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Speaker 1: Hey guys, Ready or Not 2024 is here and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election.
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Speaker 1: Coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that, let's get to the show.
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Speaker 3: Well, some very bad news. Wendy's looks like it's about to face 300 closures. You can put this first headline up on the screen. This is from the Associated Press. Wendy's faces 300 closures across 15 states due to crippling beef prices. The report here says one of the largest U.S. franchisees for Wendy's has filed for bankruptcy protection after the restaurant chain tried to terminate its franchise agreement. Meritage Hospitality Group, which operates 314 Wendy's restaurants in 15 states, said in a statement last week it intends to keep operating its restaurants and paying its 9,000 employees during the bankruptcy process. So this is a franchise based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and they are now facing, according to court documents, a notice of termination. from Wendy's from Wendy's of that company's agreement for the franchising. And that was effective immediately on September 16th. Wendy's is claiming that this franchise owes almost $ 30 million in royalties and fees. So looking pretty brutal, but coming of course, as beef prices are very high, this franchise has 54 Wendy's locations in Michigan. Uh, but they also run Wendy's in Georgia, Florida. Uh, they have a lot of Wendy's in Connecticut, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and then less than 20 Wendy's in Arkansas, Indiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia. All that is to say, this is a huge, a huge franchisee of Wendy's that is now coming under court filings from the parent company.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, we want to talk for a minute about how Wendy's got to this situation.
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Speaker 1: But first, the good news, if you can't afford beef, there are other things that you can eat. Let's roll Agricultural Secretary Brooke Rollins.
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Speaker 4: But if it is too expensive, unlike fuel, Benny, you can eat chicken, pork, salmon, eggs. There are other sources of really good protein. And all of those prices are coming down as well. So it isn't necessarily breaking out there. And listen, I'm a mom of four. I'm still feeding a whole bunch of kids, very hungry kids. We realize the price of groceries are too high. We're doing everything we can to bring them down after the Biden years of crazy, crazy inflation. I would argue as a farm girl, as a cattle girl, and as a maha mom of four teenagers, that $ 6. 50 for a pound of ground beef probably isn't that bad.
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Speaker 1: Two different quotes there.
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Speaker 3: So first she's saying you can get salmon instead, and second she's saying that price is not that bad.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, and things got pretty bad for Joe Biden during COVID and inflation, but it never got to a place where he was telling people that they can eat eggs. or veggie burgers, as I've seen some people on the right kind of circulating, like some people saying like, Hey, you know, if you really pile that veggie burger up with a whole bunch of other stuff, it's basically the same, uh, just an incredible level of cope. Um, but the Wendy's hit here is, and it's not fair to blame all of this on Trump. Uh, Wendy's has been a struggling company for a very long time, but this is kind of, uh, the straw that broke the camel's back. It's like, a patient who is unwell and gets a cold, and the cold is the thing that takes them out. This was kind of the cold that took out this franchisee, but may end up taking the entire thing down. But Emily, let's roll through some Wendy's history here, because I think it is kind of instructive about how things have unfolded in our political and corporate economy over the last couple of decades. When Wendy's came in, they did the always fresh, never frozen, quality is the thing that was going to differentiate them.
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Speaker 1: And it was.
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Speaker 2: It was compared to McDonald's and other fast food companies.
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Speaker 1: It was a little bit better.
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Speaker 2: It then gets bought by basically private equity in the 2000s. Nelson Peltz, who's this activist private equity investor, and also Bill Ackman. Bill Ackman came in and Bill Ackman had a bunch of ideas for how they were going to make Wendy's better.
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Speaker 3: One big, beautiful bill.
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Speaker 1: One big, beautiful bill, Ackman.
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Speaker 2: And then a lot went wrong, but Stavros actually had, you know, said this well recently on Pablo's show.
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Speaker 1: Let's roll a little bit of E4.
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Speaker 5: I think it's clear that what's f * * * ing us up is like private equity and... and money taking over these things that are all, products that are awesome, right? Let's, sports is the easiest one, but the one I've actually latched onto recently that I think goes hand in hand with sports is fast food. Because everybody understands that Wendy's has gotten here. The spicy chicken sandwich now uses shredded lettuce. Exactly right there, that is private equity. That is someone saying, we don't want a fresh head of lettuce, that costs more money, so we're gonna get you bagged lettuce, And I know that in the grand scheme of things, it's not a big deal, but people will notice Jersey Mike's was bought, I think two years ago, it started to get. It was one of the, it was the best sandwich chain. It's getting here because some head who's never spread mayo in his life decided, oh no, actually, instead of a sandwich, this is now a commodity, right? And what's important is that by turning the buyer experience, the consumer experience shittier, I,
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some dickhead that's never made a sandwich, gets.
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Speaker 1: A billion extra dollars, right? I was just looking up. So, Blackstone.
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Speaker 5: Blackstone.
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Speaker 2: Of course, acquired a controlling majority stake in Jersey Mike's subs in early 2025 for approximately $ 8 billion.
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Speaker 1: Insane.
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Speaker 3: Insane.
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Speaker 1: Those people don't give a f * * * about sandwiches. The before and after. I mean, you're right. There are only so many active, active fan communities. Totally. It'll be like, This is what it used to be like. This is how much salami I was getting. And now look at this. Emily, when was the last time you were at Jersey Mike's or Wendy's?
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Speaker 3: Not that long ago. I like both of those restaurants. I completely agree on Jersey Mike's. I hadn't noticed Wendy's so much. But Jersey Mike's, I feel like, is the most obvious.
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Speaker 1: What about you? Noticeably boring.
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Speaker 2: It's just like, you get it and you're like, what happened to Jersey Mike's?
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Speaker 3: And low quality, too.
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Speaker 1: I didn't realize.
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Speaker 2: They'd been bought by private equity when I went and this is not at all how I remembered it.
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Speaker 1: What is going on here?
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Speaker 2: And so it's not just private equity. You hear people talk about the K-shaped economy, which kind of means things are doing well on the top and the bottom, but not in the middle. And Wendy's got hit with this because they were somewhere in the middle. They were better than McDonald's, but they weren't that good. And then along comes stuff like Shake Shack, where it's a couple bucks more than Wendy's, but it's way, way better. And so people who can afford it are going to Shake Shack. And then stuff like Chick-fil-A comes along and blows up, which is a little bit cheaper, but probably arguably better. But regardless, it's giving people options underneath there. But then within that private equity just spent 20 years doing its financial engineering, one of the craziest things they did was, so the way that these companies work is they get royalties from from all of the franchises. So you buy a franchise, you make a profit, you have to send it back to headquarters. What Wendy's did is they securitized those future royalties.
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Speaker 1: So basically, it'd be like you're due a salary over the next two years, and you will go to a payday lender and say, I want all of that right.
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Speaker 2: I want all of that up front. So they borrowed money from these private credit folks, out of the private equity world, they securitize the future flow of these royalty fees and give it all to private equity.
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Speaker 1: They give all that away to themselves, basically.
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Speaker 2: And then when royalty fees are not coming in anymore, like they used to, then the stockholders are left holding the bag. And then it just crashes. So kind of the people who own it in their 401ks and their pensions and such. That was one of the kind of like different financial engineering moves they made.
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Speaker 1: I've talked about this before. One thing they do is they sell the land out from underneath.
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Speaker 3: It's a huge thing with the franchise. It's like one of the biggest parts is just owning the land. It's an enormous part of the business is land ownership.
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Speaker 2: And they'll sell what they also will sell the franchise to the franchisee.
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Speaker 1: So you're not just like a franchise anymore. Now you straight up own the thing.
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Speaker 2: And so then the private equity goon is getting like a big lump sum payment right there. They're basically trying to extract as much wealth as possible from it before the party ends and they file for bankruptcy and everybody's screwed as a result. The thing that might have actually destroyed them was, you remember in 2024, their CEO came out and said they were rolling out all this new software and they were going to start doing dynamic pricing where if it was busy, then you were going to get charged more. And people lost it over that. They're like, no, I'm going to pay what I'm going to pay. You can't change the price just based on how long the line is. And the free market folks are like, why not?
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Speaker 1: Supply and demand. You don't like that?
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Speaker 2: And it really does show you how anathema, the kind of quote unquote free market is to the human spirit. Like we don't actually like pure unfettered supply and demand. Like, we think that that is gross. And I was telling Sagar, I'm reading this book on the history of capitalism. We have always thought that's gross. Like the people think that price gougers are gross, that they are, that they run contrary to the human spirit, which is, which is really one of community. And so to exploit people like that, People just find it to be wrong. And so people reacted extraordinarily harshly to that.
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Speaker 3: Globalism has totally changed the bargain that was the engine of free markets, which is that you're trading as it's gotten easier to travel. It's totally changed the bargain. You started and you still hear hardcore capitalists speaking reverently about the earliest days of the free market where people were trading goods. But what made that possible is that you had a physical in-person relationship where you were trusting and haggling over what was fair. And that bargain is almost impossible, almost impossible on a global level where there's such consolidation. I mean, we haven't even talked about that with beef prices. It's not, I don't think it's just private equity. I think it's also that there's so much consolidation, the U.S. cattle herd, it's a nightmare right now. There are all kinds of factors that explain why these prices keep going up. It's not necessarily just a Trump or a Biden thing. Stoller would tell us it's an antitrust
thing. And I think he's correct about that. I'm sure he would agree on the private equity level too. But that's how gummed up the works are of this quote unquote free market. And for anybody to look at this and say, well, that's just capitalism, baby. It's damaging to their own cause, but also doesn't make any sense whatsoever because this is, I mean, sure, it's unfettered. You could say it's unfettered. It's Randian capitalism, perhaps. But it's certainly not free and fair markets. Yeah.
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Speaker 2: And what Wendy's couldn't, and I don't think we'll be able to withstand, is this beef price explosion. Because their whole thing is fresh beef, never frozen. And McDonald's recently invested in their supply chain so that their quarter pounders are not frozen, so they can.
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Speaker 1: Compete with them on that.
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Speaker 2: But now, they just don't have the cushion, I think, to withstand this blow, or at least this $ 300 Plus, franchises didn't. We'll see how the rest of them end up doing.
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Speaker 1: That's right.
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Speaker 2: I did want to talk real briefly before we move on to the next segment about this Trump administration announcement that they were kicking 750,000, I'm going to put people in quotes, off of the Affordable Care Act. And they're saying that they're investigating another 400,000 plus for potential fraud. So, But I did want to zag on this a little bit. I like everything the Trump administration does. It's like totally chaotic and will probably blow up in their face because it's for some reason they just don't do things effectively. But the principle of it is, I actually think, sound. So basically, over the last several years and really fueling, firing up during covid, it became a lot easier to. to sign up for the ACA, but in particular to have brokers get paid to sign people up for the ACA. And so when you introduce something like that into a system, what you're then going to get is scammers who come in and set up a healthcare brokerage company and then basically make up people and claim that they have signed people up for the ACA and then go to the federal government and say, look, we signed up 10,000 people to the ACA, to these gold, platinum, copper plans, and so here's an invoice for our brokerage fee for setting them up. But the people don't exist, or they're stolen social security numbers, the people don't know that they've ever been signed up, or they're going around to people who are kind of mentally incapacitated, and just giving them $ 100 to sign a piece of paper. And then the person has no idea that they're even signed up, so they can't use it. So one positive development of AI is that it's much easier to put in major data sets into these systems and have them do some pattern recognition and find us hundreds of thousands of people who are enrolled in the ACA but have never once used it.
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Speaker 1: And then that.
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Speaker 3: Or who didn't put a social security number
in. That's one of the things that they caught. And this is less than a million of 20 million plus. So it's, yeah, to your point, I think that's probably what they did. It probably was AI being like, why are all these accounts without a social security number and not using the plans? And you're able to identify brokers. Yeah.
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Speaker 2: And so I think for some on the left, the initial response was to say, this is outrageous and you're kicking people off of healthcare, but I would just encourage people on the left to pause on that and to say, well, hold on. We do want the ACA to work. We want public healthcare to work. And for public healthcare to work, people have to have faith in it. And so then we have to crack down on scammers. And nobody's getting healthcare by some mentally disabled person getting tricked into signing up for something that they don't know how to use and haven't used. So I think this is actually a step in the right direction. Will they do it accurately or effectively?
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Speaker 1: We'll see.
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Speaker 2: I hope they do because I do want there to be faith in the government's ability to implement these programs without fraud.
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Speaker 3: I didn't know where you were going to go with this, and that was sort of my thoughts on the whole thing.
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Speaker 1: Nothing to argue about.
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Speaker 3: No, nothing to argue about at all because the headlines were kind of scary. Like, oh, people... I know.
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Speaker 2: I was angry, too, when I first saw the headline. Like, oh, I see what's going on here. This has actually been a problem for a while.
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Speaker 3: Right. Maybe the administration wanted the headlines to be scary, but also, you know, 750,000 on millions and millions and millions, not necessarily even the huge fraud number, still a ridiculous number if.
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Speaker 1: It's... It's billions. selecting fraud, but yeah. It's billions of dollars, for sure. So, all right. Anyway, a little zag at the end there for you.
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Speaker 3: Perfect. Let's go to Maine. ProPublica dropped a massive investigation into Susan Collins, Senator Susan Collins, who's obviously up for reelection in Maine. The headline was, the FBI anti-corruption squad was circling Susan Collins until Trump got in the way. So the story really has two parts. Some of this is new reporting on Susan Collins' super PAC. So that technically should be a distinction between Senator Susan Collins and the super PAC, of course. dating back to the 2020 election cycle, particularly, and a defense firm that was spending money through a shell group to the Collins super PAC, expecting to get defense contracts in return. Now, the second part of the story, so some new reporting on that front, a lot of this was already known. The Collins campaign said they returned the money, they cooperated with the FBI back when this investigation first sprang forth. But ProPublica is now reporting that Trump's FBI has squashed the investigation when it could have produced more fruit. So that's the claim of the ProPublica story. And Ryan has been digging into this. I'll be in Maine later today, actually, not related to this story, but going to be checking things out with obviously this big election cycle. And, uh, Ryan, curious for your take as you've gone through the story basically line by line to try and understand what exactly the Trump administration might have been squashing with the investigation. What are you looking at here?
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Speaker 2: Yeah, and we might disagree on how big of a scandal this is. So I think it'd be helpful to go through a bunch of it because people don't read anymore, including me. It's a thing.
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Speaker 1: That it's a lost art form. But I actually read this one, and let's.
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Speaker 2: Share some of the key details of it, because if you're just following this on Instagram or on Twitter, you're seeing Republicans push back and say, you're taking the word of a fraud, liar, and a criminal and just running this.
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Speaker 4: Right.
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Speaker 1: When there's a lot more evidence that they're going with. But let's roll through.
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Speaker 3: But yeah, that is the Collins campaign, just to download that.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the Collins.
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Speaker 3: The Collins campaign is saying that you're going to meet him in just one moment, but that he has motivation, basically, to lie because he's trying to get a lighter sentence. He was sentenced in bribery, and so he's now trying to get a lighter sentence. And I'll say, honestly, I don't doubt the... back and forth between this guy and the campaign being shady and corrupt at all. I mean, there's just naked corruption on display. I doubt ProPublica's, I guess, context giving. But anyway, let's get into it.
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Speaker 2: So the basic thing that people need to understand is that there is a law on the books that bars defense contractors from contributing to campaigns. And there's hilarious first of all right but it great work it's an obvious reason why that should be the case you don't want uh corruption to seep into the military industrial complex that's so cute we cannot we cannot have that and so it is one of the few like red lines that we have you absolutely cannot do that and so this guy and allegedly Scott Reed, who is a kind of legendary fundraiser and D.C. operative, he was a Chamber of Commerce operative for many years. He's very close to to Susan Collins. He is currently, as we speak, running the super PAC that is supporting Susan Collins. So he's still not in prison, is still in the game. In order to get around this law against defense contractors giving money to campaigns, candidates or super PACs, they came up with the idea of creating a shell company. So the defense contractor would move the money to a shell company and the shell company then would make the contribution. And so let's put up this first element here. They write, to skirt
campaign finance laws and conceal the source of the funds, Navitek planned to funnel the donation through a shell company. The CEO wanted assurance that Collins would know where the money came from, as you would. You don't want to blow $ 150, 000.
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Speaker 1: And they don't know that you bribed them. Reid confirmed that she would, the executive said, and that Navitek would get its government contracts. After the corner bakery meeting.
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Speaker 2: Navitek's CEO, Martin Kao, sent an initial $ 150, 000 to the Collins SuperPak using the shell company. Two months later, he told Navitek executives that Collins committed... to getting the company $ 32 million in naval contracts, according to an internal company email reviewed by ProPublica. They ended up that year getting at least $ 10 million. And ProPublica has the image of the check that they cut. Now, one delightful piece of this, Emily, is the name of the company. It's just so perfectly kind of woke one.
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Speaker 1: The name of the company they came up with was Society.
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Speaker 2: of scientists and engineers society of young women scientists and engineers and maybe they only had one scientist but but because they didn't put the s on it i think that's one of the things that got them caught it's.
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Speaker 3: Like a quality leering situation.
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Speaker 1: There was like a watchdog going through and was like what is this It's the.
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Speaker 3: Quality Learing Center of Nonprofits for Girl Scientists.
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Speaker 2: And so they filed a, this is back in 2020, they filed a FEC complaint, and then they were able to dig up the LLC paperwork. And also, a society of young scientists giving $ 150, 000 out of nowhere to a Collins Super PAC? That's not normal behavior. So what's happening here? So they look up the paperwork, and the LLC is his wife. It's like registered to his wife. And so people are very quickly like, oh, this is clearly a shell company that's using this here. So let's roll the next quote up here. So after the budgets became law, Collins' office pushed the Navy to award specific contracts to Navitek, emails seen by ProPublica show, even though awards are supposed to be competitive.
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Speaker 1: Quote, I spoke with Senator Collins' office.
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Speaker 2: Regarding the $ 8 million a naval official wrote in an email on February 6, 2019.
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Speaker 1: The interested company is Navitek.
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Speaker 2: In a meeting with Collins and two campaign officials, Cowell said, the officials told him the senator expected his ongoing support. Collins told him, you've seen me deliver, Cowell said. Reed knew cow was behind the $ 150, 000 anonymous donation emails showed because cow told Reed, he planned to donate through a shell company.
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Speaker 1: Very smart.
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Speaker 2: Reed replied in an email, uh, viewed by pro public. And so that's, that's pretty bad.
00:23:30
Speaker 1: That's bad.
00:23:31
Speaker 2: And so
the, the, the, the more extensive back and forth, um, shows him laying out.
00:23:35
Speaker 1: I just spoke to my lawyer.
00:23:37
Speaker 2: He said, do this shell company LLCs are very well protected. And then, you know, Reed tells him this is very smart and blah, blah, blah, blah. Um, So then the question is, what did Collins know about this? Did she actually know anything about this? So let's put this next element up. And so this is the Collins campaign saying they have no idea what's going on here. But then ProPublica writes, but an email seen by ProPublica suggests that someone must have relayed the news of Cow's donation to Collins, just like Reed promised to do in Cow's recounting of the corner bakery meeting. Seven days after the super PAC cashed a check from Cal's shell company, one of Reed's subordinates emailed a Navitek lobbyist asking for Cal's phone number. Senator Collins would like to call Martin to thank him. Now, last night, the Collins campaign said that there's nothing to see here because this is actually very normal stuff, that you don't have to know why somebody gave.
00:24:36
Speaker 1: You the donation.
00:24:37
Speaker 2: You see a donation, you call them, and you thank them for it. However, notice the timeline here. This is seven days after the super PAC cashed the check. Super PACs don't disclose their fundraising until oftentimes months later. So it raises the question, how did they know that the check had been written to the super PAC if the super PAC did not tell the campaign?
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Speaker 3: Yes, I was going to say, I'm glad you picked up on this exact line because this was the one that jumped out to me as well, not just because of the potential transactionality of it, because some of that is perfectly normal. And a lot of this piece or a lot of my sort of eye rolling with the piece is that ProPublica is describing as shocking novel information, the most normal things ever. And they're bad normal things, to be clear, but entirely normal, unfortunately. But this one is significant because it's not just... The timeline, but also the fact that you have someone from Colin's staff, not from the Super PAC staff, but from Colin's staff would have had to convey that information to her. And previously, as you're reading the entire story, it's possible to say that Reed was freelancing. So there's there's plausible deniability, which is exactly why Super PACs kind of function the way that they do between. saying, well, Reid was dealing with Cal in the way that Reid was dealing with Cal. When you have that email you previously mentioned, Ryan, where it says, quote unquote, very smart, as Cal indicates he's planning to give through a shell group. That, again, can stop with Reid. It can be, well, maybe Susan Collins shouldn't have somebody who's willing to engage in this kind of wink-wink behavior leading her super PAC. But when you actually see this happening, that does implicate the Collins operation, I think, overall, because now you have super PAC coordination on the table.
00:26:28
Speaker 1: Yes, indeed.
00:26:30
Speaker 2: Now, less people think I'm just being a partisan hack here. Let's let's drag the good Brian Schatz, who's also an Appropriations Committee member, a Democrat who is being pushed. He's sort of like understood to be one of kind of Schumer's choices to replace him. If if Schumer departs the Senate world, put up the next element here in another message. Andy Weiner, who former executives said was Navitek's chief strategist. reminded Cow to budget money for political contributions based on how much the company wanted in congressional funding the following year. That would be criminal in the defense world. Weiner was his guide to the political underbelly, Cow said. A consummate insider, Weiner had parlayed six years as chief of staff to Democratic Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii into a lucrative lobbying career with a firm called Strategies 360. one of Weiner's former colleagues, compared him to the slick lobbyist on the Netflix show House of Cards who toggles between the political and corporate worlds. And again, to point out how bipartisan this is, the entire reason this company exists is former Senator Daniel Inouye, legendary, they called him what, the Prince of Pork or the King of Pork. He passed away in the 2010s and left a lot of defense companies in Hawaii hanging because they were all getting their taxpayer money through Inouye and this company was among them. And so they had to then, they changed their name and redeveloped relationships. And that's why they became so tight with Susan Collins.
00:28:08
Speaker 1: So let's roll this next one here. So less than one month after the event, the Senate released a draft of the defense budget containing $ 21. 5 million dollars.
00:28:18
Speaker 2: Of Navitek's pet projects in Maine, Cow emailed a Collins campaign fundraiser, who would in theory have nothing to do with a government contract, four days later saying, thanks again for all the support from Senator Collins. I've been involved in many tight races in the past and understand that last minute needs come.
00:28:37
Speaker 1: Up, he continued.
00:28:38
Speaker 2: We are here to help any way we can, financially or whatever. Cow's desire to donate even more money led to the fateful corner bakery meeting with the head of the Collins Super PAC, called the 1820 PAC, Cow told the FBI. Unlike Collins' campaign, which could accept only $ 5, 600 per election from individuals, the Super PAC could accept unlimited contributions. The Super PAC emailed Cow a memo before the meeting, stressing the need to raise money with, quote, urgency. At the meeting, Cow and Reed, the Super PAC's chair, hammered out a deal for a six-figure donation, Cow told the FBI, over email. Cal informed Reed of his shell company scheme, saying he had cleared it with his lawyer. They are super vague and very difficult to get any background info on. Cal reassured him, talking
about LLCs. Thanks for doing this, Reed replied. So notice the timeline here. Collins gets this company a contract after they give some money. He reaches out to the Collins campaign. The Collins campaign, we're not talking about the super PAC here, reaches out to the Collins campaign and says, thank you for getting me this government money.
00:29:40
Speaker 1: Let me know if you need more money.
00:29:43
Speaker 2: Then Scott Reed reaches out to him saying, we do need a lot more money and asks for this extraordinary amount of money. That again suggests that the campaign and Scott Reed are working directly together on that.
00:29:58
Speaker 1: Right.
00:29:58
Speaker 3: And what was kind of frustrating to me about this story is that ProPublica, I don't know if you picked up on this, I thought it was weird that ProPublica's reporting nowhere really made the connection with the Super PAC and the campaign coordination. It was mostly focused on the transactionality, potentially a transactionality of Cow and Reed, which again, it's an unfortunate reality. Reid sounded like he was being fairly careful in how he was couching Kao to talk and what to put in print and otherwise, according to the emails that What it looks like is somebody who was let go by the DOJ because Trump was getting rid of people who went after 2020 election stuff then leaked to ProPublica. I think that's pretty clearly the sourcing chain here because they have all of the documents that apparently the DOJ had and the FBI had. And so those documents show pretty normal soft corruption, which is coaching you on what to say, what not to say, knowing full well that there's a transactionality happening and you just don't want it in print precisely for these reasons. So I was sort of frustrated that ProPublica, again, wasn't, you know, normally if you're reporting on this, you would say, well, the law about coordination between super PACs in the campaign, like there's literally none of that in the ProPublica story. It's as though they thought the real story was just that the FBI squashed this investigation into transactionality rather than the FBI squashing an investigation into potential super PAC coordination. And I honestly found that weird.
00:31:24
Speaker 1: Well, to me, not so much. Maybe they could have included a little bit more about it.
00:31:28
Speaker 2: But to me, the coordination between super PACs and campaigns is an inside baseball kind of ticky-tack paperwork violation.
00:31:38
Speaker 3: But it seems to me like there's much more evidence of that here than there is of violating the sort of corruption transactionality thing.
00:31:46
Speaker 1: Well, and to your point, I think if they more tightly linked the.
00:31:51
Speaker 2: Campaign to the Super PAC, then you can more tightly show the relationship between Collins and the bribe. On the other hand, everything I'm telling you here is from the article. So it was all in there. So I want to give them that credit. This is the
last one that we'll read for now. A few weeks after the $ 150, 000 check to the Collins Super PAC cleared in February 2020, Cao and his team met with Collins' office and secured a new round of funding. We were very warmly received, Cal reported to his colleagues in an email obtained by the FBI. So this is not taking his word for stuff. These are emails from the time. Excellent meeting. Total of $ 32 million will be supported. Records show the Senate allocated at least $ 10 million that year based on Navitek's proposals. Now, what Cal also says, and you can back this up too, is that it was junk.
00:32:47
Speaker 1: What they were selling was junk.
00:32:48
Speaker 3: They were selling nothing. They were selling, like, research.
00:32:51
Speaker 2: Like, and 3D printed boats that the Navy didn't want. Like, just total garbage. And the scam is even worse. What he would do is he would find, his idea was let's find a university that we can then funnel the money through. So the University of Maine, which did not respond to requests for comment from ProPublica, is part of this scheme where he tells Collins, basically, we're going to do the research through the University of Maine. So he's going to then give University of Maine a little cut And then they're going to take the rest of it. And then it operates underneath the rubric of the University of.
00:33:26
Speaker 1: Maine, which is offensive across the board.
00:33:31
Speaker 2: And we end up as a public with nothing, like nothing that they made. Take his word for it or not, nothing that nothing that they made for many, many, many million dollars over the years is used by the military to at all. It's just money that was burned up. He was driving a Ferrari to work every day and living this lavish life, $ 5 million home in Hawaii. Like that's, that's what the taxpayers got out of it is this guy getting fantastically rich, but we didn't, we didn't even get anything out of it. Meanwhile, service members, um, you know, are, you know, lacking, you know, decent food, like supplies, like they're, they're like undies are catching fire on the aircraft carrier. You know, they're the ones who are like putting themselves out there are getting stiffed while people like this are getting enormously rich, enabled directly by Susan Collins in a flagrantly and directly illegal way. Like there aren't many laws left on corruption, but you can't take money from a defense contractor for contracts. It's like the last law that's left on the books. And she had to go out there and break it.
00:34:43
Speaker 3: I mean, my strong assumption is that this is happening every day with everyone. It doesn't make it any better. But I just get frustrated with ProPublica, which I think traffics really heavily in innuendo. And there's a bigger picture story than the Susan Collins.
00:34:59
Speaker 1: Although there's more coming.
00:34:59
Speaker 2: And yeah, so they identified a whole bunch of people. And apparently there are more stories coming. Well, next one, Lindsey Graham, apparently.
00:35:08
Speaker 3: There has to be because there's, again, this is... It's all bad. Like, don't get me wrong. I just got frustrated with the story, but it's all bad. And there's this part where they say, this one drove me crazy. In one back and forth, a lobbyist and a company executive described another senator as quote unquote, fundamentally transactional and having a reputation as a pay to play office. please name for me the lobbyist and the senator, rather than just putting that in the story. Maybe it's because this is going to be a series and there's more to come, but there were a couple of notes like that. It's like dragging me insane. Tell me who it is. You have the records. I want to know who it is. If that's the case, tell me. If lobbyists are walking around saying that, which they are all of the time, and you have it in your possession, I want to know. Ask them for comment, of course, but tell me who it is.
00:35:55
Speaker 1: So we can put this New York Magazine element up on the screen.
00:35:58
Speaker 2: It's a kind of a 7,000-word investigation into the Troy Jackson campaign, and particularly the way that Washington consultants, after kind of Graham Plattner volunteers, pushed him through the kind of rapid-fire nomination contest that came right after Plattner withdrew from the race. They were all pushed aside, and in came pollsters and campaign managers and consultants, from the Dan Goldman campaign, from the Colin Allred campaign, from the Mallory McMorrow campaign, effectively also from kind of Schumer world in Washington, D.C. And it gets into some detail about the ways that they're telling him to stop being an interesting candidate. He's a genuinely working class candidate from far northern Maine, would be the only senator with just an associate's degree The logger his entire life, very clearly a regular person. They told him basically, you know, stop taking questions from people like you're killing us.
00:37:07
Speaker 1: Stop telling people what you honestly think.
00:37:11
Speaker 2: They have given him new talking points around Medicare for all. He can't back off of Medicare for all. But if you hear him talk about it. now it sounds much more like a public option and he wants to be very assuring to people that don't worry, he's not actually going to do anything too radical. The biggest kind of push from them seems to be over his calling what's going on in Gaza from Israel a genocide. And they tell him, you can't walk back to your previous position. You said it and You can't unsay it, but we want you to kind.
00:37:54
Speaker 1: Of basically stop saying it again.
00:37:56
Speaker 2: I spoke to some people familiar with the campaign and obtained some of the same documents that Rebecca Tracer did and confirmed and kind of advanced some of the reporting. If we could put up F5, no, F6 here, put F6 up on the screen. So I obtained this campaign document and and the
document tells Troy Jackson to say, quote, I think this is when asked about Israel and Palestine and the genocide.
00:38:28
Speaker 1: Quote, this is what he's supposed to say.
00:38:29
Speaker 2: I think what's happening in Israel and Palestine is horrific, senseless violence. I think Israel has the right to defend itself, but I do not support the United States sending offensive weapons that enable more killing. It also goes on to say that he should call for, quote, the release of the hostages. And so a couple of things on that. This banning offensive weapons, this is over. Like this is a position that is way more to the right. I don't want to say to the right because there are people on the right that are against this also. It's just behind the times like like J Street, others like they're all abandoning this distinction between offensive.
00:39:10
Speaker 1: What Rahm Emanuel has.
00:39:11
Speaker 2: Done with it, like Netanyahu has said he doesn't want Americans supporting more, except, of course, he does. But they're bringing in this anachronistic offensive weapons thing for him to try to say that he's opposed to. The release of the hostages is utterly bizarre, right? There are no hostages, unless you're talking about the thousands of Palestinian detainees who are in without charge, which I'm sure he's not talking about. In all of his talking points that we've obtained, he's instructed to call for the release of the hostages.
00:39:43
Speaker 3: Are they copying and pasting from 2024, actually? I don't know.
00:39:46
Speaker 1: What are you doing? I don't know. What on earth are you doing? He won in, what, July of this year. There are no hostages. What on earth is going on?
00:39:57
Speaker 2: And so then, if he is asked about the previous position on the genocide, the document instructs him to.
00:40:02
Speaker 1: Say, quote, start with, I've said what I've said. It was perfect circular Washington statement. talking point. Start with, I've said what I've said.
00:40:12
Speaker 2: Do not sound like you're walking back the previous position, and do not invite an argument over semantics.
00:40:20
Speaker 3: Do not sound like you're walking it back, but walk it back.
00:40:24
Speaker 1: It's so bad.
00:40:25
Speaker 2: Now, what we've been told is that, and we've obtained a bunch of different invites and calendar records that show that he has, over the last several weeks, been doing a huge number of high-dollar fundraisers with a lot of corporate CEOs, very wealthy people, and also people with strong pro-Israel bona fides, one of them being Suzy Levine, who was a former ambassador to Switzerland, who in the spring of 2024 was one of the signatories of a letter to President Biden saying effectively, keep doing what you're doing. Thank you for standing up for us. She's in the liberal Zionist camp, you know, two-state solution. Let's hope that we can get in aid to Palestinians in Gaza. But fundamentally, the thrust of the letter was, thank you for
standing strong in support of Israel. This is while Israel was killing tens of thousands of Palestinians. And Biden was overseeing this absolutely horrific policy. And so he's meeting privately with with people like her who are then conveying their sense of the situation. And because he's working class from northern Maine, you can imagine this is not an issue that he has spent his life. It would be weird if it was an issue that he'd spent his life kind of steeped in. And so what he's hearing from people is this word, genocide, is deeply offensive to us. So please stop saying it. And so some of this is very clever on the part of his campaign operatives. They'll give him the talking points, but then they'll also surround him with people who are going to very earnestly and emotionally tell him how impactful it is to them to hear words like genocide. And without having a grounding in the issue to begin with, and then also by cutting him off from the grassroots supporters around Maine who propelled Graham Plattner to the nomination, he then doesn't hear the other side.
00:42:42
Speaker 5: Of, of this.
00:42:43
Speaker 1: And so he doesn't even get a both sides. He just gets the one.
00:42:45
Speaker 2: Side and that's, and, uh, Tracer talks in her article about being in a, a room where he's giving his, his speech. And then someone asks him about his Israel, Palestine, and he does this, Israel has the right to defend itself. And they're like, does this like, mealy-mouthed, incoherent, both sides-ism. And she said, you could just feel all the energy in the room just evaporate. And she said somebody gave him like a visible thumbs down. And it was a metaphor for the kind of sucking out of the energy of the entire campaign.
00:43:20
Speaker 3: Well, first of all, midterm elections are about turnout. And what you are going to succeed with in a state like Maine is if you turn out just about every single member of the grassroots. that would be excited about a position someone like Graham Plattner would take on this particular foreign policy issue. And so you're already sucking the energy and the enthusiasm out that you need to support the enthusiasm gap. And on the other hand, independent voters are going to, they don't agree, actually, with the kind of liberal Democrat position on this anymore. That's pretty clear at this point if you look across polling. People are closer to the original Troy Jackson position on this than they are otherwise. And so even if you take the kind of enthusiasm question away and you talk just about swing voters, they want to believe that you believe what you're saying. And they're more likely to agree at this point with the Troy Jackson anyways. Like the math doesn't make sense. The politics of it don't make sense. It's so backwards.
00:44:23
Speaker 5: Yeah.
00:44:25
Speaker 2: Now, maybe the Collins campaign And it's this corruption story coming out of ProPublica and the environment that we're in, the trade war with Canada, which is really hurting Maine. Fuel oil is absolutely crushing families in Maine right now because fuel oil is basically diesel. And so people are paying extraordinary amounts for it. There's reporting that I've done that shows that people who are trying to lock in their fuel oil for the winter... are being told by the companies, it's just not possible this year. You can't lock in a price. They're going to get absolutely murdered. New England, for people who don't know it, in the winter basically relies almost exclusively on home heating oil for heating for these.
00:45:10
Speaker 1: Very long and cold winters.
00:45:12
Speaker 2: So maybe the combination of all the misery, plus it's like, okay, well, I've got a wood stove.
00:45:18
Speaker 1: I don't need the heating oil. Oh yeah, well, guess what wood costs now?
00:45:22
Speaker 2: Uh, Trump's in a trade war with Canada and he's, uh, driven up a cord of wood is, is also going to set you back, uh, insanely.
00:45:29
Speaker 1: Uh, so yeah. Um, the other.
00:45:30
Speaker 3: Thing I was going to say is trying to do both at the same time, like Tallarico on some of the like quote unquote woke one stuff who's winning by the way in Texas has flat out said, I was wrong. He said, I spoke, I got that wrong. What you can't do is straddle both lines. You either have to stand by yourself completely and say, like, go, and this is just on a political level. We're not even talking about morally. Obviously, morally, it's correct to own what you believe. But even politically, it's not helpful to play both camps. You either have to say, I was wrong or hell no, I was right. I'm standing firm on this despite what Washington wants me to say. But to try to do the both ways thing is a disaster. It's like the worst thing you can do because it makes you look like you don't believe in anything. Yep.
00:46:18
Speaker 1: Yes, indeed.
00:46:18
Speaker 2: All right, well, that'll do it for us.
00:46:22
Speaker 1: When are you back in D.C., Emily?
00:46:24
Speaker 3: I'll be back Thursday, so it's a quick one, but I'm eager to check out the vibes in Maine. Excellent. Good election cycle. I'm speaking up at Colby, so if folks are around, I'll be there this evening.
00:46:32
Speaker 1: Excellent. Yeah, check in on our Maine reporter, Nathan. He's up there. Amazing.
00:46:38
Speaker 3: What a life.
00:46:39
Speaker 2: He and I should have a piece, I hope, out soon, more on this Troy Jackson campaign. I'll be on tomorrow, I believe, with Crystal. Is that something like that?
00:46:48
Speaker 1: But, you know, have a great time in Maine and I will see everybody tomorrow.