Hawk Podcasts

The accountability trail is the story. The FBI investigation that would normally follow a fatal shooting by federal officers was reportedly halted. The federal government withheld its evidence for seven months, turning it over to Hennepin County only in the days before Todd Blanche's confirmation hearing. Roughly 75 percent of the Minneapolis US Attorney's office resigned during this period, and more than half the prosecutions brought against protesters have since collapsed. Hawk offers his own reading of the Pretti footage, noting Pretti was legally carrying, and argues the sequence suggests an accidental discharge during the disarm. He stresses...

Hawk, who lived in Mill Valley and still keeps a place in Marin, gives a tour of the county along the way, from Sausalito and Mount Tam to Tiburon and Point Reyes, and explains why one of the wealthiest places in America was always likely to turn up in those documents. The student's slideshow, published by the award-winning Redwood Bark, catalogued mentions of Larkspur, Corte Madera, Tiburon, Mill Valley, Novato, Kentfield, and more, with documents backing each claim. Then came the legal threat. A woman named in one slide demanded the post be taken down or she...

The geography tells the story. South Carolina saw more than a thousand cases centered on an insular religious community in Spartanburg County. Utah is now the epicenter with 441 cases across 22 of its 29 counties, tied partly to an FLDS community, though state officials point to statewide erosion of coverage rather than any single enclave. National kindergarten MMR coverage has fallen from 95.2 percent in 2020 to 92.5 percent in 2025, below the herd immunity threshold, and religious exemptions have risen roughly fivefold since 2010. The heart of the video is Amy Maxmen's Wired piece, in which six Utah pediatricians describe treating these children...

The middle of the episode turns inward. Reflecting on the Texas and Maine primaries, Hawk revisits his own habit of reducing elections to seat math, and admits that focusing purely on numbers led him to dismiss voices and communities he should have listened to. He is still working through what that means. From there he covers James Lankford's comments, James Clyburn's remarks about a photo from an Abdul El-Sayed rally in Michigan and the 30 million in AIPAC-backed spending behind Haley Stevens, the frustration with politicians serving into their eighties and nineties, and Trump's claim at a Georgia...

The conversation widens to the global picture: why Iran and Ukraine have shown that larger militaries can be fought to a standstill, what that means for China and Taiwan, and how Gulf allies feel exposed. They connect the war's cost, officially put at 37.5 billion but estimated far higher, to defense and oil interests, and to a Congress they argue has stopped representing constituents. The back half turns to elections. Both stress that the president has no power over elections run by states, walk through the window between Election Day and January that concerns them most, and cite...

The polling is the throughline. A new American Research Group poll puts Trump's approval at 30 percent against 67 percent disapproval, below the mark where George W. Bush left office, while the Iran war itself draws just 29 percent approval. Hawk pairs that with a rising US service member death toll, now four killed at a base in Jordan, and Jason Crow's blunt assessment that Americans are done with endless Middle East conflict. From there Hawk moves fast through the day's stories: a measles case count surging past 2,295, the highest in 35 years, Trump's super PAC reportedly hoarding 400 million while not...

The speech matters less for its facts than for its signal. Hawk reads it as telegraphing that this administration will not accept the results of the midterms, and he puts it alongside the rest of the week: Jay Clayton declining to say who won in 2020, Todd Blanche testifying the president may direct prosecutions of his enemies, and Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller announcing an expansion of groups designated as domestic terrorists under National Security Presidential Memorandum 7. His practical warning is about conspiracy charges, using a Texas ICE protest case where one participant reportedly received 30 years, and how...

North Carolina Republican Thom Tillis is now threatening to block the nomination unless Blanche meets personally with survivors within a day or two. The committee splits 11 Republicans to 10 Democrats, so a single Republican no vote stops it from reaching the floor, and Tillis says the earliest vote is roughly two weeks out. John Cornyn has separately voiced concerns over the settlement fund. Hawk is skeptical either will follow through. Bensky's testimony covers the January release of Epstein files in which, despite assurances about protecting identities, hundreds of victims were reportedly named and some addresses left unredacted. Hawk...

Then come the numbers. A Center for Strategic and International Studies report covering 1994 through 2020 found that right-wing extremists carried out the large majority of domestic terrorist attacks and plots in the United States, roughly two-thirds in 2019 and over 90 percent in early 2020, and were responsible for 335 of 357 domestic terror deaths across that period, about 93 percent. None of that appears in Miller's speech. Hawk's argument is that "political terrorist" here functions as a label for anyone who disagrees with Donald Trump, not a description of violence. He points to Republicans controlling the House, Senate, White House, and Supreme Court...

Jay Clayton, questioned by Jon Ossoff and then Mark Warner, gets as close as any Trump nominee has to acknowledging 2020, allowing that Biden won the Electoral College and that Congress certified it, while still avoiding the popular vote. Hawk notes the pattern across every nominee for a year and a half. The real news is John Cornyn. Pressed on the roughly $1.8 billion settlement fund, Blanche did not reassure him, and Cornyn told CNN's Manu Raju he is truly undecided, with Thom Tillis wanting the fund fully dead. On an 11-10 Judiciary Committee, one Republican no vote ends...

The defendants include the Heritage Foundation and its employees Victoria Coates and Robert Greenway, Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio, Markwayne Mullin, Todd Blanche, Kristi Noem, plus Betar and Canary Mission. Khalil's theory traces a line from the Heritage plan known as Project Esther, written after October 7th, to the targeting of activists by those groups, to his own arrest and months in detention during which he missed the birth of his first child. He is a green card holder married to a US citizen. Hawk walks through the evidence the complaint cites, largely the defendants' own public posts...

Hawk focuses on Springfield, Ohio, where he grew up nearby, using two newsletters by Jim Swift at the Bulwark. Haitians came to Springfield at the request of the Republican governor and mayor to fill unfilled manufacturing jobs and reverse decades of population decline. They filled factories, opened businesses, started churches, and stabilized the city, until Donald Trump and JD Vance spread the fabricated story about immigrants eating pets, after which Pastor Carl Ruby says business relocation inquiries stopped entirely. The numbers and the human cost both land hard. Ohio's Haitian population produces an estimated $160 million in annual...

The emails center on Ed Martin Jr., the right-wing lawyer pushed out as acting U.S. Attorney for D.C. and then parked at DOJ headquarters to run the weaponization working group. Blanche wrote "I am frustrated" within a month, set up weekly check-ins, and reassigned investigative lanes to his own deputies. Hawk covers Martin's role in the Letitia James mortgage case, the January 6th review, and the Biden auto pen probe, complete with a look at what an auto pen actually is. Along the way Hawk plays Andrew Weissmann on the one question he would ask...

Hawk connects the killings to the legal warning from his previous video, that murder and assault are state charges a president cannot pardon, and to a Fourth Amendment argument about race-based stops, referencing an MSNBC segment and New York Times writer Mara Gay. He also previews Trump's Thursday prime time speech on the 2020 election, noting the lapsed federal statutes of limitations, and Dan Abrams on the SAVE Act. He then covers the Michigan Senate primary, where AIPAC-backed Haley Stevens faces Abdul El-Sayed for Gary Peters' open seat and is being mocked over a viral clip, before closing...

Using a Nicolle Wallace MSNBC segment and his copy of Jack Smith's indictment, Hawk revisits the record. Trump was indicted on more than 40 felony counts across two jurisdictions for trying to overturn 2020, lost some 60 lawsuits, and his attorneys and fake electors were later charged. He also notes the reported White House task force preparing to release documents, and figures like Tulsi Gabbard and Bill Pulte tied to the declassification push. Hawk walks through Ari Melber's timeline of the 2020 effort, from Rudy Giuliani's suits and the fake elector slates to the pressure on Brad Raffensperger and Mike Pence...

At the center is a lawsuit Donald Trump filed against the IRS and the Treasury Department after a contractor leaked his tax information. As Hawk lays out, the suit appears to have been time-barred by a two-year statute of limitations, sought far more than the roughly $10,000 the statute allowed, and pitted Trump against agencies he controls, meaning there was no genuine adversity between the parties. The judge, joined by a brief from 35 former federal judges, described it as a fraud on the court. The collusive settlement reportedly created a large compensation fund and an addendum, signed by...

Hawk walks through the legal reasoning. A presidential pardon reaches only federal offenses, so a future pardon would leave state prosecutions untouched. He points to how murder is charged at the state level, citing the Tyler Robinson case and the prosecution of the man accused of killing Minnesota's House Speaker, and notes that murder carries no statute of limitations. Looking ahead, Hawk argues that if Democrats take the House this fall, oversight committees will spend two years documenting the conduct of federal immigration agents and could hand that evidence to state attorneys general and county district attorneys...

The Trump arc is the spine of the video. Hawk revisits Graham's 2016 warning that nominating Trump would destroy the party, his endorsement of Jeb Bush, and Trump giving out Graham's cell phone number, then the turn: endorsing Trump, working to overturn the 2020 election Joe Biden won, condemning Trump after January 6th, and getting back on board weeks later. Hawk also traces Graham's close friendship with Joe Biden, recalling the loss of Beau Biden and the Biden family's history, and how that warmth curdled into calls for impeachment over Afghanistan. He closes on Graham's fealty to Benjamin Netanyahu...

Hawk builds his assessment around three moments he calls flashes of moral clarity: Graham's early 2016 warning that nominating Donald Trump would destroy the Republican Party, his Senate floor speech denouncing Trump after the January 6th insurrection, and his past defense of Joe Biden as a fundamentally good and decent man. In each case, Hawk argues, Graham soon reversed course and returned as one of Trump's most loyal foot soldiers. The throughline, in Hawk's telling, is a man who had a moral core and principles but proved willing to jettison them entirely for power. He contends Graham will...

Hawk, a former criminal defense attorney, walks through the evidence now in the record, including the Discord group chat first reported by journalist Ken Klippenstein and additional text messages reported by the New York Times. He explains why this far exceeds the probable cause standard, why Twiggs received state and federal immunity, and why he expects Robinson to be held over for trial and, absent something dramatic, convicted. Along the way Hawk reacts to Fox News commentary from John Yoo on how the judge is running the courtroom, credits Megyn Kelly's legally sound take, and addresses the...