TURMOIL OVER TRUMP "TOWN HALL" INSIDE CNN - 5.4.23

Hey there, I'm Ed Helms, the host of Snafu, a podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. Recently, I spoke to Rachel Maddow about her riveting podcast, Ultra. It's about a 1940s Nazi plot to overthrow our government. Like Snafu, Ultra left me with an eerie feeling about how much important history gets forgotten. And as a result, repeats itself. History is told by the winners, and sometimes what the winners most want is for us to forget that the thing happened. My full conversation with Rachel is available now. Just listen to Snafu, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Naivar Reynosa from Latinas Take the Lead podcast. Through fun, yet intimate and revealing conversations, Latinas Take the Lead will dive into issues modern Latinas face. We are the 200%ers, 100% American and 100% proudly, Latina. Stay tuned for upcoming episodes where we will be talking to award-winning authors like Reina Grande. I definitely didn't think that I could be a professional writer. I just knew that I liked to write, and it made me feel better. Entrepreneurs like Sandra from No Palera. What I wanted to do was to create a heightened Latina brand to disrupt the historically Eurocentric beauty shelves. We, Latina, start 20% of the population, and yet I don't see any premium Latina brands on shelves. Money Experts. There's lots of different ways that you can make money, lifestyle experts, and more. Listen to Latina's Take the Lead on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, it's Edgy Martinez. Check out my podcast, Edgy Martinez-IRL, where we have beautiful conversations with all types of people. From Kelly Rowland to Mike Tyson to Kim Kardashian to JT from the City Girls. These are conversations about real life. We talk about love and death and our mental health and how we navigate all the ups and downs of life. And I promise every episode, there'll be a takeaway for you to use in your own real life. Check out Edgy Martinez-IRL on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Countdown with Keith Oberman is a production of iHeartRadio. Almost nobody has noticed that CNN has changed the time of its upcoming betrayal of American journalism and American democracy. And this is not trivia. This is another confession of CNN's real motives behind its cynical and irresponsible act. And also a possible foreshadowing of a coming CNN attempt to launch a conservative leaning show in prime time. The original announcement and even the promos running on CNN said quite clearly that the Trump Town Hall was next Wednesday at 9 p.m. Eastern. Suddenly, yesterday, it became next Wednesday at 8 p.m. Eastern. So what? What used to be on cable news at 8 p.m. Eastern? As of say, two weeks ago tomorrow. 8 p.m. Eastern time. What was on Fox at 8 p.m. Eastern time? Why 8 p.m. was when Fox put on Tucker Carlson. CNN has now trebled down on this Trump Town Hall madness by moving the Town Hall to the exact hour of the conservative viewers' discontent. The hour they no longer have Tucker Carlson to indoctrinate them. While CNN's executives, especially its amoral malefactor CEO Chris Licht and its unfortunate and terrified political director David Shalyan, continue to spout platitudes about the journalistic necessity for turning over editorial control of prime time to a manifestly irresponsible and seditious criminal, the real motive is as simple as this time shift. Chris Licht thinks he can grab the 8 p.m. conservative audience, the disaffected Tucker Carlson crowd next Wednesday. That's all this is. That's all that matters to him. That's all he understands. That's all he is worth as a human being. And moreover, it would not surprise me in the least if Licht and CNN are contemplating not just a one night pursuit of the erstwhile Tucker Carlson crowd, but an actual nightly play for it. The new CNN did not have one program in the cable news top 25 in the month of April. Anderson Cooper's 8 p.m. show was its best. It ranked number 27 with 782,000 viewers. 5% less than my friend Chris Jansing gets on MSNBC and my friend Chris Jansing is on at 1 in the afternoon on MSNBC, not in prime time. Besides Anderson Cooper's no CNN prime time show even includes the name of the anchor or anchors. And last month was the first time in four years that CNN lost to MSNBC in the so-called ad demo of viewers age 25 to 54 for the entire day. And there is somewhere between a million and two million Tucker Carlson ex viewers up for grabs. The booking as Puck News naively describes CNN's deal with the devil, which CNN producers executives and the event moderator Caitlin Collins spent months trying to land finally came together due to a confluence of interests. Moderator Caitlin Collins spent months trying to land Trump? Hmm. This same article describes the awkward and glowering Collins as quote unquestionably the network's fastest rising star. Her conservative bona fides, parentheses, Alabama, a daily caller pedigree are instrumental to licks efforts to win over conservatives and likely played a role in convincing Trump to agree to the town hall unquote. The signs are all there and in capital letters, CNN sources are pushing not just Trump and the town hall on the more easily manipulated of the TV writers, but they are pushing Collins herself. They are crediting her in part with getting Trump to return to CNN. CNN and its marks among the TV critics are sanitizing her past. I mean, do you really want to describe her articles in which she compared ALS charity fundraising with the ice bucket challenge to waterboarding at Gitmo? Do you really want to call that her daily caller pedigree? The ratings say CNN has nothing to lose by moving Anderson Cooper elsewhere in prime time from eight o'clock. It's done that before his ratings are as inert as is his expression. So this nightmare scenario is entirely plausible. Stage two of Chris licks attack on the old incorrectly perceived as liberal CNN could easily be a pursuit of the old Tucker Carlson audience. And it could hinge on how well Caitlyn Collins does in the town hall and how well the town hall does in the ratings. And remember, they just moved it from 9 p.m. to 8 p.m. and pretended they had never ever said it was at 9 p.m. But what does doing well for Caitlyn Collins or for CNN at this monstrosity look like? What happens if Collins refers to something Trump has previously done or said and he denies it ever happened? Do they cut away to tape of him doing it or saying it? What exactly happens if Trump announces that President Biden eats babies? Does Collins say, excuse me, sir, I don't think that's true, the CNN cut the feed? More realistically, what happens when Trump insists the 2020 election was fixed rigged against him as you and I know he will? Is it the job of Caitlyn Collins to push back or is it the job of Caitlyn Collins to not push back? Is successful CNN revealing Trump for the psychopath he is or is successful CNN discovering that among its audience next Wednesday night is 400,000 displaced Tucker Carlson viewers because 400,000 more 8 p.m. viewers would suddenly put CNN back in the top 20 or is it something worse still from another website, quote, a Trump advisor told Semaphores Shelby Talcott that they hope to quote, jump start the relationship with CNN now that the network is under new management. Trump on CNN as a regular feature. Nobody who has ever appeared in television has lacked ambition. People often say Walter Cronkite would never do that. Well, hell, Walter Cronkite used to go over the daily ratings for an hour at a time and analyze the show rundowns and curse loudly as warranted. What would Caitlyn Collins, seven years removed from being an unpaid 24 year old CNN guest, be willing to do or say on air to become the lead anchor on her network? Well, what was Tucker Carlson willing to do or say? As it is now, the front man for CNN's moral failure here is its political director David Shallion. Quote, for us, our job despite Trump's unique status, Shallion told the Washington Post is the same. I don't think our mission as journalist is anything less than to cover the news and he's the news, unquote. Shallion's naivete, incredible for anybody in his position anywhere, stems in part from the day when he was the news. Shallion was once the Washington Bureau chief of Yahoo News. He was part of live online coverage of the 2012 Republican National Convention by Yahoo and ABC News and he was caught on a hot mic, making a crash joke with racial overtones about Mitt Romney and his wife. Yahoo fired him on the spot and Shallion has been terrified of Republican criticism ever since, just like Chuck Todd is, just like Margaret Brennan is, just like all of them are. And this is the guy charged with keeping Trump honest on CNN and keeping Caitlyn Collins honest too. If there is a silver lining here, it is that there have finally been some signs of conscience from within CNN about this looming debacle. One offer record, one on the post reporting quote, a CNN staffer speaking on the condition of anonymity to be candid about his employer called the decision baffling. Quote, he's going to be taking questions from voters. This staffer asked. This was the guy who tried to overturn what voters decided in 2020, and quote, a good point except the voters to whom CNN has also ceded editorial control at the town hall think that's a good thing. Remember, these are not just voter voters. These will only be people voting in the New Hampshire Republican primary. More owned up to and more disturbing yet. Pock news reports that the former US Capitol Police Officer and January 6th victim, Michael Fanon, now a CNN contributor, submitted an op ed, he wrote for CNN's website in which he wrote quote, allowing Donald Trump an open forum on a major television news network is the moral equivalent of putting an AR 15 in the hands of someone mentally unstable. Mr. Fanon says CNN will not run his op ed, which is odd, since it seems to be pretty much a statement of fact. And it's odd or since the new lick D and CNN is supposed to be all about non partisanship or at least balance. And somebody somewhere within the CNN galaxy should be publicly pushing back against the whorehouse Chris licked has turned the place into. Fanon also says he asked for a forum in which he could debate Chris licked about this town hall. Well, guess what the answer to that was. There is a reason I always say that when we were at MSNBC together, we used to think Chris licked eight paste. There is a second TV news story I have something on. It is tangentially related to licked burning down CNN and he and Caitlyn Collins watching in gleeful fascination as it burns. It is the aftermath of the Tucker Carlson firing. Oddly enough, the term burning down applies here too. Please do not mistake any of this for sympathy or empathy. I heard it as early as last week and it has been getting louder and louder and it crested Tuesday night with the New York Times publishing the unredacted exhibit 276 from the Fox Dominion suit the now infamous. It's not how white men fight Tucker Carlson text. The sentiment is not an issue. As I said yesterday from having worked with him. That's who he is. It may be his family crest. What Fox perceived as the damage seems less mysterious to most people than it did initially. If there had been a trial and there had not been a Carlson firing, Dominion's attorneys would have been within their rights to have called Tucker Carlson to testify in open court, then hand him that text and have him read it aloud. That alone could have sparked backlashes on the Fox board and more importantly among the cable carriers that Fox is trying to get more money out of. But no, it's neither of those things. People are also struggling to figure out who leaked the text and who leaked the details of how much Carlson was despised within Fox and who leaked who keeps leaking. All of these out take videos of him. Who and why? Who? Seriously? Fox leaked them. Duh. Why? Another easy question because I don't just know it. I've lived it. The answer? That's next. This is Countdown. In 1973, Penthouse Magazine launched Viva, one of the first erotic magazines for women. It was staffed by feminist writers and featured full frontal male nudity. It was going to try to be for women what Penthouse was for men. But Viva had one bulging obstacle. It's porn king publisher Bob Guccione. I mean, here he is a guy wearing open shirts down to his waist and chains. I'm Jennifer Romolini and my new podcast, Stift, is the true uncensored story of Viva Magazine. The covers were gorgeous. Inside it was gorgeous. It was so well produced. And I thought, this is a work of art. I just loved looking at it. How did a scrappy group of feminist journalists get involved with the porn king at the height of the sexual revolution? What were they trained to say? And were they doomed to fail? Listen to Stift on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Looking for a master's guide to the marketing world? From decades of experience, starting with building MTV, I found it comes down to two things, math and magic. I'm Bob Pippman, chairman and CEO of iHeart Media. On the new season of my podcast, Math and Magic, you'll hear unlikely visionaries from the frontiers in marketing share how they've used data, the math, and creativity, the magic, to launch their biggest, most impossible sounding ideas, like Goop founder and CEO Gwyneth Paltrow. So many people when I started were like, what the hell is she doing? Like she has this good day job, like what is this? Our guest this season will urge you not to underestimate the power of passion, imagination, and self-belief, particularly with naysayers all around you. Listen to the new season of Math and Magic stories from the frontiers in marketing on our very own iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, it's Alec Baldwin. This past season on my podcast, Here's the Thing. I spoke with more actors, musicians, policymakers, and so many other fascinating people, like actress and director, Cheryl Hines. They were looking for an unknown actress. To play Larry David's wife, I said, well, how old is that guy? Isn't he old? And author David Sedaris. You know, like when you meet somebody and say, well, I want to be a writer or I want to be an artist. And I say, well, is it all you care about? Because if it's not, it's going to be pretty hard for you. If you're not on fire, it's like opening the door of an oven. And it's like, wow, you know, you take a step back. It's all they think about. It's all they talk about. It's all they care about. They don't have relationships. They're not good friends for other people. This is just what they're all there. And she goes, yeah. Listen to the new season of Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Post scripts to the news. So as promised, of course, Fox leaked the, it isn't how white men fight Tucker Carlson text just as, of course, Fox leaked the video of Carlson bantering with Pierce Morgan and swearing it medium matters for America, then bellowing about how mean the Dominion lawyer was to him during his deposition and then trashing his own employer's website. Not complicated. It dirties him up. It reduces, maybe completely, maybe negligibly, the chances that somebody else hires Tucker Carlson. Given the blind Trump-like loyalty to Carlson, that may be a pipe dream, but the win-win out of this for Fox is for Tucker Carlson to disappear, to not wind up at 8 p.m. on Newsmax or OAN or News Nation or America's Got Fascists or whatever channel has dropped. His name since the firing. Make him look like a disloyal employee, like a loose cannon, like a perpetual problem, like a whatever. Do it well enough and you might even make those who would finance a Tucker Carlson startup, think twice, or invest less. Even do it superficially and you can make Tucker Carlson in his new job, look bad or feel bad at minimum it is revenge. How do I know this? It's been done to me. Six times that I recall, twice in cable news, twice in cable sports, once in local TV news 39 years ago, once in network radio longer ago than that. I'll give you the details, but first just put yourself for a moment in the role of Chris Ruddy at Newsmax or Heinrich Hemler of America's Got Fascists. TV executives are the biggest primadonas in the world. I have met maybe three of them in my life who would willingly hire a new and whiny employee, and I confess to often being said whiny employee, hire that person and ignore the whininess and think only of the ratings and the quality and the profit. One of them is Jeff Zooker. One of them oddly enough is Rupert Murdoch. The rest of them are soft as grapes and they will take no drama even when it means no ratings every damn time. And you thought they were businessmen. Well to be fair, I thought they were businessmen too. You're the guy who wants to hire Tucker Carlson and you hear this and you think what? Well I feel great. I can never assess my appearance. I wait for my post-menopausal fans to weigh in on that. No, great post-menopausal fans. So you think at some point there will be a tape of him disparaging the age of our female audience. And then you hear this. This is airing on the nighttime show and I wanted to look official. I don't want it to be like Bro Talk. You know what I mean? Give it a majority of it. Like if we go like 45 minutes, this is going to be for Fox Nation. So nobody's going to watch it on Fox Nation. Nobody watches Fox Nation because the site sucks. Oh great. Ron Vibbentrop and I are trying to build our America's Got Fascist brand trying to move up from plucky outsiders to challenging Fox. And this idiot will be badmouthing the marquee show on our sub-channel called, called, I did not see that coming. You got it yet? That's what they're trying to do to Tucker Carlson. Oh no, stop. Oh no. So I promised some details on my personal experience with this dirtying up process. This was first done to me, as I said, in radio when I was 21 years old. On my last scheduled weekend before I left my old network UPI for my new one, RKO, I caught strep throat and I called in sick. The business editor at my old network, a tiny jackass named Mike Alabaugh, told everybody at UPI and a bunch of people at other New York radio outlets that I had faked the illness that he had heard me doing my new job that very day. Happily, the enraged UPI general manager phoned me at home to threaten me. I answered, and he did not even recognize my voice. Can I talk to Keith, please? I said, speaking, and he said, no, can I talk to Keith old woman, please? That got resolved fairly quickly, but it was my first experience with dirtying up somebody on the way out. After I left a TV job in Boston, the GM of that station, James Coppersmith, not only told my agent and the local newspapers, he will never again work in this business. But he called the general manager of a rival Boston TV station, which had previously offered me a job, and he trashed me to him too. The first time I left ESPN in 1997 to go to MSNBC and NBC, the parting was actually amicable. The president of the network asked me to come back as a guest on some ESPN shows. Bob Iger, chairman of Disney, then Edens Now, said, If you ever want to work here again, call me personally. Then about five months later, I got a call from Rudy Martzky, the TV sports columnist from U.S.A. today. Another top-level ESPN executive had called Rudy and read him the ratings of my new MSNBC show. The ratings were microscopic. I don't think Rudy remembered he was not supposed to tell me about the call and who it was from, but that was Rudy. They tried to dirty me up. I got mad, so I tried to dirty them up, and the next thing I knew, we were in a nuclear war ESPN in me. Fox Sports did it to me in 2001 after Rupert Murdoch fired me. They trashed me to a guy named Chris Ballard at Sports Illustrated, and then they gave him my email, and they said I was ready to talk to him. Never telling me that that's what they told him. Also never telling him that before they told him that, they'd first shut off my access to my email. So it said in his article that I didn't comment. Don't put it in the paper. I was mad. They also planted something in the New York Daily News asking why in my farewell statement I had not thanked several Fox Sports executives, well maybe because they and Murdoch had just fired me. MSNBC did this to me more pertinently when I left there in 2011 after they breached my contract. There was a strict non-disparagement clause. Then I started reading story after story after story about warnings I had been issued by executives, which never happened, and their version of the day the chairman of GE nearly took the network off the air because his mommy the Fox fan told him to. And finally I read about how I had appalled colleagues by wearing five toad running shoes in the office. All of these stories were from NBC sources unnamed of course. Some of it matched word for word with the same unnamed NBC sources had said eight years earlier when they had fired Phil Donahue, and I know that because I was already at MSNBC when they fired Phil Donahue, and I was in the office as one of the anonymous sources called a writer he knew and read most of the smears about Donahue to that writer off a page of talking points. MSNBC's campaign against me in 2011 was designed to keep me from being hired anywhere else in news. Happily they did not know I had already agreed to join Al Gore to join the news. On happily I didn't know that current TV was just a scam by Gore's business partner to raise the price at which he could sell the network to Al Jazeera. When he got that price. He suddenly stopped paying me. Then he hired an ex-white house spin doctor who announced to the public that I had violated current values of respect, openness, collegiality and loyalty. This is after they stopped paying me. The spin doctor then leaked that I was so disrespectful that I had insulted car service drivers everywhere by demanding that my assistant get a new company to come pick me up as it said in my contract because my driver smears the price of the car. The driver said in my contract because my driver smelled bad. This guy even produced my email and showed it to reporters to prove it was true. Of course he left out the fact that the driver did smell bad because the driver had been smoking inside the car while he was driving me to the current TV studio and this was the sixth or seventh different car service we had had in the previous month because current TV had stopped paying its bills. And the good car services would no longer pick me up or pick up any of our guests for the show. Anyway, the video part of the Carlson thing is kind of new. I have seen it done before by employers who did not want to fire a talent so much as to merely embarrass or discipline them and the next thing you knew his off air comments were on somebody else's website somewhere. Most people of course who are on TV know not to say anything of substance, anything, angry, funny, complimentary or otherwise while a camera or a microphone is or could be on. But as we have found out this week, somebody who does not know that is Tucker Carlson. You wouldn't, okay, I'm not, you know what, I'm not qualified on that score I will say. My girlfriend is cutting on me. Just kidding, just kidding in cases of being pulled off the bird. Yeah, the bird. Hey, medium matters for America. Go yourself. That's the first thing I want to say to you. In 1973, Penthouse Magazine launched Viva, one of the first erotic magazines for women. It was staffed by feminist writers and featured full frontal male nudity. It was going to try to be for women what Penthouse was for men. But Viva had one bulging obstacle, it's porn king publisher Bob Guccione. I mean, here he is a guy wearing open shirts down to his waist and chains. I'm Jennifer Romolini and my new podcast, Stift, is the true uncensored story of Viva magazine. The covers were gorgeous. Inside it was gorgeous. It was so well produced. And I thought, this is a work of art. I just loved looking at it. How did a scrappy group of feminist journalists get involved with a porn king at the height of the sexual revolution? What were they trained to say? And were they doomed to fail? Listen to Stift on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Looking for a master's guide to the marketing world? From decades of experience, starting with building MTV, I found it comes down to two things, Math and Magic. I'm Bob Pittman, Chairman and CEO of iHeart Media. On the new season of my podcast, Math and Magic, you'll hear unlikely visionaries from the frontiers of marketing share how they've used data, the math, and creativity, the magic, to launch their biggest, most impossible sounding ideas, like group founder and CEO, Gwyneth Paltrow. So many people when I started were like, what the hell is she doing? Like she has this good day job, like, what is this? Our guest this season will urge you not to underestimate the power of passion, imagination, and self-belief, particularly with naysayers all around you. Listen to the new season of Math and Magic's stories from the frontiers of marketing on our very own iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, it's Alec Baldwin. This past season on my podcast, Here's the Thing. I spoke with more actors, musicians, policymakers, and so many other fascinating people, like actress and director, Cheryl Hines. They were looking for an unknown actress to play Larry David's wife. I said, well, how old is that guy? Isn't he old? And author David Sedaris. You know, like when you meet somebody and they'll say, well, I want to be a writer or I want to be an artist. And I say, well, is it all you care about? Because if it's not, it's going to be pretty hard for you. If you're not on fire, it's like opening the door of an oven. And it's like, well, you know, you take a step back. It's all they think about. It's all they talk about. It's all they care about. They don't have relationships. They're not good friends for other people. This is just what they're... For all their energy goes. Listen to the new season of Here's the Thing on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. To the number one story on the countdown on my favorite topic, Me and Things I Promise Not to Tell, as if the entire show has not been about my favorite topic, Me. The first two parts of this edition of the podcast have been about politics and television and Fox, quote, news and Me. So fittingly, so is this part. Just about this time of year, early May, late April 1998, 25 years ago, I went on my second and final date with somebody who had been one of the originals at MSNBC. And in November of 1997, she had appeared on my show as a guest for the first time. She was paid to be there on the show, not the date. And her name was... Laura Ingram. This began a process that ended in us going out on two dates. And something she told me on the first of these dates has resonated with me literally every month since, and is relevant to politics today. I know, I know, I did not so much date her as survive her. Even then, before 9-11 helped to slide her cheese off her cracker, I find a diary entry referring to her as Hurricane Laura. That was March 15, 1998. Beware the odds of March Julius Caesar. I didn't. Honestly, and God help me nearly 48 years of dating. I have not been a kiss and teller. I have dated, I don't know, dozens? I'm wearing a couple of hundred actually? 13 seriously. With maybe three exceptions, you don't know any of their names. One of them, now a political writer, basically lived with me for three years. I keep that confidence. So why am I telling this story, violating that? Because not three months after that first date, when we were still going out. Laura Ingram asked me if she could look at a speech I was going to give at Cornell's graduation weekend and offer suggestions. This is so long ago, I literally faxed it to her. Sure enough, couple days later, I'm watching IMS in the morning, which was televised by my network MSNBC, and there on his desk in front of him, is the faxed copy of my speech, and he is reading from my fax. I could recognize the exact sequence of the vertical stripes my cheap fax machine used to streak all of my outgoing pages with. Laura used to go on his show a lot, so to curry favor with IMS, she sent him the speech without asking me. As I told her that day, all bets are now off. So I've told parts of this story before, like she had been a Supreme Court clerk for Clarence Thomas, and our first date consisted of taking me on an insider's tour of the court and having me sit in his chair. Intribute to him, I did not say or do anything constructive. She then cooked me the largest steak I had ever seen that did not have a rodeo cowboy riding on it. And we watched a woman later discredited because she could not keep her stories straight, go on 60 minutes and make allegations against Bill Clinton. This is my perfect date, Laura told me, seared into my memory. But the important Laura Ingram story, sitting there in the middle of all the debris, I don't think I've ever told this. The first date was only about six weeks after the then First Lady Hillary Clinton got on the Today Show and blamed the, at best, exaggerated scandal about her husband, Ed Monica Lewinsky, on the quote, vast, right-wing conspiracy. That is sounds stupid, Laura said that night as she showed me her small office upstairs. I expected that she was about to decry the idea that Republicans would exploit television, talk radio, and the brand new internet to try to bring down a president from the other party, and I said so. A naive little boy that I was. No, not that. Of course we're doing that. She was kind of offended that I doubted the conspiracy part. I explained I'd only been covering politics for two months. At the end of the day, she said, end of the day constantly. At the end of the day, it's the vast part. It's not vast, vast, right-wing conspiracy. Why I bet there's not even 30 of us. Laura Engerman explained that she was essentially the central desk for what she called the miniature right-wing conspiracy. She showed me a printed page that had the fax numbers of about two dozen people. There at the top are the sources, she said. There was Ted Olson, the attorney, founder of the so-called Arkansas Project and the husband of Barbara Olson, a constant presence as a talking head on cable news. She later died on 9-11. Everybody liked her. There were several numbers in the Office of Independent Counsel Ken Starr, one of them read B. Kavanaugh. I said, who's that? She said, nobody important. The only other name I remember was Spencer Abraham, who then was a senator from Michigan. She said, they, including the people in Ken Starr's office, sent her, all the rumors, the ideas, stuff about Clinton, stuff they made up, and she distributed them to the office. She distributed them to the other parts of the list. That's these numbers. One number was marked Hannity Radio, another Hannity TV. O'Reilly radio, O'Reilly TV. There was one for Limbaugh. There was one marked Justice Thomas, and I pointed to it. He likes to stay infarmed. Now, maybe the most important name's not on that list. That's Matt Drudge. She said Matt Drudge used all her stuff, but he didn't want any of it to be traceable, very big on, not traceable. So I never fax it to him. She said, I just give it to my brother. This is when she still liked her brother. He sees Drudge all the time. He gives the stuff to Drudge. Now, over here is my baseball collection. See, there were reasons to go out with her. At the time, I could think only of an old cartoon I had once seen. It was an octopus working in the post office using all eight of its limbs to sort the mail. But every couple of weeks it dawns on me afresh that I was actually a witness to one of the earliest configurations of the machinery. And there is no doubt today whether it is vast or miniature. It's vast. The machinery that lengths the right-wing politicians and those who are supposed to be above the fray, like Supreme Court justices and special prosecutors and people like that there, with the right-wing publicity outlets that pretend to be news organizations like Fox and Drudge and OAN and Newsmax and the ones that don't even pretend like those who succeeded Limbaugh. This machine is in fact everything that your typical paranoid, conservative, Republican, fascist, Trumpist thinks is being run by George Soros or Bill Gates or Dr. Fauci or me. You want to be able to say there are reports or accusations about some Democrat or liberal figure or celebrity? Well, somebody puts a rumor in at one end of the machinery, or somebody makes up a rumor at one end of the machinery. It is then sent to dozens of other people. They repeat it. Voila. Suddenly there are reports. The reports then get fed back to Fox News or Breitbart or the Wall Street Journal or the Supreme Court. Or they're just tweeted by a thousand bots simultaneously. You want to push this ancient racist anti-Semitic paranoia called the Great Replacement, but you wanted to come out washed clean enough that soulless opportunists like Elise Stefanik and JD Vance can say it aloud on the campaign trail without forfeiting their candidacies. This is the machinery. And I saw the machinery when it was just a list of 20 and 30 people. And at that moment I barely recognized the importance of what I saw. Then again I was still on that night recovering from not just the giant stake, but something far more visceral. Earlier that day as we were leaving the Supreme Court, Laura Ingram had boasted about getting even with an ex-boyfriend by going back into what had been their house and putting up exact copies of all the photos of the two of them together that he had taken down from his walls. And when he got smart and changed the locks, she went back again to finish the job, found her key didn't work. So naturally, as you would, she stuffed his garden hose through the mail slot of his front door and turned on the outdoor spigot. $10,000 worth of heart went floors ruined, she said proudly, and part of me screamed, flea, flea now. I didn't flee. Later as I tried to sleep, two noises kept me awake, snoring, not my own, and Laura's dog. Laura's dog kept talking in his sleep. I mean, almost in syllables. Yeah, like that. It was something like 25 degrees out, and I was on the second floor. And yet I resolved that if her dog really did make that last leap to formulate actual syllables, and it turned out, her dog was the one telling her what to do. I was simply going to leave by the window without bothering to open it first. The next morning, Laura and I walked her dog. We got to an empty field. She threw a tennis ball. He went and got it. She cocked her arm back again. He took off, loving life as he did. She did not throw it. He went 40, 50, 60 feet, then stopped and looked back at her with such disappointment and even, a sense of betrayal. And she said loudly without a trace of affection for him or anything else, wait far at, which is when I realized I was being courted to be the next dog. A few weeks later, back home in New York, I got home from working an early morning shift, filling in for the commentator Paul Harvey at ABC Radio. I was just waking up from a tortured nap when the phone rang. And it's Laura, I'm downstairs. We're going to my old law firm's party at the museum. I said I was exhausted. We're going, or I'll just stay here at this payphone outside your place calling you all night. We went. The next opportunity probably was going to be me on the wrong end of a hostage drama. Turned out she was not invited to her party. We're crashing it. I'm going to drink heavily. Frankly, it was a great party. I got to meet Hillary Clinton's mother and her brother. And if you think the fascists are completely sincere about everything, even their neuroses and their paranoia, no, Laura Ingram hugged Hillary Clinton's mother and Hillary Clinton's brother. They seem to be friends. Later, we wound up meeting friends of her in the Oak Bar at the Plaza Hotel where she kept drinking. I was astonished. After about her sixth cosmopolitan on top of everything she'd had at the party, she began to droop her head nodding like a bobblehead doll. Her friend said, okay, that's it. We'll take care of the check. You take care of her. She had not gotten a hotel room or anything. And if you've ever heard of anybody who needed to be poured into a cab because they were so drunk, you don't really know what that means until you have to pour them into a cab. Frankly, I wanted to put her in a hotel somewhere, but the spectacle would have made the gossip pages. She basically could not stand up. So I took her to my apartment, put her into my bed, and I went and slept on the couch at the far end of the apartment, which is where I was hours later in the morning when she woke me up because she came parading through, using my phone to call my assistant to get a car sent to my address to take her to the airport and to make sure that everybody in my office knew she had stayed overnight at my apartment. And all I kept thinking was, why didn't I follow my instincts? My instincts said flea. I fleed, not. Of course, if I had fled, I would have missed seeing the telephone tree of the miniature right-wing conspiracy, wouldn't I? I've done all the damage I can do here. I'll have recovered from the Laura Ingraham date, any time now. Here are the credits. Most of the music was arranged, produced and performed by Brian Ray and John Philip Chanel. They are the countdown musical directors, all orchestration and keyboards by John Philip Chanel. Guitars, bass and drums by Brian Ray, produced by TKO Brothers. The other Beethoven selections have been arranged and performed by No Horns Allowed. The sports music is the Obermann theme from ESPN 2 when we run it, and it was written by Mitch Warren Davis, courtesy of ESPN Inc. Musical comments by the best baseball stadium organist ever, Nancy Faust. We didn't have an announcer today, so it was only me and everything else was pretty much my fault. So that's countdown for this, the 849th day since Donald Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of the United States. Don't forget to keep arresting him while we still can, and not putting him on televised town halls on major networks. A quick promo, tomorrow I've got something special, I think, on Saturday. As on every May 6th since the year 1954, the world has celebrated Roger Banister, the mile runner. For breaking the 4-minute mile barrier, the first man ever to run a mile in 4 minutes or less, except he was not the first man to do that. It is probably the greatest undeserved record or accomplishment in sports history, a long and I think fascinating story. That's tomorrow on Countdown. Till then I'm Keith Olderman, good morning, good afternoon, good night, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, I'm Ed Helms, the host of Snafu, a podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. Recently, I spoke to Rachel Maddow about her riveting podcast, Ultra. It's about a 1940s Nazi plot to overthrow our government. Like Snafu, Ultra left me with an eerie feeling about how much important history gets forgotten, and as a result, repeats itself. History is told by the winners, and sometimes what the winners most want is for us to forget that the thing happened. My full conversation with Rachel is available now. Just listen to Snafu, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Naive Reynosa from Latinas Take the Lead podcast. Through fun yet intimate and revealing conversations, Latinas Take the Lead will dive into issues modern Latinas face. We are the 200%ers, 100% American, and 100% proudly, Latina. Stay tuned for upcoming episodes where we will be talking to award-winning authors like Reina Grande. I definitely didn't think that I could be a professional writer. I just knew that I liked to write, and it made me feel better. Entrepreneurs like Sandra from No Palera. What I wanted to do was to create a heightened Latina brand to disrupt the historically Eurocentric beauty shelves. We, Latina, start 20% of the population, and yet I don't see any premium Latina brands on shelves. Money experts. There's lots of different ways that you can make money, lifestyle experts, and more. Listen to Latina's Take the Lead on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, I'm Alexia Napola, and I'm Marisol Patton, your favorite Miami housewives. And now, the host of the new podcast, Ayur Boudfahour. We are bringing the heat as we dish on hot topics, celeb gossip, and more. Alexia and I have been gossiping for 23 years. We call it Chimeando. Listen to Ayur Boudfahour as part of the Michael Duda Podcast Network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.