Take away Mike Lee's phone!
>> Bryan Schott: Foreign
welcome to Special Session. I'm Bryan Schott. So glad
to have you on board this week. This is the show where we
break down the important Utah political news
of the last week to help you understand the story
and what it all means. And I think
this week we're going to start on social media
because a couple of Utah politicians had a
very bad week.
Let's start with Burgess Owens. On Friday, he
reposted to his personal X slash
Twitter account an anti Muslim
video from an account that
posts all sorts of really
hateful white supremacist
content. There's no other way to describe what
this X slash Twitter account was.
And he reposted this video. The
account's username was White Guilt is
Dead and the user had posted in the
caption. I love it when white people wake up
about Islam and Muslims. They're
the scum of the earth, White pride
worldwide. And when you look at the video, I'm not
gonna play any of the audio from it, but it was pretty
gross anti Muslim content.
It warned that Muslim men are
coming to rape women in the United
States and the UK
and made a number of inflammatory
claims about the Muslim faith, saying that they,
quote, hate women, children, white people,
America and Western civil. And
for some reason, Representative Burgess Owens
retweeted that, reposted that to his X
account. Now, when I reached out to his office, they
didn't officially respond to me. They didn't respond to
questions about why he might be interacting
with that content. Does he follow that account
online? I didn't get answers to those questions, but I did have a
source close to Owens who said that it was
probably a mistake, that he may have
accidentally reposted it while he was scrolling,
which, um, you know, makes some sense. But the
post was online for more than 14 hours before
I reached out about it. One of the reasons why
you might not believe that explanation from
Owens is that this is not the first time that he has
interacted with that kind of content in the
past. During his run for Congress in
2020 against Democrat Ben McAdams, he
had multiple media appearances, did interviews with
podcasts and YouTube channels
that promoted the QAnon conspiracy
theory, believe that there was
some secretive pedophile ring in
Washington, D.C. and that Donald Trump was
trying to expose them. Owens went on a
number of those podcasts during the 2020 campaign.
Back in 2016, Owens amplified
an article from far right conspiracy
theorist Alex Jones that was a smear against
gold star father Kazir
Khan, who criticized Donald Trump
at the Democratic National Convention in
this, it claimed that Khan
founded, quote, an academic periodical
that sought to defend Sharia law
to a legal system based on Western
jurisprudence. It was this really gross anti
Muslim smear. And Owens promoted that in
2016. So this is not the first time that he has
interacted with this stuff, which is
why I found it so notable on
Friday that he had reposted
this content, this anti Muslim
video from a white
supremacist account on Twitter.
If you take the explanation from his team at face value,
he made a mistake. He accidentally promoted this.
But you have to wonder, why was
this on his feed in the first place where he could
accidentally repost it? I think that that's
a question that deserves some answers, but I don't think that
we're going to get them the second story we have this week.
Somebody just needs to take Mike Lee's
phone away from him. Senator Mike Lee. On
Tuesday, he posted, then
deleted, an apparent fake resignation
letter from Federal Reserve Chair
Jerome Powell. If Lee had taken
two seconds to read this
letter that had popped up online to really take a look
at it, all it would have taken is two seconds and you would have seen that it was a fake,
that it was AI generated. All you had to do is look at the
seal of the so called Federal Reserve.
Uh, the only English word in this
seal that was posted to the letter was the word
reserve. It also looks nothing like the
Federal Reserve seal. But that didn't
phase Lee. He just immediately posted it on
his personal based Mike Lee Twitter account
with the red flashing light saying Powell's out.
Lee later deleted it and when a reporter asked him
about it, he said it was because he couldn't verify whether it was
authentic or not, which is something you
probably should do before hitting
the post button on your app. But
apparently that's a little bit too much effort
for Lee because he's gotta get those posts out there,
gotta get that engagement. Remember, taxpayers
pay him $186,000 a year
to constantly post on social media
stuff like this. This is not the first time that
Lee has been fooled by a fake
post on social media. Almost one
to the day. The Jerome Powell fake letter was posted
on July 22nd of this year. July
23rd of last year, 2024,
Lee Got Fooled by a fake letter
announcing the death of Jimmy Carter. And again,
if he had just taken two
seconds to look over the letter, he would have seen
that it was fake. Especially because a couple of
paragraphs down, it had quotes from
Carter making really gross sexual
references to his late wife,
Rosalyn. And former first lady
Nancy Reagan. All you have to do is take a second
and read it before posting it. But that's not enough
for Lee. He has to get it out there, post, post, post,
get that engagement. And all of this is
infuriating, especially to me, because
Lee loves to criticize the media
for any perceived inaccuracy
if a headline isn't written the way that he likes.
He loves to go on social media and yell about
how the media is accurate or they can't be trusted or they're
biase. But there's seemingly zero
accountability for him when he does
stuff like this, when he posts these obviously fake
things on social media, and he does it again and again
and again, and he keeps getting fooled. And this isn't all you
remember. He posted those really gross things
online following the assassination of the
Democratic lawmaker in Minnesota and her spouse and the
attempted assassination of another one, by the way.
He still hasn't apologized for that. Again, no
accountability for him at all.
Also last July, he ran with this
unsubstantiated rumor on social
media that then President Biden was
having some sort of quote, unquote, medical
emergency on Air Force One.
That never happened. That was a conspiracy
theory that came from far right
conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer. But Lee
tickled something in his lizard brain, and so he
decided to run with it. Again, no
accountability at all when he posts
stuff like this. And I don't know about you, but
I am tired. I've had it. I'm done
with his constant criticism
of the media, his attacks on the media. When he has
demonstrated that he has zero media
literacy himself, he doesn't know what he's
talking about. But what it does is it
riles up his base, it riles up the rubes, and
so that's why he keeps doing it. Lee needs
to shut up when it comes to the media. I don't want to hear anything
from him again until he gets his own house in order.
Once he stops posting fake stuff online,
once he stops getting fooled by fake stuff online,
then we can have a conversation about the media. But until then,
I don't want to hear it.
We learned this week that President Donald Trump was
told by the Department of Justice in May
two months ago that his name appears multiple
times in the, quote, truckload of
documents that the DOJ as
about convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey
Epstein. Which means that he and his
administration have been lying about this information
for months. They've been misleading the American
people, they've been lying to the press about what
they know about these documents. And now there's a
fight in Congress, which I'm sure you're well aware of,
to force the FBI, the
doj, to turn over what they have to release these
documents. And we don't know if that's going to
happen. But instead of coming down on the side of accountability,
instead of coming down on the side of transparency
from the government, especially when we find out this
week that they've been lying about this issue. Senator
Mike Lee voted this week to
block a Democratic led effort
that would have pressured the DOJ to turn those
documents over to Congress. It's kind of a
Byzantine thing, but here's what happened. The Senate
Judiciary Committee on Thursday
was debating a bill that
targeted opioid trafficking. It was a
bipartisan measure. They tried to get it in the last Congress.
It didn't make it through. They're trying to push it through again. And
Democratic Senator Cory Booker proposed an
amendment to the bill that would have
delayed its effective date, kept it from going into
effect until the
DOJ turned over what it had
the documents on Jeffrey Epstein. Essentially a
pressure tactic to get the DOJ to turn this
stuff over. In response, Texas Republican Senator
John Cornyn proposed a different
amendment. A substitute that nullified
Booker's effort, made it null and void, uh,
wouldn't have gone into effect. And Lee joined the Republicans
on the committee to vote for Cornyn's
amendment, which would not have
made a requirement to release the Epstein
files, rather than Booker's
amendment, which would have put some pressure on the doj.
Republicans argued that what Booker was trying to do would
have delayed this important piece of
legislation. They didn't want to jeopardize
this bipartisan piece of legislation
by adopting Booker's measure. And Booker probably knew it wasn't gonna
get through anyway. But it was an attempt by Booker to get
Republicans to get members of Congress on the
record. It was the first time they tried this in the Senate. There have been multiple
efforts in the House. In fact, uh, House Speaker Mike Johnson
shut down the House of Representatives, uh, to
avoid taking any votes on releasing the
Epstein file. Didn't wanna have any floor votes on that, but this is the first
time it happened in the Senate. And Lee is now on record
as voting against a measure to pressure the
DOJ to release the Epstein
files. There is an argument here that this is not a hundred
percent fair because it was attached to an
unrelated bill. But still it was a
vote about pressuring the
administration. It was a vote against
putting any pressure on the Trump administration. To release
information on Jeffrey Epstein. And you couple this
with last week when all four members of
Utah's House delegation voted against a
Democratic effort on the floor to
force the release of the Epstein files. So we've got
Utah's, uh, congressional delegation, save one.
Senator John Curtis hasn't been forced to take any votes yet.
But. But Utah's congressional delegation voting against
these efforts by Democrats to release the
Epstein files. And in the case of Burgess Owens, that's
interesting because he was going on these QAnon podcasts,
although he didn't specifically talk about QAnon. But Representative
Owens loves to talk about human trafficking. He made
that a big part of his campaign in 2020,
talked about it during his campaign post about
it on social media. So you find that curious that
he would not vote to pressure the release of these
files on Jeffrey Epstein? And consider this.
We talked about this last week's show. Lee said
that he wanted Ghislaine Maxwell,
who was Jeffrey Epstein's closest
associate. Don't forget, she ran
an international criminal
pedophile child sex trafficking
ring. He wants her to testify before Congress.
I don't know what that would accomplish, because in 2021, when
she was convicted of these crimes, the government
said in court filings, quote, the
defendant's willingness to brazenly lie
under oath about her conduct, including some of
the conduct charged in the indictment, strongly
suggests her true motive has been and
remains to avoid being held accountable for her crimes.
So I have no idea what having her testify
would accomplish, especially because she has
a history of not telling the truth when it comes to this.
This whole issue is a mess. And as you can see,
Trump and his allies are desperately trying to find a way
out. Now, we know that Senator
Lee does not want to
put any pressure on the Trump administration to release these
files related to Jeffrey Epstein.
This is a news item that probably would have slipped
past you if you weren't paying attention. On Tuesday,
the House Appropriations Committee added
language to a spending bill that was setting
funding for the, uh, Department of the Interior
and the Environmental Protection Agency,
that, that holds funding for the Kennedy
center for the arts in Washington, D.C.
hostage, unless they
rename the Opera House. That's part of the
complex after first lady Melania Trump.
Now, Representative Celeste Malloy, who
is on the Appropriations Committee, a very powerful
committee in Congress, she
voted yes on this amendment on this
language that was inserted into the bill
by Republicans. I had to go back and watch
the video of hearing, scrolling through it and trying to
find the moment when they held the roll call
vote. To confirm whether she was One of the 34 Republicans
who voted in favor of the measure.
And she was. And this just
illustrates that a lot of the things that you're elected
representatives, especially in Washington, a lot of the things that they're
doing just sort of sneak by unless
you're really paying attention. Lucky for
you, I'm that much of a, uh, junkie for political
stuff. When this news item came out, when
people started talking about it, I rem that
Representative Malloy is on the Appropriations
Committee. So I decided to go back and check and see what she did,
because she's probably not gonna talk about this. She's probably not
gonna publicize it. But lucky for you,
I am, um, that sick in the head that that's
something that I decided to spend a couple of hours trying to do. It
also highlights how a lot of this stuff gets
done. Instead of the normal legislative process. Instead
of proposing legislation to
rename the Opera House, they attach
language to a funding bill and hold that fund.
Unless the Kennedy center renames the Opera
House after first lady Melania Trump. They can't do
that here in Utah. They can't do that in the Utah legislature,
because we have a rule that's single subject. A piece
of legislation can only address
one topic, one subject. You could
not throw a measure like this into
that bill because it would violate the one subject rule. But
this is the same process that Representative Malloy used
when she put a provision to
sell off 500,000 acres of public
lands in the massive tax cut and
spending bill, uh, in Congress. When it was going through
the committees and the markups and they were talking about it, she
proposed an amendment right at the last second of this meeting, right at the end of the
meeting, to sell off these lands,
and it got approved. Now, that measure was stripped out of
the House version before they passed it, but it
was resurrected in a much larger capacity
by Senator Mike Lee. And as I've explained before,
he tried to put it into the bill because this
is something he's wanted to do for years, but he
knows he cannot get it through through the regular process.
He would need 60 votes in the Senate to get this
measure approved if he went through the regular process. He knows
he doesn't have 60 votes. I don't even know if he has
50 some votes. Um, um, that's why he had
dropped it from this bill. But this bill only needed. Because it was
going through the reconciliation process, it only
needed the slim
majority, a bare majority, to pass
this measure renaming the Opera House at the Kennedy Center.
It's really unclear whether or not this is going to
the full House because this is not a reconciliation measure. This
is regular legislation. And
I don't know if it passes the House. And
even if it does, it's really unlikely that it would make it
into some bipartisan deal to pass
the Senate because Republicans are going to need
Democratic votes to pass whatever funding bills
they have, and they only have until the end of September to do
it. So this issue is not decided by any means.
Means we still have a floor vote in the House. We still have
it going through the Senate process. And then, as I
said, it's going to need 60 votes in the Senate. If this
provision survives, it might, it might
not. We don't know. But its future is really
uncertain right now. This is just a nice little illustration
about how if you're not paying attention and people are
busy, they don't have time to pay attention.
I do. And that's why you're here, I would
think. But it just shows that if you're not paying attention or if
someone is paying attention for you, you might miss this stuff.
It's looking more and more likely that Utah is going to increase
the size of its congressional delegation after the
2030 census. We have another analysis
that came out this week that says that
Utah is one of a handful of states poised
to gain another seat in the House of
representative after the 2030
census. Last year, there was a report from the
Brennan center for justice that looked at new
census numbers and the trend lines and said
Utah's population was growing enough, would
increase enough by the time we got to 2030 if everything
holds steady, if everything remains the same, if the trend
lines continue in this direction, that the state would
get another seat in Congress, going from
four seats in the House of Representatives to
five. And now a new analysis
that came out earlier this week says the
same thing. The new report is from a
Democratic leaning group headed by former
Attorney General Eric Holder. It's called the National
Democratic Redistricting Committee. And they
also looked at the trend lines and said that Utah
would be one of those states that would
gain seats. According to their analysis.
They think that Texas would gain three
seats, Florida probably two. And then
Utah, Arizona, Iowa, Idaho and Georgia would
all gain one seat. And most of those states are
Republican. Georgia's kind of swingy. The states that would
be losing seats, according to this analysis, would
be Democratic states. California
would probably lose three seats.
Illinois is projected to lose two.
And then you would see New York, Minnesota,
Pennsylvania and Rhode island each
lose One of them. And according to
this analysis, they said that it's not
reason for Democrats to wor that
seats will be shifting from
traditionally blue states to red states
because they say that the population growth in
these red states is happening in urban
areas which are traditionally
Democratic. And there's some evidence to back
that up. What they're warning about though
is if you see these Republican
states gaining seats in Congress,
then and that could make the
gerrymandering issue much
more acute. Here in Utah, it's gonna be really
hard for Republicans to
gerrymander five seats to
favor the gop. It's going to be really
difficult to do that if the
legislature retains power over
redistricting. And I'm guessing they're gonna do everything they can
even though there is an active court case. And I'll comment on that
in a second. But in states like Texas,
their gerrymandering would have really
extreme to find ways to
minimize Democratic gains. Are already trying to do it.
They're going back into a special session right now
to try and redistrict and
gerrymander more Republican seats. They're hoping to pick
up four or five Republican seats ahead of
the 2026 midterms because of the
headwinds that they're already facing
electorally. So that's what this report
is warning about. Gerrymandering in these Republican
states could get much more extre
as Republicans try to find ways to
maximize their advantage and break up
the Democratic leaning areas. Now here in
Utah, we're still waiting for the court decision
which could come at any day. I've spoken to numerous people
who are connected to the court case
that's currently winding its way through the system,
alleging that the maps
drawn by the legislature in 2021
were an illegal gerrymander. The
congressional maps, and they were illegal,
they violated Prop 4, which was
passed by the voters in 2018,
establishing an independent redistricting commission.
You remember, uh, almost a year ago now, actually over a
year ago, the Utah Supreme Court ruled
that lawmakers overstepped their bounds when they
passed legislation to gut that
citizen approved initiative. And we're just waiting now for the lower
court to decide to rule on whether or not the
legislature violated the principles of Prop 4
when they drew those maps. It's likely that they
did. And that's probably the ruling or something in that
neighborhood that we're going to see when we finally get that
opinion when it's finally released. But that doesn't
mean that we're going to see new maps
drawn ahead of the 2026 midterms
here in Utah. There's a lot of people who are
expecting to have forced the legislature back
into session to redraw those maps. Uh,
we're running against the calendar. The clock is ticking and
we're running out of time to do that. If you remember,
the lieutenant governor's office has argued that their
new MA drawn they need to be done by
sometime in November so they can get their
systems in place and so candidates know where they're
running. It most definitely has to be done
by January 2, 2026,
because that's the day that candidate filing starts
and candidates need to know where they are running.
Those are the first two deadlines we're running up against. But also
consider that no matter what the judge rules,
there will likely be an appeal which will
slow down this whole process even further. And it's just,
just my sense, my gut feeling. I'm not a lawyer
again, but I like to play one on a podcast. But it's just
my gut feeling that we're not, we're probably
not going to have new maps drawn before
2026 or it's going to be extremely unlikely
that the legislature will be forced to draw new
maps before the 2026 midterms.
2028 is probably more the more likely
scenario if this court case goes the
way that I expect it to. But
we'll only have to deal with four seats for two election
cycles then because we're on track right now to
get number five. And as I said before,
it's gonna be really hard for Republicans to
gerrymander the state to make five
G O P dominated seats with four.
It's a little bit easier. As we saw in
2021, they maximize the Republican vote,
almost evenly divided all the Democratic
voters in four to
protect the Republican incumbency.
And even if we do get new maps for the four seats,
you're not going to miraculously see a Democratic leaning
map come out of that. You will see a map that might be more
competitive where instead of having a
plus 11 plus 15 advantage,
you might see a Republican candidate or a district
lean plus five
plus three somewhere in there with which
is much more competitive than the seats we have
right now where all of the Republicans have
double digit advantages in the
electorates. I would expect that whatever maps
they draw for a fifth seat in Congress, that would probably
be much more competitive or at least one of those districts would
most likely have to be much more competitive
than what we have right now here in the state
that's gonna do it. For this week. I don't know about you, but I probably had
enough talking about the news. It's time to go out and enjoy the weekend.
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