Speaker 1: And Hi, how are you welcome to the Big podcast
on this Yes, it's Friday, what about you? It feels
like a Friday. Today is Friday, the twelfth day of September,
Year of Our Lord, twenty twenty five. My name is
Tom Sullivan. And no, it's it's been a rough week
and it's all been about the shooting and killing of
Charlie Kirk and then the manhunt. And now the man
hunt has come to Fruition. They have arrested the suspect
and he's in custody in Utah. So we'll start with that,
give you the very latest on all of that. There
was a news conference last night and they had the
press person came out and said these are the four
people that are going to speak, and there was a
Cash Patel, the head of the FBI, flew in. She
talked about the head of the Utah I don't know,
Commissioner of Public Safety, basically the head of the state police.
They had the local sheriff, they had the local police,
they had all that and instead forgive me, but this
is it just bothers me to no end. Politicians need
to step back when it comes to crime and information
that the professionals have to share with us. And so
this governor in Utah, Spencer cox is his name. Never
heard of the guy before, but man, he got his
fitteen minutes of fame. He came out last night and
basically did all the things that were basically the lines
that the FBI should have done, talking about well, if
now you need to contact the FBI, you call one
eight hundred. Uh. Yeah, it was. It was crazy what
he was doing, and he was I'm sorry. I know
a lot of people said, oh, what a great job
the governor did, I mean again today, No, he he
basically was spelling the beans on things that I think
a lot of the investigators were going, no, no, no, no, no,
we have the guy in custody. Now you need to
protect the evidence and the and the trials so that
you can convict this guy. Uh. But it was over
the top. He is when you look in the dictionary
under media hog, there's another word for it. I think
his photo was there he took I mean it just
there were all the all the the law enforcement people
were there who had good information, and he took control
of the news conference. Sorry, it bothers me a lot
when politicians shoved their way into the Kleague lights and
that's what it was. The lights and the cameras were there,
and he could not help himself. But I'll tell you
something about this guy. Utah is a very Republican state,
and the legislature there is controlled by the Republicans, both houses,
both chambers. But this is a guy who isn't all
that Republican to me. He vetoed a bill aimed to
prevent transgender youth athletes from participating in women's sports. Now
he vetoed it, and now the legislature overrode his veto
Thank goodness, But he's for transender athletes competing against women.
They say he's a moderate Republican, but he endorsed Mark
Rubio back in twenty sixteen, and then when Rubio dropped out,
he put his weight behind Ted Cruz. And when Ted
Krue didn't make it and Donald Trump with the nominee,
he wrote, this is the governor of Utah. He wrote,
we care a lot about decorum, We care about our neighbors.
We are good kind people. He Trump does not represent
neither goodness nor kindness. Should I think he's disingenuous. I
think he's dangerous. I think he represents the worst of
what our country stands for. I won't vote for Hillary,
but I won't vote for Trump either. So twenty twenty
rules around and same thing, claims he did not vote
for Donald Trump. So I mean, this guy, I don't
know who he is. I don't know what the deal
is with him. I've never seen a politician drooling at
the chance to stand up there and ignore the law
enforcement experts that have all the data standing behind him.
So anyway, that's how the event last night, which they
basically said nothing, and then today, of course they said
a lot. And that is repeated by John Miller, former NYPD.
This is what his reaction to the news that they
have arrested a twenty two year old, a guy out
of a little town called Washington, Utah. Done by Saint George, Utah.
It's actually closer to Las Vegas than it is to
Salt Lake City. His father, I'm not sure if he
is or was, but he's related somehow to the Sheriff's department,
and he based I mean, he had to know that
that was his son. The photos that we all saw
and they released a video and it was from far away,
didn't really show who the person was. But here's the father,
and he called a friend of his who is a
chaplain with the US Marshall's Office, the Fugitive Warrant Group.
The US Marshalls are amazing how they can find people.
And he called up his friend who's a chaplain with
US Marshall Marshall's office, and there he's the one who
called the FBI and zoom, they were there in absolutely
no time. But this brings up the question if you
found out that your loved one, your spouse, your parents,
your children, your niece's nephews, your next door neighbor, would
you call the police and tournament, I'm sorry to my children,
but yes, if you're if you're the kind that committed
this murder, absolutely there's something wrong with you. So, uh,
this is how it went down, and here's John Miller's reaction.
Speaker 2: So we learned a great deal and it explains a
lot about what happened overnight. So you know, the timeline
we pieced together from the press conference is last night
they do a press conference at eight pm. They put
out the video which is meant to draw more people
to the website so that they will be pushed from
the video to those additional images that were released of
the individual with the baseball hat and the sunglasses. Now
they had seven in leads to sort through before that
press conference. That press conference generated another four thousand leads.
Among those leads, the following unfolds. The family member, who
we believe was the father, talked to the son about this,
had his suspicions, spoke to the son, and then called
a minister. The minister was associated with law enforcement as
kind of the chaplain for the County Fugitive Task Force. Then,
after speaking to the father, calls the task force, speaks
to one of the sheriffs in a Deputy US Marshall,
and passes on this information which is then passed to
the FBI, which moves very quickly. By ten PM, the
FBI has observed the suspect, taken him into custody and
then starts put this together. So all of this unfolded overnight.
Other key things that came out during the press conference
was additional information about a roommate who says that they
had followed conversations on the group chat platform known as
Discord and was able to share these messages with FBI
agents that are presumably from the suspect talking about a
rifle being left at a drop point, wrapped in a towel,
and other details which added to the evidence that they'd collected.
And we learned additional details about that rifle, the Mauser
ninety eight bolt action rifle, which is the one that
federal authorities discovered in the wooded area near the campus
after the shooting prior to knowing this information, and that
the bullets had inscriptions on them, including the words hey
fascist catch on one bullet and bella Chow, which may
be a reference to an Italian folk song which has
been emblematic of resistance for a long time. So a
lot of information, big developments, and it all came together
in just a few hours.
Speaker 1: It did come together fast. But you heard John talking
about the roommate and about the fact that they were
communicating back and forth, the roommate apparently showing the messages
to the FBI on the Discord server, which is basically
a gaming platform, but a lot of people, apparently a
lot of young people use that to communicate send messages
back and forth. And so a lot of that about
the gun and the towel and all that sort of
stuff was communicated to this guy who I think was
his roommate. And now the question is was the roommate
involved in this here's Andy mc kay, former number two
guy at the FBI.
Speaker 3: From the text messages that we learned about, it seems
to indicate that the roommate had some knowledge about what
he was doing. A question is did he know about
the entire plan, and if he did know about it,
if he assisted it, supported it, provided you know, any
kind of if he was in agreement with Robinson and
took any step in furtherance of the crime in terms
of providing support or whatever that might have been, he
could certainly be considered a co conspirator. So doesn't mean
he will get charged. But but boy, if I was
running this investigation, I'd be wanting to take a very
close look at him now. The fact that he's already
been interviewed, that he provided some information about these chats
to investigators and explain them indicates that he's at this
point anyway in a very cooperative posture, which is good.
But we'll have to see, you know that. I still
think that one he could really go in either direction. Yeah,
we don't know the answer to that. It's certainly possible
that as soon as they heard from the people in Washington,
Utah about this, about Robinson's identity, they would immediately do
a full scrub on him and could would then have
identified where he lives and then could have come across
the roommate that way, so that that pushes him in
one direction towards potentially co conspirator. But if Robinson reached out,
you know, the question, because how long did he know
about this rifle and did he understand what the rifle
had been used for, It's hard to imagine he didn't.
So yeah, we still a lot more to be learned
about that. It sounds like, again from what we heard
before the press conference, that a family member had suspicions,
likely based off of seeing the photographs, but that has
not been confirmed to us at this time. And and
confronted him, had a conversation with him, and in that conversation, Robinson,
you know, madeid statements that amount to a confession, whether
he acknowledged doing it, took responsibility for it, something along
those lines. Those statements will be devastating to him down
the road. They'll be admissible to some extent, certainly at
this point where he's going to be where he's first
going to be charged with an offense. I expect you'll
see those statements in the affidavit that supports the initial charge,
and they could also, depending on the vagarities of Utah
evidence law, could also come be admitted if at trial.
If he goes to trial, there would be a fight
over that. But nevertheless, the government has a lot to
work with.
Speaker 1: So he kept referring to Robinson Robinson as the last
name of this twenty two year old the shooter that's
now in custody. And he brings up this question about
the roommate. If I was the roommate, I'd be very concerned.
Right now, he's cooperating, but how much did he know
about what his roommate was doing? What did he know
about thee Why did he not say something two days ago?
So this is getting to be rather die seeing. The
whole question about this is another copycat off of Louisian
Luigi Maggione who shot the executive healthcare executive in Midtown Manhattan,
about how he had the bullet casings he etched on them.
What was it denied? Defend to do something anyway? Messages
on bullet casings, So this gun that was used was
a bolt action gun, so he manually had to eject
the casing. There were four bullets I believe in the
gun on the casing from the bullet that he fired
and killed Charlie Kirk with was still in the gun.
And that one said notices bulges o wo, which is
an emoji basically of somebody looking all surprised. Another one
that had not been fired, said, hey, fascists, catch A
third one said bella Chow and repeating Bellachow, Bellachow, bella Chow.
It's an anti fascist Italian song that comes back from
World War two years And finally to mean that goes
around on the internet is the fourth one said, if
you read this, you are gay lapping my ass off lmao.
And that that's another problem for this guy when he
gets into court. Jim Trusty, former federal prosecutor, brings that up.
Speaker 4: So the Bullets Bill, you know that evidence is going
to loom large because in a very very concrete, tangible way,
it does a couple of things. Number One, it seems
to establish so there's a lot of kind of warped
language and symbol It seems to establish what we already knew,
which was this was a politically motivated assassination, and that's
forever going to be a big part of the story
if you're pursuing a first degree murder conviction as a
predicate to the death penalty. And secondly, just that simple LMAO,
you know, laughing my ass off. If I'm a prosecutor,
at the end of that trial, that phrase is going
to be in front of that jury over and over again.
You were telling that jury that this is a monster,
that this is a kid who thinks it's hilarious, that
he's got this narcissistic kind of oblivion to the depravity
of what he's about to engage in as he goes
and murders somebody who had the temerity and speaking freely
and celebrating as Christianity. So I think if I'm handling
that trial, and it sounds like we may be heading
towards a state trial, which I think is probably appropriate here,
and then you're going to have those bullets in that
language on the bullets going back all over again.
Speaker 1: He mentioned it probably going to be a state trial,
and from the lawyers that I've heard from, of course
they could do federal charges, but Utah does have the
death penalty, and the governor is as he was babbling
on last night about the fact that this is definitely
going to be asking for the death penalty. He's not
the prosecutor, but also the President Trump talking about the
day when he was revealing that they had somebody in custody.
He was talking about that he would like to believe
I'm paraphrase, and he basically wanted to see the death penalty.
He's personally hurting from the death of Charlie Kirk knew
him well, thought of him as almost family. So the
state version, though, is state prosecutors are used to doing
murder cases, Feds are not. That's pretty uncommon, so it's
probably better that this is going to be in the
state court. We'll find out the charges apparently are going
to be filed on Tuesday. So they got him in
custody and they will keep him in custody until those
charges come down on Tuesday of next week. Mary O'Toole
is PhD, former profiler for the FBI. She did the
Elizabeth Smart abduction, the unibomber, the Green River killer. She's
a long time in profiling these criminals and this was
her observation about this guy that they have picked up.
Speaker 5: Let me start by saying this, I was impressed by
the information that indicated the shooter had been thinking about
this for some time. They even use the word it
went back maybe for years years with an s on it.
So one of the things investigators are going to be
looking at is during that pathway towards violence, what was
he doing, who was he talking to? And I think
important about this is was he simply focused on Charlie
Kurt or were there other possible victims along the way
that he was also interested in? And that's all going
to become information they can obtain through his social media
or talking with people. It would be quite interesting to
me if someone this young in his early twenties was
only focused on one person, which means that Charlie was
one of maybe multiple people that he could have targeted.
That becomes important because if there are multiple possible victims,
there could have been other people that he talked with about, Hey,
I'm thinking about doing this, or this person I hate
because of their ideology. So they really have to get
a much tighter and they will idea of that pathway
to violence. What he was thinking, what plans were was
he making involving possible other victims? And who might he
have been talking to about that? Because the whole idea
of leakage, which I think is critical here, is to
announce ahead of time what somebody is about to do.
That's where we get the warning behaviors. Warning behaviors mean
we see it, we hear it beforehand, and that occurred here.
But what were the other warning behaviors with this young
shooter because those warning behaviors will become very important, unfortunately
for the next shooter. So I think that they're still
very much in the preliminary stages of finding out what
his plans were, and who he was talking to, and
maybe who purposely or even inadvertently was helping him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so that brings up the roommate again, but also
where else was he going to try to do this this?
I think this story has potential to explode from here
into many different angles. I saw an interview last night
of a young man by the name of Hunter Kozak,
and if you saw any of the video leading up
to the shooting at the college, there was the way
that Charlie Kirk did those was he had people, he
had a microphone that was set up in front of
the stage. He sat on a chair on the stage
and the person that would come up would ask him
questions or debate him, and he would debate them back.
And there was a young person who came up and
asked the first question. Charlie Kirk talked to him, and
then the second person stepped up. The second person to
step up was this guy, Hunter Kozak, and he was
asking Charlie Kirk about gun violence. Here's Hunter Cosey back today,
still trying to process what happened.
Speaker 6: It's a tragedy and I don't It's hard to grapple
with and I'm part of a community that's striving to
grapple with it right now. And people have obviously pointed
to the irony that I was. The point that I
was trying to make is how peaceful left was great
before he got shot, and that that only makes sense
if we stay peaceful. And as much as I disagree
with Charlie Kirk, I'm on the record for how much
I disagree with Charlie Kirk, But like man, dude, he
is still a human being. Have we forgotten that?
Speaker 1: Apparently? Yes? And here's the problem. This guy's from the left.
But that's what Charlie did. He loved to talk to
people that had different views, different ideologies, and so this
guy's from the left is trying to convince Charlie that
the left is peaceful and then he gets shot. So
this guy was standing facing Charlie, maybe ten feet in
front of him when Charlie was killed. So he's got
all that to deal with as well. Back to the
news conferences today or the news conference today, Chris Wecker,
former top official at FBI, was worried about the fact
that you've got to be careful when you hold these
news conferences, and like I said, the governor was out
there just flapping his lips. Here's Chris Wecker's view of
how that whole thing went for the FBI.
Speaker 7: I was an assistant district attorney, and so I look
at it from both angles. I mean, investigators want to
talk about the case, and they want to satisfy the
public interest in all of the details. But this is
a point where you have to have a lot of discipline.
You are protecting a trial. The attorneys are going to
be very circumspect if they go to true to form here,
and they will they will make sure that they get
some information out there, and there are guidelines on this,
especially in the federal system, from the US Attorney's Manual
and d o J guidelines. You put out the basic
facts and you know what what would essentially be in
the arrest warrant or the indictment itself, and make sure
that you tell them that this is these are accusations only,
and this this is not you know, we're not holding
a trial in the public arena here. And as I
said earlier, now you've got to protect your witnesses and
any you know, and any evidence that's being produced, and
make sure that their their recollection is not based on
details that are being fed out from from the podium.
We all know a lot about it right now, but
but there are a lot of details that only witnesses
will know, and they don't want to put that type
of information out there. So you've got to protect the
prosecution now and have some discipline and resist the urge
to put it all out there. That's going to be
hard for some people because some of these folks, because
I think some of them very much enjoy the press activity,
and that the attorneys are going to be the ones
that are pulling back on the rain the potential prosecutors here.
Speaker 1: Chris Wecker was being nice saying, there are some people
that enjoy the press activity. Yes, these politicians, man, they
cannot help themselves. And I saw where the governor of
Utah is going to be all over cable television tonight.
So he's just absolutely loving this.
Speaker 6: It's sad.
Speaker 1: It's sad how how he just let the offit, let
the law enforcement officials handle the governor. So at this point,
thankfully the person is in custody. The question is about
the roommate. Did he work with anybody else? All of
that will be fascinating to see whether he had a
target list or not. Apparently he may have, we don't know.
It's Friday, so the economy financial Friday. A couple of things.
One is consumer sentiment came out today and took a
big drop down four point eight percent for the year.
It's down twenty one percent, So consumers all of a
sudden getting very disappointed out there about the economy. Gary Cohne,
who was the chief economic advisor to President Trump in
Trump one point zero former I believe he was the
CEO of Goldman Sachs when Trump tapped him back in
twenty seventeen. Anyway, he was on talking about the economy
this morning. He's now vice chairman of IBM. And I thought,
whenever Gary Cone pontificates about the economy, I like to
share it with you.
Speaker 8: So I think you ask a really interesting question. So
I think tariff do serve some important purpose. And you
and I've talked about that.
Speaker 1: We have.
Speaker 8: The one thing that we learned and we all need
to remember is during COVID we realized how fragile our
supply chain is in the United States. So when we
take a look back and say, what can't we allow
to happen ever again in this country. We cannot allow
ourselves as a nation to be exposed to certain goods
where the supply chain gets clogged up or stops and
really slows down our economy.
Speaker 9: It's been five years. Have we made progress on that?
Speaker 1: We have?
Speaker 8: We have made progress on that. So you know, you
can go back into the prior administration and the Chips Act.
We knew that chips were one of the biggest bottlenecks
that came out of the COVID crisis. Everything that was
just about everything that was manufacturing in the United States
ceased manufacturing because we no longer had access to chips.
Because the supply chain slowed down. It was quite obvious
that we needed to manufacture chips here domestically so we
could continue to build. From toasters to sophisticated weaponry, all
of them had chips in it. The piece of the
equation where we are forcing and incentivizing and incentivizing is
important key parts of the supply chain components back into
the United States. I think everyone agrees is a really
important part of what the administration is doing, and we
should applaud that because we are a safer and sound all.
Speaker 9: The way to the point of taking a steak in intel.
Speaker 8: Look, I'm not sure I would argue that taking a
steak in intel is the right thing to do, but we.
Speaker 1: Already gave money, we might as well get a stake.
Speaker 3: I agree.
Speaker 8: Once you give them money, the question is do you
want equity or do do you want debt? You know,
and by the way, and I'll remind you guys, it was.
It wasn't the best few months of my life. But
in two thousand and eight the banks went through this
when Hank Paulson tarped the banks. You know, the US
government put capital, They put debt into each of the
banks you had, whether you needed it one or not,
whether you'd gone out and raised capital the week before,
which the I was with, had you got capital injecting
your bank, you owe them a very high coupon, and
they attached warrants to it. So this idea that the
federal government needs should get a return on capital for
something they do to stimulate economic.
Speaker 9: Grants is not the only thing that makes it publicly
platable for taxpayer dollars.
Speaker 8: Honestly it does well. What should makes it publicly platable
for taxpayer dollars is the sovereign protection and the security
we get by being able to control our supply chain
that we saw how vulnerable you were in coades. We
should not have to live through that again. But the
flip side is, and you look at tariffs as a whole,
you know, I think what you have to tell you
is take a step back and look at how corporate
America is dealing with this terriff equation. And I think
this is not as well understanding. I think it's a
very interesting phenomena that's going on right now. So if
you look at corporations today, and they look at their
input costs and they're buying goods and the cost of
those are going up, and they feel like their ability
to raise their prices to end consumers is very limited. Yes,
they can slowly InCor manually raise prices, but they're being
charged tariffs overnight. Companies are being forced to figure out
how to deal with that equation or that conundrum. They
have actually figured out how to deal with that conundrum.
And I think we see it in the data we
did we scratch your head, so what are we seeing.
We're seeing companies they can't deal with the cost of goods,
the cost of goods, the input costs, they can't deal
with the sales costs. But what companies have figured out
in the last decade or so, when this has been
going on pre tariff, what got accelerated by tariff, is
companies are figuring out that they can be dramatically more
efficient and run with less human capital.
Speaker 1: Well, let me translate, running with less human capital simply
means they're not hiring and maybe they're laying off, but
they're trying to get by with fewer people working for
the company. And that is why we're starting to see
the labor markets become soft. Is these companies, some of
them are passing on the tariffs. They're saying, sorry, consumers,
we can't do anything. You're just going to have to
pay more, and they're hoping that you will continue to
buy their products at higher prices. Other companies are trying
to figure out how to eat it. What Gary Cohne
was talking about is that a lot of companies are
looking at this and going, oh, I know where we
can save money. It's the most expensive part. It's the
biggest expense we have on our profit and law statement.
It's called humans labor employees. So if we have fewer
of them, then our costs go down and we can
still price our products for the same price. That consumers
won't balk because it's going to be roughly at the
same price. So that's what Gary Cone is saying is
going on is there are companies out there, the companies
out there doing all kinds of things trying to figure
out how to deal with the tariffs. But he's saying
that a lot of big companies are doing it by
basically maybe layoffs, but basically not replacing people that are leaving.
They're shrinking their workforce then in addition to Gary Cohne,
there's a woman named Abby Joseph Cohen. And for those
of you that have been around for a few years,
you go, oh, I remember her. She was the Wall
Street guru. She was the chief economist at Goldman Sachs
and she called the economy. Oh yes, she called the
economy so perfectly. She became quite famous back in the
I want to say, seventies, eighties, even into the nineties. Well,
she's still around, and she was asked today about the
economy and what she sees out there today.
Speaker 9: As you know, I'm a long term bull on the
United States. I think that our economy is by far
the most impressive in the world, but there are always
things to watch out for. And I loved watching the
interview that you did yesterday with Lloyd Blankfine, because I
have memories of sitting in a room with Lloyd and
we'd all go in and everybody sort of knew what
the consensus was and broad expectations in the market, but
our conversation in that room was always what are we missing?
What could go wrong? And so if you think of
a bell curve, the market tends to trade in the
center of that Bell curve. But the real opportunities and
the real risks are at the extreme ends of that
Bell curve. And one of the things I'm looking at,
quite frankly, because I like to be prepared for risks,
is what's happening with the United States visa VI China.
This is a long term concern. I'm worried, for example,
about the way we seem not to be investing as
much as we used to in science and technology and
also education, and the Chinese are doing a blockbuster job
in their own economy investing in these categories. So is
this something that investors need to worry about this week. No,
but it's something to keep on the radar. Apparently the
money is not being well spent because the pipeline that
we have in the United States K through twelve in
math and science and so on just isn't doing it
for us. And we find that our PhD programs are
very heavily filled by non Americans. Now, this has been
going on for quite a long time. We extend student
visas to people, and fortunately in the past many of
these people have stayed in the United States. You know,
sixty two or sixty three percent of the working PhDs
in the US in medicine and engineering and applied science
are in fact immigrants, not children of immigrants, but immigrants.
And it's part of the secret sauce. The US has
always benefited immigration flows, going back obviously to the founding
of the nation. And if we mess that up, and
at the same time we are not enhancing domestic education,
that is not a recipe for success. I was one
of those who was extremely concerned about tariffs, and as
I always do, I go back and say, have I
missed something? And one of the things that we need
to keep in mind is that the tariffs have not
yet been fully implemented. We haven't yet seen the impact.
Now I hope that we in fact have what the
consensus is saying, which is basically a one time increase
in price level but not in inflation, but we don't
know that yet. And one of the things to keep
in mind is that those one time increases in tariff
costs will be rolling. We've only seen part of it
thus far. We'll see more in the second half of
the year, and as all those inventories that got built
up up in anticipation of the tariffs get run down,
we may see some cost increases as well as well
as the supply chain disruptions. But if it turns out
that I was unnecessarily pessimistic, I will be among the
first to say.
Speaker 1: Ok So. Always good to hear from Abby Joseph Cohen.
We haven't heard from her for a long long time.
Wall Street today, Yesterday we set all kinds of new records,
and today we did not. The market went the other direction,
at least as far as the down down two hundred
and seventy three down now at forty five thousand and eight,
thirty four, SMP down just three points. NASDAK up ninety
eight points. Gold was up six dollars to thirty six
seventy nine. Price of oil up twenty cents sixty just
under sixty three dollars now for one barrel of oil.
That's it for today. That's it for this week. Thank
you for coming by. If you have a great weekend,
and we'll be back on Monday. Hope to see you them.