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Hello, and welcome to the DSR Daily. I'm David Rothkoff, joined by Riley Fester and Menas Stein. We're here to talk about the news. We have a whole weekend that we could talk about.
We can went like super fast.
Did have you noticed weekends getting shorter? Do you think the Trump administration is like shaving menets off of weekends and giving them to billionaires? It wouldn't surprise me in the least. Nothing would surprise me at this point.
Yeah. Well, that's the thing, you know.
“As the exploited working class, the billionaires own our time anyway, right?”
That's really true. Power to the tour. Yeah, exactly. Well, let's make the best of it. Go on.
Throw a story out there. Give us your sense of it. Well, but we'll take it from here. Let's go. Well, as predicted, the US Iran ceasefire is on the brink of collapse.
Wait a minute, I thought the war was over. We were celebrating a product. Right. Perhaps we celebrated prematurely because the US Marines seized an Iranian cargo ship, leading Tehran to withdraw from the schedule.
The peace talks in Pakistan and a vowing retaliation. And of course, oil prices surged 6% in response to the escalation. And both nations have now traded more threats about strikes against civilian infrastructure. The ad then, some Iranians said, well, maybe we should talk anyway. The war is not in our interests.
Then Trump is like, yeah, we should, you know. And so here's the thing. We're in a little bit of a game. And what you're seeing happening with stopping these ships and saying things are good and saying things are bad. It's all in negotiation.
You think the negotiation is happening in Islamabad, but it's not. It's actually happening in the straight-of-war moves. It's happening in the airways. And it happens at a variety of ways. So for example, the Iranians know that the thing that Trump doesn't have is time.
So they want to drag it out. The other thing the Iranians know is that the thing that is really intolerable to Trump is pushing up the price of oil. And making markets go down. So they know that every time they push back, it gives them a little bit more leverage. And Trump, on the other hand, still seems to think that he can bully the Iranians into a deal, even though that has not worked at any time.
And so, you know, where is it going to end up? I think Trump's pretty close to doing a mediocre deal that the Iranians will take.
“Because I think we have to remember that the one big thing that Trump has talked about, which is getting rid of nooks having the Iranians promised not to produce a nuclear weapon, is their national policy.”
He just is to dumb or obtuse technology. It was what they agreed to in the JCPOA in 2015. So getting them to agree to that, no big deal. If they can agree to something they've agreed to in the past and get up on to cash released into their system, good for them. As far as, you know, the other promises keeping the straight open, if they can keep the straight open and make some money off of it,
which they were never doing before, then, you know, that's a win for them.
The deal will somehow smell out somewhere around that, who's going to go negotiate. There were, you know, but I went back and forth over the weekend, it would be a T and the VP would go the VP wouldn't go Trump would go Trump wouldn't go there's a team but all optics. I suspect this week there will be meetings, there will be talks, there will be some progress, there will be some pushback.
I think, you know, what I would advise everybody is to have some perspective ...
That'll lead to the nature of the deal. And if you want to understand a little bit more about this, I wrote a whole Substack column yesterday and the five things about the war that aren't really getting played up, that I think are really really important.
“So that's David Rock of Substack and it would called need to know. So go look at that and share it with your friends.”
Okay, men, what are you with?
Well, Joe, Dijonova, a former Trump campaign lawyer and a man instrumental in trying to overturn the election in 2020 has been appointed to lead a wide ranging federal investigation targeting officials who previously investigated Donald Trump. Which is being overseen in excuse me, where else, but Florida aims to examine claims of a long running conspiracy, conspiracy, quote unquote. You sound a little, you sound a little better about your home state.
“You know, it's just like with these stories one day, there's a win for Florida and then we, what is it the saying one step forward three steps back.”
Well, in the case story is like 10 steps back. So well, it's just like it's just what it is, you know, Trump is based in Florida. If Trump could move the national White House to Mara Logo bullseye, he would do it.
You know, he would make it all very Trumpy. He would rename Florida Trump state and he would, you know, he would rename it the United States of Trump.
He, you know, he would do whatever he could get away with and this is really, you know, I mean, that sounds like, oh, yeah, overstatement. This is pretty egregious, because Joe de Genova completely corrupt lawyer who is, you know, one of the president's tools is now going to conduct an investigation. Not into the crime, Trump committed, not following up on all the evidence of those crimes that independent lawyers and investigators from the FBI and other places came up with.
“Investigate the investigators to punish them for, for honoring their oaths and for seeking justice. Now, she'll, what'll happen? Will he indict some people and have those people end up winning in court? Yeah, that's what's going to happen.”
Will he make those people spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to defend themselves? Yeah, because what they're trying to do is penalize them in the court of public opinion. penalize them in their pocket books. It's pretty darned disgusting. You can expect more of this also later this week from Cash Patel. The underfire FBI director who has said, we're going to, we're, we're going to go after some of the president's opponents this week. And that's his desperate attempt to stay in the job that he currently has. And so they all realize what Trump wants is to use the police like the police in a police state, not to uphold the law, but to punish people who are not sufficiently loyal to Trump.
Where is Cash Patel, by the way? I don't know, is he with you? I haven't seen him. No, he looks, I mean, he looks a mess. He was on the TV yesterday. There is an article in the Atlantic on Friday that just blew him up and said he was drunk and said he and he said, I'm going to sue. In fact, he said he will sue them today. But of course, he's not going to sue them. He's just going to threaten to sue them. He may file a sit, but he will never follow through with the suit for a couple of reasons. One of which is he would lose it on its merit.
Second of which, you think Cash Patel wants to do discovery in a lawsuit, where he has to answer under oath all the questions of the people that he is suing.
Because that will put him in a pretty awkward position about the way he is abused as authority or neglected his responsibilities as director of the FBI. And not to mention other things. It might put him in a bad position saying what Trump did or did not approve or say, no way, no way, the lawsuit actually materializes. Well, the Trump administration has started the unenviable task of refunding over $166 billion in tariffs to US businesses after the Supreme Court struck down their use of emergency powers to tax imports.
And as you might expect, while corporations can get their money back, UNI and millions of other normal everyday Americans cannot. And we remain in LA for director. You're characterizing yourself as a normal American. Yes, I would.
Can I get myself as a corporation?
As I like to point out, the 14th amendment of the United States Constitution, which guarantees all equal protection under the law has been used more time since it was passed following the Civil War.
“To protect and identify and expand the rights of corporations who identify it under it as people, then it has been actual people.”
For, for 140, 50 years, the United States has given corporations, which are actually fictional people, which were created to serve the state. And the idea of the corporation is that a business doesn't die when the people run it die and thus continues to provide economic benefit to the state. The whole idea has been turned on its head and we now all work to serve corporations that are kind of super citizens that have more powers and rights and more political influence because they can get money because citizens united and so forth.
You know, communist propaganda. This is just where we are. Now, of course, the tariffs should never have been levied in the first place. They were illegal and imposing them did create a hardship for the corporations.
But as Riley points out, the corporations passed it on to us. So who's going to benefit at the end of this? You may know.
The corporations to some extent, but really the people who own the corporations who, you know, direct windfalls in ways that benefit them stock buybacks and bonuses and so forth. So, you know, more scamming for the oligarchs going on here. Well, speaking of scamming, the Department of Justice demanded access to about 865,000, 2024 ballots and election materials from Wayne County. It's part of a broader investigation into election integrity. They really want to investigate election integrity. I would start by looking in the mirror and I'm not a lawyer. So that's just a piece of
“unknowing advice. Well, well, it's informed by facts. But, you know, again, what have we ended up with? You know, they are systematically trying to get voter rolls. Why? Why?”
They don't have any right to the voter rolls. A lot of states are fighting back against it. But they want the voter rolls so they can identify people on the voter rolls. Who they feel are not. Who they would like to intimidate away from voting or they would like to disqualify from voting and so forth. This is all part of an effort to manipulate the elections to steal the elections. A job which is growing more urgent for them, not just because we're getting closer to the elections every day. But every single day, there is a new pollout that shows Donald Trump, the Republicans and Congress Republican Party and the policies they stand for deeper and deeper underwater. Roughly two thirds of Americans do not approve of the war in Iran.
Okay? And that bottom third, they always approve of Trump or they don't understand the question. Or their lion. It's probably more than two thirds of Americans. Nobody likes the war.
So things are getting worse and if you can't win fair, then you're going to try to cheat and that's just what they're going to try to do.
“We of course will be here and we will point this out to them pointed out to you, bring in experts to point it out throughout the week because that's what we do here at the DSR Network.”
So please follow us here at the DSR Network. Subscribe to our podcast somewhere at the DSR Network.com or easier yet for you go to YouTube, subscribe to the DSR Network. And you'll get lots of streaming content and the chance to provide comments to us, which we will then use to guide what we're doing. And we may read them in the podcast, you know, Riley and minute, we could go when you find good comments. Let's talk about them right here on the podcast. For now, we're ready for Monday. You're ready for Monday. Let's all go Monday. We'll see you soon.
