The Rachel Maddow Show
U.S. under Trump backs off countering Russian sabotage campaign in Europe
Thu, 20 Mar 2025
Rachel Maddow looks at recent acts of sabotage by Russia in countries that support Ukraine, including what is believed to be the planning stages of detonating a bomb in a cargo plane over the United States. Erin Banco, national security correspondent for Reuters, joins to discuss her new reporting that the U.S. is now taking steps to back away from its role in helping to counter Russian acts of sabotage.
Full Episode
Thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. Really happy to have you here. You know what tomorrow is? Tomorrow is Friday Eve, which means you're almost there. You're going to make it. Trust me. Do you know Roz Chast, the cartoonist? Roz Chast does cartoons for the New Yorker magazine, and she has forever. She's been doing that since the 1970s.
Roz Chast also wrote a fantastic book that I read a decade ago that has stuck with me ever since. It's cartoons. It's written in her style and in her art form, which is cartoons, but it's a memoir. It's about her parents aging into their late 90s and all the crazy decisions or the lack of decisions that made their lives and her life as their daughter such a mess as they got really old.
It's this very serious book, but told through cartoons. It's really good. It has stuck with me for a decade. It also has the perfect title, which is Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant Today? Anyway, needless to say, I'm a big Roz Chast fan and I have been my whole adult life.
And one of Roz Chast's cartoons that I keep thinking about all the time in this news environment that we are living in right now is this one. And she has done several cartoons on this theme of Venn diagrams, right? You got two circles and they overlap, and the overlap is usually where the joke is.
But in this one, it's a Venn diagram, and on the left, the circle is labeled fun, and on the right, the circle is labeled boring. And in the Venn diagram, overlap between fun and boring... That's Bob. Hi, Bob! Who is fun and boring. I think about that all the time. The version of this that I keep in my head in this news environment, though there's a slight difference, though.
The overlap isn't between boring and fun, as it is in the original. The overlap that I keep in my head is between boring and scary. Boring stories, scary stories. And there's one particular story that lives right in that overlap that I think about every day. It is the story of Donald Trump's return to the presidency that keeps popping up for me right there.
It is unrelentingly boring and unrelentingly scary in equal measure. And I have thought about this story every day since it broke. And it is developing now. This is a story out of the federal prosecutor's office, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington, D.C.,
If you have been following the news about the rule of law and the Justice Department under Donald Trump, you have noticed that a lot of bizarre stuff has been happening in that prosecutor's office. Ever since Donald Trump installed a guy there, who was it? January 6th. And now Trump has named him acting U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C. His name is Ed Martin.
And for at least some of the time that Ed Martin has been there, he was attempting to practice law in Washington, D.C. as the acting U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., despite the fact that he was not a member of the bar in D.C. in good standing. In one case, he wrote to a judge on behalf of the Justice Department, telling the judge to drop the charges against a particular defendant.
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