Andrew Weissmann
speaker
1,068 appearances
9 recordings
5 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 20 May
Andrew Weissmann’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I always find it very strange to be in lower press there where the kind of junior level White House staffers work. I found it weird during Biden. I also found it kind of weird during Trump because like technically you're allowed to be there as a credentialed White House reporter. You can go in there and talk to them and ask them questions and stuff. But it's just the vibe is very strange.
It's completely unlike, you know, Congress where the staffers are all in their offices and the principals walk around and you can talk to them. It's like I've never quite gotten my feet underneath me there. So I don't know whether
Yeah, a little bit. I don't know. They were chatting it up. Fox News was up on a TV. They were eating some cupcakes and things that somebody had brought in. I don't know. I was more focused on the question and whether or not I was about to get sandbagged, you know? Did you encounter any MAGA creatures? Just junior comm staff, junior people, you know, just...
Friendly, bright, shiny faces of the new right-wing future. Were your palms sweaty?
I wasn't taking a moisture level test or anything, but I was a little freaked out, man. I had no idea. Like I said, they called me. I was like, why are they bringing the bulwark into here? Is there some dark scheme? But it all went fine.
The through line with all of these stories is just how much of a black box it all is, right? I mean, we know just openly that these are things that Donald Trump profits from. He and his associates own 80% of the supply of this coin. Whenever people put more money into it, it pushes up the price and they make money.
And beyond that, you know, there's all kinds of opacity based around, you know, we know this because there's been reporting on this, but a lot of the reporting only serves to highlight how completely untraceable and oblique a lot of this is.
The only reason that we know, for instance, that like the bulk of the major purchases of this coin have come from overseas is because Bloomberg did an investigation to the trading platforms that those purchases were made on, many of which, you know, bar US users from trading on them. And so based on that, they know that they're not here But that's kind of all the further that we know.
These wallets are largely anonymous. Your point about the Qatari plane is a good one. I feel like it's a little bit like what we just saw happen with the China tariffs, where the tariffs were at like 10,000% for a month. And so now that they've come back down to only 30, we're all kind of like, oh, thank God, now they're only 30. Right. But 30% tariffs are still kind of alarmingly large.
And like, yeah, the the Qatari plane does does sort of wash out some of these other financial scandals and some of this other open corruption, because a $400 million plane is just one of those kind of eye poppingly large numbers that like, of course, yeah, it's, you know, nothing really holds a candle to that.
But at the same time, I mean, the Trumps do stand to make millions of dollars off of these various crypto grifts. They get a cut of all these transactions that are happening and they own massive supplies of these coins themselves, these various coins themselves. So it's all very open. It's all very naked.
And as you heard in that clip, I mean, Carolyn Levitt essentially doesn't even try to offer any kind of halfway plausible alternate explanation other than the one that we all know, is the case, which is that he just wants to make a bunch of money and this is an easy way to do it. He thinks it's a deal. He thinks it's a good deal for him.
And he thinks the conflict of interest stuff is kind of pointless and for squares and for nerds to follow those rules. But not only does she, I mean, she says, obviously we're abiding by all conflict of interest rules and regulations and stuff.
And I resent the very notion that anybody would suggest any of this is unethical, but there's no alternate explanation given for why he would possibly be interested in doing this because we all know.
I'm not totally sure that the White House is involved, right? The wording is a little opaque on the website. They get to visit the White House, though. Is that in there? My reading of it, maybe I should bone up on this. I had thought that what was on offer was like there's this dinner and there's this reception at the club, at Trump's golf course in D.C., and that Trump would be present for that.
And then there's this kind of oblique reference to a VIP tour for like the creme de la creme, for like the top of the top of the top. But it's not super clear from the wording on the website what the tour is of. I don't know whether it's been externally reported that that's the White House or what. But but that's I mean, either way, the point is not like, oh, they get to see the Lincoln bedroom.
Right. The point is they get access to Donald Trump. The point is that they get they get. personal proximity to this guy who has this big sign around his neck that says, buy me. And they get to pitch him on stuff, presumably. I mean, we don't know exactly what that dinner is going to look like.
It could be that he's kind of scamming all of these people and there's not going to be that much access on offer. But we do know that at least some people are thinking of it in those terms, are buying the coin with the express hope that they'll be able to influence the president and with good reason because they're putting money in his pocket.
I think the point that you make is a good and important one, which is that even in the first term, when things were wildly less insane than they are today, ethics experts still were having conniptions constantly about all of the ways in which Donald Trump was obviously self-dealing because he had not divested from his properties.
The quote unquote blind trust was just that he had kind of pinky promised not to talk Yeah, absolutely. And he was putting up the Secret Service at his clubs and having the government pay him to do that, all sorts of things like that. And that was just the first term. And now, you know, all that stuff is still happening.
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