Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.
Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.
Matt Taibbi: And Walter and I, as you can see, are no longer together. That was a fleeting moment in history, Walter.
Walter Kirn: Yeah, it really was. Yeah. Sun Valley, the place that brings all the world’s important people together in a strange funnel. I felt like briefly, we were among maybe the class that runs things. I saw private jets flying over gigantic parties, and I had a feeling that I was among not just oligarchs, but just secretly influential people from the past. Yeah.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. We may have met the Great Gatsby.
Walter Kirn: We may have met the Great Gatsby. Yeah. The Deep State Gatsby. But it was interesting to be up there, and it was interesting to do the show live and not be assaulted by abusive comments the way we are when we do a live stream on X.
Matt Taibbi: We’re not assaulted by abusive comments. It’s just those are the ones that I notice.
Walter Kirn: Right. But we had zero in Sun Valley.
Matt Taibbi: Right.
Walter Kirn: See, that’s the nice thing being among the upper classes. They comport themselves a little bit more politely than do the commenters on the right side of my screen during our live streams.
Matt Taibbi: I got a Sun Valley souvenir that you didn’t get though, Walter. I took a selfie in front of the Cuts and Mutts van from Dumb and Dumber…
Walter Kirn: Whoa.
Matt Taibbi: … Which is warehoused in Sun Valley because the Farrelly brothers have a place there and there’s an auto center near the airport that is packed with unbelievable vehicles, including some of the most beautiful Porsches in the world. But the Cuts and Mutts van, the dog car is there. So, I’ll post that at some point. It was pretty cool.
Walter Kirn: But didn’t it end up in Aspen in the movies? Sun Valley’s competition, remember?
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, but maybe Aspen was like a stand-in for where they really hang out. I don’t know.
Walter Kirn: Interesting.
Matt Taibbi: But anyway, cool place. I went up on the ride, the Gondola ride. It’s unbelievably gorgeous at Sun Valley if anybody ever has a chance to go that place.
Walter Kirn: The truth is I want to thank our hosts for showing us a good time, putting us up in a nice place and being instinctively courteous, helpful, and delightful. So, thank you Sun Valley Policy Forum.
Matt Taibbi: Absolutely. Yeah. And I can see why Papa Hemingway moved there. I was always a mystery, but now, I’m no longer one. So, we’re now in different places. I’m in Denver. Walter, it looks like you’re back, Livingston.
Walter Kirn: Yeah. I drove six hours through the night last night from Sun Valley, which takes you past one of the spookiest places in the American Defense Archipelago, which is called the Idaho National Laboratory. It’s a big empty part of Idaho. That’s where they build nuclear reactors for submarines and things like that, and where they’re now doing the research to build the small nuclear reactors that are going to power our AI future.
Matt Taibbi: Wow.
Walter Kirn: Yeah, so I could feel its glow. I stopped in Arco, Idaho, which was the first nuclear-powered town in the world.
Matt Taibbi: Wow.
Walter Kirn: Yeah.
Matt Taibbi: Wow.
Walter Kirn: Stands for Advanced Research Corporation. And I had-
Matt Taibbi: The town is a nuclear acronym?
Walter Kirn: Yes. The town is a nuclear acronym.
Matt Taibbi: I love it.
Walter Kirn: And I had the worst hamburger I think I’ve had in 50 years.
Matt Taibbi: I had the worst hamburger I think I’ve ever had. Anyway, we’ll compare our notes later.
Walter Kirn: Okay, okay.
Matt Taibbi: But anyway, great trip. Today, for people watching, this is the 4th of July for you, so happy 4th of July everybody. Happy 4th, America.
Walter Kirn: Also known as No King’s Day.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah, No King’s Day. Exactly. Are they doing that tomorrow?
Walter Kirn: Yeah, they’re doing No King’s Day again.
Matt Taibbi: Oh, my God. Give it a rest for the day. I get it. But come on. All right. So, there’s been significant news. It’s funny, as the week progressed, Walter and I, Walter sent me a story by Miranda Devine of the New York Post, who is probably famous to the audience, most famous for breaking the Hunter Biden laptop story. But this time, she scooped everybody on a new CIA report about Russiagate, and it should be leading the news everywhere, but isn’t because of another story that is everywhere at the moment. And that is the acquittal of Sean Puff Daddy Combs. And this is a story I haven’t followed terribly closely, but we’re going to talk about it a little bit. People may not notice, but there is actually a link between these two stories, which is the Comey family. The Russiagate report was very nasty to James Comey, though nastier to someone else. And the losing prosecutor in the Puffy case was his daughter. What’s her name again? What’s the daughter’s name?
Walter Kirn: Can’t remember.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah.
Walter Kirn: Her last name is so conspicuous that her first name is overshadowed by it.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Just casts a glow over the whole thing. So, we’ll have, take a look.
Walter Kirn: Could they remake the Addams family as the Comey family?
Matt Taibbi: Oh, my God.
Walter Kirn: And they’re spooky.
Matt Taibbi: He’s tall enough.
Walter Kirn: Yeah, exactly, lurch.
Matt Taibbi: Right? Yeah, he’s lurch. If you’ve ever seen the guy, most people who are that big are physically intimidating. He’s like one of the only six-foot-eight people who I thought was a wimp looking at.
Walter Kirn: Oh, great dude.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. But anyway, so it’s a significant story on a number of levels. I’ve seen a lot of people comparing it to the OJ verdict. It’s not the OJ verdict. We’ll get into why it’s not the OJ verdict. So, P Diddy got off on the most important charges for which he could have served a life sentence. And these were basically RICO charges racketeering and-
Walter Kirn: My wife asked me this morning, “What’s racketeering, Walter?” And because I don’t use Grok, I probably gave her an insufficiently detailed answer, but what does it mean, racketeering?
Matt Taibbi: Well, racketeering is just, that’s what our site is named after, a racket, if you have a criminal enterprise. Classically, racketeering is a criminal organization where all the people who are in your organization, in some way, are helping commit a crime even if they didn’t, themselves, commit the crime, if the organization does that crime, and you’re a part of the organization, you’re a racketeering, you’re in a racket. So, the classic thing is like a protection racket. So, if you’re a mobster and every business for a 10 block area has to pay protection money to you, that’s a racketeering enterprise. If you’re just the accounting accountant for them, and you don’t actually go to the places and threaten people, that’s the theory of how RICO works. RICO allows the government to prosecute people for crimes, even if they weren’t present for the predicate.
Walter Kirn: They didn’t pull the trigger, so to speak.
Matt Taibbi: Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, Diddy was massively overcharged. Obviously, there were individual offenses specifically against, is it three women? Three women, who I think were the main complainants in the case and some of those are pretty messed up. If you read those accounts, you can see how, look, the whole story bites is horrifying and off-putting. But the government’s theory of this case was that not only did these bad things happen, but that the entire, his company was a criminal enterprise whose purpose was sex trafficking and sexual offenses, which is a goofy theory of how it all went down. And most of the lawyers who were reacting to what happened, and we’ll get to their reactions, are heavily criticizing the prosecutors for going there instead of going for something a little less sexy. He did get convicted of the Mann Act. Walter, when was the last time you heard the Mann Act mentioned?
Walter Kirn: I don’t know, like Dukes of Hazzard or something, maybe. The Mann Act is transporting an underage person across state lines for the purposes of prostitution. It’s one of the few that I’ve never committed accidentally, and I think it’s unfair to people who live close to state lines. I grew up on a state line, and it means that if I’d gone from Taylors Falls, Minnesota to St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin with weird intent, I would’ve been charged with a federal crime. But if I’d gone the other direction, five miles, I wouldn’t have been.
Matt Taibbi: Right. Right. Yeah. This is a law that was very much in the news often in the early days of the FBI and in the early days of federal criminal enforcement. A lot of very famous people have been charged with the Mann Act, Charlie Chaplin, Frank Lloyd Wright, Jack Johnson, the heavyweight boxer.
Walter Kirn: And interestingly, in the parlance-
Matt Taibbi: Chuck Berry.
Walter Kirn: In the parlance, it used to be called white slavery. As opposed to black slavery, white slavery was prostitution and pimping and carrying people from place to place for purposes of it.
Matt Taibbi: Yeah. It was often used to bust somebody who may have just had a consensual relationship but brought a girlfriend across state lines and was politically an enemy of the state in some way. We know how the FBI operated back in those days. But I don’t know. Walter, what’s your initial take on the Diddy verdict? Because there are a couple of interesting angles on it that maybe some people aren’t getting into.
Walter Kirn: Well, the merits of overcharging is that when you finally get a conviction on something that would be serious otherwise, if it were the main charge, it looks by comparison that you got off. Technically, Puff Diddy didn’t get off. He was convicted of some very serious federal crime, but he was not convicted of more serious federal crimes. Therefore, relatively speaking, he did well. So, in other words, it’s a little bit of a trick of optics or point of view. And what I think, in general, from a cloud-down perspective, a bird’s-eye view, a god’s-eye view is that Puffy has friends somewhere because there were many lawyer friends of mine and lawyer sources, and one particular who follows this kind of thing follows government scandals and corruption and so on, and has a jaundiced view of how things work in America was able to predict to the charge back before a whole other slate of charges were dropped, which one he’d be convicted on.
And her theory of why this was was that he was, in some fashion, a protected figure. This is just pure speculation on her part, but it’s slightly weightier because it led to such an accurate forecast.
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Author: Matt Taibbi
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