התמלול המלא של STEPHEN MILLER'S APPOINTMENT IS TRUMP'S DECLARATION OF WAR ON AMERICA - 11.9.26

majority for forewarning the targets of its constitutionally required oversight responsibility. In apocalyptic terms, what Trump did there with, I believe, Stephen Miller's compositional help was to declare war on against the law, to declare war against the cops, to declare war against the United States of America. The Attorney General, this clown Blanche, who used to be merely a corrupt, amoral, Trump private legal whore, yesterday went on various chat shows and confirmed he has graduated to fully qualified institutionalized moron. He said the Constitution specifies that the Attorney General is supposed to defend, say, the Defense Secretary if he's impeached. The Constitution does not mention any title of any office called Attorney General. And by the way, the attorney general, as Trump seems to know, can also be impeached. Simple vote in the House. Of course, two thirds in the Senate to convict. The attorney general can also be prosecuted. Ask John Mitchell from Watergate. Susan Glasser pointed out that Blanche's threats yesterday to prosecute Democrats for, you know, being members of the House Oversight Committee or warning Trump staffers about the stank. This is especially hilarious. I would call it mob lawyer-esque, actually, given that Todd Blanche is at this moment prosecuting James Comey for a photo of seashells by the seashore. Back to Stephen Miller. There are more early signs of him in Trump's insisting that the laws don't apply and logic doesn't apply and reality doesn't apply. We're back to 2021 and Georgia and the I just want to find 11,780 votes call. Back to reposting lunatics claims that Texas was stolen. Texas where Ken Paxton lost by so many that if they found a million illegal votes, Ken Paxton would still have lost by 200,000. Texas stolen. Greg Abbott lost by 700,000. First, the claims were the votes were stolen because they were too close. Now the votes are stolen because they were landslides. Back to the, if you simply take all the votes against me and instead count them for me, I won. Daniel Sullivan, Trump wrote. Again, I think this is Miller, and I think that's why he's there. Daniel Sullivan is leading substantially in the Alaska senatorial race. When you add Daniel, 3,600 votes, 1.68%, into Dan, and more about. 00:09:29 Speaker 2: Men again with Trump. I don't know what's going on there. 00:09:31 Speaker 1: Gerald Hikas, 4,846, 2.27%. Senator Dan Sullivan is up by thousands of votes. Of course, if you eliminate all votes for anybody named Dan Sullivan, that means that Paltonin won by a landslide. In fact, a shutout. Remember, Heikas was always fraudulently put into the race. I don't know what takes so long to announce his win. This should be immediate. Anyone voting for Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., a man who tried to change his middle initial, but was unable. 00:10:01 Speaker 1: What did J.D. 00:10:02 Speaker 2: Vance do again? Change his first name's middle initial? initial, twice? 00:10:06 Speaker 1: Yes, that's it, a crime. A crime of trying to change his middle initial, but was unable to get it done in time, and who was otherwise non-political, never even voted as a vote for Senator Dan Sullivan. The Alaska race is over. Dan Sullivan won capital letters by a lot of capital letters. President Donald J. Trump again. No thank you for your attention to this matter. They probably had a three-hour meeting with Trump to explain to him why thank you for your attention to this matter is for letters to your contractor building you a concrete wall in your Trump building, not to the United States of America. And by the way, none of it works this way. Stephen Miller, though, is there to tell Trump, yes, that's how it works, sir. If you just clap hard enough and close your eyes and wish, Peter Pan will make Sullivan the senator from Alaska. And Hegseth... is there to provide the guns with which to shoot anybody who interferes with Stephen Miller. And that is the Stephen Miller problem. There is nothing yet decisive out of Alaska. There is nothing decisive yet out of Mississippi. But in both cases, the Democrat is ahead of And if things were called off now, there would be two more Democratic senators. As to Mississippi, column is ahead by about 2,600 votes. But Senator Cindy Hyde, mail-it-in Smith, says she's not giving up yet. Secretary of State there says there are 3,000 mail-in ballots that need to be processed. They are legally countable if postmarked by Election Day and received by today, Monday, or tomorrow. If the Republicans weren't constantly corrupt or hypocritical, this would be stunningly ironic because months ago, the Republicans sued to invalidate all late-arriving mail-in votes in Mississippi. It went to the Supreme Court, and the Republicans, aw, they lost five to four, so the late-arriving votes count. As to Lauren Boebert, everybody wants to see if she goes down. Probably. She claims unusual voting patterns. Oh, no, I'm not going there. She wants a recount. She wants it done manually. In other words, Lauren Boebert wants a handjob. Meanwhile, Easter eggs continue to be found, lost in the shuffle of last Tuesday. I don't know how long we're going to be continuing to celebrate this one, but let's call it off before Christmas. They really, really lost and barely made a headline. Scott Perry lost. Virginia Fox lost. Brian Fitzpatrick and his little Kewpie doll eyebrows lost. Jeff Van Drew, who left the Democratic Party in Jersey to become MAGA, lost. Max Miller lost and now faces prosecution. Mike Turner lost. We know about Derek Van Orden lost, but I'm just going to keep mentioning that Derek Van Orden lost again and again and again. Brian Stile of Wisconsin lost. Marionette Miller Meeks, christened Marionette by prophetic parents. And Victoria Sparks lost. Jared Golden lost. A Democrat, well, he ran on the Democratic ticket. about Golden's loss, the manager of Sabato's Crystal Ball says, there is now not a single Trump 2024 plus nine or less district that

will be represented in the 2027 Congress by a Republican. In other words, if you were in a district that Trump won by less than 10 points in 2024, you did not get reelected in 2026. That's what a sea change we saw last week was. 00:13:40 Speaker 2: All right. 00:13:41 Speaker 1: Much to discuss here about next steps in the wake of the Democratic landslide. It was not just a landslide. It was a landslide and all the land slid and then it slid again. About the Supreme Court, the New York Times reports that Alito has told people close to him he does not intend to retire immediately, despite the Democrats win. As a result, Republicans, as the Times writes, may have missed the window of For President Trump to name a fourth or even fifth justice. Oh, sorry. Alito shared his plans with friends after the election results were clear. According to two people, the Times cites close to the justice who spoke on the condition of anonymity. As recently as last month, Alito, a forceful conservative and reliable vote in favor of Mr. Trump's policies. Also, a religious nut who believes he was put on the bench by God or I don't know. the devil, had rejected the idea that he would step down if Democrats took. Well, we know what this means. It means the price of Clarence Thomas bribes just went up again. On the other hand, Thomas has ruled out retiring, too, suggesting he intends to serve for decades more. With 35 years on the bench, if he stays through, the Times points out, May 2028, he would set the record as the longest serving justice in Supreme Court history. Also, most bribes. So the simple solution on the next steps about the Supreme Court is the next president will have to add seven justices or 17. Sarah Isger, a conservative shill who's posed for years as an ABC News legal and particularly Supreme Court expert, writes that Trump can bypass all this by simply nominating and getting approval for extra backup Supreme Court justices at any point in the remainder of his presidency. presidency, claiming that this has been done when justices have said they will retire when their successor is approved, which leaves out the fact that this would be justices saying that you should approve my successor because I will not retire when my successor is approved. So this is like the Dan Sullivan vote. If you simply count the votes against Dan Sullivan as votes for Dan Sullivan, it means Dan Sullivan wins. Alito won't retire, Sarah Isger writes in The Lame Duck, and he doesn't need to. Trump can nominate someone to the Supreme Court and the Senate can confirm without a vacancy. Then Trump can wait to sign the commission any time in the next two years. The question isn't Alito, it's Cornyn Tillis Thune. This is about as true and valid as Trump's order supposedly preventing further presidents from taking his gold off the walls of the Oval. It dawns on me you could have another president issue an executive order saying that they're going to hold Trump in midair after he leaves

office and make him pull that gold crap off the walls with his teeth. And as to Sarah Isger, Harvard Law... We're really going to have to audit Harvard Law to see if any of the professors there are accredited, aren't we? On the other hand, Sarah Isger, if you keep writing like this, you could be the next attorney general after they impeach good old Todd. Next steps on the Hegseth investigation. I am not optimistic that he will be removed, despite Thomas Massey retiring at the end of the year, who says and told MSN that he's expecting to force a vote on impeaching Hegseth in the House, perhaps as early as today. Obviously, it can't be any earlier than today. It would be, as he put it, there is one contingency in which I won't reintroduce the articles of impeachment. Hegseth resigns. Massey would move. And then the Speaker of the House, Johnson, that's some small, ugly, tiny Johnson you got there, Mike, who will have two legislative days to act. He can either put the resolution to the floor or hold a vote to refer the legislation to committee or motion to table it. And he'd need a majority vote. Two Republicans say if the vote does come to the floor for impeaching him, it will succeed. One House Republican not named. I think the numbers are there. He would be inclined to support. I think he's been incompetent. It's been all about bravado and not about strategy. And he added, I think he should resign. The one value in impeaching Hegseth at this point is pressure on him to resign. There's a ton of members, said another GOP unnamed lawmaker, that have been waiting to take, wanting to take this vote. We don't have that big of a majority. The GOP lawmaker said there's a lot of Republicans that don't like Hegseth. The Washington Sun quotes Tom Tillis, the lame duck from North Carolina in the Senate. Pete Hegseth has a reckonin'. Said it on CBS, blaming the unpopular defense chief for stalled Pentagon spending legislation. So it's not just about his crimes in office. He is one of the reasons why we don't have the funding or guarantee for defense that we need. Again, the snag is you would still need 67 votes in the Senate right now to remove Hegseth from office. And Hegseth is now, again, this is where Stephen Miller factors into this. With Susie Wiles as chief of staff, they would never stick Trump's neck out to defend Pete Hegseth or anybody else in particular. The Wiles White House was designed to manipulate Trump One of the staffers went on one of the shows yesterday and said they treated Trump like a baby. It's perhaps the most accurate description that we've been yearning for all these years. The staff treated Trump as a baby. They changed his diapers and manipulated him into doing what they wanted in terms of practical things that allowed them to take bribes and such. But more importantly— The manipulation of Trump was designed to make sure that the MAGA message and the Project 2025 message would never get buried behind Trump's ego, that they could

manipulate Trump in such a way as to force him to sell Project 2025 to America. That's what this was all about. If you saw the bulletin about the hiring of Miller, I quoted Paul Danz, one of the deputy architects of 2025, who said before Wiles was fired, that Wiles and her staffers needed to be out of the White House by sundown tomorrow. And the next thing you knew, it happened. And Miller, a 2025 devotee to the point where it's believed he has a series of tattoos about it throughout his body. I don't want to discuss that any further. He's in charge because the point is that there is now a triad that is running this government. Hegseth, Miller, Trump. And they will do anything, including violence, to stay in charge of this government. Next steps about stopping Trump's vanity war in Iran. Greg Sargent tried to figure out how Adam Smith, the incoming chair at Armed Services, Armed Forces Committee rather, plan to stop the war. Smith told him there's no easy way to do it because Trump keeps robbing every account he can to rob, to keep funding it and keep moving it forward. What we will do, we will vote resoundingly to end the war. We will vote to cut off all funds that go to the war. But remember, he will still be president. He will still have veto power. Sargent then said Trump certainly doesn't. So just for clarification, you think that Democrats in both houses next year will pass a measure which cuts off funding in the sense that forbids funding for the Iran war? And Smith said, absolutely. I think it'll be one of the first things we do and strongest things that we should do. In other words, these events will not die all of a sudden. They will be basically smothered through lack of funds, including the Iran war. By the way, Trump says on Iran, they are locked and loaded. Well, Hegseth is loaded. Next steps on saving Ukraine. Trump has made up some delusion about Kushner delivering a new defense structure for Europe as a kind of super imminent grand deal this week involving Europe and Ukraine. And for all we know, Mars and Elon Musk and space chickens. Well, we already have a structure for peace in Europe. It's called NATO. In point of fact, if Putin were ever to escalate to shoot his wad, it would be now in the next couple of months, knowing that if he does not decimate Ukraine by January 3rd, the tide turns. And every day thereafter, the Democrats get closer to power and more in power. And while they cannot take over Trump's status as commander in chief, they can, as noted before, throttle his pro-Russia expenditures. Also, this super deal, it's nonsense. Remember Robert Kelly, the politics professor at Pusan University? He was the viral guy on BBC News who was giving a strong answer about conditions in the Koreas, and suddenly first his infant crawled into the room behind him in his live shot, and then his wife came into the room chasing after the infant, and Robert Kelly went on giving a cogent analysis, as he always does, well, this time without his wife or child present. Quote, Does it need to be said that there is, in fact, no imminent super deal on Ukraine? Trump talks like this all the time. Past hallucinatory super deals include healthcare, infrastructure, North Korean nukes, Gaza, Ukraine on day one. Trump said he met with the Putin envoy and that a Russia-Ukraine deal will involve all of Europe, then admits he didn't meet with the Ukrainian delegation. then downplays Russia's ongoing atrocities in Ukraine, claiming Russia is losing civilians also because, I would add, Trump cannot possibly admit a mistake. And I don't mean he can't say he's made a mistake. He cannot accept the idea that his understanding, as Putin gave it to him, about what's going on in Ukraine is entirely backwards. To admit you got it wrong is to admit you made a mistake, is to admit you made a mistake last time, which is to admit you may have made other mistakes in your 80 years and therefore you're not perfect. And the moment Donald Trump explains to himself that he's not perfect, he will fall apart like he's a piece of glass hit perfectly with a rolled up piece of hardened chewing gum. After meeting with the aforementioned Russian envoy, Trump was asked, Putin right now kills Ukrainian civilians in their apartments, on buses, in schools. Did you bring that up? And Trump answered, I did bring that up. And I always bring it up the other way. The other way, they kill too. Russia is losing civilians also. That's what happens when you start a war. The top monitor on Russian TV news, of Russian TV news, I should say, Julia Davis responded, he still doesn't know which side is invading and which one is defending itself. And of course, that's not the point. The point is, I know that a person with an undamaged brain and the most limited intellects would have recognized which was the invader and which was the invadie. But that's not Trump. You are asking Trump to admit and correct his own mistake and go public with it. These are three things he has never done before. Try to find an occasion in which he's done one. His brain damage prevents him from doing any of those things, let alone all three. What is missing in this equation is the only time we get anything close to any of those three corrections. Somebody he views as a bigger alpha than him, like Putin. Somebody that he would, in this case, view as a bigger alpha than Putin needs to tell him that Putin is wrong and that it is Putin's fault. And then Trump might actually reverse course, but not before that. But who is that other alpha? She? Dana White? Kid Rock? Somebody took a whack at Melania. Melania Trump welcomed Kirill Dimitrov, who is a special envoy from Putin, which means he was probably in the KGB with him and probably killed somebody, to say some words in the White House. Countless outlets asks incredulously, a Putin envoy at the White House? The answer to that, the correct one is, well, one more Putin envoy than usual in the White House. Next

steps on the Trump Memorial Arch investigation. It is all on hold. The arch that would throw most of Arlington National Cemetery under shade. Do you need a bigger illustration of Trump's perfidy than the fact that Trump would leave office literally shading the true war dead, the true heroes of our wars dating back to the Rebellion? For at least two weeks, this thing is on hold, thanks to a judge named Tanya Chutkin. Now, where do I know the name Tanya Chutkin? Oh, that's right, the January 6th Trump trial. Revenge is a dish which Tanya Chutkins prefer to eat cold. I have a compromise on this that I think might be the next step. Trump can build a triumphal arch, but it can only be four feet tall. Just like his metaphorical true real-life height. Next steps on corporate corruption. The Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, Permanent Subcommittee Investigations, Homeland Security and Government Affairs, has sent by my count at least 64 letters in the last week to corrupt truff staffers, Bitcoin scam companies, corporation heads. Status wrote, renewing his demands that they turn over documents related to their donations. to Trump's crypto scams and ballroom after they, quote, failed to adequately respond and threatening to investigate them come in January. The entities receiving letters Thursday included World Liberty Financial, Fight, Fight, Fight LLC. Blumenthal had begun an inquiry in 2025 into the dollar sign Trump cryptocurrency. That's their problem. He's also... queried Binance, Tether, Mark Wayne Mullen, the Homeland Security, Brendan Carr from the FCC, Miriam Adelson, the head of Amazon, John Ternus at Apple, Larry Fink at BlackRock, Horacio Rozanski of Booz Allen, the Winklevoss twins, Joseph Creed of Caterpillar, Chuck Robbins of Cisco, that's Cisco and not Crisco, Brian Roberts of Comcast. 00:27:28 Speaker 2: Oh, that would be a shame if they investigated the head of Comcast. 00:27:32 Speaker 1: Sundar Pichai of Google, Bruce Broussard of HP, Jason Miller with a perfectly symmetrical round head, Jeff Yoss, who's worth $ 77 billion, Lockheed Martin Guide, Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Microsoft, Jensen Huang from NVIDIA, and the spy he gave the chips to in bed. Oops, it's Huang, right? It's not Wang. Alex Karp of Palantir, Dan Gilbert of Rocket Mortgage, Mark Bienoff of Salesforce, who owns Time Magazine, Kelly Loeffler, the Letnick family, the head of T-Mobile, and Stephen Schwartzman of Blackstone, who also put his name on the Animal Medical Center. Oops. Blumenthal gave these executives until January 4th to comply, warning that failure to do so would leave the subcommittee with no chance but to consider alternative measures to obtain compliance. Translation, turn over those documents or prepare to be subpoenaed. Next steps about Trump's illnesses. Marge Green, of all people, has come through with one as a postscript to a subject that is almost irrelevant now called Laura Loomer. She matters only in passing. Listen to this post, the end

of it from Marge Green, who retweeted the screenshots of 138 Laura Loomer tweets in the 24-hour period around the election. The Big point is at the end. Laura Loomer is mentally unwell, Green wrote, and is probably living in a state of psychosis. And high-level admin in the White House talked to her all the time. So does the president, called her a great Republican strategist. Her insane advice, here's the operative part. Her insane advice, writes Marjorie Taylor Greene, led to losing and could end with Trump in jail. I don't know how to quite say this. I'm feeling, I guess, a little bit of real life version of what Trump feels 24 hours a day. How do I say that I got something entirely wrong? I can preface this by saying that some of the circumstances changed, and I believe that the person involved clarified their own life and perspective on the world in the interim, but I still got this entirely wrong. Marjorie Taylor Greene. you have unsuspected depth. Please join the prosecution of Donald Trump. On a personal note, Harmeet Dhillon got cashiered. This job is now open in the administration. They allowed this deplorable scumbag, Harmeet Dhillon, election denier, conspiracy theorist, transsexual witch hunter, self-hating American, to resign as the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, per Todd Blanch. CBS reports, though, two sources familiar with the matter, however, told CBS News that Mr. Trump demanded she be fired after he watched her October 18th appearance on 60 Minutes. See, 60 Minutes is valuable, Barry Weiss. Congratulations, you got Harmeet Dhillon fired. This was about election integrity efforts, and Dhillon touted the Justice Department efforts to prosecute non-citizens, and Trump, apparently, according to CBS, felt that Dhillon should have been more forceful in her explanations. Dylan used to be skunk hair Tulsi Gabbard's attorney. I once retweeted somebody else who called Gabbard something like a Russian operative or a Russian asset. I forget the terminology. It was part of my insistence that she could not actually be a Russian asset because she had never been considered an asset to anybody at any time for anything. In point of fact, I was defending Tulsi Gabbard, and on Twitter, Harmeet Dhillon posted a threat to sue me on behalf of Gabbard and insisted I preserve all documents. She did not know that she had litigated against the attorney who has represented me since 2010, and every time she had faced her in court, my attorney had smoked her. So I had my attorney write to Harmeet Dhillon and to Gabbard, insisting that they preserve all documents pertaining to their unfounded claim and their malicious threats. Guess who never sued me? Guess who never even wrote back? Then Gabbard went full MAGA. She got hired by Trump for Director of National Intelligence. The title, I continue to insist, was meant ironically. I'm convinced of that. And then he fired her. Now he's fired Harmeet Dhillon. My attorney and I, we're still here. On a happier personal note, so Phil Weiser, the Attorney General of Colorado, gets elected governor there. And my sister sends me a text with like a did you know rhetorical question, which she does all the time. And they're usually very pleasant and family related. And she says, did you know that Phil Weiser and I graduated together? And I'm thinking, no, that's cool. You went to college with the new governor-elect of Colorado. And she goes, no, high school. Phil Weiser, governor-elect of California. He's from Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, our hometown. And he and my sister graduated from the high school there in 1986. And they were only there in school a few years. 13, they went to school together from K through 12. I was like, when were you going to mention it? When he ran for president? How to fix this problem? Here's one more directly fixable. Last week, I called Haley Stevens Haley Rogers. Now, that's exhaustion plus a Freudian slip. I'd like to apologize to anybody out there actually named Haley Rogers. Assorted laughs before we go. The Daily Mail, inside Trump's losing night. Apparently, he switched from McDonald's last Tuesday. Trump's dark night, paralyzed by fury as he hid in private residence, refused to see anyone. Think about how pleasant that must have been for anyone. Explosive fly-on-wall account as aides walk out of White House bracing for purge with delusional Susie Wiles and Rubio on top of list. The Daily Beast recounts this article from the Daily Mail. Donald Trump was so angry at his breathtaking midterm defeat that he holed himself up in the dark with Natalie Harp. As the results rolled in, the Daily Mail aides ordered platters of appetizers from the Cheesecake Factory. In the delusional expectation that there'd be something to celebrate as the results of the nationwide contest poured in, I hope they sent these unused delights from the Cheesecake Factory to Obama. Within an hour of the first results, Trump was so furious, he briefly lost the ability to speak.' Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. He's watching Fox News, barely uttering a word, and paralyzed into silence. It's very, very dark in the residence. It's a dark scene. When he starts talking to the paintings like Nixon did, call me, Daily Mail. Ever eager to feed him good news, Trump's advisers kept promising him a midterm victory right until the polls opened. Wiles, in particular, was telling White House staff that Republicans would come out on top as late as September, one source told the Daily Mail. That unfounded optimism apparently had West Wing staffers chattering about the GOP expanding the majority in both House and Senate. As late as Tuesday morning, delusional, as the mail source put it. They were delusional right up until the very end. Well, wait a minute. What the implication here is that they've stopped being delusional since then. Another insider recalled watching the president's longtime comms

strategist, Jason Miller, panicking, doused in sweat as newscasters announced one embarrassing Republican electoral defeat after another. Yeah, but Jason Miller is doused in sweat 24-7. A media note, the free press. Correction, this post and opinion video states that Abdul El-Sayed gave his acceptance speech in Arabic. That's not accurate. In fact, he said a few phrases in Arabic, but the majority of his speech was in English. The free press regrets the error. No, no, no, the free press regrets getting caught making the error. The video, by the way, is still posted because the free press is Barry Weiss's craps all over your head. Speaking of media, the Dana White as press secretary, the kickboxing clown, there is reason to believe, A, he probably thought about it, Trump that is, but there's also reason to believe that they were throwing actual candidates to do this job, which does need to be filled by somebody, and somebody mentioned Dana W. White yesterday. an actual former press spokesman in the DOD during the first Trump junta, and he just assumed that they meant his Dana White. And who gets to tell him that Dana W. White is an African-American woman? Surprise! Yep, you're going to show up at Four Seasons Total Landscaping owned by Dana White. told that Hillary Clinton had criticized what he'd done to the White House. Trump said he'd been in her house, too, and he didn't like it either. She has replied, he's never been in my house. He'll never be in my house. Thank you for the attention to this matter of my house. The Trump administration, another laugh, is again moving to dismiss the conviction of Steve Bannon, guilty of contempt of Congress in connection with the investigation by Congress into the January 6th treason. Here it is, turn Bannon over to the actual responsible appropriate authority, in his case, the International Whaling Commission. Veteran Ohio congressional fraud Mike Turner beaten in Ohio in the 10th by 5,000 votes by Democrat Krista Knickerbocker. And the Knicks have won it again, this time in 5,000. 00:36:59 Speaker 2: Yes, and it counts. 00:37:04 Speaker 1: And lastly, never heard of Dominic Waghorn of Sky News, international affairs editor of Sky News? He asked a question that is at once both a wonderful saving moment of clarity— A question that also no American reporter would dare to ask or has dared to ask for 11 years. It gave us all a huge lift. It gave us a catharsis. And yet, sadly, it underscores the abject failure of everybody who actually gets literally within shouting distance of Trump every day. And not one of them would have the courage to say this because they would be immediately fired and attacked by their own employers because the real collapse is of American media is by people like Brian Roberts and the people who run MSNOW and the people who run CNN much more than the people who are on the air. It is always management's fault because, with very few exceptions, the so-called liberal media in this country is owned by conservative corporations like Comcast. Never forget that. Never let anybody distract you from that reality. Trust me, I've been there. They're all fascists. And that's what they're supposed to be. That's our system of media. That's our system of news. It's for profit. Therefore, there will be a greedy fascist element to it at all times. The goal is to get away with as much as you can and take as much of their money as you can before they make it impossible for you to continue. Worked for me. But back to Mr. Waghorn. Again, everybody gets within shouting distance of Trump. And all you have to do is shout out And you can make your mark whether or not he says anything back. Dominic Waghorn of Sky News posted this himself on social media. One assumes it is Sky News' property. It's been seen everywhere. If you have not seen it, you're going to see it now. Waghorn thinks Trump heard him. Watch Trump flinch. I think Waghorn is right. I do too. But what could he say to this? What could he say to this question? He believes it's a federal offense that could be met by a firing squad if you ask him directly. How does it feel being a loser, Mr. President? This is Countdown with Keith Olbermann. To the number one story on the countdown and things I promised not to tell. And I hope that you all in your own worlds have or will yet experience what I got to experience early in the year 1988. A bidding war for my services that involved, let's see, one, two, three, four, five, six employers. My contract at KTLA, Channel 5 in Los Angeles, as the sports director there, was coming to a conclusion. They would like me to stay, they said, but of course, they knew they couldn't offer me very much of a raise. My salary had gone up, and this actually happened, 1985, 86, 87, 88. $ 60, 000 to start, and then it raised to $ 66, 000, and then it went to $ 72, 000. They thought they could get it to $ 100, 000 if everybody in the Tribune Corporation corporate management got together and cast all 1,743 votes to give me that big a raise because it was unprecedented. to pay a Tribune sportscaster six figures. So they were very nice about it. Go ahead and negotiate. You don't have to wait till the negotiation period. We know you're going to leave. We know you'll do a good job for us and keep working hard up until the end. And I might point out that when I was an ultimate lame duck inside the last three weeks of my tenure there, That's when I broke that Wayne Gretzky story I always compliment myself about. 00:40:57 Speaker 2: I was a lame duck. 00:40:59 Speaker 1: And then eventually I left and left them on a Friday and started my new job on a Sunday. But not until after... a six-employer bidding war for my services. Nominally seven, if you include KTLA. My agent handled it deftly, and the end results were spectacular. I never expected to see anything like that again in my career, and I did not experience anything else in my career. But there's a crucial postscript to this

that I hope none of you experience. When you turn down an employer, the employer is likely to say... Thanks for considering us. Good luck to you. Or they might never even talk to you again and just dismiss you as not existing any longer in their world. Both of those answers are fine. I had one of the rejected employers. call me up, the head of the company, call me up and scream and swear at me for not accepting his offer. Scream and swear and begin to break down into, I don't think he actually was in tears, but I heard sniffling. I heard the sniffling of tears. All right, let me tell the story in chronological order. As I said, the contract was expiring. I guess the last day would have been the last day of August or thereabouts in 1988. It had been a largely happy three-year experience. I resuscitated what had been a stalled career. I was 29 years old and on the cusp of perhaps my peak earning years. I had just celebrated my 29th birthday, and I was in the driver's seat. I had taken the sportscast on Channel 5 in LA, an independent station that only had one newscast a day at that point, and made it the number two most popular and most frequently award-given sportscast in the state of California in a span of about three months. This was not all my doing. I am actually not patting myself on the back here. I walked into a town in L.A. in which there were lots of sportscasters. There were seven different newscasts and everybody had at least two sportscasters. And they were all pretty much the same, with the exception of a guy named Fred Rogan, who only retired, I guess, a couple of years ago, still doing the same stale, stupid jokes he was doing the day I got there on Labor Day of 1985. And Fred was Mr. Innovation. Everybody else there did the same sportscast. The only question was, how many live shots did you do from Dodger Stadium so you could get the free meal from the Dodgers? And how loudly did you yell? There was a sportscaster there named Ted Dawson on Channel 7 who once had a brief audition on Channel 7 here in New York and who talked breathlessly. And I mean, he talked like this and said, you know, 45 minutes like this. It sounded like somebody had hit the slight forward button on an old-fashioned VCR and it was being played back at 1.25 speed. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He had an audition here in New York once and finished it up. That's sports. I'm Ted Dawson. Roger, back to you. And the newscaster, the absolutely bitterly cynical and wonderful Roger Grimsby, simply looked like this over towards Dawson, looked back to the camera, and stoically said, with a total deadpan, we will now resume the news. That was the end of Ted Dawson's audition in New York. He was a big hit in L.A., and everybody else was either an ex-jock who one of them was described as conducting flatulent, lap-sitting interviews with athletes. Oh, my God. It's a phrase I remember from a newspaper article in 1986. That's how great a phrase it is. And against this backdrop where it was all the same, I walked in doing what I did, only I never smiled because that was part of the act. The point was to be kind of Buster Keaton like and never let on that what I was saying was satirical. And we did all the jokes about the guy who played a was arrested after doing a round of golf naked in the middle of the night. And I finished it up with, on top of everything, Hal, turning it back to my anchorman, Hal Fishman. On top of everything else, Hal, throughout the round, the suspect said he was having trouble with his putts. 00:45:13 Speaker 2: Hal? 00:45:14 Speaker 1: And then just give it back to Hal Fishman, who then burst into laughter, which was the point of telling the story. So that was the backdrop to this. And this became phenomenally successful. We were, according to my news director, the only station in America... whose late newscast, the ratings went up when the Sportscaster came on. They didn't double. They went up fractionally. They went up one half of 1%. But this was enough to make me the hottest commodity on the Sportscaster market in 1988. And boy, was I a hot commodity. The offers came in before I got to meet with anybody from ESPN. And they had reached out to me as early as 1983. But by this point, they hired this fellow, John Walsh, who remade SportsCenter. And the first tape he looked at was mine. And as he has been famously quoted as saying, I looked at the first tape and looked at Keith and I went, boy, this job is going to be easy. I'll just find him and another guy like him and we'll have the whole thing set for 50 years. So they wanted me to go back and host SportsCenter. And it's so long ago that they hadn't hired Dan Patrick yet. They wanted me to co-host with Chris Berman. And I'll tell you why that was a problem. although Chris remains a dear friend and a guy who really started me in my career. I had already worked with him in high school, and as I said to them, are you sure? Because I already have a little loss of hearing in this ear from sitting next to him a lot. I don't want to lose the whole ear. Chris is kind of loud. Chris makes it sound like I'm whispering. To this day, he can out-shout me, and we're old men. So ESPN was involved. Channel 9, KHJ put in a bid and they said, well, you know, we're not doing very well at 10 o'clock, but mostly that's because we're competing with you. So we'll give you $ 150, 000, which is, you know, double what you're making now at Channel 5. And it's like, all right, you bought yourself a seat at the table. Let's see if it's doable. It wasn't really doable. Then there was the station that Fox had just bought and their guys came in and I never heard before or after of any of them. These were the people who handled the transition from Metro Media Television owning the Channel 11 in LA to Fox owning it. And they just looked like low-level gangsters, which I think sums up the Murdoch broadcasting operation. They were wearing white pinstripes

on black suits and And they never offered money, and they were just kind of... It looked like they were waiting there, and I was the alibi when the police asked them to assist them with their inquiries. So there was them. There was, again, a nominal interest from Channel 5. And then there was Madison Square Garden Television, which was just starting up its idea of broadcasting things besides... The New York Knicks, which Madison Square Garden owned, and the New York Rangers, which Madison Square Garden owned, and the New York Yankees, which it did not own, but which it was beginning to move onto cable in the great migration of the 1980s and 1990s of TV sports. And MSG had a lot of drawbacks. They didn't have a sportscast. They were going to start one for me. And they had a lot of, you know, negatives and there was a lot of disruption. And I would be sort of throwing away the advancement I had made in the L.A. market over the course of three years. On the other hand, it was a chance to go home and work in Madison Square Garden and cover three of my favorite childhood teams. To be the studio host, in addition to everything else, doing a nightly studio sportscast just about New York sports. And not three and a half minutes on Channel 7. 00:48:57 Speaker 2: Not. 00:48:59 Speaker 1: four minutes on Channel 5, none of the jobs I actually saw, but a half an hour every night with just me on it as the guy in New York sports on TV when I was 29 years old and a comparative boatload of money. Plus the idea of coming back to my home. I loved LA. It was great. There was no humidity there. And it was my second and remains my second favorite place to live in the world. But New York was my home. I spoke that language. The streets were consecutively numbered. I liked New York. And even if I didn't really like New York, I was used to it. I often missed it. And after three years away, I had forgotten about all the crap on the streets. 00:49:40 Speaker 2: And I mean. 00:49:41 Speaker 1: Crap on the streets. So I was really favoring MSG, and I thought, well, this is great. There's going to be a bidding war, and we can jack the price up that will cost them to get me to move from L.A. to New York and take essentially my dream job. This will be perfect. My agent, Gene Sage, did a magnificent job pitting these people against each other. 00:50:03 Speaker 2: The L.A. 00:50:03 Speaker 1: Markets, and there was one more competitor, KCBS, Channel 2 in L.A., a graveyard for careers. But the good part was that as long as you stayed in the graveyard— They had a tendency to pay you two or three times what anybody else would pay you. So we knew they were probably going to be the high bidder. And by a significant amount. It turned out we had no idea how significant. That part of the story in a moment. So, okay. Now the sessions begin. And it's that rare thing that I said, I hope you enjoy a bidding war. Because in a bidding war, you don't apply for a job. They come and pitch you. I

was flashed back to college. Two or three people who worked with me at the college radio station were electrical engineers. Cornell's electrical engineering college is as good as any and was as good as any in the country. And the electrical engineers, as our senior years approached, the guys who worked in the radio station, you know, rebuilding your broken tape recorder into a microphone, one of these guys later wound up as the number two man at Apple, and he basically invented... not the Walkman, but the next adventure towards it, the thing that was the center to the iPhone. He invented the iPod. He invented it. He put the pieces together. He went around the world. He was a techie who used to stand in the back rebuilding tape machines and smoking cigarettes. And come our senior year, when everybody else was worried and I was sending out tapes in hopes maybe I could get a job in a town as big as Burlington, Iowa. 00:51:41 Speaker 1: He was getting recruited by Hewlett Packard and this new computer company, Macintosh, Apple, what is it called? And all the other guys were being recruited. And that's what I felt like. I was being recruited like I was a star college athlete. And let me tell you, I was not a star college athlete. But I was the best available free agent sportscaster in television in the United States of America, maybe in the world in early 1988. So out they came. The pitches, even Channel 5 asked for a meeting, and we had a great meeting in which we all got drunk and they all went, we don't have any money. Well, I'm just hoping we have enough money to pay this bill. They were knee deep in money. They just weren't going to spend it on the sportscaster. And the guy they got to replace me made $ 10, 000 more than I did. ultimately, so we can know I'm already telling you I didn't go to Channel 5. Channel 9, as I said, they were willing to double my salary, but they really didn't have a newscast. And I said, who's your anchor? And nobody in the room knew. Who's your sports anchor now? And they didn't know who it was. I was like, I don't think this is going to work. And Channel 11, as I said, sent a bunch of guys who were just, you know, trying to evade the local authorities about something. Something didn't look right. And then there was KCBS, which basically came out and said $ 350, 000. And it's like, huh? $ 350, 000. I said, well, what I do, you already have a sportscaster. They had just hired Jim Lampley, who was at that point had been the number one free agent sportscasting talent of the year before. They'd hired him to do the nightly sports. He had been at ABC Network. He was a well-known face who'd done the Olympics and they'd hired him to do the sports at five, six and 11. And they said, well, between you and me, we're expecting to make him the newscaster. In which case, if we make him, if you're sharing sports with him, we might have two sportscasters in the afternoon. You might have to do weekends and maybe three days a week. But

we'll give you $ 350, 000 for that. If you're the only sportscaster, we'll make it $ 490, 000. And I'm like, what the hell? Now, everybody who ever went to Channel 2 regretted it from a professional standpoint. I don't know anybody's career ending there, but it would be a long time because the place was run not by the executives in Los Angeles, but by the ones in New York. And they had fired, I believe, 11 news directors in 10 years. So the key thing in dealing with them was to know that whoever was offering me this money and this freedom and this future would not likely be there six months after I started. Turned out it was seven months, and then he left for New York. But that's another story. The last pitch, or two pitches, ESPN came out. They sent John Walsh, who looked like Santa Claus as a young man, and who wondered why, as he quizzed me about LA sports, I didn't know about certain stories about certain teams in LA. And I said, well, It's Sunday night. I haven't been in the office since Friday. I like taking the weekends. Well, I don't know about that. And they offered $ 115, 000. And I said, you know, I don't mean to get involved in the money. That's what my agent is for. But that's less than Channel 9 steam-powered television has offered me to stay here. And I don't even have to go into the snow to go to Channel 9. 00:55:08 Speaker 2: I just have to go. 00:55:09 Speaker 1: Like five minutes of a shorter commute to get to Channel 9 from my home. And that was about it. And of course, they had the last laugh because I went there anyway. And then I had the last, last laugh because I went there anyway. And they got exactly what they paid for. So they came out and it was just John Walsh. And there might have been somebody else there from the local L.A. office of ESPN. But I don't remember being extraordinarily impressed by anything that they presented. And they were not really in competition and they weren't sure if they wanted me to do SportsCenter with Chris Berman or they wanted me to do their baseball shows or maybe some combination of both or whatever. It was kind of confused. And then the last presentation was very, very impressive. And here was, though I was certain, the winner. I was going to turn down $ 350, 000 or $ 490, 000 from Channel 2, the CBS station, because here came Madison Square Garden Television. And Madison Square Garden Television, MSG, sent a contingent, a party. They got a room, a suite in the finest boutique hotel in Beverly Hills, and we met there by the pool, and then we went and had dinner, and there was champagne, and there was Bob Gutkowski, the president of MSGTV, and his special consultant, Chet Simmons, the former head of NBC Sports. the former president of the United States Football League, no, the World Football League, I guess it was, one of the two, and the principal advisor towards ESPN when they went from this kind of punchline to an established all-sports cable network, although by 1988, They were just

getting there. They just ended their first year carrying the National Football League. So it was just getting legitimate and not just the proverbial tractor pulls. But Chet was there and there was somebody else like the executive producer of MSG. And we sat down and they asked me to bring my producer because they were going to offer him a job, too, to produce the show. That's how much they wanted me to do this. And they explained what they wanted to do. Half an hour a night. The studio would be built into the offices of Madison Square Garden, into the back row of Madison Square Garden so that behind me would be the playing surface. So I would be shown after games as they dismantled the rink or as they dismantled the court or put up the court or put up the rink or whatever else was going on. We would be in. at Madison Square Garden, with a view of Madison Square Garden behind me, with the facilities of Madison Square Garden, my office would be in Madison Square Garden. My business cards would say Madison Square Garden. I would be the guy in New York television as the number of homes that did cable or had cable in New York City grew by something like 5% every year. So our audience was going to keep growing and growing and growing. And I'm like, Where do I sign? Where do I sign? And my agent was like digging her nails into my upper arm to just shut me up because I was giving away money. And then they got to the point in which everything changed. They said, now we're going to premiere this show as soon as you are available. So we're targeting this for September 1st or the 8th or the 15th, whatever it is, 1988. So this was about six, seven months in the future. And we're going to be prepared to go. There's only one problem because of union regulations and reconstruction that's already going on in the garden. We can't put up the satellite dishes to get all the highlights for the shows until next January or February. So the first six months you're on the air, you'll have the Rangers highlights, the Knicks highlights, and the Yankees highlights, and nobody else. And my producer said, Not even the Mets and the Nets and the Jets and the Giants? No, we won't have access to any of those. We can probably get the football highlights in a deal with one of the local stations. We'll get copies of their tapes, but we might not get them for the first day show. You might be showing your Giants and Jets highlights the next day. 00:59:14 Speaker 2: Like, what? 00:59:16 Speaker 1: And my producer said, what about out of town highlights? Oh no, we won't have those. In six or maybe eight months at the outside, we'll have the other satellite dishes. And I said, so this is going to be a highlight show and you're bringing me in to do the highlights. Oh yeah, but you can do creative things over just those full screen score panels. So instead of the Mets game highlights, and again, this is 1988. The Mets had won the World Series in 1986. They were the popular team. The Yankees sucked. So we would show Yankees highlights because they were on our air and we were recording them anyway. The satellite dishes were devoted to their broadcast, not to my little half hour show that was supposed to take over the world of TV sports. 01:00:07 Speaker 2: In New York. No, no, no, no, no, no. 01:00:09 Speaker 1: We're going to waste it on that. During every other highlight, it would simply be the score. And as Bob Kutkowski said, and Chet Simmons echoed him, this is where you say something funny. That was their idea of what I was going to do for them for the first eight months of the show. And I said, have you guys ever done a show like this before, launched something? And Chet went, well, I did all the shows at ESPN. I said, did you do a highlight show that basically didn't have any highlights in it? that had fewer highlights than the local news would get. Because it's nice. I mean, I like the idea of the room, the bigger platform to do half an hour a night rather than the four minutes I get right now or the four minutes I get over here. But we would have less highlights than Warner Wolf will on Channel 2. In his four minutes, he'll show three minutes and 30 seconds of videotape. And you're telling me we won't have three minutes and 30 seconds of videotape in half an hour. And they said, why is that a problem? We'll have it eventually in six or eight or one year at the absolute outside. So now each time they bring this up, the start date for the satellites is moving further and further into the future. And essentially, as I said to them, so for the first perhaps year, your TV sports highlight show is going to be radio. Well, if you put it that way, well, I'm not thinking of how I'm going to put it. I'm thinking of how the viewers are going to put it. We're going to invest a fortune in advertising this. And I said, why are you going to do that? And they went, what are you talking about? I said, why are you doing this? Why don't you start the show after you put the satellites in? Because if you get people to watch this show, no matter how good I am, the first thing they're going to say after watching this brilliant young sportscaster you've just brought home to New York, the first thing they're going to say is... Where are the effing highlights? And they're never going to tune in again because guess what? Once they've tuned in and you have given them a product they don't want, they're not going to tune in again. You're not going to be able to say, hey, come back. We got the satellites. There's not going to be a big news story on Channel 7 the night we install the satellites. Hey, you can watch MSG Sports Desk now because we've got the satellites finally. Now Keith Olbermann and MSG Sports Desk now showing sports highlights. Don't you see where this is not going to work? And they didn't. And they said, no, we're going to start it in September. And if you're not interested in hosting, we have a list of 143,000 sportscasters who

are. And I said, I'm sure you do. And you know that I have a list of like seven other sports programmers who are willing to hire me. And five of them are offering me more money than you are. So that's where we left it. And I said, please think about this. Even if we wind up not doing a deal, please think about not starting this show in the event that you don't have highlights the first, what now, two years? When are those dishes coming in? Are they coming in from a different planet? We left, my producer Ron Grelnick said in the car on the way back to Channel 5. He said, you know, there's another problem here. How many nice days do you think there are a year in New York? I mean, I've always wanted to work in New York. My family's from New York. But how many nice days? We did the math on the way back to the office. We came up with the idea that perhaps there were 32 nice days a year in New York. And the rest of it were, yeah, okay. It didn't rain. It didn't snow. The humidity was only 80%. And there's 330 days a year that pretty much aren't worth moving for. On top of which is there weren't going to be any highlights for the first two years of the show. It was a highlight show. Only the highlight was me. I had my agent make a few cuts while we let KCBS and ESPN kind of fight it out. They were the two high bidders. ESPN would eventually pay me twice as much to go there four years later, I guess. But then they were runner up and we almost got KCBS to bid against itself again. They had already raised, as I mentioned, from $ 350, 000 to $ 490, 000. And we almost got them to 525. But I thought, you know, maybe they'll figure out that nobody else is in that territory and start bringing it down. Maybe we ought to just say yes. So we said yes. And she told everybody else and she called Bob Gutkowski. And one day as I was preparing to go in to begin my lame duck career at Channel 5, the phone rang and it was Bob Gutkowski, the president of MSG Networks. And he called up and I, for a moment, The cliche applied. I could hear him before I picked up the phone. He was yelling that loudly from New York. What do you think you are doing? How could you turn down this as the opportunity of a lifetime? Do you think there'll ever be a place to get in on the ground floor once again? This show will dominate television in New York and not just sports television for the next 40 years. And it will be just about you. You'll be as much of an institution as Walter Cronkite was on the CBS Evening News. How dare you turn us down? We came out and we sold our souls to make you the host of MSG. And he went on and on and on. And I'd never heard anybody in a position of authority crumble down as he then proceeded to do. And there was no, Bob, it was me. This was my end of the conversation. Bob, Mr. Gutkowski, I'm urging you, don't, Saddle, don't, Don't put the show on until you get the satellite dishes. I'm going to go now. Thank you for your interest. I appreciate it even despite this call. Hung up the phone and then the force of his voice lifted the receiver off the phone and I could still hear him yelling at me. And there were swear words. I went to KCBS. Largely, it was a terrible experience. Most of the promises they made turned out not to be true. 01:06:30 Speaker 2: The money? The money was great. 01:06:33 Speaker 1: I have not significantly experienced monetary problems since. This occurred starting in September of 1988. I was on three times a day. I got to hone my act. I got to do things I had never done before, which would later prove very useful in other aspects of my career that I could not have foreseen in 1988. And the punchline to all of this is after Bob Gretkowski got promoted to president of MSG, the first thing he ordered as they hired a man named Bob Page to be the initial host of MSG Sports Desk, which went off the air, I guess, in 2000. So it lasted about 12 years, not 50. The first thing Bob Gutkowski as president of MSG ordered at MSG Network was that they delay the premiere until they put in the satellite dishes. I mean, seriously, they should have sent me a dollar at least for that idea. May you too be the subject of a bidding war. Thank you for listening. The sports theme is from the old Olbermann show on ESPN2. It was written by Mitch Warren Davis and appears courtesy of ESPN Inc. Other music arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. And my announcer today was my friend, Larry David. Everything else was, as always, my fault. That's countdown for today, day 659 of America held hostage again, exactly 804 days until the scheduled end of his lame duck, lame brained term, unless it ends early because Miller and Hegseth go too far. Oh, and by the way, how does it feel to be a loser, governor? If you're listening, remember, you can see the whole thing now on YouTube. If you're watching, remember, you can just listen to it. And avoid me wherever you podcast. The next scheduled countdown is Thursday, probably. as I have been hinting, yeah, there's another heart procedure happening. Not life and death. It should be over in about four hours. I may give you a shortened edition Thursday or a shortened edition next Monday. I'm going to try to keep working. We'll see. I will alert the media that Bulletins is the new Smuritz. Until the next one, whenever the hell that is, I'm Keith Olbermann. Good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olbermann is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.