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Thank you so much for listening and supporting us the Josh Marshall podcast featuring Kate Riga.

We're going to talk a lot about political corruption in this episode of the podcast, but we're going to talk about a number of different topics. And as we kind of know,

and as we were talking about just before we started recording this episode, political corruption

is sort of the through line to everything right now. It's kind of everywhere and it's pervasive.

And I was, I wrote a post about this and I wrote there that

I don't think, you know, I'm pretty, I'm pretty well versed in American history. And I think

I can say without any question, this presidency, even compared to Trump's last presidency,

this presidency has a scale of corruption that is

way worse than at any time in American history. And there, you know, we talk about the sort of the

scope of American history and, you know, democracy and the rule of law and all these kind of things.

And the thing about political corruption is that, you know, the United States has a, certainly

the federal level, and at the state level pretty much too, a very good record of contested

elections and a pretty good record of the rule of law with, you know,

with some, with some significant exceptions over the years. And obviously, when you get down to,

...