Ari Melber was talking about his interview with Matt Gaetz last night.
"Now we hear from someone from a different perspective. Howard Dean ran the party. Welcome back," Melber said.
"I try to start by taking things on the level and dealing with them. It matters if there was no deal. Turns out, now confirmed by Mr. Gaetz on the record on MSNBC, there is a secret deal. He said he lost his copy. Your response?"
"He's trying to give George Santos a run for his money. This is a guy who loves attention. he'll do anything to get it, and you just gave him some, so he's going to say whatever it takes to keep him in the news," Dean said. "He doesn't care what he says."
"We asked House GOP leaders and some of the Gaetz allies if they had their copy, if they would provide it, and they didn't," Melber said.
"I'm curious what you think, because you have been around politics for so long. There may be the bad faith actors who want attention, and lie, and then there's other people, old school Rockefeller Republicans or independents, they might believe that the new Republicans want to be more transparent or want to hold government accountable that way.
"I made the analogy to S.E.C. or FBI or agencies he might have issues with and say, you got to put up or shut up here. What does it mean to you? Do you think it's something that should be tackled if these focus say they're running on transparency and are in secret?"
"These people are essentially authoritarians. They'll say whatever it takes," Dean said.
"They're not that different from Putin. And they like Putin. These are dangerous people. I think Matt is sort of a tool in their hands, but there are people in that Congress who mean America harm, and I think there are also some Republicans who want to make sure that doesn't happen, and it's going to be really fascinating to see what happens when they try to handcuff some of the members.
"There's been some pushback. I don't think the American people are going to vote for these people. They barely won the House this time, and if it hadn't been for a bunch of screwups in New York, we could have. You can have them on once in a while. I wouldn't give them much of a platform because they're evil."
Berman protested that if journalists didn't confront things, politicians would never be held accountable.
"I think that's right. This is always the area you have to be careful in," Dean said.
"I don't want to pick on the New York Times, but they helped make Donald Trump with their incessant focus on the so-called emails of Hillary Clinton. and Trump is so outrageous that, it makes great copy and it sells newspapers.
"So it is true. I agree with you about the media. They have an obligation to try to defrock of of these George Santos types, of which there are a great many in the Republican party. But at some point, if you keep giving them all this light, people are going to believe it. While Trump is incompetent and psychiatrically, I think, hampered, he has a genius for these politics.
"And there are many, many Trumps. The guy from Florida certainly has behaved worse than Trump in terms of firing people and fiddling with judges and kicking people off school boards he doesn't like. That's really dangerous," Dean said.
"It's good to see the lack of principles and backbone in these people, but it's not good -- I'm not accusing you of doing this. I think you're a terrific interviewer, and I think the fact that you're an attorney is very, very helpful. You know how to ask questions and you know what the next questions is going to be. My daughter's a very good attorney, and I saw you leading Gaetz down the pathway to which his vanity was going to take him, and it was great.
But I do think we have to be really, really careful with these people. The tool is to get on the media as much as possible and repeat lies, so people start to believe them. So that, we have to resist," Dean concluded.
