Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Bullwork podcast. I am JVL sitting in for Charlie Sykes. It is Wednesday, December 21st, the Winter Solstice.

I'm joined by Bill Crystal and Bill, there's so much good news today. But the best news is that tomorrow the day start getting a little bit longer.

I thought JVL you being JVL that you would say the best news is today is the shortest day of the year. So we have the most darkness.

Then we could always site John McCain, the only John McCain. His favorite quotation was that, you know, always darkest before it goes pitch black.

Right. Always darkest before it goes pitch black, which he for some reason used to describe to Ho Chi Minh. It was like a weird comic riff he had.

It was very, very funny. About where he would have good timing, say it's always darkest before it goes pitch black.

But he claimed somehow that was not too much. I don't remember. He used to say this was kind of a bizarre description. I would say to them. But anyway, it's good to be with you.

And I am looking forward to longer days. I had though I think it's going to get super freezing here in a couple of days up here in New York City. It's already quite cold.

This week is traditionally a dead news week. And yet we are somehow in a vortex of 24 hours of just tremendous amounts of real, very important news.

We have the passing of the omnibus bill. We have the release of the president's tax returns. We have the criminal referrals. We from the January 60 meeting.

We have the January 6th committee final report. And then we have Vlodongers Linsky arriving in America to meet with Joe Biden and then address a joint session of Congress all within about 36 hours of one another.

So it is unclear to me how much any of America will pay attention to this as people are running around doing Hanukkah celebrations and finishing the last minute shopping and beginning their travel plans.

Because I know some people are already being needed to travel for the holidays. Let's start with the January 6th committee report.

That's the time we're sitting down to take this. I have read bits and pieces of the executive summary. It is pretty impressive, I would say.

And the thing which struck me most in it is that it begins by quoting a whole bunch of the foot soldiers, the people who were arrested and convicted for their actions on January 6th.

And these are people who say, I'm a patriot. And I was told by the president of the United States that an election had been stolen.

And he said we should come to Washington to fight it. And now it turns out I was just being lied to the whole time. I'm paraphrasing.

But this is what, you know, like a dozen of these people are quoted as saying in interviews in the opening paragraphs of the report.

The idea that these people can have their lives disrupted and many of them wind up in jail, lose jobs, have rifts with family members.

And yet the president who did all of this could face no consequences. And even worse, the members of the Republican Party who knew better, but who stood to the side and either actively abetted it or refused to pass any judgment at all, refused to say anything.

Right. You refuse to say that Joe Biden was president. That there be no consequences for any of them. This strikes me as deeply unfair.

Yeah, I think that's why they began to report that way to suggest that they were recommending that the president be prosecuted as the so many hundreds of those who followed his guidance.

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