Evan McMorris-Santoro & Dr. Annie Andrews

**Molly Jong-Fast** (0:00)
Hi, I'm Molly Jong-Fast, and this is Fast Politics, where we discuss the top political headlines with some of today's best minds and the Treasury unveiled fresh photos of Donald Trump's $1 coin.
We have such a great show for you today. Notus' own Evan McMorris-Santoro stops by to talk about Trump needing nearly $90 billion, more money for his foreign war adventures. Then we'll talk to Dr. Annie Andrews about her run for Senate in the state of South Carolina. But first, the news.

**Jesse Cannon** (0:36)
So, Molly, it's a rare day in America where we have confirmation hearings of two of Trump's biggest sycophants. And, you know, we usually get one at a time. But, you know, in the Trump world, you get flooded with news every day. So we have to have two incompetent morons show their incompetence at once.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (0:56)
OK, so there are two different hearings. There's Jay Clayton, who will take the Bill Pulte position if he gets confirmed. This is an incredible bit of Trumpism here. Trump puts Bill Pulte into a job that he is absolutely not qualified for in any stretch of the imagination. He is, right now, our nation's top spy, Bill Pulte. You will remember him as being a housing executive with absolutely no experience with anything except he was like a Twitter troll, and that's how Donald Trump got to know him. He is the guy who found mortgage fraud conveniently. Whenever the president had an enemy, he could go to Bill Pulte and Bill Pulte would find mortgage fraud in the vein of somebody saying that their second house was not their second house or maybe just not making that disclosure in a way that Bill Pulte deemed to be appropriate. I mean, this is where we are. So, what's the story here? Jay Clayton, he is being interviewed. He is testifying right now in a confirmation hearing in the Senate with half of the senators. The other half of the senators are interviewing Todd Blanch. Todd Blanch is up for AG.
He is very slick, very good at presenting an image of an attorney general, but he is very much a Trump sycophant. Some of the things that are happening, I just want to go through what we've seen in these hearings for a minute. We've had a lot of Democrats trying to get...
One of the things that were a couple of Republicans pushed Blanch on his refusal to put anything in writing, that his anti-weaponization fund, remember the 1776 fund, which was a $1.8-ish billion that we're going to go to people who had felt they had been mistreated by the Justice Department. He refuses to put that on paper, but he says it's dead. A couple of Republicans pushed him on that. Then we had also Todd Blanch say that we don't have... He said to Kennedy, who was a Republican, other than himself, who do you think Mr. Epstein trafficked young women to? Blanch says we don't have evidence of other men. That is demonstrably not true. There's all sorts of other stuff here. We really did see Blanch get pushed by Democrats and Republicans on the many things he's responsible for. He also, Epstein, and signing off on Trump's insane IRS, will not audit stuff, I think, are the two main headlines of the Blanch hearings.

**Jesse Cannon** (3:47)
Pretty remarkable stuff there, and yeah, it really is what we're seeing there is that they really keep doing that thing of like, what? This is the first time hearing of this thing and...

**Molly Jong-Fast** (3:58)
Right. Well, I'm shocked to see gambling in this casino.

**Jesse Cannon** (4:01)
Yep. So interestingly, one of the most egregious things from our previous election was when Elon Musk was giving away $1 million checks to people for them voting. Well, it's looking like we're getting closer and closer to having him pay a consequence for them.

**Molly Jong-Fast** (4:17)
This is one of the insane things that the richest man in the world before he or during his time working in the government, the richest man in the world who got rich from government subsidies, that guy likely broke the law by giving voters $1 million, a Wisconsin board said. So you'll remember that while he was working as a special government employee, he went to Wisconsin to hand out $1 million checks to voters in the 2025 state Supreme Court election. So there are two complaints and they are going to decide whether or not to bring criminal charges over violating the state law against election bribery. Prosecutors have 40 days to report back to the commission. This is man who is the first trillionaire. He is the largest Republican donor. He made his money on environmental.