Speaker 1: And hello, Hi, how are you welcome? Welcome to the
Big Podcast on this Thursday. Today is the fourth day
of June, year of our war, twenty twenty six. My
name is Tom Sullivan. And well, there's a number of
things today to start with, and the war. We've talked
about the war endlessly, and we've talked about the President
always saying that, oh, we're about ready to Oh yeah,
it's coming, it's going to end quickly, going to be
here soon, and he's saying that again today. But we'll
skip past all of that. We'll wait to see. But
in the meantime, not talking about the war, but about
the War Powers Act, and what it essentially says is
the president can go ahead and commit troops and enter
into a war without the approval of Congress in advance.
But if you do that, you've got to go to
Congress and get their approval within sixty days. While the
sixty days have come and gone. So the House had
a vote last night on the War Powers Act. The
vote was to fifteen to pass the War Powers Act,
stopping the President from committing troops to the war, to
fifteen to two eight, and there were four Republicans that
joined with the Democrats in order to pass the War
Powers Resolution. Now it goes to the US Senate, and
the Senate looked like they were going to pass a
war Powers Act before everybody took off for what was
a Memorial Day I think it was. They never got
around to finishing it. But even if both chambers were
to pass this, the ability of Congress to force a
president to withdraw troops remains a contested legal question about
the fact that he is designated in Article two of
the Constitution. Asked the Commander in chief. So, yeah, it does.
It says that you have to do this within sixty days,
mister president. But it did vote. The vote on this
War Powers Resolution directs the president to withdraw troops from
the conflict with the Iran or come back to Congress
to try to get approval. So that's the only thing
I knew on the war. And obviously this gives the Iras.
I'm sure they're cheering, thinking this is great. They're gonna,
they're gonna, they're gonna pull their troops out. Well, they
aren't in Iran, but there's certainly a lot of them
in that area, and I don't know how far away
they have to be. So it's not a done deal,
but that was a big deal that the House enacted
the War Powers Act last night, so we'll see where
it goes from there. The four Republicans that sided with
the Democrats, Tom Barrett from Michigan, Tom Massey from Kentucky,
Congressman Fitzpatrick from Pennsylvania, and Warren Davidson from Ohio. Here's
a clip of three of them, starting with Tom Barrett,
then Tom Massey, then Congressman Fitzpatrick.
Speaker 2: And how much pain is there are your constituents feeling
as a result of this horror?
Speaker 3: Well, you know, I think that people are frustrated, certainly,
but that's not the only consideration in this There are
a variety of considerations that we have to take into account.
But I definitely see that, I definitely feel what people
are experiencing back home.
Speaker 4: The vote is a good vote.
Speaker 5: It says we're done with this war.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you didn't come and get authorization, and now we're
doing the opposite of authorizing, we're deauthorizing. There's a law
in the books in the last sixty days. I don't
see what's complicated about it. Bring it to Congress, debate
it on the merits and have his vote. That's the
way the system is supposed to work.
Speaker 4: He's going to come after you. Are you worried about it? No?
Speaker 2: No, I got to do my job and we'll continue
to do my job.
Speaker 1: And that was Barrett from Michigan, Massi from Kentucky, and
Fitzpatrick from Pennsylvania. In politics, Well, today's Thursdays. The vote
was on Tuesday. I'm fascinated because I lived in California
for I don't know, thirty seven years something like that,
and I remember that on election night they would have
the results of who got elected all the way down
to the county dogcatcher. They would have that by the
eleven o'clock news. So California has really changed, and they
keep passing laws that make no sense. They apparently have
laws that it goes back to this whole business about
every registered voter in California gets a ballot in the mail.
And by the way, I need to correct something from yesterday.
I thought they had something like a couple million registered voters. No,
they've got the population of California's about forty two million,
and they've got twenty three million registered voters. So twenty
three million people got ballots. How many of them return
them don't know yet, they don't know, they're still counting.
It may be weeks before we know who won the
mayor of Los Angeles, who won the primary, not the
general in November. And also the same with who stacks
up for the governor's race, who's number one and number two?
So why is California? Well, listen to this guy. This
guy is his name is Dean Logan, and he's, I believe,
the recorder of all of this in Los Angeles, and
he doesn't seem to have any problem with the fact
that it's going to take them forever.
Speaker 6: Importing to state that in the days ahead, you will
likely hear from voices, some big voices, some loud voices,
that it's crazy, that maybe it's even stupid that it
takes this long for votes to be counted in California.
I want to emphasize it's not stupid, it's not crazy.
It's actually the law in California. You see, there's the problem.
He says, Well, it's the law, and it never was
the law before. Somebody's passed the law recently where they've
made it so that it's next to impossible for them
to find their results. And okay, we'll get the results someday.
But it does make you wonder why ever, forty nine
of the fifty states can get their results that same evening,
but California cannot. And they are the home of the
biggest technologies companies in the world. They seem to think
there's nothing. Well, the law says, well who wrote the law?
And I'll tell you what the problem is. It's the
mail in ballots. A lot of places have mail in ballots.
State of Washington, state of Oregon, they both have mandatory
mail in ballots to all of their citizens. There's something
wrong with the way California does this. And here's the
problem with mail in ballots, and here's the problem with
where they are with a delay of weeks, if not months,
is that it breeds suspicion. It breeds people going where
all of a sudden they find, oh, they found another
whole case of ballots behind the garbage can out in
the alley.
Speaker 1: Well, we better count those. And so then you get
into that question about where did these other surprise ballots
come from? What was the monitoring of the ballot boxes
where people dropped their ballots. Well, there's it raises lots
of questions and it creates conspiracies. It's not a good
way to do the election. But that's what this Dean
Logan is. The guy he just heard, he's the La
County recorder. He doesn't seem to have any problem with it.
Steve Hilton, who we think is the number one spot
for the runoff for governor, he was talking last night
about how this is driving him crazy.
Speaker 4: To by the end of last night it was something
I don't know. I'm fifty percent counted with it. Nearly
a whole day later, it's about fifty five percent.
Speaker 2: What have they been doing?
Speaker 4: What is going on?
Speaker 7: It is an absolute humiliation and abject failure.
Speaker 1: Truly is a failure, and they looked, They looked really bad.
The guy who knows everything about politics inside and out,
Carl Rove, see what he has to say from this.
I have a one rule that applies to both, which
is that the late ballots tend to come from younger
voters and therefore tend to be a little bit more liberal.
So I would not be surprised if from here on out,
the gap between Bessera and Hilton titans. That is to say,
Besarah moves up Hilton moves a little down, and I
wouldn't be surprised to see the same thing happen in
Los Angeles with the Pratt and Bass, and the third candidate,
who's even more liberal than Bass, is likely to move
up as well. But you know, Steve Hilton is right,
this is just absurd. You know, we are not going
to know the outcome, the final numbers of this for
days and weeks. And the Secretary of State of California
said this is normal. Well, if this is normal, it's
one more reason why California looks like a joke. All Right.
I brought this up a couple of times, as we
call ready. But there's a lot of publicity about on
the main extreme media making sure that you know that
Donald Trump's approval ratings have dropped significantly. So what about
the Democrats. What's not being reported is very I mean
I'm sharing it is that the Democrats are also very unpopular.
So when you look at in fact, they're less popular
than Donald Trump. Yes, so when you look at it,
there's all these surveys that are taken about you're going
to vote Republican? Are you going to vote Democrat? These
vague general questions and Carl weighs in on that, well, look,
I'm not certain how much change there really is. You've
got into the nitty gritty of these measures. How likely
are you to vote, are you served to vote? Et cetera,
et cetera.
Speaker 5: But if you look at just the top line numbers
among all the respondents in the survey in May, it
was fifty six D forty five R. The D's had
a one point advantage. In April it's forty eight forty four,
a four point advance. So the Democrats in the Marquette
survey have dropped two and the Republicans have added one,
which is inside the margin of error. Essentially, if you
look at this one pole, what it suggests is is
that there hasn't been much change. But if there is
any change, it's to the advantage of the Republicans. But
we're losing the big picture. We need to step back.
We're a highly polarized country. We've just gone through a
mid decade redistrict team that has mildly advantage to the Republicans,
and the question is how big a gap do the
Democrats need in order to pull off a significant sweep
in the House of Representatives And having a Democrat advantage
of one ain't much. A Democrat advantage of four is
significantly better. But I'm thinking that they need to have
at least five or six minimum lead in the advantage
on the ballot if they're going to take the House
with a significant margin. The reason is is that so
many seats send me so many more. Democrat seats are
earthurban and hence highly Democrat, and the Republican seats, even
when they're in highly conservative rural America, are not as
conservative as not as Republican as their urban counterparts are Democrats.
So the Democrats right today have an advantage, but it's
likely to reduce a produce a relatively small margin in
the House elections. And remember this is a contest between
two unfavorables. The President's unfavorabilities at forty percent. The Democratic
Party's unfavorability is below thirty seven. So who's less popular?
And how's that going to affect the out here in
great analys. Well, let's check in with Jim Assina. He's
been talking lately. Jim is considered to be the guru
of Democrat campaign managers. He got Barack Obama elected. He's
a very smart guy. He's like Carl Rove.
Speaker 1: He knows the ins and outs of all the things
going on in politics in our country. So he was
asked about his view of how the Democrats are doing.
Speaker 8: That's a myth because we all thought that the ascended
Coalition of Barack Obama was going to save the party.
We're going to have more and more young people, African Americans,
Latinos voting, and we're going to win the national fight
because of it. Until the twenty twenty four election, will
you all have reported on this ad nauseum. You know,
Donald Trump did much better and got to almost parody
with Latino voters, doubled his support with African American voters,
did historically well with young male voters, and yet the
Democrats sort of ignored the seventy two percent of voters
who are white voters and decided it was all about
this ascended coalition. The truth is Barack Obama won two
elections because he did both. He excited his base, but
he also talked to swing voters and turned them out
in big numbers. We have to treat these what we
think our base groups, Latinos, African Americans, young voters. We
have to treat them like persuasion targets, not turnout targets.
We've got to make our case to them. We didn't
in the last election, and if we don't do that
in this midterm, we will lose again.
Speaker 1: Interesting, he basically said, the Democrats focused on all these
various groups, the African Americans and Latinos and all these
other groups, and the seventy two percent of the voters
were white people and they totally ignored them. That was
a mistake. Plus the Republicans focused on minority voters. So
back to Messina, he's talking about every election is not
like the previous election.
Speaker 8: In twenty twenty two, we won an election on abortion,
and that was great and it was a big upset.
But in twenty twenty four, we thought it was the
same election, and yet abortion was the seventh most popular
issue and we lost the economic argument, which was the
number one issue by twelve points. We can't do that. However,
when you look at the demographics and midterm elections in
twenty twenty six shape something much better for Democrats. It
is older voters, it is more women voters, especially upper
educated voters, where Democrats are doing historically well. So if
we can continue to learn the lessons from twenty twenty
four and have a mid term election turnout. We could
do very very well. We've just again got to do
both things. Turn our base out and talk to these
persuadable voters.
Speaker 1: But the problem with well both parties, but the Democrats
are faced with you've got different groups. You've got far left,
you've got moderate, and you've got something in between. And
Harry Enton has been doing a lot of work about
trying to figure out who the Democrats are, and he
says they're having trouble trying to figure out who they are.
Speaker 9: Problem which is Democrats aren't sure what direction they want
their party to go. Democrats want their party to move
left twenty eight percent, not move at all eighteen percent,
move center forty seven percent. This is a party divided
where they're not actually giving a clear message of where
they want their party to go. The one thing I
will say is sixty one percent of all voters want
their party movie at center. So if all of a sudden,
Democrats are actually going to move to the left, which
is not what their party wants, that will actually upset
the rest of the electorate. The only thing that really
unites Democrats right now is they are very upset with
Donald Trump, and I think the candidates were able to
actually capture that. That's the candidate who are going to
advance the general election.
Speaker 1: Yes, but can they win the general election by saying
I hate Donald Trump's vote for me. It hasn't worked.
Hillary tried it, Kamala tried it. So it just it
doesn't work. In other news, John Bolton, who I admire Bolton.
I think he's extremely smart, but he got on the
wrong side of President Trump. He was his national security
advisor in Trump one point zero. He was the UN
ambassador back at George W. Bush's day. But he apparently
would do things I do so things, but I'm not
dealing with national security. He emailed, I will have things
on my computer here at work, and I want to
save them on my personal computer or work on some
project on my personal computer. So I'll email myself some
of the files from my work computer. Well apparently he
did that too. But the problem with the files for
John Bolton was they were national security files and they
he was accused of basically violating all the rules about
classified documents. And they said, you got classified documents on
your personal computer at home? So back and forth they go.
John Bolton who graduated at the top of his class
law school at Yale, so he knows the law, and
apparently he's worked out a deal because today the news
came out he is going to plead guilty to one count.
They had eight counts against him, one count of violating
the National Security Act. John Miller, former counter intelligence guy
with the NYPD, chimes.
Speaker 4: In, well, this is John Bolton caught between Iraq and
a hard place when he wrote this book in the
room where it happened. The Justice Department came out with
a civil suit trying to block the publication because it
had classified material in it. But it's been years later
when the Trump Justice Department, under then Attorney General Pam
Bondi last October, and I think this is a book
that came out in twenty twenty last October, indicted him
on eighteen counts, as Caitlin Pollenz told us, of retaining
classified information, transmitting classified information, and failing to disclose when
it turned out that it was believed that the Iranians
had hacked his computer to government officials that there was
classified information in there. So each one of those eighteen
counts is ten year count for the disclosure of national
defense information. He could have been facing a significant amount
of time in prison if he were convicted. Even if
he was convicted and all of the charges were bundled
into one ten year or five year term, it's a
big risk. So this guilty plea is John Bolton saying,
let's get a recommendation from prosecutors on a sentence, Let's
get a deal with the government. Let's boil this down
to one count and try to get out of it.
Speaker 1: But you heard John Miller talked about the fact that
he was going to publish a book. He was on
the outs with Donald Trump, and so Donald Trump or
somebody in the White House did not want that book published.
So they sued him and said he has national security
documents and information in there. And so it went through
the whole process of being approved to be printed, and
he got approval from whoever approves national secure documents and said, no,
this is fine. He's not disclosing anything that is a
classified document. So they told him it was okay. Then
I have the book in my library, it's been out,
I've read it. I didn't find anything that seemed to
be a national secret. But apparently technically he must have
violated something and you were also John Miller say that
each count has a possible ten year prison sentence. So
Ellie Honig, former Southern District of New York federal prosecutor,
also had some comments.
Speaker 7: I think this case is fundamentally different than those other cases,
than the prosecutions of, for example, Letitia James and Jim
call Me, the attempted prosecution of Senator Mark Kelly, the
other cases that we would consider to be part of
the political payback agenda that Donald Trump has pushed here,
I think the Bolton case is entirely separate for a
couple of main reasons. One, the reporting is that this
investigation goes back to the Biden administration and predates the
current Trump administration. In two, the conduct that John Bolton
has been charged with and now apparently we'll be pleading
to some of it is quite serious. It's quite straightforward.
This is not some manufactured crime, as John Miller just
laid out for us. John Bolton took the highest level
sensitive and classified information which he got in his capacity
as a key White House advisor, and he disseminated it
to others. That is a straightforward crime, and so I
do not categorize the Bolton case along with those other cases.
I think it's fundamentally different.
Speaker 1: Illegally and technically. The answer is yeah, I alway's right,
but I still think it was they went after him
because of the fact that he got sideways with the
President Trump. But now the question is how long of
a sentence is a judge going to give him? Going
to be interesting. Another guy who is on the outs
with a lot of people in Congress, but not on
the outs with President Trump, and that is Bill POULTI
we talked a little bit about it yesterday. He's been
nominated by President Trump to be the Acting Director of
National Intelligence, the head DNI of all our nation's secrets.
And somebody described him yesterday as a political hitman. That's
because as the as the head of the Federal Home
Mortgage Finance Corporation, he went after Lisa Cook over at
the FED, and he went after Adam Schiff, and I
don't know who he hit. All political hits, if you will.
As I mentioned yesterday, he did not go after Scott
Bessen's the Treasury Secretary who has the same problem of
having two homes, in which he claimed that they're both
his primary residents. But regardless, he has no qualifications. He
has no background in intelligence. He came from the Poulti Group,
which is one of the nation's largest home builders. His
grandfather started the company, and the grandfather brought his grandson,
Bill Poulty into the company. And yet after the grandfather died,
the board of directors literally threw Bill Poulty out of
the company. They did not like him. He was nothing
but trouble for them. And he's been not well liked
in the mortgage business either. So Speaker of Mike Johnson
was asked by a reporter today about, well, well, what
are you guys going to do about Bill Poulty?
Speaker 6: Do you think that Bill Poulty is qualified to be
the acting Director of National Intelligence? And do you think
you can still pass a bipartisan fis a deal given
some of the Democratic pushback to that.
Speaker 4: So here's the thing.
Speaker 6: The president obviously has a prerogative, the prerogative and the
choice on po We had points to these positions and
this would be an interim appointment, but.
Speaker 1: He dodged that. But I agree with Mike Johnson, the
president has the right to choose whoever he for the
positions that are especially his cabinet. This is a cabinet
level job. But man alive. Really this guy Roger Chris
and Morphy, big Democrat, he's on the Intelligence Committee, and
he doesn't like this at all.
Speaker 10: Well, it's time to pull Pulty. That was a non
answer from the speaker. He didn't want to voice his
support for this person. And there's a good reason why.
He's completely inexperienced and unqualified for the position as a
member of the Intelligence Committee. I look at this guy
and what I see is that his claim to fame
being a housing official is basically using sensitive information to
go after Donald Trump's political enemies. Now imagine why he's
being hired now to head the intelligence community. It's to
basically use sensitive and potentially classified information to go after
Donald Trump's political enemies. That is completely outrageous. The intelligence
community performs a vital role in telling the truth about
foreign threats, and we cannot have someone so unqualified in
experience with nefarious motives in that position.
Speaker 1: The other thing they're worried about is it's a very
powerful position, being in charge of our national intelligence. Is
to use it to somehow say that the midterm elections
in November are rigged something long. That's what the Democrats
are worried about. We're going to keep an eye on this.
It truly. My two sense is, whoever runs the intelligence
of our country should not be easily aligned with Democrat
or Republican politics. It should be as a political job
as you can possibly find. Problem is, trying to find
somebody like that, especially in today's world, is very, very difficult.
So they're also speaking of fraud. We've got a couple
of things going on. One of them is there have
been you may have seen it on the news where
there are there are riots mostly in the evening, but
certainly on the Saturday, Friday night and Saturday night at
the detention center. It's called Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey,
and Charles Marino, who is a retired Social Secret Service officer,
talks about the fact that this is orchestrated. It is planned,
it is plotted. They use all kinds of whether it's
telegraph or signal or something online. That's that keeps it
a secret. There's lots of supplies, gas masks, you name it.
So this protest against ICE and their facility at Delaney
Hall in Newark, New Jersey is a political hit job.
Here's Charles Marino.
Speaker 2: Well, no surprise that this is all extremely organized and
coordinated on the financial side, on the other material support side,
like these supplies that we see being dropped in the
vicinity of Delaney Hall, and finally also on the communication
side that includes internal communications and external communications, so they're
provided essentially talking points. They're educated about an inch deep
and a mile wide on the issues that they're protesting,
but they're told to use those buzzwords to invite, insite, facilitate,
and basically bring forward everything that we are seeing play
out outside of that detention facility to try and make
it as hard as possible for law enforcement agencies like
the FBI to infiltrate their groups either physically or in
to one of those messaging apps. The other thing is
on the financing side. Unfortunately, we are going to find,
based on the nature of these organizations that are providing
the money, that US tax dollars are being used for
the very behavior that we're seeing, which is very disturbing.
The other thing is the list of private donors to
these organizations. This is likely what the FBI is focusing
on right now. Yes, we know it's from the extreme
radical left, but now it's time we need names. We
need to know who the private donors are and to
confirm that tax dollars are making their way to these
non governmental organizations. We saw this play out during the
Biden crisis, where these NGOs were serving as an extension
of the Department of Homeland Security to facilitate all of
the illegal immigration of unvetted immigrants into the country. We're
going to say the same thing playing out here and
it's got to stop.
Speaker 1: Yeah, people have the right to protest, but that's not
what this is. People are being paid by these NGOs
to go out there and raise havoc and go after
his ice facility, but also border protection. They want to
overthrow our form of government, and this is one of
the ways that they just just keep chipping away to
see if they can make any progress. So they're going
after a lot of the money donors on this because
they're not there to protest. And this afternoon they also
came out in Ohio. Doctor Oz was there, the Attorney
Assistant Acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche. They're there to go
after a fraud that they're finding in the Medicare program
in Ohio. Von Miller again weighs in on the fact
that they're going around state to state to try to
crack down finally to crack down on some really obvious fraud.
Speaker 4: Well, this is a large effort on the part of
the federal government to go state by state and to
look into these programs. You'll recall the Minnesota childcare programs
that were prevalent in the Somali community there and the
fraud that was charged in those cases. They moved on
to Ohio. But we're talking about thirty eight million dollars,
two people charged with felony counts and then two more,
both of them state employees who would have been the
alleged inside people who pushed these billing processes through memet Oz,
the doctor Oz that we saw. He's the head of CMS,
which is the Medicare Medicaid Administration in terms of taking
care of one hundred and sixty million Americans. And they're
talking about rampant fraud in Ohio involving numerous people, and
that the state under Governor Mike Dewain, is about to
suspend forty nine home healthcare outfits that they consider not
necessarily charged in this but high risk for even more frauds.
So I think we'll see more of this story rolling
out in Ohio, and I think we'll see more of
it rolling out in other states. There's a political backdrop here,
which is these are programs that this administration through Congress
has delivered serious cuts to, and there's a narrative that
comes with that, which is not that there aren't people
in need, but these programs are wasteful and subject to
rampant frauds. So some of these cases are going to
be seen as validation of those claims.
Speaker 1: Yes, sir, I mean, I'm glad to see it. It
sounds like the fraud was just so obvious to everybody.
You can put in all kinds of fake claims that
you were treating people for something, and the government wouldn't
even question it. They would send you the money millions
and millions of dollars. So today it's Ohio, a couple
of weeks ago it was Minnesota, California. I think is
also part of the latest active investigations. I hope they
go around the country and crack down on this stuff
so people think twice before they apply for fake claims.
Wall Street, I don't know. You figure it out. Oh.
By the way, again, I want to start a second
podcast that where we take tackle people's financial questions, whether
it's investing, whether it's borrowing, whether it is mutual funds
or stocks or bonds or ETFs, or insurance, or saving
for college, saving for a home purchase, saving whatever it
might be for. We used to do this years ago.
We take calls from people about their about their financial questions,
and I'm getting some emails. Emails are fine as well.
I prefer the calls, but emails work as well. You
can find the phone number and the email address by
going to my website, which is Tom Sullivan dot com.
The phone number, if you have a pen, write it
down eight five five two nine five sixty six hundred
eight five five two nine five sixty six hundred. The
email address simple Tom Sullivan's Show at gmail dot com.
All right, so today I've said you figure it out,
because yesterday we had the biggest drop in years on
the Dow, and today it was up eight hundred and
seventy five points, so it was totally a rebound. And
by the way, most of the stock market gains in
the last I don't know since the beginning of the year,
a lot of it has been around AI and about
tech and the Magnificent seven is there called, and these
are all tech companies that are leading the way with
AI and that that's the future, and everybody's all excited
about it. So the stocks for those companies have been
going up, but they're out of the S and P
five hundred. They're only seven stocks. Most of the other
stocks have been doing some up, some down, but nothing
nothing of great consequence. Well, now we're starting to see,
at least today that the game broadening out. A lot
of the Magnificent seven stocks have not participated today, not
at all. So these are the rest of the stocks
out there in the stock market. The Dow up, like
I said, up eight hundred and seventy four to close
at fifty one thousand and five sixty one. That is
a new record. The S and P up thirty, the
NASDAC see about those tech stocks, was down twenty three points.
The price of gold up thirty nine dollars to four
thousand and five oh four thousand and five oh six,
and oil after again talk about the fact that maybe
we're getting close to a peace agreement. I'll believe it
when I see it. Oil fell almost three dollars, down
to ninety three dollars, still very expensive for one barrel
of oil. So that's it for today. Thank you for
coming by. We will be back again tomorrow and I
hope to see you then tomorrow, and I hope to
see you then