In this episode of IHIP News, Jennifer Welch, Josh Welch and Angie Sullivan react to a series of political stories. They discuss a White House counsel letter warning Representative Robert Garcia about oversight investigations, and leaked reports of a heated Trump-Netanyahu phone call about Iran.
The hosts also cover allegations about Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Nvidia, departures from the Justice Department, and a death after deportation from ICE detention. Their views are opinion-driven and critical of the administration; listeners get the hosts' commentary on each story, along with a defense lawyer's account of immigration cases.
In this episode Angie Sullivan, Jennifer Welch, Josh Welch
This IHIP News episode on the leaked Trump-Netanyahu shouting match was made with the technology behind HappyScribe's automatic meeting notes.
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All right, the White House is terrified of upcoming investigations, as they should be—pop this up. Jake Sherman is reporting via the Punch Bowl News. The White House counsel warned Democratic Representative Robert Garcia, Democrat of California, the incoming House Oversight Committee chair, in a new letter that some of the new majority's investigations could cross the line into criminal behavior. So the threats are—are ramping up.
These people in the White House allegedly committed crimes, and instead of having accountability and saying, "We welcome the transparency, we can't wait to be sworn in and stand in front of Congress and talk about, you know, all of these things that we're doing," what do they want to do? They want to charge and threaten and intimidate Robert Garcia like mob bosses, Josh.
Well, I mean, and this is the White House counsel too, he's not even a prosecutor, so what he thinks is criminal or isn't criminal is irrelevant. Like, he doesn't have the ability to charge anyone with a crime. But aside from that, it's complete and utter bullshit, his interpretation of what's happening here. Basically what he's saying is, you know, we're going to threaten to charge you with a crime if you decide to conduct oversight over what we know is a corrupt organization, which is the White House, which is the president, which is his family. I mean, they don't want this looked at, but, you know, Trump takes intimidation tactics to an all-new level.
Right.
Like, he really does. He'll—he'll pull out all the stops, and I know you had Congressman Garcia on recently. He's not afraid of that, nor should any—any of them be, because they're performing a legislative purpose, which is oversight, and it's necessary with this corrupt agency. So, for lack of a better word, that letter, you could throw it up, you could rip it up, throw it in the trash can, because it's complete trash.
It's funny you say that, because Garcia, when I interviewed him yesterday, he said he had received letters previously, and he did exactly that. Something pertaining to Elon Musk a couple of years ago. He took the letter, ripped it up, and put it in the trash. And this doesn't speak—this doesn't bode well. This is not the way innocent people behave. If you are—if you are wrongly accused of something, you are welcoming an exoneration, and these people don't want that. Pumps, I can tell you're dying to tell us something.
Well, I'm—I'm going to ask a question to Josh. When I first saw this, I was like, isn't this obstruction? Could it be considered obstruction?
It could be if you had a Department of Justice that would be interested in making that case. But yeah, they're trying to prevent—you're trying to intimidate a committee member from pursuing an investigation. That—that definitely can be construed as obstructing an investigation. Of course, you would need a Department of Justice to—to be able to look at it and file the charge, but yeah, it's a crime in and of itself to try to deter, intimidate, or threaten someone not to conduct or perform their legislative duties.
That's a really good point, Pumps. I mean, really, like—
Well, I mean, that was just the first thing I thought.
In a normal world, that's what it would be, and—and it would be criminal to do such a thing. But I do—I did ask Garcia, and he said the—the—the Oversight Committee has a lot of powers to, you know, subpoenas and all sorts of things, so they need to make sure they will do the every extent, and I'm certain that Robert Garcia will. He is a fighter. He is not scared. He knows he's on the right side of history. And most importantly, he knows he's living in this historical moment as to what he does and how important it is.
All right. Details of Trump's phone call with Netanyahu have been leaked. Pop this up. Trump and Netanyahu held an unusually heated phone call focused on Iran that was a, quote, "shouting match from hell"—from hell, Israeli officials tell Net. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that properly or not. During the call, Netanyahu eagerly pushed Trump to resume major combat operations against Iran while figures inside and outside the White House try to block it, Israeli officials say.
Iran is working to renew the nuclear threat. The only way to permanently remove this existential threat is by toppling the Ayatollah regime, Netanyahu also claimed during the call. He warned Israel would soon face international pressure to accept a nuclear Iran and the survival of the regime. I think that there has just been a complete repudiation in this last vote, bipartisan, honestly. Nobody wants the United States of America doing the work and executing the wishes of a war criminal, Benjamin Netanyahu.
If he were to touch down in Spain right now, he would be met with bracelets and hauled off to The Hague. We are a bad actor now in the world. He's able to come over here and he gets standing ovations in Congress. He's bought up via these PACs, these secret PAC moneys, all under the APAC umbrella. Tons and tons and tons of American politicians. The American people do not wish to be partners with a war criminal that is committing a genocide and now wants to balkanize Iran because at some point in the future they want to go over and gobble up to expand Israel more so that they can actually build a country that has natural resources, which Iran is super, super rich in.
Josh.
Well, and—and I'm thinking to myself, you know, didn't Trump just say he was going to pull back aid from Israel? I mean.
Right.
Now he's having a conversation about re-upping these—the bombing attacks. I mean, it's—we have a leader, we have a commander in chief that is incompetent to be in that position. And the fact that we're in this thing with Israel, I know we say this every single day, but I don't know how else to explain it. Like, why are we catering to Israel? Like, the—the election just showed that that was unpopular. It's a repudiation of the war. You lost everything because of this war. And so Donald Trump's just not fit to make these decisions.
And then, you know, we get into Hegseth's not either, but we can't seem to get enough people to get him out to vote. So I—it's a cluster.
Pumps, this is right in your wheelhouse. There's a major scandal breaking in the MAGA world. Pop this up. Scoop: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, also referred to as Howard Nutlick—Nutlick on the interwebs—was sent a highly classified memo warning about Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's relationship with suspected Chinese spy Alice Wong. No relation. Lutnick, aka Nutlick, oversees the agency charged with keeping sensitive U.S.
technology out of the hands of American adversaries. The warning raises questions about how the department weighed potential security risks as it cleared Nvidia chip sales to Chinese-affiliated entities. Before you respond, it's incredible to me that the conservative argument is that women can't lead because we're so emotional and all of these things. These guys get honeypotted out the wazoo, left and right. It's easy to—it's just so easy to honeypot these guys.
You just put, you know, a hot Chinese spy in front of them, honeypot them. This guy—this—this Jensen Huang, you guys, no prenup.
Right.
If his wife files for divorce, it would be an $81 billion settlement. And then, of course, Howard Lutnick, who know—you know, he—he doesn't care that Jeffrey Epstein is a pedophile. He doesn't care about any of this shit. It's just all personal enrichment.
That's what I was going to say. When I saw this, you know, you've got Trump saying, "Well, I may have been—somebody may have told me that it was a spy thing," but it just didn't really register or send words to that effect. And you have Howard Lutnick going on and saying, "Well, you know, I backed away from Epstein," and then we find out, no, he's lying. Trump has everybody invest in crypto. He—you know, he makes a gazillion dollars, everybody else goes broke. Same with Truth Social and on and on and on. At the end of the day, something that we all as a country have to come to terms with, Donald Trump and Howard Lutnick and every other person in this administration, they simply do not give a flying frog's fat ass about the American people.
They simply do not. What they want is personal wealth, personal enrichment. Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, I mean, I could go on until my head fell off. And then until we decide, the president of the United States and all of his cabinet members, or at least most of them, in my opinion, are working for themselves and enriching their family and their allies, period. Everything else is just, you know, an exercise in futility because to think that Howard Lutnick would say, "You know what, I'm not going to take my percentage of this sale because I'm worried about the ethics involved," while he sits and works for an adjudicated rapist, convicted fraudster.
We're asking too much. We're—this is beyond what they are capable of as human beings.
Well said. All right, Josh, there's a new report on Trump's DOJ. Pop this up. As wave of DOJ leaders depart, official warned U.S. attorneys this week to get on a wartime footing for Trump or consider leaving the ship with the others. Josh.
I think that the lawyers have spoken and they have decided to leave the ship with others. That's what—that's what we're reading about in the headlines every day. You're seeing DOJ lawyers leave because, you know, the last thing you want to do is man up for Trump right now in a federal—federal courtroom in front of a federal judge. That's not a good idea. It's not very popular across the country to flex that, that, "Hey, I'm pro-Trump and I'm here to, you know, say all this shit on his behalf." So, you know, DOJ is a mess.
It's a mess and it's all a mess because of Todd Blanch. He's got no morals. You see him.
Man.
He makes it clear that he and his agency are representing Donald Trump and any cabinet official that may be represented or that may be investigated by an oversight committee, and that's a clear abuse of the Department of Justice. That agency, in theory, is to prosecute, is to be objective and prosecute cases that they find have merit, not to be a personal pit bull for the president to threaten his political opponents or try to leverage people to do what he wants to do. And that's what he uses it for.
That's the primary purpose of DOJ right now. It's not to seek justice. It's for him to be able to say, "If you don't do this, I'm going to do this, and I'm going to have DOJ do this, or I'm going to have FBI do this." That's how this guy operates. And that's tarnished this agency and other agencies and will for decades moving forward. I mean, the shit they've got to clean up at DOJ after this administration leaves will take a long time.
And I just want to say that the Democrats have an opportunity here messaging-wise because the Republicans falsely propagandize and pathologically lie to the American people. We're the party of law and order. We back the blue. We support the troops. It's all a lie. It's all bullshit. They support a criminal enterprise. They have turned the Department of Justice upside down. And here's the problem with that. If you're a fiscal conservative and you care solely about the economy and you're a trickle-down economics guru, which was also a fucking jet stream of bullshit, if you do not have a Justice Department to where businesses can take a contract in and litigate, you do not have an economy any longer.
And ultimately, as quickly as they have turned the Department of Justice upside down goes against any sort of economic stability in the United States economy, and we don't have to look very far to see what happens in real time. You see what happens in Russia when you turn the rule of law upside down and you usher in elites and an oligarchy, and then you have the courts that are completely corrupt, like our Supreme Court. The Supreme Court isn't ruling for Trump. The Supreme Court is ruling for capital, for the capitalist businesses, the oligarchs, the elites.
That's corporations. And ultimately, when this happens, all of this U.S. dollar and us being this, you know, economic juggernaut, it goes away. It completely goes away. And this is why it's fascinating to me, because Russia is in a very horrible position with their economy because of what I just mentioned. They turn the rule of law and everything upside down. And their—their currency isn't worth hardly anything. And we are bending the knee to a very weakly positioned Vladimir Putin because I believe our president is somehow, in many ways, compromised by him.
But Pumps, there's another heartbreaking story, and these are just all the time out of ICE detention. And this—this makes me so sad because we could literally just all day, every day, report on what's happening, what our tax dollars are paying for. Pop this up. Awful. A family pleaded with ICE to deport their ill father so he could get out of detention. They even offered to pay for plane tickets, but ICE kept him jailed for two months after he accepted removal, his health deteriorating daily.
He died hours after he was finally deported.
I would just say my response to this is when you have people in charge and you have a government and you have voters that thought this would be a great idea and, you know, a little bit of my faith has been restored in voters after the midterms, but when you dehumanize people to the level that you put them in cages, that you take them away from their family, that you deny them proper health care, that women have miscarriages and/or give birth in detention centers and the baby dies, when you have dehumanized people so much and you sit there and say, "We are pro-life," you are not pro-life.
What you are is pro-my life, my, you know, my allies, my family's life. This is—this is so stunningly sad, but it is happening every day. You have little kids who are put in the position of representing themselves in court when they're taken away from their parents. These—it's inhumane. This is what toxic empathy—they're running around saying empathy is toxic. If you do not have empathy for somebody dying in front of you while you have them locked up many, many, many without due process, no criminal charges, and you sit there and banter about how great you are for life, you are a hypocrite and you are going against everything you stand for every day.
And it's such a clear picture when it comes to ICE. It is—it is so breathtakingly despicable what these people are doing, and they don't give a shit. They simply do not care.
No, because MAGA is a death cult. All of their policies lead to death. They can clip this up and pop it all over the internet, but their policies always lead to cruelty and death, which they never condemn. They never condemn these things. And they're just hypocrites that weaponize faith and put it in their—in their bios, Christian, you know, or some Bible verse, and they weaponize their faith to justify cruelty. They are the exact opposite of the central character in the Bible, Jesus Christ, who would have shown this person that was incarcerated and their mercy and help.
And this guy is not even a criminal. These people have paperwork issues. The majority of the people detained have paperwork issues. They're human beings. And I would argue they're a million times better human beings than all of the people that cheerlead this administration. And leaving the last one here, this dipship from our home state, Mark Wayne Mullen, doubles down on mass deportations. Before you play the clip, I want to remind everybody, Mark Wayne Mullen, every Sunday on his Twitter feed, puts up all these Bible verses.
And this is what needs to be called out. These duplicitous hypocrites that put out, "Oh, I'm with Jesus, I'm with God, I'm doing all of these great things." But he's all down on this mass deportations, which are so incredibly inhumane. Our government is sending people to countries that they have no affiliation with just to be cruel because MAGA is a death cult that traffics in recreational cruelty because these people are so fucking broken.
Play the clip.
Off the streets, right?
I hear you.
But he promised mass deportations, which are still wildly popular among Republican voters.
We haven't slowed down at all. We've reprioritized what we're doing by going after the worst of the worst, by getting the murderers and the rapists and child predators and drug bangers and cartel members. And keep in mind, we arrested 2,268 terrorists since President Trump's been in office.
I mean, that's the kind of shit we got to put up with in Oklahoma. Like, people here think that guy's smart.
No.
You know? I mean, seriously. And then, so, like, when I leave here and go to court and put a suit on and I'm dealing with those guys. That's who I'm dealing with. So.
But also, let's just point out the MAGA electorate thinks Donald Trump is masculine and smart.
Yeah. I mean, that.
Right. You know.
Yeah. That guy's in that position, though, for one reason.
Right.
And that is because he will do any fucking thing that Donald Trump says to do. That's the only reason. He's not there for his intellect.
No.
He's not there for his conviction or his leadership or anything. It's because Donald Trump can say jump and he's going to say how high. Period. And, you know, listening to him speak and it's—it's maddening. I mean, it's—and Pumps is right about an earlier point she made. Like, they don't care. These people don't care if they hurt people. I think that's kind of the point of it. Like, they might even relish it, that if they can—if they can make a symbolic person an example of and make their life miserable and use that as an example as to what they're going to do to other people, that's the point of what they're doing.
And that's why it's so easy to double and triple down against guys like that. Like, when I just go irate on a—on a tirade about this shit, it's because nobody—you know, with what I do as a defense lawyer, I stand up for people in a courtroom. And I'll never forget, I had this one client, a young Black man, and I looked at him and I said, "Look, I'm getting ready to stand up. We're in a preliminary hearing." And I said, "Look, I'm going to—I'm getting ready to stand up and I'm going to treat that police officer the exact same way that he treated you when he arrested you. So watch this." And that young man's face lit up because they don't have people that advocate for him.
They don't have people that stand up and—and want to fight for them. And it's the same way with all these immigrants that are detained unlawfully. They don't have anybody to stand up for them. And that's what lawyers do. That's what I do day to day. That's what other lawyers that take these immigration cases, they become the voice for these people when they don't have a voice. And it means something to them. That young Black man I represented, his face lit up and, God, after I chewed out that police officer on the stand and ripped his ass, that—that young man's face lit up and you could see that nobody had ever done that for him, especially in a courtroom in front of a judge.
And so that's why I get so fired up about this shit. I hate guys like Mark Wayne Mullen's. I would relish in an opportunity to cross-examine him or get in his ass about something and not back down from it. And we'll continue to do that on this podcast and I'll continue to do it in a courtroom when I leave this podcast.
And we all need to really advocate for these undocumented and/or immigrants in this community because how we treat the most marginalized defines who you are.
Right.
That's—that how you vote, if you vote for the most marginalized person in the community over your own personal interest, 5% less in tax or whatever it is, that defines who you are. And that's what this whole thing is about. And we want to really, really advocate because we firmly believe here none of us are free until all of us are free. All right. Make sure you're subscribed here on YouTube. If you are an audio listener, wherever you get your podcasts, buy my book, Not Today Fascist, and we'll be back later with more news.
Trump and Netanyahu are blaming each other for their collective failure in Iran.
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