Maria Comella and The Trio: Holy Schmitt, That Was Bad

Tim Miller (0:12)

Hello, and welcome to The Bulwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We got a double header for you today in segment two. For the first time, we're bringing the trio to the Daily Feed. We're going to be discussing Byron Donalds' ex, revealing some pretty crazy history, and Candace is maybe a lesbian, so, I don't know. Stick around for the candy at the end. That'll be good. But first, she's a political strategist and advisor. She was chief of staff to former governors Andrew Cuomo and Chris Christie. She also worked on Christie's 2024 presidential campaign. Went about as well as the presidential campaigns I worked on. And she also advised Kamala Harris a bit on reaching out to GOP voters. It's a long overdue inaugural visit to the show, Maria Comella. What's up, girl?

Maria Comella (0:52)

Hi, it's good to be here. It is a long overdue. It's like years in the making.

Tim Miller (0:56)

Years in the making. I forget what happened.

We're going to bring you on to do like debate analysis and something crazy happened. And, you know, time is a flat circle.

Maria Comella (1:07)

It is.

Tim Miller (1:07)

Something else took over besides the debate, who knows. But such is life. We're here now.

Maria Comella (1:12)

And it turns out most of what we'd be talking about is probably still similar.

Tim Miller (1:17)

You were invoked twice on the Liz Smith podcast as well. We'll get to that at the end.

Maria Comella (1:20)

Okay.

Tim Miller (1:21)

Yesterday, Trump's retribution agenda was in action, and they continued to kind of step on rakes on this front. We have the Eric Schmitt questioning of Jack Smith, which I want to get to in a second. But another story, a friend of the show, Adam Kinzinger, there's this leak yesterday that the CFTC is investigating him. And you might wonder what kind of seashells he put in what design in order to get this investigation against him. It wasn't that in his case. He was betting on Cal sheet, which bro, we're going to get Adam on to talk about that. I don't know about the calcium. Turns out he lost a couple of grand. I have that. I have that on personal authority. He lost a couple of grand on Cal sheet. But he's like betting on the campaign. He's betting on his stuff. I think he bet on Comella. This is his real problem. But he's betting on the pardons and what Biden is going to do. Not to, he had no information. He's just fucking off. On one of the trades, he made 820 bucks.

And the administration that is running multi-billion dollar scams on behalf of administration family members sniffing around Adam over 800 bones. What do you make of that?

Maria Comella (2:27)

I mean, it's par for the course, right? I mean, none of this is surprising. And I actually think listening to the line of rhetoric of the Republicans yesterday in the Jack Smith hearing, it's just kind of like you throw your hands up as they're kind of accusing him of these partisan antics and a level of partisanship and going after the president and using such elaborate rhetorical terms. And it's the exact thing actually that the administration is doing. So the whole thing to me feels like a farce. And it's like, what are we actually doing here?

Tim Miller (3:00)

It is crazy how little that they have on Jack Smith.

And the performative anger they have towards him versus the evidence they have of any wrongdoing. Like, you know, they're calling him Dirk Bag, you know.

John Kennedy said that you make me want to throw up in my mouth.

Maria Comella (3:18)

Right.

Tim Miller (3:18)

And it's like over nothing.

Maria Comella (3:20)

Right. Well, it kind of reminded me of, you know, you watch like in a TV show or a movie where they do the congressional hearing and you're always like, you know, coming from like the real world. You're like, oh, this is so over the top and ridiculous. This is never how a congressional hearing would go. You're like, actually, this is exactly how this congressional hearing is going. I mean, it's like a it's like a movie magic situation.

Tim Miller (3:39)

Well, it was a spoof at the part with Eric Schmitt. And I usually I try to keep the clips for people to, you know, keep it tight. 30 seconds. You know, people are here to hear us. You know, Maria, they're not they're not here for the C-SPAN hearings. But the Eric Schmitt exchange with Jack Smith was so delicious. I have to do a couple of minutes.