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Hello and welcome to the DSR Daily.
I'm David Rothkuff. Today I'm joined by Riley Fessler.
“Menestine is at an undisclosed location.”
How are you doing today, Riley? Pretty good. We've made it to a Friday that used to seem like not such a big deal, because it happened every week. But these days with all the crap that's going on, making it through another week seems like an achievement. Let's talk a little bit about, let's go down right now this week, next week.
Well, for today's big story, President Trump dismissed home insecurity, Secretary of Christy and Nome following a contentious congressional hearing regarding her agency's 220 million dollar advertising campaign. The firing was triggered by Nome's testimony claiming the President had personally authorized the lavish spending and assertion Trump later denied and reportedly reacted to it with significant anger. While the spending dispute was the final straw, her Oster followed a year of mounting scandals involving allegations of infidelity.
The mismanagement of FEMA's workforce and friction with other agency leaders. Senator Mark Wayne Mullen has been selected as her replacement to lead the department's aggressive immigration agenda and the execution of mass deportations. Yeah, I mean, what a story, right? Because it was Christy down fired because her people shot Americans in the street. No, was she fired because they seriously violated the legal rights and fundamental freedoms of American people down.
“Was she fired because her agency's scores and scores of times ignored court orders?”
No, all that stuff which should have led for her to be impeached and possibly even prosecuted wasn't it. What she did was she bumped into the fragile ego of a tottering president and he had to flex his muscle and he kicked her out. Of course, most of the things that she did wrong were directors, not of her actions, but of her following the direction of Stephen Miller, the guy they refer to in the White House as the prime minister. The evil mastermind of putting up concentration camps across America, rounding people up American citizens, people of every right to be illegally, people who are in the legal process of becoming immigrants and sending them off to foreign jails or beating them or otherwise punishing them.
Yes, I mean, you know, she should have been fired. She should never have been hired and she should have been fired when she broke all these laws and she should have been fired when she showed contempt for our legal system and she should have been fired when she hired her lover and put him on the payroll and you know had him berating members of the US military.
All those things should have happened but but triggered it was the president'...
Well, a guy that is truly done more than a box of rocks. I mean, all you got to do is Google Senator Mark Wayne Mullin of Oklahoma, and you will see examples of him like calling out people during senators and say wanted to beat him up or of him saying we're in a war. We're not in a war. We're in a war. We're not in a war. Or, you know, him just being the loyalist redneck that Trump really wants in his administration that should be worrying to everybody because this Congress will probably approve him.
He will probably get into this job, and then this episode, who, by the way, has zero homeland security experience, zero border experience zero experience with any of the issues involved will not only be responsible for this vast portfolio and this incredibly huge budget, which was given to DHS, but he's also going to play a key role and how are elections unfold on how we treat foreign interference and the elections.
Whether or not we deploy federal troops to the city's dirty elections. And of course, we know that if these elections were free and fair, Trump will lose big.
“And so he's going to do everything in his power to metal with them. And that's why he needs a guy who will say whatever you want, boss, as opposed to somebody with an actual functioning brain.”
So is it possible we are going from bad to worse? Thanks, Texas Congressman Tony Gonzalez has with drawn his reelection bid following his admission of an affair with a staff member Regina Santos Avila, who it died by suicide in September 2025. The announcement came after Republican House leadership issued a joint statement calling for him to end his campaign. And as the House Ethics Committee launched an investigation into potential sexual misconduct. Though Gonzalez previously dismissed the allegations as a coordinated attack, he recently confirmed the relationship, while maintaining that it was unrelated to his staffer's tragic death.
His departure follows a failed primary showing and marks a sudden and his congressional career amid mounting pressure from both his party and federal investigators.
But what I want to do is not to be a part of the whole studio. The semester-by-tag labed Tobicher Soft behind the internet, so it's a master's real-time.
I'm saying you can say that you're a jerk.
“You're a jerk, right? But you don't believe it.”
No, it's not. It's a fake news. It's a real deal. It's a real deal. And if you then know how to do it, you'll be able to catch it. That's right. What a deal.
You're going to get a deal.
Now, you're going to try it out. Amazon beat it all. Frischgabakinen Eltern in the Logistik Center in extra-family in Boni.
“So, we're going to see if he's going to get his new job in the evening.”
Your glutes are for you, the most beautiful girl in the world. That means you're the most beautiful girl in the world. But you're not that the pressure from his party is not for him to resign, which is what he ought to do. He ought to be out of the Congress today. He ought to be up and out of the Congress months ago. They don't want to do that.
They want him to remain in Congress until there can be an election. Why? Because the Republican majority in the Congress is so thin. So, you know, they're deal with the devil as well. Let's keep this guy who obviously violated a whole parcel of rules in place.
Because it's in our political interest to do that. It's ugly. It's almost as disgusting as what this guy did and what his actions led to. But it's par for the course. This is the party of Epstein, of Trump, of sexual misconduct, of worse than that, of corruption.
This is that party, behaving exactly as you would expect it to. The Justice Department has released 16 additional pages of Epstein related FBI records after an NPR investigation revealed that dozens of documents involving a decade-old sexual abuse allegations against President Trump were being withheld. The newly published files, a detail a woman's claim that as a minor in the early 1980s, she was introduced to Trump by Jeffrey Epstein and subjected to a violent sexual encounter.
Despite this disclosure, 37 pages remain missing from the public database, leading the House Oversight Committee to vote to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi for further explanation. The White House has dismissed the claims as untrue and sensationalist, maintaining that the president has been totally exonerated and remains a proponent of transparency regarding the Epstein files.
Come on!
I mean, this is one of the biggest nastiest, ugliest and stupidest cover-ups in American history. A lot of the documents that they're hiding were documents that were out there before that people know are out there.
“That's how this little release happened.”
But there are 3 million pages of documents that haven't been released, only half the documents have been released,
even though there was a law passed saying they had to release all of these documents. And, you know, the question hangs in there. Why? Why? Why? Why are they hiding these things? Why aren't they releasing them on time? Why are they, you know, saying the president has been completely exonerated when he clearly has not? What are they afraid of? Well, of course, they're afraid of the facts. And, you know, they've got wars going on all around the world.
There's wars going on in Latin America, wars going on in Africa, wars going on in the Middle East, wars going on that we are involved in in the European continent. And, all sorts of other distractions being thrown out there, and yet the Epstein story does not go away.
Because it's a horrible story of abusive women, because those women have never received justice,
because over 1,200 women allegedly were involved in this sex trafficking ring, because powerful people were involved, because the most powerful of those people is currently the president of the United States. And, because of what has been described as the sense of impunity of the Epstein class, because this story illustrates the nature of our society, where if you are rich and if you are powerful, you believe you can get away with anything that laws are for little people.
“That's why Epstein's not going away. That's why these lies won't cut it.”
And, that's why you can expect later this year this thing to blow up even more profoundly than it has thus far.
U.S. military investigators have tentatively concluded that American forces were likely responsible
for a weekend strike on a girl's school in Minab, Iran, which reportedly killed 150 students. The incident occurred during the opening days of a joint U.S. Israeli offensive, with U.S. operations specifically focused on targeting naval and military sites in southern Iran. While the defense secretary Pete Heggseth confirmed that an official investigation is on her way, the White House and State Department have emphasized that the U.S. military does not intentionally target
civilian infrastructure. As the United Nations calls for a transparency inquiry into the potential war crime, the Pentagon is awaiting further evidence to make a final determination on the source of the lethal attack.
“Yeah, this is a disgusting story, of course, and their side stories was this targeted”
with AI and does this represent kind of problems that are associated with using AI for targeting. But, you know, let's pull the camera back a little bit here and see what we're talking about. There are already a thousand dead civilians in Iran as a result of this war. When you carpet bomb a country, when you bomb the big cities of a country, you are going to kill lots of civilians. And so a decision was made by the President of the United States
to unleash the fury of the United States military alongside the fury of the Israeli military. Against a country knowing that thousands of civilians would be killed, knowing that thousands of others would suffer as a consequence of this whole thing. For no reason, it's an illegal war. There was no imminent threat. Everybody knows that. And yet, here we are. So, yeah, the Girl School is bad, but all the other lives lost.
All the other families, grieving. All the other people who are enduring unimaginable pain. Those are also bad stories. And we shouldn't push the matter of our mind with a single word. Oh, this is a war. Or with the kind of dismissive attitude that Trump is used both towards them and towards Americans. Both Americans who might die in this war and Americans here who might be targeted by terrorists.
He said it multiple times that it's a war in a war people die. I guess that happens. Disgusting. Disgusting. That's where we are. And that's where the U.S. why the U.S. is now a rogue state. It is considered one of the world's rogue states that is not a reliable ally
that violates international law, seriously, that causes death and pain and suffering.
That's what you elected in 2024.
That's what we all have to live with because we didn't find a way to find an alternative.
“The U.S. labor market showed unexpected weakness in February with employers cutting”
92,000 jobs in the unemployment rate climbing to 4.4%. While wage growth remained at relatively healthy at 3.8%. Job loss is expanded nearly all major sectors, including a notable decline in health care, which it would be partially to a major nurse's strike in California. Economists suggest the slowdown may be a result of both cooling demand
and are restricted labor supply following the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. This data is expected to spark intense debate at the Federal Reserve's upcoming March meeting as officials weigh the need for rate cuts against persistent inflation risks fueled by the conflict in the Middle East.
Yeah, I don't envy those people on the Fed because every sign that you see from this economy is a bad sign.
Terrible job numbers. For the whole past year and a half or so, since Trump came to office, certainly inflation still there, taking up in some areas, clearly this war is going to cause it to tick up in other areas. This war is going to cause global economic upsets as the traits of our moves are closed off. Oil and gas can't make its way out of that region mostly to Asia, but these are global markets,
and it has effects on us. You know, we have people in this country, you know, touting like the President, the stock market, but the stock market is not an indicator of what the underlying situation is. And what the underlying situation is, according to one Wall Street observer I was reading yesterday,
is that there is effectively a recession going on.
And the recession is being masked because there are a few companies, big companies, tech companies, AI companies that are doing well. So you have a recession hiding inside of a bubble. When the bubble bursts, the recession will get worse.
“Is this President able to even acknowledge that there are problems?”
No, as late as today, I saw him being interviewed with people. And he said, no prices are good, prices are not going up. This is a fake news. So he sent an aisle. He's pursuing incredibly bad policies for the economy.
He fired huge numbers of people in the government saying, oh, well, they'll find other jobs. And they didn't, he is promoting, you know, sort of unregulated free for all in AI sector, which is going to cause a lot of job dislocation. He's fighting multiple wars, which have these consequences. He's giving big tax cuts to billionaires while making everybody else suffer.
Kicking tens of millions of people off of health care and so forth. So that'll mean more bankruptcies.
“And because of the tax cuts and because of the wars.”
The U.S. budget deficit is burgeoning to record levels. Trump is one of the great contributors to the growth of the United States budget deficit, which puts a lot of pressure on us. That puts pressure on the dollar. The dollar has fallen a lot since Trump took office.
It's a mass folks. It's not just one little headline. It's a lot of headlines that connect together in a lot of stories that aren't being told that should be told. But right now, the economy's not in good shape. And there is no sign that it's going to get better sooner.
Indeed, if bubbles burst, this could be a very rough year economically. Comforting? Comforting? Well, it's end on happy, happy, happy, happy Friday. Um, look, you know, we just have to tell it like it is here.
I hope everybody will spend some time, like go listen towards matter with normal and Stina and I we did it with Mary Trump yesterday was a great show. Go listen to the two shows that we did this week on this Iran war with leading experts like the former Secretary of the Army, like the former Secretary of the Air Force, like leading experts on arms proliferation and on the region. Um, uh, the great Silicon justness we did on this huge story that is, you know, been hidden by all of this,
which is the Pentagon pressuring AI companies into dealing their product to them without any guidelines or rules. There's just a lot going on. We are trying to stay on top of it. And of course, you've got our daily and you've got, uh, the new republic's daily, which we also produce.
If you've got time to speak and listen to those things, we'll be back with mo...
with more coverage of US politics, with more coverage of the things that you care about.
Um, starting on Monday.
“So we'll see you then and in the meantime, have a good weekend.”
Have a good weekend, Riley.
Bye, bye everybody. [music] [music]
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