ears? -nope. comcast business 5-year price lock guarantee. powering five years of savings. powering possibilities. comcast business. first. >> application. >> call the. >> number. >> on your screen. >> call one( 800) 845-4316. >> i'm hanako montgomery in tokyo and. >> this is cnn. >> it's thursday, february 6th right now on cnn this morning. >> i would characterize. >> it as. chaos and. >> just department after department. >> swept up in the chaos, the federal workforce reeling as president trump and elon musk

over gaza and move the palestinian people out, and later. >> anybody worth their salt could pretty easily get to actual names. >> a, quote counter disaster. the cia sent a list of names of its new hires in an unclassified email to the white house, and vital forecasting on the line. the national weather service facing cuts. why that could put millions of lives in danger when the next natural disaster strikes. all right. it is 6 a.m. here on the east coast. a live look at capitol hill on this thursday morning. good morning everyone. i'm kasie hunt, it's wonderful to have you with us day by day, department by department. president donald

trump is empowering elon musk to slash and burn. >> he campaigned across this country with elon musk, vowing that elon was going to head up the department of government efficiency and the two of them with a great team around them, were going to look at the receipts of this federal government and ensure it's accountable to american taxpayers. that's all that is happening here. >> tonight is the deadline for federal workers to decide about the president's so-called buyout offer. the trump administration claiming that about 2% of the roughly 2 million federal civilian employees have accepted the buyout offer. sources tell cnn that after the deadline passes, federal workers will see sweeping layoffs. it is that slash and burn approach that mirrors what happened at twitter after he bought the social media platform, musk cut 80% of employees. cnn spoke with one former senior employee at twitter who explained musk's

approach this way. quote, question every requirement. assume that every requirement that anybody ever gives you is dumb. question it. eliminate it wherever possible. i remember him directly saying, quote, if you're not adding things back in afterward, then you weren't cutting hard enough to start with. it's one thing when the consequences are related to a social media platform, and quite another when it's about americans health care, social security payments, the safety of our planes in the skies. but we'll get to that. here is how steve bannon, trump's former chief white house strategist, explains it. >> these guys come with a silicon valley attitude of break things and do it fast. obviously, there's a different regulatory structure within the government. i think it will get worked out. i think they're going to bring to the surface many fights that have been going on that haven't really got public attention. i would just tell you, like in, like in film, you'll fix it in post. >> you'll fix it in post. and of course, though there are some

things, especially in government, that once they're broken, they are just that they are broken. sources telling cnn that the cia sent the white house an unclassified email containing the first name and last initial of everyone the agency has hired in the last two years. the email could have exposed the employees identities to foreign hackers. it was sent to comply with one of president trump's executive orders. so his vision and musk's portfolio, of course, only growing. they have. let's just tick through a couple of these things that they've done right in the past. i mean, how many it's not even three weeks. they've gained access to the treasury's payment system. they are looking at upgrading, quote, unquote, the nation's air traffic control system they want to plug in, i believe, was the quote, they've dismantled america's largest foreign aid agency, and they're already planning helping to plan the end of the education department. they're also, of course, offering those buyouts to all of america's spies at the cia.

when he was asked whether all of these cuts undermine congressional authority, house speaker mike johnson argued that, well, it's actually all just going according to plan. >> we see this as an active, engaged, committed executive branch authority doing what the executive branch should do. it looks radical. it's not i call it stewardship. this is not a usurpation of authority in any way. it's not a power grab. i think they're doing what we've all expected and hoped and asked that they would do. >> all right. our panel is here. jonah goldberg is co-founder and editor in chief of the dispatch. alex thompson, cnn political analyst, national political reporter for axios. megan hayes, democratic strategist, former director of message planning for the biden white house. and matt gorman, republican strategist, also adviser formally to tim scott's presidential campaign. welcome to all of you. another day in the second trump administration, jonah, and it's all coming so quickly. i do think that there clearly is some

appetite among americans for trimming government waste. this is something we hear from voters all the time, but the stakes are incredibly high for things like our air traffic control system. you know, the the data sensitive data of all americans inside the treasury department. they now reportedly have access to medicare and medicaid, which includes people's health records. is elon going too far for american voters or is he not? >> well, if the question is for american voters, i think the evidence isn't in yet. right? i mean, we just don't it doesn't seem to be the massive groundswell of popular sentiment. i think you got to put this in a whole bunch of different buckets, right? i mean, there's the first of all is the actual policy aim desirable? in some cases? i very much willing to defend the trump administration on some of these things. and then there's the. procedure. legal, constitutional or wise. right. and those those are three different, much more difficult questions to answer.

sometimes you don't. i'm all in favor of doing like maintenance on airplanes, but not while they're flying. right. and. >> like, you know, go digging into the code for the air traffic control system while all of these planes are still up in the sky, like, like moment to moment, i mean, yeah, if you move fast and break things, if you break that, like planes fall out of the sky, right? like the stakes are different. >> so like the triage questions are like the prudential questions about, you know, what they're doing on one one part of government i may be totally fine with because i think the stakes are low. another part of government, i think the stakes are high and you don't want it. but also, i mean, the problem with mike johnson's position is not only he's technically right, this isn't a power grab because they're letting them. it's a power giveaway. right. and this has been a problem with congress for a very long time. both parties have basically said, we want the president to operate as essentially a, you know, a de facto regent who is going to use usurp our power and let and we're going to let them do whatever they want. and this is that on steroids. >> and often because they don't have the political guts, which

is the polite word to take on the consequences of their own actions. >> at this point, they don't even have the institutional memory. lots of people in congress don't even know how to legislate anymore. >> yeah. so we do have a little bit, i will say, jonah, of of data coming in on on musk. it's early days, but alex thompson, here's how our, um, our harry enten has kind of assessed elon musk's overall favorable rating in the country. right? so back in 2016, his net favorability rating was 29 points positive. right. so, uh, 29% more people thought favorably of him. it fell in 2024 to something that looks a lot like, you know, any of our politicians, quite frankly, 5050 negative three. it's continued to drop to -11. um, there's some economist yougov polling that looks at republicans, um, and that that has gone from november. 47% of republicans said they wanted musk to have a lot of influence, 29% said a little that a lot

number has dropped to 26% from 47. so clearly people are reacting to this. >> yeah, but he is undeterred. and that's because he has president trump's backing. i mean, the fact is. >> that half $1. >> trillion. well, i mean, you know, you you spend 200 and you spent 200 works. yeah, i mean, he basically gave trump $290 million for this last election. that buys you a lot of leeway with donald trump. i'd also say that, you know, doge, you know, it's not it is not satisfied. it is expanding. you saw just this week they've they've really gone to try to take over this obscure agency, the government services administration, which essentially controls all of the property, all of the computers, all the technology that every single other agency has to use usually has to go through gsa. and you're seeing that they are trying to take over that agency as well. so they're just ramping up. >> a couple of things. it doesn't matter what his approval rating is, right? i think in some ways. >> oh, it does to trump, though, if he starts seeing bad polling numbers on elon musk, i don't think that's going to happen. >> i totally disagree. here's

why i think in many ways this is a good cop bad cop routine. and elon can be the proverbial undertaker because he's never going to face, as you said. >> if his polling numbers go down. trump is fine with that because trump's polling numbers, because. >> companies get rid of him. trump is. >> because trump is a good cop in this, right? i think we've seen this a little bit when it comes to like some of the gaza and the foreign policy stuff, too. but again, i think if democrats and some, you know, in the media want to be going kind of in defending kind of the federal workforce and the bureaucrats and foreign aid, the trump administration is kind of feeling out where they how far they can take this right. domestic spending, as we saw with the spending freeze, they kind of hit the electric wire a little bit and backed off this sort of thing. they feel empowered to and look, you know, i think you're seeing a lot of and you're going to continue to see, you know, talk from these federal government workers. it's look, buyouts and layoffs are something that almost every other american worker, either they themselves or know somebody who has been through. and government jobs are not lifetime contracts. so the idea that

democrats are going to run on these buyouts or layoffs as a political issue, go for it. >> well, and to that point, megan, politico rachel bade talked to david axelrod and to rahm emanuel, both of whom, of course, have, you know, their own long histories and kind of ways of looking at the world. but axelrod told them this, quote, my heart is with the people out on the street outside usaid. but my head tells me, man, trump will be well satisfied to have this fight. when you talk about cuts, the first thing people say is cut foreign aid. rahm emanuel said, quote, you don't fight every fight. you don't swing at every pitch. and my view is, while i care about the usaid, as a former ambassador, that is not a hill i am going to die on. so should this be a hill that i mean, what hill should democrats die on and which ones should they not? >> well, it's interesting because they don't seem to be dying on any hill because they don't seem to be doing much. so they are leaving this up to people on the outside to file lawsuits. i mean, do you see democrats out there? you saw chuck schumer out. >> there chanting, chanting, and it's like, what are you doing? >> there are things you can do in congress. i mean, senator

tuberville shut down confirmations for ten months over an abortion amendment. what are democrats doing? >> there's schumer. >> more of that. i mean, like, really. >> what are we doing here? and so you're leaving it out to outside groups to file lawsuits. it's a lot of this stuff is unconstitutional and should be handled. i don't disagree with rahm emanuel that you shouldn't die on the usaid. hill. i think it's just the first one that has, like real implications. 50,000 people in the united states have lost jobs from the lack of funding for aid, so i do there are a lot of things here to continue to pull. >> out, and. >> i get it right, like it's a cruel fact. i don't want anyone in theory to lose their jobs, but just in january, you had microsoft, google, stripe, you know, layoffs like this isn't something that is, oh, my god, can you believe they're laying people off? like, this is something that american, you know, regular non-government americans are acquainted with very well. >> well. >> and for aid. it's not that people are losing their jobs that are government workers. they spend $2 billion on food. so it's people in farms and people in communities in rural and 38 states. i hear what you're saying. but these aren't like traditional government employees. so it's different. >> jonah. i mean, big picture

here. i take the point about layoffs, what we what people deal with in the private sector. i just keep coming back to the stakes of cutting the government without really considering how you are doing it. and what do you think? in particular, the national security implications of how they're going about this? >> yeah. so like that characterization of elon musk's approach from the old twitter guy where he says, if you're not putting stuff back in, then you didn't cut too far in the first place. i'm not sure i want a surgeon who has that philosophy. oh, i shouldn't have taken out that liver. i'll put it back in now. right? like and on areas like national security also. i mean, i'm not saying there's evidence for this yet. we just don't know. but like, there are places where the government touches people. usaid really isn't one of them. but like social security and medicare, va reimbursements, i mean, there are places where like that game operation to stick with the medical metaphor. like there could be one spot where musk touches and the nose lights up

and people are like, what the hell is this this guy doing? and that that can have the tendency to cause people to retroactively view this whole period differently. right? it's like you judge it by here's the screw up. oh my gosh. you look back and you say, this whole thing was a mess, right? and it could be something to do with national security where somebody gets kidnaped. right. we reveal the sources and methods or something. or it could be something with entitlements, or it could be something with public safety. and presumably they know this. but if their attitude is cut first and fix later, uh, just knowing it and actually doing something about it are two different things. >> yeah. again, the stakes of making a mistake when you are. and i think it's also worth noting as much money as elon has as successful as his enterprises have been. they they have not affected nearly so many people as the federal government of the united states can affect with, like, the touch of a button. all right. coming up here on cnn this morning, concern about growing risk to national

security. we're going to talk more about how an unclassified email may have exposed some of america's spies, plus the new agency on elon musk's chopping block, the national weather service. what these cuts could mean for those life saving, saving weather warnings that you rely on. and the white house trying to clarify the president's proposal to, quote, take over gaza some of the arab american voters who helped him get elected say they feel betrayed. >> i mean, it's very concerning. and it's infuriating. palestine is the red line for this community. >> when migraine strikes. do you question the trade offs of treating ubrelvy is another option. it works fast and most have migraine pain relief. within two hours. you can treat it any time, anywhere. tell your doctor all medicines you take don't take with strong cyp3a4 inhibitors. get help right away for allergic reactions like trouble breathing or face, tongue or throat swelling, which may occur hours to days after

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business. start your risk free trial today at stamps.com. >> trump wants to take over greenland, canada and now the gaza strip. he's like everyone at 2 a.m. drunk ordering off amazon. i'm going to add i'm going to add gaza strip to it to cart. i want gaza strip. >> as president donald trump seems to add another territory to his wish list. allies in his administration are now

scrambling to clarify what he really meant when he said that the u.s. would take over gaza, possibly with the assistance of u.s. troops. >> as far as gaza is concerned, we'll do what is necessary. if it's necessary, we'll do that. we're going to take over that piece. >> we'll do what is necessary, he said when asked about potentially using the u.s. military in gaza. now, members of the trump administration are trying to clarify why he wouldn't rule out that possibility. >> why not rule out. >> because i think the president is very good when he's making deals and negotiating not to rule out anything because he wants to preserve that leverage in negotiations. and so i think that's what he's doing here. >> also unclear in the idea from the president is where would the nearly 2 million displaced palestinians live? secretary of state marco rubio suggests that any displacement would be

temporary. >> so what? he's very generally, very generously has offered is the ability of the united states to go in and help with debris removal, help with munitions removal, help with reconstruction, the rebuilding of homes and businesses and things of this nature so that then people can move back in. >> but the president seemed to throw out a range of possibilities for the future of current gaza residents. when he talked about his idea on tuesday. >> if we can build something for them, and one of the countries and it could be jordan and it could be egypt, it could be other countries, i hope that we could do something where they wouldn't want to go back. who would want to go back? the only reason the palestinians want to go back to gaza is they have no alternative. i think the entire world, representatives from all over the world will be there and they'll and they'll live there. palestinians also palestinians will live there. >> jonah goldberg, the degree to which that this we've learned in the last 24 hours about how this

wasn't thought through. um, jonathan swan and maggie haberman over at the times, um, they wrote wrote it this way, right. the presentation from the president left more questions than answers. like, how would this work? how many u.s. troops would be required to clear out of hamas in the mountains of rubble and defuze all the unexploded ordnance? what would it cost to rebuild a demolition site the size of las vegas? how would seizing palestinian territory be justified under international law? what would happen to the 2 million refugees in the hours after the announcement? senior administration officials were notably short on substantive answers. the reason for their evasiveness soon became clear. no actual details existed. >> details. look, i want to be real clear. it's an insane idea. okay? it's, um. when when joe biden, i thought, somewhat foolishly, tried to put in that pier to provide aid to hamas. hamas fired on it, right. the idea that you're going to be able to do something like this

with, with boots on the ground and not have americans lose their lives, which is pretty explicitly what jd vance and these guys were saying, america is going to be done with, right? i mean, we can go down a long list. it's a pinata. you can hit it from any angle and get some reward. the one thing i will say in defense of all of this is as a just a giant middle finger to the the sort of cliched, conventional wisdom about how the israeli-palestinian conflict works and, and the process of terrorist attacks on israel. israel responds, everyone condemns israel for responding. and then we need a peace process and aid to flow in to to build back up gaza all over again. and then the cycle repeats and the whole one state, the whole two state solution process. what this does is just says, yeah, we're not thinking along those terms anymore. and that's not a bad thing. by my, by my way of looking at this stuff. the

october 7th attack deserves terrible consequences for hamas. and this is part of that package of terrible consequences, even though it is an insanely stupid idea. >> well, to add to that point, i mean, the bigger story here is the fact that donald trump is is basically declaring unequivocal solidarity with israel, has essentially abandoned talking about any sort of two state solution for gaza. and you saw even netanyahu yesterday, you know, throw a little bit of an elbow to joe biden and basically say, now there's no daylight between our two countries. >> and this will keep the right the crazy right wing members of his netanyahu's coalition in for another year. so it's a huge political gift on that front. >> so that was the smile on his face throughout. >> i don't think i don't think netanyahu wants america to take over gaza either. but like, he'll play along. >> yeah. all right. still ahead here on cnn this morning, fbi leadership being accused of insubordination. it's a showdown brewing with the justice department. plus, one of the five things you have to see this morning. a runaway boat. how

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>> we got lucky in florida. very, very lucky indeed. we had actually our original chart was that it was going to be hit hitting florida directly. maybe i could just see that, kevin. it was going to be hitting directly, and that would have affected a lot of other states. but that was the original chart. >> you'll remember the moment from president trump's first term, now known as sharpiegate, when he altered a hurricane forecast with a sharpie. now, america's forecasting agency is being targeted by elon musk's doge employees at the national weather service and noaa were sent a so-called buyout email. their job is to ensure americans have sufficient time to evacuate in the event of a hurricane or a tornado. senator chris van hollen posted to esque x, saying noaa is vital and save lives, saves lives. he says he and his team will not stand for musk's cronies to target noaa. let's

get to our meteorologist, derek van dam. derek, help us understand the implications of this. >> well. >> casey. >> what people need to understand is that the national weather service was already grossly understaffed. some of the lowest staffing in decades, and further cuts to that amount of personnel means the potential for missing life saving and property saving information, which these meteorologists are responsible for creating and passing off to our viewers and the general public as well. but remember these meteorologists, they don't only forecast. they oversee the hardware that's responsible for the forecast. so launching weather balloons that go into our computer, modeling, maintaining the infrastructure as well. super important for this personnel. so reducing the amount of people that are able to do that means time sensitive information like storm surge, hurricanes, tornadoes could potentially be missed. think back to the fires in los angeles. the meteorologists out of the national weather service, there were some of the first to

warn of the potential impacts of that strong la nina and wind event for that particular region. and we've got to think about what's happening with the upcoming tornado season as well this spring, and then the hurricane season this summer and into this fall without personnel to warn, what are we going to do? >> and derek, there seems to be severe weather out there right now. >> yeah. that's right. so the meteorologists who are staffed 24 hours a day at these local agencies are issuing tornado warnings as as we speak. in fact, there's a tornado watch here across parts of kentucky into west virginia. all those pink shades of boxes, those are tornado warnings moving with this line that's associated with a much larger storm system that is currently actually producing a flash flood emergency. this is life saving information that is being relayed by the meteorologists that jobs are in question right now. charleston, west virginia, this area under a flash flood emergency, the larger storm system bringing ice to the mid-atlantic and snow to much of the northeast. so

without that personnel, the warnings don't get relayed to the people at home. casey. >> all right, derek van dam for us this morning. derek, thank you very much for that. all right. let's continue to discuss donald trump's makeover of the federal government. but let's focus now on the impact it may have on our national security and our intelligence agencies. >> the cia. >> sent a. >> buyout offer. >> to. >> their entire workforce. i guess that's a wrap on. >> the cia. >> let us now bid a fond farewell to some of their finest work. >> not all of the cia's information has remained redacted, though, because cnn has learned that in order to comply with the president's executive order to shrink the federal workforce, the spy agency has sent the white house an unclassified email listing the names of all employees hired over the last two years. this

does raise serious concerns about whether foreign adversaries could access the list and identify those employees. one former agency officer told my next guest, david sanger of the new york times, that the unclassified reporting of the names was a, quote, counterintelligence disaster. democrats criticizing the move. >> apparently some list, according to public reports of officers at the cia, was sent to the white house in an unclassified email. now, i remember a time it seems very quaint when donald trump was always talking about hillary's emails. what about this email? >> joining us now, new york times, white house national security correspondent david sanger, who's, of course, also a cnn political and national security analyst. david, good morning. how big of a screw up is. >> this case? >> well, casey, when we wrote about this yesterday, my

colleague julian barnes and i were quite surprised to have heard about what had transpired. um, to their defense. and it's a pretty thin one. the unclassified email had the name, the first names, and the first initial of the last name of the agents and operatives and analysts. involved. um, so the white house made the case and others that this did not actually, you know, reveal their their full identities. it sure gave some clues. that would be pretty useful, combined with other information from social media and et cetera.. and we know that the chinese and the russians are particularly adept at combining all sorts of intelligence to put these together. i guess the question that i would ask casey would be, supposing we had published in the new york times or you had published on cnn.com a list of

names and first initials of the last name of people hired by intelligence agencies in the past two years. what do we think the white house would have been saying? >> david? >> of course we wouldn't have done that, right? >> right. we would never have done that. um, but can i just ask sort of on a basic level, can we assume that this is being read by foreign adversaries, that this has been hacked? >> i don't know for sure, but we do know in this particular case. but what do we know? we know that during the obama administration that the russians were in the unclassified white house, state department and pentagon systems, we know that the chinese, through a group called soul typhoon, that you and i have talked about before, got deeply into the telephone networks of nine major telecom providers and got at the

information about how the justice department, um, basically taps into the phones of suspected spies, uh, drug dealers and so forth. when they have warrants. so their skills here are pretty good, and particularly for getting into unclassified systems. >> and very briefly, david, the lengths to which the cia would normally go not to reveal the actual first name and last initial of let's let's stick with the directorate of operations. the more kind of sensitive players here, normally, how far would they go to make sure? i mean, normally these people operate in the world, often under names that are not their actual first names. right? >> that's right. and frequently they operate as well. um, under a sort of official cover that, you know, they've got a job and a title at the state department, at the agency for international development, perhaps at the agriculture department. you know, they could be placed in other, uh, in other roles. um,

so it's it's very possible that the data could be, you know, cross-registered here. and remember, what did the chinese steal back during the obama years? they went into the office of personnel management database and got all kinds of data about u.s. officials who had security clearances. they did not at that time get into the intelligence agency list because the intelligence agencies kept them separate from what's in the office of personnel management. but this is obviously the kind of information foreign groups all look for. >> all right. david sanger, thank you very much for being on the program, sir. always appreciate you. see you soon. >> great to be with you. >> all right. still to come here on cnn this morning, some arab american voters who supported donald trump expressing regret after hearing his plans for nearly 2 million palestinians in gaza. plus, fbi agents under scrutiny. how deep will the

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>> closed captioning brought to you by book.com. >> if you or a loved one have mesothelioma, we'll send you a free book to. >> answer questions. >> you may have. call now. >> and we'll come to you. >> 808 two one 4000. >> here's just some of the agenda. we will immediately implement when we become we we we're going to become the 47th president of the united states. i will totally obliterate the deep state. we started. we fired comey. we got rid of a lot of scum. >> president donald trump making good on his campaign, promises to go after these so-called deep state. attorney general pam bondi sworn in at the white house yesterday, where she vowed to end the, quote, weaponization of the justice department. part of this effort, apparently,

acting deputy attorney general emil bove request for information on a core team of fbi employees who worked on january 6th investigations. but he said fbi leadership refused to identify that group of employees, prompting beauvais to accuse fbi leadership of insubordination, according to a memo obtained by cnn. this comes a week after beauvais sent a memo instructing the fbi to provide information on all current and former bureau employees who worked on january 6th investigations at any time. but yesterday, beauvais attempted to clarify fbi employees who simply followed orders won't be fired. he said in an email, however, if anyone acted with, quote, corrupt or partisan intent, they could still face consequences. the former deputy director of the fbi, andrew mccabe, rejected that idea that these kinds of agents exist within the bureau at all. >> the idea. >> that the fbi. contains some group of rank and file agents who are radical, left leaning partizans who are out there

ignoring the directions given to them by their supervisors in order to target republicans is fantasy. it is a fever dream. >> all right. joining us now is phil mudd. he is a former cia counterterrorism official and former fbi senior intelligence adviser. phil, good morning. always grateful to hear from you. um, you stood up earlier in your career. the fbi's domestic counterterrorism capabilities in the wake of nine over 11. you have kind of a deep understanding of the stakes of this kind of action. can you help us understand what they are? >> well, there's a couple of pieces here. first, the numbers you're talking about, thousands of people. >> whether you divide that into. into what the trump people call partizans or a broader fbi population, that's a substantial portion of the fbi. >> so if. >> you're looking at national security issues like counterterrorism and counterintelligence and some of those agents or analysts worked on the case against president trump and some of his advisers. that's a lot of people. and so that can impact mission,

especially in the short to mid-term. if you remove those people suddenly from the table, there is a personal piece here. you can't be sitting around in new york or washington or elsewhere at the 50 plus fbi offices across the country, and not having a have a cup of coffee saying, am i next? so there's a nervousness about joining the service and saying, what do i get for my service? am i going to be fired? and then there's the bigger piece about whether thousands of people go and that affects not just investigations into political corruption, which is a very small piece of the fbi, but also counterintelligence and counterterrorism stuff from agents and analysts who were detailed to work on those trump investigations. >> yeah. phil, can you also talk a little bit about the cia, because i know you spent the bulk of your career there. we were just talking to david sanger about it. but this idea that they're going to offer buyouts across the board, and then there's this email that goes out that potentially exposes the real names of everyone that's been hired in the last two years. um, what are the implications and how far

does the agency normally go to conceal the information that they just put in an unclassified system? >> but you just gave the chinese a gift. you're going to conceal that stuff. not because of first name. and last initial means a lot to a regular american citizen, but what the chinese will do and other services will do is take that and combine that with other open source information. let's be really simple. let me give you an example. somebody who identifies himself as an analyst on facebook without saying what agency they're with, and they have the same first name and last initial that's on that list. that's one bit of data you might use if you're the chinese, and they've got a million other bits of data, they're going to try to use this as a phone book. so i mean i'm not going to lose sleep over it, but that is an unforced error, as we would say in tennis. i mean, you hit the net with that one because you didn't even try to get it over the net. that's embarrassing. and it could be a substantial risk to a person who just joined the agency in terms of buyouts. let me give you a simple sort of layman's response to that. good luck with that. you joined the service of the cia. it's an interesting job. it's not well

paid, but it's interesting. and it's not just a job. it's a mission. you're in washington, d.c., you're traveling around the world trying to understand what the chinese, the russians, the iranians, the north koreans are doing. and somebody comes in and says, here's some chump change to retire. good luck with that. i don't think they'll get a lot of success with that. and then the question will be, what's the next step? are they going to fire people? try that one too. >> what would be the implication of firing people if, as you say, the cia employees who are as you as you very importantly note are mission driven people, what implication does that have for all of us here at home? >> well, let's let me give you a simple example. let's say they look at employees who are who are brought on in the last couple of years. those are the easiest employees to remove because they're still under what's called probationary period. they're not full time. they're not sort of employees who have gone past that initial stage of vetting. once they join the agency. let's say you eliminate 2 or 3 years of recruits. do you know how hard it is to find somebody to want

to move to washington, d.c., alone with your family? it's an expensive city. you're not going to make that much money. let's say you speak some or fluent mandarin or russian or korean. so you move them here for 2 or 3 years, you get them through a vetting system, and then you eliminate that entire generation of people. not only is that really hard to replace, not only will that take a while, but try going on to a college campus in 2027 and saying, hey, why don't you join the cia? if you speak mandarin, what would you say? if you were a graduate student? i'd say, get out of here. you can't insure my my professional career. and furthermore, the next administration might can me. i think there's a lot of implications, second order that people haven't thought through yet. >> all right, phil mudd, always grateful to have you, sir. thank you so much for being here. i hope you come back. all right. so let's turn to this. president donald trump won the critical swing state of michigan in november with a significant assist from arab american voters. he convinced many of

them that he would deliver peace and stability to the palestinian people. here, though, is what some michigan voters are now saying after the president announced his plan to take over gaza. >> many in the community are at a loss for words. last night was a very rough night for most of us. at the end of the day, um, as arab americans or muslims, we really didn't have much of a choice. >> palestine is the red line for this community. >> a lot of. >> people are calling me and texting me saying, hey, you know how how did your vote work out? you know, how is that third party vote? >> i didn't vote for trump. so a protest vote, i don't know, i would say it was a targeted vote of conscience to say that the children of gaza have to mean something. >> all right. our panel is back to talk more about this. i mean, jonah goldberg, it seems very obvious on its face, as angry as people in michigan were about joe biden, that president trump was not going to be someone that was going to do the things that

were going to make them happier about the situation. um, i mean, the that said, i mean, this is kind of the farthest you could go. almost. right. other than saying that you're going to forcibly remove 2 million people, which i guess it's still a question like maybe that is on the table. >> yeah. i mean, i don't know. i mean, like, i thought the whole turning the palestinian issue among those voters into the decisive question of that election was foolish. regardless of how you think about it, it also didn't matter ultimately, like they thought they had a lot more leverage. but trump won all the swing states, right? so it was it was it was basically just performative on the whole. and i understand why they're they're so incredibly frustrated at the same time. uh, there are lots of people who voted for things that they didn't see pan out the way they would like. so we'll see, you know. >> matt, i mean, yeah, for for voters like this, i mean, for

people in the u.s. who have, you know, who are watching this kind of horrified, um, i mean, what what is it? i guess maybe what it says is, is something about donald trump's ability to convince people that, um, you know, he's not going to do what he says he's going to do. i just i'm having a hard time wrapping. >> my head. i would. >> put it a little differently. i think, um, for, for. years i was a constituency of the democratic party had almost expected folks to kind of fall in line. african-american voters for a long time were the, the sort of thing until trump came along in 24 and really courted them. i think this was something where democrats and i won't speak for megan, but from the outside, it seemed like these guys, they expected this kind of like, what are you going to vote for donald trump? or are you going to vote for a third party and almost didn't expect him to go that far, and there wasn't a courting there. it was. you can really vote for him. and they didn't. and i think they're now dealing with the consequences of it. >> yeah, elections have consequences. i think this is the best thing that you can see.

your vote matters and elections do have consequences. i don't understand. i think the thing that was really impactful in the 24 election is it's not just the protests that were happening and the people who are out there who did not vote for him. it was the narrative for so long that drove the narrative that that joe biden and kamala harris had to fight back against that i actually think impacted them, and it changed the way the youth voted. it wasn't just these people in michigan. there was a lot of people impacted by this. so i do think it was quite impactful. but elections have consequences. >> october 7th. >> would have changed the debate in so many ways that we're seeing now, and certainly in the election. >> absolutely. yeah. >> all right. i'm going to leave you with this because we're just days away from super bowl 59, where, of course, the kansas city chiefs are set to face off against my eagles, setting up a rematch of sorts for the brothers kelce. travis of course, currently plays for the chiefs. and jason is a former eagle travis of course hard at work preparing for sunday's game. but jason was front and center in his own kind of competition this week. we've been seeing so many of these, but i loved this one lookalike

contest. people magazine reporting ten eagles fans were sent searching for jason kelce in a crowd of look alikes. what was his takeaway? according to people, he said, quote, it went fantastic. the look alikes really looked alike. not that i'm a particularly hard person to look like, he joked. he did mention that like, you have to have the eyebrows, you know, to look like him, which i was entertained by. now that jason kelce is off the field, though, the big question is who is he going to be rooting for on sunday? >> i'm rooting for philadelphia and i'm rooting for travis kelce. that's the reality of it. >> you can see the eyebrows there anyway. the choice not so easy for jason kelce's wife kylie kelce. i have so much respect for this woman. she is a die hard eagles fan. she even refused to wear a chiefs red at last year's super bowl. she did wear red, but it was for the university of cincinnati anyway, there you have it guys. i have to say go birds. thanks to all of you