democracy and the autocrats and the principal thing we got going for us here. And this is what Navalny says in his his book Patriot is the truth and we've got to keep telling the truth. You're going to be playing a critical role. I hope you're you've got a lot of sleep before the election been because we're going to need the podcasters and the TV people and the radio people to be able to sort out very quickly fact from fiction and not to fall for all of the propaganda in nonsense. But the other point I would make is that defending the election means defending it not just all the way up to the election through the right to register and to keep the polling places open and not to get people, you know, fraudulently thrown off the rolls and so on. But it means defending the election all the way until people are actually sworn into office because look, Donald Trump has nothing but a bag of tricks at this point. All they've given the country is war, corruption, inflation, illegal tariffs, you know, ruinous economic policies. So they've got nothing to run on. So they just reach into their bag of tricks to see what to do. And we need people to be more and more self-confident about making that judgment and being able to read what they're doing as the last gasp of declining and dying authoritarian regime. Yeah. And then after this election, I really want people to focus on what's happening globally because the foreign malign actor influence network, they work in in lockstep with each other. And we often think about things in terms of election, who's up, who's down, who's winning, who's losing. But the real globalist network that I talk about is a globalist network of dictators and authoritarian who want to destroy elections. So while we're playing, okay, let's have a debate. Let's talk about this and that. And my issue is they're talking about wiping away elections and creating panic and so-and-discorded. One of the ways I think they try to open the floodgates for malign foreign actors is to try to break the institutions here, Congressman Himes, that try to stop it and detect it that give us our intelligence radar to be on the lookout for it, right? So the Trump regime has ripped apart incredible groups that do good work like FMI-C, the foreign malign influence center within ODNI, CISA, CISA, some of our top counter-hacking people, cyber security has been ripped apart. I mean, I don't even know where this guy is, maybe you do. I remember Thomas Fugate III, like the intern. They put some intern, you know, as like the main counterintelligence guy. I remember seeing the guy's photo. I mean, the guy looked like guy, whatever. I won't characterize. I'm like, who's this guy? Thomas Fugate III. So how is that playing out over here as they've destroyed some of the detection mechanisms? Like how are we sure that you're getting even in your briefings data when they've destroyed data repositories, you know, because I think that's a major issue people on. Yeah, no, look, you're absolutely right about that, and you're right, and in at least two ways, you know, it was not lost on me that Victor Orbán, you know, the very epitome of what you're describing, you know, did all he could to slide hungry, a NATO ally, into the column of autocracies, and then he gets whooped in an election outraged over corruption. And what does he do? He actually puts up social media, congratulating BB Netanyahu on his win. Another right-wing quasi-authoritarian leader, and, you know, when Bolsonaro right-winger loses in Brazil, what happens? Donald Trump puts him on a plane and brings him to Miami. I mean, this is very much a cabal of like-minded authoritarians, and so you're absolutely right about that. And, you know, we need to worry about some of these instincts that are rising in Europe, in France, in Germany, in particular. But to bring this all back home, you're 100% right on the dismantlement of the tool. that we have to identify the cooperative efforts, and I mean I'll give you one real example. Sissa, right? Sissa is the organization that ironically was created in the first Trump administration to identify the really hard stuff, the attempts to hack our networks and that kind of thing, and you'll remember very famously, you may even remember Chris Krebs, he was the director of Sissa going into the 2020 election, and when he had the temerity to say what was true, which was that the 2020 election was absolutely safe and secure. The president Trump fired him on the spot. I mean that tells you the story that you need to be aware of. And of course since then, in the second Trump administration, Sissa has had no director, roughly a third of the staff, these are the technical experts who know about hacking and all that stuff, is no longer there. That's true, of course, around the apparatus of these organizations that monitor for election interference. So you get a real sense for how committed Donald Trump is to creating the ambiguity that opens doors for him to say what he has always said, which is that our elections are rigged. And if I may, let me just slant a little bit away from your direct question because we haven't gone to this point. I think Jamie would agree with me on this point. One of the things of course you can do, and you can do this in most states in the United States, to try to take off the table, some of the risk associated with election day itself is to vote early. Here in the state of Connecticut, we've had two weeks of early voting. Many, many people have taken advantage of that. A vote that has cashed prior to election day when God only knows what president Trump is going to say or do is a more secure vote as against that vote that could be in jeopardy to the president's attempts on election day to discourage people to the polls or to create chaos at a polling place that might make it impossible for somebody to cast their vote. Congressman Raskin, how are you feeling right now? People, you're sometimes a barometer for people's confidence. They remember you standing up to him and you too, Congressman, how are you feeling right now? Any surprises? I mean, I'm feeling great. I've been to 27 states campaigning out there when the reporters ask me, I say, look, I'm not in the prognostication business. I'm in the mobilization business. I'll leave the punditry to someone else. But I will tell you, we are mobilizing for a landslide election. A landslide in the sense that we have opened up dozens of new U.S. House districts that were never considered competitive before to surging excellent democratic candidates. And I would say that's really the secret weapon in this campaign. We've got some extraordinary candidates out there. Callie Barr in the first district of Michigan is amazing. I'm thinking about Blake Gendobine in the 21st district in New York who will take over from at least to Fonic. She won her last election by 21 points and he's leading in the polls. I've been campaigning with him for many months and it's just incredible. There's amazing candidates. It's meantime, they've got the worst possible candidates in the world because they've got to pass all of Trump's, you know, moronic, paranoid tests. And so they've purged their party of anybody with critical thinking faculties left. And like the guy that Gendobine's running against in New York 21 is, he makes rap music where he just repeats Donald Trump's name over and over again. And you know, you've seen the kind of people that are on the ballot for the Republicans. It's like white nationalists, people with serious criminal records and on and on. So I look, I think things are set up for the landslide that America deserves. We need a landslide repudiation of all the corruption and authoritarianism. Now what we've got going against is of course, is a wall of gerrymandered districts. There are a whole bunch of states like you could look at North Carolina or Georgia where we're winning the election statewide. We've got two brilliant US senators from Georgia and North Carolina. We've got a Democratic governor, a Democratic attorney general who are about to win the US Senate with Roy Cooper. But the congressional district is 10 Republicans and four Democrats because a sixth grader can take the computer technology and the AI and carve up the electorate in order to promote total Republican hegemony. And that's what's happening in so many of the states, especially in the Southern states in Ohio too. We're headed to potentially winning the governorship in the US Senate seat. And yet you get the same kind of better than two to one margin in the House delegation for the Republicans. So we're up against that structural factor. We're also up against citizens united in all of Elon Musk's money. But having said all of that, I looked around the world and it's like the fall of the autocrats, whether we're talking about Serbia or Hungary or Brazil, all over the place, the Democratic forces are winning. And I just think that's an unstoppable force in this election. Yeah, I talk about this in our book too. Structures and systems are so important. And I think pro-democracy forces have kind of taken for granted that elections will happen. And there's good faith debate and the other side will play by the rules. But as I've said, the structures and systems have been under attack and we have to fortify structures and systems generationally and that's a major project that we're going to need from leaders like you. Now Congressman Himes, the number one issue, and it's inextricably intertwined with the number two, is corruption on voters' minds right now. And it's the number one issue and the number two's economy neck and neck because people see these Trump oligarchs getting so damn rich while people are struggling with the economy. So they're really the same issue just to recast a different way. So when people are looking at this election, when they're looking at the issues, when they're looking at the attacks on the election, when they're looking at these intelligence breaches, they're thinking about oversight. And what does that look like? As Warren Buffett said, it's hard to do a deal with a bad person. And so I'd like to believe that you're able to do deals that help affordability and help the America. I truly do. I root for that. But Trump's a maniac and he doesn't give a crap about people's lives. And so I think the accountability oversight. And so I would be remiss if we didn't address at least oversight from both of you priorities heading out of this. And then we'll of course have kind of a final closing remarks about the election. But I'm curious, the oversight agenda within the intelligence committee, if and when you take over as the chair because there's so many, how do you organize it? How do you think about them? How do you conceive of that right there? Yeah, great, great question. I think it's going to pose a real challenge to the Democratic Party after election day. And you're absolutely right. The evil stew of high gasoline prices, of a president saying, I'm not taking the country to war. And then doing precisely that illegally without even informing the Congress, plus all of the corruption, the $400 million jet from Qatar, the crypto, the crypto billions, this has resulted in precisely where we are today, which is that the president has approval ratings in the mid 30s. And by the way, I should just note as a side note that that's a critical fact, a critical asset in the context of what we know is coming, which is that the president saying this election is rigged. Frankly, if the president had 50% approval ratings today and the American public, you know, backed him 50/50, I'd be much more worried than I am. Like Jamie, I'm very optimistic because when the president tries to run his usual BS here, you know, two-thirds of the American public are going to just say, no, we know the game and we're not accepting that. And public sentiment is really important. And it's going to be a critical asset here. But to answer your specific question, the levels of corruption are sky high. I sometimes joke with my constituents, you know, Martin Van Buren, eat your heart out. We've never seen anything like this, including back in the era of time and the y'all. And so here's one political analysis. And this will be a debate within the party. But we need to remember a couple of things. We are not going to win bid on Tuesday because all of a sudden America has fallen in love with the Democratic Party. That is not true. Our numbers are terrible. What we are doing is we're being given in my opinion an audition. And we need to do two things in that audition period, which may be two years. We'll see. We need to stay laser focused on the number one source of anxiety and concern and rage right now, which is the cost of living for Americans energy. Let's end the war. Let's scale back the tariffs. Let's show that we can actually be laser focused on the thing that is causing them the most pain. And at the same time, to your question, given the corruption and the hideousness of this administration, we've got to start the process of pushing back, you know, pushing back against that and demanding accountability. And shining a bright light of transparency on all of the deals that have been made so that we begin to move the country back towards, you know, the good country that we all remember. Now, the danger lies. It's an awful lot easier to raise all kinds of hell about the corruption than it is to stay absolutely focused on the affordability question. And I think one of our challenges is going to be to do both. And to do it in the right order. In my opinion, based on, you know, years of politics, let's always talk about the affordability and the cost of living first and then get to the oversight and the transparency and the corruption so that we are never perceived as taking our eye off the ball that will position us, if we do it right, to turn this into a victory two years down the road. We're going to be taking either believe that, you know, America is falling back in love with us, or to take the easier route. And, you know, I'm anticipating that on day one, there will be demands for impeachment. We've seen that movie before. You never take a constitutional remedy off the table. But let's be very careful about the politics of how we do what we must do, which is to demand accountability for the hideous corruption that has been demonstrated by this administration. Congressman Raskin, we know you're also working closely, you know, with Congressman Garcia on the House Oversight Committee. You've been a mentor to him. You shared that with me. And so we know that there's a very aggressive agenda. You know, it's almost like the word corruption doesn't give justice to what's happening to me. If you have a healthy body politic corruption is like a virus that you get rid of. But when the entire body politic becomes a corrupt mess, it just becomes this zombified thing that almost needs to be de-zombified because the whole thing is a criminal cartel. You know, I don't know how to describe what you're seeing when the DOJ seems like a mafia protection racket, you know, versus actually doing the work of the DOJ. So how do you see this? I mean, how do you see what these hearings look like, you know, in terms of even their length, the dynamic of it, you know, how questioning is going to happen? Who's going to call in? How do you structure? Who goes first? What goes first? You know, it's a lot there, but how do you think of that? Well, first let me agree with your way of framing it, Ben. I totally agree with that that corruption and affordability or the cost of living or the quality of life are just two sides of the same coin. I mean, look, what's on the ballot here is one public philosophy, which Jim and I are fighting for, which is the government must be an instrument for the common good of all the people. Barks and Democratic philosophy. The other is that the government is an instrument for the private self enrichment of the guy who gets in and his family and his cabinet and a handful of businesses that are on their side. Those are two radically opposed conceptions of government, which lead to completely different economic and social and political results for the people. That's why I think it's impossible also to disentangle the fight for honesty and integrity in government from the fight for an economic program that is going to benefit the vast majority of the people rather than just the people on the top who have seized control of our government and are using it for their own purposes. So look, when we're thinking about the investigations, the investigations must go to the fundamental corruption and prostitution of government agencies and offices that are supposed to be working for the people but now are no longer doing that. And there are going to be different potential solutions to the problems that have been created under this corrupt authoritarianism. So, for example, everybody knows now that government contracts are another money making venture for Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. and for their family. We've got to clean that up. Some of it will just be shining a light on it, exposing it to the light of day, getting the first amendment to work through a press that is not intimidated in Cald and being bullied by the president. Part of it will be through reform of government contracting procedures. Take another one. We're not only did Trump part in more than 1500 convicted proud boys, oath keepers, three percenters, clansmen and other violent criminals who attacked our police officers on January 6th, but then he unleashed a wave of dozens and dozens of parts of criminal fraudsters, white collar criminals in bezlers, corrupt CEOs and so on. Who ripped off consumers, who ripped off workers, who ripped off investors and so on. And gave them partings and also forgave the restitution that they owed to their victims and the fines they owed to the government. We counted more than $1.7 billion that has been forgiven already. Well, we need to shine a light on that. And although the president has a lot of plenary power under the pardon power, that doesn't apply to the people who are paying bribes and the people who have now filled in in the new field of pardon brokers, people like Matt Gates, people like Roger Stone, who take money, not as lawyers, but as pardon brokers and say, I'll get you a pardon from the White House, but you're going to have to pay me. And then you're going to have to pay into different political, public, governmental or private slush funds that have been created. We're going to shine a light on all of that in the hopes that we can shut it down. But you know, we have about a dozen different categories like that. Another one close to my heart is foreign government emoluments. Jim mentioned the $400 million jet from Qatar. You know, that's a fraction of the billions of dollars that have float in through these crypto rivers of foreign government cash, the money that's gone to the hotels, the golf courses, and so on. That violates the constitution, which says none of us in federal office can receive a present in a monument, which means a payment in office or a title, any kind, whatever from a prince, a king or a foreign state without the permission of Congress. Trump has never once come to Congress, and we've got to create a whole system that requires and compels them to come to Congress to seek permission for that. And if not, it's criminal and civil offenses for everybody all down the line in Congress should have to act within 10 days on a request for foreign government emoluments. So basically what I'm saying, Ben, is we need to pair every corrupted system with a legislative or administrative or a constitutional solution. So it's not just, you know, like political pornography that people are watching, but it actually leads us to better government and a better economic and social situation for the people. Yes, seriousness, like we need to be a serious nation with serious people. And as I talk a lot about on the show is we need this baseline before we talk about what's a Democrat and what's the Republican and this idea versus that idea. We need to, as a nation, say, baseline. We're serious. We're competent. We stand for integrity. And in a gamified media landscape and political news cycle, who's up? Who's down? This person said this? Oh, isn't that crazy? Isn't that crazy? So you get this dystopian reality TV show where people in this country feel like non-consensual extras in a really bad episode of the apprentice. Like we want to stop this. So I want to talk about this and ask you both the same question. And then we'll do kind of a closing statement, which is just the issue of character and integrity and being a role model and leadership and values and principles. And just speaking to that, because to me, we all just look at this, you know, and to me, it's the least political, political campaign that's happened to your point Congressman Himes and no offense to Democrats. I don't think you're getting a shining endorsement per se. You said it, not me. I think people are grossed out and disgusted. They're really sick. And they're like, all right, we're going to give you a try because I'm just going to puke in my mouth every time I watch this. And then you see him and he's talking about men's asses as the campaign finishes up and cognitive exams. And it's all distractions from how bad things are. But like, we got to be serious with the United States of America, dammit, character matters and integrity matters. So I look for you to speak to that. Then Congressman Raskin, I'd love to you to speak to that. Then just kind of a final remark. I'll go ask each individually before we head out of what you want people to do or take with them before we're really, let's talk about character because it's not talked about enough. Yeah, no, I'm glad you raised it because one of the characteristics of this mess that you describe is the abolition of the concept of shame, of shamelessness as a sort of national value. When did that happen? I'm not convinced that character is destiny, but character is really, really important and particularly important in people who are in positions of leadership. I have been second in the last two years, as, you know, like Jamie, I'm a product of a number of fairly elite institutions. And I have been absolutely second by the extent to which the leaders of our elite institutions in this country. And I'm thinking of Paul Weiss that bent the knee immediately to the demands of the president, all the white shoe law firms who even in the face of court order saying that it was illegal for the president to say you're going to give me 20 million dollars worth of legal work. Universities who yes were threatened, but bent the knee, major corporations, you know, how I've got democratic activists without any particular power or wealth and they're being immensely courageous standing up to this autocracy. And so character and an adherence to principle in our leaders is one of the fundamental things that our democracy relies on. And part of character and I can't emphasize this enough is knowing that as a citizen in a democracy and we are blessed to be citizens in the greatest democracy history has ever seen. We have profound responsibilities and I tell my constituents this all the time. If you regard your role as a citizen as somehow fulfilled by scrolling through Twitter and getting increasingly outraged by deciding that the other party are a bunch of, you know, Charlottes. treasonous evil people. What you're doing is you're sacrificing the obligation to be a critical thinker. And citizens thinking critically is argued that that is arguably the underlying unity of our democracy. So we need all of us, all of us, to take that duty seriously, to know that if we're scrolling through social media and we're outraged, we are being manipulated by somebody. It might be Mark Zuckerberg, it might be the Russians. But anyway, I think at the end of the day, the key here is going to be a restoration of the notion that as citizens, we have an obligation to think critically, to think with humility, to consider the possibility, which by the way helps in a marriage, that you might be wrong. Until we restore that, we're all going to be, you know, fair game for the Mark Zuckerbergs, for the Instagrams, the Twitter's, and quite frankly, the manipulation of demagogues like Donald Trump. >> You know, Congressman Raskin, same question for you. I also think though, also about, you know, when Trump holds these propaganda sessions, and he'll have like a coach of a football team, who like prides themselves and like instilling leadership values, and the coach will stand there, while Donald Trump is not talking about the sports team or congratulations on winning, but just stands there as a prop with some of those young athletes that are even up there, while Trump spews the nonsense about, you know, and the dangerous stuff, you know, about the election lies, or when he says, you know, we're going to destroy the civilization of this that are on, and you have the coaches standing next to him and just kind of nodding their head, and I'm like, you tell me that you're supposed to be a leader of young people in RELPIN, and you're just standing there, and to me, this is not a period of time where obviously you don't be complicit, but sometimes just even standing there, it makes you complicit in this, you know, nefarious agendas. I just want you to speak to that, then we'll just kind of final remarks. Well, yeah, let me make a few points about the very interesting things both of you guys have said. Well, one, just on the sports angle, of course, there's been a tremendous corruption of sports during this period, because the corruption that begins with the president and the president's men, and the system then radiates outward and creates corruption in a lot of places. We've seen horrific sex scandals, sexual exploitation and sexual abuse scandals in college sports on, you know, both women and men's sports teams. Like, how is that acceptable? And why is it that we have a presidential administration and a Department of Justice, which never do anything about it? They're always, I mean, like, even the thing that the terrible rape scandal that is just coming out now from Cornell, you never hear anything from the Department of Justice or the Trump administration about it. And I think that the Epstein network dimension of this cannot be, you know, dismissed or trivialized, because it goes right along with all of the other, you know, economic exploitation. All right, but here's what I wanted to say, generally about the question of character that you pose to has been. And I'm going to answer it actually by way of sort of disagreeing with both of you guys about what you're saying about the Democratic Party. Obviously, every political party is on trial when it runs for office to get things done. That goes without saying. But I want to say this, I think that the Democrats that I've met all across America, in my travels over the last year, are demonstrating the most exceptional character. Many of them in red states in red districts standing up to the corruption and the authoritarianism. And one reason why the Democrats are so low in the polls is because we lost to Donald Trump in 2024 and for a long period. I don't really hear it so much anymore. People were saying the Democrats are not fighting these fascists who are trying to destroy our institutions. I think when we come out, we win these elections, we show people that we can make democracy work. We can defend democracy against its enemies foreign and domestic. Our stock is going to go up immediately and it should go up. That doesn't mean people shouldn't hold us to account. They should, but it's not really they. It's we. It's us. At this point, the Democratic Party is the party of democracy. That's what FDR called us. He didn't call us the Democratic Party, much less the Democrat Party, which is what, you know, my Johnson and Donald Trump called us. He called us the democracy. So you'd say, well, the economic royalists and the plutocrats say just invest in the wealthiest people and the wealthiest corporations and some of the wealth will dribble down on everybody else. But the democracy says invest in the great American working middle class. We will all rise and prosper together. That's a politics with character and the people who stand with it and live up to their values are people acting with character. So I'm not, you know, I don't want to run away from the people as flawed as we are as imperfect as we are like everybody else who are standing up for democracy and for human rights. But I want to then make a final point about this kind of contradicting what I just said. Even more important than being willing to stand with your party and to make it a party of character is to stand up for your constitution and the country. And we have to be constitutional patriots at this moment. This is what the Republicans never understood. You know, when we went, when we took the second impeachment case over to the Senate and we were able to get seven Republican senators to join 50 Democrats to vote to convict Donald Trump for inciting violent insurrection against the Union to support his inside political coup. That was the most widespread bipartisan vote in American history for a presidential conviction, but still 10 votes short of the two thirds. And that's simply because it has become such a partisan process. We've got to rise above our partisan loyalties to be loyal to the constitution and to the democratic experiment itself. Final concluding remarks, Congressman Himes. How are you going to, how are you going to top that, man? Are you just going to tap out? Are you going to, you're going to give a call? What are you going to do? Not at all. Jamie and I are 100% agreement on this, especially the final call to the, to the constitution, which at the end of the day is what we swear in those two and which has been so badly damaged by, by this president. You know, since time immemorial, there has been a tension between the executive and the legislature on issues like who gets to declare war, et cetera, et cetera. That tension is generally healthy. This, of course, is a radically new era in which the president, president, Trump has simply dispensed with the constitution as something that's important in his thinking. And Jamie's absolutely right when he says that unfortunately his acolytes in the Republican Party because their existence, political existence, depends on them joining him in his disdain for the constitution. This is why Congress has been flat on its back for the last two years. It has utterly failed in its role to act as a check in a balance on the power of the president. That changes, of course, in this election. But, and let me close with that point because we, we really went far afield in some fascinating areas here, but of course the subject here is election protection. And I just want to close with a couple of thoughts that I think are really important. Number one, our elections have always been accurate and secure. And Americans should trust that at the end of the day, whatever garbage, whatever noise the president chooses to make, your vote must be counted. It will be counted. And traditionally in this country, we have never had an issue in any meaningful sense with elections reflecting the will of the people. Number two, part of the reason you're hearing from Jamie and I is that we've devoted a ton of time in the last couple of months to preparing for. And no, as Jamie suggested to the woman that he met, we can't guarantee an outcome here where assuming the president is going to pull out all the stops, but we are prepared. We've been war gaming and preparing and not just the Democrats, but all sorts of lawyers around the country who the moment there's misbehavior will be in court filing injunctions in temporary restraining orders, all that stuff. So again, our elections are going to at the end of the day reflect the will of the people as they always have, but for warned is for armed. And our message is expect the president to do precisely what he always does, but we're ready and maintain your confidence in the fundamental workings of our democracy. Get out there and vote and express your opinions. Congressman Raskin, concluding thoughts on election security. Well, election security is fundamentally about character two. The character to say that in a society built on one person, one vote, we're going to respect other people's votes. And we're not going to allow Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump or anybody else interfere with our elections, steal away the result, change the results or shut down the democratic process. That's the that is the commitment that we've made to each other. And so this is an important moment. I will make a final pitch for the democracy, both in the sense of in constitutional terms, but also in the sense of the party of democracy, the Democrats, because we are the party that will stand up for everybody's right to vote, even if they're not going to vote for us. I mean, I've been to a million democratic meetings or Democrat meetings in my life. I've never once heard somebody get up and say, how are we going to suppress the vote over here? How are we going to pass a disenfranchisement statue? That's not how we operate. We defend both our program, like health care for everybody, but also the democracy itself. I've never seen any Democrats say, yeah, maybe we should mount a violent insurrection to try to overthrow the result or get somebody to cheat. It's not happening. So I think that we can say we are the party with the program to sweep away the corruption, to build economic policies around the needs of the vast majority of the people. And also the party that will stand up for democracy and human rights and freedom all over the world, because it's not [BLANK_AUDIO] America where they're looking to us. It's a new crane, for example, where they're looking to us. And we are going to be on the side of Democratic allies and not on the side of all of Donald Trump's communist autocrat friends and dictators and bullies from around the world. That's what we've got to offer people. So vote for the democracy. Congressman Himes, Congressmember Raskin, we appreciate you both. We look forward to call you the chairman of your respective committees after this midterm elections. And it will be an honor to bring you back on. Talk to you about the oversight and committee hearings and work year doing when we can actually advance things and move this country forward. We're honored that you spent this time with us, especially right before the midterms. We've been going for about an hour, but people really wanted to hear from you these important perspectives. And you made me feel a lot more confident. I know you made the people out there feel a lot more confident. So we appreciate you both. Thanks for joining us on this special edition episode of the Midest Touch podcast. Thank you, Ben. Thank you, Ben. Everybody hit subscribe. Let's get to seven million subscribers. We appreciate you. It's finally here. WTF America. The book I wrote with my brothers is out now. It's about how we got into this hell and how we get out. Scan the QR code, click the link in the description, or find it anywhere. Books are sold and order your copy today.