10/26/26: Lula Defeats Bolsonaro, Mehdi Hasan Exposes AIPAC, Early Vote Omen For GOP

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Flavio Bolsonaro, after the first round election, had something like a 90-plus percent chance to win elections.

Last night's election.

Instead, you're looking at the winner right there, Lula da Silva, with a comeback of absolutely historic proportions, winning a narrow victory over Bolsonaro. The Brazilian stock market has lost something like 20 to 30.

Percent, maybe a quarter of its value.

The market had absolutely surged after Bolsonaro's won the first round elections and looked like he was going to become Brazil's new president.

But the right there, extremely shocked.

Disappointed, and selling off as many assets as they can watching Lula's victory. Joining us to talk about this will be Juan David Rojas, who was down in Brazil over the past couple of weeks covering the election.

Juan, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me on, guys. So there were some rumors in.

The last couple of days that polls were showing an extraordinarily tightened race. It seems like there are pockets of voters who didn't turn out in the first round, who did turn out for Lula this time, when I guess they kind of realized, oh, wait a second, Flavio Bolsonaro might actually win this. And not as many of the minor parties who lost, supporters, went to Bolsonaro as they thought.

Did you see any of this coming? What do you think happened between the first round and this final round that shift these results so dramatically?

This is a truly shocking victory. I thought that Lulu would lose. And in fairness, the polls were sort of wrong in both directions. They were wrong in the first round in that they didn't expect Bolsonaro to win in the first round. He got the most votes. They thought that Lula would get the most votes. And then in the runoff, a lot of them were 50-50, but many still had Flavio Bolsonaro slightly ahead. What I think happened in the first round, for instance, is that a lot of the support for third candidates dropped off and went to Flavio Bolsonaro, evidently at the last minute. And in the second round, wow. The PT really went into overdrive.

I saw this in every city I went to. I went to five Brazilian cities and you just saw PT people handing out flyers everywhere, holding rallies. Lula went around the country, which really was incredible. He's 80 years old and is still extremely sharp mentally. He arrived like running to this demonstration of like 300,000 people in Sao Paulo.

And Andres Anonis has been really credited as a federal deputy for the PT, put together this social media following, like this WhatsApp group, which was over the course of just the first and second rounds, gained like 10 million followers, 7% of the electorate.

It was really, really crazy.

So this is historic in every way. No Brazilian president had ever won a runoff after losing in the first round. And of course, Lula is elected to a historic fourth term. Now, at the same time, this is also, I hate to rain on everyone's parade, but this is really a pyrrhic victory because Bolsonaro made huge gains in Congress. They won something like half of all seats that were up for grabs in the Senate. They nearly controlled the Senate. So this is going to be really tough in Lula's next term.

Let's put this map Up on the screen, guys, this should be D3. We can see the shift towards Lula from the initial election to the runoff. And the red arrows that you see here, it's a little backwards from what we're used to in the U.S., but the red shifts are towards Lula. And you can see in the vast majority of the country, there was a shift towards Lula.

Let's also put the polymarket image up on the screen here. We had a major gambling app fail. They really thought, you can see at the peak, they really thought that Flavio was going to win going into this. And then as the results came in, it just drops off a cliff and totally flips Flavio. So, you know, no real insider, no real sort of like intuition or instinct that went against the polls here. And one of the things that I did see, Juan, is that one of the pollsters came out and said basically like, look, we were so worried about underestimating Flavio and the Bolsonaro movement this time that we put our film too much on the scales in the other direction and we missed what was going on here.

Very, very possible.

Yeah, like I said, I mean, the amount of support I saw for Lula on the streets was insane. And, you know, in the past, like support on the street wasn't necessarily correlated to vote totals, but dude, like, over the weekend, there was a rally in Sao Paulo that had supposedly half a million people. It was apparently the largest demonstration in the country's history, potentially. Lula, really, if you look at the data, what he managed to do was drive out people who abstained in the first round.

Abstention in the first round actually was the highest in history, something like 22%. And that dropped off significantly in the second round, I think by a few points. So, it's really stunning. I saw that potentially even some of Flavio Bolsonaro's voters in the first round evidently ended up abstaining in the second round. So it's truly shocking. Really, I'm going to be honest, Lula has had a lot of failings in this term. By far, this has been his most disappointing of his three terms so far. But the thing is, on the other hand, like He was literally running against a bunch of guys, an entire family, who lobbied to accidentally and intentionally tariff and sanction their own country. So, I mean, it's really an indictment on Bolsonaro.

Now, Flavio is saying that he doesn't respect these results, that he's crying foul.

What do you suspect? There's also been some reports that he might just leave. But given the fact that they did so well in Congress. What do you expect his future is? Because on the one hand, he's feeling quite vulnerable. On the other hand, he's complaining that the results were not fair. On the other hand, his movement is, at the lower level, surging.

And what irregularities is he referring to, and where do you see this going?

Yeah, there were irregularities. I don't think that they affected the result. What happened yesterday was. In a handful of cities with mayors controlled by Bolsonaro allies, they were screwing around with transportation to polling stations and PT areas. And there's been back and forth over this. But anyway, Lula complained and requested an extension to voting.

And there was also inclement weather in the south of the country where Bolsonaro is really strong. So both candidates actually ended up requesting an extension. But once polls had already closed, a single justice, Cristiano Zanin, who was Lula's personal lawyer, issued a monochromatic decision. Brazil has this ridiculous judiciary where single justices can make these extremely consequential decisions.

He ruled that voting would be extended by two hours. But the problem was a lot of the voting machines had already been turned off. And once they're turned off, you can't turn them back on. So apparently a lot of people who might have been able to vote, still weren't able to vote. In fairness, I saw something that apparently the amount of people that were able to vote after 5 p.m. once polls closed or were supposed to close was still pretty minimal, only like 30,000, something like that.

So I don't think you can really dispute the results from what I've seen, at least. But, you know, that was definitely irregular. I mean, that had never happened in Brazil's history.

Thank you so much.

A lot of Latin America has shifted to the right with the Trump regime really helping that that movement towards the right along. So what will this mean globally and for relations with the U.S.

Yeah, you know, I haven't seen anyone else pick up on this, but actually, Trump. if you look at him, he did not issue a formal endorsement of Flavio Bolsonaro. Like, you know, he typically does his, like, truth endorsements. Now, obviously, you know, it's implied that he has his back. I mean, Flavio Bolsonaro literally went to the White House, oh, and, you know, got, like, a terror designation for, like, Brazilian drug gangs, whatever. But I think they might have omitted a formal endorsement because they thought it would probably help Lula.

I mean, every time the terrorists before... There were two rounds of tariffs this year and last year that extremely helped Lula in the polls when he was down, actually. And in Latin America, I mean, this is the first left-wing party to win re-election since Morena in Mexico in 2024. Every other election has been lost by left-of-center parties. So, and here's where I say, look, this is really important not to, like, it's really important to get the right lessons from this result. What I would say is that because Bolsonaro did so well in the Congress, there were some serious questions about the legitimacy of Brazil's Supreme Court.

There was this Epstein-like scandal implicating a bunch of people, including people in Lula's government and also Flavio Bolsonaro. And actually, the justice that convicted Jair Bolsonaro, Flavio Bolsonaro's dad, took millions of dollars from this evangelical. Banker, and a lot of the rest of the Supreme Court, they were trying to protect themselves. This really energized Bolsonaroismo, and it's why they came out to vote so massively in the Congress. So both Lula and Flavio promised to reform the Supreme Court. I think he's going to have to make good on that decision. Otherwise, seriously, I would not rule out impeachment proceedings at some point during this term.

Juan?

Really appreciate your analysis. Thanks so much for being here. Thanks, guys.

We are pleased to be joined today by Mehdi Hassan, a friend of the show, the founder of Zateo, to talk about his new documentary, Nightflower, Inside APAC's Fight for Influence.

Mehdi, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks for having me, guys.

And so actually, this was a bit of a punk. We said we would have you come on and talk about the APAC documentary. We actually have Matthew Iglesias and Neera Tanden standing by here who want another shot.

Round two, ding-a-ding-ding.

They want another shot at the interview. No, but this is a tremendous new documentary. Let's start with a little bit of it. We can roll this clip here.

What is it that you fear about speaking out?

I'm afraid of some form of retaliation from AIPAC.

I decided to speak out because I'm disappointed something has to change.

You may know AIPAC as being one of the biggest and most recognizable donors to many of the members of Congress in your state. A former director of AIPAC said, the lobby is like a night flower. It thrives in the darkness and shrivels in the daylight. This is great, man. AIPAC and what it's supporting is very unpopular right now.

And that is the moment where sunlight shines on the night flower.

Do you feel like AIPAC operates as a foreign agent for Israel?

Maddie, there's another interesting moment I wanted to roll before we go into the conversation, actually. If we could just go ahead and put up E3, too.

I imagine there must be times, though, when you were preparing to lobby on the Hill that you would talk with Israeli officials and coordinate messaging and plan, no?

Well, I.

Don't want to go into that. to talk to somebody who does not coordinate. There were people who had some... Just drop it. I have no direct information.

Not sure what you're getting at?

I have no direct knowledge of anybody coordinating with anybody outside with any other government.

But suspicions or something or?

I don't know.

Can you just kind of explain what you're... Not on camera.

Many what I particularly liked about this film was that it sort of doubles as a window into American politics from the 1980s up until today and how it's evolved and also Israeli politics and the U.S.-Israel relationship as it has evolved over kind of together, co-evolved, I would say. What struck you the most about the history as you were looking back at it?

Yeah, so Dion Nissenbaum, the Pulitzer Prize-winning former Wall Street Journal Middle East reporter who made this film, When he started working on this film, AIPAC wasn't as central to our politics as it's become in recent months. I guess timing has been great for us in terms of this film coming out in the past week and all eyes being on AIPAC, especially post-Michigan primary and pre the general.

But what's interesting is, excuse me, there's been a lot of coverage of AIPAC, its role in financing Democratic primaries. its role in spending a record amount of money in Michigan and St. Abdul El-Sayed, the role of Republican billionaires in funding AIPAC. But there hasn't been as much coverage in terms of AIPAC's role itself in our political system and whether it should even have to register as a foreign agent. And that is the focus of this film.

the FARA Act, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires lobbies that are coordinating with foreign governments to register as foreign agents so we don't have secret foreign government interference in American politics. And this is a debate that's been going back, as we point out in the film, to the 1960s. This has been going back to Robert Kennedy, the good RFK, not the one we currently have, who actually suggested the precursor organization to AIPAC should register as a foreign agent. So did Senator William Fulbright and many others over the years, and it never has. And this debate is now back, and this film lays out quite a lot of evidence for why a DOJ, maybe run by the Democrats, not by the Republicans, clearly, should actually

investigate whether AIPAC is acting as a foreign lobby. And we speak to whistleblowers, we speak to former officials like Douglas Bloomfield, you just saw there, who was a chief lobbyist, legislative director for AIPAC for nearly a decade in the 80s. And they all seem like they want to say something about Israeli government coordination. We interviewed Keith Weitzman, who says on camera, yeah, I passed on classified information that the Pentagon gave me to the Israeli embassy in D.C.

So, Mehdi, what AIPAC's defenders will say, and some of them do say in your documentary, is this is not an organization representing a foreign government. This is a group of Americans who believe that it is good for America when you have a strong U.S.-Israeli relationship.

And you say to them what?

So it is the main argument that this is an American group. Stop trying to bracket us with Israel. And that's a fair argument. But what's interesting in this film is you have someone like Sam Lauter, who Dion speaks to, who is from DMFI, Democratic Majority of Israel, a pro-Israel group. Let's just be very clear. He calls himself an AIPAC prince in the film. His mother was one of the co-founders, one of the big drivers of AIPAC when it was founded.

And even he says, while he says, look, I don't think it's a foreign lobby, I don't think it's a foreign agent, but even he says, I do have to remind AIPAC, and he's distanced himself from AIPAC because it's so uncritically pro-Netanyahu, he says, I do have to remind my friends at AIPAC that the A in AIPAC stands for American. So even former supporters of AIPAC are saying, guys, where is your loyalty right now? Remember that you are an American group, not just uncritically pushing an Israeli agenda.

We interview a former DOJ lawyer. in the film, who's an expert on FARA violations. And he makes the point, look, you don't have to be perpetually funded by Israel or controlled by Israel to register. You just have to have even one instance of coordination that forces you to register. And it's interesting that in this town in D.C., where we are, Crystal, The Republicans, they want to have Code Pink, the far-left anti-war group, register under FARA for alleged ties to a Chinese Communist Party. They want to have Al Jazeera, where I do a show. They've been trying to get them registered as a foreign agent. For a while, the bar is very low when it comes to groups the Republican Party does not like. But when it comes to AIPAC,

the bar is raised high. It's see no evil, hear no evil. Even though, as we say in the film, we have a former whistleblower who says, he says AIPAC AIPAC is acting as a foreign agent in spirit, if not the letter of the law. So there is enough here for Democrats, if they ever take back Congress, if they ever take back the White House and the Justice Department, to actually investigate. But the problem, of course, is people like Hakeem Jeffries, the future speaker for a Democratic House, take a lot of money from AIPAC.

What also struck me about this film is the extent to which AIPAC is energized to go after Jewish politicians, but not because incidentally they are Jewish, but precisely because they are Jewish. You get into, now, you know, there was the famous case of Andy Levin, the synagogue president, and you also get into- Haley Stevens, in fact, too. Yeah, some of these Chicago races. Right, exactly, running against Haley Stevens.

Some Chicago races where Daniel Biss was running against an AIPAC-backed candidate.

There was also a pro-Israel, Support like APAC guy.

Who'd gone to every APAC convention for like decades that they drove into the ground. Talk a little bit about Daniel Biss opening up about his meetings with with APAC and how that race unfolded, because that was that's pretty, pretty extraordinary example.

Yeah, so this Chicago primary earlier this year had, I think it's Laura Fine was the APAC-backed Democratic candidate. There was Daniel Bist, the mayor of Evanston, who's a liberal Zionist. I mean, he's not some anti-Zionist Israel hater. He's a liberal Zionist Jewish-American politician whose mother is Israeli and whose grandparents are Holocaust survivors, right? This is not some flaming anti-Semite or a person you can smear as an anti-Semite, but he'd been critical of Israel's war in Gaza. He'd been critical of the Netanyahu government and AIPAC decided to spend against him. And yes, they forced out Bruce Lee on a conservative, an Orthodox Jewish member of the community, a conservative Democrat, pro-Israel Democrat. And actually, Ryan, you'll enjoy this.

He came to our premiere that we did in Chicago last week for Nightflower, and he got cheered by the audience. He had nothing but praise for Kat Abu-Ghazala, who is a Palestinian-American also in that race who AIPAC spent against. And it was interesting that this is the destructiveness of AIPAC right now, that they're willing to take down even liberal Zionists who don't tow the Netanyahu line. far-right Zionist line.

They did it to Tom Malinowski in New Jersey and ended up with an even more anti-Israel congressional candidate on the Democratic side. So a lot of these interventions by AIPAC are backfiring severely for them. But look, Daniel Biss has what I think is the line of the film. He tells Dion in the film, and I want to read out to you, he says, AIPAC basically performs anti-Semitic tropes and then criticizes the people who just described the thing that just happened for allegedly being anti-Semitic. It's really disingenuous.

It's really dangerous. You're inviting them to dabble with real anti-Semitism. Because in his race, AIPAC didn't just spend against him. They spent against him via groups that had names like elect women and progressives or whatever. Like AIPAC does not do this openly. It's super PAC, United Democracy Project, hides behind other organizations, shell front groups, which then wrap up and you see it is really United Democracy Project. So these people are operating behind the scenes in the shadows with these kind of fake front groups, which is why we call the film Nightflower, which comes from the quote, from the APAC official, former APAC official, the late Steve Rosen, who said, the lobby is like a night flower. It

withers in the sunlight. It blossoms in the dark. And that is what they're doing. And that's what Daniel Biss, of all people, calls out.

So it seems like APAC, and to your point, they've been less upfront about when they put money into races because they've become so incredibly toxic.

Let's put E4 up on the screen.

Of course, both you and Ryan over at DropSight have done extraordinary reporting about this dark money flowing in from APAC. The Lever has a new comprehensive report tracking all of these other groups with these, you know, like Democratic women and all these other names that sound, oh, progressive, they sound good, completely obfuscating who is actually behind this. Let's also put E2 up on the screen because this is another really quite shocking shift for AIPAC. They say they are not going to directly endorse candidates because, again, it has become such a toxic organization. mostly on the left, but also a growing sentiment on the right as well, where it's at least complicating for candidates. So do you

think that we're entering a new era here with AIPAC?

Certainly in reputational terms, AIPAC's taken a massive hit. You even had Mike Rogers, Crystal, telling AIPAC at the start of the general campaign that he was doing against Abdul Hussein, like, don't publicly spend for me. He was still doing fundraisers with them in California, but like, don't put your name on anything in Michigan, because he knew how toxic the brand has become. I would point out we should be careful about the bait and switch. AIPAC is saying we won't directly give money to candidates. My understanding is they only give three or four million directly. Maybe I've got the number lower or slightly higher than the exact number, but through their super PAC, they give tens of millions,

maybe a hundred million, in this race, the United Democracy Project. And that super PAC is a new development. in AIPAC's approach to politics. Traditionally, they never had a super PAC. They helped bundle money for congressional candidates, but didn't directly give. So when they say we're not going to directly give, they're really going back to what they did before, but they're leaving the super PAC intact. And the super PAC still operates in the shadows behind these front groups and running ads against, you know, they ran ads against Cori Bush and Jamal Bowman successfully in 2024 and helped defeat those guys in very expensive primaries. But they defeated them by saying, oh, they don't back Joe Biden. They don't

support the bipartisan infrastructure bill. They didn't run ads saying they hate Israel.

What I love about this documentary too, is that you got Dion to do it. A tremendous, uh, investigative reporter, um, who really puts his, those investigative skills to work and, and kind of sifting through what, uh, you know, what APAC has been doing for the last, um, several, several decades. And I really did.

Appreciate, uh, this is, this is quote, because it has been our experience here at breaking points and over at dropside too. We covered these Chicago races and you start looking at it. You're like, wait a minute, elect Chicago women. This is a, pack that didn't exist like two days ago. And now it's spending hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars.

Like that's not how organizations work. You know, they usually launch, they have a gala, they raise, they do fundraisers. Like it's not easy to wake up and all of a sudden have several million dollars. And so then you start connecting the dots and By saying, oh, the treasurer here has also been a treasurer for an APAC PAC. The ad buyer they're using has worked with APAC before. Oh, this nonprofit that they're using, this is connected to APAC.

And so you do that reporting and say that all of the evidence is that APAC is working behind the scenes to spend money here. And immediately APAC will say, you're just engaging in anti-Semitic tropes.

Like how dare you do that?

It's like, no, I'm describing the precise behavior of this organization at this precise moment.

And they don't have to behave in that way, right? If you want to spend $ 100 million under Citizens United, you legally can. I don't like it, but legally nothing's stopping you from doing it. But come out and say, hey, we're spending $ 100 million because we love Israel and we want these candidates to love Israel and we want them to support Israel. The fact that you're not doing that tells us, number one, you know what a toxic issue Israel is in Democratic Party politics and with the American public right now. And number two, you're behaving in this deceptive, secretive way. And again, as Daniel Biss puts it, promoting these anti-Semitic tropes, performing anti-Semitic anti-Semitic tropes by hiding in

the shadows and not being transparent about your lobbying efforts. People say to me, why do you pick on AIPAC? What about the other lobby groups? I'm against all of these lobby groups. But it's interesting that AIPAC behaves in this way. And I think Bernie Sanders has said it best, that the Democratic Party can't overturn Citizens United overnight, obviously.

It requires a constitutional amendment with the current Supreme Court. But what it could do is come up with rules that disincentivize, basically prevent candidates in Democratic primaries from taking AIPAC money. And it's a point I made to Neera Tanden, you mentioned Neera Tanden, when I interviewed her for my Al Jazeera English show head to head recently at Georgetown.

And she agreed in principle that none of these, you know, none of these groups should be involved in primaries, although she wouldn't say AIPAC shouldn't be allowed in. She kept saying all groups, you know, all lives matter because she can't, you know, give People, a clip of her saying she's anti-APAC for whatever reason you and I can speculate. But even in principle, even she accepted this argument that we need to push now that at the very minimum in Democratic primaries going forward, including the presidential primary in 2028, there need to be rules that prevent a Republican funded group that may or may not be coordinating with a foreign government from spending on Democratic Party primary candidates.

Yeah, I pushed Representative Adam Smith on the same thing, and he was just in denial that that was even a possibility. It's like, well, it's the Democratic Party. They can set their own rules for their primary, and he just was adamant that that was not even theoretically possible.

I do want to move on.

To AIPAC's perhaps top target in the entire nation, Abdullah Syed, running for Michigan Senate. But before we do, Mehdi, just tell people where they can find the complete documentary so they can watch this extraordinary work.

Thank you so much. It is a Zatea produced film. Please do become a subscriber. You can watch the film at InsideAPAC.com. Excellent.

And it really is great and gets into the history and does a deep dive. And, you know, I think you'd be hard pressed to come away from it and not feel that they are just doing Israel's bidding. And there are some key turning points in there, in particular with regard to the Obama administration, the JCPOA.

Let's go ahead and.

Turn to Michigan, where you have this marquee race between neocon Mike Rogers and Abdul El-Sayed, who successfully faced down tens of millions of dollars in his primary against Haley Stevens. Haley Stevens was on one of the Sunday shows this weekend, and she was asked specifically if she still backs and supports Abdul El-Sayed, and she refused to forthrightly support him.

Let's take a listen to that.

You're still fully behind, Abdul El-Sayed?

Look, I'm on the Democratic ticket. I can't say that I agree with everything that's gone on. I wish that first debate had been more about that rubber stamp for Trump because we got a lot of chaos in Michigan. I don't want to debate who's the enemy of the United States. It's very clear that Iran is. I didn't run my campaign on foreign policy issues, but that was litigated in my primary. I'm not looking to be front and center right now. I'm looking to be on the team to support you know, my next governor, Jocelyn Benson, and frankly, these great Democrats who are working their tails off, who are going to make Hakeem Jeffries the first Black Speaker of the House.

You didn't mention Abdul Hussein in that last answer.

Well, look, I would just say you had asked me if I'm still on the team. I'm on the team.

Your thoughts, Matty?

That's so painful to rewatch. I watched that yesterday. You're making me watch it again on a Monday. Torturous. I'm furious, actually, watching that clip. And just thinking about how giddy and happy Dana Bashworth here was saying, you didn't mention Abdullah Saeed. We'll park Dana for a moment there. On Hayley Stevens, furious about the answer for multiple reasons, number one, She endorsed Abdul El-Sayed already. She came out and said, I endorse him. I, at the time, was one of many people.

I don't know if you did, Christopher. I came out on Twitter and said, good job, Haley Stevens. This is really good that she's doing this, uniting the party to stop Mike Rogers, the Trump MAGA candidate. So what is the point of now disowning or walking back your own endorsement in this way with less than 10 days to go?

I don't understand it. Number two. To do it on the day when Barack Obama is in Michigan campaigning for Abdul El-Sayed is just ridiculous. If Barack Obama can go out and endorse Abdul El-Sayed, Hayley Stevens can endorse Abdul El-Sayed. Number three, to not say his name, right? She went out, you noticed that twice she spoke, twice she would not say his name. She said Jocelyn Benson's name, Dana Bash mentioned again, she will not mention it name. I find that odious. I find it disgusting at a time when Donald Trump is using the worst racist Islamophobic rhetoric against Abdul Al-Sayed for a Democrat in Michigan who lost the race against him, who's apparently a proud Michigander, proud Democrat, anti-racist,

Why is she not saying his name? Why is she not defending him from Donald Trump's racism, saying, oh, I just call him Muhammad because I'm the president. He's a jihadist. He should go through a metal detector, Trump said this weekend, if he enters Congress. Not a word of defense from Haley Stevens. The same people who go on and on about anti-Semitism and bigotry, Islamophobia just normalized from them. They don't give a damn. So I was furious watching that clip on so many levels. And by the way, I'm most furious because of the hypocrisy. If Abdul El-Sayed had lost to Haley Stevens, and turned up on CNN less than 10 days before the general had been asked that question and had refused to say her name, number one,

Democrats would have gone nuts saying he's a traitor, this is what the left does, they're helping Trump and Maga, and they would have accused him of whatever it is. Oh, he's against her because she's for Israel, etc., etc. So I just find the whole thing so odious, so hypocritical. And by the way, dangerous for Democrats. I don't know.

I hate to be the I told you so guy. But in 2028, when a bunch of leftists decide to sit down because it's Gavin Newsom or Pete Buttigieg on the ticket and they say, well, you guys didn't support Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, they'll be right to point that out. And Democrats will regret dropping their vote blue no matter who, except when it's Abdul El-Sayed or a leftist they don't like in Michigan. I just find the whole thing nauseating, hypocritical, infuriating, racist.

And, you know, I was also struck by the difference between how some people like Haley Stevens, Neera Tanden, and other Democrats are treating this primary and others, some of the never Trumpers, like Tim Miller over at the Bulwark, for instance. Once the primary was over, like he has been agitating, saying we're all in. In fact, he recently had some new reporting on Mike Rogers that is very interesting.

I don't know if you saw this, but last week or so, Mike Rogers threatened to sue Dropsite because we had reported that his second wife took over basically or launched the American branch of this British security contractor and immediately started getting hundreds of millions and then more than a billion dollars in contracts.

We had reported that He took seven trips to Iraq, or he says that he took seven trips to Iraq in the 2000s while she was over there as the spokesperson for Paul Bremer.

I had kind of suspected that they may have met at that point. Turns out Tim Miller reports they already knew each other. And this is an important detail. So let's roll F2 here.

Christy, then now Rogers. Christy Clemons, she was the finance director for his congressional campaign in 2000. She had been a lifelong staffer in Lansing, working for the state legislature, that kind of person. She's married to her college sweetheart at the time, Chad.

Mike is married to his first wife.

This is 2000.

Then Mike gets elected to Congress. She gets a job in D.C. Not working for Mike, though. And then she gets a job in Iraq working for Paul Bremer. It's a pretty good job to get for somebody who had been a lifelong staffer in Lansing. I think a lot of national security people probably wanted that job, working for Paul Bremer. Then Mike goes on seven codels to Iraq in only a few years. That's kind of a lot.

I don't know.

You were doing a lot of codels. Seven in a couple years.

Not that many.

Feels like a lot. Then in 2006, she comes back to D.C. and starts doing defense contracting lobbying. It's kind of surprised people, her level of success in that. 2007, Mike divorces his wife.

Okay.

Then they get married. During that time, he rises to the head of the House Intel Committee. She stays as a Defense contract lobbyist. She keeps getting more contracts. She ends a massive $ 10 billion deal a few months after he takes over the committee. That's just something that just happened. Seems like maybe on one of the contracts she worked on, there's some dispute about this in the story, but people can read it for themselves, was doing security in Benghazi.

I don't know how that turned out.

Dropsite News has all the specifics. You can see then also on his financial reports, you know, the chart going up. And a lot of that money was his new wife who was doing the contracting. Anyway, I don't know exactly what was happening between the year 2000 and 2007 when he divorces his wife. I don't know exactly anything about whether he had roles in her just shockingly successful career getting money for defense contracting.

So it turns out that Christy Clemons, who later became his second wife, was his finance chair for his 2000 campaign. So he knew her before she went to Iraq. Meanwhile, Rodgers and Christy Rodgers deny any wrongdoing. I want to say that. But meanwhile, Rodgers has made Abdul El-Sayed's family a huge part of this election. How do you assess Rodgers' effort to say he's going to sue us over this compared to the way that he talks about Abdul El-Sayed?

So, well, first of all, the kind of the free speech warriors in the Republican Party, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Mike Rogers, they love free speech until they see a lawsuit they can file, a spurious defamation lawsuit they can file against media or political critics. And I'm sure DropSight will stand its ground and stand by its reporting. And I suspect if he loses, he may just go away quietly.

We'll see. It's interesting that he's doing this, you know, so close to the election, making all this noise. But it's interesting. Look, he claims he didn't do anything wrong. Abdul El-Sayed says he's got nothing to do with the Muslim Brotherhood. He doesn't know about his mother's alleged ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. But bringing family in again is the hypocrisy. I said this recently on social media, Ryan, like, OK, you want to ask questions about Abdul El-Sayed's mother. That's fine.

Do we get to talk about Donald Trump's father, who was allegedly arrested in the 1920s at a violent KKK rally? He's only ever been asked about it once, back in 2015, when he launched his campaign by the Washington Post. In the last decade, I've never seen a single reporter ask Donald Trump or a single interviewer, let's talk about your dad.

Was he a member of the Ku Klux Klan? Never asked that question to Donald Trump in the last decade. So, you know, if you want to go after family members, let's just be consistent. As for Mike Rogers and the actual claims in your article, I just find it fascinating that the mainstream media just decided to give this veteran Republican, former chair of the House Intel Committee, guy who's running, by the way, for the Senate a second time. He lost to Alyssa Slotkin in 2024. This is his second attempt at trying to get the Senate seat. Where's all the coverage? And by the way, just props to Senator Alyssa Slotkin, who's been an outspoken campaigner for Abdul El-Sayed, hasn't behaved as awfully as Hayley Stevens. I just want

to give a shout out to a centrist who understands what's at stake. But Mike Rogers has just had a pass. For example, it was a Detroit local paper, Ryan, that pointed out that Mike Rogers voted to send money to the Mohammed Morsi Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt. It was Mike Rogers who told Reuters in 2012 that there are moderate Muslim Brotherhood members that we can work with. Can you imagine if there was a quote from Abdul El-Sayed saying that on the record? And yet it required a Detroit paper to do that story. And then Kristen Welker did it on Meet the Press yesterday, less than 10 days out from the election. Why wasn't he asked this question a long time ago? Rodgers had a complete pass

from mainstream media, while the mainstream media obsesses over Hassan Paika and everything Abdul El-Sayed's ever done in his life, going back to captain of the high school football team or whatever it was. That's been examined. So I just find the complete pass for this Republican just so odious. And I'm glad you mentioned Tim Miller and the Bulwark because some of the never Trumpers, not all of them, but some of the never Trump Republicans do understand what's at stake. I don't have to agree with them on foreign policy or health care or whatever it is. But one thing I've always respected about some of the Never Trump Republicans, again, I say some, is that they understand that what's at stake in a way that many centrist

Democrats do not, even some on the left do not. And I think that's important. That's why Tim Miller was upset with Neera Tanden when she came on his show, that she was obsessing over Hasan Piker at a time when Mike Rogers was getting a free pass. And I think it's interesting that Neera Tanden, whose best pals with Hayley Stevens, as she told me on my show, has not said a word since yesterday. I can check her Twitter again. I know she tweets every seven seconds. but I'll check after this show. She hasn't said a word at the time of this taping about Hayley Stevens not endorsing Abdul El-Sayed. She kept telling me, I'm totally on board.

I want Abdul El-Sayed to win. We've got to lock in for Abdul El-Sayed. Why isn't she calling out Hayley Stevens, her friend, for not getting behind Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan? Why is Tim Miller more pro-Abdul El-Sayed than Hayley Stevens, or apparently near a tandem?

Yeah.

Haley Stevens and Jasmine Crockett both need to get it together with this mess. I did want to ask you, though, Trump was in Michigan for a rally with Mike Rogers over the weekend.

A Klan rally. Yeah, exactly.

And some great photos there of the two of them just embracing, happy as could be. But when Mike Rogers was asked— whether he considers himself a MAGA Republican and whether he will be a reliable vote for Donald Trump. He struggled with these answers.

Yeah.

Let's let's go ahead and take a look at that. F3.

Congressman, we're almost out of time. So let me just ask you big picture. Do you consider yourself to be a MAGA Republican?

Listen, I'm going to tell you this is.

I get you guys on the national press, but this is a little bit disgusting to me.

You know what you don't cover?

The chairman of the Democrat Party just came out and said he cannot, the former chairman, sorry, he cannot vote for Abdul.

Can you answer my question?

All you want to do is talk about something else on the ground.

Are you a MAGA Republican? I've already answered the question, Kristen.

That's just what I want to know. Do you consider yourself to be a MAGA Republican?

Kristen, I'm gonna go right back through this. There is a reason we have support from people in Detroit.

And Flint.

I know that President Trump is going to be out in Michigan campaigning with you a little bit later on today. Let me ask you, Congressman, is a vote for you a vote for the Trump agenda?

I'm apologizing.

I'm having some difficulty in my earpiece, but is a vote for you? I'm not sure.

I'll tell you what a vote for me is. It's a great day for the state of Michigan.

Amazing.

Very convenient earpiece issues there for Mike Rogers.

I mean, he's practicing to be a Republican member of Congress who always, have you seen this Trump tweet? I haven't seen the tweet. Do you hear what he said? I didn't hear it. Mike Johnson's classic response to every question is, I don't know what you're talking about. I haven't seen the tweet. I haven't seen the press. So he's just practicing for that role he'll have to play once he gets to the Senate. It is shameless cowardice. Again, this is all happening very late in the race. These interviews, these questions should have been put to Mike Rogers weeks, months ago. He's had a complete pass on the mainstream media, which is what annoys me when some of us say, why are you talking so much about Hassan Baika? It's

not that Hassan Baika hasn't said controversial issues. It's not that Hassan Baika should be immune from criticism. It was the disproportionate attention paid to a Twitch streamer from California. rather than the veteran chair of the House Intel Committee who lied about seeing bin Laden's body in person when he was killed and all sorts of other nonsense that he said over the years and his role with Big Pharma and allegedly helping the opioid crisis, as Abdel El-Sayed has accused him of. None of that has had the coverage and he's had a complete pass. And that's what frustrates me. When I have these arguments with people like Matt Iglesias and Neera Tanden say, well, look how good Roy Cooper and Mary Peltola are doing. It's like, well,

they haven't had these kind of races with the mainstream media on one side, with the president of the United States just completely attacking Abdul El-Sayed in the most vicious, racist terms. I mean, all we talk about in D.C. and in our media It's about antisemitism on the left, antisemitism in the Democratic Party. Find me one Democrat, one mainstream Democrat, left, center, wherever, who speaks about Jews in the way Donald Trump speaks about Muslims. It just isn't any kind of comparison. There's never been any kind of comparison.

Nobody would ever dare talk about Josh Shapiro or JB Pritzker or John Ossoff. in the way that Donald Trump has spoken about Abdul El-Sayed. He's a jihadist. He's a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. He needs a metal detector if he comes to Congress. I call him Muhammad. In fact, I call all Muslims Muhammad because that's what most of them are called. I'll call him whatever I want. This kind of disgusting stuff. Don't even get me started on the Somali racism. that's just been given a pass is insane.

I just, even by Donald Trump standards, we are at full on KKK neo-Nazi levels of racism, which is why the Michigan race is so important, because if they win with this racist campaign, they will just escalate it in the run up to 2028. Yeah, absolutely.

And we have, we have a few numbers that we can talk about real quickly, but we can put up F5 here. I think the hope among Abdul Alsaid supporters who see this incredible amount of racism coming their way, you know, I've heard from, you know, people with access to internal polling, that all of the fear-mongering has, you know, has affected the unfavorables of El-Sayed. But there's also a huge kind of national blue wave underway, and you're starting to see that express itself in Michigan, where in counties carried by Kamala Harris, they're at about two-thirds of their 2024 pace so far, whereas in in counties carried by Trump in 2024, they're at about 45% of their pace.

So more Democrats are coming to the polls, according to the early vote in Michigan, so far than Republicans. That might be enough to kind of carry El-Sayed over this kind of wave of racism that's being pushed his way. Mehdi, have you been tracking any of the early vote? What's your sense as we get down to the wire of this very consequential race, as we talked in the last segment about the role APAC has played. This could be a Waterloo for APAC or could be a huge victory if they're able to come back and put Mike Rogers over the top.

Yeah, I mean, they spent tens of millions in the primary, tens of millions in the general. Look, I don't trust any polls anymore. There's just been too much misinformation, disinformation, mistakes. We saw the nonsense with this fake polling company Wedgwood Polls. We saw the mistakes in the Francesca Hong primary. We've seen Republicans constantly being kind of understated by polls over the last decade, especially in the Trump era. I suspect it'll either be a very, very close race or not close at all. I don't think there'll be a middle ground.

I think the polls will be kind of completely off or it's gonna be super tight nail-butter. Of course, Alyssa Slotkin beat Mike Rogers by half a percentage point in 2024. That was in a year that was bad for the Democrats. The Matthew Iglesias of this world keep telling me that he shouldn't win by half a percentage point because there's this national blue wave. And I keep saying, well, don't forget, He's running in a very sui generis race where the president is attacking him day after day. His own former party chair won't endorse him. His own former rival won't endorse him. And, you know, this is a very, very unique Michigan race. A win's a win. If he wins, it's going to be historic. The Republicans know it's going

to be historic. There'll be some centrist Democrats who will do a, well, versus the generic ballot. And nobody cares at that point. Good luck with that argument. Everyone knows it will be a historic, insane win and that he will be a very valuable member of the Democratic caucus in the Senate. But it is going to come down to the wire. And those numbers, I mean, put the numbers to one side. Just talking to people on the ground in Michigan who were there this weekend and knocking on doors and have been living there. I mean, the ads that Mike Rogers is spending, yes, of course they're going to drive down favorables. You can't get through a football game in Michigan on TV without an insane number of anti-Abdul ads. And they're not ads about Abdul's support

for Medicare for All, I can assure you. They're ads about his radical jihadist connections and his mother's Al-Qaeda links and Muslim Brotherhood and all the usual bullshit. And this stuff works. I mean, look, we're an independent media. I used to work for MSNBC. We understand corporate media is in decline, but it still has a lot of power.

The airwaves still have a lot of power. Look at what's happened in the UK. Non-stop, several weeks of negative coverage of anti-Zionist Jewish leader of the Green Party, Zach Polanski. His numbers are down. People think that the Green Party is now anti-Semitic. It's led by the only Jewish party leader.

When the mainstream media gets together as a group and goes for someone, they still have the power to change reality, change perceptions, change views. Let's not understate that in any way. Yeah.

And it would be one thing, you know, in terms of this discourse about who's electable and who's not electable. It'd be one thing if they were attacking him on his issue positions, if they were demonstrating that, oh, Medicare for all just won't sell with a general election audience. But that's not what they're doing at all. Their entire campaign is just racist hate.

And he's got a weird name. That's the whole thing.

What does unelectable even mean? This is the discussions I've been having recently with the Neerajs and Matthews of this world. I just had an argument online with Liz Smith, who was obviously working with Mallory McMorrow, a Democratic consultant, about, oh, well, he's not electable. Well, this is the problem with electability versus Roy Cooper. Does anyone really seriously believe that Roy Cooper, for example, is of the caliber of Abdul El-Sayed? No, genuinely, if you arrived from Mars... and you saw these two people on the stump campaigning. No one disputes Abdul El-Sayed as a great public speaker. No one disputes his charisma.

Bill Clinton told him to run for public office when he was at college giving a commencement address. His policy positions, as you say, are super popular. In fact, in Michigan, Medicare for All is insanely popular and has been helping his numbers. The focus groups show that he's getting more Trump voters from 24 other Democratic candidates in swing states.

What does it mean to say he's not electable? On paper, he's got everything. He's got public speaking, he's got charisma, he's a local boy, he was captain of the football team, he's got popular policy position. So really what you're saying then is he's unelectable because as you say, the different name and the Muslim background and he went against Israel.

Yep, and because Democrats joined up with Republicans. making common cause on exactly that ugly smear campaign and a campaign too based on ethnic division in.

The state of Michigan. Crystal, there's a great line in the Matthew Iglesias interview. I know a lot of bits have gone viral, but one line that hasn't been spotted is he says, well, Roy Cooper, he says, Abdul is a divisive candidate. And I say, well, what does it mean to be divisive? How is he dividing people? He's not divisive. People are being divisive about him. in bringing up things about him. And he says, well, Roy Cooper's not divisive in that way because Roy Cooper doesn't take positions that make people spend against him, which I thought was a rather revealing admission. Basically, if you don't want to be spent against by dark money groups, don't go against special interests. which is an interesting message.

Yeah, well, I mean, you have to hand it to Matt Iglesias. He's very consistent on that point. Also made some extraordinary, yeah, extraordinary points about how we should have just allowed the ICE rampage to happen. We should have let ICE just murder people in the streets and not said anything about it because it was, in his mind, not electorally advantageous, even though that did not even be true.

Yes.

Mehdi, always great to have you, my friend.

Thank you so much for your time and your analysis.

Thanks so much, guys. Appreciate it.

All right, that'll do it for us today.

Again, if you want to help us fix this studio, go to breakingpoints.com, do the one-month free trial, but don't cancel when the month is over, and we will try to produce the kind of stuff that makes you want to keep going. Crystal, thanks for struggling through the sickness. Hope you're feeling better tomorrow morning.

Yeah, I feel like the voice is getting stronger, so I should be— I feel fine. It just still sounds like crap.

You know how it is.

Yeah, the only way out is through.

That's right.

10/26/26: Lula Defeats Bolsonaro, Mehdi Hasan Exposes AIPAC, Early Vote Omen For GOP

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